Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld

by Theo Aronson

  Osbert Sitwell, in his book Noble Essences, says that Walter Sickert claimed to know the identity of Jack the Ripper. According to the painter, he had been given his name by the landlady in whose house Sickert had once had lodgings. She told him that the previous occupant of his room had been Jack the Ripper. She and her husband had often heard their lodger, a quiet veterinary student, return home from having been out all night; from traces in the fireplace, they would know that their lodger had burnt the suit he had been wearing the previous evening.

  Walter Sickert had scribbled the name of the Ripper in the margin of the book he happened to be reading; a book which he subsequently gave away. If Osbert Sitwell wanted to know the name, said Sickert, he should try and track down the book. But by the time Osbert Sitwell tried to trace it, it had been destroyed in the bombing during the Second World War.

  If Walter Sickert was telling Osbert Sitwell the truth, it proves that the name he scribbled down could not have been a particularly well-known one, and that he was given it by a landlady only ‘some years after the murders’.14

  All these theories – Stowell’s and Spiering’s of Prince Eddy as the Ripper, Harrison’s of Jim Stephen killing for love of the Prince, and Joseph Sickert’s of a Masonic conspiracy to keep a royal marriage secret – can safely be discounted. Not so easily dismissed is the theory of Martin Howells and Keith Skinner. In their book The Ripper Legacy, published in 1987, they establish a link between Prince Eddy and a man named Montague John Druitt.

  It has long been suspected that there was an official conspiracy of silence about the true identity of Jack the Ripper; that his name was known to what has since come to be called the Establishment and to the upper echelons of the police force. It seems to have been realized, by the end of 1888 – seven weeks after the last and most ghastly murder – that there was no further need to hunt for the Ripper. The exceptional number of police patrolling the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields was gradually reduced. By 1892, with the Ripper still not caught, detained and brought to trial, the file on the case was closed. No official explanation was given for this closure. It was afterwards claimed, by an Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, that the Ripper had ‘escaped justice’; and by Chief Commissioner James Munro that ‘he should have been caught’.15 The apparent belief, at the highest police levels, was that the Ripper had committed suicide.

  On 31 December 1888 a body was fished out of the River Thames. It was estimated to have been in the water for about a month. It was identified as that of a thirty-one-year-old man named Montague John Druitt. He was subsequently described as a barrister. He was, in fact, a failed barrister and an obscure schoolteacher who had recently been sacked from his post. At the inquest the dead man’s brother, William Druitt, gave some misleading information and produced what appeared to be a suicide note, found in his brother’s lodgings.

  No official indication was given, at the time, that Druitt might have been Jack the Ripper. Not until many years later, in the private notes of yet another Assistant Commissioner, Sir Melville MacNaghten, was Druitt found to be listed as the prime suspect. This information had been given to MacNaghten ‘privately’. At the time of Druitt’s death, no evidence appears to have been brought against him; there is apparently no mention of him in any of the police files; nor was a police report on his death sent to the Home Office. The lower levels of the police – the men who had so tirelessly been hunting the Ripper – knew nothing about him.

  Quite obviously Druitt – this unsuccessful barrister and insignificant schoolteacher – was being protected. But why should his identity have been kept secret? What reason could there possibly be for an Establishment cover-up?

  Montague Druitt had been born in 1857 into a respectable upper middle-class family in Wimborne, Dorset. One scholarship took him to Winchester College; another to New College, Oxford. Like Prince Eddy’s mentor, Jim Stephen, Druitt was an accomplished scholar and a successful sportsman. But, again like Stephen, he failed to live up to his early promise. In 1885, after completing his training, he was called to the bar but in the three years that he spent at the Inns of Court as a barrister, he received not a single brief. With no private income, he was forced to take a teaching job. He taught in a private school in Blackheath until he was dismissed in the autumn of 1888. Both in the privileged and highly competitive world of the bar and in the less demanding post of a schoolteacher, Druitt had proved himself a failure.

  But Montague Druitt moved in another world as well. He was an attractive young man and, before his life began to fall apart late in 1888, very popular. He was a dedicated cricketer, a keen debater and a good mixer. At the Inns of Court, during his early, more optimistic days, he found himself in the company of many like-minded young men; many, in fact, who belonged to that coterie of Apostles who had once surrounded Prince Eddy at Cambridge. Some of the Prince’s closest companions, including Jim Stephen and his brother Harry, and Harry’s close friend Harry Wilson, had chambers at the Inns of Court during this period. Druitt was also known to have played cricket with many of the Prince’s Cambridge set.

  The writers of The Ripper Legacy, and others, believe Druitt to have been homosexual. ‘As a resident,’ claim Howells and Skinner, Druitt ‘would have dined at the Inns of Court more regularly than most, and he would have been drawn into the same cosseted homosexual circle as other men of similar disposition.’ He would almost certainly have been able to attach himself to that ‘privileged and clandestine league’ who had been together at Trinity.16 Druitt was exactly the apparently heterosexual but secretly homosexual type characteristic of the Apostles.

  Obliged to keep their private lives secret, this group of young barristers did what homosexuals have always done: arranged to meet each other, and their less presentable companions, in some place safe from prying eyes. In this case the haven was provided by the leading member of the group – Harry Wilson. In a tribute to Wilson, his old friend Harry Stephen gives a picture of this haven. Reading between the lines – or indeed, the lines themselves – Harry Wilson’s homosexual milieu is only too apparent.

  At Cambridge, writes Stephen, Wilson ‘joined the mysterious company of the Apostles of whom nothing can be said because their very existence is a secret, and he also made a host of friends who were not leading men, and who had no particular intellectual gifts, but did possess certain common but very definite qualities which were necessary to gain his friendship … During this later period [1885–8] he was able to carry out an idea that he had long had in his mind by establishing a “chummery” in a picturesque little house called “The Osiers”, in Chiswick Mall, where a succession of young men, chiefly from Cambridge, found an ideal substitute for the lonely and uncomfortable lodgings which would otherwise have been their lot, and where other friends could always find youthful and cheerful company.’17 This is the same Harry Wilson who had been Prince Eddy’s closest friend at Cambridge, whom he still often met and who was destined, it was widely believed, to become the Prince’s private secretary.

  An understanding of Wilson’s circle at ‘The Osiers’ makes the discreet letter from Prince Eddy, written in 1888 and innocently quoted by James Vincent in his official biography, especially significant.

  My Dear Harry,

  I put off writing to you before in the hope of still being able to give a favourable answer. But I now find, very much to my regret, that I shall not be able to get away for next Saturday, which is very tiresome, for I should have much enjoyed paying you a visit at Chiswick and seeing some of my old friends again …18

  That Montague Druitt was not only a member of this particular barristers’ inner circle but that he actually knew Prince Eddy seems to be indicated by the fact that when the Prince paid a visit to Lord and Lady Wimborne in Dorset that year, Montague Druitt – who lived in London, and not his elder brother William who lived in nearby Bournemouth – was invited to a ball in his honour. One can only assume that the Wimbornes knew of the Prince’s friendship with Mon
tague Druitt.

  This is not the place to follow the reasoning by which Druitt has become one of the chief suspects in the hunt for the Ripper’s identity. By the autumn of 1888, with the failure of his career as a barrister and his sudden dismissal from his teaching post, he had become a brooding and embittered man. There was insanity in the family: his mother, to whom he was devoted, was by now in a lunatic asylum. The one detailed description, by a young policeman, of the man who was undoubtedly the Ripper, is an uncannily accurate portrait of Druitt. As we have seen, he was the principal suspect of Sir Melville MacNaghten: the truth of the Ripper’s identity, the Assistant Commissioner afterwards declared, lay ‘at the bottom of the Thames’.19 What is certain is that once Druitt’s body, weighted down with four large stones, was fished out of the Thames on the last day of 1888, the hunt for the Ripper ceased. When Albert Bachert, a member of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, complained about the fact that the police seemed to be making no more effort to apprehend the Ripper, he was told, in strictest confidence, that ‘The man in question is dead. He was fished out of the Thames two months ago.’20

  But why should Bachert have been sworn to secrecy? Surely the police would have been only too eager to broadcast the fact that the notorious Ripper had been caught. Druitt, on the face of it, was an obscure and unimportant person. What possible reason could there have been for this conspiracy of silence about him?

  The theory is that any investigation into Druitt’s background would have led the police and, more importantly, the newspapers and the general public, straight into that circle of ambitious, socially prominent and, above all, homosexual members of the Establishment. Among their number were a private secretary to the Home Secretary, a future Lord Mayor of London, the sons of one of the country’s leading judges, and Harry Wilson himself, who had been marked out as a future private secretary to Prince Eddy. At the head of this band of ‘faithful servants of the Crown and State’ stood the future wearer of the Crown and the embodiment of the State – Prince Albert Victor, Heir Presumptive to the throne.21

  In one of the dead Montague Druitt’s pockets was found the return half of a ticket from Charing Cross to Hammersmith – the nearest station to Chiswick Mall. The body itself, heavily weighted, was fished out of the Thames just yards from Harry Wilson’s ‘chummery’, The Osiers. Had Druitt visited his friends and had they advised him that suicide was the only honourable course? Or had they, as Howells and Skinner imply in their study of the case, taken it upon themselves to rid the Establishment of this risk to its position of power and privilege? Had Druitt been murdered to save the skin of the future King-Emperor?

  The whole exercise bore a striking resemblance to the cover-up of that other great cause célèbre of the period: the Cleveland Street scandal.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Kings and Queens

  In January 1889, Prince Eddy turned twenty-five. By now, apparently, this mysterious young man was leading what has been described, by the official biographers of several other members of his family, as an extremely ‘dissipated and unstable life’. He indulged in ‘every form of vice and dissipation’; his ‘dissipations were beginning to undermine his health’.1 Yet the precise nature of these dissipations is never made clear. His younger brother, Prince George, kept a girl in St John’s Wood: ‘a ripper’ whom he is said to have sometimes shared with Prince Eddy.2 One cannot know how often or how eagerly Prince Eddy took advantage of her services but an occasional visit to a kept girl can hardly be regarded as debauchery.

  Apart from this, Prince Eddy’s name has not been linked with that of any woman during this period of his life. Joseph Sickert’s story of his ‘secret marriage’ is hard to believe, and until the worried royal family began dragooning Prince Eddy into marriage, he seems to have shown very little interest in the opposite sex. His father, by the same age, was an ardent womanizer; even the younger Prince George, generally regarded as sexually abstemious, not only kept one woman in St John’s Wood and another in Southsea but was also embarked on a more chaste love affair with a Miss Julie Stonor. He was even rumoured to have married a woman on Malta.

  On the other hand, the allegations of Prince Eddy’s homosexuality must be treated cautiously. Michael Harrison’s contention, in his book Clarence, that Jim Stephen was in love with Prince Eddy, has led subsequent writers to refer to the two men as ‘lovers’. There is no proof of this. Nor is there any proof for Harrison’s claim that the Prince was ‘a regular and popular guest’ at a string of homosexual clubs and pubs, and that he was known, at the notorious transvestite Hundred Guineas Club, as ‘Victoria’.3 The allegations may be true but Harrison gives no source for them.

  Yet the contention that Prince Eddy would never have dared to visit homosexual meeting-places, or even brothels, for fear of being recognized, is not valid. In those days, before the widespread reproduction of photographs in newspapers and magazines, readers had to rely on line drawings for likenesses. These bore little resemblance to the subject. Even the future King Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, claimed that, until the First World War, it was quite possible for him to walk largely unrecognized through the streets of London. For Prince Eddy, in the 1880s, it would have been even easier. With his waxed moustache and his well-cut clothes, he would have been indistinguishable from any other young man-about-town.

  The weight of – admittedly circumstantial – evidence seems to indicate that the Prince’s unspecified ‘dissipations’ were predominantly homosexual. So many factors seem to bear this out: the personalities of, and relationship between, his parents; his fear of his busy and aggressively heterosexual father and his adoration of his elegant and possessive mother; his ‘want of manliness’, his ‘shrinking from horseplay’, his ‘sweet, gentle, quiet and charming’ nature;4 the submissive, easily influenced qualities which would make any highly sexed young man such as he amenable to the advances of a bolder, more predatory male. Prince Eddy seems to have been typical of a sort of lazy, feather-brained voluptuary who can become obsessed by sex. For someone like that, sexual activity can quickly lead to overindulgence.

  By all accounts, Prince Eddy seems to have been most at ease in the company of men younger than himself. Indeed, in common with many backward and inadequate men, he enjoyed being with boys. James Vincent, in his official biography that tells one so little about Prince Eddy’s tastes or personality, suddenly brings him to life in a paragraph about the Prince’s interest in boys. ‘If the people to be addressed were boys – the lads of a Boys’ Home for example – the Prince addressed them in words exactly appropriate to their needs, and in a tone which, without being for a moment lacking in dignity, was friendly and kindly and went straight to their hearts. He had, indeed, always the tenderest corner in his heart for boys and for little children and his simple kindness towards them never failed to rivet their affections to him …’5 On the Prince’s coffin, continues Vincent, was placed a wreath from two boys whom he had befriended: the inscription read simply, ‘From Norrie and Charlie’.

  Another observer claims, with no apparent awareness of a double entendre, that Prince Eddy ‘interested himself in those efforts which modern philanthropy, taught by experience, is making to get hold of the young lads at the dangerous age between school and manhood’.6 Boys’ activities were something in which the Prince seems to have shown a real, and a rare, interest. He opened numberless clubs and homes for boys; not only in London but in cities such as Manchester and York. Given his reputation for yielding to temptations of every sort, it must have been with a degree of cynicism that his entourage listened to the words which the Prince’s speech-writers put into his mouth on these occasions. ‘Never do what you know is wrong,’ he told a gathering of boys in Bethnal Green. ‘Often you will feel inclined, either through your own wishes or through the promptings of companions, to do something you would like but which your conscience tells you ought not to be done. Then is the time not to give way: be brave, stand firm, refuse under any circumstances to do what
you are not sure is right.’7

  In his book The World’s Tragedy published in Paris in 1910, Aleister Crowley – admittedly an unreliable source – claimed to possess some compromising letters written by Prince Eddy to a boy named Morgan. ‘And a pretty penny [the letters] have cost me!’ he complained.8 Apparently the boy’s mother ran a shop in Cleveland Street. Perhaps – if the claim is true – the Prince had met young Morgan while visiting the male brothel in Cleveland Street.

  None of this is to assert that Prince Eddy was exclusively homosexual. But there is a strong possibility that his sexual orientation was not entirely straightforward. Elements of maleness and femaleness, in varying proportions, are present in all human beings. There is, to a greater or lesser extent, a certain amount of homosexuality in all men. The celebrated psychologist, Alfred Kinsey, in Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, divided men into seven groups – from the exclusively heterosexual Group 0 to the exclusively homosexual Group 6. Prince Eddy probably fitted somewhere into the upper half of this scale.

  Bisexuality, in different degrees, is far more common than is generally realized. Kinsey claimed that two out of every five men have had homosexual experience; this means that over one-third of the male population is bisexual. Being heterosexual does not preclude a man from having sex – if the circumstances are favourable – with another man; any more than being homosexual prevents a man from getting married and fathering children. This was particularly true of late Victorian England when social conventions were more rigid. Hardly one of the prominent homosexuals of the period was not also a husband and a father.