Anderson - More Questions Than Answers

[Howard Brown]

Howard, as Chris has made a comment about the omission of my name in your post here, I thought that I should make some comment upon it. do hope that it was a slip rather than a deliberate action.

Correction: The Ultimate by Evans & Skinner.

Nats:

If at any time you wish to copy and paste and related articles I found over there, please feel free to place them here at your leisure. That goes for everyone else as well.

Here's one which has been mentioned earlier:
San Antonio Express
Sept. 21,1902
Page 22
SEVERE ON CRIMINALS
SIR ROBERT ANDERSON WOULD TREAT THEM AS LUNATICS
London,Sept. 20-
Sir Robert Anderson who was at the head of the criminal investigation department of the metropolitan police force a long period, has written an article reaffirming his conclusion that a radical change in dealing with professional criminals is necessary.
He favors a registration of this dangerous class and would render it compulsory for judges in committing them to hard labor whenever proof is shown by the police that they are professional criminals preying on the community. He believes the constant conviction and sentencing of habitual criminals for short terms of imprisonment to be a waste of punitive energy when they could be branded for what they are and kept under restraint, like lunatics, at the leisure and discretion of the Crown.


and one more...

Philadelphia Inquirer
August 24,1913
Page 2
BURGLARY DEMANDS EDUCATED THIEVES
Opportunity For Trained Men To Become Genteel Raffles
Never So Good.
London,Aug 23-
Much of the 1913 crop of college students as have not yet chosen a career may be interested to learn that, according to the chairman of the Middlesex Sessions, the opportunity for men of education in the burglary business was never so good as now. The ignorant Bill Sykes type has ceased to exist, to be superceded by the genteel and erudite Raffles.
The authority above quoted has been looking through the calendars from February 1910 to November 1911 and has found that out of two hundred burglary cases, eighty three percent of the prisoners were persons of good education.
Sir Robert Anderson, formerly of Scotland Yard, without committing himself to the correctness of the view expressed, declares that if it is true it is due to the fact that punishement is now much lighter than formerly and that long sentences have disappeared. He thinks present methods tend to increase crime.
" I remember that once a friend of mine, who was a minister, went to New York, where he was shown over the prisons, " said Sir Robert. "As he was speaking to a well educated prisoner on the sadness of his position, the man replied , " You have fox hunting in England. Sometimes you get a bad fall while hunting, do you not? I have had a bad fall, but that is no reason why I should give up the sport."

[Natalie Severn]

Thanks for these Howard and for your offer.
All the Best
Norma

[caz]

That Scotland Yard still roamed the docks looking for the fiend after 1888/1889 might well mean they had 'no idea.'

On the otherhand, it might really mean they had a damn good idea, but were hoping like hell they could prove themselves wrong.

Hi RJ,

How many in Scotland Yard might have been in on this damn good idea?

I must admit I can’t see why they would be so troubled all the while it remained only a damn good idea. Damn good ideas can be kept out of harm’s way as long as nobody feels the need to parade them as definitely ascertained facts. That's when they have the potential to do harm, surely?

So do you think they were also hoping like hell that Anderson would not decide to take this damn good idea out for walkies one day without belt, braces and a damn good reason?

Love,

Caz
X

[Cap'n Jack]

Stewart, wasn't Lushington a Jew?

[Natalie Severn]

Stewart, wasn't Lushington a Jew?

Does it matter Ap?

[Cap'n Jack]

Not to me, Natalie, but to Anderson, yes.

[Chris]

No, Godfrey Lushington was not Jewish.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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

[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.

[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]

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.

[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