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Aberconway Version in Ripperologist magazine
The History of the Macnaghten Memorandum, including the Aberconway Version in full and a complete transcription, will appear in Ripperologist 124.
Best wishes
Adam
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bravo
Hello Adam. Well done. I look forward to this.
Cheers.
LCComment
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Photographs of the Aberconway Version
Adam Wood's photographs of the Aberconway Version of the Macnaghten Memorandum can be viewed here:
Publication courtesy Christopher McLaren.
Originally published in Ripperologist issue 124.Comment
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Thanks for posting these photos of the Aberconway version.Originally posted by AdamNeilWood View Post
Here are my attempts at a transcription and a word-by-word comparison with the official version:
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work
Hello Chris. Thanks for posting this. You have done a great deal of work here, but this should greatly facilitate research and comparison of the two versions.
Cheers.
LCComment
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The legacy of 'Aberconway'?
http://www.jtrforums.com/showthread....681#post164681
On the other site is this fascinating review of George Sims, as Dagonet, rudely blasting Anderson for his 1910 memoirs.
Apart from making the shrewd point that the leftist Sims often parroted Tory nostrums when it came to crime, it is arguably evidence that he is also parroting Macnaghten's opinion about his former boss -- and Ripper opinion.
The cruel caricature of 'Jewish financiers' is really low, as that is not what Anderson was asserting: eg. it was not an opinion driven by classic anti-Semitism.
Could this just be Sims' opinion and nothing to do with his pal Mac?
Yes, it might be.
It's just that other sources confirm this clubby coalition.
In his memoirs, Macnaghten praises Sims as a friend, a wit and as a crime writer -- even using a chunk of his about another infamous murder. So, he praised a chum who had trashed a senior police chief as a liar and a racist.
In 1914, if Macnaghten thought that the criticism Anderson received in 1910 was unwarranted, or at least went too far, then he could have redressed the balance by mentioning that there was indeed a Polish Jew suspect, though less likely than the drowned doctor.
He does not such thing.
Mac praises Swanson, Abberline, Littlechild and other members of the constabulary but Anderson does not exist, just as Mac was not mentioned in his 1910 account, except for a fleeting put-down as a nervous nellie over a threatening letter. Macnaghten, the 'action man'? How that must have galled him?
If Sims is channeling Mac's opinion in 1910 then we see that the conventional wisdom that these two police chiefs politely and professionally disagreed over preferred Ripper suspects is off-track.
They hated each other, they were rivals on this subject and others, it was a gentlemanly civil war -- as memoirs often are -- and they airbrushed each other out of each other's lives.
Mac via Sims, and then the total ommission of 'Kosminski' in his 1913 comments, and his 1914 memoirs did not think that the Polish Jew was a legit suspect at all and sought to quash this notion in the public arena.
The irony being that in 1914, Mac also carefully distanced himself from Sims' drowned doctor profile too.Comment
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