Donston: The "Openshaw Letter"

[Howard Brown]

That Donston wrote two letters during the period of time he was within the confines of the London Hospital is a fact. The letters were recieved by the Police on October 16th....and December 26th.

One article written by Tom Wescott in 2004 for Ripperologist Magazine ( November # 56 ),entitled "Have You Seen The Devil?" is a well written exhibition of several anonymous letters sent to the Police,George Lusk,and of course,the theme of this thread, Dr.Thomas Openshaw,pathologist at the London Hospital.

In the future,perhaps we can discuss each of the anonymous letters within this article. But for the time being,we will concentrate on the Openshaw Letter and the mechanics involved with this letter.

Chris George and Tom,as well as other Ripperologists, see similarities with the From Hell letter recieved by George Lusk to the Openshaw. I see those similarities as well,with one special feature that they do not mention....on the affirming side that Stephenson may well have written letters in anonymity.



I,for one,see similarities with the October 16th letter and the Openshaw,recieved on October 29th,which I hope to put up here as soon as possible for comparisons....as well as the December 26th letter,which Donston wrote once again to the Police.

Just for the record...on another thread regarding Donston and Dr.Davies, it may have appeared that I was in some sort of opposition to Tom's premise in his article in Ripperologist. Thats not true at all.

What I was in opposition to is that the letter mentioned in the December 31st,1888 PMG, was not anonymous the instant W.T.Stead recognized either the handwriting,the syntax/phrases, or the theme of the letter as coming from Stephenson.

Therefore, if Stead WAS the "philanthropist" from the East End who recieved this letter, it,to me,was a hyped up story that another paper carried first and THEN the PMG with Stead behind this prank. There is no way that this "anonymously" sent letter could have been assumed to have come from the London Hospital without Stead in the first place.

We know Stead was in possession of letters from Stephenson while RDS was in the LH as well as in communication with Stephenson afterwards. If the letter was not recieved by Stead,then it remains to be seen from whence a connection to both the Hospital and Stephenson came from for the postal authorities to link the two together.

So for starters,lets see what facts we have about the Openshaw and the mechanics behind the letter...
..as in all what had to happen for it to reach its destination,in this case,the same Hospital Dr.Openshaw was working at. For the Openshaw Letter was not sent to Openshaw's residence,but place of business.

The letter was signed "Jack The Ripper" and really appears to be an intentional masking of the fabricator's true writing technique and spelling capabilities.

No less than 15 words are misspelled and the word "will" is misspelled six words later as, "wil".

However, none of the words on the face of the envelope are misspelled and "pathological" is spelled correctly.

The letter had a stamp on it for one penny and is marked "London E OC 29 88".

The fact that it had a stamp may be important here. In modern times,hospitals have spots where a person can purchase postage stamps to send out to individuals.

However,this letter was sent back into the Hospital. Of course,thats an obvious no-brainer.

But what is problematic is that we do not know if Stephenson could leave the Hospital to send letters. He concievably could have asked for/borrowed/paid for one or two stamps from some obliging individual from within the Hospital. That the letters ( the one to the Police in October must have had one ) were taken out of the Hospital by Stephenson is an entirely different matter.

If he had a stamp,for the sake of argument, he could have done one of two things to have the Hospital's courier or even a representative from the Post Office ( a mailman...) pick up a letter from within the Hospital.

A. He may well have stamped the letter....asked hospital personnel where the outgoing mail bin was.....and placed the letter within the stack of letters to be jettisoned....not on top,certainly....but within the stack and out of plain view. Had a mail "chute" been utilized, the letter would probably pass muster and be dispatched in the outgoing bag and on its way to the post office.

B. Or he may have simply handed the letter to the person in charge of outgoing mail....

This latter possibility is rife with risk. Not for the fact that its contents were contemptible or that is was an anonymous Jack The Ripper letter....but that HAD the person in charge looked at the envelope's face, he would see that the letter was addressed to someone within the Hospital,that being Dr. Openshaw.

This was a serious risk....and one that would have had Stephenson in very hot water and probably out on a very cold pavement. For had the mailperson merely looked at the envelope....not told Stephenson and gone ahead and delivered it to Openshaw without taking it out the front door...Openshaw then reading it,seeing no post office date stamp...would realize it came from within the hospital....and then in asking the mailperson who gave him this letter,finds out who originally handed the letter to the mailman....its bye-bye hospital,hello Police station.

Even the first possibility, A , is a little risky,but nowhere near as risky as B.

So,lets begin the beguine folks....what are your ideas on the possibility of the Openshaw letter coming from RDS?

By the way,the link that I see within all THREE of the letters I mentioned is this:

All three have a degree of contempt towards authority or a mutual tone of resentment to those in positions Stephenson only wished he held......two doctors and the police.

In the Dec. 26th letter,Stephenson is overt in his denunciation of the 34 year old Dr. Morgan Davies ....the police for their misspelling of Jews in the equally incorrect way he followed up with in the October 16th letter and the Oct. 29th letter which is pretty sarcastic and mocking to say the least to Openshaw.

I sense a similarity for the imperiousness that these three letters contain. How about you?

And do not worry,more to come for certain.

[Tom_Wescott]

Here's a couple excerpts from my article regarding the Openshaw letter and what might be its sister missive:

The ‘Openshaw’ letter (posted on Oct. 29th, 1888)

Text: ‘Old boss you was rite it was the left kidney I was goin to hopperate agin close to your ospitle just as I was goin to dror mi nife long of er bloomin throte them cusses of coppers spoilt the game but I guess I wil be on the job soon and will send you another bit of innerds Jack the ripper O have you seen the delve with his mikerscope and scalpel a lookin at a Kidney with a slide cocked up’

Almost two weeks after Lusk received the ‘From hell’ package, Dr. Thomas Horrocks Openshaw arrived to work at the London Hospital to find a letter addressed to him from none other than ‘Jack the Ripper’. It appeared the author had read in the papers of Openshaw’s findings following his examination of the Lusk kidney, addressing the letter to ‘Dr. Openshaw, Pathological Curator, London Hospital’, just as his title had appeared in the papers. As already noted, D’Onston lived at this very same address and would certainly have been aware of the doctor by reputation, if not by acquaintance. Many researchers, including Christopher T. George, have noted similarities between this and the ‘From hell’ letter, suggesting they’re from the same hand.
As documented earlier, a story that D’Onston was fond of telling immediately followed the source for the limerick found in this letter, and in a 500 page volume full of short stories, no less! Robert Hunt’s Popular Romances of the West of England has heavy occult leanings and would have appealed to a person of D’Onston’s nature. In fact, a search on the internet proves that the book is still quoted amongst followers of Theosophy and the occult, but seems to have lost all significance outside these circles.
The expletive ‘O’ which opens the piece of limerick (“O have you seen the delve”) is a tool of the very literate and was not to be found in ‘Duffy and the Devil’, proving it to have been an invention of the letter’s author. This literary device was used by D’Onston in his Ripper article for the Pall Mall Gazette (i.e. “O! most sapient conclusion!”).
The handwriting of the ‘Openshaw’ letter is more similar to D’Onston’s than any of the other letters examined here, despite the author’s attempt at disguising his hand. Simple, but revealing, constructions, such as ‘to’ and ‘of’, appear identical in both the letter and in D’Onston’s December 26th, 1888, statement to the police. A far more difficult construction, ‘Whitechapel’ (on the letter’s envelope), also appears identical, though the letter author opted for the original rendering of the name as two words (‘White Chapel’). Most interesting is the way D’Onston renders ‘Dr’, with a large ‘D’ looping upwards into a floating lower-case ‘r’, precisely as it is found on the ‘Openshaw’ envelope.


The ‘Have You Seen the “Devil”’ letter (Oct. 10th, 1888)

Text: ‘(newspaper cutting) HAVE YOU SEEN THE “DEVIL” (black ink, practiced flourish) If not Pay one Penny & Walk in-side (in pencil, poor hand) Hampstead Oct 10/10/88 Dear Boss I am Waiting every evening for the coppers at Hampstead heath you will find tow or three of them goone before this week is ended I am lodging in Scratchem Park now the number I shall not tell you I mean Litchin st I Remain yours Jack the Ripper/ Hampstead Oct 10/10/88 Dear Boss I am waiting’

This letter is intriguing in that it preceded the ‘Openshaw’ letter by more than two weeks, yet both contained the phrase ‘have you seen the devil’ and referred to the police as ‘coppers’ (the ‘Box of Toys’ postcard, received by Lusk 4 to 5 days later, also made use of this colloquialism). Other than these two remarkable occurrences, nothing else about this letter, including its style of hand, strikes me as reminiscent of any of the other communications examined here. It is worth mentioning, however, that a cheap wax display was for a short time erected (before being forced to close by outraged citizens) wherein wax dummies were splashed with blood and sold to the public as duplicates of the Whitechapel murder victims. This display, which may have influenced the opening of this letter, was situated directly across the street from London Hospital.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Tom_Wescott]

For the sake of comparison, I thought I'd also include my excerpt pertaining to the 'From Hell' letter. Note how D'Onston, in his own writings, would adapt a similar method of writing in 'accent':

The ‘From hell’ letter (received Oct. 16th, 1888)

Text: ‘From hell Mr Lusk Sor I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman prasarved it for you. tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise. I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer signed Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk.’

This alleged communication from the Whitechapel murderer is distinguished by the fact that it arrived in a parcel that also contained a portion of human kidney. Like the ‘Box of Toys’ postcard, it was not signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. It is thought that the kidney came either from Catherine Eddowes, the Ripper’s alleged fourth victim, or was obtained from a recently deceased person at a local hospital. As the London Hospital was the only such location in the East End it would be the likely source (other than through murder) for such a specimen. Notwithstanding that he may have been the Ripper, D’Onston was a resident of the London Hospital throughout the ‘Autumn of terror’ and, as a self-admitted patient, would have had more freedom to roam than the average ward. Come October he’d been a resident at the hospital for almost two months and would have been as familiar a face to the staff as one of their own. As such, it is not difficult to imagine a man such as D’Onston, with a morbid fascination for the dark arts equal only to his lust for creating intrigue, sneaking into the dissecting room and obtaining a human kidney for the purpose in which it was used on Lusk. That this would have been no difficult feat was illustrated in a Sept. 13th, 1889, interview with a London Hospital surgeon published by the Pall Mall Gazette (and perhaps conducted by D’Onston himself, who wrote freelance for the paper) following the suggestion in the press that the Pinchin Street torso (discovered only three days prior) was the work of medical students having a prank. The unnamed surgeon was surprisingly candid, if not overly so, in discussing the lackadaisical standards then present in the post-mortem room: when asked if it was a common thing for students to possess themselves of certain body parts following a dissection, the carefree surgeon replied, “Oh yes. They often take away a foot or a hand, but it is not very likely that they would cart home a head or a leg.”!
Turning to the letter itself, we find that the author chose to disguise his education by intentionally misspelling words and hide his true voice through a ‘stage Irish’ idiom. D’Onston was a student of linguistics (as his contribution to the Goulston Street graffiti mythos bears out) and displayed the same fondness for imitating dialects in his writings; when assuming the persona of his family servant, “Old Bob”, a Yorkshireman, D’Onston wrote the following: “Maister Ros, there’s something uncanny aboot it. I heerd her come on the bridge, and off it, I’d knaw them clickety heels onywhere; but I’m dommed, sir, if she passed me. I’m thinking we’d better gang.”
A most curious observation was brought to my attention in one of the aforementioned e-mails from Christopher T. George. He made note of the letter D’Onston wrote to the City Police regarding the graffiti in Goulston Street and pointed out D’Onston’s peculiar wording in requesting that his letter “be preserved until I am well enough to do myself the honour to call upon you personally”. That ‘preserved’ is an odd choice of words to use in reference to a letter is self-evident and may be seen as suspicious when one considers that this letter was posted on the same day as the ‘From hell’ letter, which carried the phrase, “I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman prasarved it for you…”.
In 1966, George Lusk’s grandson, the late Leonard Archer, wrote a letter to the editor of the London Hospital Gazette and put forth the following: “He [Lusk] lived at the time in Alderney Road which is not far from the London Hospital; I believe he either did some work in the hospital or for some of the staff and in his later years he believed that the kidney was sent to him as a practical joke by someone in the London Hospital.”

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Howard Brown]

Food ( Hospital ,that is ) For Thought

The startling premise in the previous post ought to get people thinking.... Thanks to Tom for helping out here.

What if...what if Stephenson,although confined to the Hospital could have somehow gone out in the day time and sent the infamous package to Lusk? How about that mysterious "clergyman" who went to see Ms.Marsh,in the day time, right before the reception of the package by Lusk? It was,after all,in proximity to the Hospital?

What if...what if Stephenson was not only a writer of letters to the Police ( at least twice ) but the helmsman behind some of the other mysteries in this case,and yet not have so much as picked up a knife? The possibilities are there....Who is in a better place to know what is transpiring at the Hospital where Openshaw works, having access to a kidney, and definitely writing letters from said Hospital? Thats right: Donston.

Thanks again,T.C.

[Chris G.]

Hello Howie and Tom

Tom, thanks for bringing up my suspicions about D'Onston's 16 October 1888 letter to the City of London police and its similarity to the Openshaw letter of 29 October. As I say, what I thought was particularly curious is the use of the word "preserved" in both the Lusk letter, received by George Lusk on 16 October and the same word in the letter to the police and that D'Onston would use the strange phraseology that he wished the police would "preserve" the letter until he was well enough to visit them.

When I made my presention on the Jack the Ripper letters at the first Ripper US convention in Park Ridge, New Jersey, in April 2000, I pointed out similarities between the writing in the envelope of the Openshaw letter and D'Onston's letter. That is, that the righting in both slopes up to the upper right. Also that D'Onston places the dot over the "i" relatively high, as does the Lusk and Openshaw letter writer.

It is also very obvious that the writer of the Openshaw letter affects illiteracy in the letter itself but can write the address of Dr Openshaw and the London Hospital perfectly well in the envelope of the letter:

Dr. Openshaw
Pathological curator
London Hospital
Whitechapel

The handwriting style in "Hospital" on the envelope of the Openshaw letter and in the address in D'Onston's 16 October letter is close. I also note that in the colour images in the book by Evans and Skinner, Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell (pp. 67, 205) both are written on gray notepaper. Could it be the same stationery? Possibly Patricia Cornwell was looking at the wrong suspect?

It has also been noted, not by me but in the Mammoth book of Jack the Ripper by Jakubowski and Braund (p. 448) that D'Onston places the cross on the "t" very high so that it looks like a capital letter "T" which brings to mind the odd capitalization in the graffiti.

I certainly think that Stephenson was a gamesplayer and a busybody so, yes, I agree, he may have had some fun inserting himself into the case when he may not have been the murderer at all. In other words, as you indicate, Howard, possibly he was the prankster that sent the kidney even if he was not the man who committed the bloody murders.

Chris

[Howard Brown]

Chris:

Thanks very much for chipping in here,sor...

I noticed the greenish paper as well,but refrained from "adding" that to the similarities,since other letters in SPE/KS's book also had green tinted paper. Good eye,old man. You may be right.

As to Stephenson possibly writing the letters you and Tom detected and deserve credit for mentioning, of course I agree with you there.

The possibility that RDS was that man who visited Ms.Marsh for Lusk's address is problematic. But even without the Lusk letter and package,that RDS wrote even one of these letters is to me,really a prelude to the 1896 Borderland article,where we know ( now ) that some of his claims were "attention seeking" demonstrations.

[Debbie D]

Hello Howie and Tom

Tom, thanks for bringing up my suspicions about D'Onston's 16 October 1888 letter to the City of London police and its similarity to the Openshaw letter of 29 October. As I say, what I thought was particularly curious is the use of the word "preserved" in both the Lusk letter, received by George Lusk on 16 October and the same word in the letter to the police and that D'Onston would use the strange phraseology that he wished the police would "preserve" the letter until he was well enough to visit them.

When I made my presention on the Jack the Ripper letters at the first Ripper US convention in Park Ridge, New Jersey, in April 2000, I pointed out similarities between the writing in the envelope of the Openshaw letter and D'Onston's letter. That is, that the righting in both slopes up to the upper right. Also that D'Onston places the dot over the "i" relatively high, as does the Lusk and Openshaw letter writer.

It is also very obvious that the writer of the Openshaw letter affects illiteracy in the letter itself but can write the address of Dr Openshaw and the London Hospital perfectly well in the envelope of the letter:

Dr. Openshaw
Pathological curator
London Hospital
Whitechapel

The handwriting style in "Hospital" on the envelope of the Openshaw letter and in the address in D'Onston's 16 October letter is close. I also note that in the colour images in the book by Evans and Skinner, Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell (pp. 67, 205) both are written on gray notepaper. Could it be the same stationery? Possibly Patricia Cornwell was looking at the wrong suspect?

It has also been noted, not by me but in the Mammoth book of Jack the Ripper by Jakubowski and Braund (p. 448) that D'Onston places the cross on the "t" very high so that it looks like a capital letter "T" which brings to mind the odd capitalization in the graffiti.

I certainly think that Stephenson was a gamesplayer and a busybody so, yes, I agree, he may have had some fun inserting himself into the case when he may not have been the murderer at all. In other words, as you indicate, Howard, possibly he was the prankster that sent the kidney even if he was not the man who committed the bloody murders.

Chris

Hi Chris,
This is very interesting. I may have to take a close look at these particular letters in Letters From Hell. I've studied the handwriting in several of the JtR letters but have never compared them to D'Onstons writing.

I very much agree with your last paragraph and I will look at these items a bit closer this weekend...

[Chris G.]

Hi Debbie

Thanks, Debbie. I am pleased that my post made you curious to do your own comparisons of these letters.

Let us know what you think.

Chris

[Howard Brown]

I certainly think that Stephenson was a gamesplayer and a busybody so, yes, I agree, he may have had some fun inserting himself into the case when he may not have been the murderer at all. In other words, as you indicate, Howard, possibly he was the prankster that sent the kidney even if he was not the man who committed the bloody murders.

Couldn't have said this better myself,C.G.

The work that you and Tom have done with the letters in the past surprisingly ( not surprising to me ) had recieved little interest from the two authors on Stephenson and seldom gets the recognition from Ripperologists for the two ( or perhaps with the addition of my view on the Dec.26th letter for the reason of the tone of these letters....) or three similarities pointed out.

In fact,Melvin Harris had this to say about the possibility of Stephenson writing a letter(s) other than the October 16th,December 26th,and letters to Stead from within the London Hospital.

From page 137 of the True Face of JTR....

" D'onston needed no nickname,he killed anonymously. While the world was convinced and horrified by the "Jack The Ripper" letter and postcard ( referring to the Dear Boss letter & Saucy Jacky postcard...HB ), he completely ignored them. They were not from his pen. They were nothing but empty hoaxes...When he did write,it was simply to inject himself into the inquiry."

One omission from The True Face that stands out is the complete absence of any mention whatsoever of the Lusk Kidney and letter. In fact,Mrs.Eddowes' detached organ is not mentioned at ALL.

One probable reason for Mr.Harris' decision to dismiss D'onston as an anonymous letter writer...and more so,any part with the Lusk Kidney at all....is that Mr.Harris was of the opinion that NONE of the letters were authentic at all to begin with.

Yet,he had to have seen the similarities which Chris mentioned ( not necessarily the one Tom found,the one with links to other lines of doggerel ) : the use of the word preserved...the handwriting...as well as a sense of contempt perhaps within the similar Openshaw and Dec/Oct. letters.

Funny how some are able to employ a critical eye when it is affordable,isn't it? And here I thought we were the subjective ones.

[Chris G.]

Chris:

Thanks very much for chipping in here,sor...

I noticed the greenish paper as well,but refrained from "adding" that to the similarities,since other letters in SPE/KS's book also had green tinted paper. Good eye,old man. You may be right. . . .

Hi Howie

I think the writing paper in both D'Onston's letter of 16 October and the 29 October letter to Openshaw is light gray although the the colour images in the book by Evans and Skinner, Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell (pp. 67, 205) are somewhat different in tint in that the picture of the D'Onston letter (p. 205) has a yellowish tint which yes makes it looks somewhat greenish. I think this is possibly an artifact of the photography and that the tint of the paper is the same light gray in both letters.

Chris

[Debbie D]

Openshaw letter vs. D'Onston 16th Oct. 1888 letter...

I spent a little bit of time comparing the two. The Openshaw letter and D'Onston's letter do have very similar T crosses. In fact the crosses are both what is called "clubbing" or club strokes. This can be an indication of cruelty in an individual. I know many people are very skeptical of handwriting analysis and graphology so I'll skip over the rest of those items.

It seemed very obvious that the spelling errors were done on purpose. I find it silly that the author could spell "hospital" correctly on the envelope and then screw it up in the letter. It's very mocking in it's tone and that along with the ridiculous errors, indicates it was done by someone with a reasonable level of intelligence and education.

The final thing that jumped off the page at me was the "type" of sloppy handwriting. I would go out on a limb and say that the author used their weak hand to write this in an effort to conceal their own handwriting. For example a right handed person would have used their left hand and vice versa. There are a number of physical illnesses that can cause "shakey" handwriting like this but I don't think that's the case here. It looks like it was written weak handed.

And my dear Sor, that's my opinion,,,

[Howard Brown]

Debbie:

Thanks very much for taking the time to read the letters,at all.

The sad fact is that most Ripperologists are so apathetic towards Stephenson that efforts such as Tom's,Chris's,and our site's work, go unnoticed for the most part. Its really mindboggling.

Of all the known suspects,Stephenson should have been considered as a prime candidate for some ,not all,of the anonymous letters for the obvious similarities between the two or three non-anonymous letters long before Tom,Chris,or we here ever pointed that out.

There,to me,is a "good" reason for this.

In spending many hours of thought about Stephenson, it occurred to me that had anyone merely suggested that Stephenson may have had a link to the letters ( which is what Tom and Chris did some time ago ), it would disrupt the carefully constructed "image" of Stephenson that the previous and outdated promoters of Stephenson-as-Ripper theory had established and what is,for the most part,what newcomers to the entire fascinating saga of RDS will see first.

We must ask ourselves why those who considered Stephenson "sinister" enough to be Jack The Ripper would uniformly denounce him as an anonymous letter writer if these similarities are of a nature that someone taking the time to read them at all can see what we see.

Thanks Debbie for reinstating my faith in my fellow man ( er...woman)

[Chris G.]

I spent a little bit of time comparing the two. The Openshaw letter and D'Onston's letter do have very similar T crosses. In fact the crosses are both what is called "clubbing" or club strokes. This can be an indication of cruelty in an individual. I know many people are very skeptical of handwriting analysis and graphology so I'll skip over the rest of those items.

It seemed very obvious that the spelling errors were done on purpose. I find it silly that the author could spell "hospital" correctly on the envelope and then screw it up in the letter. It's very mocking in it's tone and that along with the ridiculous errors, indicates it was done by someone with a reasonable level of intelligence and education.

The final thing that jumped off the page at me was the "type" of sloppy handwriting. I would go out on a limb and say that the author used their weak hand to write this in an effort to conceal their own handwriting. For example a right handed person would have used their left hand and vice versa. There are a number of physical illnesses that can cause "shakey" handwriting like this but I don't think that's the case here. It looks like it was written weak handed.

And my dear Sor, that's my opinion,,,

Hi Debbie

Many thanks for taking the time to perform your analysis and interpretation of the D'Onston and Openshaw letters. I find your observations interesting.

I was not aware that, as you say, a high stroke on the "t" is an example of "what is called 'clubbing' or club strokes", which you say "can be an indication of cruelty in an individual."

Also I thought that your opinion of the sloppiness exhibited in the Openshaw letter could have some basis -- that, as you believe, "the author used their weak hand to write this in an effort to conceal their own handwriting." Nice work, Debbie!

Chris

[Howard Brown]

C.G. :

I just noticed your post regarding the color of the pages. The older I get,the more my ability to distinguish color appears to be fading. My mistake.

[Chris G.]

C.G. :

I just noticed your post regarding the color of the pages. The older I get,the more my ability to distinguish color appears to be fading. My mistake.

Hi Howard

That's okay, Howard. My age 86 mother insists that I am color blind, although I think that is she herself who has the color distinguishing prob!

Chris