Did Anderson Know

[Bailey]

The suggestion that we read Anderson's book is a good one but is it still in print anywhere (I'm assuming not), or am I looking at taking out a second mortgage to finance a copy from an antique book dealer? Hopefully the answer lies somewhere in the middle - it's out there if you're lucky enough to find it, and probably not at too much of a cost.

B.

[The Good Michael]

Damon,

It's right here!

http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/dst-lightersidetext.html

Mike

[Natalie Severn]

An interesting impression that I have of Anderson is that he actually believed that he was, himself, above the law. A few years back I purchased a pile of correspondence and ephemera from Anderson's files. These included several letters that should not have been in his possession as they were official communications and should not have left the Government or police office where they belonged. Anderson chose to take them home and kept them after his retirement. This is nothing less than theft of official documents. Below is one of the envelopes from this material.

[ATTACH]2854[/ATTACH]

Stewart,
Surely this puts paid to the concept that Anderson was of unimpeachable personal integrity, incapable of anything but honesty and uprighteousness?

[Natalie Severn]

Damon,
Anderson"s 1910 memoirs can be obtained from the public libraries in England , free of charge.It is usually kept in storage because there isnt a great call for it, but you only have to ask and the library will obtain it for you.It really needs to be put on line.

[Jeff Leahy]

Hi Stewart

Just a couple of questions re: Andersons home office correspondence.

Where the letters address to him dirrrectly ie did they have his name on them?

And is there any historical president for such correspondence being taken home by other civil servants or government ministers. (Perhaps I'm being a little clumsey with my wording...I guess I'm tyring to say this may seem very odd today..but was it so in the Victorian era?)

Yours Jeff

[jason_c]

Hi Stewart

Just a couple of questions re: Andersons home office correspondence.

Where the letters address to him dirrrectly ie did they have his name on them?

And is there any historical president for such correspondence being taken home by other civil servants or government ministers. (Perhaps I'm being a little clumsey with my wording...I guess I'm tyring to say this may seem very odd today..but was it so in the Victorian era?)

Yours Jeff

I think it was a widespread practice.

Much of the Ripper material has gone missing. Pictures of Kelly's remains were believed to have been taken by a police official. MacNaghten himself had photographs of Kelly in his desk.

I remember reading about Abberline somewhere. He was being interviewed by a newspaper after his retirement. I believe the journalist mentioned Abberline looking over past case notes at his home. Or it has been implied by at least one modern author.

[Bailey]

Damon,

It's right here!

http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/dst-lightersidetext.html

Mike

Well how about that!

Cheers, Mike!

B.

[Stewart P Evans]

Official Documents

Anderson took home a wide selection of correspondence which was a mixture of some addressed to others and some to him.

Although it was not unknown for senior civil servants to take home the odd official document or two it was still a technical theft, compounded if they retained it after they retired. That others did it does not, of course, make it right. Anderson appears to have been 'at it' on a major scale. After his censure of 1910 you would have thought that he would have returned everything he had whilst he had the opportunity.

Yes, Macnaghten had copies of the Kelly photographs in his desk, but that was at Scotland Yard and whilst he was still serving. It is, of course, suspected that it may have been Macnaghten who had retained the Ripper and Crippen papers that were returned to Scotland Yard in 1987.

The senior police officer who took the photo album of the Ripper victims was Deputy Assistant Commissioner Ernest Millen who retired in 1969. I suppose he looked upon these photos as old and obsolete and, apparently, he openly used them in talks he gave after retirement.

Below are two examples from Anderson's collection, one is a letter dated December 5, 1868 from Gathorne Hardy (Earl of Cranbrook) the then Home Secretary to Sir Adolphus Liddell the Permanent Under Secretary of State and nothing to do with Anderson. The second is dated October 11, 1873 from Lord Hartington the Chief Secretary for Ireland to Anderson himself and concerns official matters.





I have quite a lot of this material.

[Iain Wilson]

Wow - that's really interesting.

Thanks for sharing!

[jmenges]

Stewart,

Off topic, I know, but out of curiosity, what is the status of the "full set of crime scene photos from Millers Court" claimed to have been possessed by Eric Barton? I wonder where those originally came from. I assume they are still missing amongst his possessions? What do you believe the likelihood of these photos turning up?

Thanks,

JM

[Stewart P Evans]

Lost...

Stewart,
Off topic, I know, but out of curiosity, what is the status of the "full set of crime scene photos from Millers Court" claimed to have been possessed by Eric Barton? I wonder where those originally came from. I assume they are still missing amongst his possessions? What do you believe the likelihood of these photos turning up?
Thanks,
JM

Jonathan,

Lost, I fear. I have told the story of how Eric Barton described the Kelly photo's as being with the George R. Sims material that he bought. These victim photographs Sims would have undoubtedly obtained from his like-minded friend Macnaghten. The only victim photograph that Eric located for me was one of Liz Templeton (1909) which I bought from him.

Eric was convinced that he still had the photographs somewhere in the house when he was sorting through his material at Sheen Road but he was never able to find them. His final thought was that his son may have sold them (his son did book fairs) but no definitive answer was ever found. As they have never emerged I fear that they must be presumed lost.

[caz]

Hi All,

Interesting thread!

The added complication is that people in the Victorian era tended to have very similar writing anyway as they were all taught the same copybook, so the kind of small differences I observed may just have been the small differences between different authors.

[Dr Christopher Davies, Forensic Science Service document examiner.]

I just wanted to ask if anyone knows whether Davies makes any suggestion elsewhere that the kind of small differences he observed could be accounted for by a different author, or authors, writing after the Victorian era.

If not, are there any ‘doubters’ who feel that Davies got this wrong? The implication of the expert opinion quoted above appears to be that even if Swanson wasn’t the author of part of the marginalia it would still have been someone from the same era.

I’m just trying to establish what the viable alternatives are considered to be to the marginalia being the genuine work of the right Swanson.

Have a great weekend all.

Love,

Caz
X

[Jeff Leahy]

Hi All,

Interesting thread!

The added complication is that people in the Victorian era tended to have very similar writing anyway as they were all taught the same copybook, so the kind of small differences I observed may just have been the small differences between different authors.

[Dr Christopher Davies, Forensic Science Service document examiner.]

I just wanted to ask if anyone knows whether Davies makes any suggestion elsewhere that the kind of small differences he observed could be accounted for by a different author, or authors, writing after the Victorian era.

If not, are there any ‘doubters’ who feel that Davies got this wrong? The implication of the expert opinion quoted above appears to be that even if Swanson wasn’t the author of part of the marginalia it would still have been someone from the same era.

I’m just trying to establish what the viable alternatives are considered to be to the marginalia being the genuine work of the right Swanson.

Have a great weekend all.

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz

I reposted comment from Martin Fido earlier in this thread on the Marginalia

extract: A casual glance indicates that the hand and initials appear to be Swanson's, as familiarized in MEPO files. A character-by-character inspection reveals no discrepancy in the letter formations. Therefore, any proposal of tampering now has to postulate a highly skilled forger capable of making an expert imitation of DSS's hand. (This is a much more difficult job than convincingly disguising one's own hand. Haigh the acid bath murderer who forged powers of attorney with his victims' 'signatures' was a far more accomplished forger than Madeleine Smith, acquitted of poisoning her discarded lover, though she had very adroitly addressed her secret correspondence to him in a variety of apparently completely different hands). Adding this to the provenance leads us into the conclusion that the unlikelihood of the notes being by anyone other than DSS is so great that one may safely put it beyond a peradventure.

If the Marginalia was forged it was done by someone of considerable skill, certainly not Jim Swanson, we're not talking about forgery as basic as the Maybrick Diary..which bears little resemblance to known examples of Matbricks hand writing..

All the Best

Jeff

[Simon Wood]

Hi All,

There's an excellent analysis and discussion of detective memoirs in "Police Detectives in History, 1750-1950" by Clive Emsley and Haia Shpayer-Makov. Whilst they don't say that various detectives told outright lies in their memoirs the authors do point out that the genre was shaped by a mixture of professional constraint and reader expectation. Audiences knew how they wanted their policemen to be portrayed, and memoirists took care not to disappoint.

An example of reality versus recollection cited by the authors are J.G. Littlechild's 1893 "Reminiscences".

Four years earlier at an 1889 public enquiry into Metropolitan Police Superannuation Littlechild acknowledged on record how difficult it was for him to serve in the Special Branch, declaring, "I can simply say that I have no desire to go through my career again". Yet in his memoirs he wrote, "I have certainly been fortunate, and have always congratulated myself on the fact that the life of a detective was suited to me in every way".

That's quite a leap.

The authors write, "Conscious of literary conventions, equipped with source material they could [and couldn't] use, and trained in the habit of writing while at work, it was no wonder that they decided to reconstruct their life course in writing. Surely, a commercial incentive and an impulse for self-expression were not absent either." [my brackets].

Robert Anderson wrote this, Major Smith wrote that, Swanson scribbled something different. Around and around we go. We have no idea of what pressures or constraints shaped their recollections, all of which leads me to believe that seeking definitive truths from police memoirs is a fool's errand.

So instead of arguing imponderables, let's keep doing what we do best. Dig for facts.

Regards,

Simon

[Rosey O'Ryan]

Hi All,

There's an excellent analysis and discussion of detective memoirs in "Police Detectives in History, 1750-1950" by Clive Emsley and Haia Shpayer-Makov. Whilst they don't say that various detectives told outright lies in their memoirs the authors do point out that the genre was shaped by a mixture of professional constraint and reader expectation. Audiences knew how they wanted their policemen to be portrayed, and memoirists took care not to disappoint.

An example of reality versus recollection cited by the authors are J.G. Littlechild's 1893 "Reminiscences".

Four years earlier at an 1889 public enquiry into Metropolitan Police Superannuation Littlechild acknowledged on record how difficult it was for him to serve in the Special Branch, declaring, "I can simply say that I have no desire to go through my career again". Yet in his memoirs he wrote, "I have certainly been fortunate, and have always congratulated myself on the fact that the life of a detective was suited to me in every way".

That's quite a leap.

The authors write, "Conscious of literary conventions, equipped with source material they could [and couldn't] use, and trained in the habit of writing while at work, it was no wonder that they decided to reconstruct their life course in writing. Surely, a commercial incentive and an impulse for self-expression were not absent either." [my brackets].

Robert Anderson wrote this, Major Smith wrote that, Swanson scribbled something different. Around and around we go. We have no idea of what pressures or constraints shaped their recollections, all of which leads me to believe that seeking definitive truths from police memoirs is a fool's errand.

So instead of arguing imponderables, let's keep doing what we do best. Dig for facts.

Regards,

Simon

Hi Simon,

You proprose an interesting proposition...in some certain specified historical instances, can we believe anyone? Some folks in power, lie. Some hoax. Some forge false documents. Some steal. And a few do all of these. WHY?
Rosey.