Frantic Friends?

[Jonathan H]

To Bridewell

All of that is quite off-track.

You are repeating a stale paradigm of the secondary sources, not the primary sources, and now arguably redundant.

No, 'going like mother' more likely refers to going into a madhouse (Sims, 1907).

Why? Because on Friday, I argue, he had confessed to being the fiend to a priest and the clock was ticking on his being sectioned -- like his mother.

Your theory as to an innocent but tragic Druitt is exactly what his family and Macnaghten would have desperately considered at the time to get a family member and a fellow gent off the hook. They couldn't as the evidence that he was the Ripper was just too compelling.

In terms of the meagre sources the veiled version in Sims (1902, 1903, 1907) and the North Country Vicar tale of 1899, all point to family cognition of Montie as the fiend before he took his own life.

The timing of his suicide was not an unfortunate coincidence. In fact the timing of his death theoretically proved he was not the Ripper because of the subsequent Whitechapel murders.

As the new MP source shows, Farquharson remained 'adamant' and so did Macnaghten, once he was briefed and had to let go of Rose Mylett, Alice McKenzie, the Pinchin St. Torso and Frances Coles as victims of 'Jack'.

As he admitted in his memoirs the police had been -- embarrassingly -- chasing a phantom.

To Wickerman

Druitt especially resembles Lawende's Jack the Sailor.

To Hunter

With the Liberal government, Mac did not bother with the witnesses and just claimed nobody saw anything. What would Henry Asquith know about the Whitechapel horrors?

But with his literary pals, Griffiths and Sims -- both crime writers -- Mac had to be more careful. They might remember a witness, or simply look up and see Lawende in the press accounts. So he inverted the ethnicity of the witness and suspect, placing 'Kosminski', or a man who resembled him, into the 1888 investigation, now a sighting by a beat cop of a Jew.

On the other hand, Mac could humour Sims, who really did look like Druitt -- when much younger and thinner and just in that pamphlet pic -- because it would give the wrong impression to the public that the real murderer, the middle-aged doctor, sported a beard (Sims, 1907).

As Fred Wensley wrote about his patron Mac had a knack for keeping 'everyone satisfied' -- just not Ripperologists.

[Cogidubnus]

What would Henry Asquith know about the Whitechapel horrors?

He'd know he was Herbert Henry!

But nitpicking aside, this is proving a fascinating thread...I've always discounted Druitt as an all-too-handy peg on which to hang the blame, and now find I can't any longer...

Thanks all

Dave

[Jonathan H]

Asquith was known by his middle name, or as H H, but nitpicking aside ... what I am trying to do is reassert the primary sources about Druitt, as opposed to the secondary ones whose theory of a tragic innocent shanghaied into the case by a Constable Magoo has been arguably superseded by recent discoveries.

[Bridewell]

To Bridewell

All of that is quite off-track.

You are repeating a stale paradigm of the secondary sources, not the primary sources, and now arguably redundant.

No, 'going like mother' more likely refers to going into a madhouse (Sims, 1907).

Are you arguing that Sims 1907 is a primary source then?

And "going like mother" more likely refers to going into a madhouse?

That is opinion, yes? Why is "going madhouse" more likely than "going mad"?

Regards, Bridewell.

[Jonathan H]

To Bridewell

Yes, Sims is a primary source in the sense that he is repeating what Macnaghten wants him to about Druitt, whom the latter posthumously investigated in about 1891. It does not matter when Sims writes up this tale as his chummy source remains the same.

If the summary of Druitt's note is accurate then, yes, he could easily be saying that he was about end up in an asylum because he and confessed to being a multiple murderer.

At least this is what people believed, about his being a high-functioning maniac, who knew the whole story -- including his own family.

[Bridewell]

Sims is a primary source in the sense that he is repeating what Macnaghten wants him to about Druitt

I have posted a definition of "hearsay" on another thread. Perhaps I should have posted it on this one as well.

Regards, Bridewell

[Cogidubnus]

Cockney Inquisition

I have posted a definition of "hearsay" on another thread. Perhaps I should have posted it on this one as well.

Perhaps what you should've posted was a definition of "heresy"...then we'd have got shot of some old established myths (like Druitt as nothing but a handy scapegoat) perhaps!

All the best

Dave

[Jonathan H]

Hearsay, or a primary source by proxy?

I'm afraid your off-track about the nature of sources, or this source.

For what you see with Sims' profile of Montague Druitt is that each element has been altered and made unrecognisable through exaggeration or inversion.

Sims' Ripper writings from 1899 to 1917, building on Griffiths, form a clear pattern and one I believe controlled and authored by Macnaghten.

You can check all this out on the press section: 'Dagonet and Jack the Ripper'.

This textual breakthrough is one of my significant contributions to this debate, and was the subject of an article for the now defunct 'Casebook Examiner': 'Melville Macnaghten Reconsidred -- Part I Tatcho's Tale' ('Tatcho' was the name of an hair restorer which Sims hustled and what his pals ike Mac nicknamed the famous writer).

Here is the gist:

- the 'son of a surgeon' becomes a middle-aged, retired doctor, the father and son subsumed into each other just as some of the libel-fearing tabloids awkwardly did in 1891. Here it is much smoother.

- he was found with some generous cheques on his corpse, and so he becomes fabulously rich, and thus does not have to work at all (actually he worked two jobs).

- the date of his body's retrieval, 'Dec 31st', began to fade on 'Aberconway' to 'Dec 3 st' and, noticing this, Mac told Sims that 'Dr D' was found in early November, not late late December -- and sure enough the writer shifted the date backwards by 1907.

- he was found with a season rail pass on his corpse, and so the fiend becomes an idle invalid who does nothing much but travel around on public transport.

- the Blackheath school where he was a live-in master becomes a private home, where he idles away as a morose recluse. He certainly does not play cricket.

- the Druitt family, or at least brother William alerted by a friend that his sibling is missing from his legal chambers, becomes the frantic friends, searching for him after he vanishes from his Blackheath mansion -- who already suspect their mad pal's culpability in the Whitechapel horrors (though apparently it took them five murders?!)

- the confession to a priest after Kelly, as claimed not by Sims but by a North Country Vicar in 1899 (and whose sketchy profile matches the real Druitt better) becomes the mad doctor having been sectioned -- 'twice' -- in a mental institution for confessing to doctors that he wants to kill harlots (in 1902, the leftist Sims essentially blames the state for the murders -- for plonking this manifestly ticking bomb onto the streets!)

- the murder of Kelly, and then his confession to a priest and self-murder, weeks later, becomes compressed into a confession in deed; the murder and self-murder happening almost simultaneously, or as long as it takes to stagger shrieking to the river. The Vicar's tale was rudely denounced by Sims because the gap was too long (the Vicar matches the real Druitt, and so does Mac's memoirs on this point). The theme remains the same: the tormented mental state of the fiend-murderer.

- Macnaghten privately chatting with Farquharson in 1891 before moving onto to a discreet briefing with the brother, becomes the police 'chiefs' of 1888 already knowing about the mad doctor before the friends show up to impart their terrible suspicions, before even the body is fished from the Thames.

- The melodramatic race against time to arrest the doctor by a super-efficient, monolithic constabulary is inspired, I think, by the Tumblety investigation of this middle-aged, deviant sort-of-doctor, though the latter actually was in a jail cell on another charge before jumping his bail.

Macnaghten, a lover of the Classics and a wannabe thespian, has used, I think, Robert Louis Stevenson's 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'(1886) as his template for Edwardian readers, via Sims. It is also about a middle-aged, respectable civilized medico who has a bestial side, and who takes his own life as concerned friends and the forces of justice close around him for committing vile murder.

Major Griffiths under his pseudonym Alfred Alymer wrote the following article, 'Unsolved Mysteries of Crime' for Cassell's Family Magazine, April 1896:

'No real solution has beeen offered as of yet of the notorious Whitechapel murders, no reasonable surmise made of the identity of that most mysterious monster, "Jack the Ripper" ... Various theories ... were put forward by the police ... or that he was a man with a double personality; one so absolutely distinct from, and far superior to the other, that no possible suspicion could attach to him when he resumed the more respectable garb. It was in fact a real case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Granted also, that this individual was afflicted with periodic fits of homicidal mania, accompanied by the astuteness of this form of lunacy, it was easy to conceive of his committing the murders under such uncontrollable impulse, and his prompt disappearance by returning to his other irreproachable identity. No doubt this was a plausible theory, but theory it was, and nothing more. It was never, even inferentially, supported by fact.'

And not two years later, in 'Mysteries of Police and Crime', Griffiths reversed himself -- to an extent -- now asserting, in a subdued scoop, that there was just such a strong suspect resembling Stevenson's tale -- in an amazing coincidence he was also a doctor no less?! Only a lack of hard evidence prevented his arrest, but his 'friends' feared the worst -- again just like in the best selling novella!

I theorise that the 1896 piece above was Mac's first off-Broadway debut of Druitt to Griffiths, and it was not going to impress without evidence.

In 1898, Mac had Griffiths -- and Sims -- join the ultimate Ripper, Inner Cricle by showing them the biggest secret of state. He showed them a copy of what he hustled to them as a definitive 'Home Office Report' which 'proved' that Dr. Druitt was the best bet to be 'Jack'. They could be reassured about this opinion -- as it was Mac's!

From 1902, Mac began adding details to the profile not in 'Aberconway' but are distortions of the real Druitt.

George Sims is arguably one of the best primary sources we have because his Ripper profile comes directly from Macnaghten, whose agenda is to both reveal and conceal.

[Simon Wood]

Hi Jonathan,

Looking at the chronology of who wrote what first, it's a fair bet that Sims' initial January 1899 Ripper profile came from Major Griffiths' November 1898 book and not directly from MM.

Regards,

Simon

[Jonathan H]

God, the Old Guard can be breath-takingly, shall we say ... austere here in offering an opinion.

I feel like I am a schoolboy in a public, Latin examination circa 1891.

And stop teasing people about the Tumblety source, Simon, like we might be let out early for lunch -- or maybe we will have to stay in for another lesson in conjunctions.

Why not just point to it, or publish it so that we assess it too?

OK, yes, yes, but Macnaghten did not disagree with Sims' slamming of the Vicar's impertinent tale and from 1902 -- the Rev. Charles Druitt had passed away by then -- Sims added details to the profile which are not in Griffiths, and not in 'Aberconway'.

But they are certainly a 'shilling shocker' which enhances the rep. of Scotland Yard, and must come from Macnaghten -- who else?

For all Mac had to do with his friend, boxing fan, theatre buff, and fellow member of a gentleman's crime club, was warn him that he was publishing material which was mistaken -- the most critical aspect being that the police were hunting this doctor in 1888.

That is what Mac's memoirs do.

Instead Sims as Dagonet becomes Mac's mouthpiece for the public, propagating a tale which, if you really checked the press accounts between 1888 and 1891, has to be made up. Or, Sims was in on it.

[Simon Wood]

Hi Jonathan,

Frankly, having privately shared information with you, I expected better than these cheap insults.

Please be assured that from now on you and MM are on ignore.

Regards,

Simon

[Jonathan H]

To the previous poster

Suits me, humourless.

Having put so much effort into this, and tried to be polite , I would have expected a whole lot better treatment than the repugnantly mean-spirited, pedantic post you did.

And as for being on ignore -- God, how infantile -- with Sir Melville Macnaghten, I could not imagine better company.

Oh, and how's that devastating, but never actually sighted anti-Tumblety source going ...? Like others I won't be holding my breath.

[Jonathan H]

The Mac-Sims Pincer, 1905

This was put on a Druitt thread by 'Chris' in mid-2009.

Historical methodology says to notice patterns and then try and xplain them.

http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast?a=d&d=GRA19050714.2.2

What we see is a repeat of the Vicar story of 1899, in the sense that a deluded invalid has confessed (in New York) and sure enough George Sims comes in and rudely dismisses it as impossible due to the shattered state of the Ripper's mind immediately following Miller's Ct.

We also have a Scotland Yard official anonymously claiming that the drowned man in the Thames, as the fiend, is official Home Office opinion.

Definitive Home Office 'documents', which we know do not exist in that dept. of state, and never did.

Yet the source is careful not to claim that this suspect was a doctor or that he killed himself immediately after the last murder (just as Mac is careful not to confirm either in his memoirs.)

This source seems to get the date of the body's retrieval wrong, as being but a month after the final murder.

Yet Sims in 1907 will alter his account to bring it into alignment with his backdating.

And Aberconway's date of 'Dec 31st' has faded, at least decades later to look like 'Dec 3 st'.

My theory is that the SY official is of course Macnaghten having his cake and eating it too; the guy in NYC is not 'Jack' who was long known to the 'police' and the 'government' as a tormented suicide.

[Bridewell]

Hearsay, or a primary source by proxy?

I'm afraid your off-track about the nature of sources, or this source.

I'll repeat the common law definition of hearsay evidence:

Evidence that is offered by a witness of which they do not have direct knowledge but, rather, their testimony is based on what others have said to them.

A primary source by proxy is hearsay evidence and any "private information" disclosed to MM, and repeated by him, is hearsay evidence. That doesn't necessarily render it worthless, but it is stereotypical hearsay. Don't get me wrong, you can place as much, or as little, value on it as you choose, but it is hearsay. "A primary source by proxy" is also a secondary source.

Regards, Bridewell

[Jonathan H]

Let me assist you, pal.

You are talking about evdience in a courtroom; a legal definition of hearsay evdience.

Whereas historical evidence is quite different.

A primary source is somebody who was there -- at the time.

For example, George Sims is a primary source about the posthumous investigation into Druitt as the Ripper. He knew the police chief who had done this and published the latter's findings, though veiled.

Anderson was abroad for several Whitechapel murders, yet he is still a primary source about those crimes in 1910.