Jack the Ripper the works of Francis Thompson
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Francis Thompson (1859-1907).
His own family who were closest, knew him as Jack the Ripper. They were Roman Catholics - once a minority social class in England used to harassment and vilification. The Thompson family had no friends, apart from the Catholic Priests. They kept their suspicions to themselves. ‘He could get into a temper when roused.’ His sister would volunteer if asked about him. About his medical studies, she said, ‘Many a time he asked my father for £3 or £4 for dissecting fees; so often that my father remarked what a number of corpses he was cutting up.’ |
Francis Thompson, aged 24.
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Francis Thompson Aged 9 with his sisters and their dolls.
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There was always something wrong with Francis Thompson. He was a silent, brooding boy, who delighted in pulling the heads off dolls. He was an awkward, secretive teen with a habit of fire starting. His mother got him hooked on heroin before she died of a horrible illness.
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In 1885, Thompson was 26 when, after a terrible argument with his father over his plans to remarry, he fled the Manchester family home for London. His people had already decided that Thompson was a lost cause and it didn't surprise them that within months of reaching the capital he spiralled out of control into drug-addiction, and became a homeless vagrant.
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Francis Thompson Aged 17
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Thompson was mentally disturbed. A Catholic priest said he showed, signs of schizophrenia. A psychiatrist said, by the age of 14, Thompson was exhibiting psychopathic tendencies. Another doctor put it more bluntly that Thompson's life was that of an overt psychopath who lived in a world of masochism, self-mutilation, and fanaticism.
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In the spring of 1887, while wandering in a drug haze, he bumped into a prostitute. They lived at her place for a year. She plied her trade and he spent her money on drugs and tried to write poetry. She found out that he was writing about a sex fiend who is hunting down prostitutes so he can kill and gut them.
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The prostitute told Thompson to leave but he refused. She fled her West End apartment to disappear, in the East End, among the thousands of other working girls.
Dorset Street where Mary Kelly was murdered.
Providence Row Night Refuge at 50 Crispin Street, Spitalfields in Whitechapel. Opposite Dorset Street. This is where Thompson was living at the time of the murder of Mary Kelly in Dorset Street.
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He followed her and eventually found lodgings at a homeless shelter run by nuns. It was in the heart of Whitechapel. Thompson stayed there until the middle of November 1888, when he became exhausted from walking the streets. He was put into a private hospital. People only remarked later on the coincidence that when Thompson left London to recover in a monastery the Ripper murders stopped.
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A charitable journalist, who stumbled onto Thompson, took pity on him and paid the hospital bill, hoping that he could get him a job. The journalist was very influential and was close friends with London’s rich and powerful. Prime Ministers and media moguls were among his closest friends. Thompson was kept in different forms of isolation and monitored.
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The Journalist Wilfrid Meynell (1852-1948) His wife and son and friends.
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He spent his remaining time writing poetry and essays until his early death of a drug overdose. It is a small coincidence that the age he was when he died was the same as the oldest Ripper victim. Two days before his death, Thompson signed over the rights to his written work to his journalist friend. There was no autopsy and his funeral was kept a secret.
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Right after his death, the journalist destroyed most of Thompson’s papers and led a campaign to whitewash his life. He tried removing any suggestion that Thompson was even ever in the East End, let alone in Whitechapel, during the time of the murders or at any time. The truth was Thompson was hunting for his prostitute there in that autumn, as all around him, an unnamed knife murderer was killing prostitutes.
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Francis Thompson. A depiction of him on the streets in 1888.
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All the people involved were long dead when in 1967 a historian wrote a biography on Thompson that said that he was sought by the police for the Ripper murders. Thompson was already known to police for repeatedly causing trouble, but why he may have been of particular interest was not just that he was a drug addict. They did not know that kept a general medical use, dissecting scalpel in his coat pocket, which he would sharpen daily. The reason they may have questioned him was not even that he was acquainted with prostitutes. It was because of his highly specialized medical training and his many years of practising human organ removal which was the modus operandi of the killer.
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1988 was the centenary of the murders. It sparked renewed worldwide interest and prompted a forensic pathologist to publish an article named ‘Was Francis Thompson Jack the Ripper?’ The Pathologist who perfumed 9,000 autopsies in his professional career and had been an expert medical witness in several high profile murder trials, said that Thompson should be considered a candidate for the murders.
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During the six years, Thompson attended medical school; he took the 2-year human anatomy course three times in a row. The pathologist said that Thompson would have gained significant medical knowledge and because he had been homeless for three years, he knew the London streets like the back of his hand. The pathologist shared the prevailing view that Thompson was mentally disturbed, sexually depraved, and had a hatred of women.
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He was off roaming London at night, high on drugs and delusional when the Ripper murders occurred. His lodging was no more than a 15 minute walk from all the murders with the most gruesome, and the final, occurring nearest to him, down the street, one hundred yards away.
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Francis Thompson Aged 45
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In 1998 Dr. Joseph Rupp published the article 'Was Francis Thompson Jack the Ripper' in a journal named the Criminologist. Dr. Rupp was the forensic pathologist for Nueces County in Texas.
Dr Rupp's premise was strengthened by Patterson's 2016 Non-Fiction book, Jack the Ripper, The Works of Francis Thompson. The following is what Dr. Rupp said in Patterson's 2016 book. |
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‘As a forensic pathologist for over fifty years I have personally with my own two hands performed approximately one autopsy a day, that is a total of about 9,000 autopsies performed during my working life. Performing an autopsy is a skilled task.
If someone came to me and offered a king’s ransom to perform a partial autopsy (evisceration) in the dark, on the ground, bare handed with only a surgical knife and no assistance plus a time constraint of a few minutes, my answer would be, “Certainly not, are you crazy?”’
And yet such a feat was accomplished not once but at least four times. It is almost impossible to even contemplate such a feat of daring and dexterity. How could such a thing be possible in the near darkness with slippery blood all over the scene from the slashed arteries in the neck, …Yet, Jack did lt.
Now take look at Francis Thompson, our suspect, with six years in medical school, three times through the medical curriculum which meant that he may have taken the anatomy course three time…a poetic genius possessing all the elements fitting him for the role of a serial killer and driven by his drug addiction and the resulting delusions, to commit these crimes regardless of the risks and possible consequences…
As the result of my article, there was not one single letter of praise or criticism. I was paid for the article but was so disappointed l never even cashed the check; it still resides in my filing cabinet. There the matter rested for twenty-eight years. Then in 2016 I received a call from Richard Patterson in Australia who had come to the same conclusion about Francis Thompson independently only to find that my article had secured for me bragging rights and I was still alive and kicking.’
If someone came to me and offered a king’s ransom to perform a partial autopsy (evisceration) in the dark, on the ground, bare handed with only a surgical knife and no assistance plus a time constraint of a few minutes, my answer would be, “Certainly not, are you crazy?”’
And yet such a feat was accomplished not once but at least four times. It is almost impossible to even contemplate such a feat of daring and dexterity. How could such a thing be possible in the near darkness with slippery blood all over the scene from the slashed arteries in the neck, …Yet, Jack did lt.
Now take look at Francis Thompson, our suspect, with six years in medical school, three times through the medical curriculum which meant that he may have taken the anatomy course three time…a poetic genius possessing all the elements fitting him for the role of a serial killer and driven by his drug addiction and the resulting delusions, to commit these crimes regardless of the risks and possible consequences…
As the result of my article, there was not one single letter of praise or criticism. I was paid for the article but was so disappointed l never even cashed the check; it still resides in my filing cabinet. There the matter rested for twenty-eight years. Then in 2016 I received a call from Richard Patterson in Australia who had come to the same conclusion about Francis Thompson independently only to find that my article had secured for me bragging rights and I was still alive and kicking.’
Jack the Ripper, The Facts.
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The Jack the Ripper story began in London, the largest and most powerful city in the world. It was on a very dark night, well over a century ago that the body of a woman was found. Although there were murders before, and after – what became known as the canonical five – this one was the first that saw a spike the public’s outcry for law and order. The area that these murders were taking place was rather small, less than a square kilometre.
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The Jack the Ripper story began in London, the largest and most powerful city in the world. It was on a very dark night, well over a century ago that the body of a woman was found. Although there were murders before, and after – what became known as the canonical five – this one was the first that saw a spike the public’s outcry for law and order. The area that these murders were taking place was rather small, less than a square kilometre.
It was August 31, 1888 that Mary Ann Nichols was found on a footpath. Her throat had been cut and although they could not find the knife, the police first thought that it was simply a case of suicide. The woman was obviously very poor and there was no reason to rob and kill her.
Then the police realised, from wounding to the abdomen, that the woman had been murdered. About a week later, the killer struck again.
This second woman was found in the backyard of some flats and, like the first, her throat had been cut. The police stepped up their patrols and paid more attention to anyone acting suspiciously or appearing unusual, but they could not find the murderer.
By now, all three murders were recognised as the work of one man.
During that year there happened to be an extraordinary outbreak of crime and the first two murders passed almost unnoticed among the many that were daily reported in the press.
The victims were all middle-aged woman, widowed or separated from their husband, barely subsisting on her earning as a prostitute. On the night of the crime, they were drunk and penniless.
The murderer was a stranger them until a few minutes before he seized and killed noiselessly, within earshot of at least half a dozen people. Then, careless of detection, he proceeded to mutilate the body.
During that year there happened to be an extraordinary outbreak of crime and the first two murders passed almost unnoticed among the many that were daily reported in the press.
The victims were all middle-aged woman, widowed or separated from their husband, barely subsisting on her earning as a prostitute. On the night of the crime, they were drunk and penniless.
The murderer was a stranger them until a few minutes before he seized and killed noiselessly, within earshot of at least half a dozen people. Then, careless of detection, he proceeded to mutilate the body.
London. The centre of the Victorian empire on whose colonies the sun never sets. The home of kings and queens, of magnificent monuments only a thousand years of royalty could build, but it was also a city of cruel paradoxes. What a romantic epoch it is that unfolds itself? The world could not be changed, as each generation trusted it would be, by a few years of gaslight and steam engines or telegraph and electric light.
A thousand false messiahs were born into this arid, sure, and religious 19th century. The same period that was the first, perhaps, to organise an efficient police and detective force, watched the noiseless and remorseless operations of Jack the Ripper.
That series of anonymous and sequent murders that is the most frightening in the annals of English crime. Indeed, as this dim, jaunty figure of vengeance slinks down the crooked, rat-ridden alleys and through the rather beautiful courts of an older London, his murders seem to transcend crime, and to be attended by something of the monstrous and diabolic.
Jack the Ripper displayed an anatomical knowledge that could not have gained in any other epoch. This fact, indeed, while it narrows down the field for inquiry, only makes the figure of the murderer more mysterious.
Did he belong to the professional classes, this terrible, quiet monster; was he a doctor, a medical-student, or a student at a veterinary college. and, if so, for what purpose did he write the horrifying letters?
The police who investigated what was formally named the Whitechapel Murders were at a loss as to what to do when they had what was thought to be a stroke of luck. Someone claiming to be the killer wrote a letter for the police to read. He called himself Jack the Ripper and he told them that he loved his work and his knife was nice and sharp. In another letter, the Ripper also let the authorities know what night he was going to kill again. He promised that he would slaughter two women this time, writing, ‘Just for jolly wouldn’t you.’
Soon after the police found the body of a woman with her throat cut and another body a seven-minute walk away. The other woman had been cut up so badly that, as well removing parts of body and taking them away, he had cut small shapes under her eyelids. Beneath all this slaughter, it was discovered that the killer had such knowledge of anatomy to have caused in her instant death with little more than a nick in her neck. One surgeon, who had years of experience, said he could only have made the same injuries in just under half an hour in a brightly lit operating theatre. The killer had done this in less than fifteen minutes, in almost total darkness. It was then that people began to panic.
The newspapers told of rumours that the killer was possibly not human. Some of the most destitute and depressed prostitutes were overheard begging and praying that the murderer would take them next and end their horrible existences. Some men secretly dressed as women, pretending to be prostitutes, in the hope that they could lure and capture the killer.
All through London people grew fearful. Citizens banded together in mobs and searched the streets at night. In a city of five million people, almost every woman felt unsafe to be alone outside. Even if she were to live across the road, many asked to be escorted when walking home at night. Families fled the city.
The Queen grew concerned and urged that the killer be stopped. Radicals and extremists used the murders to justify the failure of authorities to protect the people and they called for revolution. The highest officials in the land warned that these murders might topple the government.
During all this commotion, people at least felt safe in their homes. The killer had struck on the streets – in alleyways, backyards and courtyards – but it was thought that as long as you stayed indoors, you were going to be all right.
The last, and the most horrible murder, happened in a bedroom. The woman had been cut up so badly that some of the people who saw her remains later killed themselves. It has been reported that bits of her flesh were found hanging from nails on the walls. Her breasts had been cut off and her hand pushed into her stomach. Her heart had been removed and her womb had been taken. Her face had been so badly cut that her partner could only identify her ears and eyeballs.
The Queen called the head of the police, only to be told that he had quit. Then the murders inexplicably stopped and the killer escaped capture.
Speculation Relative to Facts on the Life of Francis Thompson.
Richard Patterson continues to encourage others to research Francis Thompson. Not just because he was named by Dr. Rupp as a suspect in 1988. Patterson does not say that the press is wrong when they still describe Thompson as the greatest mystical poet of the modern age, but that the press was right back in 1888 when they described, the multiple murderer, Jack the Ripper as a monster.
If Francis Thompson could readily take on the mantle of a respectable poet, while also hide that he was killing multiple women, he was a monster in human form.
Thompson was an intellectual powerhouse. While at Ushaw Seminary College, that had 300 student priests, Thompson won 16 of the school’s 21 competitive exams in essay writing, giving a success rate, against 300 other writers, of 76%.
The master of the school announced that Thompson’s essays were ‘the best production from a lad his age I have ever seen in this seminary.’ Before the age of 18, he had become fluent in German, French, Italian, Latin and Ancient Greek. He had a reading speed of at least 40 words a second.
Apart from his many hundreds of poems, Thompson wrote and published 250 reviews and articles in the space of four years, and only 40 of them were with the Meynells help. The total number of essays he wrote and published in his lifetime was near 600.
This man’s articles were on science, history, biography, politics and sport. When not writing his own essays at a startling speed, he was translating the works of other writers from French, Italian, Greek and even Indian literature.
His range of work was admired by many, including the writer Lewis Hind who said, ‘He wrote on anything. I discovered his interest in battles and strategy of great commanders was as keen as his concern on cricket. So his satchel was filled with military memoirs, and retired generals ensconced in the armchairs of service clubs wondered. Here was a man who manipulated words as they manipulated men.’ Thompson, was ‘an argonaut of literature’.
The master of the school announced that Thompson’s essays were ‘the best production from a lad his age I have ever seen in this seminary.’ Before the age of 18, he had become fluent in German, French, Italian, Latin and Ancient Greek. He had a reading speed of at least 40 words a second.
Apart from his many hundreds of poems, Thompson wrote and published 250 reviews and articles in the space of four years, and only 40 of them were with the Meynells help. The total number of essays he wrote and published in his lifetime was near 600.
This man’s articles were on science, history, biography, politics and sport. When not writing his own essays at a startling speed, he was translating the works of other writers from French, Italian, Greek and even Indian literature.
His range of work was admired by many, including the writer Lewis Hind who said, ‘He wrote on anything. I discovered his interest in battles and strategy of great commanders was as keen as his concern on cricket. So his satchel was filled with military memoirs, and retired generals ensconced in the armchairs of service clubs wondered. Here was a man who manipulated words as they manipulated men.’ Thompson, was ‘an argonaut of literature’.
When the murders happened, Thompson, was overlooked even though he was an ex-medical student, and lived just a 15-minute walk to where all five women were knifed. In late 1888, most of the people from his past thought him dead and he was known to only a handful of people. He had not yet been discovered by the press as rising star of Catholic poetry.
The bed of Francis Thompson, was Providence Row night refuge. The man whose writing shows a hatred of prostitutes, was only 100 meters up the street from the last victim's residence at Miller's Court.
At this time, Thompson was carrying, under a long coat, a knife, which he kept razor sharp. All while he was hunting for a prostitute after their failed relationship, formed after seven years of training in surgery, dissection and anatomy, in one of the best medical schools in the country.
The bed of Francis Thompson, was Providence Row night refuge. The man whose writing shows a hatred of prostitutes, was only 100 meters up the street from the last victim's residence at Miller's Court.
At this time, Thompson was carrying, under a long coat, a knife, which he kept razor sharp. All while he was hunting for a prostitute after their failed relationship, formed after seven years of training in surgery, dissection and anatomy, in one of the best medical schools in the country.
Out of all the people suspected of the Whitechapel crimes, it would be hard to imagine anyone less likely to fit the image, described in the papers of the time of the murders. The public were urged to wary of a hulking of a rough and strong-armed foreigner. Nothing like a mild-mannered well-spoken Englishman.
To accept Thompson as Jack the Ripper is to think he abused his privilege of fame by using it cloak a series of murders that he perpetrated.
What we do know is that, on the night of the first murder in what a Ripperologist calls the canonical five that Thompson had recently moved from the West End to somewhere within the East End’s West India docks. The same area where a distracting huge warehouse fire had been burning, leading officers away from their usual patrols in Whitechapel on the night that Mary Ann NIchols was murdered on Buck's Row, August 31, 1888.
Reaching the site of the fire and Buck’s Row, where the first murder happened undetected, was easy. The straightest and most covert route was to simply follow the Great Eastern railway line that began at the Thames. The railway cut through streets before plunging beneath Whitechapel. It passed right under Buck’s Row as it headed north. Extremely steep brick walls that would be impossible to climb unassisted flanked most of the railway as it went through the underpass.
Here, exiting the line and gaining access to the street above was easy. As are shown in photographs of other bridges from the time, there were probably convenient wooden steps with a guardrail that led up from the tracks to the 1.8-meter-high brick wall that could be climbed over to reach the street. Once someone was on the other side, they would be standing about four feet from where the body was found.
After the murderer had found, courted and killed his prey, all he needed to do was take a moment to step up to the wall and descend the steps down to the unlit and empty train tracks to be able to vanish.
It was not only the apparent convenience of being able to instantly escape that makes this first murder comparatively easy to commit. The fear of the Ripper had not yet taken hold on the streets, so prostitutes where not specially alarmed or wary. Also, this had not been a typical Saturday night.
The nearby dock fires had temporarily drawn away potential clients with other entertainment, so business for Whitechapel’s prostitutes would have been slow, but as the fire had been put under control, the crowds would have returned. The fire would have brought strangers, with some making their way to Whitechapel, the known prostitute’s haunt, to end a night of revelry. Prostitutes would have expected that they would be serving more than the usual clients.
For Thompson to be the killer on that night more than any other night, all that he would have needed was to have some coins, and be wearing good clothes and a smile. For the years previously he had worn torn and worn rags, as a homeless person on the streets.
On the night of the murder of Nichols', Thompson was finally looking good. Since been homeless the last three years had almost killed him, he was advised to seek rest in a sanitorium and was also offered lodgings but Thompson, being an ardent admirer of destiny, refused to leave the streets.
All thanks to his brand new editor’s help with money and purchasing a new suit, and some cash from a kind donation by the family friend Father Carroll, Thompson was more than capable of convincing Nichol's to walk with him down Buck’s Row.
If Thompson were accosted by police and questioned at any time moments before or after the murder, he would only have to tell them the truth to give himself a plausible alibi.
Thompson, if he were capable of being diabolically evil, with his intimate knowledge of London streets and the ways of prostitutes, could say he was only on the hunt for his missing prostitute. He could have simply confessed to anyone who bothered the truth to appear innocent. Thompson was walking the dark streets and lanes to seek the love of his life. He would have told anyone asking that he wished to find and rescue her for a new life as his wife of a respectable journalist. She the maiden in distress and he the handsome prince.
Reaching the site of the fire and Buck’s Row, where the first murder happened undetected, was easy. The straightest and most covert route was to simply follow the Great Eastern railway line that began at the Thames. The railway cut through streets before plunging beneath Whitechapel. It passed right under Buck’s Row as it headed north. Extremely steep brick walls that would be impossible to climb unassisted flanked most of the railway as it went through the underpass.
Here, exiting the line and gaining access to the street above was easy. As are shown in photographs of other bridges from the time, there were probably convenient wooden steps with a guardrail that led up from the tracks to the 1.8-meter-high brick wall that could be climbed over to reach the street. Once someone was on the other side, they would be standing about four feet from where the body was found.
After the murderer had found, courted and killed his prey, all he needed to do was take a moment to step up to the wall and descend the steps down to the unlit and empty train tracks to be able to vanish.
It was not only the apparent convenience of being able to instantly escape that makes this first murder comparatively easy to commit. The fear of the Ripper had not yet taken hold on the streets, so prostitutes where not specially alarmed or wary. Also, this had not been a typical Saturday night.
The nearby dock fires had temporarily drawn away potential clients with other entertainment, so business for Whitechapel’s prostitutes would have been slow, but as the fire had been put under control, the crowds would have returned. The fire would have brought strangers, with some making their way to Whitechapel, the known prostitute’s haunt, to end a night of revelry. Prostitutes would have expected that they would be serving more than the usual clients.
For Thompson to be the killer on that night more than any other night, all that he would have needed was to have some coins, and be wearing good clothes and a smile. For the years previously he had worn torn and worn rags, as a homeless person on the streets.
On the night of the murder of Nichols', Thompson was finally looking good. Since been homeless the last three years had almost killed him, he was advised to seek rest in a sanitorium and was also offered lodgings but Thompson, being an ardent admirer of destiny, refused to leave the streets.
All thanks to his brand new editor’s help with money and purchasing a new suit, and some cash from a kind donation by the family friend Father Carroll, Thompson was more than capable of convincing Nichol's to walk with him down Buck’s Row.
If Thompson were accosted by police and questioned at any time moments before or after the murder, he would only have to tell them the truth to give himself a plausible alibi.
Thompson, if he were capable of being diabolically evil, with his intimate knowledge of London streets and the ways of prostitutes, could say he was only on the hunt for his missing prostitute. He could have simply confessed to anyone who bothered the truth to appear innocent. Thompson was walking the dark streets and lanes to seek the love of his life. He would have told anyone asking that he wished to find and rescue her for a new life as his wife of a respectable journalist. She the maiden in distress and he the handsome prince.
Before any of the Jack the Ripper murders Francis Thompson wrote a poem about a lusty knight who wanders through london hunting down unclean woman and killing them with a knife, It was intended to include a modern styled twist that paid homage to the days of knights and chivalry. In Chapter 3, The Gutters of Humanity, of his 1988 book Francis Thompson, Strange Harp Strange Symphony, John Walsh wrote,
‘The most painful of these poems was The Nightmare of the Witch Babies, never revived in a fair copy. But in the last of the notebook drafts, he added a reminder, rare for him, of the date of its completion: “Finished before October 1886” – that is within a year of his departure from home.’
It was probably while still apprenticed at McMaster’s, that Francis Thompson penned it; while almost certainly written unhinged by the influence of drugs. There is probably no poem that came out of the nineteenth century to contend with its unbound revelry for carnage and bloodshed. It provides an awful glimpse into Thompson’s mind and shows that finally the years of solitude, the riot faced by his family, the seeming wickedness of his stepmother, the cruel loss of his mother, had all unhinged him. With the Witch Babies his full depravity and abandonment of morality is revealed. It shows his rage against women who abandon and betray him.
The poem begins with the protagonist, a ‘lusty knight’ on a hunt, but he hunts in London, after dark, and his game is women.
‘A lusty knight,
Ha! Ha!
On a swart [black] steed,
Ho! Ho!
Rode upon the land
Where the silence feels alone,
Rode upon the Land
Rode upon the Strand
Of the Dead Men’s Groan,
Where the Evil goes to and fro
Two witch babies, Ho! Ho! Ho!
A rotten mist,
Ha! Ha!
Like a dead man’s flesh,
Ho! Ho!
Was abhorrent in the air,’
As he rides through a desolate landscape of the metropolis, the knight catches sight of a suitable prey.
‘What is it sees he?
Ha! Ha!
There in the frightfulness?
Ho! Ho!
There he saw a maiden
Fairest fair:
Sad were her dusk eyes,
Long was her hair;
Sad were her dreaming eyes,
Misty her hair,
And strange was her garments’
Soon he begins to stalk her.
‘Swiftly he followed her.
Ha! Ha!
Eagerly he followed her.
Ho! Ho!’
Then she disappoints him. He discovers she is unclean.
‘Lo, she corrupted!
Ho! Ho!’
The knight captures her and decides to kill her. He slices her open and drags out the contents of her stomach. He guts her like an animal in order to find and kill any unborn offspring she may have. The poem ends with a macabre twist and his rapture at finding, not just a single foetus, but two.
‘And its paunch was rent
Like a brasten [bursting] drum;
And the blubbered fat
From its belly doth come
It was a stream ran bloodily under the wall.
O Stream, you cannot run too red!
Under the wall.
With a sickening ooze –
Hell made it so!
Two witch-babies,
ho! ho! ho!’
The entire poem contains phrases like ‘the bloody-rusted stone’, ‘blood, blood, blood’, ‘No one life there, Ha! Ha!’ and ‘Red bubbles oozed and stood, wet like blood’. It has a plot which reads like the description of a slaughterhouse. Those people who think poets always rely solely on imagination are not thinking of Thompson.
To him, his poems were records of real events in his life, clothed in rhyme and symbolism. In a letter written years later to his editor, this is how Thompson explained that his poetry was always more fact than fiction, ‘The poems were, in fact, a kind of poetic diary; or rather a poetic substitute for letters.’ {Poems p436]
‘The most painful of these poems was The Nightmare of the Witch Babies, never revived in a fair copy. But in the last of the notebook drafts, he added a reminder, rare for him, of the date of its completion: “Finished before October 1886” – that is within a year of his departure from home.’
It was probably while still apprenticed at McMaster’s, that Francis Thompson penned it; while almost certainly written unhinged by the influence of drugs. There is probably no poem that came out of the nineteenth century to contend with its unbound revelry for carnage and bloodshed. It provides an awful glimpse into Thompson’s mind and shows that finally the years of solitude, the riot faced by his family, the seeming wickedness of his stepmother, the cruel loss of his mother, had all unhinged him. With the Witch Babies his full depravity and abandonment of morality is revealed. It shows his rage against women who abandon and betray him.
The poem begins with the protagonist, a ‘lusty knight’ on a hunt, but he hunts in London, after dark, and his game is women.
‘A lusty knight,
Ha! Ha!
On a swart [black] steed,
Ho! Ho!
Rode upon the land
Where the silence feels alone,
Rode upon the Land
Rode upon the Strand
Of the Dead Men’s Groan,
Where the Evil goes to and fro
Two witch babies, Ho! Ho! Ho!
A rotten mist,
Ha! Ha!
Like a dead man’s flesh,
Ho! Ho!
Was abhorrent in the air,’
As he rides through a desolate landscape of the metropolis, the knight catches sight of a suitable prey.
‘What is it sees he?
Ha! Ha!
There in the frightfulness?
Ho! Ho!
There he saw a maiden
Fairest fair:
Sad were her dusk eyes,
Long was her hair;
Sad were her dreaming eyes,
Misty her hair,
And strange was her garments’
Soon he begins to stalk her.
‘Swiftly he followed her.
Ha! Ha!
Eagerly he followed her.
Ho! Ho!’
Then she disappoints him. He discovers she is unclean.
‘Lo, she corrupted!
Ho! Ho!’
The knight captures her and decides to kill her. He slices her open and drags out the contents of her stomach. He guts her like an animal in order to find and kill any unborn offspring she may have. The poem ends with a macabre twist and his rapture at finding, not just a single foetus, but two.
‘And its paunch was rent
Like a brasten [bursting] drum;
And the blubbered fat
From its belly doth come
It was a stream ran bloodily under the wall.
O Stream, you cannot run too red!
Under the wall.
With a sickening ooze –
Hell made it so!
Two witch-babies,
ho! ho! ho!’
The entire poem contains phrases like ‘the bloody-rusted stone’, ‘blood, blood, blood’, ‘No one life there, Ha! Ha!’ and ‘Red bubbles oozed and stood, wet like blood’. It has a plot which reads like the description of a slaughterhouse. Those people who think poets always rely solely on imagination are not thinking of Thompson.
To him, his poems were records of real events in his life, clothed in rhyme and symbolism. In a letter written years later to his editor, this is how Thompson explained that his poetry was always more fact than fiction, ‘The poems were, in fact, a kind of poetic diary; or rather a poetic substitute for letters.’ {Poems p436]
About 4 or 5 days after the murder of Mary Kelly, Francis Thompson was moved from Providence Row night refugee. The refuge faced the intersection into Dorset Street where she was murdered about 100 meters away.
From Providence Row, Thompson was placed in a private hospital, for six-week, and four days after his release, he was shipped off to the priory in Storrington.
In his first correspondence, from the priory, the born again pressman poet wrote from the top floor of the three-storey building. This religious retreat was run by French monks – French was a language he was fluent in – and surrounded by high walls. The grounds were patrolled by a guard dog that attacked him when he tried to set foot on the grounds. In his first letter to his editor, Thompson expressed his needs and was straight to the point,
‘And I want to make a request which looks rather a luxury, but which I believe to be a necessity in my present position. Can you send me a razor? I shall have to shave myself here, I think; & it would of course be saving of expense in the long run. Any kind of razor would do for me, I have shaved with a dissecting scalpel before now. I would solve the difficulty by not shaving at all, if it were possible for me to grow a beard, but repeated experiment has convinced me that the only result of such action is to make me look like an escaped convict … I know this is a very perfunctory letter … there is no cause for uneasiness on that account.’ {Letters p25}
Being homeless for the previous three years meant Thompson was forced to carry everything he owned on his person. When he was homeless, being able to shave was not just something one did out of hygiene or to keep fashionable, it prevented arrest. To some police officers, a homeless man with a long, unkempt beard was a sign that a vagrant was trying to hide his face like a wanted criminal might do. It also showed everyone else that such a bearded man had been homeless for a long stretch of time and probably knew no one. This would make them an easy target to anyone who wanted to do harm. Thompson kept his dissecting scalpel under his coat razor sharp, not only because it was something he liked to do, but because it was something he had to do.
In his first correspondence, from the priory, the born again pressman poet wrote from the top floor of the three-storey building. This religious retreat was run by French monks – French was a language he was fluent in – and surrounded by high walls. The grounds were patrolled by a guard dog that attacked him when he tried to set foot on the grounds. In his first letter to his editor, Thompson expressed his needs and was straight to the point,
‘And I want to make a request which looks rather a luxury, but which I believe to be a necessity in my present position. Can you send me a razor? I shall have to shave myself here, I think; & it would of course be saving of expense in the long run. Any kind of razor would do for me, I have shaved with a dissecting scalpel before now. I would solve the difficulty by not shaving at all, if it were possible for me to grow a beard, but repeated experiment has convinced me that the only result of such action is to make me look like an escaped convict … I know this is a very perfunctory letter … there is no cause for uneasiness on that account.’ {Letters p25}
Being homeless for the previous three years meant Thompson was forced to carry everything he owned on his person. When he was homeless, being able to shave was not just something one did out of hygiene or to keep fashionable, it prevented arrest. To some police officers, a homeless man with a long, unkempt beard was a sign that a vagrant was trying to hide his face like a wanted criminal might do. It also showed everyone else that such a bearded man had been homeless for a long stretch of time and probably knew no one. This would make them an easy target to anyone who wanted to do harm. Thompson kept his dissecting scalpel under his coat razor sharp, not only because it was something he liked to do, but because it was something he had to do.
Here is a description of life at college for Thompson from 1878 onwards. It is from the writer Bridget Boardman’s 1988 biography on Thompson, called ‘Between Heaven & Charing Cross’, she described the curriculum and working conditions of the lecture theatre, autopsy rooms and the busy Manchester Royal Infirmary where he worked as a student surgeon.
‘Anatomy had always occupied a central place in training and the dissecting of cadavers was accompanied by far more practical experience in assisting at operations ... his time was almost equally divided between the college and the hospital.’
‘Anatomy had always occupied a central place in training and the dissecting of cadavers was accompanied by far more practical experience in assisting at operations ... his time was almost equally divided between the college and the hospital.’
On 19th December, 1880, after suffering a complaint of the liver, Mary Morton Thompson, Francis’ mother died in the family home at Ashton, Mary was aged 58. It was the day after Francis Thompson turned 21; he had effectively come of age, but in many ways he was still a child, having never known a woman, a day’s work or the independence of fending for himself.
The day after though, his fantasy world began to fall apart. To Thompson, his mother’s death was a nightmare become real. Mortality through liver failure is not a pretty sight. What Thompson would have witnessed of his mother’s final hours would have included the jaundiced yellowing of the skin, bleeding, vomiting, swelling and reduced brain function.
Thompson would have been familiar with death in the sterile conditions of the hospital, but like it had with his baby sister and his grandfather, death had again visited his home.
Outwardly, Thompson seemed to be little affected. He had already learned how to bury his feelings. As he once wrote he was, ‘expert in concealment, not expression, of myself. Expression I reserved for my pen. My tongue was tenaciously disciplined in silence.’ Publicly, Thompson never brought up the subject of his mother’s death.
The closest experience of this grief that he shared was when, at the age of five, he lost her while shopping. It happened at the town of Ashton’s marketplace. This short time of separation was devastating and the memory haunted him. He told of its lasting impact, ‘world-wide desolation and terror of, for the first time, realising that the mother can lose you, or you her, and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her.’
To turn 21 in 1880-England granted adult status. A person of lesser faith may have doubted why a just God would kill their mother the day after this most important of birthdays. Thompson never lost faith, though a fragment of verse on her passing, found in his papers after his death, explained in visceral terms how his mother’s awful suffering and the disintegration of her flesh only served to please a jealous God who took her life.
Thompson’s un-published This is my Beloved,
‘Died; and horribly
Saw the mystery
Saw the grime of it- ...
Saw the sear of it,
Saw the fear of it,
Saw the slime of it,
Saw it whole!
Son of the womb of her,
Loved till the doom of her
Thought of the brain of her.
Heart of her side,
Joyed in him, grieved in him-
God grew fain [pleased] of her,
And she died.’
It must have been difficult for Thompson to reconcile his image of the unchanging ideal women from his dolls, books and gallery statues, with the sordid destruction done to his mother. It was his mother, Mary’s wish, of course, that her son become a doctor, and so at the end of the Christmas break Thompson returned to the infirmary of Manchester’s hospital and lecture theatres of Owens. The conditions of the hospital, with its endless traffic of sick and dying, must have afforded little respite.
Finally, the years of hospital work and his lasting grief proved too much for the medical student. It was early in 1882 that James Thompson, uncle to Francis, told that his nephew ‘had been afflicted with a nervous breakdown before leaving Manchester, from the effects of which he never fully recovered’ {Charing p50-1)
The Owens’ college attendance register records his absence from the summer session. Little time was given for his recovery, for he was back in the surgery for the autumn session, and by near the year’s end Thompson was sent to Glasgow for his second attempt at the medical finals.
When Thompson had failed his first London exams he had not told his father, he had simply missed them. His only words upon returning home were, ‘I have not passed.’ Dr Thompson organised for his son to make his second attempt in Glasgow because it was considered that the exam was easier. ‘I have failed,’ was Thompson’s repeated answer when he returned to Ashton once more. It is more likely he never actually sat the exam. As 1883 began, and with his father growing more perturbed by his son’s failure to pass, Thompson buried himself in his hospital studies.
It was easier to face the sawdust floors of the surgery and distressed patients coming in on wagons than his father’s disappointment. Thompson compensated with longer and longer hours in the hospital’s mortuary, cutting into hundreds of corpses with his dissecting scalpel.
So many did he dissect that his sister Mary could not help but complain,
‘Many a time he asked my father for £3 or £4 for dissecting fees; so often that my father remarked what a number of corpses he was cutting up.’ {Harp.p.35}
A fellow student remembered Thompson at this time, ‘a vacant stare, weak lips, and a usually half-open mouth, the saliva trickling over his chin.’ {Charing p.52)
The day after though, his fantasy world began to fall apart. To Thompson, his mother’s death was a nightmare become real. Mortality through liver failure is not a pretty sight. What Thompson would have witnessed of his mother’s final hours would have included the jaundiced yellowing of the skin, bleeding, vomiting, swelling and reduced brain function.
Thompson would have been familiar with death in the sterile conditions of the hospital, but like it had with his baby sister and his grandfather, death had again visited his home.
Outwardly, Thompson seemed to be little affected. He had already learned how to bury his feelings. As he once wrote he was, ‘expert in concealment, not expression, of myself. Expression I reserved for my pen. My tongue was tenaciously disciplined in silence.’ Publicly, Thompson never brought up the subject of his mother’s death.
The closest experience of this grief that he shared was when, at the age of five, he lost her while shopping. It happened at the town of Ashton’s marketplace. This short time of separation was devastating and the memory haunted him. He told of its lasting impact, ‘world-wide desolation and terror of, for the first time, realising that the mother can lose you, or you her, and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her.’
To turn 21 in 1880-England granted adult status. A person of lesser faith may have doubted why a just God would kill their mother the day after this most important of birthdays. Thompson never lost faith, though a fragment of verse on her passing, found in his papers after his death, explained in visceral terms how his mother’s awful suffering and the disintegration of her flesh only served to please a jealous God who took her life.
Thompson’s un-published This is my Beloved,
‘Died; and horribly
Saw the mystery
Saw the grime of it- ...
Saw the sear of it,
Saw the fear of it,
Saw the slime of it,
Saw it whole!
Son of the womb of her,
Loved till the doom of her
Thought of the brain of her.
Heart of her side,
Joyed in him, grieved in him-
God grew fain [pleased] of her,
And she died.’
It must have been difficult for Thompson to reconcile his image of the unchanging ideal women from his dolls, books and gallery statues, with the sordid destruction done to his mother. It was his mother, Mary’s wish, of course, that her son become a doctor, and so at the end of the Christmas break Thompson returned to the infirmary of Manchester’s hospital and lecture theatres of Owens. The conditions of the hospital, with its endless traffic of sick and dying, must have afforded little respite.
Finally, the years of hospital work and his lasting grief proved too much for the medical student. It was early in 1882 that James Thompson, uncle to Francis, told that his nephew ‘had been afflicted with a nervous breakdown before leaving Manchester, from the effects of which he never fully recovered’ {Charing p50-1)
The Owens’ college attendance register records his absence from the summer session. Little time was given for his recovery, for he was back in the surgery for the autumn session, and by near the year’s end Thompson was sent to Glasgow for his second attempt at the medical finals.
When Thompson had failed his first London exams he had not told his father, he had simply missed them. His only words upon returning home were, ‘I have not passed.’ Dr Thompson organised for his son to make his second attempt in Glasgow because it was considered that the exam was easier. ‘I have failed,’ was Thompson’s repeated answer when he returned to Ashton once more. It is more likely he never actually sat the exam. As 1883 began, and with his father growing more perturbed by his son’s failure to pass, Thompson buried himself in his hospital studies.
It was easier to face the sawdust floors of the surgery and distressed patients coming in on wagons than his father’s disappointment. Thompson compensated with longer and longer hours in the hospital’s mortuary, cutting into hundreds of corpses with his dissecting scalpel.
So many did he dissect that his sister Mary could not help but complain,
‘Many a time he asked my father for £3 or £4 for dissecting fees; so often that my father remarked what a number of corpses he was cutting up.’ {Harp.p.35}
A fellow student remembered Thompson at this time, ‘a vacant stare, weak lips, and a usually half-open mouth, the saliva trickling over his chin.’ {Charing p.52)
At the end of 1883 Thompson again failed to attend his medical examinations. His father gave up on his son ever passing to become a doctor. He insisted that Francis Thompson find any job. To satisfy his father’s demands Francis applied for the position of an encyclopaedia salesperson. His income would have come from a commission on the books sold. Francis was given a two-month deadline to sell the encyclopaedias.
The excessively shy and withdrawn Thompson instead locked himself in his room. Eight weeks later Francis emerged having sold none of the books, having instead read every word and volume. It is unknown which encyclopaedia Thompson had read, but the most popular was the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The latest complete edition then available was the eighth, which consisted of 24 volumes containing roughly 33 million words. If Thompson were to have spent eight hours a day, without stopping, over the eight weeks and finished reading the complete set, his reading speed would have been at least 20 words a second.
Thompson then, took the unusual step, for a would-be poet, of joining the army. He trained for a month with bayonet and other arms, before he was discharged for failing drill and not possessing the minimum chest measurement.
Dr Thompson, dismayed at his son’s performance, used his contacts to find another job for his son in the same year of 1883. This time it was at a local factory that made medical instruments. Some may say that this was where he sourced the dissecting scalpel he carried with him when he would become homeless in London. It would have been relatively easy to fish one he liked from the factory’s assembly line. It is more likely though that the one he carried ‘to shave with’ was kept as a memento from his medical student days. Thompson managed a fortnight’s work before being dismissed.
Thompson had already begun writing poetry when at the seminary. These poems were mainly about his schoolmasters or on wars and historic generals. After returning to Manchester, Thompson tried his hand again at poetry and sent off several submissions to various publishers and editors in the hope that he would be ‘discovered’, but nothing came of it.
Francis sent his submissions without his father’s knowledge. ‘If the lad had but told me!’ Dr Charles Thompson would one day implore when asked of his efforts to assist with his son’s aspirations of becoming a poet. It was one of these comparatively early poems that saved Thompson’s first successful submission from the flames, and Thompson from death on the streets, or worse.
On Sunday 19th September, 1885, one of the Ashton’s priests and consequently a friend of Dr Charles Thompson, Fr Richardson, gave a sermon. It inspired Thompson to take some notes on it, which, two years later, would be used for his poem The Passion of Mary.
At the time of writing Thompson did not know that this priest’s sister would one day become his stepmother. In the poem Thompson describes a dying mother of Christ as she is bleeding to death. It would not be until three years later in June 1888. Two months before the Ripper claimed his first of five female victims, the world would read how he has a female suffer the five wounds of Christ’s crucifixion. Part of the poem tells,
‘Thou hung’st in loving agony …
‘The red rose of this Passion-tide
Doth take a deeper hue from thee,
In the five wounds of Jesus dyed,
And in thy bleeding thoughts, Mary.’
Another year would drag by, with relations between father and son soured even further. Home life was changing. Devoid of a mother, his sister Mary was planning to leave to become a nun, and his other sister Margaret had married Canon Richardson’s brother and moved to Canada. Worst of all for Thompson, he was informed that his widowed father had become engaged to Ann Richardson, the sister of Cannon Richardson. Now there was no one to care for him.
His security at home was coming to an end and he was let known that his father’s new fiancé wanted Francis out of the house before she moved in. Richardson felt that Francis Thompson had no future and was a failure in all things. She suspected he was hooked on opium and believed him to be a drain on the finances of her future husband.
On 8th November, 1885, things came to a head. Dr Thompson confronted his son. He accused Francis of being drunk, Francis, knowing that the cause of his flushed appearance was opium, at first denied the accusation. When he admitted to taking laudanum, his father then accused him of stealing laudanum from his own supply of medicine.
Francis was also expressed as bitter over his father’s plans to remarry. His sister Mary wrote about the argument, telling that this second marriage was the cause of it. ‘My father may have given Frank some reason for thinking that he may have been in the way.’
The animosity between Francis Thompson and his stepmother only increased. In 1891 Richardson convinced her new husband to cut Thompson out of the family will. In 1896, when Thompson’s father died and he returned to Manchester for his funeral, she would not allow him into the home. Ann Richardson’s loathing of Thompson meant that he was forced to find paid lodgings.
It is probably important to know that ‘Mrs A Richardson’ was written on the front of the Hanbury Street building where the second Jack-the-Ripper victim, Ann Chapman, was cut open in 1888. It seems more than odd that the name of the victim, Ann, and the name of the place of execution, Richardson, both make up the full name of Thompson’s stepmother. Coincidences is not just confined to fiction. Of the 16 residents at this address were a Francis and a Thompson.
The excessively shy and withdrawn Thompson instead locked himself in his room. Eight weeks later Francis emerged having sold none of the books, having instead read every word and volume. It is unknown which encyclopaedia Thompson had read, but the most popular was the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The latest complete edition then available was the eighth, which consisted of 24 volumes containing roughly 33 million words. If Thompson were to have spent eight hours a day, without stopping, over the eight weeks and finished reading the complete set, his reading speed would have been at least 20 words a second.
Thompson then, took the unusual step, for a would-be poet, of joining the army. He trained for a month with bayonet and other arms, before he was discharged for failing drill and not possessing the minimum chest measurement.
Dr Thompson, dismayed at his son’s performance, used his contacts to find another job for his son in the same year of 1883. This time it was at a local factory that made medical instruments. Some may say that this was where he sourced the dissecting scalpel he carried with him when he would become homeless in London. It would have been relatively easy to fish one he liked from the factory’s assembly line. It is more likely though that the one he carried ‘to shave with’ was kept as a memento from his medical student days. Thompson managed a fortnight’s work before being dismissed.
Thompson had already begun writing poetry when at the seminary. These poems were mainly about his schoolmasters or on wars and historic generals. After returning to Manchester, Thompson tried his hand again at poetry and sent off several submissions to various publishers and editors in the hope that he would be ‘discovered’, but nothing came of it.
Francis sent his submissions without his father’s knowledge. ‘If the lad had but told me!’ Dr Charles Thompson would one day implore when asked of his efforts to assist with his son’s aspirations of becoming a poet. It was one of these comparatively early poems that saved Thompson’s first successful submission from the flames, and Thompson from death on the streets, or worse.
On Sunday 19th September, 1885, one of the Ashton’s priests and consequently a friend of Dr Charles Thompson, Fr Richardson, gave a sermon. It inspired Thompson to take some notes on it, which, two years later, would be used for his poem The Passion of Mary.
At the time of writing Thompson did not know that this priest’s sister would one day become his stepmother. In the poem Thompson describes a dying mother of Christ as she is bleeding to death. It would not be until three years later in June 1888. Two months before the Ripper claimed his first of five female victims, the world would read how he has a female suffer the five wounds of Christ’s crucifixion. Part of the poem tells,
‘Thou hung’st in loving agony …
‘The red rose of this Passion-tide
Doth take a deeper hue from thee,
In the five wounds of Jesus dyed,
And in thy bleeding thoughts, Mary.’
Another year would drag by, with relations between father and son soured even further. Home life was changing. Devoid of a mother, his sister Mary was planning to leave to become a nun, and his other sister Margaret had married Canon Richardson’s brother and moved to Canada. Worst of all for Thompson, he was informed that his widowed father had become engaged to Ann Richardson, the sister of Cannon Richardson. Now there was no one to care for him.
His security at home was coming to an end and he was let known that his father’s new fiancé wanted Francis out of the house before she moved in. Richardson felt that Francis Thompson had no future and was a failure in all things. She suspected he was hooked on opium and believed him to be a drain on the finances of her future husband.
On 8th November, 1885, things came to a head. Dr Thompson confronted his son. He accused Francis of being drunk, Francis, knowing that the cause of his flushed appearance was opium, at first denied the accusation. When he admitted to taking laudanum, his father then accused him of stealing laudanum from his own supply of medicine.
Francis was also expressed as bitter over his father’s plans to remarry. His sister Mary wrote about the argument, telling that this second marriage was the cause of it. ‘My father may have given Frank some reason for thinking that he may have been in the way.’
The animosity between Francis Thompson and his stepmother only increased. In 1891 Richardson convinced her new husband to cut Thompson out of the family will. In 1896, when Thompson’s father died and he returned to Manchester for his funeral, she would not allow him into the home. Ann Richardson’s loathing of Thompson meant that he was forced to find paid lodgings.
It is probably important to know that ‘Mrs A Richardson’ was written on the front of the Hanbury Street building where the second Jack-the-Ripper victim, Ann Chapman, was cut open in 1888. It seems more than odd that the name of the victim, Ann, and the name of the place of execution, Richardson, both make up the full name of Thompson’s stepmother. Coincidences is not just confined to fiction. Of the 16 residents at this address were a Francis and a Thompson.
In April of 1887, Francis Thompson's father, Dr Charles Thompson married his second wife, Anne Richardson. His son did not attend the wedding. Thompson’s anger at his father’s seeming ease of shedding his devotion to the departed wife and mother, Mary, gnawed at him. Whatever the truth of his father’s intent or extent of grief for his first wife, Thompson was already planning to cast both his father and stepmother as villainous monsters. This is seen in another poem that never saw publication. The Ballad of Fair Weather typically presents his new stepmother as he does any other women who he thinks wronged him, as monsters, or demons. His father is described as a lackey to her sadistic and foul torture and killing of him.
Together their treatment of him, according to Francis Thompson, the severing of the neck, and the removal of the heart, is consistent with the injuries exhibited on Jack the Ripper's victims.
The Ballad of Fair Weather
‘My father, too cruel,
Would scorn me and beat me;
My wicked stepmother
Would take me and eat me,
They looked in the deep grass
Where it was deepest;
They looked down the steep bank
Where it was steepest;
But under the bruised fern
Crushed in its feather
The head and the body
Were lying together, -
Ah, death of fair weather!
Tell me, thou perished head,
What hand could sever thee? ...
My evil stepmother,
So witch-like in wish,
She caught all my pretty blood
Up in a dish,
She took out my heart
For a ghoul-meal together,
But peaceful my body lies
In the fern-feather,
For now is fair weather.’
Together their treatment of him, according to Francis Thompson, the severing of the neck, and the removal of the heart, is consistent with the injuries exhibited on Jack the Ripper's victims.
The Ballad of Fair Weather
‘My father, too cruel,
Would scorn me and beat me;
My wicked stepmother
Would take me and eat me,
They looked in the deep grass
Where it was deepest;
They looked down the steep bank
Where it was steepest;
But under the bruised fern
Crushed in its feather
The head and the body
Were lying together, -
Ah, death of fair weather!
Tell me, thou perished head,
What hand could sever thee? ...
My evil stepmother,
So witch-like in wish,
She caught all my pretty blood
Up in a dish,
She took out my heart
For a ghoul-meal together,
But peaceful my body lies
In the fern-feather,
For now is fair weather.’
The following descriptions of what occurred between Thompson and his prostitute are examples of the changes Everard made to the original text of his biography on Thompson. The 1913 edition gave the following description of Thompson’s final meeting with his prostitute friend in June. The 1913 edition compares his prostitute leaving him, to the impact the deaths had on him of Thompson's mother Mary, and his younger sister Helen who died young.
‘After his first interview with my father he had taken her his news. “They will not understand our friendship.” She said and then, “I always knew you were a genius.” And so she strangled the opportunity; she killed again the child, the sister; the mother had come to life within her. She went away. Without warning she went to unknown lodgings and was lost to him.’ {LIFE p83}
‘After his first interview with my father he had taken her his news. “They will not understand our friendship.” She said and then, “I always knew you were a genius.” And so she strangled the opportunity; she killed again the child, the sister; the mother had come to life within her. She went away. Without warning she went to unknown lodgings and was lost to him.’ {LIFE p83}
Therefore, when in the summer of 1938 an American Jesuit priest went on a pilgrimage, from Massachusetts’ Boston College to England, to retrace the poet’s life there seemed to be no indication that there was little amiss about Thompson.
Father Terrance Connolly worked for the college’s English department. His travels stemmed from his frustration as a teacher in not finding enough material on Catholic poets. He also had the dim hope of acquiring enough of Thompson’s paraphernalia for a planned display room.
Connolly’s previous experience in literature and as teacher of poets made him well suited to the task, but Connolly held an additional prerequisite. He had also worked for a time as a prison chaplain, counselling murderers and hearing their confessions on death row. He also advised the relatives of condemned men who confided their suspicions to him.
The priest must have felt a strange sense of déjà vu when he came to meet an old classmate of Thompson’s. The bizarre introduction between Father Adam Wilkinson and himself was recorded in his 1945 book In His Paths. A Visit to Persons and Places Associated with the Poet,
‘We found the aged priest, sitting before a blazing hearth fire, reading a detective story in Braille. He was then eighty years old ... “Just a minute, Fathers, please. I must not lose my place. Oh, my! They’re hot on the trail of the murderer.” As he spoke, he marked the place in some mysterious way, placed the book on the mantel over the fire and then extended his hand in welcome.’
Father Terrance Connolly worked for the college’s English department. His travels stemmed from his frustration as a teacher in not finding enough material on Catholic poets. He also had the dim hope of acquiring enough of Thompson’s paraphernalia for a planned display room.
Connolly’s previous experience in literature and as teacher of poets made him well suited to the task, but Connolly held an additional prerequisite. He had also worked for a time as a prison chaplain, counselling murderers and hearing their confessions on death row. He also advised the relatives of condemned men who confided their suspicions to him.
The priest must have felt a strange sense of déjà vu when he came to meet an old classmate of Thompson’s. The bizarre introduction between Father Adam Wilkinson and himself was recorded in his 1945 book In His Paths. A Visit to Persons and Places Associated with the Poet,
‘We found the aged priest, sitting before a blazing hearth fire, reading a detective story in Braille. He was then eighty years old ... “Just a minute, Fathers, please. I must not lose my place. Oh, my! They’re hot on the trail of the murderer.” As he spoke, he marked the place in some mysterious way, placed the book on the mantel over the fire and then extended his hand in welcome.’
Just to summarise things: In 1888 and specifically when a murder was being carried out Thompson was living in Providence Row refuge, less than 100 yards from where the victim, Mary Kelly, lived. He was carrying a razor-sharp dissecting knife and his only reason for roaming the streets of Spitalfields at night was to find a prostitute. He also carried in his coat pocket a poem he wrote about hunting down prostitutes and killing them with a knife, and disembowelling them so he could find and kill their foetuses too.
The belief that the murderer had medical knowledge was a theme that ran through the entire investigation. That the killer understood human anatomy and possessed great skill in surgical operations was arrived at by the testimonies of many experts, including those of the legal profession. In summing up the evidence the coroner, Wynne Edwin Baxter, for the inquest of the second murder victim, Annie Chapman, said,
‘The injuries had been made by someone who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge. There were no meaningless cuts. The organ had been taken by one who knew where to find it, what difficulties he would have to contend against, and how he should use his knife so as to abstract the organ without injury to it.’
The medical profession agreed that the killer had surgical skill. Dr George Bagster Phillips, the police surgeon who had examined Annie Chapman, concluded that the wounds were made by someone with knowledge of anatomy and a bladed tool for dissection. Dr Chapman said under oath, ‘such an instrument as a medical man used for post-mortem purposes … the mode in which the knife had been used seemed to indicate great anatomical knowledge.’
Dr Frederick Gordon Brown also believed the Ripper had anatomical skill. He performed the post-mortem for the third murder victim, Catherine Eddowes, and said,
‘I believe the perpetrator of the act must have had considerable knowledge of the positions of the organs in the abdominal cavity and the way of removing them. The parts removed would be of no use for any professional purpose. It required a great deal of medical knowledge to have removed the kidney and to know where it was placed.’
The press concurred with these opinions. The most respected paper, The Times, also reported,
‘The injuries had been made by someone who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge … There were no meaningless cuts. The organ had been taken by one who knew where to find it, what difficulties he would have to contend against and how he should use his knife so as to abstract the organ without injury to it. No unskilled person could have known were to find it or have recognised it when found. For instance no slaughter of animals could have carried out these operations. It must have been some one accustomed to the post-mortem room.’
The police believed the same thing. Sir Robert Anderson, Commissioner to the CID from 31st August 1888 onwards, wrote of the Ripper,
‘One thing is certain, namely, the elusive assassin whoever he was, possessed anatomical knowledge. This, therefore, leads one pretty surely to the conclusion that he was a medical man, or one who had formerly been a medical student.’
Despite much discussion, during and immediately after the murders, that the Ripper was a doctor or medical student, today many consider that the final word on the matter rests with Dr Thomas Bond. He was the esteemed doctor who examined the last Ripper victim, Mary Kelly. He quashed the medical-student hypothesis when he wrote,
‘In each case the mutilation was inflicted by a person who had no scientific nor anatomical knowledge. In my opinion he does not even possess the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer or any person accustomed to cut up dead animals.’
In 1888 Dr Thomas bond, at the age of 47, was considered an authority on the medical aspects for homicides. His decision was based on what seemed unorthodox cuts and the unaccountable removal of the organs from the Ripper’s victims. Today pathologists routinely remove the organs from cadavers, but when the expert Dr Bond trained at London’s King’s College Hospital, between 1860 and 1865, this was unheard of.
Although it is now the standard procedure in medicine today, when Bond was a medical student it was not the practice to remove organs. It was the pioneering work of the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow that saw organ removal become part of modern pathology, but when in 1888 the Ripper was taking away kidneys and uteruses, the practice taught to do this had not yet extended beyond Manchester’s Owen’s College. It was here that Thompson had been taught.
It was his lecturer of pathology and his infirmary director, Doctor Julius Dreschfeld, who had first begun to teach, in England, the idea that determining cause of death was better accomplished by not treating the body as a whole but by the examination of individual organs.
This theory is now standard practice but at the time it was a new and radical idea. Francis Thompson, when he studied from 1878 till 1884, would have been the first to learn about treating each organ as separate entities. It was only in 1880, a few short years before the murders and well after Bond had finished studying, that Virchow first published, in Philadelphia, an English translation of his German book on post-mortem technique, Post-Mortem Examination with especial reference to medical-legal practice.
The belief that the murderer had medical knowledge was a theme that ran through the entire investigation. That the killer understood human anatomy and possessed great skill in surgical operations was arrived at by the testimonies of many experts, including those of the legal profession. In summing up the evidence the coroner, Wynne Edwin Baxter, for the inquest of the second murder victim, Annie Chapman, said,
‘The injuries had been made by someone who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge. There were no meaningless cuts. The organ had been taken by one who knew where to find it, what difficulties he would have to contend against, and how he should use his knife so as to abstract the organ without injury to it.’
The medical profession agreed that the killer had surgical skill. Dr George Bagster Phillips, the police surgeon who had examined Annie Chapman, concluded that the wounds were made by someone with knowledge of anatomy and a bladed tool for dissection. Dr Chapman said under oath, ‘such an instrument as a medical man used for post-mortem purposes … the mode in which the knife had been used seemed to indicate great anatomical knowledge.’
Dr Frederick Gordon Brown also believed the Ripper had anatomical skill. He performed the post-mortem for the third murder victim, Catherine Eddowes, and said,
‘I believe the perpetrator of the act must have had considerable knowledge of the positions of the organs in the abdominal cavity and the way of removing them. The parts removed would be of no use for any professional purpose. It required a great deal of medical knowledge to have removed the kidney and to know where it was placed.’
The press concurred with these opinions. The most respected paper, The Times, also reported,
‘The injuries had been made by someone who had considerable anatomical skill and knowledge … There were no meaningless cuts. The organ had been taken by one who knew where to find it, what difficulties he would have to contend against and how he should use his knife so as to abstract the organ without injury to it. No unskilled person could have known were to find it or have recognised it when found. For instance no slaughter of animals could have carried out these operations. It must have been some one accustomed to the post-mortem room.’
The police believed the same thing. Sir Robert Anderson, Commissioner to the CID from 31st August 1888 onwards, wrote of the Ripper,
‘One thing is certain, namely, the elusive assassin whoever he was, possessed anatomical knowledge. This, therefore, leads one pretty surely to the conclusion that he was a medical man, or one who had formerly been a medical student.’
Despite much discussion, during and immediately after the murders, that the Ripper was a doctor or medical student, today many consider that the final word on the matter rests with Dr Thomas Bond. He was the esteemed doctor who examined the last Ripper victim, Mary Kelly. He quashed the medical-student hypothesis when he wrote,
‘In each case the mutilation was inflicted by a person who had no scientific nor anatomical knowledge. In my opinion he does not even possess the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer or any person accustomed to cut up dead animals.’
In 1888 Dr Thomas bond, at the age of 47, was considered an authority on the medical aspects for homicides. His decision was based on what seemed unorthodox cuts and the unaccountable removal of the organs from the Ripper’s victims. Today pathologists routinely remove the organs from cadavers, but when the expert Dr Bond trained at London’s King’s College Hospital, between 1860 and 1865, this was unheard of.
Although it is now the standard procedure in medicine today, when Bond was a medical student it was not the practice to remove organs. It was the pioneering work of the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow that saw organ removal become part of modern pathology, but when in 1888 the Ripper was taking away kidneys and uteruses, the practice taught to do this had not yet extended beyond Manchester’s Owen’s College. It was here that Thompson had been taught.
It was his lecturer of pathology and his infirmary director, Doctor Julius Dreschfeld, who had first begun to teach, in England, the idea that determining cause of death was better accomplished by not treating the body as a whole but by the examination of individual organs.
This theory is now standard practice but at the time it was a new and radical idea. Francis Thompson, when he studied from 1878 till 1884, would have been the first to learn about treating each organ as separate entities. It was only in 1880, a few short years before the murders and well after Bond had finished studying, that Virchow first published, in Philadelphia, an English translation of his German book on post-mortem technique, Post-Mortem Examination with especial reference to medical-legal practice.
It was from a Philadelphia that Patterson's was 2016 book was recommended by a forensic pathology specialist who had been been practicing for 57 years. On Amazon Books Patterson's book was given a rating of 5 Stars and described as , 'Well Researched'. By Robert Catherman M.D. 7 May 2017. The ex-Chief Medical Examiner for the city of Philadelphia, who has given expert medical testimony for many high profile murder trials. Of Patterson's book that Francis Thompson was Jack the Ripper, Dr Catherman wrote in his Amazon review,
"As a Forensic Pathologist with close to 60 years of experience in evaluating the crime of murder, Patterson's book is extensively researched and well written. It seems a total slam dunk that Francis Thompson and Jack the Ripper are one and the same. The documentation in Patterson's book leaves little doubt in support of that conclusion."
Although Rudolph Virchow's book on anatomy and pathology was readily available to Thompson, this 145-page textbook, complete with illustrations, would not have been found on the shelves of Dr Bond’s college library when he was a medical student 20 years earlier. If Bond had read it he would have seen how it accords with his own findings on the mutilations of Mary Kelly. Virchow wrote in his book on how a good student should remove the heart,
‘To bring the heart into the right position for the dissection, when the incisions for the right side are to be made, I extend firmly the forefinger of the left hand, and push it under the heart, and keep it against the base, so that the ventricular portion hangs down over the forefinger, which is as a fulcrum to it.’
To perform this heart removal, the pericardium, which was the layer holding it in place, had first to be cut through. When Dr Bond wrote, in his post-mortem of Mary Kelly, ‘The pericardium was open below and the heart absent’, he described a procedure straight out of Virchow’s manual.
Bond’s own medical training would have brought him to the uniformed but logical conclusion that such an act had nothing to do with any profession; not slaughter-men and certainly not doctors.
Although the removal of body organs was a feature of the Ripper murders, as well as the heralded new Virchow technique, there were deviations. If the Ripper, like Thompson, had been taught Virchow, this could be explained by the strange circumstances in which the technique was performed.
Having to alter how the organs were collected by different incisions was not only allowed in Virchow’s teaching, but also actively encouraged. In his book Virchow wrote,
‘It is scarcely necessary to point out that there are many cases in which deviations from this method are not merely allowable, but also absolutely necessary. The individuality of the case must often determine the plan of the examination.’
Francis Thompson, aged 28 at the time of the murders, had received not just the training of one doctor, but because he delayed leaving medical school by four more years, he had gained the training of three.
The Ripper performed cuts that removed internal organs on three of the five prostitutes – with only one knife, in the dark and under time constraint.
Such a feat with a dissecting scalpel, for Thompson, would have been difficult but not impossible. That a single knife was used for all cuts was the opinion of most of the medical experts involved in the Ripper case. Use of just one knife was something Virchow himself praised.
In his medical textbook on what Thompson was taught, the German pathologist wrote of its merit, ‘A good pathological anatomist is perfectly able to dissect all the viscera of one subject, or even of two, with one knife.’
All the other doctors who examined the victims were aged in their forties to sixties and, like Bond, would have been untrained in Virchow. To them the use of one knife and nature of the mutilations would have appeared insensible.
They would see no reason to remove a heart, for example. Most people, and most murderers, would never contemplate doing so, but the Ripper did. Thompson did. In his poem The House of Sorrows, he writes.
‘The life-gashed heart, the assassin’s healing poniard [knife] draw.
The remedy of steel has gone home to her sick heart.
Her breast, dishabited,
Revealed her heart above,
A little blot of red.’
‘To bring the heart into the right position for the dissection, when the incisions for the right side are to be made, I extend firmly the forefinger of the left hand, and push it under the heart, and keep it against the base, so that the ventricular portion hangs down over the forefinger, which is as a fulcrum to it.’
To perform this heart removal, the pericardium, which was the layer holding it in place, had first to be cut through. When Dr Bond wrote, in his post-mortem of Mary Kelly, ‘The pericardium was open below and the heart absent’, he described a procedure straight out of Virchow’s manual.
Bond’s own medical training would have brought him to the uniformed but logical conclusion that such an act had nothing to do with any profession; not slaughter-men and certainly not doctors.
Although the removal of body organs was a feature of the Ripper murders, as well as the heralded new Virchow technique, there were deviations. If the Ripper, like Thompson, had been taught Virchow, this could be explained by the strange circumstances in which the technique was performed.
Having to alter how the organs were collected by different incisions was not only allowed in Virchow’s teaching, but also actively encouraged. In his book Virchow wrote,
‘It is scarcely necessary to point out that there are many cases in which deviations from this method are not merely allowable, but also absolutely necessary. The individuality of the case must often determine the plan of the examination.’
Francis Thompson, aged 28 at the time of the murders, had received not just the training of one doctor, but because he delayed leaving medical school by four more years, he had gained the training of three.
The Ripper performed cuts that removed internal organs on three of the five prostitutes – with only one knife, in the dark and under time constraint.
Such a feat with a dissecting scalpel, for Thompson, would have been difficult but not impossible. That a single knife was used for all cuts was the opinion of most of the medical experts involved in the Ripper case. Use of just one knife was something Virchow himself praised.
In his medical textbook on what Thompson was taught, the German pathologist wrote of its merit, ‘A good pathological anatomist is perfectly able to dissect all the viscera of one subject, or even of two, with one knife.’
All the other doctors who examined the victims were aged in their forties to sixties and, like Bond, would have been untrained in Virchow. To them the use of one knife and nature of the mutilations would have appeared insensible.
They would see no reason to remove a heart, for example. Most people, and most murderers, would never contemplate doing so, but the Ripper did. Thompson did. In his poem The House of Sorrows, he writes.
‘The life-gashed heart, the assassin’s healing poniard [knife] draw.
The remedy of steel has gone home to her sick heart.
Her breast, dishabited,
Revealed her heart above,
A little blot of red.’
Thompson’s childhood history, that included fire-starting, mutilation of dolls and refusal to communicate, showed an unsound mind, but is it fair to paint him as a possible psychopath? Paul Van K, in his 1973 Francis Thompson a Critical Biography, wrote that while Francis Thompson studied at Ushaw College as a priest his strange, secretive, behaviour ‘gives evidence of a schizophrenic tendency in him.’ {Paul Van K p28}.
This opinion was backed up by respected psychiatrist Thomas Verner Moore. He wrote of Francis Thompson’s personality in the fifth volume of the 1918 Psychoanalytic Review. In his article, The Hound of Heaven, Moor wrote of Thompson that, ‘At Ushaw he manifested that shut-in reaction type which might readily have developed into a full-grown dementia praecox.’ [childhood psychosis].
Moore explained in his article that the ‘shut-in’ personality ‘tends to become psychopathic.’
Doctor William B. Ober, followed suit. Dr Ober was an internationally recognized Director of Pathology in New York. In 1968, in the New York Academy of Medicine journal, his article Drowsed With The Fume Of Poppies, appeared. It was on opium-addicted poets. His summary of Thompson was damming. Dr Ober wrote, of the poet’s life.
‘Francis Thompson (1859-1907) was that of an overt psychopath and known addict’
Of Thompson’s poetry, such as his Hound of Heaven, which has the words, “Naked I wait Thy love’s uplifted stroke!” the good doctor continued,
‘An expression of the most masochistic attitude ever adopted by any poet who has written in English, even beyond the customary limits of self-flagellation or martyrdom.’
This opinion was backed up by respected psychiatrist Thomas Verner Moore. He wrote of Francis Thompson’s personality in the fifth volume of the 1918 Psychoanalytic Review. In his article, The Hound of Heaven, Moor wrote of Thompson that, ‘At Ushaw he manifested that shut-in reaction type which might readily have developed into a full-grown dementia praecox.’ [childhood psychosis].
Moore explained in his article that the ‘shut-in’ personality ‘tends to become psychopathic.’
Doctor William B. Ober, followed suit. Dr Ober was an internationally recognized Director of Pathology in New York. In 1968, in the New York Academy of Medicine journal, his article Drowsed With The Fume Of Poppies, appeared. It was on opium-addicted poets. His summary of Thompson was damming. Dr Ober wrote, of the poet’s life.
‘Francis Thompson (1859-1907) was that of an overt psychopath and known addict’
Of Thompson’s poetry, such as his Hound of Heaven, which has the words, “Naked I wait Thy love’s uplifted stroke!” the good doctor continued,
‘An expression of the most masochistic attitude ever adopted by any poet who has written in English, even beyond the customary limits of self-flagellation or martyrdom.’
Thompson told that in June of 1888, his girlfriend, who worked as a prostitute, left him after a dispute. He said it ended with her threatening to leave him because he was now too well-known. He claimed he needed to stay on the streets looking for her; He gave up searching for her in October. In the same month the remains of a woman were found buried along the London embankment.
Although not as well-known as the Whitechapel crimes, what became known as the Whitehall Torso Mystery was also striking in both its macabre nature and its apparent lack of motive.
The remains, found on the building site of New Scotland, was a decayed human torso, wrapped in possibly a petticoat and tied with string. It had been hidden there for not more than three days. An interesting feature of the crime was that the style of the killer in this case mimicked that of Thompson who hated the sight of flowing blood. An autopsy determined that after death the killer had tied tourniquets before removing the victim’s limbs to stem the blood flow.
This has led researchers to remark that someone with medical skill had killed her. The limb’s sites of amputation were packed with newspapers from 24th August.
The coroner found that the woman, who was aged about 24, died of suffocation. Her uterus had been removed. The coroner concluded that the woman, with fair skin and dark hair, was not someone who was used to manual labour and that she had been killed in July. A month after Thompson’s prostitute said she would leave him.
Could this torso have been what was left of her? It might explain why it was in October, the month that the Torso was found, that Thompson is said to have accepted that his prostitute would not return to him. Although the torso was thought by some to be yet another Ripper murder, the identity of the woman, like Thompson’s prostitute, was never discovered.
Surprisingly, the Ripper himself is believed to have written to the police about this very crime. Perhaps not surprisingly, the contents of the letter show a bizarre resemblance to, not only Thompson’s style of writing, but also the same rare knowledge of biblical history and leaning to religious extremism.
This is made apparent when Francis Thompson, who had trained as a priest and a surgeon, gave a review of London under the pen name of Tancred.
The name came from an early Medieval eastern crusading knight. It was not the first time Thompson depicted himself as a crusading knight, as was seen with his April 1888 poem Nightmare of the Witch Babies, with his knight hunting down and disembowelling women, and laughing as he tears babies out from their stomachs.
In response to the police’s discovery of the Whitehall torso, it appears the assailant, normally glad to claim his guilt, said that if he killed this prostitute it was only because God had forced his hand. He wrote to them three days after the torso had been found,
‘Central News Agency’ on October 5,
‘Dear Friend In the name of God hear me I swear I did not Kill the female whose body was found in Whitehall. If she was an honest woman I will hunt down and destroy her murderer. If she was a whore God will bless the hand that slew her, for the woman of Moab [place of human sacrifice] and Median [worshipers of pagan Gods] shall die and their blood shall mingle with the dust. I never harm any others or the Divine power that protects and helps me in my grand work would quit forever. Do as I do and the light of my glory shall shine upon you. I must get to work tomorrow treble event this time yes yes three must be ripped I will send you a bit of face by post I promise this dear old Boss. The police now reckon my work a practical joke ha ha ha Keep this back till three are wiped out and you can show the cold meat. Yours truly Jack the Ripper.’
By any measure, the Ripper murders were the product of a sick and twisted mind. It is true, also, that Thompson was not a normal personality by any stretch of the imagination. Thompson’s review, called Catholics in Darkest England, was published in the January 1891 edition of Merry England.
This was a Catholic literary magazine owned by his editor, Wilfrid Meynell. The review was written as a reply to the book In Darkest England, by General Booth, head and founder of the Salvation Army. Thompson’s view was that Catholics should take up and accentuate the militarism of the salvationists. It is written in the same style as the October Ripper letter and it contained the same themes of Old Testament religion, prostitution and human sacrifice,
‘I see upon my right hand a land of lanes and hedgerows, I look upon my left hand and I see another region – is it not rather another universe? A region whose hedgerows have set to brick, whose soil is chilled to stone; where flowers are sold and women, where the men wither and the stars; whose streets to me on the most glittering day are black. For I unveil their secret meanings. I read their human hieroglyphs. I diagnose from a hundred occult signs the disease that perturbs their populous pulses.
Misery cries out to me from the kerb-stone, despair passes me by in the ways; I discern limbs laden with fetters impalpable, but not imponderable; I hear the shaking of invisible lashes, I see men dabbled with their own oozing life ...
This contrast rises before me; and I ask myself whether there be indeed an Ormuzd [a god of light] and an Ahriman [a destructive spirit of darkness], and whether Ahriman be the stronger of the twain. They are brought up in sin from their cradles ... the boys are ruffians and profligates, the girls harlots in the mother’s womb ... Here, too, has the Assassin left us a weapon which but needs a little practice to adapt it to the necessity of the day? Even so our army is in the midst of us, enrolled under the banner of the Stigmata. Far better your children were cast from the bridges of London than they should become as one of those little ones.’
Although not as well-known as the Whitechapel crimes, what became known as the Whitehall Torso Mystery was also striking in both its macabre nature and its apparent lack of motive.
The remains, found on the building site of New Scotland, was a decayed human torso, wrapped in possibly a petticoat and tied with string. It had been hidden there for not more than three days. An interesting feature of the crime was that the style of the killer in this case mimicked that of Thompson who hated the sight of flowing blood. An autopsy determined that after death the killer had tied tourniquets before removing the victim’s limbs to stem the blood flow.
This has led researchers to remark that someone with medical skill had killed her. The limb’s sites of amputation were packed with newspapers from 24th August.
The coroner found that the woman, who was aged about 24, died of suffocation. Her uterus had been removed. The coroner concluded that the woman, with fair skin and dark hair, was not someone who was used to manual labour and that she had been killed in July. A month after Thompson’s prostitute said she would leave him.
Could this torso have been what was left of her? It might explain why it was in October, the month that the Torso was found, that Thompson is said to have accepted that his prostitute would not return to him. Although the torso was thought by some to be yet another Ripper murder, the identity of the woman, like Thompson’s prostitute, was never discovered.
Surprisingly, the Ripper himself is believed to have written to the police about this very crime. Perhaps not surprisingly, the contents of the letter show a bizarre resemblance to, not only Thompson’s style of writing, but also the same rare knowledge of biblical history and leaning to religious extremism.
This is made apparent when Francis Thompson, who had trained as a priest and a surgeon, gave a review of London under the pen name of Tancred.
The name came from an early Medieval eastern crusading knight. It was not the first time Thompson depicted himself as a crusading knight, as was seen with his April 1888 poem Nightmare of the Witch Babies, with his knight hunting down and disembowelling women, and laughing as he tears babies out from their stomachs.
In response to the police’s discovery of the Whitehall torso, it appears the assailant, normally glad to claim his guilt, said that if he killed this prostitute it was only because God had forced his hand. He wrote to them three days after the torso had been found,
‘Central News Agency’ on October 5,
‘Dear Friend In the name of God hear me I swear I did not Kill the female whose body was found in Whitehall. If she was an honest woman I will hunt down and destroy her murderer. If she was a whore God will bless the hand that slew her, for the woman of Moab [place of human sacrifice] and Median [worshipers of pagan Gods] shall die and their blood shall mingle with the dust. I never harm any others or the Divine power that protects and helps me in my grand work would quit forever. Do as I do and the light of my glory shall shine upon you. I must get to work tomorrow treble event this time yes yes three must be ripped I will send you a bit of face by post I promise this dear old Boss. The police now reckon my work a practical joke ha ha ha Keep this back till three are wiped out and you can show the cold meat. Yours truly Jack the Ripper.’
By any measure, the Ripper murders were the product of a sick and twisted mind. It is true, also, that Thompson was not a normal personality by any stretch of the imagination. Thompson’s review, called Catholics in Darkest England, was published in the January 1891 edition of Merry England.
This was a Catholic literary magazine owned by his editor, Wilfrid Meynell. The review was written as a reply to the book In Darkest England, by General Booth, head and founder of the Salvation Army. Thompson’s view was that Catholics should take up and accentuate the militarism of the salvationists. It is written in the same style as the October Ripper letter and it contained the same themes of Old Testament religion, prostitution and human sacrifice,
‘I see upon my right hand a land of lanes and hedgerows, I look upon my left hand and I see another region – is it not rather another universe? A region whose hedgerows have set to brick, whose soil is chilled to stone; where flowers are sold and women, where the men wither and the stars; whose streets to me on the most glittering day are black. For I unveil their secret meanings. I read their human hieroglyphs. I diagnose from a hundred occult signs the disease that perturbs their populous pulses.
Misery cries out to me from the kerb-stone, despair passes me by in the ways; I discern limbs laden with fetters impalpable, but not imponderable; I hear the shaking of invisible lashes, I see men dabbled with their own oozing life ...
This contrast rises before me; and I ask myself whether there be indeed an Ormuzd [a god of light] and an Ahriman [a destructive spirit of darkness], and whether Ahriman be the stronger of the twain. They are brought up in sin from their cradles ... the boys are ruffians and profligates, the girls harlots in the mother’s womb ... Here, too, has the Assassin left us a weapon which but needs a little practice to adapt it to the necessity of the day? Even so our army is in the midst of us, enrolled under the banner of the Stigmata. Far better your children were cast from the bridges of London than they should become as one of those little ones.’
On 6th October 6 1888 Roderick Macdonald, a coroner’s assistant for the Ripper victims, told the press that the Whitechapel victims might have been drugged with a form of laudanum.
All autopsies on the victims show there was no struggle. The killer then let his unconscious victims slump to the ground. This provided him with a prone subject and a stable surface to begin cutting.
It would be very difficult to strangle someone, until they lost consciousness, without the risk of killing them. Jack the Ripper was able to perform this task very well, without exception, repeatedly. There was only one job where someone was trained to do this. A surgeon.
In the 1870’s and 80’s anaesthetics, although used in some hospitals, was rare. The usual procedure, in Hospital Emergency Departments, to restrain patients to prepare them for surgery, was by partial asphyxiation. This was achieved by strangulation with a ligature around the neck.
In the years that Thompson, trained as a surgeon’s assistant in Manchester’s Hospital Emergency Department not only did he practice surgery on cadavers, cutting into flesh and removing bodily organs, Thompson was required to sedate patients who presented injuries needing surgical intervention, such as having a limb amputated.
In the 1870’s, when he was training, sedation involved using a thin cord for a ligature that was wrapped around the neck of the resisting patient to cause asphyxiation and unconsciousness. Thompson, who was nicknamed The Necktie Poet, effectively practiced strangling people into unconscious, every day, year after year.
Once the Ripper’s victims were still and prone on a rigid surface, mutilating the women with a sharp knife would not require great strength. It would be particularly less strenuous if one kept a knife that was razor sharp. Like Thompson’s dissecting scalpel. The one he only needed to reach into his coat pocket for when he had to ‘shave’.
Thompson was aged 28 when these women were killed. High physical fitness and strength were major requirements needed for Thompson to enter medical school, and the army, as he did. One biographer has told that when Thompson left his Manchester home in 1885 he walked the 300 kilometres to London. In London, his odd jobs had him carrying heavy bundles of newspapers, and racing about town on errands for employers.
All biographers tell of him being a keen hiker, walking all over London and the hills of Sussex and Wales. People ask if Thompson could walk the quarter-square-mile to any of the murders and performed what, for a trained student doctor many times over, would be easy.
All autopsies on the victims show there was no struggle. The killer then let his unconscious victims slump to the ground. This provided him with a prone subject and a stable surface to begin cutting.
It would be very difficult to strangle someone, until they lost consciousness, without the risk of killing them. Jack the Ripper was able to perform this task very well, without exception, repeatedly. There was only one job where someone was trained to do this. A surgeon.
In the 1870’s and 80’s anaesthetics, although used in some hospitals, was rare. The usual procedure, in Hospital Emergency Departments, to restrain patients to prepare them for surgery, was by partial asphyxiation. This was achieved by strangulation with a ligature around the neck.
In the years that Thompson, trained as a surgeon’s assistant in Manchester’s Hospital Emergency Department not only did he practice surgery on cadavers, cutting into flesh and removing bodily organs, Thompson was required to sedate patients who presented injuries needing surgical intervention, such as having a limb amputated.
In the 1870’s, when he was training, sedation involved using a thin cord for a ligature that was wrapped around the neck of the resisting patient to cause asphyxiation and unconsciousness. Thompson, who was nicknamed The Necktie Poet, effectively practiced strangling people into unconscious, every day, year after year.
Once the Ripper’s victims were still and prone on a rigid surface, mutilating the women with a sharp knife would not require great strength. It would be particularly less strenuous if one kept a knife that was razor sharp. Like Thompson’s dissecting scalpel. The one he only needed to reach into his coat pocket for when he had to ‘shave’.
Thompson was aged 28 when these women were killed. High physical fitness and strength were major requirements needed for Thompson to enter medical school, and the army, as he did. One biographer has told that when Thompson left his Manchester home in 1885 he walked the 300 kilometres to London. In London, his odd jobs had him carrying heavy bundles of newspapers, and racing about town on errands for employers.
All biographers tell of him being a keen hiker, walking all over London and the hills of Sussex and Wales. People ask if Thompson could walk the quarter-square-mile to any of the murders and performed what, for a trained student doctor many times over, would be easy.
Strangely, the Ripper murders stopped while Thompson was absent from London, but upon his return, there were further outrages in the East End. Some said it was the work of the Ripper starting up again. For instance, another East-End murder occurred on February 13th 1891. The police briefly arrested a man named Thomas who was acquitted when a man, also named Thomas, testified for him. Although the woman, Frances Coles, lay dying, when found by PC Thompson, nobody was convicted for her murder.
Francis Thompson, our wandering poet, was in a typically dark mood with life around this time, when he wrote to Wilfrid Meynell, ‘If you see in tomorrow’s paper anything about a body being recovered from the Thames, perhaps you will kindly call and identify it?’
Wilfrid and Alice Meynell had many children, mostly girls. When this husband and wife first had dealings with Thompson, in 1888, and invited him into their home, the children were absent. They had arranged for the children’s governor to take them away on a seaside vacation. When Thompson returned to London, after his stay at the Storrington monastery, he was delighted to be able to spend time with the children, particularly the little girls.
The children, on their part, had no urge to spend time with him. The Meynell youngsters’ attitude towards the poet was rather more down-to-earth than his to them. In his poems, he always idealised them as elfish embodiments of joy and innocence; and he believed that they were especially devoted to him. Yet, in later life, Viola wrote,
‘He was not the visitor at the sound of whose special knock the Palace Court children raced down the stairs to be the first to open the door; his is not remembered as ever being sought by them or causing the smallest stir of expectation which children easily feel.’
The children ignored, tolerated or avoided him. One daughter, Madeleine Meynell, spoke for her siblings when she remarked of Thompson that, ‘We rather despised him.’
This is probably because Francis Thompson held an unhealthy attraction to little girls. On 19th July 1900 he wrote to Wilfrid Meynell. The content of the letter was his delight in snapping up the opportunity to feel a child’s hair. That he was then a man of 40, while his glee revolved around a girl who had just reached puberty, is worrying, even if we do not assume that he had already killed and ripped apart five women. Thompson wrote, in his letter to his editor,
‘We had a carnival hereabouts … The only sport … was for girls to dab you in the face with a peacock’s feather … Only the children made amends for their elders … I cheerfully submitted my neck to be tickled on my cheek, by the feathery weapons of the kids … One charming child of 13 or 15 had a veritable impromptu game of ‘tick’ with me … at last she allowed me to ‘tick’ her and then, feeling my hand among her bright tresses … I fell in love with her at first sight for she was delightful: of antelope-lightness, fair complexion and long glittering hair … I retained my old attraction for children…Any way, not even the chicks tempted me forth among the crowd on Friday.’
In 1885, the age of consent was raised to 16. When, in 1900, Thompson wrote about this girl, to marry her was already a felony. Thompson struggled to reconcile his love for small girls, not because he felt guilt but because puberty forced them out of his age range. These lines are from Thompson’s 1890 poem Sister Songs. It was written to two of the Meynell daughters who were aged 10 and under,
‘But still within the little children’s eyes
Seems something, something that replies,
THEY at least are for me, surely for me!
I turned me to them very wistfully;
But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair
With dawning answers there,
Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.’
The children of the Meynell’s became a special attraction to Thompson and his fantasies bled into letters written to them. In one letter written in 1894 to 14-year-old Monica Meynell, Thompson hinted of how he wished he could emulate with her the Greek myth known as Leda and the Swan.
This story is of how the god Zeus turns himself into a swan and rapes Leda, the wife of a king. Over the ages, poems written about this rape often depict the beak penetrating Leda’s vagina. In his letter, to young Monica, Thompson quipped.
‘you will have to lift me up in your arms to kiss you … do you still put your thumb in your mouth … It was such lovely weather for bathing. I wished I were a duck with nothing on but feathers. Or perhaps a swan - that would be more poetical’ {Letters p116}
It seems that the younger the girl, the stronger Thompson’s attraction to her. In another letter to his editor, in September 1890, he told of a girl who he met in Queen’s Park. It was located within a few blocks of his lodgings in Third Avenue. In his letter, he again shows sorrow that one day puberty will come to steal her away from him too,
‘The dearest child has made friends with me in the park; & we have fallen in love with each other … I rather fancy she thinks me one of the most admirable of mortals … And now I am in fever lest … her kinsfolk should steal her from me. Result – I haven’t slept for two nights … Of course in some ways she is sure to vanish …’ {Letters p51}
In John Walsh’s biography Strange Harp, Strange Symphony. The Life of Francis Thompson we are told that the child of which he confessed having sleepless nights over was no more than six years old.
Francis Thompson’s relationship with Alice Meynell, his editor’s wife, after her husband and she took him in, was at first one of mutual admiration.
Thompson had been a long-time admirer of Alice’s poetry. It often featured in her husband’s magazine Merry England. Alice supported his literary growth and tried to overlook his gruesome poem Nightmare of the Witch Babies, about the laughing knight that kills and cuts women open. It was a poem that she thought she despised.
Then, at the start of September 1892, their relationship soured. Some realisation caused Alice to see Thompson in a new light. She grew cold and distant. She refused to speak with him and generally ignored him. Thompson’s reaction was one of anxiety and fear as to what she might do. Here are excerpts from his letters that he wrote at this time, while living in London. They record his warped perception of his editor’s wife and his worry that she no longer trusted him,
‘To Alice Meynell
Dear Mrs. Meynell. It is a small matter and hardly, I suppose, worth taking a second thought about in your mind. Yet it seems I have offended you. [Thompson then writes a page on how they had arranged to meet at her house to discuss his poetry but she kept her distance] … I felt convinced that you shrank from it for some reason … I felt sharply wounded … I saw you were so cold and estranged from me, that going through the poem would have been a constrained affair, painful for both of us. So I left. It seems that the more I strive to please you and serve you … the more I alienate you from me … I am unhappy when I am out of your sight and would pass every hour, if I could, in your exquisite presence … I know how it must tax you to endure me …’
Three day later Thompson found out that Alice had shared the contents of his letter with her husband. He wrote again to the wife of his editor and future literary heir,
‘… I had somehow fallen out of touch with you after the first moment. And I was miserable for it … I had slept little last night, eaten nothing in the morning, and was able to eat little last night. So that I felt utterly spent and unable to stand the strain of emotions …’
Alice and Wilfrid wrote to him telling him, in effect, to leave her alone. Two days later he wrote to her again,
‘…. this morning I get your terrible letter … withdrawing from me your love … I feel blinded and paralysed … if you knew all as I know it, you would feel that never man had more claim on you for patience than I have … I am indeed more sinned against than sinning … Henceforth I will only come to your house when business calls me there … I will draw back into the hermit and leave your lives free from me and perhaps when the curse of me is removed from the house it will settle back into its ordinary condition …’
Thompson would not write to Alice again until a full year had passed and he had been sent to a monastery in Pantasaph. Even then it was only on the topic of editing his poems and having them published. Never again would their friendship fully recover.
To show the true face of this Ripper suspect, all we need do is read what he wrote. The following are extracts from his private letters. A London writer’s career is made or broken by the pool of fans and how he engenders their respect. This is what he thought of those who appreciated his verse, and his London audience and the England’s capital,
‘The public has an odd kind of prejudice that poems are written for its benefit … that infectious web of sewer rats called London ... the villainous blubber brained public.’
Thompson’s thoughts on the fairer sex is revealed in his essay, ‘The Decadence Of Female Decadence.’ It was upon female murders and was published on September 23, 1899, in the ‘Academy’.
‘A bad woman is a very bad woman. … Her wickedness comes from her with cheerfulness and comfort. The man is a strong swimmer in evil; but to the woman it becomes her element…poison in a bowl — not even a phial: a thumping bowlful, as if she were going to poison a horse — and a dagger; what coarse, what primitive means! … Women who murder their babies, and suchlike types of sordid achievement. … It is not surprising that women should become conspicuous in evil. The inventions of the novelist pale before these ladies' vigorous reality.'
Although Wilfrid Meynell’s support of Thompson got his career as a writer off the ground, it received a big boost when the famed poet Robert Browning wrote to his friend Meynell, recommending Thompson’s verse. Browning died in Italy soon after.
Thompson described his effect on the deceased poet, ‘as though one stirred a fusty rag in a London alley and met the eyes of a cobra scintillating under the yellow gas lamps.’ Thompson’s perspective on the big picture could be summed up when he wrote, ‘The world-the Universe-is a fallen world.’
Of a sunset, Thompson wrote, ‘As a burst and blood-blown insect cleaves to the wall it dies on, the smeared sun doth clot upon a heaven without horizon.’
Normal is not the word that could ever be applied to the person who killed at least five women. Francis Thompson was anything but normal. We cannot be sure that he was ever in a relationship. He could not hold a steady job. He suffered from deliriums, hallucinations and mental breakdowns. He tried to commit suicide. He had a disquieting like for small girls. He was a drug addict who was disowned by his family. He has a history of arson.
Much of his poetry shows a fixation on death and dying. The only story he wrote was about a man who stabs a woman to death. His only play was about the killing of a woman because she was a prostitute. He was a conspiracy theorist who was fascinated with the occult. He was homeless by his own doing. He mingled with murderers. He claimed to be a magician and to have prophetic powers.
Most people who dealt with Thompson on a daily basis simply accepted that he was not quite right in his mind. His landlady gave the typical impression of him as a lunatic, ‘Many a time I’ve asked him to have his bit of lunch in with me and the other ‘mental’ – oh yes, she’s a mental case, as I may have told you.’
Francis Thompson, our wandering poet, was in a typically dark mood with life around this time, when he wrote to Wilfrid Meynell, ‘If you see in tomorrow’s paper anything about a body being recovered from the Thames, perhaps you will kindly call and identify it?’
Wilfrid and Alice Meynell had many children, mostly girls. When this husband and wife first had dealings with Thompson, in 1888, and invited him into their home, the children were absent. They had arranged for the children’s governor to take them away on a seaside vacation. When Thompson returned to London, after his stay at the Storrington monastery, he was delighted to be able to spend time with the children, particularly the little girls.
The children, on their part, had no urge to spend time with him. The Meynell youngsters’ attitude towards the poet was rather more down-to-earth than his to them. In his poems, he always idealised them as elfish embodiments of joy and innocence; and he believed that they were especially devoted to him. Yet, in later life, Viola wrote,
‘He was not the visitor at the sound of whose special knock the Palace Court children raced down the stairs to be the first to open the door; his is not remembered as ever being sought by them or causing the smallest stir of expectation which children easily feel.’
The children ignored, tolerated or avoided him. One daughter, Madeleine Meynell, spoke for her siblings when she remarked of Thompson that, ‘We rather despised him.’
This is probably because Francis Thompson held an unhealthy attraction to little girls. On 19th July 1900 he wrote to Wilfrid Meynell. The content of the letter was his delight in snapping up the opportunity to feel a child’s hair. That he was then a man of 40, while his glee revolved around a girl who had just reached puberty, is worrying, even if we do not assume that he had already killed and ripped apart five women. Thompson wrote, in his letter to his editor,
‘We had a carnival hereabouts … The only sport … was for girls to dab you in the face with a peacock’s feather … Only the children made amends for their elders … I cheerfully submitted my neck to be tickled on my cheek, by the feathery weapons of the kids … One charming child of 13 or 15 had a veritable impromptu game of ‘tick’ with me … at last she allowed me to ‘tick’ her and then, feeling my hand among her bright tresses … I fell in love with her at first sight for she was delightful: of antelope-lightness, fair complexion and long glittering hair … I retained my old attraction for children…Any way, not even the chicks tempted me forth among the crowd on Friday.’
In 1885, the age of consent was raised to 16. When, in 1900, Thompson wrote about this girl, to marry her was already a felony. Thompson struggled to reconcile his love for small girls, not because he felt guilt but because puberty forced them out of his age range. These lines are from Thompson’s 1890 poem Sister Songs. It was written to two of the Meynell daughters who were aged 10 and under,
‘But still within the little children’s eyes
Seems something, something that replies,
THEY at least are for me, surely for me!
I turned me to them very wistfully;
But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair
With dawning answers there,
Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.’
The children of the Meynell’s became a special attraction to Thompson and his fantasies bled into letters written to them. In one letter written in 1894 to 14-year-old Monica Meynell, Thompson hinted of how he wished he could emulate with her the Greek myth known as Leda and the Swan.
This story is of how the god Zeus turns himself into a swan and rapes Leda, the wife of a king. Over the ages, poems written about this rape often depict the beak penetrating Leda’s vagina. In his letter, to young Monica, Thompson quipped.
‘you will have to lift me up in your arms to kiss you … do you still put your thumb in your mouth … It was such lovely weather for bathing. I wished I were a duck with nothing on but feathers. Or perhaps a swan - that would be more poetical’ {Letters p116}
It seems that the younger the girl, the stronger Thompson’s attraction to her. In another letter to his editor, in September 1890, he told of a girl who he met in Queen’s Park. It was located within a few blocks of his lodgings in Third Avenue. In his letter, he again shows sorrow that one day puberty will come to steal her away from him too,
‘The dearest child has made friends with me in the park; & we have fallen in love with each other … I rather fancy she thinks me one of the most admirable of mortals … And now I am in fever lest … her kinsfolk should steal her from me. Result – I haven’t slept for two nights … Of course in some ways she is sure to vanish …’ {Letters p51}
In John Walsh’s biography Strange Harp, Strange Symphony. The Life of Francis Thompson we are told that the child of which he confessed having sleepless nights over was no more than six years old.
Francis Thompson’s relationship with Alice Meynell, his editor’s wife, after her husband and she took him in, was at first one of mutual admiration.
Thompson had been a long-time admirer of Alice’s poetry. It often featured in her husband’s magazine Merry England. Alice supported his literary growth and tried to overlook his gruesome poem Nightmare of the Witch Babies, about the laughing knight that kills and cuts women open. It was a poem that she thought she despised.
Then, at the start of September 1892, their relationship soured. Some realisation caused Alice to see Thompson in a new light. She grew cold and distant. She refused to speak with him and generally ignored him. Thompson’s reaction was one of anxiety and fear as to what she might do. Here are excerpts from his letters that he wrote at this time, while living in London. They record his warped perception of his editor’s wife and his worry that she no longer trusted him,
‘To Alice Meynell
Dear Mrs. Meynell. It is a small matter and hardly, I suppose, worth taking a second thought about in your mind. Yet it seems I have offended you. [Thompson then writes a page on how they had arranged to meet at her house to discuss his poetry but she kept her distance] … I felt convinced that you shrank from it for some reason … I felt sharply wounded … I saw you were so cold and estranged from me, that going through the poem would have been a constrained affair, painful for both of us. So I left. It seems that the more I strive to please you and serve you … the more I alienate you from me … I am unhappy when I am out of your sight and would pass every hour, if I could, in your exquisite presence … I know how it must tax you to endure me …’
Three day later Thompson found out that Alice had shared the contents of his letter with her husband. He wrote again to the wife of his editor and future literary heir,
‘… I had somehow fallen out of touch with you after the first moment. And I was miserable for it … I had slept little last night, eaten nothing in the morning, and was able to eat little last night. So that I felt utterly spent and unable to stand the strain of emotions …’
Alice and Wilfrid wrote to him telling him, in effect, to leave her alone. Two days later he wrote to her again,
‘…. this morning I get your terrible letter … withdrawing from me your love … I feel blinded and paralysed … if you knew all as I know it, you would feel that never man had more claim on you for patience than I have … I am indeed more sinned against than sinning … Henceforth I will only come to your house when business calls me there … I will draw back into the hermit and leave your lives free from me and perhaps when the curse of me is removed from the house it will settle back into its ordinary condition …’
Thompson would not write to Alice again until a full year had passed and he had been sent to a monastery in Pantasaph. Even then it was only on the topic of editing his poems and having them published. Never again would their friendship fully recover.
To show the true face of this Ripper suspect, all we need do is read what he wrote. The following are extracts from his private letters. A London writer’s career is made or broken by the pool of fans and how he engenders their respect. This is what he thought of those who appreciated his verse, and his London audience and the England’s capital,
‘The public has an odd kind of prejudice that poems are written for its benefit … that infectious web of sewer rats called London ... the villainous blubber brained public.’
Thompson’s thoughts on the fairer sex is revealed in his essay, ‘The Decadence Of Female Decadence.’ It was upon female murders and was published on September 23, 1899, in the ‘Academy’.
‘A bad woman is a very bad woman. … Her wickedness comes from her with cheerfulness and comfort. The man is a strong swimmer in evil; but to the woman it becomes her element…poison in a bowl — not even a phial: a thumping bowlful, as if she were going to poison a horse — and a dagger; what coarse, what primitive means! … Women who murder their babies, and suchlike types of sordid achievement. … It is not surprising that women should become conspicuous in evil. The inventions of the novelist pale before these ladies' vigorous reality.'
Although Wilfrid Meynell’s support of Thompson got his career as a writer off the ground, it received a big boost when the famed poet Robert Browning wrote to his friend Meynell, recommending Thompson’s verse. Browning died in Italy soon after.
Thompson described his effect on the deceased poet, ‘as though one stirred a fusty rag in a London alley and met the eyes of a cobra scintillating under the yellow gas lamps.’ Thompson’s perspective on the big picture could be summed up when he wrote, ‘The world-the Universe-is a fallen world.’
Of a sunset, Thompson wrote, ‘As a burst and blood-blown insect cleaves to the wall it dies on, the smeared sun doth clot upon a heaven without horizon.’
Normal is not the word that could ever be applied to the person who killed at least five women. Francis Thompson was anything but normal. We cannot be sure that he was ever in a relationship. He could not hold a steady job. He suffered from deliriums, hallucinations and mental breakdowns. He tried to commit suicide. He had a disquieting like for small girls. He was a drug addict who was disowned by his family. He has a history of arson.
Much of his poetry shows a fixation on death and dying. The only story he wrote was about a man who stabs a woman to death. His only play was about the killing of a woman because she was a prostitute. He was a conspiracy theorist who was fascinated with the occult. He was homeless by his own doing. He mingled with murderers. He claimed to be a magician and to have prophetic powers.
Most people who dealt with Thompson on a daily basis simply accepted that he was not quite right in his mind. His landlady gave the typical impression of him as a lunatic, ‘Many a time I’ve asked him to have his bit of lunch in with me and the other ‘mental’ – oh yes, she’s a mental case, as I may have told you.’
Francis Thompson was a young child when he complained to his doting mother about why only his sisters were allowed dolls. Finally his mother relented and he was given a series of dolls. None of them lasted very long, after being subject to his particular method of play. A method that would be of particular interest to child psychologists today. Of one doll in particular, which he had become overtly fond of, Thompson would write many years later,'
‘With another doll of much personal attraction, I was on the terms of intimate affection, till a murderous impulse of scientific curiosity incited me to open her head, that I might investigate what her brains were like. The shock which I then sustained has been a fruitful warning to me, I have never since looked for a beautiful girl’s brains.’
Psychologists, when studying subjects with passion for violence, will look at their childhood and signs of some trauma. Although some serial killers can have a perfectly uneventful upbringing, most have suffered or witnessed overt violence, causing deep-seated fear and aggression. In the case of Francis Thompson, such violence is not hard to find. It was not in the form of a sadistic father, drunken mother or beating. It revolved about an episode for which Francis Thompson could find no comparison apart from an apocalypse.
In May 1868, when Francis was almost nine years of age, he became part of a full-scale and bloody riot. In that year, an anti-Catholic agitator, named William Murphy, brought his propaganda to Ashton-under-Lyne. His rabble-rousing heralded a chain of events that would lead to violent ends. Murphy made a series of fiery speeches, expounding his hatred for Catholicism.
The Catholic religion to Protestants was then shrouded in mystery and secrecy. Fear of the unknown had caused wild rumours to spread. There were claims of a conspiracy headed by the Pope in Rome against the people of England; even worse, some said that the rites and rituals practiced by Catholics involved horrible acts including infanticide.
Murphy appealed to the largely Protestant crowd to riot against the Catholics. On 10th May, a mass of people rushed through streets attacking almost every Catholic house. Wielding hammers, hatchets and knives, the rioters wreaked havoc; furniture was overturned and household items and bedding were strewn onto the roads and gutters. Scores of people were shot and stabbed.
They included Thomas Summer, a clothier who suffered scalp wounds from a bullet while walking in Stamford Street, the street that Thompson lived. Dr Thompson would have been quickly summoned to treat the wounded in his back-room dispensary. It would have been impossible to shield his son from the carnage.
A large mob descended upon the two small Catholic churches of St Mary and St Anne. The interior of St Anne, in nearby Cavendish Street, was destroyed. The Manchester Guardian newspaper gave a detailed account of the damage,
‘The appearance of the chapel could not easily be forgotten by anyone who had the opportunity of seeing it shortly after the event. The floors in every part were strewn with broken glass, stones and brick-bats; benches were broken, pictures torn down and destroyed; a brass bell used in divine service had been taken from the alter steps and broken into fragments; an oil painting of the Sacred Heart was cut through and torn; a holy water font broken; the alter in the chapel dedicated to St Joseph destroyed and a figure of the saint removed and broken to pieces; and the whole of the canvas matting in the aisles had been taken up. The figure was seen to be carried off by one of the rioters and dashed to fragments against the street pavement.’
As houses continued to be broken into and people attacked, the Thompson family, with Francis in tow, ran with other parishioners to the comparative safety of the surviving church of St Mary. The enraged mob, who numbered almost 3,000, then attempted to storm the little church, while families, including the Thompsons, sealed the doors and mounted a guard inside.
The rioters attacked with bottles, stones, burning timber and gunshot. The constabulary could not control the crowds and the Riot Act was read. The siege continued and military personnel had to be called in. It took trained militia three days to quell the bloodshed. By the end of the chaos, 111 houses of the Catholic congregation had been broken into and gutted.
Such events might have sent any normal boy mad. There were no counsellors to comfort Francis. Neither were there the familiar faces of priests; for months the entire clergy, fearing for their lives, were obliged to leave town. Francis’s only relief was to turn to the pages of the bible for comfort, but the section, which he could not help returning to repeatedly, was the Apocalypse. This details the reign of the antichrist and the end of the world.
Francis Thompson had already concluded by the age of 10 that, ‘The world – the universe – is a fallen world.’ When he would grow up to write about these passages, it is little wonder that Thompson seems to recall the Ashton riot,
‘An appalling dream; insurgent darkness with wild lights flashing through it ... on the earth hurryings to-and-fro, like insects at a sudden candle; unknown voices uttering out of darkness darkened and disastrous speech; and all this in motion and turmoil ... Such is the “Apocalypse” as it inscribes itself on the verges of my childhood memories.’
‘With another doll of much personal attraction, I was on the terms of intimate affection, till a murderous impulse of scientific curiosity incited me to open her head, that I might investigate what her brains were like. The shock which I then sustained has been a fruitful warning to me, I have never since looked for a beautiful girl’s brains.’
Psychologists, when studying subjects with passion for violence, will look at their childhood and signs of some trauma. Although some serial killers can have a perfectly uneventful upbringing, most have suffered or witnessed overt violence, causing deep-seated fear and aggression. In the case of Francis Thompson, such violence is not hard to find. It was not in the form of a sadistic father, drunken mother or beating. It revolved about an episode for which Francis Thompson could find no comparison apart from an apocalypse.
In May 1868, when Francis was almost nine years of age, he became part of a full-scale and bloody riot. In that year, an anti-Catholic agitator, named William Murphy, brought his propaganda to Ashton-under-Lyne. His rabble-rousing heralded a chain of events that would lead to violent ends. Murphy made a series of fiery speeches, expounding his hatred for Catholicism.
The Catholic religion to Protestants was then shrouded in mystery and secrecy. Fear of the unknown had caused wild rumours to spread. There were claims of a conspiracy headed by the Pope in Rome against the people of England; even worse, some said that the rites and rituals practiced by Catholics involved horrible acts including infanticide.
Murphy appealed to the largely Protestant crowd to riot against the Catholics. On 10th May, a mass of people rushed through streets attacking almost every Catholic house. Wielding hammers, hatchets and knives, the rioters wreaked havoc; furniture was overturned and household items and bedding were strewn onto the roads and gutters. Scores of people were shot and stabbed.
They included Thomas Summer, a clothier who suffered scalp wounds from a bullet while walking in Stamford Street, the street that Thompson lived. Dr Thompson would have been quickly summoned to treat the wounded in his back-room dispensary. It would have been impossible to shield his son from the carnage.
A large mob descended upon the two small Catholic churches of St Mary and St Anne. The interior of St Anne, in nearby Cavendish Street, was destroyed. The Manchester Guardian newspaper gave a detailed account of the damage,
‘The appearance of the chapel could not easily be forgotten by anyone who had the opportunity of seeing it shortly after the event. The floors in every part were strewn with broken glass, stones and brick-bats; benches were broken, pictures torn down and destroyed; a brass bell used in divine service had been taken from the alter steps and broken into fragments; an oil painting of the Sacred Heart was cut through and torn; a holy water font broken; the alter in the chapel dedicated to St Joseph destroyed and a figure of the saint removed and broken to pieces; and the whole of the canvas matting in the aisles had been taken up. The figure was seen to be carried off by one of the rioters and dashed to fragments against the street pavement.’
As houses continued to be broken into and people attacked, the Thompson family, with Francis in tow, ran with other parishioners to the comparative safety of the surviving church of St Mary. The enraged mob, who numbered almost 3,000, then attempted to storm the little church, while families, including the Thompsons, sealed the doors and mounted a guard inside.
The rioters attacked with bottles, stones, burning timber and gunshot. The constabulary could not control the crowds and the Riot Act was read. The siege continued and military personnel had to be called in. It took trained militia three days to quell the bloodshed. By the end of the chaos, 111 houses of the Catholic congregation had been broken into and gutted.
Such events might have sent any normal boy mad. There were no counsellors to comfort Francis. Neither were there the familiar faces of priests; for months the entire clergy, fearing for their lives, were obliged to leave town. Francis’s only relief was to turn to the pages of the bible for comfort, but the section, which he could not help returning to repeatedly, was the Apocalypse. This details the reign of the antichrist and the end of the world.
Francis Thompson had already concluded by the age of 10 that, ‘The world – the universe – is a fallen world.’ When he would grow up to write about these passages, it is little wonder that Thompson seems to recall the Ashton riot,
‘An appalling dream; insurgent darkness with wild lights flashing through it ... on the earth hurryings to-and-fro, like insects at a sudden candle; unknown voices uttering out of darkness darkened and disastrous speech; and all this in motion and turmoil ... Such is the “Apocalypse” as it inscribes itself on the verges of my childhood memories.’
Copyright © Richard Patterson (2020)