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Apologies, Stewart, but I have been asleep on the other side of the planet.
Let's take your objections, one by one.
I am sure that the Druitt as the Ripper theory was unknown to Sims, probably at least until the publication of Griffith's 1898 work. That still wouldn't mean that he didn't recall a suicide of 1889 that had appeared in the newspapers.
This is a very unconvincing theory because the fictionalising of Druitt begins with Macnaghten, in the official version of his 'Report', through into the backdated 'draft' (or the other way round) and continues into Sims -- obviously from his pal, who also confirmed that the document was a definitive 'Home Office Report', when it was nothing of the kind.
You think that Macnaghten had reason to fear 'the Druitt revelation', but why? He continued to espouse, and push, the idea of the 'drowned doctor' in the Thames and it really wouldn't have taken a genius to do a little research and find that the only Thames suicide candidate fitting the essential criteria was Druitt, who was named as the appropriate suicide in the January 1889 press.
Druitt was a potential tar-baby, politically speaking, because he had been a Tory barrister, from a Tory family, stumbled upon by a Tory MP. Did police really not know about him, or was he tipped off by Tory chiefs that the net was closing. Imagine what Liberal demagogues and Liberal tabloids could do with this humiliating tale -- quite unfairly?
I think you underestimate the partisan-political context and pressures, as do a number of secondary sources.
You write that Druitt could have been easily found.
Yes, but nobody did find Druitt, and in the generation closer to the murders, what would it get you to try and find out?
George Sims had provided the basic profile, or so people thought -- even what 'Jack' looked like: he looked like Sims. You could not publish the murderer's name without heading towards a potential libel suit.
In 1929, Leonard Matters rebooted the entire mystery, as a 'mystery' choosing to dismiss the memoirs of Macnaghten (and Anderson) -- which was his right -- by claiming that no such doctor took his own life by drowning himself in the Thames on Nov 10th 1888. So far as I know this was the first attempt, in the next generation, to try and find the 'drowned doctor' in the public records, and he did not find Druitt.
But then why would you connect a young, barrister-teacher, a working bourgeoisie, from a concerned family, with Sims' affluent, unemployed, middle-aged physician? (in his own memoirs, Macnaghten is so cagey on this point that he drops both 'doctor', which was untrue, and 'drowned', which was true).
Even with the name, Dan Farson and his researchers in 1959 had so much trouble initially finding 'M. J. Druitt' that they wondered if he existed at all?
Macnaghten had set up a shield against Druitt being found and until his own daughter handed the name to a famous TV reporter, this shell game held (as the 1899 'North Country Vicar' puts it so well: 'substantial truth under fictitious form'.)
How can you argue with success?
Macnaghten made demonstrable errors, but you seem to choose selectively what he said and assign deliberate deceit in order to mislead on his part, rather than admit the most likely explanation.
Can you give me an example of where I choose 'selectively'? I'm not saying I don't. Undoubtedly I do, but I cannot think of an example because I am too close to it.
I have tried in my articles, and my unpublished manuscript, to examine every Macnaghten source, and Mac-source-by-proxy, that I can find.
I have argued against my own theory too.
For example, the one element which never alters between the MP article, Mac's Report(s), Griffiths and Sims, one of Mac's 1913 comments, and his 1914 memoirs, is that Druitt killed himself within hours of the Kelly murder.
That this is the 'proof' of his guilt.
If that is what Macnaghten really believed then he was mistaken, seriously so, because Druitt does not qualify for his 'awful glut' criteria, no more than any other suspect.
You are the one who is also selective, and you have every right to be, by excluding Macnaghten's memoirs from several of your books -- brilliant books.
But you make the same choices (eg. this is in and this is out, and this is right and this is wrong) you say I make.
It has always been obvious that Druitt was a retrospective suspect, and was not suspected in 1888/89.
Has it?
That would be news to Cullen, Farson and the early work of Don Rumbelow who all [provisionally] included the McCormick hoax about Albert Backert and therefore claimed that Druitt was a 'police' suspect in 1888 -- because that is what Macnaghten implies in both versions of his 'Report'.
They all downplayed his memoir, the only document by Macnaghten on this matter, under his own knighted name, for publication, where he concedes that this was not true.
That he, Mac, and nobody else, had laid the mad miscreant's ghost to rest.
Macnaghten is such a casually misunderstood figure in some secondary sources that writers think that the preface of his memoirs (unavailable on Casebook) claims that he lamented he was six months too late to hunt the Ripper. Actually he claims -- quite falsely by the way -- that this lament was made up by an 'enterprizing' reporter. That it is up to the readers to make up their own minds.
Then Chapter IV makes his meaning of the preface clear.
I was too late to hunt this 'Protean' killer, who was so omnipotent, until he imploded and 'confessed' in deed by killing himself immediately after his 'awful glut', and who had had nearly sunk the Home Sec.
But Mac asserts that he 'in all probability' -- as the man could not be put on trial -- had posthumously identified the Ripper as [the un-named] Druitt, 'some years after', by information received: 'certain facts' which led to a 'conclusion' -- inclining him to a 'belief', not a suspicion or theory.
Embarrassingly the police had no idea that 'Jack' had been dead for years; they had been pursuing a phantom, whilst arresting innocent members of the proletariat.
This quite an admission, going against the expect bias of such a usually unreliable source, though it has to be said that it was also a way to put his thumb, again, in Anderson's eye and debunk the latter's conceited, self-serving claims to have caught the killer alive, but that they were let down by Slavic trash.
It was this excruciating factor, that Druitt was unknown and long deceased, which guided Macnaghten's machinations over the case for a quarter of a century.
That is my 'case disguised' interpretation.
It is a very brief preface in 'Days of My Years' one in which , nevertheless, championship cricket, Jack the Ripper, and an apology for 'inaccuracies' are suggestively juxtaposed.
Either that is a sly in-joke or just another coincidence, like that sloppy Sims' inaccurate 'drowned doctor' profile luckily protected the Druitt's family privacy ...
Let's take your objections, one by one.
I am sure that the Druitt as the Ripper theory was unknown to Sims, probably at least until the publication of Griffith's 1898 work. That still wouldn't mean that he didn't recall a suicide of 1889 that had appeared in the newspapers.
This is a very unconvincing theory because the fictionalising of Druitt begins with Macnaghten, in the official version of his 'Report', through into the backdated 'draft' (or the other way round) and continues into Sims -- obviously from his pal, who also confirmed that the document was a definitive 'Home Office Report', when it was nothing of the kind.
You think that Macnaghten had reason to fear 'the Druitt revelation', but why? He continued to espouse, and push, the idea of the 'drowned doctor' in the Thames and it really wouldn't have taken a genius to do a little research and find that the only Thames suicide candidate fitting the essential criteria was Druitt, who was named as the appropriate suicide in the January 1889 press.
Druitt was a potential tar-baby, politically speaking, because he had been a Tory barrister, from a Tory family, stumbled upon by a Tory MP. Did police really not know about him, or was he tipped off by Tory chiefs that the net was closing. Imagine what Liberal demagogues and Liberal tabloids could do with this humiliating tale -- quite unfairly?
I think you underestimate the partisan-political context and pressures, as do a number of secondary sources.
You write that Druitt could have been easily found.
Yes, but nobody did find Druitt, and in the generation closer to the murders, what would it get you to try and find out?
George Sims had provided the basic profile, or so people thought -- even what 'Jack' looked like: he looked like Sims. You could not publish the murderer's name without heading towards a potential libel suit.
In 1929, Leonard Matters rebooted the entire mystery, as a 'mystery' choosing to dismiss the memoirs of Macnaghten (and Anderson) -- which was his right -- by claiming that no such doctor took his own life by drowning himself in the Thames on Nov 10th 1888. So far as I know this was the first attempt, in the next generation, to try and find the 'drowned doctor' in the public records, and he did not find Druitt.
But then why would you connect a young, barrister-teacher, a working bourgeoisie, from a concerned family, with Sims' affluent, unemployed, middle-aged physician? (in his own memoirs, Macnaghten is so cagey on this point that he drops both 'doctor', which was untrue, and 'drowned', which was true).
Even with the name, Dan Farson and his researchers in 1959 had so much trouble initially finding 'M. J. Druitt' that they wondered if he existed at all?
Macnaghten had set up a shield against Druitt being found and until his own daughter handed the name to a famous TV reporter, this shell game held (as the 1899 'North Country Vicar' puts it so well: 'substantial truth under fictitious form'.)
How can you argue with success?
Macnaghten made demonstrable errors, but you seem to choose selectively what he said and assign deliberate deceit in order to mislead on his part, rather than admit the most likely explanation.
Can you give me an example of where I choose 'selectively'? I'm not saying I don't. Undoubtedly I do, but I cannot think of an example because I am too close to it.
I have tried in my articles, and my unpublished manuscript, to examine every Macnaghten source, and Mac-source-by-proxy, that I can find.
I have argued against my own theory too.
For example, the one element which never alters between the MP article, Mac's Report(s), Griffiths and Sims, one of Mac's 1913 comments, and his 1914 memoirs, is that Druitt killed himself within hours of the Kelly murder.
That this is the 'proof' of his guilt.
If that is what Macnaghten really believed then he was mistaken, seriously so, because Druitt does not qualify for his 'awful glut' criteria, no more than any other suspect.
You are the one who is also selective, and you have every right to be, by excluding Macnaghten's memoirs from several of your books -- brilliant books.
But you make the same choices (eg. this is in and this is out, and this is right and this is wrong) you say I make.
It has always been obvious that Druitt was a retrospective suspect, and was not suspected in 1888/89.
Has it?
That would be news to Cullen, Farson and the early work of Don Rumbelow who all [provisionally] included the McCormick hoax about Albert Backert and therefore claimed that Druitt was a 'police' suspect in 1888 -- because that is what Macnaghten implies in both versions of his 'Report'.
They all downplayed his memoir, the only document by Macnaghten on this matter, under his own knighted name, for publication, where he concedes that this was not true.
That he, Mac, and nobody else, had laid the mad miscreant's ghost to rest.
Macnaghten is such a casually misunderstood figure in some secondary sources that writers think that the preface of his memoirs (unavailable on Casebook) claims that he lamented he was six months too late to hunt the Ripper. Actually he claims -- quite falsely by the way -- that this lament was made up by an 'enterprizing' reporter. That it is up to the readers to make up their own minds.
Then Chapter IV makes his meaning of the preface clear.
I was too late to hunt this 'Protean' killer, who was so omnipotent, until he imploded and 'confessed' in deed by killing himself immediately after his 'awful glut', and who had had nearly sunk the Home Sec.
But Mac asserts that he 'in all probability' -- as the man could not be put on trial -- had posthumously identified the Ripper as [the un-named] Druitt, 'some years after', by information received: 'certain facts' which led to a 'conclusion' -- inclining him to a 'belief', not a suspicion or theory.
Embarrassingly the police had no idea that 'Jack' had been dead for years; they had been pursuing a phantom, whilst arresting innocent members of the proletariat.
This quite an admission, going against the expect bias of such a usually unreliable source, though it has to be said that it was also a way to put his thumb, again, in Anderson's eye and debunk the latter's conceited, self-serving claims to have caught the killer alive, but that they were let down by Slavic trash.
It was this excruciating factor, that Druitt was unknown and long deceased, which guided Macnaghten's machinations over the case for a quarter of a century.
That is my 'case disguised' interpretation.
It is a very brief preface in 'Days of My Years' one in which , nevertheless, championship cricket, Jack the Ripper, and an apology for 'inaccuracies' are suggestively juxtaposed.
Either that is a sly in-joke or just another coincidence, like that sloppy Sims' inaccurate 'drowned doctor' profile luckily protected the Druitt's family privacy ...
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