Several years ago, the Eureka! moment I had was when I was examining these puzzling sources by George Sims--the doctor had been in an asylum; a medical man but no patients for years--and wondered where on earth this data had come from?
It is not true of Druitt and it is not in either version of Macnaghten's reports?
That police chief has a really lousy memory, hey?
These were also 'mistakes' that had the effect of further spinning the story away from the real figure.
Well, I thought, at least that was a bit of luck for the Druitt family (who are themselves disguised as "friends") that their tragic Montie cannot be found because of the 'errors' of this police chief and his close friend the famous writer ...
Bingo!
That's when I realized I was being conned. It was deliberate, not accidental.
Earlier in a classroom,a student had asked me what "said to be a doctor" meant?
I parroted the received wisdom: it meant that Macnaghten was under-informed about his own suspect, and so on.
She was unimpressed, asking if the line could not mean he was hedging his bets--that he was writing might be a doctor?
I said, yes, that's possible.
To which she replied, so, it could mean--might not be a doctor ... and he wasn't, right?
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Druitt Disguised--by accident or by design?
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It's my fault, not yours, for writing obscurely.
I will try and do it succinctly.
In the Edwardian Era many people believed that the Whitechapel case was solved because a very famous and popular true crime writer of the day said so.
The killer had, apparently, been a real life 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' figure who had drowned himself in the River Thames as a police dragnet fast closed upon him.
It was not a mystery.
In fact, the real suspect, a young barrister was being discreetly disguised, both to protect his respectable relations and to [deceitfully] enhance Scotland Yard's dented rep, e.g. we were just about to arrest the "mad doctor" (a single police chief did not stumble upon this suspect until years after he had killed himself).
By the 1920's the case was re-mystified by new writers who could not find any such "drowned doctor" in the media of 1888, and therefore assumed the story must be a self-serving, police myth (they were half-right).
In the post-war era the middle-aged, "mad doctor" turned out to be a young barrister. In the long run this ruptured understanding of the subject into the 21st Century--because the Edwardian era public relations campaign to hide Montague Druitt was not rediscovered too.
The iconic image of the Top Hat Toff is partly correct. The killer had been an English gentleman, just not a medical man.
Can we know this for a fact? Of course not. The suspect was deceased before he even came to the attention of this senior police administrator in 1891.
It must remain an historical solution based on limited and fragmented sources, e.g. it is a provisional solution, but arguably the best.
Where I disagree with many here is the conventional wisdom that Sir Melville Macnaghten never knew much about Montague Druitt, and never made a thorough investigation of this solution.
My book is an attempt to restore his reputation as a sleuth, and with it the veracity of his solution:
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Originally posted by Mayerling View PostI am to make a suggestion here which you can discard (possibly will) or ignore or think about.
Let's go back to step one - it is 1894. Montie has been in his grave now five years (and the victims up to Mary Kelly up to six). Suddenly we have the "Cutbush" incident, which has been the most powerful post-November 1888 incident since the murder of Frances Coles in February 1891. By his odd behavior Thomas Cutbush is now a suspect for being the Whitechapel Killer with the public.
Melville MacNaghton decides to write a memorandum listing three names of whom the Yard felt were the three best candidates who were known as suspects. He is supposed to send this memo to Home Secretary Herbert Asquith. Instead he files it away.
We know it names Osrog, Kosminski, and Montie Druitt.
Now, the discovery of the 1905 newspaper item that heads this column is a wonderful find - no question of that. But I just wonder about the following.
We are assuming that after December 1888 nobody at all at the Yard ever wondered about the Chiswick suicide of Montie Druitt. We are assuming that through old boys connections (and I don't deny they could be quite powerful) Melville learned of the Druitt family tragedy and suspicions.
This is possibly through the bigmouthed M.P.
Why couldn't it have been through some low level constable or police inspector who knew of Druitt, but never was able to look into the matter?
That said (admittedly) supposed police officer still was at the Yard in 1894, at the time of the Cutbush incident, and managed to mention his feelings about Druitt to Macnaghton?
There not only had to be a point where Druitt was officially brought to Macnaghton's notice - and if it was in some rising star in the Yard headed off as carefully as possible (if Macnaghton decides he must protect the Druitt family).
All the best
Dave
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G'day DD
As far as I can decipher it, the suggestion is that Macnaghten had some very definite proof that Druitt was the Ripper, but obscured this, for the sake of the Druitt family name, by a very clever trick: admitting to Druitt's being a suspect, but deliberately obfuscating the details, so that future students would be more apt to discount him. But I am not familiar enough with the details to parse this through at all.
That is the theory in the most basic terms, and by the way, the OP [Jonathan] posts on the forums almost daily [so I don't understand you saying he hasn't posted for seven months] and indeed under the thread "New Book" you will find detals of his soon to be released book on Montie.Last edited by GUT; 10-02-2014, 04:12 PM.
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I'm an idiot.
I'm slow on the uptake.
I might be a mental invalid.
But I cannot, for the life of me, follow any of this. It seems to have spun off of my thread here, but following all of this is beyond my ken. I've not read any books on Druitt and know about him only from the various encyclopedias of the case which have been published (the Mammoth Book, the A-Z, and so on).
I have in my mind the general outline of the orthodox Druitt theory - disturbed barrister with a familial history of mental illness who drowned himself in the Thames in December of 1888 and was therefore associated with the Macnaghten "glutted to death" drowned doctor. This seems something entirely new, but I can make no sense of it at all.
It's been seven months since the OP posted in this forum, so I shan't expect a reply soon. But if he or anyone who has been following this could, could someone please explain to me this "Druitt disguised" theory, in detail so simple that a child could follow it? I have a hard enough time working my way through the subtle class-based nuances in the 'orthodox' Druitt story (the allusions to pederasty which may or may not be there, and so on); this double-layer of nuance is thoroughly beyond me without someone to break it down, start to finish, in an easily digestible form.
But I'm still very interested in it, primarily because I fear much of the motivation for dismissing Druitt as a suspect (and also Severin Klosowski to a lesser extent) is a conscious rejection of "Gentleman Jack", a deliberate attempt to avoid cliche which may run too far in the other direction.
And if someone does opt to do this for me, for which I would wave palm leaves and sing a thousand hosannas, bear in mind please that I'm American and completely oblivious to the English caste system of the eighteen hundreds.
As far as I can decipher it, the suggestion is that Macnaghten had some very definite proof that Druitt was the Ripper, but obscured this, for the sake of the Druitt family name, by a very clever trick: admitting to Druitt's being a suspect, but deliberately obfuscating the details, so that future students would be more apt to discount him. But I am not familiar enough with the details to parse this through at all.Last edited by Defective Detective; 10-02-2014, 03:57 AM.
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Dear Mayerling
I think that anything is possible.
But is it probable?
The limited sources we have strongly suggest that--as Mac's memoir attests and the behaviour of the police do over Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles--that they had never heard of Druitt in a Ripper context before the MP blabbed.
Macnaghten in 1913 and 1914 took implicit credit for finding the identity of the fiend, and for keeping it as his secret.
It exited with him.
Actually he left behind not one but two documents naming Druitt, but the official one was unknown. For example, Macnaghten's successor had to use Griffiths to write about the trio of suspects.
At his 1913 press conference Mac that it was his property to do with as he saw fit, not the Yard's.
Therefore, no, it's not about a Bobbie or a field detective.
It is about this upper class sleuth, roving alone as usual, and meeting with Farquharson and then the Druitts or a Druitt.
Who could have stopped him ...?
I think the Chief Constable also met with the Vicar and convinced him, with impeccable schoolboy logic, to only reveal the truth in ten years as "substantial truth in fictitious form". That to tell lies, but to be honest about it while doing so, is morally ok.
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A Suggestion - for better or worse
I am to make a suggestion here which you can discard (possibly will) or ignore or think about.
Let's go back to step one - it is 1894. Montie has been in his grave now five years (and the victims up to Mary Kelly up to six). Suddenly we have the "Cutbush" incident, which has been the most powerful post-November 1888 incident since the murder of Frances Coles in February 1891. By his odd behavior Thomas Cutbush is now a suspect for being the Whitechapel Killer with the public.
Melville MacNaghton decides to write a memorandum listing three names of whom the Yard felt were the three best candidates who were known as suspects. He is supposed to send this memo to Home Secretary Herbert Asquith. Instead he files it away.
We know it names Osrog, Kosminski, and Montie Druitt.
Now, the discovery of the 1905 newspaper item that heads this column is a wonderful find - no question of that. But I just wonder about the following.
We are assuming that after December 1888 nobody at all at the Yard ever wondered about the Chiswick suicide of Montie Druitt. We are assuming that through old boys connections (and I don't deny they could be quite powerful) Melville learned of the Druitt family tragedy and suspicions.
This is possibly through the bigmouthed M.P.
Why couldn't it have been through some low level constable or police inspector who knew of Druitt, but never was able to look into the matter?
That said (admittedly) supposed police officer still was at the Yard in 1894, at the time of the Cutbush incident, and managed to mention his feelings about Druitt to Macnaghton?
There not only had to be a point where Druitt was officially brought to Macnaghton's notice - and if it was in some rising star in the Yard headed off as carefully as possible (if Macnaghton decides he must protect the Druitt family).
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To Gut
Everything you have written is wrong.
We know that the other police probably did not know about Druitt--and about that file--because none of them refers to him either 1.) at all, or 2.) in a way which matches the real man.
As if somebody has misled them. Hey, I wonder who?
Tom Divall's memoir is critical here as Macnaghten told him that the Ripper was a man who fled to the States and died there in asylum.
When Mac's successor retired and wrote about the fiend, he had to use Major Griffithsas a source because he was unaware of the Report lying in the archive.
We also know that Macnaghten knew more than other police about the suspects, for example that Ostrog was in a French asylum (Sims, 1907) at the time of the 1888 murders, and that Aaron Kosminski was alive and not deceased (Aberconway; Sims 1907) as wrongly believed by Anderson and/or Swanson.
You wrote that Sims was only a novelist, and therefore was not a reliable source. He wasn't just a novelist. He was many things, including a true crime writer and lobbyist for the innocently convicted. In 1904 his rep was never higher in helping to exonerate Adolf Beck.
I think Macnaghten gained his initial private briefing from Farquharson, the original fictionalizer, but he later learned the facts--William Druitt was trying to find his missing brother (Sims, 1902, 1903, 1907; Mac, 1914), there were no blood-stained clothes as he was found a water-logged corpse, and nor did he kill himself the same night (the Vicar, 1899; Mac, 1914).
Actually, I have not only considered that Mac was poorly informed. For about five years I accepted it as fact.
Until I saw the "West of England" MP source in 2007 and realized that I would have to revisit my assumptions.
Here, for the first time for me, was evidence that belief in Druitt as 'Jack' predated the 'memo(s)' and emerged from "his own people" in Dorset.
I was stunned. Once I read Mac's memoirs then I realized that I had been off-track, and that most--not all--secondary sources hopelessly misunderstand this subject. That it is not a mystery. It was solved, posthumously, and the solution was broadly shared with the public, but with discretion (there was Druitt's respectable relations to consider and he was beyond due process). The Ripper was a mad toff--top hat or not.
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G'day again Jonathan
I wonder if you have ever considered that Macnaghten may have got it so terribly wrong simply because he was under informed.
Maybe his "private information" came from his old Etonian mate the famous MP.
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G'day Jonathan
As it was the official report of 1894 was seen by nobody at the Yard
It was an official report by Macnaghten put on the file, anyone could have and as far as we know did see it.
In a fateful assumption for this subject Farson assumed that Macnaghten had mis-recalled or been misinformed, after all he was not there in 1888 (neither of course was Druitt as a suspect, not until "some years after").
Look, Sims was not a conventional reporter-- that is why Macnaghten chose him. Because, in the strictest sense he was not a journalist but a novelist, playwright, poet, a dabbler in crime reporting. The most famous of his two eras. A journeyman writer who wrote what he liked--a law unto himself.
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To Gut
Much as you hate this, it is a great disguise.
It worked?! Yet you, and many others, argue with success.
I appreciate that there will be no concession (no prisoners!) on this, or anything else.
Plus you do not realize there were two versions written for different audiences.
As it was the official report of 1894 was seen by nobody at the Yard--they did not know it existed--so that took care of that. It was never sent. It is a draft for a propaganda offensive never activated. In 1913 Macnaghten denied that there was anything left on file--he had destroyed it (another lie of course) and thus no record remained of the "secret information".
Whereas the unofficial version of 1898 was only seen by Griffiths (who was deceitfully told it was a copy of a definitive home Office Report--he remained skeptical) and George Sims, who was in on it.
Not only did they disseminate Druitt (carefully altered) on behalf of Macnaghten without the name, they disguised the family as friends too.
This propaganda offensive was launched to head off the 1899 Vicar (and Anderson) and was totally successful (it is only some modern writers who take Anderson seriously).
In 1959, when Dan Farson had the name--but from the unofficial version, so it's mix of fact and fiction and propagandist purpose was lost--he still could not find Druitt's death certificate. With the deadline fast approaching for his TV show he despaired in TV Week that he was not going to find "The Man Who Had Never Died".
Then a Farson researcher working backwards from a Druitt descendant found found Montague (the age Mac provided, 41, had totally thrown them) and he was a barrister and not a doctor.
In a fateful assumption for this subject Farson assumed that Macnaghten had mis-recalled or been misinformed, after all he was not there in 1888 (neither of course was Druitt as a suspect, not until "some years after").
Macnaghten had been deceased since 1921, and Sims from 1922, and yet the 'Drowned Doctor' shield nearly held up in 1959. It had held up just long enough for all the graduates of the Valentine School, contemporaneous with the tragic Mr. Druitt, to have all died off a few years before.
It .. worked.
As it was Farson did not reveal the name (only the initials, at Lady Aberconway's insistence) and it was not until 1965 that Druitt's name finally entered the public arena with Cullen's book.
Yet in 2014 Montague Druitt, among the 'community' is barely a suspect.
That poor innocent, gay martyr, cruelly shanghaied in death by an incompetent, lazy desk jockey (or, conversely, in the one official document he wrote on the subject he dismissed Druitt as unlikely and minor) and whose family never harbored such terrible suspicions, and if they did, well, so phucking what.
'Ripperology', though it is not conscious of it, has taken up the torch of Druitt-Disguised and perpetuated it all over again (albeit with different and modernist fictitious features).
A mystery where there is no mystery.
To Velma
You are talking in cliches.
eg. Journalists are honest seekers of the truth.
eg. Historical figures are never the real people on the page.
Look, Sims was not a conventional reporter-- that is why Macnaghten chose him. Because, in the strictest sense he was not a journalist but a novelist, playwright, poet, a dabbler in crime reporting. The most famous of his two eras. A journeyman writer who wrote what he liked--a law unto himself.
You don;t believe me-- then read his Ripper reports of 1888 on this site and compare them with [from] 1899, and you tell me if he is not indulging in cheerful deceit.
Macnaghten is sometimes portrayed in a kinder light; as a straight shooter, but one with maybe an over-rated memory. That he was too honest and straight to have archived material he knew to be false. He never was as sure as Anderson and--officially--he thought Druitt was a possible 'Jack' but not necessarily a likely one.
I think this interpretation misses the mark of the real person, misses his memoirs revelations and 1913 comments and misses his certainty about Druitt.
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Originally posted by Jonathan H View PostT
I have to point out that melding Druitt and Tumblety is disguising both suspects.
Ergo, Sims knew that he was doing no such thing; that the Ripper was not from a London family, not a physician and did not jump into the Thames from the Embankment.
And I don't think Macnaghten presented the solution to the Ripper case. He created a suspect that was the opposite of Anderson's to make it appear that he, and he alone, had solved the case.
On point 2: Then why print anything at all?
Especially if you KNOW what you're printing is a lie -- that goes against basic journalism, which should be seeking the truth, not hiding it. I know, slanted journalism is everywhere, but I find it distasteful.
I'm sorry, Jonathan, but it is just too convoluted.
edited to add. You're right, of course, Macnaghten is not real in any of the books in which he appears. People never or rarely are in books as they appear in real life -- the writer's choice of words is wrong or understanding of the person is incomplete it's an attempt to reduce a three-dimensional real person into two dimensions and badly chosen words.
VelmaLast edited by curious; 03-08-2014, 06:40 PM.
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But how could the respectable circles in which the family moved recognize their tragic Montie when he had been transformed into a toff physician, subject to fits of mania, from a London-based family and who threw himself into the River Thames--in London.
None of that data matches Montie Druitt--that's the whole point!
That is the disguise.
What a great disguise!
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To Bridewell
Your first post shows that you do not understand my argument, or I put it badly.
Probably the latter.
You are so far off-track you have ended up agreeing with me while thinking we disagree.
'Mac' and 'Tatcho' disguised Druitt so that the respectable circles in which the Druitt family moved (and the grown-up graduates of the Valentine School) could not recognize him.
Of course the Druitts themselves recognized him, and kept their mouths shut.
But how could the respectable circles in which the family moved recognize their tragic Montie when he had been transformed into a toff physician, subject to fits of mania, from a London-based family and who threw himself into the River Thames--in London.
None of that data matches Montie Druitt--that's the whole point!
That is the disguise.
What makes the new source so puzzling--at the time-- is that the reporter is saying that Sims said the family have to be protected.
But surely Sims has given away so much information that he can be recognized by the circles in which the London family move--even without the name?
Unless. The. Data. Is. Untrue. Which. It. Is.
The question remains: by accident or by design?
I think it is naive to vote for accident, in a culture that was obsessed with reputation, libel and fact mixed with fiction.
Edwardian readers of Logan in 1905 knew that it was such a mixture.
What they could not know which was fact and which was fiction to disguise the innocent -- was is that Mortemer Slade (obviously not the Ripper's real name) was an Oxford graduate? Was is that he was a notable athlete? Was he middle-aged? Was he from an upper class family from the North? Did he have sleek hair, a high forehead, thin lips and narrowly spaced eyes? Was it that he told the people with whom he was living that he was going abroad before he killed himself? Did he drown himself in London-- or outside the city?
Was he really a doctor? A doctor who had never had a patient?
To Bridwell [next post]
Hey, I love to see the righteous indignation of RipperLand in full wrath-mode.
That utter bounder should have been sacked!
How about hung?
How dare he! How! Dare! He!
How dare he complicate our lives as researchers by being --like most historical figures-- complex, and not flat and simple and cartoonish, like his portrayal in most books since the late 80's.
In that case do not ever go near the following historical figures or you will all die of apoplexy at discovering their mixture of good and bad: Pericles of Athens, Martin Luther, Wellington, Florence Nightingale, President Roosevelt (both), Monty (as in Bernard Law Montgomery) JFK (get the smelling salts!), Margaret Thatcher (Bloody Thatch'!) and the list goes on ...
Actually Macnaghten was sacked, sort of, before he even started, by Warren in a political fight with Monro.
I think that left him embittered behind the calculated affability and contributed to his not sharing his Ripper solution with men he regarded as utterly beneath him in class (whereas Monro he adored, and in his case it was to protect his patron from further ammunition that would have been exploited by the latter's bureaucratic enemies).
To Lech
Come on, mate, you're a hard-nosed cynic and can appreciate a sly hustler.
Mac's subterfuge was not just to protect a country doctor's relations, it was to avoid further humiliation for Scotland Yard that they had been chasing a corpse for several years.
Very successfully.
So successfully, that to this day RipperLand will not budge an inch from the theory (it's a definitely ascertained fact, you Aussie swine!) that Druitt killed himself at the right time.
A previous poster trotted out this stale chestnut.
They are being conned by 'Mac', almost one hundred years after he died.
Actually Druitt died two years too early. Macnaghten had to pretend that McKenzie and Coles were never thought by anybody at Scotland Yard to be by 'Jack'.
Instead Mac created a bogus litmus test: 'Jack' could not have functioned after Miller's Ct., not for a single day (by 1907, Sims has it that the killer could not have lived for even a single day). So, Ostrog was driven mad, Kosminski could not stop self-abusing but the Englishman, ah, he cracked and drowned himself.
Therefore on the 'awful glut' litmus test Druitt comes off best, and that is why the 'police' think that of these three he's the best, or better than Cutbush (who had been sectioned for stabbing women!) But other than that timing, there was no hard evidence against any of them.
In his 1914 memoir Macnaghten revealed that the un-named Druitt was unknown until years after he killed himself, that his culpability was based not on timing but information posthumously received and assessed (he implies this came from the man's family) and that he did function after Miller's Ct. for a single day, and night-- and might have been longer.
Nobody noticed that Mac had gone 'off-message', then or now.
Your bull$$$$ detector is thus, arguably, off the true scent.
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The good name of a humdrum fairly good country doctor's family. Was that worth all that subterfuge? No.
Why did he get details wrong?
Because he didn't know much and filled in the blanks with bull.
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