Missing Memorandum 2

[Roy Corduroy]

Well, Simon "Blue Line" Wood, this is another nice mess you've gotten us into.

Roy

[mariab]

Simon Wood loves to instigate mischief, doesn't he? I've heard about the Eddowes photo controversy!

[Simon Wood]

Hi Maria,

Thanks for the compliment. Yes, Eddowes in the boat was a real doozy. Not bad for someone still in the practice stage. It's early days yet, but you'll be pleased to hear that I'm slowly working my way towards the instigation of a truly monumental piece of mischief like the Maybrick Diary or Swanson marginalia.

What's really ironic is that the story about the ruled blue foolscap MM is true, so I guess that certain things are simply too fantastic for people to believe.

Regards,

Simon

[Roy Corduroy]

What's really ironic is that the story about the ruled blue foolscap MM is true,...

It is only true in the sense that Robin Odell, who was kind enough to share his experience, mis-remembered a few small details of his seeing the one and only official MM all those years ago. You are a highly qualified researcher, Simon, able to work through minor inconsistencies like this. Is Jethro Clampitt posting for you in Californy?

Roy

[Simon Wood]

Hi Roy,

Nobody can state as a fact that Robin misremembered the MM. But your highly qualified researcher is still on the case, so if after rummaging through all the treasures in Robin's attic it should prove to be a "minor inconsistency" please rest assured that you'll be the first to know.

By the way, it's actually Cousin Bessie who writes my posts. The chimp's a lot smarter than Jethro.

Regards,

Simon

[jason_c]

Simon Wood loves to instigate mischief, doesn't he? I've heard about the Eddowes photo controversy!

That was ripperology at its best. Almost has good as his Millers Court essay. Diagrams, graphs, mathematical analysis, all to prove Kelly's dayglow innards were hanging from the ceiling of Millers Court.

[Simon Wood]

Hi Jason,

For a full description of the hanging entrails in Room 13 Millers Court I would commend to you Inspector Moore's interview with R Harding Davies in the Pall Mall Gazette, 4th November 1889.

Regards,

Simon

[Fisherman]

Maybe you could oblige us with a link, Simon? Or the relevant "snippets" (ugh - sorry about that one...)

The best,
Fisherman

[jason_c]

Hi Jason,

For a full description of the hanging entrails in Room 13 Millers Court I would commend to you Inspector Moore's interview with R Harding Davies in the Pall Mall Gazette, 4th November 1889.

Regards,

Simon

No thanks, I would rather rely on official testimony nearer the time of the murder itself.

[Simon Wood]

Hi Fisherman,

Always happy to oblige. I hope the off-topic police aren't around. Here's the relevant snippet.

Pall Mall Gazette, 4th November 1889.

Inspector Henry Moore talking to journalist R. Harding Davis–

"He cut the skeleton so clean of flesh that when I got there I could hardly tell whether it was a man or a woman. He hung the different parts of the body on nails and over the backs of chairs. It must have taken him an hour and a half in all. And when he was ready to go he found the door was jammed and had to make his escape through the larger of those two windows." Imagine how this man felt when he tried the door and found it was locked; that was before he thought of the window - believing that he was locked in with that bleeding skeleton and the strips of flesh that he had hung so fantastically about the room, that he had trapped himself beside his victim, and had helped to put the rope around his own neck."

Regards,

Simon

[mariab]

Hello Mr Cordyroy and Mr Wood,
I'm convinced that the blue-ruled paper is a misremembrance. Who's Jethro Clampitt?
Hopefully Simon Wood's announced book (Deconstructing Jack: The secret history of the Whitechapel murders) won't be BOTH about the Maybrick diary and the Swanson marginalia. (I can't help it, but the mere mention of the Maybrick diary produces the mother of all yawnfests upon me...)
I'm just back from the Archives Nationales, where I went through one of the 2 boxes (there are in fact just 2 boxes, not 3, as the inventaries claimed) with London police reports to the Paris police on London anarchism activity. I'll post about this in more detail in the Kaufman thread, but I just wanted to say that I've found some relevant, but unfortunately not terribly significant reports pertaining to the Jewish anarchists in London. All reports are from 1902-1906, not earlier, although there are French secret police reports from Paris from the 1880s. But today I concentrated exclusively on London. Whitechapel is mentioned constantly as a venue for anarchist meetings, particularly The Black Lion. Also frequently mentioned are Der Arbeter Fraint, Rudolph Rocker, and an anarchist called Beck (no first name). Plus, in a secret police report from February 1904 about an anarchist gathering of Polish/Jewish anarchists at the Vonderlauf, an orator with the name SCHWARTZ (no first name) is included on the list. (And I know, there were hundreds of Schwartzes in Victorian Whitechapel.) I didn't have time to transcribe and wasn't allowed to xerox the relevant reports (due to the fact that the British ones were typewritten in blue ink, which allegedly fades away when xeroxed), but I've ordered a special (fancy but cheap) xeroxing process called “scan“ in French (which is everything but a scan!), and I might get the copies after the Xmas holidays – at the earliest. I might go back tomorrow and shoot pictures of the most relevant documents. The French reports are handwritten, and normally should be allowed to be xeroxed.
Oh, and a last digression: On my way back home I bought a French pie for dinner, and one of the choices for filling was minced veal kidney (à la Lusk?). Needless to say, I went for the duck filling...
With many apologies for highjacking this thread, and I'll post the rest at Kaufman's – at some point in the next days.

[Simon Wood]

Hi Maria,

Nice work. Well done.

Regards,

Simon

PS. You can now call me Simon

[mariab]

Hmmm... Simon Wood allows me to address him on first name terms ONLY after I've conducted research in Ripperology. Ponder over that... (Just kidding, Simon.)
I'll try to go back to the Archives Nationales tomorrow afternoon, and shoot some pictures and go through the second box of documents. It's obvious that someone with specific knowledge and reading capacity in Russian (the French police reports contain cuttings of Russian newspapers) ought to go through the 2 boxes at some point. It can be done in a week or two. Any volunteers?
Tomorrow morning I hope to go to the Police Museum (Musée de la Préfecture de Police), which too contains archives with reports from the Police de Sûreté. I've located 2 inventaries from the period in question, one with an index of names, and one with a thematic index. Obviously I'll also look for Ostrog and Le Grand, for whom I suspect that they were mixed up by the British police. I'm not sure yet if the Police Museum archives contain criminal records (from the 1880s), but the Archives de Paris feature tribunal records (possibly similar to the Old Bailey and the Marlborough Courts).
And now this thread has officially gone to hell in a basket thematically, but I'm too tired to start a new thread tonight...
(And by the by... The duck pie, with cooked oignons and rosmarin, is super-super yummy... I think it was the right choice not to get the minced kidneys, even if it might have fitted better thematically with Ripperology.)

[Simon Wood]

Hi Maria,

The Archives Départmentales de Paris holds the record of Ostrog's 1888 conviction under the name Stanislas Lublinski alias "Grand Guidon". The archive may hold other nuggets of information.

Regards,

Simon

[mariab]

Thank YOU so much, Simon! This is a GREAT help for me, as Stanislas Lublinski was missing from the list of con names that I have for Ostrog. I was talking about precisely this with Tom Wescott 2 days ago, but he didn't have any further con names for Ostrog than the ones posted on casebook. Thank God I didn't look at the Archives de Paris already, otherwise I might have probably missed Ostrog (or perhaps not, as Lublinski is pretty close to Sobieski, and in my search I remained very aware of similar sounding names).
By the by, Lublinski is a derivation of “beloved“ in Russian, and “guidon“ means bike bell in French. OK, since this thread is now going on all directions, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it out loud: Le Grand built bombs, they even found ingredients for this in his dwellings. Le Grand claimed that he engaged in “detective work“ pertaining to the Parnell matter. Today I've seen a London police report where it said that an anarchist gathering at {King's?} Hall on Commercial Street in Whitechapel on 25 March 1903 degenerated into a lecture on how to build bombs, and the attendants had to be dispersed.
(And by the way: This is nothing but conjecture and one of my several current trails of thought, nothing more, nothing less...)
Apologies, again.