Frantic Friends?

[Bridewell]

Hi Jonathan,

The suggestion that MJD was sacked for going AWOL is not one I have considered before, and is certainly not without merit. One concern I would have is the presence of the two cheques on the London & Provincial Bank (for £50 & £16). That's the equivalent of something like £7,000 at today's values. The reports, frustratingly, don't say who the cheques were made out to or against whose account(s) they were drawn. It's been speculated that these represented severance pay from the school, bu perhaps they weren't. If they were severance pay, are you arguing that they were sent to MJD by post?
Just as an aside, I'm puzzled that cheques in the pocket of a drowned man, who had been in the river for some time, hadn't dissolved & were still legible. Why did he have them with him if he was intent on suicide - it's not as though there would have been any point in paying them in, is it? I guess, though, if he was suicidal, he wouldn't have been thinking rationally anyway.

Regards, Bridewell.

[Bridewell]

' ... However, on 21 December, after MJD had vanished, but before he had surfaced at Chiswick, the meeting's minutes record: 'The Honorary Secretary and Treasurer, Mr M J Druitt, having gone abroad, it was resolved that he be and he is hereby removed from the post of Honorary Secretary and Treasurer' ...'

The word 'abroad' is currently used to mean 'overseas' or in another country. I'm not sure exactly when its use changed, but it was once used to mean 'at large' or 'astray' in the sense of being absent from those places where one might usually be found; in MJD's case this would presumably mean the school, his chambers his home address. It's therefore perfectly feasible, if MJD was the Ripper, that he could have been 'abroad' in Whitechapel, i.e. missing from his usual haunts.

Regards, Bridewell.

[Jonathan H]

Frantic Brother

I don't think they would put an ambiguous euphemism in the official minutes.

Rather, the cricketers honestly thought that Druitt was abroad.

Putting all the [incomplete] bits and pieces together, I think that Druitt confessed to a priest on a Friday and from that moment -- 'Since Friday ...'-- he knew he was headed, like mother, into the asylum system.

To avoid that fate, he had these big cheques, put it about that he was fleeing abroad, 'alluded' to suicide in a note for his brother, bought a season rail pass he would not need, and went to a location with which he was not associated, Chiswick, and drowned himself using rocks in his pockets.

Either the un-named 'friend' was the priest, eg. possibly Lonsdale, or just a concerned pal, and thus it was another figure who told William that his brother had confessed to being 'Jack' -- possibly his own cousin, the Rev. Charles.

A shocked William hightails it to London and, on the 13th, at the school, finds the note. He also learns that for supposedly being abroad, for being AWOL, his brother has been sacked. Yet the two gents kept the terrible possibility that they were looking for a tormented figure, possibly a deceased figure, to themselves. Consequently the cricket club sacked him too.

Then his body floated to the surface on the 31st ...

This is how Sims veils it in his Edwardian writings, definitive for his wide audience because he had such such clubby contacts with police administrators from the same ruling elite (though Sims was a Liberal-Radical and Macnaghten an affable Tory):

Feb 16th, 1902

'The homicidal maniac who

Shocked the World as Jack the Ripper

had been once - I am not sure that it was not twice - in a lunatic asylum. At the time his dead body was found in the Thames, his friends, who were terrified at his disappearance from their midst, were endeavouring to have him found and placed under restraint again.'

April 5th, 1903

'A little more than a month later the body of the man suspected by the chiefs at the Yard, and by his own friends, who were in communication with the Yard, was found in the Thames. The body had been in the water about a month.'

Sept 22nd, 1907

'The doctor had been an inmate of a lunatic asylum for some time, and had been liberated and regained his complete freedom.

After the maniacal murder in Miller's-court the doctor disappeared from the place in which he had been living, and his disappearance caused inquiries to be made concerning him by his friends who had, there is reason to believe, their own suspicions about him, and these inquiries were made through the proper authorities.

A month after the last murder the body of the doctor was found in the Thames. There was everything about it to suggest that it had been in the river for nearly a month.'

[Robert]

Hi Jonathan

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, you make Monty's suicide seem like a very cold, planned affair. The trouble is, Monty didn't make a will. A barrister might have been expected to make a will if he was as clinical in his last days as Monty is supposed to have been.

I think the friend who alerted William was probably a fellow lawyer. He said that Monty hadn't been seen at his chambers. This seems to indicate a legal contact.

[Jonathan H]

To Robert

So cold was Montie that his later fictional counterpart, the drowned doctor, had to be more acceptably tormented and out-of-control, committing suicide immediately!

John Henry Lonsdale was a fellow lawyer and a clergyman.

In the fictional version, the friends suspect because the doctor had said he wanted to kill harlots, and was diagnosed as insane -- but high functioning.

Behind that I believe is Montie telling somebody that he was Jack, and that person told the brother after he vanished.

Imagine the stress William must have been under from the 11th to the 31st of Dec?

[Cogidubnus]

I don't think they would put an ambiguous euphemism in the official minutes.

Rather, the cricketers honestly thought that Druitt was abroad.

Here I believe you're quite correct Jonathan...but if he really wanted to give the impression he'd gone abroad:

To avoid that fate, he had these big cheques, put it about that he was fleeing abroad, 'alluded' to suicide in a note for his brother, bought a season rail pass he would not need, and went to a location with which he was not associated, Chiswick, and drowned himself using rocks in his pockets.

Then why go to all that blessed trouble, and then leave the suicide note?

However:

If I am right about the date being Dec 13th....

Again I think your conjecture re the 13th/30th may well be correct...it sounds a likely mishearing at any rate...and you also make a good point about teaching being possibly the lesser of his occupations...

Jonathan, every instinct tells me to totally mistrust Mac, and therefore regard MJD as being just too conveniently at hand - but you continue to niggle away at the back of my mind!

All the best

Dave

[Jonathan H]

Distrusting Mac the smoothie is a healthy position, for sure.

I think that Druitt went to a lot of trouble to appear to have gone abroad -- it got him sacked from two places -- but he left his brother with the possoble truth because he would know that William by then likely knew that he was the Ripper (or delusionally believed that he was the Ripper).

Once Montie was safely deceased then William could produce the letter to him, and in public.

If William really did claim to be his dead sibling's only relative, apart from sectioned Mum, then it may have been because he wanted his clerical cousin, Charles, kept well away from taking an oath about what he really knew.

Or the reporter simply misheard William as he misheard the date: 30th for 13th. William meant that he was the only relative in the room.

That is what is key here.

What are the implications for the old paradigm, that Druitt killed himself because he had been sacked -- always shaky -- if the month is correct but the number, by a single digit, is what is incorrect?

[Cogidubnus]

Hi Jonathan

It could, of course, be argued that he'd been tempted into doing something for which he KNEW he'd be sacked when he was inevitably caught...(I'm not specifying what, you understand), "and it was the dreadful guilt over this"....etc...

So I suspect there is ample breathing room for the "old paradigm" to survive.

Sorry!

Dave

[Jonathan H]

In one sense I agree.

Limited, meager and ambiguous sources are, of course, capable of mutliple interpretations.

But part of the entrenched and arguably redundant paradigm is that Mac did not know the real Druitt (Wwell, not according to him?)

Therefore he did not know that a likely cause of Druitt's untimely self-murder was his being dismissed for 'serious trouble'.

This gets boot-strapped by some into: Druitt was gay, he was caught doing something perverse, he was sacked in disgrace, he took his own life.

A variation on this old line is that Mac's 'sexual mania' refers to homosexuality which it does not -- not according to Mac anyhow.

Druitt the tragic gay is possible but unlikely as it flies in the face of all other available sources who claim no such sequence of events. Even the one primary source which mentions his dismissal does not make such a tragic connection.

It is much more likely that since this detail was dropped the meaning of that source is that the brother arrived on the 13th and discovered that he had been sacked, and that the 'serious trouble' was being AWOL.

Consider also that Mac alone knew this at the Yard because it was his private investigation.

We see this confirmed again in a newly found, or published source on the other site:

Sunday Independent
June 8, 1913
--------------

Column by J.H. Cox

'... Sir Melville is sherlockholmeslikeman ... the secret as to the real identity of Jack-the-Ripper will perish with him. He could tell the whole history of that fascinating personage. But he won't. He said to the reporter--"Jack the Ripper was a maniac. I have a very clear idea of who he was and how he committed suicide. But that with other secrets will never be revealed by me.'

As all other sources suggest, Druitt as the fiend was Mac's secret. Despite the name gaething dust in SY's archive it was a tale known only to him, fully, and involved a load of secrets. Those secrets go with him to the grave.

Then what on earth had he been telling Sims ...?

[caz]

Hi Jonathan,

Just my amateur observations here, but the language used in your sources does not really lend itself to your corresponding interpretations.

For example:

1) Getting into serious trouble at the school, and being dismissed for it, would tend to imply that Druitt was there at the time and had said or done something serious enough to warrant the boot. Being in trouble with the school would have been the more natural way of putting it if he had taken himself off without leave and was consequently dismissed in his absence.

2) In those days, the default position of saying that someone had 'gone abroad' was the ambiguous euphemism (think 'gone away' and you'll get the drift), used when it either wasn't known where the person was, or the person didn't want their whereabouts broadcast. If it was believed that Druitt had literally gone overseas, that would have been stated, precisely to avoid everyone putting the euphemistic interpretation on it and assuming he had vanished, God knows where or why.

3) Druitt left a letter for Valentine, 'alluding' to suicide. He also left one for his brother, saying it was best for him to die. (He also left cheques in his pocket that could identify him, when he could easily have torn them up, knowing they were no use to him.) But he seems not to have left a suicide note for his legal colleagues.

Isn't it likely then, that there was a direct link between the 'serious' trouble 'at' the school and the note he left for Valentine, alluding to suicide? That he knew both notes would be found soon after he was missed, and then Valentine would know just how troubled he had really been? But this doesn't quite square with your idea that when Druitt went missing - from his chambers, the school and his cricket club - he wasn't yet in trouble with any of them specifically, and did not know Valentine would be 'dismissing' him, effectively for drowning himself on the job. Why did he want Valentine, specifically, to know his intentions, if they had no link with anything that had happened at the school?

Love,

Caz
X

[Jonathan H]

Caz,

I could not agree less for the following reasons.

1. I seriously doubt that the formal minutes of a formal club would record a phrase that was not serious. For the very reason that ambiguity is to be avoided in such records.

They thought, for some reason, that Druitt was overseas.

That his being AWOL was inconvenient, and sudden, and unexpected for them -- and so he was sacked. Later, realising they had been dealing with a member who was mentally deranged -- as they saw it -- they also officially recorded their sorrow at his passing by his own hand.

2. For decades it has been assumed that the source saying 'on the 30th of December' must be wrong because Druitt could not have been sacked so late, after he had vanished and after William and/or Valentine had found his suicidal notes.

That the month is wrong and should be 'November'.

I think now it more likely that the reporter has misheard '13th' for '30th' (they are phonetically similar) which undermines the case for Montie taking his own life because he was dismissed while alive. This was always shaky because no other source makes such a connection between his dismissal and his suicide, not even this one.

The likely date, 13th Dec, makes sense as the whole paragraph is referring to when William learned things. eg. On the 11th that his brother was mssing from his legal chambers. He came to London. On the 13th he learned that his brother had been sacked for 'serious trouble', and yet his belongings were still at the school two weeks later.

The Cricket club, on the 21st of Dec. sacked Druitt also for serious trouble: being absent abroad and being unable to perform his duties.

Why did they think this? We don't know.

Possibly because Druitt had left a message to that effect, perhaps verbally. He may have done the same at the school.

The point is the brother, by the 13th, knew that they were hunting a man who may have absconded, or may have taken his own life.

What he does not do is inform the cricket club that they were dealing with a tormented man -- and he may not have known to do such a thing, or wanted to?

3. No other source mentions this event, instead it is replaced with the positive claim that the Head also received a note 'alluding' to suicide which sounds like a face-saving claim after having sacked a dead man.

Note that the same source does not mention the head receiving a note?

Sims has Druitt's fictional counter-part totally unemployed for years which is both deflective and allows for the 'mad doctor' to kill harlots in the East End whenever he likes. eg. it's polemical.


I think Druitt took the cheques because he wanted to give the impression that he was abroad with means, though they would never be cashed.

He left a message with both the school and the club and his legal chambers to that effect, that he was heading for Paris so to speak.

But here's the rub.

If that is what Druitt did, leave messages with everybody (though a more true one for his brother which was private in his bag) an unidentified 'friend' did not believe that Montie had pulled up stumps and gone to France, thus ruining his legal career just as it was blooming.

This friend knew that something more appalling was afoot and went to Bournemouth to alert the brother, who rushes to London, and there at Blackheath -- where Druitt's belongings still remain rather than sent on, if he was sacked on Nov 30th in high dudgeon -- he learned that his brother might have killed himself (another mortal sin which Montie does not want to admit).

Druitt mentions a significant 'Friday', and believes that his fate would now take him into the hideous asylum system like their mother.

This would make sense if he had confessed to the same 'friend' that he was the Ripper, whether real or delusional.

[Roy Corduroy]

Jonathan, you're proposing Montague Druitt wasn't originally terminated from his teaching position at the school. Instead he got up and left. After first confessing to a clergyman and also writing a note. If I understand you correctly.

Roy

[Jonathan H]

Compassionate State Professionals

To Roy

Yes, although my theory is not dependent on his being sacked in absentia.

For all we know, he was sacked to his face for beating the cook, but not a single source sees it as the reason he took his own life, or that he had committed a criminal act.

The consensus of the sources is that it was inexplicable why this successful barrister (and part-time teacher) should do such a thing; that obviously he must have suffered from some kind of fatal breakdown.

So, the question remains as to why his family 'believed' -- and kept on believing despite more Whitechapel murders of harlots -- that their Montie, was of all things, Jack the Ripper!?

In the veiled version of all this tale, in Sims, which comes from Mac -- whom else? -- the 'friends' strongly suspected their 'mad doctor', unemployed, affluent and reclusive, because he had previously 'confessed' to physicians that he wanted to kill harlots, and this had got him sectioned 'twice' and left him a semi-invalid upon [premature] release.

If you match that with the North Coiuntry Vicar of 1899, then what may have happened is that Druitt confessed ('since Friday ...') to a priest after the murders and killed himself before he could be sectioned, like his mother.

I am arguing that Macnaghten redacted the clerical confession to protect the Anglican Church, by turning a single priest into another kind of professionally compassionate members of the state who are also supposed to administer help and treatment to the tormented and ill of mind/soul: anomic physicians.

In his memoirs, determined to debunk Anderson and his insane Jewish suspect, Macnaghten denied that Druitt had ever been 'detained' in an asylum -- which is true.

But then if the suicidal suspect was not an unemployed semi-invalid, what did he do for a living? Mac does not say.He certainly does not suggest that this 'Simon Pure' (eg. Christian hypocrite) was a medical man with 'anatomical knowledge'.

Mac also pulls back from the incriminating conjunction of murder and self-murder within hours.

[Roy Corduroy]

I am arguing that Macnaghten redacted the clerical confession to protect the Anglican Church, by turning a single priest into another kind of professionally compassionate members of the state who are also supposed to administer help and treatment to the tormented and ill of mind/soul: anomic physicians

Then he used the physician motif everywhichway but Sunday.

Macnaghten's 'said to be a doctor,' the Vicar's 'the assassin was at one time a surgeon.' Farquharson's 'the man was the son of a surgeon' - the doctor theme permeates the Druitt saga, but more than that, it came up early and often in the case itself. 'Posessing anatomical knowledge.'

Was Melville Macnaghten sloppy, like reading the Classics version instead of slogging through the original?

Or was Mac being coy? You've made me think about that, Jonathan. As you point out, he dropped the doctor bit in his memoir. But he dropped almost everything. It was written for public consumption. He thought that would be his final word on the subject.

Roy

[Jonathan H]

To roy

But not quite everything.

If you measure his memoirs against what he hustled to the publci through Sims, but anonymously, then we can see that under his own name for the public he has made concessions:

- the police were not after [the un-named Druitt] in 1888.

- he was not a poor Jew (moreover, he even savaged the trio of Jews who disturbed him in abusive graffiti).

- there was no witness who saw anything of use.

- Jack was omnipotent against the state, and only stopped because he killed himself in act of self-revulsion.

- it was nothing to do with being a doctor, or having anatomical knowledge, or that he had been in a madhouse, or that he was an idle-invalid-affluent recluse, or being a religious fanatic, or that he killed himself within hours of Kelly.

- I, sir Melville Macnaghten, laid his ghost to rest based on information received 'some years after he topped himself.

- it is not true (see: preface) that the Ripper case is one of my life's two great disappointments, (for I laid his ghost to rest).

- Jack did have, probably, a 'diseased body' which matches what Victorians erroneously thought was a symptom of 'epileptic mania'.

- He was a sexual maniac; he sadistically enjoyed violence against women, specifically trash harlots but he was also 'Protean': he could appear to be quite normal and functional -- a 'Simon Pure'.

- he lived with his 'people', who noticed that he was missing, eg. AWOL.

The populist template Mace exploited, via Sims for Edwardians, was I argue 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' (1886) but he dumped this for his memoir and nobody noticed.