Anderson - More Questions Than Answers

[Stewart P Evans]

Statements

In view of what Martin has said I feel that we should look at some of his statements with regard to Anderson. These are a few statements which, I feel, show a lack of objectivity, bias, or opinion posing as fact.

“Anderson was a scrupulous born-again Christian, quite incapable of lying through vanity.”

“Anderson was correct. Once identified, his suspect fits everything we know about the nature of sexual serial murderers.”

“At the same time he had a peculiarly scrupulous regard for the truth and would never have lied directly though when he thought anti-social criminals [is there any other sort?] were involved he was prepared to mislead with half-truths or mental reservation (as he did before the Parnell Commission). His statements about the Ripper’s identity are far too direct to come under this heading.”

[Chris]

And a provenance that says "This can be shown to have passed from the writer to his daughter, who never looked at it, and from her to her nephews who found what it contained and tried to make it public without making a lot of money out of it" is excellent once it is shown that the family consists entirely of people of good character. In fact, it effectively rules out of court any idea of fakery or forgery.

I'm sorry, but all this boils down to is that you, personally, don't believe that the people concerned would have faked the marginalia.

Now obviously that point of view depends on the book having a secure provenance, but it has nothing to do with the way in which scholars normally use provenance to establish authenticity, because it depends entirely on your personal assessment of the character of the people concerned. As I said, obviously the marginalia themselves have no provenance before 1987, when they were first made public.

As it happens, I don't think the people concerned faked the marginalia either. But I would never dream of accusing those who held a different view* of "obtuse imperviousness to reason", let alone of attributing that to a lack of "formal training in scholarship". Because the argument you have just outlined depends entirely on a subjective assessment of character.

[*I'd better make it clear that by "a different view" I mean the view that it is possible that the marginalia were not written by Donald Swanson.]

[Stewart P Evans]

Anderson

Anderson's importance cannot be gainsaid. I have always advised those interested in him to read all they can find - both written by him and about him. Only then can they draw their own conclusions. Of course most will not bother to do this but, Ripperologically speaking, they will probably rely on what their favourite author has to say about him.

I have told the story in the past of how, in 1968 in Bournemouth, I purchased a three-volume set of Major Arthur Griffiths's Mysteries of Police and Crime (1903) in which I read of the three suspects of the Macnaghten memorandum, sans names, and of Anderson and Macnaghten. I was, at the time, attending law college in Bournemouth and felt that here, with the police words on the case, the answer was, most likely, going to be found.

So I was, from a very early date, receptive to such material and sanguine of such source material being productive of a solution.

[fido]

Hello, Stewart!
Indeed I include you among those who have substituted an attack by Sir William Harcourt here and an eccentricity of Andersonian thinking there for a complete overview of political positions on the Irish question or the whole nature of Anderson's thinking - including the vital fact that his religious activities were far more important to him and central to his life than his police activities. And they need to be addressed. (By the way, I should have said that I addressed these problems thirty years ago; not unfortunately written the boastful claim that I answered them! Apologies to all). I hadn't wished to go into it as a matter of personalities, but you have, Stewart, in various places described Paul Begg and myself as lacking impartiality and in similar ways failingin scholarly objectivity, so I feel entitled to point out the reasons why I think my approach is in fact more balanced and scholarly than yours. To tell the truth, I am rather at a loss to know why you have to spring to the attack on the Anderson and Kosminski question at every opportunity. Or why you persistently accuse the A-Z of an unbalanced presentation of the question. We are equally interested in the opinions of Swanson and Macnaghten, and only wish we knew more about Littlechild so as to be able to evaluate his contribution. Abberline we think has been seriously overvalued by people who underrate the damaging nature of his Pall Mall Gazette interviews and his admission that he had not been given the medical evidence on Annie Chapman. I think you and we are in agreement in discounting the sources accusing PAV, Maybrick, and possibly Donston. None of which stops me from praising people whose work I admire, whether or not I agree with it or they agree with me. Among those whose conclusions I dispute but whose work I have praised you might note R. Michael Gordon, A.P. Wolfe, Bruce Paley, and, not least, yourself and Paul Gainey! I prefer praising to carping and value the friendship of people I think dead wrong but unimpeachably honest and hard-working: John Wilding and the much maligned Shirley Harrison, for example. (This does not mean that I think the honesty and industry of anyone I have mentioned previously is less than perfect!)
Chris - of course there are many cases where the provenance doesn't prove anything one way or another. But the provenance "A mate of mine I used to drink with gave it to me wrapped up so that he never showed it to me open. before I took it home. He wouldn't tell me what it was, but told me to use it. He's dead now," is a sure pointer to worthless rubbish, especially when the first round of enquiries establishes that the said mate's daughters categorically insist that the story is impossible. And a provenance that says "This can be shown to have passed from the writer to his daughter, who never looked at it, and from her to her nephews who found what it contained and tried to make it public without making a lot of money out of it" is excellent once it is shown that the family consists entirely of people of good character. In fact, it effectively rules out of court any idea of fakery or forgery. I note with horror on another board that the 75 quid the Swanson brothers got from the News of the World has been upped to a grand by some process of Chinese whispers. Avoiding casting aspersions on innocent people is incumbent on us all: if we should disapprove of people who cavalierly invent crazy theories to finger prominent or respectable Victorians as far-fetched suspects, we should be even more careful about the living and the rcently dead.
All the best,
Martin F

[Natalie Severn]

Obviously, this is a double fallacy.

But what I dislike is the arrogance of someone who dismisses different opinions as "obtuse imperviousness to reason" arising from a lack of "formal training in scholarship" - even when those opinions come from a trained document examiner!

Yes Chris I too noted that Martin was making a number of assumptions here,one of these being about a "lack of formal training in scholarship" contributors have.

Just as a point of information: I myself am trained in formal scholarship to M.Phil Level in Linguistics.I am also a trained teacher.

And let us be quite clear-just because Martin says something is so, does not mean it is .

[Stewart P Evans]

Statements

The following is not stated with any sense of sour grapes, jealousy or ego-chasing. It is, I hope, factual.

Ripperology has evolved greatly over the years and there are now, mainly thanks to the Internet, many more true Ripper authorities around than at any other time in the past. The forums have led to much vying on the ladder of Ripper hierarchy, as well as battling to establish Ripperological firsts. No longer can any so-called Ripper expert expect to be believed at every turn and his word accepted as gospel. Indeed, the Ripper author or 'expert' had better get his facts right - for if he doesn't he will soon be challenged. From 1987-1991 Martin and a couple of others were in the vanguard of the new Ripperologists emerging at the centenary. This culminated with the enjoyable and very useful A-Z in the latter year.

It could be argued, validly so, that by 1991 Martin was one of the top Ripper authorities (and still so) and given his great charisma and camera appeal he appeared regularly on television. Such a position brings significant results, one of which is that what you state and your opinions carry great weight. Your published statements are taken as unequivocal fact by many.

[Jeff Leahy]

Dear Martin

I do share your frustration at losing long posts. The only answer is to get into a system of writing in ‘Word’ and ‘copy and paste’. It might be a little more time consuming but it does stop things disappearing into the ether.

Many thanks for taking the trouble to post. Your input is most welcome by those of us still trying to get our heads around Anderson. He is one of the more complex and difficult characters in the Ripper case to try and understand.

Thanks to Stewart for interesting thread and for everyone’s contributions.

Pirate

[Stewart P Evans]

Good posts How, Stephen, Rob and rjp. You all seem to have the admirable historical approach of surveying as wide a range of evidence as possible and forming a conclusion from the overall impression, rather than picking out a quotation here and a sentence there which endorses your preconceived conclusion and offering tham as proof...
All the best,
Martin F

As far as this opening sentence goes I can only imagine that it is aimed at me, amongst others. I like to think that I have surveyed as wide a range of evidence as possible, indeed I should also think I perhaps have rather more on Anderson than most, especially as I have some of his private correspondence that others don't have.

So I stand accused of 'picking out a quotation here and a sentence there which endorses my preconceived conclusion and offering them as proof...' There is no other way that this opening gambit of Martin's can be read. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. It is a nonsense to suggest that you should cite lengthy extracts from a book, you have to select samples to illustrate your contentions - and Martin does that as much as anyone else. I have pointed out Anderson's importance and recommended others to read up on him. Martin's published writings signally omit relevant material that militates against Anderson.

Martin also uses his old ploy of praising others whom he perceives as being supportive.

[Chris]

I'm sorrythat demurrers haven't had the formal training in scholarship to take for granted the importance of provenance, and its offering the virtual certainty that the Maybrick diary was fake while the Swanson papers are even more certainly genuine.

Obviously, this is a double fallacy.

A lack of provenance is simply a lack of evidence about the history of a document. It can lead to grave suspicion, but clearly it can't of itself provide "virtual certainty" that a document is a fake. Many genuine manuscripts, even from the late Victorian period, simply do not have a documented history of ownership.

And of course the marginalia themselves have no provenance beyond 1987. The fact that annotations are found in a document with a known history tells us nothing, of itself, about when those annotations were made or who made them. Jenni Pegg's exposure of the "Uncle Jack" imposture demonstrates that a document with "unimpeachable" provenance, and in what should have been secure custody, can have fake material inserted in it.

Just to be clear, personally I believe the marginalia are genuine (though that's very different from saying that their contents are factually reliable). But what I dislike is the arrogance of someone who dismisses different opinions as "obtuse imperviousness to reason" arising from a lack of "formal training in scholarship" - even when those opinions come from a trained document examiner!

[Stewart P Evans]

Martin

Phew, a long post Martin and much to address. I appreciate how busy you are and I am pleased to see you contributing. I shall break down my responses to individual points and address them, I hope, in a coherent and proper manner. Obviously we do not agree on many points, but there are probably as many that we do agree on, and I have said so in the past. I do hope that you and Karen are keeping well.

[fido]

Good posts How, Stephen, Rob and rjp. You all seem to have the admirable historical approach of surveying as wide a range of evidence as possible and forming a conclusion from the overall impression, rather than picking out a quotation here and a sentence there which endorses your preconceived conclusion and offering tham as proof.
I've just re-read pages 156 to 173 of my own Crimes, Detection and Death of JtR (which the publishers would not let me call The Police, The Jews and JtR as I wished). I find as I thought that many of the questions raised about Anderson were answered there 30 years ago. Of course, subsequent research has changed some of my conclusions. I would, today, draw much stronger attention to Anderson's stubborn obstinacy in forcing doctor after doctor to view Rose Mylett's body, and would be less inclined to attribute it to his reliance on Dr Bond. Conversely, I should not be so entirely dismissive of the Parnell Commission's conclusion that when in America Parnell and the Parnellites endorsed full Irish Independence and acknowledged the inevitabiity of some violence under the imperialist conditions, despite their denials of these positions in England.
I knew far less than Christy Campbell about the workings of the internal Fenian politics and the entanglement of Millen and others with the English spies, and I am full of admiration for his invaluable work. But I don't think he has examined Anderson and Monro as fully as I have, and so I think he misjudges their personalities rather seriously when he suggests speculatively that Monro was denied a knighthood and generally brought down because of Anderson's machinations.
A lot of things that didn't go into my text contributed to my views. I thought long and hard about the "flashing" accusation Anderson describes in his memoirs, knowing that many women would say such an accusation is always smoke pointing to fire. In the end I felt that had he really been guilty of anything he would have kept silent about the incident (which was not well known) as he did about the "errors" he got away with, and the much more publicized incident in Ireland when he and the evangelical crusader he was accompanying got drunk at a social festivity after the preaching.
I could pull sentence after sentence out of my writing showing that I have anticipated, considered and assessed the sort of anti-Anderson judgements picked out of the records that Natalie and Stewart seem to think the last word on him. Like Stewart, I had noted the great oddity of Anderson's penological views. I was particularly struck by his ighly idiosyncratic view that while society should protect itself by imprisoning every habitual professional criminal for life, not matter how small his offences, still we had no right to punish the soul, and so prisons should be comfortable with beautiful views!
I don't believe that anyone else in Ripper studies has troubled to read any of Anderson's theological writing, and weigh it's strange unorthodoxy but touchy scrupulosity against the known theology and conduct of other contemporary independent evangelicals (notable Barnado, Warren and Monro with whom we know Anderson associated). I am profoundly unimpressed by ex cathedra prononcements that born-again Christians are all unreliable. Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakke (or George W.Bush) are not sensible parallels to draw with Robert Anderson.
I believe I am the only Ripper scholar to have traced Anderson's granddaughter and got her opinions about him from her recollections, as well as her recollections of how her father wrote the life of Sir Robert and Lady A.
Why are Stewart and Natalie so obsessed with trying to remove Anderson from the position of "most reliable and plausible witness who was in a position to know what had been discovered"? If my conclusion had been anything other than "Anderson could have been wrong. He was always opinionated," I would understand the need to overthrow it. Given my success in accurately identifying from internal evidence which Times articles Anderson contributed, and Natalie's oversight in suggesting that they included more than one Parnell letter and that Anderson had a hand in that, I feel justified in trusting my own judgement against Natalie's in assessing Major Smith's character, personality and reliability - especially in view of the dry description of him as an entertaining but very unreliable raconteur inscribed by an acquaintance in Scotland Yard's copy of his memoirs.
To respond to a couple of things said about me on another board: I don't have time to keep up with the boards now, Stewart, partly because there is so much on them and I have a duty to my students. It took me three hours to catch up on all the material on the Swanson marginalia the other night, and another hour and a half to respond to all the points raised - only to accidentally erase all my response unrecoverably! I just can't afford that sort of time.
I doubt whether there would be fireworks if we podcast together: we've never fallen out in person. But i think we should be bored by going over and over the same old ground, just as Paul Begg and I agreed that Cohen/Kosminski was off limits when we podcast together.
And to all who are offended that I have no respect for anyone who can't see why the provenance and appearance of the marginalia makes them unimpeachably genuine - sorry: it's your obtuse imperviousness to reason that I deplore. (By the way, am I the only person to remember indelible pencils - common items at one time that instantly explain the mysterious purple tinge). I'm sorrythat demurrers haven't had the formal training in scholarship to take for granted the importance of provenance, and its offering the virtual certainty that the Maybrick diary was fake while the Swanson papers are even more certainly genuine. Buit I have to set their position against that of equally untrained or self-trained scholars like Paul Begg and a host of other in the Ripper world who see it with ease. In no way do I base my respect for people's work on whether their general opinions concur with mine. I admire, for example, both How Brown's and Ivor Edwards' work on Donston, though they contradicty each other. I've no idea what A.P.Wolfe's background is, but I love his work on Cutbush. I don't for one moment believe that Klosowski was the Ripper or the Thames murderer, but I think R. Michael Gordon's work is an excellent contribution to Ripper studies. Even when I think some work is ill-conceived and misleading rubbish (The Bell Tower, for example) I see no need to harumph about it and its author at every opportunity.
So why the ceaseless attempt to say that Paul Begg and I are biassed, partisan, and incpable of reading the evidence? I have the sneaking suspicion that it's because our accusers know that the evidence for giving Anderson's testimony the highest historical priority is in fact so strong that it weakens other fields they might wish to pursue.
All the best,
Martin F

[Natalie Severn]

It sounds like Lushington may have been friendly with Sir Edward Jenkinson too.Certainly he wasn"t keen on Robert Anderson.I think Sir Robert may have presented as rather uncool to these sophisticates Ap.

[Cap'n Jack]

Lushington, Whistler and Sickert, enjoyed a cosy little relationship, based on pro-Semetic influence; and I think Anderson would have viewed this as the end time. I wonder why dear old Pat has not got behind this?

[Scott Nelson]

..."My old Home Office friend "the Admiral" often gave me good advice, and one of his maxiums was useful. "In official life," he said, "never defend yourself. If you are wrong, the less you say the better; and if you are in the right, do like the pious coster when his moke kicked him: instead of swearing, he was only sorry the poor creature knew no better!"

and, and the O.U. Duck Brooch episode!!! Required reading for any study of Anderson's veracity, to use an over-availed word in this study.

[Chris]

No, Godfrey Lushington was not Jewish.