The Third Man

The second half of the above quoted paragraph was derived from the Toronto Daily Mail story of 21 December 1888 which had said that:

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'The English detective was not on the hunt for Fenians and Invincibles, and was not engaged in ferreting out political refugees.  On the contrary, the Inspector was searching for Leaguers willing and able to give evidence before the Parnell Commission that would tend to make the National League responsible for murder and other outrage in Ireland, and his statement to this effect did not insinuate anything more.' 

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This was nothing more than the conclusion of the Toronto Daily Mail journalist or editor (based on what exactly, is unclear) but we can see that, in the New York Herald, this has become Inspector Andrews' own words (i.e. 'Mr Andrews distinctly said...') when he had said nothing of the kind.

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The fabrication in the New York Herald then continues, for it states:

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'Though he could not divulge the secrets of his profession, he could say that there was an organized detective system on behalf of the British government both in Canada and the United States, and that if the names of these detectives were made public Irishmen all over the world would receive a shock that would cause a sensation beside which the Phoenix Park tragedies would pale into insignificance.'  

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This is based on nothing more than the imagination of the writer, although it might have been partly derived from Andrews' reported comments about the hunt for the Whitechapel murderer. 

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When it comes to the concept of these fabricated additions being made to previously published stories, it is certainly worth noting an extraordinary incident that occurred a few months later, following the murder by Clan-na-Gael of an Irish-American doctor, Patrick Henry Cronin, in Chicago on 4 May 1889.   Reports from Toronto were filed by a Toronto journalist called Charles Long on 11 May 1889 which featured interviews with Dr Cronin despite him being dead at the time.  These despatches were particularly helpful to Clan-na-Gael because the deceased Cronin reportedly admitted to Long that he was a British spy and told him he was on his way to London to testify against Clan-na-Gael.   It was stated in the St Paul Globe of 1 June 1889 that, 'Long fabricated these stories out of his fertile brain for the purpose of making money out of them.'  In respect of Inspector Andrews, there was not only money to be made out of articles proving that he was in Canada to collect evidence for the Times but also (as in the Cronin case) good propaganda for the Irish Nationalist cause at a time when a fair number of reporters and newspapers in North America appear to have had Irish Nationalist sympathies.

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In short, Inspector Andrews was engaged in no secret, improper, mission.  It might conceivably be the case that when Andrews' superiors learnt he was off to Canada they asked him to carry out some lawful task in that country. We don't have a day to day itinerary of what Andrews was doing for the entire week in Canada so we can't say for sure it didn't happen.  There would not be anything very surprising about such efficient use of manpower although, at the same time, there is absolutely no reliable evidence to suggest that he did anything of the kind and he almost certainly did not.  But to claim that his primary purpose of going to Canada was anything other than delivering Barnett, or that he used Barnett as a cover story for another mission, is quite at odd with the facts.

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When we look at the mechanics by which Simon D. Wood and Wolf Vanderlinden allege that Inspector Andrews' mission was hatched, we find not only vagueness and uncertainty but rather different theories offered by the two of them. 

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According to Vanderlinden, the legal procedure used against Barnett was odd from the start.  Thus, he says, in his 'Ripper Notes' article (part 1):  'Rather than simply letting Barnett go free or shipping him off to New York (sic) to face fraud charges the police magistrates just kept remanding him on the nine year old British charge.'  This comment was, unfortunately, based on an evident misunderstanding of the legal procedure whereby Barnett, after his second arrest on 13 September, was actually being remanded on the Canadian warrant, not the nine year old British charge, which had been dropped.  He was only remanded twice on the British charge. 

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This error leads Vandelinden to the erroneous conclusion that: 'It was as if the authorities were making sure that Barnett was returned to Toronto even if the Canadians seemed to be resisting' . Vanderlinden offers no sensible evidence that the Canadians were 'resisting' the extradition - and of course they were not - but what Vanderlinden does not do is tell us why the British authorities would have been making sure Barnett was returned to Toronto in the face of Canadian resistance.  Were they all - the Home Office, the Colonial Office and Scotland Yard - in on a plan from as early as September 1888 to infiltrate a British detective into Canada to do some covert investigative work relating to Parnell in three months' time?  Clearly not very urgent investigation if so!  Were they really trying to foist Barnett onto a reluctant Canadian police force, despite the fact that the Canadian police had initially asked for Barnett's extradition?  He doesn't actually say, leaving us to draw our own conclusions from his musings.

Certainly Simon D. Wood does not seem to have been impressed with Vanderlinden's theory that the entire mission had been carefully plotted virtually from the time of Barnett's arrest.  In his book, he says that by 19 November, 'It is not known whether up until this moment Robert Anderson had been looking for a surreptitious way to send another officer to North America...' but he thinks that the A.C.C. now had a 'perfect opportunity' arising from the urgency of the need to send Barnett.  Strangely - or not so strangely - he doesn't say that it is also not known whether after this moment Robert Anderson was looking for a surreptitious way to send an officer to North America.  The fact of the matter is that there is not one iota of evidence that Robert Anderson had even the slightest interest in sending an officer to America to assist the Times or do any work at all relating to the Parnell Special Commission.  The Times was perfectly capable of hiring its own private detectives and there was simply no need for Scotland Yard men to do anything at all in America, especially as Anderson was fully aware that he would come under scrutiny; so it would have been foolish to use police detectives to act in this way.

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Was Inspector Andrews' secret mission, according to the conspiracy theorists, a carefully planned one or was it arranged at the last minute when it was realised that a British officer was required to escort Barnett to Canada?  Vanderlinden doesn't tell us and we get little help from Simon D. Wood.  But Wood introduces another element to the conspiracy which is that the flight of Tumblety was all part of a carefully prepared plot.  Thus, he says, in his Ripperologist article: '...it was not a coincidence that Tumblety fled to America in a blaze of carefully crafted publicity after being annointed as a Ripper suspect'.  Naturally, no evidence is offered to support this wild statement but one might think that he was saying that this was done as cover for Andrews' mission because, he says, the notion that a Scotland Yard detective was sent to America to track down Tumblety was 'nothing more than Whitehall disinformation.'

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Pausing there, we can see that Wood has got carried away with himself.  The notion that a detective had gone to America to track the Whitechapel murderer came not from Whitehall but from misunderstandings in the press about what Andrews was doing.  In any event, it wasn't much of a 'carefully crafted' publicity campaign considering that almost none of the London newspapers even mentioned Tumblety and it would surely have been newspaper readers in London who would have been Scotland Yard's target audience if they were trying to provide an explanation for what Andrews was doing in Canada.

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But hold on, before we get ourselves terribly confused.  Wood does not say that the flight of Tumblety was to provide cover for Andrews.  His cover story was already in place; the extradition of Barnett.  No, Wood claims that Tumblety's flight from justice was to provide a cover story for Superintendent Shore's trip to New York, even though this was never mentioned by anyone in London. Thus, in addition to the pretexts provided by Barton and Barnett for Jarvis and Andrews respectively, Wood says: 'Tumblety's new-found notoriety and dash for America via France furnished Shore with a similar pretext.'  Wood again presses the point that Shore landed in New York on 7 December when he says, 'It cannot have been by chance that he [Shore] arrived in New York just four days later [i.e. after Tumblety's arrival].'  Shore did not of course arrive in New York on 7 December (and, as we have seen in 'England Sends Her Spies', even Wood now seems to think it might have been 21 November, although he didn't arrive then either) so, in the end, we do not need to worry about whether any such arrival was a coincidence or not which, of course, it could quite easily have been, had it actually happened.

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So we don't get much help from our pair of conspiracy theorists about when the plot to send Andrews to Canada was hatched.  Neither of them seem to want to commit to anything.  It's not surprising considering that there clearly was no such plot.  Let us consider the facts of Barnett's extradition.

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There is no doubt that Barnett was badly wanted by the Toronto police.  They issued a warrant for his extradition in September and then provided the requisite evidence in October.  To the extent that there was a month's delay, this (a) was not deliberate on the part of the Canadians and (b) had nothing to do with Scotland Yard.  Vanderlinden quotes a letter from the Toronto Chief of Police Grassett dated 21 September 1888, apologising for the delay in sending the papers out to London (which, he noted, was caused by a difficulty in getting hold of key witnesses, as described above). 

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The reason, incidentally, why Vanderlinden felt able to say that the Canadians seemed to be resisting was on the basis of a newspaper report (for which he does not give a reference) that the Canadian justice minister was refusing to sign the necessary papers on 6 October.  Thus, in the first of his two articles, he says, 'For some unknown reason there was a snag on the Canadian end, and it was reported on the 6th of October that the Canadian Minister of Justice, Sir John Thompson, was refusing to sign the necessary papers.'  Bizarrely, however, in the second of his two articles, we find a footnote (number 3) which says that the New York Times of 6 October 1888 'stated that the problems with the extradition were caused by the Canadian Minister of Justice in Ottawa, Sir John Thompson, who was refusing to sign the papers'  but, Vanderlinden then adds, 'This was incorrect but it did save the Toronto police some public embarrassment'.  So Mr Vanderlinden here appears to be saying in his second article that the single source he had used to support an important point in his first article was totally wrong!  Furthermore, as we have seen, there was a newspaper report on 4 October that the minister had already signed the papers by that date and, in the second of his two articles, Vanderlinden himself quotes a letter dated 4 October 1888 from Chief Constable Grassett to Robert Anderson, found in the Canadian archives, in which Grassett actually encloses the depositions and papers!  So much for the Canadians resisting.

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Clearly, Toronto wanted to press forward but everyone was constrained firstly by the fact that Barnett needed to be committed by the Bow Street magistrate which, presumably because Barnett's lawyers were challenging the Canadian evidence, did not happen until 6 November.  We may note that the same letter from the Toronto Chief of Police of 4 October 1888 put forward by Vanderlinden includes an apology that the evidence was not as strong as he would have liked (corroborating what the Toronto Evening News said on 3 October as seen above); and that makes sense of why it took so long for a committal. Then everyone was paralysed by the fact that Barnett had fifteen days to, in effect, appeal his committal.  That was all due to the legal system.  It may be noted that this was the first extradition being effected from England to Canada under the 1881 Fugitive Offenders Act so no-one, at least on the Canadian side, was entirely sure how it would all work. 

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The most important factor that needs to be borne in mind is that, when it came to the critical question of how Barnett was going to be removed to Canada (and who was going to pay for this), the proper channel of communications between England and Canada was between the Colonial Office and the Dominion Government of Canada.  And all communication between the Colonial Office and Scotland Yard was via the Home Office.  Even if the Toronto police wanted to send an officer to London to collect Barnett, someone was going to have to provide authority for them to spend the money to do this so that the Toronto police were as much at the mercy of the Dominion Government of Canada as the British police were.  Nothing could be done until the Canadian authorities decided what they wanted to do. By the time the fifteen days were up after Barnett's committal, it was too late for an officer to come over from Canada to be able to get Barnett onto a ship sailing back to Canada before 6 December and, if no-one was coming, Barnett simply had to be escorted by a British officer on the Sarnia on 29 November because that was the last ship sailing out. 

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It was clearly unfortunate that the effect of the Fugitive Offenders Act was that a Canadian officer could not be invited to come to England before 22 November (because there might not be a prisoner for him to collect if he left any earlier than that and his journey would have been wasted) yet, by that date, there simply wasn't enough time for such an officer to come to England and be able to board the last ship sailing for Canada before the cut-off point of 6 December.  We can only wonder what was going through the mind of the drafter of the Act in effectively allowing only fifteen days for arrangements to be made to return a prisoner to a distant foreign country; but that was all the time that the Act allowed and the British authorities were constrained by the legislation in their dealings with Canada.

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There is, of course, no question but that, at any time, the Canadians could have informed the British that they were sending an officer over to London to collect Barnett on their own volition but they never did. Consequently, if Scotland Yard hadn't arranged for his transportation then Barnett would have been able to apply to a judge to be set free and there was a fair chance he would have been successful. Such an outcome would have been nothing short of disastrous. 

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If Andrews had been assigned any kind of second mission, therefore, it must have been very last minute but, as Scotland Yard already had agents in the United States and Canada, there was no obvious need to send Inspector Andrews to do anything. It is hard, in any case, to see what he could possibly have achieved in such a short space of time as one week in Toronto.

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Before leaving the Parnell conspiracy behind us, a quick mention for Vanderlinden's bizarre theory as to why Inspector Andrews (deliberately) let slip his mission to the press about the hunt for clues relating to Parnell.  In saying to a reporter in Toronto that he had found 'important clues in the Parnell case, facts that he did not dream had existed' he was supposedly targeting one Irish man who lived in Buffalo who, he hoped, would read this statement in the newspapers and would then come forward to speak to someone (exactly who is not made clear bearing in mind that Andrews himself was on his way back to London). This man supposedly had some important information and was being paid by a Canadian private detective on behalf of the Times although, by 23 November, the private detective suspected he was being duped by him.  Vanderlinden wonders if it was possible that Andrews' statement about having found the important clues was intended as 'an extra incentive for the Buffalo labourer to come forward with his invaluable evidence.'  Why such a statement would have incentivised the labourer - whose main incentive appeared to be money - is not clear and, indeed, if his information had been genuine, he might well have thought that his input was no longer required, considering that the British detective had everything he needed.  So the theory can be quite easily ignored.

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Having disposed of the Wood/Vanderlinden theory, we now need to turn our attention to the R.J. Palmer theory that Andrews was in Canada to carry out research on Tumblety. This gets off to a wobbly start on the facts from the outset when Palmer says:

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'In September 1888 Andrews arrested Roland Giddeon (sic) Barnett after spotting the longtime confidence man lounging in Piccadilly. Andrews knew Barnett by sight from past offenses, but was unable to hold him for any recent criminal activity in London.  Instead, he discovered Barnett was wanted in Canada for fraud against the Central Bank of America and promptly secured a warrant under the Fugitive Offenders Act.'

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As we have seen, Barnett was arrested by Andrews on 30 August 1888.   While it is certainly the case that Barnett had not committed any 'recent' criminal activity in London, it is misleading for Palmer to say that Andrews was unable to hold him for criminal activity in London because Barnett was indeed held for two weeks on a nine year old English warrant.  It is also misleading to say that Andrews secured a warrant under the Fugitive Offenders Act without explaining that the request for this warrant came from Canada, albeit that it appears to have been Andrews who informed the Canadians that Barnett was in London. While the purpose of this article is not to pick out minor factual errors in Palmer's article; the point here is that the way Palmer writes it, probably by accident rather than design, leaves the reader with the impression that it was Andrews on his own who was pushing to get Barnett to Canada and opens the door to the inspector having had a light bulb moment in thinking that here was his chance to get across the Atlantic, all expenses paid, for whatever reason.

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Not that Palmer says any such thing in his 'Casebook Examiner' article but in an internet post on the Jack the Ripper Casebook forum on 19 October 2010 ('Tumblety's Past; Not Tumblety Today - Andrews' True Agenda' #43), he speculates that 'whatever Anderson was doing' it might have started 'at the time...Andrews arrested Barnett right after his appearance in Wandsworth Police Court on 13th September.'  It was a strange comment because that does not fit with his theory that Andrews went to Canada to research Tumblety's past, bearing in mind that Tumblety's arrest had not yet happened as at 13 September. What Palmer said in the 'Casebook Examiner' article was simply that the Roland Barnett case 'became Scotland Yard's vehicle for sending Andrews to America in late November 1888.'  However, in pushing this theory he quite badly twists the facts because he says:

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'The authorities in Toronto, blissfully unaware that Barnett's extradition papers had been filed in London on November 6th were still scrambling to get Barnett's papers in order.'

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The footnotes in Palmer's article at this point have gone wrong - and footnote 27 should be footnote 28 - but the reference he gives is to pages 24-25 of Vanderlinden's 'Ripper Notes' article.  However, Vanderlinden was, on those pages, talking about events in October 1888 and the fact is that, by 6 November 1888, all the Canadian papers had been filed.  The Canadians were not scrambling around at all.  For Palmer, of course, until Tumblety was arrested on or shortly before 7 November, there could not have been any secret plan to infiltrate Andrews into Canada.  Indeed, it seems for Palmer that the plan started on or after 19 November 1888 when the New York Tribune reported that Tumblety was Canadian (although the idea that Robert Anderson was an avid reader of the New York Tribune is far fetched).

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For Palmer, therefore, there is great significance in the fact that Robert Anderson wrote to the Home Office about Barnett, who was still lingering in Holloway prison, on 19 November.  One might think that it was only natural that the A.C.C. would want to know what was going to happen to Barnett once the fifteen day period after his committal was up but Palmer turns this query into a key part of his theory.  Thus, referring to Godfrey Lushington's letter of 23 November (reproduced in full above), he says:

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'...it is clear from Lushington's letter that Robert Anderson had inquired about the feasibility of sending a man to North America and was further asking if he could use the extradition of the prisoner to Roland Barnett to do it.'

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With the greatest respect to Mr Palmer, and even allowing for the fact that he had not seen the letter from Anderson (quoted in full above), this is nonsense of the highest order.  No such thing was clear at all from Lushington's letter and it certainly does not feature in Anderson's actual letter.  It is an example of someone reading what they wanted to read into a document because of a pre-determined theory.  All that Lushington's letter showed - as reflected in Anderson's letter - is that Robert Anderson was very sensibly writing to the Home Office for instructions as to how to dispose of a prisoner who had been committed for extradition but was sitting in a British prison.  In the absence of the imminent arrival of an officer from Canada, he would have been grossly negligent had it not occurred to him that a British officer might be required to convey Barnett to Canada and, in that context, it was rather sensible to calculate how much it would cost so that the Canadians could be asked to indemnify the cost.  For that reason, Palmer's claim that, 'What is equally clear is Anderson's intense interest in sending a man to America - revealed by the fact that he had already drawn up an estimate of the cost of the mission...', is, in fact, not clear.

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According to Palmer: '...under the auspices of the Fugitive Offenders Act, it was entirely up to the Canadians to come and fetch Barnett.'.  This statement is not correct. There is nothing in the Act that says such a thing.  On the contrary, a Home Office memorandum, dated 31 March 1890, entitled 'Memorandum as to Procedure in Extradition Cases and Cases Under The Fugitive Offenders Act, 1881' (HO 347/8) says, in the section under the 1881 Act dealing with the extradition of fugitives from British Possessions (which, as per section 39 of the Act, includes dominions), that if a prisoner makes no application for a writ of habeas corpus within fifteen days of committal, or he makes an application which is refused, then:

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'the Secretary of State issues his warrant for the surrender of the prisoner, and he is either handed over to an officer deputed for that purpose by the Governor of the British possession, or he is taken out to the British possession by an English officer, according to the arrangement that may be made in each case.' (underlining added)

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This memorandum reflected the procedure in 1888. So there was nothing procedurally improper about a British officer taking Barnett to Canada.  

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Then we have Palmer commenting that 'none of these negotiations [about Barnett's conveyance to Canada] actually states that the officer had to be an inspector'.  Well no, that is true, but then again there was nothing that said it had to be an officer of another rank either. We can certainly find other examples from the period of detective inspectors accompanying prisoners to a foreign country:  Inspector Tunbridge escorted Alice Woodhall when she was extradited to the United States at the end of May 1888 (HO 144/475/X18533), Inspector Abberline escorted William Henkel to Germany in June 1888, having personally arrested him in Aberdeen (HO 144/473/X16778) and, according to a surrender warrant in HO 134/25, it would appear that Inspector Henry Moore escorted Oscar Moeller to Germany in September 1888.

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Palmer states a bland truism when he says, 'Technically almost anyone could have escorted Barnett back to Toronto - a detective-sergeant or even a pair of constables.  Interestingly, Robert Anderson chose Andrews.'  But is it really interesting?  Andrews was the officer who had arrested Barnett on the English warrant and then arrested him again on the Canadian warrant.  Given the importance of the case, demanding a senior officer be responsible for getting Barnett to Canada. Inspector Andrews was the obvious choice.  In fact, had Anderson sent anyone else, of any rank, to Canada, we might today be asking: 'Why didn't he send Andrews?'  The whole issue is a mystery that is not a mystery.  Simon D. Wood, incidentally, makes a similar point to Vanderlinden in his book when he claims, without any evidential support, that extradition to Canada was 'a routine errand' which could have been handled by 'a lowly Detective Sergeant' .  Had something gone wrong with the extradition - such as the escape of the prisoner - questions might have been asked why a lowly detective sergeant was used rather than a more experienced senior officer.

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We may note one other point made by Palmer about Andrews' selection.  Noting that Andrews was once involved on a case with Detective Sergeant Froest, one of the two detective sergeants who arrested Tumblety, Palmer suggests, on the basis of this single case, that Froest 'may have been Andrews' detective sergeant.'  Palmer does not explain what he means by this nor does he provide any evidence that inspectors actually had their own detective sergeants in the way, presumably, that television Detective Inspector Morse had Detective Sergeant Lewis as 'his' sergeant.  But it doesn't seem to have worked like that in the C.I.D in 1888.  Just to give one example, Detective Inspector Tunbridge was working with Detective Sergeant Dinnie in respect of the case of Alice and Harriet Woodhall in April 1888 (HO 134, page 42) yet, when it came to the apprehension of Harris Groman at Plymouth in May 1888, this was effected by Detective Inspector Tunbridge and Detective Sergeant Richards (HO 144/475/X18980).   Palmer's attempt to link Andrews with Tumblety via Froest therefore fails.

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In any event, Palmer claims that it is plausible that Robert Anderson had 'a sudden inspiration', presumably at some point between 19 November and 26 November, that he had the perfect opportunity to send an officer out to Canada to do some background research into Tumblety, in order to build up a case against him as the Whitechapel murderer.  It's a little hard to know what Andrews could have been hoping to find in Canada but, leaving that aside, Palmer tells us that the timing of Andrews' visit was 'highly suggestive' and that 'one can readily see that Robert Anderson's bureaucratic gyrations to send a man to North America and the C.I.D.'s investigation of Francis Tumblety's American antecedents dovetail perfectly.'  Or was it just a pure coincidence that Barnett had to be escorted to Canada on 29 November when Tumblety was on bail for indecency offences?   (The answer is: yes.)

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There is a timing problem in any case with Palmer's theory.  Scotland Yard must have known shortly after 24 November that Tumblety had fled from England, because the American newspapers were not only reporting it (on 1 December) but reporting that the British police had spoken to Tumblety's sureties. It was certainly known that Tumblety had fled on 10 December, when Tumblety did not appear to take his trial, because the Evening Post reported that a bench warrant was issued for his arrest on that date.  Given that Tumblety was no longer under British jurisdiction, what would have been the purpose of Inspector Andrews conducting an investigation into him in Toronto after that date?  And Andrews definitely knew that Tumblety had fled from bail when he arrived in Toronto because he told a Canadian journalist that this had happened.  If he had been sent there to do background research into a suspect for the Whitechapel murders it would have been pointless to proceed because the suspect was gone.

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It is not only that there is a timing problem, there is also the fundamental problem that the entire mission of Inspector Andrews was dependent on the Canadian authorities agreeing to indemnify the costs.  In the absence of such an indemnity, it would have been a question for the Home Secretary as to whether whether the British government would fund the extradition.  Either way, it is remarkable that an investigation into Tumblety, the suspected Whitechapel murderer - which was supposedly very important - was dependent on a decision from a foreign country as to whether it would agree (unknowingly) to pay for it.  We know that Tumblety was initially remanded into custody on 7 November 1888 and committed for trial on 14 November with his trial due to take place at the Old Bailey sessions commencing on 19 November.  Had he been acquitted he would have walked free long before the Sarnia set sail.  Even with the adjournment to 10 December, which was at the request of the defence, Tumblety could easily have been free before Andrews returned to London, and probably before Andrews had discovered anything in Canada, rendering any research he had done into Tumblety worthless.  One would have thought that such research would have had to have been done immediately upon Tumblety's arrest on the indecency offence to avoid the risk of it being a waste of time.  Dilly-dallying during almost the whole of November in the hope that the Canadians might agree to fund the extradition of Barnett to Canada does not make much sense. If the answer is that Robert Anderson did not know of Tumblety's Canadian connection until 19 November then it still does not make sense that nothing was done to send a man to Canada for ten days.

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We can contrast this approach with the approach taken by Scotland Yard when carrying out research into Thomas Neill Cream in 1892.  Cream was suspected of murdering Matilda Clover but was arrested on a holding charge of blackmail on 3 June 1892, after information was received by the C.I.D. that he was likely to leave the country.   Such a charge was nevertheless a serious one; in August 1886, for example, one Joseph Cull was found guilty at the Old Bailey of 'Threatening to accuse Mr. Robert Whitby of an infamous crime with intent to extort the sum of 10s from him' and received a ten year prison sentence (Times, 06.08.1886).  Cream was alleged to have sent a letter to a doctor saying that he had evidence that the doctor's son had caused the death of two girls and that he would not go to the police if the doctor gave him £1,500.  He was charged at Bow Street on 5 June and bail was continually refused until he was finally charged with murder on 19 July.