The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper

by James Carnac

  This dynasty existed. Indeed, it is notorious because its later members executed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The dynasty appears to have begun with Charles Sanson (Longval; 1658–1695), a soldier in the French royal army who was appointed executioner of Paris in 1684. He was succeeded in turn by Charles Sanson (1681–1726), and Charles Jean Baptiste Sanson (1719–1778). It was through Charles’s brother, Nicholas Charles Gabriel Sanson (1721–1795), that the Carnacs apparently claimed descent.

  Nicholas Sanson was the executioner at Reims and achieved a degree of notoriety in 1757 when he assisted his nephew, Charles Henri Sanson (1739–1806), in the execution of Robert-François Damiens, who had attempted to assassinate Louis XV. Damiens, who had managed to inflict a minor wound but caused no significant injury, and who was probably insane, was subjected to a long period of the most excruciating torture, then tied to horses with the intention of having them wrench his arms and legs from his torso, but his limbs refused to part and Sanson had to separate them with an axe. The horrendous execution was witnessed by Giacomo Casanova, who left an account in his memoirs in which he recorded his horror: “I was several times obliged to turn away my face and to stop my ears as I heard his piercing shrieks, half of his body having been torn from him…”

  Nicholas Sanson resigned his position as executioner of Reims thereafter, but his nephew, Charles Henri Sanson, continued as executioner of Paris and, despite claiming that he disliked the family business, executed nearly three thousand people during his career. He was the first person to use the guillotine, of which he was a firm advocate, the earliest customer being a robber named Nicolas Jacques Pelletier. He was publicly executed at 3:30 in the afternoon outside the Hôtel de Ville in the Place de Grève, but the excited crowd was not satisfied with the fast and clinical method of execution, which altogether lacked the spectacle and entertainment value of a hanging or breaking on the wheel.

  Charles Henri went on to achieve immortality as the executioner of King Louis XVI. His second son, Henri Sanson (1767–1840), executed Marie Antoinette, who accidentally stepped on Sanson’s foot as she mounted the scaffold, saying, “Pardon me, sir, I meant not to do it.” They were her last words.

  The last of the dynasty was Clément Henri Sanson, who served until 1847.

  Meanwhile, Nicholas Sanson, who had resigned his position as the executioner of Reims, had a rather grandly named son, Louis Cyr Charlemagne Sanson, who in turn had a son named Pierre Louis Sanson, who in his turn had a son named Charles Louis Sanson. The Autobiography claims that this man also had the surname Carnac and was the father of John Louis Carnac, James Willoughby Carnac’s father.

  After the last murder, that of Mary Kelly, Carnac suffered an accident that resulted in the amputation of a leg, putting an end to his mobility and his killing.

  —

  The Manuscript

  The manuscript was found among the effects of S. G. Hulme Beaman, bequeathed to his daughter Betty, who in turn bequeathed it to her cousin, Jean Caldwell. The collection included some of S. G.’s wooden carvings of bandsmen from Larry the Lamb’s Toytown and figures from Faust that he used for his illustrations, copies of the children’s books he wrote and illustrated, and this manuscript. Mrs. Caldwell knew about the manuscript but wanted to keep the collection together and hoped that whoever bought it would publish the manuscript. Appreciating the potential value of the Larry the Lamb material, she approached Bonhams auction house, who recommended she offer the collection to Alan Hicken, the proprietor of the Montacute TV, Radio and Toy Museum in Montacute, Somerset. When Alan Hicken read the Carnac manuscript, he felt he had to get it published, with Mrs. Caldwell’s full approval and encouragement.

  The manuscript appears to have been written between 1928 and 1930—this date being calculated from the author’s claim to have been sixty-nine years old at the time of writing and for the murders to have been committed forty or forty-two years earlier. This date agrees with some of the statements made in the manuscript, such as the author’s observation that detective fiction was a relatively new genre and enjoying considerable popularity. The 1920s and 1930s were indeed the golden age of detective fiction and are generally recognized as such today, having produced Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Josephine Tey. The date also fits S. G. Hulme Beaman’s life. Hulme Beaman, of course, died tragically young in 1932, so the manuscript can’t have been written after that date. However, 1928–1930 was also the time when Hulme Beaman was hard at work with Larry the Lamb and Toytown.

  The manuscript is in three parts with an explanatory note by S. G. Hulme Beaman and an epilogue recounting the inquest and inquest verdict into Carnac’s death.

  The explanatory note is perhaps the most curious part of the whole manuscript. It runs to one and a half single-spaced pages and ends with the initials “H.B.” It was typed on a typewriter different from the rest of the manuscript. S. G. explains that he was executor of the will of James Carnac and in that capacity had received Carnac’s effects, among which was the manuscript. It was “enclosed in a sealed packet”—an important point to note—and that attached to the packet was a letter requesting S. G. to send the manuscript to a specified literary agency whose name we are not told. Fearing legal complications from giving an unopened package to a literary agent without first knowing the content and having the sanction of the probate authorities, S. G. explains that he opened and read the contents, and that having done so, it was his intention to hand the manuscript over to the literary agent. He does not say he had done so, which is another important point.

  In the nine paragraphs, he explains that he knew Carnac and along with others who knew him had regarded him as “unpleasantly eccentric” and as a man who held “unorthodox and peculiarly offensive views on certain vital matters,” who had a “vitriolic tongue” and a “cynical and macabre humour.” He put all this down to a personality soured by the loss of a leg in Carnac’s early adulthood, but even so, Carnac sounds such an unlikeable person that one wonders how S. G. could ever have become sufficiently close to him to be appointed executor of his will.

  What is perhaps highly important about the manuscript is that it is unclear to whom the explanatory remarks are addressed. S. G. states that he intends to send the manuscript to the literary agent, as Carnac had requested, so the remarks are not directed at the agent. It is also obvious that they are not intended for a publisher or for a general reader such as you or me. In fact, the tone suggests that they are directed at someone known to S. G. and with whom he had discussed the manuscript, albeit not in any detail.

  S. G. also claims in the explanatory remarks that he had removed and destroyed “certain portions of the manuscript which contained details particularly revolting to [him],” but that otherwise the manuscript is “presented exactly in the form in which it came to me [him].”

  It is tempting to assume that the material S. G. found offensive were descriptions of the bodies of Jack the Ripper’s victims, but this need not be the case.

  S. G. says the passages were sufficient to convince him that Carnac was insane, but he prefaces this by remarking that he possesses “little medical knowledge.” Why would medical knowledge have been a requirement for finding the passages offensive? And wouldn’t the fact that Carnac murdered and mutilated six women in the most brutal fashion have been sufficient to show that Carnac was insane? What S. G. seems to be saying is that Carnac wrote things that S. G., though lacking medical knowledge, thought made Carnac insane. The offensive material could have therefore involved the victims, but equally could be bloodlust fantasies, or the occult, or blasphemous descriptions that we see in the manuscript.

  However, it is questionable whether any material was removed from the manuscript. There are no gaps in the manuscript where material was removed, therefore either S. G. has completely rewritten the manuscript to provide a flowing, uninterrupted narrative, or S. G. did not remove any materia
l.

  All of the above reasoning assumes that the manuscript is “genuine,” at least in the sense that S. G. received it from someone else and did not write it himself. What lends some support to this assumption is the fact that the explanatory remarks are written on a typewriter different than the rest of the manuscript. However, this could be because S. G. bought a new machine, borrowed a machine, or typed the remarks away from his office, and while we should be cautious about reading too much significance into it, it does raise a question we should stop to examine.

  Claiming that a manuscript has been found among the possessions of a dead man, or been bequeathed, or discovered in an attic or in a sales room is, as I said at the beginning, a device used by authors to give verisimilitude to their stories. Perhaps the best known and loved use of the device was that by George MacDonald Fraser, who claimed the Flashman Papers were found in an antique tea chest in a Leicestershire auction room in 1965.

  However, there is rarely any pretense that the fiction is actually genuine. There are occasional instances where that is not the case, where an author intentionally presents his fiction as genuine and does what he can to make his narrative look authentic. Could this have been what S. G. was doing by using different typewriters? Interestingly, in the remarks, S. G. dates the Jack the Ripper murders to 1880, which could be a typing error, but at the start of part 2, where the murders are correctly assigned to 1888, the year is underlined and there is a large, ostentatious question mark in the margin. Could this have been done by S. G., part of an elaborate and very subtle way of making it appear that he was questioning the date?

  Or was he really questioning the accuracy of the date?

  Trying to make sense of this manuscript is impossible, the questions too numerous, the permutations too many, the desire to dismiss the story as Hulme Beaman’s invention too great a temptation, the inclination to think of it as real an equally great temptation, all leading to a feeling that a sign should be hung on the opening page of the Autobiography saying “Insanity This Way Lies.” But what we can say is that the explanatory remarks seem to have been written for somebody other than a literary agent, publisher, or general reader, that S. G. Hulme Beaman claims to have known James Carnac, that he claims to have removed personally offensive material (but the manuscript doesn’t have any gaps showing where the material could have been removed), and that the whole of it is written on a typewriter different than the rest of the manuscript.

  Part 1 of the manuscript provides the biographical background of James Carnac already discussed and brings his life story up to 1888. The page number is typed in the center at the top of the page, except for the start of every new chapter.

  Part 2 consists of chapters 12 to 24. The opening page looks older than part 1, the page being creased and with tiny tears along the page edges. This page is not numbered, but one would not expect it to be, as the start of new chapters are not numbered. However, none of the subsequent pages are numbered until the numbering resumes with chapter 15. Page numbering thereafter continues until chapter 21, when it ceases altogether. This is not a slip of memory. The page numbering stopped with page 72 and resumed again with page 77, so if it was a slip of memory, we’d expect there to be four unnumbered pages. In fact, there are twenty-four pages, so it is clear that a substantial addition has been made.1

  The numbered and unnumbered pages were written on the same typewriter, from which it seems clear that the author was responsible for them all. What cannot be determined is whether the unnumbered pages are older than the numbered pages or vice versa. In other words, was there an original manuscript consisting of unnumbered pages that the author expanded by adding part 1 and the other numbered pages?

  Part 2 opens in the summer of 1888. As already noted, somebody has underlined “1888” and put a large, ostentatious question mark in the manuscript’s margin, evidently questioning the date. The most obvious person to have done this is S. G. because in his explanatory remarks, he assigns the murders to 1880.2

  Carnac was living in rooms in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, one of two lodgers in the house of a “Mrs. D.” Financially independent, he devoted himself to reading and art. His literary tastes were for the occult, on which he claims to be an authority, and his art took him across London, looking for subjects to draw, being particularly “attracted by the grotesque and the macabre” of the East End. He had done some drawings to accompany his book—the manuscript—but doubted they would be good enough for publication.

  He describes falling in love with Julia Norcote, the sister of a friend, and proposing and being accepted, but then the manuscript diverts into an extraordinary tale that reads like a drug-induced fantasy. It begins quietly enough with a reference to hearing voices, and one more than the rest, which he calls “the Voice.” He then recounts an evening with Julia in which he sees a vision in a small wall mirror of her throat cut, a circlet of red around her neck and drops of blood on her white bosom. Excited by the sight and at the same time horrified by his emotions, he rushes from the house, the “tiger,” as he called his urge to kill, having reawakened inside him.

  Carnac notes that the experience and his reaction were “like a scene from a ‘Surrey’ melodrama.” This is a reference to the Surrey Theatre in Blackfriars Road, which had a long history of producing melodramas. From 1881 until 1900, it was owned by George Conquest (1837–1901), who famously produced a string of melodramas there, but after his death from heart disease in 1901, the theater’s popularity rapidly declined and it was turned into a music hall. By 1924, it had closed.

  Having fled from the Norcote house, Carnac plunges into a bizarre and surreal account of being taken by a man in black with Carnac’s features to a torture chamber and seeing an unconscious woman strapped to a wheel. He leaves the house and meets other wraithlike but real men (or so Carnac claims), all dressed in black, all with his face, and he wanders through the streets dazed until he reaches home.

  Chapters 15–20 are page numbers 77–109.

  Chapter 16 has what reads like a firsthand account of a visit to the Opera Comique to see the first-night performance of a much-discussed version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde staged by Daniel Bandmann.

  The Opera Comique had opened in 1870, and some of Gilbert and Sullivan’s early operas had been staged there, but after their departure for the Savoy Theatre, its fortunes declined. A refurbishment in 1885 led to a short-lived period of popularity, which it was enjoying in 1888, but it was a false summer and within eleven years, it was closed. The Bandmann production was perhaps typical of the sort of productions in what the theatrical paper, The Era, described as the theater’s “singularly eccentric and mostly disastrous career.”

  Both Daniel Bandmann and Richard Mansfield had come to London with productions of Jekyll and Hyde, and Mansfield’s transformation from Jekyll to Hyde was widely acclaimed and is what he is largely remembered for today. Bandmann was an actor-manager of note and distinction, but his much-awaited version was a disaster. His transformation consisted of little more than disturbing his wig and putting in a hideous set of false teeth while the lights were turned down, and, according to The Times, Bandmann as Hyde then “hops about the stage after the manner of a kangaroo, emitting a wheezing sound like a broken-winded horse.” The Daily News likened Bandmann’s hopping to that of “a galvanised frog,” referred to the audience laughing aloud, and stated that “unseemly tittering” even accompanied a murder scene.

  “As tedious as it is puerile,” according to the Pall Mall Gazette, the play lasted only a few performances.

  Carnac describes the play briefly, but accurately, and, as said, it feels like a firsthand account. S. G. Hulme Beaman could not have seen it, and in some respects, it is surprising that he would have even heard of it, so reference to it could indicate that the manuscript is not his. On the other hand, it was something of a theatrical cause célèbre, at the time and he could have heard of it from his mother or anot
her family member.

  What is also interesting, if Hulme Beaman was the author of the autobiography, is that he connected the first night of Bandmann’s Jekyll and Hyde with the night on which Martha Tabram was murdered. In many ways, it appears to have been inspired by the play.

  Carnac briefly describes the murder of Martha Tabram, whom he calls Martha Tabron. He also denies having murdered Emma Smith and refers to reading accounts of the crime, and he mentions Dr. Killeen and Dr. Phillips.

  Chapter 19 briefly describes the murder of Mary Ann Nichols and describes it as “a somewhat dull affair,” which of all the Whitechapel murders, the murderer might well have retrospectively felt it was. It certainly lacked the risks the murderer took in the later cases.

  Chapter 20 describes the murder of Annie Chapman, who is portrayed as a very chatty Cockney whose main achievement, at least as Carnac recalls, is having once possessed a canary in a cage. She recalled having to pawn the cage and release the canary, which much to her distress was eaten by a cat.

  The real Annie Chapman had known much better than that. She had been married to a coachman and lived in a mews accommodation in the West End, and also for a while on the estate of the very wealthy Sir Francis Tress Barry at St. Leonard’s Hill near Windsor. She was often drunk and ultimately an embarrassment to all concerned, her husband separating from her, but she had enjoyed a lifestyle in which having a singing canary would not have been a high spot.

  Chapter 22 refers to the murder of Elizabeth Stride. Carnac bought grapes for her, which is a controversial story concerning Matthew Packer, who had a small shop on Berner Street and who claimed to have sold grapes to a couple and watched them standing in the rain eating them. Carnac says she had an accent, which some contemporary sources don’t support, and relates her telling him a story about having lost her children in the Princess Alice disaster. This was a story Stride frequently told. On September 3, 1878, the Thames pleasure steamer Princess Alice collided with the Bywell Castle and sank within four minutes, over 650 passengers drowning. As far as can be told, Stride’s husband and children were not among them, nor was Stride herself a passenger. Why she repeatedly told the story is not known. Carnac also refers to being disturbed by the arrival of a horse and cart. This was a man named Louis Diemshutz, who was returning home.