The Swanson marginalia - a new interpretation?

[PaulB]

[QUOTE=Phil H;174547]With respect you cited the feeding a multitude example!!

So far as the point of a story not changing - what if the story was made up to start with? It's point is irrelevant?

With equal respect, I simply used that example to illustrate the purpose of the story and how you could change the time and place and apply the story to someone else, but the miracle of feeding the multitude remains the same.
That the story was made up is neither here nor there. I thought I had made that clear.

I cited on another thread a day or two ago, an old Guardian (UK newspaper) ad of some years ago.

It showed a "punkish" youth apparently pushing a middle aged man for no reason. Then the camera pulled back to show that the youth was selflessly pushing the man out of the way of a falling object that might have injured him.

So, what if Schwartz saw only the first image - the point of his story might have been how violent and terrible young people are today. If he saw the second he might praise an heroic action and a brave man!

Both might have been right, the first story might have been told over years by friends to support a contention that modern youth is awful. But it was never true and the "point" however consistently maintained was always false.

Phil

Actually, that's a bad example. The core of the story would have been that he saw a punkish youth pushing an old man. That he thought this illustrated the violence young people show towards the old is the interpretation he placed on what he saw. We are not talking about the perceived meaning of what was seen, but how the core or purpose of the story survives elaboration and exaggeration.

To the specific case of Schwartz, he saw a man assault a woman, but that it was the prelude to her murder is how he (or others) interpreted what he saw. It could likely be untrue, but he did see a woman assaulted (or claimed to have done). That's the core.

This has nothing to do with the truth or otherwise of the story.

All Pirate Jack was saying is that eye-witnesses can and generally do get the details of what they saw wrong, but the core of their story is true; so there were two bank robbers not three, they drove off in a red car not a green one, and they went north, not west... But the eye-witness was there, people did run from the bank, they did drive off in a car. The core remains.

[PaulB]

Actually, Swanson does say that the suspect was 'taken by us with difficulty' to the Seaside Home for the ID attempt.

Just for the sake of being nit-picky, he wrote "sent" not "taken".

[ChrisGeorge]

The Swanson Marginalia is neither official, nor was it's opinion or tale publicised or leaked, nor was it known to the man's family -- apparently.

It is as private an act as, well, masturbation.

If we take it as Swanson's own opinion, and own memory, then it shows him to be arguably unreliable, to the point of being self-servingly so, even if it was only for his own private self-satisfaction.

Aaron Kosminski, if that is whom he means, was not dead 'soon after' the final murder, or dead soon after his incarceration -- a much more satisfying element than that he was still with us when the annotation was scribbled.

Macnaghten is cognizant in 1894 (and perhaps as late as 1898) that 'Kosminski' was probably still breathing -- and he was. The same police chief who is more reliable about the suspect being still alive, and -- via Sims --- that he was out and about for a very long time after the Kelly murder, also never mentions any positive witness identification by a Jewish witness.

That no murders were committed after his being incarcerated is glaringly mistaken. A few days after Coles was murdered and there would have been no need to embarrass themselves with the tabloids if they knew that 'Jack' was 'safely caged'. They could have gone after Sadler for just Coles, not muddied the waters ith the fiend.

If Swanson and Anderson already knew, or even thought they knew.

But did they ...?

It appears the Kelly and Coles murders are being fused as they both involved young and pretty unfortunates; the messy events of 1891 redacted into 1888.

The limitation of an entirely private notation is that you can write what you like without being accoutanble to anybody.

Interesting too that 'Kosminski' remains bereft of his first name, as he is in the Mac Report(s), and it is the latter source where he first shows up in the extant record as a Ripper 'suspect'.

So, if it is Swanson's own opinion then his memory, by 1910 or thereafter, was hopelessly and self-servingly flawed. If, on the other hand, he is only recording Anderson' opinion then it is an egocentric, yet sincere mishmash of suspects, victims and witnesses -- the less said about the better thought the retired Chief Inspector.

Hi Jonathan

As you have said, Swanson's marginalia were annotations for his own information -- and per se not for us, or even for his family, it seems.

As such, he was giving information to illuminate what his former boss had written, but not I think to necessarily endorse the suspect's candidacy for having been the Whitechapel murderer. In fact, it might be noticeable that Swanson does not write anything contrary to what Anderson had written, as if that might not have been the thing to do, if there was any place where Anderson got it wrong. On the surface, it would seem Swanson was backing up Anderson but I have to wonder if that was really the case.

Our view of what Anderson and Swanson wrote might depend on whatever side of the divide of the, say, Kosminski/Druitt or Anderson/Macnaghten debate, each of us as students of the case find ourselves. In which case, playmates, good luck in your interpretation.

All the best

Chris

[PaulB]

Hi Jonathan

As you have said, Swanson's marginalia were annotations for his own information -- and per se not for us, or even for his family, it seems.

As such, he was giving information to illuminate what his former boss had written, but not I think to necessarily endorse the suspect's candidacy for having been the Whitechapel murderer. In fact, it might be noticeable that Swanson does not write anything contrary to what Anderson had written, as if that might not have been the thing to do, if there was any place where Anderson got it wrong. On the surface, it would seem Swanson was backing up Anderson but I have to wonder if that was really the case.

Our view of what Anderson and Swanson wrote might depend on whatever side of the divide of the, say, Kosminski/Druitt or Anderson/Macnaghten debate, each of us as students of the case find ourselves. In which case, playmates, good luck in your interpretation.

All the best

Chris

Chris,
Swanson neither endorses nor denies Anderson's conclusion, but why would you conclude that it was other than a tacit agreement?

[Phil H]

Paul

I think you may have put yor finger on what has bothered me about the marginalia - thanks for that.

In fact, it might be noticeable that Swanson does not write anything contrary to what Anderson had written, as if that might not have been the thing to do, if there was any place where Anderson got it wrong.

One would expect some - even if minor - differences, or even a re-emphasis.

By the way the "sent by US" quote is interesting - why not say "I"? The grammar does not rule out a direct quote by Anderson to Swanson, simply being recorded - that's why I said earlier that I don't think my perspective on the marginalia does violence to the text or grammar.

In other words, Anderson might have said: "After you'd moved on to pastures new, Donald, the suspect was sent by us to..." and DSS simply recorded that. "Or even we sent him to..." which Swanson wrote down as representing his old loyalty as "us". I prefer the former.

Had Swanson known it I might have expected him to say what the dicciculties encountered were etc.

Phil

[ChrisGeorge]

Chris,
Swanson neither endorses nor denies Anderson's conclusion, but why would you conclude that it was other than a tacit agreement?

Hi Paul

I'm not making any conclusion, just being open to the possibility that Swanson might not have entirely agreed with what Anderson wrote. As you have written many times, those fellows probably knew more than we will ever know, but on the other hand the exact meaning of Swanson's annotations are not clear. We can all read the same thing and come to different conclusions, which was the point of my post.

All the best

Chris

[PaulB]

Hi Paul

I'm not making any conclusion, just being open to the possibility that Swanson might not have entirely agreed with what Anderson wrote. As you have written many times, those fellows probably knew more than we will ever know, but on the other hand the exact meaning of Swanson's annotations are not clear. We can all read the same thing and come to different conclusions, which was the point of my post.

All the best

Chris

I appreciate that, but the first and obvious interpretation of the marginalia was that it endorsed Anderson, which I don't think it is altogether fair to assume it does, but I'd have thought that Swanson would have said he disagreed or that he had no direct personal knowledge or perhaps just made no notations at all. Whilst we can and should consider the possibility that Swanson did not agree with Anderson, shouldn't we be analysing the marginalia to see what if any indications it may have to an answer?

[Jeff Leahy]

One would expect some - even if minor - differences, or even a re-emphasis.

l

Last time I saw it, it had several words underlined (I dont mean the red margin lines obviously)

Pirate

[Wickerman]

...
It seemed that either Swanson must have been in his dotage when he wrote his notes in Anderson's book; or that he inadvertently wrote the wrong thing (Seaside Home for Seamen's Home?); or got his facts muddled over the passage of time.

Hi Phil.
I meant to ask you what the basis of this suggestion was, that if the location was a Seamans Home, how would that change things?

Swanson does suggest it was Kosminski who was taken to your 'Seamans Home' for identification. That being the case would it not imply the witness who claimed to have seen JtR at the scene of a crime was a Sailor?

Do you know of a sailor witness?

Macnaghten got basic facts about the case wrong. There would be no logical explanation to do so for any reason except, he apparently was relying on memory and second hand information. He confused the Berner St. Murder and the Mitre Square murder by stating that 3 Jews found Stride's body. In reality, the 3 Jews were the witnesses that saw Eddowes with a man at the entrance to Church Passage...

Hi Hunter.
Precisely so, in my opinion. In fact I think it is for this very same reason that the Aberconway version referenced the 'PC witness in Mitre Square'.
There was no such PC witness in the Eddowes case (a city PC at that!), but PC William Smith was a witness in the Stride case.
Hence, for the longest time I have assumed the Swanson reference to taking Kozminski to the Seaside Home (for Met. policemen), to be identified, was precisely because the witness was a policeman.
The fly in the ointment to that conjecture is finding evidence that PC Smith was ever convalescing at any of the (3 different?) Seaside Homes used from 1888 to 1893.
I'm hoping Rob's new book is going to throw some light in this direction.

Regards, Jon S.

[Chris]

The fly in the ointment to that conjecture is finding evidence that PC Smith was ever convalescing at any of the (3 different?) Seaside Homes used from 1888 to 1893.

If it helps, there is no mention of William Smith, either in the recommendations for detached sick leave or in the lists of officers to see the Chief Surgeon, in Police Orders for January 1890-March 1891.

[Jonathan H]

Arguably, Swanson is disagreeing with Anderson by his mention of the 'Seaside Home' if you believe he is annotating his own opinion (he may, on the other hand, have received a personal clarification from Anderson too).

Consider that everything Anderson said, and wrote, about the Polish Jew suspect from 1895 gives the impression that these were events which took place in 1888, and certainly no later than mid-1889.

Swanson by introducing the police hospital at the coast, which had only been built in July 1890, shows, arguably, some cognition that the police machinations involving this suspect took a number of years -- which would broadly fit with Aaron Kosminski being permanently sectioned in 1891.

I agree that Swanson signed the annotation because he wrote it, not that he necessarily agreed with its content.

For example, Swanson never seems to have told his family. He never wrote a letter to any newspaper backing his beloved old boss. The Marginalia is therefore a terribly weak source because it is so monastic.

Macnaghten was Commissioner by then, and could have spoken to a reporter to say that, yes, in fact a Polish Jew suspect had been one of three men being looked at very seriously as the fiend.

Of course, he did not lift a finger for a former boss he loathed.

Plus, Macnaghten makes it clear that murders after Kelly were, at least initially, thought to be the fiend too.

Edmund Reid believed that Coles was the final murder to his grave, and knowing nothing of Druitt, a posthumous suspect contained to the Old Boy Net, why wouldn't he?

It is the silence or lack of memory by Anderson and/or Swanson about the events of 1891 which also make both, or one, such unimpressive sources.

To recast the disappointing anti-climax of the mystery, into the near-triumphant climax of 1888, is classic self-serving memory muddling.

Oh, and in his memoirs Macnaghten deliberately mixes and matches the witnesses of the 'double event' to make the Jews look innocent (eg. the sighting of the Polish Jew suspect which Mac initiated is erased by him) and not guilty of letting a Gentile unfortunate be bashed and killed. That the graffiti, unmentioned in his Report(s), was defintiely by the killer to balme the three Jews who disturbed him with Stride.

Mac's overall objective was to eliminate Lawende's 'Jack the Sailor' (and eliminate Lawende, who becomes a beat cop) because he believed that it was a clear sighting of Druitt: youngish, lithe, and fair-moustached.

To Hunter

Thanks for the positive comments.

I would just say that the idea of Mac's faulty memory comes ... from Mac?!

From this smoothie's memoir's preface (in which he cheekily juxtaposes Jack the Ripper with championship cricket) as his excuse for any errors -- His Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card.

All other contemporaneous sources describe his memory as extraordinary.

Plus, you hardly need a marvelous memory to recall such basic details that your preferred suspect is a barrister rather than a doctor.

Mac, the 'honourable schoolboy' prankster and overgrown Old Etonian, is being deceitful -- as usual.

Let me give you ten further examples:

1. He claims in 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper' (1914) to be writing entirely from memory.

In fact, it is obvious he is adapting 'Aberconway' right in front of him.

Furthermore, he dumps Druitt as a 'Tumbletyesque' middle-aged doctor being hunted by police in 1888, and completely dumps the camouflage suspects, 'Kosminski' and Michael Ostrog, whom he had created (I think Druitt's hapless sidekicks were nothing more than self-amused japes by the Old Etonian; the former because he masturbated like there was no tomorrow, and the latter because he dared to defile Eton with his thievery)

2. In 1913 Mac claimed to the press, and an aghast H. L. Adam, that he had destroyed all documents pertaining to the un-named Druitt.

But not only was Druitt's name still on file, Mac had not even burnt his own personal copy of the same document which he had been flashing around to cronies for years (I think he said this lie to reassure the surviving Druitts). Even his daughter conceded in 1959 that her father was harmlessly fibbing.

3. Mac misled Sims into believing that Griffiths had seen a definitive Home Office Report, seen by the Home Sec. Neither claim was true. This was so Sims could swat away Abberline's off-hand rejection of the 'Drowned Doctor'.

4. Both versions of his slippery report give the impression that Druitt was being hunted before he killed himself, or came to police attention very soon after. This was how Major Griffiths and George Sims understood it and disseminated the tale to the public.

Primary sources show this to be impossible, and Macnaghten himself came clean that it was not true in his memoirs.

5. From 1902 Sims began writing of the clincher detail against the 'Drowned Doctor' now revealed to have not practiced as a surgeon for many years. That he had been incarcerated in an asylum, 'twice', after being diagnosed as a homicidal harlot hater. That it was the state's fault for letting him out.

In his memoirs Macnaghten again conceded what we know from primary sources -- Druitt had never been institutionalized (but may have feared going like mother; eg. ending up in a madhouse for what he had done).

6. After a woman, Elizabeth Camp, was murdered on a train in 1897, somebody at Scotland Yard told a reporter that her likely killer immediately drowned himself in the Thames.

Sound familiar?

It is like a dry-run for the Griffiths' revelation about the Ripper as 'Drowned Doctor' the following year.

7. From 1903, Sims began writing that the doctor's body bobbed up within, or even less than a month after the Kelly murder.

Yet in 'Aberconway' and the official version, Mac wrote that the date was the 31st of December. Of course the new Sims' version is more satisfying, and removes the three weeks that Druitt was alive. It makes the barrister's true identity even more unrecoverable. It is also cognition on Mac's part that the timeline needed crunching for public consumption.

8. Griffiths and/or Mac changed the Druitt family of 'Aberconway' into 'friends' presumably to make the tale even more libel-proof.

Sims never claimed to see the 'Home Office Report'. He just adds the detail about the frantic friends trying to find the missing, unemployed doctor.

Therefore, Sims was misled by Mac, as this was actually the fiend's brother.

9. Research by the brilliant and meticulous Debra Arif shows that Cutbush and Cutbush are probably not uncle and nephew -- not related at all!?

Therefore Macnaghten is either Constable Magoo, or a deft Whitehall player.

That he is preparing a scurrilous -- and spurious -- motive for Inspector Race to the Liberal Home Sec.

eg. That the un-named Race's 'outing' of the un-named Thomas Cutbush to 'The Sun', is motivated by nothing more than malice; that he feels such 'sour grapes' towards a retired colleague, one who does, tragically, have a lunatic relative -- who non-fatally 'jobbed' a few women -- that he has tried to manufacture a police cover-up of Jack the Ripper, the bloody swine!

In fact, it is all made-up by Macnaghten (and never actually sent to that Dept. of State).

10. 'Said to be a doctor ...' literally means that from information received this minor suspect might have been a physician, or might not. He might have been from a 'good family', or he might not. He might have disappeared right after the Kelly murder, or he might not. He might have been 'upwards of a month' a rotting corpse in the Thames, or he might not.

eg. We never checked because he was so minor a suspect, yet -- and here's the circle Mac is awkwardly trying to square -- his own family definitely 'believed' in his guilt, not might have believed. And he was, not might have been, 'sexually insane'; that he took erotic pleasure from violence against women, specifically whores.

Might have been a doctor, but then again he might not have been -- and guess what, he wasn't.

Mac is not 'wrong' in that document about Druitt, though I do not think anybody 'said' to him that the suspect was a physician either.

It's another excuse, a bureaucratic dodge, prepared in case the whole 'son of a surgeon' story comes spilling out of Dorset (as it nearly did in 1891) and a Liberal govt. looks askance at Tory police chiefs about a dead Ripper who turns out to come from a Tory family, and who was first stumbled upon by a loose-lipped Tory backbencher.

And who, embarrassingly (though not to Mac personally) was never on police radar.


Frankly, Hunter, it is my enduring failure, and frustration, that I cannot get traction with hardly anybody on these examples of gentlemanly sleight-of-hand by Scotland Yard's 'Brer Fox'.

[Wickerman]

If it helps, there is no mention of William Smith, either in the recommendations for detached sick leave or in the lists of officers to see the Chief Surgeon, in Police Orders for January 1890-March 1891.

Thankyou for that Chris.
May I ask, the time window you offer, is this because records are not available prior to January 1890 or subsequent to March 1891?

Thanks, Jon S.

Correction:
Sorry, Kosminski was admitted to Colney Hatch Feb 1891.
However, whoever the policeman was he was surely admitted to the Seaside Home before Kosminski 'could' have been brought, hence, sometime prior to 1890?

[Stewart P Evans]

Not

Just for the sake of being nit-picky, he wrote "sent" not "taken".

That is not being 'nit-picky' that is called being accurate, and the wording conveys a different meaning. It's interesting to see that you regard being accurate as being 'nit-picky'.

[Stewart P Evans]

Anderson

It is with some trepidation that I venture to remark upon Anderson and his character. But as the originator of the whole identification of Jack the Ripper as a Polish Jew claim he must be looked at, hopefully in an objective manner. No one here knew the man and we have to draw upon information that has been left to us by those who did.

One man who regarded Anderson as a friend, and certainly as a source of valuable information, was the amateur criminologist and writer Hargrave Lee Adam. Adam wrote much about Anderson and he observed, 'Sir Robert was a stalwart champion of the police force of this country, the virtues of which he was never tired of extolling. "But", I remember him observing in this connection, "very few Britishers have any adequate appreciation of this great institution." He was very fond of comparing the police force of this country, which he declared emphatically was the best in the world, with that of America, very much to the detriment of the latter.'

This at least shows that all the criticism and attacks suffered by the police, and himself personally, over the non-detection of the Whitechapel murderer really must have been annoying and upsetting for him. It may well be imagined how he received the contemporary press reports from American sources that stated if the Ripper was operating in the USA he would have soon been caught.

[PaulB]

That is not being 'nit-picky' that is called being accurate, and the wording conveys a different meaning. It's interesting to see that you regard being accurate as being 'nit-picky'.

Well, I don't really, of course. I was trying not to sound like a teacher walking up the aisle saying, '"sent by us", Jones. Fifty lines...'