Macnaughten Memorandum

[Victor]

Why are the 3 people listed - Ostrog, Druit and Kosminski - the ones Macnaughten chose?

Ostrog wasn't in the country.
Druit - almost every detail about him is wrong, and the "private info"?
Kosminski - seems exaggerated "great hatred of women", "strong homicidal tendencies" and again lots of errors.

Why not any other contemporary suspect, such as Chapman(Kloslowski)?

It just seems that a lot of people use the MM, and yet it is so completely inaccurate. Was it written just to shut up the media - The Sun and Cutbush?

[aspallek]

The memorandum was not written to "shut up" the media. Since it was marked "confidential" and not released to the public or to the press, it could hardly have had that effect. It was written as a response to the Sun's suspicion of Cutbush, however. To whom it was written remains a mystery, however. It may have been written for posterity as much as anything else.

[dougie]

I dont know if anybody can say with certainty those 3 suspects were macnaughtons alone anyhow, they may have been the "confidential" police suspects as a whole and macnaughton was just giving his opinion on who was the best of the 3......and since the contents didnt become public till a great time after it could hardly have "shut up" cutbush and co.
regards

[detective abberline]

McNaughten Memo

The important thing is that Donald Swanson, writing in his own copy of Mc's memoirs, not for any anyone else's viewing, agreed with Mc and added his own views about the suspects. The 3 men were not pulled out of a hat. We don't know what his private info was. I doubt we ever will. But his views cannot be ignored or explained away.

Cheers

[Bob Hinton]

Memo

I think you have misunderstood the purpose of the MM. It was written as a briefing note for the home secretary to answer questions in the house about the Sun's claim to have identified JTR.

Macnaghten isn't saying JTR is one of these three men, what he is saying is that any one of these three is a better suspect than Cutbush. In other words all four of them are crap suspects but these three are the best of the litter.

[detective abberline]

McNaughten

Perhaps. But what about the Swanson Marginalia?

Cheers

[dougie]

I think you have misunderstood the purpose of the MM. It was written as a briefing note for the home secretary to answer questions in the house about the Sun's claim to have identified JTR.

Macnaghten isn't saying JTR is one of these three men, what he is saying is that any one of these three is a better suspect than Cutbush. In other words all four of them are crap suspects but these three are the best of the litter.

why should it mean they were "crap suspects"? and of coursemacnaughton as near as damn it said druitt was the man. "my biggest regret" etc etc etc.....so in other words maybe none of them was the culprit, but crap suspects?
regards

[Cap'n Jack]

I'd like to know where Bob gets his information from, that Macnaghten prepared his memo for the Home Secretary of the day?
That surely is base assumption and idle speculation.
One simple fact dictated the writing of the Macnaghten Memo, and that is not based on any one suspect being more 'crap' than another, but rather the salient issue that one of these 'crap' suspects just happened to have a close relation who sat in Macnaghten's office at Scotland Yard.

[Dan Norder]

The important thing is that Donald Swanson, writing in his own copy of Mc's memoirs, not for any anyone else's viewing, agreed with Mc and added his own views about the suspects.

Swanson wrote in the margins of Anderson's memoirs, not the Macnaghten Memorandum.

I'd like to know where Bob gets his information from, that Macnaghten prepared his memo for the Home Secretary of the day?
That surely is base assumption and idle speculation.

Is this meant as a joke?

[aspallek]

The important thing is that Donald Swanson, writing in his own copy of Mc's memoirs, not for any anyone else's viewing, agreed with Mc and added his own views about the suspects. The 3 men were not pulled out of a hat. We don't know what his private info was. I doubt we ever will. But his views cannot be ignored or explained away.

The Swanson marginalia were written in his person copy of Robert Anderson's autobiography, not in Macnaghten's. (ed. -- Oops, I got interrupted and Dan beat me to that one!)

The Macnaghten memorandum was not addressed to anyone in particular. There is no copy of it in the Home Office records. I do not believe we are able to say for whom it was intended. As I have said, it may have been intended for posterity more than anything else.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.