Montague John Druitt - New Headstone on grave

[GUT]

Are we in laws the same thing happened to mine and from then on she got really nasty.

[Nick Spring]

Boys in the school

G'Day Pinkmoon

You raise the timing, the killings all look to appear on the first and last weekend [full weekend] of the month.

I've been looking forever but can't find anything about Druitt's work hours at school.

I'm wondering if he had duties supervising the boys at school at nght and only had certain weekend nights off.

Have you, or anyone else of course, ever seen any such details.

G.U.T.

Sligtly off thread but if he did have duties supervising at night etc:

If there was a scandal at the school concerned inappropriate behaviour with one of the boys, this surely would have come out.

Young children are noted gossips, any scandal would have been passed down. So i'm inclined to think this was not the reason he left or was dismissed.

Best

Nick

[pinkmoon]

Sligtly off thread but if he did have duties supervising at night etc:

If there was a scandal at the school concerned inappropriate behaviour with one of the boys, this surely would have come out.

Young children are noted gossips, any scandal would have been passed down. So i'm inclined to think this was not the reason he left or was dismissed.

Best

Nick

Hi Nick,very good point also would you pay the man if he had been up to no good with the pupils I think not.

[Jonathan H]

There is no indication in any of the primary sources that Druitt was sacked because of scandal, or was even sacked to his face or was even sacked whilst alive.

He was sacked from this sports club for being AWOL, and likely was sacked from the school for the same reason.

That the tormented multiple murderer falsely left word he was going abroad is the likeliest explanation, and is arguably confirmed by the extraordinary new source discovered by Guy Logan from 1905.

Extraordinary except here, where it is nothing. Because it is about the original suspect.

[GUT]

G'Day Pinkmoon

Hi Nick,very good point also would you pay the man if he had been up to no good with the pupils I think not.

Even more to the point if he had done something to, or with, a student and you wanted to protect your school your first point of call would be the police. So you could say to upset parents "Look I handed him over to the authorities, I had no idea that he was like that" would you not?

[GUT]

G'Day Jonathan

There is no indication in any of the primary sources that Druitt was sacked because of scandal, or was even sacked to his face or was even sacked whilst alive.

Unfortunately we are sadly lacking in any primary sources regarding any aspect of Monatgue's life. But in reality that applies across the board to Ripper issues.

[Jonathan H]

That's not true.

All the bits and pieces about Druitt's schooling and cricket, reports of his legal cases and the 1889 accounts of the recovery of his body and subsequent inquest into his suicide are primary sources.

We even have two innocuous letters written by the Ripper.

Do we have much? Not at all, but it's not nothing either.

Furthermore we have primary sources about the posthumous investigation into Druitt as the fiend: the two 1891 articles about M.P. Farquharson, everything written by Macnaghten the most important of being his 1913 comments and 1914 memoirs, and what he shared with his pal George Sims (eg. that culpability comes from the killer's own lips).

We also have the 'North Country Vicar' source of 1891. If that is Charles Druitt, and he really heard the confession (as Sims claims) then that is again a primary source as to Druitt's guilt and why he took his own life.

Now we have Guy Logan from 1905--also Macnaghten via Sims--in which the killer is again a mixture of fact and fiction, this time openly so as with the Vicar.

Montague Druitt, who is called Mortemer Slade by Logan, is also for the only time between the 1889 obits about the 'barrister of bright talent' until 1965 and Cullen's 'Autumn of Terror', an Oxonian, an athlete, with thin lips, high forehead, slick hair and narrowed eyes, whose Dorset origins are, furthermore, shielded by pretending he is from the North, who says he "has business abroad" when he is really going off to kill himself, and who throws his knife into the Thames ("... the truth once lay at the bottom ...".

[GUT]

G'Day Jonathan

I did not say we had nothing I said what we have is "sadly lacking" ie there is so much that we do not have.

[GUT]

We also have the 'North Country Vicar' source of 1891. If that is Charles Druitt, and he really heard the confession (as Sims claims) then that is again a primary source as to Druitt's guilt and why he took his own life.

But the Vicar doesn't say "I heard the confession" rather a fellow clergyman told me.

[Jonathan H]

You are wrong on both counts.

This is what you wrote:

Unfortunately we are sadly lacking in any primary sources regarding any aspect of Monatgue's life.

any ... any --t twice.

This is what Sims wrote about the Vicar who was admitting that his tale was a confection of truth and lies to protect peopl, under his pseudonym Dagonet in his regular "Mustard and cress' column for "The Referee" of Jan 22nd 1899:


"There are bound to be various revelations concerning Jack the Ripper as the years go on. This time it is a vicar who heard his dying confession. I have no doubt a great many lunatics have said they were Jack the Ripper on their death-beds. It is a good exit, and when the dramatic instinct is strong in a man he always wants an exit line, especially when he isn't coming on in the little play of "Life" any more.

I don't want to interfere with this mild little Jack the Ripper boom which the newspapers are playing up in the absence of strawberries and butterflies and good exciting murders, but I don't quite see how the real Jack could have confessed, seeing that he committed suicide after the horrible mutilation of the woman in the house in Dorset-street, Spitalfields. The full details of that crime have never been published - they never could be. Jack, when he committed that crime, was in the last stage of the peculiar mania from which he suffered. He had become grotesque in his ideas as well as bloodthirsty. Almost immediately after this murder he drowned himself in the Thames. his name is perfectly well known to the police. If he hadn't committed suicide he would have been arrested."

[GUT]

G'Day Jonathan

Yes "Sadly Lacking" NOT without.

[GUT]

And yes we are lacking [again not without] primary sources re his work at Valentine's his career at the bar even his sporting career, his mental health.

School

What were his duties
How much was he paid
Was he sacked
If so why?
What hours did he work
How did he fit in his duties with his legal career/ his sporting career?


Barrister

What cases were he briefed in, so far I've found a handful from 86-88.
How often did he attend chambers?
Who briefed him?
What fees did he charge?
What was his rent for chambers?

Mental health

Did he seek treatment?
If so from whom?
What was the diagnosis?

Sport

We have accounts of a handful of games.
What other sports did he play? At school and Oxford he played fives and Rugby, did he play during winter?

His social life

Did he have a girlfriend
What were his other interests, if any.

So I repeat we are sadly Lacking in any [form] of primary source in regards to any area of his life.

[GUT]

G'Day again Jonathan

That's what Sims says, but where did he get his information from?

The News account, that claim to have interviewed the North Country Vicar, says something altogether different.

[Jonathan H]

You wrote in an ambiguous way which promotes the reductionist argument that we have nothing, nothing, nothing on Druitt.

Is is quite untrue and misleading.

We do not know what his exact duties at the school were, that is certainly true.

We probably never will.

On the other hand, we know that he was "in all probability" Jack the Ripper.

Sims got his information from Macnaghten, who got it from the Druitt family. or at least a member of the family.

Sims writes a veiled version of this contact several times in the 1900's and so does Macnaghten himself, in his memoirs, where the distancing effect of 'private information' coming from someone else, eg. a go-between like the MP, has been entirely dropped.

If you want to play amateur sleuth to try to solve the case, as many have done and will do in the future, that's your right.

As a subject of crime detection from a vast distance then of course we do not have enough on Druitt or Macnaghten's reasons for choosing this suspect.

How do we know, after all, that Montie did not confess in a compelling and lucid way to somebody but was suffering from a powerful and fatal delusion?

That's possible. The scraps could be interpreted that way too, for sure.

But it was not just anybody who made the call that it was not a delusion, it was his family members and later a police chief with multiple biases to get Druitt off the hook.

Perhaps his greatest prejudice was that he did not want Scotland Yard to be humiliated--again-- by having to admit that they had been chasing a ghost for years.

How do we know that?

Because Macnaghten went to such great lengths, with some risk to his own career, to convince the press and public that the police were on his trail of this man in 1888 and about to arrest him.

And yet we still have (and will always have) the Mac propaganda taken literally--to this day and unto the end of the age--that Druitt 'died at the right time'.

He didn't.

The premature timing of his suicide arguably proved he was not the Ripper.

Furthermore, there was a history of mental illness in the family, and Macnaghten knew this too (Logan, 1905) and yet this police chief was left, he felt, with no choice but to 'believe'--despite his private inquiries being entirely posthumous.

[David Andersen]

About 7 years ago, at the invitation of the Wimborne Council, I gave a series of talks on Druitt. A place I have regularly visited. Wimborne cemetary gets a lot of visitors wishing to visit the Druitt grave. At my suggestion the stone was replaced due to the old one being very wobbly.