Seaside Home?

[Jeff Leahy]

Thats cool Jonathon and good luck with your work:

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

But do keep your work focused positively towards Druit as a potential suspect..

Yours Jeff

[Jonathan H]

It's my fault, Jeff.

I am going to let my upcoming articles speak for themselves as I can't get any traction with what I am arguing, due to rushing being tired -- I am in a different time-zone to you -- and I don't want people fussed by this.

It's always great to debate with PaulB, and I thank him -- as I do in the forthcoming article -- for passing on a new source which backs my theory to the hilt.



.

[Jeff Leahy]

Hi Jonathon

But surely this is 2012? and regardless of what any of the police officers wrote or thought about the various suspects we now know an awful lot more about the individual suspects: Kosminski, Druitt, Chapman, Tumbelty.

We can make an acessment about the Ripper murders based on what is known and the individuals involved.

Yes they are credible suspects as they are mentioned by the senior policeman running the case as possible suspects but the critia for their acessment alone by that is, as has been suggested, a step backwards not a step forward.

Yours Jeff

[Jonathan H]

To PaulB

I am not making myself understood. It's my fault. I rush these posts trying to do too many things at once.

You are right that Macnaghten's 'coming out' -- up to a point -- in 1913 and 1914, did not make him the key police figure on this subject that he arguably was, and had been since 1891 -- and had been pulling the strings since 1898.

What a lot of people thought between 1898 and for many years after, though dissipating by the mid-20's, was that the 'police' thought it was this drowned doctor.

With Anderson spoiling this cosy solution with his 'embarrassing anti-Semitism' unsupported by any other police figure, and candidly rejected by some.

So, at the time, Anderson, Abberline, Reid, Smith, were dwarfed in the popular imagination by Macnaghten, well, by Sims anonymously on his behalf.

That Jack the Ripper was no longer a mystery and, allegedly -- and incredibly -- had not been since the man's rotting corpse was fished from the Thames.

This was Sims' doing but once he died he was relatively forgotten and so the pop image of the top-hatted toff with medical bag, became detached from the tormented suicide in the river.

Plus, Leonard Matters tried to find this suicided physician, and so far as he could tell from the press accounts and the Royal College of Surgeons' records, such a figure did not exist -- which was half-right.

1959 was actually the brief revival for the drowned not-a-doctor and for the first time we could see that the opaque suicide of Mac's memoirs was the same figure.

Therefore I am reviving a paradigm that was accepted for a generation by a number of people as the 'solution', and sociologically-speaking -- not evidentially -- it's comeback is overdue.

I don't think Anderson ever told an untruth, but I do think he was played by his subordinate and we see glimpses of it in the sources.

[PaulB]

My interpretation of Macnaghten in his 1913 comments, his shaping of the narrative via Sims in 1907, and his memoris of 1914, is that he was very much quashing the notion that the best suspect to be the Ripper was a Polish Jew (or a Russian doctor, or an American medico) and that there was only one 'Jack': an English suicide, though a posthumous suspect.

Consider this also:

In the primary sources between 1891 and 1917 the suicided suspect is the paramount suspect according to Macnaghten and his cronies.

Whereas the Polish Jew suspect is a sideshow.

How do the sources stack up, balanced like that? Why aren't Macnaghten and Anderson in equipoise?

Because, arguably, Macnaghten and co. specifically mention both suspects, whereas Anderson seems oblivious about the drowned doctor (understandably).

This is purely from an historical point of view, not legal or forensic.

The drowned doctor is ascendant, and the Polish Jew is sidelined in the Edwardian era.

Later research will cut both ways about the real figures who lay behind the top cops' prognostications: Druitt was not a middle-aged doctor, or a rich recluse, or an asylum veteran. But Aaron Kosminski was also not 'safely cgaed' mere 'weeks' after the autumn of terror, not is it likely that once once he was forever sectioned that he was confronted with an eyewitness.

And Mac's memoirs do not confirm, in fact pointedly distance themselves from the 'drowned doctor' profile, and he also -- in a mixture of sources -- knows that 'Kosminski' wasn't dead and was out and about for years after Kelly.

the theory of many excellent secondary sources that the Polish Jew was actually the better suspect is a reasonable theory to argue.

But it it a revisionist take on the primary sources left to us.

To reverse the clock back to 1898, to Druitt being the best suspect and Macnaghten as the policeman who is the most reliable source -- by a country mile -- is thus a restoration of the original balance of the primary sources.

It's just an observation, as I often loosely throw around the word 'revisionist' when arguably I am seeking to restore an historical paradigm.

With Aaron Kosminski as the best suspect, secondary sources have arguably and understandably elevated and trumped a number of more reliable primary sources, and that perhaps this is not as strong an argument as it may have first appeared over twenty years ago?

Jonathan,
There is no reason to suppose that Druitt was the best suspect or that Macnaghten was the most reliable source in 1898. Just because Griffiths and Sims understandably accepted the information he fed them doesn't mean that anyone else believed it, or, indeed, was even aware of it. Reid seems not to have known it, Abberline was arguably unaware of Macnaghten's private information and in any event publicly said there was nothing but the timing of Druitt's death to implicate him in the crimes. Littlechild appears never to have heard of Druitt, supposing that Druitt was Dr D), Anderson clearly didn't accept it, Swanson arguably didn't (assuming either man knew of it). How, then, does Druitt become the best suspect or Macnaghten the most reliable source c.1898?

Macnaghten only really came center stage post-1959 and the discovery of the AV, but nobody connected his "Kosminski" with Anderson's unnamed Polish Jew and, indeed, Don Rumbelow made a very strong case for the suspect to be John Pizer. What Martin Fido did in 1987 was to review the evidence for all the primary suspects and make the connection. This was revisionist history only in the weakest sense of revising popular thinking as expressed in a handful of books and magazine articles. It sort of pushed Druitt off the top of the Christmas tree of suspects, and it is great that you are working so assiduously to put him back there, but trying to restore "an historical paradigm" is surely overstating the case. At best you are trying to return us to pre-1987 thinking when nothing was known about Kosminski or Ostrog.

I have absolutely no problem with pushing Druitt as a suspect and have put new information your way as and when I have come by it, and you know that whilst I baulk at some of your reasoning I am very sympathetic to your arguments, but this isn't the Kosminski v Druitt battleground you seem always to turn it into. Everything doesn't have to be assessed in light of your theorising about Macnaghten/Druitt. Their orbits come together, but they also separate quite widely and can be considered wholly independently. That he was "very much quashing" the Polish Jew theory is your interpretation, but the actual evidence upon which it is based is largely your interpretation of the sources. What bothers me about it is that Macnaghten was subordinate to Anderson and that Anderson would have seen the memorandum if it had ever left Macnaghten's desk, and that in the office politics of a hierarchical organisation like the Met it would have been nuts to slap one's boss in the face and say his thinking on the case was wrong - especially if one's boss knew of and presumably rejected the evidence against Druitt. This raises several important questions about who knew what and how much they knew about it.

[Jeff Leahy]

I guess the defination and interpretation of "Exonerated" depends on which side of the fence you are on.

In my book it means "removed" from all suspicion,

He clearly came to his senses about Ostrog having perhaps realised he had been provided inaccurate information when setting out to compile the memo and the same in relation to Kosminski, hence "exonarates"

If you are removed from all supsicion then clearly you cant be guilty of the murders, and you certainly cant be a prime suspect without any suspicion.

From what i have seen and read in police documents and records I do not beleive their was ever a specific suspect file persee. Exitsing police records and documents are littered with the names of persons who were put forward in various way by various sources as suspects. If there had have been a file why were all of these not added to that file. Again i say that its so easy to say evidence of suspicion etc was part of those files lost stolen or destroyed.

"Undiscovered murders in London are rare, and the Jack the ripper crimes are not within that catigory"

[Trevor Marriott]

Oh dear. No, Trevor, he does not do that. He does not even come near to saying it. Not even within a whisker. What he said was that there were good grounds for suspecting them, but he concluded that they weren't guilty of the murders. There is a big difference.

I guess the defination and interpretation of "Exonerated" depends on which side of the fence you are on.

In my book it means "removed" from all suspicion,

He clearly came to his senses about Ostrog having perhaps realised he had been provided inaccurate information when setting out to compile the memo and the same in relation to Kosminski, hence "exonarates"

If you are removed from all supsicion then clearly you cant be guilty of the murders, and you certainly cant be a prime suspect without any suspicion.

From what i have seen and read in police documents and records I do not beleive their was ever a specific suspect file persee. Exitsing police records and documents are littered with the names of persons who were put forward in various way by various sources as suspects. If there had have been a file why were all of these not added to that file. Again i say that its so easy to say evidence of suspicion etc was part of those files lost stolen or destroyed.

[Jonathan H]

My interpretation of Macnaghten in his 1913 comments, his shaping of the narrative via Sims in 1907, and his memoris of 1914, is that he was very much quashing the notion that the best suspect to be the Ripper was a Polish Jew (or a Russian doctor, or an American medico) and that there was only one 'Jack': an English suicide, though a posthumous suspect.

Consider this also:

In the primary sources between 1891 and 1917 the suicided suspect is the paramount suspect according to Macnaghten and his cronies.

Whereas the Polish Jew suspect is a sideshow.

How do the sources stack up, balanced like that? Why aren't Macnaghten and Anderson in equipoise?

Because, arguably, Macnaghten and co. specifically mention both suspects, whereas Anderson seems oblivious about the drowned doctor (understandably).

This is purely from an historical point of view, not legal or forensic.

The drowned doctor is ascendant, and the Polish Jew is sidelined in the Edwardian era.

Later research will cut both ways about the real figures who lay behind the top cops' prognostications: Druitt was not a middle-aged doctor, or a rich recluse, or an asylum veteran. But Aaron Kosminski was also not 'safely cgaed' mere 'weeks' after the autumn of terror, not is it likely that once once he was forever sectioned that he was confronted with an eyewitness.

And Mac's memoirs do not confirm, in fact pointedly distance themselves from the 'drowned doctor' profile, and he also -- in a mixture of sources -- knows that 'Kosminski' wasn't dead and was out and about for years after Kelly.

the theory of many excellent secondary sources that the Polish Jew was actually the better suspect is a reasonable theory to argue.

But it it a revisionist take on the primary sources left to us.

To reverse the clock back to 1898, to Druitt being the best suspect and Macnaghten as the policeman who is the most reliable source -- by a country mile -- is thus a restoration of the original balance of the primary sources.

It's just an observation, as I often loosely throw around the word 'revisionist' when arguably I am seeking to restore an historical paradigm.

With Aaron Kosminski as the best suspect, secondary sources have arguably and understandably elevated and trumped a number of more reliable primary sources, and that perhaps this is not as strong an argument as it may have first appeared over twenty years ago?

[PaulB]

The MM is an unreliable document as has been proved to be so. After he wrote it is it quite clear that by what was written in his notes (AV) he retracted the suggestions that Kosminski and Ostrog were ever involved.

Oh dear. No, Trevor, he does not do that. He does not even come near to saying it. Not even within a whisker. What he said was that there were good grounds for suspecting them, but he concluded that they weren't guilty of the murders. There is a big difference.

[PaulB]

Rob
Prime suspect you are talking utter rubbish someone needs to take you aside and explain to you the differences between a prime suspect, a likely suspect and someone who comes under suspiscion by reason of their actions.

Aaron Kosminski may well have come under suspicion by reason of the incident with his sister the same applies to Cutbush. Thats a long way from sugesting they were prime suspects.

You only have to read all the connecting papers and police correspondence to see how naieve the police were at times. Many of these documents clearly show they didnt have a clue about the killer let alone have a prime suspect, not then nor in 1891 nor in 1895 and certainly not in 1910 when Hans Christian wrote his book,

We've been down this road before. In the argot of the police "prime suspect" may have a specific meaning, but outside the police it means no more and no less than the main theory for research and investigation, he suspect who researchers think, for whatever reason, is on the top of the heap. And it isn't necessarily because they think that suspect was Jack the Ripper. This is history, not a cold case police investigation.

[PaulB]

Lets make it three or shall we say perm any one from three. Aaron Kosminski, jacob Cohen, Nathan Kaminski.

Perhaps four if you add to that the ridiculous suggestion that the police made a mistake or got confused over the names, if that be correct then what other mistakes or names mixed up did they make throughout this enquiry.

You want answers I can give you answers but can you handle the truth !

Trevor,
You don't actually understand Martin Fido's theory at all, do you? You can't even get the names right. Nor do you apparently understand that they all fit into a single, cohesive theory, and one which hasn't changed much since he advanced it in 1987. So, give me an example of Martin Fido back-peddling.

[Jonathan H]

To Lynn

The 'Sailor's Home' theory explained how the police could use Lawende for [allegedly] for Kosminski, and then Sadler when surely refusing to testify against the fiend would have rendered him redundant -- and even another 'confrontation' too.

As in, there was just this one 'confrontation' as Kosminski was sectioned a few days before.

I find the arguments that the witness was actually Schwartz plausible but unconvincing.

To Trevor

Macnaghten adapted 'Aberconway' for his memoirs, Chapter IV, 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper' and made the decision to totally exclude any mention of the Polish Jew suspect (and Anderson) even to debunk him. That's arguably implicit exoneration.

I think the argument that Macnaghten is a hopelessly unreliable source to be perfectly sensible.

[Cogidubnus]

O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in't!

[lynn cates]

procedure

Hello Jonathan.

"It was brilliant because it did not rely on sources we can never assess but on what is in front of us, and has been the whole time."

And this MUST be our chief means of proceeding. It is singing my song.

Cheers.
LC

[Jonathan H]

'Sailor's Home'?

The 2006 theory of Stewart and Evans and Don Rumbelow in their excellent 'Scotland Yard Investigates' was a new theory of the Seaside Home conundrum.

It was brilliant because it did not rely on sources we can never assess but on what is in front of us, and has been the whiole time.

The Lawende-Sadler confrontation is not the double of the other, alleged but toally unknown to anybody else confrotation but the original one mis-remembered by either Anderson and/or Swanson.

But this does not mean that'Kosdminski' or Aaron Kosminski is not a major suspect according an interpretation of the limited sources.

It can be argued that he was the best soltion according to two key police sources of the time.

You can accept the 'Sailor's Home' as a sincere myth, and still argue that the Polish Jew is the likeliest solution.