The Lodger
In January 1911, McLure's Magazine published a story by Marie Belloc
Lowndes entitled "The Lodger." The story revolves around a retired
couple, both formerly servants who make extra income by renting out rooms
in their home. Unsuccessful as landlords and facing the prospect of hard
times, they are saved when a single gentleman rents their upstairs rooms
at a higher rate than usual. The extra money permits the husband to once
again indulge himself in a daily paper wherein he follows closely a series
of murders of harlots committed by a madman calling himself "The Avenger."
The new lodger is a quiet gentleman who is a bit idiosyncratic. Deeply
religious, he spends his days reading the bible aloud. He is given to nocturnal
wanderings, leaving the house late and not returning until early morning.
On those nights when he is at home, he conducts strange experiments on
the gas ring in one of his rooms.
The wife becomes suspicious. Noting that her lodger's late night disappearances
coincide with the murders, she begins to believe that he is "The Avenger."
Thus was born for the public the mythical lodger who turns out to be
Jack the Ripper. The strange, bible quoting gentleman with the deep seeded
hatred of whores, who spends his days alone and spends his nights prowling
the city for prey. Belloc Lowndes story went on to become a best selling
novel and no less than three films have been based on it. One of these
films, "The Lodger, a Story of the London Fog," was made by a
young Alfred Hitchcock and is generally excepted as the first truly Hitchcockian
film.
Mrs. Belloc Lowndes is supposed to have gotten the idea for this story
by overhearing a snatch of dinner conversation wherein one guest was telling
another that his mother's butler and cook claimed that had once rented
rooms to Jack the Ripper. But the story of the lodger appears well before
Mrs. Belloc Lowndes and, as recently put forward by Stewart Evans and Paul
Gainey in their book, "The Lodger, The Arrest & Escape of Jack
the Ripper" it may very well have more fact behind it than originally
thought.
Prior to Belloc Lowndes the story had already been put forward by at
least two people: Lyttleton Stewart, Forbes Winslow and the painter Walter
Sickert. Both of these tales contain the same essential ideas and "facts"
and suggest that the story had reached the level of urban myth within a
few years of the Whitechapel murders.
Forbes Winslow was the son of a doctor who specialized in lunacy. He
followed in his father's practice and became a leading alienist. In his
memoir "Recollections of Forty Years," as quoted in Donald Rumbelow's
"The Complete Jack the Ripper." he describes himself as a medical
theorist and practical detective. A description not unlike that given to
the medical doctor upon whom Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes.
Forbes Winslow became engrossed in the Whitechapel murders. "Day
after day and night after night I spent in the Whitechapel slums. The detectives
new me, the lodging house keepers new me, and at last the poor creatures
of the streets came to know me. In terror they rushed to me with every
scrap of information which might be of value. To me the frightened women
looked for hope. In my presence they felt reassured, and welcomed me to
their dens and obeyed my commands eagerly, and found the bits of information
I wanted."
Using his experiences with those suffering from homicidal-religious
mania and foreshadowing the modern practice of psychological profiling,
he claims to have constructed an imaginary man whom he now set about to
find.
In 1889 Forbes Winslow connected with a Finsbury Street lodging house
keeper named Callaghan who told him of a former lodger, G. Wentworth Bell
Smith, who had rented a large room from him in April 1888. According to
Callaghan, Smith was a Canadian and he went on to describe him as 5' 10"
tall, dark complexioned with a full mustache and beard worn closely cropped.
He walked with a curious weak-kneed, splay-footed gait. Smith's dress and
manners suggested a man of some gentility. Callaghan also said that Smith
was multilingual and had a foreign appearance.
The landlord was told by Smith that he was in England on business and
might stay an indefinite period of time. He requested and received a house
key. Soon the landlord and his wife began to take notice of their tenants
behavioral idiosyncrasies. He changed clothes several times a day, wearing
a different suit and one of three pairs of rubber soled boots each time
he went out. He kept three loaded revolvers in his room. He frequently
railed against the women of the street and once filled fifty or sixty sheets
of foolscap paper with his disgust for "dissolute women." These
ramblings were punctuated with a mixture of morality and religion which
he often read to his landlord.
On August 7, the night of the Martha Tabram murder, he arrived at his
lodgings at 4:00 AM, explaining the lateness by claiming that his watch
had been stolen in Bishopsgate, which later proved untrue. In the morning
the maid found bloodstains on his bed and noticed that the cuffs of his
shirt had recently been washed. Soon after Smith left his lodgings saying
that he had to return to Canada, but it was known that he remained in England.
It was in August of 1889 that Callaghan, who had in the mean time moved,
was told by a woman that she had been approached by a man in Worship Street
who had offered her one pound to accompany him down a court. She refused,
but soon after there had been another murder. The woman told Callaghan
that she had recognized him as a man she had seen coming and going from
Callaghans Lodgings in Finsbury Street. Callaghan immediately assumed it
to be Smith and told this to Forbes Winslow. Since he perfectly matched
the man Forbes Winslow had in mind, he knew he had his man.
According to Forbes Winslow's written story he went to the police with
his information. He claimed that the man could be captured at Saint Paul's
Cathedral, where he went ever day at 8:00 AM. He said that if the police
would not cooperate with him he would publish his story. According to Forbes
Winslow the police didn't cooperate and he published in the form of an
interview in the New York Herald Tribune. In the interview he showed the
reporter a pair of rubber soled, bloodstained boots saying they belonged
to Jack the Ripper. (*We assume he had the boots from Callaghan.)
When the English press picked up the story Scotland Yard dispatched
Chief Inspector Swanson to interview Forbes Winslow who immediately began
to back-peddle. He said the story printed in the paper was not accurate
and misrepresented the entire conversation between himself and the reporter.
He claimed the reporter had tricked him into talking about the case. In
truth, Forbes Winslow had never given any information to the police with
the exception of an earlier theory of his involving an escaped lunatic.
A theory which even Forbes Winslow had abandoned. He showed the boots to
Swanson and they turned out to be canvas topped boots the tops of which
were moth eaten and the molt of the moth still adhering to the tops. No
bloodstains.
In "The Jack the Ripper A-Z" it is suggested by the authors
that Smith was an agent of the Toronto Truss Company which had offices
in Finsbury Street. He kept another office on Saint Paul Street. Eccentric
as he may have been and resident in London at the time of the murders,
there is nothing to connect him in any way with the murders. Indeed, at
Five foot ten and fully bearded, he doesn't match either Mrs. Long's or
Lawendes description of the murderer.
The second lodger story involves Walter Sickert, painter, and for better
or worse now indelibly caught up in the Ripper myths. However, there is
no royalty or masonic plots in this contribution bearing the Sickert name.
Instead it involves the painter's claim that he knew the identity of the
Ripper because he occupied his former rooms.
Sickert took lodgings in Mornington Crescent, Camden, in a house owned
by an elderly couple. It was several years after the Ripper killings. It
was they who told him that the previous occupant of the rooms was Jack
the Ripper. He was a veterinary student with delicate looks and suffering
from consumption. Again, this lodger was said to stay out all night and
rush to buy the morning papers on the morning following the murders. They
said he was in the habit of burning his clothes. Eventually his health
began to fail and his mother returned him to Bournemouth where he died
shortly there after.
They told Sickert his name which he supposedly wrote down in the margin
of a copy of "Casanova's Memoirs" which he gave to Albert Rutherford.
Unfortunately, Rutherford could not decipher Sickert's handwriting and
the book was lost in the blitz.
As reported in "The Jack the Ripper A-Z" the tale takes another
twist and seems to point at another well known suspect, Montague J. Druitt.
Donald McCormick, author of "The Identity of Jack the Ripper,"
says that he was told the story by a London doctor. The unnamed doctor
had been at Oxford with Montague Druitt's father. According to him the
veterinary student's name was something like Druitt or Drewett or Hewett.
McCormick also suggested that this story was told to Melville Macnaughten
who, in his famous Memorandum wherein Druitt is named as a suspect, states
that "from private info I have little doubt but that his own family
believed him (Druitt) to be the murderer." McCormick suggests that
this story may be the "private info."
Research by N. P. Warren, editor of "Ripperana, The Quarterly Journal
of Ripperology" shows that the only student at the Royal Veterinary
College whose name is close to Druitt is George Ailwyn Hewitt. Hewitt would
have been 17 or 18 years old in 1888 and he died in 1908. Only one student
who failed to follow a career beyond 1888 came from Bournemouth. His name
was Joseph Ride who was 27 in 1888.
These two stories bear a great deal in common: the solitary and strange
lodger whose habits slowly bring him under the suspicion of his landlord
and landlady. The night-time wanderings, the unusual habits with clothing
and the hatred of whores. They also share the dubious distinction of having
been brought forward well after the Ripper murders stopped. Indeed, they
are not the only two. Another with very similar sounding "facts"
relates to a seaman from New Zealand (see Ripperana No.4, April 1993, pgs.
6-9).
Of the two stories, the Forbes Winslow story gives the initial impression
of carrying a bit more weight. Unfortunately, a more careful examination
doesn't bear this out. For one thing, he bases his finding on there having
been more murders than are generally attributed to the Ripper. The murder
reported by the woman to Callaghan to Forbes Winslow was that of Alice
McKenzie which even at the time was considered a copycat (sic) murder.
There is also evidence of considerable tampering with other evidence brought
forward to support his story.
His work as an amateur detective is no different than that of countless
others who descended on the East End during the murders. Why should we
believe his success over any of the others? Forbes Winslow went on to embellish
and change the story for the rest of his life.
There is little to reccomend either of these stories as a possible lead
in identifying Jack the Ripper and they should be relegated to the realm
of myths. But there is another lodger story which is contemporary with
the murders, was reported in the newspapers of the day and, with the research
done by Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey in their pursuit of the Littlechild
Suspect, takes a much more important place in the story.
The story first appeared in The Globe of October 10, 1888.
DETECTIVES ON A NEW SCENT
"A well informed correspondent states that he has gleaned the following
information from an undeniably authentic source, and from careful and persistent
inquiries in various quarters he is able to relate the news fact, though
for obvious reasons names and addresses are for the present suppressed:
A certain member of the Criminal Investigation Department has recently
journeyed to Liverpool and there traced the movements of a man which have
proved of a somewhat mysterious kind. The height of this person and his
description are generally ascertained, and among other things he was in
possession of a black leather bag. This man suddenly left Liverpool for
London, and for sometime occupied apartments in a well-known first class
hotel in the West End. It is stated that for some reason or another this
person was in the habit of 'slumming'. He would visit the lowest parts
of London, and scour the slums of the East End. He suddenly disappeared
from the hotel leaving a black leather bag and its contents, and has not
yet returned. He left a small bill unpaid, and ultimately an advertisement
appeared in The Times, setting forth the gentleman's name, and drawing
forth attention to the fact that the bag would be sold under the Innkeeper's
Act to defray expenses, unless claimed. This was done last month by a well-known
auctioneer in London, and the contents, or some of them, are now in possession
of the police, who are thoroughly investigating the affair. Of these we,
of course, cannot more than make mention, but certain documents, wearing
apparel, cheque books, prints of obscene description, letter, & c.,
are said to form the foundation of a most searching inquiry now afoot,
which is being vigilantly pursued by those in authority. It has been suggested
that the mysterious personage referred to landed in Liverpool from America,
but this so far is no more than a suggestion."
Evans and Gainey suggest that this must have been written of October
9 and that the detectives must have been sent to Liverpool at the beginning
of that week. This would be almost immediately following the 'Double Event.'
Further information came forward over the next several days.
In an article dated October 13, the Suffolk Chronicle wrote "The
steamers leaving Liverpool for America and other ports are now carefully
watched by the police and passengers are closely scrutinized by detectives,
there being an idea the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders may endeavour
to make his escape via Liverpool."
Just three days later a report in the Daily News, October 16 adds to
the story:
"According to a Correspondent, the police are watching with great
anxiety a house in the East-end which is strongly suspected to have been
the actual lodging, or house made use of by someone connected with the
East-end murders. Statement made by the neighbours in the district point
to the fact that the landlady had a lodger, who since Sunday morning of
the last Whitechapel murder has been missing. The lodger, it is stated,
returned home early on the Sunday morning, and the landlady was disturbed
by his moving about. She got up very early, and noticed that her lodger
had changed some of his clothes. He told her he was going away for a little
time, and asked her to wash his shirt which he had taken off, and get it
ready for him by the time he came back. As he had been in the habit of
going away now and then, she did not think much at the time, and soon afterwards
he went out. On looking at his shirt she was astonished to find the wristbands
and part of the sleeves saturated with blood. The appearance struck her
as very strange, and when she heard of the murders here suspicions were
aroused. Acting on the advise of some neighbours, she gave information
to the police and showed them the bloodstained shirt. They took possession
of it, and obtained from her a full description of her missing lodger.
During the last fortnight she has been under the impression that he would
return, and was sanguine that he would probably come back on Saturday or
Sunday night, or perhaps Monday evening. The general opinion, however,
among the neighbours is that he will never return. On finding out the house
and visiting it, a reporter found it was tenanted by a stout, middle-aged
German woman, who speaks very bad English, and who was not inclined to
give much information further than the fact that her lodger had not returned
yet, and she could not say where he had gone or when he would be back.
The neighbours state that ever since the information has been given two
detectives and two policemen have been in the house day and night. The
house is approached by a court, and as there are alleys running through
into different streets, there are different ways to approach and exit.
It is believed from the information obtained concerning the lodgers former
movements and his general appearance, together with the fact that numbers
of people have seen this man about the neighbourhood, that the police have
in their possession a series of important clues, and that his capture is
only a question of time."
At this point Evans and Gainey put forward that the police had indeed
found the East End base of the murderer. It appears that they had solid
evidence connecting the lodger with the crimes, certainly the shirt being
a significant clue. They also knew his identity. Conversely, their quarry
now had to know that he was being searched for and was on the run.
Another press story suggests that the police were trying to play the
events down and try to keep the press in the dark. This was a hallmark
of the police-press relationship throughout the Whitechapel murders.
East Anglican Times, Wednesday, October 17:
" The startling story published Monday, with reference to the
finding of a blood-stained shirt, and the disappearance of a man from a
certain house in the East End, proves, from the investigation carried out
by a reporter, on Tuesday, to be not altogether devoid of foundation, though
on Monday afternoon the truth of the statement was given an unqualified
denial by the detective officers, presumably because they were anxious
to avoid a premature disclosure of the facts of which they had been for
sometime cognizant. The police have taken exceptional precautions to prevent
disclosure, and while repeated arrests have taken place with no other result
than that of discharging the prisoners for the time in custody, they have
devoted particular attention to one particular spot, in the hope that a
few days would suffice to set at rest public anxiety as to further murders.
Our reporter, on Tuesday, elicited the fact that from the morning of the
Berner Street and Mitre Square murders, the police have had in their possession
a shirt saturated with blood. Though they say nothing they are evidently
convinced that it was left in a house on Blatty Street by the assassin.
Having regard to the position of this house, its proximity to the yard
in Berner Street, where the crime was committed, and to the many intricate
passages and alleys adjacent, the police theory has in all probability
a basis in fact. The statement has been made that the landlady of the house
was, at an early hour, disturbed by movements of her lodger, who changed
some of his apparel, and went away after instructing her to wash the cast-off
shirt. Although, for reasons known to themselves, the police, during Saturday,
Sunday, and Monday, answered in the negative all questions as to whether
any persons had been arrested, there is no doubt that a man was taken into
custody on suspicion of being the missing lodger from 22 Batty Street,
and that he was afterwards set at liberty.
The German lodging-house keeper could clear up the point as to the existence
of any lodger absent from her house under the suspicious circumstances
referred to, but she is not accessible and it is easy to understand that
the police should endeavour to prevent her making any statement. From our
own inquiries in various directions on Tuesday afternoon, a further development
is very likely to take place."
Batty Street is one street east of Berner Street -- central to all the
Ripper killings. The lodging house in question nearly backs up to Dutfield's
Yard, scene of the Stride murder. Much of this has been previously overlooked
because of a series of articles, possibly placed by the police through
the Central News Agency, countered and played down the story.
Evans and Gainey conjecture that there was an increasing cover up by
police surrounding this suspect. His name was Francis Tumblety, an American
quack doctor and herbalist. He was in Whitechapel at the time of the murders.
Although there is no absolute proof that Tumblety was the Blatty Street
Lodger, there is a very strong circumstantial and conjectural case for
it. He was arrested for "unnatural acts" during the period of
the murders and was RELEASED ON BAIL! He fled, through Liverpool and finally
made his way back to America where Scotland Yard continued the chase sending
detectives to New York City where Tumblety once again gave them the slip.
Tumblety is a very strong suspect. That he was the preferred suspect of John
J. Littlechild, Chief of CID Special Branch is weighty enough. His habits
(it is reported that he kept a collection of uteruses in jars) and personality
as put forward in Evans and Gainey's book appear to give him a psychological
profile which makes him a potential candidate. Ongoing research regarding
this suspect is underway.
Moreover, Tumblety again lends credence to a very likely "type"
of suspect. Far from Royalty and the semi-famous or infamous, he puts forward
the image of the quiet little man, ignored or barely noticed by those around
him who takes his revenge on the society which he feels has unjustly alienated
him by murdering strangers. Not unlike those people who, when they are
arrested as serial killers are described for the evening news by their
neighbours as "Him? Oh, he kept to himself and seemed harmless!"
