Montague Druitt - Legacy

Legacy

Druitt was a favoured suspect in the Jack the Ripper crimes throughout the 1960s, until the advent of theories in the 1970s that the murders were not the work of a single serial killer but the result of a conspiracy involving the British royal family and Freemasonry. The theories are widely condemned as ridiculous, and implicate Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, his tutor James Stephen, and their doctor Sir William Gull to varying degrees. One version of the conspiracy promoted by Stephen Knight in his 1976 book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution supposed that Druitt was a scapegoat, chosen by officialdom to take the blame for the murders. Martin Howells and Keith Skinner followed the same line in their 1987 book The Ripper Legacy, which was panned by one critic as being based on "no evidence whatever".

The theories attempted to link Druitt with Clarence, Gull and Stephen through a network of mutual acquaintances and possible connections. Reginald Acland, the brother of Gull's son-in-law, had legal chambers in King's Bench Walk near Druitt's, as did Harry Stephen, who was James Stephen's brother. Harry Stephen was good friends with Harry Wilson, who had a house in Chiswick, "The Osiers", near to where Druitt's body was found. Wilson and James Stephen were close friends of Clarence, and were both members of an exclusive society called the Cambridge Apostles. As a schoolboy, Druitt had played cricket against two of Wilson's friends, Kynaston Studd and Henry Goodhart, who was also one of the Apostles. Another potential connection between Druitt and Wilson is through John Henry Lonsdale. Lonsdale's name and Blackheath address are written in a diary belonging to Wilson now in the possession of Trinity College, Cambridge. Lonsdale's address is a few yards from the school at which Druitt worked and lived, and Lonsdale had been a barrister and had also rented legal chambers in King's Bench Walk. In 1887, Lonsdale entered the church and was assigned as curate to Wimborne Minster, where the Druitt family worshiped. Lonsdale and Macnaghten were classmates at Eton, and so theorists argue that Lonsdale might have been in a position to provide "private information" to Macnaghten regarding Druitt. The connections between the Apostles and Druitt led to the suggestion that he was part of the same social set. Druitt, his mother and his sister Georgiana were invited to a ball in honour of Clarence at the home of Lord Wimborne on 17 December 1888, although they did not attend because by that time Montague was dead, his mother was in an asylum, and his sister was expecting her second child. Clarence, Stephen, Wilson, Studd, and Goodhart are suggested to have been homosexual, although this is contested by historians. John Wilding's 1993 book Jack the Ripper Revealed used the connections between Druitt and Stephen to propose that they committed the crimes together, but reviewers considered it an "imaginative tale ... most questionable", an "exercise in ingenuity rather than ... fact", and "lack evidential support".

In his 2005 and 2006 biographies of Druitt, D. J. Leighton concluded that Druitt was innocent, but repeated some of Knight's and Wilding's discredited claims. Leighton suggested that Druitt could have been murdered either out of greed by his elder brother William or, as previously suggested by Howells and Skinner, out of fear of exposure by Harry Wilson's homosexual cronies. The propensity of theorists to associate Ripper suspects with homosexuality has led scholars to assume that such notions are based on homophobia rather than evidence.

The accusations against Clarence, Stephen, Gull and Druitt also draw on cultural perceptions of a decadent aristocracy, and depict an upper-class murderer or murderers preying on lower-class victims. As Druitt and the other aristocratic Ripper suspects were wealthy, there is more biographical material on them than on the residents of the Whitechapel slums. Consequently, it is easier for writers to construct solutions based on a wealthy culprit rather than one based on a Whitechapel resident. There is no direct evidence against Druitt, and since the 1970s, the number of Jack the Ripper suspects has continued to grow, with the result that there are now over 100 different theories about the Ripper's identity.