Maybrick--a Problem in Logic

[Iconoclast]

It’s worth mentioning, that to the average Liverpudlian in the late 1980s, both cases would have been common knowledge.

A few months after the Michael Caine Ripper special, At St. George’s hall Liverpool, there was a play re-enacting the Maybrick trial which took place six times a day and ran for two months.
The play was well publicised and the 100 year anniversary of the Maybrick trial also attracted mentions in the local papers.
It’s not inconceivable, that a local person with an interest in crime, would want to see if it was feasible to tie the ripper and Maybrick together.

Most ripper suspects seem to be born that way.
Choose a suspect of some notoriety, then make them fit.

Yes, Yabs, the re-enactment was just one more brick in our horrible dystopian wall. I don't doubt for a moment that the typical observer has every grounds for assuming the scrapbook and the watch to be fakes. Indeed, it is more or less all many observers have got to say on the matter because there doesn't appear on the surface to be any point investing time and effort in reading about it. I'm not unsympathetic to that view! It would seem for all the world that the Maybrick scrapbook was in fact concocted by some wily old Scouser at the end of the '80s or start of the '90s. More's the pity.

How much more reassuring it might have been had it played out more as follows:

Mike Barrett [1992]: I know this is going to sound crazy, and it's probably some kind of bizarre fit-up, but my wife has given me an old Victorian scrapbook with a confession of sorts signed 'Jack the Ripper'. She says it's been in her family for at least half a century. My research to date has identified that we are to believe that the author of it was James Maybrick, celebrated murder victim of the late Victorian period. I'm sure it's some kind of joke, but I don't know that for certain so I've brought it to everyone's attention to see if it can be investigated more seriously.

Ah, ifs, buts, and maybes, eh?

Ike

[Graham]

Ikey,

The gentleman who went into the water was Jimbo's old drinking buddy George Davidson (in whose arms he died) not John Over. It wasn't you who said it, but I wanted to correct it anyway.

It was I. My bad. Just at the moment I'm hopping between two households (no, not what you're thinking...and no, they're not both mine) and when I wrote that utter crap I hadn't got my books within easy reach. I am suitably mortified.

Graham

[Iconoclast]

Ikey,



It was I. My bad. Just at the moment I'm hopping between two households (no, not what you're thinking...and no, they're not both mine) and when I wrote that utter crap I hadn't got my books within easy reach. I am suitably mortified.

Graham

Hi Graham,

It is another aspect of the dystopian nightmare that one feels compelled to remember all of the plethora of utterly esoteric facts and dates and names and places because we feel if we get something wrong we have somehow compromised our position, our argument, or our credibility.

Personally, I don't give a s**t.



PS If it makes you feel better, I could not remember George's surname to save my life (and had to look it up). I so nearly instinctively called him George Hutchinson. Maybe it's catching ...

Ikey

[Graham]

Aw shucks, y'all too good to me, Massa Ike. But you're quite right - names sometimes just will not come to my now knackered memory-cells. I mean, I can't these days even name the Villa team that thrashed Middlesborough 6-1 in the 1937 season. I mean!

But seriously, this is what I mean by nit-picking on these boards. Trifles put forward to reduce or even eliminate the big stuff. It's gone on here for years. Hair-splitting? Yep, and sub-splitting. There are one or two posters on here who are absolute past-masters at that doubtful art; people who will call you to task for a misplaced comma. But what the eff? Who cares? Stuff 'em.

TTFN,

Graham

[erobitha]

Mr. Barnett -- Yes, you're right. Witt was always London based. I had assumed (wrongly) that he decamped for London after the mid-1870s bankruptcy, but I see now that he was already in Camberwell in 1871.

Melvin Harris and everyone else always figured that Maybrick worked for G. A. Witt & Company in the Liverpool office, not the London office.

How this evolved into Maybrick "living and working in Whitechapel" is a mystery I will leave for others to explain.

He worked as a shipping clerk in London’s Docklands (which is where?) throughout his 20’s. This is a matter of census record. Witt or no Witt - he has a first hand knowledge of the area having lived there for many years.

[Sam Flynn]

He worked as a shipping clerk in London’s Docklands (which is where?)

...three or four miles away from the heart of the Spitalfields slum, since you ask.

[erobitha]

...three or four miles away from the heart of the Spitalfields slum, since you ask.

He was named as living at 55 Bromley Street, Commercial Road in a will made by Sarah Ann Roberston's step father in 1868, 10 years after he left Liverpool for London. This is about equidistant to the heart of London's Dockland's and to the Whitechapel area.

[Sam Flynn]

He was named as living at 55 Bromley Street, Commercial Road in a will made by Sarah Ann Roberston's step father in 1868, 10 years after he left Liverpool for London. This is about equidistant to the heart of London's Dockland's and to the Whitechapel area.

Thanks, but what reason would he have had to acquaint himself with the slums two miles to his West? Even if he did, that's not saying much; I'm familiar enough with the streets of Spitalfields and I've never lived there, or near there, at all.

[erobitha]

Thanks, but what reason would he have had to acquaint himself with the slums two miles to his West? Even if he did, that's not saying much; I'm familiar enough with the streets of Spitalfields and I've never lived there, or near there, at all.

Firstly it is just one mile in both directions from his named home address and the docklands area. James was familar with prostitutes, that is well known. I would imagine he might have some recreational incentive to travel that short distance west along the Whitechapel Road.

[Abby Normal]

He worked as a shipping clerk in London’s Docklands (which is where?) throughout his 20’s. This is a matter of census record. Witt or no Witt - he has a first hand knowledge of the area having lived there for many years.

what years/dates?

[Sam Flynn]

Firstly it is just one mile in both directions from his named home address and the docklands area.

1.7 according to Google Maps.

James was familar with prostitutes, that is well known.

I'm not sure it is, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.

I would imagine he might have some recreational incentive to travel that short distance west along the Whitechapel Road.

And therein lies one of the biggest myths associated with the Whitechapel Murders. Whitechapel wasn't some kind of "Red Light District", and there were plenty of prostitutes elsewhere in London, including East End districts outside Whitechapel - especially Docklands, where there was a demand for their services, for obvious reasons. (One contemporary survey showed that there were, in fact, more prostitutes in Poplar than there were in Spitalfields.) Unless the younger, clerkly Maybrick had a penchant for walking, or for ragged looking women in their 40s, I see little reason for him to have ventured into the rookeries of Spitalfields to satisfy his urges.

[erobitha]

what years/dates?

1858 to around 1868

[rjpalmer]

He worked as a shipping clerk in Londons Docklands (which is where?) throughout his 20s. This is a matter of census record.

Thanks, Erobitha. Out of curiosity, have you actually located Maybrick in the 1861 UK census?

There's an anomaly in the 1871 one. James Maybrick is listed at 77 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool, in the English census for the night of 2 April.

Yet he's also in the 1871 Scottish census, listed in 'vessels' in Glasgow, on the night of 2/3 April. Which might suggest the resident is not always physically in the family home when the census taker comes knocking.

I haven't looked at this in years, but I don't remember anyone finding him in 1861...

[Abby Normal]

1.7 according to Google Maps.



I'm not sure it is, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt.



And therein lies one of the biggest myths associated with the Whitechapel Murders. Whitechapel wasn't some kind of "Red Light District", and there were plenty of prostitutes elsewhere in London, including East End districts outside Whitechapel - especially Docklands, where there was a demand for their services, for obvious reasons. (One contemporary survey showed that there were, in fact, more prostitutes in Poplar than there were in Spitalfields.) Unless the younger, clerkly Maybrick had a penchant for walking, or for ragged looking women in their 40s, I see little reason for him to have ventured into the rookeries of Spitalfields to satisfy his urges.

or do it some twenty years later, when he wasn't working in London. nor known the streets well enough in any event, as the ripper surely did.

[Abby Normal]

1858 to around 1868

thanks ero
but do you think this would really give him the knowledge (or even the wherwithall or desire) to know the streets of WC some twenty years later?