The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper (22 page)

Children's Hour
became a national institution. It had begun on December 23, 1922, just a month after broadcasting started, and by November the following year,
The
Times
reported that it had almost one million listeners and said there were discussions about broadcasting programs on different wavelengths so that listeners would be able to choose between
Children's Hour
and speeches in Parliament. This might suggest why
Children's Hour
became so popular. It was broadcast between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. every day, the anticipated audience range being from five to fifteen, and
Toytown
, first broadcast on July 19, 1929, soon became a firm favorite. It was narrated by Derek McCulloch (1897–1967), known to millions of children as “Uncle Mac,” a persona he maintained until the 1960s. He also provided the tremulous voice for Toytown's most famous animal resident, Larry the Lamb.

S. G. also developed a model stage show called
The
Arkville
Dragon—
Arkville was a neighbor of Toytown—and Pathe Films turned this into an animated film, but S. G.'s premature death prevented the development of the project. Toytown lived on without S. G., his friend, the writer and producer Hendrik Baker, turning four of the Toytown stories into a stage play entitled
The
Cruise
of
the
Toytown
Belle
, a film version of which was broadcast under the title
Larry
the
Lamb
by BBC Television on May 10, 1947. In 1956 the BBC broadcast a series of twenty minute marionette plays featuring Larry, and in 1962 and 1964 the animators Halas & Batchelor produced
The
Showing
Up
of
Larry
the
Lamb
and
The
Tale
of
the
Magician
. About this time, Baker released through HMV some Larry the Lamb stories on 45rpm EPs, four of the stories later being released as an album called
Stories
from
Toytown.
Between 1972 and 1974, twenty-six animated shows were made by Larry the Lamb Ltd. for Thames Television.

Sadly, Sydney George Hulme Beaman would never realize the huge success of his creation or enjoy the profits that were surely his. He died from pneumonia in February 1932 at the age of forty-four. He left £979 in his will and is today very largely forgotten; not even his respectably suburban home in Sneath Avenue, Golders Green, bears a blue plaque, which unquestionably it should. But it is a testament to the man that Larry the Lamb and the population of Toytown are still loved by thousands of people over eighty years after they were created.

Thankfully, there is no suggestion whatever that S. G. Hulme Beaman was Jack the Ripper, but the question whether or not
The
Autobiography
of
James
Carnac
was his work remains. As said, it would have been a step outside his normal writing and also alien to what we know of his character. In fact, the only hint that there was a dark side to Hulme Beaman is a 1930s edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's
The
Strange
Case
of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, for which he was commissioned to provide the illustrations. As a professional artist and illustrator, Hulme Beaman accepted commissions from publishers, so he can't be held responsible for the choice of subject, nor is there anything about his illustrations that's remotely violent or bloodthirsty. Indeed, they draw heavily on early Expressionism, being beautifully stylized and strikingly atmospheric, and are among the finest twentieth-century illustrations for Stevenson's classic.

—

James
Willoughby
Carnac

As for James Willoughby Carnac, nobody of that name has so far been identified, so either he is a fictional creation or the name is a pseudonym, either adopted by Carnac himself or bestowed upon him by someone else. Although the
Autobiography
is largely concerned with the Whitechapel murders, it provides a detailed and engaging account of Carnac's life up to the commission of the crimes. Writing shortly before his death, he says he was sixty-nine years old and he variously describes the murders as having been committed forty or forty-two years earlier. This means that he was born between 1859 and 1861, and wrote and died between 1928 and 1930.

He was born in Tottenham and lived in a double-fronted semidetached house in a row of six houses. Next to his home there was a field owned by a dairy farmer. His father was a doctor named John Carnac, but an inclination to overdrinking kept his practice from flourishing, and the family never achieved financial security until he inherited a considerable sum of money from an aunt named Madeleine.

At the age of twelve years, James Carnac attended a day school that was run by a religious fanatic named Dr. Styles—a “hateful, narrow-minded, ignorant bore”—whose principal success seems to have been turning over a large number of staff. The school was in a private house about one mile from Carnac's home, and it was there that he developed an interest in art and an early preoccupation with blood, being particularly attracted to the slaughter of a pig by the father of a school friend.

He also recalled an attraction for three books he discovered in his father's library, Roberts's
Treatise
of
Witchcraft
and John Cotta's
Triall
of
Witchcraft
, and also an 1875 edition of Edgar Allan Poe's complete writings. I assume the first of these was a book by Alexander Roberts, a preacher of King's Lynn in Norfolk who was a witchfinder contemporary of the notorious Matthew Hopkins. John Cotta escapes me, but the Poe was presumably the edition by John Henry Ingram, published initially in Edinburgh in 1874 and 1875 and which must therefore have been a relatively recent acquisition by Carnac's father.

Both his parents died when he was nearly eighteen years old, putting the event between 1877 and 1879, and he went to live with his uncle, a bookmaker in Peckham. Although the uncle was very good to him, Carnac developed an overwhelming desire to cut his throat and one night very nearly did so. He fled his uncle's home, never to return, and thereafter had very little contact with him, although his uncle did on one occasion supply him with a family that which had been found among the papers left by his father, which he thought might suggest that Carnac's blood lust was hereditary. The tree traced his ancestry back to the Sanson dynasty of Paris executioners.

This dynasty existed. Indeed, it is notorious because its later members executed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The dynasty appears to have begun with Charles Sanson (Longval; 1658–1695), a soldier in the French royal army who was appointed executioner of Paris in 1684. He was succeeded in turn by Charles Sanson (1681–1726), and Charles Jean Baptiste Sanson (1719–1778). It was through Charles's brother, Nicholas Charles Gabriel Sanson (1721–1795), that the Carnacs apparently claimed descent.

Nicholas Sanson was the executioner at Reims and achieved a degree of notoriety in 1757 when he assisted his nephew, Charles Henri Sanson (1739–1806), in the execution of Robert-François Damiens, who had attempted to assassinate Louis XV. Damiens, who had managed to inflict a minor wound but caused no significant injury, and who was probably insane, was subjected to a long period of the most excruciating torture, then tied to horses with the intention of having them wrench his arms and legs from his torso, but his limbs refused to part and Sanson had to separate them with an axe. The horrendous execution was witnessed by Giacomo Casanova, who left an account in his memoirs in which he recorded his horror: “I was several times obliged to turn away my face and to stop my ears as I heard his piercing shrieks, half of his body having been torn from him…”

Nicholas Sanson resigned his position as executioner of Reims thereafter, but his nephew, Charles Henri Sanson, continued as executioner of Paris and, despite claiming that he disliked the family business, executed nearly three thousand people during his career. He was the first person to use the guillotine, of which he was a firm advocate, the earliest customer being a robber named Nicolas Jacques Pelletier. He was publicly executed at 3:30 in the afternoon outside the Hôtel de Ville in the Place de Grève, but the excited crowd was not satisfied with the fast and clinical method of execution, which altogether lacked the spectacle and entertainment value of a hanging or breaking on the wheel.

Charles Henri went on to achieve immortality as the executioner of King Louis XVI. His second son, Henri Sanson (1767–1840), executed Marie Antoinette, who accidentally stepped on Sanson's foot as she mounted the scaffold, saying, “Pardon me, sir, I meant not to do it.” They were her last words.

The last of the dynasty was Clément Henri Sanson, who served until 1847.

Meanwhile, Nicholas Sanson, who had resigned his position as the executioner of Reims, had a rather grandly named son, Louis Cyr Charlemagne Sanson, who in turn had a son named Pierre Louis Sanson, who in his turn had a son named Charles Louis Sanson. The
Autobiography
claims that this man also had the surname Carnac and was the father of John Louis Carnac, James Willoughby Carnac's father.

After the last murder, that of Mary Kelly, Carnac suffered an accident that resulted in the amputation of a leg, putting an end to his mobility and his killing.

—

The
Manuscript

The manuscript was found among the effects of S. G. Hulme Beaman, bequeathed to his daughter Betty, who in turn bequeathed it to her cousin, Jean Caldwell. The collection included some of S. G.'s wooden carvings of bandsmen from Larry the Lamb's Toytown and figures from Faust that he used for his illustrations, copies of the children's books he wrote and illustrated, and this manuscript. Mrs. Caldwell knew about the manuscript but wanted to keep the collection together and hoped that whoever bought it would publish the manuscript. Appreciating the potential value of the Larry the Lamb material, she approached Bonhams auction house, who recommended she offer the collection to Alan Hicken, the proprietor of the Montacute TV, Radio and Toy Museum in Montacute, Somerset. When Alan Hicken read the Carnac manuscript, he felt he had to get it published, with Mrs. Caldwell's full approval and encouragement.

The manuscript appears to have been written between 1928 and 1930—this date being calculated from the author's claim to have been sixty-nine years old at the time of writing and for the murders to have been committed forty or forty-two years earlier. This date agrees with some of the statements made in the manuscript, such as the author's observation that detective fiction was a relatively new genre and enjoying considerable popularity. The 1920s and 1930s were indeed the golden age of detective fiction and are generally recognized as such today, having produced Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Josephine Tey. The date also fits S. G. Hulme Beaman's life. Hulme Beaman, of course, died tragically young in 1932, so the manuscript can't have been written after that date. However, 1928–1930 was also the time when Hulme Beaman was hard at work with Larry the Lamb and Toytown.

The manuscript is in three parts with an explanatory note by S. G. Hulme Beaman and an epilogue recounting the inquest and inquest verdict into Carnac's death.

The explanatory note is perhaps the most curious part of the whole manuscript. It runs to one and a half single-spaced pages and ends with the initials “H.B.” It was typed on a typewriter different from the rest of the manuscript. S. G. explains that he was executor of the will of James Carnac and in that capacity had received Carnac's effects, among which was the manuscript. It was “enclosed in a sealed packet”—an important point to note—and that attached to the packet was a letter requesting S. G. to send the manuscript to a specified literary agency whose name we are not told. Fearing legal complications from giving an unopened package to a literary agent without first knowing the content and having the sanction of the probate authorities, S. G. explains that he opened and read the contents, and that having done so, it was his intention to hand the manuscript over to the literary agent. He does not say he had done so, which is another important point.

In the nine paragraphs, he explains that he knew Carnac and along with others who knew him had regarded him as “unpleasantly eccentric” and as a man who held “unorthodox and peculiarly offensive views on certain vital matters,” who had a “vitriolic tongue” and a “cynical and macabre humour.” He put all this down to a personality soured by the loss of a leg in Carnac's early adulthood, but even so, Carnac sounds such an unlikeable person that one wonders how S. G. could ever have become sufficiently close to him to be appointed executor of his will.

What is perhaps highly important about the manuscript is that it is unclear to whom the explanatory remarks are addressed. S. G. states that he intends to send the manuscript to the literary agent, as Carnac had requested, so the remarks are not directed at the agent. It is also obvious that they are not intended for a publisher or for a general reader such as you or me. In fact, the tone suggests that they are directed at someone known to S. G. and with whom he had discussed the manuscript, albeit not in any detail.

S. G. also claims in the explanatory remarks that he had removed and destroyed “certain portions of the manuscript which contained details particularly revolting to [him],” but that otherwise the manuscript is “presented exactly in the form in which it came to me [him].”

It is tempting to assume that the material S. G. found offensive were descriptions of the bodies of Jack the Ripper's victims, but this need not be the case.