Sickert's Veterinary Student
Some years after the Whitechapel murders the artist Walter Sickert took a room in a London suburb, believed to be 6 Mornington Crescent, Camden. The owners of the house, an elderly couple, told him that the previous occupant of the room was Jack the Ripper, who was a veterinary student whom would stay out all night, then come home in the early hours, before rushing out to buy the morning newspaper. He also occasionally burnt the clothes he had been wearing the night before. When his health began to fail, his widowed mother took him home to Bournemouth, where he died three months later. Sickert wrote the man's name in the margin of a book (said to be Casanova's Memoirs) which he gave to Albert Rutherstone. The book, it is claimed, was lost in the blitz. Donald McCormck, the writer and author, claims to have been told this story and remembers the students name as Druitt, Drewett or Hewitt. If the room mentioned in the story was Sickert's studio at 6 Mornington Crescent, then the last occupant was an Egyptian medical student.
