On 29 April 1894 Alice, now nine years old, spent one day in the Endell Street Workhouse because she was destitute and her mother a prisoner (we don’t know why or for how long). She was discharged ‘to Northaw’, an establishment which cannot be identified with certainty but which may possibly have been a charitable home called ‘Mrs Kidston’s Convalescent Home for Destitute Children’ at that place.
Eight years later, on 26 August 1902, Alice, aged seventeen, applied to St Pancras parish (No. 7 Ward) for relief. She had measles and the form also noted that she was ‘Stone deaf’. This was a permanent handicap, though whether she was born deaf or it was the result of childhood illness, we don’t know. She was given meat is. and milk 6d. Under ‘Occupation’ the space is left blank, though possibly she may have been a charwoman like her mother and grandmother. A note says that the grandmother (now sixty-four) kept the three of them in food. They were then living together at 5 Pancras Street (later renamed Capper Street), Tottenham Court Road. They had one room for which the rent of 3s. per week was paid by a friend (Greenwood?). At this particular time four weeks’ rent was due. There is no suggestion here of Sickert supporting the girl.
Six months later they were still at the same address. Annie was the only one who appeared to be working. She was then a casual hand at Crosse & Blackwell. Five weeks’ rent was due. On 7 February 1903 Annie’s epilepsy was so bad (presumably she was having fits) that the police were called and they in turn summoned a doctor at 2.30 a.m. She was admitted to the St Pancras Workhouse. On 28 October she applied for relief but appeared to be so ill that she was sent back to Pancras Street and told to wait until the workhouse conveyance called for her that evening.
Although there is only one recorded gap of three months (see table on page 241) and a break in the records of seven years (the records for Hendon Infirmary – now Colindale Hospital – are missing), it seems almost certain that the rest of Annie’s life was spent in workhouses and infirmaries. Her admission record for 15 November 1904 mentions paralysis. Her death certificate in 1920 specifically mentions hemiplegia, paralysis of one side of the body. Medically it is possible that an aneurysm caused the epilepsy and subsequently burst to produce the hemiplegia. Another explanation for the arterial degeneration is syphilis, which might have resulted if she had ever earned money as a prostitute as so many women were forced to do in similar circumstances; a conviction for prostitution might explain her imprisonment in 1894. Whatever the reason, her partial paralysis does suggest some mobility which might have led to her temporary discharge from hospital on 7 August 1906. Clearly there was a deterioration. Three months later she was readmitted to hospital where the worsening condition confined her for the rest of her life. Alice was admitted to the Poland Street Workhouse on 11 October 1905. The cause of her distress was given as her deafness and a bad foot. Eight years later, when she was admitted with her grandmother to the Endell Street Workhouse, both women were described as market porteresses with Messrs Deaton, Covent Garden. Sarah was then seventy-five years old. She died on 18 November 1916 in Caterham Mental Hospital.
Annie died four years later in the Lunacy Observation Ward of the workhouse at 367 Fulham Road where she had been moved to four days before from the Fulham Road Infirmary (later St Stephen’s Hospital).
Case notes dated 12 March 1913 had stated that Annie had ‘spells of amentia. Is an epileptic.’ Amentia is defined as absence of intellect; idiocy. Seven years later the notes for her last four days show that she was insane. For 20 February 1920 they read, ‘Confused – sometimes noisy & hilarious, at other times almost stuporous – has delusions that she is being tortured – takes no interest in her surroundings.’
The end came on 23 February 1920: ‘Sudden attack of cardiac failure which ended in death at 12.40 a.m.’ Next of kin was given as a daughter, Mrs Gorman, of 195 Drummond Street, Hampstead. This was Alice, who two years earlier had married William Gorman, aged forty-five, a fish curer, and was the mother of Joseph ‘Sickert’ Gorman, the source of Knight’s story.
Long before the end of Knight’s book, one is asking over and over again, ‘Where’s the evidence?’ The answer, of course, is that there isn’t any. He has skilfully woven his story and tells it well; but where he can be checked, using the same documents, he falls down badly.
Let us begin with Sickert’s studio at 15 Cleveland Street. There is no evidence that he ever had a studio in Cleveland Street, although he did have one at the same number in Fitzroy Street, only a short way away – but not until 1917. Knight quotes a great deal from Marjory Lilly’s Sickert, The Painter and his Circle, which is where I suspect he got the numbering from. Allegedly, when Clarence and Annie Crook were abducted at the same time in April 1888, ‘two men in brown tweed’ went into the studio and brought out Clarence while a ‘fat man and a woman’ went into Annie’s basement at No. 6 and brought her struggling to the street. They were then driven off in separate directions. It’s a nice piece of fiction. Using the same directory and rate books yields the information that No. 15 and its neighbours were pulled down in 1887 to make way for three Middlesex Hospital establishments: the Trained Nurses Institute, the Residential College and the Medical School. Had the abduction taken place in April 1888 then there must have been a lot of surprised nurses or workmen looking on.
As far as 6 Cleveland Street is concerned, Alice’s birth certificate confirms that Annie was living there when she was born in 1885. The ground-floor shop was run by John Pugh, hairdresser, and the electoral register shows James Hinton and Charles Horne also living at this address. Annie wasn’t shown, since at this time women didn’t have the vote. Knight argues that Annie was still living there when she was abducted in April 1888. She must have been living elsewhere between those dates for in that period Nos. 4 to 14 were pulled down and replaced with a block of flats called Cleveland Residences. According to the rate book for 1888, there was an Elizabeth Cook living in the basement of No. 6. According to Knight, he had been told by Joseph Sickert that Crook was often rendered as Cook (there is no evidence for this in the workhouse records), and this was the information he was looking for. Unfortunately for Knight, Elizabeth Cook was still living there in 1893, so clearly the two women were not the same. Further proof that Elizabeth Cook is not Annie Elizabeth Crook is that when Annie and Alice were admitted to the Endell Street Workhouse on 22 January 1889 their last address was given as ‘9 Pitt Street, Tottenham Court Road’.
So her abduction could not have taken place, either.
The next major stumbling block is Annie Crook’s alleged Roman Catholicism. All the evidence actually points the other way, to the uncomfortable fact that she was a Protestant. Her daughter was baptized into the same faith and, even more damning, her admission entries into the various workhouses, infirmaries and hospitals make the same point.
The only discrepancy relates not to her but to Alice. When she was married, at St Aloysius’s Chapel, St Pancras in 1918, it was ‘according to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Roman Catholics’, which suggests that if Alice was not a late convert, she had adopted her husband’s faith on marriage. But even supposing that Annie had been Catholic there is still no reason why this so-called ‘threat’ to the throne had to be done away with by such bloody means. The Royal Marriages Act was – and still is – operative. Any such marriage between Clarence and her could have been set aside as illegal because not only was Clarence under twenty-five at the time but also he had married without the Queen’s consent. The Act had been specifically designed by George III to stop his sons from entering into marriages of which he disapproved; he had used it to nullify the marriage of Augustus, Duke of Sussex, even though a second son had been born in lawful wedlock. It has been binding on the Royal Family ever since. Even without it, the authorities could have used the Act of Settlement (1700), which is still in force, and which expressly debars anyone who marries a Roman Catholic from ‘inheriting the Crown’.
Knight’s original trio of murderers is Gull, Netley and Sir Robe
rt Anderson, head of CID, who is supposedly acting as a look-out. However, to resolve the inconsistencies in the story, as Knight himself admits, Sickert is substituted for Anderson. He becomes the third man, although his role is never clearly defined.
What value then can be placed on Sickert’s claim that he once lived in the same lodgings as Jack the Ripper (see p. 159)? If he knew the truth about Clarence’s marriage and his affair with Annie – which must have lasted from 1884, when Alice was conceived, to 1889, the time of the Cleveland Street scandal – why did he draw this red herring over the trail and why, if he knew the truth, was he himself never silenced?
Equally involved are the Freemasons who fear that they too will be toppled if the throne falls. Salisbury, Gull, Warren, Anderson and so on, ad infinitum, are Freemasons. Nobody is left out. They are all involved in the sordid cover-up of putting down five Whitechapel whores. The murders are carried out according to Masonic formula, hence the disembowellings and fearful mutilations. Nichols, Chapman and Stride are lured into the coach, driven by Netley, and fed poisoned grapes by Sir William Gull who subsequently mutilates them. Their bodies are later dumped in the streets which explains the lack of sightings, awkward times and few traces of blood at the murder scenes. Eddowes, who also used the surname Kelly, is (so the theory has it) murdered in mistake for Mary Kelly.
The book becomes more and more frustrating as one searches for hard facts.
Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, whom Knight accuses of being a leading conspirator, was not a Mason although the second Marquess and one of his sons were. Salisbury himself did not join (Freemason, 29 August 1903).
Knight expects the reader to take a great deal on trust but gives nothing himself. Compare his treatment of two men – John Netley and Dr Benjamin Howard.
His documentary proof for Netley’s existence rests on three newspaper cuttings dated 1888, 1892 and 1903. The first refers to an unnamed hansom cab driver, the second to a man called Nickley who tried to drown himself, and the last to a horse-van driver, John Netley, who was killed in an accident near the Clarence Gate into Regent’s Park (this seems to be Knight’s sole justification for assuming him to be the same man). There is no proof that these three incidents were linked, or that Nickley and Netley were the same man. For the sake of the story we have to assume that they are.
But look what happens to Dr Howard.
According to the Chicago Sunday Times-Herald of 28 April 1895, Dr Howard was one of twelve London physicians who had sat as a court of medical inquiry and as a commission in lunacy upon a brother physician who had been responsible for the murders. The piece was headed ‘Capture of Jack the Ripper’. Knight spends three-and-a-half pages proving to his satisfaction, if not to ours, that the unnamed physician referred to was Sir William Gull. While the book was still in proof, Richard Whittington-Egan published A Casebook on Jack the Ripper. By chance he had found in a London bookshop a letter from Dr Howard, angrily denying the story. The letter was dated 26 January 1896 and had been sent to the editor and publisher of The People newspaper. He had been abroad and had only learned of the story on his return.
Understandably, he was furious. Knight calmly pooh-poohs his denial and says that he could hardly admit to having broken Masonic secrets and that the existence of such a letter is not surprising.
As far as Walter Sickert himself is concerned, Knight makes a great deal out of his eternal fascination with the mystery of Jack the Ripper. Having accused him of being directly involved in the murders, he cites in evidence Sickert’s apparent preoccupation with a red handkerchief which he wore about his throat when working and which Knight alleges he wore on the night of the murders. What isn’t mentioned is that this happened twenty years after the murders, in 1917, and was no more than a prop to help his thinking as he worked. He had many such props. Marjorie Lilly, whom Knight is quoting, describing this incident with the red handkerchief, says that:
he had two fervent crazes at the moment, crime and the princes of the Church; crime personified by Jack the Ripper, the Church by Anthony Trollope. Thus, we had the robber’s lair, illumined solely by the bull’s-eye lantern; when he was reading Trollope we had the Dean’s bedroom, complete with iron bedstead, quilt and bookcase. The ecclesiastical flavour so congenial to him was somewhat marred by the red Bill Sykes handkerchief dangling from the bedpost; but the presence of this incongruous article in the Dean’s bedroom was not a passing whim; it was an important factor in the process of creating his picture, a lifeline to guide the train of his thought, as necessary as the napkin which Mozart used to fold into points which met each other when he too was composing. Sickert was working now on one of his Camden Town murders and while he was reliving the scene he would assume the part of a ruffian, knotting the handkerchief loosely round his neck, pulling a cap over his eyes and lighting his lantern. Immobile, sunk deep in his chair, lost in the long shadows of that vast room, he would meditate for hours on his problem. When the handkerchief had served its immediate purpose it was tied to any doorknob or peg that came handy to stimulate his imagination further, to keep the pot boiling.
Knight further quotes Marjorie Lilly as saying that Sickert would have ‘Ripper periods’ in which he would dress up like the murderer and ‘walk about like that for weeks on end. He would turn down the lights in his studio and literally be Jack the Ripper in word and mood.’ But, again according to Lilly, Sickert ‘had his Burns days, his Byron days, his Whistler days, his Degas days, his Napoleon days, his Dr Johnson days and many other days …’ Osbert Sitwell makes the point, which helps to explain the above, that the artist is often his own model; it’s cheaper for one thing, and with the aid of ‘beards, coats, hats and the rest, it was possible at the same time to vary the person before him in the mirror’. It was a practice that Sickert had adopted from an artist friend who kept on the pegs in his studio ‘the various disguises he wore when posing for the characters in his own drawings’.
Sitwell had one other piece of information that Knight missed. One of the stories Knight tells is of Lord Salisbury, the leading conspirator, visiting the artist’s studio and paying him £500 for a picture for which he might have received only £3. When Sickert told the story to Osbert Sitwell he told it about an artist whom Sitwell calls Vollon. In the Joseph Sickert story, as told to Knight, the painter allegedly said that the incident really related to him. This caused Knight to speculate that the money was really payment for Sickert’s part in the murders and for making the plan work. Had Knight gone on to read Sitwell’s Noble Essences instead of confining himself to the introduction to A Free House! he would have learned that Sitwell had subsequently checked on the incident with the Marchioness of Salisbury and found that the painting by A. Vallon (not Vollon) was still at Hatfield and still showing the family group that Salisbury had asked the artist to include and for which he had paid the £500.
Whoops, there goes another ‘fact’.
Whichever way you look, there is not a shred of evidence to back up Knight’s theory; there’s absolutely nothing to connect either the Crook family or Walter Sickert (other than his curiosity about them) with the Jack the Ripper murders.
What, then, would he accept as evidence? Ironically, in the end, not even the public statements of his source Joseph Sickert.
Knight’s book was originally published in 1976. Two years later, in the Sunday Times (18 June 1978), Sickert confessed: ‘It was a hoax; I made it all up.’ He went on to say that his part of the story was ‘a whopping fib’. The only part he stuck to was that concerning his mother’s parentage. The part about Jack the Ripper was pure invention. He said: ‘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 when I was six years old’ (in the book he was about fourteen). Sickert added that he had decided to confess because things had got out of hand. ‘I want to clear the name of my father. I didn’t think that much harm would come from it at the time because I thought the story was
just going to appear in a local paper. As far as I am concerned Jack can go back to the Ripperologists.’
On 2 July 1978 Knight replied that he was not surprised that Sickert had now tried to denounce his book. He had threatened to do so after Knight had told him that his father, Walter Sickert, had been directly involved in the killings. He felt that by making the monstrous statement that he was the son of a man personally involved in the murders, he had betrayed him. He had begged Knight not to publish his findings about his father but when Knight refused, Sickert had said that he would find some way of exonerating him even if it meant denying the whole story. Knight says that he had been prepared for this and before showing him the last chapter had secured a signed statement that he had recounted his father’s original story with complete accuracy.
* * *
Sarah Ann Crook (grandmother)
Periods spent in Workhouses and Infirmaries. Bracketed dates indicate consecutive periods of refuge.
St Marylebone Workhouse
19–21.8.80
St Pancras Workhouse
14.5.82 (1 day)
St Giles Workhouse, Endell St
5–12.6.91
15–17.5.92
Poland Street Workhouse
13.8.95–9.9.95
St Pancras Workhouse
{12–24.10.95
Poland Street Workhouse
{25–28.10.95
2–23.11.95
St Giles Workhouse, Endell St
8.12.95 (1 day)
4–14.5.96
Strand Union Workhouse, Edmonton
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 25