The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper
Page 16
Further, but less surely, he believes that the Duke was at Sandringham, celebrating his father’s 47th birthday, on the occasion of the last murder of Marie Jeanette Kelly, in Miller’s Court, on November 9, 1888. The court circular simply says that the then Prince of Wales celebrated his birthday with his family; but diary entries and other notes in the archives at Buckingham Palace suggest that the Duke was in fact at Sandringham during the early days of November until November 11.26
Dr Stowell was interviewed for BBC Television’s 24 Hours current affairs programme,27 where again he gave enough hints for people to assume that he spoke of Prince Albert Victor, again without naming him. Apart from Colin Wilson, others had to ‘join the dots’ to give ‘S’ his identity. In fact, Stowell went on record as denying that he had ever suggested that the prince was the Ripper when he wrote to The Times to make his feelings succinctly clear:
I have at no time associated His Royal Highness the late Duke of Clarence, with the Whitechapel murderer or suggested that the murderer was of royal blood.
It remains my opinion that he was a scion of a noble family.
The particulars given in The Times of November 4 of the activities of His Highness in no way conflict with my views as to the identity of Jack the Ripper.28
But in the short time between the writing of this letter and its publication, Dr Stowell died. His son then read his collection of notes and, considering them to contain nothing of importance, burned them. He claimed that ‘the case doesn’t interest me particularly. It was before my time’.29
13.
Conspiracy
It was clear that the events of 1970 would herald a new approach to the riddle of Jack the Ripper. Mysteries have always been compelling and attractive to mankind, and, as nature abhors a vacuum, the empty space that was the Ripper’s true identity must therefore be filled. From the first unsolved crimes, it was always necessary to create attributes for him, and invariably they would reflect the era in which they were made. During 1888, London appeared to be in fear of the new socialist and anarchist thinking that was being brought from overseas by the Eastern European immigrants, and thus initial suspicion would be placed upon foreigners, with the Jewish settlers of Whitechapel becoming early scapegoats. Perhaps a mistrust of Tsarist and subsequently post-revolutionary Russia helped furnish the mystery with a range of shadowy Russian suspects in the early to mid-twentieth century. By the onset of the 1970s, the upper classes were well in the frame, and there appeared to be a growing fascination with the perceived dubious proclivities of the privileged. Much of this could be seen as the start of a ‘conspiracy culture’. It was during that decade that suspicions over the true events surrounding the death of President Kennedy would begin to take hold, stories about US government cover-ups of UFO incidents would gain ground, and even NASA’s Apollo moon-landing programme would not escape the scrutiny of those who thought that everything was not as it seemed. The so-called ‘peace and love’ era of the late 1960s was quickly giving way to a more aggressive and questioning society.
In 1972, Michael Harrison’s study of Prince Albert Victor, Clarence: The Life of HRH the Duke of Clarence and Avondale (1864–1892),1 attempted to exonerate the prince of the Ripper murders by re-emphasizing his whereabouts at the time. Appearing on BBC Television, Harrison explained that he could not accept that the Ripper was Prince Albert Victor, ‘but I couldn’t leave the reader high and dry, so what I did was find somebody who I thought was a likely candidate’.2 Harrison’s Ripper was James Kenneth Stephen, the prince’s tutor, whose surname fitted more comfortably with Dr Stowell’s suspect ‘S’. He based his argument on the speculation that Prince Eddy and Stephen had become homosexual lovers during, or after, Eddy’s time in Cambridge. He felt that some of Stephen’s poetry suggested a hatred of women, with some even showing sadistic tendencies. According to Harrison, the relationship was broken off, and Stephen then killed prostitutes on dates which would appear significant to Eddy, such as birthdays of members of the Royal Family. In the same television interview in which Harrison appeared, Daniel Farson made a mockery of the theory, stating that ‘you can make out a better case for Queen Victoria’. But an interesting letter to the Sunday Times in 1975 appeared to support the theory: Mary Hallam of Newbury wrote stating that her great-grandfather, a barrister, had long ago declared that the authorities knew that Stephen was the Ripper.3
Daniel Farson had now got round to publishing his own study of the case – simply titled Jack the Ripper – and predictably put forward his suspect, Montague Druitt.4 Despite ‘discovering’ him, Farson had lagged behind, allowing Tom Cullen to steal some of his thunder. Farson, however, was a media personality of some repute, and so Druitt began to gain the attention he probably deserved back in the 1960s, helped no doubt by Farson’s frequent writings and interviews in national newspapers.
But it was BBC TV’s 1973 series Jack the Ripper, a six-part documentary-drama which put fictional detectives Charlie Barlow and John Watt5 into a modern-day investigation of the Ripper crimes,6 which really began to hammer home the theory surrounding the royal household.
The ‘investigation’, in laying out the events of 1888, was remarkable in that the researchers were granted access to the official files and used the actual witness testimonies contained therein for the scripts when reconstructing scenes of the inquests. Much of this material was heard by the public for the first time, as most information before then had to be gleaned from contemporary press reports, which were not always accurate. These reports, with misheard or dubious information often being set down by otherwise dedicated journalists, produced errors that were invariably repeated for decades to come. Barlow and Watt’s findings were channelled via the claims of Joseph Gorman Sickert, who, in the final episode,7 sat in front of the camera smoking as he relayed a story apparently told to him by his father, the artist Walter Sickert. Prince Albert Victor was certainly part of it, but now the culpability for the murders was shifted elsewhere. Joseph’s version of the story goes thus:
When Eddy, the Duke of Clarence, was twenty his mother thought it would be a good idea if he met an artist and writers as well as just usual people who made up court circles at the time. She arranged for him to meet the painter Walter Sickert, whose family had been painters to her own Royal Court in Denmark – at the time, Walter Sickert lived in the Cleveland Street area, and when Prince Eddy went there during his vacations at Cambridge he was passed off as Sickert’s younger brother and was known as ‘Mr S’. He also met a close friend of Sickert’s, a girl called Anne Crook, who worked in a tobacco shop at no. 20. She actually lived at no. 6 Cleveland Street. She was very beautiful and in fact she looked very much like Eddy’s mother.
Eddy fell in love with her, and she became pregnant, and there was also some sort of a wedding ceremony at St Saviour’s private chapel in 1888. The two lovers, Clarence and Anne Elizabeth, were parted after a police raid on a party in Cleveland Street, and Anne Elizabeth was in Guy’s Hospital for 156 days before she had been put into a smaller hospital at 367 Fulham Road. She was supposed to be mentally ill. She was kept in the Fulham Road hospital until her death in 1921. The servant girl also disappeared at the same time. Her name was Mary Kelly. The little girl Alice Margaret was then looked after by old Walter Sickert with the help of various local friends.
Now one day, when she was about seven years old, in 1892, a woman friend was taking her for a walk along Drury Lane when a carriage ran the girl down. The driver of the carriage was recognized as John Netley, a man who had been used as an outside coachman by Clarence on his visits to Sickert, a man who knew the story of the lovers and the child and their Irish servant girl, Mary Kelly.
The girl, Alice Margaret, was fortunate; after a spell in Charing Cross hospital she recovered from her injuries. Mary Kelly was not so lucky. She was of course a Catholic girl. She was known by the nuns of the convent in nearby [?] Place. She went first of all to an assistant convent which was in the East End.
Wha
t happened then was that various people behind the government and the royal household were very worried indeed about the possibility of the news getting out, that the heir presumptive to the throne of England was married and had a child and that the child had been born of a Catholic mother. You have to remember that it was a time when the possibility of revolution was thought to be a very real one and that the problems and violence surrounding Ireland – it was decided that Mary Kelly would have to be silenced.
The operation was undertaken by the driver, John Netley, and the royal physician, Sir William Gull. To conceal the dangerous motive behind Mary Kelly’s death and the enquiries they were making for her, she was killed as the last of five women in a way that made it look like the random work of a madman. The child, however, survived – she was protected by Walter Sickert and had two sons by him. The first one was Charles, who disappeared at the age of two, and I am the other son.
The prince appeared to be vindicated, no doubt because his alibi for the murders had been firmly established. However, the ‘scion of a noble family’ was still the source of so much trouble. Now Sir William Gull was firmly in the frame, not merely as the guardian and protector of a homicidal prince, but now fulfilling Robert Lees’s story of the ‘eminent London doctor’ by actually being Jack the Ripper himself. But even before this episode could be broadcast, the first glimmers of doubt were beginning to show. One newspaper columnist, having done his homework, mentioned the inconvenient matter of Sir William Gull’s health, namely the strokes he suffered in 1887, which caused partial paralysis and prompted his early retirement from general practice. In fact, by 1888 Gull’s health was so poor that ‘this would surely not have allowed him to launch into a series of grisly murders, with or without help’.8
With interest in a ‘royal conspiracy’ in the ascendant, City of London Police officer Donald Rumbelow put his considerable knowledge of the Ripper mystery into print with The Complete Jack the Ripper.9 Rumbelow, as a serving police officer, had used his professional acumen to further knowledge of the Ripper case by rescuing material from the City Police’s rather ad hoc archives – rescuing being the operative word, as the archives were not necessarily organized, and often material would be lying around ready for the refuse collectors. In this way, Rumbelow discovered a large cache of letters to the City Police and, perhaps more significantly, mortuary photographs of Catherine Eddowes and the police photograph of Mary Kelly in Miller’s Court. Through his interest in the subject, he had met many of the movers and shakers in the field and was well placed to commit himself to a factual and unsensational overview of the subject. The Complete Jack the Ripper, in an age where theories were becoming more convoluted and outlandish, was a breath of fresh air, a factual account of the Ripper crimes, placed within their historical context, with an overview of the suspects without moulding the narrative to put forward any one theory in particular.
Similarly, Richard Whittington-Egan produced A Casebook on Jack the Ripper,10 which, as well as attempting to redress the balance of fact over fiction, looked at the theories up to 1975 with a critical mind and made several important assertions in an attempt to dispel some of the more enduring errors. He also introduced rarely discussed ideas, such as the occult theories pertaining to Roslyn D’Onston Stephenson, whose prominence as a suspect would later find new supporters. However, Whittington-Egan was circumspect on the subject of suspects and, unable to draw any solid conclusions after some considerable analysis, said, ‘I find no case to answer against any of the accused. They are dismissed. The verdict must remain undisturbed. Some person or persons unknown.’
But naming Jack the Ripper was still the order of the day. By 1975, East London Advertiser journalist Stephen Knight was busy finalizing his own contribution to the steadily growing canon of Ripper literature. Knight was sent by the newspaper to interview Joseph Gorman Sickert about his royal cover-up story and found his subject so persuasive that he decided to undertake further research of his own. The results were published the following year in Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution,11 a book that would see phenomenal worldwide success and truly nail the ‘royal conspiracy theory’ into popular culture.
The Final Solution invariably took Sickert’s story as its central foundation. However, Knight had been busy examining other elements of the case that he believed dovetailed with the basic premise. He was able to consult the official files at the Public Record Office before they were legitimately accessible to the public and made several valuable discoveries, including naming Israel Schwartz as the man who saw the alleged attack on Elizabeth Stride in Berner Street a mere fifteen minutes before her body was discovered. But what Knight also brought to the story was a new level of intrigue and conspiracy, alleging the involvement of the Freemasons and that the clues to that complicity were plainly evident in the events of 1888.
According to this amended version of Sickert’s tale, the murders were committed by Sir William Gull, a Freemason, in compliance with ancient Masonic execution rituals, specifically in the cutting of the throat and the throwing of the ‘heart and vitals’ over the shoulder of the corpse. This latter detail resembled mutilations in the murders of Chapman and Eddowes. The victims were killed in a coach (driven by John Netley) after being rendered incapable by being fed grapes laced with laudanum; Knight was obviously keen to emphasize the detail of the grapes, therefore adding to their mystery and undoubtedly giving this confusing and controversial element of the Elizabeth Stride murder a relevance and even importance that was perhaps unwarranted. The bodies were then deposited where they were eventually found, which Knight claims explained the lack of blood present at the murder sites, notably in the case of Mary Ann Nichols in Buck’s Row. The erroneous reporting of carefully arranged coins and other objects at the site of Annie Chapman’s murder also prompted Knight to suggest that they were placed there as part of Masonic ritual.
Other members of the Freemasons were also involved with organizing the operation – Sir Charles Warren, Lord Salisbury, Robert Anderson – and in fact Warren’s involvement was particularly important in light of the events surrounding the discovery of the writing on the wall in Goulston Street. Knight directed the reader’s attention to the spelling of the word ‘Juwes’ and made the assertion that the ‘Juwes’ were Jubelo, Jubela and Jubelum, the three assassins of Hiram Abiff, chief architect of King Solomon’s temple in Masonic lore. The graffiti was a hidden clue, and Warren, upon his arrival at the scene, realized this immediately.12 Not wanting any suspicion to rest upon his esoteric society, he had it removed forthwith.
The involvement of Mary Kelly was expanded to make her a key player in the whole story, suggesting a blackmail attempt on the government, with three friends complicit in the plot and conversant with the Annie Crook/Prince Eddy affair: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman and Elizabeth Stride. Kelly had sent the blackmail threat via Walter Sickert, who was compelled to send it on to the relevant authorities. Knight also suggested that Catherine Eddowes, not part of the plot, was murdered by mistake, for when she was released from Bishopsgate police station on the morning of her murder, she had given a false name, ‘Mary Ann Kelly’. With Mary Jane Kelly as the ultimate quarry, this was supposed to explain the brutality of Eddowes’s injuries, as she was erroneously believed to be the woman most deserving of the Masonic slaughter.
The theory took a major knock in 1978 when Joseph Gorman Sickert claimed in the press that the whole story was ‘a hoax … I made it all up’. He would later retract this denial, saying that he had only cried ‘hoax’ because of his resentment of Knight’s assertions that his father, Walter Sickert, was being implicated in the murders themselves:
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.13
However, it did not need Sickert’s fluctuating opinions to prove this particular story as false, and over
the years numerous pieces of information surfaced that essentially proved the theory to be untenable. Apart from Sir William Gull’s poor health, it was also observed that no documentary evidence existed to prove that he was ever a Freemason, and the same went for Robert Anderson and Lord Salisbury, who, it was said, had apparently masterminded the entire Masonic clean-up operation. Further doubt on the Masonic links to the murders surfaced when it was noted that ‘Juwes’ had not been a term used in Freemasonry and that Jubelo, Jubela and Jubelum were known as ‘the ruffians’, and even that term had fallen out of use in English Freemasonry seventy years before the Whitechapel murders. Where Knight got these notions of Masonic lore is anybody’s guess. Researcher Simon Wood also worked hard to find out the truth regarding this story, unearthing records which would have undoubtedly been known of by Knight and perhaps passed on as they interfered with the integrity of the theory. Wood raised doubts about the existence of the Cleveland Street addresses at the time of the events which sparked the cover-up in the first place, as well as the truth about Annie Crook’s religion; according to infirmary records, she was Protestant, not Catholic.14
But this drama had staying power, no doubt assisted by the burgeoning interest in conspiracy theories. The high-profile Watergate scandal had shown the world a disastrously deceitful side to government, and in Britain the mysterious disappearance of Lord Lucan in 1974 (following the murder of his children’s nanny) suggested that the upper classes were, in theory at least, capable of shocking acts of violence. The popularity of such ideas has been given many origins, from the ‘search for meaning’ to the projection of the unacceptable side of human behaviour upon the conspirators. It also suggests a belief that events which have far-reaching effects are invariably the result of man-made decisions, rather than a chance series of incidents. With the Ripper being such an unknown quantity, the ‘search for meaning’ and the desire to allocate identity and blame to some person or persons no doubt contributed to the popularity of Sickert’s story and Knight’s theories.