What are we to make of so vacuous a deposition? It was what novelists call a filthy night in a poorly lit alleyway. Levy had a brim-down glimpse of a man and a woman. ‘From what he saw, the man might have been three inches taller’. Eddowes was a diminutive five feet, meaning her paramour ‘might’ have been five feet three inches. However, if he was a taller man, he ‘might’ have been leaning down to whisper sweet nothings in her ear. We cannot know, and certainly not from Levy, because ‘He did not look at them.’
Peripheral estimates such as his are worthless. An on-site witness, Abraham Heshburg, who actually saw Elizabeth Stride as she lay dead at Dutfield’s Yard, estimated her age as twenty-five to twenty-eight – she was forty-four, and Heshburg was about twenty years out.7 Predicated on the enormous variations of physical description, we can assume that the Ripper was between five and six feet tall, and between thirty and fifty years old – like virtually half the male population of London. It is only when a description is specific that it begins to have some worth, and this perhaps explains why Levy was not under police escort.
We now come to the man who was.
JOSEPH LAWENDE 45 Norfolk Road, being sworn saith:– On the night of the 29th I was at the Imperial Club. Mr Joseph Levy and Mr Harry Harris were with me. It was raining. We left there to go out at half past one and we left the house about five minutes later. I walked a little further from the others. Standing in the corner of Church Passage in Duke Street, which leads into Mitre Square, I saw a woman. She was standing with her face towards a man. I only saw her back. She had her hand on his chest. The man was taller than she was. She had a black jacket and a black bonnet. I have seen the articles which it is stated belonged to her at the police station. My belief is they were the same clothes which I had seen upon the Deceased. She appeared to me short. The man had a cloth cap on with a cloth peak. I have given a description of the man to the police.
But he isn’t giving it here, where only the man’s hat is described. ‘The man was taller than she was … She appeared to me short.’ Did she appear short because the man was much taller than her? It’s a question I would like to have asked, but Coroner Langham asked the question instead: ‘Can you tell us what sort of man it was with whom she was speaking?’
Lawende had clearly been warned off, and again described the man’s hat: ‘He had on a cloth cap with a peak.’ The jury had already heard that, and just in case anyone was looking for a little more description than a hat, Crawford interceded:
Unless the Jury wish it I have a special reason [my emphasis] why no further description on this man should be given now.
The City Police had been protecting Lawende, and now they shut him up. The jury ‘assented to Mr Crawford’s wish’, although I don’t imagine they realised it would be sustained for the next 130 years. Here was a witness who had information about the killer – height, age, whatever – under the ‘exclusive care’ of the City Police, who had imposed ‘a pledge of secrecy’.
Crawford had just defended the pledge, adding veracity to the Evening News report. Here was a man who, at a minimum, had had a glimpse of Jack the Ripper, yet his description was suppressed, and remains a secret to this day.
Cue the fairy dust.
On page 247 of his book, Mr Philip Sugden makes a convoluted and unsuccessful effort to explain away the description Crawford wanted kept secret. He would like us to believe that it is no secret at all, but was brought into the open by the Metropolitan Police on 19 October 1888. He refers us to a description in the Met’s own weekly newspaper, the Police Gazette. The Gazette was founded by Howard Vincent in 1884, and was brought into disrepute by Warren and his boys with the kind of casuistry proffered by Mr Sugden.
‘Lawende saw the man too,’ he writes energetically, ‘but the official transcript of his inquest deposition records only that he was taller than the woman and wore a cloth cap with a cloth peak. Press versions of the testimony, however, add the detail that “the man looked rather rough and shabby”, and reveal that the full description was suppressed at the request of Henry Crawford, the City Solicitor, who was attending the hearing on behalf of the [City] Police. Fortunately,’ he enthuses, ‘this deficiency in the record can be addressed from other sources. Lawende’s description of the man was fully published in the Police Gazette of October 19th 1888.’8
To which I add the word ‘Bollocks.’
Here is Mr Sugden’s historic breakthrough, as published in the Police Gazette on 19 October 1888: ‘… a MAN, aged 30, height 5ft 7 or 8 in., complexion fair, moustache fair, medium build, dress, pepper and salt colour loose jacket, grey cloth cap with peak of same material, reddish neckerchief tied in a knot; appearance of a sailor’. This description of 19 October, grasped by Mr Sugden, was in fact published in The Times on 2 October, more than a week before Lawende gave his evidence, and more than two weeks before its appearance in the Police Gazette. It therefore can have absolutely nothing whatever to do with the description Crawford suppressed at the inquest.
This is what The Times printed on 2 October: ‘… the man was observed in a court in Duke Street, leading to Mitre Square, about 1.40 a.m. on Sunday. He is described as of shabby appearance. About 30 years of age and 5ft 9in in height, of fair complexion, having a small fair moustache, and wearing a red neckerchief and a cap with a peak.’
Apart from knocking a useful inch or two off the height and adding a bit of nautical gibberish, the Police Gazette/Times descriptions are as near as makes no difference, red neckerchief and all. Thus Mr Sugden’s supposed revelation is no such thing, and certainly has nothing to do with the description Crawford suppressed.
I am aware of The Times’s description 130 years after it appeared. Are we to imagine that a man as sharp as Henry Crawford was ignorant of something published in The Times only nine days before? Crawford was a man of rare intellect, and it is simply ridiculous to imagine that he would try to suppress something that had recently been printed in 40,000 copies of the world’s most prestigious newspaper. Crawford would have to be as foolish as Sugden to suggest it. And the Evening News, despite The Times piece a week before, was very well aware on 9 October that the City Police were keeping something secret.
Unless Mr Sugden thinks a ‘pepper and salt’-coloured jacket glimpsed in darkness and rain is some kind of dramatic breakthrough, the Police Gazette has elucidated absolutely nothing. Sugden describes this grey jacket as ‘a fortunate addition to the deficiency of the record’. I call it worthless twaddle. This belated confection in the Police Gazette doesn’t explain Crawford’s imposition of secrecy, and has no value. It is simply a cooked-up, out-of-date newspaper reprint, another dispatch from the Land of Make Believe. If this description had any validity to the Metropolitan Police on 2 October, why not print it in the Police Gazette on that day? Or the 5th? Or the 9th? Or the 12th? Or the 16th? Why wait for the issue of 19 October?
The real reason the Met regurgitated this unsourced ‘description’ was to coincide with an internal report Bro Inspector Donald Swanson had prepared on the same date. Destined for the Home Office, this concoction of 19 October makes reference to the man with the red neckerchief, and since they’d never bothered with him before, it would look most untoward it they didn’t fabricate some interest now. Hence, seventeen days after his appearance in The Times ‘the Seafaring Man’ makes his debut in the Police Gazette, only to be dismissed on the very same day by Swanson himself. ‘I understand from the City Police,’ he wrote, ‘that Mr Lewin [sic] one of the men who identified the clothes only of the