The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper (17 page)

McCormick has also been accused of instigating several Ripper myths which would dog subsequent serious studies of the case. One of the most notable was perhaps his references to the ‘Old Nichol Gang’. The ‘Nichol’, a notorious slum in Bethnal Green, no doubt had its criminal element, but evidence of a gang of that name has never been ascertained, and their presence in the East End in the 1880s has continued to surface in Ripper literature to the present day, all thanks to McCormick’s fanciful writing. What is apparent is that McCormick’s ideas stemmed from sources that probably didn’t exist. His mysterious Russian doctor theory signalled the end of what was essentially a period of sporadic solutions fuelled by hearsay and the dubious recollections of sundry individuals, both in Britain and abroad. Like Edwin Woodhall’s brush with quasi-racist rhetoric in the era of rising fascism in Europe, McCormick’s theory reflected the developing ‘Cold War’ between East and West, brewing up a story that would put the most convoluted plot of any spy thriller to shame. Espionage
was very much the rage in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a result of the changing political climate; the classy James Bond novels of Ian Fleming were well established and were soon to be joined by works by other popular writers of the genre such as John le Carré and Len Deighton. The Ripper crimes were now steadily becoming an international phenomenon, and it seemed that there was now a rapidly growing band of enthusiasts willing to lend their special knowledge and opinion to the fascination with solving what was by now considered to be the world’s greatest crime mystery.

Ironically, as McCormick twisted and turned with his elaborate tale, the photographer, journalist and broadcaster Daniel Farson made an important discovery. While researching a series of television programmes for ATV in the UK entitled
Farson’s Guide to the British
,
¹⁷
Farson had decided to devote some of his air-time to the mystery of Jack the Ripper. Often well connected, he had, purely by luck it seems, been introduced to Christobel McLaren, 2nd Baroness Aberconway, the daughter of Sir Melville Macnaghten, and she showed him the typed and handwritten transcriptions she had made of her late father’s 1894 memoranda, which named the suspects Druitt, Kosminski and Ostrog. This artefact – now known as the ‘Aberconway version’ – was an important find to say the least and has since been considered as the initiation of serious post-war studies on the Ripper case. It must be remembered that for all the hint-dropping of Macnaghten, Anderson and Swanson
et al.
, the actual names of suspects were not included in anything that was to be published. Macnaghten’s memoranda were for private and official use, and Swanson’s marginalia were the private notation of a dear friend’s autobiography. Now, by seeing the names Druitt, Ostrog and Kosminski for the first time, Farson was well placed to make these findings public on television.

Farson set his store by Macnaghten’s first suspect, Druitt. It is no doubt likely that this information was familiar to other police officials of Macnaghten’s day, for several hints had previously been made by various individuals that the Ripper had drowned in the Thames after the Mary Kelly murder. One of these claims was alleged to have been made as early as 1889 to Albert Bachert, the Mile End Vigilance Committee leader who had taken over from the eminent George Lusk that year. Bachert’s story was that he had been advised to disband the Vigilance Committee owing to the fact that the Ripper’s body had been found floating in the Thames at the end of 1888. It was quite possible that he was encouraged to do this merely to stop Bachert being a nuisance. However the story itself emanated once again from Donald McCormick and Dr Thomas Dutton’s elusive ‘Chronicle of Crime’.

When Farson’s programme was broadcast, the name of the main suspect was given as ‘M.J.D.’ – this was in accordance with Baroness Aberconway’s request not to make the full name public. As previously observed, it appeared that Macnaghten’s notes had got a few biographical details wrong, for Druitt was thirty-one when he died, not forty-one as was stated. Nor was he a doctor, but a barrister. Whatever the plausibility of Druitt’s candidacy for the Whitechapel murderer, he was certainly in keeping with a continuing trend of seeing Jack the Ripper as having emerged from the upper middle classes (such as the medical professions, for example), rather than from the poor underbelly of the East End slums or the rank environment of the lunatic asylum. It seems that Jack the Ripper was slowly going up in the world.

In literary terms, a new, improved era of ‘Ripperology’ began with two books issued within weeks of each other in 1965, Tom Cullen’s
Autumn of Terror
¹⁸
and Robin Odell’s
Jack
the Ripper in Fact and Fiction
.
¹⁹
With all respect to Odell, Cullen’s book became the more significant and high-profile of the two, for here the theory of Montague John Druitt was expounded fully, and, more importantly, he was publicly named for the first time.

Although Daniel Farson was responsible for rediscovering Druitt, his own attempts to set his discoveries in print were significantly delayed, as he was by now busy running a popular pub on the Isle of Dogs as well as becoming quite a media personality in his own right. He was also hampered when a file of notes went missing, and his proclivity for the high life did not help matters either. So despite Farson’s discovery and championing of Druitt as the Ripper, it was Cullen’s now highly regarded book which placed Druitt well and truly in the public domain. And a popular suspect he turned out to be, not just with true crime aficionados, but also the public at large, no doubt helped by Farson’s own public profile and his numerous subsequent newspaper articles on the subject. Tom Cullen changed Montague John Druitt from a tantalizing hint into the first important twentieth-century Ripper suspect who could be proved to have existed. In the 1960s he was considered by many to be the most convincing candidate so far, a status that was maintained for a good two decades.

Robin Odell’s treatment of the Ripper case would have less far-reaching effects. Again, it was widely respected as giving an unsensational overview of the events of 1888 and even presented a survey of the fictional work inspired by the Whitechapel murders. Not to be outdone, Odell also put forward his own candidate for the crimes, this time a Jewish slaughterman or
shochet
. Without needing to name an individual, Odell believed the occupation was evidence enough, ticking the boxes of somebody local who could walk about in
blood-soaked work clothes (thus avoiding suspicion) and who would also have a rudimentary, but sufficient, knowledge of anatomy to accomplish such visceral injuries. This rather rational and perhaps cautious theory won little support, even among experts on the Ripper case, but Odell’s method was a sensible one. Like William Stewart, he looked at the case and went where the evidence took him and, as such, should be recognized as pursuing a logical solution at a time when naming a name would appear to be the minimum requirement.

In 1960 Colin Wilson, the best-selling author of the existentialist non-fiction book
The Outsider
, wrote a series of articles in the London
Evening Standard
entitled ‘My Search for Jack the Ripper’,
²⁰
which kick-started his long-standing association with the field of ‘Ripperology’. This term, coined several years later by Wilson himself, gave the study of Jack the Ripper a (not always favoured) definition.
²¹
The
Evening Standard
articles, which in spite of their brevity were at that time a pretty good résumé of the crimes, came to the attention of Dr Thomas Stowell, who, meeting Wilson over lunch, expounded his rather unique hypothesis that the Ripper was none other than Prince Albert Victor (Prince ‘Eddy’), grandson of Queen Victoria, later Duke of Clarence and Avondale and heir presumptive to the throne. The theory was later mentioned in Wilson’s
Encyclopaedia of Murder
, where the story of clairvoyant Robert Lees’s ‘eminent physician’ was given consideration, as Stowell had presumably done in private:

The weakness of the story lies in the certainty that the police would have taken pleasure in giving the widest publicity to the capture of Jack the Ripper. Perhaps it is to account for this discrepancy in the theory that the name of Queen Victoria is frequently brought into it. It is claimed that Mr Lees was twice
interviewed by the queen, who was greatly concerned about the Whitechapel murders. The story connected with Lees usually goes on to add either (a) that the doctor was the queen’s physician, or (b) that Jack the Ripper was some relative of the Royal Family.
²²

Though not named in print on this occasion, the ‘queen’s physician’ in 1888 was Sir William Gull.

Apparently, on the evening of the day he lunched with Stowell Wilson met diplomat and politician Sir Harold Nicolson and told him about the theory. The following year (1962), Philippe Jullian published his book
Edouard
VII
, in which he thanked Nicolson ‘for allowing me to delve into his works and for telling me a number of hitherto unpublished anecdotes’. What is interesting in this case is that Jullian’s book said that

Before he died, poor Clarence was a great anxiety to his family. He was quite characterless and would soon have fallen a prey to some intriguer or group of roues, of which his regiment was full. They indulged in every form of debauchery, and on one occasion the police discovered the Duke in a maison de rencontre of a particularly equivocal nature during a raid. Fifty years before, the same thing had happened to Lord Castlereagh, and he had committed suicide. The young man’s evil reputation soon spread. The rumour gained ground that he was Jack the Ripper (others attributed the crimes committed in Whitechapel to the Duke of Bedford).
²³

According to Wilson, ‘at least a dozen people had known about his theory since 1960’,
²⁴
showing that once again anecdotal passing of rumour and information was still going on at
even this late juncture, harking back to the stories shared by old police colleagues and the well-connected members of smoky gentlemen’s clubs. Then, after sitting on the story for a decade, Dr Stowell finally went public with an article published in the
Criminologist
in 1970 entitled ‘Jack the Ripper – A Solution?’
²⁵
Stowell set out his reasoning behind the notion that Prince Albert Victor was the Ripper without actually naming him. Originally calling his suspect ‘X’, he was apparently advised that such an alias was somewhat clichéd and reverted to ‘S’ instead.

In this version of the story, ‘S’ was suffering from syphilis, which had affected his brain to the point where he had completely lost his mind. He then embarked on a killing spree, but after the death of Catherine Eddowes he was detained, only to escape and commit the final murder of Mary Kelly. Stowell also hinted at confidential papers owned by Caroline Acland, daughter of Sir William Gull, which claimed that Prince Albert Victor died not from influenza in 1892 as was publicly stated, but from a ‘softening of the brain’ caused by syphilis. The fact that ‘S’ had knowledge of dressing deer not only explained the Ripper’s alleged anatomical knowledge, but also pointed to the prince as being the suspect in question as he most certainly would have possessed such experience through his forays into game hunting.

Stowell’s theory suggested that Sir William Gull was given the duty of following the prince on his sojourns in London and was therefore in a position to expose and then incarcerate him. This was the first time that Gull’s name had been linked to the Whitechapel murders, echoing not just Colin Wilson’s published comments about the killer possibly being the queen’s physician, but also the Robert Lees story of the eminent London doctor. One has to weigh up whether Lees’s story was actually true, but
for argument’s sake, if it was, then had that London doctor now been identified?

It was obvious that a public figure such as Prince Albert Victor would have had his movements carefully recorded by the Royal Court; anyone willing to destroy this new theory would not have had a difficult task in giving him an alibi. The matter was quickly attended to:

Buckingham Palace is not officially reacting to the mischievous calumny that Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale and Earl of Athlone, was also Jack the Ripper. The idea that Edward VII’s eldest son and, but for his early death of pneumonia aged 28, heir to the throne, should have bestially murdered five or six women of ‘unfortunate’ class in the East End is regarded as too ridiculous for comment.

Nevertheless a loyalist on the staff at Buckingham Palace had engaged in some amateur detective work and come up with evidence on the Duke’s behalf. Two women were murdered on September 30, 1888, in Berners Street [
sic
] and Mitre Square, and their murders were fully reported in
The Times
the following day.

The Times
of October 1 also carried a court circular from Balmoral, stating: ‘Prince Henry of Battenberg, attended by a colonel clerk, joined Prince Albert Victor of Wales (the Duke of Clarence as he was to be) at Glen Muick in a drive which Mr Mckenzie had for black game.’

Further, but less surely, he believes that the Duke was at Sandringham, celebrating his father’s 47th birthday, on the occasion of the last murder of Marie Jeanette Kelly, in Miller’s Court, on November 9, 1888. The court circular simply says that the then Prince of Wales celebrated his birthday with his family; but diary entries and other notes in the archives at Buckingham
Palace suggest that the Duke was in fact at Sandringham during the early days of November until November 11.
²⁶

Dr Stowell was interviewed for BBC Television’s
24 Hours
current affairs programme,
²⁷
where again he gave enough hints for people to assume that he spoke of Prince Albert Victor, again without naming him. Apart from Colin Wilson, others had to ‘join the dots’ to give ‘S’ his identity. In fact, Stowell went on record as denying that he had ever suggested that the prince was the Ripper when he wrote to
The Times
to make his feelings succinctly clear: