McNaughten's Notes

[Jonathan H]

Among people using historical methodology if you make a statement, with your name attached to it it, then that means you are proposing a theory.

For example, if I write the statement that Napoleon loved war, then that is a theory, not a fact, about that historical figure. For parts of his memoirs claim the very opposite; that he allegedly abhorred war, loved peace, being a family man, and setting up progressive educational policies, and so on.

The conventional wisdom about Macnagten is that he wrote a draft, and then he rewrote it very soon after, perhaps within hours.

That he removed details about which Macnaghten was unsure or were only hearsay, eg. that Druitt was a doctor, and details which were his personal opinion, eg. that the truth probably lay at the bottom of the Thames -- whatever that means?

But follow that line of thinking through to its conclusion.

A few years later, Mac utilized the rejected, inferior 'draft' to mislead the public, via Griffiths and Sims, into believing that a minor suspect, if much of a suspect at all, was almost certainly the fiend.

Furthermore, with Sims, Mac added details not in that 'draft' which further spun the story away from the historical Druitt, and away from the real investigation of 1888.

Why?

Let's assume that the official version, being official, is correct; that Druitt was one of several unlikely suspects, and no more than that.

So, in 1898 and for years after, Mac misled his pals, and through them the public -- didn't he? A minor suspect catapulted to the status of the almost-certain-murderer, case closed.

In 1913, the retiring Macnaghten wistfully spoke of the un-named Druitt as 'that remarkable man' and 'the most fascinating of criminals', and that he knew who he was and how he took his own life -- almost as if his guilt was, at least for him, a definitely, ascertained fact.

That's Mac being misleading too, isn't it, for the conventional wisdom argues that Macnaghten was not even sure what Druitt did for a living (he seems to have told Sims that 'Dr D' was unemployed!), actually knew almost nothing about him?!

His memoirs the following year, by implication, took credit for posthumously finding the un-named Druitt as the only suspect worth writing about, though obliquely.

That's totally misleading too, isn't it?

Either Mac was going to mislead the Liberal govt about his true opinion of Druitt in the official version, or he misled his family, his pals, his colleagues, and the public with the unofficial 'draft' version.

It can't be both.

[Chris]

Among people using historical methodology if you make a statement, with your name attached to it it, then that means you are proposing a theory.

So what do they do when they are just stating a fact?

Or is the idea that there's no such thing as a fact, so people may as well just say whatever they like?

[Jonathan H]

You have it backwards, Chris.

Some people here say what they like, or rather what they passionately want to remain true -- especially where an old, entrenched paradigm is concerned like: Druitt is nothing, Macnaghten was under-informed, and the identification of the 'West of England' M.P. counts for bugger all -- as if these are facts, more-over sacred facts which to question is heretical and, from some, to invite abuse, ridicule and stale cliches.

Therefore what some people here think are 'facts' are actually opinions which, arguably, fly in the face of known and/or new facts.

[Stewart P Evans]

Not quite sure...

...
Some people here say what they like, or rather what they passionately want to remain true -- especially where an old, entrenched paradigm is concerned like: Druitt is nothing, Macnaghten was under-informed, and the identification of the 'West of England' M.P. counts for bugger all -- as if these are facts, more-over sacred facts which to question is heretical and, from some, to invite abuse, ridicule and stale cliches.
Therefore what some people here think are 'facts' are actually opinions which, arguably, fly in the face of known and/or new facts.

I'm not quite sure as to whom this outburst is directed. I should, therefore, like to make it clear that from my point of view I have never claimed that 'Druitt is nothing' nor that 'Macnaghten was under-informed', in fact quite the opposite.

As for the identification of the 'West of England MP', which was tentatively made by Nick Connell and myself some eleven years ago but was identified confirmed and published by Andy Spallek more recently, I was amongst the first to congratulate Andy on this important, positive, identification.

For my part I do try to distinguish between what are facts, as recorded historically, and what is merely my opinion.

[Jonathan H]

To Stewart

Of course I am not referring to you, or for that matter Begg, or Fido, or Rumbelow, or Palmer, et al.

You are all highly regarded secondary sources on this topic, who have come to differing provisional conclusions, or theories based on available sources.

I had previously responded to you because you felt that I was writing about Macnaghten's actions and agendas -- eg. my Macnaghten -- as if they were factual statements beyond dispute. I claim no such thing, even if my manner of argument gives that impression. It's a theory, specifically a revisionist theory on a police chief and his too-late suspect. I take it as a read that I am proposing a theory which claims to trump all others, and perhaps I should not take it as read at all?

I was then responding to 'Chris', who seemed to be suggesting that I was suffering some kind of post-modernist disease, which I do not believe that I am -- though I agree with him that post-modernism is the enemy of common sense and even-handed analyses.

Respectfully disagreeing with you, I argue that Mac's memoirs are more important than the official version of his Report because it is the only document he produced, in public, on this matter with his knighted name on the line -- hence I argue the pulling back from 'shilling shocker' details he had fed pal Sims -- and because it fits hand-in-glove with the MP revelation of twenty-three years before.

You can shoot a straight arrow between the 'West of England' MP story of Feb 1891 to the memoirs of 1914 to a perfect bullseye.

I am well aware, of course, that all memoirs are self-serving, inaccurate and unofficial.

On the other hand, 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper' (1914) fits the primary sources between 1888 and 1891, than either version of his internal report, eg. a posthumous, 'protean' suspect unknown to the police until 'some years after'.

Furthermore, it goes against the expected bias of this source, in terms of profession and class, by admitting police failure (or how about Anderson's) by offering a suspect from his own class who took his own life years before.

I have been accused by some of contributing nothing in the way of new sources. This is true, yet somewhat unfair. I have tried to bring a fresh focus to old sources, especially Sims.

To my knowledge, I am the first person to break the wall around what Mac knew, or did not know about Druitt, eg. just PC Moulson's Report and nothing else, as the frantic pals in Sims (1903, 1907) are obviously a semi-fictional version of brother William trying to find missing Montie.

For Mac to know that then it is likely that he also knew that Druitt was a young barrister who killed himself around Dec 1st 1888, or exactly six months before he joined the Met in June 1889 -- as Mac mentioned to the press in 1913.

[Mayerling]

Hello all,

I'm sorry, but whether or not we trust the choices (Kosminski, Osrog, AND Druitt - everyone keeps picking on Monty more than the other two) that Sir Melville chose, it strikes me that if Sir Melville wanted to lie to throw off the "bloodhounds" after Cutbush (and, by extension, his famiy), he could have said:

These are our main choices:

1) Mary Pearcey - but only if you believe that a witness thought she saw Mary Kelly outside the rooms in Miller's Court where that poor girl was found torn apart.

2) Dr. Thomas Neill, (a.k.a. Neill Cream) - who confessed on the scaffold according to Mr. Billington the executioner, just before the trap door was opened. It is true that Dr. Neill was in Joliet Prison in 1888, but his family and himself were wealthy, and (without casting aspersions on Amrican prison conditions) he could have bribed his way out. And his later victims in 1891-92 (for which he was executed) were prostitutes.

3) Our best bet, Frederick Bailey Deeming - who appartently was trying to suggest involvement to build up an insanity defense. The newspapers and police did track down his apparently being in Whitechapel on the night of the double killing, and he may have known one other Victim. His death mask is in Scotland Yard (from Australia) and we point it out to visitors of our Black Museum as our chief suspect.

In any case all three of our leading suspects have been hanged. Therefore we consider all further investigation at an end here.


That would probably would have killed off public concern about Cutbush.


Jeff

[Jonathan H]

To Mayerling

Mac's 1914 memoirs, plus the alternate version of his 'Report' seen by his literary cronies, plus his 1913 comments upon retirement, and the extra material he fed Sims in the 1900's, all concur -- as sources -- that this poice chief believed, rightly or wrongly, that Druitt (un-named in public) was the Ripper.

Mac's extraordinary certainty about a fellow English gentleman matches that of his fellow Old Etonian, the MP Henry Farquharson, and the latter's 1891 'doctrine'; that to simply hear this tale from this indiscreet politician was to be convinced, as a 'good many people' believe the hideous revelation about this long deceased 'son of a surgeon'.

The reason Macnahten felt he had to mention Druitt in an official document of state, though never requested and never sent -- yet archived -- was that the tale had already leaked in Dorset on Feb 11th 1891.

By a stroke of luck, to put it tastelessly, there was another Whitechapel murder, two days later (Frances Coles) which press, public and police thought was by 'Jack'. This, and the libel laws, helped bury the surgeon's son scoop -- yet the MP was named the following year?!

The story could again break on any day, at any time, perhaos with more details.

If the entire story spilled out then Scotland Yard would look like chumps all over again, or worse, if Liberal-Radicals smelled a Tory cover-up of a Tory barrister multiple murderer?

Creating a 'firewall' against such a scandal Macnaghten had to put on the official record that Druitt was a suspect, in case of this unwanted spillage.

But he did not want, in 1894, to archive the whole story regarding a chief suspect about whom the police knew bugger all, for 'some years' after he had taken his own life, as that was a scandal too (though not for Mac personally, as it all happened before he joined the Force. A 'man of action' he 'laid to rest this ghost' in 1891, I believe, after he privately investigated the MP story)!

To 'cut the knot his own way' Mac turned the young, tormented man he believed was, 'in all probability', Jack the Ripper into a minor, hearsay suspect ('said to be ...').

Druitt's real identity was carefully veiled by having him subsumed into the identity of his own deceased father: eg. he might have been a physician, we are just not sure. He was too minor to waste time checking the the records of the Royal College of Surgeons, and such like.

And Druitt's status as an entirely posthumous suspect was completely obscured (in both versions, but not the memoir) which would later fool both Griffiths and Sims in 1898, and 1899, when the pair -- a Tory and a Liberal -- began disseminating the [un-named] Druitt story, in semi-fictional form, to the public.

So. it did leak -- but on Mac's terms.

In 1894, the Cutbush non-scoop could have, nevertheless, pried open the dormant scoop about the Dorset suspect, then and there.

Consider this.

If you are Macnaghten, and you believe that Druitt was the fiend -- and no official record exists of this belief as there was nobody to arrest, and respectable people's reps were on the line -- what do you do about it as the Cutbush story unfurls?

Nothing?

And then the Druitt story is discovered anyway?

That could look even worse.

For you would have to scramble to say: Oh him? Yes, of course 'we' knew about him. We even knew about him before he killed himself, being so efficient. We honestly thought that he was not that important.

Really? And where is this knuckle-headed assessment documented ...?

[Roy Corduroy]

Furthermore, it goes against the expected bias of this source, in terms of profession and class, by admitting police failure (or how about Anderson's) by offering a suspect from his own class who took his own life years before.

... it goes against the expected bias of this source, in terms of profession and class ... offering a suspect from his own class...

Good evening Jonathan,

Whose expected bias? Yours, mine, theirs? And why should offering a suspect of his own class matter? Matter compared to what or to whom? Because look what happened when Anderson offered up his suspect, a lower class ethnic minority. The negative flack came in a New York minute.

Whereas Mac's "drowned doctor" seemed to have an easy ring to it, recalling some early and lasting suspicions along those lines. I don't see how Mac sticking with a man of his same class, Druitt (disguised), has any bearing on it.

Roy

[Jonathan H]

To Roy

I think you make a really good point about what happened, in terms of the public acceptance of the 'Drowned Doctor' by the better classes -- with Macnaghten never taking public credit for it, mind you -- and the way the tactless Anderson was hammered by the very minority group he admired.

That Macnaghten was fitting into the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde/Dorian Gray pop groove, so how is that going against the expected bias?

On the other hand ...

Macnaghten, in both his memoirs and the sources which mention him, show him to be a jaunty chap who would bend over backwards to say nice things about other people, especially fellow Englishmen.

He had in front of him Dr Tumblety, an Irish-American Confidence Man, and he had 'Kosminski' an insane, obscure local man.

And perhaps he had other suspects about whom we know nothing.

But instead of choosing, if he had to choose, a suspect for 'Jack' who was 'one of them' -- and they were available according to Anderson and/or Swanson, and Littlechild, and Abberline -- he chose 'one of us', a fellow Gentile gentleman with no known criminal record, who was in no position to defend himself against rumour, slander, and the tabloid evisceration of his name and his family name.

Everything about Druitt, and everything about Macnaghten's affable character and personality, screams do not choose this man as the fiend.

Choose somebody else!

Yet, Macnaghten chose a man who could never be arrested, never officially investigated, and whose date of when he became a police suspect (1891) would provoke nothing but heartburn for the Yard because the suspect was long deceased and the police had been chasing nothing but a 'ghost' (Mac cleaned up that excruciaating element in his Report(s) and in the guff he fed his literary cronies, but came clean in hiss memoirs)

Macnaghten, who adored cricket, chose a [minor] cricketing champion.

Macnaghten who described his years at Eton as the happiest of his entirre life, chose a man who was a part-time teacher at a Boys' School.

Macnaghten, an 'enthusiastic' Tory according to Lady Aberconway (1966), chose a suspect who was himself, if not a Tory, was certainly connected by family and legal business to the Conservative Party, plus the truth had leaked in Dorset and been blabbed about by an indiscreet Tory M.P.

Instead of dismissing this 'Jack the Tory' tale as utter nonsense, Macnaghten committed this man's name as a Ripper suspect, albeit a minor one, in an official document which might have been accessed by the Liberal government of 1894!

Instead of getting Druitt off, of erring on the side of caution for the sake of his relations, of posthumously clearing such a 'tar-baby' suspect as, say, depressed, or dismissed, or delusional, or a deviant -- but not a murderer -- he embraced, wholeheartedly, whatever he heard from Farquharson and almost certainly a member of the Druitt family, and was committed to this suspect as 'Jack the Ripper', whom he calls 'remarkable' and 'fascinating' and 'protean', for the rest of his life.

Affable Mac ...?

Historical methodology teaches that a source which goes against its expected bias in terms of character, personality, vanity, nationality, professional reputation, political pressures, race, religion and class prejudice is [potentially] more reliable than one which, as expected, dovetails with some, or all of those categories.

Macnaghten goes against every single one of those categories to choose Druitt as the Ripper.

This strongly suggests that what Mac was told something about the deceased surgeon's son, in early 1891, it was so devastating, and so incriminating, that it overcame all of the countervailing factors to get the dead Druitt off the hook -- and not put the Yard on the hook by connecting it to this inconvenient suspect. (The M.P. only has to tell the full version of the tale and 'a good many people believe it').

Could Macnaghten have been mistaken?

Of course. But if so, it was a mistake made by other people, those in the know, whose prejudice would have also been against believing in Druitt's culpability: his own family (and an M.P. who discovered, perhaps, that Jack the Ripper had voted for him?)

Even the Stevensonian element projected onto the late Victorian and Edwardian public by Griffiths and Sims consolidated an element of the mythos which was not true of Druitt; that he was a medical man. Macnaghten exploited a popular novella and play because he wanted the so-called 'better classes' to swallow an unpalatable truth, like it or lump or it. That the fiend was a Gentile Gentleman.

The English Jews, understandably, were appalled at what Anderson wrote in 1910 but I think that the virulent anti-Semitism of many English people, of all classes, would have been relieved if the Polish Jew had been the hegemonic solution, rather than what Sims -- on Mac's behalf -- was claiming: one of us, not one of them.