Did the Seaside Home ID happen?

[Harry D]

I'd be interested to know people's thoughts on the Seaside Home Identification of the Jewish suspect. I know there are some who speculate that Robert Anderson was suffering from bad recall and had confused the event with the identification of James Sadler in the Frances Coles murder. Granted, I'm not quite sure how Anderson can confuse an unsuccessful identification of a non-Jewish suspect with the successful ID of a Jewish suspect at a seaside home where the witness refused to testify. There's bad memory and then there's just making things up.

[Hunter]

If it was just Anderson's recall here a case could be made that his recollection could have been flawed since there are known examples. However Swanson's added input in a private annotation gives credence to the probability that some ID attempt took place, even if the reasoning about the result may still be speculative.

[c.d.]

I think it did happen but the description of what took place was tweaked by Anderson to make himself look good. "See, we did find the killer but the witness refused to testify." In reality, if the witness was in fact really sure of his identification, I think enormous pressure would have been put on him to testify.

c.d.

[Wickerman]

I'd be interested to know people's thoughts on the Seaside Home Identification of the Jewish suspect. I know there are some who speculate that Robert Anderson was suffering from bad recall and had confused the event with the identification of James Sadler in the Frances Coles murder. Granted, I'm not quite sure how Anderson can confuse an unsuccessful identification of a non-Jewish suspect with the successful ID of a Jewish suspect at a seaside home where the witness refused to testify. There's bad memory and then there's just making things up.

Strictly speaking Harry, all Anderson claimed was that his suspect was a Polish Jew, and that the only person who had a good view of the murderer "unhesitatingly" identified him, but refused to give evidence against him.

Where this took place is not identified by Anderson, for that we look to Swanson.
It was Swanson who identified the location of the I.D., the name of Anderson's suspect, and the reason the witness refused to testify.

If there are any faults in these details, these faults must be laid at Swanson's door, not Anderson's.
It is probably just as well to mention that Swanson was only identifying Anderson's suspect, he was not saying Kozminski was his suspect.

It was suggested some years ago that Swanson meant the Seaman's Home, which is right there in the East End, that idea makes sense to me.

[Harry D]

Isn't the Seaman's Home where Sadler's attempted ID took place?

In such a high-profile case, I don't think the senior officers of the time would've mixed up events. If Swanson wrote the 'seaside home' we don't have any reason to doubt him. That said, I can understand them interpolating their own wish-fulfillment into the case. For example, perhaps the Jewish witness didn't ID the suspect per se, but there was some flicker of recognition which the police noticed, as a result they rationalized that the witness knew the suspect but the lack of ID was down to the two of them being fellow Jews.

Then we have the witness. Who was he? The only Jewish witnesses we know of who came closest to seeing the Ripper were Lawende & Schwartz. By his own admission Lawende didn't get a good look at the man, and Schwartz seems to drop out of the picture. We know it couldn't have been Lawende, otherwise why would they have used him in the identifications of Sadler & Grainger? Begging the question why Lawende was even being used to identify potential Ripper suspects if Anderson's man had already been identified?

Grrragh. Everything about the 'seaside home ID' poses more questions than answers.

[pinkmoon]

What if a policeman did see something and it came to light after the murders the pc white story might well be a variation on this.The most obvious reason for taking a suspect so far away to a police convelence home is to meet a policeman who was staying there.There must have been lots of easier places in London to arrange an I.d attempt.

[pinkmoon]

I think it did happen but the description of what took place was tweaked by Anderson to make himself look good. "See, we did find the killer but the witness refused to testify." In reality, if the witness was in fact really sure of his identification, I think enormous pressure would have been put on him to testify.

c.d.

Thank you CD I have been saying this for ages there is no way a witness would be left in peace by the police if he refused to identify a witness in such a high profile case.

[PaulB]

Thank you CD I have been saying this for ages there is no way a witness would be left in peace by the police if he refused to identify a witness in such a high profile case.

This is a question which has been addressed many times over the years and the point made is that no great interval seems to have separated the identification and the committal of Kosminski by his family. The police may have put extreme pressure on the witness, they may even have got him to agree to give evidence, but the game play was completely changed when Kosminski was certified insane and, presumably, deemed unfit to plead.

Whether or not this is possibly what happened depends on the interval. My take on that is that it was very short, not more than a couple of days and perhaps not even that.

[Wickerman]

What if a policeman did see something and it came to light after the murders the pc white story might well be a variation on this.The most obvious reason for taking a suspect so far away to a police convelence home is to meet a policeman who was staying there.There must have been lots of easier places in London to arrange an I.d attempt.

That avenue was also explored, indications were looked for to see if either Watkins or Harvey had ended up in a Policeman's Convalescent Home at any time.

The Seaside Home in Brighton, thought to be the one referred to, was for Met. Policemen as far as I recall.
However, Macnaghten implied it was a City PC who saw the killer, though that reference was eventually removed.

This may be worth a read, if you have not already done so...

http://casebook.org/dissertations/dst-koz9.html

[pinkmoon]

That avenue was also explored, indications were looked for to see if either Watkins or Harvey had ended up in a Policeman's Convalescent Home at any time.

The Seaside Home in Brighton, thought to be the one referred to, was for Met. Policemen as far as I recall.
However, Macnaghten implied it was a City PC who saw the killer, though that reference was eventually removed.

This may be worth a read, if you have not already done so...
http://casebook.org/dissertations/dst-koz9.html

Let's just suppose that a policeman had a close encounter with the ripper shortly after one of the murders but for what ever reason it wasn't reported at the time could this story have circulated within the police force and eventually come to the attention of senior police officers sometime later who then took the opputunity to discreetly try and identify the suspect.

[Trevor Marriott]

This is a question which has been addressed many times over the years and the point made is that no great interval seems to have separated the identification and the committal of Kosminski by his family. The police may have put extreme pressure on the witness, they may even have got him to agree to give evidence, but the game play was completely changed when Kosminski was certified insane and, presumably, deemed unfit to plead.

Whether or not this is possibly what happened depends on the interval. My take on that is that it was very short, not more than a couple of days and perhaps not even that.

For someone to be deemed unfit to plead they first have to be charged, that involves the use of evidence to first bring a charge. Evidence to charge or evidence to show Kosminski was ever charged seems to be a bit thin on the ground would you not say?

Your take is nothing more than speculative, but I am sure your followers will hang on your every word and readily accept it as being gospel.

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[Wickerman]

For someone to be deemed unfit to plead they first have to be charged, that involves the use of evidence to first bring a charge. Evidence to charge or evidence to show Kosminski was ever charged seems to be a bit thin on the ground would you not say?

Your take is nothing more than speculative, but I am sure your followers will hang on your every word and readily accept it as being gospel.

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

There's no need for that Trevor.

Surely, if a suspect is deemed insane, the police cannot charge him. An insane person, not being of sound mind cannot be allowed to plead.

[Jonathan H]

Anderson's Fairy Tales?

I think Paul put forward a perfectly plausible theory to try and make all the contradictory bits fit together, and he may well be right.

On the other hand such ambiguous and fragmentary--not to mention self-serving--sources allow for alternate interpretations, the veracity of which is in the eye of the beholder.

If Swanson is merely repeating Anderson's take on the matter then he is not a separate, confirmatory source (but then again perhaps he isn't?)

Allagedly a witness, likely Lawende, did identity Grant as the suspect he saw with Eddowes. That's a 'yes' by a Jewish witness to a very promising Ripper suspect that comes to nothing.

Sound familiar?

Anderson's capacity to sincerely mix up data--and to also do so in a mean-spirited, partisan way--is shown by his 1908 interview, in which he, a conservative Tory and Protestant fundamentalist, has the despised Liberal William Harcourt putting him under undue political pressure (it was the Tory, Henry Matthews) and he mixes up the Kelly and McKenzie murders over broken pipes (and again blames the blameless).

Moreover, what we also see is that his deteriorating memory is blithely capable of compressing people and events between 1886 and 1889.
It is not much of a leap to see that Anderson is also doing the same thing about events between 1891 (Coles, Sadler & Lawende) and 1895 (Graham, Grant & Lawende). Somewhere in there he learned about 'Kosminski' and also learned that he was deceased--which he wasn't. That error alone is not one that Donald Swanson is likely to have made is it? Such a mistake further points to his annotations being a record of what Swanson was informed, verbally, by Anderson in 1910 (hence being written in Anderson's book).

Further textual indications that the above is likely to be the case is that Mentor, the Jewish writer, had severely--and astutely--criticized Anderson for relying on a single witness. The Adolf Beck miscarriage of justice of a few years previous--which an outraged Mentor witheringly deploys--had spectacularly shown the unreliability of a veritable harem of eyewitnesses (some of the defrauded women had even slept with the suspect and yet still picked the wrong man). In the Marginalia, as if to desperately rebut the Beck comparison, the suspect confesses to being the Ripper (by deed, not word), suggesting the encounter between Anderson and Swanson, if it happened, post-dates the Mentor bollocking.

Evans and Rumbelow in their excellent "Scotland Yard Investigates" (2006) argued the theory of memory confusion and conflation, having found that a witness, likely Lawende, had [allegedly] 'confronted' Sadler and failed to identify him. This was just a few days after an Aaron Kosminski was permanently sectioned. Furthermore Sadler had also been identified by a man, Duncan Campbell, as the latter claimed that the suspect had sold him a knife at the Seamen's Home (a.k.a Sailor's Home). This could account for the strange location of the "Seaside Home". I would add, for what it is worth, that I think the memory malfunction is by Anderson, not Swanson, and that the suspects who were actually subject to one-on-one identifications, Sadler and Grant, albeit Gentiles, were both themselves Seamen.

The secondary source, "Scotland Yard Investigates", and it's sublime Sailor's Home sub-theory received amazing (if sadly unheralded) support from a previously unknown primary source found by Chris Phillips a few years ago. In 1910 George Sims, arguably the public mouthpiece for Sir Melville Macnaghten who was by then Assistant Commissioner (CID), debunked Anderson in exactly the same terms as Evans and Rumbelow; that the aging braggart was talking out of his hat regarding the Polish Ripper suspect in his specific and incendiary sectarian charges of Jews letting down so-called "Gentile Justice".

This is Dagonet from "The Referee" of April 17th 1910, in his "Mustard and Cress" column that very rudely trashes Anderson as an exaggerator (e.g. a liar) who was unfair to Hebrews (e.g. an anti-Semite):

“It was only the other day that the late esteemed head of the C.I.D. caused a storm of indignation among the King’s Jewish subjects by stating that JACK THE RIPPER was a Jew, and that the Jews knew who he was and assisted him to evade capture. The statement went beyond ascertained facts.[/B] The mad Polish Jew, to whom Sir Robert refers, was only one of three persons who were each strongly suspected of being the genuine Jack. The final official record, which is in the archives of the Home Office, leaves the matter in doubt between the Polish Jew, who was afterwards put in a lunatic asylum, a Russian doctor of vile character, and an English homicidal maniac, one Dr.-----, who had been in a lunatic asylum. In these circumstances it was certainly indiscreet of Sir Robert to plump for the Polish Jew, and to imply that many of the Jewish community in the East End were accessories after the fact. … ANDERSON’S FAIRY TALES. There is no truth to the rumour that in the course of further romantic revelations to be expected from Sir Robert we shall learn … The name of the eminent Jewish financiers who assisted Jack the Ripper to evade arrest.’

[Monty]

And we know Swansons claim of a deceased Kosminski is an error how?

All we know with regards this suspect is that his name was Kosminski. Everything else is based on the assumption that Aaron Kosminski is indeed the same Kosminski of the identity parade.

We do not know this for certain, so to state Anderson or Swanson is in error is a tad premature.

Monty

[Jonathan H]

Anderson's son claimed in his biography of his parents that his father also believed that the local madman was deceased.

No other Kosminski has been found in asylum records. The 'suspect' in Mac's Aberconway version--who lived in the heart of the kill-zone, was locked away for self-abuse and was not deceased--is also a match for Aaron.

On the other hand, perhaps Martin Fido was correct. That 'Kosminski' was a mangled version of David Cohen, who was deceased and had been known to be violent.

Scott Nelson argues this theory very well too.

I personally think that Anderson--and by extension Swanson--were deliberately misled by Macnaghten about 'Kosminski' being deceased. They only ever knew of a fictitious variant of Aaron Kosminski, and this was not their fault.

Does anybody see this as a viable possibility. No, not here, not at all.

Those who advocate Aaron Kosminski as Anderson and Swanson's suspect need Macnaghten to be ignorant about the Polish suspect. Perhaps he was. But if he was not, then the "Seaside Home" identification never happened as Sims, a Mac source at one remove, dismissed it in 1910, Macnaghten, by implication, dismissed it in 1913, and arguably he did so specifically in 1914.

But the identification is not needed for Aaron Kosminski to be the likeliest Jack if that is what his family really believed.

Sir Robert Anderson was pro-Semitic, a dedicated public servant and incorruptible, albeit on his own terms, and thus may have sincerely mis-recalled the family's belief and conflated it with a Jewish witness (Lawende, Sadler & Grant) and then, hystrionically, with a whole ethnic subgroup.

To me it is telling that Anderson had the witness identification as just a footnote/afterthought in the magazine version.