Gladstone’s repeated absences from home “converting” prostitutes was accepted by Mrs. Gladstone and she must have got used to it. Blood was even found on her husband’s clothes on occasions, caused, he said, by too much starch in his high collars cutting his neck. After that season of terror in London’s East End political matters fully occupied Gladstone and soon his physical strength began to fade. During the last years of his life he was dominated by his wife, “a tool in her hands,” and she made sure that nothing would prevent his being universally mourned and ceremonially interred in Westminster Abbey when the time came: death and burial were so very important in Victorian times. So Gladstone became the Grand Old Man but Graham Norton asks whether he was in fact the Grand Old Murderer, Gladstone the Ripper, the terror of the streetwalkers of Whitechapel. It is yet another interesting speculation.
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More than one Ripperologist has thought the Ripper may well be a nonentity and there is circumstantial evidence to give some weight to this idea. In the Mary Kelly murder (which may well hold the clue to the whole mystery) it seems likely that the murderer, having sated himself, probably burning his victim’s foetus with a necessarily fierce fire helped by gin or other spirit, let himself out of the door and then bolted it on the inside by reaching through the already broken window pane. Why should he do that?
If the murderer had lived some distance from the scene of the murders and had been seen by any of the local people in the vicinity of the murders shortly before the body was found, he would have been merely a vague and unknown individual, but if he were a local man, known by sight in the area, then he could not afford to be seen anywhere in the area of Miller’s Court. So to delay discovery of the body he bolted the door.
Weight is added to the idea that the Ripper lived in the East End, and probably quite close to Miller’s Court, when the other murders are considered. Hanbury Street is less than a quarter of a mile from Miller’s Court; and all the murders took place within an area of a quarter mile. The murderer, by all accounts, must have left Mary Kelly’s room about 6:00 A.M.; he must have murdered Annie Chapman about 5:30 A.M. but the other three, Mary Nichols, Elizabeth Stride, and Catherine Eddowes were murdered much earlier, around 3:00 A.M., 1:00 A.M. and 1:45 A.M. respectively.
While prepared to risk being seen in a public place near where a body was found in the open, to be seen in the vicinity—perhaps even leaving the building—of a person murdered in their own room is something quite different. Even the police should have realised that the murderer probably lived in the Whitechapel area, and perhaps they did, for they traced him as far as Dorset Street where he was found to have washed his hands and left behind a piece of linen.
More than one student of the Ripper crimes has suggested that the elusive suspect for the murders came not from the aristocracy or the higher classes but from the lower strata of society. He would have had to have the brains and the control to hold down a steady job, one that might give him cover for his crimes, such as a cab driver. There is much to suggest that Jack the Ripper was a working-class man who knew the Whitechapel district well; he knew also the customs and habits of the East Enders of the day; and, as one Ripperologist puts it, “in all probability he now lies buried in the same cemetery as one of his victims.” If the Ripper was a nonentity it is unlikely that much evidence of his existence will be found and even less proof of his guilt. Perhaps, as Donald Rumbelow has suspected, we shall have to wait until the Great Day of Judgement to learn of the Ripper’s identity—always assuming that that day ever comes.
Although the name of Frederick Bayley Deeming has been put forward as a contender for the Ripper murders, mainly on his own evidence while in prison awaiting execution for murder, when he claimed to be Jack the Ripper, it is a non-starter as a serious theory. He had murdered his first wife and four children at Rainhill, Liverpool, cementing their bodies underneath the floor of the kitchen fireplace and he had murdered his second wife and hidden her body in a similar fashion in Melbourne, Australia, the police being attracted to his house by a disagreeable smell.
It seems impossible for Deeming to have been Jack the Ripper since he was in prison at the time of the Whitechapel murders but rumours and stories that he was indeed the elusive murderer continued long after his execution in 1892. A plaster death mask was forwarded to New Scotland Yard and for many years it was pointed out to visitors to the famous Black Museum as the death mask of Jack the Ripper.
Chaim Bermant in his book on London’s East End, Point of Arrival (1975), claims the killer known as Jack the Ripper was in fact a Jewish religious fanatic and he relies largely on the dates on which the murders were committed, linking most of them with Jewish religious festivals but having to go over to “some hours after the close of evening service on the second day of the Jewish New Year” in one instance and admitting that the important Day of Atonement passed without a murder. In addition, curiously, the fourth and fifth murders took place on 30 September, “one of the few days in the holiest of Jewish months to be devoid of any religious significance whatsoever…” Although it is suggested that 30 September was chosen deliberately for fear that the pattern might be deduced, it all seems rather to stretch the imagination and the evidence, although there is no doubt that more than one Jew was seriously suspected and twenty years after the murders the then Assistant Commissioner of Police declared: “In stating that he was a Polish Jew I am merely stating a definitely established fact.”
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Stephen Knight has suggested that Stowell may have been pointing the finger of suspicion at Dr. William Gull instead of the Duke of Clarence or James Stephen but refusing actually to accuse the good doctor for Masonic reasons. Stowell suggested Gull did not die when he is supposed to have done, thereby lending support to three independent claims that Gull was the doctor sent to an asylum under a false name. Stowell told Colin Wilson that in Gull’s private papers he had discovered that “S” had not died of pneumonia as he is reported to have done in 1892 but had died later of syphilis; but Gull is said to have died in 1890 so was Stowell really saying: “Sir William Gull did not die in 1890”? Gull was a Freemason with influence; he had suffered from mental trouble which caused him to behave strangely and violently; lies have been woven around his death; he was a strange and unpredictable man; he was seen in Whitechapel on the nights of some of the Ripper murders, and by his own admission he had woken up in his room to find blood on himself. Stephen Knight states that William Gull was stated to be the Ripper by at least six people whose word might be regarded as reliable, including his own daughter Caroline.
The grave, ostensibly of Sir William and Lady Gull, is in the churchyard at Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex. It is a somewhat large grave about which the verger once remarked, without any prompting: “Big enough for three, that grave…” If Gull was the doctor committed to an asylum and a bogus funeral was carried out and a coffin filled with stones was lowered into the grave, when Gull did die was he secretly buried beside his wife, making the third in a grave for two?
Further investigation could well prove or disprove whether or not Sir William Gull or James K. Stephen was in reality Jack the Ripper. What does seem difficult to unravel with any degree of certainty is the Stephen Knight theory that the Ripper murders were organised by top government circles of the day to hide a royal scandal, a story that involved Freemasonry: Prime Minister Lord Salisbury (who was not a Mason); Sir William Gull, the Queen’s physician; Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Police Commissioner. It is a story with an unexpected aftermath and it deserves a section to itself.
NOT “THE FINAL SOLUTION”
In 1976, after several years of research, Stephen Knight, a young Essex journalist, produced a remarkable addition to the ten serious books already published on the Jack the Ripper murders. This was to be the “final solution” (a title thought up by my old friend Ken Thompson, who was at the time in the employ of the publishers Harrap Limited)
and a convincing line of deduction led to the novel idea that Jack the Ripper was not one man or even one person but three—two killers and an accomplice. From the “confused skein of truths, half-truths, and lies” woven around the case, Stephen Knight claimed to have at last solved the (then) eighty-odd-year-old mystery and it was confidently predicted that his book would be the last word on the case.
Knight takes as a starting point a story told about the three-times-married painter Walter Richard Sickert (1860–1942). During the course of research for a BBC television series, The Ripper File, the producer Paul Bonner and script writer Elwyn Jones began their investigation at New Scotland Yard. Although for years the response of the police to enquiries about the Ripper case (which still come in, to this day) had been, in effect, “The case is closed. We know nothing which has not already been published,” the BBC researchers felt there must be some information that had not been released and, more by leakage than by direct statement, a curious scrap of information led the researchers on and formed a basis that shaped the course of Knight’s book. After much questioning their “impeccable source” at Scotland Yard asked them whether they had had any contact with a man named Sickert, “who has some connection with the artist.” The puzzled researchers were told that this man knew of a marriage between the Duke of Clarence, son of King Edward VII and Heir Presumptive to the throne until he died in 1892, and a certain Alice Mary Crook. The clandestine marriage had taken place at “St. Saviour’s” and the two witnesses to the marriage were to become victims of the Ripper. Alice Mary Crook died in 1920.
Armed with this information, Ian Sharp, a research assistant who was working on the series, set out to show just how thorough the team were determined to be, but their enquiries at Somerset House and elsewhere failed to locate any marriage certificate or indeed any mention of a woman named Alice Mary Crook. They went back to Scotland Yard and asked for more information about the man Sickert. They were immediately given a London telephone number and when they rang the number they spoke to a man who said his name was Sickert. Without disclosing anything the researchers told Sickert that the BBC was interested in his story as they were doing a series of documentaries and an appointment was made for a personal meeting.
The story that emerged on that and subsequent meetings with Joseph Sickert was to the effect that the whole Ripper episode had its beginnings in Cleveland Street, where Sickert’s father, Walter Richard Sickert, had his studio. There was a confectioner and tobacconists’ shop nearby in which a certain Annie Elizabeth Crook worked, and another girl who sometimes worked in the shop was named Mary Kelly. It was here that Prince Albert Edward, Duke of Clarence, had met Annie (whose surname was variously rendered as Cook or Crook) on one of his secret visits to the area. They had been married in St. Saviour’s Chapel with one witness, Mary Kelly, and there had been a child, Alice Margaret. In 1888 there had been a raid on certain premises in Cleveland Street and two people had been taken away: the Duke of Clarence and Annie, the latter being confined in various establishments and institutions until she finally died, in 1920, insane. Mary Kelly had seen what had happened and she fled to the East End with the child and hid in a convent. She is next heard of on 9 November when she was murdered. The Ripper was hardly mentioned and no hints were given as to his possible identity but the impression was conveyed that more than one person was involved. After a great deal of coaxing and persuasion Joseph Sickert agreed to tell his story on television in the Jack the Ripper series.
In that broadcast, in July 1973, Joseph Sickert, known as “Hobo,” said his mother always told him that his grandmother had suffered “terribly” at the hands of the authorities; a servant had died in a terrible way, and he had to be very careful. His father, when Joseph was in his teens, told him in a roundabout way that his grandfather was the Duke of Clarence. Joseph Sickert’s father, the artist Walter Sickert, lived at that time at 21 Cleveland Street, an area full of artists and their friends. Prince Edward’s mother thought her son should meet artists and painters and she arranged the initial meeting between the Duke of Clarence and Walter Sickert, whose family had been painters to her own Royal Court of Denmark. The Duke and Walter Sickert became friendly and on occasions the Prince would stay with Sickert during his vacations from Cambridge; during these visits he was passed off as Sickert’s younger brother. During such a visit the Duke met a very attractive if not beautiful shop girl who sometimes modelled for Sickert, Annie Elizabeth Crook. Prince Eddy fell in love with the girl and when Annie became pregnant a ceremony of marriage was performed at St. Saviour’s.
A friend of Annie’s was one witness at the wedding, Mary Jane Kelly, Walter Sickert being the other, and when the child was born in a workhouse near Drury Lane, Mary helped to look after the little girl and sometimes accompanied Sickert on visits to France. Things become somewhat confused here but Joseph Sickert thought that suddenly Annie Crook had disappeared, seemingly having moved to the Drury Lane area, but she reappeared from time to time and on one occasion was run down by a carriage and seriously injured. The carriage was being driven by a man named Netley. Annie went to hospital in Fulham and she was kept in confinement there and elsewhere until her death.
Mary Kelly was a Roman Catholic and she was known to the nuns of the convent in nearby Harewood Place. Worried by what seemed to be happening she took the child to a sister convent in the East End. What was happening was that the Royal household and people in high positions were becoming very worried about news getting out that the heir presumptive to the throne had married a Catholic and that there had been a child. In the climate of the time, especially the Irish troubles, revolution was by no means unlikely and it was decided that Mary Kelly, the only real threat (they thought), might have to be silenced. The delicate operation was outlined to Sir William Gull, the Royal physician, and he proposed the association of John Netley, a coachman who regularly drove the Duke of Clarence, although not on the official Palace staff.
For a while all was quiet and, the authorities argued, if Mary Kelly kept quiet and brought up the child as her own, there was no need for anything further to be done but then an untidy attempt at blackmail emanated from somewhere in the East End. It is possible that some gang was behind it but certainly it seemed that four women were involved: Mary Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, and Mary Kelly. The authorities decided to act with the help of Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner to the Metropolitan Police, who are only answerable to the Home Office, and Sir William Gull. A plan was devised and carried out; a series of murders that have become known as the work of Jack the Ripper.
Mary Kelly was eventually killed but only after a number of other similar women in the area had also been murdered, people who were suspected of being involved in the blackmail attempt, but also making it look like the work of a madman. The child survived, protected by Walter Sickert and had a son by him; Joseph Sickert claimed to be that son.
There appears to be some circumstantial evidence for this story. In 1888 a rate-book for Cleveland Street shows rates for a basement being paid by an Elizabeth Cook. A birth certificate, dated 18 April 1885, exists for a girl Alice Margaret whose mother is given as Ann Elizabeth Crook, confectionary assistant, Cleveland Street; place of birth Marylebone Workhouse; no father’s name or occupation appears on the birth certificate. Joseph Sickert possesses a portrait of his mother, painted by Sir William Orpen, and her Christian names are given as Alice Margaret. Around the corner from Cleveland Street there used to be a convent that had close ties with another convent in Providence Row, Dorset Street, fifty yards from Miller’s Court. A John Netley did exist, and he was a driver and he was born in 1860 and he was killed in an accident on 26 September 1903. Sir William Gull was one of London’s leading physicians and Thomas Stowell, who as far as we know never heard Joseph Sickert’s story, said “rumour mongers” picked on Sir William Gull who, as Stowell says, was seen in the neighbourhood of Whitechapel on the nights of some of the murders. Stowell also says the medium Le
es led the police to Gull’s Park Lane house.
Oddly enough it is a historical fact that Prince Edward, Duke of Clarence, in 1890, wanted to marry a Roman Catholic, the Princess Hélène d’Orleans, daughter of the Comte de Paris, and this brought a sharp comment from the prime minister of the day, Lord Salisbury, who, according to Sir Philip Magnus, the biographer of the Prince’s father, Edward VII, warned the Prince that “the anger of the middle and lower classes might endanger the throne if it ever became known that he had even entertained the thought.” So it seems that, if the story of the Duke of Clarence marrying a Roman Catholic had come out, it would indeed have caused tremendous repercussions. Yet there is still no hard evidence to connect Gull or anyone else with the Ripper murders. There were a number of alleged sightings of the Ripper and one very detailed one, at the time of the Kelly murder, by George Hutchinson; and yet there is nothing in the police files, or even in the newspapers, to indicate that any enquiries were put in hand to locate the “toff” who was so minutely described. It matters not whether Hutchinson was telling the truth or not, the point is that after at least five very nasty murders a witness provided a very good description and nothing was done about it. There does appear to be an air of cover-up: a good description and nothing done; the inquest on Mary Kelly closed before they had even established the time of death; no serious suspects named in the files—until Sir Melville Macnaghten’s notes came to light and the three names there are not mentioned anywhere else in the whole investigation. Could it be that the authorities not only got very near to the Ripper, but that they even knew who he was—but they made sure nobody else found out and “they” keep on making sure no one finds out?
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 17
