The Complete and Essential Jack the Ripper by Paul Begg, John Bennett Read Free Book Online

‘conspiracy culture’. It was during that decade that suspicions over the true events surrounding the death of President Kennedy would begin to take hold, stories about US government cover-ups of UFO incidents would gain ground, and even NASA’s Apollo moon-landing programme would not escape the scrutiny of those who thought that everythingwas not as it seemed. The so-called ‘peace and love’ era of the late 1960s was quickly giving way to a more aggressive and questioning society.
    In 1972, Michael Harrison’s study of Prince Albert Victor,
Clarence: The Life of
HRH
the Duke of Clarence and Avondale (1864–1892
), 1 attempted to exonerate the prince of the Ripper murders by re-emphasizing his whereabouts at the time. Appearing on BBC Television, Harrison explained that he could not accept that the Ripper was Prince Albert Victor, ‘but I couldn’t leave the reader high and dry, so what I did was find somebody who I thought was a likely candidate’. 2 Harrison’s Ripper was James Kenneth Stephen, the prince’s tutor, whose surname fitted more comfortably with Dr Stowell’s suspect ‘S’. He based his argument on the speculation that Prince Eddy and Stephen had become homosexual lovers during, or after, Eddy’s time in Cambridge. He felt that some of Stephen’s poetry suggested a hatred of women, with some even showing sadistic tendencies. According to Harrison, the relationship was broken off, and Stephen then killed prostitutes on dates which would appear significant to Eddy, such as birthdays of members of the Royal Family. In the same television interview in which Harrison appeared, Daniel Farson made a mockery of the theory, stating that ‘you can make out a better case for Queen Victoria’. But an interesting letter to the
Sunday Times
in 1975 appeared to support the theory: Mary Hallam of Newbury wrote stating that her great-grandfather, a barrister, had long ago declared that the authorities knew that Stephen was the Ripper. 3
    Daniel Farson had now got round to publishing his own study of the case – simply titled
Jack the Ripper
– and predictably put forward his suspect, Montague Druitt. 4 Despite ‘discovering’ him, Farson had lagged behind, allowing TomCullen to steal some of his thunder. Farson, however, was a media personality of some repute, and so Druitt began to gain the attention he probably deserved back in the 1960s, helped no doubt by Farson’s frequent writings and interviews in national newspapers.
    But it was BBC TV’s 1973 series
Jack the Ripper
, a six-part documentary-drama which put fictional detectives Charlie Barlow and John Watt 5 into a modern-day investigation of the Ripper crimes, 6 which really began to hammer home the theory surrounding the royal household.
    The ‘investigation’, in laying out the events of 1888, was remarkable in that the researchers were granted access to the official files and used the actual witness testimonies contained therein for the scripts when reconstructing scenes of the inquests. Much of this material was heard by the public for the first time, as most information before then had to be gleaned from contemporary press reports, which were not always accurate. These reports, with misheard or dubious information often being set down by otherwise dedicated journalists, produced errors that were invariably repeated for decades to come. Barlow and Watt’s findings were channelled via the claims of Joseph Gorman Sickert, who, in the final episode, 7 sat in front of the camera smoking as he relayed a story apparently told to him by his father, the artist Walter Sickert. Prince Albert Victor was certainly part of it, but now the culpability for the murders was shifted elsewhere. Joseph’s version of the story goes thus:
When Eddy, the Duke of Clarence, was twenty his mother thought it would be a good idea if he met an artist and writers as well as just usual people who made up court circles at the time. She arranged for him to meet the