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Originally Posted by
Colin Wilkinson
It has taken a long time but at last Tom's book on Jack the Ripper is now in the shops. At 400 pages, it is a pretty heavy read but I look forward to hearing people's opinions in due course. There will always be new theories on who was the Ripper but Tom has a very original take which has drawn admiration from Richard Whittington-Egan, widely recognised as one of the foremost Ripperologists in the world.
Review in
Ripperologist No. 116, September 2010
JACK THE RIPPER: BRITISH INTELLIGENCE AGENT?
Tom Slemen with Keith Andrews
Introduction by Richard Whittington-Egan
Liverpool: The Bluecoat Press, 2010
Softcover, illus, index, 381pp
£8.99
Tom Slemen has chronicled Liverpool’s weird and wonderful paranormal past for a long time, penning a series of popular books and a regular column for the
Liverpool Echo. They are great fun, but it has to be said that rigorous factual analysis and historical accuracy don’t appear to be among his highest priorities, and one didn’t really expect
Jack the Ripper: British Intelligence Agent? to bring us any nearer to the identity of Jack the Ripper.
And the book met one’s expectations.
Slemen’s theory that Claude Reignier Conder (1848-1910) was Jack the Ripper has been kicking around for over a decade and the book promised for almost as long, so researchers have had an opportunity to see if the idea has legs, and it hasn’t, not as far as folk could see, but with the instinctive desire to champion the underdog, one really hoped that Slemen had some eye-popping evidence, or at worst a compelling argument. Sadly
Jack the Ripper: British Intelligence Agent? is the damp squib one thought it would be. It’s a moderately enjoyable read, but it isn’t serious history.
The basic theory is that all the Ripper’s victims were somehow implicated in Fenian and Anarchist activities and were murdered by Conder, a trained assassin.
Conder was born in Cheltenham and after being educated at University College London and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, he carried out survey work in Palestine, where he became a friend of Kitchener and Charles Warren. He twice undertook surveys for the Palestine Exploration Fund and in later years wrote several scholarly works. According to Slemen, it was when working for the Palestine Exploration Fund that Conder acted as an intelligence agent for the British, but if that was ever the case it was purely in the capacity of collecting topographical information. There appears to be little or no reason to suppose that Conder was ever or would ever have been employed as an assassin.
This
prima facie daft idea is compounded by Slemen’s claim that the Ripper’s victims were subdued by the murderer using pressure points, something a killer trained in martial arts would know how to locate. Slemen supposes that Conder had martial arts training, but as far as facts are concerned, there’s no evidence that Conder could karate chop through a paper bag.
Other ‘evidence’ implicating Conder is a claim that the murderer carved glyphs from the Moabite language on Eddowes’ face. Why he should have done that isn’t clear, and the significance of said glyphs is equally obscure, as is the claim that ‘Juwe’ is a Manchu word meaning two. Equally, of course, it was a misspelling of Jews.
Thankfully there’s an index, but notes and a list of sources would have been appreciated.
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