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“Was Francis Thompson Jack the Ripper?”
Joseph C. Rupp, M.D., Ph.D., was a highly qualified American forensic pathologist with over fifty years’ experience and approximately 9,000 autopsies performed personally. His extensive medical and forensic background gives him an exceptional understanding of criminal pathology, wound analysis, and the technical requirements of surgical precision.
In 1988, on the centennial of the Whitechapel murders, Rupp published a seminal article in the criminology journal The Criminologist titled “Was Francis Thompson Jack the Ripper?” This article laid out a forensic and psychological case for Thompson as a viable suspect, supported by the following arguments:
BY Joseph C Rupp, MD PhD NUECES COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER
November 1988 marked the hundredth anniversary of the most celebrated series of murders committed in the 20th century. Within a three-month period between August 31 and November 9 1888, Jack the Ripper killed and mutilated five women in the East End of London. A series of crimes so bizarre and so brutal, committed by a killer so nebulous and elusive, that these murders have fascinated amateur and professional sleuths for a hundred years. The murderer was never apprehended and the case never solved, and yet there is enough information available to provide us with grist for endless speculation as to the identity and motive of the killer. Herein lies much of the fascination of this series of crimes.
In 1910 Dr Thomas Stowell caused a sensation when he published, in ‘The Criminologist’, his solution to the Ripper mystery. He proposed that Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, the eldest son of the future King Edward VII, was in fact Jack the Ripper. While an interesting theory, it did not really stand up too well under close scrutiny. But it was all great fun and provided many Ripper aficionados with entertaining bedtime reading. As the centennial approaches perhaps now is the time to take another look at the Ripper ease in the hope that renewed interest will be generated in solving this series of murders.
In 1968 John Walsh authored a biography of the poet Francis Thompson titled ‘Strange Harp, Strange Symphony’. Francis Thompson is best known for his celebrated poem ‘The Hound of Heaven’, which is required reading in every survey of English literature course. In 1968, I knew very little about Thompson except that he was an opium addict and was rescued from the streets of London by a literary benefactor. Early in Walsh’s book in discussing Francis Thompson’s rescue from the streets of London the author states, ‘It was Everard Meynell who first glimpsed the connection between ‘The Hound of Heaven’ and Thompson’s search for his friend (a prostitute) during August-September 1888 …’ This was followed by a footnote,
‘At this time (August-September, 1888) occurred the most bizarre coincidence in Thompson’s life. During the very weeks he was searching for his prostitute friend, London was in an uproar over the ghastly deaths of five such women at the hands of Jack the Ripper. In these circumstances, his concern for his prostitute friend’s welfare would naturally have been heightened. The police threw a wide net over the city, investigating thousands of drifters, and known consorts with the city’s lower elements, and it is not beyond possibility that Thompson himself may have been questioned. He was, after all, a drug addict, acquainted with prostitutes and, most alarming, a former medical student! A young man with a similar background and living only a block away from McMaster’s shop was one who early came under suspicion, see Cullen, T., “When London Walked in Terror”.’
Needless to say this footnote made a great impression upon me and as l read the biography I could not help but read it in light of the possibility that Thompson himself might have been the Ripper. Upon finishing the biography, it was clear that Francis Thompson was at least as good and perhaps a far better candidate for the role of Jack the Ripper than was the Duke of Clarence or any number of other suspects that have been put forward over the past one hundred years. With these thoughts in mind, let us review the life of Francis Thompson, taking particular cognizance of those facts and incidents in his life which fit him for the role of the Ripper.
Francis Thompson was born on December 18, 1859, in the town of Preston in Lancashire. He was born into a devout Catholic family and his father Charles Thompson was a practising doctor of homeopathy. Francis was a frail and delicate child and until he was nearly 11 years old, was educated at home with his two sisters. A precocious child, by the age of seven or eight he was already reading Scott Macaulay, Shakespeare and the Bible. He was allowed to read anything that interested him and at a young age was particularly taken by Coleridge’s poems, ‘The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Christabel’.
When Francis was nearly 11 years old, he was sent away to school at Upshaw College near Durham to begin the fall term in September of 1870. At Upshaw he was one of three hundred boys. Later in his life, Thompson said of his first association with his schoolmates,
‘Fresh from my tender home and my circle of just- judging friends, these malignant schoolmates, who danced round me with mocking, evil distortion of laughter … were to me devilish apparitions of a hate now first known; hate for hate’s sake, cruelty for cruelty’s sake. And as such they live in my memory, testimonies to the murky aboriginal demon in man.’
{LIFE p18)
Thompson made a satisfactory adjustment to his school life for he was to remain at Upshaw for seven years. His school record was good, especially in Latin, Greek, and English. His teachers spoke of him as a ‘good, quiet shy lad’. Thompson pursued a four-year course in Christian humanism that led to a three-year college programme in preparation for entry into the priesthood. After seven years in school at Upshaw, his teachers decided that he was unsuited for the priesthood.
The reasons given to his parents were ‘his strong nervous timidity’ and a ‘natural indolence, which has always been an obstacle with him’. The officials at the school concluded that it was ‘not the holy will of God’ that he should be a priest.
In July 1877, a failure in his own eyes and disappointment to his parents, he returned home. It was now decided that Francis should follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. The boy acquiesced in his parent’s wishes and after passing the entrance examinations for medical school was accepted as a student of Owen’s College in Manchester. On September 27, 1877, two months short of his 18th birthday he signed the Owen’s College Register and was admitted to the Medical Department for both summer and winter sessions.
Francis now began to live a double life, which was to last for six years. As a medical student, he communed each day from his home in Ashton-under-Lyne to Manchester. He pretended to study but attended only as many lectures as allowed him to convince his family that he was an earnest student. During the hours when he should have been attending lectures he was walking the streets of Manchester, dozing in the sun, reading books and poetry, visiting the library and spending long afternoons watching the cricket matches. In June, 1879, after two years in medical school, he went to London to sit for his examinations and failed.
His health now began to break under the pressures of his pretence, and in 1879 he suffered his first long illness from tuberculosis. He lay in bed for days and it was probably during this period than he first began to take laudanum [a mixture of 90% alcohol and 10% opium). It was at this time also that his mother, for no known reason, gave her son a copy of De Quincey’s ‘Confessions of an English Opium Eater’. It was her last gift to her son before she died on December 19, 1879, as the result of some sort of liver ailment from which she had been suffering for about six months. The indications are that Francis began using laudanum because of his illness and continued to use laudanum because of his reading of De Quincey.
In any event, by the end of 1880 Francis had acquired the laudanum habit. Upon his recovery from his illness, he returned to medical school, renewing his life of deception with the new added burden of his drug addiction. In 1881, he went lo London and again failed his medical examinations. His tolerant father sent him back to medical school for yet another two years, and in 1884, he went to sit for his examinations in Glasgow, rather than London, in the hope that the examinations in Scotland would be easier. Thompson’s father finally determined, after the third failure and at the age of 25, that his son should leave school and go to work.
Francis’s first job was with surgical instrument makers in Manchester. This job lasted only a couple of weeks and was followed by a job as an encyclopaedia salesman, which lasted only a couple of months. During this time, he read the entire encyclopaedia, but sold not a single volume. After these failures, Francis enlisted as a
soldier. He was examined and put through a course of basic training and then rejected as physically unfit for military service, presumably because of his drug addiction. It finally dawned on the tolerant Dr Thompson that something was the matter with his son and he suspected alcoholism as the problem. One Sunday in November 1885, he confronted Francis with his suspicions and was met with denials but no explanations. Of course, Francis’s denials were truthful concerning alcohol since his real problem was his addiction to laudanum. On the following day, November 8, 1885, Francis left home and went to Manchester where he spent about a week in his old haunts disposing of some of his books in order to sustain his laudanum habit. Several days later, he wrote home for his fare to London and arrived in London about November 15, 1885.
He arrived in London with no plans. ‘I made the journey to the Capital,’ he wrote, ‘without hope and with the gloomiest foreboding in the desperate spirit of an enfant perdu. [a soldier assigned to a dangerous post]’ His arrival in London was the beginning of three years of penury and suffering from which experience forms the basis for much of his wonderful poetry.
He made no attempt to contact relatives in London who might have helped him. His love of books drew him to a job as a ‘collector’ for a bookseller. He picked up books from the wholesale book dealers that had been ordered by his employer and delivered the books back to the bookstore or directly to the customers. He soon lost this job, partly through indolence and partly because he
read more books than he delivered. By July, 1886. Francis was living on the streets with enough money only for food and drugs.
The streets of London did not provide many opportunities to find the eleven pence a day, which he needed to exist. He was reduced to near beggary. He was a bootblack, a newspaper and match seller, he ran after cabs in hope of a tip for loading and unloading baggage or holding the horses while passengers alighted. Many nights he had no money for a bed, even in the poorest lodging house. Sometimes he spent the night in a shelter provided on the Embankment for the homeless, sleeping on a mattress in a boxlike, lidless coffin covered with a leather blanket. His love of books continued and an observer at the Guildhall Library recalled, ‘He was so poorly clad that it fell on my lot to have to perform the painful duly of asking him to forego his visit.’ He lived in the gutter, sheltering from the elements in doorways and porches and wandering the streets by day and by night.
In August of 1866, after nine months on the streets of London, Thompson met John McMaster, owner of a boot shop at 14 Panton Street just off Leicester Square. McMaster took him in his shop and gave him employment. He received his food and five shillings a week for his services as messenger, odd job Boy, and for opening and closing the shop. Mr. McMaster did all he could to rehabilitate Thompson. He gave him a boy’s work to do and Thompson was more a guest than an employee. In the bookmaker’s shop and within the circle
of the McMaster family Thompson began to write and talk as he had not done for a long time.
In December 1888, it was arranged that Francis should return home to his family for the Christmas holidays. Francis spent two weeks with the family, however his family was changing. His sister Mary planned to enter a convent and his father announced his intention to take a second wife.
When Thompson returned in McMaster’s shop in January, he had increased his use of laudanum, although his benefactor, like his father, mistook the symptoms for those of alcoholism. Upon his return, Francis was even less of a satisfactory employee than before. Disappointed with what he considered as ‘his only failure’, McMaster decided that he could no Longer keep Thompson in his home. By the middle of January 1887, clothed in a brown overcoat, which he was to wear for several years, the poet left the bookshop to return to his vagrant life. On the streets of London during the bitter winter of 1886, he reached the nadir of his life. Starving and near death, charity came to him from an unexpected source. A young prostitute took him home to share her food and lodging. With her Thompson found companionship and warmth, which filled the gap left by the death of his mother.
In February of 1887, Francis had some kind of unexplained good fortune. ‘With a few shillings to give me breathing space’, he began to pull together the manuscript of his essay entitled ‘Paganism’ and some poems. ‘Next day I spent my half penny on two boxes of matches (to sell) and began the struggle for life.’ At the end of February 1887, he sent the manuscript and the poems to a small Catholic magazine called ‘Merry England’.
The editor of the magazine Wilfrid Meynell was too busy to read unsolicited manuscripts and so for six months the package remained unopened. When it was finally examined, Meynell was struck by the quality of the essay, although the poetry did not impress him. He wrote at once to Thompson’s return address, the post office at Charing Cross. This letter was unclaimed, and after more delay and finally without the author’s permission one of Thompson’s poems, ‘The Passion of Mary’, was published in ‘Merry England’, in April 1888, fourteen months after its submission.
In the meantime, Thompson’s circumstances had become truly desperate. With hope virtually gone, decimated by cold and hunger and with the drug tearing at him, he decided upon suicide. Thompson’s account of his suicide attempt is not without interest. He went to a dump behind Covent Garden when he planned to take one large dose of laudanum. After swallowing half of the laudanum, he felt a hand laid on his wrist and, looking up half conscious, saw the figure of the dead poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) – the marvellous boy who had committed suicide by taking arsenic before his 18th birthday and who has become the romantic symbol of suffering genius. Restrained by the figure from drinking the other half of the laudanum, Thompson recalled the legend that money had arrived for Chatterton the day after his suicide and so Thompson resolved not to take his own life. The very next day he learned that his poem, ‘The Passion of Mary’, had appeared in ‘Merry England’ in the April issue, which had reached its subscribers in the third week in March.
On April 14, 1888, Thompson wrote a letter to Wilfrid Meynell. Meynell immediately responded to Thompson’s letter, however, it was many days before Thompson appeared in Meynells office. At this encounter Meynell described Thompson as ‘a waif of a man more ragged and unkempt than the average beggar, with no shirt underneath his coat and bare feet in broken shoes’. During June and July of 1888, Thompson continued to visit Meynell at the ‘Merry England’ office. He refused either to accept the offer of a regular sum of money or to leave his life in the streets.
Apparently the rescue of Thompson by Meynell had precipitated a crisis in the life of the poet, for he was faced with breaking off his relationship with the prostitute who had for so long sustained him. However, it was the girl herself who finally resoled the problem, for she disappeared without a word and without a trace. According to his biographers, Thompson was desolate.
During August and September of 1888, he searched for her day and night through the streets of London. There is evidence that during this period of searching in the closing months of 1888, that concept of pursuit by and flight from a loving and forgiving God began to crystallise his ideas for his finest poem, ‘The Hound of Heaven’. By mid-October, 1888, Thompson had tentatively accepted the fact that the girl had vanished for good. The girl was never found nor was her name ever discovered.
Thompson now became more amenable to Meynell’s offers of help. He allowed himself to be examined by a doctor and late in 1888 entered a private hospital. We know that Thompson underwent the pangs of withdrawal in the hospital and was there for several weeks. He was discharged as cured some time in December of 1888. After his release from the hospital, Thompson was so weak and depressed that Meynell, after taking him under his roof for a while, arranged for him to convalesce in the free Premonstratensian Monastery at Stonington in Sussex. It was there that Thompson went early in 1889 and remained until February of 1890. This period of time, free of drugs and recuperating, was one of the most productive and creative of his life.
Thompson, who had begun taking laudanum, about 1880, underwent withdrawal in 1888, which affected a temporary cure. He reverted to the drug habit after several years, underwent another cure and was drug free for about four years. Then, in 1896, he began using the drug again and continued until his death, in 1907, as a result of tuberculosis and addiction.
The first of the Ripper murders occurred on August 31, 1888. By this time Francis Thompson had been living on the streets of London for about three years. The second Ripper murder occurred September 3. The third and fourth murders occurred on September 30. It was during August and September of 1888 that Thompson was conducting his desperate search by day and night through the streets of London for his prostitute girlfriend. The last of the Ripper murders occurred in November, after which no more was heard from Jack the Ripper. Francis Thompson left home on November 9, 1885, after a bitter argument with his father. He entered hospital sometime around the middle of November, 1888, for treatment of his drug addiction, which accounts for his sudden departure from the London scene.
All of the authorities on the Ripper agree that the murderer quite likely had some sort of medical training. Francis Thompson spent six years in medical school: in effect, he went through medical school three times. It is unlikely, no matter how disinterested he was or how few lectures he attended, that he did not absorb a significant amount of medical knowledge. Indeed, we know that he learned enough medicine to deceive his father, a practising physician, for a matter of six years.
By 1888 Thompson had been a drug addict for eight or nine years. There is no need to reiterate what drug addiction does to the personality and patterns of behaviour, nor what the drug addict is capable of doing in order to supply his drug habit. One of the most interesting facts pointing to Thompson as a suspect is his poetry itself. One cannot read his poems without seeing the underlying rage and hostility of this otherwise devoted, obedient son and pious Catholic. Francis Thompson certainly possessed a chaotic sexuality. He grew up and was educated with his sisters. He was devoted to his mother. His relationship with women later in life including his prostitute benefactrix was always strange and unusual. In none of the biographic material is there evidence that he ever had a sexual encounter with a woman.
These facts also make Francis Thompson a prime suspect in this series of sex murders, particularly if we couple this with his drug addiction.
Another curious coincidence is the fact that the Ripper was able to elude the police so many times in spite of the complete mobilisation of many volunteer groups and law enforcement agencies in London. If we look at Thompson’s background, having lived in the streets for three years prior to this series of crimes, there is no doubt that he knew the backstreets of London intimately, and that his attire and condition as a derelict and drug addict would not arouse suspicion as he moved by day and night through the East End of London.
It is of importance to look at the origins of his most famous poem, ‘The Hound of Heaven’. There has been a great deal written concerning where the idea originated of comparing God and his pursuing love to a hound of heaven. Meynell felt that the idea began to crystallize during August and September of 1888 when he was searching for his prostitute girlfriend through the streets of London. If this is true, it is possible that all the talk of press of using bloodhounds in the East End of London to track the Ripper was in fact part of the material that provided the fleeing Thompson with the idea for his most celebrated poem. Finally, in regard to the matter of the sudden and complete disappearance of Thompson’s
prostitute girlfriend, his biographers would have us believe that this woman, upon realizing that Thompson’s rehabilitation was being delayed by his attachment to her, suddenly and with altruistic intent, disappeared out of Thompson’s life. In fact, the hooker with the ‘hooker with the heart of gold’ is a fiction almost as universally accepted as the ineffectuality of capital punishment. It is just as likely to suppose that Thompson, in the grips of an avaricious streetwalker, decided that she should disappear.
Was Francis Thompson Jack the Ripper? Perhaps the matter can be settled since handwritten notes from the Ripper and handwritten manuscripts by Francis Thompson are easily accessible.
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