Koz - No First Name in Marginalia

[Trevor Marriott]

Hi Trevor,

Glad you cleared that one up. I obviously mistook the meaning of your 'totally agree' comment earlier in the thread.




If you were the sort of person to filch papers from files, would you nick the rubbish and leave the good stuff? Wouldn't you actually nick the good stuff and leave the rubbish? No coincidence needed, just a bit of good, old-fashioned, common-sense deduction.

Regards, Bridewell.

Yes but there is no evidence to show any ever existed. Just think all the manpower that would have been needed to convey a prisoner in 1888 to Brighton, Sgt and at least two constables. one Inspector perhaps, so theres four people aware of this Id procedure and four people aware of the outcome. Add to that staff from the seaside home where this supposdely took place three or more, all aware of the outcome, and no doubt others who these would have later spoken to.

The outcome the positive identification of the Ripper yet from that day forth no one said a word zilch nothing,and to this day no one has come forth to say I was there, or my grandfather said this or that. Nothing written in any police officers memoirs save for Hans Chritsian.

And in later years officers who were on the ground say nothing other than we didnt have a clue. Even Chief Insp Moore who was Staff officer to the commisioner mentions nothing other than in a 1913 police review article he beleived that the killer was a merchant seaman. Every piece of paper every file heading to the commissioner would have passed through his fingers first.

Its fantasy its made up it didnt happen had it happened we would have know about it in the absence od all of this there must be a doubt about the marginalia.

Playing devils advocate to please some.

The only other possible explantion is that if Swanson wrote the marginalia then at the time he had completly lost his marbles and wrote seaside home instead of seamans home in reference to Sadler, but even that doesnt stand up because Sadler did not have a brother and so following his ID parade could not have been taken back to his brothers house.

Oh what a tangled web is weaved as first they flatter to deceive

[lynn cates]

suspect

Hello Colin.

"Why will he have needed to read the MM to know that Kosminski was a suspect?"

Umm, perhaps because he really was not?

Cheers.
LC

[Bridewell]

Swanson's Knowledge

Swanson must have also known about Kominski from The MM or from what he had been told as Scotlan Yard

Trevor,

At the specific direction of Sir Charles Warren, Swanson (who didn't retire till 1903) saw every single document pertaining to the Metropolitan Police's involvement in the Whitechapel Murders enquiry. Why will he have needed to read the MM to know that Kosminski was a suspect?

Regards, Bridewell.

[Phil Carter]

Hi Trevor,

Glad you cleared that one up. I obviously mistook the meaning of your 'totally agree' comment earlier in the thread.




If you were the sort of person to filch papers from files, would you nick the rubbish and leave the good stuff? Wouldn't you actually nick the good stuff and leave the rubbish? No coincidence needed, just a bit of good, old-fashioned, common-sense deduction.

Regards, Bridewell.

Hello Colin,

Then whoever nicked what, KNEW what they were looking for. The meat from the bone.

Wasn't it in Don Rumbelow's book (correct me if I'm wrong) that a lady wrote to him mentioning that her late policeman husband left a cache of old Special Branch papers in a box under the bed?

Nice to know...eh?

best wishes

Phil

[Bridewell]

To PaulB

We will of course agree to disagree, as ever.

I don't accept that I am slanting anything.

I am simply interpreting limited and incomplete sources in an attempt to create a unifying theory without loose ends.

I am joining dots together whilst always conceding that the dots can be joined other ways -- as you did with your previous post about Macnaghten.

Such conclusions can only ever be provisional.

By the way, when I wrote about the potential unreliability of the Swanson Marginalia, I did not mean its authenticity. I was clumsily referring to Swanson's credibility as a primary source writing in a private document -- and making errors about his own alleged chief suspect.

All sources have values and limitations, the disagreement is over the balance. Are they more reliable than unreliable?

I'll just tidy up a few other bits and pieces.

I have seen you write that before, about Mac's memoirs; about him pointing to a Thames suicide.

In 'Laying the Ghost ...' he never mentions the location and method of the likely Ripper's suicide.

Never even hints at it.

I agree, you'd think he would. What with his eye for the memorable anecdote and vivid detail even if exaggerated?

But he doesn't. Perversely neither 'drowned' nor 'doctor' make it into his public account.

Is that slanting it when I write 'perverse'?

I don't think so. It is perverse, that the Ur-source of the drowned doctor Super-suspect drops both those elements in his own account.

Why did he do that?

It was one of the first surprises when I read the whole chapter in 'Days of My Years' for myself rather than rely on the interpretation of secondary sources -- those which include the memoirs of course.

Well, [the un-named] Druitt wasn't a doctor and in the one account of his for the public under his own name Mac was careful not to commit himself to this error -- or should I write: lie? Nothing about what the 'Simon Pure' did for a living ...?

The river omission is even odder, as it was true. He thus denied his readers the most colourful and vivid bit about that suspect; his penitential plunge into a river (eg. see Sims what does with it in 1907)?

Griffiths and Sims had made it consistently clear to the public that the suicidal doctor drowned himself in the Thames, the latter even making it crystal clear that it was within hours of the Kelly murder.

The MP had made it clear in a source you recently found that he stuck by his opinion, despite the arrest of Sadler and apparent police scepticism -- that the Ripper had killed himself 'the same evening' as the final murder.

My theory is that Macnaghten could not include the river detail if he wanted to concede that this suspect did not kill himself 'the same evening', because it exposed a compression of events for the sake of a melodramatic climax.

It made the story impossible, so it had to go.

for if you elongate the gap between Kelly's murder and the fiend's own murder, then how can he be hanging about for longer than it takes to stagger to the Thames? It's already quite a stretch to even believe that nobody saw him on his way to the river, but any longer than a straight line from Miller's Ct. the Thames ('raving and shrieking' in Sims) and it is rendered ludicrous.

In 1914, Macnaghten stretches the gap to a loose twenty-four hours and shrugs that it might have been longer.

In reality it was was longer. Again the cosy old paradigm of the police chief who did not know much about the basic details of his preferred suspect is arguably shown to be very fragile.

Now, either the cronies were 'credulous' or they were in on it, that the suspect was being fictionalised.

Is that slanting it? I don't think so. It is interpreting contradictory data.

We know that 'Aberconway' is not a copy of a definitive document of state, nor does it reflect the real archived version about Druitt's worth as a suspect? That it was never sent to the Home Office.

Yet Sims, in 1903, breathtakingly swats away Abberline, no less than a genuine policeman who investigated the Whitechapel murders, because the playwright knows about the 'Home Office Report' -- which isn't one.

Now either Sims wrote that sincerely (and rudely) and therefore was misled by Macnaghten -- and was therefore credulous via his friendship with an high-ranking cop -- or he was in on it, and knew full well that the police of 1888 were of course not about to arrest the 'mad doctor'.

The Major probably knew that 'family' in the 'Home Office Report' had become 'friends'. That's deceiving his readers, a piece of deceit which Mac never corrected in Sims. The latter has more material on the likely Ripper, which also spins the story away from Druitt, eg. being in an asylum.

Now that is fact, Paul.

It is a fact that Sims' profile takes you away from the real Montague Druitt. The question is how and why did that happen?

The old paradigm said because Macnaghten began to sincerely forget bits and pieces.

I accepted that until I read your 2006 book, specifically your suggestive line that perhaps Mac should not be taken 'literally' in all that he writes?

For example, his memoirs deny that Druitt had ever been 'detained' in an asylum, or that he was about to be arrested, or that he killed himself within hours of the Kelly murder and thus strongly indicate, to say the least, that he was not forgetful but instead affably manipulative.

I respect the interpretation of Anderson as the most reliable police source and more sources found in the future may show it to be stronger again. In this interpretation Macnaghten becomes a sideshow: a man with merely a theory which may have hardened as a well-earned retirement beckoned (and he was seriously ill) whereas Anderson allegedly alone among these police sources, actually claimed that the Ripper had been definitely identified. Since Mac did not know much about Druitt, then we can judge him to be less reliable and certainly less emphatic than his former boss.

Then battle is joined over Anderson's values and limitations, and so on.

Yet I believe this interpretation to be quite unconvincing because Mac's 1913 comments, and his 1914 memoirs, and propagating his opinion via reliable surrogates, and Druitt-as-the-Ripper originating in Dorset, show that he too was just as convinced and just as certain about his chief suspect.

Sure, they both might have been wrong, but one of them might have been right.

That could have been Sir Melville Macnaghten because he, arguably, seems to have a better handle -- based on the frustrating fragments left to us -- on both the real Aaron Kosminski and the real Montague Druitt.

I offer the working theory that the 'North country Vicar' of 1899 is writing about Druitt and therefore we most certainly do have a provisional explanation as to why Macnaghten was so posthumously certain, along with the family and the politician.

The drawback is that 'epileptic mania' does not literally exist ...

I don't accept that I am slanting anything.

Maybe not but, in a post on a Swanson Marginalia thread, you make two mentions of Swanson and fourteen of MacNaghten. Much of what you say is very interesting, but perhaps better said on a MacNaghten thread, given the misplaced emphasis here.

Regards, Bridewell.

[Trevor Marriott]

The world can at least be grateful that Trev hasn't joined the often loony fringe of Biblical scholarship. Since he has huge trouble understanding how official files can be known to have existed, he simply wouldn't be able to comprehend how and why it can be said that the New Testament Gospels drew on earlier and now lost books.

However, one observes how convenient it is to Trevor to be able to discount every piece of evidence by claiming it is either forged or didn't exist, or was somebody's fantasy. You can't really argue against reasoning like that. Not that is is 'reasoning', of course. It's utter nonsense. But the marginalia is a forgery, so that's got rid of. No proof, of course. Just a bunch of unoriginal questions which have been asked a thousand times, and argued about, and written about. And there are no official records about Kosminski, and since he denies that records must have existed otherwise Macnaghten wouldn't have heard about him, so there's no evidence, not even presumed evidence, that Kosminski was a suspect.

It's great, isn't it. With 'reasoning' like that you can argue anything.

The MM is and has proved to be unreliable, The only thing you can rely on with any certainty is the fact that in The AV he exonatrates Kosminski. He refers to four likely suspects they all could not have been JTR one some or all had to be exonarated at some point.

In the light of that it matters not what records or files there were on Kosminski because it is clear that the contents of those were also unreliable. But no its not suffficient in the eyes of some resecarchers who have hidden agendas for keeping Kosminisk as an active viable suspect to this day. They still want to suggest that MM was wrong to exonerate this man and that 124 years later they know more than one of the men on the front line at the time.

Swanson must have also known about Kominski from The MM or from what he had been told as Scotlan Yard, and thereore must have known about the exoneration so why would he then write about some mythical ID parade in this marginalia and name someone who was no longer a suspect.

But of course someone not so au fait with all the ripperological facts in later years may not have been aware of The full contants of the AV and that could have been there biggest mistake.

[Bridewell]

Agree or Not Agree, That is the question

I am man enough to say I cannot conclusivley say that the marginalia is a forgery.

Hi Trevor,

Glad you cleared that one up. I obviously mistook the meaning of your 'totally agree' comment earlier in the thread.

If it did ever exist what a coincidnce evidence to show perhaps who JTR was, lost or destroyed, and look at all the rubbish police files and records that has been left behind and not destroyed or lost.

If you were the sort of person to filch papers from files, would you nick the rubbish and leave the good stuff? Wouldn't you actually nick the good stuff and leave the rubbish? No coincidence needed, just a bit of good, old-fashioned, common-sense deduction.

Regards, Bridewell.

[Jonathan H]

Why ... would I be discouraging a reader from sharing my view (scratches knuckle-head)?

Of course Macnaghten knew there was supposedly a slam dunk witness because 1. he had read it in Anderson's memoirs, and used his own to subtly refute them, and 2. he knew about Lawende but wrote beat cop, just as he disguised the [Druitt] 'family' as friends' with the Major and Sims.

He thus pointedly rejected the idea of a clincher witness.

Before you say I am slanting, did you not yourself do this in your previous post. eg. interpret that what when Littlechild wrote Anderson, he really meant Macnaghten.

Possible -- but how about he meant Anderson.

A somewhat puzzled Littlechild thought that 'Dr D' is either somebody he's never heard of, or is perhaps a garbled version of 'Dr. T.' who was a doctor, of sorts, and was 'believed' to have taken his own life, after jumping bail, and the 'Jack' murders stopped.

Littlechild's point to Sims is, arguably, that Anderson 'only thought he knew' and therefore Anderson telling Griffiths about this 'Dr D' does not make it gospel as the true chief suspect.

In my opinion Littlechild is quite unaware that Macnaghten was pulling the string behind the scenes with Sims, and thus Sims provided Mac with a measure of 'cover'.

Between he positions Anderson lying -- no way! -- and Anderson being a feeble geriatric -- a bit strong? -- there is a third positiuon. He has sincerely if self-servingly misremembered the non-identification of Sadler by Lawende a Jewish witness.

I know the countyer-argument.

One of them is that in more sectarian-conscious times people did not willy-nilly mistake Jews for Gentiles, and vice versa.

On the other hand, in 1908 Anderson, a staunch, reactionary Tory, misremembered William Harcourt, a Liberal Home Sec. from years previous, as the relevant minister he was put under pressure about the Ripper case?!

That's quite a howler: wrong time, wrong minister, wrong party, wrong ideology!

In fact, it was Henry Matthews, a Tory, though Harcourt was back in government as Treasurer until June 1895, the time when Anderson first asserts that he is pretty sure that the fiend was locked up in a madhouse -- while Swanson is saying that the best suspect is deceased (By 1910 these two bits have fused together via the Swanson Marginalia in Anderson's book).

[Trevor Marriott]

However its valid and remains so.

Records have been lost and destroyed. Lets not try and dismiss this fact out of hand.

It remains.

Monty

You are not able to prove that anything connected to this was lost or destroyed or that it ever exsited in the first place.

If it did ever exist what a coincidnce evidence to show perhaps who JTR was, lost or destroyed, and look at all the rubbish police files and records that has been left behind and not destroyed or lost.

As I said before its a cop out used by those who champion Kosminski and the marginalia. I would have thought you with your experience would be one of the first to question this mythical ID procedure which went against all known police protocol and procedures of the day. If there is a doubt about that there has to be a doubt about eveyhtibg else connected to the marginalia. They both stand or fall together. !

[PaulB]

However its valid and remains so.

Records have been lost and destroyed. Lets not try and dismiss this fact out of hand.

It remains.

Monty

The world can at least be grateful that Trev hasn't joined the often loony fringe of Biblical scholarship. Since he has huge trouble understanding how official files can be known to have existed, he simply wouldn't be able to comprehend how and why it can be said that the New Testament Gospels drew on earlier and now lost books.

However, one observes how convenient it is to Trevor to be able to discount every piece of evidence by claiming it is either forged or didn't exist, or was somebody's fantasy. You can't really argue against reasoning like that. Not that is is 'reasoning', of course. It's utter nonsense. But the marginalia is a forgery, so that's got rid of. No proof, of course. Just a bunch of unoriginal questions which have been asked a thousand times, and argued about, and written about. And there are no official records about Kosminski, and since he denies that records must have existed otherwise Macnaghten wouldn't have heard about him, so there's no evidence, not even presumed evidence, that Kosminski was a suspect.

It's great, isn't it. With 'reasoning' like that you can argue anything.

[PaulB]

Hmmm

A very cryptic last line?

Mysteriously truncated and way down the page. It said that the problem (from my perspective anyway) is that sometimes you bang on about Macnaghten inappropriately, as if we were in conflict or as if you felt obliged to take down Anderson a few pegs, or shove Macnaghten up a few. As said, you don't have to feel that way. Macnaghten's thoughts are just as valuable as Anderson's or Swanson's or anybody else's.

I'll try and read it again tomorrow during daylight.

I I think you are saying that since each suspect has his police 'patron' of arguably varying degrees of certainty, then they are all in a kind of equipoise until a source, or sources turn up to break this stalemate.

Yes I am.

I subscribe to the belief that a strong argument can be mounted that Macnaghten claimed that he solved it to his satisfaction, as best you can without catching the maniac in the act, then that might be the best provisional solution.

Fine. Some won't agree with you, but that's a reasonable position to adopt if you want to.

I think that by eliminating 'Kosminski' and Ostrog from his memoirs, and hammering it home that there was no slam dunk witness and that the best suspect was not Jewish he was, by implication, 'exonerating' everybody who was not Druitt -- perhaps quite wrongly.

Aw, and I was getting in an agreement groove there. Here's examples of you slanting again: Have you shown - indeed, can be shown - that Macnaghten 'eliminated' Kosminski and Ostrog from his memoirs, rather than simply didn't include them? Can you demonstrate that Macnaghten was aware of a 'slam dunk' witness? If there was a witness, and Anderson says there was, then either Anderson was lying, Macnaghten was unaware of it, or Macnaghten intentionally didn't mention him. The latter doesn't reflect on Macnaghten or his veracity very well. But moving on...

But he was consciously doing it. For Macnaghten and Anderson were in some kind of competition, even if only one was playing this game.

Okay...

The reason I find the cronies credulous is becasue they accepted what they surely must have known was rubbish: that the 'police' were very sure by the end of 1888 that the Ripper was probably a suicided doctor, because ... why? Because their top cop pal said so. This is especially true of Sims.

Littlechild had no idea that 'Dr D' originated with Mac.

That's open to question. One assumes that Sims told Littlechild that he got the Dr D info from Griffiths, who in turn, he says, got it from Anderson. Now, there are arguments swirling around that piece of text, but a solid argument is that Littlechild meant Macnaghten - the information in Griffiths came from Macnaghten, Dr D, if Druitt, was Macnaghten's suspect. So maybe Littlechild did know, or at least suspected, that Dr D originated with Macnaghten.

In fact, I was being too generous in writing that Macnaghten 'broke cover' in 1914 because he barely did so since he omitted both 'doctor' and drowned'. He still kept much of the real story veiled writing he says 'chiefly for his own amusement'.

Generous or not, it is still prejudicial in that you are encouraging your reader to share your opinion about what Macmoriarty was doing.

[Monty]

In 1894 MM formulates the MM based on what? We do not know, but in that he names amongst others a person named Kosminski as being a likely suspect in surname only. What we do know is that there is no official records or reports which can corroborate his initial suspicion that a man named Kosminski was ever regarded a likely suspect. (Lests (sic) not go ito all this business about records being lost stolen or destroyed this old chestnut has been done to death and is widely used as in this case to prop up theories)

However its valid and remains so.

Records have been lost and destroyed. Lets not try and dismiss this fact out of hand.

It remains.

Monty

[Jonathan H]

Hmmm

A very cryptic last line?

I'll try and read it again tomorrow during daylight.

I I think you are saying that since each suspect has his police 'patron' of arguably varying degrees of certainty, then they are all in a kind of equipoise until a source, or sources turn up to break this stalemate.

I subscribe to the belief that a strong argument can be mounted that Macnaghten claimed that he solved it to his satisfaction, as best you can without catching the maniac in the act, then that might be the best provisional solution.

I think that by eliminating 'Kosminski' and Ostrog from his memoirs, and hammering it home that there was no slam dunk witness and that the best suspect was not Jewish he was, by implication, 'exonerating' everybody who was not Druitt -- perhaps quite wrongly.

But he was consciously doing it. For Macnaghten and Anderson were in some kind of competition, even if only one was playing this game.

The reason I find the cronies credulous is becasue they accepted what they surely must have known was rubbish: that the 'police' were very sure by the end of 1888 that the Ripper was probably a suicided doctor, because ... why? Because their top cop pal said so. This is especially true of Sims.

Littlechild had no idea that 'Dr D' originated with Mac.

In fact, I was being too generous in writing that Macnaghten 'broke cover' in 1914 because he barely did so since he omitted both 'doctor' and drowned'. He still kept much of the real story veiled writing he says 'chiefly for his own amusement'.

[PaulB]

Some of my best stuff there, Paul, and it gets consigned to the irrelevant pile.

It's read and digested and notes are taken. It just isn't relevant to the discussion here.

Oh well. We agree to disagree. I think that was all relevant to my not-a-slanter defense.

It may have been, Jonathan. All I'm trying to say, really, is that I don't consider Druitt any more or less likely than any other suspect, Kosminski included. All we are doing is trying to understand our sources and hopefully find more information, the fact that somebody thing Druitt or Macnaghten is a potentially more profitable line of inquiry and somebody else thinks Kosminski is is neither here nor there. They are both worth investigating.

Martin Fido thought Anderson was unlikely to mean Aaron Kosminski as his suspect because he was sectioned too late.

Indeed he did. And does.

The overwhelming evidence is that the Marginalia is authentic for reasons given by many already.

Yes, it is.

Does Trevor have the right to question its authenticity?

Of course, but the argument used to debunk it as an hoax is weaker, to put it mildly, than the one which strongly argues that it is not an hoax and is really Swanson's authentic, private jottings.

'Accepted fact'?

By whom ...? It's not 'accepted' by anybody here?

I always write: I am alone. It is a theory. I maybe wrong -- for all the bloody good it does me ...

Sorry, you lost me a bit here. Yes, Trev has every right to question the authenticity of the marginalia, although I rather wish he'd stop parading his observations as if they were new. There is absolutely nothing he says that wasn't thought of years ago, discussed, argued about, looked into... It's all old and ancient hat.

It's where you say accepted fact that I get lost on...

I know you always write it is a theory, Jonathan, and I, for one, am grateful you take the time and trouble to air it, but just sometimes it is either off topic or diverting, and sometimes you use our theory to argue an angle as if your theory was a fact that needed to be taken into consideration. And I think you've done that here. Just a little. My point is that Anderson and Swanson do not devalue Macnaghten, or vice versa. We don't know enough about any of them to make any hard and fast conclusions. That's where Trevor goes way off the rails too, because he asks questions of the story we're told and then draws a conclusion (in his case the marginalia is a fake), or he interprets Macnaghten exonerating Kosminski and Ostrog as if he actually did exonerate them, when it is in fact manifestly obvious he didn't. What we have to do is answer the questions, you are attempting to do that, and making some good points too.




Yes, I know you do. And I, at least, am very grateful that you do so. Somebody keep hammering home The problem is that you

[Jonathan H]

Some of my best stuff there, Paul, and it gets consigned to the irrelevant pile.

Oh well. We agree to disagree. I think that was all relevant to my not-a-slanter defense.

Martin Fido thought Anderson was unlikely to mean Aaron Kosminski as his suspect because he was sectioned too late.

The overwhelming evidence is that the Marginalia is authentic for reasons given by many already.

Does Trevor have the right to question its authenticity?

Of course, but the argument used to debunk it as an hoax is weaker, to put it mildly, than the one which strongly argues that it is not an hoax and is really Swanson's authentic, private jottings.


'Accepted fact'?

By whom ...? It's not 'accepted' by anybody here?

I always write: I am alone. It is a theory. I maybe wrong -- for all the bloody good it does me ...