Deborah Mcdonald - The Prince, His Tutor and the Ripper: The Evidence Linking James Kenneth Stephen to the Whitechapel Murders

James Kenneth Stephen. Photograph of a painting by Charles Wellington Furse. ARA, 1891. Oil on canvas. By kind permission of Provost and Scholars of Kings College, Cambridge.

Foreword by COLIN WILSON

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-1691-9

2007 Deborah McDonald. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

On the cover: Portrait of James Kenneth Stephen taken for his mother and captioned done at the command of she who must be obeyed; platinum print, possibly by Henry H Cameron, 1990 (Leslie Stephen Photograph Album, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College); Kings College 2007 Clipart

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

During the hours spent researching this book, I have been constantly amazed by the number of people who so willingly helped me in my endeavors. These included the staff at both Beckenham Library in Greater London and Cowes Library on the Isle of Wight, whom I pestered to obtain obscure inter-library loans. Other library staff who helped me were at the New York Public Library, Kings College Library, the Wren Library, Churchill College Library, the Pepys Library, University Library Cambridge (at which Godfrey Waller has been especially helpful), Chiswick Local Studies Library, Lewisham Local Studies Library, The Public Record Office, and the Royal Archives at Windsor. Individuals who have helped include Tia ORourke and Peter Giles at the Savile Club; Tim Davies at St. Andrews Hospital, Northampton; David Hinton at the Branksome Library, Bournemouth; Kate Bradley at Toynbee Hall; Olivier Bell, who put me in touch with Professor Bicknell, without whom I would never have discovered the whereabouts of Mary Stephens diary; Henry Vivian-Neal, the secretary of the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery, who took me on a personal guided tour of the cemetery in order to locate Stephens grave (incidentally it was done with much good humor and willingness despite my having interrupted his lunch and the fact that it was a bitterly cold February day); Sue and Andy Parlour, who have themselves written a book on the Ripper and who have willingly shared some of their research and illustrations; Martin and Sally Hallam for information on their family; and Stephen P. Ryder, who runs the wonderful website CasebookJack the Ripper, and who guided me to my publisher.

On a more personal note I would like to thank David McDonald for all the hours he devoted to helping me with my research, Ian Miller who assisted with all the information technology work and Kelvin Wynne for his photographic input.

Finally, I would like to thank all those people I havent mentioned but who willingly went beyond carrying out their normal jobs in order to provide me with information.

by Colin Wilson

One day in late 1971, my friend Michael Harrisonnovelist and Victorian chroniclersaid to me over the telephone: Im sitting at my desk and looking at a letter from Jack the Ripper.

The Duke of Clarence?

I asked this because I knew Michael was working on a biography of Queen Victorias grandson, who had been proposed as a Ripper candidate as far back as 1960.

No, not Clarence.

Who then?

Ah, youll have to wait until the book comes out.

This was reasonable, for if the identity of his suspect became known too far in advance, the resulting publicity might have taken the wind out of the sails of his book

So I had to wait until his publisher sent me an advance copy of the book in April the following year. It was then I learned that his suspect was J. K. (Jim) Stephen, son of the eminent judge Sir James Fitzjames Stephen. Jim Stephen had been Clarences tutor at Cambridge, and possibly his lover.

On April 10, 1972, I interviewed Michael Harrison and the journalist Dan Farson on Westward Television about Jack the Ripper, and Michael came to stay with us for a few days in Cornwall. It was then that he told me how he had stumbled upon his Jim Stephen theory of the Rippers identity.

Twelve years earlier, in 1960, I had written a series of articles for the London Evening Standard called My Search for Jack the Ripper, describing how the subject had begun to fascinate me in childhood. As a result of these, I had received a letter from a doctor named Thomas Stowell, who said that, from hints I had dropped in my articles, I obviously knew the identity of Jack the Ripperand implying that he did.

We arranged to meet for lunch at his club, the Athenaeum. He proved to be a charming old gentleman, probably in his 70s, and as we had a sherry in the lounge, he told me why he assumed I knew the Rippers identity1 had described him as a well-dressed young man. I explained that I was merely quoting the witnesses. PC Smith had described the man he saw speaking to the fourth victim, Elizabeth Stride, as wearing a deerstalker hat, about 28 years of age, and of respectable appearance. Another witness, Matthew Parker had described the same man with a deerstalker.

At the lunch table, Dr Stowell told me the name of the man he believed to be Jack the Ripper: the Duke of Clarence. I have to confess I was less than amazedas he obviously expected me to befor I did not have the slightest idea who the Duke of Clarence was. I had a vague idea that he was a historical character who drowned in a butt of Malmsey. But he was, it seemed, the grandson of Queen Victoria, son of the man who became Edward VII, and the heir to the throne of England. In one of the best-known photographs, he is wearing a deerstalker hat.

Stowell explained to me that, in the 1930s, he had been approached by Caroline Acland, the daughter of Queen Victorias physician Sir William Gull. She had found among her fathers papers some documents about the Duke of Clarence, which asserted that he did not die in the flu epidemic of 1892, as the history books assert, but in a mental home near Sandringham, suffering from a softening of the brain due to syphilis. There were also ambiguous remarks about Jack the Ripper, which made it sound as if the Duke of Clarenceknown to everyone as Eddyknew his identity.

Caroline Acland had told Stowell that a detective had called at her fathers house in Park Lane, and asked him some impertinent questions which infuriated her, all of which made it sound as if the police thought Sir William Gull was Jack the Ripper. But that was unlikelyGull had had a stroke in 1887, the year before the murders, and died of a second stroke three years later. No, the mysterious references to the Duke of Clarence convinced Stowell that he was Jack the Ripper, and that Gull knew all about it.