Pollard was a partner of Robert Churchill the gunsmith, who was closely involved with Scotland Yard for many years as their ‘gun expert’. I believe that Pollard, who played a similar role, was given the knives, possibly to destroy, but kept them because of what he had been told. He had also been employed as an Intelligence Officer by the Irish Office after the 1914–18 war. His career would overlap with Macnaghten’s. Although this is very circumstantial it is the sort of evidence which, if found in Druitt’s room, might have turned a hunt for a potential suicide into a search for Jack the Ripper.
Unfortunately, as in so many other instances, there’s no proof.
But if the police were already in possession of some such facts as these then it would explain why, when Montague Druitt’s brother William gave evidence at the coroner’s inquest, he said that he was the only living relative. If he had been apprised by the police of the possibility of his brother being named as the killer, it is not surprising that he should be doing his best to protect the family’s good name. All this is very circumstantial. But then so are most theories.
Druitt is still a favourite with many Ripperologists as the man most likely to have been Jack the Ripper. By chance, I happened to be looking through some old cuttings pasted in a battered three-volume edition of Griffiths’ Mysteries of Police and Crime. Among them was one from the People’s Journal issue of 26 September 1919, on the retirement of a detective named ‘Steve’ White who had spent many nights as a young policeman loitering about the evil-smelling alleys of Whitechapel in search of Jack the Ripper. His story is quoted below in full. Clearly it refers to the Mitre Square murder, as it is the only murder which fits the facts; it also confirms a long-held suspicion of mine that Constable Watkins was probably on the other side of Kearley & Tonge’s warehouse door, either talking or drinking tea with the watchman who happened to be an ex-policeman.
Certainly White’s description of the Ripper, when it is compared with the photograph of Druitt, is one of the most uncanny things about the whole story. One of his reports included the following passage:
For five nights we had been watching a certain alley just behind the Whitechapel Road. It could only be entered from where we had two men posted in hiding, and persons entering the alley were under observation by the two men. It was a bitter cold night when I arrived at the scene to take the report of the two men in hiding. I was turning away when I saw a man coming out of the alley. He was walking quickly but noiselessly, apparently wearing rubber shoes, which were rather rare in those days. I stood aside to let the man pass, and as he came under the wall lamp I got a good look at him.
He was about five feet ten inches in height, and was dressed rather shabbily, though it was obvious that the material of his clothes was good. Evidently a man who had seen better days, I thought, but men who have seen better days are common enough down East, and that of itself was not sufficient to justify me in stopping him. His face was long and thin, nostrils rather delicate, and his hair was jet black. His complexion was inclined to be sallow, and altogether the man was foreign in appearance. The most striking thing about him, however, was the extraordinary brilliance of his eyes. They looked like two very luminous glow worms coming through the darkness. The man was slightly bent at the shoulders, though he was obviously quite young – about thirty-three, at the most – and gave one the idea of having been a student or professional man. His hands were snow white, and the fingers long and tapering.
As the man passed me at the lamp I had an uneasy feeling that there was something more than usually sinister about him, and I was strongly moved to find some pretext for detaining him; but the more I thought it over, the more was I forced to the conclusion that it was not in keeping with British police methods that I should do so. My only excuse for interfering with the passage of this man would have been his association with the man we were looking for, and I had no real grounds for connecting him with the murder. It is true I had a sort of intuition that the man was not quite right. Still, if one acted on intuition in the police force, there would be more frequent outcries about interference with the liberty of subject, and at that time the police were criticized enough to make it undesirable to take risks.
The man stumbled a few feet away from me, and I made that an excuse for engaging him in conversation. He turned sharply at the sound of my voice, and scowled at me in surly fashion, but he said ‘Good-night’ and agreed with me that it was cold.
His voice was a surprise to me. It was soft and musical, with just a tinge of melancholy in it, and it was the voice of a man of culture – a voice altogether out of keeping with the squalid surroundings of the East End.
As he turned away, one of the police officers came out of the house he had been in, and walked a few paces into the darkness of the ally. ‘Hello! What’s this?’ he cried, and then he called in startled tones to me to come along.
In the East End we are used to shocking sights, but the sight I saw made the blood in my veins turn to ice. At the end of the cul-de-sac, huddled against the wall, there was the body of a woman, and a pool of blood was streaming along the gutter from her body. It was clearly another of those terrible murders. I remembered the man I had seen, and I started after him as fast as I could run, but he was lost to sight in the dark labyrinth of the East End mean streets.
White’s description of the suspected murderer was widely circulated. It was this description that allegedly gave Sir Robert Anderson, the head of CID, the alternative possibility that the murderer was a Jewish medical student, who had taken this method of avenging himself on women of the class to which his victims belonged.
The mystery, however, that baffled the police more than anything was how the murderer and the victim managed to get into the alley under the eyes of the watching police. It was clear that the couple had not been in any of the houses, and they were not known to any of the residents. Therefore they must have passed into the alley from the Whitechapel Road, and the two police officers were positive that in the four hours of their vigil not a soul had entered the alley. White had his own suspicions regarding the truth of this declaration, and his suspicions were shared by Sir Robert Anderson, who afterwards, in comparing notes with White, expressed the opinion that the murderer and his victim had entered the alley during the temporary absence of the two watching policemen. The men afterwards admitted that they had gone away for not more than a minute. It was a very short absence undoubtedly, but it was long enough to give the murderer time to walk into the alley with his victim.
Kosminski
‘Theories!’ exclaimed Chief Inspector Abberline when discussing the murders (this was to Cassell’s Saturday Journal in May 1892). ‘We were lost almost in theories; there were so many of them.’ Eleven years later he expanded on this point to the Pall Mall Gazette by adding that the police ‘have never believed all those stories about Jack the Ripper being dead, or that he was a lunatic, or anything of that kind’. What he did believe we don’t precisely know, as apart from some odds and ends that survive the Scotland Yard papers are missing, presumed destroyed; and despite allegations, which have been denied (my own letter is dated February 1988), that the Home Office are sitting on secret files, all that is available would appear to be open for public inspection at the National Archives. The scale of the loss can be gauged by Abberline’s own remarks that the police ‘made no fewer than 1,600 sets of papers respecting our investigations’ and that because of the desire of the East Enders to assist the police ‘the number of statements made – all of them requiring to be recorded and searched into – was so great’ that he himself almost broke down under the pressure. Although he doesn’t say what he means by ‘sets’, it would be reasonable to interpret this word as meaning interviews. A figure of 1,600 interviews would still seem modest considering that at least a minimum of four murders were being investigated. Nor would this figure include the statements which were taken by the City police when investigating the Eddowes murder, of which nothing remains except some let
ters from the public; those are only a selection and are now deposited with the Corporation of the City of London Records Office.
The reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette had found Abberline surrounded by a sheaf of documents and newspaper cuttings relating to the case. What the former were we don’t know, but there are unconfirmed rumours that notebooks or diaries (they are described as four exercise books) are in the possession of the Sickert family. One can only speculate as to their contents if they do exist, but clearly they are unlikely to amount to much, as they didn’t help either Knight or Joseph Sickert in their book collaboration or stop the latter from denouncing the HRH Duke of Clarence theory (see page 237) as a hoax. Abberline never wrote his own account of the murders, and the reason for his discretion is to be found in a book of press cuttings, compiled by him, which I unearthed in the records of the Hampshire Genealogical Society. Interspersed throughout the cuttings are handwritten notations by Abberline. Irritatingly, there is nothing – not even press cuttings – about his two most interesting cases, the Whitechapel murders and the Cleveland Street scandal (a homosexual vice ring again involving the Duke of Clarence). But there is his explanation of why he never wrote his memoirs. It actually begins: ‘Why I did not write my Reminiscences when I retired from the Metropolitan Police.’ (His silence on those two cases has sometimes been interpreted as meaning that he was bribed to stay silent. There is no evidence for this. When he died in 1929 the value of his estate was £317 4s. 10d. His wife, who died only a matter of weeks after, left a personal estate of £32 17s. 3d. The gross value of her estate was £66 6s. 3d. There’s no evidence here of any big pay-offs.)
The full explanation of the unwritten memoirs – which is even more irritating because of the hints of what he might have told – is as follows:
I think it is just as well to record here the reason why as from the various cuttings from the Newspapers as well as the many other matters that I was called upon to investigate – that never became public property – it must be apparent that I would write many things that would be very interesting to read.
At the time I retired from the service the Authorities were very much opposed to retired Officers writing anything for the press as previously some retired officers had from time to time been very indiscreet in what they had caused to be published and to my knowledge had been called upon to explain their conduct and in fact they had been threatened with actions for libel.
Apart from that there is no doubt the fact that in describing what you did in detecting certain crimes you are putting the criminal classes on their guard and in some cases you may be absolutely telling them how to commit crime.
As an example in the Finger Print detection you find now the expert thief wears gloves.
Slightly less circumspect was Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson, who was the headquarters man between Anderson, as Assistant Commissioner head of CID, and the investigators on the ground. Abberline had been seconded from the Yard after the Nichols murder to co-ordinate the divisional investigations. Because of his willingness to give interviews he was wrongly credited with being in charge of the overall investigation.
Swanson’s comments came to light in a copy of Anderson’s The Lighter Side of My Official Life, which had once belonged to him and is now in the possession of his grandson. On page 138, after Anderson’s statement that ‘The only person who ever saw the murderer unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him; but he refused to give evidence against him,’ Swanson had written: ‘Because the suspect was also a Jew and also because his evidence would convict the suspect, and witness would be the means of murderer being hanged which he did not wish to be left on his mind. D.S.S.’ He continued in the margin: ‘and after this identification which suspect knew, no other murder of this kind took place in London.’
He added on one of the endpapers:
After the suspect had been identified at the Seaside Home where he had been sent by us with difficulty, in order to subject him to identification and he knew he was identified. On suspects return to his brother’s house in Whitechapel he was watched by police (City CID) by day and night. In a very short time the suspect with his hands tied behind his back, he was sent to Stepney Workhouse and then to Colney Hatch and died shortly afterwards – Kosminski was the suspect – D.S.S.
The book was a present, possibly from Abberline, and inscribed ‘To Donald with every good wish from Fred’. The ‘discreet indiscretions’ (as Martin Fido has called them in the revised version of his book The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper) of Anderson’s book were highlighted by the underlining of the words ‘the traditions of my old department would suffer’ following on from Anderson’s reasons for not being more forthcoming about the Ripper’s identity.
Fido’s researches have unearthed more facts about Kosminski, who had been named by Macnaghten as one of three possible suspects. Until now there had been only this solitary reference to work on. In the Colney Hatch Hospital Admissions and Discharge Book to 1892 Fido found the following details: ‘Aaron Kozminski, Hebrew hairdresser, admitted 7 January 1891, suffering from mania for 6 years, caused by self-abuse. His bodily state was fair; his main symptom was incoherence; he was not believed to be dangerous to himself or others, and he was discharged to Leavesden Asylum in 1894.’ Leavesden was the Asylum for Imbeciles.
The case notes were fuller. His delusory ‘instincts’ let Kosminski believe that he knew what everyone world-wide was thinking or doing; they also commanded him not to accept food from other people. This led him to picking up and eating bread from the gutter. One of the places where he was seen doing this was on City police territory, in Carter Lane, one of the backstreets near St Paul’s Cathedral. He wouldn’t wash and wouldn’t work and was alleged to have threatened his sister on one occasion with a knife. In January 1892 he attacked a hospital attendant with a chair. These incidents were in contrast to his normal apathy and inactivity, however. He was twenty-six years old when he was admitted to Colney Hatch Asylum on 6 February 1891. His trade was nominally that of a hairdresser. His next of kin was his brother Wolf (with whom he is supposed to have lived at ‘Lion Square’, Commercial Road, although no such place exists). He had been treated in the Mile End Old Town Workhouse Infirmary since July 1890 before being transferred to Colney Hatch. After his committal he became steadily more incoherent and withdrawn and was transferred to Leavesden as an incurable imbecile. He was still there when he died of gangrene in 1919.
Before discovering the entry for Aaron Kosminski, Fido had identified Macnaghten’s suspect as one Nathan Kaminsky who, he argued, had been committed to Colney Hatch under the name of David Cohen, which, Fido was informed after the publication of his book, was a ‘John Doe’ for unpronounceable or misheard Jewish names. Cohen was not only the same age as Kaminsky but also, in Fido’s opinion, the only East End Jewish lunatic whose committal and dates would explain the cessation of the murders. Fido further identifies Kaminsky with both Leather Apron and Anderson’s mad Polish Jew. All that we know about Cohen is that he was twenty-three years old, had no known relatives, was extremely violent and had been brought to the Whitechapel Infirmary on 12 December 1888 after police had ‘found him wandering at large and unable to take care of himself’. On 21 December he was sent to Colney Hatch, where he was force-fed, kept under restraint and put in a strait-jacket. He died a year later.
In Fido’s opinion he is the only possible Jack the Ripper.
And that word ‘possible’ simply underlines the fact that yet again the identification with Jack the Ripper has not been proved. Clearly Swanson’s Kosminksi and Fido’s Kaminsky, a.k.a. David Cohen, don’t match. They contradict one another at too many points. Bad hearing, bad memory, bad pronunciation and three people to prove one identity are just too much to take on board. To get round the complexities Fido argues that the Metropolitan and City police were each investigating a different man. The Met. hijacked the City’s witness, Joseph Lawende, who saw Edd
owes and a suspect together in Mitre Square. It was Lawende’s description of the suspect – navy-coloured serge, red neckerchief, deerstalker cap and small, fair moustache – that the City police had circulated. When Lawende refused to confirm his identification of ‘Cohen’ (Fido ignores Lawende’s own statement that apart from the clothes he would not know the man again) they had Cohen committed to the Whitechapel Infirmary.
The City police, meanwhile, had staked out Kosminski, who was eating out of the gutters, and found him to be harmless; he was still at large for a further two years after the Kelly murder before being committed by his family. Because of the rivalry between the two police forces, the Met. never let on that they had imprisoned their own suspect under a pseudonym, and when they referred in their memoirs to a ‘young Polish Jew’, the City thought that they were referring to the innocent Kosminski, and it was this unfair aspersion that provoked Smith’s indignant outburst.
The truth is probably a lot less complex, but certainly Swanson’s notes do raise some interesting questions. The central one is that of identification. Why did the suspect have to be taken to a seaside home for identification? My initial reaction was that this was done to get him away from the hot-house atmosphere of London, away from the press in particular, to somewhere quiet where he could be interviewed and, possibly, identified; but then I realized that this would have been too complex an operation and one that would quickly have been discovered as the witnesses were moved about. The correct explanation would seem to be that Kosminski was taken to the seaside home to be identified by someone who was convalescing and couldn’t travel up to town, someone who had been taken sick or injured sometime after the Kelly murder, someone who was a male and a Jew. Fido argues that this was Lawende, but this now seems unlikely. According to Swanson, Kosminski was identified; but if so, why wasn’t he charged? Why was he allowed to roam the streets for two more years? If we are to believe Fido, Swanson should have written ‘Kaminsky’ not ‘Kosminski’. Or should it be ‘Cohen’? Whoever it was, there was not the evidence to hold him or charge him with any of the murders.
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 19