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David Orsom has found a new source that is about both Druitt and the Vicar and, in my opinion, it further vindicates my 'case disguised' theory.
I have to put it in context and so the source does not appear until further down.
In the interests of full transparency David thinks my book/theory is rubbish and has written a lengthy, relentlessly negative, semi-review on his website:
In my defense, David gets one of the central tenets of the theory quite wrong and then, like a crackpot fetishist, focuses on just a single Edwardian source to discredit the entire thesis (no, I don't get it either?)
Here is a positive review of my book which grasps the entire thesis (whilst kicking me in the pants for a persistent "linguistic atrocity"):
But all of the above is beside the point compared to what David has found: a source that arguably backs my theory to the hilt, and I thank him for publishing it.
I had argued in my book that the Chief Constable of C.I.D., Melville Macnaghten, and the famous writer, George R. Sims -- close pals -- had discovered the true identity of the Ripper: a drowned barrister named Montague Druitt.
This had happened in early 1891 due to a leak in London, though originating in Dorset, via a loose-lipped Tory M.P., Henry Farquharson (I also theorize that he was the first to guardedly mix fact and fiction in order to protect the decencies, e.g. to libel-proof the solution so he could brag about it). To what, I theorize, was the pals' acute consternation the late Mr. Druitt was distantly related to a mutual close chum, Colonel Vivian Majendie (I also postulated that Druitt had confessed to his cousin, the Reverend Charles Druitt, who was married to the daughter of one of Majendie's cousins). From a very prominent family the colonel was a Victorian hero as, among other things, a heroic bomb disposal expert.
I argue the three VIP friends were anxious for this solution -- after all, there was never going to be a trial -- to be suppressed. When "The Sun" ran with their Ripper scoop in 1894 (albeit Thomas Cutbush, languishing mutely in an asylum, was never named) the newspaper said that they had to be careful not to ruin the respectable relations of the alleged killer -- that even somebody who was distantly related to such ghastliness would be inevitably soiled by such a connection.
The problem for Macnaghten, Sims and Majendie was that the Reverend to whom I theorized Montague had confessed, Montie's cousin Charles, was anguished over the whole tragic affair; that he felt a moral need to go public with the truth (this anguish is, I think, is dramatized in a Sims' short story from 1892, "The Priest's Secret"). The thee toffs could not convince the middle-class cleric not to go public, but they managed to get him to hold off until the tenth anniversary of Montague's death. Macnaghtem at that stage, would have preferred for the truth never to come out at all. Perhaps the affable chief convinced the Reverend to at least clothe the truth in a bit of fiction to protect his respectable relations (because that is the chief's m.o.)
I further argued that Macnaghten and Sims decided (Majendie died of natural causes in mid-1898) that since the Anglican priest was going to go ahead with his Ripper revelation the pair would head him off with a pincer movement -- they would get in first to muddy the waters; to make the vicar's tale look like nothing much. But Macnaghten had to be very careful not to leave his fingerprints anywhere on this bit of propaganda and misdirection.
Hence Mac briefed Major Arthur Griffiths (who seems to have been very skeptical about this from-out-of-nowhere scoop, sidelining it into his book's intro) who first revealed the suspect contents of the [so-called] draft version of the top cop's internal report of 1894; in which M. J. Druitt is definitely a middle-aged doctor and is also definitely the chief's paramount choice as the likeliest Whitechapel suspect.
The book debuted in December 1898 and the press did take big notice of this unexpected scoop: that the police, supposedly had three prime suspects and one of them, an English physician who drowned himself in the Thames after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, was the best. The Druitt family were disguised as anomic "friends" (that's a fact).
The press realized -- and some openly scoffed at this -- that Major Griffiths, in little more than a paragraph, had reset the entire story. No longer was it a protracted affair lasting from mid-1888 to early 1891, with about ten possible victims by the same fiend. Instead police supposedly knew at the time that Kelly was the final victim of this now brief 'autumn of terror' (and there were only four other victims). The clueless constabulary of 1888 to 1891 now became an efficient bunch of detectives who were zeroing in on three possible suspects, and one almost definitely the right man. Shockingly for the so-called better classes it was not the Russian doctor or the Jewish immigrant but an English gentile and a professional.
On January 19th 1899 the Vicar launched his version of the truth, and to some extent it failed to launch. Here is the extraordinary source first placed on these boards in 2008 by the late Chris Scott (who, to my knowledge, never agreed that it was of such importance, let alone a critical jigsaw piece in a definitive solution):
Western Mail
19 January 1899
WHITECHAPEL MURDERS
DID "JACK THE RIPPER" MAKE A CONFESSION?
We have received (says the Daily Mail) from a clergyman of the Church of England, now a North Country vicar, an interesting communication with reference to the great criminal mystery of our times - that enshrouding the perpetration of the series of crimes which have come to be known as the "Jack the Ripper" murders. The identity of the murderer is as unsolved as it was while the blood of the victims was yet wet upon the pavements. Certainly Major Arthur Griffiths, in his new work on "Mysteries of Police and Crime," suggests that the police believe the assassin to have been a doctor, bordering on insanity, whose body was found floating in the Thames soon after the last crime of the series; but as the major also mentions that this man was one of three known homicidal lunatics against whom the police "held very plausible and reasonable grounds of suspicion," that conjectural explanation does not appear to count for much by itself.
Our correspondent the vicar now writes:-
"I received information in professional confidence, with directions to publish the facts after ten years, and then with such alterations as might defeat identification.
The murderer was a man of good position and otherwise unblemished character, who suffered from epileptic mania, and is long since deceased.
I must ask you not to give my name, as it might lead to identification"
meaning the identification of the perpetrator of the crimes. We thought at first the vicar was at fault in believing that ten years had passed yet since the last murder of the series, for there were other somewhat similar crimes in 1889. But, on referring again to major Griffiths's book, we find he states that the last "Jack the Ripper" murder was that in Miller's Court on November 9, 1888 - a confirmation of the vicar's sources of information. The vicar enclosed a narrative, which he called "The Whitechurch Murders - Solution of a London Mystery." This he described as "substantial truth under fictitious form." "Proof for obvious reasons impossible - under seal of confession," he added in reply to an inquiry from us.
Failing to see how any good purpose could be served by publishing substantial truth in fictitious form, we sent a representative North to see the vicar, to endeavour to ascertain which parts of the narrative were actual facts. But the vicar was not to be persuaded, and all that our reporter could learn was that the rev. gentleman appears to know with certainty the identity of the most terrible figure in the criminal annals of our times, and that the vicar does not intend to let anyone else into the secret.
The murderer died, the vicar states, very shortly after committing the last murder. The vicar obtained his information from a brother clergyman, to whom a confession was made - by whom the vicar would not give even the most guarded hint. The only other item which a lengthy chat with the vicar could elicit was that the murderer was a man who at one time was engaged in rescue work among the depraved woman of the East End - eventually his victims; and that the assassin was at one time a surgeon.
A few days later George Sims (under his Shakespeare-derived pseudonym Dagonet in his regular column for "The Referee") weighed in to quash the Vicar's tale. The element that he is most anxious to discredit is the bit of fiction that had been started by the MP; that the killer suicided the same night as his final victim (which is a confession by action, rather than by word) and therefore had no time to confess verbally anything to anybody. As I argued in my book this was part of what Macnaghten was anxious to suppress; that the police had never heard of this suspect until years after he was in his grave. Whereas Sims implies -- and kept on expanding this element -- that the police were efficiently closing fast upon the "mad doctor".
So that was my thesis: that Macnaghten, via Griffiths (not in on it) and Sims (in on it) wedged the Vicar into being just some dotty cleric whose opinion could not compare to the major and the famous true crime writer. That this gentlemanly bit of misdirection worked a treat (and fools most researchers to this day).
By 1902, Sims, with Macnaghten behind him, felt sufficiently safe to begin explaining how the "friends" of the "doctor" had found out that he was the fiend: he had confessed to wanting to savage East End harlots to his own doctors as a private, voluntary patient in an asylum -- twice. In the 1900's Sims added other fictitious details that appear nowhere in Macnaghten's report(s): that the killer was so rich he did not need to work and lived as a semi-recluse. Sims also mentioned that there was a definitive "Home Office Report" written by the "Commissioner" (Warren? Monro?) which laid out the facts that made it a slam dunk that the 'drowned doctor' was the killer.
In a source just found by my researcher, Sims is asked in 1903 by another reporter as to exactly how he knows all this. He replies that he cannot divulge his source (instead of simply saying that he had read it in Griffiths' book). Surely Sims must be protecting his friend, Macnaghten.
Now this is what David has found, and I have tried to provide the historical context for it both in terms of other contemporary sources and my own interpretation of them:
"The Western Times"
19 January, 1899 (the same day as the vicar's tale was published in the Mail)
[From a London correspondent]:
"In police circles there is the most deep distrust of the new version as to who Jack the Ripper really was. The new version is that he had been a surgeon and engaged in rescue work in the East End, and then after confessing his crimes to a clergyman who told the story to another clergyman, the narrator, committed suicide in the Thames. An earlier version made the man a petty officer on board a ship always in dock in the East End who, being suspected, came no more to England but wholly disappeared. A third story, told elaborately, made him out to be a living inmate of one of our suburban asylums. Naturally one story is as good as another."
At this point David terminates the source without ellipses ("...") but in fact it has a couple of more lines -- and they are arguably very important.
"... , and the police offer none of their own, but prudently deny all three. But the mystery will be solved one day."
Apparently a journalist has seen the Vicar's tale coming off the wire and has gone to Scotland Yard, or met with somebody in-the-know about the files on a case that was a decade in the past. To be authoritative it cannot just be anybody. Police are not supposed to unofficially speak or leak to the press, but Macnaghten boasted, at his retirement in 1913, of having cultivated excellent and mutually productive relations with the press.
If it is Macnaghten he is consciously deceiving the reporter (hey now steady on!) because he has written an internal report in which, in one version -- the one he disseminated to the public via Griffiths and Sims -- he believed, rightly or wrongly, that Druitt, the drowned man, had probably been the Ripper.
If it is not Macnaghten then it must be somebody not-in-the-know who has been misled by the Chief Constable about the drowned suspect, by omission at least (e.g. there was no "Hey you know that Ripper bit in Griffiths causing all the fuss, well, it's from me, old chap") or they are also lying to the reporter.
It certainly ends with the characteristic Mac cheer and bounce, about the case being solved some, sunny day.
In 2015 my book, "Jack the Ripper-Case Solved, 1891" [McFarland] a secondary source, postulated that the Vicar's Ripper is the same man as the drowned doctor, even though the Vicar himself never even hints how his alleged Jack died. He never comes out and says that his "at one time a surgeon" is the same man as the "doctor" who drowned himself in the Thames (nor does he deny it). I argued that they are likely the same man. That behind all these layers of "substantial truth in fictitious form" is Montague Druitt.
Now here is a primary source from 1899 -- from the very day the Vicar debuts -- which also makes the same connection; the Vicar's Ripper is obviously Griffiths' drowned doctor. Whether it is the reporter making the connection or the policeman (or men) with whom he is conferring is unclear. But the police certainly do not correct the reporter as being in error in connecting the two suspects (because the Vicar does not).
It is the first primary source found, albeit without naming him and at several removes, that has Druitt being the man who confessed to a priest about being "Jack the Ripper" (primary about the Vicar that is).
I think this is potential confirmation of the pincer I theorized about: "Good Old Mac" is briefing a journalist against the Vicar having already briefed Griffiths for the same propagandist purpose, and who published first, and then Mac deployed Sims who overtly dismisses the Vicar a few days later. The Vicar was quickly forgotten, but the "mad doctor" of Griffiths and especially Sims became entrenched in Edwardian culture as the likeliest solution.
By 1914 the retired and ill Macnaghten dropped the doctor element and opened the gap between the final murder and self-murder, allowing time for the killer to have to be compos enough to get away -- and not just stagger "shrieking" and "raving" to the river's edge -- and thus allow space for a confession in word to "his own people".
I have to put it in context and so the source does not appear until further down.
In the interests of full transparency David thinks my book/theory is rubbish and has written a lengthy, relentlessly negative, semi-review on his website:
In my defense, David gets one of the central tenets of the theory quite wrong and then, like a crackpot fetishist, focuses on just a single Edwardian source to discredit the entire thesis (no, I don't get it either?)
Here is a positive review of my book which grasps the entire thesis (whilst kicking me in the pants for a persistent "linguistic atrocity"):
But all of the above is beside the point compared to what David has found: a source that arguably backs my theory to the hilt, and I thank him for publishing it.
I had argued in my book that the Chief Constable of C.I.D., Melville Macnaghten, and the famous writer, George R. Sims -- close pals -- had discovered the true identity of the Ripper: a drowned barrister named Montague Druitt.
This had happened in early 1891 due to a leak in London, though originating in Dorset, via a loose-lipped Tory M.P., Henry Farquharson (I also theorize that he was the first to guardedly mix fact and fiction in order to protect the decencies, e.g. to libel-proof the solution so he could brag about it). To what, I theorize, was the pals' acute consternation the late Mr. Druitt was distantly related to a mutual close chum, Colonel Vivian Majendie (I also postulated that Druitt had confessed to his cousin, the Reverend Charles Druitt, who was married to the daughter of one of Majendie's cousins). From a very prominent family the colonel was a Victorian hero as, among other things, a heroic bomb disposal expert.
I argue the three VIP friends were anxious for this solution -- after all, there was never going to be a trial -- to be suppressed. When "The Sun" ran with their Ripper scoop in 1894 (albeit Thomas Cutbush, languishing mutely in an asylum, was never named) the newspaper said that they had to be careful not to ruin the respectable relations of the alleged killer -- that even somebody who was distantly related to such ghastliness would be inevitably soiled by such a connection.
The problem for Macnaghten, Sims and Majendie was that the Reverend to whom I theorized Montague had confessed, Montie's cousin Charles, was anguished over the whole tragic affair; that he felt a moral need to go public with the truth (this anguish is, I think, is dramatized in a Sims' short story from 1892, "The Priest's Secret"). The thee toffs could not convince the middle-class cleric not to go public, but they managed to get him to hold off until the tenth anniversary of Montague's death. Macnaghtem at that stage, would have preferred for the truth never to come out at all. Perhaps the affable chief convinced the Reverend to at least clothe the truth in a bit of fiction to protect his respectable relations (because that is the chief's m.o.)
I further argued that Macnaghten and Sims decided (Majendie died of natural causes in mid-1898) that since the Anglican priest was going to go ahead with his Ripper revelation the pair would head him off with a pincer movement -- they would get in first to muddy the waters; to make the vicar's tale look like nothing much. But Macnaghten had to be very careful not to leave his fingerprints anywhere on this bit of propaganda and misdirection.
Hence Mac briefed Major Arthur Griffiths (who seems to have been very skeptical about this from-out-of-nowhere scoop, sidelining it into his book's intro) who first revealed the suspect contents of the [so-called] draft version of the top cop's internal report of 1894; in which M. J. Druitt is definitely a middle-aged doctor and is also definitely the chief's paramount choice as the likeliest Whitechapel suspect.
The book debuted in December 1898 and the press did take big notice of this unexpected scoop: that the police, supposedly had three prime suspects and one of them, an English physician who drowned himself in the Thames after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, was the best. The Druitt family were disguised as anomic "friends" (that's a fact).
The press realized -- and some openly scoffed at this -- that Major Griffiths, in little more than a paragraph, had reset the entire story. No longer was it a protracted affair lasting from mid-1888 to early 1891, with about ten possible victims by the same fiend. Instead police supposedly knew at the time that Kelly was the final victim of this now brief 'autumn of terror' (and there were only four other victims). The clueless constabulary of 1888 to 1891 now became an efficient bunch of detectives who were zeroing in on three possible suspects, and one almost definitely the right man. Shockingly for the so-called better classes it was not the Russian doctor or the Jewish immigrant but an English gentile and a professional.
On January 19th 1899 the Vicar launched his version of the truth, and to some extent it failed to launch. Here is the extraordinary source first placed on these boards in 2008 by the late Chris Scott (who, to my knowledge, never agreed that it was of such importance, let alone a critical jigsaw piece in a definitive solution):
Western Mail
19 January 1899
WHITECHAPEL MURDERS
DID "JACK THE RIPPER" MAKE A CONFESSION?
We have received (says the Daily Mail) from a clergyman of the Church of England, now a North Country vicar, an interesting communication with reference to the great criminal mystery of our times - that enshrouding the perpetration of the series of crimes which have come to be known as the "Jack the Ripper" murders. The identity of the murderer is as unsolved as it was while the blood of the victims was yet wet upon the pavements. Certainly Major Arthur Griffiths, in his new work on "Mysteries of Police and Crime," suggests that the police believe the assassin to have been a doctor, bordering on insanity, whose body was found floating in the Thames soon after the last crime of the series; but as the major also mentions that this man was one of three known homicidal lunatics against whom the police "held very plausible and reasonable grounds of suspicion," that conjectural explanation does not appear to count for much by itself.
Our correspondent the vicar now writes:-
"I received information in professional confidence, with directions to publish the facts after ten years, and then with such alterations as might defeat identification.
The murderer was a man of good position and otherwise unblemished character, who suffered from epileptic mania, and is long since deceased.
I must ask you not to give my name, as it might lead to identification"
meaning the identification of the perpetrator of the crimes. We thought at first the vicar was at fault in believing that ten years had passed yet since the last murder of the series, for there were other somewhat similar crimes in 1889. But, on referring again to major Griffiths's book, we find he states that the last "Jack the Ripper" murder was that in Miller's Court on November 9, 1888 - a confirmation of the vicar's sources of information. The vicar enclosed a narrative, which he called "The Whitechurch Murders - Solution of a London Mystery." This he described as "substantial truth under fictitious form." "Proof for obvious reasons impossible - under seal of confession," he added in reply to an inquiry from us.
Failing to see how any good purpose could be served by publishing substantial truth in fictitious form, we sent a representative North to see the vicar, to endeavour to ascertain which parts of the narrative were actual facts. But the vicar was not to be persuaded, and all that our reporter could learn was that the rev. gentleman appears to know with certainty the identity of the most terrible figure in the criminal annals of our times, and that the vicar does not intend to let anyone else into the secret.
The murderer died, the vicar states, very shortly after committing the last murder. The vicar obtained his information from a brother clergyman, to whom a confession was made - by whom the vicar would not give even the most guarded hint. The only other item which a lengthy chat with the vicar could elicit was that the murderer was a man who at one time was engaged in rescue work among the depraved woman of the East End - eventually his victims; and that the assassin was at one time a surgeon.
A few days later George Sims (under his Shakespeare-derived pseudonym Dagonet in his regular column for "The Referee") weighed in to quash the Vicar's tale. The element that he is most anxious to discredit is the bit of fiction that had been started by the MP; that the killer suicided the same night as his final victim (which is a confession by action, rather than by word) and therefore had no time to confess verbally anything to anybody. As I argued in my book this was part of what Macnaghten was anxious to suppress; that the police had never heard of this suspect until years after he was in his grave. Whereas Sims implies -- and kept on expanding this element -- that the police were efficiently closing fast upon the "mad doctor".
So that was my thesis: that Macnaghten, via Griffiths (not in on it) and Sims (in on it) wedged the Vicar into being just some dotty cleric whose opinion could not compare to the major and the famous true crime writer. That this gentlemanly bit of misdirection worked a treat (and fools most researchers to this day).
By 1902, Sims, with Macnaghten behind him, felt sufficiently safe to begin explaining how the "friends" of the "doctor" had found out that he was the fiend: he had confessed to wanting to savage East End harlots to his own doctors as a private, voluntary patient in an asylum -- twice. In the 1900's Sims added other fictitious details that appear nowhere in Macnaghten's report(s): that the killer was so rich he did not need to work and lived as a semi-recluse. Sims also mentioned that there was a definitive "Home Office Report" written by the "Commissioner" (Warren? Monro?) which laid out the facts that made it a slam dunk that the 'drowned doctor' was the killer.
In a source just found by my researcher, Sims is asked in 1903 by another reporter as to exactly how he knows all this. He replies that he cannot divulge his source (instead of simply saying that he had read it in Griffiths' book). Surely Sims must be protecting his friend, Macnaghten.
Now this is what David has found, and I have tried to provide the historical context for it both in terms of other contemporary sources and my own interpretation of them:
"The Western Times"
19 January, 1899 (the same day as the vicar's tale was published in the Mail)
[From a London correspondent]:
"In police circles there is the most deep distrust of the new version as to who Jack the Ripper really was. The new version is that he had been a surgeon and engaged in rescue work in the East End, and then after confessing his crimes to a clergyman who told the story to another clergyman, the narrator, committed suicide in the Thames. An earlier version made the man a petty officer on board a ship always in dock in the East End who, being suspected, came no more to England but wholly disappeared. A third story, told elaborately, made him out to be a living inmate of one of our suburban asylums. Naturally one story is as good as another."
At this point David terminates the source without ellipses ("...") but in fact it has a couple of more lines -- and they are arguably very important.
"... , and the police offer none of their own, but prudently deny all three. But the mystery will be solved one day."
Apparently a journalist has seen the Vicar's tale coming off the wire and has gone to Scotland Yard, or met with somebody in-the-know about the files on a case that was a decade in the past. To be authoritative it cannot just be anybody. Police are not supposed to unofficially speak or leak to the press, but Macnaghten boasted, at his retirement in 1913, of having cultivated excellent and mutually productive relations with the press.
If it is Macnaghten he is consciously deceiving the reporter (hey now steady on!) because he has written an internal report in which, in one version -- the one he disseminated to the public via Griffiths and Sims -- he believed, rightly or wrongly, that Druitt, the drowned man, had probably been the Ripper.
If it is not Macnaghten then it must be somebody not-in-the-know who has been misled by the Chief Constable about the drowned suspect, by omission at least (e.g. there was no "Hey you know that Ripper bit in Griffiths causing all the fuss, well, it's from me, old chap") or they are also lying to the reporter.
It certainly ends with the characteristic Mac cheer and bounce, about the case being solved some, sunny day.
In 2015 my book, "Jack the Ripper-Case Solved, 1891" [McFarland] a secondary source, postulated that the Vicar's Ripper is the same man as the drowned doctor, even though the Vicar himself never even hints how his alleged Jack died. He never comes out and says that his "at one time a surgeon" is the same man as the "doctor" who drowned himself in the Thames (nor does he deny it). I argued that they are likely the same man. That behind all these layers of "substantial truth in fictitious form" is Montague Druitt.
Now here is a primary source from 1899 -- from the very day the Vicar debuts -- which also makes the same connection; the Vicar's Ripper is obviously Griffiths' drowned doctor. Whether it is the reporter making the connection or the policeman (or men) with whom he is conferring is unclear. But the police certainly do not correct the reporter as being in error in connecting the two suspects (because the Vicar does not).
It is the first primary source found, albeit without naming him and at several removes, that has Druitt being the man who confessed to a priest about being "Jack the Ripper" (primary about the Vicar that is).
I think this is potential confirmation of the pincer I theorized about: "Good Old Mac" is briefing a journalist against the Vicar having already briefed Griffiths for the same propagandist purpose, and who published first, and then Mac deployed Sims who overtly dismisses the Vicar a few days later. The Vicar was quickly forgotten, but the "mad doctor" of Griffiths and especially Sims became entrenched in Edwardian culture as the likeliest solution.
By 1914 the retired and ill Macnaghten dropped the doctor element and opened the gap between the final murder and self-murder, allowing time for the killer to have to be compos enough to get away -- and not just stagger "shrieking" and "raving" to the river's edge -- and thus allow space for a confession in word to "his own people".
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