Why Did Simms Write to Him?

[curious4]

Hi C4,

This is actually way off the mark. When they say the average height was 5 fo 8 inches, not everyone was that height. Height would have fit the usual bell curve with many people over 6 feet. Also, it was at a time when wearing hats was the norm. Check out any photo of the Whitechapel streets. To say someone the height of Tumblety would have towered over everyone is simple wrong. Also, it was the norm to wear facial hair in the Victorian Era. Tumbletly probably would have been more noticable if his did not have a mustache. It being big? Check out the photo of Tumblety on the front of Riordan's book. The mustache contoured his face.

Tumblety himself stated when he was walking the streets of the Whitechapel district during the time of the murders he dress as to not bring attention to himself. He would have never said that if he could not blend in.

To discount Tumblety as a suspect because of modern-day bias and misconception is simply foolhearty.

Sincerely,

Mike

Hello Mike,

New try! Amost canīt remember what we were arguing about now! Anyway - where did you get your average height from? The whole of Britain? London? Or the East End? Remember that many of the inhabitants of Whitechapel were poor immigrants, who would most probably be short of stature because of deprivation. However, not familiar with the picture you mention, but if he was sporting the gigantic `tache he is usually pictured with, I canīt see him losing it just for a trip to London - it wasnīt the moustache itself, but the size which would be conspicuous. If you read Jack the Ripper, an encyclopaedia, the author gives a much better argument than I can against JTR being Tumblety - it is really worth reading.

ChrisGeorge - writing a personal letter by typewriter was a definite no-no - extremely disrespectful. Even now (probably because of my advanced age) I feel guilty if I write a personal letter on the computer and Littlechild had such beautiful handwriting that I can imagine he was a stickler for the niceties!

Best wishes,
C4

P.S. Regarding height and American moustaches, have you seen the film clip on You Tube of Petticoat Lane in 1903? About 2.00mins in there is a (possible) American leaning against the wall sporting a moustache that would not have disgraced Tumblety.

[Jonathan H]

To Chris G.

No, it's not 'convenient' that I think Mac's 'mistakes' protected the Druitt family.

It's that Mac's mistakes DID protect the Druitt family and were thus very, very convenient for them.

I asked if you believe this protection was by accident or by design?

You did not answer.



Secondary sources on this subject have been crippled by not realsing that Mac's 'mistakes' inlcuded extra material he passed on to Sims, which are not in his Report(s).

Even then we can see 'family' (in 'Aberconway') becoming 'friends' in Griffiths and Sims -- that is the first step in protecting the Druitts and the police (potentially from a libel suit).

Facts are stubborn things. The family were discreetly obscured.

Clearly by design. To some extent.

Why not the rest of the profile too?

The 'West of England MP titbit appears in 1891.

When it returns in 1898, every bit is either added to, like the Thames drowning, or fictionalised like a surgeon's son becoming a middle-aged doctor, with concerned pals.

Except the date of the murderer's self-murder -- which is wrong. That is retained from one source to the next. Arguably Mac kept that date because it was safe, eg. because it was wrong.

Is it not reasonable that further added details, which were also not true about Druitt, were also added for the same reason? For protection of all concerned? (thus even the doctor element could be consciously fictional, especially as it begins life as 'said to be a Doctor ...' meaning might be a doctor, and then again might not be a doctor)

That Mac added elements, in Sims, which he knew were not true shows cognition of a fictional construct.

How do we know that he knew those details were not true, rather than misremember them?

Because in his memoirs, the critical primary source which does not appear in a number of secondary sources, Mac debunked that the killer had been sectioned (which means he may have worked and was not a recluse), he debunked that he was the subject of a police hunt, and he did not confirm the 'drowned doctor' mythos -- neither 'doctor' nor 'drowned' appear in 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper'.

[ChrisGeorge]

Hi Jonathan

I think it's rather convenient that you think that Macnaghten's "mistakes" were to protect the Druitt family. You are only making the assumption that Farquharson and Macnaghten talked, which they might not have done. Rather, I think the converse of what you think. You think that Macnaghten was the master of the truth about the Ripper case, and Druitt was the killer. In contrast, I think Macnaghten and Anderson were part of the comedy of errors that played out at Scotland Yard and that none at the Yard knew the real truth behind the murders.

Best regards

Chris

[Jonathan H]

To Chris G


I did not write about Mac and the 'facts'.

I wrote that your assumption that Macnaghten did not know the real Druitt is a theory regarding contradictory sources.

It's a long-standing theory not a fact, leaving to one side whether it is a strong or weak one.

It's a long-standing theory which has become accepted as fact, but it is not a fact.

I am not denying that Mac told Griffiths and Sims things which were not true about Druitt, but in his memoirs he either did not confirm what he had told them, or he specifically retracted them -- like the asylum detail and the police hunt.

Mac knew about the real Druitt, in my opinion.

He had in Henry Farquharson the perfect, clubby contact from the Old Boy Net, who knew the family as both near-enighbours and from constituency business -- and the MP had learned their terrible secret.

It had leaked in 1891, and was refrred to again in 1892.

When it returned in 1898 as the semi-official solution the tale had been altered -- whether by accident or design -- and rendered libel-proof.

These are also facts, Chris.

the question is: by accident or design?

When the Druitt family read about their tragic sibling in Sims, in the 1900's, they were relieved to discover -- if they did not already know what was coming -- that Mad Montie had been rendered unrecognisable as he had been in Griffiths.

Their family name was safe, among their respectable circles who would know that that they had a troubled, young member who 'also' took his life in the Thames -- but he was not a doctor, he was not middle-aged, he was not so affluent and reclusive, he had not been in an asylum, and he was not the subject of a police investigation.

Those with really long memories of the death and funeral of Montague would also remember that he did not kill hmself in November, but in December 1888.


Do you really believe that was all a fortuitious co-incidence for the Druitts?


That Macnaghten, far from being compassionate, discreet and diligent was really lazy, callous, and incompetent -- but his poor memory had saved them!


To Simon

We do not know who initiated that correspodnece between Sims and Littlechild?

It may have been the other way round; Littlechild querying who this sucided doctor was who escaped the clutches of the police by drowning himself in the Thames?

Whichever Sims did not name him, either because he thought he was being appropriate, or he was being pompous -- or both.

It made Littlechild -- I think irrritated by this 'Dr D' shell game -- alert Sims that he was being conned, conned he assumed, wrongly, by I-never-made-a-mistake Anderson.

But by witholding the name, Druitt, it left open to Littlechild that he meant 'Dr T': Dr. Tumblety, the genuine suicded doctor who was arrested but absconded.

Not a complete failure of justice as this prevented any more ghastly murders, and this swine may have been so broken that he took his own life.

You ask why didn't Sims know that Druitt was not a doctor?

That's the point of the fix: for him not to know. for him not to know that most of what he written about this figure is fiction, or fictional exaggaeration of the facts

How could Sims know? The Druitts were not famous people.

Dan Farson could barely find Druitt with the name in 1959, as he had to wade through the same fictional cocoon not knowing it was one -- and even wondered if he was real (the answer was mostly 'no', if you had access to all of Sims' writings and Farson did not).

Oh, sure if Sims really tried to find 'Dr. Druitt' he would have, eventually, found the family, but why would he bother when he could not publish the name, nor should the name be published?

What's the point?

Remember, if Sims was not in on this fix, it would never have occurred to him that Mac was playing him.

Because being briefed by Mac, the Commissioner, was the research for a man who had famously and with much acclaim helped Adolf Beck, but did not concern himself with being a shoe-leather reporter.

He was a big shot and Mac played him like a fiddle.

Was Mac so deceitful? The surviving sources strongly suggest it, over and over.

That the definitive 'Home Office Report' seen by Griffiths (which he must have mentioned to Littlechild as he had done in public in 1903) was nothing of the kind. That document which Mac waved around, whether a draft or a backdated rewrite, had no bureaucratic status whatsoever.

By 1902, Mac is further fictionalising Druitt by turning him into a middle-aged, unemployed recluse who has tiwce been sectioned.

With friends and no family.

Another behind-closed-doors sigh of relief from the Druitts, as this profile spun evern further away from the real Ripper, who had held down two jobs and was a champion cricketer.

By 1907, Mac is impressing upon Sims that the date of the body's retrieval was really in early November, not late December -- and he complied with this further fictionalization.

Sims would not feel callous, or see Mac as callous, because the fiend had no family and his friends already knew the horrible truth.

What about ... his patients?

Surely they would be aghast at recognising that the Ripper had his hands on them...?

Well ... maybe, and then again maybe he never had any. He certainly has not had patients for years and years before the murders.

The perfect fix: everybody is happy and everybody looks good, and nobody's toes are trod on.

And then Littlechild, ho knew about the Tumblety debacle, hurled a Fenien bomb right into the middle of this mirage.

But Mac could have dealt with Sims' panic soooooooooooooooo easily.

For one thing he could have said, truthfully, that Tumblety did not kill himself. That Littlechild, ex-special branch not CID, has grasped the wrong end of the stick, and was ignorant of the 'drowned doctor' super-suspect (what he as ignorant about was that Sims' source was the wily Mac).

This would have mollified Sims, and so he never seed the great scoop, one of the greatest of his career -- exiled to a drawer!

But it also would have meant a proud, aged person admitting he was wrong, and that Sims had been hustled by his own charming chum, Tumblety style.

What deformed Ripper studies, from 1959, was not having full access to all of the Sims' writings.

Then the 'errors' in Mac's Report(s) would be seen in context -- Mac was making up a profile which would protect everybody -- and thus everybody would be satisfied.

Except 'Ripperologists' generations later, who do not understand any of this. Who are led down the garden path all over again ...

[ChrisGeorge]

Your claiming that Mac did not know the real Druitt is a theory, not a fact.

Mac gets the facts wrong. That's a fact, not a theory.

[Simon Wood]

Hi Jonathan,

George R. Sims had obviously asked Littlechild about a "Dr. D."

You blithely assume Sims meant Druitt.

If Sims had picked up on the name Druitt, why, in 1913, did he not know that he wasn't a doctor?

Regards,

Simon

[Jonathan H]

To Chris G

You are not addressing what I wrote before, but i am sued to that, so you never address the argument I am putting.

Sims wrote about a figure who is partly Tumbletyesque, his source being Macnaghten who knew it all. Littlechild noticed this and called him on it.

Your claiming that Mac did not know the real Druitt is a theory, not a fact.

[ChrisGeorge]

To Chris George

So, since you did not highlight my point about Macnaghten's comments from 1913 being about the un-named Druitt, but misunderstood by Littlechild, inevitably, as being about Tumblety -- you agree now, you understand and agree, and that you were wrong in what you wrote?

Sims did not know that Druitt and Tumblety seemed to be fused together, that is what Littlechild was getting at -- so far as he understood it. Only Mac held all the cards.

In fact, having watched only 'Secret History' I did not know how close I was.

When I read 'The Lodger' I read the full Littlechild Letter for the first time and discovered two things.

1. Littlechild mentions that it was 'believed' that Tumblety had taken his own life, drawing the two suspects even closer together.

2. those elements: a middle-aged doctor who does not have patients and is not a surgeon, and yet is very wealthy, and is the subject of a police chase which is unsuccessful, were propagated by Sims, none other than the person to whom Littlechild wrote his letter.

I did not know those things when I had my notion watching the documentary, as they are not mentioned in it.

Oh, and I did not mean nobody agrees. Just not here.

Everybody agrees outside of these sites. Not to please me. I just hand over the material and they always come to the same [provisional] conclusion.

Tom Divall claimed in 1929 that Mascnaghten said that the murderer was a man who fled to the States. Arguably Mac did not forget what he was told and read about Tumblety, and elements of this suspect was rebooted for the Edwardian public.

It's not rocket science, though here I feel like Von Braun.

Hello Jonathan

Sorry but I don't agree. It's you who seems to have your wires crossed. Yes Littlechild writes that it was believed that Tumblety killed himself. But that doesn't mean that the Druitt and Tumblety stories were in any way fused together. They don't seem to have been fused for Macnaghten or his acolytes, so I am not sure why you see so much significance in Tumblety for your Druitt theory. Druitt killed himself... that's a fact, and that reality doesn't need Tumblety to add anything to make it a theory Macnaghten could latch onto. Macnaghten wrongly thought that Druitt was a doctor. He wasn't though he was the son of a doctor.

Littlechild saying Tumblety did away with himself is a convenient way to end his discussion of the American quack, even if he believed it... it also explains why the murders stopped if that "likely" suspect did the crimes. So it's as much of a slapdash statement as the bad information that Macnaghten presents as the supposed "truth" about Kosminski, Ostrog, and Druitt.

All the best

Chris

[Jonathan H]

To Chris George

So, since you did not highlight my point about Macnaghten's comments from 1913 being about the un-named Druitt, but misunderstood by Littlechild, inevitably, as being about Tumblety -- you agree now, you understand and agree, and that you were wrong in what you wrote?

Sims did not know that Druitt and Tumblety seemed to be fused together, that is what Littlechild was getting at -- so far as he understood it. Only Mac held all the cards.

In fact, having watched only 'Secret History' I did not know how close I was.

When I read 'The Lodger' I read the full Littlechild Letter for the first time and discovered two things.

1. Littlechild mentions that it was 'believed' that Tumblety had taken his own life, drawing the two suspects even closer together.

2. those elements: a middle-aged doctor who does not have patients and is not a surgeon, and yet is very wealthy, and is the subject of a police chase which is unsuccessful, were propagated by Sims, none other than the person to whom Littlechild wrote his letter.

I did not know those things when I had my notion watching the documentary, as they are not mentioned in it.

Oh, and I did not mean nobody agrees. Just not here.

Everybody agrees outside of these sites. Not to please me. I just hand over the material and they always come to the same [provisional] conclusion.

Tom Divall claimed in 1929 that Mascnaghten said that the murderer was a man who fled to the States. Arguably Mac did not forget what he was told and read about Tumblety, and elements of this suspect was rebooted for the Edwardian public.

It's not rocket science, though here I feel like Von Braun.

[ChrisGeorge]

You know, I have a close friend who spells his name with two m's. Sims, Sims, Sims - I'll get it right soon. By the way, this is evidence that you are reading my posts!

Mike

Always nice to know.

Watch it, Mike. Stephen is counting the number of m's you use. Mmmmmmm.

Cheers

Chris

[mklhawley]

Do yourself a favour, Mike.

It's Sims not Simms.

You know, I have a close friend who spells his name with two m's. Sims, Sims, Sims - I'll get it right soon. By the way, this is evidence that you are reading my posts!

Mike

[ChrisGeorge]

To Chris G

I have always mentioned Tumblety in my articles, the latest being 'A Pair of "Jacks"' which is to what the title refers; the fusion of Druitt and Tumblety into Sims' drowned doctor super-suspect.

It was the very first notion I ever had about this case when I watched 'Secret History' several years ago, about Tumblety, whom I had never heard of.

I was just stunned to discover that the likely fiend was not a poor, obscure wretch -- as I expected -- but a middle-aged doctor who had been arrested by the police. He absconded and the murders stopped (actually they didn't, but anyway ...) These were the very aspects so conspicuously and disappointingly missing from the real Montague Druitt; who was neither a doctor, nor middle-aged, nor the subject of a police hunt in 1888.

Nobody agrees here.

Hi Jonathan

I am not surprised that nobody agrees. Look at it this way, Sims had been promulgating a version of the drowned doctor story for years before he was told about Tumblety by Littlechild in 1913. So how is "Sims' drowned doctor super-suspect," as you put it, "the fusion of Druitt and Tumblety"?

Of course, Tumblety was not a doctor. He was a quack. He only called himself a "doctor," claiming phony medical degrees and expertise.

When the idea arose early on that the Ripper could have been a doctor, the idea came about because of the mutilations rumored at first to be expertly done, as if by a surgeon. But Tumblety did not do surgery. He was a herb doctor, who did his work with pills and potions and not the knife. He indeed expressed an aversion to the knife and to doctors who used knives.

By the time Sims wrote the bulk of his writings on the case, Tumblety was forgotten about, probably even by the police, so it might be somewhat of a mystery why Tumblety would bring him up years later. He was just one of many suspicious men arrested during the case, apprehended by a police force who were desperate to catch an elusive killer. His importance ceased after he skipped out.

Best regards

Chris

[Stephen Thomas]

For me, it's a non-issue specific to Littlechild being approached by Simms as an authority on the ripper murders and Littlechild considering Tumblety a significant suspect, but there are a few things to take into consideration.

Do yourself a favour, Mike.

It's Sims not Simms.

[Jonathan H]

To Hunter

I agree with Mike, that that is an excellent counter-point.

How could Littlechild not know about, if not Andrews' trip, then intelliegnece about Tumblety as still very much alive back in the States. they had a huge file on him paparently -- di that just become completely inactive?

Here some possibilities:

1. Littlechild's memory genuinely failed him on this point, and he guessed that Sims had this aspect correct.

2. He was not as well informed as we think about such a transient, eccentric figure and accepted that he may have killed himself, because he was told as such by somebody in authority -- Mac is the obvious dodgy source here.

3. Littlechild knew that Tumblety did not kill himself but he felt contrained at dislodging this key piece of Sims' long-standing tale as not to completely embarrass the Yard (Andrews' trip) and/or so as not to completely embarrass Sims.

4. A rumour happened in 1889 that Tumblety killed himself. It was shown to be spurious, but it has stubbornly lodged in his memory.

I don't think Littlechild would be foolishly making it up about Tumblety's sucide, since that could be checked by an affluent gentleman such as Sims, with his wide and trans-Atlantic contacts.

I subscribe to No. 2, but that could be quite wrong.

To Chris G

I have always mentioned Tumblety in my articles, the latest being 'A Pair of "Jacks"' which is to what the title refers; the fusion of Druitt and Tumblety into Sims' drowned doctor super-suspect.

It was the very first notion I ever had about this case when I watched 'Secret History' several years ago, about Tumblety, whom I had never heard of.

I was just stunned to discover that the likely fiend was not a poor, obscure wretch -- as I expected -- but a middle-aged doctor who had been arrested by the police. He absconded and the murders stopped (actually they didn't, but anyway ...) These were the very aspects so conspicuously and disappointingly missing from the real Montague Druitt; who was neither a doctor, nor middle-aged, nor the subject of a police hunt in 1888.

Nobody agrees here.

[mklhawley]

Reckon why Littlechild seemed to not be privy to all of the fuss over Tumblety in the American papers that clearly established the fact that 'Doctor T' was alive and well? Someone in charge of Special Branch would surely keep abreast of events in America considering the strong ties there to the Irish Independence movement.

Something just ain't right with that picture.

Hi Hunter,

Excellent point. For me, it's a non-issue specific to Littlechild being approached by Simms as an authority on the ripper murders and Littlechild considering Tumblety a significant suspect, but there are a few things to take into consideration.

First, this letter is a quarter of a century after the murders, which is why I am so surprised Littlechild recalls so many accurate details about Tumblety. Maybe he mixed up the drowning part by this time.

Second, I believe most of us agree Littlechild was not in charge of the office directly responsible for the Whitechapel killings, yet was clearly privy to the latest investigations at the time (Simms certainly thought so and he was buddies with Mac). In view of this, his concern for Tumblety after leaving British soil was most-likely minimal.

Third, when I look at the 1888 US newspapers, the Americans at the time received their British news from these papers and not from British papers. There is a page dedicated to European news. On the flip side, I'm sure the British received their US news from British papers (keeping in mind instant TV or internet news was unavailable), and we already know the British papers were not reporting anything on Tumblety. My guess is Littlechild and everyone else knew about Buffalo Bill, though, since there was no liability in that news.

Sincerely,

Mike