Inspector William Nixon Race & The SUN

[Cap'n Jack]

And I did write this in 1993:

'And what of the other officers involved in pursuing information about Thomas Cutbush? Inspector William Race actually arrested Cutbush and up till then had been seen as a first-class detective with scores of good arrests to his name. However after the Cutbush affair his career took a sudden downward turn, his expected promotion to superintendent was blocked by his superiors for no apparent cause and instead he was downgraded - because of ill health and depression brought about by his unfair treatment during the Cutbush affair - to be eventually thrown out of the police force with a reduced pension.

Police Constable John McCarthy, the other policeman involved in the Cutbush case, seemed to have fared somewhat better, being promoted to sergeant in the same year that Macnaghten wrote his memorandum about Cutbush. Oddly enough he was transferred at some time, again the record of the date of this transfer in the Scotland Yard files has become ‘illegible’, McCarthy’s rise in the force continued apace after being made a sergeant, four years later he was an inspector, six years later a chief inspector and another six years later a superintendent.

Curious isn’t it that of the three police officers heavily involved in the Cutbush case two should suffer severe bouts of depression leading in one case to suicide and in the other to enforced early retirement while the other one should go on to become some sort of super cop?

Further than that, it does appear from the sources that are still available, that Inspector Race was actually being penalised by his superiors for having cleared the man named Colicott - who you will remember as the young man originally arrested for stabbing women with a knife but subsequently cleared of the attacks made by Cutbush - which then cleared the way for Race to arrest Thomas Cutbush. Macnaghten glosses this fact over quite neatly in his memorandum by claiming that Colicott was discharged ‘owing to faulty identification’, which in police terms really means he was the wrong man.

One instinctively feels from what Macnaghten writes that he desperately wanted Colicott to be the ‘right’ man for the crimes and Cutbush to be the ‘wrong’ man, and this could be the clue behind Inspector Race’s sudden fall from grace. He had, it seems - in a completely honest fashion cleared the suspect Colicott and in doing so unwittingly broken the ‘Unwritten Rule of the Service‘.

[Howard Brown]

Day late and a dollar short, but no matter....it appears Mr. Jake Lauukenen had a thread on Inspector Race some time ago ( thanks to Debs for sending the heads up...) with newspaper articles to boot:

http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=530

[Howard Brown]

If there is discussion somewhere else relative to Race & the possibility that he was the source for the Sun series of articles on Thomas Cutbush in 1894, please ask the administrator to delete the thread.
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In the latest edition of Stewart P. Evans & Nicholas Connell's work , The Man Who Hunted Jack The Ripper", Amberley, 2009... Mr. E. presents a good argument, in my view, regarding Inspector Race, of Lambeth ( L Division ) as being the source for the series of articles in The Sun on Cutbush ( whose case was in the hands of Race after Cutbush's arrest in 1891 ) as being the Whitechapel Murderer.

If this is true, then the subsequent effort on Melville Macnaghten's part, his memoranda, if you will, can also be or definitely is, a direct result of what Mr. E presents as a consuming desire on Race's part to convince the police department heirarchy that he had resolved the issue of the apprehension of the Ripper....but no one seemed to be convinced.

This telling tales out of class...the probable, if not definite, dissemination of information regarding Cutbush and the particulars to The Sun by Race...in a way makes him a martyr...because consider this:

Imagine if no one from within the Met Police department had gone and...as Race apparently did...approach a newspaper, would any of us have ever heard of the three MM suspects in the first place? I think this is food for thought. There's a good chance that without Race and the Swanson marginalia, which is available to us now by extremely good fortune, we might only have Tumbelty as a police-named suspect with whom the issue of his theorized complicity left unresolved.

Sir Robert Anderson's articles and DSS' marginalia aside for a second here, but had Race not opened up Pandora's Box in 1894...MM would not have had a need or been asked to prepare the ultra important memoranda...the information on Kosminski,Druitt,and Ostrog would not have been prepared ( and remember that the MM was an internal police memo anyway...) and subsequently trickled out inferentially within other individuals works...

Try and think of any musings over suspects from police sources prior to the MM...and then consider Inspector Race's consuming desire to see his name in proverbial lights with the revelations he felt would clear the matter up in an outside source such as The Sun.

Only, unless I am incorrect, until SRA opened up,himself, do we have a police suspect, albeit unnamed at the time in SRA's works, ...and if we had examined the asylum records as assiduously as Mr. Fido had, who didn't find a suspect to fit the scenario which would accomodate all facets of Kosminski-as-Ripper ( which is why Mr. Fido concluded the particulars fit Cohen )..its very possible that unless the Swanson marginalia appeared with the surname of Kosminski....we'd be left with only Tumbelty....who was also found with a degree of good,if not great,fortune by the very same Mr. Evans in the early 1990's....

Funny how this works out.

Race in my view is the single most important catalyst in the development and provision of suspects in the whole Case...and yet by virtue of his consuming desire to share inside information on an individual ( who has a snowball's chance of being anything other than someone infatuated and influenced by the WM in the first place by reading the headlines...kooks are like that you know...) he suffered the consequences of his efforts by being overlooked for promotion despite what has been called an excellent record ( page 117 of TMWHJTR) until his retirement on April Fool's Day, 1898.

Think of all the other officials....SRA,DSS,MM, Abberline,et al...and then compare the unsung and inevitable backfiring of Race's efforts. A whistle blower who may been the individual most responsible for the basis of modern suspect theory, which includes 2 of the top in our collective hunt.

A photo of Walter Nixon Race accompanies the text in this latest excellent addition to any Ripper library by Mr. E....one which many here may not have seen before....on an individual worth keeping in mind with great thanks.

As always, any criticisms of the preceding are welcome.