M.P. Farquharson-Druitt -- A New Source

[Jonathan H]

For those who have missed it, there is a new source on the 'West of England' MP source, which I have moved from another thread.

Paul Begg found this before Christmas, 2011, and was kind enough to pass it on to me. It forms the basis of an article I have in issue #3 of 'The New Independent Review'.

I am placing it on here for anybody interested to read and assess.

In my opinion, it is a major find and further strengthens the historical case for Druitt as the paramount suspect, and it pre-dates sources by Macnaghten, or by his proxies.

From 'The York Herald' and 'The Yorkshire Herald', Feb 18th 1891:

'The member of Parliament who recently declared that 'Jack the Ripper' had killed himself on the evening of the last murder, adheres to his opinion. Even assuming that the man Saddler [sic] is able to prove his innocence of the murder of Frances Coles, he maintains that the latest crime cannot be the work of the author of the previous series of atrocities, and this view of the matter is steadily growing among those who do not see that there is any good reason to suppose that 'Jack the Ripper' is dead. So far as Saddler is concerned, there is a strong feeling that the evidence will have to be very much strengthened against him by next Tuesday, if he is to be committed for trial. His manner in the Thames Police-court was consistent with any theory.'

Notice that even though the police are seriously investigating Coles as a 'Jack' murder, the un-named Farquharson remains serene in his certainty.

A certainty which Mac would come to share, in 1891, and perpetuate for the rest of his life.

Notice that the other police are coming round to the same opinion about Sadler, but not that the fiend is deceased.

Yet both Macnaghten and Anderson came to believe -- when exactly for the latter? -- that their separate prime suspects were deceased. But one was, and the other was not.

The indiscreet Farquarson is way ahead of the cops: they too will come to see Coles as not a 'Jack' murder even if they do not agree (or know?) about the dead Druitt as the solution.

The MP has the timing of Druitt's death quite wrong, an element of the tale not confirmed in Mac's memoirs, which are closer to the true historical figure.

Why post all this again?

Because I just saw the biggest load of biased balderdash about Druitt being regurgitated on the other site ...

[lynn cates]

date

Hello Jonathan. Thanks for starting this thread. We need a good discussion on Druitt.

I wonder if you know:

1. When Farqy first formulated the theory?

2. How did he manage to be off on the date?

Regarding #2, I can understand one like Mac, looking back at another's theory, and getting the dates wrong. But it is difficult to conceive of one formulating the theory and doing so--especially if it is conceived from hard facts.

Cheers.
LC

[Jonathan H]

To Lynn

I think that Farquharson heard about the Druitts' terrible secret at second or third hand along the local, Tory constituent grapevine as they were all Conservatives and near-neighbours.

That Farquharson felt no loyalty, whatsoever, to the Druitts to keep his mouth shut shows that he did not receive the tale in confidence from them.

That the tale is second-hand is also proved by having already mutated into a major error about the timing of Druitt's suicide (or the death of the final victim?)

My theory is that the confession to a priest or a family member (or both) after Kelly has been redacted backwards -- that's my theory as to the identity of the clincher element being with-held by the original 'Bristol Times and Mirror' which also alludes to a 'clean breast' being made -- and so the confession-in-word has become intertwined with his suicide: a confession-in-deed.

The MP was not trying to alert the press. He just told so 'many people' -- who were also convinced -- that it has inevitably leaked to the press. The new source shows that the MP was not going to back down, even when another 'Jack' murder had seemingly happened.

In his dodgy Reports Macnaghten does give the impression that he swallowed Farquharson's mistake -- a mistake which calls into question whether the police chief did any independent investigation of Druitt at all.

This is the entrenched conventional wisdom, which is shown to be unlikely by the following:

- Mac was a meticulous, hands-on police administrator, with a formidable memory, who was obsessed with Jack the Ripper. The preface of his memoirs pointedly deny that he was entirely too late to have a go at the fiend.

- Mac knew (we see in Sims) that William Druitt was trying to find his missing brother, suggesting the chief had checked the press accounts of 1889, at the evry least, which would have told him that the final murder and self-murder were not simultaneous. Therefore if that was the only 'evidence' (Abberline, 1903) he would have cleared Montie.

- Mac with 'family' becoming 'friends' in Griffiths, and the middle-aged doctor having been in an asylum in Sims, shows that he demonstrably a source who manipulates data to fit the specific audience, and thus it cannot be asserted with confidence that because he wrote 'doctor' (actually he wrote 'said to be a doctor' too, which means might not be a doctor too) that he thought Druitt definitely was one.

and

- 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper' (1914) pulls back from the murder/self-murder 'the same evening'.

To my knowledge no secondary source has ever noticed this lengthening of the gap by Mac to render the timing of Farquharson and Sims an impossibility (impossible, that is, if you include the odyssey to the river -- and he doesn't)

This is what Mac allows Sims in 1907 to write, based on 'Aberconway'-Grffiths (and no doubt Mac's own verbal confirmation as it includes extra details not in either):

'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. There was everything about it to suggest that it had been in the river for nearly a month.

The horrible nature of the atrocity committed in Miller's-court pointed to the last stage of frenzied mania. Each murder had shown a marked increase in maniacal ferocity. The last was the culminating point. The probability is that immediately after committing this murderous deed the author of it committed suicide. There was nothing else left for him to do except to be found wandering, a shrieking, raving, fiend, fit only for the padded cell.

What is probable is that after the murder he made his way to the river, and in the dark hours of a November night or in the misty dawn he leapt in and was drowned.

[Emphases mine]

Notice that not only has the date of the murder/self-murder been telescoped backwards but it has also dragged back the date of the retrieval of the body to early December.

No wonder the first writers to try and find the 'drowned doctor' in extant records, Leonard Matters and Donald McCormick, were at a loss and concluded that the figure did not exist (it's fun to think of that most notorious of Whitechapel hustlers, McCormick, being fooled by Mac from the grave).

Yet this is what Mac wrote in his 1914 memoirs and it voids what his own pal had written in 1907:

'Although, as I shall endeavour to show in this chapter, the Whitechapel murderer, in all probability, put an end to himself soon after the Dorset Street affair in November i888, certain facts, pointing to this conclusion, were not in possession of the police till some years after I became a detective officer ...

'Soon after', not 'immediately after'!

And,

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 ... 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.'

Why didn't Mac simply write three weeks later?

First of all that would alert Sims too blatantly that he had been played. Mac did it just enough to suggest that he knew it was not 'the same evening' -- which is a tale straight out of penny dreadful melodrama -- but just close enough to claim to Sims that he had made an error.

To keep 'everyone satisfied'.

[lynn cates]

timing

Hello Jonathan. Thanks.

"'Although, as I shall endeavour to show in this chapter, the Whitechapel murderer, in all probability, put an end to himself soon after the Dorset Street affair in November 1888, certain facts, pointing to this conclusion, were not in possession of the police till some years after I became a detective officer ..."

Do you think that these facts were known before or after he wrote the memorandum?

Cheers.
LC

[Jonathan H]

In my opinion, before.

Mac, the 'action man', would have left no stone unturned in posthumously investigating Druitt, though with discretion and sensitivity -- all in 1891.

The new source backs my theory that Mac told nobody at the Yard, as it asserts that the authorities do not agree with Farquharson about the fiend being deceased, even if they do agree that the case against Sadler is crumbling.

I argue that Macnaghten did not trust the police or the government with preserving the reputation of the Druitts (fellow Conservatives).

Yes, he did name Druitt for the Liberal govt. in an official document -- deceitfully as a minor suspect, in the filed version -- if the tale again spilled out of Dorset.

It didn't and thus was never sent to the Home Office; this trigger was never pulled, but it remained on file just in case. Nobody knew of its existence until 1966.

I do not think it a coinceince that by 1895 Anderson (and perhaps Swanson) also were just as certain about a different deceased Ripper, who is actually alive in the asylum.

And whom do we know manipulated data depending on the audience?

[Beowulf]

This is all kind of confusing to me, I'm going to lay out how I read this first statement of this column so I can continue to follow this very interesting discussion, if you please:

"'The member of Parliament who recently declared that 'Jack the Ripper' had killed himself on the evening of the last murder, adheres to his opinion."

Meaning the MP believes JTR to be Druitt, who has drowned himself, and is sticking to that idea. Correct on that one, I think.

"Even assuming that the man Saddler is able to prove his innocence of the murder of Frances Coles..."

Meaning this guy Saddler feels he can prove Druitt is innocent of the murder Frances Coles, as she was murdered after his suicide took place?

"he" (Saddler?) "maintains that the latest crime cannot be the work of the author of the previous series of atrocities"...meaning Druitt must be innocent of the other canonical 4, previous to Kelly? Why does he feel this? What is his logic for this conclusion?

"and this view of the matter is steadily growing among those who do not see that there is any good reason to suppose that 'Jack the Ripper' is dead."...

And so the previous 'facts' add up to Druitt can't be JTR? He must still be at large?

Do I understand this correctly?

[Jonathan H]

No, that's not it.

I agree, however, that it's poorly written and takes some untying of the knot.

The 'he' refers to the MP.

That even if Saddler (sic) is able to prove himself innocent of the Coles murder, 'Jack the Ripper' -- according to the politician -- is still long deceased and not thus at large.

Though police are coming around to the same conclusion about Sadler not being the murderer of Coles, and not being the Ripper -- they do not agree that 'Jack' is deceased (yet Anderson would have his own deceased Ripper some time later, who was actually alive?).

But secretly, I argue, Macnaghten did, for the rest of his life, agree with his fellow member of the Old Boy Net, Farquharson.

In 1891 Mac's troubles, as to what to do with this embarrassing revelation, had just begun ...

[Beowulf]

Thank you, just read up on Saddler a bit. Yes, very interesting.

[lynn cates]

tentative

Hello Jonathan. Thanks.

"In my opinion, before."

Very well. Then a great problem, for me, is the tentativeness in his memorandum. To paraphrase:

"The Sun has it all wrong. I can think of 3 suspects--all of them better than Cutbush. Here they are. Now the first 2, although good suspects, probably aren't the ripper because of X, Y, Z. Hence, I exonerate them. But I have been thinking about Druitt for some time. And, frankly, the closer I get the better he looks."

If this captures the essence of Mac's memorandum, it seems inharmonious with his having all the evidence in place.

On the other hand, it could be an understatement so as not to set off an alarm.

But here's a proposal. Could not Mac have forgone naming suspects altogether in the memorandum? Instead of Kosminski, Ostrog and Druitt, what about an insane Polish Jew, a Russian con man and the son of a surgeon?

Cheers.
LC

[PaulB]

Hello Jonathan. Thanks.

"In my opinion, before."

Very well. Then a great problem, for me, is the tentativeness in his memorandum. To paraphrase:

"The Sun has it all wrong. I can think of 3 suspects--all of them better than Cutbush. Here they are. Now the first 2, although good suspects, probably aren't the ripper because of X, Y, Z. Hence, I exonerate them. But I have been thinking about Druitt for some time. And, frankly, the closer I get the better he looks."

If this captures the essence of Mac's memorandum, it seems inharmonious with his having all the evidence in place.

On the other hand, it could be an understatement so as not to set off an alarm.

But here's a proposal. Could not Mac have forgone naming suspects altogether in the memorandum? Instead of Kosminski, Ostrog and Druitt, what about an insane Polish Jew, a Russian con man and the son of a surgeon?

Cheers.
LC

Or not referred to them at all. After all, the purpose of the memorandum was to refute the allegations against Cutbush. The three named were irrelevant to that purpose.

[Jonathan H]

To Lynn and PaulB

There was every reason to mention Druitt. It was a political imperative.

I wondered about this too -- until I freed myself from the dead weight of the conventional wisdom regarding the secondary sources on the Macnaghten primary sources (about him, by him, and by his proxies).

[Your own '--The Facts' was a major influence.]

Lynn, the version you refer to, 'Aberconway', was only shown to cronies and family, and disseminated to the public through the former.

In my opinion, whenever it was written, it was composed for that purpose -- to be disseminated to the public with each suspect carefully fictionalised to make them unrecognisable and untraceable (and they were not traced without the names).

What the 'West of England' MP articles show is that the Druitt story could surface again in Dorset.

If the 1894 alleged scoop in 'The Sun' (whose key element was a Scotland Yard cover-up) caused certain people in Dorset to tell what they knew, then it could all comes out, again, about the 'son of a surgeon' and how he -- the Ripper -- was totally unknown to the constabulary.

But Druitt wasn't unknown. His tale was lodged in Mac's head since 1891, but not written down anywhere as he hoped to spare the family any more anguish, let alone public ruin.

But if the family could not be protected, then Mac had to protect himself and the Yard by claiming to the Home Office, in the official version, that Druitt was checked out in 1888/9 -- that's the timing implication of a lack of proof, or even its shadow -- but that he was a minor, hearsay suspect about whom the police had not even bothered to find out if he was definitely a physician, or from a good family, or if his body was over a month in the Thames.

Mac could not leave Druitt alone, in that document, and so he made him just one of a trio, of a list of [semi-fictional] suspects, who were probably not the fiend but more likely than the demonstrably insane, permanently incarcerated and violent to women Cutbush.

He is trying to square a big circle, and the strain shows.

Then the Home Sec. H H Asquith would have read out the profiles in the Commons, but not the names, and if the story did not spill out of Dorset, Druitt would not be found as a doctor who drowned himself in the Thames on about Nov 9th 1888.

But if the story did surface again, with a vengeance, then Mac could claim that Druitt was on file -- and that the family were pretty certain -- but mistakes were, unfortunately, made: the doctor was really a doctor's son and barrister. Oh, well ...

None of this happened, and so the Report was never sent to the Home Office. I think he filed it -- in the Scotland Yard archive -- as an insurance policy, especially if the 'North Country Vicar' is about Druitt as that is the story resurfacing and Mac used Griffiths and Sims to quash it. He did covertly exactly what the Vicar admitted he was doing overtly: 'substantial truth in fictitious form'.

Later he deceitfully told Griffiths and Sims that the 'draft' version was a copy of a definitive document of state (Sims, 1903).

[lynn cates]

Q

Hello Jonathan. Thanks again. One quick point.

"Then the Home Sec. H H Asquith would have read out the profiles in the Commons, but not the names."

Could Mac be sure of that? It would seem natural to include them.

Cheers.
LC

[Jonathan H]

It's true that you can say what you like in the Commons, immune from the libel laws (this is true of our national and state parliaments, in Australia, too).

On the other hand, it would have been so unseemly to say that one of three men was more likely to be Jack the Ripper (a dead Englishman, and two sectioned Russians) and actually name them?!

For they could never receive due process -- in the case of the English physician permanently so! -- and thus never be able to defend themselves in a court of law.

The very fact that there would have been three of them hardly suggested official certainty about the fiend's identity. I doubt that Asquith would have even detailed their profiles, just said that Scotland yard had better suspects on file, and left it at that.

As it was, this trigger was never pulled but Druitt was now on file -- a dormant insurance policy -- should the whole story resurface in Dorset, perhaps more virulently than before?

Much later, to reassure the Druitts, Mac would quite shamelessly and falsely claim that he had destroyed all records of 'Jack's's identity. Of course this is also the give-away that the 'Report'(s) are seen as his own property, and not the state's.

[lynn cates]

rumour

Hello Jonathan. Thanks. I see what you mean.

Concerning Farqy, I don't think he ever mentions Druitt by name. That would, I think, increase the likelihood he had formed his theory from local rumour?

Cheers.
LC

[Robert]

I cannot help thinking that, if Macnaghten had definite evidence implicating Druitt, he would have been very irresponsible if he didn't leave such info in a safe place in the event of his early death. In 1894 there was still an unlikely but possible chance that some other man, a complete innocent, could have been convicted of the crimes. Not Cutbush, who was safe within the confines of Broadmoor, but some other chap might have been suspected and charged. Suppose Macnaghten walked under a cab in 1894. What would have happened?