The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors (58 page)

88. Most Sherlockian scholars agree that there was not one page named Billy, but two. The first was mentioned in
The Valley of Fear
(which Baring-Gould dates as having taken place in January 1888 and Christopher Morley dates a year later); the second, not until some years later, in
The Problem of Thor Bridge
(circa October 1900) and
The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone
(the summer of 1903, according to Baring-Gould). We know that the second Billy was “young but very wise and tactful.” We are told nothing at all about the first in any of Watson’s previous writings.

89. Wrote Watson in his only other reference to Johnson: “With the glamour of his two convictions upon him, he had the entree of every nightclub, doss-house and gambling-den in the town, and his quick observation and active brain made him an ideal agent for gaining information. Had he been a “nark” of the police, he would soon have been exposed, but as he dealt with cases which never came directly into the courts, his activities were never realized by his companions.” (See
The Illustrious Client
.)

90. Rhyming slang, widely spoken in the East End, was native to the cockney stronghold of Cheapside, and for years it was employed as almost a “secret” language by those who lived and worked within its environs, it being believed that only those “born within the sound of Bow Bells,” as the saying went (i.e., the bells of the church of St. Mary-le-Bow), were genuine cockneys and were therefore capable of speaking or understanding it. But over time its use was adopted by non-cockneys as well, becoming a part of the speech of all of London — a colorful jargon of the streets made up of foreign as well as of native words and expressions, doggerel to the uninitiated, but having rich, humorous (and often scatological) meaning to those familiar with it.

91. bushel o’ coke — man (bloke)

clubs n’ sticks — detectives (dicks)

flag unfurled — man of the world (i.e., of the upper class)

giggle stick — (self-explanatory)

92. “Sweeney” — short for “Sweeney Todd,” cockney rhyming slang for the “flying squad” of the Metropolitan Police force, a sort of SWAT team of its day. Sweeney Todd, of course, was the notorious “demon barber” of Fleet Street.

93. Shinwell must have been referring to the now-famed Tower Bridge, which was completed in 1894.

94. There is no longer a Dorset Street (not to be confused with the one near Baker Street) in Spitalfields, having been bulldozed out of existence. In its day it vied with the notorious Ratcliffe Highway for the distinction of being the most dangerous street in all of London. People of the area called it “do-as-you-please street,” for police constables were rarely in evidence, being afraid to patrol it alone.

95. Warren had submitted his resignation to the Home Secretary the previous day, and it was promptly accepted without even a pretense of the customary “regret.” Curiously, when news of the resignation became known among members of the
department, Warren was visited by a deputation of officers, who informed him, in all sincerity, that “he carried with him the respect and admiration of every man in the force.” Eventually returning to active duty with the army, he was to serve in South Africa once again (not without controversy) in command of an infantry division during the Boer War.

96. The pub is still in existence, though in a considerably altered state and with a different name. It is now called The Jack the Ripper.

97. There is some disagreement as to where Hutchinson was standing when he encountered Mary Kelly that night. Some accounts say it was at the corner of Thrawl Street, some say it was near Flower and Dean Street, a short distance away.

98. Dr. George Bagster-Phillips, a police surgeon with twenty years’ experience, was more intimately involved with the Ripper murders than any other member of the medical profession, having examined four of the five acknowledged victims (Chapman, Eddowes, Stride, and Kelly).

99. Dr. Thomas Bond, consulting surgeon to “A” Division of the City Police (as well as to the Great Western Railway), who conducted his own postmortem of Mary Jane Kelly, was of the opinion that “one or two o’clock in the morning would be the probable time of the murder.” He disagreed with Bagster-Phillips on another important point: Bagster-Phillips, like others, felt the murderer displayed “considerable” knowledge of anatomy and no small amount of surgical skill. Bond, who studied the autopsy notes of all of the victims, and personally examined two of them, was to write: “In each case the mutilation was implicated by a person who had no scientific or anatomical knowledge. In my opinion, he does not even possess the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterman or any person accustomed to cutting up dead animals.”

100. That proved to be the case. The missing key, as well as the method used to bolt and unbolt the door, was subsequently confirmed by one Joseph Barnett, a porter at the nearby Spitalfields Market, who had been living with Mary Jane Kelly up until ten days before her murder.

101. The vast network of underground tunnels, passageways, sewers, and pipelines that threads its way beneath the streets of London goes back to Roman times in many cases. There are even underground rivers (the Fleet River stills runs beneath
Fleet Street, for example), and cesspools of ancient and malodorous provenance, which hover not always deeply beneath the surface, and sometimes make their presence known most inconveniently. (A particularly fetid sewer ran directly under the windows of the Houses of Parliament, as M.P.s discovered to their acute distress during the “Great Stink” of 1858. The sewer in question was the River Thames.)

The first of London’s underground rail lines, a marvel of the age, opened to the public in 1863, and by 1875 a joint line of the Metropolitan Railway had been extended to Bishopsgate, while a further joint line was opened to Whitechapel Road in 1884. These were steam-driven, the engines being fitted with special smoke traps and condensers to keep pollution in the tunnels to a minimum.

102. See
A Case of Identity
.

103. See
The Illustrious Client
.

104. The murder actually took place within the boundaries of the Spitalfields district, which did not have its own coroner but came under the jurisdiction of Whitechapel’s, Dr. Wynne Baxter.

105. There is a body of suggestive evidence that the hunt for the Ripper during this period was in reality a cursory affair that was not intended to obtain results. The official files apparently lack the same volume of paperwork for this period — investigatory reports and the like — that had earlier been submitted by detectives assigned to the case, suggesting that serious police activity simply stopped.

Most meaningfully, a sharp fall-off in reports filed by Inspector Abberline raises a suspicion that if there was a cover-up, he, quite possibly, was involved in it.

106. Sir William Gull, Bart., Physician Extraordinary to the Queen and Physician in Ordinary to the Prince of Wales and royal family, was noted for his skills as a diagnostician, specializing in paraplegia, diseases of the spinal cord and “abscesses of the brain.” He was credited with saving the life of the Prince of Wales in 1871 (receiving his baronetage as a result), when the latter was gravely ill with typhoid. Gull suffered the first of three strokes in 1887 and died in January 1890 at the age of 73.

107. It is a matter of record that on the morning of Saturday, the 10th, the cabinet was summoned to 10 Downing Street in emergency session to discuss the Ripper murders and the wave of fear that had descended upon the capital because of them.

108. Holmes was missing from May 1891 to April 1894 (a period known as “The Great Hiatus” among Sherlockian scholars) and at first was indeed thought to be dead, carried to his death over the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland by the infamous Professor James Moriarty (see
The Final Problem
). Upon his startling reappearance on April 5, 1894, the public was told that those “missing” three years were actually spent traveling the world (under the assumed name of Sigerson) to such exotic places as Tibet and Persia, Mecca and Khartoum (See
The Adventure of the Empty House
). But the story has always been looked upon with more than a modicum of suspicion, and these new disclosures of Watson’s — or rather the suspicious gaps in his notes that suggest new disclosures were made and then suppressed — lead one to question whether Holmes was in Switzerland at all in May 1891. The evidence, though incomplete, strongly suggests what has always been widely conjectured, that it was all mere subterfuge, an effort to deceive the public to prevent it from knowing Holmes’s true whereabouts during this period and the actual reason for his absence.

109. This was the opinion expressed in
The Saturday Review
. Not all periodicals were that complimentary in their obituaries of Churchill.
The Outlook
said he represented “the coarser qualities of his race,” while
The National Review
called him “swift and dangerous when hard pressed” and “reckless beyond all men’s reckoning.”

110. Watson, by most estimates, married Mary Morstan in May 1889, at which time he took up residence and established a medical practice in London’s Paddington district. But the course of Watson’s married life has confounded scholars almost as much as his wartime injury(ies). While he could not possibly have met Miss Morstan earlier than July 1888 (see
The Sign of the Four
), there is evidence that he was already a married man in March of that year, a full four months earlier (see
A Scandal in Bohemia
), and there is an implication that he was married as early as September 1887 (see
The Five Orange Pips
). It would seem, then, that Miss Morstan was his second wife and that the period of mourning between his two marriages was mercifully brief.

But it gets more complex: Sadly, all indications are that the “second” Mrs. Watson (née Morstan) died sometime between 1891 and 1894 (see
The Adventure of the Empty House
), yet we find that the doctor is with wife as late as 1903 (see
The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier
), leaving us with no alternative but to conclude that he was married no fewer than
three
times, in each case, curiously, to a woman named Mary.

While we cannot be sure what his married state was when this discussion took place with Holmes in January 1895, it is certain he was not residing in Baker Street at the time but occupied a residence in Kensington, where he had a practice that was “small” (see
The Norwood Builder
) and “never very absorbing” (see
The Red-Headed League
).

111. The day was forever fixed in Watson’s
faulty
memory, for here we come upon yet another of his calendrical inconsistencies. Holmes, as we have already seen, was by all accounts (including at least two of Watson’s own), out of the country when Prince Eddy died on January 14, 1892, and could have had no discussion of
any
kind with Watson (see Note 108 above). As is usual with Watson’s often muddled dating of things, there is no accounting for the discrepancy.

112. The prince (who had been created Duke of Clarence and Avondale a year earlier) had become engaged, in December 1891, to one of his German second cousins, Princess May of Teck. Unquestionably it was an arranged affair. Wrote Ponsonby, Queen Victoria’s secretary: “I am told he don’t care for Princess May of Teck, and she appears to be too proud to take the trouble of running after him, for which I rather admire her.”

Knollys, the Prince of Wales’s private secretary, wrote to Ponsonby: “I think the preliminaries are now pretty well settled, but do you suppose Princess May will make any resistance? I do not anticipate any real opposition on Prince Eddy’s part if he is properly managed and is told he
must
do it — that is, for the good of the country, etc. etc.”

After Eddy’s death, Princess May, who was nothing if not dutiful, allowed herself to be married off to his younger brother, who in time became King George V, while she became Queen Mary. She is best remembered as Britain’s wartime Queen Dowager, the mother of both Edward VIII, who was to abdicate and marry a twice-divorced commoner, becoming the Duke of Windsor, and George VI, the father of the current queen, Elizabeth II. Highly popular among the English people (she insisted upon remaining in London during the worst of the bombing in World War II), Queen Mary died in 1953 at the age of 86.

113. The police became interested in number 19 Cleveland Street in the summer of 1889, when it was noticed that the house was frequented not only by certain adult male members of the aristocracy but by an unusual number of delivery boys and telegraph messengers, who appeared to be flourishing a good deal more spending money than their meager wages would justify. Among those named in the scandal was Lord Arthur Somerset, Extra Equerry and Superintendent of the Stables to the Prince of Wales, who was forced to flee the country to avoid prosecution. Prince Albert Victor’s name was kept out of it, but only just, by accommodating members of the police raiding party. The officer in charge of the case for Scotland Yard, coincidentally, was Inspector Frederick Abberline.

114. The suggestion here, the hint that Prince Albert Victor might have been done away with, is not as absurd as some might think. There was a subsequent event in England’s royal family that removes the idea from the realm of the totally unbelievable and places it into the category of the not entirely impossible: It is a matter of historical record that in 1936, when Albert Victor’s brother, King George V, was lying incurably ill, his death was hastened by lethal injections of morphine and cocaine secretly administered by the royal physician. (See
The Sun
, November 27, 1986.)

115. James Kenneth Stephen entered a Northampton lunatic asylum in November 1891 and died there on February 3, 1892, just twenty days after hearing of the death of his former friend, Prince Albert Victor. It is said that he refused all nourishment and starved himself to death.

116. Blunders on his part, Holmes once said, “were a more common occurrence than anyone would think.” (See
Silver Blaze
.) “I have been beaten four times,” he said on another occasion. “Three times by men, and once by a woman.” (See T
he Five Orange Pips
.)