Why did Macnaghten deny Cutbush as a serious suspect?

[Natalie Severn]

Ap and Chris ,
Will respond later to your points Chris.
However,if we pause for a bit and try to think this through ,this very strange detail Police Chief Macnaghten provides,in his 1894 memorandum, on his senior colleague from the Commissioner"s office, Supt. Charles Cutbush , may well be the very "breakthrough" we need here.
Sir Melville Macnaghten refers to Supt Charles Cutbush as being the "uncle" of Thomas Cutbush.Now if ,say for arguments sake,he was actually a rather different type of relative,say one who had got his leg over with Thomas"s mum thirty years before,then its perfectly reasonable to see him ,perhaps in the role of absent but loving father or even,if Thomas"s mother was pressurising him as his ex lover -seeing himself as an about to be thrown out "husband" ----and father of a Jack the Ripper suspect----- going off hurriedly to have a quiet word with Macnaghten or maybe his Lambeth neighbour Abberline--- or whoever would prove most helpful in Scotland Yard and telling a little white lie by calling his illegitimate son his "nephew"? They would be unlikely to question him about it because he had the same surname after all - indeed all these Cutbush folk may we well have harked from the same distant "Cutbush" clan .
Imagine the scandal in the family,imagine the look on his daughter"s face if she learnt in 1894 that the Sun"s "Jack the Ripper" suspect, Thomas Cutbush,was actually her half -brother!
No wonder poor "Uncle" Charles Cutbush threw in the towel,took a gun to his head in front of his daughter,and ended it all!

[Chris]

Try... having an uncle called Executive Superintendent Charles Henry Cutbush of the Commissioner's Office of Scotland Yard?

But I thought Charles was now known not to have been Thomas's uncle.

[Cap'n Jack]

'What do you think about the story of someone (Cutbush?) throwing a colleague downstairs, and apparently rendering him at best semi-conscious for a period of weeks? If true, how did he escape a charge of attempted murder?'

Try... having an uncle called Executive Superintendent Charles Henry Cutbush of the Commissioner's Office of Scotland Yard?

[Chris]

I am not suggesting we depend on the Sun for our information about Cutbush but that we should try to analyse and interpret that information in the light of other source material we may have access to,we should try to match it up with what has so far emerged from The Broadmoor archives for example,medical records which are likely to contain the least bias and subjective judgement.This is what is meant by scholarly research.

Crikey, isn't that what I've been saying all along - that we should try to verify the Sun's claims from proper contemporary sources?

But you must realise that just because the Broadmoor records say that Cutbush was dangerous to the public - which opinion could obviously be justified by the fact that he had (or was believed to have) stuck a knife into a girl's bottom, or that he once hit an attendant in the face, or tried to bite his mother - that doesn't make everything the Sun said about him true.

You made a big play previously of asking me to have "the courtesy" to explain why I was sceptical about the Sun reports, but, once again, now that I've stated a difficulty, you've ignored it.

What do you think about the story of someone (Cutbush?) throwing a colleague downstairs, and apparently rendering him at best semi-conscious for a period of weeks? If true, how did he escape a charge of attempted murder? And what do you think about the strange business of the ages?

[Natalie Severn]

My point being that having taught history in state schools my training guided me to examine SEVERAL sources---not just one or two to try to establish an "approximation" of the truth on any historical data,which is usually the nearest we will get after the passage of many years.That history more often than not depends on the scribe and whose interests he or she is defending,than the truth per se.
I am not suggesting we depend on the Sun for our information about Cutbush but that we should try to analyse and interpret that information in the light of other source material we may have access to,we should try to match it up with what has so far emerged from The Broadmoor archives for example,medical records which are likely to contain the least bias and subjective judgement.This is what is meant by scholarly research.

[Simon Wood]

Hi Chris,

Are you Ben in another persona?

Regards,

Simon

[Chris]

Natalie

Your point being what, precisely?

[Cap'n Jack]

And it is wise to remember, Natalie, good post by the by, that I have yet to see the Broadmoor archives, and when I do... ?

[Cap'n Jack]

Oh but I must unbutton me chemise and display all me wares for a mere six pence, and then get 'orribly murdered by a corn flakes packet?
I'll go to bed and get murdered in me sleep.
Roy, when I remember what I know you'll be the first to know.
'ave you seen my file, it's enormous.

[Natalie Severn]

It seems to me that we can put The Sun"s articles to one side for a minute and stay solely with the facts as we know them from the records from Broadmoor .
Thomas Cutbush was sent to Broadmoor for feloniously cutting and wounding Florence Johnson with intent to do grievous bodily harm and with attempting to wound Isabel Anderson.The knife produced in court was one with a six inch long blade-VERY SHARP-with a curved point and had been purchased by Thomas Cutbush in Houndsditch/The Minories not long before the event
. A memo in his medical notes says :"Through the carelessness of the attendant he escaped . Smeared mud on his face to avoid detection.Came home at midnight.Man at Cottons Wharf says he was there when assault alleged was committed." Also in his medical notes are references to "overstudy" of medical text books,references to the belief Thomas had that Dr Brooks was trying to poison him and that Lord Grimthorpe was in on the conspiracy.That he took to wandering the streets at night ,returning covered in mud or-according to ONE REPORT covered -in BLOOD.
Also in the notes."He was taken to Lambeth clinic but escaped.While on the loose,a girl was stabbed and another threatened".

The notes accompanying him to Broadmoor suggest he was dangerous.Another note on his medical records states he was "very insane"[in 1891 entry],a danger to staff,other patients and even to his adoring mother.He was convinced others were plotting to harm him and fantasised aloud about getting his hands on a knife so he could "rip up" the staff and patients.Mr Bailey ,a night attendant said that "Cutbush had said that if he had a knife suitable for the job he would rip up attendants and anyone else soon as look at them".Another report states that attendant Slater was told by Cutbush at dinner twice that he would stick a knife into anyone of us if he had one.
On another occasion -" in May 1891 another attendant was talking to a Mr Gilbert Cooper when without a word Cutbush struck Cooper a violent blow in the face"
I believe that whatever Chris says about The Sun and its accuracy there is ample evidence in the Broadmoor archives so far produced on Cutbush to exculpate The Sun from a charge of misrepresentation regarding Thomas Cutbush and indeed that the picture that emerges about him from The Sun"s reports tallies very well indeed with the picture beginning to emerge from the Broadmoor authorities.Moreover it is a picture of a man whose whereabouts were never ascertained by police at the time of the Whitechapel murders.A man who knew Whitechapel through working there.A man,who like Robert Napper ,suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and who like him was kept in Broadmoor because he was considered too dangerous to send anywhere else.

[Roy Corduroy]

May the Truce be with You.

AP has the full skinny on PS McCarthy, who in December 1887 was a member of Littlechild's Section 'D' and in 1918 retired as a Special Branch Superintendent.

Ask AP about McCarthy's horse betting scam.

Cap'n, how bout the CID man, comprende?

Roy

[Chris]

Well said, Robert, and I agree with you... but it is Christmas and I have urgent need to roast a turkey.

Well maybe we can call a truce in the yuletide spirit and agree that Robert is an eminently suitable person to do the disentangling of the Sun reports.

[Chris]

er, well, perhaps because the Sun made the perfectly rational decision that the case of Colicitt was a case of mistaken identity, and that Cutbush had stabbed all the women concerned in the twin cases?
And that this opinion was provided by a senior serving officer directly involved in the twin cases?
This is not rocket science, you daft bun.

Please just read what the Sun report said:
"It will be remembered that this man was charged with stabbing either four or six young women."

It is a claim about how many stabbings Cutbush was charged with, and moreover it is clearly referring to facts that the writer believed were in the public domain - not information supplied to him privately by a police officer, and not his own reinterpretation of history.

Quite clearly it was a simple mistake on the writer's part. Otherwise he would have said something like "the man was charged with stabbing a young woman, but we are reliably informed that in fact he stabbed three or five [?!?] more"!

[Chris]

So who or what do you think was Jack the Ripper, Chris?

You see to know all about who or what it wasn't.

You're missing my point.

What I'm saying is that I'm very sceptical about the claims made in the Sun, because many of them are unverifiable, and there are demonstrable errors in the parts that can be verified.

I really thought that after the work done by Sugden and others it was generally accepted in the field that a sceptical, scholarly approach to sources - sensationalistic newspaper reports above all - was vital.

I am no expert on Cutbush, and maybe more has been done in this direction than I'm aware of. If so, and if someone can point me towards it, I shall be only too pleased.

My problem is that every time I look at those Sun reports, I see something that looks incredibly fishy. Take the story of the swarthy man - presumably we're intended to believe it was Cutbush - who threw an elderly colleague downstairs in or around July 1888. An obvious question is whether there's any contemporary record of this assault - the Sun says that the victim later made the facts known, and his injuries must have been extremely grave, if he didn't "come to himself" until weeks after the assault. If the account were accurate, it would have been a case of attempted murder which very nearly succeeded. So what is supposed to have happened afterwards? We're not told.

But actually the little detail that strikes me as fishiest of all is that the man is said to have been "about 27" when he was appointed, in July 1888. A little earlier the article, written in February 1894, says that Cutbush (though unnamed) is "just over 33". A perfect match! But of course the Sun had it wrong. When these articles appeared, Thomas Cutbush was actually only 28.

So what are we to make of the discrepancy? Is it a genuine story about a completely different man? Is it a genuine story about Cutbush, and was his age misreported - by sheer luck - in a way that precisely matched the Sun's 5-year misconception about his age? Is it a genuine story about Cutbush, and did the Sun reporter make up the detail about the age to improve his case? Or is the whole thing sheer invention?

I don't deny that there's an interesting story to be told about Thomas Cutbush - though I don't believe he was the Ripper. But surely people who are interested in the story should want to try to find the answers to questions like these, rather than just trying to gloss them over.

[Cap'n Jack]

Well said, Robert, and I agree with you... but it is Christmas and I have urgent need to roast a turkey.