Jack the Ripper (9 page)

He was very bright and exceptionally hard working, obtaining his first degree (by convention a BA), in 1838. He obtained his MB (Bachelor of Medicine) three years later and was lecturing in
Materia Medica
(Pharmacology) at Guys a year after that. He became MD, in 1846, and for the next three years was Fullerian Professor of Physiology, during which time he became friends with the scientist Michael Faraday.

In 1848, while Europe convulsed with revolution and the Chartists met on Kennington Common in London, William Gull married Susan Lacy, the daughter of an army colonel from Carlisle. The young couple moved to genteel premises in Finsbury Square and Susan gave birth to three children over the next twelve years. Caroline was born in 1851 and William nine years later. The third child, Cameron, probably born in 1858, died in infancy.

By the year of his marriage, Gull had become a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and, by 1869, was a Fellow of the Royal Society. He lectured regularly and was at the cutting edge of research, turning him into an international star in medical circles. He was an expert in myxoedema (thyroid problems), Bright’s disease (a disease of the kidneys), paraplegia and anorexia (it was Gull who first coined the term).

What really made Gull’s name, however, was his treatment of the Prince of Wales, when he suffered from the life-threatening typhus fever in 1871. ‘Bertie’s’ father, Albert, had died of the disease ten years earlier and Victoria was distraught, in case another member of her family should go the same way. Bertie recovered –
The Times
describing his care as ‘nursing so tender, ministry so minute’– and the grateful Queen made Gull one of her four Physicians-in-Ordinary and a baronet. He was now First Baronet Gull of Brook Street, a far more imposing address than Finsbury Square and his coat-of-arms is a true Victorian monstrosity, in-keeping with the poor heraldic artwork of the time.

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, honours continued to be heaped on Gull. He received honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh universities and sat on the General Medical Council. He championed the cause of women in medicine (there were no female doctors in his day) and worked with his usual passion and enthusiasm until 1887, when he suffered a stroke at his Scottish retreat, Urrard House, in Killiecrankie. The cerebral haemorrhage had caused, in medical terms, hemiplegia (paralysis of one side of the body – in Gull’s case, his right) and aphasia (loss of speech). He recovered sufficiently to work in his London practice but knew it was the beginning of the end. ‘One arrow had missed its mark,’ he wrote, ‘but there are more in the quiver.’

He was right. After a third stroke, he died at 12.30 p.m. on 30 January 1890. He was seventy-four. Gull was buried in the family plot, in the parish churchyard at Thorpe-le-Soken, next to his parents. A special train had to be laid on to bring all the mourners from London. Eulogies came from all over the world – the American novelist Mark Twain noted the death in his diary – and on the headstone they carved the lines:

What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with God?

All in all, a well respected gentleman. William Gull’s story can hardly be called conventional. From humble beginnings, he made his mark in medical science and can stand alongside the great doctors – not just of his day but of all time.

Then, eighty years after his death, someone claimed that he was Jack the Ripper.

William Gull belongs to that strand of Ripperology involving the highest in the land. The logic (if it can be called that) runs something like this: a maniac killed a disputed number of women in the East End of London, in 1888, and was never caught. Why not? Because there was a huge cover-up. Who could have orchestrated such a cover-up? It had to be someone in the corridors of power, with supreme clout. Who could that be? Someone closely connected with the Royal Family – the highest in the land.

The proverbial Elephant in the room, in respect of the Whitechapel Murders, is the likelihood that the killer had some medical expertise; evident, not in the killings, but in the post-mortem mutilations and removal of organs. Various police surgeons at the time – Thomas Bond and Frederick Brown were the most impressive – could not believe that a surgeon, having taken the Hippocratic Oath to save life, could carry out such crimes at all. Clearly, they had no notion of the impulses that drive a serial killer and were unaware of the depressingly long list of murderous doctors from William Palmer to Harold Shipman. They were probably right about the mutilations however; a practising surgeon had ample opportunity to cut and remove organs on a daily basis, without resorting to the dingy alleyways of the Abyss.

But of course, in the case of the highest in the land, we are not talking about cold, rational fact, based on historical and empirical research, but a myriad of conspiracy theories. In the world of the mythological Ripper, William Gull fits like a hand in a glove. However much we try to shake it off, the image of the top-hat, cape and medical-bag-carrying monster will not disappear into the (equally irrelevant) London fog. As a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Queen’s doctor, of course, he wore those clothes and he would have carried a medical bag.

Gull’s name first appears linked with the Ripper in
The Criminologist
, in November 1970, in an article written by Dr Thomas Stowell. To be fair to Stowell, his article was called ‘Jack the Ripper – a Solution?’, with the all-important question mark, and it was other Ripperologists who sought to put flesh on the bones and replace healthy scepticism with dogmatic certainty. Stowell had been a friend and medical partner of Dr Theodore Dyke Acland, Gull’s son-in-law. He believed that the Ripper was ‘Eddie’ (Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence), Victoria’s grandson and heir to the throne. There is little doubt that Stowell was more than a little confused. He claimed that Gull had been seen in the Whitechapel area on more than one occasion, and was there shadowing the deranged Eddie, in order to certify him insane prior to his being locked away in an institution. Stowell was eighty-five when he wrote the article, which was heavily amended by the editor, and he died in the same year. Certainly his conversations with criminologist Colin Wilson show a scant regard for the facts. When his article, suggesting a royal connection, appeared, Stowell wrote a retraction to
The Times
, claiming that he was both a Royalist and a loyalist. But the damage had been done; Ripperology, with all its delicious and infuriating red herrings, took off from this point.

William Gull moved from accessory after the fact, to protagonist three years later. Joseph Gorman Sickert, who claimed to be the son of the Victorian painter Walter Sickert, contributed to a BBC drama documentary and his story was seized upon by journalist, Stephen Knight in what is still, probably, the best known book on the case –
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
.

In a long (and unbelievable) story cut short, Knight asserted that Eddie had married a Catholic shopgirl (Annie Elizabeth Crook) and her friends, led by Mary Kelly, tried to blackmail the government to keep the scandal secret. A worried Prime Minister (Lord Salisbury), anxious to save the Royal Family’s face, and to prevent a potential collapse of government, called in his old Freemason friend, William Gull, to silence Kelly and co. in any way he saw fit. Because Gull had medical training, he could kill easily with a surgeon’s knife and he left Masonic ritual mutilations as a warning to others. To explain how an eminent physician could track down the women concerned, find his way around Whitechapel and get away unobserved, Sickert and Knight brought in a coachman, John Netley. Netley not only drove the doctor to the murder sites, but allowed the killings to take place in his cab. With Walter Sickert – who knew Mary Kelly personally – as lookout (Joseph Sickert claimed that this was actually Robert Anderson, head of the CID), the Ripper became not one man, but three. All with the aim to conceal the terrible secret of the clandestine marriage, and the birth of a daughter (Alice Crook) who, it could be argued, should have become Queen of England.

The Spiritualist medium, Robert James Lees.

Further ‘evidence’ against Gull comes from a rather tortuous source. Articles began to appear in various American newspapers, including the
Chicago Sunday Times Herald
in April 1895, claiming that the Ripper was an eminent London doctor. The information came from tittle-tattle from Dr Benjamin Howard, an American who had been working in London, and he had told the story to a prominent San Francisco citizen, William Greer Harrison. Although the doctor was unnamed, there were sufficient links with Guys Hospital – and the vivisectionist lobby, of which Gull was a member – for the well-informed to draw obvious conclusions. Even though Howard wrote a strenuous denial, via the
People
in January1896, to the effect that he had never discussed Jack the Ripper with anyone and knew no more than the sketchy newspaper reports back in 1888, the public were hooked.

The same series of articles concerned the spiritualist medium Robert James Lees, who claimed to have offered his services to both the City and Metropolitan Police in early October, 1888. Lees’ story was that whilst riding on a bus, he had the strongest sensation that he was sitting near the Ripper. He followed his suspect to an elegant house in the West End (later said to be Brook Street), and this led to police questioning the inhabitants. Lees’ fellow traveller turned out to be William Gull, who had recently suffered from serious bouts of memory loss. Over a period of time, the physician’s wife had come to recognise her husband’s increasingly violent mood swings and had become so afraid of him that she had locked herself, and her children, in a room in the house. At one point, she discovered blood on her husband’s shirt for which he could not account. A court of inquiry was held by Gull’s fellow doctors (or Masons, or both, depending on which subsequent version of the tale you read) and, convinced of his guilt, they sentenced him to an asylum under the pseudonym ‘Thomas Mason 124’. The word was put out that Gull had died, but the coffin contained either another body entirely or a pile of rocks, depending on how far down the conspiratorial path you want to go.

Nothing is more delicious to a researcher, especially of conspiracy theories, than to stumble upon a collection of papers which blow the lid off an accepted body of evidence. When Frank Spiering wrote
Prince Jack
in 1978, some of the material for the book came from the Academy of Medicine Library, in New York. This was a straight, 1896, reprint of the memoirs that had appeared two years earlier, written by Dr Acland, Gull’s son-in-law. What intrigued Spiering was the sheaf of 120 handwritten pages – apparently in Gull’s handwriting – which contained the extraordinary information that Gull had told the Prince of Wales that his son, Eddie, was dying from tertiary syphilis. Even more bizarre was the claim that Gull had hypnotised Eddie, and the heir to the throne had confessed to the Whitechapel Murders. He had become aroused watching butchers at work in Aldgate High Street, and had taken a knife to commit the crimes from the horse slaughterers in Buck’s Row (technically, the firm of Harrison in Winthrop Street). The Prince complained of headaches and was very talkative, showing signs of slight delirium. He also had a leather apron in his possession, a positive link to the notion of the butcher and one of the most famous red herrings in the entire Ripper case. In this version of the tale, of course, the Ripper is not Gull, but Eddie, and once again the Queen’s physician assumes the role of accessory after the fact.

Scratching around for circumstantial evidence, various commentators have hit upon ‘the grape theory’, which has resurfaced in more than one movie about Jack. In one of these, Gull uses poisoned grapes to lull his victims into a stupor before killing and mutilating them in his coach. According to Stephen Knight, Gull was a great believer in grapes as refreshment when tired, but the idea that he constantly carried a bunch with him seems a little unlikely. Poison of course is pre-eminently the doctor’s murder weapon, in fact as well as fiction, so this makes sense. In fact, it makes no sense at all. The publicity-seeking grocer, Matthew Packer, whose shop was close to Dutfield’s Yard in Berner Street, claimed to have sold a bunch of grapes to a man accompanying Liz Stride, shortly before she was murdered. Witnesses at the scene later – Louis Diemschutz, Isaac Kozebrodski, Fanny Mortimer and Eva Harstein – all claimed to have seen a grape stem in or near the dead woman’s hand. The police and doctors, who were called to Dutfield’s Yard (men trained to be observant), saw nothing of the kind, only the cachous (sweets) in Liz Stride’s left hand. At the inquest, Drs Bagster-Phillips and Blackwell swore that there were no grapes at the crime scene and none in the stomach of the deceased. Even if both these doctors were wrong, of course, it does not remotely point a finger at Gull, or anyone else in the medical profession. We might as well point the finger at the story-changing Matthew Packer.