Macnaughten Memorandum

[Sam Flynn]

Moreover Mcnaghten couldn't have proposed Klosowski/Chapman as a suspect as he wasn't in he frame until his arrest in 1903. The only suggestions that he was so suspected come in an unsubstantiated claim by H.L.Adam that Abberline questioned Klosowski's wife Luicy Baderski

...which sounds unlikely to have proven useful, even if true, given that Kłosowski and Baderski weren't married until the very end of October 1889.

[fido]

Moreover Mcnaghten couldn't have proposed Klosowski/Chapman as a suspect as he wasn't in he frame until his arrest in 1903. The only suggestions that he was so suspected come in an unsubstantiated claim by H.L.Adam that Abberline questioned Klosowski's wife Luicy Baderski (something Abberline omits to mention in the PMG interviews where he stated his sjspicion of Klosowski as the Ripper), and the deeply suspect material that Donald McCormick clsimed to have been given by Dr Dutton.
Allthe best,
Martin F

[Stewart P Evans]

Ostrog

Ostrog isn't discussed too much these days in light of the fact that he has been crossed off the viable suspects list. However, I find it quite interesting to note that he was arrested in 1894, after Macnaghten wrote his 'memoranda', but no official comment about him being a Ripper suspect has been found anywhere in the official files. This is an 1894 Home Office report about him -



This may have implications with regard to the Macnaghten memoranda.

[aspallek]

Yes, Dan, I agree. The document is what it is, regardless of what we call it. It's precise purpose or audience remains unknown. I do not believe it is in the nature of a draft even though it is handwritten. The "draft" is the Aberconway version, which Sir Melville retained.

[Cap'n Jack]

I was poking a monkey with a stick, Dan.
It jumped.
But you have ignored my pertinent comment about a similar document from Anderson being filed as a 'rough draft', which is obviously what the Macnaghten Memo was, a rough draft, but there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this rough draft was prepared for the Home Secretary or even the Home Office.

[Dan Norder]

I think people have suddenly started concentrating on definitions of words instead of what's really under discussion. "Memorandum" is just the word we happened to assign to this document, it's not like it somehow magically gives any specific significance, any more than the "canonical five" are really part of some canon established by a religious figure or that the "Goulston Street graffiti" must have been written in spray paint by a vandal.

A.P. even bringing up the Sept. 17th letter is an act of desperation. I was looking for examples of items written by police that were found in the police files that were memoirs and not reports, or drafts for reports. As the Sept. 17th letter has never been considered to have been written by anyone in the police no matter whether you go along with the view that it's a modern fake, an old fake, or so forth, there's no reason to even bring it up other than for A.P. to once again try to hijack a thread to talk about one of his pet fantasies.

[Sam Flynn]

Why only the other day I was reading about this strange letter, dated 17th September 1888, which was found in the files.

What often goes unremarked, CJ, are the microscopic layers of dust deposited as 20th Century researchers merrily leafed through the files.

[Cap'n Jack]

Actually, Dan, it is quite astonishing what turns up in them old MEPO files.
Why only the other day I was reading about this strange letter, dated 17th September 1888, which was found in the files.

When the Home Office asked Scotland Yard for details concerning the word 'Lipski', Anderson replied, and the rough draft of his studied reply is contained in the files, marked as such; so if the Macnaghten Memo was a rought draft of a reply to the Home Office it would have also have been marked thus.
In other words the very filing system that was created by these senior officers appears to indicate that Macnaghten's 'ramblings' were a memo rather than a report.

[Gideon Fell]

memorandum = Note to help the memory; record of events etc. for future use; (Law) document recording terms of contract, agreement, establishment of company, etc.; informal diplomatic message.

report = Account given or opinion formally expresssed after investigation or consideration or collation of information, description or epitome or reproduction of scene or speech or law case esp. for newspaper publication.

Oxford Dictionary.

[aspallek]

I believe the Macnaghten memorandum itself does not meet the definition of a report. That's why we call it the Macnaghten Memorandum rather than the Macnaghten Report Sometimes memoranda are placed in official files in order to get certain facts on record.

[Dan Norder]

Yes, Andy, people do occasionally write things for posterity's sake. Memoirs, for example. But reports found in police records written by police officials are police reports: official documents with official reasons for being written. If there are any examples of content in the MEPO files that was written by police officials and that do not fit this description, I would love to hear about them.

[Robert]

Well, yes, we may not know why the memorandum was written, but it might be worth bearing in mind that T.P. O'Connor, the editor of the newspaper which published the articles on Cutbush, was an MP at the time and might have been expected to raise the matter in the House.

Robert

[aspallek]

I'll say it again. There is no way of knowing to whom Macnaghten wrote the memo. Yes, he wrote the memo in response to the Sun's feature on Cutbush and it may have had something to do with the fact that Cutbush had a relative with SY. But exactly why and to whom it was written is a mystery.

Police officers do indeed write reports to their superiors. However, people -- and especially public officials -- also sometimes put things in writing mainly to provide a record for history or "posterity." The Macnaghten memorandum is not a "report" in the official sense. It is much too informally written for that. It is, in fact, a memorandum, an "FYI," if you will.

[Dan Norder]

With all due respect, police administrators do not write reports just for the sake of it, or for posterity, they write reports for their superiors. Cutbush was in the news, people were trying to criticize the police and the Home Office for it, and Macnaghten wrote a report to be used as a possible defense against the criticism. If you think that politicians act in public on every report they receive (which seems to be Cap'n Jack's argument, because otherwise it makes no sense at all), then you have a basic lack of understanding of how bureaucracies work.

[Cap'n Jack]

Thank you Andy.
The only reference I can find to the Home Secretary answering questions on the Whitechapel Murders in the same year that Macnaghten wrote his memo, 1894, is to basic policing issues, answering concerns that too many police officers had been removed from other areas of duty to investigate the crimes.
Perhaps Dan's search engines are better than mine, and he does have references to the Home Secretary responding to questions in the House concerning the 'Sun' articles about Thomas Cutbush?
My impression of the Macnaghten Memo is that it was written in response to the fact that one of Macnaghten's most senior officers at Scotland Yard was intimately related to the suspect featured by the 'Sun'; and then that Macnaghten's immediate superior required private assurance that the Metropolitan force was not being compromised by this familial relationship.
But of course two years later all that was moot, as the senior officer concerned did the right and honourable thing by shooting himself.
Still today one of the most remarkable and spectacular events in the entire history of English policing.
Cause and effect.