GEORGE HUTCHINSON

it to the necessity of the day… For better your children were cast from the bridges of London than they should
become as one of those little ones.’
Another suspect, the butcher Jacob Levy, knew how to cut up carcasses, but Thompson knew how to cut
up people. Levy had butcher’s knives, Thompson had a dissecting scalpel. Levy was an East Ender, but so was
Thompson. He stayed, for much of 1888, at the newly opened Salvation Army refuge. Although he was born a
Roman Catholic, served as an altar boy and studied for the priesthood, he had already accepted offers of help from
other faiths. This first happened when the shoemaker John McMaster came to his succour. Thompson had just
lived through a straight fortnight in the streets, when McMaster, who was also the Protestant Churchwarden and
choirmaster of St Martins, sighted him. Thompson was wandering the Strand trying to sell a box of matches when,
from the crowded street’s din, McMaster called out to him.
‘Is your soul saved?’ he asked.
‘What right have you to ask me that question?’ replied Thompson.
‘If you won’t let me save your soul, let me save your body.’
McMaster took Thompson home and hired him to work in his shop. He later recalled that Thompson would raise
his voice, would shout, in medical and other arguments:
‘There was something between him and the priests...A damp rag of humanity...He was the very personification
of ruin, a tumbledown, dilapidated opium-haunted wreck.’
After being dismissed by McMaster for accidentally injuring a customer’s foot, Thompson again sought help
outside his faith at the Salvation Army’s Limehouse male night refuge. At this shelter the men slept in narrow
wooden boxes under a leather apron or coverlet to protect them from the rats. By August 1888, he had received
some income from the publication of his works and by the following month of September, when the words ‘The
joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits’ appeared in the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, Thompson had no more need of
his shelter’s leather apron.
By November, when the Catholic-run Providence Row
night refuge opened for the winter, Thompson was able
to meet an entry requirement of working at a trade. He
could now joke about the leather apron and the dark
days of his homelessness, when his cohorts were wanted
murderers, like the Ripper. Everard Meynell explained
this in his 1913 biography, The Life of Francis Thompson:
In a common lodging-house he met and had talk
with the man who was supposed by the group
about the fire to be a murderer uncaught. And
when it was not in a common lodging-house, it
was at a Shelter or Refuge that he would lie in
one of the oblong boxes without lids, containing
a mattress and a leathern apron or coverlet, that
are the fashion, he says, in all Refuges.
Unlike Thompson, Jacob Levy had no motive to
commit murder, leading people to speculate that sexual
disease may have been a reason for him to hate prostitutes, even though there is no evidence that he ever visited
one. Thompson, on the other hand, had a clear motive. He was devastated when his prostitute friend broke off
their relationship.
Another top suspect is Severin Klosowski, also known as George Chapman, who had qualified as a surgeon in
Poland. But while Chapman had taken only a four-month surgery course, Thompson had trained for six years.
Like Tumblety, Chapman disliked women generally, while Thompson specifically hated prostitutes. Chapman, a
publican, could not walk through the East End unnoticed, while Thompson, who had lived there several years
as a homeless person, could be out at all hours without arousing suspicion. That Chapman owned a knife was
mentioned by his wife only once, in passing. Thompson, on the other hand, was known to carry a scalpel in his
person at all times.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 43