Question?

[crberger]

So over in Pub Talk, Pinkmoon was saying that his family is from Whitechapel and his father and his father's sisters said that it was a well-off person who committed suicide shortly after the last C5 murder. As a novice this sounds an awful lot like Druitt, but would there have been the idea of him as the killer floating around say 40-50 years ago?

[Phil H]

I have just seen this.

Frankly I don't think you would find an "average" for East End streets in 1888, or that if a simple mathematical calculation were done, it would be meaningful.

You don't say where you live. It may be that you come from a town or city where streets were laid out formally from the beginning - to a grid plan or something similar. That was not true of London which has its origins around 43 AD if not before (so 2,000 years of history all but).

Spitalfields and Whitechapel were originally outside the walls of the Roman and medieval City, and until Elizabethan times were fields. Development began in the C17th (I am summarising here) and many of the houses in 1888 were built for Huguenot silk weavers who fled religious persecution in France. There was no particular street plan and as far as i am aware little in the way of planning law to guide developers.

Thus, the map of Whitechapel comprises major thoroughfares like Whitechapel High St/Road which are exceptionally wide and probably very old, some streets (Hanbury St for example) which would be of a pretty standard width for an oldish British town, and narrower alleyways and courts - Millers Court for example. I have in mind in particular the contrast between Buck's Row (later Durward St) - scene of Polly Nichols' killing which was of a reasonable width, and the parallel Winthrop St which was much narrower.

We have experts here on Casebook who are very well versed in the history and nature of Victorian Whitechapel. If anything I have said is wrong or misleading, I am sure they will correct me.

Welcome by the way,

Phil

Edited to add: I suggest you look at the pictures of some of the streets which you'll find in the photo archive here on Casebook. That will show you the range of streets I have tried to describe - there is also a long thread of pics of the East End which you might find useful. I should also have said that a few streets and areas apart (the parallel streets around Berner's Street for example) there is little logic to the plan of the streets which is haphazard in the extreme.

[pinkmoon]

local gossip

I think we can assume that if the police had anything at all on druitt we would have know I think he was just a convenient suicide.Also local gossip says every one who saw jack the ripper noted that he wore a cloak top hat and carried a Gladstone back but of course none of these thousands of people came forward at the time.....it's just gossip only takes one person and it snowballs

[pinkmoon]

So over in Pub Talk, Pinkmoon was saying that his family is from Whitechapel and his father and his father's sisters said that it was a well-off person who committed suicide shortly after the last C5 murder. As a novice this sounds an awful lot like Druitt, but would there have been the idea of him as the killer floating around say 40-50 years ago?

druitt came to light in the early 60s due to the discovery of the famous macnaughton memo the story in my family originates from my great grand parents who lived in Whitechapel during the time of murders it was a common story through east end

[pinkmoon]

druitt and abberline

Trevor Marriott has posted a thread on suspects called druitt and abberline about a newspaper report from 1903 very interesting

[pinkmoon]

When I started ready books about jack the ripper I got all excited by the connection between the tale I had been told and druitt untill we find out what this "private information"was we will just have to guess

[crberger]

Phil, bit off topic

Phil,
Thanks for the information, sometimes you can estimate street information by what's on the street: a dogcart tends to have a certain width or a wagon or some such. Or you use the average height of the time for a person and by an algorithm you can calculate the shadow and determine the height and wattage of a street lamp.
There is a certain amount of guess work, but the more data utilised the more you can eliminate the impossible and limit yourself to the highly improbable.

I answered this here rather than pub talk or mapping because you posted here, if my post is too off topic I apologise!

[Phil H]

I should apologise because I think I posted (accidentally) in the wrong thread.

Phil

[David Andersen]

I think we can assume that if the police had anything at all on druitt we would have know I think he was just a convenient suicide.Also local gossip says every one who saw jack the ripper noted that he wore a cloak top hat and carried a Gladstone back but of course none of these thousands of people came forward at the time.....it's just gossip only takes one person and it snowballs

It is very doubtful if anyone actually saw the killer let alone 'thousands'
As for the cloak. top hat and Gladstone bag. That is pure fiction.
The police may have had a lot on Druitt which is only now coming to light.

[El White Chap]

It is very doubtful if anyone actually saw the killer let alone 'thousands'
As for the cloak. top hat and Gladstone bag. That is pure fiction.
The police may have had a lot on Druitt which is only now coming to light.

We have official witness reports of Annie, Liz, Kate and Mary all seen with a man shortly before they were murdered. Joseph Lawende and Elizabeth Long are generally considered to be of the most valuable and the most likely to have seen the killer.

[David Andersen]

There was certainly no shortage of those who claimed to have seen the killer. But their descriptions are of such variance as to be believed. Lawende played up to the press since his friend Harris said that none of them had seen anything except the back. Lawende was feted by the press and dined out on the story.

[Wickerman]

Even Swanson was not too sure about the reliability of Lawende's story.
Although Lawende did see the woman and was shown her clothes, he didn't see her face and had only seen the back of her Jacket & Bonnet. As these women typically wore dark or black clothing there is no certainty the woman he saw was Eddowes.

[Fisherman]

Even Swanson was not too sure about the reliability of Lawende's story.
Although Lawende did see the woman and was shown her clothes, he didn't see her face and had only seen the back of her Jacket & Bonnet. As these women typically wore dark or black clothing there is no certainty the woman he saw was Eddowes.

Correct - sort of. But her skirt (which I think was dark green) had Michaelmas daisies or lilies on it, hadnīt it? Of course, we donīt have it on record that Lawende spoke of that ...

The best,
Fisherman

[pinkmoon]

Correct - sort of. But her skirt (which I think was dark green) had Michaelmas daisies or lilies on it, hadnīt it? Of course, we donīt have it on record that Lawende spoke of that ...

The best,
Fisherman

Hi fisherman,if the couple Lawende saw were not eddowes and her killer it is possible that this other lady might well have taken her client into mitre square and might well have disturbed our killer.

[Jonathan H]

The counter-argument is that Lawende was the paramount witness because he was rolled out to 'confront' two Gentile, sailor suspects in 1891 and 1895 (Tom Sadler and William Grant, respectively) to whom he reportedly said 'no' and 'yes' (yet the case against Grant as 'Jack' evaporated).

We only have singular newspaper reports for these 'confrontations', nothing official, but other sources back up the theory of the Jewish witness as the critical eyewitness, at least as believed by some of the police.

Major Smith in his memoirs mentions Lawende, albeit un-named and claiming that he said he would not be sure of identifying the suspect (Smith gets the description of the suspect's hat quite wrong, upping the class of the man), while the author strenuously rejects Anderson's claim of a Jewish Ripper.

Sir Robert Anderson, though only as late as from 1910 at least according to the extant record, writes of a Jewish witness who identified a Jewish suspect and, allegedly for sectarian reasons, refused to testify (it did not matter as this suspect, allegedly, died soon after in a madhouse.)

Donald Swasnon, though perhaps only repeating what he had been told by Anderson, recorded the notion of a critical Jewish witness in a private notation in his revered chief's memoirs.

Sir Melville Macnaghten in the unofficial version of his report, and via Major Griffiths in 1891 and George Sims in 1907, swapped the ethnicity of the suspect and witness; a Gentile, beat cop sees a man, whose silhouette resembled the Polish-Jewish suspect, exiting the scene of the Eddowes murder.

In his own memoirs, Macnaghten, carefully debunking Anderson's, denies there was any witness who saw anything satisfying at all, but lets slip that the cop witness he invented saw the suspect and victim before she was killed--matching Lawende's sighting of a youngish man dressed like a sailor chatting amiably with Eddowes.

Joseph Lawende's description is a generic fit for Montague Druitt: about 30, of medium height and sporting a fair moustache, at least as the latter appeared in the last of his school pictures.