The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper

by Paul Begg

  Another attempt at pinning the identity of the Ripper upon a female suspect came with William Stewart’s Jack the Ripper: A New Theory,12 published in 1939. Stewart suggested that a woman trained as a midwife could have committed the murders. The argument was that a woman could go about the streets of the East End without arousing suspicion (after all, Jack the Ripper had universally been considered as male). A midwife could do so even if her clothes showed traces of blood, something that would not be unusual for someone in such a profession. The nature of the job would also require the requisite familiarity with human anatomy, especially those parts which the Ripper was believed to have extracted on two occasions. Another piece of reasoning behind the theory was based on several contemporary newspaper reports that Mary Kelly was pregnant at the time of her death, giving the killer midwife every reason to be at Miller’s Court to undertake an illegal abortion.

  Stewart also noted similarities between the modus operandi of the Ripper and that of Mary Pearcey, who was hanged after stabbing her lover’s wife and child to death and cutting their throats in October 1890. With Pearcey, the notion that a woman was incapable of the thought processes and physical strength to commit such atrocities was dashed; even Melville Macnaghten commented that he had ‘never seen a woman of stronger physique … her nerves were as ironcast as her body’.13

  Like Woodhall, Stewart would go on to be maligned, this time as an ‘uncaring fictioneer’, and his book dismissed as ‘one of the worst ever written on the subject’.14 This is an unduly harsh condemnation. What Stewart did was to ask certain questions of the case; what sort of person could have roamed the East End at night without attracting suspicion, could wear bloodstained clothing without attracting suspicion, could have sufficient medical knowledge to carry out the murders and could have risked being found near the victim and yet have an alibi? In answer to these questions, Stewart went where this line of thought took him: the midwife. He was not necessarily looking for a name, as was becoming common in Ripper studies at that time, but a profession or occupation that could tie in with the execution of the crimes. The theory, however, fails because it hooks on to the notion that Mary Kelly was three months pregnant, a claim that was disproved many years later following the rediscovery of Dr Thomas Bond’s post-mortem report.15

  It could be argued that theorizing about the identity of Jack the Ripper has spawned three, perhaps four subsequent eras, each bringing with it differing perceptions and approaches from both the wider public and those who would study the crimes and times specifically. The first era produced the crimes themselves, with the accompanying scramble for a motive. The second saw a move away from there to named individuals, primarily anecdotal by source, then anecdotal with supporting ‘evidence’ of an esoteric and often dubious nature. In 1959, Donald McCormick produced the next significant full-length study of the Ripper case, The Identity of Jack the Ripper,16 a peculiar book for several reasons and one which could be seen as the final outing of the theorist scrabbling around with hitherto untraceable (or false) sources and strange foreign suspects who may or may not have actually existed.

  McCormick reintroduced Dr Alexander Pedachenko as a suspect, and the motive behind the killings was a Tsarist plot to discredit the Metropolitan Police, a wholly successful conspiracy which resulted in the resignation of Sir Charles Warren. The story was obviously a throwback to the one proposed by William Le Queux in 1923, but this time it was riddled with secret dossiers, obfuscating aliases and claims of counter-espionage. The sources for this theory were numerous and included the notes supposedly written in French by Rasputin. McCormick also claimed to have seen and taken notes from the three-volume ‘Chronicle of Crime’, handwritten by Dr Thomas Dutton. Briefly suspected of the Whitechapel murders in 1888, Dutton claimed that Jack the Ripper was ‘a middle-aged doctor, a man whose mind had been embittered by the death of his son. The latter had suffered cruelly at the hands of a woman of the streets, and the father believed this to be the cause of his brilliant son’s death,’ which sounded very much like Leonard Matters’s ‘Dr Stanley’. McCormick said that Dr Dutton had made micro-photographs of the handwriting of Ripper correspondence and the writing on the wall in Goulston Street, but that Sir Charles Warren ordered the destruction of the prints of the latter. He also claimed that Dutton was a friend and adviser of Inspector Abberline. With no trace of Dr Dutton’s writings to be found, it appeared that McCormick’s book was wandering into the realms of pure invention, even in his examination of the events surrounding the murders themselves. Imagined conversations between witnesses or police officers littered the book, often lending an unintentionally comic air to the proceedings.

  McCormick has also been accused of instigating several Ripper myths which would dog subsequent serious studies of the case. One of the most notable was perhaps his references to the ‘Old Nichol Gang’. The ‘Nichol’, a notorious slum in Bethnal Green, no doubt had its criminal element, but evidence of a gang of that name has never been ascertained, and their presence in the East End in the 1880s has continued to surface in Ripper literature to the present day, all thanks to McCormick’s fanciful writing. What is apparent is that McCormick’s ideas stemmed from sources that probably didn’t exist. His mysterious Russian doctor theory signalled the end of what was essentially a period of sporadic solutions fuelled by hearsay and the dubious recollections of sundry individuals, both in Britain and abroad. Like Edwin Woodhall’s brush with quasi-racist rhetoric in the era of rising fascism in Europe, McCormick’s theory reflected the developing ‘Cold War’ between East and West, brewing up a story that would put the most convoluted plot of any spy thriller to shame. Espionage was very much the rage in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a result of the changing political climate; the classy James Bond novels of Ian Fleming were well established and were soon to be joined by works by other popular writers of the genre such as John le Carré and Len Deighton. The Ripper crimes were now steadily becoming an international phenomenon, and it seemed that there was now a rapidly growing band of enthusiasts willing to lend their special knowledge and opinion to the fascination with solving what was by now considered to be the world’s greatest crime mystery.

  Ironically, as McCormick twisted and turned with his elaborate tale, the photographer, journalist and broadcaster Daniel Farson made an important discovery. While researching a series of television programmes for ATV in the UK entitled Farson’s Guide to the British,17 Farson had decided to devote some of his air-time to the mystery of Jack the Ripper. Often well connected, he had, purely by luck it seems, been introduced to Christobel McLaren, 2nd Baroness Aberconway, the daughter of Sir Melville Macnaghten, and she showed him the typed and handwritten transcriptions she had made of her late father’s 1894 memoranda, which named the suspects Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog. This artefact – now known as the ‘Aberconway version’ – was an important find to say the least and has since been considered as the initiation of serious post-war studies on the Ripper case. It must be remembered that for all the hint-dropping of Macnaghten, Anderson and Swanson et al., the actual names of suspects were not included in anything that was to be published. Macnaghten’s memoranda were for private and official use, and Swanson’s marginalia were the private notation of a dear friend’s autobiography. Now, by seeing the names Druitt, Ostrog and Kosminski for the first time, Farson was well placed to make these findings public on television.

  Farson set his store by Macnaghten’s first suspect, Druitt. It is no doubt likely that this information was familiar to other police officials of Macnaghten’s day, for several hints had previously been made by various individuals that the Ripper had drowned in the Thames after the Mary Kelly murder. One of these claims was alleged to have been made as early as 1889 to Albert Bachert, the Mile End Vigilance Committee leader who had taken over from the eminent George Lusk that year. Bachert’s story was that he had been advised to disband the Vigilance Committee owing to the fact that the Ripper’s body had been found floating in the Thames a
t the end of 1888. It was quite possible that he was encouraged to do this merely to stop Bachert being a nuisance. However the story itself emanated once again from Donald McCormick and Dr Thomas Dutton’s elusive ‘Chronicle of Crime’.

  When Farson’s programme was broadcast, the name of the main suspect was given as ‘M.J.D.’ – this was in accordance with Baroness Aberconway’s request not to make the full name public. As previously observed, it appeared that Macnaghten’s notes had got a few biographical details wrong, for Druitt was thirty-one when he died, not forty-one as was stated. Nor was he a doctor, but a barrister. Whatever the plausibility of Druitt’s candidacy for the Whitechapel murderer, he was certainly in keeping with a continuing trend of seeing Jack the Ripper as having emerged from the upper middle classes (such as the medical professions, for example), rather than from the poor underbelly of the East End slums or the rank environment of the lunatic asylum. It seems that Jack the Ripper was slowly going up in the world.

  In literary terms, a new, improved era of ‘Ripperology’ began with two books issued within weeks of each other in 1965, Tom Cullen’s Autumn of Terror18 and Robin Odell’s Jack the Ripper in Fact and Fiction.19 With all respect to Odell, Cullen’s book became the more significant and high-profile of the two, for here the theory of Montague John Druitt was expounded fully, and, more importantly, he was publicly named for the first time.

  Although Daniel Farson was responsible for rediscovering Druitt, his own attempts to set his discoveries in print were significantly delayed, as he was by now busy running a popular pub on the Isle of Dogs as well as becoming quite a media personality in his own right. He was also hampered when a file of notes went missing, and his proclivity for the high life did not help matters either. So despite Farson’s discovery and championing of Druitt as the Ripper, it was Cullen’s now highly regarded book which placed Druitt well and truly in the public domain. And a popular suspect he turned out to be, not just with true crime aficionados, but also the public at large, no doubt helped by Farson’s own public profile and his numerous subsequent newspaper articles on the subject. Tom Cullen changed Montague John Druitt from a tantalizing hint into the first important twentieth-century Ripper suspect who could be proved to have existed. In the 1960s he was considered by many to be the most convincing candidate so far, a status that was maintained for a good two decades.

  Robin Odell’s treatment of the Ripper case would have less far-reaching effects. Again, it was widely respected as giving an unsensational overview of the events of 1888 and even presented a survey of the fictional work inspired by the Whitechapel murders. Not to be outdone, Odell also put forward his own candidate for the crimes, this time a Jewish slaughterman or shochet. Without needing to name an individual, Odell believed the occupation was evidence enough, ticking the boxes of somebody local who could walk about in blood-soaked work clothes (thus avoiding suspicion) and who would also have a rudimentary, but sufficient, knowledge of anatomy to accomplish such visceral injuries. This rather rational and perhaps cautious theory won little support, even among experts on the Ripper case, but Odell’s method was a sensible one. Like William Stewart, he looked at the case and went where the evidence took him and, as such, should be recognized as pursuing a logical solution at a time when naming a name would appear to be the minimum requirement.

  In 1960 Colin Wilson, the best-selling author of the existentialist non-fiction book The Outsider, wrote a series of articles in the London Evening Standard entitled ‘My Search for Jack the Ripper’,20 which kick-started his long-standing association with the field of ‘Ripperology’. This term, coined several years later by Wilson himself, gave the study of Jack the Ripper a (not always favoured) definition.21 The Evening Standard articles, which in spite of their brevity were at that time a pretty good résumé of the crimes, came to the attention of Dr Thomas Stowell, who, meeting Wilson over lunch, expounded his rather unique hypothesis that the Ripper was none other than Prince Albert Victor (Prince ‘Eddy’), grandson of Queen Victoria, later Duke of Clarence and Avondale and heir presumptive to the throne. The theory was later mentioned in Wilson’s Encyclopaedia of Murder, where the story of clairvoyant Robert Lees’s ‘eminent physician’ was given consideration, as Stowell had presumably done in private:

  The weakness of the story lies in the certainty that the police would have taken pleasure in giving the widest publicity to the capture of Jack the Ripper. Perhaps it is to account for this discrepancy in the theory that the name of Queen Victoria is frequently brought into it. It is claimed that Mr Lees was twice interviewed by the queen, who was greatly concerned about the Whitechapel murders. The story connected with Lees usually goes on to add either (a) that the doctor was the queen’s physician, or (b) that Jack the Ripper was some relative of the Royal Family. 22

  Though not named in print on this occasion, the ‘queen’s physician’ in 1888 was Sir William Gull.

  Apparently, on the evening of the day he lunched with Stowell Wilson met diplomat and politician Sir Harold Nicolson and told him about the theory. The following year (1962), Philippe Jullian published his book Edouard VII, in which he thanked Nicolson ‘for allowing me to delve into his works and for telling me a number of hitherto unpublished anecdotes’. What is interesting in this case is that Jullian’s book said that

  Before he died, poor Clarence was a great anxiety to his family. He was quite characterless and would soon have fallen a prey to some intriguer or group of roues, of which his regiment was full. They indulged in every form of debauchery, and on one occasion the police discovered the Duke in a maison de rencontre of a particularly equivocal nature during a raid. Fifty years before, the same thing had happened to Lord Castlereagh, and he had committed suicide. The young man’s evil reputation soon spread. The rumour gained ground that he was Jack the Ripper (others attributed the crimes committed in Whitechapel to the Duke of Bedford).23

  According to Wilson, ‘at least a dozen people had known about his theory since 1960’,24 showing that once again anecdotal passing of rumour and information was still going on at even this late juncture, harking back to the stories shared by old police colleagues and the well-connected members of smoky gentlemen’s clubs. Then, after sitting on the story for a decade, Dr Stowell finally went public with an article published in the Criminologist in 1970 entitled ‘Jack the Ripper – A Solution?’25 Stowell set out his reasoning behind the notion that Prince Albert Victor was the Ripper without actually naming him. Originally calling his suspect ‘X’, he was apparently advised that such an alias was somewhat clichéd and reverted to ‘S’ instead.

  In this version of the story, ‘S’ was suffering from syphilis, which had affected his brain to the point where he had completely lost his mind. He then embarked on a killing spree, but after the death of Catherine Eddowes he was detained, only to escape and commit the final murder of Mary Kelly. Stowell also hinted at confidential papers owned by Caroline Acland, daughter of Sir William Gull, which claimed that Prince Albert Victor died not from influenza in 1892 as was publicly stated, but from a ‘softening of the brain’ caused by syphilis. The fact that ‘S’ had knowledge of dressing deer not only explained the Ripper’s alleged anatomical knowledge, but also pointed to the prince as being the suspect in question as he most certainly would have possessed such experience through his forays into game hunting.

  Stowell’s theory suggested that Sir William Gull was given the duty of following the prince on his sojourns in London and was therefore in a position to expose and then incarcerate him. This was the first time that Gull’s name had been linked to the Whitechapel murders, echoing not just Colin Wilson’s published comments about the killer possibly being the queen’s physician, but also the Robert Lees story of the eminent London doctor. One has to weigh up whether Lees’s story was actually true, but for argument’s sake, if it was, then had that London doctor now been identified?

  It was obvious that a public figure such as Prince Albert Victor would have had his movements
carefully recorded by the Royal Court; anyone willing to destroy this new theory would not have had a difficult task in giving him an alibi. The matter was quickly attended to:

  Buckingham Palace is not officially reacting to the mischievous calumny that Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale and Earl of Athlone, was also Jack the Ripper. The idea that Edward VII’s eldest son and, but for his early death of pneumonia aged 28, heir to the throne, should have bestially murdered five or six women of ‘unfortunate’ class in the East End is regarded as too ridiculous for comment.

  Nevertheless a loyalist on the staff at Buckingham Palace had engaged in some amateur detective work and come up with evidence on the Duke’s behalf. Two women were murdered on September 30, 1888, in Berners Street [sic] and Mitre Square, and their murders were fully reported in The Times the following day.

  The Times of October 1 also carried a court circular from Balmoral, stating: ‘Prince Henry of Battenberg, attended by a colonel clerk, joined Prince Albert Victor of Wales (the Duke of Clarence as he was to be) at Glen Muick in a drive which Mr Mckenzie had for black game.’