Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

purposes of conversation and good company, membership of the Savile Club was based on a man’s character and sociability. It comprised professionals drawn from all walks of life: actors, composers and writers; scientists, doctors, lawyers and politicians. All members were encouraged to talk with one another in the club, no matter who they were or what their social standing might be. They were expected to ‘leave their halos in the hall’.
    The Savile Club boasted many famous members, including Robert Louis Stevenson, author of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), the stage version of which played nightly to packed audiences at the Lyceum Theatre in London’s West End. So realistic was Richard Mansfield, the leading actor, in his transformation from good to evil, that he was once proposed as a Ripper suspect, though quickly dismissed as such.
    At the age of twenty-three, Rudyard Kipling had left his home in India, bound for England via America where he spent several months touring extensively. In Elmira, New York he met Mark Twain who, he said, impressed him deeply. During this time he supported himself by writing articles for The Pioneer – an English language newspaper published in India. He arrived in London in 1889 when Sir John Williams was still a member of the club; both shared the bond of Freemasonry, and, in view of the club’s code of sociability, it is likely that the two men knew one another, though Williams, at forty-nine, was some twenty-five years Kipling’s senior.
    Rudyard Kipling was a first cousin of Stanley Baldwin, a Conservative politician who became Prime Minister in 1923 (the first of three terms). Already a popular and welcomed character within the country’s literary circles, Kipling’s fame and family connections also gave him easy access to political cliques. These undoubtedly included those of another future Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith MP, and just as importantly, Margot Asquith, his socially active wife. Margot Asquith was a member of an aristocratic circle of politicians and intellectuals named ‘The Souls’. They were a social, non-political group formed for the purpose of amicable discussion and included Sir Henry Cockayne-Cust, politician and editor of the Pall Mall Gazette , to which Kipling contributed, helping to make the periodical a great success, George Curzon, Former Viceroy of India 1898-1905, and Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister 1902-05, all of whom Kipling knew socially. Margot Asquith was a friend and patient of Sir John Williams, and well acquainted with his wife, Lady Williams. It was Margot Asquith who had written to Sir John Williams in late November 1900 concerning something the reverse of complimentary about his wife, which, we believe, judging by the content of Sir John’s brusque letter in reply, linked him and Lady Williams directly to the murders.
    Kipling was also on friendly terms with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sir Arthur was also a Freemason, and they attended Masonic Lodge meetings, and played golf together. It is inconceivable that they would not have discussed the murders when Sir Arthur would undoubtedly have expounded his own ‘Jill the Ripper’ theory to Kipling: that the murderer might have disguised himself as a woman in order to gain the confidence of his victims, or could in fact have been a woman, perhaps a midwife, or a woman who posed as such.
    If, as seems likely, Kipling had heard the “foolish and wicked talk” about the unstable Lizzie Williams from someone within Margot Asquith’s clique, Sir Henry Cockayne-Cust, George Curzon, Arthur Balfour, or perhaps even Margot Asquith herself, then Sir Arthur’s theory would have rung true. Perhaps the fraternal bond of Freemasonry prevented Kipling from speaking out publicly and damaging Lady Williams and Sir John Williams, a fellow Mason who had been “troubled beyond measure” by the “tongues of scandal”. In any event, there was no hard evidence linking anyone to the murders, and Lady Williams was unwell, so whatever she may have said could not be relied upon.
    So was Rudyard Kipling driven to record in 1911, in allegory instead, the person whom he believed the murderer might have been? One who “has the greater determination – the greater courage and single-mindedness in the pursuit of the important in life.”
    Certainly, his poem ‘The Female of the Species’ could have been a metaphor for Lizzie Williams. The phrase encapsulated in the title is repeated a