Frantic Friends?

[Jonathan H]

I don;t really foloow much of what you say but then I do not have access to the article you wrote.

Perhaos if I did I would have a better sense of all this.

I would just say that the Vicar writes about a murdrer who had plenty of time to confess after the final murder, of Kelly, and then expired for reasons not given.

The murderer had been a man of good (not great) position (eg a barrister?) and had an unblemished record, was not from the East End but went there to help out poor harlots and was 'at one time a surgeon'.

That last bit is not true of Druitt but it is exactly the same falsehood as the one peddled by Griffiths and Sims (on behalf of Macnaghten) the difference being that the Vicar is being up-front that he is mixing fact with fcition to protect people's reputations.

The Vicar also acribes the crimes to 'epileptic mania' whose manifestations included homicide, suicide, shrieking, raving -- and a kind of demented, amnesiac fury.

All of these elments appear in Sims, often for melodramatic purposes.

They also appear in Mac's memoirs: 'furious madness' and a 'diseased body'.

Sims in 1899 rudely and inaccurately dismisses the Vicar's tale on the basis that the drowned doctor had no time to confess anything to anybody. He only had enough manical energy to stagger to his watery grave.

We know, of course, that Druitt had three weeks to confess to a legion of clergymen. Therefore the Vicar's tale fits Druitt better, yet we know that behind the 'drowned doctor' is nevertheless ... Druitt.

Macnaghten in his memoirs stepped back from the melodramatic conjunction of Sims' 'shrieking, raving fiend', allowing for a loose day and a night btween the Kelly murder and the suicide.

That is also enough time for Druitt to confess to a priest; confess to 'his own people' about his 'Protean' madness and 'diseased body' and they then realised he was 'absented' 'soon after' the 'awful glut' of Miller's Ct.

Sims has the drowned doctor confessing to other doctors of his need to kill harlots before he begins his spree.

Whereas Druitt was a lawyer, and so was Lonsdale and so was his older brother William: a barrister confessing to other barristers -- one of whom was also a priest?

[Jonathan H]

Oz Opp. Leader accused of being the Fiend!

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/treasury/hes-jack-the-ripper-jibes-julia/story-fn59nsif-1226454451299

The Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was using a colourful metaphor for what she claims the Conservative Opposition Leader will do to public education if he becomes the PM next year, eg. tear it to pieces.

Actually Gillard is under some small amount of pressure herself over whether she was sacked from her law firm in the mid-90's, for being either incomptent and/or corrupt. The former is much more likely than the latter.

Yet she resigned from the law firm, and asserts she did so of her own volition. It is more likely that her position was untenable, after an internal probe over money irregularieties involving her then union boyfriend, and therefore she was given the opportunity to resign.

This is a reminder that the strongest argument about Druitt's dismissal is that it happened because he was AWOL, as he was from his cricket club -- who also dismissed him not realising he was deceased by his own hand.

Druitt was also sacked from the school because he had gone unaccountably missing and was needed and required to be at the school and yet was absent. His things were still at the school yet nobody thought to search through them until the frantic older brother showed up.

Therefore it sieems unlikely that Valentine thought Druitt was mad, or that anything sinister had happened to him. He was missing and perhaps as with the cricket club, had told somebody he was abroad. It is the brother's arrival which apparently led to the discovery that Montie may have tried to harm himself (apparently for fear of being sectioned like his mother) for he had left a note for William.

Sectioned over what?

For if Druitt had been sacked whilst alive he would have been allowed to 'resign' as a face-saving gesture to both him and the reputation of the school.

That he was sacked because he was AWOL is arguably the most likely explanation since the one primary source which mentions his sacking does not connect it with his self-murder at all.

The other primary sources simply dropped this detail (in fact, tidied up Valentine; now he supposedly received a note too) as it was all a ghastly misunderstanding: the respectable school had embarrassingly dismissed a corpse.

Or of course the reporter has mistaken the sacking from the cricket club for the school, and that is why it was not repeated in other sources (the same reporter does not even mention the deceased's name?)

[caz]

Druitt was also sacked from the school because he had gone unaccountably missing and was needed and required to be at the school and yet was absent.

Matter of opinion, Jonathan. Nobody knows what the 'serious trouble' was. For all you know, Druitt took off after being formally dismissed at the school, with the cheques that were found on his body to cover his salary up to that point and a payment in lieu of notice, for example, and simply failed to return for the rest of his belongings.

If Valentine had dismissed Druitt in his absence, or because he was absent, there is no reason why he would have been too embarrassed to say so. He could easily have justified his actions, and could hardly have been expected to guess that Druitt had in fact gone off to drown himself.

If, on the other hand (as I suspect, simply because there is no evidence to the contrary), Druitt went into the river knowing he had been sacked from the school, Valentine would have had much more reason to feel badly about his own role, unless of course the 'serious trouble' outweighed any feelings of responsibility or regret concerning his former staff member.

Therefore it sieems unlikely that Valentine thought Druitt was mad, or that anything sinister had happened to him. He was missing and perhaps as with the cricket club, had told somebody he was abroad.

'Therefore' nothing. You still have no evidence for why Valentine had to sack him, what the cheques represented if not from the school, or that he wasn't present when given his marching orders.

And for the last time, it is not a fact that Druitt told anyone that he was 'abroad', in the sense of overseas. My Chambers dictionary tells me that 'abroad' can still mean today, just as it did in 1888: 'at large'. (Think about it: a-broad; at-large.) So unless you are going to argue that whenever anyone described Jack the Ripper as being 'at large', they must have known who he was and that he had escaped overseas, can this be an end to the nonsense, and can you finally admit that those blasted cricket minutes may merely have recorded the fact that Druitt could not be found, rather than the misinformation that he was out of the country?

[Jonathan H]

To Caz

Could I be wrong in my theory as to why Druitt was sacked? Of course.

I have said so all along.

I am arguing that the likeliest interpretation of the meagre material is that Druitt was sacked because he was AWOL -- from both the cricket club and the school.

Somebody had told them, presumably originally the person missing since it was not true, that Montie had gone abroad.

That is not a euphemism for having absconded due to scandal. It is literally what they believed hence thay placed it in the minutes of an offical meeting.

Druitt's things remained at the school yet he was abroad? Only when the brother arrived were the things searched and they discovered that they had a probable tragedy on their hands.

Potential confirmation of this line of argument comes from Leighton's book in which he claims that headmaster George Valentine had a brother on the circket committee. Therefore, arguably, what the club believed was what the school believed -- and they were wrong probably because they had been misled.

Not a single primary sources links druitt's sicudie with his dismaissal and the onyl one that mentions it does not do so either. The suicide is inexplicable. So inexplicable that he must have been suddenly and tragically unbalanced?

Moreover, George Valntine gets a letter from the deceased man too. Euither that said he was tinking of killing himself, or it said I'm off to Paris which left his boss in a dilemma. Hence no face-saving resignation as he was not there to be offered one.

Or he did not receive a note at all but wnated to seem as if he was on good terms with the deceased so that the unfortunate AWOL dismissal had not caused his death.

On the other hand if this was Montie's ruse then he forgot to inform his legal chambers. To them he had just vanished and this set off alarm bells.

This notion of Druitt's absence being linked by frantic family to his culpability in the Whitechapel Murders appears in Macnagten's 1914 memoirs, though the work-places and school-home have been compressed into a single locale:

' ... I do not think that there was anything of religious mania about the real Simon Pure, nor do I believe that he had ever been detained in an asylum, nor lived in lodgings. I incline to the belief that the individual who held up London in terror resided with his own people ; that he absented himself from home at certain times, and that he committed suicide on or about the 10th of November 1888, after he had knocked out a Commissioner of Police and very nearly settled the hash of one of Her Majesty's principal Secretaries of State.'

The 'people' were noticing his 'absences' not at the time of the Kelly murder as in not on the 'same evening', but over twenty-four hours later, suggesitng his suicide was taken in a state of calm deliberation, eg. not as a 'shrieking, raving fiend'.

Mac knew all about Druitt and the dismissal if it happened while he was alive was not relevant to his dual identity, or the reasons for his self-murder.

[caz]

I am arguing that the likeliest interpretation of the meagre material is that Druitt was sacked because he was AWOL -- from both the cricket club and the school.

Somebody had told them, presumably originally the person missing since it was not true, that Montie had gone abroad.

That is not a euphemism for having absconded due to scandal. It is literally what they believed hence thay placed it in the minutes of an offical meeting.

Where did I say that 'gone abroad' in the minutes meant 'absconded due to scandal'?

In England in 1888 it would simply have meant that Druitt was not around to perform his duties and his whereabouts were at that time unknown.

But by all means keep putting your fingers in your ears and putting the less likely, more convoluted interpretation on the phrase, without a shred of evidence that Druitt needed or wanted to give anyone the impression that he was leaving England - except in the sense of leaving the world, as per the suicide notes he left for his brother and for Valentine.

Why make stuff up when the evidence is so clear?

Love,

Caz
X

[Jonathan H]

Mac knew exactly who Montie was and believed he was 'Jack'

But arguably his whereabouts were known.

Druitt was abroad, and this belief -- which turned out later to be wrong of course -- was duly recorded in the cricket club's official records.

It's really that simple.

But by all means, keep putting the less likely and more convoluted explanation; that not knowing where he was they used some kind of expression which did not mean he was abroad, so far as they knew, but that he was 'whereabouts unknown' -- without a shred of evidence for this complicated semantic theory.

Nor do you deal with Leighton's claim that Valentine had a brother on the same cricket committee and therefore it is also likely that he, the headmaster, had thought that the missing Montie was literally abroad, like his sibling, and also had to fire him for the same reason.

Hence no face-saving resignation, which was very unusual. the only primary source to mention the 'serious trouble' does not suggest it was criminal, and nor that it was a cause of his quite inexplicable suicide.

Since Montague Druitt was not really abroad why would anyone think this? It is thus a reasonable theory that he is the person who left behind a false trail (and using large rocks may have hoped that his body never surfaced).

What you miss, and sadly will never get, is that an unidentified 'friend' of Druitt's was alarmed by his absence from his legal chambers and contacted his brother. This friend, who is sufficiently familiar with Druitt's comings and goings at the London office -- yet is not described as a colleague -- seems to have not bought that he was suddenly abroad.

Why?

William Druitt was told on the 11th and then came to London on the 13th though this was arguably misheard by the reporter as the 30th.

William discovered that his bother had been sacked from the school -- perhaps because he was thought to be abroad like the club -- and yet his things were still there. The brother searched them and found a cryptic note which suggested, but did not prove, that Montie was off to kill himself.

The school and the cricket club had sacked a dead man, and it was not their fault as they were misled by a person of clearly unsound mind.

Other primary sources do not mention this embarrassing aspect (in fact one reports Valentine also getting a message which is a better look for him for sure.)

At some point between being told that his brother was missing and searching for him as best he could, no doubt conferring with other family members -- for twenty days -- William was informed by somebody or something that Montie was 'Jack the Ripper'.

By whom?

By something his brother left behind that he then kept to himself?

Or, by the same unidentified friend?

Here is the primary source where William Druitt seems to be anxious to eliminate members of his family from the official proceedings and record (like his cousin the Rev. Charles Druitt?) Maybe he should have said they had gone abroad.


Acton, Chiswick & Turnham Green Gazette
United Kingdom
Saturday, 5 January 1889
FOUND DROWNED. ... William H. Druitt said he lived at Bournemouth, and that he was a solicitor. The deceased was his brother, who was 31 last birthday. He was a barrister-at-law, and an assistant master in a school at Blackheath. He had stayed with witness at Bournemouth for a night towards the end of October. Witness heard from a friend on the 11th of December that deceased had not been heard of at his chambers for more than a week. Witness then went to London to make inquiries, and at Blackheath he found that deceased had got into serious trouble at the school, and had been dismissed. That was on the 30th of December. Witness had deceased's things searched where he resided, and found a paper addressed to him (produced). — The Coroner read the letter, which was to this effect:-"Since Friday I felt I was going to be like mother, and the best thing was for me to die."

— Witness, continuing, said deceased had never made any attempt on his life before. His mother became insane in July last. He had no other relative. — Henry Winslade was the next witness. ... A verdict of suicide whilst in an unsound state of mind was returned.'


This is the semi-fictional, Edwardian version by Sir Melville Macnaghten, via George Sims, in which the frantic 'friends', plural, suspect the worst of their periodically insane 'chum' because the 'doctor', by implication, has already told his own doctors he feels compelled to kill harlots:

February 16, 1902.

... the large class of lunatics who are liable after their release from asylums to be driven mad again by the stress of daily life ... 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.'


This is what I believe Druitt meant by fearing to go the way of mother, as in literally into a mental institution because the brother and other family members -- and a friend who is subsumed into the generic friends -- knew about his dual identity.

In the veiled version it's because he told compassionate and humane professionals in an asylum.

Why not the friend go straight to the police if Montie confessed to him? Have him sectioned then and there? A priest, even an Anglican one, would feel constrained by the secrets of the confessional.

But how would a priest know if Druitt was missing from his work?

John Henry Lonsdale was both a barrister with an office almost next door, and a clergyman, and knew the Dorset wing of the family -- exactly where the story will spring to life again momentarily and incompletely in 1891 (Lonsdale and MP Farquharson were both Oxonians too).

Here is Sims again claiming that the frantic 'friends' were in touch with the Yard, which may have been true of the family but only in 1891 and only with Macnaghten:

April 5, 1903.

... No one who saw the victim of Miller's-court as she was found ever doubted that the deed was that of a man in the last stage of a terrible form of insanity. No complete description was ever given to the Press. The details were too foully, fiendishly awful. 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.

Sims from Sept 22nd 1907:

The third man was a doctor who lived in a suburb about six miles from Whitechapel, and who suffered from a horrible form of homicidal mania, a mania which leads the victim of it to look upon women of a certain class with frenzied hatred.

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.'

Notice how the date of the self-murder disguises Druitt's true rendezvous with death, and so does Sims shifting the body's retrieval to early Dec.

Confirmation of the family fearing the worst by their member's 'absence' comes in Sir Melville's 1914 memoirs where the time he could have told somebody that he was 'Jack' between the final murder and the self-murder has been stretched from the MP's 'the same evening' to a loose twenty-four hours - it might be more. That's time to confess to somebody, and matches the real Druitt who had thee weeks ('Since Friday ...').

CHAPTER IV.

LAYING THE GHOST OF JACK THE RIPPER.

' ... On the morning of 9th November, Mary Jeanette Kelly, a comparatively young woman of some twenty-five years of age, and said to have been possessed of considerable. personal attractions, was found murdered in a room in Miller's Court, Dorset Street. This was the last of the series, and it was by far the most horrible ...Not infrequently the maniac possesses a diseased body, and this was probably so in the case of the Whitechapel murderer ... nor do I believe that he had ever been detained in an asylum, nor lived in lodgings. I incline to the belief that the individual who held up London in terror resided with his own people ; that he absented himself from home at certain times, and that he committed suicide on or about the 10th of November 1888, after he had knocked out a Commissioner of Police and very nearly settled the hash of one of Her Majesty's principal Secretaries of State.'

The persistent theme here is that Druitt was tormented but the coroner's inquiry piece and Mac's memoirs agree that he was functional ('Protean') and that his culpability came from his lips to people close to him. They believed and so too -- posthumously -- did this police chief.

[caz]

But arguably his whereabouts were known.

Druitt was abroad, and this belief -- which turned out later to be wrong of course -- was duly recorded in the cricket club's official records.

It's really that simple.

Sigh.

Druitt's whereabouts were only known when he was fished out of the Thames and formally identified from what he had chosen to leave in his pockets.

I actually laughed out loud the first time I saw you interpreting this 1888 example of 'gone abroad' to mean 'gone to foreign parts'. I thought to myself, bless him, he's a modern-day Australian, why would he know any better? My grandparents, all four of them, were growing up in England in 1888, and my parents, born in London in 1915 and 1917, were influenced by the language of their parents. So it strikes me as faintly ludicrous for you to be telling me, and against all the evidence, that the cricket club had been wrongly led to believe (and for no good reason as far as I can see) that Druitt had actually left the country, but chose instead to use the ambiguous expression 'gone abroad', which also meant 'gone walkies who knows where', and would inevitably leave the reader at that time to interpret it how they saw fit.

It's only the 'less likely and more convoluted explanation' to you because, as you admit yourself, you are nowhere near as familiar with the expression being used in that way as I and others are, and of course it's simpler for you to plump for the interpretation that better suits a theory you have already invested so much of your time and energy in. Quite understandable.

But there really is nothing remotely 'convoluted' about the fact that the cricket club, like everyone else, knew Druitt was missing but only found out where he had gone when his body turned up.

Nor do you deal with Leighton's claim that Valentine had a brother on the same cricket committee and therefore it is also likely that he, the headmaster, had thought that the missing Montie was literally abroad, like his sibling, and also had to fire him for the same reason.

What? Look, Druitt could have alluded to leaving the country in those notes he left for his brother and for Valentine to find, but he did not. He only alluded to committing suicide, and that's precisely what he upped and did after writing about it. The moment he took off, either of those notes could have been found, so why would he have left them if he wanted Valentine's brother and everyone else on the cricket committee to think he had left the country? How does that even begin to make sense - unless poor Druitt truly was as mad as a hatter by then?

If Druitt's note to his own brother was an honest one, from the heart, then his suicide was very far from 'quite inexplicable'. He explains himself that it would be better for him to die than to end up like his mother - clearly a reference to her own mental instability, and it's not as if there wasn't a family history of mental instability and suicide. He didn't say it would be better for him to leave England and be away from his mother, did he?

Since Montague Druitt was not really abroad why would anyone think this?

I have no idea. Only you appear to think that anyone did think this. Druitt himself put his intentions in writing and carried them out. They didn't include the slightest hint of him going overseas.

What you miss, and sadly will never get, is that an unidentified 'friend' of Druitt's was alarmed by his absence from his legal chambers and contacted his brother. This friend, who is sufficiently familiar with Druitt's comings and goings at the London office -- yet is not described as a colleague -- seems to have not bought that he was suddenly abroad.

Why?

Because nobody suggested he was 'suddenly abroad'; there was no reason for anyone to think he was 'suddenly abroad'; and we know he wasn't 'suddenly abroad'. Simple as falling off a log really.

One final thought: how many times have you seen it written in 1888 and beyond that Tumblety had 'gone abroad'? Isn't he usually said to have 'fled England'?

Love,

Caz
X

[Jonathan H]

To Caz

I think you are missing the overall.

Somebody who is missing, literally suddenly vanished, is not somebody you dismiss from their position if you think they have met with an accident or foul play.

To the Valentine brothers, Druitt had 'gone abroad' because he must have left word with a third party that he had, inexplicably, left town. They were left with no choice but to dismiss him from the school and the cricket club because he was not there to resign.

Once the Druitt brother arrived and Montie's things were searched he discovered a note on which he feared, not necessarily that he was going insane like his mother, but that something he had done or said, on the previous Friday, was going to guarantee that he was sectioned like his mother.

Is the above factual?

No, it's an interpretation of limited data. A newly discovered source could easily upend it.

The reason it is more likely to have occurred like that -- that the 'serious trouble' alluded to by a single primary source refers to his dismissal for being unaccountably AWOL -- than your narrow adherence to the old paradigm is that it factors in the family, or at least William Druitt, discovering not that his brother had been dismissed because he was a homosexual, or going ga ga, or something like that, but that he was 'Jack the Ripper' -- or at least Montie believed he was.

It is you, not me, who overlays modernist notions onto the primary sources.

[Bridewell]

To the Valentine brothers, Druitt had 'gone abroad' because he must have left word with a third party that he had, inexplicably, left town. They were left with no choice but to dismiss him from the school and the cricket club because he was not there to resign.

Isn't this exactly the point which Caz is making - that 'gone abroad' can simply mean 'left town'? He was 'not there to resign', but that doesn't mean that he had left the country, does it? Druitt had not gone abroad. There is no evidence that he intended to go abroad, or that he told anyone that such was his intention. The phrase 'gone abroad' is ambiguous, but I have seen no evidence that the intended meaning was not the one logically applicable in these circumstances - that they knew Druitt had gone missing (which he had) rather than that he had gone overseas (which he hadn't).

Regards, Bridewell.

[Jonathan H]

Lucky for the ex-Students, hey?

To Bridewell

No, I don't think so.

I see no evidence -- whatsoever -- that it was an expression of the era for missing-in-action that you would put into the official minutes of a club's records about a member, one meaning that they were apparently unaware about what had actually happened to them.

So you summarily sack them because they are AWOL?!

How would they know Druitt was not lying in a ditch -- or a river?

Unless they mistakenly thought he was suddenly, genuinely abroad. Then his conduct, of course, forced a dismissal. With no opportunity for a face-saving resignation.

But the larger point is that he was not sacked to his face while alive.

This is the old theory: Druitt's 'traumatic' dismissal caused his vanishing act -- eg. not the Ripper -- whereas his vanishing act, whether the school and club literally thought he had suddenly gone to Paris or not, was really what caused his dual dismissals.

A number of secondary sources arguably have it the wrong way round, and therefore a theory of the 'real' reason for Druitt's self-murder calcified into a 'definitely ascertained fact'. That he was sacked not on Dec 30th, as the primary source illogically claims, but on Nov 30th. This is the old theory.

I propose the new theory (perhaps it is old too?) that the '30th' is the reporter mishearing or mis-recording the 13th, referring not to Montie but rather to William; as to when the latter arrived at the school looking for his AWOL sibling who had been sacked for 'serious trouble' eg. just like the club with Valentine's brother -- for being AWOL.

It seems the Druitt brother and his unidentified friend, who alerted him to his sibling's disappearance, know that Montie is perhaps not abroad. This fits since other sources by Macnaghten, and about the un-named Farquharson show that the family (or family member and a friend becoming the generic-plural 'friends') 'believed' he was the Ripper.

Why?

Sir Melville Macnaghten, in 1914, artfully gives the impression that this 'Simon Pure' lived with family who noticed he was absent.

Why was this 'Protean' maniac with a diseased mind and body absent?

Because, according to 'his own people' -- whom Sir Melville implies told him 'certain facts' 'some years after' leading to a 'conclusion' -- the Ripper had killed Mary Kelly and 'soon after' his 'awful glut' he took his own life in some kind of overwhelmed-tormented state.

This did not happen immediately but after an interval of a day and a night -- perhaps longer? -- when the madman could have returned home, appeared to function, and yet then taken his own life and thus was again 'absented'.

This thread was begun by me to provoke debate regarding what I think is the redundant nature of the old theory -- often spoken of on this site and the other I am banned from as virtually proven -- that Sir Melville knew almost nothing accurate about Montague Druitt.

The 'West of England' MP story shows that 'belief' in Druitt's guilt began with 'his own people' in his home county and leaked along the local, Tory Grapevine.

The 1914 memoirs, Mac's comments in 1913, and Sims' (a Mac source by proxy) mentioning several times in the 1900's that the unemployed doctor's frantic 'friends' were trying to locate him because he had disappeared from where he lived -- and that they already knew he was 'Jack' -- shows that this police chief did, arguably, know whom he was talking about as he claimed (even the ambiguous 'said to be a doctor ...' cuts both ways, eg. might not be a doctor).

Sir Melville knew that William Druitt was looking for Montie?

If he only knew this from the press account of 1889 that would have told him that the deceased brother was 31, and a barrister, and killed himself three weeks after Kelly (though it would not have, ironically, given him Montie's name).

More likely is that Sir Melville conferred with William Druitt, and Sims gives us a veiled glimpse of such a meeting.

Why would Mac, in 1891, not meet with William Druitt, or the Rev. Charles, or whomever he deemed relevant to understanding their 'belief'?

Sir Melville knew more than just P.C. Moulson's Report to know about the brother's frantic search.

A diligent, hands-on police chief correctly recalls the titchy detail about the train ticket but gets it wrong about the suspect's age, and profession, and timing of their suicide?

That is so unlikely, but makes perfect sense that he would write it exactly that way for literary cronies whom he knew were going to disseminate this information to the public.

In fact, it would make no sense, and be quite out-of-character, for Sir Melville to indiscreetly give them the full facts which could make Druitt entirelyrecognisable to those who had known him.

The family (turned into 'friends') would have been shunned lime Typhus carriers.

Just consider a grown-up graduate of the Valentine school is reading 'The Referee' in the 1900's and keeps noticing that Dagonet (Sims) claims that the Ripper mystery was solved at the time by the cops.

The former pupil would also notice that the Ripper had killed himself just like poor Mr. Druitt; by throwing himself in the Thames.

Both were also corpses floating under the water for about a month. They also both lived in a suburb six miles from the murders -- which, eh, matches Blackheath?

But there the similarity would come to a screeching halt -- thank God (except that both the teacher and the murderer were members of the 'better classes').

For the tragic Mr M. J. Druitt was a young man, a successful barrister, and a teacher, and a cricketer.

The Ripper, by comforting contrast, was a middle-aged surgeon, though unemployed for years as he had been in and out of mental asylums, and was a fabulously wealthy recluse. A man with friends but no family (and no patients either).

If you had a really sharp memory you could also recall that Mr. Druitt killed himself in early Dec 1888, whereas Sim's Ripper drowns himself on the same morning, the 9th of Nov, as the final murder.

Not the same man, of course not, how could they be.

In fact they are the same man, but this could not have been known at the time and wasn't.

A police chief, moreover, who adored his school days had successfully protected the adult sensibilities (and school's rep) of Druitt's former pupils, already saddened in their memories by their young, sporty teacher's inexplicable act of self-destruction.

Whether the cricket club thought he had actually gone abroad is such small beer compared to whether Sir Melville did this deliberately or whether a failing memory luckily, just luckily, protected everybody concerned: the school, the club, the Yard, the Druitts, and the former students.

[caz]

Whether the cricket club thought he had actually gone abroad is such small beer compared to...

Finally - what I was trying to get at from the start, ie how important was it to your overall theory whether Druitt had given anyone the false impression that he had fled England or whether he had simply taken himself off, leaving behind the two notes that provided an explanation for his absence, soon to be confirmed with the solid evidence of his drowned corpse.

You still fail to deal with the small but rather telling matter of what Druitt put in the note for his brother, about thinking it better that he should die, rather than go on living only to end up like his mother (whether he mostly feared going 'ga ga' or being sectioned). Do you imagine his brother would have been anything less than 'frantic', to read such a note and be left with the impossible task of tracking down the missing Monty before he went ahead and topped himself? If Monty had given his brother, or Valentine, or anyone else, the contradictory information that he wasn't going to die, but was swanning off to foreign climes instead, there'd have been little point in going 'frantic' about it.

Look, I have no 'adherence', either broad or narrow, to this 'old paradigm' you keep banging on about. I couldn't give two hoots about it to be frank. I look at what little evidence has been put forward and make up my own mind. Macnaghten had his reasons at the time for naming Druitt as the man most likely to have committed the murders in his view, and I have no right to doubt that he did at one time possess written information from a trusted source that he considered too sensitive to share publicly and ended up destroying. The man after all was dead (like 'Sir Jim' Savile) and could not be tried.

So for all I know, Druitt could have been, or deluded himself into believing he was the ripper, and his brother could have got wind of it and suspected it to be true. But that would in itself make Druitt 'ga ga' and likely to be dismissed at any time by the school, the moment his deteriorating mental state began to affect his duties, as it surely did when he was no longer there to do any. It's a no-brainer really. I just don't see why your theory requires Valentine to have sacked him after he had finally gone over the edge, left those notes and taken himself off, and only because he was not present to carry on with his duties as usual. Is it really more likely that Jack the Ripper, or someone who thought he was Jack, had been a model employee up to his last day on the job, with no black marks against him, and would have kept his position had he not done that vanishing act? When do you suppose Valentine formally gave the absent Monty the boot? Before or after his possessions were searched and Valentine read his note alluding to suicide? Too callous either way: before anyone even had the chance to look through his stuff for clues, when he could have met with an accident or be lying in a ditch somewhere? Or afterwards, when it was obvious he had already dismissed himself, and was heading for an early grave or the asylum?

Love,

Caz
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[Jonathan H]

It is possible that Druitt was sacked to his face but since the cricket club -- with a Valentine brother on the committee -- minuted him as being dismissed for being suddenly abroad then iti is morelikely that he was dismissed while absent for being absent.

The primary sources are mixed about this, but it seems that Druitt's belongings were not searched while he was 'abroad' until the brother arrived -- why did he not think Montie was in Paris, for what had he learned? -- and found a note which alluded to suicide to avoid being sectioned like their mother. That Valentine also received a note about this seems unlikely, but possible.

The only primary source which mentions his dismissal for 'serious trouble' does not link it to his self-murder, and why would it if he was sacked while AWOL, and because he was AWOL -- as with the cricket club? Other sources dropped the detail altogtehr as they realsied it was based on a misunderstanding; he was not irresponsibly abroad but tragically deceased by his own hand.

Further confirmation of this theory is provided by the date of the 30th which makes no sense for his dismissal after the sucidei note was found. But the old paradigm (Bang, Bang) had claimed the month was wrong -- Nov 30th. That's possible. But if you look at the whole section it is more likely that it refers to when the brother arrived at the school: Dec 13th, having been told on the 11th by a 'friend' that Montie was missing from his legal chambers.

Why did that 'friend' not think he was abroad too? What he did he know and how did he know it?

The problem with the old theory is that it started from the assetrion that Druitt had nothing to do with the Ripper mystery and so all these events involving his suicide and the school and the brother are not Ripper-related.

There is nothing wrong with doing that -- it should be done -- so long as you also consider the alternative interpretations of incomplete and ambiguous data.

For example, that Macnaghten was right that the family indeed 'believed' he was Jack. This would mean that the brother (and the friend? Who all become generic 'friends' in Griffiths and Sims) was rushing around believing, rightly or wrongly, that Montie was the Whitechapel murderer.

But Macnaghten supposedly did not know Druitt was not Dr. Jekyll and so the alternatives were not considered in a number of very good secondary sources, eg. I find Sudgen a great read but he is terminally weak on Macnaghten (and Druitt) who is little more than a cypher in his account.

Plus he lknows nothing about the MP linking source, so his chapter on all this is out of date.

Sir Melville may have had written evidence, or a written account from the family or whomover (a priest? a Vicar?) that he subsequently destroyed, but since he did not burn the unknown-unread file he had left in Scotland Yard's archive -- nor the sexed-up version used for propaganda in his own possession -- then I seriously doubt that to be true.

He cheerfully manipulated information all the time, you know lied, and I think he just said, in 1913, that he was leaving nothing behind at the Yard to reassure the surviving Druitts that their 'secret' was safe (though both cousin Rev. Charles and brother William were deceased by then, as was Lonsdale). It also means that the documents were his own possessions, his own property to do with as he pleased, rather than official -- which is why Hargrave Adam was so startled, even aghast, that Macnaghten could says he had done such a thing as destroy files.

I think that one of the reasons that people fell under the spell of the drowned barrister as the fiend, those who knew the real story, is because he did not exhibit any signs of mania at all. That is why his telling somebody hat I'm Jack was so compelling, even as a posthumous tale, as he had something like so-called 'epileptic mania'; periods of lucidity interrupted by sudden bursts of homicidal mania.

Mac called Druitt 'Protean' and 'remarkable' because you could meet him and not have the slightest inkling as to his other, savage, 'sexually insane' identity.

Another example of potential deceit is that I don't think Mac really believed that Druitt had written the graffiti (the 'only clue left behind by the murderer' yet it appeas in neither version of his Report?) That detail was added to his memoirs only as part of his anti-Anderson polemic -- notice the way he cleans up 'Juwes' into 'Jews'; as a 'Simon Pure', educated gentleman would hardly mis-spell such a word.

[caz]

It is possible that Druitt was sacked to his face but since the cricket club -- with a Valentine brother on the committee -- minuted him as being dismissed for being suddenly abroad then iti is morelikely that he was dismissed while absent for being absent.

No - they reported he had 'gone abroad'. Had they reported that he was abroad, was suddenly abroad, or any combination other than 'gone abroad', there would be no argument. They used the only two words that were very much used in those days to convey what we know was true: he could not be found in his usual haunts.

The primary sources are mixed about this, but it seems that Druitt's belongings were not searched while he was 'abroad' until the brother arrived -- why did he not think Montie was in Paris, for what had he learned? -- and found a note which alluded to suicide to avoid being sectioned like their mother. That Valentine also received a note about this seems unlikely, but possible.

Oh Christ - because there was no reason why anyone should have thought he was in Paris.

Other sources dropped the detail altogtehr as they realsied it was based on a misunderstanding; he was not irresponsibly abroad but tragically deceased by his own hand.

No, he wasn't. And nobody but you has misunderstood this.

Love,

Caz
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[Phil H]

I think " going abroad" or "having gone abroad" were contemporary euphemisms for having become a "remittance man" - having gone abroad to escape the law (for example Lord Euston in 1889 - Wilde was given time to follow him later!) or debts.

If one assumes (for a moment) that MJD was homosexual and that evidence of this had come to light, his dismissal would have been enough for others to assume he had taken the boat train rather than face social ruin or bring disgrace on his family.

I suspect that fleeing, or (less likely) going into hiding within the UK would be considered ahead of a man taking his own life.

Phil H

[Jonathan H]

Well maybe Phil, it's possible but flimsy.

For there is no evidence, and no relevant examples, for what you are saying about 'going abroad' and all other the primary sources, including Macnaghten, totally argue against it.

As in Druitt was gay and tormented over this and was dismissed because of it, or something like that, and this is something we can see from the early 21st Century, but Macnaghten -- who had been to Eton and knew all its 'solitary vices' -- could not work this out while [posthumously] investigating the self-murdered barrister in 1891.

Is that really very likely ...?

In 1894, Macnaghten put it on file that Druitt was 'sexually insane' not a homsexual; that he definitely gained erotic pleasure from violence (in his case against harlots). Hence his family believeing he was the Ripper (how could they not?)

His 'absence' was due to being thought, rightly or wrongly, to be the Ripper, not a homosexual. That notion is a modern, politically correct overlay used by some to dismiss Druitt as a Ripper suspect at all even though it was confirmed in 2008 that 'belief' in him as Jack predated Macnaghten -- just as he wrote for file in 1894.

To Caz

Yes, I'm alone here, but not out there where anybody who takes just a cursroty interest in the surviving bits and pieces -- and who is fresh to all this -- can see that of course Macnaghten thought Druitt was the fiend (as convinced as was Anderson) and must have done so from a thorough, albeit private and posthumous investigation. Whether he and the family were correct about this ghastly revelation can never be known.

Perhaps they were not, though that is a colossal blunder on the part of a dispassionate police chief with every reason not to agree with hysterics.

The likeliest interpretation of the scraps is that the Valentines thought he had literally gone abroad, and thus he was dismissed from both positons for being AWOL -- an embarrassing detail later dropped from all other accounts of the inquest.

Since Druitt wasn't abroad, this false trail must have come from Montie himself. Yet a friend knew that he was really missing, and William headed for London and found a note alluding to being sectioned like mother (in Sims' veiled version the frantic friend and frantic brother become the frantic friends who suspect-know that their missing chum is Jack; the periodically insane doctor needing to be sectioned by them again).