The Most Dangerous Man in his Majesty's Prisons!

[Debra Arif]

This looks like the entry for the one you mentioned, David:

Title: Answers.
Publication Details: London
Uniform Title: Answers (London, England : 1889)
Place Name: London
Identifier: System number 013903981
Related Titles: Earlier Title: Answers to Correspondents on every subject under the sun no.1-82 (2 June 1888-21 Dec.1889)
Later Title: Answers & T.V. Pic. no.3312-3329 (22 Oct.1955-18 Feb.1956)
Creation Date: 1889
Holdings Notes: 1889-1955 General Reference Collection LOU.LD112
Shelfmark(s): General Reference Collection 1889-1955 LOU.LD112
UIN: BLL01013903981

[Debra Arif]

'No I never done it, I'm innocent I tell yer, it was that bleedin' judge'

He actually spoke with a noticeable foreign accent- other than cockney.

[SPE]

Answers

Simonis 1917 -

[Edward Stow]

Debra
I considered trying to render my prose to reflect a Danish accent but it defeated me.
Bearing in mind Mr Le Grande was a master of disguise who knew the East End like the back of his hand, or so I have been reliably informed, and given his sixteen years in the pokey mixing with the most awful roughs, I thought I’d take the liberty of endowing him a stage Cockney accent.
The producers of Thunderbox Films (Hollywood and Ebbw Vale) Inc. are free to reject my suggestion. But if they do cast him with a Cockney accent I expect to be paid.

With respect to ‘Answers’, I confess I had never heard of it and I have been unable to trace a single mention of it via Google or in any Library catalogue – but maybe I have not been patient enough to scroll through a sufficient number of pages.
I am tempted to pay a trip to the British Library now that I know the catalogue numbers, but if you intend to go first let me know as I don’t want to tread on your toes.

I have an inkling that if his memoirs were printed in ‘Answers’ then Le Grande will not mention his employ by the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. I could of course be wrong but it is my hunch that he and Batchelor were the two men rejected by the WVC (reported in the Morning Advertiser on 3rd October 1888) – and that Le Grande passed himself off as being with the WVC to the policeman he met. If his memoirs come to light we shall see!

On coincidences:

It isn’t a coincidence that Haslewood and Haslip appear next to each other in the phone directory as their names both start HASL. But it is a coincidence that they appear in that directory as both can be linked to Tom’s theories and are names not usually dwelt on in ‘Ripperology’. Even though it is the wrong Haslewood for the letter writer, he has nevertheless a Le Grande link. Also that directory was the first record I personally checked to see who this HD Haslewood was, and only a day or two before I had been checking on Haslip. It is however no more than an amusing coincidence.

If it had been the same Haslewood, then of course it could only have been a strange coincidence for the reasons you gave. However I do not doubt that some might tried to make something out of it (I was being ‘ironic’ when I suggested this before).
In my opinion HD Haselwood made a bit of a fool of himself complaining that he had allowed his name to be put to something that he clearly hadn’t read and then he drew more attention to it by complaining.
HT Haslewood must have been somewhat eccentric given the nature of his allegation against Thick.
So had the two Haslewood’s been the same person, then the only sensible conclusion would be that he was an idiotic eccentric.
But they are not the same, so all we have is a mild coincidence that two people called Haslewood, both with broadly legal backgrounds, have slight ‘Ripper’ connections – one was an eccentric and the other an idiot.

Pizer staying at Albert Crossingham’s on Holloway Road when the Deputy at William Crossingham’s at Dorset Street said he had thrown Leather Apron out, is I would suggest of a different magnitude of coincidence.
We have very good reason to believe that Pizer was the template for the Leather Apron scare – in my opinion overwhelmingly so.
We have Pizer moving from Holloway Road to another lodging house – almost certainly the one at Great Peter Street – run by a near neighbour of William Crossingham.
This is suggestive that Pizer chose to stay in lodging houses run by people he was familiar with.
It isn’t absolute proof that Pizer did this, but the inference is clear. It is another link in the chain of evidence that makes it clear that Pizer was indeed known as Leather Apron.
If, say, we had a record of Kidney staying at Albert Crossingham’s place on Holloway Road, then that would just be an uninteresting coincidence as there is no link between Kidney and William Crossingham’s establishment or any reason to suppose there might have been.
(Someone’s going to tell me here was a link between Kidney and William Crossingham but I just chose his name as someone closely linked to the case!)

I think Pizer was an interesting character in the overall Ripper-Whitechapel Murder episode. The Leather Apron aspect clearly had influence on the way the police investigated the murders in the initial stage anyway.
Plotting out Pizer’s movements, from Paddington Hospital to the Jewish Convalescent Home in Norwood, to Albert Crossingham’s, to Great Russell Street and back to Mulberry Street at the tail of end of Rosh Hashanah, with that sketch almost certainly actually being of Pigott and the linking of ‘Snob’ to the shoe trade – all rounds off a picture that had been lost for decades.
So in that sense I try to look at things as a whole.

[Debra Arif]

I have sent you a pm Edward

[Dusty Miller]

Hello Debra,

No mysterious motives in asking if the were related, just enjoying the coincidences;-)

[Tom_Wescott]

I don't have much to add except I also looked in some corners to find a copy of 'Answers' a year or so ago when Debs shared this with me, but to no avail.

Let's please not give Thunerbutt films any ideas.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Edward Stow]

I have seen the relevant issues of Answers at the British Library

The ‘Crawford’ item that Debra found was a scrap book of stamp collecting related items in different magazines and included an issue of Answers from 23rd March 1895. Alfred C Harmsworth is listed as the editor.
This issue had an interesting piece in it in which it was estimated that Great Britain was worth £12,000,000,000 on the open market – by monetarising all the land, the houses, railways, ship yards, mines, factories, overseas investments and so forth. This was typical of the sort of articles in this magazine.

The second reference Debra gave was for the whole collection of Answers held at Boston Spa, in bound annual volumes.
I asked for a few years to be sent down and I have gone through them.

Answers magazine had about twenty odd pages a week and was made up of many small articles. It includes regular and rather excruciatingly poor jokes, the issues are full of semi ‘amusing’ “who’s better, the Scots the Irish or the English”, type discussions. There were many anti-foreigner pieces, with the Germans being the particular objects of animosity, always expressed though with a degree of forced humour.

By 1907 the editor isn’t mentioned by name anywhere.
They prominently offered £1,000 to anyone who died in a rail accident, so long as they had a copy of the current issue of Answers about their person!
I presume the newsagent's kiosks at various stations did a brisk trade.
They boasted that they had given away £12,700 as a result of this generous offer. The odd £700 was the result of multiple claims. If there was more than one claim in any week, each claimant’s next of kin would only get £100.

Anyway, Le Grand’s articles ran for an incredible 17 weeks! Initially covering two pages, it shrunk to one page an issue. The initial instalment went into some detail as to why he claimed he was innocent and how he was arrested.
Then when he was shipped off to jail, Le Grand lingered over describing the indignity of his strip search, before admitting that every prisoner had to undergo this process, the poor dears.
Then issue after issue, column after interminable column, week after week leg Grand went on and on and on and on about his experience in jail, moaning like a bitch.

Answers paid £1 a column. Le Grand’s articles filled 56 columns, so by my calculation he earned £56. Not a bad sum. He could have gone straight and developed a new career. This was probably the largest amount of honest money he ever earned.

There was not a single mention about his past life.

[Howard Brown]

Thanks very much, Edward ! Nice hands-on effort, sir.

[Debra Arif]

Thanks Edward! Sounds fascinating to me! The advert does say the article will be about Grande's prison life so I didn't expect anything else .
It does sound like he got his ideas from Jabez Balfour who also wrote a book on the prison regime and being strip searched etc. in his book too.
This also fits the June 1907 marriage I found where a Charles Grande describes himself as a journalist.
Coincidentally? When the woman in that marriage died (as a widow) she left £57 19s estate. Grande was locked up again by 1908 and stayed there until deportation orders came through in 1915 so maybe he never got a chance to spend the money!

http://www.jtrforums.com/showthread.php?t=16343

[Edward Stow]

She probably didn't dare spend it

[Edward Stow]

In it he recounts the life stories sundry crims be buddies up with but not a whisper about himself. I would have expected the odd sentence - he even mentions Jewish prisoners from Whitechapel.

[Debra Arif]

In it he recounts the life stories sundry crims be buddies up with but not a whisper about himself. I would have expected the odd sentence - he even mentions Jewish prisoners from Whitechapel.

Does he mention Grainger or Ostrog?

[Edward Stow]

In my haste I miscalculated.
His story was serialized over 20 weeks and 71 columns - so if he was paid at the standard flat rate of £1 per column that's £71 - a considerable sum.
The column ran from 9th March to 3rd August. Two weeks were missed probably because of the serialization of a short story called 'Reapers in Evil' by E Philips Oppenheim.

[Edward Stow]

I don't think he mentions Ostrog or Grainger - at least by name.
I haven't read it that carefully - I just scanned it. It must be a good 20,000 words.