Jack the Ripper

by The Whitechapel Society

  In addition, said Stowell, a carefully-managed smokescreen had kicked in. The establishment rattled out a disorienting battery of cover stories, offering false leads to the curious and red herrings to the rumourmonger. Behind the bluster, however, Stowell felt that he had seen the realm-threatening truth – and there were diaries, Gull’s among them, which, he said, testified to Eddy’s murders. These diaries, however, failed to manifest themselves quite as readily as Stowell may have liked – he had had connections once, and, metaphorically at least, the keys to the archive boxes of the Gull family (and to those of their co-medics and relations, the Aclands), but it appears that he relied chiefly on memory when he recalled Sir William’s daughter referring to an episode in which the venerable Dr Gull told the future King Edward VII that his son, Eddy, was dying of syphilis of the brain. In Stowell’s defence, he seems to have told a broadly similar story to the true crime writer Colin Wilson in the early 1960s – in retrospect, Wilson wondered whether Stowell had secretly wanted him to publish the tale. But perhaps Stowell was no better than partially reliable – when, in 1970, he finally came to place his article with The Criminologist, Stowell entitled it ‘Jack the Ripper – A Solution?’ The question mark may have represented the natural humility of a man aware that he had an astounding story to tell; on the other hand, the octogenarian Stowell may have found himself caught on the horns of doubt. Could he be certain? His recollection of the conversation with Caroline Acland, Gull’s daughter, dated back, probably, to the 1930s.

  After publication, it took almost no time to debunk the theory, but the episode was an irregular one, with, supposing that one was looking for them, potential conspiracy building quickly upon conspiracy. The Times, getting hold of the story in its edition of 4 November 1970, described the tale as a ‘mischievous calumny’, and reported that Buckingham Palace had decided to take the moral high ground, withholding its scorn for Stowell’s revelations in a superior display of tight-lipped, royal disdain. The same article also noted that the newspaper’s own records placed Eddy – free and apparently unsought by anyone – at Balmoral on 1 October 1888, a day after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.

  Stowell responded to this knockback with admirable spirit, writing to the editor of The Times on 5 November 1970 to state that he had ‘at no time associated His Royal Highness, the late Duke of Clarence [part of Eddy’s official title from 1890 onwards] with the Whitechapel murderer.’ Indeed, Stowell now wrote that he did not believe that the killer was royal at all – his opinion was, specifically, that the murderer was ‘a scion of a noble family’. He therefore rejected the idea that Eddy’s incontrovertible presence at Balmoral was fatal to his theory, and signed himself away with an artless, dactylic flourish, ‘a loyalist and a Royalist’. This was game stuff, but the horse had very much bolted, and Stowell’s retractions were untenable, absurd. It seemed as if he no longer wished to lie in the bed he had made for himself, but – strange to tell – he would not have to. By the time his letter was published on 9 November, Stowell was dead, and his papers on the case were swiftly destroyed. Had he said too much?

  Notwithstanding the curious timing of these events, however, the manner of Stowell’s death was uncontroversial; quite naturally, he was not silenced for his unusual claims, and, after his demise, Stowell’s son, Eldon, burned his father’s file on Jack the Ripper, having first checked that there was nothing inside it worth keeping. This act was lamented in some quarters, but Eldon professed himself uninterested in the mystery. He did not even seem to know – and less to care – why his father’s name had recently been mentioned in connection with the Ripper. So Eldon was not, after all, a secret government agent conspiring to suppress his father’s dangerous, state-breaking knowledge, but merely a son clearing out his deceased father’s house. On an individual level, this was all perfectly unremarkable, if slightly sad.

  Thomas Stowell’s true legacy to Ripperology, however, would not disappear into the flames quite as quickly as did his file. For the next twenty years, give or take, the hunt for the Whitechapel murderer would be a merry-go-round of conspiracy, subterfuge, cover-up and misinformation, and, surprisingly often considering the prima facie problems of his candidacy, Eddy would be, however paradoxically, at the centre of the off-centre thought processes of Jack the Ripper’s pursuers.

  In 1972, Michel Harrison, an author and Sherlock Holmes enthusiast, subjected the case against Eddy to further, book-length, scrutiny. In the manner of the subject of his passion, Harrison embarked on his enquiries fuelled by arch scepticism and Aristotelian logic – he was unable to access the official papers relating to Eddy’s movements in the last months of 1888, but, working from other sources, he developed a vision of the Prince which saw him, now, not as the Ripper, but as the dull, probably unknowing, acolyte of the Ripper. Where Eddy had once stood, silhouetted against Whitechapel’s dimly lamp-lit streets, Harrison now sketched in J.K. Stephen, a poet of ugly, misogynistic sentiment who had, in fact, tutored Eddy at Cambridge. A closer inspection of Harrison’s reasoning, however, betrayed a flaw, a loophole through which Stowell’s felonious re-invention of Eddy now tore, belying his biographer’s attempts to exonerate him. Without the official documents to guide him through the period of the so-called canonical murders of 1888, Harrison was forced to assume that Eddy’s demonstrable unavailability at the time of the killing of a non-canonical victim – Alice McKenzie, in 1889 – ruled him out, by extension, of complicity in the whole series of Ripper crimes. The Victorian police, though, had found it difficult to associate McKenzie’s death with those of the previous year; they had postulated a separate assailant in her unRipperesque case, and so, in spite of Harrison’s intentions, it appeared that Eddy was not yet rendered free from popular suspicion.

  Eddy’s candidacy had, by now, developed a rather peculiar form of resilience; the bubble of the Royal Ripper Theory had survived Harrison’s attempts to puncture it, and, back in the world of Ripperological dreams, the mad urge to implicate the Prince simply grew stronger. Now, Eddy was up to everything and anything, some of it grounded in something resembling fact, some of it brazenly fictitious. His association with the Cleveland Street Scandal – an unedifying rent-boy saga, with Eddy playing a walk-on role, if the rumours were to be believed – put him into theoretical contact with all manner of rogues, but the allegations of his involvement may have arisen with the wholly unreliable solicitor, Arthur Newton, then attempting to wriggle out of (possibly trumped-up) charges of professional misconduct. Meanwhile, a more laid-back, mid-seventies interpretation of Eddy’s sexuality suggested that he may, after all, have had an eye for the ladies, and another story emerged from questionable sources, this one describing an illicit marriage, an illegitimate child, the woozy mesmerism of Freemasonry, and a full-blown rearguard action on the part of the establishment. The crux of this revised Royal Conspiracy was that, in executing its grand, defensive plan, the establishment had apparently seen fit to tactically murder and mutilate a handful of Whitechapel prostitutes – fallen women who, counterintuitive though it may have seemed, were in possession of certain powder-keg information. The potential explosion was, once again, apparently big enough to bring down an empire.

  This rendition of events pushed the aged, unwell Gull into the limelight. Stowell’s theories had cast the doctor in a minor role, in loco parentis after the homicidal Eddy’s apprehension. Now, he was reimagined as the killer, obeying Masonic imperatives (perhaps originating at government level with Lord Salisbury) to slaughter the small clutch of ladies of the night who knew not only that the wilful, hedonistic Eddy had married a common Catholic woman, Annie Elizabeth Crook, in 1885, but also that he had then had a daughter, Alice, by her, thereby rather upsetting the applecart of royal primogeniture. Mary Jane Kelly, Jack the Ripper’s final victim, had, indeed, been a witness at the notorious wedding – or so the story went – and, when she realised that this placed her in a position of unlikely influence, she attempted to blackmail the governmen
t, suggesting that they buy her silence. Gull’s murder spree was the establishment’s brutal response to Kelly’s impudent demands, and her associates went down with her, one by one: on reflection, it seems amazing that Mary Jane should have remained in Spitalfields, in her little one-room hovel off Dorset Street, assimilating the highly-publicised and extremely unpleasant serial assassinations of her friends and confidantes without, apparently, exhibiting much in the way of anxiety. Gull’s un-Hippocratic mission terminated automatically with Kelly’s murder, and, for good measure, the clues he had left at the scenes of the crimes had been packed with esoteric connotations, comprehensible only to the cognoscenti – the misspelled code-word ‘Juwes’, which jumped out from the enigmatic Goulston Street Graffito, for example, actually alluded to three key figures of Masonic lore, although it appeared at face value to be not much more than a semi-illiterate approximation of the word ‘Jews’, written on a doorjamb which happened to be positioned at the street-market heart of the East End’s Jewish community. This was, all in all, an eccentric and somewhat charmless scheme, festooned with sideshow excitements, bit-part players and, lingering on the palate for some while afterwards, a powerful undertone of paranoid sensibility. Somewhere along the line, the trusty reputation-blackener which was the Cleveland Street Scandal found its way into the story, as did, for the first time, the artist Walter Sickert. Eddy’s death scene now came with visibly-putrefying fingernails, this being, it was suggested, a sign of poisoning.

  The detailed planning and execution which characterised this theory – given voice in the 1977 book by Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper: the Final Solution – seemed on more sober reflection to have been excessive: it was overkill, to put it crudely. Supposing that Eddy had entered into marriage in 1885 (and of this there was no record whatsoever), then he had done so without Queen Victoria’s permission, and in contravention of the Royal Marriages Act (1772). This made the marriage an illegal one, liable to immediate and unfussy cancellation, so there was very little here – legally speaking – which merited the concoction of an elaborate multiple-murder plan by the establishment, supposedly running scared. The story was off-wavelength in other ways, too, and there is evidence to suggest that Knight himself knew that the foundations of his solution were, in fact, terribly shaky. A solid debunking of this second-generation Royal Conspiracy theory did not prevent its being taken into the public consciousness, however, and Ripperology’s fantasists, all starting from Knight’s cynical headspace, maintained their grip on the discipline for another decade.

  Times gradually changed, however. Glasnost and perestroika altered the face of Ripper studies as the centenary of the crimes approached, and, with crabby old conspiracy theories quickly shedding their relevance, so Eddy’s star inevitably faded. There was one last hurrah, which came in 1991 in the form of Melvyn Fairclough’s The Ripper and the Royals, a portmanteau of ambitious plots and manoeuvrings in which a raving Eddy lived on, incarcerated among the ghosts of Glamis Castle, into the 1930s. Fairclough’s book belonged naturally to an era which had already passed without ceremony, however – the author himself repudiated his story a few years after its publication.

  In this way, Eddy was, finally, permitted to step down from Ripperology’s first rank. He had been an unlikely figurehead in frightened times, but he jarred with the discipline’s democratisation, and he showed his age. Stowell’s enthusiasm had come to nothing; Knight’s visions had blurred; both men were dead. Fairclough’s abandonment of Eddy’s platform brought the era of royal intrigue to a forlorn end, and nothing seems likely, now, to revive responsible interest in a theory which, eventually, failed to adapt to its changing environment. The marginalisation of the idea’s central figure inevitably followed.

  And so Eddy’s right out there on the horizon now, and his stock is lower than ever, but his hands are quite unbound and his curious little eyes twinkle back at us. And, below the perfectly-kept moustache, that’s a smile, and the taste of crème de menthe on his lips.

  M.W. Oldridge is the author of Murder and Crime – Whitechapel and District, published by The History Press. He lives in London and is a member of The Whitechapel Society. He has contributed articles to The Whitechapel Society Journal and is currently proof-reading for Casebook Examiner.

  11

  Suspects: The Best (or Worst) of the Rest

  William Beadle

  Jack the Ripper was not the world’s first serial killer. Gesina Gottfried in Germany; Helene Jegado, Charles Avinmain and Eusebus Pieydagnelle in France; Italy’s Vincenz Vezeni and Americans Jane Toppan and Jesse Pomeroy all preceded him. In fact, it is arguable whether Jack was even East London’s first serial homicide. ‘A murderer who is such by passion and by wolfish craving for bloodshed as a mode of unnatural luxury cannot relapse into inertia,’ wrote Thomas De Quincey in his 1827 dissertation on the Ratcliffe Highway murders of December 1811; in which two families were butchered just south of where the Ripper later killed Elizabeth Stride. Note the prescience of De Qunicey’s words; he not only foretells what is to come but also describes what these human werewolves are; men and women who kill for sexual pleasure, pure sadism, fame megalomania, a messianic purpose or vengeance against a gender or group of people.

  But the Ratcliffe Highway murders had been largely forgotten when the Ripper emerged onto the same stage, seventy-seven years later. What distinguished him from those who had gone before is that his crimes coincided with the growth of the tabloid press, which requires a constant infusion of sensational stories in order to sell their wares. Thus Jack the Ripper became the first serial killer to be widely publicised: ‘…as each murder was committed we wrote up picturesque and lurid details…one evening Springfield would publish a theory, next night Charley Hands would have a far better one and then I would weigh in with another theory in the Globe,’ recalled the journalist William Le Queux. It was Le Queux, and his ilk, who made the Ripper what he is today; the symbol of silent butchery the world over, as he stalks the gaslit streets of East London, cutting down one prostitute after another, a demonic force erupting out of the fog with all the fury of Hades.

  Images from the Illustrated Police News.

  The reality is that Jack never struck on a foggy night and the eruptions were very likely fuelled by alcohol; an estimated 68 per cent of serial killers have drink or drug problems. Lost in a fast shuffle were the victims – a group of women subsisting amongst the poorest of the poor of Whitechapel and Spitalfields – ‘who [had] no home except the kitchen of a low lodging house; to sit there, sick and weak, bruised and wretched; to be turned out after midnight to earn the requisite pence, anywhere and anyhow; to come across your murderer and caress your assassin,’ said the Daily Telegraph, in one of the few pieces of decent journalism marking these murders. It was the victims’ so-called betters, the upper classes of Britain, who created the parlour game of ‘name the Ripper’. By doing so, they diverted attention away from the conditions of which the Daily Telegraph complained and made common cause with the mythmakers.

  Such is the aura that has been created around these crimes, that people seem to believe that Jack the Ripper walked between the raindrops, leaving the cream of two police forces floundering in his wake. In the eyes of the mythologists, he cannot, therefore, have been any ordinary person. So, it is no surprise that in the era of Watergate he spawned his own grand conspiracy theory, one which over a twenty-year period dragged into its purview a representative selection of the British ruling class of the late nineteenth century: Prime Minister Salisbury, Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren and his Chief of Detectives Sir Robert Anderson, the Duke of Marlborough, Lord Randolph Churchill, Lord Euston, Lord Arthur Somerset, James Kenneth Stephen (the son of an eminent Judge), Sir William Gull, Physician-in-Ordinary to the Queen, the artist Walter Sickert and last, but oh-so-certainly not the least, Prince Edward Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, heir presumptive to the throne. Peering through the curtains is the future King George V and, in a variant on the story
, his Father Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, is involved.

  I have left it to my colleagues to examine for you the individual cases of Gull, Sickert and Prince Eddy, along with those of seven other candidates who have merited their own individual chapters. In this particular essay I will be concentrating on four men, who, likewise, have received their share of attention as possible Rippers: the aforementioned James Stephen, Robert Donston Stephenson, Aaron Davis Cohen and George Hutchinson.

  Stephen was inducted into the lexicon of Ripper suspects by author Michael Harrison, in 1972. The purpose of Harrison’s book was to debunk the case against the Duke of Clarence: ‘…I couldn’t leave the reader high and dry so what I did was find somebody I thought was a likely candidate,’ he told the BBC. There are good Ripper suspects and there are bad Ripper suspects (the majority), but Mr Harrison is surely unique in accusing somebody simply to entertain an audience. A man’s posthumous reputation was clearly of no concern to him, as he crumbled Jim Stephen’s good name to pieces in the palms of his hands. Unhappily, in Harrison’s wake, along came a number of other writers to spin Stephen into their own pet theories: he and Clarence had committed the murders together, or he supported and succoured the Prince while he carried them out, or he was part of a plot to cover up the birth of an illegitimate royal baby – one fathered by Clarence – alternatively one sired by the future King Edward VII (see above). It is all rather like seeing a man put into the stocks and watching him being pelted with rotten fruit and eggs.