Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [42]
What was not covered up were various Court Circulars and journals that placed him conclusively in Yorkshire, Scotland and Sandringham during the murders. Eddy died of pneumonia in 1892, unless Melvyn Fairclough was correct in his assertion in The Ripper and The Royals (1991) that he was held a deranged prisoner at Glamis Castle until the 1930s.
Of course, you don’t have to be a public figure to be suspected of being Jack the Ripper, but it does seem to help. Those accused at different times include: George Gissing, author of New Grub Street; William Gladstone, whose attempts to help fallen women were renowned; Frank Miles, 1880s Turner Prize winner, known for paedophile leanings, who suffered from dementia from 1887; Dr Thomas Barnardo, who did meet Liz Stride and was rumoured to have kept a diary (hmm) in which the dates of murders were left blank; Lord Randolph Churchill (another of Joseph Gorman Sickert’s Rippers – see below); Madame Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy; opium-addicted visionary poet Francis Thompson who may have committed the murders in a frenzy of religious symbolism; and let’s not forget the sadistic harlot mutilator that was... Lewis Carroll.
Sir William Withey Gull (1816–90)
Fingered by Joseph Sickert in the BBC dramatised investigation of the case Jack the Ripper (1973) and by Stephen Knight in Jack the Ripper:The Final Solution (1977)
Gull was an eminent physician, an ardent vivisectionist and (according to Stephen Knight) a prominent Freemason (although the Masons have always denied it). In 1873 he identified and named anorexia nervosa. He became physi-cian-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria in 1887.
Thomas Stowell places Gull pursuing Eddy through Whitechapel in order to certify him insane, but this, according to Gorman Sickert, was not the true story. A brief summary of the story he told to Knight, and Knight tells us: Prince Eddy secretly married a shop girl, Annie Elizabeth Crook (Sickert’s real grandmother), and she bore him a daughter, Alice Margaret Crook. When the relationship was discovered,Annie Crook was abducted by Crown agents and committed to an asylum. (In reality, she spent much of her later life in workhouses.) The daughter was saved by the artist, Walter Sickert, Joseph Sickert’s alleged grandfather and a close friend of Prince Eddy. Mary Kelly, an acquaintance of Sickert’s, found out. Along with Liz Stride, Annie Chapman and Polly Nichols, she attempted to blackmail the Crown. Queen Victoria and the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, fearing that the revelations would lead to revolution, sent Gull to rid them of the meddlesome whores. Gull enlisted the help of a coachman, John Netley, to aid his scheme. When it was finished, Gull was secretly committed by Salisbury and other members of his lodge. At the same time, his death was announced. Through complex machinations, Druitt was selected as a fall guy.
The story told by Joseph Gorman Sickert to Stephen Knight is a rattling tale – royalty, sex, violence, and just when you think it can’t get any more preposterous, it does, bless it. Sickert stated that he was the offspring of Walter Sickert and Alice Margaret Crook, who began an affair after her husband, a man named Gorman, had proven impotent. Knight brought a wealth of Masonic theory and valuable Ripper research to the tale. This included a long-lost statement by Israel Schwartz. Schwartz’s testimony led to Knight’s conclusion that Walter Sickert had worked as Gull’s look-out man. Possibly because of this revelation, Gorman Sickert later publicly withdrew most of his story. Despite a rapturous reception from many quarters, Knight’s theory later fell out of favour. Although the fact that it was ever accepted as anything other than a rattling