Donald Swanson

Chief Inspector Donald Swanson

Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson (1848 - 24 November 1924) was born in Thurso in Scotland, and was a senior police officer in the Metropolitan Police in London during the notorious Jack the Ripper murders of 1888.

Early life

The son of John Swanson, a brewer, Swanson was a good scholar and on leaving school he worked for a period as a teacher, but realising that that career offered him few prospects, he decided instead to join the Police.

Police career

Swanson joined the Metropolitan Police on 27 April 1868, and was given the warrant number 50282. He married his wife Julia (born c.1854) in 1878 at West Ham in Essex. By November 1887 Swanson was Chief Inspector of the CID in the Commissioner's Office at Scotland Yard. He was promoted to Superintendent in 1896. Swanson was involved in preventing Fenian terrorist attacks in London during the 1870s and 1880s. Other cases he was involved in include recovering the stolen jewels of Lady Dysart and a stolen Gainsborough painting, as well as acting against 'rent boys', blackmailing homosexual prostitutes in 1897, and in preventing the Jameson Raid from starting a war in South Africa.^[1] He arrested Percy Lefroy Mapleton,^[2] the railway murderer, in 1881.^[3] He retired in 1903.

Swanson died on 24 November 1924 at 3 Presburg Road, New Malden, Surrey. He was buried at Kingston Cemetery.

Jack the Ripper

Dr. Robert Anderson, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), placed Swanson in overall charge of the investigation into the Whitechapel Murders from 1 September to 6 October 1888. Swanson was freed from all other duties and given his own office at Scotland Yard from which to co-ordinate inquiries. He was given permission to see "every paper, every document, every report [and] every telegram" concerning the investigation.^[4] In this way Swanson gained a mass of knowledge and information about the killings.

The 'Swanson Marginalia'

Swanson was a close friend of Dr. Robert Anderson, the Assistant Commissioner of Police, and in his copy of Anderson's book of reminiscences, The Lighter Side of My Official Life, published in 1910, Swanson wrote pencilled notes, or annotations, which were disclosed by his descendant, James Swanson, in 1987. In these notes Swanson names a "Kosminski" (widely thought to be Aaron Kosminski) as the Polish Jew that Anderson had hinted at in his book as being a suspect. Anderson wrote that the only person to get a close look at Jack the Ripper identified him "the moment he was confronted with him" but refused to testify. Swanson clarified this by writing -

"...because the suspect was also a Jew and also because his evidence would convict the suspect, and witness would be the means of murderer being hanged which he did not wish to be left on his mind...And after this identification which suspect knew, no other murder of this kind took place in London...after the suspect had been identified at the Seaside Home where he had been sent by us with great difficulty in order to subject him to identification, and he knew he was identified. On suspect's return to his brother's house in Whitechapel he was watched by police (City CID) by day & night. In a very short time the suspect with his hands tied behind his back, he was sent to Stepney Workhouse and then to Colney Hatch and died shortly afterwards - Kosminski was the suspect - DSS"^[5]

While it is true that Kosminski lived with his brother in Whitechapel, and that he was an inmate at Colney Hatch, he in fact did not die shortly after being transferred there, as Swanson states; in fact, Kosminski died in 1919, and therefore was still alive when Swanson wrote his annotations. Nor is it likely that an identified and homicidal criminal would have been simply and quietly released into his brother's care. Also, by stating that after Kosminski's identification as the Whitechapel Murderer "no other murder of this kind took place in London" Swanson overlooks the series of Ripper-like killings that took place after Kosminski's incarceration, including that of Frances Coles in February 1891, only six days after Kosminski had been admitted to Colney Hatch.

The identity of the Jewish witness is considerably doubtful. As far as is known, there were only two, Joseph Lawende and Israel Schwartz. Joseph Lawende saw a man and a woman together near Mitre Square, Aldgate, a few minutes before the fourth victim Catharine Eddowes was found there but told Swanson that he was doubtful if he would recognise the man if he saw him again. Israel Schwartz saw the third victim Elizabeth Stride attacked at the place where fifteen minutes later her body was found. Stride's assailant - when he saw Schwartz approaching him and recognised him as a Jew - sent him on his way with the popular anti-Semitic taunt of those times "Lipski". Israel Lipski was a Jewish murderer who had been hanged in 1887 and hostile Gentiles had taken to insulting Jews by shouting his name at them. Stride's attacker was obviously an anti-Semitic Gentile and therefore not Kosminski.

"Kosminski" is also mentioned in Sir Melville Macnaghten's Memoranda in a list of three individuals who were suspected of being the Ripper. Macnaghten, however, thought that Montague Druitt was more likely to be the killer, and he did not mention anything about any alleged identification of Kosminski that was withdrawn by a witness. That was strange because Macnaghten was an Assistant Chief Constable in the Criminal Investigation Department and Anderson was in charge of that department. Kosminski was sent to Colney Hatch Asylum, via the Mile End Old Town asylum, in February 1891, and we may suppose that the identification at the "seaside home" took place a little earlier, perhaps in January of that year. Macnaghten went to Scotland Yard in 1889 and so would have been there when the identification took place. Quite obviously he was not told about it and, if Anderson was confident that Kosminski had been the Ripper, he would have thought that there was no reason for Macnaghten to compile his memoranda, speculating about the Ripper's identity. Of the three men suspected at the time of the murders, Magnaghten thought Druitt was the most likely but in 1972, two years before she died, she told her friend Michael Thornton that in nominating Druitt her father was "only following the official line. The truth could make the throne totter." Thornton reported this in the Sunday Express in 1992.^[6]

References

External references

• Swanson on the Casebook: Jack the Ripper website
• Swanson and Kosminski on the Metropolitan Police website
• Swanson in The National Archives
• Handwriting analysis of the Swanson Marginalia
• The Swanson Marginalia in 'The Times'
• The Swanson Marginalia in 'The Independent'