Upon what basis did the Druitt family suspect Montague?

[Jonathan H]

To Pinkmoon

But that is what happened?!

From 1898 Sir Melville Macnaghtenm anonymously, and from behind a wall of fiction, shared with the public via, not journalists, but two particular, reliable pals who were writers on crime of unimpeachable reputation--ecumenically a Tory and a Liberal--that the case was solved and, like it or lump it, it was an English gent of the professional classes.

In 1913, Sir Melville implictly took credit for identifying the killer and even more explicitly in his memoir of 1914.

To Roy

Yes, Macnaghten makes it seem as if this is a deparmental opinion.

Mind you, he does not try very hard at this. The book's preface and his 1913 comments hint that it his solo solution.

We know from other sources that not only was it not the opinion of CID or the Home Office, they had never heard of this suspect (unless it's a grabled version of Tumblety, the elss said about the better).

Plus his chapter is there to debunk Anderson's mad, Jewish murderer.

To all

I would argue that all this stuff about people in 1888 or later being paranoid or imaginative or hysterial, is fine as far as it goes.

But Macnaghten was there; he likely met with the Druitts, or a Druitt and therefore would he not have come away thinking: they have nothing but imagination and hysteria from grief, and so on?

Mac was of a temperament and a personal bias for the case not to be over, that he was too late, and for the Yard not to have been embarrassed and outwitted by the fiend, and to be seen to be fruitlessly chasing a phantom for years?!

In other words, if the evdience was anything less than devastating 'Good Old Mac' was going to reassure the family that they were quite wrong; Montie was, at worst, delusional--as mad people often are. After all, would Montie really savage a Whitechapel harlot and then calmly go and play cricket the same morning?!

Instead this competent, sympathetic, hands-on police chief felt he had no choice but to agree with their appaling and distressing conclusion.

Then it was a question, for him, of what to do with this unwanted solution ...

[pinkmoon]

To Pinkmoon

But that is what happened?!

From 1898 Sir Melville Macnaghtenm anonymously, and from behind a wall of fiction, shared with the public via, not journalists, but two particular, reliable pals who were writers on crime of unimpeachable reputation--ecumenically a Tory and a Liberal--that the case was solved and, like it or lump it, it was an English gent of the professional classes.

In 1913, Sir Melville implictly took credit for identifying the killer and even more explicitly in his memoir of 1914.

To Roy

Yes, Macnaghten makes it seem as if this is a deparmental opinion.

Mind you, he does not try very hard at this. The book's preface and his 1913 comments hint that it his solo solution.

We know from other sources that not only was it not the opinion of CID or the Home Office, they had never heard of this suspect (unless it's a grabled version of Tumblety, the elss said about the better).

Plus his chapter is there to debunk Anderson's mad, Jewish murderer.

To all

I would argue that all this stuff about people in 1888 or later being paranoid or imaginative or hysterial, is fine as far as it goes.

But Macnaghten was there; he likely met with the Druitts, or a Druitt and therefore would he not have come away thinking: they have nothing but imagination and hysteria from grief, and so on?

Mac was of a temperament and a personal bias for the case not to be over, that he was too late, and for the Yard not to have been embarrassed and outwitted by the fiend, and to be seen to be fruitlessly chasing a phantom for years?!

In other words, if the evdience was anything less than devastating 'Good Old Mac' was going to reassure the family that they were quite wrong; Montie was, at worst, delusional--as mad people often are. After all, would Montie really savage a Whitechapel harlot and then calmly go and play cricket the same morning?!

Instead this competent, sympathetic, hands-on police chief felt he had no choice but to agree with their appaling and distressing conclusion.

Then it was a question, for him, of what to do with this unwanted solution ...

If macnaughton had any firm evidence about druitts guilt he would have made it public .

[Simon Wood]

Hi Pinkmoon,

Macnaghten had no firm evidence about Druitt's guilt.

Anymore than Anderson had evidence against his Polish Jew, Abberline against George Chapman, or Littlechild against Francis Tumblety.

Bite the bullet. Grasp the fact that [for whatever as yet unknown reason] these top policemen contrived to keep the Ripper Roundabout turning.

Regards,

Simon

[pinkmoon]

Hi Pinkmoon,

Macnaghten had no firm evidence about Druitt's guilt.

Anymore than Anderson had evidence against his Polish Jew, Abberline against George Chapman, or Littlechild against Francis Tumblety.

Bite the bullet. Grasp the fact that [for whatever as yet unknown reason] these top policemen contrived to keep the Ripper Roundabout turning.

Regards,

Simon

I do think that his "private information" was nothing more than gossip .To not release any firm evidence and turn up the chance to be known as the man who unmasked jack the ripper would any police man do that?

[Simon Wood]

Hi Pinkmoon,

Macnaghten's "private information", received some time after he became a police officer, neatly absolved the cops from having had any suspicions regarding Druitt.

Regards,

Simon

[Jonathan H]

Ro Pinkmoon

You are misunderstanding the legal and moral context.

Macnaghten, himself, as a senior police administrator, could not directly brief the press in 1898 about a killer, or chief suspect, who could not be arrested, could not be convicted and who could not enjoy the protection of due process. There were implications of a libel dimension too-- from the point of view of the man's family.

When Mac finally did take implicit credit, in 1913--to the surprise of the press--he gave them almost nothing. His memoirs are are a little more forthcoming on some critical elements, but still opaque.

For example, in 1913 and 1914 Macnaghten mentions neither doctor nor drowned. In 1966, a fine, thoughtful writer like Robin Odell did not even realise Macnaghten was writing about Druitt.

[pinkmoon]

Ro Pinkmoon

You are misunderstanding the legal and moral context.

Macnaghten, himself, as a senior police administrator, could not directly brief the press in 1898 about a killer, or chief suspect, who could not be arrested, could not be convicted and who could not enjoy the protection of due process. There were implications of a libel dimension too-- from the point of view of the man's family.

When Mac finally did take implicit credit, in 1913--to the surprise of the press--he gave them almost nothing. His memoirs are are a little more forthcoming on some critical elements, but still opaque.

For example, in 1913 and 1914 Macnaghten mentions neither doctor nor drowned. In 1966, a fine, thoughtful writer like Robin Odell did not even realise Macnaghten was writing about Druitt.

How tempting would it be for a police man who had any evidence in his possession to release it and name the killer and solve perhaps the biggest unsolved case of all time that's if he had evidence in his possession which he probley didn't.

[Jonathan H]

I agree.

Fom 1891, when he believed--rightly or wongly--that he knew thr solution, Macnaghten seems to have been very disciplined.

But from 1895, his boss, Sir Robert Andersin, with whom he had a difficult relationship, began telling epople, sincerely and forthrightly, that the Ripper was a local madman now 'safely caged'.

Three years later, Mac, not forthrightly but just as sincerely began countering the local Jew solution with the English, Gentile doctor solution.

This profile expancded in the 1900's via the famous writer George Sims, and became ascendant: working people read it in 'The Referee' while middle class writers like Frank Richardson and Ford Maddox Ford accpected it as the real life Dr. Jekyll solution.

There were two pieces of incriminating circumstantial evidence against the English doctor. He had told doctors in an asylum, a year before, that he maniacally desired to savage harlots and he killed himself immediately after he saw what he had done to Mary Kelly.

Speaking for himself, without a protective shield, in 1913, Macnaghten confused matters to this day by not confirming the suicide was of a doctor--it wasn't--and by saying that the real story was a closely held secret.

Well, that can't be what Sims has been writing about, the press assumed, because there are no 'secrets' about that suspect (except his name) but we do know what he looked like--he looked just like Sims.

[Mayerling]

Sorry I must have missed something. When did Ford Maddox Ford make any known comment about Sims' theory? Was he Ford Maddox Ford or Hueffer (his original name) when he made it.

I have a book in my library about how Ford (when he was Hueffer) was in a small group of Anglo-American-Polish writers at the turn of the 20th Century that included Henry James, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad (hence the Polish), Stephen Crane, Ford/Hueffer, and distantly Edith Walton). All certainly had a habit of getting involved in legal activity (Crane once was a defense witness for a prostitute in a case against the New York City Police Department), or readers of true crime books (James had a correspondence with William Roughhead), or used true crimes in their fictions (H. G. Wells used the career and death of Whittaker Wright the crooked financier for his "Tono Bungay" and another novel; Conrad based "The Secret Agent" on the deadly botched attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory by Martial Bourdin in 1894). Can you tell me where Ford/Hueffer mentions the Sims' theory or the Ripper?

Jeff

[Jonathan H]

To Jeff

To be specific, Ford Madox Ford is using Griffiths, almost word for word, but in the Sims' era of the 'Drowned Doctor' solution.

Sims in 1903 had claimed that the Major had seen a drfinitive 'Home Office Report' by the 'Commissioner', who was unidentified, though that could be Warren, or Monro (actually it was a draft or rewrite by Macnaghten, by then Assistant Commissioner, about a document totally unknown to the Home Office).

http://www.jtrforums.com/showthread.php?t=12662

[Dave O]

Hi Jeff,

Forgive me for being off-topic, but speaking of Ford Madox Ford (or his grandfather), you might appreciate this other link to the Pre-Raphaelites: Diana Holman Hunt wrote in My Grandfather His Wives His Loves that the young Thomas Diplock and Frederic George Stephens arranged for the model Annie Miller to be educated by Diplock's aunt, Martha Bramah.

Dave

[Roy Corduroy]

Pinkmoon you actually make a very good point.

Inspector Race presented his dossier on Tom Cutbush to his Metropolitan Police superiors, who declined to act on it.

Likewise Melville Macnaghten, Robert Anderson, or any policeman for that matter could take an inquiry to an official level within the Met hierarchy. And if the results of further investigation warranted, the Home Office would be notified. The Home Secretary, one of Her Majesty's principal Secretaries of State, could decide to act. For instance to name a commission, chartered such that it would make no difference if the accused were deceased, insane, in a foreign country or any other contingency.

All theoretical of course, and it didn't happen. Possibly the evidence was not iron-clad to begin with. There was no smoking gun.

Roy

[Jonathan H]

Thanks for all the Fish

That's possible, Roy.

That Macnaghten lacked an iron-clad case against Druitt. eg. No smoking gun.

Hence not sharing it with any other policemen, his superiors or the Home Office (though the false impression would be given, through Sims, that all this had been done.)

But I think we are looking at this from the wrong end of the telescope.

In Sims there are two smoking guns, neither of which are literally true.

That the doctor killed himself immediately after Miller's Court and that he had confessed to other doctor's his maniacal desires to harm harlots while he himself had been a voluntary patient a year before the murders.

What I found such a jaw-dropper about Macnaghten's breezy, jaunty 1914 memoir was that let go of the 'double bang' incriminating timing ('soon after ...') and conceded that his 'Simon Pure' had never been 'detained' in a madhouse (neither does he bother with 'doctor' or 'drowned').

I argue that the 'North Country Vicar' story of 1899, in which an Anglican gentleman 'of good position and unblemished character' and who had the time and the mental wherewithal to confess to a priest after Kelly, is obviously about Montague Druitt ('a barrister of bright talent'). Yet another of the missing pieces found, I believe by, Stewart P. Evans, and in my opinion (and only mine) as important as the Littlechild Letter.

The Vicar's 'true lies', his open mix of fiction and fact--but will not say which is which--including that his penitential Ripper had been "at one time a surgeon", and then again maybe he wasn't, yet definitely was the killer, perfectly dovetails with Mac's contingent comment, for file, that Druitt was only "said to be a doctor ..." yet was definitely turned on by ultra-violence.

Therefore that confession to a priestwas the 'smoking gun' about the size of Big Bertha, and Sims fictionalized and redacted this clincher element; as a confession-of-intent before the murders.

Based on the little we have, Mac was completely confident in the solution, as was Sims, as was the Druitt family, or some of the family.

Beyond that Macnaghten was concerned for the reputation of a 'good' family,who would be ruined, but more to the point he was concerned about the rep of Scotland Yard.

The last thing he wanted was a commission of inquiry into a man who could not be arrested, charged or convicted.

All that would prove is that, humiliatingly, the Yard had no idea about this man, ever, and they only learned about him years after he killed himself (due to a leak from his county of origin). Plus if the press insinuated that the Druitts, or a Druitt knew about their deceased member's culpability, and had done nothing about it, that would be an extremely ugly case heading for the libel courts (in which Macnaghten could be called as a witness having interviewed the family, or a family member in 1891).

Whereas if Mac--who regarded himself as apart from all other cops because he was a fanatical Old Etonian and had nearly been sacked before he even worked one day at CID--just kept it to himself, fobbed off Anderson with a deceased masturbator (whom Mac knew to be very much alive), while hustling the public with Sims about how the police were about to arrest the 'doctor' who only had concerned 'friends'--then everybody would be a winner, and nobody would be a loser.

What Sir Melville Macnaghten could never have envisaged was that all these short-term machinations, essentially harmless, even boyishly prankish (he knew Ostrog was not really a medical man anymore than was Druitt, and he also knew that the Russian was quite popular with the ladies, when young, and that the hapless confidence man had also defiled his beloved Eton!) but would would spawn, over half a century later, a thing called Ripperology.

I think that's a good place to exit.

[pinkmoon]

Pinkmoon you actually make a very good point.

Inspector Race presented his dossier on Tom Cutbush to his Metropolitan Police superiors, who declined to act on it.

Likewise Melville Macnaghten, Robert Anderson, or any policeman for that matter could take an inquiry to an official level within the Met hierarchy. And if the results of further investigation warranted, the Home Office would be notified. The Home Secretary, one of Her Majesty's principal Secretaries of State, could decide to act. For instance to name a commission, chartered such that it would make no difference if the accused were deceased, insane, in a foreign country or any other contingency.

All theoretical of course, and it didn't happen. Possibly the evidence was not iron-clad to begin with. There was no smoking gun.

Roy

Smoking gun roy there wasn't even a pea shooter he's still my favourite suspect though

[Mayerling]

What Sir Melville Macnaghten could never have envisaged was that all these short-term machinations, essentially harmless, even boyishly prankish (he knew Ostrog was not really a medical man anymore than was Druitt, and he also knew that the Russian was quite popular with the ladies, when young, and that the hapless confidence man had also defiled his beloved Eton!) but would would spawn, over half a century later, a thing called Ripperology.

I think that's a good place to exit.

Hi Jon,

I agree with you. It is a dandy place to exit.

Jeff