Jack the Ripper (17 page)

And so began the instinctive hunt for meaning. Out of the jigsaw pieces of his victims, the task of assembling the image of the Ripper commenced, haphazard, fumbling. The disjunction of this aimless mystery offended logic, and solutions were sought everywhere – the doctor bent on revenge, the sociopathic Russian agent, perhaps even the social reformer pushing the envelope of charity. And then, in 1962, with rival administrations on separate continents guaranteeing each other’s destruction, with missiles hauling slowly, slowly towards Cuba, with the world never more than minutes away from ruin, another suspect was named – the one-time heir presumptive to the British throne.

Of course, every society gets the kind of conspiracy theories it deserves, but the identification of Prince Albert Victor with Jack the Ripper proved popular, informing Ripperology until the centenary of the murders. This anniversary was more-or-less coincident with the end of the Cold War and, with global nuclear efforts scaled back in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union, and with the setting back of the hands of the apocalyptic clock, there came a lifting of the paranoid burden. Prince Albert Victor dropped from the radar at the same time, his candidacy a monument to more fearful times, to the crooked potential of absolutism and imperialism, to the banished spectre of the annihilation of the masses by their leaders. Meaningful in its day, the Royal Ripper Theory was an unusual cultural victim of the political and social change of the late 1980s and early 1990s – like the systems it imitated, it became obsolete almost overnight, and was swept away, to be replaced by the information age, a generally untrammelled plurality of opinion, and widespread and remote digital access to data which were once much less readily available.

We are dealing with a relic, then; let us trace its provenance. Prince Albert Victor was born in 1864, the first son and natural heir of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, and Alexandra, Princess of Wales; upon the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, Albert Edward would become King Edward VII. At the time of his birth, therefore, little Albert Victor was second in line to the throne of the world’s greatest empire, and it alarmed the establishment to discover, as they soon did, that he seemed generally to resist his tutors’ attempts to educate him. He was perceived to be intellectually frigid, and the full range of disappointed, Gradgrindian adjectives was deployed to explain his lack of progress – listless, dull, dormant, the Prince made for a poor student. As a result, he was put to sea aboard the HMS
Bacchante
, returning to England three years later with, perhaps, a little more practical wisdom and, more certainly, a Japanese tattoo. He went up to Cambridge in spite of his apparent weaknesses, attending Trinity College, where, it is said, he was deferentially excused from having to run in the intellectual rat-race which went on around him.

This, however, is not to say that Eddy – as he was called by his family – had failed entirely to integrate into Cambridge’s social whirl. On the contrary, rumours of sexual immorality and other unbefitting behaviour leaked back to the palace: while his intellect remained stubbornly undernourished, even in Trinity’s hothouse learning environment, his libido and his capacity for drink seemed almost to have grown to compensate. Nature, then as now, abhorred a vacuum, but Eddy’s concerned entourage were determined to map the sharp lines of discipline onto the virgin territory of his mercurial conscience. Another spell in the military ensued – Eddy chose his regiment, some said, because he liked the look of the uniform. His effete style bolstered allegations of homosexuality; his craning neck, impeccably waxed moustache and unusually long arms made him a curious physical specimen. This was the man who, theoretically, was one day to become King – when Eddy left Cambridge in 1885, his grandmother, the Queen, was well into her sixties, his father was in his forties, and the future of this aging monarchy appeared, startlingly, to rest in the hands of this impish, feminine gadabout.

Perhaps in spite of his own sexual preferences, concerted efforts were now made to find Eddy a wife whose strengths would lock, enzyme-like, into the erratic profile of his own weaknesses. Princess Mary of Teck was the lady identified, but, with the marriage only six weeks away, Eddy died at Sandringham, aged twenty-eight, on 14 January 1892. He had contracted a severe dose of influenza, which was then sweeping the court, and this led on into a fatal pneumonia. The grief of his much-tested family was genuine; shock was felt across the country, and transmitted by telegraph wire to the most far-flung parts of the empire; in London, Sir Edward Bradford, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, ordered his men into mourning, from which they would not emerge until 26 February. Elsewhere, colder – perhaps shrewder – assessments marked the elevation of Eddy’s more capable brother George to the position of heir presumptive as ‘a merciful act of providence’. Eddy’s worrying peccadilloes no longer threatened to write themselves into the history of the monarchy and, were it not for the long memories of Ripperologists, he would have been very much forgotten.

But had the capital’s police mourned a man whom, three and a half years earlier, they were desperate to apprehend? Was Eddy – in the moments between his bouts of drinking and, as rumour had it, his convulsions of homosexual debauchery – the greatest criminal of his generation, ripping female prostitutes to shreds on the dismal streets of Whitechapel? In 1962, Phillippe Jullien alleged that he was, acting, he said, in concert with the Duke of Bedford, a man who had died a year to the day before Eddy, shooting himself through the heart during a spell of madness. Little attention seems to have been paid to Jullien’s allegation upon its publication, but, the other side of the Summer of Love, the dark charge against Eddy was laid for a second time. This time, the mouthpiece of the allegations was one Dr Thomas Stowell, a surgeon of Southampton, who published an article in the periodical
The Criminologist
hinting strongly at Eddy’s guilt. Stowell had
faux
-discreetly attempted to protect his suspect’s identity under the pseudonym of ‘S’, but the Devil was, as ever, discernible in the details.

Stowell’s theory was, broadly, this: Eddy, he supposed, had contracted syphilis while on his global jaunt, and, in its tertiary phase, the disease had propelled the Prince into a murderous insanity. Creeping around the East End through the gruesome autumn months of 1888, he had been responsible for the whole sequence of Ripper killings, but Eddy found himself arrested shortly after the awful murder and disfigurement of Catherine Eddowes, and, under a veil of secrecy, he was sent to an asylum. From here he soon escaped, returning (rather daringly) to London for his
pièce de résistance
, the wholesale obliteration of Mary Jane Kelly. Recaptured and returned to the asylum, Eddy’s subsequent care was delegated to Sir William Gull, the Queen’s Physician-in-Ordinary. A man on the wrong side of a debilitating stroke, Gull was now asked to take up the most extraordinary of tasks: the rehabilitation of Jack the Ripper. In fact, he went about the job so competently that Eddy – shot to the moon, mentally, while his homicidal instincts held him in their thrall – was able to carry out perfunctory official duties over the next few years. Stowell, though, examining the matter in hindsight, detected telltale signs of physical and emotional deterioration in Eddy’s shortening public speeches.

In addition, said Stowell, a carefully-managed smokescreen had kicked in. The establishment rattled out a disorienting battery of cover stories, offering false leads to the curious and red herrings to the rumourmonger. Behind the bluster, however, Stowell felt that he had seen the realm-threatening truth – and there were diaries, Gull’s among them, which, he said, testified to Eddy’s murders. These diaries, however, failed to manifest themselves quite as readily as Stowell may have liked – he had had connections once, and, metaphorically at least, the keys to the archive boxes of the Gull family (and to those of their co-medics and relations, the Aclands), but it appears that he relied chiefly on memory when he recalled Sir William’s daughter referring to an episode in which the venerable Dr Gull told the future King Edward VII that his son, Eddy, was dying of syphilis of the brain. In Stowell’s defence, he seems to have told a broadly similar story to the true crime writer Colin Wilson in the early 1960s – in retrospect, Wilson wondered whether Stowell had secretly wanted him to publish the tale. But perhaps Stowell was no better than partially reliable – when, in 1970, he finally came to place his article with
The Criminologist
, Stowell entitled it ‘Jack the Ripper – A Solution?’ The question mark may have represented the natural humility of a man aware that he had an astounding story to tell; on the other hand, the octogenarian Stowell may have found himself caught on the horns of doubt. Could he be certain? His recollection of the conversation with Caroline Acland, Gull’s daughter, dated back, probably, to the 1930s.

After publication, it took almost no time to debunk the theory, but the episode was an irregular one, with, supposing that one was looking for them, potential conspiracy building quickly upon conspiracy.
The Times
, getting hold of the story in its edition of 4 November 1970, described the tale as a ‘mischievous calumny’, and reported that Buckingham Palace had decided to take the moral high ground, withholding its scorn for Stowell’s revelations in a superior display of tight-lipped, royal disdain. The same article also noted that the newspaper’s own records placed Eddy – free and apparently unsought by anyone – at Balmoral on 1 October 1888, a day after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.

Stowell responded to this knockback with admirable spirit, writing to the editor of
The Times
on 5 November 1970 to state that he had ‘at no time associated His Royal Highness, the late Duke of Clarence [part of Eddy’s official title from 1890 onwards] with the Whitechapel murderer.’ Indeed, Stowell now wrote that he did not believe that the killer was royal at all – his opinion was, specifically, that the murderer was ‘a scion of a noble family’. He therefore rejected the idea that Eddy’s incontrovertible presence at Balmoral was fatal to his theory, and signed himself away with an artless, dactylic flourish, ‘a loyalist and a Royalist’. This was game stuff, but the horse had very much bolted, and Stowell’s retractions were untenable, absurd. It seemed as if he no longer wished to lie in the bed he had made for himself, but – strange to tell – he would not have to. By the time his letter was published on 9 November, Stowell was dead, and his papers on the case were swiftly destroyed. Had he said too much?

Notwithstanding the curious timing of these events, however, the manner of Stowell’s death was uncontroversial; quite naturally, he was not silenced for his unusual claims, and, after his demise, Stowell’s son, Eldon, burned his father’s file on Jack the Ripper, having first checked that there was nothing inside it worth keeping. This act was lamented in some quarters, but Eldon professed himself uninterested in the mystery. He did not even seem to know – and less to care – why his father’s name had recently been mentioned in connection with the Ripper. So Eldon was not, after all, a secret government agent conspiring to suppress his father’s dangerous, state-breaking knowledge, but merely a son clearing out his deceased father’s house. On an individual level, this was all perfectly unremarkable, if slightly sad.

Thomas Stowell’s true legacy to Ripperology, however, would not disappear into the flames quite as quickly as did his file. For the next twenty years, give or take, the hunt for the Whitechapel murderer would be a merry-go-round of conspiracy, subterfuge, cover-up and misinformation, and, surprisingly often considering the
prima facie
problems of his candidacy, Eddy would be, however paradoxically, at the centre of the off-centre thought processes of Jack the Ripper’s pursuers.

In 1972, Michel Harrison, an author and Sherlock Holmes enthusiast, subjected the case against Eddy to further, book-length, scrutiny. In the manner of the subject of his passion, Harrison embarked on his enquiries fuelled by arch scepticism and Aristotelian logic – he was unable to access the official papers relating to Eddy’s movements in the last months of 1888, but, working from other sources, he developed a vision of the Prince which saw him, now, not as the Ripper, but as the dull, probably unknowing, acolyte of the Ripper. Where Eddy had once stood, silhouetted against Whitechapel’s dimly lamp-lit streets, Harrison now sketched in J.K. Stephen, a poet of ugly, misogynistic sentiment who had, in fact, tutored Eddy at Cambridge. A closer inspection of Harrison’s reasoning, however, betrayed a flaw, a loophole through which Stowell’s felonious re-invention of Eddy now tore, belying his biographer’s attempts to exonerate him. Without the official documents to guide him through the period of the so-called canonical murders of 1888, Harrison was forced to assume that Eddy’s demonstrable unavailability at the time of the killing of a
non
-canonical victim – Alice McKenzie, in 1889 – ruled him out, by extension, of complicity in the whole series of Ripper crimes. The Victorian police, though, had found it difficult to associate McKenzie’s death with those of the previous year; they had postulated a separate assailant in her unRipperesque case, and so, in spite of Harrison’s intentions, it appeared that Eddy was not yet rendered free from popular suspicion.

Eddy’s candidacy had, by now, developed a rather peculiar form of resilience; the bubble of the Royal Ripper Theory had survived Harrison’s attempts to puncture it, and, back in the world of Ripperological dreams, the mad urge to implicate the Prince simply grew stronger. Now, Eddy was up to everything and anything, some of it grounded in something resembling fact, some of it brazenly fictitious. His association with the Cleveland Street Scandal – an unedifying rent-boy saga, with Eddy playing a walk-on role, if the rumours were to be believed – put him into theoretical contact with all manner of rogues, but the allegations of his involvement may have arisen with the wholly unreliable solicitor, Arthur Newton, then attempting to wriggle out of (possibly trumped-up) charges of professional misconduct. Meanwhile, a more laid-back, mid-seventies interpretation of Eddy’s sexuality suggested that he may, after all, have had an eye for the ladies, and another story emerged from questionable sources, this one describing an illicit marriage, an illegitimate child, the woozy mesmerism of Freemasonry, and a full-blown rearguard action on the part of the establishment. The crux of this revised Royal Conspiracy was that, in executing its grand, defensive plan, the establishment had apparently seen fit to tactically murder and mutilate a handful of Whitechapel prostitutes – fallen women who, counterintuitive though it may have seemed, were in possession of certain powder-keg information. The potential explosion was, once again, apparently big enough to bring down an empire.