M by Andrew Cook Page B

Metropolitan Police. These proved both unpopular and ultimately counter-productive. The height requirement for CID entry was arbitrarily raised to five feet nine inches, as though there were some correlation between height and cunning. Uniformed constables could be fined a stupendous £50 (approaching a year’s pay) for being caught with a glass of beer when on duty. If they exerted their authority and made a mistake they risked being hauled before superior officers and dropping a ‘class’. As it could take eight years to get from one ‘class’ to another and gain a pay increase of twenty per cent, this did not seem a punishment proportionate to the offence.
    Melville, in France, was fortunately spared most of this. He could still work autonomously, reporting directly to Littlechild.
    In London police morale was low; police officers were entirely demotivated and assertive action by the force, from murder investigation to crowd control, was disastrously affected. So disastrously, in fact, that with the Jack the Ripper killings of September and October the public began to grow restive and the Queen feared ‘that the detective department is not so efficient as it might be’. In October the Pall Mall Gazette printed an article that could only have been inspired by Monro, banished to some Home Office backwater but fighting hard. It demonstrated intimate knowledge of Scotland Yard and was entirely unsympathetic to Warren.
    Warren at last resigned on 10 November, the day after the final Ripper murder. There had, according to historical consensus, been five Whitechapel murders between 31 August (the date of Monro’s official departure) and 9 November. During this time Anderson had been occupied with the Parnell Commission as it looked into the truth of the allegations in The Times linking Parnell to the dynamitards. Matthews privately dismissed him as ‘a tout for The Times’.
    Monro emerged from his exile at the Home Office. On 24 November, the Cabinet having discussed his candidacy at length, his name was submitted to Queen Victoria who was graciously pleased to appoint him Commissioner.
    Anderson was officially, and openly, Assistant Commissioner in charge of CID. With Monro’s guidance in navigating the waters of ‘ordinary’ crime as well as political crime, he got on top of the job.
    The Metropolitan Police breathed a collective sigh of relief and the line of communication between the four-man Special Branch, the Assistant Commissioner and the Home Office once again included the Commissioner.
    Had it been generally known that the man strongly suspected of being Jack the Ripper had been in police custody in November, but had been allowed, probably by men working for the CID, to escape, there would have been an outcry. Francis Tumblety’s position as chief suspect had been common knowledge in the United States in his lifetime. In England it did not emerge in public for over a hundred years. Even then it came into the light of day only after years of dogged research sparked off by the discovery of a letter from Littlechild.
    In 1912, in retirement, the ex-Chief Inspector explained in a private letter to a journalist that Tumblety, a fifty-five-year-old American ‘quack’ doctor who was in London at the time, was very likely the culprit. 20 He was a homosexual abortionist and a violent misogynist. He practised what he called ‘Indian medicine’, using herbs and potions and carrying out abortions, all over America. He never stayed in one place for long and always had plenty of money. His appearance was flamboyant and his conversation full of hatred and violence towards women. He used aliases – and decades before at the time of President Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth had used the name Booth, which, allied with his general eccentricity, had been enough to get him arrested, briefly. While living in Washington DC during the 1860s he owned