Seeking to establish once and for all everything that was known to the authorities about Cleveland Street and the Duke of Clarence, the BBC team made enquiries at the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. After being told that there were no names in the Cleveland Street file that were associated with the East End (although how this was known was not revealed) three files were produced. The investigators were convinced that someone had been through the files and some documents had been removed; indeed they were told as much by an official as they left who said, on being told that there were no names of any interest in the files: “You should have seen some of the names in the pages we wouldn’t let you see…” He would say no more but the conclusion of The Ripper File television investigators was that it might well be that somebody at the Director of Public Prosecutions Office is sitting on a file that has the answer to the Ripper murders.
According to Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper was in reality three people: physician Sir William Gull, coachman John Netley, and either Walter Sickert himself or possibly Sir Robert Anderson. It is alleged that the murderers would locate their victims and in the cases of Mary Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, and Catherine Eddowes, they were offered a ride in the carriage. All but Stride were murdered inside the vehicle as Netley drove slowly round the streets. The bodies were then dumped by Netley in the places where they were found. Stride was too drunk to understand what they were saying and as she lurched off the carriage pulled up near her. Netley concealed the vehicle in a dark alleyway and Gull remained inside. Sickert (or Anderson) and Netley trailed Stride to Berner Street and there she was approached and then attacked by Netley as Sickert (or Anderson) kept watch. The deed accomplished, the murderers quietly returned to the coach and drove to Aldgate where they murdered the woman they thought was Mary Kelly. The mistake arose because they had been told that Mary Kelly was in custody at Bishopsgate Police Station for being drunk and disorderly and they knew that she was likely to be released after midnight. The woman they took to be Mary Kelly was in fact Catherine Eddowes. Quickly discovering their mistake the three murderers ran the real Mary Kelly to earth and murdered her in her own room, taking their time and making it look like the final fanatical fling of a madman, for they knew that this would be the last “Ripper” murder.
Joseph Sickert said his father “was induced” to remain silent about the whole affair by fear for his own safety. “He knew more than anyone else about Jack the Ripper, apart from the actual participants in the conspiracy.” One day the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, appeared at his studio without warning and without more than a cursory glance he offered Sickert £500 immediately for a painting. At a time when he was lucky if he obtained £3 for a painting Sickert took the money. Although there was no mention of Cleveland Street or the Whitechapel murders, the painter soon realised that he had been given hush-money. He reasoned that nothing would be achieved by fighting the issue and he accepted the bribe and remained silent until many years later when he felt compelled to tell all he knew about the whole affair to his son Joseph; although, Joseph said, his father found himself painting into his pictures cryptic references to the truth behind the Ripper murders, which may have been a way of living with his guilty secret. Alice Margaret had been Walter Sickert’s mistress for more than twelve years and she had a son by him, Joseph; Joseph’s mother had died in 1950.
Stephen Knight pointed to one or two “facts” that suggested some foundation for what seemed an entertaining but absurd story. Hereditary deafness had afflicted the Sickerts as it had the Royal Family: Princess Alexandra passed on the disability to her son Prince Albert Victor and if he had fathered a child it could well have inherited the affliction. Alice Margaret Crook, the daughter Sickert said was the offspring of the Duke of Clarence, was deaf. In 1902, when she was under the care of the St. Pancras Board of Guardians, she is on record as being “stone deaf” and again in 1905 when she applied for assistance the Relieving Officer of the Westminster Union noted her deafness. Joseph Sickert is almost completely deaf in one ear and his youngest daughter has no hearing at all. A photograph of Alice Margaret, the alleged daughter of Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, shows a marked similarity to photographs of the Princess Alexandra who may be her grandmother.
Walter Sickert, a strange, compelling, and complicated man, seems also to have been a liar. Stephen Knight says he invented a Ripper story that over many years satisfied his need to talk about the murders and ensured him of being the centre of attraction, a position he loved to occupy. He told the story to Osbert Sitwell and many other people but Sitwell used it in his introduction to an anthology of Sickert’s writings. Briefly, Sickert would say that some years after the Ripper murders he took a house in a London suburb and after he had been there some months he asked the old woman who looked after the house whether she knew who had occupied the room before him. At first she had said “No,” then, after a pause she had added, “Perhaps Jack the Ripper.”
Her story was that the room had been previously occupied by a veterinary student who took to occasionally staying out all night. The old woman and her husband would hear him come home during the early hours and then he would pace up and down his room for an hour or more, until the first editions of the morning papers were available; then he would creep downstairs and run to the corner of the road and buy a paper. He would then return and go to bed. Later there would be evidence in the fireplace that the lodger had burnt the clothing he had been wearing the previous evening. The days would be filled with talk of the terrible murders, all committed in the early hours, but the student never mentioned them. He suffered from consumption and the old couple watched him grow worse and worse. They had their suspicions but it seemed unlikely that this gentle and ailing youth could be responsible for such awful crimes and before they had convinced themselves that they should inform the authorities, the youth’s health suddenly took a turn for the worse and his mother, a widow from Bournemouth, came and took him away. From that time the murders stopped. The young man died five months later.
This story inspired Marie Belloc-Lowndes to write her best-selling novel, The Lodger (New York 1911, London 1913), which in turn inspired two plays, at least five films and a two-act opera. Donald McCormick traces back to Walter Sickert the connection with the Ripper murders, if there is a connection, and Montague John Druitt whom we have already considered as a prime suspect. McCormick tells of tracing a London doctor who knew Sickert and whose father was at Oxford with Druitt. This doctor maintained that Sickert once told his “lodger” story to Sir Melville Macnaghten at the Garrick Club and Sir Melville took the story seriously because he knew that Druitt had a widowed mother living in Bournemouth. Stephen Knight suggests that McCormick included Druitt’s name in his list of suspects as a direct result of hearing Sickert’s tale and associating him with the man who was found drowned in the Thames at the end of 1888. Interestingly enough Walter Sickert said from the beginning that Druitt had been a scapegoat in the affair; and there were incidents in Walter Sickert’s story that checked out—indeed after sitting on the story for half a century it would be amazing if there were not—but there really is very little in all of it to cause an objective observer to consider it anything other than a story based on real people and real events. Stephen Knight ended up convinced that Sickert himself had assisted in the murders.
Serious consideration of the Sickert/Knight story reveals that there is no hard evidence to link it with the Ripper murders. And what about motive? There could have been a threat of revolution and the Royal Family was unpopular; indeed Queen Victoria herself seemed to think the monarchy would die with her. Queen Victoria, incidentally, as I have shown in my book Queen Victoria’s Other World (1986), was much interested in the Ripper murders. At a time when murder was commonplace, especially in the East End of London, the Queen took an active interest in the first Ripper murder. Stephen Knight argued that only a person with some inside knowledge can recognise in a single killing the beginning of
a series, especially if the second murder has not yet occurred.
There can be no doubt that those in authority could see great danger to the monarchy and the stability of the country at the time of the murders; the Queen herself foresaw an uprising that would end the monarchy if her son married a Roman Catholic. Lord Salisbury, as we have seen, also foresaw great danger, and if the Duke of Clarence really had married a Roman Catholic and had a child by her—a child conceived out of wedlock—it is possible to see Salisbury and other influential people including the Royal Family regarding the affair as assuming immense and crucial proportions. If he thought the conduct of the Duke was likely to cause chaos and bring about the downfall of the monarchy, Salisbury might well have tried to cover up the affair by arranging the removal of Annie Elizabeth Crook to an institution, with the help and connivance of the Royal physician, Sir William Gull; and if he then discovered that Mary Kelly had escaped and might prove to be a danger, he would then have found himself led into deeper water. All of a sudden it all seems possible.
Nor does it seem to be in serious dispute that there was a cover-up and if there was, this makes nonsense of most of the previous theories concerning Jack the Ripper. If it was a vengeful midwife, a Jewish slaughterman, a mad social reformer, a deranged surgeon, Neill Cream, Montague John Druitt, even James Kenneth Stephen, there would have been no real call for a cover-up—but such action would certainly have been necessary if the murders had been arranged and carried out by those in authority. Without going into detail, a cover-up seems obvious when it is considered that vital evidence was suppressed at some of the Ripper inquests; the course of justice was prevented in the Cleveland Street brothel case; a scapegoat was prepared to safeguard the possibility of having to name the Ripper and to satisfy anyone investigating the case in later years and, without doubt, some documents relating to the case have been withheld from inspection by bona fide investigators, and other documents have been destroyed. And yet, there were criticisms of the Stephen Knight book as soon as it was published and at a time when no one was to know that this Ripper theory would shortly be shown to be little more than a hoax.
In his review of the book in The Sunday Times Raymond Mortimer refers to Stephen Knight “embroidering” his research “with many conjections of his own which he takes to be facts.” Mortimer continues: “He seems to me a very poor judge of evidence…” and “In the hitherto secret files of Scotland Yard Mr. Knight found no mention of Clarence, Gull, Netley, or Sickert. Indeed, apart from Joseph Sickert’s boyhood memories of his father’s talk, Mr. Knight offers us no evidence whatever to support his ‘solution.’ Walter Sickert loved tall stories, and must now be chuckling in the Elysian Fields. The whole ‘solution’ seems to be an obvious mare’s nest: and what most surprises me is that a BBC team ever wasted their time on investigating and dramatising a yarn so ill-founded.”
This prompted an immediate response from Paul Bonner, the producer of the BBC Jack the Ripper series, in which he pointed out that the Sickert story was accorded only a small part of the BBC series and was, in fact, dismissed from the summary at the end for want of evidence.
But there was worse to come for Stephen Knight. In an article in The Sunday Times in June 1978 David May revealed that “the final solution to the Jack the Ripper mystery put forward confidently two years ago is neither final nor a solution, according to the man whose story provided the basis for the claim. Joseph Sickert, who claimed that the Ripper murders of 1888 were organised by top government circles of the day to hide a royal scandal, told The Sunday Times: “It was a hoax. I made it all up.”
In his book Stephen Knight said at one point, “It all sounded terribly unlikely” but he became convinced that Joseph Sickert believed every word of his father’s story, and when Knight’s exciting and original researches threw up considerable circumstantial detail that appeared to corroborate Sickert’s “unlikely” story, the young author was sure that he had at last solved the mystery of Jack the Ripper.
But now Joseph Sickert said part of his story was nothing but a “whopping fib.” The only part he stuck to was the first part pertaining to his father’s story concerning his mother’s parentage; the part about Jack the Ripper, he now admitted, was pure invention. He said at this time: “As an artist I found it easy to paint Jack the Ripper into the story I had been told about Prince Albert Victor and my grandmother by my father.”
Married with three daughters of his own Joseph Sickert said, in 1978, that he had decided to confess because things had got out of hand. He wanted to clear his father’s name. When he had made up the story he didn’t think it would cause much harm or embarrassment as he thought the story was only going to appear in a local paper. “As far as I am concerned,” he is reported as saying, “Jack the Ripper can go back to the Ripperologists.” When The Sunday Times article appeared Stephen Knight could not be contacted but Simon Scott, Editorial Director at Harrap, who published Stephen Knight’s book, tells me that the author did in fact revise the original edition.
The sad story of Stephen Knight continued in 1980 when he was suddenly diagnosed as having a brain tumour and told that he might have only a year to live. After an operation in 1982 he was confident that he was cured and he visited America and wrote other books including The Brotherhood, a bestseller about Freemasonry that caused a furore when it was published. In September 1984 he underwent a second operation but died in Scotland in July 1985 aged only thirty-three; and with him died one of the most involved, plausible, and just-possible theories concerning the Ripper murders.
Another kind of Jack the Ripper hoax seems to have been attempted in 1986, according to my friend Dr. Bernard Finch, when a skeleton, some nineteenth-century surgical knives, and pieces of women’s clothing were discovered by a builder renovating the cellars of the Old Bull and Bush inn at Hampstead.
Interestingly enough there had long been a tradition in the neighbourhood that Jack the Ripper knew the area and was possibly known to Sir Thomas Spencer Wells (1818–97) who lived in a big house opposite the Old Bull and Bush. He was a famous surgeon after whom the Spencer Wells forceps are named. The house he lived in is no longer standing, having been bombed during the Second World War. Whether there is any foundation for the legend that Jack the Ripper was known to Sir Thomas Spencer Wells, it has to be accepted that the Ripper is likely to have been interested in the man famed for his successful and safe revival of the operation of ovariotomy and whose published works included Diseases of the Ovaries, Notebook for Cases of Ovarian and other Abdominal Tumours, and On Ovarian and Uterine Tumours.
Newspaper reports suggested that “authorities” thought the skeleton found in the walled-up cellar may be that of none other than Jack the Ripper himself! The bones were found in an old ventilation shaft that was bricked-up sometime in the late nineteenth century.
The landlord of the Old Bull and Bush is reported to have said at the time: “It is impossible to say how the man got into that part of the cellar. He may have been hiding and found he could not get out or he may have become unconscious due to lack of air.”
It was also stated in one newspaper report that “one of the main suspects in the unsolved Ripper murders was a medical student living only about a mile from the Old Bull and Bush.”
Dr. Bernard Finch, who examined the skeleton, said it belonged to a very strong man who was about five feet ten inches in height. He was right-handed and probably thirty to thirty-five years old, possibly a little younger.
There is a local story that a tunnel linked the public house with the home of Sir Thomas Spencer Wells, who worked in a hospital in the district where Jack the Ripper found his victims. When I spoke to him Dr. Finch told me that efforts were being made to locate this reputed tunnel but he added that he had no doubt whatever the skeleton and the knives and pieces of women’s clothing had been placed where they were found by a hoaxer.
For many years, according to Police Sergeant Maurice Link, eerie stories have abounded about the Old Bull and
Bush being haunted by the menacing ghost of a man, customers having claimed to see such a figure standing unsmiling at the bar, “looking a bit furtive.” Could it be the ghost of Jack the Ripper himself?
TWO NEW SUSPECTS
A shadowy figure in the Ripper story who, I had long thought, would well repay study and investigation, is the man whom Bruce Paley, in an issue of the American True Crime Magazine, suggests as a possible candidate for the Ripper: Joseph Barnett, the unemployed fish porter and general labourer who lived for nearly two years with the attractive Mary Kelly who was five years his junior…Mary Kelly, around whom the whole Jack the Ripper case may well revolve.
By most accounts Barnett thought a great deal of Mary and he did his best, it is said, to persuade her to keep off the streets but the two of them had great difficulty in obtaining sufficient money to live or indeed to make ends meet. There were certainly quarrels in the tiny room they jointly occupied, quarrels that increased with the passing of time and were usually over money or over Mary’s liking for gin.
Things seem to have come to a head when Mary Kelly brought home two of her fellow prostitutes in succession, a girl named Julia and Maria Harvey, and calmly suggested they share the conjugal bed. It must be likely that Mary Kelly, in common with many prostitutes before and since her day, had lesbian tendencies and inclinations which, even today, many men of the working class find abhorent.
Barnett could well have been affected psychologically by the unexpected turn of events and evidently he made his objections all too plain, a violent quarrel ensued with slaps and punches being exchanged, articles being thrown and a window broken. At the end of it all, or perhaps in the middle of it, Barnett moved out and ten days later Mary Kelly was found dead, horribly mutilated, almost certainly by someone who knew their way around and who had been in the room before the night of the murder.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 18