![Sir Melville Leslie Macnaghten (Cartoon)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Sir_Melville_Leslie_Macnaghten_%28Cartoon%29.jpg)
Sir Melville Leslie Macnaghten (16 June 1853,
Woodford Woodford may refer to:
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, London −12 May 1921) was
Assistant Commissioner (Crime) of the London
Metropolitan Police
The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), formerly and still commonly known as the Metropolitan Police (and informally as the Met Police, the Met, Scotland Yard, or the Yard), is the territorial police force responsible for law enforcement and ...
from 1903 to 1913. A highly regarded and famously affable figure of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras he played major investigative roles in cases that led to the establishment and acceptance of fingerprint identification. He was also a major player in the pursuit and capture of Dr. Crippen, and of the exoneration of a wrongly convicted man, Adolph Beck, which helped lead to the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907.
When he prematurely retired in 1913 due to illness, Macnaghten claimed to journalists that he knew the exact identity of
Jack the Ripper
Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer active in and around the impoverished Whitechapel district of London, England, in the autumn of 1888. In both criminal case files and the contemporaneous journalistic accounts, the killer wa ...
, the nickname of the unknown serial killer of poor prostitutes in London's impoverished East End during the late Victorian era. The police chief called the killer "that remarkable man", but refused to name him or divulge details that might identify him, except to reveal that he had taken his own life at the end of 1888. Macnaghten further claimed that he had destroyed the relevant papers to keep forever secret the deceased killer's identity. Since 1965, the public has known that Macnaghten's suspect was
Montague John Druitt, a country doctor's son and young barrister who inexplicably drowned himself in the River Thames in early December 1888. The source of Macnaghten's alleged "private information" about Druitt has two candidates, both only uncovered in the early 21st century. One is a Tory politician, H. R. Farquharson, who lived near the Druitts and also went to Eton with Macnaghten, and the other is Colonel Sir Vivian Majendie, a very close friend of the police chief and whose clan was related to the Druitt family. It is likely both men, in succession, were the unnamed sources of information for the police chief regarding the drowned barrister being strongly suspected of being the Ripper by his closest relations.
Since 1959, Macnaghten has been known for a major report written in the 1890s on the Ripper case, naming three possible
Jack the Ripper suspects
A series of murders that took place in the East End of London from August to November 1888 was blamed on an unidentified assailant who was nicknamed Jack the Ripper. Since that time, the identity of the killer or killers has been widely debated, ...
. There are two versions of this document, one that was filed in the archives of Scotland Yard. It was, however, a copy of the privately held version in the possession of his daughter,
Christabel, Lady Aberconway
Henry Duncan McLaren, 2nd Baron Aberconway, (16 April 1879 – 23 May 1953) was a British politician, horticulturalist and industrialist. He was the son of Charles McLaren, 1st Baron Aberconway and Laura Pochin.
Education
Born in Richmond up ...
– the version which strongly advocated "M. J. Druitt" as the likeliest suspect to have been the Whitechapel assassin – that was revealed in 1959. Macnaghten's opinion that the case was likely solved, and that it was a "Protean" maniac who had taken his own life, had already been confirmed in his 1914 memoir, "Days of My Years" (London, Edward Arnold) though Druitt was not named (and no other suspects are mentioned as possibilities).
More recently, French writer Sophie Herfort has argued that Macnaghten himself was responsible for the Jack the Ripper murders.
Early career
The youngest of fifteen children of
Elliot Macnaghten, the last Chairman of the
British East India Company
The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Southea ...
, Macnaghten was educated at
Eton Eton most commonly refers to Eton College, a public school in Eton, Berkshire, England.
Eton may also refer to:
Places
*Eton, Berkshire, a town in Berkshire, England
* Eton, Georgia, a town in the United States
* Éton, a commune in the Meuse dep ...
. In his memoirs he describes his schooldays as the happiest of his life, even going so far as to write that he knew this to be so as he lived them. After leaving school in 1872, he went to
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
to run his father's tea estates in
Bengal
Bengal ( ; bn, বাংলা/বঙ্গ, translit=Bānglā/Bôngô, ) is a geopolitical, cultural and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal, predom ...
and remained there until 1888, albeit with occasional visits back home. In 1881 he was assaulted by Indian land rioters and as a result, became friends with
James Monro
James Monro (1838 – 28 January 1920) was a lawyer who became the first Assistant Commissioner (Crime) of the London Metropolitan Police and also served as Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis from 1888 to 1890.
Early career
Monro was ...
, who was
District Judge and
Inspector-General
An inspector general is an investigative official in a civil or military organization. The plural of the term is "inspectors general".
Australia
The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security (Australia) (IGIS) is an independent statutory of ...
in the
Bombay Presidency
The Bombay Presidency or Bombay Province, also called Bombay and Sind (1843–1936), was an administrative subdivision (province) of British India, with its capital in the city that came up over the seven islands of Bombay. The first mainl ...
at the time.
On 3 October 1878 he married Dora Emily Sanderson, the daughter of a
canon
Canon or Canons may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* Canon (fiction), the conceptual material accepted as official in a fictional universe by its fan base
* Literary canon, an accepted body of works considered as high culture
** Western ca ...
from
Chichester
Chichester () is a cathedral city and civil parish in West Sussex, England.OS Explorer map 120: Chichester, South Harting and Selsey Scale: 1:25 000. Publisher:Ordnance Survey – Southampton B2 edition. Publishing Date:2009. It is the only ci ...
; they eventually had two sons and two daughters (Christabel was the second, 1890–1974).
Career in the Criminal Investigation Department
Upon his return to England, Macnaghten was offered the post of first
Assistant Chief Constable (CID) in the Metropolitan Police by Monro, who by that time had become the first Assistant Commissioner (Crime); however this appointment was opposed by
Charles Warren
General Sir Charles Warren, (7 February 1840 – 21 January 1927) was an officer in the British Royal Engineers. He was one of the earliest European archaeologists of the Biblical Holy Land, and particularly of the Temple Mount. Much of his mi ...
, the
Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis
The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis is the head of London's Metropolitan Police Service. Sir Mark Rowley was appointed to the post on 8 July 2022 after Dame Cressida Dick announced her resignation in February.
The rank of Commissione ...
, allegedly due to the beating he took by "the Hindoos" back in Bengal; but the real reason seemed to be that Warren and Monro did not get along well from the beginning. Warren's rejection of Macnaghten widened the rift between the two men, resulting in Monro's resignation and his transfer to
Special Branch
Special Branch is a label customarily used to identify units responsible for matters of national security and Intelligence (information gathering), intelligence in Policing in the United Kingdom, British, Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth, ...
by the
Home Secretary
The secretary of state for the Home Department, otherwise known as the home secretary, is a senior minister of the Crown in the Government of the United Kingdom. The home secretary leads the Home Office, and is responsible for all national ...
,
Henry Matthews.
However, due to the continuous disagreements with Home Secretary Matthews, Commissioner Warren chose to resign on 9 November 1888. Monro was brought in to succeed him as Commissioner. With this turn of events, Macnaghten was brought in with the position of
Assistant Chief Constable in June 1889; he was later promoted to Chief Constable in 1890, following the unexpected death of the first incumbent,
Adolphus Williamson
Adolphus Frederick "Dolly" Williamson (1830 – 9 December 1889) was the first head of the Detective Branch of the Metropolitan Police and the first head of the Detective Branch's successor organisation, the Criminal Investigation Department ( ...
.
Macnaghten and Jack the Ripper
![Macnaghten memorandum](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Macnaghten_memorandum.JPG)
Even though he missed being on the police force during the Ripper killings of 1888, Macnaghten was actively involved in the investigation of the murders of Whitechapel prostitutes between 1889 and 1891. Crimes that were initially believed by some at Scotland Yard, and certainly by the tabloid press, to be by the same perpetrator. In his memoir, Macnaghten claimed that information received "some years after" the final murder of 1888 led him to the belief that Jack the Ripper was a man who had taken his own life at the end of that year. The source of these "certain facts" that led to this "conclusion" is unidentified, though he implies in his book that it was the murderer's "own people", e.g. his relations who supposedly lived with him) who must have privately briefed the Chief Constable. Macnaghten even titles his chapter on the Whitechapel murders: "Laying the Ghost of Jack the Ripper"; meaning that the deceased "fiend" had only haunted Londoners as they were in ignorance that the killer had been in his grave for several years.
In February 1891 a Conservative MP,
Henry Richard Farquharson
Henry Richard Farquharson (1857 – 19 April 1895) was an English landowner and Conservative politician.
Farquharson was born at Brighton and became the owner of a large estate at Eastbury House, Tarrant Gunville (near Blandford Forum in Do ...
, the member for West Dorset, was telling people in London that he knew the murderer to have been a surgeon's son who had committed suicide. This story leaked to the press, though it never became a sensation. Like Macnaghten, Farquharson was a member of the upper classes who had attended Eton College and owned estates in the Far East. Macnaghten also had a potentially personal conduit of accurate information about Druitt – a close friend at the Home Office, Colonel
Vivian Majendie
Major General Vivian Henry Bruce Majendie, (20 April 1886 – 13 January 1960) was a British Army officer and amateur cricketer for Somerset County Cricket Club.
Military career
The son of The Reverend Henry Majendie, Vivian Majendie was educ ...
(knighted in 1895). Colonel Majendie was also from a very distinguished family, was Chief Inspector of Munitions (1871–1898) and was justly acclaimed for his persistent bravery as a bomb disposal expert. Majendie was also related by the marriage of his first cousin's daughter, Isabel Majendie Hill, to the alleged Ripper (in 1888 Isabel had married Reverend Charles Druitt, the first cousin of Montague). According to Macnaghten, Druitt's own family "believed" he was Jack the Ripper. Due to speculation in the press about another madman, Macnaghten wrote a confidential report dated 23 February 1894 naming Druitt as a Ripper suspect and placed it on file. This document, in its entirety, was not publicly available until 1975 (the section mentioning only the suspects had been published in 1966). The alternate version of this same document, believed by many to be a draft, has never been sighted by a researcher and is thought to be lost. Instead a copy of this second version was made by Macnaghten's daughter
Christabel, Lady Aberconway
Henry Duncan McLaren, 2nd Baron Aberconway, (16 April 1879 – 23 May 1953) was a British politician, horticulturalist and industrialist. He was the son of Charles McLaren, 1st Baron Aberconway and Laura Pochin.
Education
Born in Richmond up ...
, who allowed some of its contents to be publicly broadcast by television presenter Daniel Farson in 1959. The name of the chief suspect was not revealed until 1965, by the American journalist and author Tom Cullen. Why Macnaghten composed two versions remains the subject of controversy, speculation and historical debate among writers on the Ripper mystery (some have argued that the so-called Aberconway version is a rewrite of the 1894 original). This report proved influential for Jack the Ripper research, for it popularised the idea that the Ripper only had five true victims and also named three possible suspects.
It has been widely believed for over half a century that Macnaghten, in writing from memory, committed many factual errors in his report regarding Druitt. For example, in the privately held version he inaccurately describes Druitt as a 41-year-old doctor who vanished immediately after the final murder on 9 November 1888. In fact, Druitt was functioning normally, at least outwardly, at his places of work and play until the end of November 1888. This document also says that his family only "suspected" he was the Ripper. Since 1959 it has also been treated as a foundation stone of so-called "Ripperology" that the timing of Druitt's suicide, so soon after the final murder, was the threadbare reason Macnaghten considered him a suspect at all. Yet this ignores that the police chief in his memoir, and from the relative safety of retirement, revealed that Scotland Yard believed Whitechapel prostitute murders after 1888 were also by the Ripper. Years later Druitt came to his attention due to information received that was judged, by Macnaghten, to be so credible that post-1888 murders could not exonerate the tragic barrister.
This line of argument is buttressed by the filed version of Macnaghten's report as he notably equivocates, writing that M. J. Druitt was only "said to be a doctor", whilst affirming that the suspect was definitely "sexually insane" and his family "believed" he was the killer. Notably,
Frederick Abberline
Frederick George Abberline (8 January 1843 – 10 December 1929) was a British chief inspector for the London Metropolitan Police. He is best known for being a prominent police figure in the investigation into the Jack the Ripper serial killer ...
, the field detective who led the investigation, did not believe that Druitt was the Ripper. Macnaghten also makes a mistake in describing the drowned suspect a "young doctor" or "medical student" (some writers have wondered if Abberline was perhaps confusing Druitt with a Whitechapel suspect in 1888 who was a young, medical student, named John Sanders). A controversial new line of argument is that the police chief was engaged in a campaign of "spin"; to both reveal and conceal the identity of the murderer. Commendably Macnaghten wanted the public to know that the Ripper was an English, gentile gentleman and not a poor, Jewish immigrant, yet he also supposedly conspired with the most famous writer of the day,
George R. Sims
George Robert Sims (2 September 1847 – 4 September 1922) was an English journalist, poet, dramatist, novelist and ''bon vivant''.
Sims began writing lively humour and satiric pieces for ''Fun'' magazine and ''The Referee'', but he was soon co ...
, to disguise the drowned, young barrister as a drowned, middle-aged surgeon. They did this to protect the late suspect's respectable relations (Sims was also an upper class friend of both Macnaghten and Majendie). In effect Macnaghten and Sims disguised Druitt as "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (even Druitt's family in Sims's regular column in "The Referee" were disguised as unnamed "friends" of the "mad doctor").
Curiously, Douglas G. Browne in his ''The Rise of Scotland Yard'', states that Macnaghten "appears to identify the Ripper with the leader of a plot to assassinate
Mr Balfour at the Irish Office." This reference is puzzling because, although there were
Fenian
The word ''Fenian'' () served as an umbrella term for the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and their affiliate in the United States, the Fenian Brotherhood, secret political organisations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries dedicated ...
plots to assassinate Balfour, Druitt is not known to have had any such connections and it is extremely unlikely that he did. It has been recently speculated that Browne may have taken too literally some lines by Macnaghten at the end of his Ripper chapter. Macnaghten exaggerates the negative impact on the authorities of being unable to catch the fiend. He alleges it caused the resignation of the Police Commissioner and "... very nearly settled the hash of one of Her Majesty's principal Secretaries of State." Macnaghten means the near-resignation of the Home Secretary, but Browne has perhaps misinterpreted these ambiguous words as an allusion to the assassination plot against Balfour.
The second of Macnaghten's three suspects was identified only as "Kosminski," presumably
Aaron Kosminski
Aaron Kosminski (born Aron Mordke Kozmiński; 11 September 1865 – 24 March 1919) was a Polish barber and hairdresser, and suspect in the Jack the Ripper case.
Kosminski was a Polish Jew who emigrated from Congress Poland to England in the 18 ...
, a Polish
Jew
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""Th ...
who lived in
Whitechapel
Whitechapel is a district in East London and the future administrative centre of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It is a part of the East End of London, east of Charing Cross. Part of the historic county of Middlesex, the area formed ...
and was committed to an insane asylum in 1891. While not on the top of Macnaghten's list, Kosminski was suspected by Sir
Robert Anderson, the man who succeeded Monro as Assistant Commissioner, with apparent confirmation by Chief Inspector
Donald Swanson
Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson (12 August 1848 - 24 November 1924) was born at Geise, where his father operated a distillery, before the family moved in 1851 to Thurso, and was a senior police officer in the Metropolitan Police in Lond ...
, Anderson's desk officer. As with Druitt, definitive evidence is lacking to support this allegation, and both Anderson and Swanson also made errors about Kosminski, their preferred suspect (the most significant of which was to claim "Kosminski" was long deceased when he was still alive; they also claim he was positively identified by a Jewish witness who refused to testify, often thought to be Israel Schwartz, a claim publicly and explicitly rejected by police chief Major Henry Smith, and implicitly by Macnaghten via his proxies and in his memoirs).
The third suspect in Macnaghten's report was a man named
Michael Ostrog, a Russian-born thief and con man who affected several aliases and disguises and was detained in asylums on several occasions. Again there is little to support this suspicion against Ostrog: records indicated that he was imprisoned in France during the murders. The fact that Ostrog was arrested and imprisoned before the report was written raises the question of why Ostrog was included at all as a viable suspect. A possible yet tenuous answer has been postulated involving Eton College. Ostrog had stolen from Macnaghten's beloved alma mater and the police chief may have included the Russian in his reports as a private act of revenge. From late 1894 Macnaghten had to know that Ostrog had been cleared of the Whitechapel crimes, yet he still persisted with his inclusion and, what is more, projection into the public sphere of Ostrog as a Ripper suspect (via literary cronies).
Later career, including as Assistant Commissioner
In 1900 Macnaghten served in the
Belper Committee to inquire about "the working of the method of Identification of Criminals by Measurement and Fingerprints". As the committee recommended the use of
fingerprint
A fingerprint is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. The recovery of partial fingerprints from a crime scene is an important method of forensic science. Moisture and grease on a finger result in fingerprints on surfac ...
s as a means of
identification
Identification or identify may refer to:
*Identity document, any document used to verify a person's identity
Arts, entertainment and media
* ''Identify'' (album) by Got7, 2014
* "Identify" (song), by Natalie Imbruglia, 1999
* Identification ( ...
over
bertillonage
The history of anthropometry includes its use as an early tool of anthropology, use for identification, use for the purposes of understanding human physical variation in paleoanthropology and in various attempts to correlate physical with racial ...
, largely due to the testimony of
Edward Henry
Sir Edward Richard Henry, 1st Baronet, (26 July 1850 – 19 February 1931) was the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis (head of the Metropolitan Police of London) from 1903 to 1918.
His commission saw the introduction of police dogs to ...
on their respective merits.
When Henry was appointed Commissioner in 1903, succeeding
Sir Edward Bradford, Macnaghten was appointed Assistant Commissioner (Crime) and became involved in many of the most famous cases in the history of the Metropolitan Police, including the
Hawley Harvey Crippen
Hawley Harvey Crippen (September 11, 1862 – November 23, 1910), usually known as Dr. Crippen, was an American homeopath, ear and eye specialist and medicine dispenser. He was hanged in Pentonville Prison in London for the murder of his wife Co ...
case and the Farrow double murder case, which resulted in the conviction and hanging of
Albert and Alfred Stratton largely on the basis on fingerprint evidence. He also claimed in his memoirs to have found the critical female witness who exonerated the falsely convicted
Adolf Beck
The Adolf Beck case was a notorious incident of wrongful conviction by mistaken identity, brought about by unreliable methods of identification, erroneous eyewitness testimony, and a rush to convict the accused. As one of the best known causes ...
, a notorious mis-carriage of justice which led to the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal.
Macnaghten was
knighted
A knight is a person granted an honorary title of knighthood by a head of state (including the Pope) or representative for service to the monarch, the Christian denomination, church or the country, especially in a military capacity. Knighthood ...
in the
1907 King's Birthday Honours List. In the
1912 New Years Honours List, he was appointed
Companion of the Order of the Bath
Companion may refer to:
Relationships Currently
* Any of several interpersonal relationships such as friend or acquaintance
* A domestic partner, akin to a spouse
* Sober companion, an addiction treatment coach
* Companion (caregiving), a caregive ...
(CB). He was awarded the
King's Police Medal
The King's Police Medal (KPM) is awarded to police in the United Kingdom for gallantry or distinguished service. It was also formerly awarded within the wider British Empire, including Commonwealth countries, most of which now have their own hono ...
(KPM) in the
1913 New Years Honours List. He was also a Knight Commander of the
White Military Order of Spain and a Commander of the
Order of the Dannebrog
The Order of the Dannebrog ( da, Dannebrogordenen) is a Danish order of chivalry instituted in 1671 by Christian V. Until 1808, membership in the order was limited to fifty members of noble or royal rank, who formed a single class known a ...
.
Retirement and later life
However, in 1911 Macnaghten was experiencing the first signs of ill-health; even a trip to Australia the following year failed to improve matters. He was forced to retire from his job in 1913. Macnaghten's successor at Scotland Yard was Basil Thomson who had attended New College, Oxford at the same time as Montague John Druitt, Macnaghten's preferred Ripper suspect.
In 1914 he published his memoirs ''Days of My Years''. He also made a translation of
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus (; 8 December 65 – 27 November 8 BC), known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his ' ...
's ''
Ars Poetica'' into English verse, an effort to which he devoted the last ten years of his life.
Macnaghten died on 12 May 1921 at Queen Anne's Mansions,
Westminster
Westminster is an area of Central London, part of the wider City of Westminster.
The area, which extends from the River Thames to Oxford Street, has many visitor attractions and historic landmarks, including the Palace of Westminster, Bu ...
.
Macnaghten in fiction
During his lifetime Sir Melville Macnaghten was fictionalised in several novels. He appears as a character named Mr Johnson in George R. Sims' 'Dorcas Dene Detective' (1897) short stories. Both Macnaghten and George R. Sims appear in Marie Belloc-Lowndes 'The Lodger:A story of the London fog' (1911), the latter as himself though unnamed and the former as Police Commissioner Sir John Burney. Macnaghten also is arguably the model for the heroic private eye Edmund Blake who hunts the Whitechapel murderer in Guy Logan's 'The true history of Jack the Ripper' (1905) in which Montague Druitt is also disguised as Mortimer Slade.
Macnaghten also appears in ''The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade'' (1985), , the first of the
Inspector Lestrade
Detective Inspector G. Lestrade, or Mr. Lestrade ( or ), is a fictional character appearing in several of the Sherlock Holmes stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. Lestrade's first appearance was in the first Sherlock Holmes story, the novel ...
novels by
M. J. Trow
Meirion James Trow (born 16 October 1949) is a Welsh author of crime fiction, who writes under the name M. J. Trow. He has written mysteries featuring Inspector Lestrade, Peter Maxwell, Kit Marlowe and Margaret Murray.
Biography
Trow was bor ...
. The book deals with the aftermath of the Ripper case and with Macnaghten's report. Trow misspells Macnaghten's name as "McNaghten" in his book and presents a fictional version of Macnaghten's daughter.
Macnaghten also features prominently in the later chapters of
Alan Moore
Alan Moore (born 18 November 1953) is an English author known primarily for his work in comic books including ''Watchmen'', ''V for Vendetta'', ''The Ballad of Halo Jones'', ''Swamp Thing'', ''Batman:'' ''The Killing Joke'', and ''From Hell' ...
's seminal graphic novel
From Hell
''From Hell'' is a graphic novel by writer Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell, originally published in serial form from 1989 to 1998. The full collection was published in 1999 by Top Shelf Productions.
Set during the Whitechapel murders of ...
.
Footnotes
External links
Casebook.org
{{DEFAULTSORT:Macnaghten, Melville
Assistant Commissioners of Police of the Metropolis
Knights Bachelor
Companions of the Order of the Bath
English recipients of the Queen's Police Medal
Metropolitan Police recipients of the Queen's Police Medal
1853 births
1921 deaths
People educated at Eton College