More Letters to the Editor

JH to Lord Orsam, Wednesday 14th June 2023 - EMAIL 1

Just a quickie, but I'll be back, asap:

David, I can't tell you how moved I was to discover this morning that I have finally convinced you that our 'case disguised' theory - albeit not our new Mac(iavellian) - is a possibility, is in fact more than plausible.

Wow! Though I think you read historical sources too narrowly (and in sterile isolation) I do respect you as a diligent and meticulous researcher, a robust debator and a very witty polemicist.

Thanks; it means a lot to me as I believe you are being, as ever, a straight shooter…

PS

I forgot to mention that Tom Divall quoted Mac as [misleading] him about the Ripper's fate too, e.g. died in a Yank asylum.

​

JH to Lord Orsam, Wednesday14th June 2023 - EMAIL 2

I will try and be succinct and to the point, as I have no reason to avoid anything. I have never seen anybody come up with a strong rebuttal, quite the opposite.

I don't know whether you're deliberately trying to avoid answering my questions but you're definitely still not addressing them.  It's not that I don't agree with your answers, it's that you're not actually providing the answers that I've been repeatedly seeking.  Just one example from my last email: "At the very least, do you accept that it was unnecessary for "strong suspect" to be added by Mac in order to satisfy his purpose of showing the Home Secretary that there was at least one other viable suspect?".  Nil respondo.  My belief is that you are avoiding my questions because you can't answer them but feel free to prove me wrong.

I've been taking the trouble to paste the full Kosminski entry from the draft report (now amended to delete the City PC identification) and asking you why that was not sufficient to put Kosminski in equipoise with Druitt.  I've been asking again and again and again why Mac needed to add in – against his own beliefs – that Kosminksi was actually a "strong" suspect.  Answer comes there none.

But I have said that the trick of hiding Druitt, the murderer if the whole truth comes out of Dorset, is to make him one of a crowd. The police were confused and not incompetent; there was not hard evidence against any of the three.Suggesting that druitt was alive when investigated.

Now, if you want to say to me that the original entry as drafted was not sufficient to put Kosminski in equipoise and that the Home Secretary needed to be explicitly told that he was a strong suspect because otherwise he would have thought he was a weak suspect and that Druitt was the only credible suspect, then go ahead.  But you don't do this.  You've never said this.  I don't want to have to guess your answer.

Of course, if you were to say this it would be ridiculous and unsustainable.  Gee, thanks for the warning. But at least say it and explain exactly why, in your view, it would not have been sufficient.

No, it's that the dodge over the witness was too strong, so he reigned it back in. I think where you fall down trying to understand my responses is I am trying to understand why Mac wrote what he did and for whom.

He was anticipating that the Cutbush 'scoop' would force the clergyman's hand and was trying to get on file that neither he nor Scotland Yard were at fault, e.g. there was not enough hard evidence to arrest Mr. Druitt, and yet based on certain dubious post-facto criteria he was the best suspect.

I don't get how that is a non-answer? No doubt you will say it is.

Instead, you want to take me once again all through your convoluted and unsupported Grand Theory which I've already read in your books involving an arrest of Druitt in 1888 (utter nonsense)

Of course it's not. How silly of you to write such a melodramatic put down, quite strange really. If Druitt is the killer, then he could easily have been briefly questioned or detained by the police and then released to go on his way. After all, what did Macnaghten mean when he wrote that not all the facts were known about the unnamed Druitt until some years after(?) Why not write, none of the facts were known until years later as that is a whole lot less embarrassing. Instead he retains the thrust of the memo(s); a minor suspect whilst alive and then adds that, much later, he was a solution once dead.

and all of the bizarre and unfathomable motives that you attribute to the fictional Macnaghten of your creation.  I really don't want to go there.  

Yeah, I'll bet you don't as none of it plays to your strengths as an analyst, rather it exposes all of your weaknesses: everything must be black and white, no shades of grey. Your hyperbolic style of vituperative writing here, almost hysterical, is very telling I find. There is nothing remotely "bizarre" about an upper class gent wanting to protect a friend of the same class. If that is "unfathomable" then you are sadly ignorant of the history of your own country/ex-empire.

I just want to deal with the issue of whether Anderson amended Macnaghten's draft because that's the only thing that makes sense of all the changes.  

Your theory does not explain any of the other sources regarding Macnaghten and Anderson, and everybody else.

It is your theory, and to be fair everybody else's interpretation, that makes no sense to me - for what my opinion is worth - because the primary sources we have then do not match and do not make sense. They are in opposition to each other.

I can't make you see how revelatory is "Laying the Ghost ..."; it is quite different from both memos. I am trying to create a unified theory as to why, and what Mac means in 1913 by claiming that the truth had come to him personally, that it was a secret, many secrets, and that documentary proof of the un-named Druitt ("that remarkable man") had been destroyed by him. Why such an admission? Does he not sound like a rogue figure inside an institution with rules and laws and conventions? The guy had a desk job. yet he turned himself into a street detective because, well, he wanted to.

Another question that you haven't properly answered to my mind is why Macnaghten felt any need to have to conceal from the Home Secretary that Druitt was a strong suspect and to place all three suspects in equipoise.  What you've said about this makes no sense at all.  

Yes it does, just not to you and I can see why. You want there to be only one explanation for every source, which is an anti-human way of analyzing people and their artefacts.

He couldn't possibly have wanted to cover up the incompetence of the C.I.D. under Anderson in 1888, could he?  Nor was there any reason at all to hide from the Home Secretary that he'd received private information about Druitt in 1891, if that was indeed the case.  The private information is literally mentioned in the final report and I just can't see what difference it makes if Mac received this info in 1889, 1890, 1891, 1892, 1893 or 1894.  Druitt was dead that whole time and no charges could have been brought against him.

Yes, I agree that anything to throw Anderson to the wolves would have suited Mac very well. But he was preparing, scrambling really in case the entire story came out in early 1894; how the cleric met Mac, and then Mac met the brother and agreed to conceal this all from the Yard and the press. To have not informed his superiors would have been a juicy target for the Liberal government to sack all of the Tory hold-overs at the Yard, so Mac knew he would be the scapegoat - because he was guilty. The Liberal press would have done what "The Sun" did to the Cutbush clan except on a much larger scale as it would have involved the family of the famous Dr. Robert Druitt, Melville Macnaghten the son of a former Chairman of the East India Co., and the clan of Col. Vivian Majendie. What a story! What a mess? What a scandal?

You never mention Christine's Col. Majendie discovery-breakthrough, but it is at the heart of our interpretation.

I expressly asked you to tell me what rule Mac would have broken by not informing Anderson in 1891 of his private conversation with a cleric about Druitt.  Your answer? Crickets.  Totally not addressed. So, here we are, many months into this discussion and I still have no idea why it would have been of importance to Macnaghten to diminish his favourite suspect in his own report.  It makes no sense to me whatsoever.  If, in his mind, he'd solved the case and he would surely have wanted to let the Home Secretary know about it.

But I have addressed it repeatedly, as I have above though I suppose I will be scolded for being too 'convoluted'.

Of course, I also haven't received any kind of comprehensible answer about the reason for the stylistic changes despite asking for one in every email.

Again I have done so many times, but your narrow-mindedness cannot see it. You don;t know what I am talking about. My theory is bizarre and unfathomable (I like that word : ) They were for two different audiences. You focus on a small point as if it is decisive. What is decisive is that Mac and the family have reversed as to who was certain of the late M. J. Druitt's culpability. You always ignore the implications of this 'stylistic change'.

I have to say that your reference to Macnaghten's class demonstrates a lack of understanding of how it worked in Scotland Yard vis a vis the Home Office.  His class did not give him the right to approach the Home Secretary, or any Home Office official, directly about official business over the head of the Assistant Commissioner.  It was Anderson who reported directly at all times to the Home Secretary about matters of crime and Macnaghten would have known this perfectly well in 1894.

Then you should read Mac's memoir, as you will discover that Mac claims, over and over, that he was a roving sleuth doing as he pleased. The Adolf Beck case is a real eye-opener in that regard. This all makes sense in terms of Mac as an upper class operator. You are very naive if you think the low-born Home Sec. is going to turn away an unexpected visit, let alone correspondence, with "Good Old Mac": the ruling elite personified, and one with such exquisite manners and known for his discretion - unlike the pompous, blabber-mouth Anderson. I mean, you do realise that all of these people are 'politicians', whether elected or not?

As for the other matters in your email, for what it's worth:

1.    You continue to fail to convince me that Macnaghten was "heading off" the vicar by briefing Griffiths during or before 1898.  It strikes me as fantasy. Now David, I take it you have dropped your initial dismissal of this aspect claiming there were months between publications. I suppose this is you fessing up to an error? But I still do not convince you, yet no reason is given.

2.    I do not accept for one second that Macnaghten "strongly implies" that Druitt was a contemporary suspect in 1888 in either of his memos.  There is no such implication and I have no idea what you are even talking about.  Even if it's unclear, there is no 'strong implication' of any sort that he wasn't a posthumous suspect. Griffiths, Sims, Logan and Thompson all write as if the suspect was being investigated or even chased whilst alive. That's a stubborn fact. Even accepting your interpretation that they are in no way in any kind of collusion with these writers, then they are interpreting the "Home Office Report" all wrong. But that is what Mac implies - in both versions. We learn the truth in the 1914 memoir: e.g. Druitt was only a minnow in 1888 and then Moby Dick "a few years after", when he was deceased.

3.    "Enterprising" is a very commonly used word with a number of meanings.  You simply assume that Macnaghten was cross-referencing back to Anderson, and using it sarcastically, but I see no good reason to think so.  In this case, what I believe he meant was that a genuinely enterprising journalist had cleverly managed to extract from him the two big disappointments of his life.  But, in his memoir, he wanted to discuss the things he did do in his life, not the things he didn't do.  Certainly, the point you initially made to me that Mac was claiming that it wasn't true that the Ripper committed suicide six months before he joined the Met Police cannot be right.  He certainly wasn't doing this overtly and I don't believe he was doing it in code either.  The meaning I attribute to him is the ordinary, natural and obvious meaning. I can see you really struggling with this one. It caught you off guard, did it not? Mac means "enterprising" exactly the same way as Anderson. The proof? In his Ripper chapter he wants to backdate the unnamed Druitt's sucide to early November, not early December - not six months back from June 1889. Yet he also reveals it was not the same night, the first time the MP's fiction of 1891 has been amended. Consider how brief that intro is, yet there is "Jack the Ripper", the case he was obsessed with front and centre, with him denying it.

4.    Alas, Christine did not find a smoking gun from 1891. She found a column in the Referee, wrongly assumed to be by Sims, which she completely misunderstood and misinterpreted. I'm not sure what you think the significance of the Berlin suspect later turning out to be 31 and not a student is because this wasn't known to the writer of the 1891 column at the time.  He understood it was a 20 year old (student) and that's what he also thought Jack the Ripper might have been.  Hence, NOT Druitt.  I see no evidence that Sims was told of Mac's theory about Druitt prior to 1898 (after having been published by Griffiths). If he was told of it before this, he kept it secret.  But I find that unlikely for a journalist so I think it was Griffiths who was given the scoop. So, you know what was in the mind of the Referee reporter, you know for a fact what they had read about the Berlin criminal and what he had not? I thought that was one of my most egregious sins as a non-academic writer of history.

5.    Christine has obviously misunderstood the 1893 poem.  It's got nothing to do with Druitt nor even with Farquharson's 1891 story about the son of a surgeon.  Let me explain it to you.  Farquharson's unsuccessful defence to his libel action at the time was that the words he had spoken were said "in the heat of an election" and should not, for that reason, be treated by the court as slanderous.  Sims' poem was ridiculing this line of defence.  He did so by jokingly setting out all kinds of bizarre allegations that a person would be allowed to make without any penalty "in the heat of an election" if Farquharson's defence had been successful.  Thus, he mockingly said that a candidate for election could, without sanction, call a rival candidate "a wicked boy who killed his baby brother in the struggle for a toy". Or you could hint that a rival candidate's wife had attempted suicide and gone raving mad. Or you could hint that a rival candidate was Jack the Ripper.  Nothing, as it says in the poem, would be too slanderous.  But these were hypothetical examples of what ANY parliamentary candidate could say about ANY rival parliamentary candidate if candidates were exempt from the libel laws in the heat of an election.  It wasn't saying that Farquharson had, in fact, made any those allegations, nor was it scolding him for falsely accusing someone of being Jack the Ripper, as you claim.  It was no more scolding him for falsely accusing someone of being Jack the Ripper than for falsely accusing someone of killing his baby brother or having a mad suicidal wife.  Don't you see?  The fact that Farquharson was the MP who had put forward a JTR theory two years earlier is pure coincidence with respect to this poem.  I can say that because, to repeat the point, Sims' poem was about the possibility of a candidate freely accusing a rival candidate of being Jack the Ripper.  Farquharson's 1891 story did not accuse a rival candidate of being Jack the Ripper and thus the poem had nothing to do with the 1891 story or with Druitt (of whom Sims, in my opinion, had zero knowledge in 1893). Historical methodology means you have to measure every source with every other source. Farquharson is the MP who first leaked the solution of the unnamed Druitt. Mac and Sims want that quashed by ridiculing him for that too - in case it came up again. It's really brutal when you consider they agreed with him about Montie. Sims is simply saying that the MP is a notorious ninny. Because you are a literalist (but, but he has not accused a rival!) you are not strong at deducing the nuances of primary sources that are created with competing purposes.

6.    I love the way that a short and humorous poem by Sims has amazingly, in your mind, become one by "Mac and Sims".  It's just incredible.  It had nothing to do with Macnaghten. You were there were you? Two close friends both obsessed with the Ripper case and both believers in the Druitt solution, which was first spilled into the public realm by the M.P. in question? That's incredible is it? Again, the hyperbole of your apoplectic outrage is telling.

7.    The problem with saying that Anderson only started talking about Kosminski in 1895 is that, to the best of my knowledge, we don't have ANY comments from him about Jack the Ripper prior to that date (after 1888) other than his 1892 interview in which he made a passing comment that the killer was a homicidal maniac but didn't discuss the killer's identity or say whether he knew who the killer was.  For me, it's just not possible to draw any conclusions about the state of his knowledge regarding Kosminski prior to 1895.  You seem to be able to do it though, and you can also read his mind, so well done on possessing that ability. It's called historical methodology and it is used by all, all the time. In 1892, Anderson has not heard of "Kosminski" or he would have said so. Therefore, when did he hear about it? Being a conceited and pious prude, he would begin telling others as soon as he knew. That's 1895 in terms of the extant record, coinciding not coincidentally with the best Ripper suspect the Yard ever had: William Grant, caught in the act, and a sailor (and called a "surgeon" yet with no known formal education) and positively identified by Lawende their best witness. Yet... nothing comes of it (although his sometime lawyer, George Kebbel, was told by somebody at the Yard that his client was definitely The Ripper). Instead Swanson believes it is a man now dead and Anderson believes it is a locked-up lunatic (and told his son the killer had died long ago in the asylum). When you research the personalities, characters, paradoxical actions and words, and motives of the people involved this all does make sense according to our theory and nobody else's. Could we be wrong? Naturally, but you have not shown us how.

Q&A

Finally, the two questions that you seem to want me to answer.

Firstly:

"Was it just incredible good luck that starting in 1898 (but really 1891) through to 1959, Mac's hopelessly overrated memory concealed Druitt from the family's circle of friends and acquaintances (and the boys of Valentine's school)?"

This question shows a misunderstanding of everything I've been saying.  Perhaps it deserves an "OMFG".  I fully accept that Mac was never going to reveal Druitt's name.  I would have no problem with him disguising some facts when speaking to journalists in order to conceal Druitt's identity.  What I take issue with is your claim that he deliberately inserted false information (and material false information) into an official police report that was intended to brief the Home Secretary and/or be placed on the file at Scotland Yard.  That makes no sense to me.

I also don't agree that the purpose of the draft report was to disseminate information about Druitt to the public many years in the future.  That's just your silly theory.  It was merely a first draft of his official report (subsequently amended by Anderson IMO) which he retained at home. I think the idea of some kind of 10 year agreement with a vicar to withhold it is bonkers.  Mac just happened to retain his draft report which he either showed Griffiths many years later or, more likely, relayed the contents to him (so as not to reveal the names of the suspects) when Griffiths was writing a book on crime mysteries.  But, of course, he could have re-written it at any time.  In other words, had he written in his official report that Druitt was a barrister and schoolteacher, he could simply have re-written it for Griffiths to call him a medical student, doctor, accountant or whatever he wanted in order to disguise his identity, including not stating his occupation at all if he didn't want to mislead the public. 

So I just think you misunderstand what I've been saying.

And I think you have created this fictional Macnaghten who has all these schemes and plans and who is utterly obsessed with the whole case.  Sure, he would have liked to have been working on the Ripper case in 1888 and to have had a crack at solving it – which detective (or wannabe detective) wouldn't? – but I find it very hard to believe that it consumed him the way you think it did.  Sure, he had a personal theory that it was Druitt, apparently based on private information received, and he was happy to tell journalists about it, but he was also aware of a responsibility to the family not to name Druitt as the Ripper.

The short point is that I don't see this whole issue as such a big deal.  I happen to think that Mac got confused when writing his memo.  Someone had either told him that Druitt was a doctor or a doctor's son and writing some years later he believed he was a doctor.  Now, if that's the case, it's a reasonable question to ask me whether he could have safely allowed Griffiths to write the Ripper passage in his 1898 book if the information about a doctor who drowned himself in the Thames would have led people who had known of a suicide in the Thames of a Dr M. J. Druitt in 1888 to easily work out that it was THIS Dr Druitt who was suspected of being Jack the Ripper.  That's a fair point to which my best answer would be that Mac may well have discovered after 1894 that Druitt had never been a doctor after all but it suited him not to change that part of his report when disseminating it to the public.  Indeed, it may well be that it was Anderson who questioned whether Druitt was a doctor which is what caused Mac to change his report (or to be instructed to do so) to "said to be a doctor".  If, upon further checking, Mac learnt that he had made a mistake about this, it might actually be what enabled him to safely disseminate the contents of his memo via Griffiths containing what he now knew to be this false detail about Druitt.

The alternative is that he always believed that Druitt was a doctor and wasn't particularly bothered if someone who had known him recognized him from the description.  After all, what would have been the real harm if someone had done so? (and for all we know perhaps someone did).  No one who knew the assumed Dr Druitt was likely to leak his name to the press (and the press wouldn't publish the name in any case).

To the extent that Mac was simply attempting to disguise Druitt's identity from the general public I have no problem with this whatsoever. But I don't believe it was his life's ambition to conceal it, as you seem to think.  At least, I just can't see any reason for this and no evidence either.  Like I mentioned in my last email (to no response) if the overriding aim of Mac and Sims was to stop anyone discovering Druitt's name it was surely reckless in the extreme for Sims to publish the information that his body had been washed up on 31 December 1888 thus giving anyone who was able to check the records an almost 100% chance of finding him, doctor or no doctor.  And I might add that Griffiths had done the same in 1898 saying that the body was found floating in the Thames "on the last day" of 1888.  Why wasn't that important detail withheld or twisted?  I suggest because withholding the name of the suspect was good enough.

So to directly answer your question: Was it incredible luck that Macnaghten concealed Druitt's identity?  My answer is no, it probably wasn't luck.  Macnaghten had full control of what he told Griffiths (and Sims) about the three suspects but that was in 1898, not 1894.  Between 1891 and 1898 there was no luck involved because not a soul other than the family (some friends?) and a few senior police officials knew anything about Druitt as a suspect and none of them were talking to the press.  To the extent that I'm wrong and Macnaghten was never in his life aware that Druitt wasn’t a doctor, then yes it could be said to have been "lucky" for Druitt's family that it took until 1959 for his name to emerge but I really have no idea how important it was for Druitt's family that it was a secret, especially ten years after the murders in 1898 when a lot of the heat had gone out of it.  Perhaps they had braced themselves for the news emerging and were very surprised that no one who was aware of Monty's suicide in 1888 twigged that he might have been the Ripper.  Who knows?  I have literally no idea what the views of the family were (and it's not clear at all to me that Nesbit was referring to Druitt's family in 1895) so "luck" may not even be the right word.  The right word may be "unlucky" for anyone interested in the Ripper murders that Druitt's name wasn't known until 1959 because of a simple mistake by Macnaghten.  Is that possible?  Absolutely!

I am so moved by this. You are only the second person in RipperLand to agree with us. I say, "in" RipperLand, not "of". Only R. J. and Menges have also said it is viable, though my namesake has now backtracked under pressure from his spouse.

Your second question:

"Why is it that everybody else, except Abberline, mistakenly thinks their suspect/solution is dead and/or a suicide when they were not - Littlechild; Anderson; Swanson; Sagar; Forbes Winslow, George Kebbel?"

I don't really know if it's true what you say about "everybody else" but the answer to this question is so obvious it hardly needs me saying it.  As the Ripper murders had quickly ceased, the suspect was likely either dead or locked up (or had possibly gone abroad).  That said, I don't believe Anderson ever actually stated that Kosminski was dead, did he?   I think your memory has let you down with regard to Sagar's suspect who, according to Sagar, had been incarcerated in an asylum.  He didn't say he was dead.  The Evening News reported it to be a theory of the City Police that the suspect had gone to Australia where he had died but this was not attributed to Sagar who was quoted as saying "what became of him we don't know".  I had thought that Forbes Winslow claimed to be able to arrest Jack the Ripper if he was given six constables which to my mind suggests he was alive at that time.  Kebbell was speaking 22 years after the murders so a pretty good chance that the Ripper, who he had said was initially locked up before dying, had passed away.  Littlechild made a mistake in thinking that Tumblety had died: it happens.

OMG - "It happens" (?!) Come on, you're better than that, David. 

Forbes Winslow thinks his medical student drowned in the Thames. Anderson told his son that the unnamed Kosminski was long deceased in an asylum, which the son mentions in his biography of his parents. Swanson shares the same fallacious notion, and his scribble matches Mac's revised/truncated 'autumn of terror' timeline.  Kebbel was told that Grant had died in prison and nearly had a fit when his former client, released from prison, confronted him in the street (the barrister ran away). Littlechild has reason to believe, or was told it was believed, that Tumblety took his own life in France. Divall was told by Mac that the Ripper died in an asylum in the U.S. (a triple fusion of Tumblety, Kosminski and Druitt). You do not know that Sagar did not himself supply the detail about dead in Australia but asked not be quoted directly; its phrasing strongly echoes Littlechild and Dr T.  Are you seriously telling me that you cannot see a pattern in all these errors? In whose interest was it to keep all these bods happy and satisfied that their suspect was the solution, pity about his being beyond the reach of earthly justice, and thus keeping them well away from the Druitt solution and the Druitt and Majendie families.

If you take a look at the above two questions you asked me, you will see that I quoted the questions and then provided the answers, retaining 100% focus on those questions, without meandering off into other irrelevant topics.  Might I immodestly suggest that this sets the gold standard for how to answer questions in an email correspondence?

I never meander; I am always relevant and cogent and on topic, but I can see why your narrow-focus misses this every time. 

PS

I think Mac and Sims rather regretted being accurate about the timing of the recovery of the middle-aged doctor's corpse from the Thames.

In 1907 Sims began to alter the timeline: he backdated the recovery of the body to early December 1888:

"A month after the last murder the body of the doctor was found in the Thames. There was everything about it to suggest that it had been in the river for nearly a month."

(In Mac's 1914 memoirs, he is scrupulously circumspect: he does not mention drowning, the Thames or the body being recovered from anywhere at any time).

And, in 1917 in Sims' memoirs:

"Each of his murders was more maniacal than its predecessors, and the last was worst of all.

After committing that he drowned himself. His body was found in the Thames after it had been in the river for nearly a month."

Possibly this change in date was noticed by an eagle-eyed Frank Richardson, a Sims rival who read everything Dagonet wrote and who had briefly worked as a lawyer in Dorset. This Sims competitor had become so well-informed about the real man who lay behind the 'drowned doctor' that he wrote about "Dr Bluitt" being the killer in "The Worst Man in the World" (1908). Christine also discovered that Richardson even knew what Montie had looked like; the author cheekily cloaks his "substantial truth in fictitious form" by writing that a young, possibly insane character in his "The Other Man's Wife" (1908) called Montague Mayville (his surname just two letters from Mac's Christian name) resembles Sir Herbert Beerbhom Tree, a famous Victorian actor, when young. Which Montie Druitt does, uncannily so...

​

Lord Orsam to JH, Wednesday 14th June 2023

I'm astonished to find myself writing that you still, and I must use capital letters, STILL, have not addressed my question!

I know very well that you think that Macnaghten wanted to make Druitt "one of a crowd".  It's the same thing as putting him in equipoise.  But that's not an answer to my question. It answers a different question.  It answers the question as to why Macnaghten deleted the preamble to his 3 suspects which said:

"Personally, & after much careful & deliberate consideration, I am inclined to exonerate the last 2. but I have always held strong opinions regarding no 1., and the more I think the matter over, the stronger do these opinions become. The truth, however, will never be known, and did indeed, at one time lie at the bottom of the Thames, if my conjections be correct."

I fully understand that you think he deleted those sentences to equal out the suspects.

The point I keep making over and over again is that once he had deleted those two sentences, Druitt now WAS one of a crowd.  The three suspects were in equipoise (or rather the four suspects because Cutbush was said to be equally likely to be JTR).

So what I am asking – and you surely MUST understand this – is why the existing wording in his draft wasn't sufficient for the final report.  That wording surely DID make Kosminski one of a crowd, did it not?

I appreciate that you think he wanted to remove the City PC's identification so I will now repeat my question with that caveat.  Why wasn't the following entry sufficient for Mac's purposes?

"No. 2 Kosminski, a Polish Jew, who lived in the very heart of the district where the murders were committed. He had become insane owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices. He had a great hatred of women, with strong homicidal tendencies. He was (and I believe still is) detained in a lunatic asylum, about March 1889."

I repeat. Why wasn't that sufficient?

Why did he need to ADD IN that Kosminski (but not Ostrog) was regarded as a "strong suspect"?

Please don't tell me it was because he wanted to hide Druitt in a crowd.  Or rather, if that was his aim, I need to you explain to me why the wording of the original draft wasn't perfectly sufficient for this purpose.  Why did he need to expressly inform the reader of his report (which we both agree was intended to be the Home Secretary) that Kosminski was a strong suspect?

Because I'm not convinced that you are going to address this point, I'm going to labour it. 

If Mac had retained his original wording, the Home Secretary would have learnt that there was an insane homicidal foreigner living in the heart of Whitechapel who hated women and who was locked up in an asylum shortly after the last Ripper murder.  That itself would have made Kosminski a very reasonable suspect and at least as good a suspect as the sexually insane doctor from a good family who wasn't said to have lived in Whitechapel.  Sure, that doctor committed suicide shortly after the last murder and his family believed him to have been the murderer but, from the perspective of the Home Secretary, Macnaghten obviously didn't find the family's belief compelling because, otherwise, he wouldn't have needed to mention the other suspects as being equally likely of being JTR and Cutbush could have been entirely eliminated.

So what I'm saying is that, to make Druitt one of a crowd and put in him equipoise with the others, there was NO FLIPPING NEED for Macnaghten to insert into his report that there were "many circumstances" which made Kosminski "a strong suspect"?

So why did he do it????

And what I'm saying is that you have no answer to this.  You can't explain it.  Whereas the obvious explanation is that Mac's superior, a person who we know for a fact believed that a Polish Jew WAS a strong suspect, amended his subordinate's report before it was intended to go to the Home Secretary or be added to the file.

So that's the first question that hasn't been answered.

Then we come to the issue of WHY Druitt needed to be "one of a crowd". 

I understand that your belief is that Druitt came to the attention of the police before he died.  I don’t accept this for one second but I'll follow the premise and ask: Is this the reason why Macnaghten didn't want the Home Secretary to know that Druitt was a very strong suspect?   If so, why? 
If the police were "confused but not incompetent" what would have been the problem in Mac saying to the Home Secretary that the police were on to Druitt in 1888, or at least had some suspicions about him, and now in 1894 strongly think he was the Whitechapel murderer, hence Cutbush is not the killer and the Sun newspaper had got it all wrong.  This is even more pertinent if, as you tell me, "He was anticipating that the Cutbush 'scoop' would force the clergyman's hand and was trying to get on file that neither he nor Scotland Yard were at fault, e.g. there was not enough hard evidence to arrest Mr. Druitt, and yet based on certain dubious post-facto criteria he was the best suspect".  But none of that is in the memo.  He doesn’t say of Druitt "he was the best suspect" nor does he say that there wasn't enough hard evidence to arrest Druitt.  He doesn't even mention that they could have arrested him while he was alive.

As to this, you also tell me, "If Druitt is the killer, then he could easily have been briefly questioned or detained by the police and then released to go on his way".  Well yeah, sure, same if he wasn't the killer, but we're in the realms of fiction here aren't we?  There's absolutely no reason to think he was briefly questioned or detained by the police and released.  Mac doesn't say he was in his memo.  He doesn't say he was in his memoir. Sims never says he was.  No one says he was! 

When you ask,"what did Macnaghten mean when he wrote that not all the facts were known about the unnamed Druitt until some years after(?)" it's a falsely premised question because he didn't say this at all.  What he wrote in his memoir was that "certain facts, pointing to this conclusion [suicide of killer of Kelly] were not in possession of the police till some years after I became a detective officer".  That's totally different to how it's been twisted through the lens through which you view everything. It simply means that the facts about Druitt linking him to the murders were not known until years after his death.  Entirely consistent with what I've been saying.
Then we come on to the second strand of your answer as to why Macnaghten needed to hide Druitt in a crowd.  It was because "the cleric met Mac, and then Mac met the brother and agreed to conceal this all from the Yard and the press."  This is just from your imagination, of course, and if such an agreement had indeed been reached I'm utterly baffled as to why Macnaghten included Druitt amongst his suspects in a report which ends up on the Met Police file thus surely notifying Anderson about Druitt.  Whatever explanation you give me you will have to admit that it was a breach of the agreement.   Then we have, "To have not informed his superiors would have been a juicy target for the Liberal government to sack all of the Tory hold-overs at the Yard, so Mac knew he would be the scapegoat - because he was guilty. The Liberal press would have done what "The Sun" did to the Cutbush clan except on a much larger scale as it would have involved the family of the famous Dr. Robert Druitt, Melville Macnaghten the son of a former Chairman of the East India Co., and the clan of Col. Vivian Majendie. What a story! What a mess? What a scandal?"  I can only repeat that Druitt was dead so Mac didn't need to pass on the Druitt family suspicions communicated to him in private to anyone.  It would not have been a scandal at all. With Cutbush, he was still alive so could have been charged, hence the importance of establishing whether he was nor was not the murderer. You claim to have "addressed" my question of what rule Mac would have broken but haven't told me any such rule, so clearly there wasn't one.  
Then we come on to the next question not answered about the stylistic changes.  If you were accusing me of not answering a question I wouldn't reply by saying "I've answered it" and then not tell you what the answer is.  I'm telling you I have no idea what your answer is to this question so if you want to explain it to me please do.
As for the rest of your email, I'll take it by topic and will hopefully cover everything:
LAYING THE GHOST

"I can't make you see how revelatory is "Laying the Ghost "..."; But you haven't even tried.  Tell me what parts are revelatory.
Looking back over the April emails I find that what you said about this was that his chapter was "the de-facto third version of the memo revealing that there is only the [un-named] Druitt, and that there were two lines of information that reached Scotland Yard about him - or at least to Mac - several years apart; the first was minor and the second was definitive."  But the draft version already exonerated Kosminski and Ostrog, and it said that he had strong opinions about Druitt, so I can't see what's revelatory about Macnaghten identifying the unnamed Druitt as the Ripper 20 years later, after Sims had done it many times in Referee.  Indeed, it supports my claim that the middle document - the odd one out which downgrades Druitt and upgrades Kosminski - was the responsibility of Anderson.  As for the "two lines of information" I don't know what you mean.  It may be somewhere in your book but I can't be arsed to look for it.   You're going to have to explain this to me if you want me to understand it.  From the memo, it already appears that there were two lines of information.  One about the suicide in December 1888 (which would automatically have been notified to the police) and one about the the private information about the family's belief.  So I don't really know what you're on about here.
BIZARRE AND UNFATHOMABLE MOTIVES

When I speak of the bizarre and unfathomable motives you attribute to a fictional Macnaghten I'm speaking of the fictional agreement with a vicar, I'm speaking of his supposed panic, or feeling pressure, after the Sun articles, I'm speaking of his fear of being sacked (for a second time! lol), I'm speaking of the fictional messages he's supposed to have sending to the public via Sims (and Nesbit), I'm speaking of his need to inform the Home Secretary about Druitt while hiding him in a crowd at the same time, I'm speaking of his withholding Druitt's name from the Assistant Commissioner because he didn't trust him, I'm speaking of his strange desire to rubbish the vicar's story following their 10 year agreement which had been faithfully observed by both sides, and a number of other similar types of things.
MAJENDIE

The reason I haven't mentioned Majendie is because there is no evidence or good reason to believe that he was aware of the allegations against Druitt.  Then there's no evidence or reason to believe that Macnaghten was aware of this distant family connection (a marriage of a Druitt and a daughter of one Majendie's step-cousins doesn't strike me as close).  Then we have no good reason to think that a story about Druitt being Jack the Ripper would have embarrassed Majendie or caused him any difficulty or that Macnaghten considered that it would.  In any case, given that I have no problem with Macnaghten hiding Druitt's identity from the press, regardless of any connection with anyone, it doesn't seem to matter very much.

BECK

"Then you should read Mac's memoir, as you will discover that Mac claims, over and over, that he was a roving sleuth doing as he pleased. The Adolf Beck case is a real eye-opener in that regard"

I don't know what this nonsense is.  Mac was the Assistant Commissioner at the time of Beck's second trial at the Old Bailey in 1904 and was thus directly responsible for his prosecution.  What is it in his book that gives you the idea that he was "a roving sleuth doing as he pleased"?   When you say this type of thing I wish you'd give me examples because I had to re-read the entire chapter about Beck in Mac's book only to find nothing that supported what you say and that really wasted my time. I repeat that it was Anderson who reported directly at all times to the Home Secretary about matters of crime and Macnaghten would have known this perfectly well in 1894.  Nothing in his book suggests that he wasn't aware of the chain of command at Scotland Yard.
CHAIN OF COMMAND
You say:

"You are very naive if you think the low-born Home Sec. is going to turn away an unexpected visit, let alone correspondence, with "Good Old Mac": the ruling elite personified, and one with such exquisite manners and known for his discretion - unlike the pompous, blabber-mouth Anderson. I mean, you do realise that all of these people are 'politicians', whether elected or not?"

This shows that you do not understand how it worked at Scotland Yard.  It was based on rank which had nothing to do with class.   And your arguments are all over the place.  If the Home Secretary was not going to turn away "Good Old Mac", why did the Home Secretary totally blank him in 1888 when he was desperately trying to find out why he didn't get the Assistant Chief Constable job, or in your word had been "sacked" (lol) in 1888?  Mac couldn't get an answer from Matthews in correspondence and he certainly never had the opportunity of paying him "an unexpected visit" to find out.  Did his class suddenly improve between 1888 and 1894?  
HEADING OFF THE VICAR
In response to me referring to the nonsense of Macnaghten having to "head off" the vicar in 1894 you deflect to a different issue and say: "Now David, I take it you have dropped your initial dismissal of this aspect claiming there were months between publications. I suppose this is you fessing up to an error? But I still do not convince you, yet no reason is given."   I didn't say anything about "months between publications".  The point I was making in my email of 19th April to which you are referring is that Macnaghten was happy to pre-empt the vicar in 1898 (with the vicar's story only emerging in the next year) but despite supposedly being "under pressure" in 1894, fearing that the vicar would go public, he didn't pre-empt him.  Like I said in my April email, this makes it "impossible for me to understand why he didn't pre-empt him in 1894".  I subsequently pointed out that Mac wasn't responsible for the publishing deadline of Griffiths' book and it must be obvious that he would have had to have given Mac the information about the Ripper case long before December 1898 for him to be able to include it in his book, while having no say as to when that book was published.
DRUITT AS A CONTEMPORARY SUSPECT
"Griffiths, Sims, Logan and Thompson all write as if the suspect was being investigated or even chased whilst alive."

Logan wasn't writing about Druitt.  He was writing about a fictional character who was hunted by a fictional private detective.

Griffiths was quite clearly repeating Macnaghten's memo which was obviously his source and all he says was that "the police, after the last murder, had brought their investigations to the point of strongly suspecting certain persons".  It's so obviously his understanding from what Mac had written in the memo from the words "3 men against whom Police held very reasonable suspicion".
Thomson clearly got his information from Griffiths (as you said in your first book).  As I wrote in 'Bridge Over Troubled Water":

"According to the authors, the mention of the evidence being 'insufficient for detaining him' means that the doctor (Druitt) must have been arrested and let go. This is really desperate stuff.  The clear and obvious interpretation of what Sir Basil was saying there was that, based on his understanding of what Macnaghten had written, there was insufficient evidence against Druitt to have him arrested and locked up (i.e. detained).  If he had had some kind of inside information, over and above what was in the Macnaghten memorandum, that Druitt had actually been arrested (and released), Sir Basil would surely have said so."

Sims also seems to have been using Griffiths as his main source of information.
Against this, we have the clear words of Macnaghten from 1914 that the facts pointing to the conclusion that Druitt was the Ripper were not in the possession of the police "till some years after I became a detective officer".
What is clear is that there is no "strong implication" from any reliable source that Druitt was investigated or chased while alive.  There is no reason to think so. It's highly unlikely. 

ENTERPRISING JOURNALIST
You do make me laugh, Jonathan, with your  "I can see you really struggling with this one. It caught you off guard, did it not?" Nothing can be further from the truth.  Before replying to you in the last email I had read what you said about Mac's preface in both your book and in your Examiner article.  I was fully aware of your silly argument about "enterprising" as if it only has one meaning (i.e. the one used by Anderson).  And the argument you put forward about how to interpret the preface is simply mad. Macnaghten himself said in 1913 that missing out on having a go at Jack the Ripper was the greatest regret of his life. You accept this.  The Morning Post journalist basically repeated this in 1914.  So how is it possible that you think that Mac was saying that the "enterprising" journalist was lying when he was on record as saying that exact thing?!!!  I fully explained what Mac is saying in his preface and I'll repeat it:   He means that a genuinely enterprising journalist had cleverly managed to extract from him the two big disappointments of his life.  But, in his memoir, he wanted to discuss the things he did do in his life, not the things he didn't do.  That's what he means when he says "But the readers...will be able to judge for themselves how I spent my days".  In other words, his was NOT a life of disappointment.  That's what he's saying there. It's so bleedin' obvious.  And look at what he wrote in the preface before mentioning the enterprising journalist:

"A contented mind is a continual feast, and one should always be prepared to accept the bitters of life along with the sweets".

In the very next effing sentence he then refers to the two bitter regrets of his life as reported by the enterprising journalist.  Why would he mention the "bitters of life" followed by two supposed bitters of his own life (one of which we know for a fact WAS a bitter of his life) if those two bitters were not true?
As for the Eton v. Harrow game, sure we don't have confirmation that he didn't play but if he had played and wanted to correct the record he would surely have included this in his book.  So we can take it that he didn't play.  Did the journalist invent that it was a regret that he didn't play?  Unlikely in the extreme, especially as it was true that he regretted not having a go at Jack the Ripper.
If you were to ask anyone, I'm sure they will agree with my interpretation so what you are really saying is that Macnaghten was writing in code for god knows who, to say that those regrets were not really regrets and the journalist fabricated them.  I don't think anyone else but you would reach that conclusion.  
That all said, I don't even know why this is of any importance.  In your earlier email you seemed to be making some kind of point about Macnaghten trying to deceive his readers by denying that he became a detective officer six months after the Ripper's suicide but why THAT is even important I'm kind of at a loss to say.
DRUITT'S SUICIDE - PART 1
So, continuing from the above, you write:

"Mac means "enterprising" exactly the same way as Anderson. The proof? In his Ripper chapter he wants to backdate the unnamed Druitt's sucide to early November, not early December - not six months back from June 1889. Yet he also reveals it was not the same night, the first time the MP's fiction of 1891 has been amended."

I honestly don't know what you mean by Mac wanting to backdate the suicide to early November, not early December.  In his draft memo (which you say reflects his true belief and I agree coz the final one was Anderson) he wrote that Druitt's body, found on 31st Dec, had been in the river for "a month or more".  So he wasn't committing himself to a death in early December. And all he said in his "Laying the Ghost" chapter was that the killer probably committed suicide "soon after the Dorset affair in November 1888".  That is not necessarily "early November" and the same is even true when he later says that the killer committed suicide "on or about 10th of November 1888" because that has the same meaning.  "About" could include early December. He was really just trying to place the suicide as soon as possible after the murder of Kelly to strengthen the argument that Druitt was the Ripper.  The idea that any of his readers were going to note that he said he started at Scotland Yard on 1 June 1889, do a calculation of exactly 6 months and say "Hold on, this blooming liar is now saying that the Ripper might have committed suicide in November but earlier in the preface he said it was six months before 1st June which is 1st December, what's going on here, this is very dodgy, I want my money back" is ludicrous.   It's equally ludicrous to think that Mac was saying in code that it wasn't true that the killer killed himself six months before 1st June 1889 and the journalist who wrote this was lying, it was actually (for example) six months and 20 days.  I mean Jesus talk about hairsplitting.  It's absurd.  
And the idea that all this nonsense is somehow "proof" that he was using "enterprising" in exactly the same way as Anderson.... well words fail me. 
Then you say:

Consider how brief that intro is, yet there is "Jack the Ripper", the case he was obsessed with front and centre, with him denying it.

What?  He is not denying anything, Jonathan?  You might as well say that he was obsessed with not playing against Harrow for Eton front and centre.  But these were the two regrets of his life so of course he mentions it in the preface but the point is that he gets them out of the way so that he doesn't need to discuss them further.  
Do you ever think about what isn't in his book?  What we don't find is any kind of boast that HE ended up solving the Ripper case?  Instead, we get nothing more than him inclining to the belief on the basis of facts which fell into the possession of the police some years after he joined Scotland Yard.  He's not the hero.  Why not?
DRUITT'S SUICIDE -  PART 2
Referring to your second email, regarding Mac supposedly having sudden doubts about revealing the date that Druitt was found in the Thames, I think it remarkably odd that it took nine years for this to occur to him, with Griffiths having stated that it was the last day of the year in his book and Sims having expressly given the date of 31 December 1888 in 1903, the remedial work for this shocking error of judgement not being done until four years later.
I don't see the backdating that you see.  What I see is that Mac wanted to narrow the time-frame between the Kelly murder and the suicide, and Sims wanted to do exactly the same.  I mean, when you look at Sims' analysis in his 1907 article, the only reason he gives for eliminating Kosminski and Ostrog is that, "They were both alive long after the horrors had ceased".  What he wants to be able to say, therefore, is that the insane doctor committed suicide very shortly after the Kelly murder otherwise it weakens the case against him too!  So I don't see him hiding the date that the body was found, rather him trying to give the impression to his reader that Druitt must have jumped into the Thames on or about 10 November, exactly as Mac had tried to convey it.  So I see him dealing with the point from a different angle.  It's not deception as such, just a subtle way of boosting his argument.  It's very similar to what Sims wrote in 1917, although in that case it's much more vague because "After committing that he drowned himself" could have involved a drowning on or after 1st December.
(As for your point about Richardson, I'm not sure what you think it means other than that, like Macnaghten, he seems to have known the name of the well known mad "doctor" who jumped into the Thames.) 
THE SMOKING GUN

"So, you know what was in the mind of the Referee reporter, you know for a fact what they had read about the Berlin criminal and what he had not?"

Yes of course I do because the reporter literally stated what he knew about the Berlin murderer in his column.  I even quoted it in an earlier email:  "about twenty years of age, of middle height and slightly built, with blonde hair and mustache."  That's what the reporter said which is how I know what was in his mind!
And it wasn't Druitt.
THE 1893 POEM
You write "Historical methodology means you have to measure every source with every other source."
The way you demonstrate it, historical methodology means failing to understand the plain words of a text.
Of course, I know exactly what's happened.  You've seen a mention of "Jack the Ripper" in connection with Farquharson and leapt to the conclusion that this must relate to his 1891 story about the son of a surgeon without actually understanding what Sims was doing with the poem.  That is not "historical methodology", it's amateurish misunderstanding of plain English.   More than this, it's about you attempting to shoehorn into your theory a meaning of Sims' poem which doesn't exist because you like the conclusion that Sims was rubbishing Farquharson's Ripper story.   You've then made up some fantasy about Mac and Sims wanting to ridicule Farquharson (in code which no one reading the Referee at the time, including Farquharson, could possibly have understood) in case "the solution" of the unnamed Druitt came up again, or whatever other reason you've just made up from the top of your head.
Jonathan, that's not what was happening with the poem.  You can accept it from me or you can blindly continue to believe what you want to believe about "nuances of primary sources".  I have no interest in the outcome.  I just read the flipping poem to work out what Sims meant.  It took me about five seconds to work it out. But I had to go to the original in the Referee because when I tried to do so from the extract you included in your book I discovered that you left out the crucial part of the poem, making it impossible for your reader to understand what was being said in that poem.
And it's not me being literal by referring to rival candidates.  THAT is what is being said in the poem.  I've explained it to you and it is what the poem means.  It's definitely not a scolding of Farquaharson for his 1891 story other than in your imagination which has put 2 and 2 together to arrive at 5.
MAC AND SIMS
It had nothing to do with Macnaghten. "You were there were you?"
Jonathan, unless Mac helped Sims with every column he wrote in the Referee while he was working full time at Scotland Yard, the humorous little poem relating to Farquharson's libel action, which had nothing to do with Druitt, would have had nothing to do with Macnaghten either.  So I didn't need to be there to know that Macnaghten wouldn't have had anything to do with a lighthearted Sims poem about a matter entirely unconnected with police business.  The poem itself had nothing to do with the Ripper case or the Druitt solution.  That's why I know that it had nothing to do with Macnaghten.
Frankly the hyperbole of my apoplectic outrage is greatly understated in this email, and I've had to tone down my language from what I'd really like to have said about this.  
But here's a challenge for you.  Post the full extract from the Referee including the full poem on one of the forums (or ask someone else to do it for you) and invite the members of the forums to explain what they think is meant by the poem.  I dare you!
While you're at it, post the entire paragraph from Mac's preface about the enterprising journalist and ask the members of the forums to interpret what he's saying. 
I don't want you to just have to take my word for it.