Evening Post article, 1905

[Chris]

Here's a link to an interesting article published in the Evening Post (Wellington, New Zealand) on 10 July 1905:

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=EP19050710.2.9

It describes a recent visit to the Middlesex Street area by "Mr. T. E. Donne, Superintendent of the New Zealand Government Tourist Department, and Mr. P. A. Vaile, of Auckland, accompanied by Inspector Macmillan and Detective-Sergeant Ferrier, of Scotland Yard".

One of the visitors recounts what they were told about Jack the Ripper:
""We were taken all over the 'country' of 'Jack the Ripper,'" added Mr. Vaile. "The police knew who was the criminal; our friends from Scotland Yard told us that he died while under surveillance and the murders ceased. It was, according to them, a medical man's assistant, who was a little 'unsettled' mentally.""

This sounds like a version of the Druitt story, current at relatively junior levels in Scotland Yard, including the claim that the suspect was under surveillance at the time of his death.

[lynn cates]

mixture

Hello Chris. Does it strike you that this has, perhaps, some elements of the Kosminski story thrown in (surveillance)?

The best.
LC

[Jonathan H]

This interesting article is quite a dog's breakfast of bits and pieces; bits of Druitt [or at least a fragment of him as a young gentleman] and perhaps a bit of Kosminski [though he wasn't dead yet], and some sort of claim about a promising, yet undocumented surveillence on a local suspect.

The article suggests two things to me.

That serving, Edwardian policemen of the lower echelon -- as opposed to retired ones like Reid and Abberline -- were picking up gossip from their superiors [eg. Assistant Commissioner Melville Macnaghten, the progenitor of the 'Drowned Doctor'] which had mutated and added to by people who did not read Griffiths, or Sims, or know of Anderson's public comments. That they were unaware that this rudely stitched together hybrid is partly due to senior policemen prefering different 'chief suspects'.

Secondly, and more importantly, this article is, I believe, a minor cog of the overarching police propaganda machine, pushed hardest by Macnaghten but also by Anderson, that an efficient police force in 1888 was very close to catching the Fiend -- all three of him, or four of him, or five of him?

That the police knew who he [them?] was, and some sort of dragnet was closing inexorably around him [them?] like a hangman's noose -- but the swine up and died!

In other words, the public perception, from 1888 to 1891, that Scotland Yard was like the blindfolded, bumbling Bobbie in the famous cartoon is an unfair, inaccurate, and slanderous tabloid invention.

The theory I adhere to which tries to reconcile these contradictory portraits, and self-portraits of the police, and by the police, is that there were major, genuine chief suspects but it all had to be concealed that the police had 'stuffed up' every one of them.

It could be argued that such criticism would have been terribly unfair as the police were working with only the most rudimentary forensic science, trying to catch a killer who had no known connection to his victims.

Nevetheless, rather than come clean about all this, senior police buried the truth; that one had fled, one had killed himself -- with two subsequent years of the police chasing a phantom -- and one had been incarcerated before they even knew of his existence.

I am even prepared to believe that Anderson and Swanson's fading, self-serving memories were absolutely sincere in thinking that that appalling bounder, Tumblety, had been cleared and no longer worth talking about, and that Kosminski was identified by a treacherous witness soon after the Kelly murder.

The enigmatic Macnaghten is quite different because in 1914 he publicly, though gently, debunked his own behind-the-scenes claim that 1888 police hunted [the un-named] Druitt -- which this 1905 mishmash reflects -- though nobody on the eve of the First World War seemed to notice.