Edmund Reid

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