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Dear PaulB
Thanks for that.
We've probably exhausted this line of argument and counter-argument.
I don't think it was a mystery, for a small in-the-know group in 1891, and was not one for the public after 1898 -- though they were denied the name and details which make Druitt recoverable.
In 1913 Mac tried to consolidate his opinion with his retirement comments, freed somewhat from the restraints of being an officer of the state, and in his 1914 account.
But his 'Laying the Ghost ...', after the exciting Sims, reads like a sheepish schoolboy caught sneaking out of his dorm for a beer. It's too opaque and discreet despite its bombshell revelations; the effort to keep 'everyone satisfied' finally proved beyond him, and consequently in 1923 William Le Queux rebooted the case as a 'mystery' which the police had never solved.
You have done a great job to suggest that in fact the police, or at least Anderson and Swanson, were pretty certain they had the fiend identified.
I am trying to make the same argument of the primacy of the original police sources, but for Macnaghten and his 'preferred' suspect.
A major difference in emphasis is that I see Mac as a deliberate manipulator of data, and you see Anderson as essentially forthright and honest ( I agree, but also see him as having a fading memory).
I thank you again for sending me the new M.P. source for you knew, sadly and inevitably, that I would stare at it lovingly and nurse it, and misinterpret it, and read too much into it, and continue to hustle a novel as history, and so on.
One thing though.
Anderson and Swanson (in the Marginalia, which may not even be his opinion) give no cognition whatsoever that the 'Jack the Ripper' murder investigation took place over several frustrating years, and so did the incarceration and non-existent death of 'Kosminski'.
Anderson's first memoir version which has the Polish Jew suspect in the madhouse may thus be a true memory, though this detail was dropped for the book. His arguably mixing up the pipes between McKenzie and Kelly also shows a residue of the former being believed by some to be a 'Jack' murder, which he then pointedly dismisses in 1910. Frances Coles, and the messy, disappointing events of 1891, do not exist at all.
Furthermore to read Anderson from 1895 to 1910 on this subject is to gain the misleading impression that all these events happened, including the identification in 1888/9 -- exactly where that forgetful clod Macnaghten puts the incarceration of this 'suspect' (even though his sectioning happened while Mac was already years on the Force).
The Marginalia explicitly claims that no such murder took place after 'Kosminski' was incarcerated -- and died -- when Swanson himself thought that Coles was probably a Ripper murder, as we can glean from other sources.
There's nothing in these private jottings, as I would expect, if they were all his own, eg. to clarify that some of these events happened just before another Whitechapel murder was initially, and mistakenly, believed to be by 'Jack' but then, afterwards, we had the real fiend, or words to that effect.
Likewise, Anderson seems to have no cognition, whatsoever, that 'Kosminski' was sectioned two years after Kelly, and this is arguably a mistake on a par with him thinking that the same person was deceased.
And this is the best police source on 'Jack the Ripper'?
It is why Cullen, Farson, and Rumbelow (in 1975) thought that John Pizer and Emanuel Violenia were the foreign suspect and dodgy witness -- because they were a suspect and witness from the 1888 investigation.
Martin Fido was not even looking for 'Kosminski' in 1891, because it had not been yet understood by secondary sources that the brief 'autumn of terror' is a Druitt-centric notion propagated and redacted by Macnaghten, starting with his unknown 1894 Report, and disseminated to the public by dependable cronies in 1898 -- and which was so compelling a self-serving notion that some police began to write as if they knew at the time that Kelly was the last murder, or very 'soon after'.
Had Fido known this, that the police had no such Polish Jew prime suspect in their sights until much later, he would have worked backwards from 1892. The police acted as if Coles was probably a 'Jack' murder ( Farquharson, as the new source shows, serenely anticipated what would become official opinion: that she was not a 'Jack' victim and that the real fiend was deceased).
A previous poster -- not yourself -- disputed that Fido did not think Aaron Kosminski was the real Ripper because his incarceration was too late. I can only go on what Fido has written, as I understand it?
This is from his dissertation 'David Cohen' [emphases mine]"
'I was consequently astonished when I casually looked up a further Colney Hatch record book which ran to 1894 and discovered that there really was a Kosminsky. It didn't immediately strike me that he was exactly the same age as both Cohen and Kaminsky, as well as coming from the same parish and being another foreign or Polish Jew. I thought his incarceration was too late for him to be the Ripper, and even rather too late for him to be Anderson's suspect. When I found his medical records I was quite sure he wasn't Jack: he was harmless and suffered from aural hallucinations and a touch of persecution mania. No sadism. No violence. And apart from the typical silly Victorian belief that his illness was caused by masturbation, no sexual disorder.'
Hence his sticking with David Cohen as Anderson's authentic suspect, a theory which I think is ingenious but probably mistaken.
Also the counter-argument that Anderson and Swanson could not misremember the same aspect of the same subject is arguably dis-proven -- assuming Swanson's opinion is his own -- because both wrongly think these events happened, neatly, right after Kelly, and that 'Kosminski' then oh so tidily died, a satisfying story after the treachery of the witness.
You say that their mistake about the non-death of 'Kosminski' might be based on 'confusion'.
Yes, but it was not a confusion shared by Macnaghten, Anderson's second-in-command, confidential assistant and successor bar one -- and who did not mention each other's existence in their respective memoirs.
Funny that?
See how these words (Sims, 1907) ironically echo Fido's 80 years later [emphases mine]:
'The first man was a Polish Jew of curious habits and strange disposition, who was the sole occupant of certain premises in Whitechapel after night-fall. This man was in the district during the whole period covered by the Whitechapel murders, and soon after they ceased certain facts came to light which showed that it was quite possible that he might have been the Ripper. He had at one time been employed in a hospital in Poland. He was known to be a lunatic at the time of the murders, and some-time afterwards he betrayed such undoubted signs of homicidal mania that he was sent to a lunatic asylum.'
[Nobody has ever found any evidence that Aaron kosminski worked in a hospital in Poland. Of course that implies 'anatomical knowledge'. I wonder who told Sims that one, which 'sexed-up' the tale?]
The policeman who got a glimpse of Jack in Mitre Court said, when some time afterwards he saw the Pole, that he was the height and build of the man he had seen on the night of the murder.
[There was no cop who saw a Polish Jew in Mitre Court, let alone later too. We know this is one of Mac's dodges from 'Aberconway' -- which shoehorned this suspect into the 1888 investigation. Of course only 'some time later' must the policeman have given this suspect the once-over. So, the promising identification/confrontation of a Jewish suspect by a prime witness went nowhere. Sound familiar?]
'Both these men [the Polish Jew and the Russian doctor, the latter unrecognisable as Michael Ostrog] were capable of the Ripper crimes, but there is one thing that makes the case against each of them weak.
They were both alive long after the horrors had ceased, and though both were in an asylum, there had been a considerable time after the cessation of the Ripper crimes during which they were at liberty and passing about among their fellow men.'
Thanks for that.
We've probably exhausted this line of argument and counter-argument.
I don't think it was a mystery, for a small in-the-know group in 1891, and was not one for the public after 1898 -- though they were denied the name and details which make Druitt recoverable.
In 1913 Mac tried to consolidate his opinion with his retirement comments, freed somewhat from the restraints of being an officer of the state, and in his 1914 account.
But his 'Laying the Ghost ...', after the exciting Sims, reads like a sheepish schoolboy caught sneaking out of his dorm for a beer. It's too opaque and discreet despite its bombshell revelations; the effort to keep 'everyone satisfied' finally proved beyond him, and consequently in 1923 William Le Queux rebooted the case as a 'mystery' which the police had never solved.
You have done a great job to suggest that in fact the police, or at least Anderson and Swanson, were pretty certain they had the fiend identified.
I am trying to make the same argument of the primacy of the original police sources, but for Macnaghten and his 'preferred' suspect.
A major difference in emphasis is that I see Mac as a deliberate manipulator of data, and you see Anderson as essentially forthright and honest ( I agree, but also see him as having a fading memory).
I thank you again for sending me the new M.P. source for you knew, sadly and inevitably, that I would stare at it lovingly and nurse it, and misinterpret it, and read too much into it, and continue to hustle a novel as history, and so on.
One thing though.
Anderson and Swanson (in the Marginalia, which may not even be his opinion) give no cognition whatsoever that the 'Jack the Ripper' murder investigation took place over several frustrating years, and so did the incarceration and non-existent death of 'Kosminski'.
Anderson's first memoir version which has the Polish Jew suspect in the madhouse may thus be a true memory, though this detail was dropped for the book. His arguably mixing up the pipes between McKenzie and Kelly also shows a residue of the former being believed by some to be a 'Jack' murder, which he then pointedly dismisses in 1910. Frances Coles, and the messy, disappointing events of 1891, do not exist at all.
Furthermore to read Anderson from 1895 to 1910 on this subject is to gain the misleading impression that all these events happened, including the identification in 1888/9 -- exactly where that forgetful clod Macnaghten puts the incarceration of this 'suspect' (even though his sectioning happened while Mac was already years on the Force).
The Marginalia explicitly claims that no such murder took place after 'Kosminski' was incarcerated -- and died -- when Swanson himself thought that Coles was probably a Ripper murder, as we can glean from other sources.
There's nothing in these private jottings, as I would expect, if they were all his own, eg. to clarify that some of these events happened just before another Whitechapel murder was initially, and mistakenly, believed to be by 'Jack' but then, afterwards, we had the real fiend, or words to that effect.
Likewise, Anderson seems to have no cognition, whatsoever, that 'Kosminski' was sectioned two years after Kelly, and this is arguably a mistake on a par with him thinking that the same person was deceased.
And this is the best police source on 'Jack the Ripper'?
It is why Cullen, Farson, and Rumbelow (in 1975) thought that John Pizer and Emanuel Violenia were the foreign suspect and dodgy witness -- because they were a suspect and witness from the 1888 investigation.
Martin Fido was not even looking for 'Kosminski' in 1891, because it had not been yet understood by secondary sources that the brief 'autumn of terror' is a Druitt-centric notion propagated and redacted by Macnaghten, starting with his unknown 1894 Report, and disseminated to the public by dependable cronies in 1898 -- and which was so compelling a self-serving notion that some police began to write as if they knew at the time that Kelly was the last murder, or very 'soon after'.
Had Fido known this, that the police had no such Polish Jew prime suspect in their sights until much later, he would have worked backwards from 1892. The police acted as if Coles was probably a 'Jack' murder ( Farquharson, as the new source shows, serenely anticipated what would become official opinion: that she was not a 'Jack' victim and that the real fiend was deceased).
A previous poster -- not yourself -- disputed that Fido did not think Aaron Kosminski was the real Ripper because his incarceration was too late. I can only go on what Fido has written, as I understand it?
This is from his dissertation 'David Cohen' [emphases mine]"
'I was consequently astonished when I casually looked up a further Colney Hatch record book which ran to 1894 and discovered that there really was a Kosminsky. It didn't immediately strike me that he was exactly the same age as both Cohen and Kaminsky, as well as coming from the same parish and being another foreign or Polish Jew. I thought his incarceration was too late for him to be the Ripper, and even rather too late for him to be Anderson's suspect. When I found his medical records I was quite sure he wasn't Jack: he was harmless and suffered from aural hallucinations and a touch of persecution mania. No sadism. No violence. And apart from the typical silly Victorian belief that his illness was caused by masturbation, no sexual disorder.'
Hence his sticking with David Cohen as Anderson's authentic suspect, a theory which I think is ingenious but probably mistaken.
Also the counter-argument that Anderson and Swanson could not misremember the same aspect of the same subject is arguably dis-proven -- assuming Swanson's opinion is his own -- because both wrongly think these events happened, neatly, right after Kelly, and that 'Kosminski' then oh so tidily died, a satisfying story after the treachery of the witness.
You say that their mistake about the non-death of 'Kosminski' might be based on 'confusion'.
Yes, but it was not a confusion shared by Macnaghten, Anderson's second-in-command, confidential assistant and successor bar one -- and who did not mention each other's existence in their respective memoirs.
Funny that?
See how these words (Sims, 1907) ironically echo Fido's 80 years later [emphases mine]:
'The first man was a Polish Jew of curious habits and strange disposition, who was the sole occupant of certain premises in Whitechapel after night-fall. This man was in the district during the whole period covered by the Whitechapel murders, and soon after they ceased certain facts came to light which showed that it was quite possible that he might have been the Ripper. He had at one time been employed in a hospital in Poland. He was known to be a lunatic at the time of the murders, and some-time afterwards he betrayed such undoubted signs of homicidal mania that he was sent to a lunatic asylum.'
[Nobody has ever found any evidence that Aaron kosminski worked in a hospital in Poland. Of course that implies 'anatomical knowledge'. I wonder who told Sims that one, which 'sexed-up' the tale?]
The policeman who got a glimpse of Jack in Mitre Court said, when some time afterwards he saw the Pole, that he was the height and build of the man he had seen on the night of the murder.
[There was no cop who saw a Polish Jew in Mitre Court, let alone later too. We know this is one of Mac's dodges from 'Aberconway' -- which shoehorned this suspect into the 1888 investigation. Of course only 'some time later' must the policeman have given this suspect the once-over. So, the promising identification/confrontation of a Jewish suspect by a prime witness went nowhere. Sound familiar?]
'Both these men [the Polish Jew and the Russian doctor, the latter unrecognisable as Michael Ostrog] were capable of the Ripper crimes, but there is one thing that makes the case against each of them weak.
They were both alive long after the horrors had ceased, and though both were in an asylum, there had been a considerable time after the cessation of the Ripper crimes during which they were at liberty and passing about among their fellow men.'
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