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

[Bridewell]

In Public

Ah, knowing and being able to prove it is one thing, knowing and not being able to prove it is another - so maybe Macnaghten 'knew' But libel wouldn't be a considerations with a private report in police files, which is why they were kept closed for 100 years. I expect we've both seen enough police reports to know the degree of speculation they sometimes contain! But able to prove it or not, Macnaghten still wouldn't have named Druitt in public. The police got hauled over the coals for saying they'd caught the Yorkshire Ripper, even though they had and knew they had.

Hi Paul,

I agree. Jonathan is taking issue with a statement I didn't make. My answer simply said, "Name him?". I didn't suggest that he should do so in public.

Regards, Bridewell.

[Jonathan H]

Mac knew.

Was he right?

Impossible to know.

An argument from this distance that the police chief, the family, the MP, the people the latter told were mistaken is that the 'North Country Vicar' of 1899 writing that the fiend -- if he meant Druitt, and he may not have -- suffered from 'epileptic mania' may point to a ghastly mistake as the condition is, eh ... not real (Sims in 1907 also describes symptoms for the 'doctor' which dovetail with this redundant malady).

Thus they may have all misunderstood Druitt's confession of homicide and then his suicide -- both symptoms of 'epileptic mania' -- as supposed proof of his culpability, when he was only delusional.

eg. Druitt 'only thought he knew'.

That the 'good many people' to whom Henry Farquharson apparently confided his 'doctrine' were also 'convinced'.

Why?

From just hearing the tale and nothing else?

This suggests that an entrenched, Victorian misunderstanding about mental illness might be at play?

Oh, the surgeon's son had 'epileptic mania, well say no more ...

On the other hand ...

Mac's celebrated affable personality was always to see the best in people, especially if it was a fellow English gentleman, plus it would be better for the Yard's rep if they had not been chasing a phantom, plus he was obsessed with the case and would have made a thorough and discreet investigation to get Drutt off the hook, plus he was going against his class, racial and religious biases in pinning it on a fellow English, Bourgeoisie, Gentile, gent (and a cricketer!) in no position to defend his good name.

No you cannot libel the dead but you can slander the living, hence the wariness of Sir Robert Anderson in 1910, Sims in 1917, and the unknown writer of the first MP article in 1891.

Your simply repeating that libel was not a factor does not change the sources who say, yes, actually it was a factor.

Because the nearest and dearest of the deceased murderer could be libelled if it was claimed, or only insinuated, that they knew he was 'Jack' and had done nothing to inform the police.

Your notion of a police chief in a court fighting a libel case for the right to call a dead person a murderer -- a person never even arrested for the crime unlike say even Lee Harvey Oswald who was posthumously designated the likely murderer of JFK -- is not real world. Both in terms of due process and in terms of the hideous, negative publicity, I'm sorry but it's a travesty!

[Jonathan H]

To Bridewell


When you wrote 'name him' I assumed you meant in public because Macnaghten did name him in an internal, bureaucratic document, albeit seen only by family and cronies.

Yet Mac did have an official version of this document sitting in the Scotland Yard archive naming Druitt as a Ripper suspect, although a minor, hearsay one about whom the 'police' were quite unsure if he really was a doctor, or from a good family, or if his corpse was in the Thames for 'upwards of a month' -- though his family certainly did 'believe' he was the Ripper because their member gained sexual pleasure from acts of violence.

You must be appalled by Anderson who also teases us about naming him, and then does not -- for fear of a libel action. The rotten coward ...

[Bridewell]

Libel

Your simply repeating that libel was not a factor does not change the sources who say, yes, actually it was a factor.

Because the nearest and dearest of the deceased murderer could be libelled if it was claimed, or only insinuated, that they knew he was 'Jack' and had done nothing to inform the police.

Hi Jonathan,

I do have a tendency to play "devil's advocate", so please view my comments in that context.
I acknowledge that there were those who saw a libel action as a possibility, but what was the basis for that concern?

Because the nearest and dearest of the deceased murderer could be libelled if it was claimed, or only insinuated, that they knew he was 'Jack' and had done nothing to inform the police.

The fear of libel could be a motive for Anderson to keep quiet, but not for MacNaghten, surely? If you are right, MacNaghten had been told by the family of their concerns, so MacNaghten could defend a libel action by naming his source. It isn't libelous if it's true which, by your theory, it is and if MacNaghten can, on the balance of probabilities, substantiate his claim which (again by your theory) he can.

In fairness to MacNaghten, I don't think he knew anything. I think he was a bullsh*tter who wrote of "private information" which, in reality, didn't exist. Going public with that would be libelous, because it would be untrue.

In any event, it would only be if the accusation entered the public domain that a libel action would be a possibility (as Paul rightly points out). I reiterate that I did not suggest that MacNaghten should have named Druitt publicly, only that he should have placed an unambiguous record of what he knew on file.

Eventually, of course, if you are indeed right, the Druitts did tell the police of their concerns - albeit late in the day - because they told MacNaghten.

Regards, Bridewell.

[Jonathan H]

I think that Macnaghten thought the Druitts would sue the tabloids if it was even suggested that they knew Montie was Jack but stood by and let him kill harlots.

I agree that Macnaghten is an ambiguous, arguably unreliable source who bobs and weaves all over the place.

I also think that he thought his memoirs would be the definitive Ripper source, or at the very least the definitive one attributed to him (his own ruthless adaptation of his own 'Aberconway').

The only police figure to devote a full chapter to the mystery, to name all the victims, to advocate a Gentile, Protean, 'Simon Pure' suspect whom he candidly admitted the police knew nothing about until years after he took his own life.

Yet in this hope Mac's affable ghost must be very disappointed as, today, his memoirs are sidelined, or ignored, or dismissed in favour of a dodgy internal report he never even sent ...

[Roy Corduroy]

today, his memoirs are sidelined, or ignored, or dismissed in favour of a dodgy internal report he never even sent ...

Well after all, the dodgy report names names. Otherwise we'd discuss 'Simon Pure.' And how satisfying would that be.

Roy

[Bridewell]

Yet in this hope Mac's affable ghost must be very disappointed as, today, his memoirs are sidelined, or ignored, or dismissed in favour of a dodgy internal report he never even sent ...

He may not have sent it, but he certainly wrote it; not only that, but he kept a copy which is still in existence. "Dodgy" or not, it exists and, in the context of the Whitechapel Murders, I would have to ask:

Which is more likely to contain the unvarnished truth, his memoirs sold for public consumption, or a report which was, at best, an internal police document or, at worst, a personal aide-memoire?

Regards, Bridewell.

[caz]

Hang on a minute. Isn't there something missing here? Where is it written that any member of the Druitt family talked or corresponded directly with Macnaghten about their alleged suspicions regarding Monty?

For all we know, some Dorset busybody who had Monty down as the family's 'sexually insane' black sheep (and therefore a very likely ripper, as he lived and worked up in London) may have presumed his relations knew and were keeping quiet, and this was what got to Macnaghten's ears, only in a polished up form.

What I can't fathom is why a family member would have blabbed about such a thing outside the family, especially to someone who could not be trusted not to pass on the gossip. They could hardly bleat about libel if they had provided the story to begin with.

Love,

Caz
X

[Jonathan H]

To Bridewell

Memoirs are very valuable as the person was usually there, and are limited because they often rely on memory and are self-servingly biased.

An official document of state should trump a memoir for profit.

However, this is arguably not so with 'Days of My Years' because Chapter IV on the Ripper matches other sources in honesty, in ways that the 'Report(s)' do not probably because of political and bureaucratic pressure.

For the first time Macnaghten with 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper' had his own knighted name on the line and in public, and he was demonstrably accuate.

The mistake made by previous secondary sources is not to compare the memoir to what he briefed Sims to measure that accuracy. For example Mac did not repeat that Druitt was a physician, or middle-aged, or an affluent recluse and pointedly denied he had ever been in an asylum or that he killed himself immediately after Kelly.

The Report(s) give the false impression -- which fooled experienced crime writers Griffiths and Sims -- that Druitt was a suspect before he killed himself. We know from prinary sources between 1888 and 1891 that this cannot be so. The memoir agrees: a posthumous suspect based on information received.

Mac's 1913 comments though partly deceitful also matches the primary sources as they show that he was certain about Montie Druitt -- rightly or wrongly -- and that the drowned barrister was a secret held by him and perhaps nobody else at the Yard: 'came to me subsequently'.

To Caz

If it was that simple then Mac would have happily cleared a fellow, tragic gent.

That is why that opinion is so unlikely.

Instead he was discreetly investigating the following which had leaked from his fellow Old Etonian Henry Farquharson:

The 11 February 1891 edition of 'The Bristol Times and Mirror':

'I give a curious story for what it is worth. There is a West of England member who in private declares that he has solved the mystery of 'Jack the Ripper.' His theory - and he repeats it with so much emphasis that it might almost be called his doctrine - is that 'Jack the Ripper' committed suicide on the night of his last murder. I can't give details, for fear of a libel action; but the story is so circumstantial that a good many people believe it. He states that a man with blood-stained clothes committed suicide on the night of the last murder, and he asserts that the man was the son of a surgeon, who suffered from homicidal mania. I do not know what the police think of the story, but I believe that before long a clean breast will be made, and that the accusation will be sifted thoroughly.'

And after Coles' murder Farquharson did not change his mind, despite another 'Jack' murder and a suspect in custody:

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.'

Sims' Ripper profile of the 1900's is each element of Druitt veiled, and we see there the probable contact between Macnaghten and the family, or a family member:

Dagonet in 1903:

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

Why did it leak? Because secrets do leak. It seems to have been along the Tory grapevine since the Druitts and Farquharson were near-neighbours and Conservatives.

When the story reappeared in 1898, on Mac's terms in Griffiths and then Sims, it was reshaped to be libel-proof and to obscure and protect everybody concerned:

eg. Dorset, that he was a surgeon's son, blood-stained clothes, the MP, and that the police did not know about this suspect until 'some years after' -- were out!

The un-named Druitt as a middle-aged doctor, the police chasing him in 1888, that he was an affluent recluse, the location and method of suicide were in and the error about the timing of his suicide retained -- until the 1914 memoirs which tiptoe away from the notion of those events happening simulataneously, which they did not.

[Jonathan H]

To Roy

I think that if Macnaghten had told the truth in 1913, about destroying documentation which could lead to the Ripper's identity becoming known, then, today, we would have three schools of thought:

1. There was no 'drowned doctor', as Matters and McCormick discovered (prior to 'Aberconway' being discovered by Farson) and so the whole story was made up.

2. There was a young barrister (and this might be the same figure as Farquhrason is talking about in 1891) who drowned himself in the Thames and whose body was fished out on the last day of 1888? If this is whom Mac was writing about, and disseminating to cronies, then he didn't know of whom he was talking about!

3. It was Montague Druitt whom Macnaghten and his cronies are writing and talking about, but veiled for reasons of discretion. 'Laying the Ghost ...' of 1914 in no way excludes Montague Druitt.

[Roy Corduroy]

Good evening Jonathan,

In any case, Melville Macnaghten satisfied himself he had not divulged any of the names, Druitt, Kosminski or Ostrog. Because his "report" didn't go anywhere, and his papers were private. And yes, Adam's Ripperologist article reproduced Lady Aberconway's 1959 letter expressing her desire the names not be made public. Which I thought was poignant. It sort of made me sit and think for a minute.

Macnaghten's memoir is how he wanted it to end. His description of the unnamed murderer is opaque and gives almost nothing away except the suicide.

Roy

[Jonathan H]

Yes, fair enough, Roy.

Too opaque, I agree. Too opaque for most people who write on the subject now.

One other thing he did do was to quash Anderson's memoirs, for those who cared to notice:

eg. Mac claims to have identified the hoax letter writer, to have laid to rest this phantom, and that the Protean murderer was a Gentile -- who blamed in writing a trio of Jews for interrupting him with Stride -- that he had never been sectioned, and was not seen by any witness who mattered.

So, no positive identification, and not a local Hebrew.

[caz]

To Caz

If it was that simple then Mac would have happily cleared a fellow, tragic gent.

But Jonathan, that is pure assumption on your part. Druitt was only put in a position of needing to be 'cleared' because Mac named him as his most likely ripper in the memo!

The loose-lipped MP had no problem dishing the dirt on a 'fellow, tragic gent', did he? He had so thoroughly convinced himself that his 'theory' had solved this famous mystery that he wasted no time trying to convince others, which led Macnaghten to the same conclusion - without a shadow of proof.

Why write that if he knew this tragic fellow gent could not be cleared, from the private information he had been given? How incriminating could it truly have been? The only reason for not sharing the whole story with Anderson and co would have been if he was well aware that his 'evidence' would never have stood up in court had Druitt lived.

Love,

Caz
X

[Jonathan H]

No, not the only reason ...

To Caz

Yes, that's possible but not likely.

Also, it's not an 'assumption' but a [provisional] judgement based on available sources.

When we examine sources about Macnaghten we discover that he was considered both very competent, and very compassionate, and very hands-on.

I think that Macnaghten met with the priest to whom Montie confessed -- who may have also been a family member himself -- and whomever else was in-the-know. That he would not have left a stone unturned, unlike the loose-lipped M.P. eg. that he checked the cricket schedules, and so on.

From that discreet, private investigation, Macnaghten discovered two accurate things about Druitt which have never before been noticed by secondary sources (to my knowledge). That Druitt's brother William was frantically trying to find his missing sibling (Sims: 1903, 1907) and that Montie did not kill himself 'the same evening' as the Kelly murder (Mac: 1913, 1914). That Druitt's alleged confession-in-deed was actually a confession-in-word (Sims: 1902, 1907) veiled as an admission of intent to physicians in a madhouse.

I think that if Mac could have concluded that the late Mr. Druitt was much more likely to be simply delusional, or a tormented homosexual, or shattered by his dismissal, or whatever, he would have grasped at such solutions with relief.

Macnaghten is a very different figure form the one portrayed in most secondary sources. The very opposite of the fumbling, callous figure who [allegedly] exploited hysterical gossip to shanghai a clearly innocent man into this notorious case. I think he went to see Henry Farquharson thinking he would quickly quash such a ludicrous tale and instead came away, much later after meeting the brother, quite shocked.

For all it added up.

The young, solidly middle-class barrister Druitt was Jack the Ripper ...?! And we've just got egg on our faces for arresting a no-account prole?! Now what we do we do?

Or, what do I do ...?

Macnaghten is such a cheerful fellow always looking to accentuate the positive, that he was really temperamentally unsuited for such a posthumous investigation of a fellow gent as his de-fault prejudice was in favour of the Druitts, and for the Yard (not to be seen to have been fruitlssly chasing a phantom) and yet in 1891, he was completely convinced for the rest of his life.

We can never assess that evidence as he did, but that Druitt's own family 'believed' (because he was 'sexually insane'), that a Tory MP lost all sense of his political faculties and was telling his ten best friends, and that a capable and well-regarded police chief went to enormous lengths, perhaps at risk to his own career is, historically, speaking very compelling.

This is because they believed something -- something absolutely unwanted, painful and horrendous -- against their own familial, class, professional and sectarian biases (is it even a 'bias' to want your family member to be vile killer?).

I don't think that Mac restrained himself from sharing this information with other police because the case was weak, but rather the exact opposite.

I think his problem with Anderson was that Mac did not trust his superior. Not in any corrupt way. In the sense that he feared his egocentric chief, who always had to be right, would start bragging about the fiend being identified, and this might lead to the full story resurfacing in Dorset, which could ruin a 'good' family. It would need ... special handling.

So, I think he gave Anderson a fictionalised 'Kosminski' an alternate but also deceased Ripper. On cue Anderson started bragging about successfully identifying the fiend (from 1895) but the details were so altered that the real person, Aaron Kosminski --actually alive -- could not be in any danger. His own family would not have recognised him, and that was deliberate. Mac also knew that if he made Druitt more like Tumblety, a suspect genuinely chased in 1888, he calculated that Anderson would never comment on the 'drowned doctor' -- and he didn't.

I will be accused of fantasising all this. and yet the notion of Anderson and Macnaghten sitting around in a friendly and professional manner and deciding that they favoured different chief suspects, and left it that is -- to me -- wildly implausible (and Mac knew that 'Kosminski' was alive and was out and about for a very long time before being sectioned -- why not inform his chief?)

[Cogidubnus]

But...

For what it's worth I think Jonathan's produced a very well-researched and well-reasoned theory. I love reading his posts...there's something fresh about them.

My sole reservations here are about Farquharson, and arise out of his conduct in the 1892 elections wherein he openly accused his main opponent of homosexuality whilst at school (which ended up with him being on the wrong end of a libel case - whether in the least justified or not, a continued lack of judgement is indicated by rocking the boat as he did - this being no Oscar Wilde case), plus the allegations of brutality against the kennel lads as quoted in the dissertation by Andrew Spallek...

(I'm not even mentioning the 125 Newfoundland Dogs which we'll put down to a rich man's eccentricity!)

I get the feeling Farquharson's a bit of a brute who wouldn't let common sense or judgement get in the way of spreading a nasty and malicious piece of gossip he'd been fed...(especially, and here I of course speculate, if it was suggested that Druitt had been dismissed for offences against purity)...Sorry Jonathan I have to ask myself, how well does all the rest stand up if Farquharson's credibility is removed?

All the best

Dave