Francis Spurzheim Craig

[Inigo Montoya]

My last post - not going to clog up the board.

It seems to me that a quack anatomist is the closest fit rather than a mysogynist or a barber. Francis Spurzheim Craig was named after a quack anatomist, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, whose views were denounced as quackery in the Edinburgh Review in 1815 and in response who travelled to Edinburgh the following year to carry out public dissections.

Spurzheim died just short of his fifty-sixth birthday and his heart was removed.

Elizabeth Weston Davies (Mary Kelly) was killed and her heart removed one day before the fifty-sixth anniversary of Spurzheim's death.

The journalist Craig was living in Ripon Street, Aylesbury in 1875 when he was discovered to have been plagiarising items for the Bucks Advertiser. Between then and 1888 he undertook professional mapping work for Spalding's Plan of Cambridge; literally, place names were how he made his buck.

The first murder took place in Buck's Row, and after the second murder (both of which having shown signs of anatomical knowledge) the Dear Boss letter was sent to an outlet liable to be known only to journalists (an error by the murderer if a journalist), referring to his "funny little games", the risk of being "buckled", and signed Jack the Ripper.

Originality at last, Francis must have thought.

Elizabeth Craig (nee Weston Davies) was fluent in Welsh, had a brother named Jonto, had worked in an upper class brothel in west London and there is no evidence of her existence after 1888.

Mary Jane Kelly was fluent in Welsh, had a brother named Jonto, had worked in an upper class brothel in west London and had the name Davies appended to her death certificate.

The rest of Mary Kelly's story is palpably the narrative of a poor girl trying to dissociate herself from what she had become by deconstructing, rearranging and misrepresenting elements of her life. She said she had a relative on the London stage - with all the men and women merely players.

The four previous murders were followed by rushed quack dissections in a mixture of attempted misdirection (which succeeded for more than a century) and probably the release of a lifetime of imbibing his father's quack anatomical mumbo jumbo.

I'm sure others will say that they need to await cast-iron dna evidence, discovery of a videotaped confession, photographic evidence of a crime in commission and production of a suicide note more incriminating than the one that read "It would only pain you to see the Doctor's treatment". Until then, just imho, if it quacks like a duck then, 127 years later, this one is no wild goose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr1YioasDVw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv4rMDE8igg

[GUT]

My last post - not going to clog up the board.

It seems to me that a quack anatomist is the closest fit rather than a mysogynist or a barber. Francis Spurzheim Craig was named after a quack anatomist, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, whose views were denounced as quackery in the Edinburgh Review in 1815 and in response who travelled to Edinburgh the following year to carry out public dissections.

Spurzheim died just short of his fifty-sixth birthday and his heart was removed.

Elizabeth Weston Davies (Mary Kelly) was killed and her heart removed one day before the fifty-sixth anniversary of Spurzheim's death.

The journalist Craig was living in Ripon Street, Aylesbury in 1875 when he was discovered to have been plagiarising items for the Bucks Advertiser. Between then and 1888 he undertook professional mapping work for Spalding's Plan of Cambridge; literally, place names were how he made his buck.

The first murder took place in Buck's Row, and after the second murder (both of which having shown signs of anatomical knowledge) the Dear Boss letter was sent to an outlet liable to be known only to journalists (an error by the murderer if a journalist), referring to his "funny little games", the risk of being "buckled", and signed Jack the Ripper.

Originality at last, Francis must have thought.

Elizabeth Craig (nee Weston Davies) was fluent in Welsh, had a brother named Jonto, had worked in an upper class brothel in west London and there is no evidence of her existence after 1888.

Mary Jane Kelly was fluent in Welsh, had a brother named Jonto, had worked in an upper class brothel in west London and had the name Davies appended to her death certificate.

The rest of Mary Kelly's story is palpably the narrative of a poor girl trying to dissociate herself from what she had become by deconstructing, rearranging and misrepresenting elements of her life. She said she had a relative on the London stage - with all the men and women merely players.

The four previous murders were followed by rushed quack dissections in a mixture of attempted misdirection (which succeeded for more than a century) and probably the release of a lifetime of imbibing his father's quack anatomical mumbo jumbo.

I'm sure others will say that they need to await cast-iron dna evidence, discovery of a videotaped confession, photographic evidence of a crime in commission and production of a suicide note more incriminating than the one that read "It would only pain you to see the Doctor's treatment". Until then, just imho, if it quacks like a duck then, 127 years later, this one is no wild goose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr1YioasDVw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv4rMDE8igg

Wow the "rip" and "buck" convinces me anyway :shakeshead:

[richardnunweek]

Hi Inigo..
We must not forget for all of The Royal connection fans, that John Netley [ coach driver] was thrown under the wheels of a carriage , and was killed in 1903..
Get a suspect who died in 1903, and you cannot go wrong..
Regards Richard.

[Inigo Montoya]

Belated thanks for your reply, Richard.

A thought.

Mr Weston-Davies raises the question as to why Henry McBlain is described in the book as a baker.

The answer, and some considerable insight into Francis Spurzheim Craig's mental state, may lie with this annotation describing his father's letter of 8th March 1884, linked above....

"2. In the top left corner there is a drawing in red ink of two people facing each other across a stream, one carrying a basket in his or her hands, the other a basket balanced on the head. Underneath, the text reads"
WEALTH, THE FRUIT OF LABOUR, IS BEST DISTRIBUTED BY FREE EXCHANGES,
AIDED BY MONEY TOKENS AND REPRESENTATIVE LABOUR NOTES."
the word "WEALTH" is in larger letters than the rest of the text.
3. The text "Hammersmith. W.," is printed in red ink in the middle"

If we whizz back to the Bible briefly, just past the bit where Jacob sends his family across the stream in advance of his wrestling match with himself, an angel, God, man, etcetera, we'll find Joseph in Egypt, interpreting the dream of a butler, and that of a baker. The cursed baker being the one with a certain something balanced on his noggin.

I thought that the book, by the way (The Real Mary Kelly) was more than 230 sweating pounds beyond brilliant. Top marks, be it 42/42, 56/56, 112/112 or 156/156.

Thank you for writing it.

[Inigo Montoya]

At 128 years and counting, this one has been running almost as long as The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

John Jasper's Cloisterham, as you probably know, is real life Rochester. That's partly where Dickens obtained the name Drood. As in Rochester & Strood, the scene of the repeated tussle between Mark Reckless (ex-Conservative) and Kelly Tolhurst for the Parliamentary seat.

As well as Mother’s Day in the UK, today, March 6th, is the anniversary of Charles Dickens' daughter Mary's birth in 1838 while Dickens was living at Doughty Street, which is only about six hundred yards from Argyle Square, where Francis Craig momentarily lived with Elizabeth Weston Davies. If you look closely in Barnaby Rudge, you'll see that the 19th of March in the Gregorian calendar translates to a Julian 8th.

Rudge, Drudge, Drud e, and Drood, there is probably a connection between Barnaby’s birthmark, the idea of original sin, and the birth of Mary Dickens three years before the writing of the novel.

[Inigo Montoya]

Lest you think I'm making this stuff up, the year of the novel’s inciting incident (the 19th of March in 1753), to borrow a phrase from the screenwriting world, is directly adjacent to the year of the Julian/Gregorian calendar switch (1752).

One time period away as a question of poetic discretion, and two in the case of the space between the 8th of March and the 6th.

http://tune.pk/video/6429561/clara-spalding-brown-and-doc-holliday

[The Macdonald Triad]

Francis Craig

This guy bears more looking at, I feel it in my gut (pun intended). I wish there was more on him ugh.

[Inigo Montoya]

Wonder if there is any significance to the fact that Annie Chapman died on the morning of the very first day of league football.

Maybe the Ripper was a cricket fan.

Well done to Ross Taylor for the record 181 overnight.

[Inigo Montoya]

Ross to make tonight? For his injury, that was a non-negotiably honourable innings and an imprecise peer to Carlos Brathwaite having the wit to make the wholly canniest of investments in four consecutive sixes at the start of the final over of the 2016 T20 World Cup Final.

Extending the script of a sportsman at large, Polly Nichols (the victim before Ani), ed on 31 August 1888, six years to the exact day from this famous notice in Cricket: A Weekly Record of The Game:

SACRED TO THE MEMORY
OF
ENGLAND'S SUPREMACY IN THE
CRICKET-FIELD
WHICH EXPIRED
ON THE NINETEEN TH DAY OF AUGUST, AT THE OVAL
"ITS END WAS PEATE"

England’s fifth and final Match-Up with Ross and Tim Southee for the prize of neither sacred cow nor golden calf nor red heifer unfolds tonight in Christchurch, with anthems the stuff of dreams ringing from slip through third man heralding the start of play in H a gley.

[Inigo Montoya]

Honoré de Balzac said, "No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman."

Is the most destructive force in the universe loose expression?

The loathsome toad said of wives, "Never allow her to drink water alone. If you do, you are lost."

Balzac died on 18 August 1850, so we will never harvest the despicable cretin's sacred pearls on safety for solitary bibation of the honourable golden gleam of Lucozade (1927), or be as sure as the distant temple bells that do ring over the mean temple tree plant blowing in the wind, of the cola company of which Asa Candler became honourable sole proprietor "[o]n August 30th [1888]".

[Farm Buoy]

‘They took six months to find just the right corporation with just the right building for that little caper, but they never checked to see what the doors were really made of. They were steel, painted to simulate wood, and at the last minute the Adjutant found he couldn’t drive the two little nails in to hold the sign on to the door. He just had time to nip down and buy a roll of that sticky tape stuff in a stationer’s outside. It wasn’t up to the job.’

For The Want Of A Nail, Berkely Mather (John Evan Weston-Davies)

Lan Tao is just under Tuen Mun in the map of Hong Kong.

‘Lin laughs often and it sounds like the distant temple bells on top of Lan Tao.’

Red for Danger, Berkely Mather

Plumeria rubra, the temple tree plant, is often found in cemeteries…

Joe Barnett split up with Mary Jane Kelly eleven days before the fifty-sixth anniversary of Johann Gaspar Spurzheim’s death. His reason: she had been letting a woman called Maria Harvey stay in the room.

Mary Jane had let other women stay in the room at least twice previously.

‘The Coroner: “You must be very careful about your evidence, because it is different to other people's. You say you saw her standing at the corner of the entry to the court?”

Carrie Maxwell: “Yes, on Friday morning, from eight to half-past eight.”’

https://www.casebook.org/official_documents/inquests/inquest_kelly.html

‘Carrie Maxwell, to the Central News: “I saw the woman Kelly standing at the entrance of the court. It was then about half-past eight, and as it was unusual for her to be seen … at that hour I said to her, ‘Hallo, what are you doing up so early?’ She said, ‘Oh, I'm very bad this morning. I have had the horrors[.]’ I said to her, ‘Why don't you go and have half a pint of beer? It will put you right.’ She replied, ‘I’ve just had one, but I’m so bad I couldn't keep it down.’ … I then went out in the direction of Bishopsgate to do some errands, and on my return I saw Kelly standing outside the public-house talking to a man.”’

https://www.casebook.org/press_reports/evening_news/18881110.html

‘At 8.00am the following morning, [Maurice] Lewis claimed to have seen Mary Kelly leave her room and return a few moments later’

https://wiki.casebook.org/maurice_lewis.html#cite_note-1

‘Soon after ten o'clock in the morning [Lewis] was playing with others at pitch and toss in [McCarthy's Court], when he heard a lad call out “Copper,” and he and his companions rushed away and entered a beer-house at the corner of Dorset- street, known as Ringer's. He was positive tha[t] on going in he saw Mary Jane Kelly drinking with some other people’

https://www.casebook.org/press_reports/illustrated_police_news/il881117.html

‘‘’I have seen the body … and I identify it by the ear and eyes, which are all that I can recognise[.] I lived with her in number 13 room, at Miller’s Court for eight months. I separated from her on October 30th … [b]ecause she had a woman of bad character there, whom she took in out of compassion, and I objected to it.”’

https://www.casebook.org/official_documents/inquests/inquest_kelly.html

According to the article in Ripperologist #169, July 2021, after another forty years of drunkenness, prostitution and dishonesty not excluding swiping a shawl from the Hanbury Arms in Caerleon in September 1905, Elizabeth died in Wales on 9 March 1929, one day after the twenty-sixth anniversary of Francis Spurzheim Craig’s death.

Less than three years later, without intending to return, her brother walked into the sea one day after the hundred and fifty-sixth anniversary of Johann Gaspar Spurzheim’s birth.

‘…the words were torn from her lips in the rush of the wind’

Ski Test, Berkely Mather

Whatever one wishes to conclude on the eternal mystery, so wrote the son whose embellishment caused the elegant strides of Ursula Andress to re-emerge from the sea.

There’s nothing like a patronus charm progenitor.

Or in the case of the creator of the movie Cast Away, a terrible swift model for dispelling white supremacism by the book, per 1488 and Luke 10:18: 10:18 – 14 – 88mph = 10:04 @ the Clock Tower.

Not your ordinary time-travelling movie-maker, he of the Doc (Holliday), Clai[borne], [Clan]ton and Mc[Laury] by C.S. Fly’s Photographic Studio at the O.K. Corral on 26 October 1985, less those 104 years faithfully chronicled by Clara Spalding Brown.

‘The roar of the engine woke him. He lay for a moment collecting his scattered thoughts and brushing the sleep from his eyes. Then he sat up. The grey dawn light was filtering through the branches and the mist was rising over the clearing. He was alone – but beside him was a single blossom from the frangipani bush that had spread its fragrance over them through the night.’

Dual Control, Berkely Mather

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAPh7Y2HHBs