Robert Sagar

[Tom_Wescott]

I was going to comment yesterday, but I wanted to be able to say more than 'great job!', which I know Chris hears all the time. LOL. The name George Johnson rings a bell and I think he was an accomplice of Charles Le Grand in a bank forgery case. I intended to check my notes on this last night and forgot.

Regarding the probably imaginary City P.C. witness in Mitre Square, it is intriguing this has popped up in different sources. In the off chance (and I mean OFF chance) there's anything to this, we do have one PC who emerges outside the official sources to place himself early on the scene in the Eddowes case, and this is PC Amos Simpson of 'Eddowes' shawl' fame. But wasn't he actually a Met constable?

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Casebook Wiki Editor]

Terrific sleuthing, Chris. Thank you.

I finally managed to track down the source of Robert Sagar's "memoirs," quoted in 1946 in an article in Reynolds News by Justin Atholl.

They are contained in this report published soon after Sagar's retirement, in the Morning Leader of 9 January 1905:

[ATTACH]11461[/ATTACH]

[ATTACH]11462[/ATTACH]

[robhouse]

Well, I for one think it is surprising that no one has yet commented on this new find... so I might as well be the first. I assume, Chris, that you are concluding that this article is the "memoirs" mentioned in the Atholl article. This seems very reasonable to me. I think I had been assuming that Sagar wrote something along the lines of a book-length memoir that had gone unpublished. Correct me if I am wrong, but this was, I believe, the general assumption, correct?

It is also interesting to note here again, another mention of the police constable encountering a man of Jewish appearance rushing out of Mitre Square just before the discovery of Eddowes body. The other articles describe this man as either a "well-known" Jewish man or a "well dressed" Jewish man. And the whole story about the police chasing after the sound of footsteps until they reached King's block (http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=2507&page=5)

It is unclear to me whether this mention of a man of Jewish appearance is based on something that actually happened, or if it is a garbled confusion of the Lawende sighting combined with a recollection of the Goulston St graffito being discovered after the Eddowes murder.

Anyway, a great find Chris.

Rob H

[Chris]

Here is another short piece, from the Star of 7 January 1905. The content is copied from the well-known City Press report (which appeared on the same day), and the sketch is clearly based on the photo that accompanied it.

[Chris]

I finally managed to track down the source of Robert Sagar's "memoirs," quoted in 1946 in an article in Reynolds News by Justin Atholl.

They are contained in this report published soon after Sagar's retirement, in the Morning Leader of 9 January 1905:

[Chris]

Hi Chris,
Here's the 1887 Goad Map showing the Artizans Dwellings.

Thanks - that's brilliant.

Fortunately my conjections were more or less right - though Alderman Thompson was evidently way out in what he said about 20 shops in two of the blocks.

I suppose the likeliest explanation is that Sagar simply confused two fairly close blocks of model dwellings. But one can't help hankering after the alternative explanation that King's Block was somehow significant in the City CID's suspicions about the murders ...

[Rob Clack]

Hi Chris,

Here's the 1887 Goad Map showing the Artizans Dwellings.



And a photo of them (one end anyway) from the Corner of Cutler Street and Harrow Place



Rob

[Chris]

In the 1891 census, the five blocks appear in this order:
North Block, Princes Block, Queens Block, Kings Block, South Block.

So ("if my conjections be correct") King's Block, singled out by Sagar, would have been the one on the north side of Stoney Lane.

[Chris]

I assume that these two photos are (1) looking north-east up Harrow Alley and (2) north-east up Stoney Lane, both taken from just south-west of the junctions with Artizan Street.

Here is an excerpt from the 1894 ordnance survey map showing these buildings in relation to the Wentworth Model Dwellings in Goulston Street. I assume that the five blocks are the ones I've outlined in red:



For fans of "Then and Now" comparisons, here are corresponding pictures from Google StreetView:

[Chris]

I am still intrigued by Sagar's mention of "King's Block in the model dwellings in Stoney Lane" in these reports.

I found some details of these Artizans' Dwellings in online sources.

City of London, Artizans' Dwellings
Artizan Street, Gravel Lane.
These dwellings are on the east side of Artizan Street, between Artizan Street and Middlesex Street, and are erected in several blocks, distinguished by different names : King's Block, Queen's Block, Princes Block, etc.
Commenced in 1884.
They occupy the site of numerous small courts and alleys : Angel Court (Stoney Lane), Coaks Buildings, George Court, Petticoat Square, Nightingale Place, Wood Green Court.
[Henry A Harben, A Dictionary of London (1918)]

The buildings erected under the Artisans' and Labourers' Act are situated on a site in Stoney Lane, Middlesex Street, which was cleared between 1877-1879. The site covers 79,198ft., or nearly two acres, and five separate blocks of dwellings have been erected, at a total cost of £201,415. Each of the blocks is five storeys high, counting the ground floor, and altogether they contain 241 tenements. Under two of the blocks are 20 shops, with 34 rooms at the rear, and this brings the total number of habitable rooms, exclusive of the shops, up to 535. The rents are as follows : — Large shop, with one room, 28/- per week ; shop, with two rooms, 25/-; small shop, with one room, 16/- ; shop and basement, 13/-; small shop and basement, 10/-; three-room tenements, 8/6 to 9/- per week ; two-room tenements, from 6/- to 7/6 per week; and one-room tenements, 4/- per week. Rentals in 1905 amounted to £5,930, against an expenditure of £5,410, including £2,933 interest on loan. There was thus a balance of £223 in favour of the account.
[Alderman W. Thompson, Housing Up-To-Date (Companion Volume to the Housing Handbook), p. 81 (1907).
Online at http://www.archive.org/details/housinguptodatec00thom]

And also a couple of photos, on the City of London's Collage website:

http://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/

[Chris]

Like the Mercury, the Daily News reads "A police officer met a well-known man of Jewish appearance coming out of the court near the square ..." The related article in the Seattle Daily Times (presumably based ultimately on a different interview with Sagar) has "well-dressed".

I still think "known" is probably just an error for "dressed." It may just be possible, though, that there's a connection here with the suspect mentioned in a report from the North-Eastern Daily Gazette of September 1889, who is said to have "created some stir during the last murders under circumstances which I need not say anything about."

http://www.jtrforums.com/showthread.php?t=10901

[Chris]

I checked the article in the Daily News that was the source of the one in the Mercury posted above. It appeared on Monday January 9, and differs significantly only in the opening sentences (which the Mercury evidently edited slightly to make the story seem a bit more recent). The Daily News article begins:

After 24 years' service in the City of London Police Mr. Robert Sagar, Detective-Inspector at Old Jewry, has retired. Last Wednesday he bade farewell to his colleagues, and to-day he leaves the comfortable quarters in Rose-alley, Bishopsgate, which he has occupied for so long. The ex-detective is still a young man as men go, and his absence from the scene of his former activities is already keenly regretted.

"I am a Lancashire man by birth," he told a representative of "The Daily News" on Saturday, ...

[Chris]

I think there was obviously a story current in the force relating to a City policeman having seen someone near Mitre Square.

As with the similar report from the Seattle Daily Times posted earlier in the thread, I'm struck by the similarity between Sagar's version and Sir Basil Thomson's muddled account from The Story of Scotland Yard (1935):
"One [suspect] was a Polish Jew reported by police constable Thompson, the one police officer who caught sight of the man in Mitre Court ... A young officer named Thompson was patrolling Chambers Street when a man came running out of Swallow Gardens towards him. ... Thompson turned into Swallow Gardens and almost stumbled over the mutilated body of Frances Coles." (http://forum.casebook.org/showpost.p...5&postcount=11 ) In fact, Thompson didn't see anyone, but he did hear retreating footsteps and he did use his whistle to summon assistance, as in both versions of Sagar's story.

Sir Basil Thomson's source for the Swallow Gardens part of the story was apparently Frederick Wensley, who four years earlier had written in Forty Years of Scotland Yard:
"Thompson was patrolling Chambers Street when a man came running out of Swallow Gardens towards him. As soon as he perceived the officer he turned tail, made off at speed in the opposite direction, and was in a few seconds lost to view.
Thompson moved into Swallow Gardens and on turning the corner came across the body of a murdered woman - Frances Coles - mutilated in much the same fashion as the victims of the Ripper."

http://www.casebook.org/ripper_media/rps.wensley.html

One other small point of contact is that Benjamin Leeson also gave an account of the incident in Lost London: The Memoirs of an East End Detective (1934) (in which he correctly says that P.C. Thompson saw no one) according to which "The constable was wearing rubber heels that night and had approached the spot absolutely noiselessly ..." - like the officers in the Mercury version of Sagar's story.

http://www.casebook.org/ripper_media/rps.lostlondon.html

I wonder whether Thompson's discovery of Coles was the origin of the "City PC" story, or whether it just got mixed up with it as time went on.

[robhouse]

I always wonder if there is a kernal of truth in Macnaghten's City P.C. There are several stories of a police officer seeing someone leaving a murder scene. I wonder if Macnaghten was right but just got the basics (like a lot of his information) about what sort of policeman he was wrong. Anyway that's just guess work.

Rob

I wonder the same thing Rob.

[Casebook Wiki Editor]

Yes, I did manage to trace and contact two grandsons of Robert Sagar's eldest son Robert Henry, both of whom replied to my letters, but unfortunately they knew little of his career, and certainly weren't aware of any memoirs having been passed down in the family.

A pity, but thank you for the effort.