J. McDermott

[Chris]

Greetings all,


Something interesting happened last Christmas. It may be nothing or it could be something significant. A friend of mine knew I was involved in JTR stuff, so he contacted me and told me a family story.

He has an old chest that has been passed on through the family, which belonged to an artist/family member named Fred Johnson who lived in London in the 1880’s. In the chest was a pad of paper called, “Fred Johnson’s drawing book”. One of the pictures is of a man with a receding hairline and a mustache dressed in a Victorian age suit. Above the drawing it says, “W. J. McDermott the supposed Jack the Ripper”. Eric said Johnson lived in London at the time of the murders. I checked Casebook and Google and I cannot find any reference to a McDermott as a possible JTR suspect. I also asked Simon Wood and Wolf Vanderlinden last January/February and they had not heard of him. Have any of you ever heard of a suspect named W. McDermott? My thoughts are that Johnson merely saw this in a local London newspaper, so he drew it (of course, no photocopying then). It's just strange that this man has been forgotten.

My friend took photos of the chest, the drawing book, a picture of a man in a top hat next to a woman, and then the picture of this McDermott. It looks like a West End man who may have been suspected of having a second life frequenting the East End. Below is a photo of Johnson's drawing.

Sincerely,

Mike

Just one observation: I'm pretty sure that says "Mr J. McDermott", not "W. J. McDermott."

And only one near-contemporary "J. McDermott" springs to mind - "Red" Jim McDermott, the British agent in Fenian circles. There's nothing I know of to support this identification, but it would be fascinating if this were the "J. McDermott" referred to. Unfortunately I can't find a picture of "Red" Jim, but I wouldn't be surprised if one could be tracked down, and that ought to determine whether he's the right man.

[mklhawley]

This is awesome Chris, and very appropriate for this thread! Here is what I found in the New York Times, May 20, 1884:

WHERE IS JIM M’DERMOTT?
The following extract is made from a letter dated Rome, Italy, May2, and was written by a gentleman to whom McDrmott is perfectly well known:

“Last Saturday, going from Marseilles to Nice, while on the train I went …Jim McDermott. He was neatly dressed. Had on a drab overcoat, black silk hat. With crape on it, and wore black gloves. His mustache was dyed black, but not sufficiently so to hide the red. I knew him, and he knew me. There was no mistaking his bluish grey eyes and double chin…”

It's not a picture of him, but the description seems to agree.

Sincerely,

Mike

[Chris]

I finally managed to find a picture of "Red" Jim McDermott. It's from the Irish World of 18 October 1890 (available through www.genealogybank.com).

This looks to me very much like the man in Mike's drawing.

[lynn cates]

blotchy face

Hello Chris and Mike. Lovely find. It sounds like he had a carroty moustache. Now, if we could verify the blotchy face . . .

Cheers.
LC

[mklhawley]

Nice job Chris and I agree with you. I'ts also intriguing that it connects a fenian character with JTR, yet I have not seen Red McDermott being connected before. This is what ripperology is all about.

Sincerely,

Mike

[Chris]

Mike kindly provided me with some more information about the contents of the drawing book. In particular, it includes a drawing of a "Johnson Interlocking Machine", which Mike identified as a piece of equipment manufactured by the Johnson Railroad Signal Company, founded by members of a Johnson family who had originated in England. A bit more research into the genealogy of this family revealed a likely candidate for the Fred Johnson to whom the drawing book belonged.

The founders of the company were descendants of Joseph Johnson (b. c. 1809) and his wife Ellen (b. c. 1811), who were both born in Alconbury, Huntingdonshire. Joseph was a carpenter or builder (employing 8 men in 1851), and the couple had at least eight children, the older of whom were born at Alconbury, and the younger (from c. 1843) at Higham Ferrers in Northamptonshire.

The Johnson Railroad Signal Company was founded in 1888 in Rahway, New Jersey, by Charles Roberts Johnson (?1852-1893), the son of Joseph's eldest son William, and Henry Johnson (?1837-1910), Joseph's fourth son. Charles had originally gone to the USA in 1881 (see his obituary in Proceedings of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. 20 (1894), available online at http://www.archive.org/details/proceedings9420amer), and his uncle Henry followed in 1886 (New York Times, 8 April 1910).

Joseph Johnson's third son, John (b. c. 1837), was also a railway signal engineer. In 1865 at Southwark he married Susan Odell, and among their nine children was a son, Fred Stewart Johnson, whose birth was registered at Doncaster, Yorkshire, in the first quarter of 1870 (a later census record gives the month of his birth as December 1868, presumably an error for 1869; an elder brother, Harry Odell Johnson, had his birth registered in the last quarter of 1858).

Fred's father, John Johnson, was living at York at the date of the 1881 census, but that is the last record I have found of him. On 19 December 1887 Fred S. Johnson, aged 18, a whitesmith from York, arrived in New York on the Umbria. The following June, Mrs S. Johnson, accompanied by three other children, arrived in New York on the Alaska. Presumably her husband had either died or preceded the rest of the family. But by 1900, Susan was certainly a widow. At that date she was living in Newark, New Jersey, with three of her children, including Frederick S., who like his brother was a Signal Man Steam R[ail]R[oad].

Around 1905 Fred married Alida, who had been born in New York of German parents. I haven't found the couple in the 1910 census, but in 1920 and 1930 they were living at Mifflin, Juniata county, Pennsylvania, with Fred working for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Alida died in 1974 at Mifflintown, Juniata county.

This is the only Fred/Frederick Johnson I've been able to find in the immediate family of the founders of the Johnson Railroad Signal Company, though it should be mentioned that we haven't yet managed to clarify the relationship with Mike's friend's family. If this is the right man, the most important conclusions are probably that he was living in the USA, not in England, at the time of the Ripper murders, and that there is no indication that he is likely to have picked up private information from police circles. So the likeliest source of the "supposition" that McDermott was the Ripper was probably the American press, which still leaves us guessing why no trace of such a sensational story can be found today...

[Johnr]

Champion Work Chris!

Excellent work -as usual Chris,

You produce excellent and most accurate work. Congratulations!

I have a suggestion for you.

Why don't you approach the editorial committee of "The A to Z of Jack the Ripper"? And see if they would like to include you in their team for the next edition?

Now I am not being sarcastic about the current editors here.

Needless to say, that publication - a daunting challenge for anyone- attracts very few bouquets, but countless brickbats.

Good work anyway Chris. I could not find anything about Red McDermott in the Butterworth book, where one might expect to see a mention.

JOHN RUFFELS.

[mklhawley]

Excellent work -as usual Chris,

You produce excellent and most accurate work. Congratulations!

I have a suggestion for you.

Why don't you approach the editorial committee of "The A to Z of Jack the Ripper"? And see if they would like to include you in their team for the next edition?

Now I am not being sarcastic about the current editors here.

Needless to say, that publication - a daunting challenge for anyone- attracts very few bouquets, but countless brickbats.

Good work anyway Chris. I could not find anything about Red McDermott in the Butterworth book, where one might expect to see a mention.

JOHN RUFFELS.

Hi John,

I have to second you on the outstanding research by Chris. I am actually surprised more people are not interested in Red McDermott possibly being a JTR suspect, especially because of his Scotland Yard/Fenian connections. Because of the research by Chris, I am pretty confident this Johnson character who drew this most likely received his information AFTER he came over to the U.S. as opposed to when he lived in London. I'm bummed, though. Just think of the conspiracy theories popping up because of having a Scotland Yard secret agent implicated as JTR!

Awesome work Chris, and I will let you know if Johnson's descendents come up with anything. I'm sure it's the Rochester thing, since they live only an hour away from there.

Sincerely,

Mike

[Chris]

Thanks to John and Mike for their comments.

I too am surprised that this puzzle hasn't received more attention. One might have imagined it would be a conspiracy-theorist's dream.

Regarding John's suggestion, it's very flattering, but I have no ambition to become a print author, though I hope to continue contributing to Casebook's own 'A-Z' as time permits:

http://wiki.casebook.org/

[Phil Carter]

Hello Mike, Chris, John,

It is, as they say, early days...who knows what will come to light? Chris has done some marvellous work on this (as per usual it must be said).

Chris, I too will be going through the A-Z sometime next week to see what comes to my notice too. The more the merrier, as it must be a nightmare to try and cover all of this subject in one volume.

best wishes

Phil

[lynn cates]

congratulations

Hello Chris. Congratulations. You do excellent work!

"I too am surprised that this puzzle hasn't received more attention. One might have imagined it would be a conspiracy-theorist's dream."

Or, if not a conspiracy theorist, at least one who questions the dogma. But then again, dozens of other possibilities are out there waiting to be challenged. And each potentially overturning the dogma.

Cheers.
LC

[packers stem]

excellent work Chris.
A 'political hot potato' one might say

[Chris]

I have been trying to piece together some biographical notes on "Red Jim" McDermott. It's not easy, because while his activities in late 1882 and in 1883 are well documented, the evidence for the periods before and after that is very scanty, and much of what there is comes out of his own mouth - which isn't the most reliable of sources - or else from those who considered him a despicable traitor. So this should be treated with some caution, as an account of what was reported about McDermott at various times, rather than as a reliable narrative confirmed by contemporary sources. But the following is what I have so far.

On his own account he was born around 1835 (he was quoted as saying he was 54 in 1889 [1]), presumably in Ireland (though Patrick McIntyre [2] seems to have thought he was American by birth).

He was said to have joined the old Fenian organisation in Cork as early as 1862, but to have been dropped because of his fondness for the society of detectives. Soon afterwards he went to America and settled in Brooklyn. He became the private secretary of John O'Mahony, the leader of the Fenian Brotherhood, but was said to have been openly accused of betraying to the British O'Mahony's plan to seize the Canadian island of Campobello in April 1866 [1].

I have seen little information on his activities in the next decade and a half. He is said to have been a freelance journalist in Brooklyn, contributing small items of information, mainly to the Eagle, which were written up by others [3].

He also dabbled in politics, speaking in saloons [2] - McGroarty's saloon on Montague Street was said to have been his favourite [1] - and being paid by both political parties, though ostensibly a Democrat [3]. But he seems to have had a precarious existence, being described as notorious for fights with tailors seeking payment [1] - he was described as "a cheap bar-room brawler who was constantly before the police courts through the use sometimes of his fist, but more frequently of knife and bludgeon" [3].

He was said to have excited suspicion by the way in which he followed the delegation that accompanied O'Mahoney's remains to Ireland (in February 1877) [5].

He was later said to have perjured himself by giving evidence intended to incriminate a journalist, Kenward Philp, who was accused of having forged the Morey letter (to discredit James Garfield in the presidential election of 1880) but who was later shown to be innocent [3].

After the Phoenix Park murders in May 1882, he was said to have offered to lead a movement to "remove" Gladstone and Harcourt (the prime minister and home secretary) [1].

In October 1882, McDermott was recruited (or reactivated) as a spy by the British consul-general in New York, Sir Edward Archibald, after Matt O'Brien had overheard him plotting to kill Earl Spencer (lord lieutenant of Ireland) in J. P. Ryan's Liquor Saloon in Chambers Street, and followed him to the adjacent office of Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa's United Irishman [4].

In January 1883, McDermott told Rossa that he was going to Europe to trace George A. W. Stewart, the secretary of the Brooklyn Board of Education, who had absconded, and obtained from him credentials as a correspondent of the United Irishman (apparently he was already authorised to represent the Brooklyn Union) [5]. He sailed to Liverpool under the name Peter Quigley and put up at the Birkenhead Railway Hotel to await the arrival of Edward Jenkinson, the Dublin Castle "spymaster." After meeting Jenkinson, he went to London to confer with O'Brien [4]. According to McIntyre, O'Brien referred to McDermott as his "foster-brother," and at this time they lived "in the gayest fashion" at the Grand Hotel, Charing Cross [2].

In late February 1883 McDermott was in Dublin, and visited Michael Davitt in Richmond Prison, posing as a correspondent for the Brooklyn Daily Argus. He saw Davitt and his fellow prisoner, T. M. Healy, M.P., in the presence of the chief warder (at Davitt's request), praising the Phoenix Park assassins and saying that Earl Spencer deserved to be shot, but Davitt cut him short and he and Healy instructed the chief warder that he was not to be admitted to see either of them again [4, 5, 6].

Afterwards he was seen visiting Dublin Castle under the pretence of interviewing Jenkinson. He was later arrested following a drunken brawl with a cab-driver, and his letters of introduction from Rossa were shown by a desk-sergeant to a journalist, who passed copies of them to Davitt. McDermott was released without charge [4].

Apparently at about the same time he visited a Mrs Cody, who supplied the Phoenix Park prisoners with food. In the guise of a "friend of Ireland" he obtained from her the names of the people who paid her to feed the prisoners, and they were subsequently arrested [5].

Afterwards (in mid-March 1883) he went to Cork, where he posed as an organiser of dynamite societies in order to incriminate nationalists. An account of his activities there by James O'Malley was published in August 1883 [5]. O'Malley was deputed to meet him at the Imperial Hotel, where McDermott produced a letter from Rossa. He attempted to induce O'Malley to write to Rossa at an address he supplied, and to copy a recipe for explosives. According to O'Malley's own account, he was suspicious of McDermott and alerted his colleagues, but at a meeting at the Imperial Hotel on 18 March McDermott convinced Timothy Featherstone of his good faith. He then left, ostensibly on a trip to Killarney (but actually to Dublin) and after his return on 21 March he attended a meeting and proposed to poison Captain Plunkett, the resident magistrate for Cork.

On 22 March he went to London and met John O'Connor, alias Dalton, who showed him the public buildings [5]. McIntyre described how he and Littlechild had observed the meeting of the two men outside the Charing Cross Hotel and shadowed them as they visited various places, including Westminster Bridge, where they surveyed the House of Commons. Their instructions were to follow Dalton and find out where he lived, which they did [7]. Dalton was arrested in early April.

After his return, he arranged for Denis Deasy to take a box of nitro-glycerine to Patrick Flannigan in Liverpool, and gave him an incriminating note addressed to Flannigan and signed with Featherstone's name. Deasy was arrested on his arrival on 28 March, and the note led to Flannigan's arrest. On 29 March Featherstone and others were arrested in Cork, and the following day McDermott went to Dublin, registering under the name St Sylvester. In early May he went on to Liverpool, where he appeared as a witness at a secret inquiry into the Cork conspiracy, and then travelled via Le Havre to Paris [5]. There he made contact with the nationalists Joseph and Patrick Casey; he also supplied Jenkinson with information about a former Foreign Office spy, General Charles Carrol-Tevis, and his Parisian mistress [4].

On 6 June McDermott arrived back in New York. He apparently allayed Rossa's suspicions by persuading him that someone else had betrayed the plot, but two days later he was warned through William Hoare, the new acting consul, that two men were on their way from Cork to kill him, and he escaped to Montreal [4]. There he appears to have again used as a cover story the claim that he was in pursuit of Stewart, the missing secretary of the Brooklyn Board of Education; it was reported on 9 July that he had been in Montreal for some time negotiating with Stewart [9]. But it was later alleged that he had again acted as an agent provocateur in trying to organise "dynamite clubs" there on Hoare's orders [4, 5, 10].

After being assured by Rossa that the accusations against him were not believed, he returned to New York [4]. Soon afterwards, on 21 July, two men unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate him while he was having lunch with Rossa at Ryan's Saloon in Chambers Street. A "calling card" found on one of them accused him of being an English spy [1, 4].

McDermott fled to England, sailing for Liverpool on 25 July under the name Peter Quigley, in "semi-disguise" and wearing gold spectacles. On his arrival on 8 August, he was arrested, Jenkinson's plan being to stage a phony trial in order to deflect suspicion from him. But the plan was dropped and he was released on 17 (or 19) September, and disguised as a coal porter he was escorted across the North Sea to Hamburg by Jenkinson's colleague Gosselin [1, 2, 4].

After this point, McDermott seems to have been sighted only sporadically. Campbell referred to him "living it up" on the Continent, apparently in the Spring of 1884, but gave no more details [12]. In June 1885 it was claimed that his wife had been seen in deep mourning in New York, and had said he had died a couple of months before; he was said then to have last been seen near London [13]. One Samuel Maclean, described as a Brooklyn millionaire, said he had met McDermott in Princes Street, Edinburgh, and had lunch with him, apparently in August or September 1888 when he was socialising with the grouse-shooting set [14, 15].

In 1889 when the Parnell Commission was sitting, Henry Labouchere offered a reward of £50 for information on McDermott's whereabouts so that he could be forced to give evidence. McDermott later claimed that he had been in London at the time and made no attempt to conceal himself [1, 16]. Later it was even claimed that he had written a letter offering to meet Labouchere in company with a newspaper reporter [17].

McDermott was interviewed by the New York Herald in August 1889, during a week's stay in London. Two months later the same newspaper reported that he had just returned from a trip to Sweden. He gave an account of a lavish lifestyle, which shared some details with the reports of his meeting with Samuel McLean the previous year [1, 14, 15]. He claimed to have married a French countess whom he had met on his voyage to Liverpool in July-August 1883, and to have taken her name, being known as the "Count de Neonlier." He claimed to own a chateau and an estate of 56 acres and 200 tenants in France, unprofitable "owing to the ravages of the phylloxera" (a species of louse that devastated French vineyards in the late 19th century). In one article he said his wife had brought him this estate, but according to another he had inherited his French property from an aunt. His other claims included the ownership of a castle at Helsinki (described as being in Norway), a house in Stockholm, a house and grounds in Colombo, Ceylon (inherited from an uncle who had died intestate and whose son was presumed to have been eaten by "wild beasts") and a 40-ton yacht. He claimed to have travelled also in Australia, to have spent time at Monte Carlo and the German spas, and to have lived in Berlin and Copenhagen (where he taught in a school, as he had done in Norway according to a different report). Not surprisingly, these claims were treated with some scepticism [1, 14, 15, 17].

In April 1891 McDermott was reported to have written from the Victoria Hotel, London, denying that he was the "Missing Murray" in the Evelyn-Hurlbert case [18]. This was a scandalous breach of promise case, in which a "soi disant actress" in London, Gladys Evelyn, claimed that an American journalist, William Henry Hurlbert, had written her a number of compromising letters. Hurlbert claimed that the letters had been written by an acquaintance of his named Wilfred Murray, who had unaccountably vanished; Hurlbert later fled when a warrant was issued for his arrest for perjury. Why McDermott should have involved himself in the case - if his letter was genuine - is a mystery.

McDermott surfaced again in 1894, when he wrote (on 23 August, from the Hotel Victoria, Northumberland Avenue, London) to Freeman's Journal (Dublin), claiming to have just returned from America on his way home to the South of France. He recalled that when a writer in a Dublin publication made allegations against him a few weeks earlier, he had offered £1000 if they could produce proof, which he said was unclaimed in the hands of his friend Sir Charles Rich. In response to new allegations by Michael Davitt that he had plotted to deliver Gallagher and others into the clutches of Scotland Yard, he offered £2000 for proof. In his response, Davitt challenged McDermott to sue him for libel, suggested that his letter had been written on stolen notepaper, and that he had sent a letter to New York to be posted there, in order to substantiate his story of having visited America [19].

The final alleged sighting of McDermott was by Patrick McIntyre, who wrote in his serialised memoirs that around late March 1895 "a well-dressed gentleman, tall silk hat, and Newmarket ulster," called at the pub he kept in Southwark and despite the fact that his appearance was "greatly altered," according to McIntyre he recognised the customer as "Red Jim." The following week a correspondent calling himself "Vindex" claimed that a despatch published in the press on 24 April showed that McDermott was in fact in India, but apparently this related to a different McDermott who had offered to supply arms to the Pashtun chief Umra Khan two years earlier, and had subsequently gone to Egypt [20, 21].


References.
[1] New York Herald, 2 September 1889.
[2] Reynold's Newspaper, 10 March 1895.
[3] Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 September 1890.
[4] Christy Campbell, Fenian Fire (2002), pp. 130-135.
[5] Irish World, 18 October 1890.
[6] James O'Malley places this incident later, after the arrests in Cork.
[7] Reynold's Newspaper, 10 February 1895.
[8] Campbell, pp. 152, 214.
[9] Muskegon Chronicle, 9 July 1883.
[10] New York Times, 14 October 1890.
[11] Lindsay Clutterbuck, An Accident of History?, p. 206 (Ph. D. thesis, Portsmouth, 2002).
[12] Campbell, pp. 145.
[13] New York Herald, 13 June 1885.
[14] New York Herald-Tribune, 15 September 1888.
[15] New York Times, 15 Sept 1888.
[16] Campbell, p. 357, footnote.
[17] New York Herald, 2 November 1889.
[18] Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 April 1891.
[19] New York Times, 14 September 1894.
[20] Reynold's Newspaper, 28 April and 5 May 1895.
[21] Glasgow Herald, 24 April 1895; Western Mail 24 April 1895.

[lynn cates]

blackmail

Hello Chris. It might be added to his biography that "Red" Jim was also involved in a blackmail scheme against Sir Edward Jenkinson. (Campbell, "Fenian Fire" p. 366)

Cheers.
LC

[Chris]

Hello Chris. It might be added to his biography that "Red" Jim was also involved in a blackmail scheme against Sir Edward Jenkinson. (Campbell, "Fenian Fire" p. 366)

Yes, I had seen that reference, but I couldn't work out from what Campbell said exactly what was supposed to have happened, or when.