Swansea Jack (The Ripper..?!?)

Jack the Ripper is perhaps this country's most famous murderer, and almost certainly it's most famous serial killer. The agreed upon victims (historians love a good dispute) killed in the autumn of 1888, were Mary Ann 'Polly' Nichols, Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, Elizabeth Stride and Mary 'Marie Jeanette' Kelly.

The identity of the Ripper is something that has been debated ever since the murder spree in Whitechapel in 1888, a fascinating book - The Fifth Victim by Antonia Alexander - suggests that Jack was a prominent Welsh doctor, Sir John Williams, who originally came from the Swansea valleys.


Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Sir John Williams was an obstetrician/gynaecologist who also worked for the royal family. A difficult man to like personally, one of the few people who did like John in a social sense was Queen Victoria. John Williams continued to preside over births within the royal family into the 20th Century - including the birth of the current Queen's father. A prestigious man then, as well as a Freemason, who would probably have seemed above suspicion at the time of the Whitechapel murders.

Antonia Alexander is a direct descendant of Mary Kelly (well, sort of, but I'm not giving the ending of the book away, you'd have to read all the way to the last couple of pages for the final twist in this fascinating tale,) who had been having an affair with Sir John Williams since before he left for London, leaving her family in Swansea behind to follow him there.

The story is certainly a compelling one, and Antonia Alexander puts forward some very persuasive arguments. It has to be remembered however that Ms Alexander wants the evidence to fit in with her view of what happened, and as such this is a subjective, rather than objective, view of the facts.

If Sir John Williams were still alive today, the evidence Ms Alexander puts forward would not be enough to secure a conviction - it would definitely be enough for an arrest though. Not least, the fact that several of the victims seemed to have a connection to the Whitechapel workhouse infirmary, where John Williams worked on a voluntary basis, and the fact that many of the pages of his diary of 1888 have been systematically removed.
The book itself is slow to start - personally, I could have done without the story of how the author met her husband, but I suppose that to some people it would make it more accessible. And I do personally find it a little stylistically irritating that Ms Alexander is constantly speculating without pointing out that she is doing such - but again, that's just me.

Sir John Williams lived into the 1920s, returning to Wales from London to become a prominent figure in Welsh society. He founded the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, and was present at many prestigious social functions. At one such event, he sat at the table of the man the dinner was to honour - David Lloyd George, along with one of my own (very distant) relatives, a man named Lewis Morgan who was Lord Mayor of Cardiff at the time. Although, this dinner isn't mentioned in the book, it's something I came across in my own research trawling through old newspaper articles.

Whether John Williams was Jack the Ripper or just another in a long line of suspects may never be known, but it certainly makes for one 'helluva' story!