One of the most popular of all Ripper suspects,
Montague Druitt appears on the surface an unlikely
killer. Born into a comfortable bourgeois family, he was
educated at New College, Oxford, qualified for the Bar
and played cricket for a number of strong club sides.
But, there was another side to the agreeable Mr Druitt.
He moved in the artistic and aristocratic circles that
overlapped with London's secretive homosexual culture,
was summarily dismissed from his post at a boys' school,
and a few weeks later was found drowned in the Thames,
just months after the Jack the Ripper murders. Six years
later, Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaughten named
Druitt as the murderer and gave the unhappy barrister a
kind of immortality. D. J. Leighton has dug deep into
the background to Druitt's unhappy life and uncovered a
web of intriguing connections linking the eldest son of
the heir to the throne, the Cambridge Apostles, Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf and the cricketing
legend Prince Kumar Ranjitsinhji. The book is a
fascinating period piece that deftly weaves together the
criminal, sporting, aristocratic and homosexual worlds
of late nineteenth-century London, in search of the
truth behind Macnaughten's surprising allegations. This
book is an excellent piece of period crime history with
a Jack the Ripper setting. It is a colourful Victorian
underworld story, mixing high society with scandal, the
golden age of amateur cricket and murder. It is the
authoritative debunking of the case for Druitt as Jack
the Ripper. It features and reviews potential in
"Ripperologist" and other period crime magazines, and
also in cricketing press. It has a strong local interest
in Blackheath, where Druitt worked and played the key
cricket matches that rule him out as a Ripper suspect.
D. J. Leighton is a retired director of the Portals
Group with a lifelong interest in cricket, from which
his interest in the Druitt case arose.
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