Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld by Theo Aronson

Author:Theo Aronson [Aronson, Theo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 156619993X
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2013-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

That Montague Druitt was not only a member of this particular barristers’ inner circle but that he actually knew Prince Eddy seems to be indicated by the fact that when the Prince paid a visit to Lord and Lady Wimborne in Dorset that year, Montague Druitt – who lived in London, and not his elder brother William who lived in nearby Bournemouth – was invited to a ball in his honour. One can only assume that the Wimbornes knew of the Prince’s friendship with Montague Druitt.

This is not the place to follow the reasoning by which Druitt has become one of the chief suspects in the hunt for the Ripper’s identity. By the autumn of 1888, with the failure of his career as a barrister and his sudden dismissal from his teaching post, he had become a brooding and embittered man. There was insanity in the family: his mother, to whom he was devoted, was by now in a lunatic asylum. The one detailed description, by a young policeman, of the man who was undoubtedly the Ripper, is an uncannily accurate portrait of Druitt. As we have seen, he was the principal suspect of Sir Melville MacNaghten: the truth of the Ripper’s identity, the Assistant Commissioner afterwards declared, lay ‘at the bottom of the Thames’.19 What is certain is that once Druitt’s body, weighted down with four large stones, was fished out of the Thames on the last day of 1888, the hunt for the Ripper ceased. When Albert Bachert, a member of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, complained about the fact that the police seemed to be making no more effort to apprehend the Ripper, he was told, in strictest confidence, that ‘The man in question is dead. He was fished out of the Thames two months ago.’20

But why should Bachert have been sworn to secrecy? Surely the police would have been only too eager to broadcast the fact that the notorious Ripper had been caught. Druitt, on the face of it, was an obscure and unimportant person. What possible reason could there have been for this conspiracy of silence about him?

The theory is that any investigation into Druitt’s background would have led the police and, more importantly, the newspapers and the general public, straight into that circle of ambitious, socially prominent and, above all, homosexual members of the Establishment. Among their number were a private secretary to the Home Secretary, a future Lord Mayor of London, the sons of one of the country’s leading judges, and Harry Wilson himself, who had been marked out as a future private secretary to Prince Eddy. At the head of this band of ‘faithful servants of the Crown and State’ stood the future wearer of the Crown and the embodiment of the State – Prince Albert Victor, Heir Presumptive to the throne.21

In one of the dead Montague Druitt’s pockets was found the return half of a ticket from Charing Cross to Hammersmith – the nearest station to Chiswick Mall. The body itself, heavily weighted, was fished out of the Thames just yards from Harry Wilson’s ‘chummery’, The Osiers.

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