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I've intended to put this thread up for a few days or so....but Nemo and Rob and Debs have been posting so much on the subject of Grainger, I thought I would cool it until this point in time.
We find nothing at all relative to the February 1895 assault on Alice Graham by Grainger in Spitalfields within the Ultimate Sourcebook...a work which contains the available files related to the Whitechapel Murders. The material most of us have to utilize comes from new trawls and discoveries or from the seminal A to Z by Begg/Fido/Skinner.
I think it's important to point this out because some new researchers to the field of Ripperology may be under the impression that there is some sort of cache of material in the available WM file that other Forums researchers are aware of or well versed in. There isn't. As it stands, there isn't a known and/or separate file on Grainger within the WM files..which were reproduced by Stewart Evans and Keith Skinner in the Ultimate Sourcebook.
It doesn't necessarily mean that there wasn't at one time.
We have evidence of the police involvement...(the "infinite pains", as one contemporary claimed ) into determining Grainger's whereabouts ( May 7th edition of the Pall Mall Gazette...which can be found on the Forums) and an interesting section of the auto-biography of L. Forbes Winslow in 1910 ( Recollections Of Forty Years) which follows :
It seems to me that if the Metropolitan Police had a photograph of Grainger, it would be naturally placed within a file. If the file has gone walkabout, then we're all the poorer for that. Again, there is no guarantee as to the original location of a file or any file on Grainger...but if the police had gone to the length that they evidently did in ascertaining his whereabouts in 1895 for years dating back into the 1880's, it stands to reason there was a file on Grainger which might explain one or two nagging issues....one of which was the date of the prior assault on a woman, of which it has been alleged to be similar to the 1895 stabbing of Alice Graham...and the problem of his actual surname, as well as the position his father maintained in Cork, Ireland.
Does the possibility exist that someone can locate this file ?
We find nothing at all relative to the February 1895 assault on Alice Graham by Grainger in Spitalfields within the Ultimate Sourcebook...a work which contains the available files related to the Whitechapel Murders. The material most of us have to utilize comes from new trawls and discoveries or from the seminal A to Z by Begg/Fido/Skinner.
I think it's important to point this out because some new researchers to the field of Ripperology may be under the impression that there is some sort of cache of material in the available WM file that other Forums researchers are aware of or well versed in. There isn't. As it stands, there isn't a known and/or separate file on Grainger within the WM files..which were reproduced by Stewart Evans and Keith Skinner in the Ultimate Sourcebook.
It doesn't necessarily mean that there wasn't at one time.
We have evidence of the police involvement...(the "infinite pains", as one contemporary claimed ) into determining Grainger's whereabouts ( May 7th edition of the Pall Mall Gazette...which can be found on the Forums) and an interesting section of the auto-biography of L. Forbes Winslow in 1910 ( Recollections Of Forty Years) which follows :
It seems to me that if the Metropolitan Police had a photograph of Grainger, it would be naturally placed within a file. If the file has gone walkabout, then we're all the poorer for that. Again, there is no guarantee as to the original location of a file or any file on Grainger...but if the police had gone to the length that they evidently did in ascertaining his whereabouts in 1895 for years dating back into the 1880's, it stands to reason there was a file on Grainger which might explain one or two nagging issues....one of which was the date of the prior assault on a woman, of which it has been alleged to be similar to the 1895 stabbing of Alice Graham...and the problem of his actual surname, as well as the position his father maintained in Cork, Ireland.
Does the possibility exist that someone can locate this file ?
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