The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper

by James Carnac

  On the face of it, it is about as likely as Elvis living on Mars. The man who wrote that introduction was Sydney George Hulme Beaman, a sometime actor, an artist, and a superb and distinctive illustrator. Almost forgotten today, he was once as famous as Enid Blyton. He enjoyed an all too brief personal celebrity and a lasting immortality as the creator of Larry the Lamb and all the characters of Toytown.

  All of Hulme Beaman’s literary output was for children, so writing a novel about Jack the Ripper—writing anything about Jack the Ripper—would have been an extraordinary literary diversion, perhaps as shocking in its way as discovering that Enid Blyton secretly penned explicit sex novels. So this book is extraordinary and immensely valuable even if it is a novel by Hulme Beaman.

  And it would be an extraordinary and immensely valuable novel even if it wasn’t written by Hulme Beaman because it must surely be an early attempt to tell a crime story from the criminal’s perspective, and as an attempt at character analysis it is rather perceptive, avoiding all the almost stereotypical motives suggested at the time, such as religious fanaticism, an insane doctor, or an escapee from a lunatic asylum, and instead presenting James Carnac as a man who kills because he likes it, an image far more in keeping with what we know about serial killers today.

  Carnac is also an unlikeable man, attracted by the macabre and grotesque, cruelly cynical, and with an acid-tongued sense of humor, as revealed in his dedication—“Dedicated with admiration and respect to the retired members of the Metropolitan Police Force in spite of whose energy and efficiency I have lived to write this book”—and occasionally encountered elsewhere in the book.

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  Sydney George Hulme Beaman

  A person is the product of many influences, and Sydney George Hulme Beaman had an interesting family heritage, one that was normal to the point of being staid, yet also bohemian and artistic.

  His great-grandfather was George Hulme Beaman, a doctor who enjoyed an extensive private practice and was parochial surgeon to St. Paul’s in London. He was one of the founders of the New Equitable Life Assurance Company and for many years was its deputy chairman. He was also chairman of the renters and debenture holders of the Drury Lane Theatre. Today he is chiefly remembered, if he is remembered at all, for being called by the police on November 5, 1831, to examine the body of a fourteen-year-old, fair-haired, gray-eyed boy.

  The boy’s body had been brought by John Bishop and James May to the dissecting room of King’s College with the intention of selling it to the anatomy department. There was a severe shortage of cadavers suitable for the study and teaching of anatomy, and a fresh corpse could fetch as much as twelve guineas. There were rules about where the bodies could come from, but a blind eye was generally turned to the corpses of the recently dead that had been dug up from their graves. The gangs who undertook this gruesome but profitable work were politely known as resurrectionists, or more commonly as body snatchers. Bishop and May would later confess to having stolen and sold between five hundred and one thousand corpses in a career lasting twelve years.

  On this occasion, the suspicions of the anatomy demonstrator, Richard Partridge, were aroused by the freshness of the body, which he thought showed no signs of having been buried. He called his superior, Herbert Mayo, professor of anatomy, who agreed that the police should be called. Bishop and May were arrested, and later so were two other members of the gang, Thomas Williams and Michael Shields. They were charged with murder. They had in fact taken the boy from the Bell in Smithfield to a house in a part of the East End known as Nova Scotia Gardens, where they had drugged him with rum and laudanum and then drowned him in a well. The boy was later tentatively identified by the police as an Italian lad named Carlo Ferrari, but Bishop and Williams eventually admitted that he was a cattle drover from Lincolnshire, name unknown.

  George Hulme Beaman was called upon to examine the body of the boy, concluded that the body had never been buried, and deduced from the empty chambers of the boy’s heart that death had been very sudden and almost certainly from a blow to the neck. Hulme Beaman had made a particular study of death from spinal injuries; he had killed numerous animals by hitting them on the back of the neck, and afterward he dissected them to observe the results, so he considered himself something of an expert. Partridge and Mayo, who joined him in conducting the postmortem in the first-floor room of the tiny watchhouse in St. Paul’s graveyard, concurred, and the police minutely searched Nova Scotia Gardens, finding clothes from numerous other victims.

  The trial was one of the first in which not only the detective techniques were publicly on display, but also the medical detective work (or forensics), and it caused a sensation. Bishop and Williams were found guilty and publicly hanged at Newgate on December 5, 1831, in front of an estimated thirty thousand spectators. The corpses of both men were duly dissected by anatomists. But at the end of December 1831, a professor of medical jurisprudence named John Gordon Smith published a blistering letter in The Lancet in which he denounced Hulme Beaman’s conclusion that sudden death was indicated by the chambers of the heart being empty, which he said instead suggested a lingering death. And Bishop and Williams’s admission that they had drugged and drowned the boy also called into doubt Hulme Beaman’s confident claim that death was caused by a blow to the back of the neck. These criticisms did nothing to enhance Hulme Beaman’s reputation.

  At some point, there may have been a rift in the Hulme Beaman family.

  George Hulme Beaman and his wife, Mary Ann Offley, had a large family, among their children being S. G.’s grandfather, George Hulme Beaman, who also became a doctor and for a while shared a practice with his father. Another son was Ardern Hulme Beaman, who was a surgeon general with the army in Hoshangabad, India. One of his sons, the unusually named Emeric Hulme Beaman (1864–1937), was a writer who, in partnership with William Senior Ellis, wrote four mystery novels under the pseudonym Ben Strong. These were published between 1925 and 1928.

  George Hulme Beaman’s daughter, Henrietta Hulme Beaman (1831–1895), was also an interesting person. In 1851 she married Joseph Robins, a young and successful businessman who was wooed by the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd and took to the stage. He was a comedian, but not a successful one, and his career declined to doing small parts in the provinces, which was where he met Henry Irving, perhaps the greatest of the Victorian actor-managers. Engaged in some small way to do a pantomime one bitterly cold Christmas, he was pained to see a fellow actor shivering and suffering in poverty and thin, summer clothing. Pawning most of what he owned, he laid before his fellow actors a memorable Christmas dinner at his cheap lodging and to the shivering actor gave a suit of thick, warm, and heavy underclothing. Irving was that actor and never forgot Robins’s generosity.

  In 1874 Joe fell ill and Henrietta, who had joined him treading the boards, appealed in the theatrical newspaper The Era for help to pay his medical bills, which amounted to sixty pounds. As her father and family could have paid this money, the appeal in The Era suggests that Henrietta and her father were estranged. Sadly, Joe never got better and in 1878 he died. Destitute, Henrietta again turned to The Era, advertising for theater work or a job as a housekeeper. The theatrical cavalry evidently rode to her rescue because the 1891 census records that Henrietta was an “Actress with own Company.” She died on April 18, 1895.

  Her brother, S. G.’s grandfather, George Hulme Beaman Jr. (1825–1863), was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons on May 17, 1850. He married Jane Elizabeth Oakley and they had four children, two daughters, Emily Jane and Kate Julia, and two sons, George Hulme Robert Beaman, who was S. G.’s father, and Arthur Henry. For a time, George shared a practice with his father at 32 King Street, Covent Garden, but the London Gazette, January 6, 1860, records that the partnership was dissolved. This may reflect a rift in the family, especially as Joe Robins’s surname was given as a forename to S. G.’s father.

  George Hulme
Beaman died in 1863 aged only thirty-eight years, and his wife was left with four young children to raise, the youngest only ten months. It appears that she was supported by her family, possibly further evidence of a rift, and struggled alone for six years before she met Augustus Grain, manager of the Petersfield branch of the Hampshire Banking Company. The couple married in 1869 and had five children; sadly, only three made it into adulthood.

  S. G.’s father, George Hulme Robins Hulme Beaman, was born about 1855 in Westminster, London, and was educated at Epsom College, Surrey, a relatively new school opened as the Royal Medical Benevolent College by a Dr. John Probert (1793–1867) with the express purpose of giving assistance to the widows and orphans of members of the medical profession. Originally it catered to just a hundred boys, but an extension in 1862 increased the intake to two hundred, of which ten were day scholars and the rest residential. The college register records that Hulme Beaman won several prizes.

  He became a surveyor and risk assessor for an insurance company and early in 1881 married Eleanor Nicholls, who hailed from St. Albans, Hertfordshire. At one time, she had run away from home to become a singer and actress, adopting the stage name Nellie Leslie. She and G. H. R. lived at 11 Woodstock Rd, Hornsey, but moved to Tottenham, where their children were born: Sydney George Hulme (1887), Dorothy Eleanor (1889), and Winifred Gladys (1892).

  By the 1911 census, the family was all still together; S. G., now twenty-four years old, was an insurance clerk. His sister Dorothy was a private secretary to a chartered accountant, and Winifred was presumably a scholar, no occupation being given for her.

  S. G. wanted to be an artist, but his father was not supportive—something he had in common with James Carnac—and wanted him to use his talents as an architect, but his mother settled the matter and he was enrolled in the famous Heatherley’s School of Art, founded by Thomas Heatherley in 1845. Among the pupils who had studied there were Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Millais, and sometime Jack the Ripper suspect Walter Sickert.

  S. G. also indulged his taste for the theater and performed in music halls and at smoking concerts—these were very popular all-male live concerts, usually musical, the music invariably providing a background to discussion about politics and such like. S. G. formed an amateur group called the Dickensian Fellowship, acting assorted parts as diverse as Fagin and Mr. Peggotty. He was good enough to be invited to perform professionally. It was through his performing that he met Maud Mary Poltock, who played piano for his recitals. They married in April 1913 in Fulham. She and S. G. would have two children, Geoffrey S. Hulme Beaman (born in 1914) and Betty Hulme Beaman (born 1918).

  The end of the First World War in 1918 saw a changed Britain in which music halls and smoking concerts were to all intents and purposes things of the past, and new entertainments were emerging. There was a shortage of toys and S. G. turned an upstairs room in his house in Golders Green into a studio with a work bench, drawing board, tools, paints, and a pot of resin glue almost permanently bubbling on a gas burner, and there he began carving figures for model theaters, starting with Mr. Noah and the animals of his ark. They were blockish, angular figures, and he adapted the style for a comic strip called Philip & Phido, which began appearing in the Golders Green Gazette in 1923. Two years later, in 1925, he wrote and illustrated two children’s books, The Road to Toytown and Trouble in Toyland, several of the characters in these and subsequent stories having their origins in the Philip & Phido strips, such as the self-important Mr. Mayor, who developed from a character called the Admiral.

  The books were seen by May Jenkins, then better known as Aunt Elizabeth on a radio series called Children’s Hour, who recognized their dramatic potential.

  Children’s Hour became a national institution. It had begun on December 23, 1922, just a month after broadcasting started, and by November the following year, The Times reported that it had almost one million listeners and said there were discussions about broadcasting programs on different wavelengths so that listeners would be able to choose between Children’s Hour and speeches in Parliament. This might suggest why Children’s Hour became so popular. It was broadcast between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. every day, the anticipated audience range being from five to fifteen, and Toytown, first broadcast on July 19, 1929, soon became a firm favorite. It was narrated by Derek McCulloch (1897–1967), known to millions of children as “Uncle Mac,” a persona he maintained until the 1960s. He also provided the tremulous voice for Toytown’s most famous animal resident, Larry the Lamb.

  S. G. also developed a model stage show called The Arkville Dragon—Arkville was a neighbor of Toytown—and Pathe Films turned this into an animated film, but S. G.’s premature death prevented the development of the project. Toytown lived on without S. G., his friend, the writer and producer Hendrik Baker, turning four of the Toytown stories into a stage play entitled The Cruise of the Toytown Belle, a film version of which was broadcast under the title Larry the Lamb by BBC Television on May 10, 1947. In 1956 the BBC broadcast a series of twenty minute marionette plays featuring Larry, and in 1962 and 1964 the animators Halas & Batchelor produced The Showing Up of Larry the Lamb and The Tale of the Magician. About this time, Baker released through HMV some Larry the Lamb stories on 45rpm EPs, four of the stories later being released as an album called Stories from Toytown. Between 1972 and 1974, twenty-six animated shows were made by Larry the Lamb Ltd. for Thames Television.

  Sadly, Sydney George Hulme Beaman would never realize the huge success of his creation or enjoy the profits that were surely his. He died from pneumonia in February 1932 at the age of forty-four. He left £979 in his will and is today very largely forgotten; not even his respectably suburban home in Sneath Avenue, Golders Green, bears a blue plaque, which unquestionably it should. But it is a testament to the man that Larry the Lamb and the population of Toytown are still loved by thousands of people over eighty years after they were created.

  Thankfully, there is no suggestion whatever that S. G. Hulme Beaman was Jack the Ripper, but the question whether or not The Autobiography of James Carnac was his work remains. As said, it would have been a step outside his normal writing and also alien to what we know of his character. In fact, the only hint that there was a dark side to Hulme Beaman is a 1930s edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for which he was commissioned to provide the illustrations. As a professional artist and illustrator, Hulme Beaman accepted commissions from publishers, so he can’t be held responsible for the choice of subject, nor is there anything about his illustrations that’s remotely violent or bloodthirsty. Indeed, they draw heavily on early Expressionism, being beautifully stylized and strikingly atmospheric, and are among the finest twentieth-century illustrations for Stevenson’s classic.

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  James Willoughby Carnac

  As for James Willoughby Carnac, nobody of that name has so far been identified, so either he is a fictional creation or the name is a pseudonym, either adopted by Carnac himself or bestowed upon him by someone else. Although the Autobiography is largely concerned with the Whitechapel murders, it provides a detailed and engaging account of Carnac’s life up to the commission of the crimes. Writing shortly before his death, he says he was sixty-nine years old and he variously describes the murders as having been committed forty or forty-two years earlier. This means that he was born between 1859 and 1861, and wrote and died between 1928 and 1930.

  He was born in Tottenham and lived in a double-fronted semidetached house in a row of six houses. Next to his home there was a field owned by a dairy farmer. His father was a doctor named John Carnac, but an inclination to overdrinking kept his practice from flourishing, and the family never achieved financial security until he inherited a considerable sum of money from an aunt named Madeleine.

  At the age of twelve years, James Carnac attended a day school that was run by a religious fanatic named Dr. Styles—a “hateful, narrow-minded, ignorant bore”—whose
principal success seems to have been turning over a large number of staff. The school was in a private house about one mile from Carnac’s home, and it was there that he developed an interest in art and an early preoccupation with blood, being particularly attracted to the slaughter of a pig by the father of a school friend.

  He also recalled an attraction for three books he discovered in his father’s library, Roberts’s Treatise of Witchcraft and John Cotta’s Triall of Witchcraft, and also an 1875 edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s complete writings. I assume the first of these was a book by Alexander Roberts, a preacher of King’s Lynn in Norfolk who was a witchfinder contemporary of the notorious Matthew Hopkins. John Cotta escapes me, but the Poe was presumably the edition by John Henry Ingram, published initially in Edinburgh in 1874 and 1875 and which must therefore have been a relatively recent acquisition by Carnac’s father.

  Both his parents died when he was nearly eighteen years old, putting the event between 1877 and 1879, and he went to live with his uncle, a bookmaker in Peckham. Although the uncle was very good to him, Carnac developed an overwhelming desire to cut his throat and one night very nearly did so. He fled his uncle’s home, never to return, and thereafter had very little contact with him, although his uncle did on one occasion supply him with a family that which had been found among the papers left by his father, which he thought might suggest that Carnac’s blood lust was hereditary. The tree traced his ancestry back to the Sanson dynasty of Paris executioners.