Why Thompson might be Jack the Ripper. In 1,200 words.

[Ausgirl]

I actually don't think it's fanciful. I am a poet, I hang out with poets. Some are odd, some affect oddness to look more like the odd ones, which is odd in itself. Some are elderly physics/lit/whatever professors and would twitch to have a hair out of place, but some just make you want to hand them a bar of soap and a pamphlet on venereal disease... In any case, many are *charming* as hell, and attractive to a lot of women because of it.

So I don't see any problem with a scruffy Thompson enticing a tipsy woman anywhere, with a few sweet words. Especially if he was known around the streets and occasionally had spare coin. But really, he might not have even needed that if he was anything like some of the wordsmiths I know.. I'm as cynical as they get, and I catch myself getting swoony when they lay it on thick. It's a gift. That's what makes them such good poets.

Physical condition --- again, from personal knowledge: of old punk-era mates who went badly astray --- a junkie living rough on the streets can certainly hold his own in a fist fight against a fitter person, can certainly jump fences to evade the cops and can lift 1980's-weight TV's like nobody's business. Cutting a throat wouldn't be a huge challenge for some of them.

Unless they were sick. Sickness hits them hard. As does withdrawal.

So I don't see any problem that way with him being a killer. Bit dubious on whether he was in the area at the times of the murders. Pin that down, and IMO he's a solid contender.

I'd like to know if he was the poet MK was said to hang out with!

There's a lot of room to dig for concrete facts here, to back this all up (from more than one source..). I'm quietly hoping this happens.

[Ausgirl]

when Walsh stated that Thompson stayed at Providence Row, he was given an ascertained fact, rather than an uniformed remark.

I am certainly not accusing anyone of being 'uninformed' here.

What I'm saying is, you have a good enough suspect, IMO, as to be one of the few 'new' suspects which make any kind of sense. Therefore, you do your argument a vast disservice by doing what every half baked theorist does and "stretching" a perhaps into a definite in the attempt to make it all more convincing, and it just achieves the opposite.

He may have stayed at the Providence place, but was he there for the period of the murders? Was he moving between places? If you found a bit of info that contradicted your theory, would you include it, or push it under the nearest bit of furniture with the toe of your shoe and hope nobody notices?

I want to trust you as a researcher and an author, is what I am saying. Because this all looks actually quite feasible.

[Richard Patterson]

Answers?

Hi Richard,
I'm a bit perplexed as to why a lady of the night would go down an alley with a dirty vagrant who wouldn't have two pennies to rub together.

If Thompson looked as though he couldn't pay for their services, surely prostitutes would give him a wide berth let alone go somewhere quiet to get down to business.

As much as I'd love to consider your theory as a real possibility something doesn't quite gel for me. From your synopsis I gather that Thompson was in a somewhat deranged state of mind in 1888 whereas I personally feel that Jack was a much more calculating individual.
Then you have to consider the practicalities, if Thompson was Jack, he would have no doubt got blood on his clothes. So how does a vagrant living in a refuge get a change of clothes?
Lastly, the fact that Thompson knew how to remove a human heart does not make him an expert in removing female reproductive organs.

Not trying to be picky, just hoping that you can quash my doubts.
Amanda

Thanks for all the questions Amanda, let me quash your doubts,

Thompson hated the sight of flowing blood. His six years full time training as a surgeon with half that time in the Manchester infirmary with its surgery gave taught him techniques to perform operations without allowing blood to mess his clothes. Since he had three times the medical training than most surgeons, it makes him more than capable in removing internal organs.

As to his appearance, just before the murders, Thompson came to money intermittently, three or four times, in his vagrancy years. A recent sum came from his publisher in September 1888. His publisher, seeing Thompson’s derelict condition of dress told him to clean himself up and buy a new suit with his money. His publisher, Wilfrid Meynell also paid Thompson’s opium debts. Thompson used the money to buy a suit, a long dark overcoat, and a wide felt hat. During the murders he received another sum of money. The payment by Meynell was for a further essay by Thompson for the publisher’s magazine. Thompson’s essay came out November 1888 edition. Thompson was his typical, calculating self, when he wrote, in this essay, on the eve of the Kelly murder,

'He had better seek some critic who will lay his subject on the table, nick out every nerve of thought, every vessel of emotion, every muscle of expression with light, cool, fastidious scalpel and then call on him to admire the "neat dissection"'

Thompson’s mind was stable enough in 1888 to form a relationship with a publisher and write and deliver sophisticated essays, which were remarkable in the range of writers, and poets he referenced, purely from memory, including lengthy word-for-word quotations.

[Richard Patterson]

Let's be honest, it most likely wasn't Thompson. The tortured poet vowing revenge on the class of woman who broke his heart is a nice story, and I can see why you'd want to keep it alive, but it's also a fanciful one. And that's without accounting for Thompson being left-handed and not in the best physical condition to carry out the murders.

Thanks being honest in your views about the theory that Thompson was the murderer.

Why is it fanciful?

Why do you think he was not in the best physical condition?

Why do you think the Ripper was right handed?

Given that the reasons you give are debatable. (Example: That the Ripper was right or left-handed. I'm of the opinion that the killer cut his victim's necks from behind myself.) Do you suggest we drop the notion? I tell you what, there are so many people, with so many theories, some think Barnett did it for example. I might just stick with Thompson until you give me something that rules him out. Thanks for your feedback.

[Amanda]

Question.....

Hi Richard,
I'm a bit perplexed as to why a lady of the night would go down an alley with a dirty vagrant who wouldn't have two pennies to rub together.

If Thompson looked as though he couldn't pay for their services, surely prostitutes would give him a wide berth let alone go somewhere quiet to get down to business.

As much as I'd love to consider your theory as a real possibility something doesn't quite gel for me. From your synopsis I gather that Thompson was in a somewhat deranged state of mind in 1888 whereas I personally feel that Jack was a much more calculating individual.
Then you have to consider the practicalities, if Thompson was Jack, he would have no doubt got blood on his clothes. So how does a vagrant living in a refuge get a change of clothes?
Lastly, the fact that Thompson knew how to remove a human heart does not make him an expert in removing female reproductive organs.

Not trying to be picky, just hoping that you can quash my doubts.
Amanda

[Harry D]

Let's be honest, it most likely wasn't Thompson. The tortured poet vowing revenge on the class of woman who broke his heart is a nice story, and I can see why you'd want to keep it alive, but it's also a fanciful one. And that's without accounting for Thompson being left-handed and not in the best physical condition to carry out the murders.

[GUT]

That Thompson may have used the Providence Row Night Refugee in 1888 while the murders occurred.

Thanks for clarifying Richard

[Richard Patterson]

What exactly did he see as 'the most bizarre coincidence in Thompson's life', simply that the ripper murder's occurred at a time Thompson MAY have been living in the area, or something else.

That Thompson may have used the Providence Row Night Refugee in 1888 while the murders occurred.

[Richard Patterson]

One point if I may if he was such a devout Catholic, that Providence Row was so favoured by him, why would he stay in Salvo Accom.

When Walsh writes:

Quote:
'When neither food nor bed was available, he would, along with the other derelicts, often gravitate to one of the recently established Salvation Army shelters, or the Catholic Refuge in Providence Row.'

Can't that be interpreted as him having a preference for the Salvation Army shelters.

Possibly. The Salvation Army's first shelter opened in 1888 in premises at 21 West India Dock Road in Limehouse. Later, (I’m guessing after 1888, but I do not have exact dates.) others opened with one in Clerkenwell another at 272 Whitechapel Road, Whitechapel; and Westminster. Thompson was born into an ultra-conservative Catholic family, and it was they who sent him to study as a Catholic seminary student for the priesthood. Although he wrote supporting the work of the Salvation Army, to me it’s natural that this practicing Catholic would want to be with his own kind and shelter at Providence row. The Salvation Army, would have hardly been his first choice.

Why he would even want to stay at a Salvation Army shelter is complex to answer, much of his reasoning can be seen in his essay, “Catholics in Darkest England”. This essay was published in 1891. Suffice to say Thompson applauded the military persona of this charity. He signed his essay ‘Francis Tancred’. He got that name from the crusading knight who lived from 1076 to 1112 AD. This knight helped capture Jerusalem from the Muslims and was for a short time Prince of Galilee. His essay championed the word ‘army’ in Salvation Army. He described the condition of poverty in occult terms. He suggested that the work of the Salvation Army be converted into a weapon and that the poor, particular, prostitutes and their issue, should be thrown into the Thames. Here are parts of his essay

'I see upon my right hand a land of lanes and hedgerows, I look upon my left hand and I see another region-is it not rather another universe? A region whose hedgerows have set to brick, whose soil is chilled to stone; where flowers are sold and women, where the men wither and the stars; whose streets to me on the most glittering day are black. For I unveil their secret meanings. I read their human hieroglyphs. I diagnose from a hundred occult signs the disease which perturbs their populous pulses. Misery cries out to me from the kerb-stone, despair passes me by in the ways; I discern limbs laden with fetters impalpable, but not imponderable; I hear the shaking of invisible lashes, I see men dabbled with their own oozing life. ... they are brought up in sin from their cradles,... the boys are ruffians and profligates, the girls harlots in the mother's womb. ... our derelict Catholic men and women shall not have to wait till the Salvation Army has bruised our heel. ... Here, too, has the Assassin left us a weapon which but needs a little practice to adapt it to the necessity of the day? Even so our army is in the midst of us, enrolled under the banner of the Stigmata, For better your children were cast from the bridges of London than they should become as one of those little ones.’

[GUT]

Walsh saw it all as, 'the most bizarre coincidence in Thompson's life'.

What exactly did he see as 'the most bizarre coincidence in Thompson's life', simply that the ripper murder's occurred at a time Thompson MAY have been living in the area, or something else.

[Richard Patterson]

Did Walsh ever offer any opinion as to whether Thompson could have been the Ripper?

Walsh saw it all as, 'the most bizarre coincidence in Thompson's life'.

[Richard Patterson]

[ATTACH]16616[/ATTACH]

Our Lady of England Priory Storrington, Sussex where he stayed in 1889. Francis Thompson's room was on the third floor, extreme left.



Hi Richard, I didn't read about the attack dogs in John Walsh's bio. Where did you get that please.

Roy

Thanks for the terrific photo of the priory. When you say the 3rd floor are using the British convention that has the street level as the ground floor and the floor above it as the first floor, or the American English, where street level is the first floor? The incident with Thompson and an attack dog is not in Walsh’s biography. Neither is it in Brigid M Boardman’s. 'Between Heaven and Charing Cross'. The Life of Francis Thompson, or in Everard Meynell’s 1913 biography, or Viola Meynells’ book on Thompson and her father. I do have Alice Meynell’s essay, the wife of Thompson’s publisher.. Her essay, At Monastery Gates, tells,

‘and the yard thereby is guarded by a St Bernard, whose single evil deed was that under one of the obscure impulses of a dog's heart -atoned for by long and self-conscious remorse--he bit the poet; and tried, says one of the friars, to make doggerel of him.’

But this account is of Thompson while he was staying that Pantasaph, and not Storrington. There are several books that I read, any which, or none may have told of the attack at Storrington. I currently do not have access to them. These books include. Beverly Taylor’s 1987, 'Francis Thompson', Figgis’s ‘Francis Thompson: In His Paths.’ and Paul Van K Thompson’s 'Francis Thompson a Critical Biography’. Although I am certain my notes are correct and that Thompson was attacked by at least twice, I will side on caution and remove this point, about attack dogs patrolling the Storrington Priory grounds. Neither will I make this point in any future claims until my source can be named. Your question is valid and you had me digging through my library today with fruitless results. Thank you.

[Scott Nelson]

Did Walsh ever offer any opinion as to whether Thompson could have been the Ripper?

[GUT]

At least you're not saying:

CASE CLOSED

[GUT]

One point if I may if he was such a devout Catholic, that Providence Row was so favoured by him, why would he stay in Salvo Accom.

When Walsh writes:

When neither food nor bed was available, he would, along with the other derelicts, often gravitate to one of the recently established Salvation Army shelters, or the Catholic Refuge in Providence Row.

Can't that be interpreted as him having a preference for the Salvation Army shelters.