Montague John Druitt : Whitechapel Murderer ?

[Scott Nelson]

In any case, we likely would never have heard of Mr. Druitt had he not decided to drown himself when he did.

That pretty much says it all.

[Jonathan H]

To Dr Watson

In 1891 I think that Macnaghten met with MP Henry Farquharson to learn from him why the latter was blabbing so excitedly, and so indiscreetly, about this suicided 'son of a surgeon' who was supposedly Jack the Ripper. Macnaghten and Farquharson were from the same upper class, and both knew each other as Etonians.

Whether Macnaghten then contacted a member of the Druitt family is unknown.

But what can we infer from what little we have?

We have to remember that the Ripper mystery regarding Macnaghten and Druitt is a narrative in which we have the beginning [the murders] and the end [Macnaghten thinks it was Druitt] but only have the barest glimpses of the middle?

On the one hand Macnaghten was obsessed with the mystery -- and with solving it. His 1914 memoirs are, rightly or wrongly, the confident testimony of a man who thinks he did find the solution, albeit after the killer was long dead.

Thusit is hard to imagine you could keep him back from pursuing this trail, wherever it led, including a discreet interview with William Druitt -- strictly off the record as there was nobody to arrest.

The conventional wisdom that Macnaghten was bumbling around in the filing cabinet and then swallowed some long-distance hysterical gossip is not, in my opinion, borne out by the the sources when examined in their totality, especially a close reading of his 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper' -- arguably the most important source in the whole case.

Also, the Edwardian writings of Macnaghten's pal, the famous George Sims, seem to express a mythical overlay of Macnaghten's contact with family members in 1891.

Macnaghten's unofficial, singular investigation to confer with the Druitts -- or a Druitt -- is redacted by Sims to become frantic 'friends' trying to find the 'doctor' who has vanished in 1888. They contact Scotland Yard only to discover that a super-human, super-efficient, 'exhaustive inquiry' by the police has ALREADY zeroed in on the missing, middle-aged, asylum-veteran, unemployed, Sims-look-alike, Blackheath doctor.

Though implausible Sims' fictitious version is a much better story from the police's [eg. Macnaghten's] point of view.

It also suggests a desperate need to deflect from what might have been the truth. That without input from the family the Ripper's identity would have reamained unknown and unknowable.

The source link between Macnaghten's Report(s) and Sims' 'shilling shocker' is Major Arthur Griffiths who in 1898 altered 'family' into 'friends' in his "Mysteries of Police and Crime" having based his scoop on the Aberconway Version -- which clearly says family, not friends.

On the other hand, Macnaghten may have been very wary of contacting the Druitts at all because whilst the dead cannot sue the living sure can, especially if it is being claimed by police and media that they knew their member was the Fiend and they did nothing about it.

Whatever, or whenever the family knew, or acted, regarding their terrible 'belief' about their Montie it was shielded behind the myth of the close friends who were aghast that the doctor has disappeared 'from their midst' right after the Kelly murder. From the primary sources we know that the brother, William Druitt, was trying to locate Montie after he went missing from his legal chambers.

No other source on Druitt's death mentions his dismissal from the school, and the one which has the date wrong, and does not even mention the deceased's name! My theory is that if he was sacked then it was after he went missing. He was AWOL when he should have been at the school. Although the term had ended for the students that does not mean teachers were automatically released. This was embarrassing to Valentine and so other newspapers did not repeat this point.

If he really was sacked then, yes, it MIGHT have been for molestation. It might just as easily have been for theft? It might just as easily have been because he was found with his hands around the throat of Mrs Valentine?

All of those options are a huge stretch because there is absolutely nothing in the primary or early secondary sources which even hints at such things, let alone sexually interfering with a student. Such a crime would more likely have been hushed up or, conversely, have brought in the police.

It is just as likely and mundane that Druitt was sacked [not resigned you notice] because he was trying to juggle two careers and the headmaster had had enough of his absences. Montie refused to resign and was dismissed. There is nothing in the suicide note, which we only glimpse, to suggest that some scandal at the school is the reason for his taking his own life. None of the other obituaries suggest a theory. not even the one wich claims he was dismissed. He was 'a barrister of bright future' [note the emphasis on the legal career] and 'much respected' and his death is tragic and to be deplored.

In fact, his suicide to his contemporaries was inexplicable, except that he must have suddenly gone bonkers?

Soon after the Feb 13th 1891 murder of Frances Coles, and the subsequent no-expenses-spared hunt and arrest of sailor Tom Sadler as the Ripper, I think Macnaghten quietly investigated the unlikely rumor about the suicided man in Dorset.

Yet, the idea that the 'convenient' timing of Druitt's death -- soon after the cessation of the murders -- is what locked him in as Macnaghten's chief suspect is based, in my opinion, on a logical fallacy.

A fallacy that Macnaghten himself propagated in the official version of his 1894 Report.

In that slippery document Macnaghten does indeed give the impression that 'police' had this preconceived notion that the killer must have topped himself after the Kelly atrocity because who could function for even a day after doing that to another human being [Sims' 'colorful' style' makes great play with this element of the myth]?

Either 'Jack' killed himself, Macnaghten sumises, or was carted off to a padded cell. In fact, of course, Druitt was functioning perfectly well for three weeks after the Millers Ct. abomination, winning a not insignificant civil case for the Tory party [Farquharson's Conservatives].

But what the sources suggest -- and Macnaghten's memoirs admits -- is that Druitt was unknown to the police Ripper hunters until 'some years after' the Kelly murder. Hence their desperate and unsuccessful lunge for Sadler in 1891.

Macnaghten buries this embarrassment from official eyes in that Report. He implies that Druitt fit a pre-conceived notion about what happened to the killer and why he stopped. That Druitt is not a major suspect, just more likely than Cutbush.

But that conclusion flies in the face of the second version of his Report which he showed to his cronies, in which he is certain that this is the killer, and his memoirs in which he dispenses with any other suspect at all.

Plus, that line about 'no shadow of proof' in the official version is absurd! That a well-to-do family thought their dead member was a multiple murderer is hardly normal, run-of-the-mill gossip, and in fact IS 'proof's shadow' -- as every other source connected to Macnaghten acknowledges.

if you were really looking for a handy suicide then Druitt did NOT fit the bill, as the police thought Frances Coles was likely to be a Ripper victim -- and that is certainly how they had played it in tabloids, which Sadler sued -- and this young barrister was already two years in his grave.

Therefore, for what it is worth, I think many people have it backwards.

It is Macnaghten finding Druitt which locked in KELLY as the last Ripper murder.

By the time of the Griffiths 'scoop' of 1898, Macnaghten had begun to downplay the fact that the hunt went on for another two years -- until his bombshell memoirs which were the only public document by him about the mystery under his own name.

To Roy

Re: Jack the Oxonian

Tom Cullen was a journeyman writer and an American Communist [though to my knowledge not a Party member] and he had his passport withdrawn by the State Dept, in the late fifties, due to the McCathyite Red scare.

Trapped in London journalist Cullen turned to writing a book on the Ripper mystery. It is strongly rumoured that Cullen ruthlessly swiped Dan Farson's files on the case, and thus became the first person to publish the 'Aberonway Version' of Macnaghten's Report in 1965 [we should be glad he did it, if he did it?]

It would be expected of a Marxist to be utterly biased in the way he wrote about the mystery, and this is exactly what Cullen does in "Autumn of Terror" -- which I think for all its flaws is a polemical masterpiece [I doubt Lenin makes a walk-on appearance in any other Ripper tome?].

In a nutshell -- and I will not do it any prose justice here -- Cullen's brilliant thesis is that the blighted poor of the East End were considered absolute scum by the better classes. They made a hero of Charles Warren in 1886 for using cavalry and truncheons to brutally disperse the poor people's protest march -- protesting against starving to death.

Then in 1888 a couple of women, in succession, are murdered, probably by drunken soldiers. The sensation-hungry tabloids begin salivating over a possible maniac-murderer loose in Whitechapel.

Then comes the Polly Nichols murder and the whole story goes thermonuclear.

Yet the Whitechapel horrors also produce a complete turn-around in the way the media write about the denizens of the East End, now that some of them are being massacred, so openly, in the streets. It is one of sympathy. That these women were already the victims of systemic poverty. The attention of the state, even the Queen, was riveted by the spectacle of squalor living side by side with affluence.

It was like as if an elegant Victorian statue, commemorating imperial splendor, had been rudely upended and what was found scuttling beneath was quite shocking, and not just because of the ghastly crimes.

No longer was the smug nonsense about female sex fiends being propagated so that the bourgeoisie could sleep without guilt. The victims, these prematurely aged, toothless crones -- until Kelly -- sought clients, in fact risked their lives, just for the most basic amenities of life. A shamed ruling elite began cranking out plans, even short-term action, for better housing, and better sanitation -- better something for those poor wretches?

The finl muder of Mary Kelly is not only the most appalling but takes place the night before Lord Mayor's Day and its big parade, demonically defiling any attempt by the state to claim that the East End is under control and its all business-as-usual.

At the time George Bernard Shaw writes a tasteless but very witty piece about how all the Liberal and Radical reformers, like himself, have been wasting their time on marches, and meetings, and pamphlets that nobody reads. Whereas 'some independent genius' has begun converting the aristocracy to a primitive form of socialism just by 'offing a few dregs'. Shaw cheekily hopes this 'more effective social reformer' will target a Duchess next and trigger revolution.

Now Shaw did not mean this literally, that the Ripper was motivated by social reform. But Cullen, once he realized that Macnaghten's chief suspect was a young English gentleman, and an Oxford graduate, argued that the salutive effects of the Ripper on society really were his motive.

That Druitt had probably visited the East End, along with other Oxonians who gathered at Toynbee Hall, to help the poor. He had become disillusioned with their fruitless efforts and, already mentally and sexually unbalanced, then began a form of terroristic direct action. He began murdering these poor Unfortunates to rub their horrible lives, via their horrible deaths, in the collective face of the Nobs.

With spectacular success.

Cullen's book is flawed for some reasons that are not his fault.

For example, he knew nothing of Tumblety, but then nobody did then -- and he was obviously in no position to check American newspapers. He did not have access to Kosminski's medical records, as Martin Fido only found them a generation later. He downplays Macnaghten's 'mistakes' about Druitt as Cullen's class-based ideology inevitably renders Druitt's genuine vocation(s) irrelevant. And, it was not until 1975 that Don Rumbelow accessed and published the official version of Macnaghten's Report, which can be interpreted as showing that Druitt was just a more likely suspect than Cutbush, and that's all.

However, Cullen makes mistakes he should not have.

For example, he never grasped that the police hunt went on for another two years after the Kelly murder. He thinks the 'Dear Boss' letter was by Druitt even though it's creation by a journalist was the one thing about which Sims, Macnaghten and Anderson all agreed on [and of course Littlechild who named the hoaxer].

Cullen tries to make Druitt the chief suspect of most of the top cops when he was just Macnaghten's. Cullen used a completely dodgy source to claim that the police pulled back on their patrols after Druitt was fished out of the Thames, when the primary sources all how this to be false. Druitt was an unknown, too-late suspect -- as Macnaghten vitally admitted in his memoirs.

For all that, Cullen's book is written with a masterly, novelistic prose style. and for me he nailed the reason why Druitt killed exclusively in the East End when he could have 'grazed' in Blackheath, or central London's parks which were teeming with potential victims.

It has to be said that this leftist-driven theory has no confirmatory basis whatsoever in the Victorian/Edwardian sources on Druitt; not his obits, not Farquharson, not Macnaghten, and not Griffiths/Sims.

Macnaghten is, after all, the Ur-Source on Druitt and for him there was no motive at all. Just an insatiable lust to kill and destroy a certain class of women which finally and thankfully consumed the cunning perpertrator

Of the modern, major writers on the case, eg. Evans. Rumbelow, Begg, Fido, Palmer, et. al. none take this theory seriously [Theory? What theory? It's just conjecture supported by nothing more than supposition! Almost a Marxist put-on?] even to bother to debunk it.

So, who agrees with me about Montie Druitt as a 'deranged social reformer'?

To my knowledge absolutely nobody, except Cullen and of course he's passed away.

Yet 'Autumn of Terror' if you want to simply enjoy it as literature, is still the greatest and most rewarding read I have ever had in this field.

[Roy Corduroy]

It is Macnaghten finding Druitt which locked in KELLY as the last Ripper murder.

That's good, Jonathan.

Cullen, once he realized that Macnaghten's chief suspect was a young English gentleman, and an Oxford graduate, argued that the salutive effects of the Ripper on society really were his motive.

That Druitt had probably visited the East End, along with other Oxonians who gathered at Toynbee Hall, to help the poor. He had become disillusioned with their fruitless efforts and, already mentally and sexually unbalanced, then began a form of terroristic direct action. He began murdering these poor Unfortunates to rub their horrible lives, via their horrible deaths, in the collective face of the Nobs.

With spectacular success.

So that is the crux of Cullen's "Marxist" take on it, considering his leaning. Thanks for spelling that out for me. He took a direct approach - Use McNaghten's prime suspect, flesh it out and write a book. All very cutting edge at the time.

Cullen used a completely dodgy source to claim that the police pulled back on their patrols after Druitt was fished out of the Thames, when the primary sources all how this to be false. Druitt was an unknown, too-late suspect -- as Macnaghten vitally admitted in his memoirs.

The dodgy thing being Backert's statement, quoted by McCormick, from Dr. Dutton's papers.

So, who agrees with me about Montie Druitt as a 'deranged social reformer'?

Yikes! I would much prefer he simply had syphilis, or at least the clap.

Yet 'Autumn of Terror' if you want to simply enjoy it as literature, is still the greatest and most rewarding read I have ever had in this field.

I couldn't agree more. Thanks, Jonathan,

Roy

[Jonathan H]

Thanks for your thoughtful feedback, Roy, much appreciated.

I do apologize that my posts are often so long, and repetitive, but from other posters' arguments, reflecting the conventional wisdom debunking Macnaghten and Druitt -- which maybe correct -- that I feel I have to launch these detailed salvos to get my [relatively] new take on the primary and secondary sources across.

Cheers, Jonathan H

[miss_anna]

Yes, Macnaghten may have have been wrong in his conclusions, for sure.

On the other hand, his memoirs dispense completely with [the un-named] Ostrog and Kosminski, and focus only on [the un-named] Druitt, about which he writes that the goods on this suspect only came to police attention [eg. himself] 'some years after' June 1889.

That's the critical revelation of his 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper' in 1914. Druitt was not a contemporaneous suspect. He only came to Macnaghten's attention from between 1891 and 1894. That's the meaning of the title's chapter; the police were chasing a phantom about whose early demise they were ignorant of, and uninvolved with.

Abberline downplays, quite rightly, the suspect status of what he calls 'the young doctor' and the 'young medical student' in his ripostes to George Sims in 1903.

But this is unlikely to be Druitt as there was no reason Abberline had ever heard of him.

Understandably, he seems to be confusing the 'Drowned Doctor' of Sims with a third, missing medical student person-of-interest from 1888. In the same interview he talks about contacting the Police Commissioner, by then Macnaghten, to inform him of his theory, rapidly hardening into a certainty, that the Ripper was this wife-poisoner George Chapman.

What poor Abberline does not realize, and there is no reason why he should have, is that Macnaghten HIMSELF is the source for Sims about [the un-named] Druitt, and [the un-named] Kosminski.

Abberline thinks this 'Drowned Doctor' must be a journalistic fantasy because, as a key investigator in 1888, he was never in hot pursuit of an English doctor who vanished after the Kelly murder, whose friends were frantic about him being the Fiend, and who bobbed up in the Thames over a month later [it's a fantasy alright, although Sims didn't know it].

It's completely understandable from Abberline's point of view that he thinks Sims is talking out of his hat, in 'The Referee', because the famous writer had more than implied just such a monolithic police chase in 1888.

Sims' arrogant reply was that the 'Drowned Doctor' was the Super-suspect in a 'final' and 'conclusive' report to the Home Office. Again, the only suspect who makes any sense to Abberline is William Sanders, who was the subject of his own report to the Home Office -- which was hardly final nor conclusive.

We now know what neither man realized. They were both right, and they were both wrong.

Sanders, an insane medical student, was perhaps the only dodgy English medico that the police were in search of as a possible suspect for the Ripper.

Whilst Montie Druitt was the suspect whom Macnaghten, quite alone amongst senior police, was sure was the best bet to be the Ripper.

I think Macnaghten was playing a game which suckered both men.

That Report, an alleged 'draft', which Sims was privy to and now nicknamed the 'Aberconway Version', was not final or conclusive, at least in its bureaucratic status, and had never gone near the Home Office. But it did express Macnaghten's personal certainty about Druitt's guilt [Sims never even knew that it was not even a fair representation of the thrust of the original 1894 Report gathering dust in the Scotland Yard archives.]

As a source Abberline's 1903 interview arguably dovetails perfectly with Macnaghten's admission, in his memoir, confirming the [un-named] Druitt as the Super-suspect who dwarfs all others -- but a too-late suspect.

In a comparable way, Littlechild is doing the same dance in his letter to Sims. He has never heard of this English 'Dr D' who was supposedly hotly pursued by police in 1888. He does recall an American quack suspect, a strong candidate for the Ripper though not a sadist, who was 'believed' to have killed himself.

As an administrator and a propagandist, Macnaghten's mission was to bury the embarrassing fact that Druitt [and Kosminski] came to police attention only after the last Whitechapel murder, of Frances Coles in 1891, and he -- the eternal Etonian schoolboy -- did such a good job with his smoke-and-mirrors tricks that both Abberline and Sims were misled. [Macnaghten's pranks inadvertently mislead researchers to this day.]

Macnaghten's memoirs were a belated attempt, in retirement, to somewhat set the record straight for posterity.

Well, not nearly enough as it turns out.

That source, 'Days of My Years', remains ignored, or unread, or dismissed, or underappreciated by even some of the Big Guns of Ripperology -- and that included Cullen [Paul Begg and R J Palmer being notable exceptions]

I concede there's a tremendous amount of misinformation about the ripper case. It was on this website that i got Abberline's quote, which may be wrongfully referring to the drowned medical student as being Druitt.
http://www.casebook.org/suspects/druitt.html QUOTE:
In 1903, Inspector Abberline, gave an interview to the Pall Mall Gazette in response to a claim made in a Sunday newspaper that the Ripper was a young medical student who had drowned in the Thames. Abberline said, 'Yes, I know all about that story, but what does it amount to, simply this, soon after the last murder in Whitechapel the body of a young man was found in the Thames, but there is nothing beyond the fact that he was found at that time to incriminate him'.

[Johnr]

Tom Cullen's book worth a re-read.

Hello Jonathan Miss Anna, Gareth, Roy et al,

Having waded through Jonathan's non-turgid, non-convoluted ,but very long dissertation on Macnaghten and his prime candidate for JTR, I think you have made out a very interesting case.

I particularly like the way you have built upon Tom Cullen's early investigations and theorising.Of course, he published using the Aberconway version of the MM.

Roy Jenkins did not release the "official/unofficial" copy from the police files till 1974.

Cullen, being a journalist obviously drew on newspapers a lot.His was a book from the era before indexes. Though he did have footnotes.To be fair he could hardly draw on police files so early in the piece.

Yes, Cullen's, like McCormick's - dare I say it -is a colourful read.I think the former is a tad more honest though. Cullen tells you how many gold watches were pickpocketed on Lord Mayors Day 1888. And makes an early Druitt/Toynbee Hall link.

Jonathan, I would like to see you cut up your long post above, and repost it as two pieces on the Tom Cullen thread and Macnaghten Memo thread.

So things don't get lost.Well done. In my opinion. JOHN RUFFELS.

[miss_anna]

MacNaghten's Wikipedia biography confirms that MacNaghten was not directly involved with the ripper investigation!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melville_Macnaghten QUOTE:
Even though he was not directly involved with the investigation of the Ripper killings, like most members of the Metropolitan Police, Macnaghten took an active interest in the case. As Chief Constable he had access to police records on the case; as a result of his own investigation he wrote a confidential report dated February 23, 1894; however, the report was not publicly available until 1959 and the complete report was not available or viewing and reproduction until 2002. This report proved influential for Ripper research, for it established the canonical victims of the serial killer at five, as well as naming three possible suspects.

[Jonathan H]

Hi John R

Thanks very much for your kind and thoughtful response to my long post. Much appreciated.

I think I have already written a lot of this on the Macnaghten thread?

I'll go and check.

When you say post it on the Cullen thread, do you mean in the Books section -- where this great writer is dismissed as having about as much relevance as a gramophone?

Cheers Jonathan H

[bkohatl]

Druitt, better than even money suspect

No one who has ever seen the photos of Mary Jane Kelly's apartment can doubt that the murderer must have been going insane. This has always led me to Aaron Kosminski(insane asylum) and Montague Druitt(death, by suicide) as the most likely Jack The Ripper Suspects. Tumblety would periodically reappear engaged in his usual shenanagans, so he is likely. I always remember Ian Fleming saying that James Bond would have actually been a horrible spy because he was too good looking and stood out. You want someone who blends in, a worker drone. That is why Kosminski is my favorite suspect, but I just wish we could find out what prompted McNaughten's famour comment about Druitt. I don't know what kind of people inhabited the back alleys of Whitechapel, but it wasn't so extraordinary for a gentleman like Montague to be there, then he is a definite possibility.

[Jonathan H]

I would encourage you to have a look at the posts on this thread to get a better sense of this suspect.

I think that Montague John Druitt is probably the Ripper. This is considered a very old-fashioned and out of date opinion, and that is putting it politely!

A police chief, Sir Melville Macnaghten, who championed this suspect seemed to make three significant errors about him that for most people condemns him as a weak suspect, about whom this police chief knew bugger all. Macnaghten, in two versions of a confidential police report, seems to have thought Montie Druitt was a middle-aged physician, one who killed himself in the hours immediately after the horror of what he did to Mary Kelly in that tiny room.

Primary sources reveal that Druitt was not middle-aged, not a doctor and did not kill himself until three weeks later after the Kelly murder. He was a young barrister [and bachelor], a part-time teacher at a boys school in Blackheath, who had actually just won a not insignificant civil case for the Tory Party [the Conervatives] and then, a day or so later, fatally and inexplicably threw himself in the Thames. His body was recovered on Dec 31st 1888.

For what it is worth [as I am completely alone] I have developed and advocated a theory that Macnaghten was a sly charmer who wanted to conceal from the public, and the Home Office, that Druitt only came to police attention 'some years after' his suicide. Because it was embarrassing that the police had been pursuing a phantom for over two years.

I argue that Macnaghten also consciously disguised [via credulous literary cronies] Druitt as a 'Blackheath Jekyll' and a 'Whitechapel Hyde' as libel laws in England could be ferocious [many of the sources allude warily to them]. He thus made Druitt unrecoverable, without the name, which did not become available, by accident, in 1959, and was still not published until 1965.

No evidence has survived, or been allowed to survive, which 'proves' Druitt was the culprit. All we have left is historical methodology. This says that a source which goes against its expected bias is a strong indication that the evidence, or some kind of perception, stormed and overwhelmed the citadel of prejudice.

We would expect three English, Gentile Gentlemen to not want a fellow member of their class to be the Ripper -- to instead cling to say a foreign Jew -- yet they were certain it was 'one of us'?

Members of Druitt's own bourgoisie family [my guess is his older brother William], an aristocratic politician Henry Farquarson -- who stumbled upon the family's secret in 1891 as a near neighbor -- and the Etonian Macanghten all defied their class bias by believing that Druitt was the fiend. Moreover, the police chief launched a semi-fictional propaganda campaign, in the Edwardian Era, to impress upon the public that the Ripper was an English, Christian professional from the 'better classes'.

I urge a reading of Macnaghten's memoirs, 'Days of My Years' (1914), specifically the jaunty preface and the bombshell chapter 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper' as this source is, in my opinion, the most important of the entire mystery.

As I wrote before nobody agrees with any of that, and many who do not are far more experienced researchers and writers on this subject than I am -- towards whom I have the highest regard.

[Adam Went]

MJ Druitt was absolutely, categorically, definitely NOT Jack the Ripper.

Put simply, there is absolutely no evidence against him whatsoever other than the fact that he himself thought he was going a little insane and drowned himself in December 1888, which Druitt-ists use as the reason that the murders stopped.

The memo of Melville Macnaghten is riddled with simple factual errors throughout, and the fact that alongside Druitt as a suspect, he was Michael Ostrog - well, that should say all that needs to be said about the value of his memorandum to serious research.

In one of the murders, that of Annie Chapman, Druitt had to play a game of cricket a few hours after the time of that murder in an entirely different area. He would have been cutting it very fine indeed, even if he had been able to make it at all, and I can assure you that as a cricketer, it is not a sport that you want to be playing and can excel at if you've been awake most or all of the night before - yet this is the suggestion being made by those who felt Druitt was the Ripper.

He was guilty of nothing more than being a pitiful character, especially in his later years. Sacked from job, fearing that he was going to go insane like his mother, and reduced to committing suicide.

That's all aside from the fact that it's a stretch to try and match Druitt to any of the major witness descriptions of the killer.....

I would bet you right now that if Druitt had drowned himself in December 1898, rather than December 1888, we would never have heard his name linked to the crimes. He was just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it's unfortunate that such an apparently troubled man should be lumped as the world's most infamous serial killer as well post-humously.

Cheers,
Adam.

[Natalie Severn]

Henry Farquarson - one of England"s original MAD DOGS?

Jonathan,
The Farquharson family,starting with dad seem not to have been quite right in the head.
The Father [Henry Farquharson] bred 150 Newfoundland dogs and they were exercised by two kennel boys who couldnt quite manage them.One day a catrastrophic fight broke out and 45 were torn to bits during their "constitutional".Father Farquharson who had a demonic temper then laid into the two kennel boys and almost beat them to a pulp.

Next we have the MP Farquharson,his son, who specialised,it would appear,not in mad dogs but in the spread of malice.
His adversary in the West Dorset elections was a man named Charles Tindal Gatty.
Apparently,instead of simply promoting himself as the better prospective MP for West Dorset, this Farquarson chap went round the constituency with large placards ,making hellfire speeches saying that Gatty had been expelled from Charterhouse school,at the age of twelve, for acts of "impropriety".

Gatty sued him for 5 thousand pounds-----about half a million today, and he won,though the costs were halved by agreement later.
But clearly this was a man with some kind of need to spread malicious rumour of one kind or another----especially about people who he perceived to have sexual orientations that differed. Druitt may simply have been unfortunate enough to have been perceived by Farquharson to been of a different sexual orientation from him [and his mad dad Henry] and therefore game for the spread of more malicious rumour!
Might it not be best to take anything he "may have said and spread " with a large pinch of salt? After all --Druitt wasnt around to defend himself.........

I wonder if Farquharson Senior was one of the original characters in that song, "Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the Midday Sun"?

Just as an aside Jonathan,if this Farquarson chap was in fact the chap who was believed to have initiated all the rumours about Druitt and Macnaghten, then, as a former old Etonion school friend and fellow "tea planter" in India was "put in the picture" by Farquharson,then having received a pile of potentially libelous " private information" from Farquharson its no wonder he burnt it all to a cinder! He might very well have anticipated being implicated in some exorbitant damages being brought by the Druitt family!

[Jonathan H]

To Adam West

Yes, you might be right. Though you cannot know it as an absolute fact as you were not there, and at this remove we lack everything we need.

That cuts both ways. Therefore what you wrote is not the only argument which can be marshaled.

Convenient death?

For example, Druitt's death was not 'convenient' as the police were seen to be chasing Sadler not only for the Coles murder in 1891 but also as 'Jack'. To accept Druitt meant admitting that they had been chasing a phantom for two years -- which the much maligned Macnaghten admitted in his memoirs.

Eyewitness?

Of all the major suspects Druitt is potentially the best, generic fit for the best eyewitness -- at least according to the police who deployed him in such capacity -- Joseph Lawende, who described a Gentile-featured man about Montie's age and build with Catherine Eddowes.

Cricket timetable?

The tightness of the timing is arguably exaggerated. Plus this is a point that the Druitt family could have made against a delusional confession/accusation -- yet they 'believed' according to the filed version of Macnaghten's Report.

Druitt sacked?

Only one primary source makes this claim and it is dodgy, not even mentioning the deceased's name. He may have been sacked from the school and not cared. He may have been sacked after he was already dead. He may not have been sacked at all. The other primary sources about the inquest into his death focus on his main vocation as a successful barrister. His suicide, in those accounts, is inexplicable?

Macnaghten's errors?

Even if Mac's memory was slding away we now know that he poetntially had a source in MO Farquharson to whom Druitt was known. Or, Macnaghten deliberately shrouded Druitt in fictional details to enhance the Yard's rep that they were chasing a contemporaneous suspect, whilst protecting them from a libel suit: the perfect fix.

To Natalie

Yes, good point, one I too have made on these boards. The counter-argument is that if Farquharson was an unreliable twit than Macnaghten would have known this too, and thus factored it in to his assessment about fellow Gentleman Druitt. Yet he was still certain.

[Natalie Severn]

But Jonathan,I seem to remember you making the point that as both Farquharson and Macnaghten were old Etonions and as both had been Tea Planting together in India,then what was more likely than that it was Farquharson who had told Macnaghten that Montague Druitt was Jack the Ripper?
My point being that surely this Farquharson chap was a person proven to engage in the spread of malicious gossip and worse and as such his word has to be very suspect indeed.
If Farquharson began by simply pouring poison in the ears of Macnaghten and followed it up with a sheaf of "private information" this may have been the reason Macnaghten hurriedly burnt his evidence .
But for Macnaghten it suited his purpose; when it came to knowing who the ripper was, Farquharson had had his uses.Macnaghten decided he believed him----but it doesnt mean everybody else has to!

[Jonathan H]

To Natalie

I'm not sure I follow your question?

Farquharson was somebody known to Macnaghten, not just a complete stranger. If the former was an utter wanker, then Macnaghten may well have factored this into his assessment of the information that the MP had stumbled upon.

It has to be remembered that the MP did not come up with this theory necessarily out of thin air. The origins of the accusation/theory of Druitt as the fiend seem to begin with his family -- usually the last group to countenance that one of their own is a vile criminal. On the balance of probabilities I think Macnaghten would have met with them, or one of them, to test the MP's claim. Moreover, we get a glimpse of this behind the mythical version told by Sims in the 1900's; about the 'doctor's friends' being in touch with the Yard, who 'already knew' the true identity of their insane chum.

The importance of Farquharson as a bridging source between the Druitt obits and Macnaghten's 'said to be a doctor' Report, official version, is that conventional wisdom had argued until 2008 that the police chief knew nothing accurate about Montie. That his source must only have been PC Moulson's Report, and information about a mad medico which came to him 'some years after', perhaps about the third, missing medical student -- which would bring Managhten of 1894 into alignment with Abberline in 1903. Paul Begg in 'The Facts' puts this argument very well [but seems ignorant of the 'West of England MP' fragment].

Spallek's identification of the MP arguably upended this theory. For it meant that Macnaghten actually had an initial source who knew the suspect and this would have had very accurate biographical information about Druitt [eg. 'son of a surgeon']. It becomes even more mysterious that a senior police administrator -- who prided himself on having an excellent memory -- would so severely distort Druitt's profile by the 1898 unofficial version of his Report.

My theory is that it was deliberate.

I cannot prove that but I offer two examples of Macnaghten the mythmaker:

1) Griffiths in 1898 changed 'family' into 'friends' -- a conscious example that these gentlemen were playing with fire in terms of the libel laws. So, if they were playing with fire -- then why play at all? After all, if Mac was sincere in his errors then there was already enough information in Griffiths, and even more in Sims, for the affluent, middle-aged doctor's family to attempt a law-suit. Unless ... you knew that the profile had been so altered as to make it unrecoverable to the general public, to Druitt's peers, and to tabloid vultures.

2) In 1903 Sims thinks that the document Griffiths viewed, or had access to, was a 'definitive' and 'exhaustive' and 'final' copy of a Report sent to the Home Office. That 'Dr. D' -- who never literally existed -- was on file at this department of state as 'Jack the Ripper'. This was an outright fabrication if it came from Macnaghten. Not only was it another version of a Report, addressed to nobody which was lodged in Scotland Yard's files, the entire character of the 'Aberconway' version is different from the filed version -- in which Druitt is one of three, minor suspects.