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Natalie Severn
Chief Inspector
Username: Severn
Post Number: 561
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, March 28, 2004 - 10:24 am: |       |
Absolutely so Chris.But in many ways Sickert was similar to the German Expressionism which often dwelt on the darker more sinister side of life.In fact Georges Rouault"s "prostitute at her Mirror of 1906 is so like Sickert"s La Hollondaise of 1906 that you could be forgiven for thinking they were one and the same women..
But then as you point out he also painted quiet images of ordinary life similar to those of Vuillard and Bonnard who influenced him as well.
Above all he tried to "cut the crap" refusing like Kossoff say today to paint the picturesque.Everyday life is unpretentious and the people are doing the kinds of things they ordinarily do--read newspapers,lean over things look bored etc.
In fact one of my all time favourite painters Manet,who was a bit earlier than the German Expressionists and Sickert and who more than anyone else picked up the challenge from Courbet "to show it like it is"-with a commitment to concrete reality rather than dreamy sentimentality can be said to have revolutionised painting at this timeand led the way to modern painting.Manet was the painter who like Sickert a little later,was very sensitive to urban alienation and the constantly changing nature of our cities.But because he was such a fabulous painter and had not broken with the realist masters of the past such as Velasquez,Goya and the Dutch masters he is able to show all this in works of great beauty and loveliness whereas just a little later they started to abandon them.And Sickert is one of those who wass so determined to capture the essence of things that his work can often startle you with its brashness and rough brush strokes.But that was the point.
Natalie |
Natalie Severn
Chief Inspector
Username: Severn
Post Number: 562
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, March 28, 2004 - 11:40 am: | |
i do see that I am filling this thread but so has Mark.
Just to balance things up a bit as I seem to be naming only male artists.
The following female artist may interest you Mark.
Cindy sherman has created a series of baroque works where the female body is dismembered or replaced with "pornographic prosthetics in a violent evocation of the image as a corpse and woman as a victim".Using your reasoning I am led to believe that she is obsessed with corpses and women being cut up and given false faces breasts buttocks and vaginas and the life being crushed from them until they are dead.Or is she perhaps implying that the pursuit of perfection is being unsrupulously capitalised on by those in the "prosthetic" industry?
Natalie |
Caroline Anne Morris
Chief Inspector
Username: Caz
Post Number: 937
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, March 29, 2004 - 7:07 am: | |
Hi All,
Now as I see it, there is nothing wrong with speculating that the Whitechapel murderer was literate enough to be able to read the newspapers. Most of the favoured candidates would have been.
So I don't think it's too much of a leap to speculate that the killer couldn't resist reading his own publicity and learning what his public thought he had done, believed he might do next, and about the kind of man he could be.
So even if Walter Sickert had been the prolific pseudonymous letter writer of ripper-related missives that Cornwell and co would paint him to be (ha ha), the real killer - if not Mr. Sickert - would have found a rich seam of ideas and suggestions in that particular postbag, wouldn't he? Including the idea to cut out the next whore's heart, all the better to put the blame on the October 2nd informant's Malay, in this instance, or on one of his more believable impostors.
I'm afraid the evidence for Sickert, prolific writer of ripper-related letters or not, actually being the killer, needs to be much stronger, since any of the mere hoaxers, whose letters appeared in the papers before one or more of the murders, could simply have influenced the real killer.
The evidence doesn't point to Sickert being the killer unless you wheel in painted 'confessions' prepared only to help excuse his crimes in the event of proof emerging after his death (so the paintings cannot constitute that proof by themselves), or a fistula that suggests the theorist doesn't know Sickert's arse from his c---, let alone his c--- from his &c.
Just stating the obvious really, but there's a lot of that lately, so I'm in good company. 
Love,
Caz
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Mark Starr
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Monday, March 29, 2004 - 4:32 am: | |
I have now found the direct link between Walter Sickert and the Saucy Jack postcard of October 1.
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Before I reveal this link, I want to reprise some material that I have already covered in past posts about the Overshaw Letter -- which is germane. Recently Patricia Cornwell's paper experts conclusively established that Walter Sickert wrote the Overshaw letter by exact batch matches with several Sickert letters -- principally Sickert's "Dear Jimmy" letter to Whistler. Sickert's Overshaw letter contains a poem which has been identified by Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner as a literary parody of a Cornish folk ballad. Even though the Ripper's parody is written in a phony imitation of Cornish dialect, it is nonetheless a sophisticated literary parody that involves mastery of vocabulary far beyond the verbal skills of the almost illiterate lout who appears to have written the rest of the Overshaw letter. This parody also demonstrates a knowledge of the literature of Cornish folklore. The original ballad appears in a traditional Cornish folktale known as "Duffy and the Devil." I also want to point out Walter Sickert's overall erudition in literature -- which biographer Marjorie Lilly described as greater than his knowledge of painting and painters. Virginia Woolf published an long essay about Sickert, calling him "a literary painter." And lastly, from 1879-181, Sickert pursued a professional but ultimately unsuccessful career as an actor. His many small roles included bit parts in Shakespeare's plays -- especially in the company of Sir Henry Irving, the leading Shakespearian actor of the day. It is documented that among the Shakespeare plays in which Walter Sickert played small roles was Henry V. In fact, Sickert played at least two different small roles (not at the same time) in Henry V with the company on tour, and probably played several of the other small roles in the play on other occasions. In these small roles, Sickert used his stage name: Mr. Nemo. In the role of a French soldier, Mr. Nemo got a favorable mention by one drama critic. Nevertheless, afterwards Sickert never landed an important role with Sir Henry's Lyceum Theatre Company, and was never able to launch an acting career as a leading man -- something that his friends at the time recounted was very important to him. Sickert gave up acting altogether soon after that.
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Like Sickert's parody of the Cornish ballad in the Overshaw letter, the name Saucy Jack in the October 1 postcard is a literary reference -- to Shakespeare, specifically to two appearances of the name in Shakespeare's works. One of them is in the Sonnets. The other is in Henry V.
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Saucy Jack, or more precisely "saucy jacks", appears in Shakespeare's Sonnet 128:
“How oft when thou, my music, music play’st”.
How oft when thou, my music, music play’st
Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway’st
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,
Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand,
Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap,
At the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand!
To be so tickl’d, they would change their state
And situation with those dancing chips,
O’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,
Making dead wood more bless’d than living lips.
Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.
For those unfamiliar with this sonnet -- which is one of the most intricately laden with sexual references in Shakespeare's canon -- the word "jack" here means the peg with a small knife-shaped quill plectrum that plucks each metal wire or gut string in a virginal or harpsichord, to produce a musical note as the jack leaps up and down. The word "jack" is also used as a pun on the name Jack -- who may be Shakespeare's rival mentioned in other sonnets. And, according to numerous Shakespearian scholars, a jack -- especially when it leaps up and down -- is Shakespeare's word for penis. Anyone who has ever played a harpsichord knows that jacks leaping up and down are very visible to the player.
In a guide to Shakespeare's Sonnets, one noted Shakespearian scholar describes this sonnet's use of "jack" as: "an obvious reference to other vulgar and pushy men, [Shakespeare's] sexual rivals, with whom she was familiar; and to penises. The sonnet is deliberately laden with sexual innuendo. One imagines that having one's mistress sit at the virginals to play the latest love song could be quite sexy. Shakespeare does not often use the word 'virginal', but when he does it is always in a sexual context, most explicitly in Two Noble Kinsmen, a non-canonical play, but large sections of it being attributed to Shakespeare:
--Pal. She met him in an arbour: What did she there, coz? Play o' the virginals?
--Arc. Something she did Sir.
--Pal. Made her groan a month for't; Or two, or three, or ten. TNK.III.3.33-6.
Leap - the word is sexually suggestive, as are many others in the sonnet. Leaping-houses were brothels, as in the following: What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? unless hours were cups of Sack...and dials the signs of leaping-houses. H4.I.2.9. Dead wood = the keys of the keyboard; possibly also the deadness of impotence. Them = the saucy jacks; probably a not too hidden reference to fellatio, since the line could be read as 'Let your fingers do the work for them, (the saucy Jacks), but for me, let it be your lips'."
For a good definition of the word "saucy," I will cite the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable by E. Cobham Brewer, published in London in 1898. By an amazing coincidence, the author of this dictionary, the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer (1810–1897), was a relative of Walter Sickert's wife during the Whitechapel murders: Ellen Cobham Sickert.
"Saucy: Rakish, irresistible; or rather that care-for-nobody, jaunty, daring behaviour which has won for many of our regiments the term as a compliment. It is also applied metaphorically to some inanimate things, as “saucy waves,” which dare attack the very moon; the “saucy world,” which dares defy the very gods; the “saucy mountains,” “winds,” “wit,” and so on."
In Shakespeare's sonnet, the poet's beloved, who is herself like music, is playing the virginal with her sweet fingers. She gently sways as she plays. The sound of the music bewilders the poet's ears. The poet envies the nimble jacks that jump into the air to kiss the tender inside of his beloved's hand. His poor lips are made to blush in embarrassment. The bold wood of the instrument has denied him the harvest of kisses that should have been his. If the poet could tickle his beloved's fingers, the fingers would happily exchange places and states with the leaping jacks (the dancing chips.) The poet observes his beloved's fingers wandering over the jacks. Her fingers make the "dead wood" more blessed than "living lips." In the final couplet, the poet tells his beloved to give the saucy jacks her fingers to make them happy; but, he adds, give me your lips to kiss. Shakespeare is saying that his beloved's living lips can give life to his dead wood, his impotent penis.
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The second appearance of Saucy Jack in the works of William Shakespeare comes in Henry V.
act 4 scene 7. As already noted, Walter Sickert appeared as an actor in at least two small roles in Sir Henry Irving's production of Henry V. Given the long run of this production, in London and on tour, and given Sickert's long association with Sir Henry's company as a bit player, it is highly probably that Sickert at one time played one of the two bit parts in this scene: Fluellen and Williams. Fluellen is an officer in King Henry's army; Fluellen is a soldier in King Henry's army.
King Henry V: Soldier, why wear'st thou that glove in thy cap?
Williams: An't please your majesty, 'tis the gage of one that I should fight withal, if he be alive.
King Henry V: An Englishman?
Williams: An't please your majesty, a rascal that swaggered with me last night; who, if a' live and
ever dare to challenge this glove, I have sworn to take him a box o' the ear: or, if I can see my
glove in his cap, -- which he swore as he was a soldier he would wear if alive, -- I will strike it out soundly.
King Henry V: What think you. Captain Fluellen? is it fit this soldier keep his oath?
Fluellen: He is a craven and a villain else, an't please your majesty, in my conscience.
King Henry V: It may be his enemy is a gentleman of great sort, quite from the answer of his degree.
Fluellen: Though he be as good a gentleman as the devil is, as Lucifer and Belzebub himself, it is necessary, look your Grace, that he keep his vow and his oath. If he be perjured, see you now, his reputation is as arrant a villain and a Jack-sauce as ever his black shoe trod upon God's ground and his earth, in my conscience, la!
King Henry V: Then keep thy vow, sirrah, when thou meetest the fellow.
Williams: So I will, my liege, as I live.
Here Shakespeare has reversed Saucy Jack into Jack-sauce -- with many interesting implications. Williams, an English soldier, is looking for a rascal-- another English soldier who is wearing Williams' glove in his cap. Williams want to find him to box his ears. King Henry asks his captain Fluellen if Williams should keep his word and beat this soldier up; after all, says the king, this rascal may actually be a gentleman. Fluellen responds that the rascal soldier is indeed a villain and a coward. Capt Fluellen compares the rascal soldier to the devil, to Lucifer and Beezelbub himself. He adds that Williams must keep his oath and vow, to attack the rascal soldier. If Williams would go back on his word, his reputation would be that of a villain and a Jack-sauce. Evidently, a Jack-sauce is a Saucy Jack who wears black shoes as he walks upon God's ground. The implication here is that a Jack-sauce is the Devil himself.
The association of a Jack-sauce with The Devil recalls Sickert's phrase "O Have you seen the Devle" in the Openshaw Ripper Letter of October 29; the phrase "Have you seen the Devil" in the Oct. 10 Ripper Letter; the possible "devil symbol" painted or carved into the side of Mary Kelly's bed; and now the Saucy Jack postcard of Oct. 1.
__________________________________________________
Beyond any doubt, Walter Sickert wrote the Oct. 1 postcard and signed it Saucy Jack.
Here was Sickert in 1888. Twenty-eight years old. A failed career as an actor behind him. No indication yet of any career as a painter ahead of him. (In 1911, Sickert told Majorie Lillie he didn't sell a painting until he was 40.) He was still just an errand-boy assistant to Whistler, of whom he was intensely jealous of his success. His employer had just married, putting in jeopardy whatever income Sickert had. In 1885, Sickert had entered a loveless and sexless marriage just for his wifes 250 pound allowand (250 pounds was the average salary of a medical doctor.) and he was already cheating on his wife, disapearing for weeks or even months with no explanation or warning. All Sickert had in 1888 was his memories of an acting career that never was (later he would paint fantasy lies, like his "The Juvenile Lead" -- when in fact he never landed a lead role in any play in his life.) As an actor, Sickert had to swallow the humiliation of appearing in bit parts as Mr. Nemo (Mr. Nobody) on the same stage as Sir Henry Irving and Ellen Terry (whom he adored, idolized and stalked -- while she never gave him the right time of day.) Sickert -- extremely well-read in English poetry, drama and literature -- was certainly familiar with Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 128, one of the most famous poems in English poetry. And in every performance of Shakespeare's Henry V, whether or not he was on stage, Sickert would hear the Bard's lines about the villainous "Jack-Sauce."
And now we know exactly why Sickert gave the killer the nickname of Saucy Jack. We now know exactly what he wanted women to do with his Saucy Jack. However, his sexless wife, Ellen Cobden Sickert, was not only a member of the Purity League that eschewed all sex both inside and outside of marriage, she was also a militant suffragette, a feminist activitist, the daughter of renouned Socialist politician Richard Cobden - and she was not about to get on her knees for anyone. Nor apparently were his numerous short-term mistresses (women of unknown identity, as they were called when Ellen divorced Sickert.) Remember this was Victorian England and not Elizabethan England. Even the legs on chairs had proper covers in a respectable home. Sickert could not afford to leave his wife for another woman who might satisfy his particular desires. He was totally dependent on Ellen's allowance of 250 pounds a year. Ellen finally divorced him in 1899. With a fistula on his deformed penis, not even prostitutes would 'French' Sickert at any price. Is there any wonder why Jack was "down on whores"?
Like so many of Sickert's actions and decisions, the primary reason for his choice of nickname, Saucy Jack, was symbolic. Symbolic of his inner fantasy life. The fantasy life of a psychopath. We can see the importance of this symbolism in Sickert's words in his Oct. 2 letter as Nemo to the London Times, published on Oct. 4. Here he berates the public and the police as fools because they not understand the symbolic meaning of the Whitechapel murders, and instead they think it is the work of a mad fiend. The symbolism in the name Saucy Jack was as important for Sickert as the symbolism in virtually every one of his paintings. As he wrote in one of his essays on art, every good painting tells a story -- and the degree to which the artist is successful in communicating his story to the viewer is the degree to which the painting is good. By the same standard, Sickert's creation of the nickname Saucy Jack was intended to tell a story, and the solution of that story can be found in the works of William Shakespeare. The story may be difficult to discern, it may be ambiguous -- but it is there if you take the trouble to look.
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And now a question for everyone on Casebook who happened to read this post: has anyone on Casebook ever pointed out a link between the nickname Saucy Jack on the Oct. 1 postcard and the two appearances of the name in Shakespeare, in Sonnet 128 and Henry V? And has anyone ever linked the Saucy Jack postcard to Walter Sickert before?
Regards,
Mark Starr
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Natalie Severn
Chief Inspector
Username: Severn
Post Number: 565
Registered: 11-2003
| | Posted on Monday, March 29, 2004 - 9:56 am: | |
Point of Information;
It is very rare indeed for a psychopathic killer to kill for anything other than gain-usually cash!
Sometimes such a killer will kill to avoid detection.
If in fact it is being suggested that Sickert was a sexual serial killer then there is no evidence for this in Sickert"s life and in particular there are no other murders bearing the ripper"s signature after the murders ceased in 1888 0r 1891[if you include Frances Coles] and as Sickert lived until 1942 this being 54 years [or 51 years]after the murders ceased this in itself shows how very fragile any case could ever be against him.
The suggestion contradicts everything that has been discovered about Serial killers who have remained out of prison or a secure hospital or who have died.
There is no evidence that Sickert suffered from the other condition which is also a major illness and which in my view is the more likely condition that of schizophrenia[paranoid].There IS though evidence in the type of slaughter of Mary Kelly
that this killer whoever it was suffered from some kind of psychosis,delusional thinking that is hinted at in the killings of Polly Nicholls,Annie Chapman and Kate Eddowes.
If you therefore take Sickert"s ability to lead a reasonably normal life along with his good mental health and longevity and painting career as well as absence of any psychosis whatsoever having been recorded you will start to see how ludicrous the whole idea is despite snippets from Shakespeares Sonnets and the "possibility "that he was posting hoax letters.
Natalie |
Christopher T George
Chief Inspector
Username: Chrisg
Post Number: 695
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, March 29, 2004 - 3:32 pm: | |
Hi Mark
Yes as you say, it is all very "highly probably" and you might start by getting the name of the Openshaw letter right instead of calling it the "Overshaw Letter."
This is all very interesting and all very far-fetched. So what if Sickert appeared in a few Shakespearian plays? "Jack" is a common term throughout literature and culture down the centuries.
Again I have to wonder if Sickert really did write all these letters, written in different hands on different paper, posted from all over the place, when did he have any time to do his paintings, travel from England to France and back, and do the murders as well? Might we begin to realize this is beyond the capacity of one man to have done all this?
And what for. . . to give the police more clues so he could be caught?
Chris George |
John Savage
Inspector
Username: Johnsavage
Post Number: 164
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, March 29, 2004 - 3:35 pm: | |
Hi Mark Starr,
Regarding your reference to Henry V, if you read an earlier scene (Act 4 Scene 1) you will realise that the glove worn in the hat of the soldier William, actually belongs to Henry V.
The two had strong words the night before the battle and vowed to fight afterwards if they were still alive, in order that they should recognise each other they swapped gloves.
Therefore if Sickert used "saucy jack" as some sort of code, he could just as well have been pointing the finger at.....Royalty.
Equally the sonnet are often said to have been written to the Earl of Southampton, who apprently was gay. So could this be a reference to someone who was not only gay, but Royal..... Prince Eddy?
On the other hand it's been a long day, and I'm off to the pub.
Regards
John Savage |
Frank van Oploo
Inspector
Username: Franko
Post Number: 249
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Monday, March 29, 2004 - 3:57 pm: | |
Hi Dan,
You’re welcome. Just wanted to give everybody the proper context, so that a better opinion could be formed. But, as you can see, Mark has already cooked up another meaning for the letter now that he knows people have read the whole letter. First, it was some sort of prediction or promise – which it really wasn’t – and now it has become a taunting letter, in the same way the Whitehall Mystery was taunting.
All the best,
Frank
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Mark Starr
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 30, 2004 - 5:39 pm: | |
Shakespeare's 128th sonnet -- the sonnet that contains the line "Since saucy jacks so happy are in this" -- is a late sonnet, the 128th out of the cycle of 154. As Shakespeare biographer Anthony Holden has stated: "All of the sonnets are love poems, the later ones reeking of hetersexual jealousy, some 10 years before Otello, for the enigmatic Dark Lady who appears to have two-timed the writer with a rival poet. But the opening poems in the cycle express ambiguous sexual longing for an effeminate youth, traditionally identified as Southhampton, Shakespeare's patron at the time, and his host in London and Hampshire when the plague closed the London theatres."
No established Shakespearian scholar that I have ever read claims that the Earl of Southampton wrote Shakespeare's Sonnets. Some scholars, as Anthony Holden noted above, believe that the Earl of Southampton was the androgynous 'Fair Youth' to whom Shakespeare addressed some of his earliest sonnets.
All this came to a head, so-to-speak, on April 21, 2002 when Anthony Holden announced in The Observer Review that a portrait that up to now had been thought to depict a noble woman had now been positively identified by many experts to be a portrait of the Earl of Southampton made-up and dressed to appear as a woman.
"Experts who have studied the facts now agree that the portrait is undoubtedly the earliest known image of the third Earl of Southampton -- Shakespeare's patron, the 'fair youth' addressed in his sonnets -- somewhere between the age of 17 and 20 and painted at exactly the same time those first few sonnets were written...In the portrait by an unknown artist, dating from the early 1590's, the teenage Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton, is wearing lipstick, rouge and an elaborate double earring. His long hair hangs down in very feminine tresses and his hand lies on his heart in a somewhat camp gesture. Unlike all the other extant portraits of Southampton, who later chose to be depicted as a rather more macho courtier and soldier, this is much more the face of the androgynous creature the poet ambiguously called the "master-mistress of my passion" in the 20th of the 154-sonnet cycle."
Even before the identification of this portrait, at no time has Wriothesly ever been credited by Shakespearean experts as having written the Sonnets. Wriothesly was many things: courtier, soldier, Shakespeare's patron, drag queen, and probably the "fair youth" in the sonnets. But one thing he assuredly was not: a poet, much less a great poet. It is absolutely certain that Wriothesly did not write Shakespeare's sonnets -- which are generally regarded as the greatest love poems in the English language and Shakespeare's finest lyric poetry (in comparison to the dramatic poetry in the plays). Sonnet 128 is one of the jewels in his crown. It was not the work of an amateur poetaster.
Moreover, the 128th sonnet, as is clear from its text, has no conceivable connection with homosexuality. No established scholar believes that the Earl of Southampton wrote it, or even that it is addressed to him. The subject of the 128th sonnet is a lady who plays the virginal. Nor is there the slightest suggestion in this sonnet that the lady is royalty.
Regarding Shakespeare's use of "Jack-sauce" in Henry V, when Fluellen calls the unknown rascal a "Jack-sauce,' both Fluellen and Williams are totally ignorant that the true identity of the unknown rascal is King Henry. Thus the royal identity of the unknown rascal is irrelevant to Fluellen's use of the term "Jack-sauce." By Fluellen's mention of the Jack-sauce's black shoes tredding upon God's earth, Shakespeare makes it clear that he is referring to the Devil with this phrase. The idea that the unknown rascal might in fact be the king never once enters the minds of either Fluellen or Williams -- even after the king himself suggests to them both that the unknown rascal might be a gentleman. Thus, there is no connotation whatsoever of royality or nobility in Shakespeare's use of the term "Jack-sauce."
Regards,
Mark Starr
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Debra Trevaskis
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 30, 2004 - 1:47 pm: | |
Hi Mark Starr,
I've been reading your posts about Sickert's letters for two days now. They're brilliant. Especially the one about Saucy Jack and Shakespeare. You nailed him!
Don't let the mosquitos get under your skin. Now how about the Dear Boss letter?
Debra T. |
Mark Starr
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Monday, March 29, 2004 - 7:09 pm: | |
I just posted this message in the wrong thread; it should have been Sickert's Letters. So this is a copy.
Some minor slips in my previous post to correct:
Williams is a soldier in King Henry's army, Fluellen is an officer.
Sickert's career as an actor spanned 1879-1881.
Evidently Overshaw inadvertently slipped into my spellchecker dictionary, causing some confusion with Openshaw.
The Saucy Jack postcard is "signed" Jack the Ripper, not Saucy Jack. The name Saucy Jack is in the text.
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Now that I have established that Walter Sickert wrote the Saucy Jack postcard and sent it from London on October 1, what are the direct implications of this new fact? As I will show, it establishes that Walter Sickert also wrote the Dear Boss Letter on Sept. 25, and he mailed it while he was in London, and it was received by the Central News Service on Sept. 27. The Dear Boss Letter is the first known use of the name Jack The Ripper. The Saucy Jack postcard was the second document to be signed Jack The Ripper. Walter Sickert wrote the Dear Boss Letter, and thus it was Walter Sickert who created the name Jack The Ripper.
Here is the text of the Saucy Jack postcard:
"I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, you'll hear about Saucy Jacky's work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn't finish straight off. ha not the time to get ears for police. thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.
Jack the Ripper"
The text of the Saucy Jack postcard makes two references to the Dear Boss Letter: (1) "when I gave you the tip"; and (2) "not the time to get ears for the police." However, the text (but not the facsimile of the handwriting) of the Dear Boss letter was published before Oct. 1 -- thus making it theoretically possible for Sickert to have hoaxed knowledge of the Dear Boss letter.
In his excellent essay "Thomas Bulling and the Myth of the London Journalist," Thomas C Westcott effectively dismissed all of the specious arguments that journaist Thomas Bulling was the author of either the Dear Boss Letter or the Saucy Jack postcard. Westcott also summarizes the facts around the two letters thus:
"The Dear Boss letter was dated 25th September and was posted on the 27th September, but treated as a joke by Central News. The murder of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes on the night of 28th/29th September obviously caused the Agency to reconsider and it was forwarded to Frederick 'Dolly' Williamson at Scotland Yard during the morning of Saturday 29th September. It was made known to journalists the following day, Sunday 30th September, and appeared in some newspapers, such as the morning edition of the Daily News on 1st October. The postcard was posted on 1st October and made reference to details possibly thought by some not to have been available to anyone but the murderer, although some details of the murders were published in the Sunday newspapers on 30th September. Both of the communications were reproduced on handbills and distributed in hope that someone might identify the handwriting. It is clear that the authorities - or somebody in authority - felt that the correspondence was genuine (and we should respect the opinion of those who lived at the time and based their judgement on first-hand knowledge and experience).
Moreover, they continued to believe the Dear Boss letter was genuine. Indeed, it remained the hallmark by which all other correspondences claiming to be from the Ripper was judged, comparisons of handwriting being compared to that of the Dear Boss letter."
The text of the Dear Boss letter may have been printed in some newspapers on Oct. 1; but apparently, it was not until October. 4 that any newspaper published a facsimile of the Dear Boss letter showing the Ripper's handwriting. Leanne Perry wrote: "On the 4th of October, the 'Daily Telegraph' published facsimilies of the 'Dear Boss' & 'Saucy Jacky' communications. This act revealed the handwriting to the entire population, and they have been criticised for this as it started a flood of mimicers."
I don't know when the facsimile handbills mentioned by Westcott were printed and distributed, but Westcott does not state they were issued prior to the facsimiles; and if they were distributed before Oct. 4, there would not have been any outcry about the Daily Telegraph revealing the handwriting to the entire population on Oct. 4. So I think it is safe to assume that no facsimile of The Ripper's handwriting was published prior to Oct. 4.
That said, it is therefore impossible that Walter Sickert could have copied the Ripper's handwriting of the Sept. 25 Dear Boss Letter when Sickert wrote and sent the Saucy Jack postcard on October 1. Sickert could not have seen the handwriting of the Dear Boss letter published in any facsimile until Oct. 4. The only way that Sickert could have known on Oct. 1 when he wrote the Saucy Jack postcard what the handwriting of the Dear Boss letter looked like would have been for Sickert to have written the Dear Boss letter himself on Sept. 25.
Many writers have already established that the handwriting in the Dear Boss letter and the Saucy Jack postcard are the virtually the same. There is no need to re-invent the wheel on that issue.
Thus it is clear that Walter Sickert wrote both the Saucy Jack postcard and the Dear Boss letter. And since Sickert wrote and sent the Dear Boss letter on Sept. 25, Walter Sickert was therefore in London on Sept. 25 -- and not in France.
And since Walter Sickert was in London on Sept. 25, as well as in London when he wrote the Nemo letter published in the London Times on Oct 4, then Sickert must have been in London on Sept. 30 when the Double Event was committed.
Regards,
Mark Starr |
Mark Starr
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Thursday, April 01, 2004 - 11:23 pm: | |
Google is a very handy tool for literary searches. Yesterday I entered "saucy jack" and came up with 46,400 hits. After browsing among the hits for the better part of an hour, I arrived at a conclusion. Many of these 46,400 hits refer to Jack The Ripper, as you might expect. The vast majority of them refer to pop culture or porn, again no surprise to anyone. A few of them refer to the two quotations in Shakespeare, in Sonnet 128 and in Henry V, that I cited in my article on the Saucy Jack Oct. 1 postcard.
But aside from those two references in Shakespeare, I could not find even one instance of "saucy jack" ever being used by any writer in all of history before Oct. 1, 1888 -- whether in poetry, literature, journalism, history or drama. So, to continue my search, I am wondering whether anyone on Casebook can cite an instance of "saucy jack" that antedates the Saucy Jack postcard -- other than the two in Shakespeare, of course. Any such references would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Mark Starr |
Mark Starr
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Thursday, April 01, 2004 - 2:19 pm: | |
And now the Lusk Letter (pt. 1 of 2).
Walter Sickert wrote the Lusk letter. The Lusk letter is the nail in Walter Sickert's coffin -- despite the fact that Sickert had himself cremated. The Lusk Letter proves that Walter Sickert murdered Catherine Eddowes.
For those tuning in late to my series of posts about Walter Sickert's Letters on this thread: in my previous post I established that Sickert was not only the author of the October 1 Saucy Jack postcard but also the author of the Sept. 25 Dear Boss Letter. In fact, I established that Sickert must have been the author of the Dear Boss Letter specifically because I established that he wrote and sent the Saucy Jack postcard. The documents are inextricably linked. Sickert's authorship of these two missives establish that on these two dates -- Sept. 25 and Oct. 1 -- Walter Sickert was in fact in London and not in France. There is no known evidence that indicates Walter Sickert was in France between Sept. 25 and Oct. 1. The last known date that Walter Sickert was seen in France by anyone was in Blanche's letter of Sept. 16. Sickert must have returned to London from France sometime between Sept. 17 and Sept. 24. Consequently, on Sept. 30 when the Double Event (i.e. the murders of Catherine Eddowes and Liz Stride) took place in Whitechapel, Walter Sickert was in London. Sickert's authorship of the Sept. 25 Dear Boss Letter proves this.
In earlier posts, I have documented that on 4 previous occasions, and possibly 5 previous occasions, Walter Sickert made public references to the Devil in connection to Jack The Ripper in an attempt to create confusion in the police and the public. He did this to throw the manhunt off his tracks. Sickert's tactic -- of creating various mythical fiends including The Devil on whom he publically (but anonymously) blamed the Whitechapel murders -- was a tactic that he used many times in many different forms throughout his life until his death in 1942.
Sickert's devil links are:
1. the Oct. 29 Openshaw Letter that Patricia Cornwell's paper experts conclusively proved was written by Walter Sickert. This letter contains a poem: "O have you seen the devle, with his mikerscope and scalpul,a-lookin at a kidney, with a slide c*cked up." This poem is a literary parody of a Cornish folk ballad that begins: "Here's to the devil, with his wooden pick and shovel, digging tin by the bushel, with his tail c*ck'd up!" This folk ballad appears in the traditional Cornish folk tale known as "Duffy and The Devil."
2. the Oct. 10 Ripper postcard that contains the phrase: "Have you seen the 'Devil', If not pay one penny and walk inside." Despite the misspelling "devle" in the Oct. 29 Openshaw letter, the opening lines in both poems are virtually identical. Thus, the now proven authorship of the Openshaw Letter, written by Walter Sickert, establishes that Walter Sickert also wrote the Oct. 10 Ripper postcard. So once again in the Oct. 10 postcard, Walter Sickert invoked The Devil.
3. the Oct. 1 postcard signed Jack The Ripper mentions Saucy Jack in the text. Saucy Jack is a literary reference to two mentions in the works of William Shakespeare. The first, in Shakespeare's Sonnet 128, gives Jack The Ripper's motivations -- which are directly related to his penis and heterosexual fellatio. The second, in Henry V, refers to "Jack-sauce" -- which, as Shakespeare made clear by adding the phrase "as ever his black shoe trod upon God's ground and his earth", means The Devil. That Walter Sickert wrote the Saucy Jack postcard is now established for many reasons. Sickert appeared as an actor in numerous performances of Henry V, using a stage name Mr. Nemo. Sickert wrote four letters to the police during the Whitechapel murders signed Mr. Nemo. Sickert wrote an incriminating letter to the London Times signed Nemo. And Sickert wrote a handwritten telegram form to the police that stated "Mr. Nobody Jack The Ripper sent this." (Nemo in latin, which Sickert spoke fluently, means nobody. Mr. Nobody was scratched out with two horizontal lines, but it is still perfectly legible.)
4. the "devil symbol" that appears to have been painted or carved into the side of Mary Kelly's bed -- as I demonstrated in my posted enlargement and cropping of one of the Nov. 9 crime scene photos of the Mary Kelly murdered on her bed. I still count this devil reference as only a possibility, since I cannot tell whether this devil symbol was actually painted on the bed (as it appears to be) or it was added later in white ink to the original photographic plate (as it does not appear to be.)
5. and now the Lusk Letter on October 16. This letter begins: "From Hell." Who else but the Devil sends a letter "From Hell"? The designation "From Hell" was Walter Sickert's most blatent attempt ever to pin the murders on The Devil -- and thus provoke fear and even panic among the public, and confusion in the ranks of the police. Unlike any of the other letters, this letter was accompanied by incontrovertible proof that the author was also the person who murdered a specific Whitechapel victim -- in this case, Catherine Eddowes. The Lusk letter was accompanied by part of a kidney. This partial kidney was compared by Dr. Thomas Openshaw to the half-kidney that remained in the cadaver of Catherine Eddowes. It was Dr. Openshaw's judgement that the two partial kidneys matched. In addition to obvious similar characteristics such as size, etc., both partial kidney's revealed marked symptoms of Bright's Disease in the same stage of development. Despite many attempts to obfuscate this clearcut issue over the years, there can be no question that the two partial kidneys matched. Therefore, it is certain that the kidney match proves the author of the Lusk Letter murdered Catherine Eddowes. And the devil reference "From Hell" clearly establishes that it was Walter Sickert who wrote the Lusk Letter that accompanied the kidney.
Moreover, the Lusk Letter was not signed Jack The Ripper; it was signed "Catch me when you can."
And it was written in a very different handwriting than the previous Ripper letters (a fact I will discuss later.) The designation "From Hell", together with the absence of the signature Jack The Ripper, was intended to reinforce the inescapable conclusion that the Lusk Letter was a letter from the Devil himself. That was Sickert's clear intention.
Continued
Regards,
Mark Starr |
Mark Starr
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Saturday, April 03, 2004 - 4:09 am: | |
More on Sickert and Shakespeare.
In 1880, while still a struggling actor in bit parts on the London stage, Walter Sickert wrote a letter to historian and biographer T. E. Pemberton, in which he noted that he had played the role of "an old man" in Shakespeare's Henry V, in the production of Sir Henry Irving on tour in Birmingham. Sickert also mentioned: "It is the part I liked best of all."
Was this the bit part of Fluellen? -- the Welsh Captain who says: "Though he be as good a gentleman as the devil is, as Lucifer and Belzebub himself, it is necessary, look your Grace, that he keep his vow and his oath. If he be perjured, see you now, his reputation is as arrant a villain and a Jack-sauce as ever his black shoe trod upon God's ground and his earth, in my conscience, la!"
It could be. Fluellen is a senior officer in King Henry's army. And it is a bit part. Of course, he is not the only captain in King Henry's army in the play. But virtually all the other old male roles in the dramatis personae (which exceeds 30) are major historical noblemen with famous names -- and big juicy speeches. If Sickert had played one of them, he surely would have bragged about it to Pemberton and cited the specific name of the role he had played. I am trying to track down programs from Sir Henry Irving's productions to check it all out.
According to Roy Neil Graves, Professor of English at The University of Tennessee at Martin and a Shakespeare scholar, "saucy jacks" in Sonnet 128 is Shakespeare's pun on ejaculation. He also notes that the quills in the jacks pr*ck the strings of the virginal.
I have still not found any use of "saucy jack" or 'Jack-sauce" by any writer other than Shakespeare before Oct. 1, 1888. And the two instances I cited, in Henry V and in Sonnet 128, are the only instances of the two words together in Shakespeare.
However, there are many other instances in Shakespeare of "saucy" and "Jack" separately, combined with other words, and they are invariably insults or pejorative terms. They include:
saucy eunuch, saucy lackey, saucy fellow, saucy stranger, saucy friar, saucy merchant, saucy controller;
whoreson jackanape, jack-slave, jack-out-of-office, bragging Jack, scurvy Jack-a-nape priest, jack-dog priest, Jack-a-lent, flouting Jack, twanging Jack, swearing Jack, insinuating Jack, minute Jack.
Two of the more interesting appearances of "saucy" occur in Macbeth:
Macbeth. Act iii. Sc. 4.
MACBETH Then comes my fit again: I had else been perfect,
Whole as the marble, founded as the rock,
As broad and general as the casing air:
But now I am cabin'd, cribb'd, confined, bound in
To saucy doubts and fears.
(Uh, oh. Macbeth is about to have another of his fits! Now where did Lady Macbeth hide his "ghostly dagger"?)
Also from Macbeth:
HECATE: Have I not reason, beldams as you are,
Saucy and overbold? How did you dare
To trade and traffic with Macbeth
In riddles and affairs of death.
Hecate is a female devil who boils the cauldron with the Three Witches.
Perhaps Shakespeare should have entitled his Scottish play Mac The Knife.
To paraphrase Hamlet: The play`s the thing wherein I`ll catch you when I can.
Regards,
Mark Starr |
Mark Starr
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Friday, April 02, 2004 - 1:15 pm: | |
Lusk Letter (pt. 2 of 2)
I have read that the whereabouts of the Lusk Letter are presently unknown. Apparently some collector filched this letter years ago from the police files and he has been hoarding it ever since. The Lusk Letter is not a document that one could sell on the open market without attracting worldwide attention. Besides, the letter was government property; theft of it was a crime. So the letter may never surface again. Whoever purchases it is buying stolen property. In any event, the original Lusk Letter is not available now for forensic tests -- such as paper tests or mDNA tests -- that might confirm that Walter Sickert wrote it. But good reproductions of the letter are fortunately available. Consequently, the only way to deal with the Lusk Letter as evidence is with reproductions and with the internal evidence in its text.
As I demonstrated in an earlier post, Sickert's authorship of the Saucy Jack postcard proves that Sickert also wrote the Dear Boss Letter. Other letter writers may have subsequently hoaxed Ripper letters in the same handwriting as the Dear Boss letter after Oct. 4 when facsimiles of the Ripper's handwriting were published in the Telegraph for the first time. But nothing can change the fact that only Walter Sickert could have written both the Dear Boss letter on Sept. 25 and the Saucy Jack postcard on Oct. 1 in the same Ripper handwriting.
The handwriting of the Lusk Letter is not only totally different from the handwriting in any of the previous Ripper letters, it is also a phony handwriting. Obviously, Sickert wanted to distinguish this letter from all the hoax letter in the handwriting of the Dear Boss Letter that began to arrive at the police and newspapers after Oct. 4. So he chose a completely new handwriting, a calligraphic script. As in Sickert's Dear Boss Letter and his Saucy Jack postcard, the Lusk Letter displays obvious traits that are impossible to reconcile into one man: The Ripper. Unlike the scrawl of the Saucy Jack postcard and the Openshaw letter, the Lusk Letter is written in a very ornate and bizarre script. The capital F in From, the capital M in Mr., the capital L in Lusk and the capital S in Sor look like professional calligraphy. However, by the end of the letter, the writer seems to have forgotten his fancy studied calligraphy and slipped into sloppy script in the capital M and capital L in Mishter Lusk. There are many other discrepancies as well: the small s in send and in signed; the small k in the two Lusks; the huge y's in many words that do not match each other, despite Sickert's obvious attempt to make them all so big they run into the line below; and the numerous inconsistencies in the many h's are a dead give-away that the writer was trying to fake a handwriting that was not his.
But the most glaring inconsistency is the laughable difference in social class between the handwriting and the language. On the one hand, we see the illiterate language and spelling of a lout who spells Sir as Sor, Mister as Mishter, nice as nise, knife as knif, wait as wate, while as whil, and kidney as Kidne -- and who writes one women. On the other hand, we see the fastidious calligraphy of phony handwriting in the capital letters. We see the correct spelling of catch, half, piece, fried and signed. But these are tricky words to spell correctly in English. They are not spelled the way they are pronounced -- especially by someone speaking in Cockney dialect. Yet these words the author of the Lusk Letter spelled correctly. The idea that the writer spelled out his phony Cockney accent, as evidenced by words like Sor and prasarved, is absurd on its face. With all his artistic and literay skills, Walter Sickert could not hide the obvious fact that the Lusk Letter reveals two different sides of the same man: Walter Sickert/ripper-murderer, and Walter Sickert/actor-artist.
So the handwriting in the Lusk Letter is different from the handwriting in other letters; and it is obviously a phony handwriting. But the affectation of a Cockney accent in the Lusk Letter indicates that Sickert chose here the same strategy he utilised in his many Ripper letters. For Walter Sickert, the Devil spoke in Cockney. For me, the implications of Sickert's inconsistencies are but icing on the cake that make my case more colorful. It is the devil reference in "From Hell" that establishes that Walter Sickert wrote the Lusk Letter. The rest of the internal evidence -- such as the language, the spelling, the handwriting and the information in the text -- is consistent with Sickert's authorship of this letter. Everything supports Sickert's authorship. There is absolutely nothing in the Lusk Letter that eliminates Walter Sickert as the author or the sender.
Regards,
Mark Starr |
Tim Davis
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Saturday, April 03, 2004 - 7:11 pm: | |
Hello Mark,
Great post about the Earl of Southampton. As a gay man myself, I am relieved to know that Jack The Ripper was not one of our own. Henry Wriothesley may have been Hank The Wanker, but he sure wasn't Jack The Ripper -- or the inspiration for same. First they tried to pin the Whitechapel murders on the Jews (Kominski, etc.) Then they tried to pin it on the Freemasons (Gull -- who wasn't even a Mason.) Then they tried to pin it on royalty (Queen Victoria, no less.) Now they try to pin it on homosexuals (poor pathetic Prince Eddy -- who wouldn't have hurt a fly.) What's next, the Liberal Left-wing Media?
You've got the bloke, all right. Sickert. With all those links to the devil, he wanted to make everyone believe that Jack The Ripper was the devil from hell. He had fun with the panic. He enjoyed teasing the coppers. He could be any one of a dozen serial killers today.
Ta-ta,
Tim Davis
P.S. Did you know that Walter Sickert and Catherine Eddowes were stars together in the London production of Kiss Me Kate? He sang "Brush up your Shakespeare." And she sang "Where is the Life That Late I Led (Where is it now? Utterly dead.) |
Mark Starr
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Saturday, April 03, 2004 - 5:49 pm: | |
Thomas C. Wescott wrote a dissertation in Ripper Notes entitled An Inspiration 'From Hell.' It is an essay that links the Lusk Letter to a book entitled Letters From Hell, an anonymous book originally in German dialect, first published in Denmark in 1868, and subsequently translated into English by Dr. George MacDonald. The English edition was advertised in the Sept. 7, 1888 London Times. Wescott claims that the writer of the Lusk Letter must have seen this advertisement in the London Times, and credits this idea to Larry Barbee. The writer of the Lusk Letter may even have read the book "Letters From Hell." Wescott claims that the book may have been Jack's inspiration for the use of the words "From Hell" in the Oct. 16 Lusk Letter.
Of course, this book Letters From Hell should not be confused with the recent eponymous book by Skinner & Evans.
Westcott wrote: "While many parallels could be made between the contents of this book and many facets of the Jack the Ripper case, allow me to point out that I have not yet found any reference in the book to 'Juwes', nor the use of the phrases 'catch me when you can', or 'Dear Boss', nor have I discovered any character addressed as 'Sor'. In other words, no undeniable proof that Jack the Ripper, or the writer of any of the well-known 'Ripper letters', should they be a different person, ever owned or read Letters From Hell . Therefore, no direct link between the book and the Whitechapel murders exists. What does exist, however, is the very real possibility that Jack the Ripper, or the person responsible for the most notorious of the 'Ripper letters', came across the discussed volume and allowed it to serve, not as a motivation, but as an inspiration, when pen was put to paper, or chalk to black dado."
In my previous posts, I have established that the Oct. 16 Lusk Letter, the Oct. 29 Overshaw Letter, the Oct. 10 postcard, the Oct. 1 Saucy Jack postcard, the Sept. 25 Dear Boss Letter were all written and sent by Walter Sickert. The common thread that runs through all of these letters and postcards was Sickert's attempt to create panic in the public and confusion among the police by blaming the murders on The Devil, alias Jack The Ripper. Sickert created similar mythical fiends throughout his life to divert suspicion from himself and his private obsession with Jack The Ripper. His lifelong obsession with JTR is evidenced in part by his newly discovered painting Jack The Ripper's Bedroom, his use of a red neckerchief as a talisman to help him paint The Camden Town Murder series, his Ripper periods in which he would dress up as JTR, and his enigmatic painted confession "The Servant of Abraham." On top of the afore-mentioned letters, we can the Mr. Nemo letters and telegram in which Sickert linked together Mr. Nemo with Jack The Ripper and then tried to create more panic and confusion by blaming the murders on Malays roaming London. Add to that the phony Camden Town Lodger story that Sickert tried to sell Sir Melville Mcnaughten (see McCormick) after 1905, and later told to Sir Osbert Sitwell, Max Beerbohm and others. Add to that the phony Royal Conspiracy Theory that Sickert planted in the gullible teenager Joseph Sickert.
Is it possible Walter Sickert read the advertisement in the Sept. 7 London Times for Dr. Anderson's English translation of Letters from Hell? He may have. But this date is in very close proximity to the Sept. 6 letter that Sickert's mother wrote from St. Valéry-en-Caux, describing how Walter and his brother Bernhard were having such a "happy time" swimming and painting there. The letter by Sickert's mother does not date when Walter Sickert was swimming in St. Valéry-en-Caux. It could have been any day before and including Sept. 6, extending back for perhaps a week. However, if Walter Sickert did in fact read the advertisement for Letters From Hell in the Sept. 7 London Times, that would confirm that he had returned to London from France by Sept 7, just in time to murder Annie Chapman on Sept. 9. As Patricia Cornwell has documented, the trip from St. Valéry-en-Caux could be made in one morning + afternoon, with time to have dinner in London. The transportation between Dieppe and London was quick, reliable, cheap and regular.
Westcott asserts that the advertisement must have also appeared in other newspapers on other dates. So the Sept. 7 advertisement in the London Times doesn't establish that Sickert was in London on that date; it just suggests the possibility.
Westcott continues: "Much research still needs to be done not only on Letters From Hell, but on researching other newspapers and journals of the time period for references, advertisements, and reviews of the book, such as the one in the Morning Advertiser mentioned above. It is also worth noting that Dr. George MacDonald, in the preface, makes mention of a book with a similar title... 'It may be interesting to some to know that the title is not quite a new one, for just before the death of Oliver Cromwell a book was published entitled 'Messages from Hell; or Letters from a Lost Soul.' With every new find in this case doors do not close, they open. Perhaps, someone reading this will take up research and find some interesting nugget in Letters From Hell that I failed to notice. For a good portion of those studying the crimes the idea that the Whitechapel murderer penned any of the infamous missives himself is preposterous. However, somebody....somewhere...recognized and realized the "cleverness of such a letter."
That somebody might very well have been Walter Sickert.
What about the contents of the book. Walter Sickert may have purchased it and read it. He may even have read it in the original German dialect. After all, Sickert was born in Munich and spoke/read German fluently. Indeed, his father, who was Danish, may have brought with him a copy of the original when he emigrated to England -- since the book was first published in Denmark. And Sickert spoke some Danish himself.
But why would Sickert have ever read such a book, which is a theological tract. He was a confirmed lifelong atheist. He "hated Christianity." Moreover, the book is an anti-Semitic attack on Jews -- and Walter Sickert assuredly was not an anti-Semite. Later Sickert would resign his full
membership in the Royal Academy of the Arts in protest against the President's anti-Semitism in relation to the young Jewish sculptor and pianter Jacob Epstein.
Westcott states: "It is an amazing volume full of powerful and sometimes shocking scenarios such as paedophilia, promiscuity, Victorian vanity, anti-semitism, and the recurring sub-plot of our anti-hero's dysfunctional home life, complete with a cold, domineering mother and weak-willed father. An amazing work in it's own right, it certainly deserves consideration as the possibility that this book sat on Jack the Ripper's bookshelf is very real." Plenty in there to attract Walter Sickert's interest, who -- as Patricia Cornwell has documented -- was always exceptionally well read on a wide range of subject (although religion does not seems to have been one of them). I especially liked this line from the book (particularly the end of it): 'The miser is forever dreaming of riches, the voluptuary of uncleanness, the glutton of feasting, the murderer of his bloody deed.'
Sickert would have been oblivious to the author's theological message. There is not the slightest trace of any interest in religion on Sickert's part throughout his entire life up until the three paintings with religious titles that Sickert painted after his stroke in 1926. And as I detailed in many posts on another thread, the religion in these three paintings was patently phony -- and part of Sickert's attempt to save his artistic reputation in the event that his guilt in the Whitechapek Murders was discovered after his impending (at least he thought it was impending) death.
The best part of the book is undoubtedly "The Post-Office in Hell." Of course, by the Oct. 16 date of the "From Hell" Letter, Walter Sickert had already been sending Ripper letters for at least three weeks, since at least Sept. 25. So this section might have interested Walter Sickert very much indeed. Westcott recounts: In 'Letter XII', 'Philip' discusses his trip to Hell's post office, whereupon he discovers exactly how accountable people are for the words they write, be it crank letters, letters of defamation, letters or treason, or even the forgery of a signature..."
And now comes the McGuffin!
The book's hero states: "You have heard of what befell Uriah. There have always been people who,
betraying their neighbor, have done so by writing. But the invention is older even than that notorious letter, originating, no doubt, with the father of lies in the first place. It was he who inspired that piece of treachery, just as he inspired Judas' kiss. Treason by writing is known all over the world now. There are those who delight in the cleverness of such a letter, quite priding themselves on the art of taking in their fellows."
And who in the bible is the Father of Lies? Who inspired the treachery that befell Uriah (I'll explain that reference below)? Who inspired Judas' kiss? THE DEVIL, that's who!!!!! That is who the book's hero is talking about. The Devil. Satan. Lucifer. Beezelbub. The Jack-sauce. That is who, according to the book's hero, is responsible for all the treachery that has resulted from false letters.
Thank you, Mr. Westcott with providing me with yet another possible devil link between the Jack The Ripper letters and Walter Sickert.
A footnote about Uriah -- that is, Uriah The Hittite, a soldier in the army of David in the bible. Uriah carried a letter from King David to Joab, a military commander at the front lines. Unknown to Uriah, the letter carried his own death sentence. David had ordered the commander to put Uriah somewhere in the front line of battle where he would surely be killed, which is what happened. David wrote the letter to cover up an incident of adultery with Uriah's wife, Bathsheba. So, according to the Bible, David was not only an adulterer, but a murderer.
Perhaps Walter Sickert was heartened in his own letter-writing campaign by the rest of the Uriah-David-Bathsheba story in the Book of Samuel. Ironically, it was the "son of David" that rebuked David: "Thus says The Lord, the God of Israel, 'I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul; and I gave you your master's house, and your master's wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah; and if this were too little, I would add to you as much more. Why have you despised the word of The Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have smitten Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife, and have slain him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, because you have despised Me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.'" (Samuel 12:7-10 RSV).
Then comes the happy ending. God forgave David, not only because David repented (2 Samuel 12:13), but moreover for the sake of the assigned role that The Chosen People were given in God's plan of salvation for all humans.
Walter Sickert looks more and more like "The Servant of Abraham" taking up The Sword of David.
Regards,
Mark Starr |
RosemaryO'Ryan
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, April 04, 2004 - 8:35 pm: | |
Hi All,
Anyone getting any sense from this thread? As some might know, I have in the past, suggested an antidote to the syndrome 'including the kitchen sink' and 'throwing out the baby with the bath-water'...WHITE RICE!
I think the next week will see Mark discuss Walter Sickert and "The Divine Comedy", (Dante). Followed by Machievelli's "Dialogues From Hell", after which we shall be indoctrinated into the minutiae of The Tichbourne Claimant...
Even Westcott, McGuffin, and Judas, have been invoked as authorities within their respective fields! And, even Mark's cryptic aside concerning "Shakespeare's nife' had to point somewhere...my friend the Earl of Southhampton ,(two 'Hs' if you please!), Henri Wriothesley, (pronounced, "righteously").
Mark, a word of warning, WE MUST STICK TO THE DOCUMENTED FACTS...if we are to solve this case.
As Ever,
Rosey :-)
Just a thought. Is that a 'devil motif' or Mary's application to be a Bunny Girl?
|
Dan Norder
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, April 04, 2004 - 8:52 pm: | |
Mark wrote:
"In my previous posts, I have established that the Oct. 16 Lusk Letter, the Oct. 29 Overshaw Letter, the Oct. 10 postcard, the Oct. 1 Saucy Jack postcard, the Sept. 25 Dear Boss Letter were all written and sent by Walter Sickert."
You have done no such thing. All you've done is assumed he did and written fantastically speculative explanations on why you think so. So far it looks like your main arguments hinge upon the ridiculous idea that Sickert and only Sickert knew what "Nemo" meant, heard of the Devil and read Shakespeare.
Thousands of people could have written those letters. Based upon the numbers of them that came in it's likely that hundreds of people did. |
Mark Starr
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Sunday, April 04, 2004 - 3:52 pm: | |
Previously I stated that Sickert's authorship of The Lusk Letter proves that Walter Sickert murdered Catherine Eddowes. Does whatever circumstantial evidence we know about the Catherine Eddowes murder jibe with Sickert as the killer of Catherine Eddowes?
First, let's check the testimony of Joseph Lawende, a possible eye-witness to the crime scene of Catherine Eddowes. Joseph Lawende (a commercial traveler in the cigarette trade) together with Joseph Hyam Levy (a butcher) and Henry Harris (a furniture dealer) left the Imperial Club at 16-17 Duke Street at 1:30 am. At the corner of Duke Street and Church Passage, they saw Eddowes and a man talking. She stood facing the man with her hand on his chest, but not in a manner to suggest that she resisted him.
--Lawende described the man as 30 years old [in 1888, Sickert was 28].
--Lawende said the man was 5 foot 7 inches tall [Sickert was 5'7"-to-5'8"].
--Lawende said he had a fair complexion and mustache with a medium build [Sickert had a fair complexion and was of medium build; he sometimes wore mustaches, both real and fake.]
--Lawende said the unidentified man wore a pepper and salt colored jacket which fit loosely, gray cloth cap with a peak of the same color. He wore a reddish handkerchief knotted around his neck.
[The clothes are not identifiable as Sickert's, but the reddish handkerchief has considerable
possible significance -- see below].
Sounds to me like the description might very well fit Walter Sickert.
One detail of Lawende's description sets off all sorts of alarm bells: the reddish handkerchief knotted around the man's neck. There is also a red handkerchief identified by an eye-witness in the Mary Kelly murder. Previously I identified two links between Walter Sickert and the Mary Kelly Murder. Moreover, many years after the Whitechapel Murders, Walter Sickert used a red handkerchief for symbolic reasons directly associated with Jack The Ripper -- on two separate occasions. The first is revealed in Sickert's painting 'Jack The Ripper's Bedroom'. The second is related to Sickert's Ripper Periods in which he would dress up as Jack The Ripper in order to paint new works.
First, the painting 'Jack The Ripper's Bedroom.' Before describing the link betwen the red handkerchief and this painting, I must point out that the existance of this painting was completely unknown to the art world until very recently. There is no mention of this painting in any of the old art books on Sickert or any of the biographies of his life. The painting first surfaced about 15 years ago with the disposition of the estate of Cicely Hey -- an artist, former student of Sickert, and a colleague with whom Sickert once shared a studio. Sickert gave her the painting with the understanding that she would not show it while he was alive, or even while she was alive. All this is important because this painting contains many significant clues to the Ripper Mystery. Sickert did not want these clues to be made public unless he needed them to be made public to provide him with a cover story to explain away his obsession with the Ripper. Sickert biographer Matthew Sturgis dates this painting in 1909. (But the painting has no date on it. It must have been painted after 1905 when Sickert moved into Morningside Crescent in Camden Town. I have also seen it dated 1906. No one seems to know for sure exactly when it was painted. There is no doubt, however, about the title. Sickert wrote it in pencil on the back of the canvas.)
In a series of posts about this painting on two other threads on Casebook, I have listed in detail all of the contents in the bedroom -- where every item is a Ripper clue. The objects are extremely difficult to make out because of the darkness and the vagueness of the painting. Among the objects on the desk or table in the bedroom is a blood-red scarf or handkerchief. Only two small glimpses of the scarf are visible behind the black leather bag or satchel. But the deep red against the black of the leather bag leaves no doubt that the scarf or handkerchief is present in this painting. Sickert undoubtedly read Lawende's testimony in the newspapers, so there is nothing incriminating in Sickert's knowledge of the red handkerchief in Lawende's account. Sickert used this accurate detail about the murderer of Catherine Eddowes, together with many details that Sickert fabricated, to give this 1905-to-1909 painting verisimilitude, and to throw suspicion on a mythical veterinary student from Bornemouth as Jack The Ripper.
But the second link between Sickert and a red scarf or neckerchief is much more troubling. In her book about Sickert, artist Marjorie Lilly tells in detail how Sickert used a red neckerchief as a talisman in 1907 during his painting of the Camden Town Murder series of drawings and paintings.
Lilly wrote that Sickert wore the red neckerchief "loosely knotted around his neck." The red neckerchief, Lilly wrote, "played a necessary part in the performance of the drawings, spurring him on at crucial moments, becoming so interwoven with the actual working out of his idea that he kept it constantly before his eyes." Lilly also described Jack The Ripper as one of Walter Sickert's "fervent crazes." This was in 1907, almost two decades after the Whitechapel Murders.
What is important about this link between Sickert and a red neckerchief is that Sickert's use of a red neckerchief as a talisman is not some phony hoax that Sickert cooked up to throw the police off his trail. Here was Sickert in the safety of his studio, two decades later, observed only by one of his most trusted friends during the creation of a series of works about the Camden Town Murder, using a Ripper artifact for artistic inspiration. Why would this neckerchief help Sickert to create works of art? What personal significance did the red neckerchief have for Sickert? To answer those questions requires speculation. But that does not mean that this very revealing episode can be dismissed. Whatever Sickert's identification with the red neckerchief, clearly there was indeed some sort of deep personal link extending all the way from Lawende's eye-witness testimony to Marjorie Lilly's eye-witness testimony.
That is not the end of the red neckerchief. There is also the testimony of a reputed eye-witness to the Mary Kelly murder to consider, the testimony of George Hutchinson. The person Hutchinson saw may well have been the Ripper. According to the evidence he gave following the inquest into Mary Kelly’s murder, shortly after 2:00 a.m. on the morning of 9 November, he observed an unknown man in Commercial Street near Flower and Dean Street, talking to Kelly. This took place shortly after Hutchinson had spoken to Kelly; she had asked him for some money. Soon after that, Kelly said to the unknown man that she had lost her handkerchief. The unknown man pulled out his handkerchief and he gave it to her. It was a red one. No handkerchief of this description was found in the search of Kelly’s apartment. Either the murderer of Mary Kelly took it with him when he departed, or he may have destroyed it in the stove along with other articles of clothing that were burned.
Here is conclusive evidence that the man that Hutchinson saw give the red handkerchief to Mary Kelly was the man who murdered Mary Kelly. Only the murderer could have removed the red handkerchief from Mary Kelly's room or burned it in her stove.
Some skeptics have tried to discredit the testimony of George Hutchinson, but there is absolutely no evidence that he lied or even grandstanded. Hutchinson was first suspected in Bob Hinton's From Hell, the comic book fantasy on which the silly Johnny Depp movie was made. Later, the suspicions were extended by Stephen Wright in his book Jack the Ripper: An American View. Neither author was able to produce a shred of evidence to document their claims. They based their suspicions of Hutchinson entirely on their opinions that Hutchinson's description of the man he saw outside of Kelly's room on the night of her murder was exceptionally detailed - too detailed for their taste. Also, they found sinister the fact that Hutchinson withheld his evidence until after Kelly's inquest was completed. For that offense, Wright went so far as to charge him with being JTR -- with no evidence to back up his charge. That the police who interviewed Hutchinson were never suspicious of him nor any detail of his testimony never bothered either Hinton or Wright in their specious charges.
What was Hutchinson's description of the man who left Thrawl Street with Mary Kelly and then headed off with her toward her room at Miller's Court?
--The unknown man was 34-35 years old [In 1888,
Walter Sickert was 28.]
--The unknown man was 5'6" [Patricia Cornwell's expert's estimated Sickert's height as 5'7"-5'8".]
--The unknown man had a pale complexion [Sickert had a fair complexion.]
--The unknown man had dark hair [In 1888, Sickert had dark hair.]
--The unknown man had a slight moustache curled at each end. [Sickert sometimes wore mustaches --
both real and fake; also, he had access to theatrical mustaches.]
--The unknown man wore a long dark coat, collar cuffs of astrakhan, dark jacket underneath; a light waistcoat, thick gold chain with a red stone seal, dark trousers and button boots, gaiters, white buttons; White shirt, black tie fastened with a horseshoe pin; a dark hat, turned down in middle. [No one knows what clothes Sickert wore in 1888.]
--The unknown man had a red kerchief. [Sickert owned a red kerchief in 1907, but no one can prove he owned one in 1888. It is possible the red kerchief in 1907 was the same one Hutchinson saw in 1888.]
--The unknown man "looked Jewish and respectable in appearance." [Sickert was not Jewish; he was of German/Danish origin. In the late 1880's, Sickert was not only respectably dressed in most
accounts, paintings and photographs, he was usually very well dressed -- although not in expensive, highly fashionable clothes. Later in life, Sickert degenerated into a "slob" in his appearance.]
Here again, we have good match. Not a conclusive match -- which would be impossible, given the general description. Certainly, however, none of the small differences between Hutchinson's description and what is known about Sickert elimates Sickert from consideration.
In earlier posts, I have linked Walter Sickert to the murders of both Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly. Thus it appears that Sickert wore a red neckerchief/handkerchief when he killed Catherine Eddowes on Sept. 30. On Nov. 9, Sickert gave a red handkerchief to Mary Kelly. It is possible this was the same handkerchief. Then he accompanied Kelly back to her room, where he killed her. He either took the red handkerchief with him when he departed or he burned it in Kelly's stove. Nineteen years later, we find Sickert painting the Camden Town Murder series wearing a red neckerchief around his neck. It is still possible this was the same red handkerchief used in both killings. Two years after that, we find Sickert painting a red neckerchief into his painting "Jack The Ripper's Bedroom." It is possible Sickert used this same red handkerchief as a model when he painted 'Jack The Ripper's Bedroom.'
One last detail about the red handkerchief. Art expert Wendy Baron has speculated that the color of vivid red might have had some special significance for Sickert. This particular shade of red is a striking color in some of Sickert's musical hall paintings dating from the late 1890s and beyond. Sickert's red is, of course, the same color as blood. We have already seen how Sickert was obsessed with the symbolism of certain objects. Could the color vivid red have had similar symbolism for him -- in this case, signifying blood and his In 'Jack The Ripper's Bedroom,' the little bits of deep red scarf or handkerchief visible behind the black satchel stand out in vivid contrast.
So, to answer my original question at the top of this post: all the circumstantial evidence known about Catherine Eddowes Murder does indeed jibe with my conclusion that Walter Sickert killed Catherine Eddowes, as well as Mary Kelly.
Regards,
Mark Starr |
Christopher T George
Chief Inspector
Username: Chrisg
Post Number: 709
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, April 05, 2004 - 1:16 pm: | |
Hi, Mark Starr
You wrote: "I am wondering whether anyone on Casebook can cite an instance of 'saucy jack' that antedates the Saucy Jack postcard -- other than the two in Shakespeare, of course. Any such references would be greatly appreciated."
Yes the name "Saucy Jack" was the name of an American privateer at the time of the War of 1812, operating out of Charleston, South Carolina, Captain Jean Pierre Chazal, as well as a Canadian privateer out of Nova Scotia during the same war. I covered this in an article in Ripperologist several years ago. I would be very much surprised if the term was not also the name for other ships as well, in other periods, as well as a slang term for sailors, as in "Saucy Jack Tar." So your contention that the name is only found in Shakespeare or the Ripper case is clearly incorrect.
All the best
Chris George
North American Editor
Ripperologist
http://www.ripperologist.info |
Frank van Oploo
Inspector
Username: Franko
Post Number: 258
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Monday, April 05, 2004 - 5:45 pm: | |
Mark Starr wrote: “[Patricia Cornwell's expert's estimated Sickert's height as 5'7"-5'8".]”
In my Dutch copy of her book it says: “It is unknown how tall he was exactly, but according to a friend of his he was somewhat taller than average. Photographs and various pieces of clothing that were donated around 1980 to the archives of the Tate Gallery indicate that he must have been about 1.75 m (about 5’10”).”
|
Mark Starr
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Monday, April 05, 2004 - 3:49 pm: | |
Continuing with implications arising out of Letters From Hell, the anonymous theological tract examinded in Ripper Notes by Thomas C. Wescott just a few years ago. Mr. Westcott pointedly invited other readers to examine Letters From Hell with the aim of linking this book with a specific suspect, writing: "Perhaps, someone reading this will take up research and find some interesting nugget in Letters From Hell that I failed to notice." Mr. Wescott also states: "While many parallels could be made between the contents of this book and many facets of the Jack the Ripper case, allow me to point out that I have not yet found any reference in the book to 'Juwes'. Taking up Mr. Wescott's invitation, in this post I will examine the treatment of Jews in Letters From Hell in relation to the Goulston Street Graffito.
In my last post, I discussed the possibility that Walter Sickert read either the book itself or the advertisement for the book printed in the London Times -- and if he did, whether Sickert might have been inspired by the title when he wrote "From Hell" in the Oct. 16 Lusk Letter. My opinion in that post was: not only was it possible that Walter Sickert was inspired by the title when he wrote "From Hell" on the Lusk Letter, it was also possible he was inspired by the contents of this book to create a series of links to the Devil in many of his Jack The Ripper Letters. His purposes for doing so would be: (1) to panic a fearful, superstitious public into believing that Jack The Ripper was the Devil returned to earth from Hell; (2) to taunt the police; and (3) to create general confusion, and thus cover his tracks.
Letters From Hell was translated into English by Dr. George MacDonald and published in London just prior to the Whitechapel murders. The advertisement in The Times, which was published on Sept. 8, 1888, states that 14,000 copies of this book had already been sold. The book appears to have been favorably reviewed. "Should be read by every thinking mind." wrote a critic for the Morning Advertiser. With Walter Sickert's documented lifelong obsession for reading many London newspapers each day, it is very unlikely that news of this book somehow escaped his notice. To judge from the kind of gullible (no pun intended) reader being targeted by Letters From Hell, plus the 14,000 copies already sold (not to mention all the copies printed in German since 1868,) it would have been a very rational decision on Sickert's part to have expected his Ripper links to the Devil to have generated panic among a substantial segment of the population.
Mr. Wescott only raised the possibility that the title of this book may have inspired the writer of the Lusk Letter to have use the words "From Hell." Now I am raising the possibility of this book, both in its title and its contents, having inspired much more than just the words "From Hell" in the Lusk Letter. For example: it may have inspired Sickert to start his entire Ripper letter-writing campaign; it may have inspired Sickert to infiltrate his letters with the many references to The Devil; and it may have inspired Sickert to write the Goulston Street Graffito.
First, however, I would like to pursue an interesting lead Mr. Wescott planted in his essay. He raised a question of whether the writer of the Lusk letter may have read the newly published English version translated by Dr. MacDonald, or whether he may have read the original 1868 version published in Denmark in a German dialect. Mr. Wescott raised this idea because of a minor slip in the Lusk Letter -- a minor slip that might help reveal the identity of the writer of the Lusk Letter. This letter ends: "signed, Catch me when you can, Mishter Lusk." The common expression used by most native English speakers and writers is: "Catch me IF you can." However, the German language and the English language have a misleading relationship with the words "when" and "if." Wann = when; Wenn = if. Thus, it is easy for someone fluent in German to mix up "when" and "if" in English. "Catch me if you can" becomes "catch me when you can."
Is it more than a coincidence that Walter Sickert, who was born in Munich and raised there until the age of 4 when his family emigrated to England, was fluent in German. Not only that, but his father was Danish, and it was in Denmark that Letters From Hell was first published in German dialect in 1868. Sickert spoke/read some Danish as well. Did Sickert's father buy the book in Denmark and later bring it with him when he emigrated to England? Thus, Walter Sickert may well have read the book in German. This must be counted as a real possibility. The use of "when" in the Lusk Letter might be another indication that Walter Sickert wrote it and that he read Letter From Hell in German.
Mr. Westcott described the book's treatment of Jews thus: "The book paints a very bleak future for the Jews... The bleakest, in fact. Separated from all others in Hell they live in a world that mocks their holyland, but with all sacred meaning now lost." In other words, Jews are not merely condemned to Hell, they are also ostracized within Hell in their own ghetto. Talk about punishment! Even in Hell, the Jews are not fit to consort with the other sinners.
And why are the Jews being punished so much? Philip, the principal character in the book, explains: "Far away, and separated from the continent of hell by an immeasurable waste, lies the great city of the Jews - a world apart. And there, in perpetual cycles, the dread history repeats itself, from the catastrophe of Golgotha to the final destruction. Upon the sacking of Jerusalem the whole is engulfed in darkness; but daylight reappearing, the wheel of history has run back, once more to begin the awful period. Any one entering the city as the night is dispelled finds the Jewish people overwhelmed with horror at the recent deed. The awful words keep sounding about them: 'His blood be on us and on our children!' They seem aware that a terrible thing has been done - that a terrible retribution is at hand. Jerusalem trembles. Those who have taken part in bringing about that most fearful of crimes ever perpetrated by man, but whose consciences are not seared entirely, raise the question whether, after all, He was the Son of God whom they crucified; they smite upon their breast and rend their garments."
In other words, Philip (and Dr. MacDonald) trot out the same old rationale that anti-Semites have used for centuries: the Jews killed Christ.
Just in case the reader missed the book's anti-Semitic message, Philip goes on about Jews: "Pale are their faces and bloodshot their eyes; they grind their teeth, but Satan upholds them! The three crosses from Golgotha look down upon them: but not one of those men dares lift an eye to the place where they hanged Him on the tree." The book's central message: Jews serve Satan.
As I mentioned in the previous post, there is no reason to believe that Walter Sickert was an anti-Semite. There is nothing in his biography or his artistic output with so much as a whiff of anti-Semitism. I have not come across anecdotes in which Walter Sickert made anti-Semitic remarks, or circled himself with known anti-Semites. It is indisputable that Sickert resigned his full membership in the Royal Academy of Art near the end of his life in a dramatic protest against the anti-Semitism displayed by the President of the Academy in a public battle over the removal of sculptures by Jacob Epstein (later Sir Jacob Epstein.)
That does not mean, however, that Sickert was oblivious to the genteel anti-Semitism that was rampant in Victorian London among the educated
and religious classes, and that he may have decided to manipulate it for his own purposes -- just as he manipulated the general public's superstitious fear of The Devil in his letters.
The only other link I have been able to make between Walter Sickert and Jews in the bible is his late painting "The Servant of Abraham." And as I have explained in numerous posts, that painting is one of the key exhibits in the case for Walter Sickert as Jack The Ripper. I do not see that painting as anti-Semitic; I see it as Walter Sickert's confession, his self-justification, and his insurance protection for his artistic reputation in the event his identity as Jack The Ripper was discovered after his death.
What was the Goulston St. Graffito? When Catherine Eddowes was murdered in Mitre Square around 1:30 am on Sept. 30, 1888, a piece was cut out of her apron by her killer. Eddowes' body was found by PC Watkins around 1:45 am. At 2:55 am, PC Alfred Long found a piece of blood-stained apron in an archway at Wentworth Model Dwellings on Goulston Street. Above the piece of apron, on the black brick fascia edging of an open doorway, PC Long noticed some writing in chalk. The graffito was later observed by D. C. Halse. The piece of apron matched Catherine Eddowes' apron. The writing on the brick fascia was sponged out at 5:30 am, on the orders of Police Chief Charles Warren -- who was fearful that the message might incite riots against the substantial Jewish population in Whitechapel.
City Police D.C. Halse´s Version - "The Juwes are not the men That Will be Blamed for nothing". Metropolitan Police P.C. Long´s Version - "The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for
nothing". [There was some dispute over the spelling of Juwes, that seems to have been ironed out in the inquest.]
Obviously, we have two major problems here. First, what does "Juwes" mean? And second, the two versions differ in the placement of the word "not." Let's try to figure out what this riddle means.
First: what does "Juwes" mean? It is almost always assumed that "Juwes" is a misspelling of "Jews." Probably it is. No one has found elsewhere a word or a name spelled "Juwes" that is obviously relevant to the Ripper case. Is "Juwes" an example of a spelling out of a spoken dialect with misspellings -- just as Walter Sickert did in the Saucy Jack postcard and the Openshaw Letter? It could be. The use of the letter u in Juwes might indicate someone who spoke German, a language in which the word for Jews is Juden; or it might be someone who spoke French, a language in which the word for Jews is Juifs. Walter Sickert spoke both German and French fluently.
To decipher D. C. Halse's version (The Juwes are not the men That Will be Blamed for nothing): Consider two groups of men: The Jews and The Non-Jews. Both groups have done nothing. The Non-Jews are the men who will be blamed for having done nothing. The Jews are not the men who will be blamed for having done nothing. There is also another way to read D. C. Halse's version. The Jews are not the men who will be blamed for no good reason. In other words, there is no good reason to blame the Jews [for the crucifixion or for the murder of Catherine Eddowes.]
To decipher P.C. Long´s version (The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing): Consider two groups of men: The Jews and The Non-Jews. Both groups have done nothing. The Non-Jews
are the men who will be blamed for having done nothing. The Jews are the men who will not be blamed for having done nothing. Or, to restate the last sentence: The Jews are the men who will not be blamed for no reason at all. Changing the double negative to a positive, we get: The Jews are the men who will be blamed for good reason. In other words, the Jews deserve to get blamed [for the crucifixion or for the murder of Catherine Eddowes.]
The two sentences mean two very different things. D. C. Halse's version is exculpatory: The Jews did nothing to prevent the crucifixion of Christ, but they will not be blamed for their inaction; or don't blame the Jews for Eddowes murder.
However, P. C. Long's version is a typical anti-Semitic rant: The Jews killed Christ, and they deserve to get blamed for the crucifixion. By extension, the murder of Catherine Eddowes was a ritualistic Jewish murder and the Jews should get blamed for it.
We do not know which of the two versions of the Goulston St. Graffito was the one that was actually written on to the wall. Moreover, we do not even know if the Goulston St. Graffito was written by the killer of Catherine Eddowes (or of Liz Stride.) The actual graffito was washed clean on Warren's orders and never photographed. The two police forces feuded with each other at the inquest, each insisting that their man got it right.
It makes an important difference which of the two was the true version. Depending on which version is correct, the Goulston St. Graffito can tell us if it is linked to the book Letters From Hell, and also if it was written by Walter Sickert.
If P. C. Long's version is accurate, the graffito tells us almost nothing about Jack The Ripper, or the murder of Catherine Eddowes (whose apron fragment lay on the ground below), or the man who wrote the graffito. It tells us that the man who slaughtered Catherine Eddowes was considerate enough to tell the public: don't blame this on the Jews. I guess it is possible to connect that to Sickert -- the man who five decades later resigned his membership in the Royal Academy of the Arts in protest against anti-Semitism. It strikes me as amusing, but some might find it plausible.
However, if P. C. Long's version is correct, that turns the graffito into an anti-Semitic hate message, placed next to Catherine Eddowes's piece of apron deliberately to blame the murder of Catherine Eddowes on the Jews. Blame the Jews (for the crucifixion of Christ) is the blatent message of Letters From Hell. The blatent message of P. C. Long's version is: the murder of Catherine Eddowes was a ritualistic murder by Jews.
As we can see later with his painting "The Servant of Abraham," Walter Sickert attempted to manipulate public reactions to Jews and to religion for his own purposes, to create confusion and panic to cover his tracks. For Sickert, Jews made just one more scapegoat to add to his total collection of murder scapegoats:
The Devil
Jack The Ripper/Saucy Jack
Mr. Nemo/Nemo/Mr. Nobody
Malays Roaming London
The Lodger from Bornemouth
The Royal Conspiracy Theory
and now the Jews.
I see that as a much more plausible interpretation of the Goulston Street Graffito.
Regards,
Mark Starr |
Mark Starr
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Monday, April 05, 2004 - 9:49 pm: | |
According to Online Conversion:
1.75 meters = 68.8976378 inches = 5.7414698 feet, or approximately 5 feet 8+7/8 inches.
Cornwell wrote in English; "His precise height is unknown, but a friend of his described him as a little above average. Photographs and several items of clothing donated to the Tate Gallery Archive in the 1980s suggest he was probably five foot eight or nine."
There is another estimate of Sickert's height in writing at 5'7" - 5'8". I had thought it was in Cornwell, but evidently it is from someplace else I read -- maybe Sturgis. If I come across it again, I will post it.
Regards,
Mark Starr
|
Dan Norder
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Monday, April 05, 2004 - 7:27 pm: | |
I'm not even bothering to read the whole posts by this guy anymore, but, come on... How does someone we know had an interest in the Ripper case having or painting a red neckerchief from seven to eleven years or so after the murders have anything to do with anything? It's pointless in the extreme.
The witness reports of someone near the crimes having a red neckerchief may not be of the Ripper at all (the second reported one is from a witness regarded as extremely unreliable and possibly just copying previous descriptions). Are we supposed to believe that Sickert and only Sickert had red neckerchiefs? Besides just that, we knew he was interested in the crimes, if he hadn't had one by then it's not surprising that he'd get one. If an artist having interest in crimes meant someone was a killer, then Cornwell should be the first person locked up.
Coming soon: Mark tries to prove that the Ripper wore shoes, points out that Sickert sometimes wore shoes, finds some letter loosely related to the crimes (whether written by someone pretending to be the killer or someone trying to catch the killer, doesn't matter to him) mentions footwear, calls this "conclusive proof."  |
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