Chapter 1

Sources and methods

There is much mythology about documentary evidence on the Whitechapel murders and its availability for public study. Two well known stories - one of them certainly apocryphal, the other probably so - are that there is a secret file, presumably in the Metropolitan Police or Home Office archives, which contains crucial sensitive information on the case or even names the killer, and secondly that each new appointee to the post of Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police called for the files on the Whitechapel case to see exactly what they contained. There may have been some truth in this in the days before all the remaining files on the case were put into the public domain, but I still have doubts about the truth of this beguiling story.
All the available documentation is now available for public inspection and has been exhaustively analysed and annotated. It has to be said that the remaining documents are a disappointment to many people who expected some great and momentous revelation. There is no doubt that the existing files have been heavily "weeded" both by time and by human hands. It is easy to see this as part of some orchestrated cover up but the losses could also be due to routine housekeeping, carelessness and souvenir hunting. We certainly have evidence that some important and potentially very interesting items of evidence have disappeared over the course of time.
To quote only two instances, the original of the so called Lusk letter, which arrived with a portion of kidney at the dwelling of George Lusk, chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, is no longer to be found in the case files, and the letter, known as the Littlechild letter, which brought the name of Francis Tumblety to the public eye as a contemporary suspect, makes reference to an extensive file held at Scotland Yard on Tumblety. Many researchers would certainly be most interested to browse the contents of this file! Whether it now resides in some private collection, or moulders away in some forgotten family archive or went the way of many documents many years ago, we simply do not know, and maybe never will.
Many of the contents are seen by some researchers as irrelevant to the modern study of the case. A prime example of this is the cache of letters purportedly from the murderer, some signed "Jack the Ripper," some not. There is a heated and ongoing debate as to whether the Whitechapel murderer wrote one, some or none of these epistles. But even if the killer wrote not one of these letters, it does not mean they have no value as evidence, unless the core and sole purpose of one's research is to put a name to the anonymous killer. Indeed, they are a valuable case for study in their own right, casting a fascinating light on the impact that the crimes had on the public psyche and the effect these high profile atrocities produced on a surprisingly high number of individuals which prompted them to write these communications which can be, by turn, chilling, bizarre and even unintentionally comic.
However, for the purposes of the present work I have used reference sources, which are, all in the public domain and which, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, are becoming increasingly available to the all, a development which can only be welcomed. I have principally used two sources:
1) Census returns data from 1871 to 1901 inclusive. Census data is subject to restriction for 100 years, so the last census that has become available in its entirety is that for 1901.
2) The indices for Births, Marriages and Deaths (hereafter termed BMD) from 1837 (when the statutory requirement to register such events was formalised) to date.
Both sources, as with any form of data or evidence, have their own problems and limitations. To allow both Census and BMD data to be searched, especially when the data has been transferred to general availability "on line" via the Internet, any such search is conducted using a manually transcribed index which can be very unforgiving when it comes to even the slightest of spelling mistakes! This is not to criticise the heroic efforts of the transcribers, many of them volunteers, without whose sterling and selfless efforts this invaluable data would not be available at all.
I have done transcription work myself and know how tedious and mind numbing it can be and, considering the sheer volume of data involved in even one census return, mistakes and transcription errors are inevitable. We must also remember that there can be problems with the original documents themselves. Some are not in the best of condition with physical deterioration and faded handwriting to contend with. Some of the enumerators (those whose transferred the individual household returns onto the data sheets we see today) do not have the most legible writing in the world and it seems to be some perverse universal law that the one area of a census return that is faded, torn or badly written is the very part that contains the entry you are interested in!
Census Data:
The format of census for the period in question (i.e. the returns for 1871 to 1901 inclusive at ten year intervals) includes the following data fields for each person listed:
Road, Street etc. and Number or Name of House
Name and Surname of Each Person
Relation to Head of Family
Condition as to Marriage
Age last Birthday
Profession or Occupation
Where Born
The format does vary slightly from one census year to another and there are other fields included, such as Disability, Number of Rooms Occupied if less than Five etc., but these are not relevant to the current research.
The data contained in census returns has to be treated with a healthy degree of caution, as there are various points at which errors can enter the data chain. The household return was completed by the head of household, these returns were collected and collated by the enumerator for that district onto the return sheets to which we have access today. Finally, key fields have been copied by modern transcribers into the indices that are used for searchable databases of census returns. It is apparent that the key field for any research will usually be the surname and if this has been misread or misspelt in the original data then problems can definitely arise. Sometimes letters are transposed or slight variations of spelling are encountered. However, sometimes such radical spelling changes are present that tracing an individual can be seriously compromised. As examples of this, when I was tracking down the census entries for two of the established suspects - Montague Druitt and Roslyn Donston Stephenson - I found Druitt listed as Montague Druk and Stephenson (who by then was using Donston as his surname) listed as Roslyn Dcuston.
On the question of reliability, I have found the most "fluid" fields in the census data to be those of the place of birth and the age. These should, in my experience, be used as ancillary fields to back up suspected identifications, and not as primary identifiers. As an example (admittedly an extreme one) of how the ages given can be most misleading, the list below gives the reported ages for Albert Backert in four successive censuses:
in 1871 he is shown as 8
in 1881 he is shown as 18
in 1891 he is shown as 22
in 1901 he is shown as 26.
If we could bottle whatever he was taking, we could all retire! Similar strictures apply to the question of a person's place of birth. In some instances, this can just be a matter of more or less detail. For example, in one census, John McCarthy is described as simply born in France. Another census adds the information that he was born in Dieppe, France. Other persons have completely different birthplaces listed in successive censuses. The physician Morgan Davies is listed as born in Wales in one census but in the next we are told he was born in Whitechapel.
Having said that the surname field is the most important field, we must be prepared for variations there too. Some of these arise because of differences in late Victorian usage and modern spelling conventions. A common example of this is the modern Mc which is often rendered in Victorian times as M'. So John McCarthy will often be listed in newspaper reports and in some census data as John M'Carthy. The murder victim Alice McKenzie is often listed as Alice M'Kenzie etc.
We must also remember that we are researching an area where there was a large and varied racial and religious mix with many names which may have posed problems of spelling for the head of household (in the case of a lodging house, for example) or for the enumerator. Also there were many variant spellings, which can trap the unwary. For example, John Pizer's name is often spelt Piser; Julia Venturney is also known as Vanturney, Van Turney and Venteney, Albert Backert is often Bachert and Albert Cadoche appears to have too many surnames to mention!
BMD Data:
Birth, Marriages and Death listings are available from 1837 to the present day. From the indices that I have used the following information is given:
Death Registers:
Surname
Forename(s)
Age at Death
District where death was registered
Volume and page number of the register in which the entry can be found.
Marriage Registers:
Surname
Forename(s)
District where marriage was registered
Volume and page numbers.
Birth Registers:
Surname
Forename(s)
District where birth was registered
Volume and page numbers
As the version of these indices I have used is the official listing as held by the Public Records Office, I have found the quality of data to be better than census returns and the number of anomalies as outlined above to be less. One further thing to note with regard to the registers is that they were compiled quarterly. So, for any year there will be volumes for January to March, April to June, July to September and October to December. Therefore, for any information gleaned from the indices to the registers I will be quoting a quarter rather than an individual month.
For each of the minor players in the Jack the Ripper saga included in the present work I will be looking at the following factors:
1) Context - this will be a brief explanation of how the person in question fits into the account of the Whitechapel murders. This will detail how they entered the story, what they contributed to the available information and their importance in the whole structure of the Jack the Ripper story.
2) Status - this will detail what role the person played, whether a witness, a friend of one of the victims, a member of their family and so on.
3) Information - this will detail what information can be gleaned from the data sources mentioned above. Speculation will be kept to a minimum and I will clearly indicate where this does occur and offer the reasons that prompted me to come to the conclusions I have reached.
One question I have been asked about the content of this book (even before I started to write it!) is whether it was a specialist book or intended for the general reader. Well, there will certainly not appear here, as in many other works on the subject of the Whitechapel murders, a general, chronological account of the murders, nor an account of the lives of the victims, nor any analysis of the commonly accepted suspects or theories. So the present work does assume knowledge of the basic facts of the case. For any reader coming to the subject without this outline understanding of the facts I would recommend the following works:
For a general reference work on the subject, "The Jack the Ripper A - Z" by Paul Begg, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner.
For a detailed account of the documents relevant to the case, "The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook" by Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner.
For a detailed account of the case, "The Complete History of Jack the Ripper," by Philip Sugden.
For a brief account of the case "Jack the Ripper" by Mark Whitehead and Miriam Rivett.
But, finally, why is it important to pay any heed to these minor players in the case of the Whitechapel murders? I have already said that nothing in these pages will get us one jot closer to "solving" the case, if such an outcome will ever be possible or, indeed, desirable. It is an odd thing in the study of Jack the Ripper that what many of my fellow students of the case say they most desire, an identity for the killer, is also, I am pretty sure what they most dread. What would we all do with our time if some intrepid sleuth solved the case?
We would have to pack our bags and go home, metaphorically. But to return to our cast of "bit players." These varied and sometimes colourful souls who flit past like fish in a pond, have long intrigued me. Some were undoubtedly self promoting publicity seekers, others simply caught up in the tide of events, some could not have known how long their names would endure in Jack's reflected glory. It can certainly be argued that, on a strictly logical basis when viewing the case as a whole, they are of no great importance in many cases. But, like the victims, like Jack himself, they were living people who eked out their lives on the streets of London. They may not be of importance in the great scheme of things, but I hope they are of interest.