Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed (8 page)

Born in 1830, Nelly was the illegitimate daughter of a beautiful Irish dancer who had no interest in being a mother. She neglected Nelly, she was a heavy drinker, and finally she ran off to Australia to get married when Nelly was twelve. It was at this juncture in Nelly’s life that she suddenly found herself in the guardianship of a wealthy anonymous bachelor who sent her to a school in Neuville-les-Dieppe, on the English Channel in northern France. Over the next six years, he wrote her affectionate letters he cryptically signed “R.”

When Nelly turned eighteen and at last met her guardian, he revealed himself as Richard Sheepshanks, a former ordained priest turned much-acclaimed astronomer. He was witty and dashing—everything a young woman might conjure up in her dreams—and she was intelligent and very pretty. Sheepshanks spoiled Nelly and adored her even more than she adored him. He connected her with the right people and placed her in the proper settings. Soon she found herself going to parties, the theater, and the opera, and traveling abroad. She learned several foreign languages and developed into a cultured young woman, all under the watchful eye of her fairy-tale, doting benefactor, who at some point finally confessed to her that he was her biological father.

Sheepshanks made Nelly promise to destroy all of his letters to her, and it isn’t possible to determine whether his love as a father skirted the passion of a lover. Perhaps she knew very well what he was feeling and chose to deny it, or she could have been trusting and naive. But it must have been a shocking moment for him when Nelly joyfully announced in Paris that she was in love and was engaged to be married to an art student named Oswald Sickert.

Her father’s reaction was an outburst of rage. He wildly accused her of being ungrateful, dishonest, and unfaithful, and he demanded that she break off the engagement immediately. Nelly refused. Her father withdrew his generosity and returned to England. He wrote several bitter letters to her and then died suddenly after a stroke. Nelly never got over his death and blamed herself for it. She destroyed all of his letters except one that she hid inside an old chronometer of his. “Love me, Nelly, love me dearly, as I love you,” he had written.

Richard Sheepshanks left nothing to Nelly. Fortunately, his kind sister, Anne Sheepshanks, came to Nelly’s rescue and gave her a generous allowance that made it possible for her to support a husband and six children. Nelly’s desolate childhood and ultimate betrayal and abandonment by her father would surely have left their scars. Although there is no record of how she felt about her irresponsible dance-hall mother or the seemingly incestuous love of a father who had been little more than a romantic secret most of her young life, one assumes that Nelly would have suffered from deeply felt grief, anger, and shame.

Had Helena Sickert not grown up to be a famous suffragette and political figure who wrote her memoirs, it is safe to say that there would be very little to tell us about the Sickert family and what Walter was like as a boy. Almost every published reference to Walter’s early life can be traced back to Helena’s memoirs. If any other family member left a record, either it no longer exists or it is safely locked up somewhere.

Helena’s description of her mother reveals an intelligent, complex woman who could be fun, charming, and independent and at other times strict, emotionally absent, manipulative, and submissive.

The home Nelly made for her family was an inconsistent one—severe and harsh, then suddenly blooming into games and song. In the evenings, Nelly often sang while Oswald accompanied her on the piano. She sang when she was at her needlework and when she took her children for romps in the woods or to swim. She taught them delightful nonsense songs such as “The Mistletoe Bough” and “She Wore a Wreath of Roses” and the children’s favorite:

I am Jack Jumper the youngest but one
I can play nick-nacks upon my own thumb . . .

From an early age, Walter was a fearless swimmer with a head full of pictures and music. He was blue-eyed with long blond curls, and his mother used to dress him in “Little Lord Fauntleroy velvet suits,” recalled a family friend. Helena, four years younger than Walter, remembers her mother’s endless praises of his “beauty” and “perfect behavior,” the latter of which did not quite mirror his sister’s view. Walter may have been lovely to look at, but he was anything but gentle or sweet. Helena recollected that he was a charming, energetic, and quarrelsome little boy who made friends on command but was indifferent to them once they no longer amused him or served a useful purpose. His mother often found herself having to console Walter’s abandoned playmates and make feeble excuses for her son’s suddenly vanishing from their lives.

Walter’s coldness and self-absorption were obvious at a young age, and one suspects that his mother never considered that her relationship with him might have been a contributing factor to the darkening shades of his character. Nelly may have adored her angelic-looking son, but not necessarily for healthy reasons. It’s possible that he was nothing more than an extension of her own ego, and that her doting behavior was a projection of her own deeply rooted and unrequited needs. She probably treated him the only way she knew how, which was to disconnect from him emotionally the way her mother had from her, and to feel for him the selfish and inappropriate intensity that she had experienced from her father. When Walter was a toddler, an artist named Fuseli insisted on painting the “glorious” little boy. Nelly kept the life-size portrait hanging in her sitting room until the day she died at age ninety-two.

Oswald Sickert’s pretense that he was head of the household was a fraud, and Walter must have known it. A ritual the children witnessed all too often was “Mummy” begging her husband for money while he dug in his purse and demanded, “How much must I give you, extravagant woman?”

“Will fifteen shillings be too much?” she would ask after going down the list of all their household needs.

Oswald would then magnanimously give her money that was hers to begin with, for she diligently turned over her yearly allowance to him. His scripted generosity was always rewarded with his wife’s kisses and expressions of delight, their playacting weirdly re-creating the relationship between her and her omnipotent, controlling father, Richard Sheepshanks. Walter learned his parents’ drama by heart. He would adopt the worst traits of his father and forever seek out women who would pander to his megalomania and every need.

Oswald Sickert was an artist for the humorous German journal
Die Fliegende Blatter,
but there was nothing funny about him at home. He had no patience with children and bonded with none of his own. His daughter, Helena, recalls that he talked only to Walter, who would later claim that he remembered “everything” his father ever told him. There wasn’t much that Walter didn’t learn quickly and remember precisely. As a child in Germany, he taught himself to read and write, and throughout his life his acquaintances would marvel at his photographic recall.

Legend has it that Walter was taking a walk with his father one day and passed by a church where Oswald directed his young son’s attention to a memorial. “There’s a name you will never remember,” Oswald commented as he kept walking. Walter paused to read:

MAHARAJA MEERZARAM
GUAHAHAPAJE RAZ
PAREA MANERAMAPAM
MUCHER

L.C.S.K.

When he was eighty years old, Walter Sickert could still recall the inscription and write it without error.

Oswald did not encourage any of his children to pursue art, but from an early age, Walter could not resist drawing, painting, and making models out of wax. Sickert would claim that what he knew of art theory he had learned from his father, who in the 1870s used to take him to the Royal Academy at Burlington House to study the paintings of the “Old Masters.” Searches through collections of Sickert archives suggest that Oswald may have had a hand in Walter’s development as a draftsman as well. In Islington Public Libraries in north London, there is a collection of sketches that have been attributed to Oswald but are now believed by historians and art experts to include sketches made by the father’s talented son, Walter. It is possible that Oswald critiqued Walter’s early artistic efforts.

Many of the drawings are clearly the efforts of the tentative but gifted hand of someone learning to sketch street scenes, buildings, and figures. But the creative mind guiding the hand is disturbed, violent, and morbid, a mind that takes delight in conjuring up a cauldron of men being boiled alive and demonic characters with long, pointed faces, tails, and evil smiles. A favorite theme is that of soldiers storming castles and battling one another. A knight abducts a buxom maiden and rides off with her as she pleads not to be raped or murdered or both. Sickert could have been describing his own juvenilia when he described an etching made by Karel du Jardin in 1652: It is, he said, a ghastly scene of a “cavalier” on horseback pausing to look at a “stripped” and “hacked” up “corpse,” while troops “with spears and pennants” ride off in the distance.

The most violent amateurish drawing in this collection depicts a bosomy woman in a low-cut dress sitting in a chair, her hands bound behind her, her head thrown back as a right-handed man plunges a knife into the center of her chest at the level of her sternum. She has additional wounds on the left side of her chest, a wound on the left side of her neck—where the carotid artery would be—and possibly a wound below her left eye. Her killer’s only facial feature is a slight smile, and he is dressed in a suit. Opposite this sketch, on the same scrap of rectangular paper, there is a crouching, frightening-looking man who is about to spring on a woman dressed in long skirt, shawl, and bonnet.

While I have found no hint that Oswald Sickert was sexually violent, he could be mean-spirited and stony. His favorite target was his daughter. Helena’s fear of him was so great that she would tremble in his presence. He showed not a whit of sympathy for her while she was bedridden with rheumatic fever for two years. When she recovered at age seven, she was very weak and had poor control of her legs. She dreaded it when her father began forcing her to take walks with him. During these outings, he never spoke. To her, his silence was more frightening than his harsh words.

When she awkwardly ran to keep up with his relentless pace, or if she clumsily bumped into him, “he would,” Helena wrote, “then silently take me by the shoulder and silently turn me into the opposite direction, where I was apt to run into the wall or gutter.” Her mother never intervened on her behalf. Nelly preferred her “pretty little fellows” with their fair hair and sailor suits to her homely, redheaded daughter.

Walter was by far the prettiest of the fair little fellows and the “cleverest.” He usually got his way through manipulation, deception, or charm. He was the leader, and other children did what he demanded, even if Walter’s “games” were unfair or unpleasant. When playing chess, he thought nothing of changing the rules as it suited him, such as making it possible to check the king without consequences. When Walter was a bit older, after the family had moved to England in 1868, he began recruiting friends and siblings to play scenes from Shakespeare, and some of his stage direction was nasty and degrading. In an unpublished draft of Helena’s memoirs, she recalled:

I must have been a child when [Walter] roped us in to rehearse the three witches to his Macbeth in a disused quarry near Newquay, which innocently I thought was really called “The Pit of Achaeron.” Here he drilled us very severely. I was made (being appropriately thin and red-haired) to discard my dress & shoes & stockings, in order to brood over the witches cauldron, or stride around it, regardless of thorns and sharp stones, in my eyes the acrid smoke of scorching seaweed.

This account as well as other telling ones were softened or deleted by the time Helena’s memoirs were published, and were it not for a six-page handwritten remnant that was donated to the National Art Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum, little would be known about Walter’s youthful tendencies. I suspect that much has been censored.

In the Victorian era and the early 1900s it was unheard of to tell all, especially about family. Queen Victoria herself could have burned down one of her palaces with the conflagration she made of her private papers. By the time Helena published her memoirs in 1935, her brother Walter was seventy-five years old and a British icon hailed by young artists as the
roi,
or king. His sister might have had second thoughts about lacerating him in her book. She was one of the few people he was never able to dominate, and the two of them were never close.

It isn’t clear that she even knew quite what to make of him. He was “. . . at once the most fickle and the most constant of creatures . . . unreasonable, but always rationalizing. Utterly neglectful of his friends and relations in normal times and capable of the utmost kindness, generosity and resourcefulness in crises—never bored, except by people.”

Sickert scholars agree that he was a “handful.” He was “brilliant” with a “volatile temperament,” and when he was three, his mother told a family friend that he was “perverse and wayward”—a physically strong boy whose “tenderness” easily turns to “temper.” He was a master of persuasion and, like his father, disdainful of religion. Authority did not exist any more than God did. In school, Walter was energetic and intellectually keen, but he did not abide by rules. Those who have written about his life are vague and elusive about his “irregularities,” as his biographer Denys Sutton put it.

When Sickert was ten, he was “removed” from a boarding school in Reading, where, he would later say, he found the “horrible old schoolmistress” intolerable. He was expelled from University College School for reasons unknown. Around 1870, he attended Bayswater Collegiate School, and for two years, he was a student at Kings College School. In 1878, he made first class honors on his Matriculation exam (the exam all schoolchildren took in their last year), but he did not attend a university.