Motives for Druitt and Kosminski?

[Jonathan H]

To Lynn

Well, I have a great deal of doubt about lumping Sir Robert Anderson, a pious, reclusive, egoistic sectarian, with the middle-class Littlechild (who was correct about Wilde being a homsexual masochist and Thaw being a vicious deviant and murderer) along with the affable, Old Etonian Sir Melville Macnaghten. The latter sort of declassed himself by becoming a Scotland Yard 'Sleuth' (true, they are all three Tories, Gentiles, and cops, but the differences arguably outweigh the similarities -- and in terms of class Mac far outranked the other two)

For one thing, Sir Melville had come from an institution which he adored and one which was inevitably rife with secret homosexuality, bisexuality and masturbation -- and heterosexuality, for those who could get it from the local barmaids.

Look how Mac writes about 'Kosminski' in his Report(s): he was driven into an imbecilic state by 'solitary vices' perhaps after what he had done to Kelly. That is a much less harsh description of masturbation than Anderson's 'unmentionable vices'.

The shaky conventional wisdom claims that Mac did not realise that Aaron Kosminski had only been sectioned long after he had joined the Force. He only accidentally backdated it to before he joined the police, to a time shortly after Kelly to possibly explain the cessation of the murders, eg. the Polish Jew's mind was turned to masturbatory mush by what he had done to that poor woman's remains.

Yet Mac knew that in the medical records of Kosminski the cause of his mania, which had been initially registered as unknown, was changed to 'self-abuse'.

He knew that tiny detail yet screwed up the obvious ones. Is that really likely?

Just as he supposedly does not know that Druitt was a young barrister but does know that among his things found on his soggy corpse was found a season rail pass -- and that his brother had been frantically trying to find him after he vanished. But he supposedly honestly forgot his chief suspect's correct age, his correct vocation(s) and the correct timing of his suicide -- which he changed in his memoirs anyhow?

And all this forgetting only accidentally yet very fortutiouslyhid Druitt's identity from the press, from researchers, from his cricket club, from his grown-up pupils, and from the respectable circles in which the surviving family members moved.

The luck of Constabale Magoo ...

Mac knew that Ostrog was just a melancholic thief as he stole valuables from Eton on the day he was there as an old scholar. He knew that the Russian con man only pretended to be a doctor. Furtehrmore, he knew, like everybody else, that in late 1894 Ostrog was banged-up in France at the time of the murders. Yet Mac went ahead and showed Griffiths and Sims (or verbally communicated its contents) his 'Home Office Report' which named Ostrog as a dangerous homicidal lunatic and a possible suspect for 'Jack'.

As for John Henry Lonsdale that is just speculation. There are no sources which suggest that Montie confided anything to him. He is just so convenient a peg because he was a barrister and a priest, he was down the road from Druitt's legal chambers, he was known to the clerical cousin Charles, and he had a parish in Dorset, and is an Old Etonian like Farquharson and Macnaghten.

But he is not at Druitt's funeral (he was apparently on his honeymoon).

What might have happened, instead, is the following:

A friend of William's discovered that Montie was missing from his legal chmabers for over a week and alerted the brother on the 11th. He came to London and went to the school on the 13th (misreported as the 30th) and then may have checked out his cricket club or other haunts. By then he had the note explaining that he was contemplating suicide and so he knew that his troubled brother might be deceased, or holed up somewhere -- possibly abroad -- considering taking his own life.

It is at this point that a priest came forward and told William Druitt the wholly unexpected and shattering news that his AWOL brother had confessed to him that he was, of all things, the Whitechapel fiend. The shock of that ghastly revelation is hard to imagine, and surely William rejected it as simply evidence of an unbalanced mind and not of a maniacal sibling.

And yet he was convinced -- he believed.

This priest might have been cousin Charles, the future vicar. He later had a Dorset parish called Whitchurch and the other Vicar's tale of 1899 weirdly changes Whitechapel to 'Whitechurch'. Also Mac does not suggest anybody outside the family 'believed' (though obviously Farquharson did even after Coles' murder and Sadler's arrest -- the MP was still 'adamant').

The source of distress in the family was that Montie had told the priest that he wanted the truth to come out in ten years and Charles -- if the priest was Charles -- was going to honour that promise.

This is what Mac learned in 1891 after it leaked in Dorset on the local, Tory grapevine: the story was coming out in 1898/9 no matter what, though veiled via 'substantial truth in fictitious form'. This gave the upper class smoothie the idea to get in first with his own self-serving, semi-fictional version, and so on.

In his veiled memoirs the murderer's 'own people' notice that he is 'absented' and this is [apparently] incriminating, for they knew he probabaly had a 'diseased body' too. How did they know that? Because he told them?

[Simon Wood]

Hi Jonathan,

A question.

If Macnaghten was so intent on protecting the reputation of this county-class family, why mention Druitt at all?

Regards,

Simon

[Jonathan H]

To Simon Wood

An excellent question which I wondered right from the start of my 'case disguised' theorising, eg. what disguise...? And why disguise at all when you can just omit?

How can you be committed to protecting the Druitt family and at the same time blithely naming them in an official document -- as no less than the ur-source of the belief -- and showing an unofficial version with their names to cronies, both writers, one with a huge readership?!

Then I realsied that since Mac sincerely, if mistakenly, believed also in Montie's guilt, then it could leak again in Dorset.

It had once in 1891, why not again?

Why not leak with even more details to the point where the government of the day would have to query Scotland Yard as to what they knew about it?

Of course Scotland Yard knew nothing about it, just Macnaghten. And he really believed that this was Jack the Ripper! The saga was over.

Yet while Mac was a protecting a 'good' family, who was protecting his back and that of the Yard for that matter?

If the North Country Vicar is real and if he means Druitt, then Mac knew that time-bomb was going to go off in late 1898, or early 1899. In that the leak was definitely going to be a press statement, though veiled in semi-fictitious form.

Another Ripper embarrassment for the Yard.

So Mac had two pressures on him about this secret in th 1890's; that it would leak again in Dorset and that it was going to come out, somewhat, a few years down the track.

Then, unexpectedly, in 1894 'The Sun' and Inspector Race forced Mac's hand.

This Cutbush story might cause somebody in Dorset to speak to the press to say, no, the real Ripper was long deceased, and so on.

Therefore Mac decided to commit to the official record that Druitt was a suspect, but not a posthumous one from a private investigation in 1891.

Instead he redacted Druitt back into the 1888 investigation, a big lie, and that he was a minor hearsay suspect, another lie, about whom they were unsure if he was a doctor or not, or from a good family, another pair of lies, and who could not be arrested because the evidence was practically non-existent (another whopper: the real reason was that the suspect himself was long non-existent) and may have killed himself on the same night -- the final lie.

But he also was careful to make it clear. on the record, that the family were sure, and that he was sexual maniac in case the whole thing came spilling out.

He also added two geuinely minor suspects: Aaron Kosminski, a local madman sectioned long after the Kelly murder partly for threatening a female relation and turned into 'Kosminski' the ferocious masturbator sectioned in March 189, and Michael Ostrog, a very private and delicious act of revenge by Mac against this con man defiler of his beloved Eton.

Like Druitt theor details would be reshaped for the government and beyond it the public. They were there because somebody had to be, in order to say that Druitt was just one suspect among others about whom there was no hard evidence. Tumblety and Pizer were genuine minor embarrassments, but better to steer clear of them.

Also, in an incredibly daring bit of deceit, with Mac banking on short memories, he gave the false impression that the police knew at the time that Kelly was the last murder and thus the three madmen, Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog, broadly fit the theory of the 'awful glut' implosion. That no maniac could possibly survive to function normally after the Miller's Ct. Horror, and since the might-be-a-doctor killed himself maybe the same night he is the likeliest of these minor suspects, though not even the 'shadow of proof' was ever on offer.

Eg. not our fault we did not arrest Druitt if it turns out from other sources that he is the fiend after all. That he was not a doctor would be explained by poor memory (it was his father, uncle and cousin) by a police administrator much celebrated, though, for his razor-sharp powers of recall.

Of course Mac was also trying to hold the line too against the exposure of Druitt, by not mentiong his age, not mentioning that he lived at Blackheath, not mentioning that he was from Dorset, that he was a country cricketer and part-time teacher, and by falsely implying that he might be a surgeon rather than a barrister.

In the Commons, if it came to it, H H Asquith would simply say that the police had much better suspects because nobody could have functioned after Kelly, among them a doctor who took his own life.

Thus affable Mac strained to 'keep everyone satisfied'.

If the whole thing came about about Druitt well the police could point to the 1894 Report that they were aware of him, aware of the family's belief, but there was nothing they could do to arrest him in 1888, and then he was deceased and beyond due process anyhow.

Mac also decided to quite falsely claim that Cutbush and Cutbush were related (the uncle practically becoming the poor madman's de-facto father) to provide the Liberals with a potentially scary-ugly libel element -- and a grubby, personal reason for Race's revelation to the tabloids.

But the Cutbush scandal fizzled. It was never sent.

Rather than destroy the Report Mac kept it on file in case it was needed, as the truth could emerge from Dorset, or even Bournemouth or London -- on any day. A completely unknown document until long after it had outlived its usefuleness and even its specific purpose and context -- unknown until 1966 and it has been misunderstood ever since.

By 1898 Mac was aware that the 'Kosminski' suspect, whom he had falsely claimed to Anderson (and perhaps Swanson) was safely dead (that's Druitt), was beginning to gain traction because of Anderson talking about him -- in public. Aaron Kosminski and his oblivious family were quite safe because they had both been rendered unrecognisable.

The Vicar's narrative was coming up and so Mac got in first.

He took out the Report and rewrote it with everybody sexed-up and with Druitt definitely a middle-aged doctor and the family now only suspicious and making allegations --whereas Mac had been pretty certain (by late 1894 Ostrog had been cleared of the murders but Mac kept him anyway because her served a fictional-polemical purpose). He then either read aloud it to Major Griffiths or showed it to him and lied that it was a definite 'Home Office Report', and so the 'West of England' MP tale of 1891 was secretly relaunched, but on Mac's terms, in 1898. In case it looked like a Tory fix, Mac also briefed Sims, the Liberal-Radical, and the latter quashed the Vicar quite rudely and effectively.

Macnaghten knew that the official report was bruried and that Griffiths and Sims would never reveal the name to the public (Dr D) and so Druitt and his family remained both revealed and yet slyly and safely disguised.

It worked a treat: 'substantial truth under fictitious form' as the Vicar characterised this strategem openly, while Mac did it covertly via literary cronies.

In 1913 to assuage the fears of the suviving Druitts the retiring Mac calimed to have destroyed all documentation naming their membe,r as they that he alone knew at the Yard. Another lie, of course, as Mac destroyed neither his sexed-up version nor the official one.

What Mac could not have forseen is that his ruse, largely abandoned in his own 1914 memoirs, would mislead and fool Ripper researchers into the 21st Century ...

[martin wilson]

Hello all
Ravkah,
Between 1881 and 1906,approximately 100,000 east european jews came to London, most of them in the east end, this was to escape the reprisals against the jewish community living in the Pale of Settlement ghetto on the Polish-Russian border, which happened after the asassination of the Tsar,Alexander II by a terrorist group that included a jewish seamstress.
Given that Hasidism originated in eastern europe in the 18th century,it's reasonable to conclude that some of them were followers.
To some extent Hasidism was already here,the Polish jew Chaim Jacob Samuel Falk, freemason and Kabbalist arrived in 1742, and there are some lurid claims about his practices, particularly interesting to me is the claim that he could induce an orgasmic trance through respiration techniques, not for prurient reasons though I hasten to add.
Eastern european jews may not have assimilated into established synagogues but formed their own steibels,somewhat like the home church movement.
What is peculiar, and in spiritual terms the LVP was an especially peculiar time,particularly in the east end, is that any study of jewish mysticsm in that period always tends to lead back to the Golden Dawn, they published translations of the Kabbalah and other mystical texts predating 1888.
Where I am having problems is establishing a consistent line on the attitudes of Orthodox Judaism to Kabbalah study, one source considers it dangerous and that it should only be studied by married men over 40, another source says this is nonsense.
As Phil allowed this to be a speculative thread,obviously I am interested in why the Kabbalah was considered dangerous,and if so what effect it would have on an already disturbed mind.
All the best.

[lynn cates]

compare and contrast

Hello Jonathan. Thanks.

I agree that all of these chaps differ in the ways you suggest. Yet, they all seem alike in that they were good Victorian males and practising detectives. I might add to that their take on human sexuality and crime.

Cheers.
LC

[RivkahChaya]

Where I am having problems is establishing a consistent line on the attitudes of Orthodox Judaism to Kabbalah study, one source considers it dangerous and that it should only be studied by married men over 40, another source says this is nonsense.

There are traditional ages at which certain points of study are supposed to begin. Study of Hebrew, beginning with learning the alphabet begins at three, study of Torah begins at five, study of Talmud at 13, and Kabballah at 40. This did not mean that the Talmud was forbidden to people under 13, or the Torah forbidden to people under 5-- that was certainly not true at all, and there was plenty of informal learning about them.

The thing about the Kaballah that makes it different, is that Jews are constantly exposed to Torah, and learning about Torah is inevitable. Formal education in Torah ends when a person becomes bar (or these days, bat) mitzvah, and an adult in the eyes in the Jewish community, is presumed to have mastered the basics, and ready to learn the minutiae, in order to observe all the commandments by himself, and not through parental instruction or proxy. This is why it is essential to know the Talmud.

Talmud and Torah are essential. Kaballah is not.

Inasmuch as it is "dangerous," some people consider it hubris, as though you are saying you have mastered the Talmud (not possible), and are ready to move on. No one who studies the Kaballah thinks that, and clearly, they find it meaningful.

There are lots of extra-Talmudic texts that discuss the content of the Torah, or Jewish practice in general, and they are known as commentary. SOme of them are considered very important, but none as important as Torah and Talmud. There is a lot of Jewish history, and other types of books that people read, which are considered important, but not as important even as commentary.

People who don't like Kaballah usually consider it dangerous, because it distracts from the study of Talmud and Torah.

Now, I don't know that there wasn't a lot of surreptitiousness in 1888. People probably believed in dybbuks and golems back then. But I don't know that Kabballah readers were thought of as magicians who could summon dark spirits, or anything like that. Any cause and effect probably just had to do with the willingness of superstitious/kabballistic types to attribute something like epilepsy, or mania to a demonic or spiritual cause, which to an outsider might have seemed like "Everyone I know who learns about dybbuks eventually is visited by one."

So, then yes, I suppose in that way, it must have come to be seen as dangerous.

[Scott Nelson]

...the affable, Old Etonian Sir Melville Macnaghten. The latter sort of declassed himself by becoming a Scotland Yard 'Sleuth' (true, they are all three Tories, Gentiles, and cops..

You can't be an Etonian and a Tory at the same time.

[Scott Nelson]

Oh wait!!

Do you mean the Etonians grow up to be Tories?

[Robert]

Etonians don't grow up - they go up - to Oxbridge.

[martin wilson]

Hi Rivkah
Thanks for your reply,it has really helped me to understand the context of the Kabbalah in Judaism.
I certainly understand the parallel with Catholicism, my mother in law,lovely woman that she is is very devout,and as you say her house is full of religious icons, pictures of the pope,Jesus etc and a child o Prague with its broken head.
She has also gone to all the Marian visitation sites,in fact somewhere around the house I have a souvenier pen from Knock with a plastic light up virgin Mary on the top.
There were all sorts of rumours about Chaim Falk, he was said to have created a Golem for instance,although,dissapointingly it never showed up, he was an alchemist and was said to have practiced all manner of strange rituals.
He was obviously a very colourful figure in the London of the time, and would wear in all weathers a shtreimel hat and bekeshe satin coat.
The Golden Dawn members certainly studied invocative ritual, in fact I need to get back to The Lesser Key of Solomon I was plodding through which was published by one of its members.
Wyn Westcott,one of its founders had to resign as a deputy coroner in 1897 after 'occult' papers were found in a hansom cab, although there are claims the papers were planted as the history of the Golden Dawn is very much one of internicine conflict.
All the best.

[Stephen Thomas]

the melancholic thief

Mac knew that Ostrog was just a melancholic thief as he stole valuables from Eton on the day he was there as an old scholar. He knew that the Russian con man only pretended to be a doctor. Furtehrmore, he knew, like everybody else, that in late 1894 Ostrog was banged-up in France at the time of the murders. Yet Mac went ahead and showed Griffiths and Sims (or verbally communicated its contents) his 'Home Office Report' which named Ostrog as a dangerous homicidal lunatic and a possible suspect for 'Jack'.

Ah, so MM actually knew that Ostrog was a total no-hoper suspect.

Perhaps Kosminski and your man Druitt were fall guys also.

[Simon Wood]

Hi Stephen,

What's all this with "perhaps"?

Regards,

Simon

[Stephen Thomas]

What's all this with "perhaps"?

You're quick, Simon. Respect.

[Jonathan H]

To Simon Wood

You asked me to explain how Macnaghten could be working in two contradictory directions in the 1890's.

Since you have not replied I presume that you have not seen the reply you requested.

To Stephen Thomas

Since you make no reference to what you asked me to produce, eg. quotes from the primary sources which show that Druitt was not being put forward as a tormented, suicidal, homosexual I take it that you accept that that part of the Old Paradigm is weak.

It always was a modernist imposition on the material and hung from the slender reed that when Sir Melville said in 1913 that he 'knew exactly who' [the un-named Druitt] was -- he didn't.

As for Macnaghten creating not two but three suspect who are really not much at all (Druitt wasn't a doctor and did not kill himself within hours of Kelly; Aaron Kosminski is from maybe an 1888 list; Ostrog from perhaps the 1888 Police Gazette) I think that is a reasonable opinion, and have said so before.

As in: once a source is shown to be deliberately misleading how can anything about it be trusted?

On the other hand, to be frank, this is a little bit naive about human beings let alone the competing pressures which create sources, usually on the run.

The reason Druitt is different from 'Kosminski' and Michael Ostrog as a Ripper suspect is that, in the limited extant record available to us, he does not begin with Macnaghten -- unlike the other two.

Montague Druitt as 'Jack' begins with a wing of his family in Dorset.

Macnaghten in both versions of his Report confirms the 'family' as the origin of the belief and/or suspicion about his dual identity.

Via Sims we can also see that the older brother, William, in Bournemouth, was also privy to this belief and apparently agreed with it.

Here are the two MP sources which arguably ended the old creaky notion of Macnaghten as incompetent and/or forgetful and/or relying on arms-length gossip:

11 February 1891, The Bristol Times and Mirror:

'I give a curious story for what it is worth. There is a West of England member who in private declares that he has solved the mystery of 'Jack the Ripper.' His theory - and he repeats it with so much emphasis that it might almost be called his doctrine - is that 'Jack the Ripper' committed suicide on the night of his last murder. I can't give details, for fear of a libel action; but the story is so circumstantial that a good many people believe it. He states that a man with blood-stained clothes committed suicide on the night of the last murder, and he asserts that the man was the son of a surgeon, who suffered from homicidal mania. I do not know what the police think of the story, but I believe that before long a clean breast will be made, and that the accusation will be sifted thoroughly.

And:

From 'The York Herald' and 'The Yorkshire Herald', Feb 18th 1891:

'The member of Parliament who recently declared that 'Jack the Ripper' had killed himself on the evening of the last murder, adheres to his opinion. Even assuming that the man Saddler [sic] is able to prove his innocence of the murder of Frances Coles, he maintains that the latest crime cannot be the work of the author of the previous series of atrocities, and this view of the matter is steadily growing among those who do not see that there is any good reason to suppose that 'Jack the Ripper' is dead. So far as Saddler is concerned, there is a strong feeling that the evidence will have to be very much strengthened against him by next Tuesday, if he is to be committed for trial. His manner in the Thames Police-court was consistent with any theory.'

And,

26 February 1892, The Western Mail:

' ... Mr. Farquharson, M.P. for West Dorset, was credited, I believe, some time since with evolving a remarkable theory of his own on the matter. He believed that the author of the outrages destroyed himself. ...'

The last one is in an article in which an unidentified police official is providing ammuniation to show that the MP's theory is 'naturally exploded' because the police have been only lately pursuing a prime suspect -- he claims that it is the fiend -- night and day, but cannot make an arrest without the hardest of hard evidence. Yet their vigilance has at least prevented further murders (I subscribe to the theory that this is an exaggerated reference to Tom Sadler).

Assuming all that slef-serving guff is sincere by the unidentified cop what we have is the MP story semi-officially dismissed at the Yard -- except by Macnaghten. Rightly or wrongly, he absorbed its certainty, Farquharson's 'doctrine', for the rest of his life.

Mac furthermore libel-proofed and reshaped the scoop like this -- in Major Arthur Griffiths' 'Mysteries of Police and Crime' of 1898:

'The outside public may think that the identity of that later miscreant, "Jack the Ripper," was never revealed. So far as actual knowledge goes, this is undoubtedly true. But the police, after the last murder, had brought their investigations to the point of strongly suspecting several persons, all of them known to be homicidal lunatics, and against three of these they held very plausible and reasonable grounds of suspicion. Concerning two of them the case was weak, although it was based on certain colourable facts. One was a Polish Jew, a known lunatic, who was at large in the district of Whitechapel at the time of the murder, and who, having afterwards developed homicidal tendencies, was confined to an asylum. This man was said to resemble the murderer by the one person who got a glimpse of him - the police-constable in Mitre Court. The second possible criminal was a Russian doctor, also insane, who had been a convict both in England and Siberia. This man was in the habit of carrying about surgical knives and instruments in his pockets; his antecedents were of the very worst, and at the time of the Whitechapel murders he was in hiding, or, at least, his whereabouts were never exactly known. The third person was of the same type, but the suspicion in his case was stronger, and there was every reason to believe that his own friends entertained grave doubts about him. He was also a doctor in the prime of life, was believed to be insane or on the borderland of insanity, and he disappeared immediately after the last murder, that in Miller's Court, on the 9th November, 1888. On the last day of that year, seven weeks later, his body was found floating in the Thames, and was said to have been in the water a month. The theory in this case was that after his last exploit, which was the most fiendish of all, his brain entirely gave way, and he became furiously insane and committed suicide. It is at least a strong presumption that "Jack the Ripper" died or was put under restraint after the Miller's Court affair, which ended this series of crimes. It would be interesting to know whether in this third case the man was left-handed or ambidextrous, both suggestions having been advanced by medical experts after viewing the victims. Certainly other doctors disagreed this point, which may be said to add another to the many instances in which medical evidence has been conflicting, not to say confusing.'

For the public via the Major (and later Sims) the MP was out and the method and location of suicide was in. The 'family' was out and instead anomic 'friends' were in. Also, other suspects were brought in so that the un-named Druitt was not completely exposed as the only alternative, as he obviously is in the MP's doctrine.

But what is missed by people who have been at this subject for a few deacdes is that Macnaghten in his memoirs pulled back, mostly though by no means completely, from his manipulation of the data:

Sir Melville Macnaghten, 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper', 1914:

' ... Although, as I shall endeavour to show in this chapter, the Whitechapel murderer, in all probability, put an end to himself soon after the Dorset Street affair in November i888, certain facts, pointing to this conclusion, were not in possession of the police till some years after I became a detective officer ... '

This matches the MP tale of 1891, in terms of the posthumous timing of when Druitt's dual identity came to be known to Macnaghten.

As for the window-dressing suspects of the Polish Jew and the Russian doctor they are dropped altogether in the memoir. Sir Robert's 'definitely ascertained fact' is to Mac nothing, and so is Ostrog.

Furthermore Mac goes out of his way to make it clear that the likely 'Jack' was a Gentile, who had never been 'detained' in an asylum against his will, and who blamed Jews for interrupting him on the night of the 'double event', which meant Mac transposing the three Jews and the beat cop from one crime scene to the other (and wholly dumping his now redundant fiction about the cop seeing maybe the Polish Jew suspect with a victim).

Macnaghten even cleaned up the spelling of the graffiti, so as to make it more likely to written by an educated gent. He claimed that this was definitely written by the murderer -- yet the 'writing on the wall', this allegedly singular clue, appears in neither version of his Report and nor in the accounts of his proxies:

' ... During this night an apron, on which bloody hands had been wiped, was found in Goulburn [sic] Street (situated, if my memory is correct, about half-way between Berners Street and Mitre Square). Hard by was a writing in chalk on the wall, to the effect that " the Jews are the men who will not be blamed for nothing." The apron gave no clue, and the chalk writing was obliterated by the order of a high police official, who was seemingly afraid that a riot against the Jews might be the outcome of this strange " writing on the wall:' This was the only clue ever left behind by the murderer ...'

Finally Macnaghten distanced himself from the account of Farquharson, and the one he passed on to Sims, about the so-called clincher timing of Jack committing the final murder and then immediately his penitential self-murder on 'the same evening'; a confession in deed.

' ... On the morning of 9th November, Mary Jeanette Kelly... was found murdered in a room in Miller's Court, Dorset Street ... the individual who held up London in terror ... committed suicide on or about the 10th of November 1888 ...'

To Scott Nelson

I'm sorry but, as is often the case with your posts, I can't follow what you are saying or arguing?

An Old Etonian means an ex-pupil of Eton. It still does.

A Tory means a supporter of the British Conservative Party, either as a voter or a member. It still does.

The Druitts family and Macnaghten were both. Christabel Aberconway desribes her father as an 'enthusiatic' Tory to the point of boring her silly -- yet an affable man with Liberal pals like Sims.

Henry Richard Farquharson was the Tory member for West Dorset in the House of Commons, an aristocratic backbencher and a fellow Old Etonian like Macnaghten (and a fellow Oxonian like Druitt, though from different colleges) and who lived just a few miles from some of the Druitts.

The current British Prime Minister, David Cameron, is both an Old Etonian and an Oxonian.

[martin wilson]

Two of Englands lowest ever test scores 52 and 63 came against the Aussies at Lords in 1888.
Maybe Monty just couldn't face the winter tour.
All the best.