Dan Farson's Book

[Limehouse]

I just picked up a hard-backed copy of Daniel Farson's Jack the Ripper published by The History Book Club. There is no publication date but the book is in perfect condition down to the cover. I paid £3. It doesn't make the most compelling read, but I thought that was quite a bargain as I am insterested in Farson's work in general.What do others think?

[Tom_Wescott]

Interesting book, but extremely outdated. I wouldn't use it in a research capacity. Look at it as just a timecapsule of how Ripperology was at that time.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[The Grave Maurice]

Well, geez, it was published in 1972 so of course it's out of date, but it's still a milestone in Ripper research and a darn good read. If you like Farson's work, Limehouse, and you haven't read it already, you should seek out a copy of his Limehouse Days which is an interesting account of his experiences in the East End.

[Graham]

Farson made an outstanding contribution to Ripperology, being the first to unearth (again) the Mary Kelly photos and also to make the connection to the Macnaghten Memoranda. He didn't get carried away with crank theories, either, unlike a few of his (more or less) contemporary writers on The Ripper.

He was a larger-than-life character - as Maurice says Limehouse Days is a great read, and I'd also recommend his autobiography Never A Normal Man which he published not long before he died (of drink-associated illness).

Cheers,

Graham

[Johnr]

Dan Farson a great chronicler in film.

I totally agree. Dan Farson, the son of a larger than life U.S. newspaper correspondent called Negley Farson, (the Negley was from a maternal grandfather, a Confederate general), lived under great pressure to succeed.

It was his discovery of photography in the U.S. forces and his genetic inheritance from master storyteller Bram Stoker ( creator of Dracular ),which
gave him his talent as a master documentary film maker at Britain's ITV studios.

The loss of his trump card ( the right to be first to reveal the Macnaghten Memorandum to the world: beaten mysteriously, by fellow JTR author, Tom Cullen) which caused Farson to cast around for a new trump card to spice up his long delayed book on JTR. Miraculously, Farson produced the "Dandenong document" as his new trump card.

Trouble was, no one has ever seen it, 'cept him.

As a London obituary gleefully put it Dan Farson died of drink.

But when he was revueing other JTR books for the Ripper centennary, Farson described one new theory where JTR was allegedly a drunken journalist.

"I like the form" he said !!

Some documentary buff should comb the world for signs of long-forgotten copies of Frason documentaries then blitz the publishing world with a film about that legendary interviewer of Britain's post war revolution.

JOHN RUFFELS.

[Limehouse]

Thanks everyone. Your comments are very helpful.

[Stewart P Evans]

Not Farson

Farson made an outstanding contribution to Ripperology, being the first to unearth (again) the Mary Kelly photos and also to make the connection to the Macnaghten Memoranda. He didn't get carried away with crank theories, either, unlike a few of his (more or less) contemporary writers on The Ripper.
...
Graham

It was Don Rumbelow and not Farson who unearthed the photograph of Mary Kelly in the late 1960s. Farson was the first to publish it of which Don states, "I had asked Camps to keep the photographs to himself and so was annoyed to discover that he had a number of sets printed off, one of which he gave to Dan Farson who then published them for the first time in his 1972 book Jack the Ripper."

[Graham]

It was Don Rumbelow and not Farson who unearthed the photograph of Mary Kelly in the late 1960s. Farson was the first to publish it of which Don states, "I had asked Camps to keep the photographs to himself and so was annoyed to discover that he had a number of sets printed off, one of which he gave to Dan Farson who then published them for the first time in his 1972 book Jack the Ripper."

Of course, you're right - and apologies to Donald Rumbelow. However, an easy mistake to make, I think, as the Kelly photos were first seen in Farson's book.

Cheers,

Graham

[The Grave Maurice]

I just wanted to thank Graham for recommending Farson's Never a Normal Man. What a wonderful book this is. There is much here for followers of this website: his life-long friendship with Colin Wilson, brief bits about how and why he wrote his ground-breaking JtR book, and his time in Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs; but, beyond that, is the recounting of a fascinating life.

The book is often painful to read because of the various demons that beset him. However, once you get past the first chapter, I suspect that you won't be able to put it down.

[Jonathan H]

In my opinion, the tragic element of Dan Farson as a Ripper researcher is that he did not fully understand or appreciate what the Aberconway version of Macnaghten's Report actually meant.

Perhaps understandably he was too dazzled at last seeing the name of the 'Drowned Doctor' -- the alleged name of Jack the Ripper no less. This led him to treat a very ambiguous and veiled document as straight-forward -- when it is anything but.

In 1959, when Farson was handed the document by Mac's daughter, until 1975 when Rumbelow published the official version of this same Report, Farson admittedly had to work in the dark between those years as to whether the official version exactly matched this privately held document [it both does and does not].

Yet, arguably Farson did not need the surfacing of the official version to have more strongly made the connection that Major Griffiths had obviously worked from this document, nicknamed the Aberconway version, and that George Sims in 1903 had claimed that it was the 'Home Office Report' which was 'final' and 'conclusive' written by the Assistant Commissioner himself eg. Macnaghten.

Well, Farson had the document and it is probably not a draft or copy of a Home Office Report [the official version was never sent there, and neither are addressed to anybody] and its confident assertions about Super-suspect 'Dr Druitt' as a Blackheath Jekyll and a Whitechapel Hyde -- are all wrong!

Why are they wrong?

What's going on?

Montague John Druitt was completely unrecoverable inside that Jekyll/Hyde disguise.

Is that just a bit of convenient luck for both the Yard and the Druitts?

What was Mac up to? Everything? Nothing?

Here are two diametrically opposed positions which Farson never even considered.

Mac Knew Nothing:

Macnaghten, an amateur obsessive, had a slanderously over-rated memory. Farson never faced the possibility that Macnaghten, his scoop, knew bugger all about the real Montie Druitt.

We know now that Mac may have had only one source for the entire story: an upper class twit politician. In fact, a panicked Henry Farquharson, in 1891, may have made up stuff about Montie to mislead his old Etonian chum Macnaghten from entangling the loose-lipped pol in yet another libel scrape. Also, perhaps Mac exaggerated; that he told the major and the playwright that it was a 'Home Office Report' simply to puff out his own chest? That does not say much for credibility.

Or,

Mac Knew Everything:

In his Report(s) Macnaghten was slyly concealing both Druitt's and Farquharson's identities, to avoid a libel suit and a scandal for the Tory Party. The 'Drowned Doctor' mythos, backed by a non-existent 'Home Office Report', also concealed an embarrassing truth from Griffiths and Sims and thus from the Edwardian public. This was the biggest, most explosive secret about the Ripper, not his identity; that Druitt was unknown to the Yard until YEARS after he topped himself which Mac revealed only from the safety of retirement: 'Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper'.

At least in published form, Dan Farson seems to have completely missed all of these machinations and contradictions which swirl around Macnaghten and his Ripper prognostications.

Instead of his fruitless quest to track down a Holy Grail-like stolen file which would break the case wide open -- and now subsequently debunked -- Farson needed to, or employ somebody to, comb through every English-speaking newspaper between 1888 and 1891. This would have eventually revealed both Farquharson AND that a middle-aged medico really was the object of Scotland Yard's attention as a Ripper suspect, for what duration and to what degree is a matter of ferocious and acrimonious [by some] debate: Dr Tumblety.