The Complete Jack the Ripper

by Donald Rumbelow

  When Montague was thirteen years old he won a scholarship to Winchester College, where he spent the next six years. From his school record it is clear that he enjoyed both sport and polemics. His only recorded failure was as Sir Toby Belch in a school production of Twelfth Night, which earned the college magazine comment: ‘But of the inadequacy of Druitt as Sir Toby, what are we to say? It can be better imagined than described.’ In November 1873 he defended the French Republic in debate, and it was presumably his post-Sedan sympathies which led him on another occasion to denounce the influence of Bismarck as ‘morally and socially a curse to the world’. He championed Wordsworth as a bulwark of Protestantism. In a more light-hearted mood he defended the fashions of the 1870s as a graceful combination of beauty and utility, not the social evil that his opponents represented them to be. In his final debate he defended his contemporaries against the older generation which had subjugated women and tolerated slavery, by proclaiming, ‘The old theory of government was, man is made for States. Is it not a vast improvement that States should be made for man, as they are now?’

  He was a good sportsman. He was the school Fives champion in 1875 and he played cricket for the school First Eleven at Lord’s in 1876. The same year he was awarded a scholarship to New College, Oxford, where he seems to have been popular with the other undergraduates and was elected Steward of the Junior Common Room. A classics scholar, he graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1880. Three years later he could purchase, as was then the privilege with Oxford and Cambridge graduates, his master’s degree on payment of a small fee.

  He applied for admittance to the Inner Temple in May 1882 and was called to the bar in April 1885. He rented chambers at 9 King’s Bench Walk, Temple and joined the Western Circuit and Winchester Sessions as a barrister. Without private income or an exceptional talent, the failure rate of such fledglings was very high: a contemporary wrote that, of eight thousand barristers, only one in eight could make a living. He was made Special Pleader, Western Circuit, in 1887, which did not involve courtroom appearances. In 1882 he had begun to earn extra money by teaching at a small crammer’s school in Blackheath, south-east London. This, however, came to an abrupt end at the end of Michaelmas term 1888 when he was dismissed. For what reason is not known. It has been suggested that there was a homosexual explanation for his dismissal, but it is equally plausible that it was because of his erratic behaviour, since he believed he was going insane. His mother was already confined in a private mental home at Chiswick, where she died on 15 December 1890 of ‘melancholia’ and ‘brain disease’.

  Montague was last seen alive on 3 December 1888. Soon afterwards, and probably in a state of acute depression after visiting his mother, he weighted his pockets with stones and threw himself into the Thames. His body was found floating in the water at Thorneycrofts, near Chiswick, on 31 December. It was fully clothed and in a state of decomposition. At the inquest, held at the Lamb and Tap in Chiswick, his brother William, a solicitor living at Bournemouth, told the coroner that the last time he had seen his brother was when he stayed overnight at Bournemouth towards the end of October. It wasn’t until 11 December that he heard from a friend that Montague had been missing from his chambers for more than a week. He went to London to make inquiries and at the Blackheath school learned for the first time that his brother had got into some serious trouble and had been dismissed. Among his things he found a paper addressed to himself which read: ‘Since Friday I felt I was going to be like mother and the best thing for me is to die.’

  There were no other clues in his pockets. When he was searched he was in possession of £210s. in gold, seven shillings in silver, twopence in bronze and two cheques drawn on the London Provincial Bank, one for £50 and the other for £16; they could have been his school wages but an alternative put forward is that they were drawn to pay off a blackmailer. There was also a first-class season ticket from Blackheath to London, a second half return from Hammersmith to Charing Cross (dated 1 December), a silver watch, a gold chain with a spade guinea attached, a pair of gloves and a white handkerchief. In his top coat were the four large stones with which he had weighted himself down.

  The one obvious thing that is missing is any shred of evidence that Montague John Druitt was Jack the Ripper.

  Among the Scotland Yard papers there is a letter that refers to some inquiries made about three medical students who were allegedly insane. The police had evidently managed to trace two, but the third had eluded them. The Home Secretary wanted to know what inquiries had been made about this third, and when. According to Inspector Abberline’s reply, which is dated 1 November 1888, searching inquiries had been made by an officer at Aberdeen Place, St John’s Wood, the last known address of the medical student known as John Sanders. The only information he had managed to glean was that a lady named Sanders had lived at No. 20 but had left and gone abroad about two years before. Unfortunately, the Scotland Yard papers contain no information other than this. The names of the other two students were not mentioned at all.

  Sir Melville Macnaghten has been put in the unusual position of having given the vital clue that makes a slightly more than satisfactory solution possible. Whether he would have appreciated this position is a matter of doubt. One of his great disappointments in life was that he became ‘a detective officer six months after Jack the Ripper committed suicide’, which deprived him of ‘having a go at that fascinating individual’. (His other disappointment was not playing cricket for Eton against Harrow.) No doubt he would be surprised that every one of his facts – precisely because they are so few – have been wrung dry of every possible shade of meaning. Even these can be wrong. He made obvious mistakes, such as saying that Druitt’s age was forty-one. Even this can be explained away if we remember that he was copying from the police file and notes about a case of which he knew nothing at first hand – as we may presume, from the rough jottings in the possession of his grandson, that he was – and that he might have been copying precisely this error as it was given in the County of Middlesex Independent of 2 January 1889, which reported the finding of Druitt’s body and which would have been filed, as we have shown, along with the rest of the case papers:

  FOUND IN THE RIVER

  The body of a well-dressed man was discovered on Monday in the river off Thorneycroft’s torpedo works, by a waterman named Winslow. The police were communicated with and the deceased was conveyed to the mortuary. The body, which is that of a man about 40 years of age, has been in the water about a month. From certain papers found on the body friends at Bournemouth have been telegraphed to. An inquest will be held today (Wednesday).

  From this it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that Macnaghten was referring to Druitt, although he doesn’t mention him by name, for he says, referring to his principal suspect, ‘I have always held strong opinions regarding him, and the more I think the matter over, the stronger do these opinions become. The truth, however, will never be known, and did indeed, at one time lie at the bottom of the Thames, if my conjections be correct!’

  This statement was made some years after his original notes, in which he was not quite so sure. In fact he hedged his bets: ‘A much more rational theory is that the murderer’s brain gave way altogether after his awful glut in Miller’s Court, and that he immediately committed suicide, or, as a possible alternative, was found to be so hopelessly mad by his relations, that he was by them confined in some asylum.’ (My italics.)

  Major Arthur Griffiths, the author of Mysteries of Police and Crime, draws much the same conclusions. In fact, his wording is so similar that it is positively certain that he was quoting from Macnaghten’s notes which, as an Inspector of Prisons, he would almost certainly have had access to. Other people have made much the same statements, but as they seem to be quoting from a common source – generally Macnaghten – it is fair to ask whether there is any independent evidence pointing to Druitt.

  Strangely enough, there is, although once again the original notes have disappeared. It is i
n a statement made by Albert Bachert who, according to Donald McCormick in his book on the Ripper, was a prominent member of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. After the Miller’s Court murder on 9 November he became alarmed at the way that the police reduced the number of their patrols in the area and eventually, in March 1889, he complained to the senior officers ‘that there seemed to be too much complacency in the force simply because there had been no more murders for some months’.

  He was asked if he would be sworn to secrecy on the understanding that he was given certain information.

  Foolishly, I agreed. It was then suggested to me that the Vigilance Committee and its patrols might be disbanded as the police were quite certain that the Ripper was dead. I protested that, as I had been sworn to secrecy, I really ought to be given more information than this. ‘It isn’t necessary for you to know any more,’ I was told. ‘The man in question is dead. He was fished out of the Thames two months ago and it would only cause pain to relatives if we said any more than that.’

  I again protested that I had been sworn to secrecy all for nothing, that I was really no wiser than before: ‘if there are no more murders, I shall respect this confidence, but if there are any more I shall consider I am absolved from my pledge of secrecy’.

  The police then got very tough. They told me a pledge was a solemn matter, that anyone who put out stories that the Ripper was still alive might be proceeded against for causing a public mischief. However, they agreed that if there were any other murders which the police were satisfied could be Ripper murders, that was another matter.

  If true, this means that the police had positively identified Druitt as the Ripper in January 1889 soon after his body was found.

  But on what evidence? Why should they pick on this cricket-playing barrister?

  One theory, which has been developed, links him with the painter Walter Sickert who thought that he knew the identity of the murderer. According to Sickert, some years after the murders he was living in a London suburb in lodgings which were looked after by an old couple. One day his landlady, as she was dusting, asked him if he knew the identity of the person previously occupying his room. When told that he didn’t, she replied that it was ‘Jack the Ripper’.

  The writer Osbert Sitwell, a friend of Sickert’s, gave the details in his autobiography Noble Essences :

  Her story was that his predecessor had been a veterinary student. After he had been a month or two in London, this delicate-looking young man – he was consumptive – took to occasionally staying out all night. His landlord and landlady would hear him come in about six in the morning and then walk about in his room for an hour or two, until the first edition of the morning paper was on sale, when he would creep lightly downstairs and run to the corner to buy one. Quietly he would return and go to bed. But an hour later, when the old man called him, he would notice, by the traces in the fireplace, that his lodger had burnt the suit he had been wearing the previous evening.

  Gradually the old couple came to the reluctant conclusion that their lodger was none other than the Ripper. But before they could make up their minds whether to warn the police about him, his health suddenly deteriorated and his mother, who was a widow, came and took him back to Bournemouth where she lived and where, says Donald McCormick, he died three months later.

  According to McCormick’s source, Walter Sickert told this story to Sir Melville Macnaghten, who became convinced that the young man in question must have been Druitt because ‘he had a widowed mother living in Bournemouth, the same as Druitt.’ This is clearly nonsense. Druitt’s brother William certainly lived in Bournemouth, but their widowed mother had been confined in a mental asylum since July 1888 and was incapable of fetching home her son – who, by the by, was not a veterinary surgeon. And Osbert adds that not only did the landlady confide in Sickert and name Jack the Ripper but that he had scribbled it down in a French edition of Casanova’s memoirs which he happened to be reading at the time, and which he had subsequently given to artist Sir William Rothenstein’s brother – and where it could be found now, Sickert had added, if Sitwell wanted to know the name. When, years later, Sitwell tried to trace the book it was only to learn that it had been lost in the bombing of London ‘and that there had been several pencil notes entered in the margin, in Sickert’s handwriting, always so difficult to decipher’. Two things are clear. Had Macnaghten been given the name he would not have been forced to speculate on the identity. The other point is that since Sickert’s talk ‘contained in its web certain invariable strands, certain immutable monuments that could be invoked for purposes of reference, allusion, comparison and simile’, one of which was the mystery of Jack the Ripper, it is equally clear that Sickert couldn’t have taken the landlady’s story very seriously – which is why he only thought it worth a note in the margin of the book that he happened to be reading, although he painted a picture of the lodger’s room titled ‘Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom’.

  McCormick’s same anonymous source says that Druitt was being blackmailed and that he confided this to his mother, whom he told ‘about the whole affair and she presumably told the police when he was reported missing some time during December 1888. Anyhow, my father was emphatic that Druitt was living at Bournemouth when the first two Ripper crimes were committed.’

  And, says McCormick, ‘this seems finally to dispose of the case that Druitt had any connection with the crimes.’

  Unfortunately it does not.

  Even if we assume that Druitt was living in Bournemouth – which I do not for one moment believe – there is fortunately independent evidence to show that he was in London for one of these murders, at least.

  According to an article by Irving Rosenwater in The Cricketer of January 1973, he was playing cricket at Blackheath at 11.30 a.m. on the very morning that Annie Chapman was murdered at 5.30 a.m. (8 September) only half a dozen miles away. This fact alone is enough to destroy the uncorroborated gossip of McCormick’s witness that he could not have killed Chapman because he was living in Bournemouth when the first two murders were committed. Even if we concede to McCormick’s theory that Chapman was the third victim and not the second (he makes Martha Tabram – 7 August – the first) there is again the confirmatory evidence from the cricketing records that he was playing in a match at Canford on the same day that Nichols’s body was found, 31 August. Either fact is justification enough for dismissing as worthless the claim that Druitt could not have committed the murder because he was living in Bournemouth.

  More difficult to explain away is Macnaghten’s assertion that Druitt was probably a doctor. This is one of the most puzzling statements in the whole case and since much the same thing has been said not just once but many times, it is tempting to ask if there might be some truth in the story. Did he begin to study medicine before becoming a barrister?

  If so, if Druitt was a medical student and one of the two who were questioned by the police, this might explain one of the most puzzling factors about the whole case. Nichols, it will be recalled, was murdered on 31 August; Chapman on 8 September; Stride and Eddowes on 30 September. Logically, if this pattern of dates had continued the next murders should have been on 8/9 October, 30/31 October and 8/9 November (which was the date that Mary Kelly was murdered). Instead, there was none at all in October. This immediately prompts the question, ‘Why?’

  Assuming still that Druitt was one of the medical students who had been traced, this would fit in with the dates in so far as we know them from Abberline’s report dated 1 November. As he is only answering the Home Secretary’s queries about the third medical student, it is a reasonable assumption that the reports about the two who had been traced must have been forwarded at least two weeks before that, and consequently the enquiries must have been made in the first half of the month. If Druitt was questioned by the police at the beginning of October it would explain why there were no killings that month and why he waited until he could be sure that he was no longer under suspicion.

  Would t
his pent-up frenzy explain the shambles of Mary Kelly’s death at Miller’s Court?

  Tempting though this theory is, there are no hard facts to support it. As Donald McCormick rightly says, ‘What other evidence is there to support Sir Melville’s claim to name him as chief suspect? He was never seen in the vicinity of the crimes.’

  This point was challenged by Dan Farson who says in his book Jack the Ripper that Montague’s cousin, Dr Lionel Druitt, had a surgery at 140 Minories, on the City’s eastern boundary. It was an important discovery, as the Minories is only a few minutes’ walk from Mitre Square, where Eddowes was murdered, and might have been Druitt’s hide-out.

  Farson’s new evidence was that Lionel Druitt was assisting Dr Thomas Thyne at his surgery in the Minories in 1879. Farson believed that Montague Druitt visited his cousin there and that later, when Lionel became a junior partner in Dr Gillard’s practice at 122 Clapham Road, he stayed on and may even have rented a room there. This, if true, would explain the ease and speed of the Ripper’s disappearance as he would be living on the City/East End boundary.

  There are several factors which throw doubts on these conclusions. Only the Medical Register (1879) lists Lionel Druitt as being at 140 Minories. The Medical Director, for the same year, lists him in the Scotland section as being assistant house surgeon to a hospital in Edinburgh. The same 1879 Directory lists the practitioners at the Minories address as Dr J. O. Taylor and Dr Thyne. The two points together prove fairly conclusively that Druitt’s stay at the Minories could only have been a short one. For the following year (1880) only Dr Thyne is listed at the Minories address. Both the Medical Register and the Medical Directory for 1880 give Lionel’s address as 8 Strathmore Gardens which is the same as in the 1878 editions.