Jack the Ripper: The Secret Police Files (37 page)

In the interim period I obtained a copy of the thesis written by Lindsay Clutterbuck, which I studied and read meticulously. In Clutterbuck’s thesis he clearly states he had been given special permission to access the ledgers and register. He states he decided to use and publish the names of the informants as they were recorded in the primary documents, however he accepts that these names may or may not have been totally accurate, having regard to the fact that informants do not always use their correct names and equally police officers also refer to their informants by secondary names or nicknames.

Clutterbuck at the time he wrote his thesis was a serving Special Branch officer of the rank of Detective Chief Inspector working in the Specialist Operations Department at New Scotland Yard where he undertook a variety of roles relating to counterterrorism. For three years he was head of the MPS unit responsible for national and London-wide counterterrorism policy and strategy. He without a doubt would have known about the Metropolitan Police policy on informants. He obviously thought it did not apply to informants going back 125 years. Nor would it seem his superiors who obviously gave him permission to examine and then extract and publish many extracts and details of informants.

However, in any event all the informants and other names contained in the ledgers have been dead for many years and on looking at the long periods that a large number of them spent working for the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, Clutterbuck believes it is quite possible that any belated recognition of their services may well have met with their approval. In the thesis he describes the ledgers as follows:

Special account box volumes of 1 to 3

There are three special account books each measuring 160 millimetres by 200 millimetres and printed into five columns per page. They detail, amongst other items what appears to be the cash amounts paid out to individual informants. In all, approximately 6000 individual entries span a total of the 24 years from 1888 to 1912
.

Book one which is headed “
special”
account and runs from February 1, 1888 to December 5, 1894
.

Book two, with no heading commences on December 12, 1894 and finishes on December 25, 1901
.

Book three again with no heading covers the years from January 1, 1902 to March 27, 1912
.

The Chief Constable’s register is a bound ledger measuring 27 centimetres by 38 centimetres by six centimetres weighing 4 kg. The front cover is embossed with the words “
crime department – special branch”
and the first page bears the stamp “
criminal investigation department –chief constable’s office – SPECIAL”
with the handwritten date of 20.4.88 inserted into its centre. It appears to serve at several functions and each page is divided into four columns, each headed respectively;

NAME

SUBJECT

REFERENCE TO CORRESPONDENCE FOLIO

REFERENCE TO CORRESPONDENCE IN REGISTER

At the rear of the book, two pages detail anonymous letters sent to the special branch. A further six pages contain references to extract from the press, ranging from the radical to the establishment, from within Great Britain and abroad. However, it is the remainder of the book that contains the most significant research material in relation to the Victorian special branch and also the Whitechapel murders
.

It is organized into alphabetical cuts, with each letter further divided into sub cuts headed A, E, I, O, U. At 35 lines a page there is a minimum of 1000 entries per letter of the alphabet, plus “Mc” and the use of the spare capacity at the back for overflow. Very few pages are not filled completely, giving a total of up to 30,000, one line entries
.

A number in the “
reference to correspondence”
column always in the format of a fraction e.g. 3622/2 accompanies each one line entry. Another number, usually between one and 400 e.g. 294 appears in the “
Folio in correspondence register”
column
.

Overall the ledger appears to have been designed to operate on three levels
.

As a register for correspondence and information sent to special branch by the rest of the Metropolitan Police and other police forces plus the home office other government departments, and members of the public. In addition to requests for information and documents not only from provincial police forces in England, but also from The USA, South Africa and Australia
.

As an index to the reports submitted by its own officers
.

As a nominal and subject index of people and topics mentioned as in 1 and 2 above
.

The ledger also gives an insight as to how Special Branch set up their ports screening system enabling them to identify Irishmen and Irish Americans entering the UK. Special Branch also took a great interest in screening and interrogating cattlemen who arrived on cattle boats. From entries in the ledger it would seem suspect Irishmen would attempt to enter the UK on these boats.

In his thesis Clutterbuck makes reference to two entries in the ledger relating to the Whitechapel murders and Jack the Ripper. One is a named person suspected of being Jack the Ripper. I was unable to confirm as to whether these are the same two entries I have previously referred to...

Although Clutterbuck’s thesis is formulated around the workings of Special Branch he does pass comments in relation to certain police officers who have previously been mentioned in connection with the Whitechapel murders, these being Inspector Abberline, Chief Inspector Littlechild, Sir Robert Anderson, and James Monro all of whom in later years all suggested they knew the identity of Jack the Ripper in their respective memoirs or letters, or interviews with the press.

Clutterbuck specifically mentions Monro and refers to a sentence in a memorandum from the Home Secretary Henry Matthews sent in 1888 to his Private Secretary Evelyn Ruggles-Brise that read: “
Stimulate the Police about the Whitechapel murders. Monro might be willing to give a hint to the CID people if necessary.”
This memo seemed to suggest that Monro at the time knew more about the possible identity of Jack the Ripper than his role as “
secret agent”
for the home office allowed him to reveal to the detectives investigating the murders. Clutterbuck states in his thesis that the Chief Constable’s register contains several intriguing references to at least support the contention that “
special”
had more than a passing interest in Jack the Ripper, but none to corroborate Francis Tumblety the new contemporary suspect that Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey had put forward in their book “
The Lodger”
(1995). Conversely he states that their conclusion (Evans and Gainey) that “
Ripperologist’s”
could no longer rely upon the writings of Sir Robert Anderson as accurate tends to echo in the comments of Superintendent Mallon of the Dublin Metropolitan Police some years previously (Bussey.1910). Anderson stated in his book published in 1910 that he knew the identity of the Ripper, believing him to have been a Polish Jew, but never naming him.

One might well ask if Monro did have his own theory about the Ripper murders. He was involved in the investigation in 1889 of the murder of Alice McKenzie as Robert Anderson was on leave at the time, in relation to that murder Monro is quoted as saying,
“I need not say that every effort will be made by the police to discover the murderer, who, I am inclined to believe, is identical with the notorious Jack the Ripper of last year.”
By this statement he obviously has a firm belief that she was a Ripper victim. If that is the case, I would suggest this adds even more weight in ruling out Francis Tumblety as being the Ripper as it is fact that he was not in the country at the time of this murder.

As far as Monro is concerned, it could have been not so much a matter of discretion on his part as a case of ignorance. We do know he had a theory because in 1890 he told Cassell’s Magazine he had “
decidedly”
formed a theory and stated, “
When I do theorise it is from a practical standpoint and not upon any visionary foundation.”
His grandson Christopher remembers him saying, “Jack the Ripper should have been caught”.

The truth is that Monro never published his memoirs and in fact no one knew he had written any until they were discovered in a back room in a house in Edinburgh in 1983, unseen by anyone outside his family. The memoirs contained detailed references to a number of notable cases he had been involved in. They make no mention of the Ripper case. So if Monro did know anything more than his own personal theory as to the identity of Jack the Ripper he took it to his grave. I personally do not believe he did.

I would thoroughly recommend Clutterbuck’s thesis for those interested in how Special Branch was formed and how it operated from its conception in 1888 to the present day. I was amazed as to exactly how much information from the ledgers and the register Clutterbuck had published. In fact out of 439 pages of his thesis 117 bear reference to specific entries in the aforementioned ledgers and register.

Clutterbuck even gives examples of informants including their names and what officers they had worked for, and how much they had been paid. I was taken aback by all of this. The Special Branch in the Butterworth appeal case had only chosen to exhibit 20 pages from the ledgers and had stated that there was nothing sensitive contained in those pages. This is clearly not the case and goes to support my belief that the Butterworth appeal tribunal was misled by evidence given by the police.

The publishing of this material in Clutterbuck’s thesis clearly contradicts their argument that the identity of informants should be protected at all times. The police knew about this thesis and its contents and if they were that concerned they could and should have taken steps through the legal system to have the thesis withdrawn or even edited by Clutterbuck. The same should apply to the material Felicity Lowde published, which is at the time of writing still shown on her website blog.

Having viewed the aforementioned register in redacted form there is one entry made by Littlechild, which as previously stated sets out the name of a suspect for Jack the Ripper. Should my appeal to have this information be made public be successful then it will be of great interest to see if Tumblety is one of the names mentioned.

Whilst on the subject of police officers naming suspects years later, I refer to likely suspect George Chapman aka Severin Klosowski. It wasn’t until after the arrest of Chapman in 1903 that Chief Inspector Abberline voiced his opinion on Chapman as being a likely suspect for Jack the Ripper. By that time fifteen years had passed since the last “Ripper” killing and the killer still had not been caught.

Abberline was no doubt still in close contact with other senior officers at Scotland Yard. If he felt so strongly about Chapman being the Ripper then while Chapman was awaiting execution why were arrangements not made for Chapman to be visited and questioned about the Whitechapel murders? This is basic standard police practice and still is the case today. After all, following the arrest and conviction of William Bury another person put forward as a likely Ripper suspect who was arrested in 1889 in Dundee for murdering his wife. Abberline went to Dundee to interview him, so this highlights Abberline’s awareness of visiting and interviewing condemned murderers.

In contradiction of all of the above, police officers who in later years made public their opinions as to whom Jack the Ripper was, Major Henry Smith who was acting commissioner for the City of London police in 1888 who investigated the murder of Eddowes, published his autobiography in 1910 titled, “
From Constable to Commissioner”
in that book he clearly states that the police did not have any knowledge as to the identity of the Jack the Ripper.

I did however uncover another interesting article on the Ripper murders published in the Police Review magazine in 1913. The article was an interview with another retired senior police officer Chief Inspector Henry Moore who was directly involved in investigating the murders. The relevant quote from that interview relating to the Ripper investigation is, “
Well so far as I could make out he was a mad foreign sailor, who paid periodical visits to London on board ship. He committed the crimes and then went back to his ship, and remembered nothing about them.”
He does not elaborate on how he came to form that opinion but it certainly does add much corroboration to the Feigenbaum theory.

In addition to all the work I conducted into the register and ledgers I also found out that there were still in existence a large quantity of letters sent between Henry Matthews who was home secretary at the time and Prime Minister Lord Salisbury.

These letters are held in the private collection of the current Lord Salisbury in the archives at Hatfield House the family home of Lord Salisbury. I made an initial request to view them but this was refused. The reason given was the fact that they are private letters and not for public viewing.

The chief archivist at Hatfield House is Robin Harcourt Williams who had been most helpful in the early stages of my investigation. Eventually we struck a compromise. Robin agreed to read the letters and would inform me if there was any relevant information on the Ripper or any Ripper connection to the Fenians. He read the letters and told me they contained no mention of anything connected to the Ripper or the suggestion of any Fenian involvement. I have to take Robin on trust and as he has been helpful in the past I have no reason to suggest that he has been untruthful in his reply. It does go to show that there are still documents in existence from 1888, which have not seen the light of day. I wonder what others there are, who has them, and what they may reveal should they ever be discovered and made public.

CHAPTER ELEVEN