I had planned
set the third instalment of my George ‘Zulu’ Hart series in South Africa. This
changed when my editor suggested a switch from imperial adventure to crime.
What better location for that, I thought, than London. I just needed a good
reason for a decorated war hero like George Hart VC to return to the UK. He
might, for example, have been asked to protect a member of the British royal
family who was in some type of danger. But had such a person really existed and
what was the threat?
A quick search
gave me the answers: the most troublesome royal of the 1880s was not Bertie,
the womanising Prince of Wales, but his eldest son Prince Albert Victor
Christian Edward, known to his family and friends as Eddy. An extremely
handsome young man with an inordinately long neck (hence his nickname ‘Collars
and cuffs’), Eddy was also a poor scholar with a short attention span. To
toughen him up, Eddy was sent on a round the world trip with his younger
brother George before going up to Cambridge and eventually joining the 10th
Hussars. As a young officer he was suspected of harbouring dark secrets that
included a liking for young men of ‘questionable morals’, gay brothels and the
dubious pleasures of the slums of London’s Whitechapel.
He was
implicated, for example, in the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889: the
revelation that teenage telegraph boys were working as male prostitutes at a
private members’ club at 19 Cleveland Street in Fitzrovia, with patrons said to
include Lord Arthur Somerset, the Prince of Wales’s Master of Horse, and Prince
Eddy himself. With this as the historical background, it seemed entirely
plausible to me that George would be given the task of shadowing Eddy and
keeping him out of trouble.
But I needed
more jeopardy, and I found it in the revelation that the most serious threat to
VIPs in 1880s London was from Irish Republican terrorists known as Fenians, the
Victorian forerunners to the IRA. It was to deal with this threat that
the Special Irish Branch of the Metropolitan Police (later just the Special
Branch) had been formed in 1883. But for most of that decade the danger of
bombings and assassinations in London was very real: in 1884, during the height
of the mainland bombing campaign, Old Scotland Yard itself was targeted. So why
not Eddy? And if Eddy really was at risk from the Fenians, it made sense that
an additional role for George would be de facto bodyguard.
I now had two
plot strands in place. But how could I weave them together? Again, history
provided the answer. A combination of Eddy’s probable homosexuality, habit of
visiting Whitechapel and untimely death in 1891, has caused some recent writers
to suspect he was Jack the Ripper, the perpetrator of the brutal series of
prostitute murders that rocked the East End in 1888. Eddy first entered
the frame in ‘Jack the Ripper – A Solution?’, an article by eminent physician
Dr T. E. A. Stowell that appeared in the Criminologist in 1970. Stowell’s
theory is that Eddy contracted syphilis on his world cruise and it was during
the periodic fits of madness brought on by this illness that he killed his
victims.
The theory has
been repeated and embellished by various writers, and is not without some
foundation. As newly discovered letters reveal (Daily Mail, 26 February 2016), Eddy was receiving treatment in 1885
and 1886 (and possibly later) for a venereal disease like gonorrhoea that he
probably caught from a prostitute.
This gave me my
third, and most important, plot strand: the gradual emergence of evidence that
seems to link the Prince to the Whitechapel Murders. But could Eddy, George
asks himself, really be Jack the Ripper? There is only one way for him to find
out: and that is to join forces with an East End-born CID detective, Jack
Fletcher, and a beautiful young prostitute (who, it will transpire, has links
to the Fenians), in an attempt to trap the killer and, hopefully, exonerate the
Prince.
Does he succeed?
You’ll have to read the book to find out.
The Prince and the Whitechapel Murders (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) by Saul David is
published on 22 February 2018. See more of Saul at www.sauldavid.co.uk and
on Twitter: @sauldavid66
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