Major Smith & the Blood-Stained Water

[Phil Carter]

Hello all,

...an officer from the City juresdiction can enter Met juresdiction if he felt a crime was about to take place and prevent it and/or the pursuit of a criminal from one juresdiction to another.

Halse was in pursuit of a criminal in his opinion.

Just a neutral question with no hidden intention..

How can a person be in pursuit of another if they haven't seen them previously commit a crime, and do not know which direction said person has gone?

Surely it is more like searching or patrolling in the hope of discovering said person? Pursuance is surely "going after" a person thought or known to have committed a crime that has left the scene of such?


As I said, no intention behind the question.

best wishes

Phil

[Simon Wood]

Hi Monty,

All I know is the wording of Section 24. I don't know how it was applied, but would guess that it covered a multitude of possibilities - anything from processions and large events to public order and serious crime.

Get thumbing through that Regulation Book.

Regards,

Simon

[Monty]

Simon,

Thanks. Sec 24 huh?

Won't be until tomorrow I'm afraid but I've duly noted it.

Phil,

You are assuming a visual pursuit. This isn't always the case. If the evidence points to a recent crime, and the PCs have good reason to think the perputrator is close by, then they fan out....which is exactly what they did.

Monty

[Phil Carter]

Hello Monty,

Thank you for the reply.

Fair enough.. I'd like to know the directions of Marriott and Outram, amongst others.

Because.. simply.. If Halse was the only officer to have met anyone walking around the surrounding area, I'd find it pretty amazing at that time of night, given pub closing time. Yet no report of anyone else being met is given, which I presume would have been noted by somebody higher up the chain in either the City or the Met, and here I refer to DSS and his report of the evening's occurrances, together with the fact that neither Marriott nor Outram were called to the inquest to give evidence, which rather indicates the lack of anything to report, i.e. they apparently stopped no-one, suspicious or nay.

And a final question.
Who was DC Halse's next in command above him?

Just my thoughts.

best wishes

Phil

[Monty]

McWilliam

Monty

[Bridewell]

'Acting'

But we do know that one City Police officer, Daniel Halse, did act within the Metropolitan Police area.

i don't see any problem with that. There was nothing preventing an officer from going into another force's area, especially in such circumstances as these. The 'acting' reference would only have applied if exercising the powers of a constable, e.g. arrest. It wouldn't be an issue now, of course because all have authority throughout England & Wales.

Regards, Bridewell.

[Chris]

The Mystery of Nightingale Lane - Part 2

Here's the exciting denouement.

A full report in reference to my interview with the Metropolitan Police will be made by Inspector Shaw this morning to the Director of Criminal Investigations, Scotland Yard.

We are all of opinion that an Illicit Still is being carried on there the windows at the rear of the above house are covered with whitening and the blinds are always drawn down in the front.

Henry Webb. D.S.

Jas McWilliam
Inspector

On the first page is written a comment in red:

Let the Matter be now left with the Met Police
J [?]

[Perhaps J. F. for James Fraser, the Commissioner, though it looks more like J. P. to me.]

[Simon Wood]

Hi Bridewell,

I didn't see it as a problem. I merely used it by way of comparison.

No Metropolitan Police officers appear to have gone into City of London Police territory.

Regards,

Simon

[Bridewell]

Wikipedia isn't the most reliable source, but this is what it claims for section 5 of the Metropolitan Police Act 1839:

Section 5 gave constables of the Metropolitan Police all "powers and privileges of constabulary" in the counties of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire and on the River Thames within or adjoining Middlesex, Surrey, Berkshire, Essex, Kent and the City of London (the MPA 1829 had already given them constabulary powers within Middlesex, Surrey, Essex and Kent).

Regards, Bridewell.

[Simon Wood]

Hi Bridewell,

Exactly so.

But what I am attempting to get across is that on the morning of 30th September 1888 no Metropolitan Police officers appear to have utilised the powers contained within this section of the 1839 Act and ventured into City of London Police territory.

Regards,

Simon

[Jonathan H]

The notion of rejecting another senior policeman's Ripper opinion is not new as it was done at the time by police rivalling and sniping at each other:

From Chapter IV: 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper' (1914) from 'Days of My Years' by sir Melville Macnaghten:

' ... Only two or three years ago I saw a book of police reminiscences (not by a Metropolitan officer), in which the author stated that he knew more of the " Ripper murders " than any man living, and then went on to say that during the whole of August 1888 he was on the tiptoe of expectation. That writer had indeed a prophetic soul, looking to the fact that the first murder of the Whitechapel miscreant was on 31st August of that year of grace.'

Sir Melville was obsessed and fascinated, immediately, by the Whitecapel murders and unlike Anderson was in london the entire time; palling around with Monro who was trying -- unsuccessfully at first -- to shoehorn his protege onto the Force.

From the same memoir chapter:

' ... No one who was living in London that autumn will forget the terror created by these murders. Even now I can recall the foggy evenings, and hear again the raucous cries of the newspaper boys : " Another horrible murder, murder, mutilation, Whitechapel." Such was the burden of their ghastly song ; and, when the double murder of 30th September took place, the exasperation of the public at the non-discovery of the perpetrator knew no bounds, and no servant-maid deemed her life safe if she ventured out to post a letter after ten o'clock at night. And yet this panic was quite unreasonable. The victims, without exception, belonged to the lowest dregs of female humanity, who avoid the police and exercise every ingenuity in order to remain in the darkest corners of the most deserted alleys.'

Once on the Force from June 1889, sources by him and about him confirm that far from being a desk-bound public servant like Anderson -- which is arguably his appropriate job -- Mac was trying to be a hands-on sleuth:

'I remember being down in Whitechapel one night in September 1889, in connection with what was known as the Pinchin Street murder, and being in a doss house, entered the large common room where the inmates were allowed to do their cooking. The code of immorality in the East End is, or was, unwashed in its depths of degradation. A woman was content to live with a man so long as he was in work, it .being an understood thing that, if he lost his job, she would support him by the only means open to her. On this occasion the unemployed man was - toasting bloaters, and, when his lady returned, asked her "if she had had any luck." She replied with an adjective negative, and went on to say in effect that she had thought her lucky star was in the ascendant when she had inveigled a "bloke " down a dark alley, but that suddenly a detective, with indiarubber soles to his shoes, had' sprung up from behind a waggon, and the bloke had taken fright and flight. With additional adjectives the lady expressed her determination to go out again after supper, and when her man reminded her o; the dangers of the streets if " he " (meaning the murderer) was out and about, the poor woman replied (with no adjectives this time), " Well, let him come-the sooner the better for such as I." A sordid picture, my masters, but what infinite pathos is therein portrayed !


Notice that he could not warn this woman that the fiend was already deceased because such knowledge, or belief, was years away.

He also claims to have begun reading the ripper mail the day he started and eventually he identified, so he claims, the journalist who hoaxed the 'Dear Boss' letter (presumably Thomas Bulling?):


' ... On 27th September a letter was received at a well-known News Agency, addressed to the " Boss." It was written in red ink, and purported to give the details of the murders which had been committed.

It was signed, " Jack the Ripper." This document was sent to Scotland Yard, and (in my opinion most unwisely) was reproduced, and copies of same affixed to various police stations, thus giving it an official imprimatur. In this ghastly production I have always thought I could discern the stained forefinger of the journalist indeed, a year later, I had shrewd suspicions as to the actual author!'

One thing Smith and Macnaghten agreed upon in their memoirs was that Anderson was talking out of his hat. The former does this directly and the latter with much greater subtlety, but is no less devastating.

Macnaghten airbrushes his former boss out of existence and creates a polemic that the Ripper not only was not a Jew, he could not have been a Jew, not only was not positively identified by any witness but could not have been so identified, and was not only not 'safely caged' in an asylum he had never been 'detained' in an asylum, and not only did not stop because of efficient police, eg. Anderson, he stopped because he privately, fatally and permanently imploded while the ignorant contabulary kept fruitlessly chasing a phantom until 'some years after'.

Simon Wood made the point that Fido resurrected Anderson and diminished Smith as a primary source, which an historian has every right to do.

Of much greater significance is that Macnaghten himself, and his proxies, had also pointedly written that the Polish Jew suspect was barely a suspect at all -- in his own memoirs Mac elminated this suspect altogether.

In our time Macnaghten is nothing, except as a forgetful sideshow to either back Anderson over 'Kosminski' or subtract from the same argument.

But in most secondary sources Sir Melville is a cypher, whose dominance in the Edwardian Era over Jack the Ripper has been not only been debunked -- unsuccessfully in my opinion -- but simply forgotten. As if he only posthumously contributed his 'memo' to the subject in 1959.

You can read seconfdary sources now -- not Begg or Sudgen -- which do not include both, very different versions of his 'Report', or do not include his memoirs, or do not include his public comments in 1913, or what he fed his cronies for fifteen years.

[Hunter]

No Metropolitan Police officers appear to have gone into City of London Police territory.

They probably had no reason to. The City Police were in Met territory because the trail of the Mitre Square murderer led there, and some of their queries involving that investigation were necessarily performed there--i.e. - City CID interrogating Kelly at Cooney's after Eddowes was identified. That apparently was not the case for the Met and the Berner St. investigation as there apparently was nothing that led them into the city pertaining to that murder, other than the possibility that the two murders might be related. But, even if so, the murderer was there for a short time.

One representative of the Met police did enter the City jurisdiction and that was H Division Surgeon Bagster Phillips, who took the apron piece relayed to him from Goulston Street and presented it at the mortuary at Golden Lane, and then assisted the medicos there in the preliminary examination and the post-mortem of the victim's body. His representing the Met in a medical capacity was all they could do at that point because the trail of the murderer himself apparently led back to their patch.

[Monty]

They probably had no reason to. The City Police were in Met territory because the trail of the Mitre Square murderer led there, and some of their queries involving that investigation were necessarily performed there--i.e. - City CID interrogating Kelly at Cooney's after Eddowes was identified. That apparently was not the case for the Met and the Berner St. investigation as there apparently was nothing that led them into the city pertaining to that murder, other than the possibility that the two murders might be related. But, even if so, the murderer was there for a short time.

One representative of the Met police did enter the City jurisdiction and that was H Division Surgeon Bagster Phillips, who took the apron piece relayed to him from Goulston Street and presented it at the mortuary at Golden Lane, and then assisted the medicos there in the preliminary examination and the post-mortem of the victim's body. His representing the Met in a medical capacity was all they could do at that point because the trail of the murderer himself apparently led back to their patch.

Absolutely spot on Cris,

There was a need for City Police to be in the Met juresdiction on this case.

If there was a need for the Met to travel into the City juresdiction then it would have been done.

Incidently, didnt Warren meet with Smith at Old Jewry on the Sunday after the double event? A Met man in City territory.

Monty

[Monty]

Confirmation

To confirm Simons post,

Below is taken from the City of London Police Orders and Regulations, and Acts of Parliment 1839 - 1894.

Monty


PS Not uploaded as I wished. Please read Top left to top right, then bottom left to bottom right

[Monty]

Warrant execution

As an addition,

Legistilation regarding the execution of Warrants.

Monty