Did the Seaside Home ID happen?

[Garry Wroe]

Having gone over Smiths account which clearly pokes fun at both Anderson and MacNaughten, in the final analysis he is actually quiet vague.

Well, Jeff, he spoke in glowing terms of Lawende and admitted total defeat over the Ripper affair.

While I agree it would appear that the ID was all there was to go on…If the Crawford letter relates to Kozminaki clearly Anderson had a lot more reason to suspect Kozminski and the changing of the wording from Blackwoods to TLSOMOL clearly suggest that Anderson was not talking about Jews but a specific family..

With respect, Jeff, you're making an awful lot of the Crawford communication with little to nothing in the way of justification.

As for Anderson, he toned down his language as a consequence of the criticism directed at him by Smith and others. The simple fact of the matter is that there couldn't have been compelling evidence against Kosminski. There simply couldn't have been. Were this not the case others in senior positions with equal access to the files would have come out in support of Anderson's conclusions. Smith was fully aware of every aspect of the Met's Ripper investigation and he essentially branded Anderson a fantasist. Macnaghten thought Druitt a likelier Ripper than Kosminski. Abberline placed no reliance on what he termed the story that the killer had been identified and caged in an asylum. And so it goes. Surely, Jeff, you cannot believe that everyone other than Anderson got it wrong. Can you?

[pinkmoon]

Well, Jeff, he spoke in glowing terms of Lawende and admitted total defeat over the Ripper affair.

With respect, Jeff, you're making an awful lot of the Crawford communication with little to nothing in the way of justification.

As for Anderson, he toned down his language as a consequence of the criticism directed at him by Smith and others. The simple fact of the matter is that there couldn't have been compelling evidence against Kosminski. There simply couldn't have been. Were this not the case others in senior positions with equal access to the files would have come out in support of Anderson's conclusions. Smith was fully aware of every aspect of the Met's Ripper investigation and he essentially branded Anderson a fantasist. Macnaghten thought Druitt a likelier Ripper than Kosminski. Abberline placed no reliance on what he termed the story that the killer had been identified and caged in an asylum. And so it goes. Surely, Jeff, you cannot believe that everyone other than Anderson got it wrong. Can you?

There is a very good chance that they all got it wrong none of them knew who the ripper was I think it is a case of picking the best from a very bad bunch of so called suspects.

[Scott Nelson]

Well, Jeff, he spoke in glowing terms of Lawende and admitted total defeat over the Ripper affair...

Smith was fully aware of every aspect of the Met's Ripper investigation and he essentially branded Anderson a fantasist.

Smith apparently came to agree with Anderson some years after the publication of Anderson's book, according to H.L. Adam.

[Phil Carter]

I very much doubt there are any secret files on Kosminski or Druitt I think the facts point to Kosminski only becoming a "suspect" because he picked up a knife to a women and an identification was at least considered but failed and because he lived locally police had a look at him as for Druitt sir Melville has heard something which he obviously has taken very seriously and for what ever reason declines to reveal his source. If people would like me to I'm quite prepared to put this scenario into another masterpiece short play let me know if you want me to.

Hello pink moon,

Agreed. You read my mind. But perhaps it won't appear as a play..perhaps a documentary? I won't be watching.


Phil

[pinkmoon]

[QUOTE=Phil Carter;341275]Hello pink moon,

Agreed. You read my mind. But perhaps it won't appear as a play..perhaps a documentary? I won't be watching.


Phil[/QUIT

My last play I posted on this thread was met with great critical acclaim!It's very easy to try and over complicate this most interesting case but in all reality the most logical conclusion is that the police had no real suspect for these crimes so anything that came to their attention must have looked good no matter how obscure or strange .

[Phil Carter]

[QUOTE=pinkmoon;341277]

Hello pink moon,

Agreed. You read my mind. But perhaps it won't appear as a play..perhaps a documentary? I won't be watching.


Phil[/QUIT

My last play I posted on this thread was met with great critical acclaim!

Oh well done Pinkmoon. ☺ didn't know that. ☺ I suspect a TV doc on its way though. Wonder why?

Phil

[Jonathan H]

Sir Robert Anderson is a terribly weak, unreliable and self-serving source who has been magnified by modern writers out of all proportion to what can actually be sustained regarding the Whitechapel murders. In the 1900's he was a minor sideshow, as he soon will be again. It does not help that he is such a pious, conceited and unlikable figure either.

His treatment of Macnaghten in his memoirs, motivated by jealousy against a superior police administrator who did all the work, is beyond despicable:

Thanks to another of Swanson’s 1910 annotations he identifies Macnaghten as the hapless subject of an ugly put-down, again suggesting that all of the annotations are clarifications from Anderson, for how else could the ex-Inspector know?) in which he mentions a lunatic named Townsend who aborted an attempt to shoot William Gladstone because, at the last minute, the Prime Minister “smiled” at his would-be assassin.

But then Anderson disparages a senior policeman (the un-named Macnaghten) for having been unreasonably concerned about his own safety after receiving a threat in writing from the same nut, and this had caused Anderson to throw the letter into the fire because “I felt so indignant and irritated at the importance he attached to it, and the fuss he made over it … though no harm came of my act, I could not forgive myself for it.”

Macnaghten makes no reference to the incident in his memoirs yet how he must have blanched when the "man of action" read that his allegedly “irritating” cowardice was so undignified that it blinded the Assistant Commissioner to the seriousness of an assassination threat against the head of government (it is also a lame excuse for having so recklessly destroyed documented evidence of this man’s lunacy, or did Anderson do it after Townsend was arrested?)

Not only did Macnaghten know about the failed i.d. against Sadler he used it for his own propagandist purposes in 1898 and 1907. And lo and behold but that old buzzard Anderson has managed to stuff that up to by creating a Jewish witness against a Jewish suspect. In 1910 Mac had to trot out Sims to both disparage Anderson's claims about Jewish sabotage. In his memoirs of 1914 Macnaghten pointedly debunked Anderson's Ripper account. Nobody has noticed that before, but you are never allowed to come up with anything new here.

The idea of two incarcerations of Kosminski is hopeless, and does not even come from Anderson (or Swanson). Hey why not three incarcerations? Or four? How about he really was dead and the asylum and family got it wrong?

The bias and unfairness here, in the sludgy wake of the DNA disappointment, is as thick as London fog with about as much substance. Twisting it around that Macnaghten knows less about the Polish suspect when he knows he was alive (in 1907!) and out about for years before being sectioned way too late, is frankly crackers.

[pinkmoon]

I just can't imagine the hassle a witness would have if he told the police he didn't want to identify a suspect because he didn't want the suspects execution on his conscience.

[Paddy]

I agree with jeff regarding the Lodger story. (as one of the many circumstances)
I think the family could have again covered for Aaron.

I wrote on another thread recently regarding finding a German couple Mr and Mrs Kuhn that lived in 22 Batty Street in 1884. However Mrs Kuhn had a baby in Poplar on 19th October 1888 and living at an address there. I followed their life (very complicated) I also managed to trace descendants who didn't know about them much unfortunately. I hit a brick wall. If anyone wants to follow it up I can give details.

For your information also, when I was visiting my daughter in scotland I was able to see Crawfords papers but found nothing regarding Anderson or the introduction in them unfortunately.

Pat.........

[Jonathan H]

To Pinkmoon

I agree, and subscribe to the theory that the incident never happened as recorded in a source that was unaccountable to anyone. It is inspired by a real event: Lawende, a Jewish witness, was brought in and affirmed to Grant, in a confrontation in 1895, and yet the case did not proceed against him as the Ripper because of countervailing evidence.

Grant's sometime lawyer, George Kebbel, claimed in 1910 that the police, nevertheless, regarded his client as the fiend and also asserted, wrongly, that he was long deceased.

Is that just a coincidence, when matched against the Anderson/Swanson error about Kosminski?

Poor Joseph Lawende, who gave the police exactly that they wanted, ends up being slandered--though not by name as that has been thankfully forgotten--in Anderson's memoirs and Swanson's Marginalia, albeit the latter was not a public document until 1987.

In my opinion the Marginalia is Sir Robert Anderson's voice we can hear; blaming somebody else for their cowardice under the guise of trying to be a bit sympathetic to their dilemma.

But I think it is made up, that a chastened Anderson is excusing himself over Mentor's furious and pointed criticism that the Adolf Beck case shows the extreme unreliability of eyewitness identification when there is no other corroborating evidence (though Anderson, a sexually repressed Victorian to the nth degree, regards self-abuse as just such 'evidence' of low moral character).

The 1908 interview in "The Daily Chronicle", with Anderson proves that the aging, retired chief--who had been sacked in 1901--was capable of the most grotesque, partisan and self-serving conflations and confusions. Perhaps some people have not seen the pertinent quotation as it is not on this site:

''In two cases of that terrible series [the Ripper crmes] there were disticnt clues destroyed - wiped out absolutely - clues that might very easily have secured for us proof of the identity of the assassin. In one case it was a clay pipe. Before we could get to the scene of the murder the doctor had taken it up, thrown it into the fireplace, and smashed it beyond recognition. In another case there was writing in chalk on the wall - a most valuable clue; handwriting that might have been at once recognized as belonging to a certain individual. But before we could secure a copy, or get it protected, it had been entirely obliterated ... I told Sir William Harcourt, who was then Home Secretary, that I could not accept responsibility for non-detection of the author of the Ripper crimes, for the reasons, among others, that I have given you.'

As the late Philip Sudgen cogently wrote about this primary source:

'Even in the brief allusion to the Ripper case there are two glaring errors. Sir William Harcourt ceased to be Home Secretary in 1885, three years before the murders began. The man with whom Anderson dealt with in 1888 was Henry Matthews. The reference to the pipe is also incorrect. Anderson's mention of a fireplace clearly indicates that he had the murder of Mary Kelly in mind for this was the only one in the series committed indoors. Dr. Phillips, the divisional police surgeon, was called out to the scene of the crime. And a pipe belonging to Joe Barnett, Kelly's lover, was found in Mary's room. But this was not the pipe that was smashed. Anderson was confusing the Kelly murder with that of Alice McKenzie in Castle Alley about nine months later. A clay pipe found with Alice's body was thrown to the floor and broken. However, this incident occurred at the mortuary, during the post-mortem examination, not at the crime scene, and the culprit was one of the attendants, not Dr. Phillips. So here, two years before his memoirs appeared, and speaking of investigations for which he bore overall responsibility, Anderson was confounding officials and running quite separate incidents together in his head.'

I go further than Sudgen. Anderson is remaking what happened to better suit his prejudices. He despises the Liberals and so they become the hack trying to put him under undue pressure. He blames others for not catching the killer, in this case an un-named physician.

Just pause for a moment to absorb how appalling that really is. He blames a perfectly competent doctor, un-named, for destroying the evidence that might

[Jonathan H]

Blaming the Doctor Part II

Sorry the cat walked on the keyboard.

You have to go back to my previous post to read Part I.

To continue:

Consider that Anderson in 1908 blames an un-named doctor whose incompetence prevented the police from [perhaps] catching Jack the Ripper.

How similar to his witness-prevented-us footnote in the magazine version of his memoirs two years later.

The doctor was really Dr. Phillips, who had not broken the pipe or sabotaged the case at all! Nor was the McKenzie murder one of Jack's according to Anderson in 1910--what a train-wreck.

But is this not exactly the same as the rubbish Anderson in his memoirs, and privately via Swanson, peddles about poor old Lawende?

e.g. Un-named, falsely blamed and an inaccurate account of what actually happened.

They are so distorted that neither Dr Phillips nor Lawende would have recognized themselves in Anderson's memoir account.

As I have written before Anderson was compressing events between 1885 and 1895 to come up with his implausible tale of a temporarily at large killer sectioned, identified and deceased around early 1889, that was dismissed at the time by better informed contemporaries but resurrected in the 1980's. There is nothing wrong with that attempt at historical rehabilitation if new evidence puts a different spin on a source's reliability. Arguably everything we have--which is not much--does no such thing. It only confirms the original denunciation and debunking of a persistently conceited and hopelessly muddled old man.

[Jeff Leahy]

Abberline placed no reliance on what he termed the story that the killer had been identified and caged in an asylum.

This is true. But exactly what I have been arguing. That Abberline and all the others involved only new about the file unto March 1889. They didn't know what Swanon , Montroe and Anderson new about the ID incident.

What Abberline confirms is that there were two different accounts being circulated at his old department. One a man who died shortly after the event (Druit) and the other about a man placed in an asylum (Kozminski)

And so it goes. Surely, Jeff, you cannot believe that everyone other than Anderson got it wrong. Can you?

No I'm saying only Anderson Swanson and Monroe new about the ID (Which failed) So they had a different view from everyone else who only new about a suspect who was followed who resembled a man seen leaving the Eddows murder scene by a City PC (presumably Harvey)

Yours Jeff

[Jeff Leahy]

Smith apparently came to agree with Anderson some years after the publication of Anderson's book, according to H.L. Adam.

Thats as I understand it…its clearly laid out in the A to Z.

Yours Jeff

[Jeff Leahy]

Sir Robert Anderson is a terribly weak, unreliable and self-serving source who has been magnified by modern writers out of all proportion to what can actually be sustained regarding the Whitechapel murders. In the 1900's he was a minor sideshow, as he soon will be again. It does not help that he is such a pious, conceited and unlikable figure either..

Yeah but thats not what it says in the A to Z. It says Anderson was a popular well liked Commissioner who was knighted. An intellectual and sharp mind.

His treatment of Macnaghten in his memoirs, motivated by jealousy against a superior police administrator who did all the work, is beyond despicable:

Clearly there was a rift of some kind between Anderson and MacNaughten.

Thanks to another of Swanson’s 1910 annotations he identifies Macnaghten as the hapless subject of an ugly put-down, again suggesting that all of the annotations are clarifications from Anderson, for how else could the ex-Inspector know?) in which he mentions a lunatic named Townsend who aborted an attempt to shoot William Gladstone because, at the last minute, the Prime Minister “smiled” at his would-be assassin.

Or perhaps Swanson was simply telling the truth which makes the most sense.

But then Anderson disparages a senior policeman (the un-named Macnaghten) for having been unreasonably concerned about his own safety after receiving a threat in writing from the same nut, and this had caused Anderson to throw the letter into the fire because “I felt so indignant and irritated at the importance he attached to it, and the fuss he made over it … though no harm came of my act, I could not forgive myself for it.”

And the two men didn't really get on?

Macnaghten makes no reference to the incident in his memoirs yet how he must have blanched when the "man of action" read that his allegedly “irritating” cowardice was so undignified that it blinded the Assistant Commissioner to the seriousness of an assassination threat against the head of government (it is also a lame excuse for having so recklessly destroyed documented evidence of this man’s lunacy, or did Anderson do it after Townsend was arrested?)

MacNaughten says he destroyed the evidence . Anderson didn't.

Not only did Macnaghten know about the failed i.d. against Sadler he used it for his own propagandist purposes in 1898 and 1907. And lo and behold but that old buzzard Anderson has managed to stuff that up to by creating a Jewish witness against a Jewish suspect. In 1910 Mac had to trot out Sims to both disparage Anderson's claims about Jewish sabotage. In his memoirs of 1914 Macnaghten pointedly debunked Anderson's Ripper account. Nobody has noticed that before, but you are never allowed to come up with anything new here.

MacNaughten continues with the same story about Kozminski.. That he is placed in an Asylum in 1889. He clear dosnt know what happened to if after that as he says (And I believe still is) however when discussing Ostrog he clear knows he is alive as he states so….'He is still alive'.

The idea of two incarcerations of Kosminski is hopeless, and does not even come from Anderson (or Swanson). Hey why not three incarcerations? Or four? How about he really was dead and the asylum and family got it wrong?

Again its been over looked by the experts. But Anderson clearly says the ID took place in an Asylum. And Swanson calls it 'Seaside Home' they are one and the same.

The bias and unfairness here, in the sludgy wake of the DNA disappointment, is as thick as London fog with about as much substance. Twisting it around that Macnaghten knows less about the Polish suspect when he knows he was alive (in 1907!) and out about for years before being sectioned way too late, is frankly crackers.

I have no idea why you seek to connect my theory with Russell Edwards. My story is linked to new research undertaken by someone in Germany.

Sims doesn't know what happened to Kozminski in 1907…he again joins together Kozminski and Ostrog… He knows Ostrog is alive and states so… however on Kozminski he is uncertain. (And I believe still is)

Yours jeff

[Jeff Leahy]

I agree with jeff regarding the Lodger story. (as one of the many circumstances)
I think the family could have again covered for Aaron.

I wrote on another thread recently regarding finding a German couple Mr and Mrs Kuhn that lived in 22 Batty Street in 1884. However Mrs Kuhn had a baby in Poplar on 19th October 1888 and living at an address there. I followed their life (very complicated) I also managed to trace descendants who didn't know about them much unfortunately. I hit a brick wall. If anyone wants to follow it up I can give details.

For your information also, when I was visiting my daughter in scotland I was able to see Crawfords papers but found nothing regarding Anderson or the introduction in them unfortunately.

Pat.........

Hi Pat most interesting. I to have been doing a little research on Crawford. He and Anderson appear to have met in Scotland, Royal observatory. Craword appears to have had connections with the Rothchildes.

I'd be most interested in anything you turned up on Crawford.

Yours Jeff