Macnaghten knew about Druitt being a barrister?

[Jonathan H]

Right, Thanks.

In theory could any kind of primary source -- say a newly discovered one whose authenticity is not in doubt -- from the Victorian and/or Edwardian Era change your mind?

[Adam Went]

Jonathan:

That would depend entirely on the contents of the document and whether it could be verified beyond all reasonable doubt; and when, where and who it originated from (i.e. whether it was an official document, a press report, a letter, another memorandum, or whatever else).

I've had a thought regarding Druitt's dismissal, i'd be interested in your thoughts (and those of others for that matter):

Druitt had been employed by Mr. Valentine at his school for at least 7 years prior to his death, obviously he was a well known member of staff. Valentine would have been aware of Druitt's work as a barrister and sporting commitments, and it could be that in the twilight of his career there his mind was elsewhere and he was devoting less and less time and energy to the school, but was kept on by Mr. Valentine just the same because he still did a good job (and Valentine himself had by then stopped being a permanent resident at the school). Then, as his time there came to an end right at the very end of a term, it could have been discovered that as he had been somewhat neglecting his duties in favour of other pursuits, one or more of the students he was supposed to be looking after had got themselves into mischief - say, for instance, they got caught with alcohol. Druitt was then either dismissed, resigned or a mutual agreement to have him leave was reached, he was payed out for the money he was owed and that was that.

This then became the "serious trouble" at the inquest - interpreted as neglecting his duty. This makes much more sense than his being involved in molesting any of the children or suspicion of his involvement in the Ripper murders, as both those offences would have surely seen him fired on the spot, not kept on to see the end of the school term out!

Anyway, just a suggestion.

Cheers,
Adam.

[Jonathan H]

I agree up to a point.

The sacking over a serious crime is extremely unlikely as it would have involved the police or a complete hush-up.

Assuming Druitt was sacked whilst alive, then it is much more likely to have been a rising conflict between his two vocations; Valentine asked for more time, Druitt refused -- and refused to resign?

This is an important element.

An odd element.

People who are sacked usually, officially, are allowed the polite fiction of 'resignation'.

Whereas Druitt was fired?! Officially and publicly fired.

That is what leads me to theorize that he was sacked whilst dead, by accident, as he was from his cricket club.

No other source, except the inquest one, makes mention of it.

Sacked perhaps for being unaccountably AWOL from the school, even after the boys had left for the holidays.

Where we disagree -- everybody disagrees with me -- is that I think that the discordant note of 'serious trouble', assuming he was sacked whilst alive, is an oblique reference to the Ripper mystery.

I do not mean that Valentine or anybody at the school had any inkling of this -- and never did.

I do not think that anybody at Druitt's legal chambers had any inkling of him being connected to the Ripper murders -- and never did.

In his 1914 memoirs, Macnaghten makes an oblique reference to the un-named Druitt being 'absent' from where he lived with 'his own people' to commit the murders.

Well, of course.

So it suggests that his absences have been noted; that they are significant.

But Druitt did not live with family, though it was his brother William trying to find him.

Macnaghten opens that final paragraph in his memoir chapter by denying something which nobody was suggesting; he denies that the murderer was anything like the fictitious murderer, a young gentleman, in the best-selling 'The Lodger' -- eg. the real fiend was definitely not a lodger.

Yet, Druitt indeed was a sort-of lodger in that he did not live in his own apartment, or in his family home [though I doubt he paid for his 'lodgings' as a resident assistant master]

Druitt may have looked after the boys at night and was found to be 'absent', and was sacked. As you say, without a resident master doing his duty-of-care the boys could get into all sorts of mischief.

One of the reasons I think that Macnaghten, a man who adored his school days, began to carefully fictionalize Druitt is that he never wanted an old scholar who had been taught by Mr Druitt to be traumatized at thinking that he had been introduced to Homer, or to Shakespeare, or to Chaucer, by England's most notorious killer.

You have to understand Adam that I believe, rightly or wrongly, that I have made a breakthrough about the disparate, meager sources on Druitt.

For three years I have been reading Sims, and then Macnaghten, and then the primary sources on Druitt and yet only the other day did I have one of those revelatory, drop-jaw, slap-the-forehead epiphanies in which I clicked that the information about the frantic chums matches the 1889 inquest report, not the Mac Report(s) -- and therefore Mac had to originally know the true facts of Druitt's biog.

I believe that since Mac did know the Druitt story he made a sincere and responsible effort to work out if Montie was the fiend -- the suspect was by then over two years deceased -- and came to the conclusion, perhaps wrongly but nevertheless in all sincerity, that the answer was a very, very probable: yes.

[Adam Went]

Jonathan:

I'm glad that we sort of agree on something at last.
It could even have been that Valentine approached Druitt with something like an argument of "You've got time to play cricket but you haven't got time to do your job properly?".

It's a shame that there is no known surviving official record of the reasons for Druitt leaving the school, but I think we can safely surmise quite a bit from the circumstantials that we are aware of. Clearly when Mr. Valentine left the school as a permanent in 1886, after Druitt had been there 5-6 years, he was quite comfortable leaving Druitt in charge, so he had no suspicion or knowledge of odd behaviours, neglect of duties or sinister nocturnal activities.

Then in 1888, should something along the lines already discussed come up, such as a student/students getting themselves into mischief while Druitt's supervision was lax, Mr. Valentine might have suspected that this had been an ongoing thing for months or even years since he had left, and confronted him. If he was still doing a reasonable job everywhere else then it might not necessarily be an instant dismissal scenario, he might have been told he would see the term out and then have to leave.

That is of course all just speculation, but whatever it was, it wasn't serious enough to warrant a hush-up payment to Druitt or to warrant a full-scale investigation. Regardless of what it was, I suspect after he left the school (or even while he was still there but knew he would be leaving), he had a "What have I done?" moment and this contributed to his demise.

You rightly point out that he didn't lodge with his family and we should also remember that he had chambers on Kings Bench Walk as well.

As to the point of Macnaghten not wanting to upset former students of Druitt, that's an interesting one, though it's worthwhile considering that when Druitt's name did eventually come out in public, it's possible that some of the former students, though quite old, could have still been alive. Did none of them come forward that we know of with a "Druitt was my teacher" story? Likewise, surely they would have heard about what had happened to their former master even in 1888, and some of the more astute ones may even have asked questions.....was nothing of a suspicious nature ever uncovered by the students then?

As for Mac, he obviously held his views on Druitt for some time, but did he have the blinkers on? He would have heard about Abberline's comments on Chapman in 1903, and Anderson's comments on the Polish Jew, all prior to the release of his own memoirs....had he become so convinced of Druitt's guilt that he allowed no other possibility to enter his mind, or somehow had he got hold of information that the likes of Anderson and Abberline were not privy to? That's the part that I consider unlikely....

Cheers,
Adam.

[Phil Carter]

Hello Jonathan, Adam,

Whatever next.. who'd have thought it? ...you to agreeing eh?... ok.. chime the bells.. announce the date and we will all turn up to the wedding day..lol

best wishes

Phil

[Jonathan H]

Anderson may have known about Druitt but he has left not a single comment, or allusion to it -- which I read as expressing frustration and loathing about both Mac and his preferred suspect.

Abberline had not a clue about Druitt.

Macnaghten knew that a number of senior and middle-ranking police -- eg. Littlechild in private to Sims -- could easily challenge the Griffiths and Sims' mythos that a 'Drowned Doctor' was a suspect effieciently chased before he plunged into the Thames.

Ex-Inspector Reid did this, for example.

But in a stroke of luck for Macnaghten, the behind-the-scenes architect of the semi-fictional version of Druitt, as a doctor chased by police in 1888, Abberline mistook this tale for the 3rd missing medical student.

Abberline had written a Report for the Home Office on this suspect. He thought this must be to whom the papers were trumpeting, falsely, as definitely the fiend in a Home Office Report. His memory I think merged the vanishing of the student with the idea of a suicide and why not the Thames?

But Abberline, attempting to debunk the 'medical student' or the 'young doctor' [the Griffiths/Sims' figure was a middle-aged physician] he inadvertently confirmed the tale by agreeing that, yes, there was such a supect investigated in 1888 [eg. the 3rd medical student] but he was not thought to be the Ripper by monolithic police opinion.

there was nothing, claimed Abberline, to connect him to the murders except that they stopped when he died and that's it.

Abberline is not only forgetting that the murders seemed to continue into 1891, he also must never have read ot heard of the contents of the Mac Report, official version, for there Druitt is a minor suspect -- but his own family 'believed' in his guilt.

It is not Abberline's fault, but he is so ignorant of the Macnaghten machinations that he tells the reporter in 1903 that he was about to contact the Commissioner, by then Mac, to excitedly let him know that of his belief about Chapman as Jack. He has not a clue that the 'Drowned Doctor' Super-suspect originates with the Commissioner -- a fact which Sims, for once, is claiming correctly in 'The Referee' -- nor that the 'locked-up lunatic' whom he also dismisses is the prefrered suspect of Sir Robert Anderson.

I don't think that Abberline had ever heard of Druitt, or Kosminski, because there was no reason why he should have.

They were both too-late suspects, from early 1891.

In that year the secret about Druitt passed from the family, eg. the brother, to presumably a third party, who leaked it to the Tory MP, who then briefed Macnaghten, who wrote it in a slightly fictiona version of it in an official Report - which was never sent -- then backdated a significantly different rewrite of this Report which was only shown to cronies, much more fictitious, and that was about that.

That's Mac's Magic Circle of those in-the-know

I think that Macnaghten may have met with the brother and/or a priest to whom Druitt had confessed.

In my opinion that was the evidence which convinced these gentlemen: 1. a penitential confession, 2. 'blood-stained clothes' directly connected to the Kelly murder, and 3. intimate, eg. familial knowledge of Druitt's mental and physical 'illness' which manifested itself in taking pleasure from violence to women, or maybe just towards prostitutes.

In my opinion the key to understanding the Ripper mystery is that Macnaghten sincerely -- and perhaps quite wrongly -- believed that he had found the murderer, and far from being convenient Druitt was already over two years in his grave.

I keep asking this of people on these sites, and it is so hard to shake the conventional wisdom once it is entrenched as doctrine.

What if you, a senior cop, found out the Ripper's identity -- but he was dead and so there was nobody to arrest, to charge, or to convict?

There was, however, a respectable family who could potentially face disgrace and ruin if this secret ever got out. Plus the police do not come out of the tale with much glory either.

Yet this was -- you sincerely believe -- Jack the Ripper.

What do you do? What can you do? What should you do?

[Adam Went]

Phil:

Don't get too excited, I fear it will be short lived.....er, the agreeing, that is.

Jonathan:

Is this other medical student you refer to John Sanders? I've seen his name tied up in the whole drowned medical student story before.

The whole thing is with the murders ending in 1891 after Frances Coles was killed, if Druitt was indeed Jack the Ripper, that of course means that Alice Mackenzie and Frances Coles were not killed by the same man - just for the record, I don't believe Coles was a JTR victim and i'm on the fence about Mackenzie but lean towards her not being a victim either - however, there was much suspicion at the time that they may have been the work of the same killer (perhaps borne more out of fear than anything else), so clearly there were many people none the wiser about Druitt during this time, specifically those in high ranking positions in the police force....

It's a shame Abberline never wrote his memoirs, like Macnaghten, Anderson, etc - I would suggest he would have heard the names of Kosminski and Druitt, even if it was only in passing and if the latter was only because of his suicide rather than any connection to the case he was investigating.

In my opinion that was the evidence which convinced these gentlemen: 1. a penitential confession, 2. 'blood-stained clothes' directly connected to the Kelly murder, and 3. intimate, eg. familial knowledge of Druitt's mental and physical 'illness' which manifested itself in taking pleasure from violence to women, or maybe just towards prostitutes.

1.) A bit of an odd one because one then has to presume that the confession to a priest took place either during the murder series or very shortly afterwards while Druitt was still very much involved in the public scene.

2.) Sounds a bit like "The Lodger" - the bloodstained clothes, the night time disappearances, etc. Perhaps a confusion of two different suspects again?

3.) Again a tough one because Druitt has no criminal record and there's no proof that he was ever, at any point, violent towards anybody, let alone prostitutes - indeed, he was trusted so much by Mr. Valentine that he was left guarding students post-1886.

What if you, a senior cop, found out the Ripper's identity -- but he was dead and so there was nobody to arrest, to charge, or to convict?

There was, however, a respectable family who could potentially face disgrace and ruin if this secret ever got out. Plus the police do not come out of the tale with much glory either.

Yet this was -- you sincerely believe -- Jack the Ripper.

What do you do? What can you do? What should you do?

You bring the identity of the killer to the public. You have to. Protecting the family of the killer is all well and good but what about the families, friends and associates of the victims? What about justice and knowledge that at least the case had been solved for their sake?
Druitt had no wife. No children. One living parent who was in an asylum.
We could ask the same question of the research that we do now in trying to uncover the killer, there are still descendants who could be harmed by such a discovery.

Cheers,
Adam.

[Jonathan H]

Yes, Sanders.

The police hunted Tom Sadler desperate to nail him as both Coles' killer and Jack the Ripper, hence the hopeless 'confrontation' with Lawende.

A double humiliation.

then privately, Mac found the fiend in the dead Druitt. They had been chasing a phantom for over two years.

I believe, based on the 1899 Vicar's story, that Druitt confessed right after Kelly and before he drowned himself. Later, Mac made sure that the rigid story, of Druitt killing himself within hours of Kelly, allowing no time for a confession forever detached itself from the Vicar's too embarrassing tale.

You are right -- Druitt was a sort of lodger.

You are right -- Macnaghten did go public, but in a way which was a perfect reflection of his upper class and good guy, compassionate yet cunning, schoolboyish personality; protect the family, enhance the Yard, avoid the libel laws.

[Scott Nelson]

Now wasn't Druitt rumored to lodge above a fried fish shop in the Minories?

[Adam Went]

Jonathan:

Yes, but it would only take somebody to interest themselves enough to take a cursory look in the newspapers of the time to see that Druitt's suicide was not "immediately" after the Kelly murder at all, rather almost a month later.

The whole theory of the killer's mind finally snapping after this murder and all the rest is a little at odds with what we know of Druitt, who continued to be employed at Mr. Valentine's for a further three weeks and who also continued to serve his other roles and sporting commitments until after he had gone missing. One would think, the way it has been said, that the killer would have marched straight from Miller's Court down to the Thames and done it there and then - not the case for Druitt.

Scott:

Don't think I've heard of that one before...?

Cheers,
Adam.

[Jonathan H]

You're right, Adam -- the story of the instant implosion really makes no sense unless the killer had cut his own throat at Miller's Ct., there and then, not staggered all the way to Chiswick to drown himself.

I believe that this error in the story about the MP's revelation was grabbed by Mac as a way of forever detaching the tale from the real Druitt, of hiding him for his family's sake.

And, it forever quashed the Vicar's Ripper who, much more like the real Druitt, had plenty of time to make a confession to a priest before he, eh, soon after died ...

Or, Mac just started to forget -- as nothing was on file and why would it be? -- and began telescoping the three weeks into one night making it more like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

But consider this:

The theme of that part of the story, in his memoirs, is that the fiend killed himself because 'his own people' had noticed his 'absences' eg. nothing to do with the police, nothing to do with the government.

The final victim of Jack was himself, for whatever reason and not because the authorities were onto him -- a striking admission!

For Mac is debunking the Sims' account [ironically provided by Mac] of the suicided suspect, eg. the 'Drowned Doctor', being contemporaneous with the 1888 to 1891 investigation -- and this is absolutely, laser-beam accurate -- and for which Mac receives little credit in secondary sources, with the possible exception of Paul Begg.

But it is immaterial.

Because, as the detail about the pals, eg, the brother, in Sims in 1903 and 1907 shows, Macnaghten did have access -- at the very least -- to the original press story about the inquest, and therefore once knew that Druitt was a 31 year old barrister who killed himself in early Dec 1888.

And yet, rightly or wrongly, Macnaghten was convinced until the end of his life that this was 'Jack'.

[The Grave Maurice]

Phil! Scott! We seem to have stumbled into an antipodean time warp where Druitt is still being discussed seriously as a suspect. Run for your lives!!

[Jonathan H]

To TGM

I know you are having a bit of a laugh, but that joke is really unfair to Adam.

He accepts the conventional wisdom that Druitt is nothing as a suspect because Macnaghten's basic errors mean that he clearly did not know what, or how about whom he was writing.

In fact, Adam argues that the primary sources, which show no evidential claim against Druitt as the fiend whatsoever, favour Montie Druitt as a tragic figure posthumously -- and completely unjustly -- shanghaied into the Ripper mystery.

That 'Ripperology', for all its undignified internecine warfare, has at least exposed and acknowledged this terrible miscarriage of historical justice, regarding poor Druitt, except for the novelistic gesticulations of the odd oddball which any major, complex mystery inevitably, if tiresomely, produces.

Eg. Me.

Adam feels the honourable need to defend the innocent name of a man who is obviously in no position to defend himself, exactly echoing Sims' words in 1917: 'the dead cannot defend themselves'.

So, just to be fair, I am the only time-warping 'Jurassic Jack' here ...

[The Grave Maurice]

Jonathan,

You're quite right, I was just having a bit of a laugh. I've been told before that I should use more of those smiling things in my posts, so here are a couple to insert appropriately above:

I've followed, and enjoyed, both of your arguments. Go to it, I say. That is, after all, what this site is for.

[jason_c]

Despite what has been said on this thread, Druitt as a Ripper candidate is still strong.

Historical miscarriage of justice is a lovely phrase but completely over the top in my opinion. We may just as well close all the suspects threads on this site right now.