Recent reads - Jack the Ripper (again), Britain in the early Seventies and a Biblical travelogue (of sorts)

I’ll start this post, about three factual works that I have recently read, by saying that I really should stop reading books about Jack the Ripper. It’s not exactly a healthy subject to obsess about. After the latest Ripper book, I think I’m done on that subject for now. It was Jack the Ripper: The 21^st Century Investigation by Trevor Marriott, an ex-copper who was bigged up by the blurb as a ‘top Murder Squad detective’ who ‘reveals the Ripper’s true identity at last’; that last bit is used, with slight variations, for the blurb on almost all books about the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 so I didn’t exactly have high hopes. There followed a re-hash of the murders (I really am not sure if there’s much new that can be said here, but every Ripper murder book must of course cover this very well-trod ground – although to his credit, Marriott does at least suggest that there were victims beyond the ‘canonical’ five) before an admittedly entertaining set of chapters about the more prominent suspects (Montague Druitt, James Maybrick, the Duke of Clarence, etc, etc) in which the cases against each of them were taken apart. Marriott was somewhat put out that he wasn’t able to use his police contacts to have a go on HOLMES, the modern crime-recording database – he must’ve hated the recent BBC documentary, Jack the Ripper: The Case Reopened, in which Emilia Fox was allowed to do just that. Marriott’s eventual hypothesis was that the murderer might have been a sailor on one of the many ships in London’s docks which were not far from Whitechapel – not original, but it’s interesting how he’s able to research this (there’s not as much evidence as he’d hoped) and I like how he brought in the international angle – there were reports in the years immediately after 1888 of similar crimes in Germany and Nicaragua, although how much of that may or may not have been true is debatable (as with any Ripper study, Marriott is as quick to disregard any evidence that doesn’t support his theory as he is solid in his defence of the evidence that does). The ‘Ripper’ in this study turned out to be a German sailor who murdered his landlady in New York in 1894 and who, after being found guilty, met his end in the electric chair two years later. Apparently his lawyer thought he might have been Jack the Ripper. I’m not really convinced – we’ve had theories about Ripper suspects ending up getting done for different murders before. This, ultimately, was not the best of Ripper reads (Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed, which also tried to use modern investigatory techniques and came up with a very different but equally unprovable suspect, has the merit of being much better written), while I take my leave of Ripper speculation with a thought that maybe, given recent events involving Russia, the old one about the Ripper being a Russian agent acting to discredit the British police might be due a re-airing.

Moving to more recent history, I’ve encountered Dominic Sandbrook before. He’s the revisionist historian who wrote four books detailing British history – not just the politics, but a bit of everything including society, economics, popular culture, etc – between the Suez Crisis and the election of Mrs Thatcher. I read them out of order, of course, starting with the last one (Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979). I liked that one so much that I went back to the beginning and enjoyed the first one (Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles), then immersed myself in the second (White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties). And so to the third – State of Emergency: The Way We Were, 1970-1974. The early Seventies in Britain were strange times indeed and Sandbrook, true to form, immerses the reader in this period which saw strikes, moral panics over the country’s youth (a recurring theme in Sandbrook’s books, the only thing apparently new about the skinheads being that they dressed different from the Teddy boys from just over a decade beforehand), all hell breaking loose in Northern Ireland, more strikes, a Home Secretary seemingly permanently drunk (stagger forward, Reggie Maudling), several decent sitcoms and massive cultural change while there was a PM who had a grand piano installed in Downing Street (Ted Heath, of whose various faults the worst seems by this account to have been a run of appallingly bad luck). Everything, right down to children’s TV shows (and the accompanying concern that kids were watching too much TV), football hooliganism and popular fiction (in particular Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man which, although published in ’75, is used as a prism here to explore radical chic) gets a look-in here; even life in the suburbs, much maligned at the time, gets a more positive going-over. As with Sandbrook’s other works, things draw to a grand climax in which events and themes previously mentioned draw together as a government teeters on the brink; here, it’s the Heath government declaring a state of emergency for the fourth time (yes, really) as Britain, in economic trouble even before the oil crisis of ’73, lurches into the Three-Day Week in which electricity was limited to conserve energy supplies (and, guess what, people panic-bought toilet paper). Worth a read, even if you haven’t read any other books in the series!

And then there’s Apostle: Travels to the Tombs of the Twelve by an American travel writer called Tom Bissell. The clue’s in the title – Bissell has taken it upon himself to visit the tombs (or sites of the tombs) of Jesus’s disciples. As travelogues go it’s an interesting challenge and Bissell – who kicks off by saying that he comes to this as a lapsed Catholic – has really done his homework in the arcane subject of who the twelve Apostles were (the four Gospels are not exactly in universal agreement here), what happened to them and where they ended up. Obviously in some cases their remains ultimately found their way to more than one place and some of this is highly disputed, but Bissell picks one site for each one and goes there to see what he can find out (the sites in question may raise some eyebrows – the site of an obscure monastery in Kyrgyzstan as opposed to Salerno Cathedral for St Matthew, for example, though what with several of the disciples being buried in Rome I guess he chose a site outside Italy for a bit of variation). On the way, he displays some impressively in-depth theological learning, sometimes perhaps too in-depth while in places he does tend to lose patience with the people he meets (his travels occurred over the course of several years, and at one point he notes that it was four years until he met ‘a person visiting a Christian church who knew something about Christianity’). He’s at his best in the first chapter, to be honest – visiting Jerusalem in an attempt to find the place where Judas Iscariot hanged himself – and by the end it seems like he’s running out of steam, devoting a mere four-and-a-bit pages to his pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostela. A promising premise and plenty of insights, overall it’s more solidly good than anything else.

Endeavour - the seventh series, one episode in

(WARNING: Here be spoilers – perhaps it’s best you don’t read this until you’ve watched ‘Oracle’, the first episode of the seventh series of Endeavour which was broadcast on Sunday…)

I was greatly looking forward to the new (seventh) series of Endeavour, the Inspector Morse prequel which follows the early years of Colin Dexter’s great detective. Various interviews with people involved have stated that we are reaching the end of Endeavour’s run, although as an eighth series has already been commissioned by ITV it seems to be a case of not just yet. The original show ran for a total of 33 episodes, as did its sequel Lewis; the current series of Endeavour has just three episodes which will brings the prequel’s total up to 30, so I think we can safely assume that there will be a further three episodes next year and then that will be, as they say, that. Shame, but nothing lasts forever.

Fan of Morse that I am, I’ve always been pleased when younger versions of characters from the original series turned up in Endeavour (spotting them has been almost as much fun as spotting the many references to films and other British TV shows that have cropped in Endeavour from time to time). With not much left of Endeavour’s run, I wonder about a few seemingly prominent characters from Morse’s early life that have yet to appear. What of McNutt, mentioned as Morse’s mentor but in Endeavour seemingly reduced to a passing mention in favour of Fred Thursday, so wonderfully played by Roger Allam? What of Roland Marshall from the cricket episode? Or that curiously-named Machiavellian academic Clixby Bream? Most of all, what of Hugo de Vries, the con-man who was out to get Morse in one of the best episodes of the lot? 

(On a more superficial note, I was hoping that at some point we’d see Morse driving a Lancia as that was mentioned as his car of choice in the earlier novels before he got the trademark Jag, but I’ve resigned myself to the fact that that probably won’t happen!)

In the world of Endeavour, it’s now 1970 and the new series kicked off with Morse seeing in the new decade in style, off to Venice for a night at the opera and getting lucky with the sultry brunette in the next box; compare that to Fred and Win Thursday who dined on chicken-in-a-basket at the WMC back in Oxford. Venice! Quite how a sergeant in a provincial police force who’s just bought a house can afford such a high-end break is a mystery in itself although to be fair, the house is very much a fixer-upper.

Elsewhere, the new year bought another murder, that of a barmaid by a canal – Oxford, not Venice – while another barmaid was acting a bit strangely.

In the first episode, the parallels between Venice and Oxford were played up for all they were worth, what with the waterways of La Serenissima contrasting with the Oxford Canal and a lingering shot of the Hertford Bridge, that bridge in Oxford that’s known as the Bridge of Sighs even though the Venetian bridge it actually resembles is the Rialto. Given this and the fact that the unmurdered barmaid was displaying seemingly psychic abilities in an early Seventies setting, Don’t Look Now obviously came to mind. Perhaps ‘Canal’ would have been a better title than ‘Oracle’?

To be honest, I’m not quite sure where the show was going with the psychic angle – both barmaids, it turned out, were test subjects in a serious university research project into extra-sensory perception, although that aside here was a typically back-biting academic set-up (are there any other sorts in the world of Morse? Perhaps surprisingly, this one was not associated with Lonsdale College). This being 1970, there was a heady dose of outright sexism; the men (headed by a professor who wouldn’t let his wife sign the cheques) were resentful of the fact that their department’s token woman, Dr Benford, got the Open University-style TV job they’d all auditioned for. Alas, she did not make it to the end of the episode.

In one of the more predictable murder cases that have come Morse’s way, the sexist prof turned out to be the murderer of poor Dr Benford, although the motive was unrequited love rather than professional jealousy and the fact that she knew something about the canal murder (actually, she knew someone – the apparently psychic barmaid – who reckoned she knew something). The canal murder which had kicked off the episode remained to all intents and purposes unsolved by the end – the psychic storyline was left hanging along with talk of a flasher operating along the canal (how very Seventies) and hints from the redoubtable Dorothea Frazil about cruelty to cats (hope the Castle Gate CID chaps catch that perpetrator). Then, just before the closing credits, a person unknown did for the flasher; clearly, we have a story arc…

More interesting was the character development. Fred Thursday, more cynical and much greyer than before under the trilby, is clearly feeling the strain – with Morse away in Venice, his investigation into the barmaid’s murder was decidedly slipshod (fingering the boyfriend as the murderer in the face of a seemingly decent alibi). Then he went and bought a couple of canaries (a bit random, that) and snapped at Win for no good reason (speaking of Thursday’s domestic arrangements, things have clearly changed as Win no longer makes his sandwiches, and when Fred had a go he made a mess of it; a good bit of realism, that, for many is the occasion when I’ve not done a good job of that task when the butter’s been too cold). Perhaps the events of the previous series, when he went a bit Gene Hunt by taking a bribe and beating up a suspect, have long-term consequences here (although, of course, he did give the money back). Anton Lesser got to do some pathos as Chief Superintendent Bright, nursing his dying wife (diagnosed with lung cancer in the previous series – what with all that smoking, I guess someone had to get that, just like Betty did in Mad Men) and worrying about his lack of faith in contrast the faith healers who’ve come round to pray with her.

Jim Strange, Morse’s future boss, has meanwhile reverted to type; having spent much of the previous series uncharacteristically pursuing the unofficial investigation into the murder of DC Fancy, he’s now back in careerist mode, berating Morse for taking crime scene photos home with him (his further criticism of Morse for highlighting Thursday’s rather slipshod investigation methods with regards to the initial canal towpath murder may have be a bit wide of the mark, but that’s in keeping with Strange as a bureaucratic yes-man).

And Morse? First of all, thank God he’s ditched the ’tache; that just didn’t sit well, last series. Aside from decorating his new house and doing typically Morse things like solving the crossword and rubbing colleagues up the wrong way while being three steps ahead of everyone else when it comes to figuring out who’s been doing the murders, he started the episode with blood on his shirt. Whose blood? At the end of the episode, we viewers are none the wiser but no doubt there are a few ideas as to what this all means. Perhaps not unrelated to this, Morse seemingly has a new friend. After getting pick-pocketed at an open-air concert (dangerous places, those Oxford colleges) he met Ludo, who introduced himself as an old pal from their university days before wining and dining the detective.

The kicker at the end, which is clearly something that’s going to run for this short series at least, was the revelation that Ludo’s wife is Violetta, Morse’s Venetian love interest, but my mind was on something else. Racing away and jumping to a couple of conclusions, possibly in the style of Morse himself (albeit without the help of a couple of pints). The blood on the shirt – does that concern this love-triangle? And this Ludo feller  – a highly cultured man with an ingratiating style and a taste for fine wine. Could he, I wonder, be Hugo de Vries?

I may be wrong, of course (even Morse got it wrong, sometimes – that’s one of the great things about him as a fictional detective, the fact that he was allowed to do so). But, one episode in, I don’t think I am…

The ongoing story of the missing Earl

Over four decades after his disappearance, the seventh Earl of Lucan is still capable of generating newspaper headlines. This week it was announced that, as he is not known to have been alive for at least seven years, a death certificate has been issued under the terms of a recent law called the Presumption of Death Act; he had previously been declared dead for inheritance purposes in 1999. This has duly prompted The Times to (finally) publish his obituary, and it means that his son can now be referred to as Lucan’s eighth Earl. The story, though, does not end here.

The saga surrounding the Lucan case has many classic ingredients – a brutal murder in a domestic setting (of the sort that Orwell identified as being so fascinating to the English), a dramatic disappearance and, of course, that old British obsession that is the class system. Also involved in the saga are high-stakes gambling, a messy legal case, some tigers, various exotic locations, a fugitive MP and the whiff of an upper-class cover-up. Unsurprisingly, it’s been a subject of ongoing fascination and speculation for the press and public over the course of many years.

Lucan was as upper-class as they come – his ancestors included the man who issued the order for the Charge of the Light Brigade and a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. A tall, distinctive-looking man with slicked-back hair and a luxuriant moustache, he worked for a merchant bank and had a taste for gambling – initially for fun, but he left his job and became a professional gambler after a big win (which led to his nickname ‘Lucky’ – although in the long run he lost more than he won). Leading an extravagant lifestyle at the higher end of Sixties London society (he was a member of the Clermont Club, a potent mixture of aristocracy and new money), he was once rated as one of the best backgammon players in the world and is said to have been considered as a possible James Bond (the story goes that he was offered a screen test but turned it down).

He married Veronica Duncan in 1963 and although they had three children the marriage was not a happy one. By the early Seventies the couple had separated, and Lucan lost custody of the children in an acrimonious and costly legal battle which came at a time when his gambling debts were spiralling out of control. He took to spying on his estranged wife in an attempt to find something with which to discredit her, and on the night of Thursday 7^th November 1974 the family’s nanny, 29 year-old Sandra Rivett, was murdered at the Countess’s home in Belgravia.

The unfortunate Mrs Rivett really had been in the wrong place at the wrong time; she had been working for the Countess for several months and usually took Thursdays off, but that week she changed her hours and had taken the Wednesday off instead. Shortly before 9pm, she asked the Countess if she would like a cup of tea and headed to the basement kitchen to make one; there, she was bludgeoned to death with a piece of lead piping and her body hurriedly placed into a canvas mailbag.

When the Countess went to find out what was taking Mrs Rivett so long, she was herself attacked by the killer but she was able to escape and run, covered in blood and presumably in shock, to a nearby pub for help; she identified her estranged husband as her attacker. The general consensus was that Lucan had mistaken Mrs Rivett for his wife, and the evidence against him was so compelling that later, at the inquest, the jury would take the unusual step of naming him as the killer. By then, though, he had vanished. The last confirmed sighting of Lord Lucan was when he drove to the house of two of his friends in Sussex in the early hours of 8^th November; he told them that he happened to have been walking past the Countess’s house when he heard a fight taking place inside; he had gone to her aid, but been accused of hiring a hitman to kill her (he also stated this in a letter that he wrote to his brother-in-law). His car was found abandoned in the Channel port of Newhaven.

Many believe that Lucan took his own life there and then – probably by drowning, either by jumping from a cross-Channel ferry or by borrowing a boat, taking it out to sea and deliberately sinking it. There’s also a more outlandish suicide theory – that after speaking with his friends and deciding that there was no way out, he was left alone in a room with a gun. After he shot himself, his body was fed to the tigers at the zoo owned by his high-rolling friend John Aspinall (who’d founded the Clermont Club). This story has featured in the papers recently – an old member of the Clermont Club who had been told this story years ago finally broke his silence – but it was suggested at the time of Lucan’s disappearance by Aspinall’s mother (who, in one of those familial coincidences that so abound among the upper classes, also happened to be the current Chancellor’s grandmother). This was denied by Aspinall himself, though, who said that his animals were only fed on the best cuts of meat and wouldn’t have wanted to eat “stringy old Lucky”.

Then there’s the theory that he used his powerful connections to disappear abroad – and this is where the story has ran and ran, “increasingly slipping the bonds of fact for the realms of fantasy” (to quote the obit in yesterday’s Times). Sightings of the missing Earl have abounded over the years, although one of the earliest took a turn for the bizarre when an Englishman was arrested in Australia on suspicion of being Lord Lucan in December 1974. He turned out to be John Stonehouse, the Labour MP and Czech spy, who had faked his own death the previous month; interesting times, the Seventies (Stonehouse, by the way, was returned to Britain and eventually sent to prison for fraud, with his spying activities being covered up at the time and not publicly revealed until many years after he had actually died).

The continuing sightings over the years that followed made Lord Lucan the most famous British fugitive from justice. He was ‘seen’ in Colombia (that one turned out to be an American businessman) and Paraguay (hanging out with ex-Nazis!), hiking on Mount Etna and working as a waiter in both San Francisco and Greece. For years, a homeless British expat in New Zealand had to deny claims that he was the Earl (despite being several inches shorter). It has been alleged that he was flown out of England in an aircraft piloted by the racing driver Graham Hill. It was claimed that people working for his friends took him to Switzerland, where they deemed him to be a liability and killed him. In 1982 a self-styled bounty hunter claimed that he’d tracked Lucan down to Cuba, although a tabloid newspaper subsequently found out that he was a hoaxer. A Rolex watch believed to have been the Earl’s surfaced in South Africa, lending credence to apparent sightings in a hotel bar in Bostwana and in a clinic in Johannesburg.

It was also claimed that he lived out his days on a beach in India. This was the pet theory of an ex-Scotland Yard detective who in 2003 published a book, Dead Lucky, which claimed that a British hippy known as ‘Jungle Barry’ who had died in Goa in 1996 was the missing Earl. It was, however, quickly established that said hippy was in fact a distinctly un-aristocratic pub musician from St Helens.

In 2004, thirty years after Mrs Rivett’s murder, the police released a computer-generated image of how Lord Lucan might have looked had he still been alive (by which time he would have been 69); this featured in a Channel Four documentary, The Hunt for Lord Lucan, which suggested that the 1974 murder enquiry had been flawed – the crime-scene had been contaminated, and the investigation had proceeded from the start on the assumption of Lucan’s guilt despite concerns over the Countess’s reliability as a witness – and featured an interview with the Earl’s son who claimed that his mother had been mistaken in identifying his father as the man who attacked her. The Countess, who refused to be interviewed for the programme and was by that time estranged from her children, stuck by her original story and has always believed that her husband drowned himself; in a rare newspaper interview, she claimed that her husband was “not the sort of Englishman to cope abroad”.

Claims of some sort of cover-up have continued. In 2012 a former personal assistant to Aspinall claimed in an interview with the BBC that she was involved in helping Lucan to set up a new life in the West African state of Gabon, and that Aspinall and the businessman James Goldsmith (another Clermont member) later arranged to have two of Lucan’s children sent out there on false passports so that the fugitive Earl could see them, albeit from a distance (the children denied this, and it is worth noting that this claim was only made in public after both Aspinall and Goldsmith had been dead for several years; the latter was notoriously litigious and won a libel case against Private Eye in 1976 after the magazine had alleged that he and Aspinall had met after Lucan’s disappearance to discuss how they could hamper the police enquiries). At the same time, one of the detectives who worked on the Lucan case during the Eighties claimed that there had been two very credible sightings of Lucan in that decade (one of them in Africa) but he was denied the funding to follow them up.

Detectives who’ve been involved in the case have published books on the subject over the years, with titles like Looking for Lucan and Lucan Lives. In the case of the latter, the author had once been convinced that Lucan had drowned himself (and had publicly said so in 1975) but later, in the course of his working on the book, he visited Mozambique, Botswana and South Africa in a bid to track the missing Earl down. It is perhaps with studies like this in mind that the eighth Earl once commented that: “I get a little tired when former Scotland Yard detectives at the end of their careers get commissions to write books which happen to send them to sunny locations around the world.”

Despite his having been declared to be the killer of Mrs Rivett by the coroner (a highly unusual occurrence which later led to a change in the law preventing killers from being named at inquests, for fear of prejudicing any future trial), the fact remains that Lucan never stood trial. The murder of Mrs Rivett has, therefore, never been solved. Most studies of the case, though, have worked on the assumption of Lucan’s guilt (although there has been a book with the intriguing title of Lucan: Not Guilty which makes the case for the defence).

One aspect of the story that always seems to have taken a back seat is the victim herself; for all the talk of the upper-class fugitive Earl not much is said of the working-class murdered nanny. The publicity surrounding the issuing of the death certificate has been unusual in that for once, a relative of hers has featured prominently. Neil Berriman, Mrs Rivett’s son (he was given up for adoption some time before the murder, and only learned who his mother was when he was an adult), has stated that he believes that Lucan planned to kill the Countess but hired a hitman to do it; the hitman, not Lucan, killed the wrong woman. He also claims to have seen a police document stating that Lucan was alive as recently as 2002 (the eighth Earl, by contrast, believes that his father died soon after the murder).

The story doesn’t end here. Mr Berriman, who has declined to produce the police document to which he referred, has stated that there are unnamed individuals “withholding evidence and not telling the truth … I do feel and hope that the Lucan mystery will be at a possible end in 12 to 14 months time through new evidence and lines on enquiry.” It seems that, even though Lucan’s family has now got legal closure with the death certificate, the saga surrounding Lord Lucan and the murder of Sandra Rivett has not finished yet.