The Big Book of Jack the Ripper
Page 16
Dan Farson now discovered that Montague Druitt’s life was more or less in decline after he left Winchester and by 1888 things had begun to go badly wrong. He had been in serious trouble of some kind and had been dismissed from the school in Blackheath; his mother became insane in the July of 1888, a month or so before the murder that is generally considered to be the first Ripper atrocity; and Druitt seems to have feared he was himself going insane (indeed he left a note stating as much). Was this because he had become aware of his unnatural sexual impulses, one wonders; did he realise for the first time that he needed to kill and mutilate to obtain sexual satisfaction? Montague Druitt’s body was identified by William Druitt, Montague’s brother, a solicitor from Bournemouth. William said the dead man had no other relatives although he knew this to be untrue: could he have been attempting to protect the Druitt family name? Did he suspect—or know—that Montague, his brother, was the Ripper? Remember Sir Melville Macnaghten: “I have little doubt but that his own family suspected the man…it was alleged that he was sexually insane.” And Daniel Farson seems to have established that Montague Druitt was, if not left-handed (as most people feel the Ripper must have been), ambidextrous. Medical evidence favours this view and furthermore Druitt’s background would certainly have provided the opportunity for the limited anatomical knowledge displayed by the Ripper.
Macnaghten, incidentally, was not the only person to think that Montague Druitt was the Ripper. Other people in authority, who might have had access to the same evidence as Macnaghten, came to the same conclusion. Major Arthur Griffiths, Inspector of Prisons, wrote in his Mysteries of Police and Crime (1898), “There is every reason to believe that his own friends entertained grave doubts about him…he was believed to be insane, or on the borderline of insanity, and he disappeared immediately after the last murder…the last day of that year, seven weeks later, his body was found floating in the Thames and was said to have been in the water a month.”
Albert Backert of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee said he was given the same information and the police suggested that the Vigilance Committee and its patrols should be disbanded. Watkin Williams, grandson of Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of Police at the time of the Ripper murders, said his impression was that his grandfather had believed the murderer to be a sex-maniac who committed suicide after the Miller’s Court murder, possibly the young doctor whose body was found in the Thames; Sir John Moylan, Assistant Under Secretary at the Home Office, is on record as having stated: “The murderer, it is now certain, escaped justice by committing suicide at the end of 1888”; Sir Basil Thomson, Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard in 1913, said: “He was a man who committed suicide in the Thames at the end of 1888”—and so on. Even as recently as 1971 such an expert in crime in general and the Ripper murders in particular as the late Professor Francis Camps told Dan Farson: “I am sure you have got the answer at last.” And Colin Wilson is on record at one time as saying that he thought Druitt was the most likely suspect.
And yet I wonder. Something does not ring true in the Druitt story. The fact that the police may have strongly suspected Druitt; the fact that some of his friends and family suspected him; and the fact that he may have had the opportunity and fills the bill as far as ability is concerned: all this does not mean that he was the Ripper. Donald McCormick disposes of Druitt as a suspect to his own satisfaction on the evidence of an unnamed London doctor whose father was at Oxford with Druitt and who says Druitt was definitely at Bournemouth when the first two Ripper crimes were committed—although he played cricket at Blackheath on the morning that Annie Chapman was murdered six hours earlier. (He was not in Bournemouth, at all events, and Blackheath is only half a dozen miles from the East End of London.) To many people there appears to have been a concerted cover-up attempt regarding the identity of the Ripper by the Establishment and such a full-scale operation would hardly have been necessary if the culprit really was the failed barrister Montague John Druitt.
Stephen Knight points out that Macnaghten did not pen his notes until six years after the Whitechapel murders and where did he suddenly come across the name for “nowhere else in the Scotland Yard file is Druitt mentioned, so he was not a suspect at the time of the murders; conveniently he was dead…” Furthermore it would seem that Daniel Farson and Tom Cullen saw only copies of notes made by Lady Aberconway and in reproducing both the original notes and the copies relied upon by Dan Farson and Tom Cullen it would appear that some of the original intonation and emphasis has been distorted, and actual statements seem to have been inserted. To add to the confusion a grandson of Sir Melville Macnaghten has stated that at one time he owned some of his grandfather’s original documents relating to the Ripper crimes, but they seem to have disappeared!
Stephen Knight and Donald Rumbelow assert that Dr. Lionel Druitt was only at an address in the Minories for a few months in 1879 and his permanent London address was in Strathmore Gardens. This must affect the assumption that if Montague Druitt ever visited Lionel it has any bearing on the Ripper murders. In short, Stephen Knight opines that the first half of the case against Montague Druitt is based on a letter that is not produced from a man who cannot be traced and the second half is based on the unsubstantiated testimony of a dead man. Stephen Knight suggests there is no evidence at all to incriminate Montague Druitt; there is no evidence that he was near the scene of the murders, not even that he ever visited the East End, and no evidence is presented to show that Druitt had a motive for the killings.
SUSPECTS AD INFINITUM
Dr. T. E. A. Stowell believed that the Ripper was “Eddy,” Duke of Clarence, grandson of Queen Victoria, brother of George V, son of Edward VII and heir to the throne of England. I first heard the story from Nigel Morland, whom I met in the company of Penelope Wallace, Edgar Wallace’s only daughter, at the launching of the ill-fated Tallis Books. Morland, who died in April 1986, possessed an extensive library of books on crime and criminology, and a wide circle of influential friends and acquaintances whose knowledge of such subjects was unrivalled. He was able to draw on this information and these people when he came to launch his excellent quarterly, The Criminologist; and it was from Nigel Morland that I first heard about Dr. Thomas Stowell CBE and his suspect for the Ripper murders.
During the course of Stowell’s article in the November 1970 issue of The Criminologist he remarks on the significant fact that after the murder of Mary Kelly the police definitely relaxed their vigilance. Senior officers and police constables were withdrawn from the area and special patrols were disbanded. It seems certain that the police had some knowledge that convinced them that the Ripper could not strike again. Furthermore the inquest on Mary Kelly was abruptly terminated (whereas the inquests on the other victims had been fairly thorough and in some cases exhaustive), the coroner choosing deliberately to suppress evidence and admitting as much. Stowell believed that within an hour or two of the murder of Catherine Eddowes on 30 September 1888 the Ripper was apprehended, certified insane and incarcerated in a private mental home in the Home Counties. Stowell further believed that the police, perhaps busy with preparations for the London Lord Mayor’s Show, afforded the madman the opportunity to escape and return to Whitechapel where he murdered Mary Kelly.
Although he did not name the Duke of Clarence in his article Stowell described his suspect with sufficient detail for some people to be persuaded that it was the Duke whom he had in mind. During a foreign tour Stowell believed the Duke had contracted syphilis, for which he was treated by Sir William Gull, Physician in Ordinary to Queen Victoria, and it has been said that on more than one occasion the illustrious William Gull, a physician at Guy’s Hospital, was seen in the neighbourhood of Whitechapel on the night of a Ripper murder. Stowell suggests he was there to certify the murderer insane and put him under restraint. The Duke of Clarence certainly visited a house in Cleveland Street, off Tottenham Court Road, much frequented by aristocrats and prosperous homosexuals.
With the inevitable progress
of the venereal affliction the patient lost his ebullience and showed signs of depression and dementia which “in time must inevitably overtake him.” His public appearances became fewer and the speeches shorter and then we hear little of him before his death a year or two later after prolonged and careful private nursing.
Stowell asserts that many false trails were laid to throw people off the scent including the idea that the Ripper must be a doctor or a surgeon to have removed the kidneys and pelvic organs of most of his victims: in fact, says Stowell, this is nonsense “for in those days, before the advent of antiseptic and aseptic surgery, the abdomen was almost inaccessible to the surgeon.”
Stowell refers to the story, which we will examine in detail in a later chapter, concerning a medium, Lees, who led the police to an impressive mansion in the West End of London, and he speculates as to whether this could have been 74, Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, the home of Sir William and Lady Gull. He adds that Mrs. Acland, Sir William’s daughter, told Stowell that she had seen in her father’s diary an entry to the effect that he had informed a certain individual that his son was dying of syphilis of the brain. This was in November 1888 and the Duke of Clarence died little more than a year later.
Stowell believed that the Duke’s deer-stalking activities provided ample opportunity for him to learn the positions of internal organs and how to remove them; and he pointed out that alleged sightings of the Ripper remarked upon headgear that could well have been a deer-stalker’s hat. Stowell believed that Sir William Gull and the authorities could see no point in punishing the culprit, who was not responsible for his actions, and they had no wish to bring shame on the royal family. So the young man was confined in a private mental home but he escaped (“let us remember,” says Stowell, “that dangerous lunatics have been known to escape from Broadmoor”) and then, after the murder of Mary Kelly, he was restrained and “given such intensive medical care and skilled nursing that he had temporary remissions of his illness and had returned almost to normality until he relapsed and died of broncho-pneumonia a few years later—the usual cause of death in such cases.”
Stowell does not excuse the murderer but he cannot conceive “any other humane way of dealing with a sadly afflicted young man and preventing a continuation of the atrocities” and points out that the women he murdered were women of little worth to the community, victims of bad homes, of low mentality, lazy and gin-sodden, adding “it is safe to say that every one of them was infected with one or both of the venereal diseases.” These generalisations do not bear examination: Mary Kelly, for one, was not of “low mentality,” nor was she “lazy” nor, as far as we know, was she suffering from any venereal disease. Stowell says that at the time of the murders the price for the use of these women’s bodies was twopence, when the cost of a bed in a doss-house was fourpence.
Stowell’s suspect is perhaps the most astonishing of all the people thought to have been the Ripper. Stowell was a devoted royalist and for years, he claims, he had kept the idea to himself because he did not wish to distress the present Royal Family. After his death, Stowell’s son, apparently upset by the scandal, destroyed all the relevant papers. Stowell revealed his utter conviction that the culprit was the Duke of Clarence to Colin Wilson as early as 1960 under the mistaken impression that Colin Wilson had already come to the same conclusion. Stowell claimed he had had access to the private papers of Sir William Gull and therein were claims that the Duke of Clarence had not died in 1892 but was kept in a mental home with “softening of the brain” due to syphilis.
Among the difficulties in accepting the theory that the Ripper was one of the highest in the land is the fact that the Duke of Clarence was in Scotland on 29 and 30 September 1888, when Catherine Eddowes was murdered, and at Sandringham from 3 to 12 November, Mary Kelly being murdered on 9 November. After 12 November the Duke went to Copenhagen to represent his father at the Danish King’s accession to the throne. The story, which can probably be best regarded as intriguing speculation, has its adherents but is difficult to prove conclusively without a statement from the Royal Family which is unlikely to be forthcoming, although they have let it be known that they regard the story as ridiculous. Certainly the Duke of Clarence cannot have been “restrained in a mental home” from November 1888 as there is ample evidence that he was alive and appearing in public into the beginning of 1892 when he fell ill with pneumonia the week after he attended the funeral of Prince Victor of Hohenlohe on 4 January and he died ten days later.
After Stowell’s death, in November 1970, the theory or something very near it, was revived by Michael Harrison in his biography Clarence (1972). His suspect was not the Duke himself but his friend and probable lover James Stephen, son of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen. After an accident in which he received “a terrible blow on the head” James Stephen suffered painful periods of excitement and depression and “eccentricities of behaviour caused growing anxiety to his family.” He died in 1892. Harrison claimed that Stowell’s “S” in his writings referred in actual fact to Stephen, James Stephen. Much of what Stowell attributed to the Duke of Clarence applied far better to James Stephen; as far as we know Clarence did not die insane in a mental hospital but Stephen did; Clarence did not resign his commission at the age of twenty-four, Stephen did, and so on. Could Stowell have jumped to the wrong conclusion and assumed Sir William Gull was referring to the Duke of Clarence in his notes when in fact he was referring to James Stephen? Stowell steadfastly denied during interviews that he was referring to the Duke of Clarence in his Criminologist article and on 9 November 1970 (the eighty-second anniversary of the death of Mary Kelly) a curious letter was published in The Times from Stowell in which he denied he had said or even thought that the Duke of Clarence was the Ripper! Stowell died the same day. However, he certainly told Colin Wilson that he believed the Ripper was the Duke of Clarence.
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Even the Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone has not escaped suspicion. In Queen Magazine (September 1970) Graham Norton regards at least some of the Ripper letters as “obviously genuine” for they disclosed aspects of the killings which only the murderer could have known” and he singles out the mention in one communication of “society’s pillar”:
“You should know, as time will show
That I’m society’s pillar.”
While this could equally have implied that the Ripper considered he was doing “work” to the benefit of society, Graham Norton looks at the obvious implication. It could not be Queen Victoria herself for a number of reasons and “only one other figure was held in the same veneration as the Queen” and it was on W. E. Gladstone “that the dark shadow of suspicion inevitably falls.”
Gladstone had, of course, been mentioned by the Ripper in one of his verses and this could be significant. It is true that pathological criminals often delight in providing hidden clues and savouring their cleverness. Gladstone was certainly fascinated by prostitutes and he was known to be in the area at the time of the murders. Most of those who claimed to see the Ripper said he carried a black bag of distinctive shape, a type of bag that Gladstone was never seen without and that bore his name, a Gladstone bag. Immediately after his honeymoon (a fact which may be significant) in 1840, he began to wander about the streets of London at night, urging “unfortunate” women to reform and repent.
He even involved Mrs. Gladstone in his work of “saving” prostitutes and his critics were well aware of his capacity to “dress up whatever he set his heart upon in the most attractive moral and intellectual clothes.” On one occasion Disraeli said of Gladstone: “I don’t mind him having the ace of clubs up his sleeve; what I object to is his insistence that the Holy Ghost put it there.” He could well have been speaking in 1988 about some other “pillar of society”!
Queen Victoria knew all about Gladstone’s admitted nocturnal activities and she suspected much more. She thought him “mad and evil”; and her well-known remark of him addressing her as if she were a public meeting could have stemm
ed from his defence mechanism; there is little doubt that he was attracted by her undoubted sexuality, and strove to repress it.
Repression seems to have been Gladstone’s middle name. His biographer Sir Philip Magnus speaks of his subject “only keeping his daemonic energy in check” by “punishing toil and prayer” while inside the great man there blazed “an unseen volcano…the tensions of the age seething in molten fury…”
In 1888 Gladstone was seventy-nine but possessing the energy and strength of a much younger man. His method of containing this energy and strength is interesting: he cut down trees and at his Hawarden estate a collection of sharp axes was preserved in the hallway and, as Graham Norton points out, “those that cut down trees also keep a sharp knife to trim the branches.” Gladstone fills the bill on a number of counts and he had the physical strength, the cunning, the interest in prostitution, the mental capacity to absorb a little knowledge of anatomy, and he had a mission. One doctor, at the time of the murders, wrote: “the murderer is a homicidal maniac of religious views, who labours under the morbid belief that he has a destiny in the world to fulfil.”
None of the Ripper letters were stamped; Gladstone never stamped his letters either. He would hand his post to a servant and, as a Member of Parliament, they would be franked. Clever as Gladstone was, this is an aspect he could easily have overlooked. Even the posting of some of the letters fitted the whereabouts of Gladstone. One, postmarked Kilburn, was sent when Gladstone was at his London home in Dollis Hill (now Gladstone Park), a couple of miles from Kilburn; two others were posted in Liverpool at a time when Gladstone was only a few miles away at Hawarden Castle—and the family business was in Liverpool where Gladstone often had reason to visit. On the other hand I wrote to Queen Magazine at the time to say that “careful analysis and examination of the letters reputedly written by the Ripper and Gladstone’s handwriting show no similarity whatever and furthermore a number of subtle points, which would be apparent if the writer was disguising his handwriting, are entirely missing. I think there can be no doubt that Gladstone, whatever else he may have done, did not write the letters signed by Jack the Ripper.” My letter was dated 26 August 1970.