Edmund Reid

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Reviews END OF THE YEAR ROUNDUP Let’s be frank, 2015 has been a poor year for Ripper books. It opened with a conspiracy theory book and it finished with a conspiracy theory book and in between there was a conspiracy theory book. Discounting the ebook of The Complete Jack the Ripper A to Z, on which it would be unfair of me to comment, nothing much else of distinction came along. Back in January and looking at the year ahead, I forecast that Simon Wood’s Deconstructing Jack was likely to be the best offering of the year. It isn’t an especially good book, the biggest downside being the sheer improbability of its incomplete conspiracy theory. However, the extensive research was commendable and it caused one to look at the case from different perspectives, which is always a good thing. The two dark horse books which might easily have knocked Simon Wood’s book from its number one position were Wynne Weston-Davies’ The Real Mary Kelly and Bruce Robinson’s They All Love Jack. The Real Mary Kelly turned out to be interesting and entertaining reading, but relied far too heavily on supposition, and Bruce Robinson’s They All Love Jack cast aside the normal standards of historical research, proffered a cock-and-bull theory, and could be a contender for the worst Ripper book ever, thought the competition for that is very stiff. Otherwise, nothing memorable appeared and the Ripper year was mostly dominated, not by a book, but by a load of overblown nonsense about the Jack the Ripper Museum in Cable Street. What came as a surprise was J J Hainsworth’s Jack the Ripper - Case Solved, 1891 (reviewed below). It’s the third conspiracy theory of the year, but on a very small scale. Jonathan Hainsworth would have you believe that Sir Melville Macnaghten wanted it known that the police knew the identity of Jack the Ripper, but at the same time didn’t want anyone to discover who it was, so he dribbled information and misinformation to cronies like George R Sims. The theory doesn’t really hold together, I’m afraid, but Hainsworth provides a makings of a biography of an Eton-obsessed, schoolboy-minded Macnaghten, and it’s the first book about Montague John Druitt to have appeared in many a long year - and a lot of new information has emerged in that time which has desperately needed to be brought together in a single volume. Hainsworth’s book isn’t the one I’d have wished for to do this, but in this case Begg can’t be a chooser. However, I think Hainsworth’s book is probably the best Ripper book of the year, pipping Simon Wood at the post. But if 2015 has been a bit on the bleak side, 2016 looks is a positively wintery wasteland. As of writing, there’s not a single new Jack the Ripper title announced for publication! Ripperologist 147 December 2015 56
Jack the Ripper- Case Solved, 1891 Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2015 http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com www.jjhainsworth.com ISBN: 978-0786496761 Softcover; 219pp; Illus; notes; biblio; index £31.95 softcover/£12.56 Kindle Every week a corpse is pulled from the water somewhere along the River Thames’ 213 miles. I don’t know how many corpses were pulled from the Thames in the 1880s. Peter Ackroyd, in his excellent Thames: Sacred River, says that it is estimated that 3-4 bodies were pulled from the river every week. That’s just over 200 a year. Mei Trow, in The Thames Torso Murders, says that 544 bodies were recovered from the Thames in 1882, that’s about ten a week. In 1889 the Gloucester Citizen newspaper indicated that one person a fortnight flung themselves from Waterloo Bridge, so popular a place for suicides that among its nicknames was ‘Arch of Suicide’. On the last day of December 1888 a waterman dragged the body of Montague John Druitt from the water off Thorneycroft’s Torpedo Works in Chiswick. It was an unremarkable suicide that barely made the newspapers, but in 1894 the Chief Constable of the C.I.D. at Scotland Yard, Melville Macnaghten, wrote a report in which he ventured his opinion that Druitt was Jack the Ripper. For some reason Macnaghten described Druitt as a 41-year-old doctor. In fact he was a 31-year-old barrister/schoolmaster. Macnaghten added a few details in his 1913 memoirs, not, of course, naming Druitt, but claiming that ‘certain facts’ pointing to Druitt’s guilt were not in the possession of the police until some years after June 1889. He added that Druitt lived ‘with his own people’ (either his nuclear family or just possibly with his class of people) and absented himself from home at certain times’. He had never been in an asylum. The theory advanced by Jonathan Hainsworth in this book is that Melville Macnaghten used writer friends Sir Arthur Griffiths (who wrote of the drowned doctor theory in 1898) and George R Sims (from 1899) (and latterly his autobiography) to make public that the police almost certainly knew the identity of Jack the Ripper, but at the same time did everything he possibly could to prevent anyone from identifying the suspect as Montague Druitt. The question is why Macnaghten would have done this, and sadly it’s a question Hainsworth struggles to convincingly answer. One can understand that Macnaghten may have wanted to make it public that the police knew who Jack the Ripper was, and it is also reasonable that he might have wanted it known that it was on his watch that the information identifying Druitt came to light and that Macnaghten (rather than, say, Anderson) recognised its significance. But if that was the case, why provide Griffiths and Sims with sufficient information to make an identification possible. Peter Ackroyd says that at the headquarters of the River Police in Wapping there is a “Book of the Dead” or “Occurrence Book”, otherwise a registry of bodies pulled from the river. I don’t know whether this book existed in the late 1800s, but I assume something like it must have done and that it would have been a relatively simple task for any journalist worthy of the name to have checked for bodies pulled from the Thames on the last day of December 1888. The misidentification of Druitt as a 41-year-old doctor would surely have been no obstacle to identifying Montague Druitt as the man of whom Griffiths, Sims or Macnaghten wrote. The other possible problem for Hainsworth’s theory is that we must allow for the possibility that Macnaghten was not responsible for the Thames suicide being identified as Jack the Ripper. In 1891 a member of parliament named Richard Farquharson was telling people about a doctor who committed suicide and who he believed was Jack the Ripper. The scant details suggest that he was referring to Druitt, although it is not known whether he was naming him. Farquharson could have been Macnaghten’s source or he and Macnaghten could have shared a common source. Seventeen years later a writer named Frank Collins Richardson referred to the Whitechapel murderer as having flung himself into the Thames and being named Dr Bluitt. Assuming this was a thinly-veiled reference to Druitt, the name was presumably in the public domain by 1908. I know that rumours circulate about people for decades before eventually appearing in print. Both Jimmy Saville and Cyril Smith were known about long before their posthumous exposure, especially among journalists, so I see no reason why Druitt’s name couldn’t have been linked with the Ripper murders without ever having made it into print, especially as journalists back then seem honourable and lacking curiosity - nobody, it seems, bothered to follow up on the Farquaharson story, for example, and later a vicar claiming that the Ripper had admitted to his crimes under seal of the confessional asked that a national newspaper not reveal his name because it could help identify the killer, and the newspaper agreed. No other journalists seem to have followed up that story either. Different days, different ways. Ripperologist 147 December 2015 57
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No. 147 December 2015 Edmund Reid N
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The Anniversary Waltz EDITORIAL by
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Edmund Reid

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