Druitt and the Civil Service

[aspallek]

Hi Norma,
There is evidence of the involvement of at least one leading political figure at the time - the overly ambitious would-be Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain. Chamberlain would abandon the Liberal Party in 1885, on the issue of Home Rule, thus seriously weakening Gladstone's government. For the rest of the 1880s there were four blocs in the House of Commons that were uneasily building up and down so that between 1885 and 1887 there two goverments that rose and fell (including Gladstone's shortest one). Parnell kept playing his own game of Parliamentary maneuvering to force the Liberals to back his Home Rule, and then came the Pigott forgery and the Parliamentary Inquiry.

Harry Wilson was private secretary to Chamberlain from 1895 to 1897. Druitt's body was found just yards from Wilson's Chiswick home, "The Osiers." Wilson also knew Druitt's neighbor (and later, in 1888, the family's pastor) John Henry Lonsdale. Wilson also knew the Duke of Clarence and, naturally, J.K. Stephen. Interesting coincidences.