Stowell’s greatest discovery, or so he claimed, was that Clarence had not died in the great flu epidemic of 1892, as the history books stated, but in a private mental home near Sandringham, from ‘softening of the brain’ due to syphilis. If true, this information could not have come from the private papers of Sir William Gull, who died in 1890 at the age of seventy-three, two years before Clarence. Presumably, then, it came from some other source. It is lamentable, in view of the claim’s startling nature, that this source was not identified.
Stowell is often wrong on small but important points of detail. For instance, he says that ‘S’ was forced to resign his commission when he was twenty-four – which Clarence never did – shortly after the raiding of a male brothel in Cleveland Street catering for aristocratic and wealthy homosexuals. Clarence is generally considered to have been one of its patrons because one of those involved was his personal equerry, who was forced to flee the country to avoid prosecution. In the publicity that inevitably followed these revelations, there was a newspaper smear which alleged that among those involved but not named was ‘the highest in the land’, which has always been taken as a direct reference to Clarence, but again without proof.
Whether Clarence was homosexual or not is open to doubt. As Michael Harrison says in his biography, Clarence, ‘the destruction of Eddy’s [Clarence’s] correspondence, and the discreet silence maintained about his private activities, have made the task of assessing his character no easy one’. His homosexuality must remain ‘not proven’ and so too, without the benefit of Sir William Gull’s papers, must Stowell’s most damaging allegation that Clarence became infected with syphilis at one of the shore parties that he attended while on a visit to the West Indies. In time, this alleged syphilitic infection, so Stowell believed, sent him insane and led him to commit the Whitechapel murders.
Stowell alleged that the Royal Family definitely knew after the second murder, and possibly even after the first, that Clarence was the murderer. Within a few hours of the ‘double event’ murders on 30 September, Stowell goes on, Clarence was placed under restraint and shut away in a private mental home. Stowell’s critics were quick to point out that Clarence was shooting in Scotland on those dates, and also that between 3–12 November, during which period Stowell would have him escaping from the asylum and committing the Miller’s Court murder, he was at Sandringham taking part in his father’s birthday celebrations. Clearly, if he was the madman that Stowell says he was, and if he was locked up once more after Miller’s Court, it becomes impossible to explain why or how, immediately after these celebrations, Clarence should have been sent abroad as his father’s personal representative to Denmark.
Stowell stressed the similarity in appearance between Clarence and some of the eye-witness descriptions of possible suspects, particularly of those wearing deerstalker hats, which he suggests that Clarence may have worn as a kind of ritual vestment. Certainly there was a startling similarity in appearance between Druitt and Clarence. Indeed, the resemblance between them is so overwhelming that the argument can go both ways, and is just as favourable to the Druitt theory as to Clarence. Clarence’s skill in disembowelling prostitutes, Stowell continues, might have been acquired by his observing and learning the art of dressing deer (another reason for wearing a deerstalker) when he was out hunting, which might in turn also have stimulated his psychopathic rages.
Throughout Stowell’s article the characters of ‘S’ and Clarence wheel about, like two moons through the heavens, occasionally overlapping sufficiently at the edges to show that there might be some common linkage but breaking away almost at once to reveal the internal contradictions of much of the evidence. Stowell says, for instance, that ‘S’ recovered sufficiently to go on a five-month cruise on which he was accompanied for part of the time by his parents. Clarence did, in fact, go as far as Port Said with the Prince and Princess of Wales when he made a journey to India in 1889. In the following year he was formally installed as the Duke of Clarence and Avondale, yet, according to Stowell, Sir William Gull, who was treating him, told his father while he was away that his son was dying of syphilis of the brain. Paresis (softening of the brain) is usually reckoned to appear fifteen to twenty years from the time of infection, symptoms being manifest for two to three years before death. Obviously there can be no absolute time scale for such a disease; some venerologists put the earliest time for the onset of paresis at ten years after infection but the general rule is fifteen. Clarence was a victim of the great flu epidemic that swept through Europe in 1892 and he died of pneumonia on 14 January 1892, aged twenty-eight. If he had caught the pox in the West Indies in 1879, and died as a result of it in 1892 (and there is no evidence to show that he did) then Stowell’s theory is possible – just.
Clearly the evidence is thin indeed for supposing that Clarence was Jack the Ripper, and yet he plays an equally prominent role in at least two other theories. The first was aired in Michael Harrison’s biography of Clarence, which examined the question of whether or not he was Jack the Ripper. Harrison concluded that he was not, but was convinced that the Ripper was somebody close enough to Clarence to have been confused with him. Harrison’s researches convinced him that Stowell’s ‘S’ was Clarence’s tutor at Cambridge, James Kenneth Stephen, with whom he believes Clarence had a homosexual relationship, not necessarily a physical one, and that the murders were committed by Stephen out of a twisted desire for revenge because of the gradual cessation of this relationship.
Stephen’s father was Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the judge who is remembered nowadays for his mishandling of the Maybrick trial in 1889 (see page 250). It was so gross that he had to be given police protection from an outraged public. He was forced to retire from the Bench in 1891 because of the brain disease which had been gradually creeping up on him. Within a year of his retirement his son died in an asylum for the insane. Cause of death, so the medical certificate stated, was a mania lasting two and a half months, the persistent refusal of food for twenty days, and exhaustion.
According to one of his contemporaries, Stephen had ‘added to his father’s powers and force of intellect a cultivated taste in the delicacies of scholarship. He was no mere bookworm, but a man with a natural bent towards dainty and exquisite language in prose and verse.’ (After which it comes as no surprise to learn that his cousins were Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.) In 1883 he was chosen to be Clarence’s tutor at Cambridge, where the Duke was sent for two years. University was regarded more as some kind of finishing school than as a place to improve his mind, which a former tutor had once described as ‘abnormally dormant’. According to Harrison there was a sexual scandal of some kind between tutor and pupil, but there seems to be little evidence of it. The accusation seems chiefly to be based on Harrison’s interpretation of the old rugby song, ‘They Called the Bastard Stephen’, which he thinks refers to Stephen and Clarence.
At the end of his time at Cambridge, on 17 June 1885, Clarence was gazetted to the 10th Hussars, and the relationship with Stephen, whatever it was, gradually petered out.
Two years later Stephen had an accident that resulted in serious brain damage. According to Quentin Bell, the nature of the accident was not definitely known, but family tradition has it ‘that he was struck by some projection from a moving train’. Harrison, however, claims that while Stephen was out riding near Felixstowe his horse shied and backed him into the moving vane of a windmill. After treatment he made what seemed to be a perfect recovery. Only much later was it realized that the brain had been permanently damaged and that he was slowly going mad.
Quentin Bell says in his biography of Virginia Woolf:
One day he rushed upstairs to the nursery at 22 Hyde Park Gate, drew the blade from a sword stick and plunged it into the bread. On another occasion he carried Virginia [Woolf] and her mother off to his room in De Vere Gardens; Virginia was to pose for him. He had decided that he was a painter – a painter of genius. He was in a state of high euphoria and painted away lik
e a man possessed, as indeed he was. He would drive up in a hansom cab to Hyde Park Gate – a hansom in which he had been driving about all day in a state of insane excitement. On another occasion he appeared at breakfast and announced, as though it were an amusing incident, that the doctors had told him that he would either die or go completely mad.
Harrison says that it was after his tragic accident that Stephen became Sir William Gull’s patient. This was apparently after Gull had suffered his first stroke in 1887. At the time of his accident, Stephen had been a fellow of his college and a barrister, looking ahead to an excellent career. Now, like Clarence, he lacked concentration, vacillating between one interest and another, but with bouts of lucidity in between. He told his father that he intended to be a professional man of letters, and published a weekly journal called The Reflector which ran for only a matter of weeks before folding for lack of support. His father had to settle its debts. Possibly with a view to curbing some of his son’s excesses, his father appointed him to a Clerkship of Assizes on the South Wales circuit, one of his reasons being that this would give him some practical experience of life at the Bar. In fact, Stephen’s illness and other absences effectively prevented his taking up his duties and in 1890 he resigned. In 1891, still under treatment, he published a pamphlet defending the compulsory study of Greek at the universities, and brought out two slim volumes of poetry, Lapsus Calami and Quo Musa Tendis. As Harrison points out in his analysis of these poems, Stephen shows both his parvenu snobbery as well as his pathological hatred of women, one of whom he suggests in a poem should be ‘done away with, killed, or ploughed’.
Later the same year he was committed to a mental asylum where he stayed until the following year, 1892, when he died on 3 February.
What evidence then is there for Harrison’s theory that Stephen was the Ripper? His explanations are elaborate, ingenious and often amusing; but they cannot be taken too seriously. Harrison argues that the inevitable termination of the homosexual relationship which might have existed between the two men aggravated Stephen’s jealousy and made him look for ways of revenging himself on Clarence. But why, one asks, should the brutal murder of five unknown East End prostitutes upset the heir to the throne? Harrison argues that Clarence may have been pressured by the Royal Family to curtail his friendship with Stephen. If so, then Stephen may have been offering up some kind of blood sacrifice.
There is the fact that the first (Smith) was ‘offered up’ on the Feast of the Great Mother, a savage deity whose temples were served castrated priests who, after their ritual castration, dressed as women. There is also the fact that the tenth and last ‘offering’ (Coles) was made on the 13 February, the Ides of February, the Roman Feast of Terminalia in honour of Terminus, patron of limits, boundaries, treaties, and endings. It was customary, though forbidden by King Numa Pompilius, who had established the feast, to offer blood sacrifices – usually a young lamb or pig. Unless it is the wildest coincidence, the ‘sacrifice’ that the classical scholar, Stephen, offered to Terminus on the morning of the Ides of February, 1891, bore a name which made her markedly suitable as a victim – Coles: Latin coleus, from Greek Χoλεòς, ‘a sheath’, which in Latin is ‘vagina’. It was in this same year that J. K. Stephen published his very able pamphlet, Living Languages, in defence of the compulsory study of Greek at the universities.
Another of Harrison’s arguments is that one of Stephen’s poems, called ‘Air; Kaphoozelum’, suggests that when Stephen wrote it he was thinking of the ribald verses which were as familiar then as they are today to anyone who takes part in a pub crawl or plays any sport, and whose chorus runs:
Hi ho, Kaphoozelum,
Kaphoozelum, Kaphoozelum,
Hi ho, Kaphoozelum,
The Harlot of Jerusalem.
The villain of this song killed ten harlots, and Harrison suggests that Stephen did the same, his other five victims being Emma Smith (who said that she was stabbed by five men!), Alice McKenzie, Frances Coles, Mellett or Davis (murdered 28/29 December 1888) and Annie Farmer. In order to get the arithmetic right, Stride and Eddowes are perversely counted as one victim. Annie Farmer is also included when, in fact, she was not murdered at all. According to The Times report of 22 November:
Considerable excitement was caused throughout the East End yesterday morning by a report that another woman had been brutally murdered and mutilated in a common lodging-house in George Street, Spital-fields, and in consequence of the reticence of the police authorities all sorts of rumours prevailed. Although it was soon ascertained that there had been no murder, it was said that an attempt had been made to murder the woman of the class to which the other unfortunate creatures belong by cutting her throat, and the excitement in the neighbourhood for some time was intense.
The victim of this last occurrence fortunately is but slightly injured and was at once able to furnish the detectives with a full description of her assailant. Her name is Annie Farmer and she is a woman of about forty years of age who lately resided with her husband but on account of her dissolute habits was separated from him. On Monday night the woman had no money and, being unable to obtain any, walked the streets until about half-past seven yesterday morning. At that time she got into conversation in Commercial Street with a man she describes as about thirty-six years old, about five feet six inches in height, with a dark moustache and wearing a shabby black diagonal suit and hard felt hat. He treated her to several drinks until she became partially intoxicated. At his suggestion they went to the common lodging-house, 19 George Street, and paid the deputy eight pence for a bed. That was about eight o’clock and nothing was heard to cause alarm or suspicion until half-past nine, when screams were heard proceeding from the room occupied by the man and Farmer. Some men who were in the kitchen of the house at the time rushed upstairs and met the woman coming down. She was partially undressed and was bleeding from a wound in the throat. She was asked what the matter was and simply said, ‘He’s done it,’ at the same time pointing to the door leading into the street. The men rushed outside but saw no one except a man in charge of a horse and cart.
The sequel was reported the next day.
The man who committed the assault on Annie Farmer on Wednesday morning has not yet been captured. It is now believed that the wound to Farmer’s throat was not made with a sharp instrument; also that the quarrel arose between the pair respecting money, as when the woman was at the police station some coins were found concealed in her mouth. The authorities appeared to be satisfied that the man has no connection with the recent murders.
Clearly the woman had faked the attack to divert attention from the robbery. When she was caught she tried to bluff it out and pretend that she had been attacked. The fact that the police took her to the station and not to hospital suggests that they knew quite clearly what she was up too. They must have done, to have caught her with the coins in her mouth.
But the weightiest argument against such elaborate conjecturing is that nowhere does Harrison make a point-by-point comparison of Stephen and Stowell’s ‘S’ to see if they were the same person. He had done so with Clarence. Had he done it in Stephen’s case he would have seen at once that they could not be one and the same man. Stephen never went on a world cruise, was never commissioned in the army, for example.
Yet Harrison insists that there is a scarcity of factual evidence, and that the case against Stephen must therefore be argued from internal evidence.
He makes two final points. First, that there is some similarity between Stephen’s handwriting and that in the two Ripper letters beginning ‘From Hell’ and ‘Dear Boss’, which he reproduces. He finds a striking similarity, indeed, between the forming of the letter ‘K’ in the letters and the initial ‘K’ of Stephen’s Christian name in signature. The other point he makes is that there is stylistic similarity between Stephen’s poetry and the verse of some of the anonymous Ripper letters. The main objection to these points is that very little reliance can be placed on a handwriting comparison. The
handwriting of the German murderer Peter Kürten, who was known as the Düsseldorf Ripper because of the way that he imitated his notorious predecessor, changed completely after each murder, so much so, indeed, that he used to point out to his wife the newspaper reproductions of anonymous letters that he wrote to the police, so confident was he that she would never recognize them – nor did she, which would seem to deny Harrison the support of even this flimsy strut.
A full rebuttal of Harrison’s handwriting analysis was made by Thomas J. Mann in the Journal of the World Association of Document Examiners (WADE Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, June 1975), Chicago, Illinois. Mann believes that only the Lusk letter is likely to be genuine and his extremely detailed analysis is based on that. It complements the analysis of C. M. Macleod (p. 126).
Dealing with the Lusk letter first, Mann says that the handwriting is the result of finger movement, giving very little freedom, rather than whole arm or forearm movement. It is the type of movement used by semi-literate individuals unskilled with the pen and to whom writing is not a familiar process. This does not prove that the writer had a poor educational background. The important question that has to be asked is whether it is the disguised handwriting of an educated person or the natural script of someone who was semi-literate?
Disguised handwriting has to be drawn slowly or else, with speed, the writer’s natural idiosyncrasies will show through. The only way to disguise these is to control the pen strokes by writing slowly; but then this itself produces tell-tale signs. In the Lusk letter there are indications of unusually slow writing but many more signs of normal, unconscious speed. Mann thinks that the letter was written at a slower than average speed, which the heavy pressure on the nib tends to indicate. Nor is there the hesitation characteristic of deliberate disguise. Everything considered, the evidence does not support the hypothesis of disguised handwriting; what it does support is the hypothesis of a semiliterate penman.
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 23