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AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1338
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, September 02, 2004 - 4:16 pm: |       |
The official Home Office view of Anderson, from the Home Office website:
'There was a more directed violence in the 1870s and 1880s with the Fenian bomb and dynamite outrages, which included an attempt in 1883 to blow up the new Home Office/Local Government Board building. The Home Office had added Robert (later Sir Robert) Anderson to its staff in 1867 as an Assistant in Irish affairs to organise intelligence. In later years, he became Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, and he is also noteworthy in that he was suspected of being one of the first ‘leakers'to the press among senior civil servants. He certainly wrote, later on, chatty articles in Blackwood's Magazine about former colleagues In this period, as before and afterwards; the statement of a later Home Secretary (Herbert Morrison) that ‘the corridors of the Home Office are paved with dynamite'remained true. The reverberations, for example, of the Adolf Beck case in 1903, where petitions were rejected by the Home Office but mistaken identity was subsequently proved, went on in the Criminal Department for fifty years, and the case was a factor in the setting up of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1908. Almost every division or department could produce cases where trouble, like a hurricane, arrived out of a comparatively blue sky.'
I like the 'dynamite'.
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AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1340
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, September 02, 2004 - 4:58 pm: | |
A 'bit cracked' is right. What a fruit cake Anderson is, I never realised.
'J. J. Abraham (Surgeon's Journey: Autobiography, London: Heinemann 1957) relates how Major Henri le Caron’s own autobiography revealed that the father of ‘a student dissecting with me [Abraham]’ had been the recipient of secret information on the Fenians from the author. The friend’s father gave Abraham some books which he had written, Daniel in the Critic's Den and The Coming Prince, from which Abraham inferred that ‘he must be a bit cracked’. After le Caron’s revelations he realised that ‘the author of the religious books I had been reading, was no less a person than the head of the Criminal Investigation Department, and it was to him that le Caron had been reporting the Fenians’ secret proceedings for years.’ He continues: ‘It was amazing. People who knew him could not believe it. No one more unlikely to hold such a post had been imagined. But it was true! That, of course, was the beautiful cleverness of it. He was entirely unsuspected. The disclosure, naturally, destroyed the value of the secret and, soon after, he and his family left Dublin. Probably his life was not considered safe there any longer, and so he was moved to London, to take up a high administrative post in Scotland Yard. I believe he kept on writing more and more religious books. His name was Sir Robert Anderson. He died in 1918.’ (p.51.)'
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Robert Charles Linford
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Robert
Post Number: 2930
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, September 02, 2004 - 5:54 pm: | |
AP, you'll be pleased to know that you can read "The Coming Prince" at http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search?author=Robert+Anderson&amode=words
Robert |
Robert Charles Linford
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Robert
Post Number: 2931
Registered: 3-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, September 02, 2004 - 5:57 pm: | |
Why did that page come up? Anyway, just click on search and enter his name.
Robert |
Dan Norder
Inspector
Username: Dannorder
Post Number: 273
Registered: 4-2004
| | Posted on Thursday, September 02, 2004 - 6:27 pm: | |
Or go directly to http://www.fbinstitute.com/Anderson/toc.html
It's kind of funny that on the author bio page they claim:
"As an author his name will go down to generations yet unborn. His general books: "Criminals and Crime," "Side Lights on the Home Rule Movement," and "The Lighter Side of My Official Life," dealing mainly with "things present," may not survive, but his Bible study volumes, dealing with "things eternal," will remain."
Yeah, because he'll be remembered in history for his religious writings and not his involvement with the Ripper case, rightttttt.
Dan Norder, editor, Ripper Notes |
Rosemary O'Ryan
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Thursday, September 02, 2004 - 9:54 pm: | |
Dear Mr Wolf,
I don't know about Anderson as a 'fruit cake', but if you were to follow his various critiques, you would discover he was not only the foremost secret policeman in the world, but also, an authority on the Chaldean Oracles, most knowledgeable on the writing-on-the-wall (King Nebuchanesser), privy to the wickedness of Jews.
Most extraordinary man!
(Think about it)
Rosey :-) |
Andrew gable
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Wednesday, December 22, 2004 - 9:56 pm: | |
I always found it to be interesting that the Ripper murders began so soon after Anderson's transfer to London. The next day, I believe? Given the nature of his transfer (I believe part of it was pressure due to Anderson's authorship of an article linking Charles Parnell to the Phoenix Park Murders), and the discussions internally about JTR being a Fenian sympathizer, at the very least, it's food for thought. |
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