He will be greatly missed by all, being a devoted husband, loving father and a warm friend.
According to the family story attached to the shawl, on the night of Catherine Eddowes’ murder, Simpson was on ‘special duties’, when regular officers were transferred temporarily to undertake specific responsibilities, such as protecting public offices and buildings, dockyards, military stations, as well as the premises of private individuals and public companies. So although Simpson was based in N, or Islington Division, the execution of ‘special duties’ often meant moving from one police division to another and he could easily have been in H Division’s territory, which comes very close to Mitre Square, within earshot of a police whistle. Another officer we know was in a similar situation was PC Alfred Long who found the fragment of Catherine Eddowes’ apron and the ‘Juwes’ graffiti on the wall of Wentworth Dwellings in Goulston Street on the morning of the double event. PC Long was actually from A Division (Westminster) and was one of many officers who had been drafted into the Stepney H Division during the murders to increase manpower on the streets.
We know from surviving reports and accounts that officers did cross the City/East End boundary, a good example being City Detective Constable Daniel Halse, who was walking around Goulston Street, Whitechapel (Met territory), not long before PC Long found the piece of Eddowes’ apron and the wall-writing there. It appears that during these difficult times, the borders between the City and Metropolitan police areas were, by necessity, becoming fluid.
There is an alternative possibility for such surveillance work outside of the Ripper investigation; I had previously thought that Simpson’s presence near Mitre Square was because his special duties were related to the hunt for the Ripper. However, when I spoke to David Melville-Hayes about this subject, he categorically stated that Amos Simpson had been there on the lookout for Fenian terrorists. This was the family story, and he was sure it was true. The 1880s were a time of great political and social upheaval, particularly in the East End, where conditions had provoked the masses of unemployed and chronically poor to, on occasion, rise up and cause great unrest and damage in the West End. Allied to this was the growth of Socialism as a valid political force, as well as Anarchism, both of which had followings among the waves of eastern Europeans who had rapidly and recently made their homes in East London.
As well as this unrest, the rise of the Home Rule movement during the mid-1800s had led to an outbreak of terrorist acts by the Fenians (a collective term for the Fenian Brotherhood and Irish Republican Brotherhood) throughout the decade in protest at the United Kingdom’s governance of Ireland. The most extreme acts were committed by ‘Dynamitards’ who used explosives to create havoc, and significant damage was done to Clerkenwell Prison in 1867 when members of the Irish Republicans attempted to free one of their members who was being held there on remand.
After a lull in attacks during the 1870s, the Fenians stepped up their campaign in the 1880s, targeting many important buildings such as major railway termini, Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square. In 1885, two men, James Gilbert Cunningham and Harry Burton, were involved in attempts to bomb several railway stations in the capital: Victoria, Ludgate, Paddington and Charing Cross. Only the bomb at Victoria went off but various errors in setting the device made it ineffective. On 24 January, a bomb went off at the Tower of London, even then a busy tourist attraction. Cunningham was the man responsible, as Burton was attempting to do the same at the House of Commons at the time.
The Tower was within the jurisdiction of H Division and Frederick Abberline was on the case, and through some impressive detective work came to the conclusion that Cunningham was the culprit and arrested him. Burton was soon also apprehended, and it interested me to note that, during the plot, Burton had been lodging at several East End addresses, including Prescott Street in Whitechapel and 5 Mitre Square. As a result of these arrests, Abberline, who would be so important to the Ripper case a few years later, was awarded £20 and gained one of his many career commendations for his efforts.
There may not be written evidence from the time that categorically proves the family story of how Simpson came into the possession of the shawl, but equally it cannot be disproven and there appears to be no deliberate attempt at deception. Indeed, the story has pretty much stayed the same over the years and if we ignore the misreporting that Simpson found Eddowes’ body and stick to the story as it was passed down to Amos Simpson’s descendants, then his presence in and around Mitre Square on that fateful morning of 30 September 1888 is not unreasonable and, in fact, not at all unlikely.
But before I track the later movements of the shawl, I want to mention two interesting references which suggest that knowledge of its existence goes back a lot further than Paul Harrison’s tip-off from Chief Inspector Mick Wyatt in 1988. The first, and least important, one is a rather curious article about a Whitechapel Club’ in Chicago, and the story dates from 1891.
The Whitechapel Club is interesting because it underlines how far the story of Jack the Ripper spread, and what a hold it had on people. The club was formed in 1889 by a small group of journalists and lasted a mere five years. The core membership was made up of newspapermen, but also included artists, musicians, physicians and lawyers. Inside, the club resembled some kind of Black Museum with decor including Indian blankets soaked with blood, nooses and knives that had been used in murders. Skulls, often for drinking out of, were everywhere. Their president was supposedly Jack the Ripper himself, although of course he never attended and so all meetings were chaired by the vice-president. These meetings were usually ribald, drink-fuelled affairs, during which members would tell stories, jokes, poems or monologues amid a great deal of good-natured insults and heckling. References to the club often appeared in the Chicago press, and one article, written by Bill Nye and published in the Idaho Statesman on 3 May 1891, made mention of an artefact from one of the Ripper murders in a supposed communiqué from their never-present leader back in London:
Perhaps I am as well off here amongst friends, suppressing vice and evading the keen eyed police, as I would be in America, where the social evil does not as yet own the town.
Do all that you can to make the club cheerful and bright. I send by this steamer a grey plaid shawl, stiff with the gore of No. 3. It will make a nice piano cover, I think. Could you not arrange with the city to combine your dining room with the city morgue, so that rent could be saved and your dining hall have about it a home-like air which money alone cannot procure?
It was obviously just another of the hoaxes club members played on each other, but the reference to a shawl, albeit from No. 3’ – one would assume it meant Elizabeth Stride, the other half of the double event – was interesting nonetheless, even if the ‘plaid’ description was far from my silk shawl.
The second near-contemporary reference, and certainly a more intriguing one, was from an article in an American magazine called The Collector: A Current Record of Art, Bibliography, and Antiquarianism, a specialist magazine that contained regular reports from London, Paris, Berlin and other places on collections and collectors. The article, published on 2 November 1892, was from their London correspondent and concerned a meeting he had had with a London collector who was not named.
But the grisliest freak of a local collectorship which has recently come to light is that of a native who is making a museum of mementoes of Jack the Ripper . . . My acquaintance with him is due by accident. Having some business in Fleet Street the other day, I turned in to the The Cheese [the Old Cheshire Cheese pub in Fleet Street, one assumes] for a chop, and there met a couple of men who exercise editorial functions on certain of our daily papers. In the course of conversation one of them mentioned a rather odd thing which had occurred to him that morning. His landlady had requested permission to speak to him when she sent up his breakfast, and this being accorded, she had stated in substance: There was some person in London who bought things connected with the Ripper murders, and the charwoman whom she employ
ed owned a shawl which had been worn by one of the victims. She wished to dispose of it, and on principle that journalists know everything, or ought to, the landlady inquired of her lodger where this collector could be found. The lodger promised to look the matter up, when he had time to spare for the search after such a needle in a haystack.
He had hardly finished telling us about it when a fat – paunched and rosy – looking man of the middle age, who had been gobbling a steak with marrow bone sauce at the next table, came over to us and introduced himself. He gave us his card, which showed him to be engaged in coals as a business, and stated that he was the Jack the Ripper collector, and stood ready to negotiate for the charwoman’s relic. At his invitation I accompanied him to his abode, which was an old house where he also had his office, at the head of the wharf where his barges landed with freight. He occupied the upper portion of the house alone, being long a childless widower, as he explained, and he had his Ripper museum arranged and ticketed in an old bookcase behind glazed doors. It was a sickening collection of rags and dirty trifles generally, and included even some stones and packages of dirt picked up at the scenes of the hideous crimes they commemorated. When he informed me, in a voice husky with pride and marrow-bone sauce that one special envelope of dirt had blood on it, Yes, sir; blood genuine blood,’ I was glad enough to remember an engagement and leave him to the study of his unique and unenviable collection.
The name of the ‘charwoman’ who supposedly owned the shawl is missing from the story. If the tale is genuine (and it is almost too bizarre to have been invented) and the shawl mentioned was actually the one supposedly taken from Catherine Eddowes, then the identity of the ‘charwoman’ could have been Amos Simpson’s wife, Jane, who we know did not like or want the shawl.
Records of Jane’s employment status are very thin on the ground; in the census records for most of her adult life, the relevant section was left blank, as it was on her marriage certificate. However, in the 1871 census, Jane (Wilkins) of Bourton-on-the-Water, aged twenty-three, is listed as housemaid to John Bundy and his daughter Elizabeth at their home at 46 Crowndale Road, St Pancras. Jane Wilkins would marry Amos Simpson at Old St Pancras Church three years later in the presence of Elizabeth Bundy, and perhaps by the early 1890s, working as a domestic elsewhere, she was giving serious consideration to getting the shawl out of her home, a plan that never reached fruition. Although she was married to a policeman and had two children to care for, like many women Jane may have worked as a cleaner to add to their income, although this is purely supposition on my part. The Collector article is a possible near-contemporary reference to the shawl. It may simply be a coincidence, but David Melville-Hayes told me when I met him that he believed a relative, possibly Amos’s son, worked at the Cheshire Cheese pub at around the time that the shawl was offered for sale in 1891, staying there until 1900.
By the time Bill Waddell at the Scotland Yard Black Museum was made aware of the shawl’s existence a hundred years later, David Melville-Hayes had removed two pieces and framed them for John and Janice Dowler. David first approached the museum in late 1991: he felt the museum was the right home for such a bizarre item as the shawl. Waddell was interested in finding out more, and so Hayes was invited to Scotland Yard to show the shawl. Impressed, Waddell asked Hayes if he was prepared to let them have the shawl as part of their collection and Hayes agreed, on the proviso that it was strictly ‘on loan’. With the museum not open to the public, the shawl spent the next six years hidden away, safe but inaccessible to all but those privileged visitors to ‘The Black’. It was in 1997 that Andy and Sue Parlour became involved.
The Parlours’ interest in Jack the Ripper was sparked around 1992 when, during research into Andy’s family tree, they discovered that he was descended from George Nichols, the cousin of Mary Ann Nichols. Andy himself hailed from the East End and had moved with his family to Essex in the 1960s, as many East Enders had done before (and still do). From there on, the Parlours began researching the murders in earnest, visiting the crime scenes and archives across the country, as well as creating their own research business, ASP Historical Research, and Ten Bells Publishing, named after the famous Spitalfields pub.
Living in Clacton-on-Sea, the Parlours had heard the story that a local resident owned a shawl associated with one of the Ripper’s victims. By now, the framed cuttings had passed from the Dowlers to an antiques dealer in Thetford and the Parlours were able to buy them from there. The hunt was soon on to find the mysterious owner of the rest of the shawl. They found him, but not in a way they would have anticipated.
One Sunday morning, early in 1997, the Parlours were at a local antiques fair, looking for old London prints and other related ephemera, when they fell into conversation with a stall owner, a distinguished-looking gentleman who asked them why they were specifically looking for items relating to the East End. Hearing that they were researching the Ripper murders, the stallholder said that he had a connection to the story, adding that he was in possession of an artefact directly relating to Catherine Eddowes. By some amazing stroke of serendipity, the Parlours had found David Melville-Hayes. Letting him know that they were the current owners of the framed sections, they asked where the rest of the shawl was and he told them that it was in the Black Museum at Scotland Yard.
At that time, the Parlours were working on a book about the Ripper murders, which was being written with author Kevin O’Donnell, the book I first saw at the auction. In late 1997, the Parlours and O’Donnell made arrangements to visit the Black Museum to see the shawl for themselves, accompanied by respected Ripper and true-crime researcher Keith Skinner, who had very close links with the museum. By this time, the curator was John Ross, an ex-Metropolitan police officer. Ross retrieved the shawl from his office – it was obviously not on display – and showed it to the visitors. He admitted that he was not convinced that the shawl had once belonged to Catherine Eddowes, going on to say that the Black Museum only kept artefacts that were unequivocally proven to have been connected with famous crimes. After a few minutes of looking at it, the shawl was taken back to whatever obscure storage area it was being kept in.
The visit to Scotland Yard that day left the Parlours bemused: they felt the shawl was not being given its due by the museum. Back in Clacton, they told David Melville-Hayes that the shawl was not on display. He was disappointed and decided that, as the museum wasn’t doing anything with it, he might as well have it back. He entrusted the Parlours to make the arrangements to have the shawl returned, and they contacted John Ross on his behalf – who in the end seemed reluctant to let it go. Nonetheless, the shawl was ‘on loan’ and David Melville-Hayes could have it back whenever he chose and so a date was arranged for it to be picked up. The Parlours were advised to bring a letter of confirmation from David, which they did. Before leaving with the shawl, Ross asked the Parlours when they would be bringing it back, and they replied with a diplomatic, We’ll have to speak to the owner.’ Before they returned the shawl, Scotland Yard had also taken a small sample of their own, which measured 2 by 4 inches.
Once David had the shawl back in Clacton, he decided to let the Parlours look after it, which they were more than pleased to do. The shawl was kept by the Parlours for many years and generated great interest. It was displayed in a glass case at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, and in 2001 it went to Bournemouth where it was shown (with other Ripper ephemera, including the famous ‘Dear Boss’ letter) at the annual Jack the Ripper conference. These conferences, first held in Ipswich in 1996, provide Ripper experts and enthusiasts with the chance to get together, hear speakers on the subject and share information and ideas. For many years the venues alternated between Britain and America, where interest in the Ripper has never abated.
Despite all the interest in the shawl and its potential importance in the case, it had never been authenticated or scientifically tested. In 2006, Atlantic Productions, a television company specializing in factual programmes, asked if they could featu
re it in a documentary they were working on. Executives from the company met the Parlours, explaining that they would like to have the shawl tested for DNA by an expert, on camera for the programme. David Melville-Hayes gave permission but insisted on being present at the examination.
Testing took place at the Parlours home in Clacton on 30 August 2006. That morning, the film crew from Atlantic arrived, followed by John Gow, a leading DNA forensics expert and his assistant Jennifer Clugston, who were flown in from Glasgow to conduct the testing. The shawl was laid out in a spare room and John and Jennifer spent much time examining it, surprised by its size and concluding that the large, torpedo-shaped stains appeared to be dried blood that had spattered across the surface. Several swabs were taken from the areas that John and Jennifer believed were stained with blood, human or otherwise. Interviews with Gow and David Melville-Hayes were filmed and eventually the film crew packed up their equipment and the experts were driven to the airport for their return flight to Scotland.
The finished documentary was aired in November 2006 and strangely, despite being featured quite a lot, there was hardly any specific discussion about the shawl. One of the interviewees, John Grieve, the Metropolitan police’s first Director of Intelligence, was asked if he felt that the shawl was genuine.
"The DNA testing was inconclusive,’ he answered.
This was a big disappointment and the Parlours and David Melville-Hayes have never been given the DNA test results by Atlantic. Apparently they had been taken away by a police officer based in Glasgow. Frustratingly, nothing had been proved: they were no nearer knowing whether the shawl belonged to Catherine Eddowes, whether it had been found at Mitre Square or indeed whether it had any link whatsoever to the Ripper story.
Naming Jack the Ripper: The Biggest Forensic Breakthrough Since 1888 Page 13