Ep. #39- A Diseased and Vile Creature: Thomas Cutbush

[rjpalmer]

The first thing that struck me about the Cutbush podcast is that I expected A.P.W. to have a Cambridge accent, but, instead, he sounded like a Sex Pistol who was about to bash me over the head and steal my wallet.

That said, A.P.W. refers to himself at one point as 'reckless,' and that attitude has always struck me as both A.P.'s strength and his weakness. But mainly his strength. His saving grace is that he lacks the timidity of an academic historian. He's willing to be laughed at, and he's willing to laugh at you in turn. Further, he's trying to make his way by lugging around in the 'bone and rag shop of the human heart,' and not necessarily cares whether the paper trail ever catches up with him or not. Frustrating, crazy, and, at times, brilliant. Ally is merely complaining that he's not Phil Sugden; but for every 3 academians we need at least 1 mad, bad, and dangerous to know fellow to return the universe back to its proper balance.


I enjoyed the point where Ally ponders (with the skepticism dripping from her microphone) why we should take it on faith that Charles Cutbush and T.H. Cutbush were even related. No census information shows this. This is ground zero; the left brain in mortal combat with the ID.

A.P.'s classic, crazy, response is that Cutbush is always ranting and raving about senior officers at the Met. He rants about going to Scotland Yard and borrowing a revolver to blow out Dr. Brook's brains. Further, The Sun wouldn't have bothered rattling the cage, if there wasn't a lion inside of it.

This facinates me. Why? Because no respectable historian would make such an argument; and yet, coupled with the Macnaghten memo, it's not an easy to argument to refute. Like it or not, it's got wheels. And its got far more attitude than a download from ancestry.com.

It is as if A.P.W. instinctively realizes that history is a matter of blood, guts, and entrails, and not dusty census records.

The dude is crazy and I seldom see things his way. Nonetheless, he's got my respect, for he's got a spine.

So my dears, the question I pose is this.

If T.H. Cutbush is not related to Uncle Charles, why was he raving about Scotland Yard? And why on earth did he believe they would lend him a revolver?

These are the unaswerables that makes history jump from the page.

[Chris]

Because no respectable historian would make such an argument; and yet, coupled with the Macnaghten memo, it's not an easy to argument to refute.

?

Surely it's entirely straightforward to refute, and has already been refuted (unless people fall back on the suggestion that one of the people involved was the product of some sort of adulterous liaison and that the fact they had the same surname was just a coincidence - which is the kind of the thing that is impossible to check, but which if true would be very unlikely to be common knowledge at Scotland Yard!).

If T.H. Cutbush is not related to Uncle Charles, why was he raving about Scotland Yard? And why on earth did he believe they would lend him a revolver?

But what's the evidence that any of this happened?

To be honest the thing that surprised me most about the podcast was that several of the participants seemed to accept everything printed by the Sun in 1894 as reliable evidence of what happened in 1891.

[Stewart P Evans]

Simple Reason

So my dears, the question I pose is this.
If T.H. Cutbush is not related to Uncle Charles, why was he raving about Scotland Yard? And why on earth did he believe they would lend him a revolver?

For the simple reason that it is not unusual for those arrested and dealt with by the police to become fixated with the police. Especially if they are unbalanced. Believe me, I have arrested hundreds in my time, and seen many 'sectioned' (detained under the Mental Health Act) and such ravings are not uncommon.

[Ally]

Hi there RJ,

I am not complaining that AP isn't Sugden, I am complaining that it seems to be perfectly acceptable in this society and this field for people to lie, invent stories, fail to provide any evidence and it's considered acceptable, and vomit, admirable. It is not noble to invent stories that are in direct contradiction to the known facts. It is not heroic to create fantasies about people and pass it off as truth without even bothering at a basic attempt to provide evidence for your fantasies, and when confronted with facts or asked to provide evidence, just claim "this is what I believe" even though it is in direct contradiction to the facts. You may see history as something that can be invented to suit a liars whim, but I disagree. People justify many different things by what "they believe" despite the evidence, whether it be holocaust deniers or others like AP who slander individuals at whim.

In short, you may find AP to be a heroic figure, I find him a pathetic liar who twists and turns and invents and weasels his way out of every direct confrontation he ever finds himself in. And blames it on being drunk. As if that were a charming excuse and gee what a cute naughty boy am I, blush. But to each his own; every person has different qualities they admire in others and charming liars and drunks are generally preferred to honest people, a sad and sorry state which no doubt explains a lot about modern society. Or at least they are preferred til they steal Granny's retirement fund.

As for why a possible nutcase would rant against Scotland yard, are you serious? The nuthouses of the world are filled with lunatics who believe that the police, the authorities, "the man" are all out to get him. It's not like it's a stretch, considering he was actually going up for trial in attacking women, that in his mind Scotland yard was after him. And as Stewart has already pointed out, it's not exactly uncommon.

[Robert]

Hi Ally

I disagree with your assessment of AP - but I think you can take that as read.

Chris, Thomas was still going on about the police when he was inside Broadmoor. One thing I found interesting was that he doesn't seem to have had any resentment against the doctor who certified him, or against the Broadmoor authorities in general. He was violent on two occasions, but both times against other patients, rather than warders. The main centres of his paranoia seem to have been Grimthorpe and Brookes, the police, and his mother and aunt.

In a sense, the relationship or otherwise between Supt Cutbush and Thomas is irrelevant - what counts is who believed in it. Macnaghten did. I am wondering who else did, and whence Macnaghten got his belief.

[Chris]

Robert

Thanks. Has that part of the Broadmoor records been published or posted anywhere yet? I'm not really convinced that paranoia about "Grimthorpe and Brookes, the police, and his mother and aunt" indicates a family relationship with someone at Scotland Yard.

And I can't find the reference to his thinking the police would lend him a revolver. (I know the Macnaghten Memoranda say that he threatened to shoot Brooks.)

[Robert]

Hi Chris

I have the records typed up, and I will be posting them here. I am going to have to go through them again before I do, because I want to reproduce the exact documentation with all its weird punctuation and so on, and once I'd typed it up first time, I felt I'd had a bit of a bellyful of it, so I've been putting it off a bit. If you want to PM me your email I can send you the draft.

[Chris]

I have the records typed up, and I will be posting them here. I am going to have to go through them again before I do, because I want to reproduce the exact documentation with all its weird punctuation and so on, and once I'd typed it up first time, I felt I'd had a bit of a bellyful of it, so I've been putting it off a bit. If you want to PM me your email I can send you the draft.

Thanks. I'm sure that will be very useful. There's no hurry at all as far as I'm concerned. But as extracts from the records have been posted in various places I just wondered whether it was already available and I'd missed it.

[Robert]

Hi Chris

I don't know where the extracts are, but maybe they can fill in the odd illegible word that I can't make out. The records are much like Kosminski's - one wishes they'd gone into more detail. It's a pity that we will never know more.

[Chris]

I don't know where the extracts are, but maybe they can fill in the odd illegible word that I can't make out. The records are much like Kosminski's - one wishes they'd gone into more detail. It's a pity that we will never know more.

I was just referring to the things mentioned in the newspaper reports, the page on Richard Jones's website and the bits you've mentioned on the boards here. I don't think there's anything in the first two detailed enough to help with illegible words.

[Stewart P Evans]

Cutbush

In a sense, the relationship or otherwise between Supt Cutbush and Thomas is irrelevant - what counts is who believed in it. Macnaghten did. I am wondering who else did, and whence Macnaghten got his belief.

If they are not related we shall probably never know. However, Cutbush is a pretty uncommon name and when Thomas came up as a topic of interest in 1894 someone at the Yard, if not Macnaghten himself, may have wrongly believed in the relationship and told Macnaghten. If they were related then, of course, there is no mystery.

[Robert]

Well this is the odd thing, Stewart. In 1891 we had Chisholm, Race and McCarthy investigating the jobbings, and trying to find out what kind of man Cutbush was. Macnaghten says that little reliance could be placed on the statements of the "excitable" mother and aunt, so surely they would have spoken to Supt Cutbush (presumably able to answer questions at the time) if they had any suspicion that he might be able to throw light on Cutbush. And if they did speak to him, and were told he knew nothing of Thomas, then it looks as though you were right when you said that the remark about the uncle-nephew relationship was added in 1894, as an afterthought. How Macnaghten got the idea I can't imagine. He also seems to have thought that Thomas's father died when he was quite young, whereas in fact the father died in 1886. The whole thing is mystifying.

[JSchmidt]

And if they did speak to him, and were told he knew nothing of Thomas, then it looks as though you were right when you said that the remark about the uncle-nephew relationship was added in 1894, as an afterthought. How Macnaghten got the idea I can't imagine. He also seems to have thought that Thomas's father died when he was quite young, whereas in fact the father died in 1886. The whole thing is mystifying.

Maybe he confused Cutbush with someone else or blended two persons of interest into one? Do we have someone with a father dying early?

[Robert]

No one I can think of, JS - at least, no one that Macnaghten would have been interested in.

[Chris]

How Macnaghten got the idea I can't imagine. He also seems to have thought that Thomas's father died when he was quite young, whereas in fact the father died in 1886. The whole thing is mystifying.

Surely it's not that strange for people to assume that two men with an unusual surname are closely related, and if they're of different generations but known not to be father and son, then uncle and nephew is an obvious possibility. (If you do a Google search you'll find a number of web pages that say Franklin Roosevelt was Theodore's nephew, whereas in fact they were distant cousins.)