Felicity Lowde's Research

The coach and horses

2007-11-15T02:49:00.000-08:00

Perhaps one of the most intriguing of Walter Sickert's secret untitled sketches.

In the late 19th Century, Special Branch agents reportedly disguised themselves as cabdrivers as a means of disguising Secret Police business in and around London. Chief Inspector Littlechild , head of Covert Operations at Section d Special Branch Scotland Yard recommended it personally, as a good, efficient means of carrying out spy operations. Top SpB agents dressed as cab drivers in order to effectuate spy business in London. According to the current Special Branch Officer Lindsay Clutterbuck's angle on the 1894 Littlechild, expressed in his thesis in 1998:

'In order to minimize the risks of discovery when on surveillance, the use of disguise was employed by detectives. Littlechild states that its use was disapproved of by some of his colleagues, perhaps as a result of the Popay case and its aftermath or for other, more practical reasons. However, he personally found it most useful...he gives several examples of the disguises he used and the reasons behind their selection ; dressing as a curate disarms suspicion, whilst access to premises can be readily gained when disguised as a Serveyer or Sanitory Inspector. A Cabman is a familiar sight throughout London but sometimes something more specialized was required:-
"So I made up by selecting a 'wardrobe cap' and spotted scarf, to be lightly tied round my neck, and the other essentials of the Whitechapel rig-out. My face I left unshaven for a week or two, and in such natural disguise- which you will see does not correspond atall with theatrical ideas upon the subject- I beagn to frequent the street market."
Littlechild, 1894, pp82 '

Back Street rebels often made the most of this efficient, mobile disguise. As did the Stuarts , it seems, as part of a Secret Arrangement in Cleveland Street and Whitechapel.

Above: an example of the classic cab, used to ferry people around central London during the late Victorian era.

And above, one of the more mundane, one horse cabs.

Intriguingly, the artist does seem to be referring to a more sophisticated coach, if we evaluate the driver's position in the sketch.

hhhmmmm ;-)

Have fun.

*****

These secret pictures are a part of my findings. Walter Sickert drew, and hid, these wonderful pictures. I think this is one beautiful artist. What is clear, is that in Sotheby's terms, the discoveries are way beyond priceless. As is this story we love.
No one's evidence is worth more than Walter Sickert's.

The article in the Evening Standard 1888

2007-11-11T07:59:00.000-08:00

Herewith one of the key secrets at the heart of the Jack the Ripper murders. On it, there is evidenced Mary Kelly', final ripper victim's, recorded last words. 'Pray for help...'

Kelly's Library

The Informal Postal Service at number 21, Cleveland Street,1888.

In late nineteenth century London, lovers and back street rebels, and Irish Fenian confederates alike avoided sending love letters or other types of secret or unlawful correspondence via the Official Post Office, which was constantly subject to surveillance by Special Branch detectives and officials. Instead of entrusting a letter to an official Post Office worker or telegraph boy, they preferred to arrange for it to be handled by a private courier who worked for an 'unofficial post office’. These unofficial post offices were arranged discreetly inside a privately owned commerce such as a tobacconists, or curiosity shop. (usually a tobacconists.)

There'd be a little letter cabinet just in front of the shop counter; sometimes hidden discreetly behind. Victorian gentlefolk would entrust a letter destined for a lover to a courier, who'd leave it at the shop counter. A trusted shop assistant would file it carefully away under its intended recipient’s name where it would remain until he or she walked in under the pretext of purchasing e.g. some tobacco, and discreetly collect it.

These arrangements could be flexible. Precise arrangements tended to depend upon exactly how secret the correspondence arrangement had to be. People went to great lengths to avoid being discovered. Sometimes middlemen 'couriers' were used between a courier and an informal little post office; at times, couriers would collect letters as well as deliver them.

In the 1880's, gentlemen frequenting Fitzrovia, in the West End of London, relied on an informal 'Post Office' arrangement inside a little tobacconist's at no. 21 Cleveland Street to handle their communications. This is the Special Branch secret relating to Cleveland Street at the heart of the Jack the Ripper murder story.

A reliable shop girl, Annie Crook, who worked behind the counter, took letters from local couriers and filed them in a little cabinet, where they remained until their intended recipients ( or their recipient's couriers) came in to collect them. Prince Albert (Victor Christian) Edward, known locally as Eddy, used the service to send letters to 'Mary Kelly', his lover and friend of several years.

The 'unofficial post office' inside the little tobacconist’s at number 21, Cleveland Street, West London, was one of the most popular. Its regulars, among them Prince Eddy and the B troop tenth Hussars, called it 'Kelly's Library'. These men would frequent the notorious brothel at no. 19 Cleveland Street. As did 'Eddie', Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward.

Using the Personal Columns in the 'Standard' Newspaper.

Corresponding lovers using informal and secret Post Office arrangements almost always had a familiar, code name for the one they used. The one at the little tobacconists at Cleveland Street was called 'Kelly's Library'. There were familiar names for secret post offices all over the city.

Regulars used newspaper personals at the back of the daily papers, the Standard in particular, to alert one another to letters waiting for them at e.g. 'Kelly's Library' , (their codename for the 'Informal Post Office.') After entrusting a letter to their courier, they'd head down to the offices of a local newspaper such as the 'Standard', have a quiet word with a reliable newspaper office assistant and ask him/her to put a discreet notice in the newspaper's back-page personal columns, such as ' A letter awaits you, Kelly's Library.' To identify themselves to their lover, they'd make sure the message destined for the personal columns referred to an aspect of their 'affair'.

Those taking great care to be as discreet as possible, e.g the Cleveland Street aristocrats, would often oblige their couriers/messengers to get down to the newspaper offices and place a message in the personal columns on their behalf, stating that 'a letter was waiting their lover' at 'whichever informal post office'. The courier/messenger delivering letters was usually known to the couple personally, and would often sign his or her own name on the message destined to appear in the paper eg. 'There's a letter for you at Kelly's Library. Polly' etc. This type of arrangement was more discreet, most of the time, but a strong relationship of trust with the courier was needed.

Prince Eddy, who frequently signed 'ALBERT EDWARD', as the world knows, is considered to have been absent from London on the dates of the Whitechapel murders, known colloquially as the 'Jack the Ripper' murders. Contemporary Court Circulars and numerous witnesses evidence his activity elsewhere well enough. During the days prior to the 29th September 1888, the night of the double murders of Mary Kelly and Elizabeth Stride, ( Killed in the early hours of the 30th September) he managed to get a letter destined for his lover Mary Kelly to his friend Walter Sickert. On Thursday the 27th, 1888, Walter gave it to his friend 'Kittie', (Catharine Eddowes/Kelly), Prince Eddy and Mary's courier. She in turn was to deliver it to ' a middleman' who was supposed to leave it at the Counter at no. 21 Cleveland Street, 'Kelly's Library’.

This middleman turned out to be Chief John Littlechild, Special Branch police, who assassinated her. He'd intercepted Catharine ('Kitty's) movements.There were a number of assassins in the group. Littlechild, as we've seen, had trained Catharine 'Kitty' personally.

Before delivering the letter destined for Mary, Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes was to leave a message with the 'Standard' Newspaper on the Prince's behalf, which would inform Mary Kelly that a letter was waiting for her at 'Kelly's Library'. She'd sign the message 'Kitty', as usual. She'd give the name Kitty to the reception at the Standard.

The photograph I enclose here shows a little clipping from the Personals in the Standard newspaper dated 5th October 1888, which the Newspapers printed seven days after the world famous 'double event': the night Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes and Elizabeth Stride were killed in the early hours in the Whitechapel back streets by "Jack the Ripper". It was long contained in the archives relating to Cheif John Littlechild, head of Special Branch covert operations. The little cutting contains a series of personal notices . It's from the 'Jack the Ripper' case files, and was once the property of Special Branch, Scotland Yard; in particular, of one Chief John Littlechild, head of Covert Operations at Scotland Yard, 1888.

One message on the tiny little cutting shown enlarged above refers to 'Kelly's Library', the tobacconist's at no. 21, Cleveland Street.

'A letter awaits you, Kelly's Library. KITTIE.'

This message was trusted to the 'Standard' newspaper on the 28th September, (the Friday before Friday 5th October) by Jack the Ripper victim courier Catharine Eddowes, who signed her name 'Kitty'.

'Kitty' Eddowes had intended Mary Kelly, intended recipient of the said letter from 'ALBERT EDWARD', to see the little personal notice later on that week, prior to the day on which it was eventually printed, Friday 5th October. Catharine 'Kitty' missed the 29th September 1888 Saturday print. She left a message at the Standard Newspaper on the afternoon of the 28th, before going to meet a 'middleman' on the night of the 29th/30th, to deliver Prince Eddy's letter.

Prince Eddy also went to the Standard during the week prior to the 29th September, the night of the historically infamous double murders. History may have been very different, had he not . As you see. The little clipping from the personals column also contains a message from a gentleman who signs himself in capital letters 'ALBERT EDWARD’. This is the signature used by both the Prince of Wales and the Wales' son, Prince 'Albert Victor Christian Edward'. His message reads:

'Time flies. We are drawing nearer together every day. How I long for the time. ALBERT EDWARD.'

'Kittie' (Catharine Eddowes') message, along with Albert Edward's, appeared in the Standard on the 5th October, six days after the Prince's courier, Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes , was intercepted and killed by Section d Special Branch agents while attempting to deliver a letter to a middleman she'd supposed would be an acquaintance.

On the little extract from the Standard personals column 5th October 1888, there appears a message from Mary Kelly, who went along to The Standard during the week after Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes' death- . She probably went down on the 2nd October- to the Standard, to leave a message. 'Last saw you in a window in May', she writes -for 'Albert Edward', identifying herself without betraying her name. She apparently refers to the Cleveland Street raid, when Annie Crook, kidnapped from Cleveland Street by Special Branch, who we now see oversaw the letter arrangement at Cleveland Street, was forcibly removed by Special Branch officials. She was consequently tortured by Sir William Gull, working privately for SB, for information on 'Kelly's Library.' (The secret letter arrangement).

Clearly, after the night of the double murders, Mary's perceived that her lover's plans have been interfered with by people who've tracked down the lovers' 'informal letter arrangement' and killed their main courier, Catharine 'Kittie' Eddowes; ( actually known as 'Kitty') her friend, as well as her close friend and neighbor, Elisabeth Stride, who was killed very soon after collecting a parcel from a gentleman.: The documents that actually have been released into the public domain - a select few as usual-evidence the fact that Elizabeth Stride was seen on the night she died beside a gentleman carrying a parcel- that is a famous matter.

'Beware of false ones', Mary writes, in the personal columns; - 'but never doubt my love.' ... ' I have received neither letter or parcel.'... ' If only we could have spoken. '

It seems Mary at this stage suspected that her lover 'Albert Edward' had been betrayed. A traitor had arranged to meet, but then killed, Kitty/Catharine Eddowes. Perhaps she merely suspected that her lover's betrayer was someone who'd simply followed Eddowes' footsteps, and informed her killers about the meeting, so putting the murderers one step ahead of her dead friend. It's not clear by the message that Mary yet suspected senior Special Branch Police.

This cutting was/is contained in Chief John Littlechild's, Special Branch's, files.

Special Branch agents were following the young people's activity closely. It's clear from the fact that Special Branch retained the personal advertisements the young people left with the Standard that Mary and Eddy were intercepted by Chief Inspector John Littlechild and the Specialist Operations unit at Scotland Yard , who killed Catharine Eddowes on the early hours of the morning of the 29th September. SB arranged for Albert Edward's courier, 'Kitty' to die on the 30th September, 1888.

The Standard Newspaper offices, c 1888-90, where lovers, Irish Fenian confederates and rebels alike left messages for one another, and where couriers left messages alerting the gentry to letters awaiting them at 'Kelly's Library'.

*********

It is my belief that Special Branch are currently liaising with the Superintendents of Thames Valley and the Met, in order to conceal these revelations unlawfully, (on my hard drives and elsewhere) and to corruptly repress evidence revealing the lost King, Mary Kelly's and Albert ( Victor Christian) Edward's child. This action has enabled people to produce false allegations, which they have all rushed to promote.

But I'm onto it, and I have been for some time ;-)

'Kelly's Library' is the name of my forthcoming book, all rights reserved.

The National Archives are complicit in the concealment with Special Branch.

I believe their pretense at the public interest( SB and the National Archives) is false. For a start, there is no legal reason to conceal the documents. They are quite obviously, legally, public property. They do not have the right to try to interfere with my photos and work on my hard drive. I believe their pretense at their respect for the Royal family is false. Surely the current royal family will be keen to find the identity of the lost heir, a member of the lost royal family; who it appears had no children; surely they would be keen to find out what happened to the favorite son of the Queen Alexandra, and his pretty Irish lover, Mary Kelly, ultimate Jack the Ripper victim. S B killed the lover's messengers, then Mary Kelly. There were a number of people involved.

Mary Kelly had strong Fenian connections; she was a Stuart. This was the Security Services' excuse. And a disgusting excuse it was.

It always is. Especially where Ireland is concerned.

A disgusting excuse.

The entire analysis of this matter, is copyright Felicity Jane Lowde. Thankyou.

Catharine and John Kelly

2007-11-11T07:58:00.001-08:00

Catharine and John Kelly.

Here are the Special Branch documents demonstrating John Kelly and Catharine Kelly, SB records on the JtR victim otherwise known as Catharine Eddowes, and her husband John Kelly, who, as recorded in the documents available in the public domain, lived in the East End of London as 'John and Catharine Kelly' during the period the Special Branch assassinations known colloquially as the 'Jack the Ripper' murders took place.

Observe that the couple are working for Spymaster Jenkinson, Under Secretary. They are recorded in the book as members of the 'Jenkinson Spy ring'. Catharine Eddowes/Kelly is recorded as making a statement on the Fenian murder of one McDoughty; her husband, John, is receiving a file on Fenian assassination activity from Jenkinson himself.

This was standard, they are members of the hitherto undisclosed and much sought after 'Jenkinson Spy Ring'.

Catharine Eddowes, central Jack the Ripper victim, was in the process of Betraying Jenkinson and Littlechild on the night she died. She was well known to Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, the evidence suggests. She was protecting a little boy known to SB as 'King of the Fenians', offspring of Mary Kelly, final Jack the Ripper victim, and Prince AVCE.

I like this woman, very clever girl. Unique, I think. If it wasn't for one mistake, not on her part, she'd have done it.

Observe the Secret Service references. The documents are also full of Littlechild's, Anderson's and the others' spy activities in and around the locations of the J t R murders.

Now charge me with Official Secrets disclosure, or stop this persecution. In my opinion, legally, this information should have been made available to the public: this is archive material.

King of the Fenians at Goodwood

2007-11-11T07:54:00.000-08:00

I want you to look carefully at this archive photograph: 'King of the Fenians said to be at Goodwood.'

That's 'King of the Fenians'.

An unambiguous term.

This Secret Service information pertains to a little boy, the offspring of Mary Kelly, young woman at the heart of the Ripper case, and the young prince known as 'Eddy'.. Which evidence Special Branch have threatened to destroy. Observe the file references.

It is archive evidence and inasmuch, it should have been made available to the public.

The Lady with the Rose

2007-11-11T07:04:00.001-08:00

Lady with the Rose (Charlotte Louise Burckhardt), 1882 John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925) Oil on canvas; 84 x 44 3/4 in. (213.4 x 113.7 cm) Bequest of Valerie B. Hadden, 1932 (32.154). The white rose stood for the Stuart associations and societies, very fashionable among the aristocracy in the 1880's.

Carnations and Roses

2007-11-11T07:00:00.001-08:00

Walter Sickert, Oscar Wilde, Prince Eddy and their artistic acquaintance who enjoyed 'slummin it' in the west and east End of London formed a part of the romantic, aesthetic set. The 'romantics' were an integral part of the 1880's era. Dandies in their top hats, gents 'slumming it' in the East end, romantic advertisements in newspapers left by the aristocratic gents who arranged rendezvous with their secret acquaintance....the 'students of the butterfly.'

To ignore this aspect of the era is to overlook the lost époque, without a true understanding of which the 1888 Whitechapel murder case cannot be solved. Elisabeth Stride, fourth J t R victim, who died on the night of the Jack Rip 'double event murders', was seen just over ten minutes before she died, by one PC Smith, talking with a man carrying a parcel, holding in her hand, a red flower- evidently from the man. Red and white, by his description; 'red outside, white inside'...possibly a gentleman's carnation. This fact is world famous, though the rose is rarely referred to directly by modern authors and film makers. Superintendent Swansen considered it a very important piece of evidence, and referred to it as a rose. Elisabeth, by the evidence, was to deliver this parcel to Mary Kelly. Mary Kelly and her people. Minutes later she was intercepted and killed, still outside the Berner Street club, which, by the Special Branch documents, was a rendezvous meeting place for an extraordinary conglomeration of people from the highest to the lowest classes, all of whom were considered rebels in the face of the prevalent government and Security Services.....

The rose ( or carnation) is relevant. It is evidence. The modern analysts, who object ferociously to any paradigm shift, refute this for its own sake. Anything remotely touching the popular Romanticism of the English era flies into the face of their theories and demonstrates that since the first, mistaken 'conspiracy theory' that emerged consequent to the Jack Rip murders they have taken the wrong path in refuting the involvement of royalty and aristocracy in East end Whitechapel.

I explore Swansens' and PC Smith's evidence at some length in my thesis, which also explores the significance of the Berner Street club, and the extent of its Fenian and rebel goings on. The Berner Street Club outside which Elisabeth Stride was killed by a slashing of the throat was of the greatest importance to Jenkinson, Anderson and Melville from a serveillance point of view. Melville and Littlechild themselves regularly operated there as spies undercover.

Bedstead

2007-11-11T06:58:00.001-08:00

Below: 'The Iron Bedstead', c 1906. The period may only be vaguely defined. In my opinion the date is much earlier. Iron bedsteads from hospitals, maternity units and the oh so unalike homely and suggestive big brass bedsteads, are major themes in Walter Sickert's work. They respectively infer the confinement of Annie Crook, 'La Giuseppina' ( The 'Josephina' ) and the series of torture she endured at the hands of William Gull and Section d Special Branch, and the pregnancy and development of 'La Carolina', usually the one lain down on the 'big brass bed' ..she's usually a direct reference to Mary Kelly.

The temptation at the sight of the sketch below is to instantly compare 'the little room' to Mary Kelly's little rented place at no. 13, Miller's Court, where incidentally she never lived; this was a room rented out for clandestine meetings. There is one striking comparison however: the bolster on the bed, which appears to be made from a tightly rolled mattress, is lain in the same place as the identical tightly rolled 'mattress bolster' on Mary Kelly's bed, in the authentic forensic pictures. This reference appears to be beyond coincidence.

Look at the woman lain out on the bed, bearing that in mind. She seems lifeless, as though lying in some type of a wrapped sheet, or 'shroud.' Her slender feet protrude from beneath the end of the sheeting; her face seems to have been covered by a shawl, such as Mary was described wearing by the key witness, on the night she died. This 'iron bedstead' where the dead Mary Kelly's form conceivably lies, is seen from a gentleman's writing desk, upon which a Victorian gent would of course write his letters. (Click to enlarge.)

Walter Sickert intended us to focus on the enshrouded woman lying on the bed, rather than the perspective.....on this occasion. Here below, the corresponding 'Gallery Painting' ; 'Theatre de Monmartre', (no alternative title available) circa 1906; it first saw the light of day in 1924, when it was purchased from the Goupil Gallery by Lord John Maynard Keynes. Last exhibited by its current owners the Fitzwilliam Musuem in 1983. ( Click to enlarge.)

The above oil painting 'Theatre de Monmantre' was painted at the same time as 'La Gaiete Rauchuart' , in which we see Prince Eddy, Mary and young Jo in the Gallery box, and the stage singer in her red dress and her eighteenth century bustle reflected in the mirror behind them. That's the 'Courtesan' picture, where Eddie and Mary seem to be 'Up in the Gallery' (click to review). . Sickert tells us as much in a letter to William Rothenstein written in 1906; ' I want another fortnight here to finish four or five pictures as good Noctes Ambrosianae, only red and blue plates, instead of black ones. The Eldorado, The Gaiéte Rochechouart, the Theatre de Monmantre..' We may accordingly assume a deliberate association on his part between the three pictures he mentions here, and further, that they are probably a part of an intended series.

The oil painting 'Theatre de Monmantre' usually receives scant comment from the critics, perhaps because in it we see at a glance the case that they all so eagerly avoid. The 'Jack the Ripper' inferences. Here, in this painting, the players are all 'up in the gallery'. ....their faces , 'painted a s slippery blobs of ochres and browns, accentuated by darting jabs of black...resemble grotesque masks...' Yet they're animated; they watch a play played out, on stage. Still this painting does not depict a tender and beautiful Irish/Jacobite awakening; there's no prophet, no lively singer, no song. They're dead. We have the enshrouded , the lost, the waiting.

There's an expressly perverse, yet touching picture of the dead, lifted, enshrouded Mary Kelly, wearing the same lovely hat (minus feather) that she wears in 'La Gaiete Rauchuart' , her mutilated body wrapped in a sheet, just as it appears when lain on the bed in the sketch 'The Iron Bedstead' above; and she sits, mutilated remains wrapped in her 'bloody sheet', on Catharine Kitty Eddowes' knee. It is 'Kitty Eddowes'. Sickert paints Catharine's mutilated mouth exactly as it appears in Catharine Eddowes' forensic pictures ( now held in the National Archives.) And would you look at that lovely brimmed hat that Kitty has above her mutilated face with its widely slashed throat.. That's our Kitty.

The scene going on behind Mary and Kitty's seats is just as interesting. Sickert infers the gallery box boldly displayed in the paintings mentioned above, yet two or three players now sit or stand beneath a clearly Parisian box-canopy.

Yes, it's them... the guardians who looked after little 'Jo'- who is inferred -the little boy in the cap that looks like a cricket cap-in the 'Old Beford' sketches (click to review.) Look at the manner in which the gent in standing position, in the top gallery box, bends forward a little; this is the exact stance taken by the guardian beside 'Jo' in the gallery boxes surrounded by the figures that evoke the little putti in the Vatican (cherubs.)

Jacobite art 'mirror inference'? Yes, there is a treacherous looking bowler hatted figure lurking inside the mirror top left, far left hand corner of the painting, and yes, there is the suggestion that this rather devious looking figure is surreptitiously surveying the figures on the balcony.

Readers familiar with the casework will already recall that one of the key issues in the Doctor's notes and forensic evidence relating to Mary Kelly's Inquest that distances her forensic evidence from the other undisputed 'Jack the Ripper' victims is her missing heart. The absence of the heart was reported by Dr. Bond, Police Doctor who carried out an examination of her corporal remains at 11.00 am on the morning after her murder 9th of November, 1888.

Mary Kelly's forensic detail is a matter that Walter Sickert associates with the 'Jacobite mirror '... forensic detail that he takes perhaps most seriously of all. In his celebrated self -portrait, 'The Painter in His Studio' or 'The Parlor Mantelpiece' , c. 1907, he communicates the depth and extent of his concern with Mary Kelly's mystery and her remains (which visibly extend beyond an artist's academic interest in crime).

In that painting (below) he depicts himself confronting the viewer, conveying profound empathy with the suspicion and grief that he intimates might be expressed by witnesses to the fact that Mary Kelly probably was assassinated. He projects a statue of Botticelli's Venus, ( to the left of the picture) with its limbs severed- in almost exactly the way in which limbs appear to be severed and desecrated in the Special Branch forensic photographs of Mary Kelly (that were not available to the public except through one scarce French publication in 1907). Behind the violated image of Botticelli's beauty, a mirror, into the frame of which someone appears to have tucked a love-letter. A letter envelope.... a letter, I would say. There appears to be a reciprocating letter tucked in the other mirror on our right.

In the picture (below) we see a reflection of Walter Sickert, looking into the mantelpiece mirror. Note the edge of the painting frame at the far left of the picture. ( he doesn't make it instantly apparent- then again, that's not unusual..) In the reflected painter's right hand, the painter's left hand, ( as shown here) a painter's brush and palette; in the reflection's left, a white rose, emblem of the Stuart Order of the Rose.

Walter Sickert's ability to depict contra-jour, illumination and reflected light are among the talents that best define his personalized genius. Most of us struggle to define any type of light, whatever the paint mix: this painter uses paint to create light that conveys insight, precious moments sealed of human memory; emotion.. longing... Here though, the the light he portrays is restricted to highlighting the face of the painter and the ruin of Botticelli's Venus 'with deliberate, constructive intent.' (Wendy Baron 1992.)

A scarce few have remarked that the heap of what looks like body matter situated between the two statue icons evokes the human entrails placed on a table to the left of Mary Kelly's murdered body, in the forensic photograph. It does; there's a thinly disguised play on the shape of a female heart amidst the flesh like amalgamation, (distorted a little, for impression's sake). The heart shape amid the body matter might demonstrate an attachment to the 'pericardia', reaching a little way into the air, stemming from a slender heart shape similar to the one upheld by the putto on Clementina's monument. But it is not vivid for comparison. It seems to be topped with some sort of attached body matter, such as a roughly detached heart may be, prior to being cleaned in surgery.

Referring to the image above: to the reflected painter's left (our right), in front of a smaller, parlor mirror, another statue, evocative of the maternal angle on Michelangelo's 'La Pieta' ( The Pity) , the Italian master's early sculpture, depicting Mary holding Christ's transient 'dead body' close to her own after his crucifixion. Observe the shape of the shoulder that Mary holds above the collapsed crucified limbs; observe the tilt of Christ's head. Compare the statues' limbs and its head tilt, against those in the statue to the reflected painter's left. (Our right).

The sculptured Italian masterpiece, (right) still contained in the first chapel to the right inside the Vatican directly opposite Queen Clementina's monument, is a different picture of charity, pity and the weightlessness of innocence from every angle. Sickert's carefully transposed a suggestion of its form without assaulting its uniqueness.

Behind Walter Sickert's suggestion of 'La Pieta', a mirror where another letter has been tucked inside a golden frame. A reciprocating letter. One assumes.

Walter Sickert sets the transition phase experienced by the broken hearted Christ (as depicted by Michelangelo) against the destroyed body of the gentle heiress that the Stuarts saw as personally sacred.

A closer look at Walter Sickert's painting reveals the aspect that validates the all important 'secondary title' that almost invariably infers a secret . In this case, 'The Parlor Mantelpiece'. The whole painting is a reflection in a mantelpiece mirror: this is overtly demonstrated by a) the mantelpiece mirror frame on the edge of painting on the far left and b) the reflection of the statue that evokes 'La Pieta', the reflection of which in the mirror behind it in the room is reflected in the mirror into which Walter Sickert looks, hence the 'double reflection' and c), the light painted onto the surface of the painting, which in fact suggests light on mirror glass.

Many of the objects in the picture are the kind of figurative symbols that generally appear in mirrors depicted by Sickert; such as the flesh pile and the secret, near magical suggestions surrounding the statue images.

Not to detract from the quality of the suggestion ( I do not want to do Cornwell here) but let's look (for a moment) at the contents of the painter's room when it is not reflected -which we can easily be achieved by an inversion of the painting:

Left: the picture seen from the 'Parlor mantelpiece' standpoint, looking into the room, at the painter in his studio'. There is no specific further information to be gleaned from inverting the painting except of course for an intended display of the lettering and names on the envelopes tucked inside the painted mirror frames. Or at least, emphasis on the suggestion that reciprocating love letters from 'someone' to a Catholic mother are at the heart of this affair.

The Telegraph Boys

2007-11-11T06:56:00.002-08:00

The prank 'Jack the Ripper' letters, of which there were clearly seven main authors, ( some experts say five) were written by the Telegraph boys who worked officially for the Cleveland Street post office, and part time for 'Kelly's Library', the informal post office, delivering secret letters for the dandy gents. These also worked for Hammond, at no. 19 Cleveland Street, the famous setting for the Cleveland Street scandal involving the 1888 aristocrats, including Prince Eddy. ( Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward.) The telegraph boys' and their friends' age varies from age seven to age nineteen.

Chief John Littlechild, Special Branch, would get the boys to spy on the gents activities, and betray the aristocrats and their specially chosen informal courriers. The telegraph boys imagined that writing foolish prank letters impersonating the dandy gents might earn them a blackmail fiver from the 'swells' in their to hats and tails... or failing that, make each other laugh...and annoy Inspectors Ried and Abberline. Or indeed, Chief John Littlechild and Commissioner James Monro.

There are one or two more peculiar J t R prank letters, ( the prank letters held in the National Archives) which were written by the Telegraph teenage boys ( the boy's age varies from seven to nineteen) signed 'Mathematicus', which seem to be a mildy amusing attempt to emulate Sickert's concepts, and (as ever) put the late 19th century gents in the frame for the Jack the Ripper murders ....There is a good attempt to emulate Oscar Wilde's writing in one or two of them..P.S. 'Two gone down suers'.....' Yours, truly, Mathematicus'..

......'Signed, Mr. Nobody'.. ( Mr. Nobody, or 'Nemo' was Walter Sickert's stage name. The telegraph boys put this name on the back of a telegraph paper, as a Jack the Ripper prank letter, signed it 'Jack the Ripper', and sent it to Scotland Yard..)

*****

In his sketch reference to 'Kelly's Library' (click and scroll down to have a look at the sketch again), Walter Sickert's evidently suggesting a secondary secret, made apparent by the 'Laundry' reference. Why combine ‘ Informal Post Office’ and ‘Laundry’? Why would the ‘Laundry’ aspect to the picture be a secret relevant to ‘Kelly’s Library' (click), the little Informal Post Office?

First, he's concealing the reference to 'Kelly's Library. But the 'Laundry' will be a relevant issue, all the same.

Walter Sickert's love of Charles Dickens is well chronicled. He virtually lived the stories as a young boy. Take the Marjorie Lilly slant on why Sickert would always return to London:

‘ And the city itself drew him; it was still infinitely various. Horses, hansoms (those loveliest of shapes), growlers, gardens, imposing Squares, queer byways, parks, cottages, trees, flowers and grass abounded; there were the endless reminders of Hogarth and Dickens; the cockneys who were bound up with his childhood had not yet vanished from the scene. He revelled in the soft, misty light that he found nowhere else, in the blue and greys and umbers. 'London! Like the evening star, you bring me everything'……’ ..'We must bless the powerful instinct that brought him back to his own country and his particular brand of realism, to the great Storm Dark City which was also the inspiration of his two idols, Hogarth and Dickens’. According to schoolmates, as related to Lilly: ...Walter knew London like the back of his hand, he could tell us endless stories about the little streets and byways as we went along and pointed out pictures that we hadn't seen. It was another world to us.'

Dickensian characters, particularly featuring Oliver, Fagin, Dodger and the boys continually come up in Walter Sickert's secret unpublished sketches. ('I want -some- more!') If Walter Sickert loved an artist, he personalised him, and adopted marks of his identity in various, small ways. Whistler, Degas, Dickens: c'est la meme chose. A pseudonym Walter often adopted for his own letter writing while going about Cleveland Street was 'Nemo', which translates 'Mr. Nobody'. (One of the prank telegraphs the Cleveland Street Telegraph boys sent to Special Branch is signed 'Nemo').

This 'Nemo' is a Dickensian character that featured in Charles' Dicken's wonderful 'Bleak House', recently televised by the BBC. A heartbroken 'anonymous lover', whose early letters to his lady were intercepted by blaggards and retained by a blackmailer and extortioner. Bleak House's key theme revolves around the tragedy that evolves out of Nemo's loveletters falling into the wrong hands, with devastating and widespread consequences.

At age eleven, Charles Dickens lived at the house still marked no. 22, Cleveland Street, (now the little white house), which was never the tobacconists at no. 21 'Kelly's library' . In the 1880's, Kelly's Library, the tobacconists at no. 21 was adjacent to Hammond's 'House of low repute' , and across the road from the modern no. 21 and 22 in the modern photo picture. (There is now a pretty Café-Bar, where the street's Formal Post Office once stood, adjacent to the modern no. 22.)

Cleveland Street hosted a large workhouse on its corner from 1830- 1875... which was later transformed into an asylum, or 'sanatorium'. It still functioned partly as a workhouse throughout the 1880's, and a good part of the street will still have been filled with 'Laundry goings on': In Dickens' 'dodger's day', in the 1850s, the union's Medical Officer was Dr Joseph Rogers, who described the workhouse building as:

...a square four-storied building fronting the street, with two wings of similar elevation projecting eastwards from each corner. The necessary laundry work of the establishment, which never in my time fell below five hundred inmates, was carried on beneath the entrance hall, which was filled with steam and the odours from washing the paupers' linen. On the right side of the main building was a badly paved yard, which led down to the back entrance from Charlotte Street; on each side there was first, a carpenter's shop and a dead house, and secondly, opposite to it, a tinker's shop with a forge and unceiled roof. This communicated with a ward with two beds in it, used for fever and foul cases, only a lath and plaster partition separating it from the tinker's shop.'

Below: Dicken's 'Artful Dodger' in the process of 'sussing' Oliver for his potential for recruitment with Fagin, who deployed the boys for child crime. This, in Victorian London, would mean picking pockets, delivering letters and messages which couldn't go through the post office, running errands for blackmailers and crooks, bob job theft, and being rented out to brothels. ( To name the most prolific.) In 1888, Swinscow, or ''Swinscoe ' approached Algernon Allies, working, as they both were, for the Official Post Office on the corner of Cleveland Street, and asked him if he'd like to work for 'Hammond', at number 19, alongside 'his good self'. Algernon Allies' ( Algernon of the Alleys) was caught in possession of a twenty shilling note in 1889: this was what officially 'sparked off' the 'Cleveland Street Scandal'. Lord Arthur Somerset later (in 1888) 'fixed Allies up' with a position delivering letters for the informal Post Office at 'Kelly's Library'-or, as the barrister at Earnest Parke's trial for allegedly libelling Lord Heuston was to phrase it, ' a position at no. 21 Cleveland Street.'

'I've come to London to seek my fortune.'
'Oh you 'ave, 'ave yer?'

As a young boy aged eleven years, Charles Dickens lived at no. 22, Cleveland Street,where he befriended the workhouse boys that he saw sauntering up and down in their rag-tag bob togs and dilapidated titfers (top hats). They clearly made a deep impact on the writer, and paved the way for his priceless 'Oliver twist'. His love for them n never left him. There's room for the suggestion that Charles Dickens saw himself as having been as an 'Oliver' boy befriended by 'the "dodger"' , which is a regular backstreet London-boy name. As with the name "Carrots." It's the note of 'im." Dickens later wrote the timeless classic Bleak House, featuring Nemo, or 'Mr Nobody', whose misdelivered letters are essential to the book's plot. (Dickens' Oliver, we note, was 'nabbed the moment he set foot out the door' while carrying a book up the road with a five pound note hidden inside- letters, too, were often hidden inside books).

According to Walter Sickert's analysis of the evidence, thirty years after Oliver Twist, in Cleveland Street, 'Hammond' (club owner) and 'Vecke', his unofficial deputy, (Fagin and Bill Syke's' counterparts ), got the Cleveland Street Post Office boys into all kinds of child labour, including working for Hammond, who ran a 'House of Ill Repute' at number 19, and working as couriers delivering letters for gents and ladies who used 'Kelly's library', at number 21.

When the boys weren't charging exorbitant rates for carrying illicit letters for aristocrats that they'd pick up at 'Kelly's Library', they'd blackmail the gentlefolk about their lover’s letters, which they often stealthily pocketed and distributed.

‘Is this a laundry then, Sir?' Oliver asked Fagin, when introduced. On screen, Ron Moody responded-'Well no my boy, no, a suppose a laundry would be a very nice thing indeed, but our line of business pays a little better…' ("Not arf'".)

Above; Another of Walter Sickert's secret sketches.... Hammond walks about in front of the dancing couple from Cleveland Street. Perhaps it's Vecke, Hammond's second in command; abit of a Bill Sykes, except thirty-five years on from 'Oliver Twist'. In 1888, the historic back street element is now starting to focus on West end Clubland; by Walter Sickert, the proprietors of the House at no. 19, Cleveland Street he seem to be keeping a lookout in some way, and protecting their customers. The secret character seems to resemble Vecke, Hammond's assistant.

Below; the Cleveland Street boys, by Walter Sickert. Apparently Alleys and Perkins. Walter Sickert's drawn them beside a horseman, the little Prince and his Catholic nanny, and Montague Druitt- apparently. The Cleveland street people.

Annie Crook, depicted by Walter Sickert in the little sketch behind the counter at 'Kelly's Library', no. 21 Cleveland Street, later spent time at the then renovated Cleveland Street workhouse- apparently a long term result of having been arrested by Special Branch in may, 1888, and tortured for information about Kelly's Library, by Sir William Gull.
Relevant though her dreadful ongoing placement there must be to Walter Sickert's sketch of the gent in the informal post office, 'Kelly's Library', it doesn’t contribute to the explanation as to why the little tobacconists’ ‘Letter Service’ arrangement is seen combined with a Laundry in the picture, or why the gent and the cabinet full of letters are superimposed on a woman and a washboard.

A suggestion we have that ties in with the rest of Walter Sickert's work is the Lion at the top of the page in the picture above the picture of the little Prince. (shown above). This lion represents the Lion of the House of Stuart, to which lineage Mary Kelly and her little boy with Prince Eddy, the Duke of Clarence, belonged.

Walter Sickert’s probably suggesting that letters handled by couriers who worked for a private/informal Post Office, ‘Kelly’s library’, contain Catholic Stuart correspondence. Bonnie Prince Charlie, in dangerous exile in France, Italy and later, incognito in London in the eighteenth century, used up to thirteen different pseudonyms, and often deployed code terms in his correspondence. The following extract passed through the hands of Bonhams suppliers and dealers Farahar Dupré:

Charles Edward, 1720-1788, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, the Young Pretender. It's a ccharacteristically cryptic autograph letter, unsigned, concerning his financial affairs, in the form of a list headed “1747” and then several indistinct figures ending “S.L. 52 Spent. S[i]r John Lambert”, 1 page 16mo., n.p., 1747:-

“ye T.P. to draw on Waters.

M[emoran]d[um] Di to know from Gordon

ye Post Book, ye Wine

ye silver for 25. Louis

ye servant to be german

ye detail of all yr rents

with ye form used by J.W.

to receive them and the man[n]er

I can make one.

ye affair of Vignion &

ye interest of 5 per C[ent]

all to be put in clier

having ye acquittances

as also ye Ordon[n]ances

to be given im[m]ediately -

for ye amount of 102 T.

ye Linnin that is nott

to be seen how to wash.

If G knows a gentilman”,

The Waters mentioned in the letter is Charles Edward’s Parisian banker. The reference to Vignion presumably indicates Avignon where he spent some of his time in exile. Gordon may be John Gordon, Rector of the Scots College at Paris, to whom the Prince is known to have written at various times. It may be that the reference to ‘ye Linnin’ is in code. It's followed by an extraordinary autograph letter signed with initials "J. D." to the Revd John Gordon, "Principall of ye Scotch Colege at Paris", saying he "cannot but be in a great Concern as to yr State of health Regarding [sic] a Certain gentilman, as I here by different ways, he is declining; Be pleased to let me know what you here on that subject; I wrote you Laste Concerning a Remittance which I hope you received, so Remain yr moste sincere Friend", endorsed by the recipient on the address leaf 'Mr Douglas 20 Decem 1758', 1 side 4to., with autograph conjugate address leaf and seal, n.p., probably Chateau de Carlsbourg, Bouillon, 20th December 1758. The draft is among the Stuart Papers at Windsor - 388/80.

Bonnie Prince Charlie typically derived from the basic reference to ‘laundry’ used by suppressed Catholics throughout England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who used laundry items to communicate hidden messages. Catholic manor houses would display laundry in the garden arranged in a way that constituted a sign to other Catholics that ( for example) a priest was hiding within and it was time for Mass, or typically, (since confederate rebels are less likely to make time for sermons as the historian assumes) that a Jacobite Catholic was within and needed to communicate information. Other villagers would simply see a row of garments fluttering in the wind, and pass by.

Jo's clothing

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There has been a comment about little Jo(e), the sketch pictures, and Victorian and Edwardian dress style. I also think some of the clothes Jo's apparently wearing in his later years appear a little Victorian in style, rather than Edwardian. This was among my first comments. I consulted with Farahar Dupré, suppliers to Sotheby's and consultants for Bonhams and Sotheby's, about this. In their opinion, and in mine, the dress Jo(e) is seen wearing in the sketches in later years was still very much in evidence in the early Edwardian era. Not always amongst the extremely fashionable, no. Yet the era does find a great many people of London in this attire. I have looked at this considerably. ( Of course.)

It should also be remembered that Walter Sickert and his group were a theatrical and artistic set, throughout their lives, to whom interesting and period costume was second nature. Throughout the 1880's they frequented Fitzrovia and the rest of the West End in their interesting dandy costume. They frequented the penny gaffs and music halls, and actors and singers, in all their theatrical attires, were a regular part of their set. Walter Sickert was constantly remarked to be dressing in interesting theatrical costume. Young 'Jo(e) was his protege, as we know.

There is nothing about the costume seen worn by Jo(e) in his later years in the sketches, or that of the man collecting his letters from 'Kelly's Library' that negates the dates relevant, or my thesis content.

Criticism is welcome, but not pointless remarks that are under researched, and simply seek to negate the thesis for the sake of it. Rather, we should look at the extent to which Sickert and the other dandy gents indulged their passion for costume, the theatre, and shared it with their friends and acquaintance. And take a closer look at the very early Edwardians.

It took a long time for some people to relinquish the idea of long dresses, hats at all times, and flamboyant collars and ties. Costume did not change entirely directly Edward VII came to the throne.

I don't think the negative commenter has much of a point in any case. The sketches clearly evidence one boy, and follow his progress. Most of the time there are no costume issues in any event. Here again are some examples of drawings of the boy.

Jo age six/seven, period costume exactly as it should be.

Jo as an adolescent; it's clearly him, as marked by Walter Sickert himself: IIII Jo. Costume exact to the period.

Jo in teenage years again, showing Eddie's physique: period costume exact.

Another one of Jo is teenage years-apparently- and the costume seems to be a little 'early Victorian', or alternatively, a tad theatrical. If Walter Sickert is this boy's 'guardian', and we know he was, then this is little of a surprise. Perhaps Jo(e), a pupil of the Westminster, was a theatre boy?

Very likely indeed.

Sickert and the Vatican

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Right: Sickert, by James McNeill Whistler.

Walter Sickert would communicate individual aspects of the secret history he reveals across a sequence of gallery pictures and sketches. Never in just one isolated painting. An insight into the hidden past as communicated by Sickert is never contained in just one Gallery picture, but across a number of connected paintings in a series.
At time to time these series overlap a little.

This technique was something of a precaution against those who wished to pervert the course of history, who might easily destroy one isolated masterpiece.

Marjorie Lilly, a friend he met in 1913, makes no mention of ever having been given state secrets, ( very few do), but she frequently laments the fact that many painting series were split up,and individual paintings distributed about the world. Yet Walter Sickert promoted and encouraged this , apparently as a means of keeping secrets safe from destructive hands.

…'……Works were seized by or entrusted to politicians, aristocrats, close friends; some scenes Walter Sickert painted disappeared almost instantly. Some vanished forever. We are suffering today from years of public neglect. His own carelessness about preserving his best work was only equaled by the carelessness of the art world. He remained the painter’s painter for too long; his best period was overlooked by art advisers and curators until these pictures were too difficult to acquire, when they fell often fell back on inferior examples to fill the gaps on their walls. …Sickert’s masterpieces steal on one unawares; the work has an accumulative effect and the simplest way to enjoy him is to see a lot of it...' Mjpp30-40

'Those who had the privilege of visiting the collection of 1941 at the National Gallery, assembled by Miss Lilian Browse, found it, as he would say, ‘one long roll of revelation.’ There are fine Sickerts to be seen today, here and there; at the Leicester galleries, and at Messrs. Agnew; the Tate, which has made gallant efforts to catch up with him, possesses several interesting portraits….but when students and art lovers ask me where Sickerts are to be found it is difficult to suggest a gallery which exhibits enough of his best work for them to gain a true impression of his powers.’Mjpp30-40

This leaves many Sickert students in something of a situation. ( And the grumbling and sighing and complaining about it goes right on into the present day.) Fifty years after Marjorie Lilly recorded her evidence, the average student will find it almost impossible to resource and regroup paintings in series that provide ' a roll of revelation' without specific secret history facts that identify their connection and what he is suggesting in each individual picture. Walter Sickert wanted the truth to remain in the world, yes. He set it down for those who knew about the injustices they'd suffered and their relatives, friends and descendants, none of whom have any trouble perceiving the realities hidden in the pictures. He also had a habit of giving extraordinary paintings to passers by- on one or two recorded occasions, to tramps. He was a man without society style snobbery, and made confidential relationships on individual bases.

Sickert's favorite theatre in Camden Town, 'The Old Bedford', near Sickert's home in Mornington Crescent, was destroyed by fire in 1896, and subsequently rebuilt as 'The New Bedford.'

Right: 'The New Bedford', Oil on Canvas, bequeathed to the Tate Gallery by Edward Marsh through the Contemporary Art Society, 1953.

Throughout most of this study we'll be looking at Sickert's pictures of 'The Old Bedford.' Note the exact style of hat the lady 'up in the gallery' wears- it's yet another reference to Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes ( and, as many point out- his love of theatrical costume). This is the same hat she wore while attending Prince Eddy's back street wedding, according to Walter Sickert's gallery pictures.

'The Boy I Love is up in the Gallery'

The next extensive casework painting series we'll look at we might call 'The Stalls and the Gallery,' for our own reference, (bearing in mind he never gave a series a name.) This series, filled with indications about the casework, incorporates the series frequently referred to by experts as 'The Old Bedford ' series.

Sickert's evocative picture of a little girl, which he gave two titles ( as usual) entitled 1. ' Little Dot Heatherington at the Bedford Music Hall,' 2. 'The boy I love is up in the gallery', is popularly considered to be one of his leading masterpieces . Utterly beautiful. It was painted prior to what's commonly described as his ' most productive period' c 1895- 1906, but quite possibly during an earlier, equally productive era, 1880-1889.

The boy 'up in the gallery' to whom Sickert refers in the series, is the little Stuart Prince. We know him as 'Jo', because we've seen the secret sketches.

In 1874, George Ware, Music Hall songwriter for child stage performers, wrote the following little ditty: 'The boy I love is up in the gallery' , the contents of which are self explanatory.

The boy I love is up in the gallery

The boy I love is looking down at me.

There he is!

Can’t you see?

Waving his handkerchief,

Merry as a robin that sings on a tree.

Below, one of Sickert's considered masterpieces, an evocative picture of a little girl, the picture has two titles: 1. ' Little Dot Hetherington at the Bedford Music Hall,' 2. 'The boy I love is up in the gallery'. Prov. London, Christies, March 1930 ( 107). Hamilton Emmons.

This painting was exhibited in 1895, London Van Wisselingh, no. 24, with the song title 'The boy I love is up in the gallery' at Walter Sickert's request. It forms part of what's commonly referred to as the 'Old Bedford' series'.

A number in the 'Stalls and Gallery series' are analysed below; many 'went missing' for many years. In this central painting, little Dot Hetherington is depicted centre stage at the Bedford Music Hall in the 1880's, pointing up at a gentleman's gallery box.

It's often stated that the beautiful Dot Hetherington picture was painted during Walter Sickert's ' most productive period' c 1895- 1906, for want of firm evidence or coherent analysis to the contrary. There is this suggestion, re the date, though not in the tonal features. Walter Sickert did produce a great deal of careful evidence and artwork throughout this time.

On the painting's first exhibition, the singer was of course instantly identified as the little Old Bedford singer ' Dot Hetherington', via Walter Sickert's gallery title. The little known artiste had performed at the Old Bedford music hall on the 24th October, 1888, two weeks prior to the night Mary Kelly, final canonical 'Jack the Ripper' victim, disappeared from the history books.

Wendy Baron (1993) observes of little Dot in the gallery painting: 'her dress and demeanor anticipate Mary Lloyd, whose repertoire was to feature 'The boy I love is up in the Gallery', written by George Ware in 1885'.... (Sickert went on to paint 'The Sisters Lloyd' , whose dress in fact greatly differs from that of 'little Dot' in his paintings). We cannot connect little Dot Hetherington and the motive for the title of the painting 'The boy I love is up in the gallery' on the basis of a comparison between music hall singers' dresses. That was never what Sickert intended. He wouldn't go to such lengths for a frippery.

So why 'The boy I love is up in the Gallery,' Mr. Sickert?

Note that the music hall gallery box decorations that little Dot points towards, start to take the form of the little Putti (cherubs) in the Basilica dei St XII Apostoli, Rome, beneath the monument where Queen Clementina's ( Bonnie Prince Charlie's mother's) heart is enclosed. The putto ( cherub) on the right, at which little Dot (below) is pointing, corresponds exactly with the putto on the right on Queen Clementinas little monument in the small Italian church. ( Queen Clementina is the Bonnie Prince Charlie's mother.)

The painting shows ‘little Dot Hetherington’ and two figures that closely resemble......

Queen Alexandra and Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward. Queen Alexandra is set behind the backstage curtain, looking on, and Prince Eddy is seated beneath the gallery box. He sports his bowler hat. He’s depicted age twenty or so, exactly as he appears in the photograph left.

Behind the stage set, behind little Dot, we can see a very high rectangular archway, high enough for Archangel Michael- and we might make the comparison directly, as the specific archway is unique to the Vatican. Compare the archways in the painting against the archway behind Queen Clementina's monument in the Vatican (below.)

Note how in Sickert's finished painting, Queen Alexandra places her right hand on a wide pink pillar identical to the pink marble pillar on the left of Queen Clementina's monument.

Compare the Archways in both the Vatican (above) and the sketch of The Old Bedford (below) and look at a) the Putti (cherubs) beneath the Monument to Queen Clementina in the photograph, then b) the decoration on the gallery box in Sickert's sketch towards which little Dot points . ( The putti/ cherubs progressively become clearer in Sickert's pictures.)

Note also that Walter Sickert's 'inversed' the Vatican Archways in his sketch of the Old Bedford, below. The Archway to the right, behind little Dot in the Stage Set, in place of the triangular topped archway leading away behind the monument to Queen Clementina. ( If you find this abit difficult, don't worry about it. Watch the cherubs below Queen Clementina's monument, and look for signs of them in Sickert's sketches.)

Right: 'Little Dot Hetherington at the Old Bedford' , 1888-9. Pencil, pen and ink. ( Now at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven) .

The line/contour of the light shining onto Dot suggests we focus on perspective.

Bowler hatted Prince Eddy, who appears at the right of the finished oil painting beneath the gallery box, is fully reflected on the left of the sketch picture. There is only the faintest suggestion of any reflection in the completed, oil -painted picture, (where the matter is disguised by the 'Bowler hatted Eddy on the right' apparently having withdrawn his pipe from his pocket.)

Walter Sickert's suggesting that little Dot's pointing hand might just as well be ‘inversed’, as in a mirror image.

So: Somewhere in the world, the original hand on which hers is modeled , a 'right hand', will reflect her own, and point in the opposite direction.

The pink Vatican marble pillar to the left of Clementina's monument is disguised as a theatre curtain in the completed oil painting shown above; the decoration at the base of the Vatican Monument to Bonnie Charlie's mother, Queen Clementina, demonstrating the little Putti, ( the little cherubs) is disguised as a 'gallery theatre box' in Sickert's completed painting and sketches.

Note also, at this stage, the lady in the audience who appears throughout the series, every time Eddy, 'the bowler hatted man' appears. They're clearly not officially associated, yet Walter Sickert etches her in corresponding tones throughout . Her hat seems to suggest the long, plumed tail of the fashionable 'birds of paradise' , named after visiting aristocrats who visited tropical regions and hunted them down. She's Mary Kelly, the 'Blackbird of Paradise.'

That Mary Kelly, ( later displayed in detail in a related painting) should be subject to this ''Bird of Paradise' inference appears to have some significance; folklore relating to the aristocracy draws a strict distinction between the exotic 'Birds of Paradise', ( the nobility) such as
the 'Prince Albert' ......and the 'Blackbird of Paradise' that according to folklore, represents the returning Stuarts . The Stuarts are-according to folklore- 'Blackbirds of Paradise'; classed as terrorists and usurpers. (And above all, Catholics). (Walter Sickert later painted a superb exaggerated portrait of Mary Kelly in her most vivacious, perhaps happiest stance, entitled 'Blackbird of Paradise.' It became one of his most treasured paintings). We can see from the date of the 'Old Bedford series' that Walter's painting the early 1885 era, when Mary, Stuart that she was, was approved and taken care of by the royal family; hence his reference to her status as one of the 'Birds of Paradise.')

Left; 'Joe Haynes and little Dot Hetherington at the Old Bedford Theatre', c. 1888-9. Chalks, watercolour and charcoal, 31.75 x 26.7 cm ( 12.5 x 10.5 in.) Private Collection.

In this picture, (shown left), the high rectangular Vatican like archways of the theatre and its gallery and the other significant features blend into the backgound, though the bowler hatted Prince Eddy is still present on the right of the picture and reflected on the left of the picture. The little girl, 'Dot' continues to point at the gallery. She's glorified by some sort of ethereal light.

The stream of light pointedly highlights her pointing hand, which takes on the proportions of that of some gargantuan being. The picture title is more revealing, and suggests who’s ‘up in the gallery’: 'our lost prince Joe'.'

Joe Haynes was a well known music hall singer in the 1880's. Yet the name 'Joe', carefully deployed, appears- of we follow all the clues- to be significant.

We need to take a closer look at beautiful little Dot, her costume, the contra-jour light that surrounds her and her demonstrative hands.

Set in the face value Music Hall context she ought simply to be a music hall child , tap dancing and prancing about the stage while pounding out the words to the popular song ' The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery.'

Even at a glance, though, that's the last thing this ethereal little girl is.

See her close up below. Her gentleness and simplicity evince Degas' 'Repetition d'un Ballet sur Scene', 1874; her focused gesture , however, is more suggestive of Michelangelo's Capella ceiling, than the music hall scene of 1880's West London. She's focused, stilled. She's not simply pointing out a gallery seat as part of some regular routine.

She's drawn to a thing of no small significance.

She holds in her right hand the golden incense portal that the Catholic choir boys and boy assistants to the Priest hold in their right hands while walking up the Isle towards St Peter's altar, during Mass at the Vatican, Rome ( to this day). She's not wearing a Theatre or Music Hall ensemble. Her dress exactly replicates the unique white over robe the choir boys and assistants wear while carrying incense and prayer books toward St Peter's altar.

Little 'Dot Hetherington' is not a Music Hall dancer; the stage and her stage name disguise her. She's a Catholic messenger. The gesture her little hand makes evokes the Italian craftsmen of Michelangelo's époque upon whose era the sun never sets.

Dot's pointing hand isn't modeled on Michelangelo's Sistine chapel ceiling, nor on that master's Heavenly Father floating on his unattainable cloud in the Sistine chapel. (It resembles the outstretched hands of those masterpieces a little, at a glance).

It can be found right inside the Vatican, a little way before St Peter's altar, where the Mass is read at evensong. It belongs to the great statue of Elijah, who stretches out his right hand and points toward the great Latin announcement about 'The King'. See below:

(I have much more explicit pictures of this hand, Elijah's at the Vatican. The one below is not sufficiently clear- but the reference is apparent, nonetheless.)

The Statue of Elijah to the Right of St Peter's Altar, The Vatican, Rome, points, arm outstretched towards the emblazoned latin Notification 'the King has come' above St Peter's Altar.

Elijah points toward the bold golden lettering to the left of St Peter's altar: little Dot, up at the gallery box suggesting Queen Clementina's Vatican monument.

' The boy I love is up in the gallery.' By the little girl messenger, the boy in the gallery is a young Catholic Stuart King.

Examine the perspectives in the Vatican surrounding Elijah. Compare these against Sickert's first sketch, looking at the archway behind little Dot pointing up at the Gallery, and the archway that can be seen behind Elijah. Remember that the first Sickert sketch implies that the original hand upon which Dot Hetherington's is modeled is pointing in an inverse direction.

The Putti (cherubs) beneath the Vatican Monument to Queen Clementina, Bonnie Prince Charlie's mother, who display the Stuart's Sceptre and hold her Crown.

Pay particular attention to their shape, their form.

‘Stuart Hearts and Stuart Monuments’ are important to Walter Sickert, who uses them to suggest Stuart history and to symbolize the state of play in respect of the ‘The Lost Prince’ . He's an artistic genius, a master of caprice, of disguise, given to demonstrations of the extraordinary. He focuses on the little Putti (cherubs). These cherubs were a special favorite of the Cardinal Henry Stuart King I and IX, whose private quarters and private homes evidence the extent to which they were the focus of his informal art commissions (many of them still Vatican property). I have had privileged access to these inner chambers, courtesy of the Vatican.

Queen Clementina has two monuments: one, in the Vatican; the other, in the beautiful little chapel beside the Stuart's modest mansion in Rome; her heart alone is buried there. The Putti (cherubs) beneath the Monument to Queen Clementina in the St Apostoli Basilica, who guard the urn containing her heart.

Next, Walter Sickert focuses on the boy 'in the gallery' in another sketch named 'The Old Bedford', c. 1890-5. (below.) Charcoal , 21.5 inches x 15.5.

There's an inscription, upper right, on this sketch, that gives us an insight into the extent to which Sickert was keen to continuously trace the whereabouts of essential pictures in series that contained secrets; apparently so secrets he communicated would not be lost after pictures and paintings had been separately exhibited and sold . He's making notes on the picture's continued provenance, with the different owners' permission, and staying in contact with the many people who've purchased the same item.

It's signed 'Sickert' lower right. The charcoal picture's inscribed upper right by Sickert as follows: ' painted on a canvas given to me by F Forster in -date erased- at Neuville. sold to Cahen. Bt at hotel Drouot by Bernheim's.'

Above: 'Gallery of The Old Bedford', circa 1894, charcoal rendition.

Mrs. George Swinton, ( owner of the charcoal sketch 1964) was the first to report in later times that there were still several 'painted versions, or modifications' of an original sketch format ( to our left) in circulation.

This original sketch rendition reveals the Stuart secret' in the series. It displays a picture of a little boy in a cap, peeking over the Bedford gallery edge. 'Jo'. Walter Sickert's drawn the boy in the gallery as though the great mirror ought to reflect him in the gallery opposite him , yet he evidently exists entirely in the world inside the mirror, opposite which there seems to be a large, lively crowd of Penny Gaff and Music hall boys.

The great mirror , used in this way, instantly suggests Jacobite or Pre-Raphaelite art. For Jacobites, scenes happening in the mirror pertain to Stuart secrets. For the Pre Raphealite brotherhood, the mirror will depict a circumstance that explains certain happenings in the painting's dominant scene.

The Gallery box (in the sketch) above which the mirror extends is evidently the one at which little Dot Hetherington points in ' Little Dot Hetherington at the Old Bedford' / 'The boy I love is up in the gallery', and in the preliminary sketches ( shown higher up) .

It's decoration is exactly the same. But most importantly, The two figures on the theatre-box decoration features are clearly the little Stuart Putti from Rome. Sickert has selected from the four Putti (cherubs) and accurately replicated two of them. In the gallery box in the little sketch above, we appear to be looking at one of the two who guard Clementina's heart, beneath the monument in the St Appostoli, the one who holds her heart to the light, and the one on the left on the Vatican monument who blazens the Stuart sceptre. Absolutely exactly; unmistakably. The charcoal sketch (above) which preceded two larger , painted versions, may, as experts have it 'have been used as an intermediary.' Perhaps, from the tonal study point of view. It is prerequisite, it does differ from the finished oeuvres, but in terms of its content it stands alone, nonetheless. Its detail holds more significance for the history student than that of the finished works it precedes.

There's a little boy in the gallery. Notice that the little boy's cap in the sketch above is somewhat distinctive. It appears to be an 1880's cricket cap, with a long rim. Was Sickert a cricketer? Was 'Jo(e)' a cricketer? It seems they both were, and happily we can draw from the magical Walter Sickert himself:

..."When you are drawing you must be clear that you are doing three things and the first thing you must do is get your tentative line. The first thing you must remember about your tentative line is that it is not a thing that can be done and then washed out. That is the English view of everything. People always apologize for such things. There is no reason to apologize for anything. If you apologize you can't draw. Put your tentative line down and say 'My tentative line is good enough for anybody.' That is how you must feel about it. It may not be of course but that is how you must feel. You must leave your tentative line and you must leave it- ( proceeds to talk on 'half tones' being the second thing..)..then ..."My great point is that the three operations in a drawing must be separate and must be done at a run. When you do these things you must think that you are Holbein and ( names imperfectly heard by auditor) all rolled into one. It is no use saying I am a poor wretched sinful person, if you do you will be a poor wretched sinful person and you had better put your pencils down and never attempt anything. You must 'have the cheek' to do it. If you get the tentative line and then the half tones, then you will get the object 'in the round.' A head we will say will look like a bubble- like an object of some form. The same thing applies to the half tones that applies to the tentative line. You must not mess your bubble about. You must not do what a little boy I knew used to do who was very sensitive and shy and when he threw a ball up and it didn't go where he wanted it to he used to say 'I mean'. You must not do that, you must be callous, then you will produce something of the character- the plastic character of the bubble, like some round but insufficiently defined object."... ( Goes on to speak of the definitive line as the final stage).
Walter Sickert, Lecture given the 23rd November, 1934, 'Engraving, Etching etc'

The man behind the tentative boy in his little cap in the gallery in the sketch above, appears to be shadowing him. His guardian, presumably. Walter Sickert. There seems to be a self portrait sketch there.

The guardian's facial contours in the charcoal sketch above are unusual. They take on the shape of a self portrait Walter Sickert painted c 1913, 'Self Portrait: The Bust of Tom Sayers.' ( right). From the collection of the late Morton H Sands. (Last exhibited at Christies, 1988, no 48).

Sickert expert Wendy Baron suggests that in this self portrait W.S. 'leaves his 1906 introspection behind' and depicts himself as a 'jaunty pugilist' in a flamboyant eccentric beard. I don't agree there. There is a profound sadness in the picture. The 'beard' is not really just a beard, is it... (needless to say); it evokes the 'muzzle' that Sickert , while giving short shrift, complains of being strapped into lest he inform the public about a precious little face while complaining about populist 'art' ( flattering portraiture):

'From every other page of our daily and weekly papers, the required ideal plays with us a self -possessed and disquieting game of peep-bo. In the year of grace 1910 she consists of three parts. The chief is a ravishing hat, for the description of which I must refer you to the more able and sachverstanding pens. A little face, for the description of which I am forced reluctantly into French - museau, frimesse, binette-but words are poor things, even in French'....
Walter Sickert: 'Goosocracy', in The New Age, 12th May 1910.

This 'muzzle' in the self portrait appears to be analogous to the fact that Sickert was bound and gagged about the security secrets that he was obliged to keep in respect of the little boy called 'Jo'. It appears to have been in place while he painted the full olf painting exhibition versions of 'Gallery of the Old Bedford' ...since the little boy and the Stuart Putti are presented separately.. You can see it in the charcoal sketch above, in the guardian figure in the gallery box- the figure that looms over the little boy.

Left: the final version, first Exhibited in London, 1895, NEAC., no. 93, then entitled 'The Boy I Love is up in the Gallery'. ( Walter Sickert always provided the art galleries with a specific Gallery title on each occasion.) Last exhibited by the Walker Art Gallery, London, 1947. Note that it is this particular painting that is given the title 'The boy I love is up in the gallery', the same title as he gave the lovely painting of little Dot Hetherington.

Here we see that the little boy, 'Jo', who appears in the sketch, has been effaced entirely. An older man replaces him, wearing the fashionable Wildean broad rimmed Italian hat. He peers over the balcony, in place of little Jo. This, then, is 'Joe Haynes', well known director of the Old Bedford throughout the 1880's. Not our 'Jo'.

The little 'Putti' (cherub) are very clear. They are those that surround Queen Clementina's monument in Rome.

Wendy Baron ( 1992) noted how the different versions in what she calls the 'Old Bedford series' focusing on the gallery box have from time to time borne the title ' Cupid in the Gallery'; of significance to our study. when we recall that Cupid was first and foremost a cherub, a 'putto'-

And, there's a love affair happening in a 'gallery' of direct relevance to little Jo(e); one between Prince Eddie and Mary Kelly- ( one Sickert also paints elsewhere.)

Wendy and other experts have remarked on how the construction of this painting and prerequisite sketches is exceptionally skilled. Here we have a master of perspective demonstrating the lofty heights of the Music Hall , showing the far reaching impression made by both singer and song.

Left: another in the 'Old Bedford series', also titled 'Gallery of the Old Bedford.' ( Click to enlarge). Signed bottom right 'Sickert', as ever; first exhibited in the Leicester Galleries, 1930, courtesy E.M.B. Ingram, who later bequeathed it to the Fitzwilliam Museum. This rendition is often ( erroneously it appears) thought to have been executed as a rehearsal for 'the final version'. In the rendition a finely featured boy distinctly appears in the Gallery box on the right of the picture; a captivated crowd look on behind him. Compare this boy's appearance to that of our Jo illustrated at approx. age six or seven.

Sickert's suggestion is that he's Watching little Dot; who's saying...'The boy I love is up in the gallery'.

Note that in the large mirror, it's the little boy who stands alone; his guardian becomes a mere shadow. The Stuart Putti (cherubs) are very apparent.

The 'Muzzle' in place ( a gagging order from Special Branch) quite apparently did not stop Walter Sickert painting this lovely scene (below) which an instinctive public has long considered to be a picture of Prince Eddy and his 1880 lady, "up in the gallery" box. Here we have Prince Eddy and the very young Mary Kelly in her flamboyant 'Bird of Paradise' headgear, ensconced in a box similar to the one that becomes the preoccupation of Sickert's little 'Dot Hetherington.' ( click to enlarge, as ever.)

That Sickert painted Eddie in naval uniform in the 'gallery box painting' again tends to suggest that Eddy's relationship with the lovely Mary Jane began when he was about twenty, before he entered the Kings Royal Hussars.

Notice the little boy behind Mary Kelly, wearing his cap. Mary sits to the left of the gentleman (on his right).

The picture is called the unabashed ' La Gaiété Rauchouart' , (purportedly completed c. 1906, though more probably twenty years earlier), where Sickert portrays the key 1880's players in their happy gallery box in the mid 1880's.

Sickert art critic Richard Shone suggests that this one ..'has a wit and suavity far removed from the spectral visions of the Old Bedford or the Middlesex.' (hence, perhaps, the critics' placing it at 1906.) It's lively, raw and unashamed, certainly, but contrary to Shone's assertion it's clearly dynamically connected to the 'spectral visions of the Old Bedford'. The lady in the exotic hat, sitting next to Prince Eddie is quite definitely the lady watching the little Dot Hetherington's performance of 'The boy I Love is up in The Gallery' alongside Prince Eddy in the original sketches (shown above). Mary Kelly. Here though, she's wearing a slightly less flamboyant, more French hat. On close inspection of the painting (above) the lady in the precocious hat is modest, gentle, bashful even; her lover in his Naval attire draws very slightly closer, watching her from his position . They appear to be either the early stages of a relationship, or experiencing self consciousness that had been induced by the gentleman's protracted absence while meeting up during a visit to France.

One of the key themes in the final 'Jack the Ripper' victim Mary Kelly's story in the inquest documents (as told by her friend Joe Barnett) is that in the mid eighteen eighties a 'Gentleman' took her to France for a couple of weeks. Walker Sickert's pictures seem to suggest that this "couple of weeks" was spent participating in a Catholic 'Stuart' marriage,which would not have been legitimate in England; this is not to say a marriage between Edde and Mary did not take place in England aswell. History denotes that Stuart couples frequently took part in legitimized, second marriages, which were approved by the Pope. Marriages originally took place between confederate Stuarts as a matter of urgency; they were later made known, and approved by the Catholic Church. Such as, presumably, the one that took place between Eddy and Mary Kelly in France.

Note that there's a little boy in his cap, seated behind the couple, with a rather sweet little expression on his face. He's just behind Mary Kelly. He doesn't immediately present to the observer. But he's there in the picture, 'up in the gallery'.

Note also that the key figures 'up in the gallery', Prince Eddy, Mary Kelly and Jo(e), are seated in front of a mirror that reflects a girl who's apparently singing on stage, who wears a rather lovely red dress, evocative of late eighteenth century wear. Recall that the secondary title of a painting, often the title of a music hall song, evokes a painting's hidden secret that's demonstrated over a series of paintings. On this occasion, the title evokes the French Music Hall itself. ' La Gaiété Rauchouart' ,

Sickert's 'Gatti's Hungerford Palace of Varieties: Second Turn of Miss Katie Lawrence', 1887. Currently in The Gallery of New South Wales, Sidney. First exhibited in the Beaux Arts Gallery in London, 1933, no.15.

It might escape the viewer that Eddy and Mary, in the row closest to us, (Eddy in his early eighties bowler hat, as previously depicted, and Mary in more formal extravagant head wear) are presented together for all to see, though of course we only see the backs of their heads. No one wants to drag the Special Operations executive into an analysis unnecessarily but we might observe that this is a classic old school Secret Service deception trick. Make the key subjects all too apparent, and no one will see them. This painting and others is further explored under ' Eddy and Mary'.

D.S. McColls' wry 1895 summary in the The Spectator is interesting: he feels that Sickert expressed ' a private sentiment for the stage and the footlights, such as men feel for the fields and sunlight; but this does not further him much with a public that resents the stage in pictures almost as much as a play in church....'

Walter Sickert's painting were full of both the stage and the church.

Painting 'audience involvement with the Theatre and Music Hall scene' was the background upon which Sickert could skillfully portray 1880's Jacobite secrets and Special Branch counter activity . Jacobite Secrets were woven into the play between audience and artiste.

Little Dot and her '..The boy I Love is Up in the Gallery' communicate more to the penultimate audience ( us) than anything they might do if they'd merely been set on stage to communicate a simple Music Hall song.

Sickert often uses figures on stage to indicate a deeper plot. Painted audiences, an essential feature distinguishing Walter Sickert's work form that of his contempories are often witnesses to secret scenes as well as to whatever might be happening on stage. (We also look at this under 'Mary Kelly', at numerous examples of Walter Sickert's paintings of Prince Eddy and Mary.)

Art Student Marjorie Lilly is one of the few people in Walter Sickert's life who witnessed him in the throes of putting some of his 'series pictures' together. A trip to the Frith, Whistler's old Studio, in 1914 found him ( as he appears right) surrounded by all manner of props apparently pertaining to back street life from previous decades....

'We found our host in a huge, bare carpetless barn engulfed in shadows, thick with dust and the odor of paint and cigars, stacked with canvases and lit by a bull’s eye lantern. ….A horsehair sofa, draped with his black, Venetian cape, stood beside the blazing fire; deep chairs and a kettle singing on the hob. A table stood beneath the windows, littered with drawings; there was a dresser decorated with China and various ornaments which were constantly being changed. …..The right-hand side of the room was furnished with the stove and a huge shelf packed with canvases; by the door stood an iron bedstead covered with a honeycomb quilt and a Victorian Book-case handing above. He had two fervent crazes at the moment, crime and the princes of the Church; crime personified by Jack the Ripper, and the Church by Anthony Trollope. Thus, we had the robber’s lair, illumined solely by the bull’s eye lantern; when he was reading Trollope we had the dean’s bedroom, complete with iron bedstead, quilt and bookcase’. (Mj.)

An association between subversive, underground Catholicism, ( Jacobite activity), and the beautiful ‘big brass bed’ ( featuring in the series that speaks of Annie Crook and Mary Kelly, otherwise 'La Jospehina and La Carolina' pervaded the ante-room at the Frith as it must have done throughout 1880- 1890………..‘The ecclesiastical flavor so congenial to him was somewhat marred by the red Bill Sykes handkerchief dangling from the bed-post; but the presence of this incongruous article in the ‘deans room’ was not a passing whim; it was an important factor in the process of creating his picture, a lifeline to guide the train of his thought, as necessary as the napkin which Mozart used to fold into points when he was composing. Sickert was working now on one of his ‘Camden Town Murders’ and while he was living the scene he would assume the part of a ruffian, knotting the kerchief loosely around his neck, pulling a cap over his eyes and lighting his lantern. Immobile, sunk deep into his chair, lost on the long shadows of the vast room, he would meditate for hours…it played a necessary part in the performance of the drawings, becoming so interwoven with the actual working out of his idea that he kept it constantly before his eyes. How it affected his preoccupation with church dignitaries I cannot presume to say but there seemed to be a sort of mysterious connection there, too. With gusto, he would refer to his clerical set as he wound the red handkerchief round his neck…'

Walter Sickert’s reclusive ante-room at the ‘Frith’ along the passageway leading from behind the high shire horse gate was alight in the London night with the spirit of confederacy. Clerical works, back street attire one might readily associate with Charles Dickens’s early studies, Oliver, Dodger, Fagin, the boys and their telegrams and old degenerates suggestive of Bill Sykes permeated the place; Victorian bookshelves laden with manuscript treasures beckoned from above the brass bed.

‘ His easel, graced by the canvas he was working on at the time, filled the centre of the room; beside it a glass topped table, constructed by himself, which served as a palette; at the side of the easel he had pinned a reproduction of ‘His Mother’s Voice’ by Frank Dicksee, ‘to Inspire me’, as he gravely explained…'..

While it abounded with all the trappings of subterfuge at night, the anteroom at number 15, Fitzroy Street swiftly vacated itself in the crisp light of day. ‘We soon got used to transformation scenes at the Frith. After the robbers lair, the dean’s bedroom; then the studio would become a sort of parlour overnight with strange or banal objects conjured up from heaven knows where, which vanished on the morrow as soon as suddenly as they came. How Sickert procured his numerous chattels, what he did when he got bored with them or they had served their purposes, will remain one of the world's mysteries...'

The following painting ( see below, & click to enlarge) ' The P.S. Wings in a O.P. Mirror' was painted in 1889, apparently an epilogue to what we've been calling the 'Stalls and Gallery' series. The Daily Star, 1889, reported ' ....the low toned audience is admirably contrasted with the reflection of the brilliant red figure and the feeling of reflected light with which all the picture is filled is admirably suggested.'..

At first glance, the painting seems to suggest a singer involved in some intense soliloquy, directing her discourse towards an audience seated to the left of the stalls. On closer inspection it becomes clear that the audience are seated in front of a gold framed mirror in which the stage- girl is reflected; they watch the stage, as she sings to them face on.

'O. F' stands for 'Off Prompt' side of the stage, and 'P. S' stands for 'Prompt side.' According to the title, the 'Prompt' side of the stage is reflected in an 'Off prompt' mirror. The 'formal scripted' scene is reflected in an 'unscripted' mirror that alters the message that the painting communicates entirely. Instead of a simple singer and a Music Hall audience, we're again looking at a secret message, one that has its origins 'off stage', where Sickert, the invisible prompter, is sitting.

The original title ( possibly containing a reference to a Music Hall song) was lost, and the 1880's Music Hall singer upon whom Sickert modeled the stage persona who appears in this painting has never been formally identitifed. However, through her red dress, and the manner in which she sings to the audience, face on, reflected in a mirror, we can connect her to the singer who appears in the mirror behind Mary and Prince Eddy in 'La Gaieté Rauchuart' , ( above) who wore a more strikingly eighteenth century attire, (and, as with 'little Dot', we ought to be able to trace the original little music hall artiste upon whom this 'Catholic messenger' was modeled via the song that forms the Painting's title.)

The young girl in the red dress is a prophet, a messenger. More so. Her dress combines both the dress style worn on occasion in the West End Music Halls and the mid eighteenth century bustle. She's bathed in crimson blood red light, suggesting resurrection and vibrant life. The singer is reflected, as we can see, in the great mirror ( we can see a golden frame beneath her feet). Through the world of the mirror, she sings directly to the audience she faces, who are seated in front of its glass- though not reflected in it.

Look at the woman whose eyes are closed, whose veil is slowly lifted from her face. She's dead. Yet she's sitting upright, even though face suggests she's lying in a tomb. Yet she's beginning to waken ,as the girl sings her red painful song ,and blood red light covers the hall. The lady's bowler hatted companion beside her, also dead , eyes closed, hears the messenger's voice. A mortuary veil is being lifted from his eyes. His companion, to his right, is already awake. (This one's cloth cap lends him the appearance of an Irish Fenian rebel, but his features are intriguing. They call to mind the early portraits of Charles II.)

Notice the little girl's wearing the Scottish beret, favorite of the clans who supported the Bonnie Prince Charlie in his assault on the English throne. Her shadow, to the left of the mirror, emphasizes her headgear and takes the shape of a beret clad Scottish clan member, apparently with sideburns, peering out at us...!

Walter Sickert drew these celebrated Scots for the lost Prince, 'Jo. ( below.) We can see what the shadow of the headgear mean more clearly in the little sketch (below).

Left: Bonnie Charlie's highlanders. In Walter Sickert's secret unpublished sketch collection- drawn for the little prince. Compare the pictures of the Highlanders against the shadow in the mirror in Walter Sickert's painting.

The 'dead has arisen', (and Commissioner Anderson, Special Branch , Chief John Littlechild and Undersecretary Jenkinson rub their brows in dismay. )

The prophet is calling a lost Kingdom from the tomb....

The Jacobites are here.....!

The Special Branch documents contain a reference to a 'Meeting of the Jacobites' in Berner Street. I have kept the photos of these in a safe place.

Lionheart

2007-11-11T06:53:00.001-08:00

The manner in which this boy's eyes reproach his critics is worth commenting on. Centuries of injustice towards the Stuarts' in his eyes; he holds us to account. Click the picture to enlarge.

This is one of the most beautiful portrait sketches I have ever seen.

Welcome among us, beautiful Jo(e). The lost prince. History has been looking for you everywhere, your identity is a legend, and your situation, a matter England holds close to her heart.

Oh! England, my Lionheart,
I'm in your garden, fading fast in your arms.
The soldiers soften, the war is over.
The air raid shelters are blooming clover.
Flapping umbrellas fill the lanes--
My London Bridge in rain again.

Oh! England, my Lionheart!
Peter Pan steals the kids in Kensington Park.
You read me Shakespeare on the rolling Thames--
That old river poet that never, ever ends.
Our thumping hearts, hold the ravens in,
And keep the tower from tumbling.

Oh! England, my Lionheart,
Oh! England, my Lionheart,
Oh! England, my Lionheart,
I don't want to go.

Oh! England, my Lionheart!
Dropped from my black Spitfire to my funeral barge.
Give me one kiss in apple-blossom.
Give me one wish, and I'd be wassailing
In the orchard, my English rose,
Or with my shepherd, who'll bring me home.

Oh! England, my Lionheart,
Oh! England, my Lionheart,
Oh! England, my Lionheart,
Oh! England, my Lionheart,
Oh! England, my Lionheart,
I don't want to go.

The Prince and the Pauper - The Lost Prince and his semblance to the 1888 Royals

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Viennese educated composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) wrote music evocative of celtic folk melody, on occasion to the the exclusion of all else. Leider Ohne Worte, 'Songs without words'-Opus 30 No 1 in E flat major and 38 no 1 in E flat major might almost have begun as celtic ballads. Perhaps they once did. Perhaps this was the reason he was a firm favorite of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria in the early years, when the Prince Consort took protective pains to instill an intellectual disposition in his naive, enthusiastic and politically vulnerable young wife. Whilst Victoria's appreciation of Opera and the arts developed, they'd often play duets together in the evening. In 1842, on his arrival in London, Mendelssohn was invited to the Palace to rendered his recitals in the drawing rooms. Whilst at Buckingham Palace, he dedicated his 'Scottish Symphony' to the Queen. He 'd just visited Scotland, and informed Victoria and Albert that he'd fallen in love with the Northern Country. Mendelssohn's visit, in 1842.

It 's interesting that Walter's picture of Victoria and Albert, drawn for little 'Jo' depicts the Queen and Prince Consort during this particular period. Firm moral, ethical and artistic instruction was, contrary to popular opinion, a strong feature of Walter Sickert's personal code, just as mutual gentleness and respect in marriage was a learned sense.

Below, Walter Sickert draws Joe's great grandparents for him as they were in 1842, "before you were born."

"A long time ago?'"

"A long long time ago.

Note that the picture of Victoria and Albert has some of the hallmarks of one of Sickert's gallery paintings. The setting is suggestive of a stage set, presenting a perfunctory chair and door in the way the two items of furniture might appear on the contemporaneous 1880's theatre screen..

Herewith ( below ) found amongst Walter Sickert's secret sketches a picture of the Prince of Wales, 'Bertie', later King Edward VII, togged up to look like Henry XII, the astounding Tudor King , representative of all that is a Great, Terrible and wonderful English King, (at least, in a child's storybook, which will have it that whatever this man was he was a King).

Courtesy of Walter Sickert's artistry, Bertie's relationship to his other, much later grandson, later King Edward IIX is apparent in his face, though the sketch makes no attempt to suggest anyone but Bertie ( and the legendary Henry VIII). Edward IIX, Bertie's grandson at the date these pictures were drawn was not yet born.

Bertie was often talked about as a man with childlike playfulness in his face, 'the child in his eyes'. He's been captured for a child relative by a portrait genius.

When Bertie is referred to for the little Stuart boy his regal Tudor origins are evoked, which suggests that Walter Sickert's setting him in the context of an era of more relevance to the Stuart boy Prince's position than that which involved the Hanoverian intrusion onto the British scene so detestable to the Stuarts. The Tudors precede the Stuarts, the Stuart's were usurped by Hanoverians; ensuite the Saxe Cobergs entered the scene, who, by these pictures, make place for the Stuart heir. If the boy were to alter his namesake to suit his position as the one uniting the many Royal Houses it might well make sense to revert to Tudor, rather than Stuart. Were he Edward ( if Jo was a nick-name/informal name ) then his royal name might have become 'Edward Tudor.' "Here is a picture of your grandfather, 'Edward Tudor'

It seems that on this point Walter Sickert and Oscar Wilde , whose families were closely acquainted and who knew one another well from childhood through to adulthood, concur entirely. Oscar Wilde bought the story of one 'Edward Tudor' in the book by Mark Twain, 'The Prince and the Pauper' for one 'Joe Mack' ( again, suggesting the Mackenzie Stuarts) and inscribed it to him before entrusting it to Irish ( Fenian?) friends in New York, America, 1882.

" For Joe Mack, from his friend Oscar Wilde. Affectionately."

The inscription suggests Oscar's dedicating 'The Prince and the Pauper' to a child.

Below: An extract from a book of Poems by Mathew Arnold that Oscar Wilde inscribed to 'Nellie Sickert,' Walter Sickert's sister, on the 2nd October, 1879. ( Actual name Helena Marie, later Mrs. Helena Marie Swanwick). In her autobiography, 'I Have Been Young', 1935, she wrote " ...he was the first of our friends to call me Miss Nellie.. he discussed books with me and and gave me my first book of poetry, ' Selected Poems of Mathew Arnold', marking his favorites." The inscription made out to little girl 'Nellie' is exactly the same format as the inscription made out to little 'Joe. ' Nellie Sickert, from her friend Oscar Wilde.' (Via Sotheby's, New Bond Street, November 2004).

Oscar Wilde's and Walter Sickert's family were very close. Walter Sickert’s and Oscar Wilde's natural disposition for decorating the truth with fairy stories seems to attain the same genius, in the same fashion. A great deal of their work reflects the 'Stuart Mason' secrets. It sheds light on their pastoral gift, almost limitless imagination, acquaintance, Catholic and specific Freemason interest, respective seditious Irish mothers and the fact that their private lives were as quite as extraordinary as their individual dispositions. Their 'Jack & I tell each other fairy-tales' attitude to work emanating from their secret political lives suggests ( in their case) that their secrets were too sensitive to disclose.

It would be very unlikely, given their acquaintance, that Oscar Wilde should not have known ‘Joe/Jo’.

In 'The Young King', Oscar Wilde tells the story of a young heir who is brought beautiful Kingly Protestant robes, which he rejects …

‘And the Chamberlain and the high Offices of State came and made obiescense to him, and the pages brought him the robe of tissued gold, and set the crown and sceptre before him.

And the Young King saw them and saw that they were beautiful. More beautiful than aught he had ever seen. But he remembered his dreams, and he said to his Lords, ‘Take these things away, for I will not wear them.’

And the Courtiers were amazed, and some of them laughed, for they thought that he was jesting.

But he spake to them sternly again, and said ‘ take these things away, and hide them from me, there is blood in the heart of the ruby, and Death is the heart of the pearl.’ And he told them his three dreams.

…. And the chamberlain spake to the Young King and said ‘ My Lord, put away these black thoughts of thine, and put on this fair robe, and set this crown upon thy head. For how shalt the people know that thou art a king if thou hast not a King’s raiment?’

And the young King looked at him. ‘Is’t so indeed?’ He questioned. ‘Will they not know me if I have not a King’s raiment?’

‘They will not know thee my Lord!’ Cried the Chamberlain.

I had thought there had been men who had been Kinglike’, he answered, ‘but it may be as thou sayest.’

Later, he’s crowned in his pauper’s raiment:

‘ And the Young King bowed his head again, and prayed, and when he had finished his prayer he rose up, and turning round looked at them sadly.

And Lo! Through the painted windows came the sunlight streaming upon him, and the sunbeams wove round him a tissued robe that was fairer than the robe fashioned for his pleasure. The dead staff blossomed, and bare lilies that were whiter than pearls. The dry thorn blossomed, and bare roses that were redder than rubies. Whiter than fine pearls were the lilies, ad their stems were of bright silver, redder than male rubies were the roses, and their leaves were of beaten gold.

He stood there in the raiment of a King, and the gates of the jeweled shrine flew open and from the crystal of the many-rayed Monstrance shone a marvelous and mystical light. …

'The Young King', in 'A House of Pomegranates,' Oscar Wilde, 1891/2

In the Pall Mall gazette, 14th October 1884, Wilde wrote:

.....The broad rimmed hat of 1640 kept the rain off winter and the glare of summer from the face.. a wide turned down collar is a much healthier thing than a strangling stock, and a short cloak much more comfortable than a sleeve overcoat, even though the latter may have had 'three capes'; a cloak is easier to put on and off, lies lightly on the shoulder in summer,...a doublet is simpler than a coat and waistcoat....short trousers are in every way to be preferred to the tight knee breeches...soft leather boots could be worn above or below the knee, are more supple, and consequently give more freedom... ... no one... would prefer a macaroni to a cavalier, a lawrence to a vandyke, or the third George to the first Charles....for ease, warmth and comfort, the seventeenth century dress is infinitley superior to anything that came after it, and I do not think it is excelled by any preceding form of costume.'

Oscar Wilde enjoyed dressing in adapted seventeenth century attire during his 1882 tour of America. Left: pictured by Napoleon Sarony, ( 1821-96 ), New York, 1882, where he inscribed 'The Prince and the Pauper.' ( One of twenty-seven poses.) During his 1882 tour he enjoyed commenting on the scoff and ridicule his costume was provoking on both sides of the Herring Pond. " Strange that a pair of stockings should so upset a nation."

Right: Wilde by Napoleon Sarony, 1882, New York. Most of the full figure pictures of Wilde sporting the cloak he rejected, but they do demonstrate the case. The costume above has been said to have been an 1870's favorite at the Apollo Freemason's lodge, a favorite of the Prince of Wales, to which Wilde belonged for a number of years. (Ref Ellman, pp 156-7 , 161). Wilde appears to have drifted away from the Apollo Lodge in the mid 1880's as his inclination turned steadily towards an active Stuart cause.

Left: yet another of Sickert's secret sketches a child in Walter Sickert's life dresses up as a seventeenth century combatant in the much admir'd attire, and capers about laughing. The boy portrayed conceivably represents an 1880's child amusing himself dressing up in the somewhat theatrical costume. He looks alot like out Jo(e)..but there's a little caricature. Jo(e) age twelve? Perhaps Jo asked Walter to draw him in Oscar's attire.

The Story of 'The Selfish Giant' evokes a little boy whose status and mission equates with the Christ’s. Yet he's his own person. He appears in the wicked Giant’s garden, touches his life, alters his wicked

heart, promptly disappears and then returns to

claim him when least expected, as if by heavenly

design. Right/above: The original 1888 volume of ' The Happy Prince', containing five different children's stories, including 'The Selfish Giant', here shown, with the original illustrations by Walter Crane that Oscar Wilde approved.

….’Only the boy did not run, for his eyes were so full of tears he did not see the Giant coming. And the Giant stole up behind him and took him gently by the hand, and put him up into the tree. And the tree at once broke into blossom, and the birds came and sang on it, and the little boy stretched out his two arms and flung them round the giant’s neck, and kissed him. And the other children when they saw the Giant was not wicked any longer, came running back, and with them came the Spring.….
‘ But where is your little companion?’ he said:’ The boy I out into the tree.’
The Giant loved him the best because he had kissed him.
‘We don’t know,’ answered the children, ‘He has gone away.’
‘You must be sure and tell him to come tomorrow,’ said the Giant. But the children said they didn’t know where he lived, and had never seen him before; and the Giant felt very sad.
…One winter morning he looked out of the window as he was dressing. He did not hate the winter now, for he knew it was merely the spring asleep, and the flowers were resting.
Suddenly he rubbed his eyes in wonder and looked and looked. It certainly was a marvellous sight. In the farthest corner of the garden was a tree quite covered with lovely white blossoms. Its branches were golden, and silver fruit hung down from them, and underneath stood it stood the little boy he had loved.
Down stairs ran the giant in great joy, and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came quite near to the child.'

....the child's wounds expressly resemble those of the Christ. In response to the Giant's 'Who has dared to wound thee? Tell me, that I may take my big sword, and slay him', he declares that they're 'wounds of love'. Such as can be found outlined in a verse by Oscar's University companion, William Wilkinds, in his 'Years after'..

With tears of blood abundantly

Wrung from my heart, be warmed again-
Loved feet, that death enwraps from me
With kisses as of Magdalen.

‘The Selfish Giant’, in ‘The Happy Prince and Other Tales,’ Oscar Wilde, 1888.

‘Years After,’ William Wilkins, ‘Dublin Verses’, William Wilde’s Copy, c 1880

The Stuart's believed absolutely in the divine appointment of themselves as Kings, and this thesis was perpetuated by the Bonnie Prince Charlie throughout his childhood, his youth, and his assault on the Hanoverian English throne, which as history as we know it correctly transcribes, had/has been cruelly usurped from the Stuart line. He went much further, though. The romanticized claim he made that his ancestors were related to the bloodline of Christ, even to the lost King Arthur, was more than a political gesture- further romanticizing the case of the beautiful ( and extraordinarily popular) lost House of Stuart, and gaining him political, fashionable and charismatic support.

We need to remember that in the Bonnie Charlie's day this sort of thesis was popular among the European Princes. It could almost be classed as an extreme aristocratic fad. His set put about the belief that 'Bonnie Charlie' ( who would have survived on that reference alone!) was related to the Knight's Templar; indirectly, to Christ, to King Arthur....and this 'belief' formed a part of the formalities of the European Masonic lodges he created, 'The Pelican and the Rose'...hence the later 'Order of the Rose'.

By that thesis then, the little Prince, our 'Jo(e)', in theoretical terms, was ( by those subscribing to the old belief, for the sake of their set) comparable to the Christ; a true spiritual, as well as rightful, King. And those perpetuating it over a century later, 'The Order of the Rose" ( a group of young aristocrats of the late nineteenth century, prominent in the 1880's-) will have indulged their thesis after a similar fashion to the BPC; an aristocratic, dandy fad; an interesting intellectual supposition, an extremely attractive aestheticism which promoted their political cause: combining the Stuart and the Saxe Coberg line, restoring the House of Stuart to the English throne, and most attractive of all to some, confounding Special Branch and parliament entirely, through the promotion of the little prince.

************

I hear him, before I go to sleep
And focus on the day that's been.
I realize he's there,
When I turn the light off, and turn over.

Nobody knows about my man.
They think he's lost on some horizon.
And suddenly I find myself
Listening to a man Ive never known before,

Telling me about the sea,
All his love, 'til eternity.

Oh, he's here again,
The man with the child in his eyes.
Oh, he's here again,
The man with the child in his eyes.

He's very understanding,
And hes so aware of all my situations.
And when I stay up late,
Hes always waiting, but I feel him hesitate.

Oh, I'm so worried about my love.
They say, no, no, it wont last forever.
And here I am again, my girl,
Wondering what on earth I'm doing here.

Maybe he doesn't love me.
I just took a trip on my love for him.

Oh, he's here again,
The man with the child in his eyes.
Oh, he's here again,
The man with the child in his eyes.

*********

Tomorrow we'll look at Walter Sickert's important references to the Stuart line, the Vatican and the lost prince in his oil paintings series. We'll compare these series and the stories told therein, with the secret pictures that he drew for the little prince.

Police Chief John Littlechild, Special Branch, and the aristocrats' letter delivery arrangements

2007-11-11T06:48:00.001-08:00

Above: The shop fronts typical of those that perpetuated Whitechapel and the West End of London of the late 19th c., beloved of the artists James McNeil Whistler and Walter Sickert. Original photograph dated 1880's, prior to the Whitechapel matter. At the centre, a shop-front replicating the one we see in Walter Sickert's sketch of the Cleveland Street commerce, 'Kelly's Library'. Note the typical conglomeration of both errand boys and shopgirls around the shop doors.

Left: a little silver Victorian stamp box, approx 10 cms long. It's apparent emptiness on the counter in a tobacconist store would indicate to any one that letters deposited there were being delivered via unorthodox means rather than passed to the local Post Office.

What has the secret letter arrangement itself, 'Kelly's Library', got to do with the head of Covert Operations, at Special Branch, Scotland Yard?

A brief look at Chief John Littlechild's methods with Post Offices, Postal workers, the London 'underclass' , newspaper personal advertisements and secret letter delivery arrangements, while he was head of covert operations at Scotland Yard.

In his own words, from ' The Reminiscences of Chief Inspector Littlechild.'

Page 13-14, Chapter II, 'An Agony Advertisement in the Morning Paper, and What Came of it'..wherein the Head of Covert Security Operations at Scotland Yard relates his usual procedure of examining the personal columns looking for odd personal advertisements that demonstrate something unusual afoot. He writes:

" Now, as can be guessed, the Agony Column is studied as closely by the detective force as anyone"..

... and goes on to speak of how a particular advertisement in the personals attracted his attention. The Chief Inspector would find that all manner of crooks and swindlers would lure the innocent into commitments via the placing of simple and appealing little ads in the Personal Columns.

" Dear F:- I implore you to give me help in this hour of deepest trial. Friendless and ill, I can look to none but you. ... My last shilling will pay for this advertisement...please address "G.C." care of X., FLEET STREET."

The Chief felt that this ad. was directed to 'enlightening the pockets of an injudicious giver.' He explains how Mr. Howard Vincent, the Chief of Prosecutions permitted covert enquiries into the 'semblance of innocence' and tells of how he rendered himself at a place called 'X' in Fleet Street...

" First I paid a visit to X in Fleet Street. It was simply a place where letters were received- and there I was informed that for some time a young woman had been in the habit of calling for letters. She had received a great many. "Does she come frequently?" I asked. " Pretty well, but I have not seen her for the last two days," said the shopkeeper. " She is a nice looking girl, and appears to be in great trouble." I thought my theory was falling to the ground. However, just to be thorough, I went to the Offices of the Newspapers which had published the advertisement, and was permitted to see a 'copy', or the 'manuscript' of it....."

The Chief Inspector explains how he was 'amazed at the discovery he made, and the fellow's audacity'. (The handwriting upon examination turned out not to b the hand of a girl, but a man he knew too well, a 'rogue' his plain clothes Officers had arrested before. The 'importune' had managed to pay a young servant girl to pretend to be a poor thing. The story is a gem in itself and fully demonstrates a) the extent to which The Head of Secret Security Operations examined the Newspaper Personal Columns / the extent he was prepared to follow them in detail, b) the fact that he was aware of how little private shops served as a base for secret letter delivery arrangements, which organisation was dependant upon Newspaper Personal Columns and c) the manner in which he followed up Newspaper Personals by going into Newspaper Offices and asking to see the original letters, and the authors' original transcripts.
In the late Victorian era many practices now common to relationships were strictly illegal. It devolved on high ranking Police and their detectives to eradicate their practice from society. Many lovers kept their communications secret, avoiding the law at all costs. Chief John Littlechild goes on to relate a number of 'secret correspondence and courier' stories. Clearly, every type of illicit lover, sexual idealist, conspirator, cheapskate, fraud, confederate and low grade criminal was making good use of Personal Columns and 'secret letter delivery arrangements' , using the small commerces as a base for Private Postal Service arrangements .......that extended from the Strand all the way in to Whitechapel. On one occasion, acting undercover, he disguised himself in a Whitechapel rigout complete with cloth cap and bandana scarf and mixed among a 'nest of loan sharks', in order to ascertain their courier's or "runner's" moves. (He was very successful undercover, by no means lacking in the 'tools of the trade'; no small measure of skill, accounting for London's East End in the LVP.) On page 69:
" When this man was released he met his old chums at a special meeting convened in a low public house in Shoreditch, and he placed his scheme before us, for I was one of the party. It was my duty to 'lick it into shape', and the result was so successful that it had not long been started before we were netting £20.00 a piece every week.

Now, as I am about to relate how it fell to my lot to capture my pet criminal, in consequence of this scheme, I ought to explain how this loan office gang worked.
One of their member arranged, on some plausible story, for letters to be received at for him at an accommodation address, generally a small shop. Then advertisements were inserted in the Provincial, Scottish and Irish newspapers, offering money to lend on note of hand, interest on 6% and at first, no enquiry fees. Letters in reply poured in, and they were fetched away every morning, directly after delivery, by the "runner", who incurred more risk of arrest than the principal ( the letter sender) but who well knew he was scarcely worth the trouble of prosecuting. He was, however, protected by a confederate or 'middle man', who watched the shop every morning before a runner entered it, and gave the signal for him to fetch the letters, if the coast appeared clear. The middleman followed the first man to receive the letters at some convenient spot, in order that they might be taken by him to the principal, who did the Office work.
The middleman who watched over the runner also cashed the Post Office orders. Thus the work was equally divided between the three, and the risk of detection reduced to a minimum.."..
He goes on to describe trapping the 'runner' who lead him to the 'middleman' or 'lookout', who in turn lead him to the gang leader. Whereupon ( he loves to boast about this move) he flung away his disguise and announced : ' I am Chief Inspector Littlechild of Scotland Yard'...

Right: a little silver coloured Victorian shop bell, such as would be found on the counter or hanging from the ceiling in a small private commerce such as 'Kelly's Library'. ( See Walter Sickert's sketch of no. 21., Cleveland Street.)
The example relevance is evident. The shops being used for secret letter delivery are carefully watched by clients that benefit from the system. A courier or 'runner' such as Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes or Lizzie Stride, ( two of the Whitechapel victims) or some young lad, ( e.g. an opportunistic Telegraph boy who wants to earn more than sixpence) waits until the coast is clear, discreetly enters the shop, collects a letter and puts it in the hand of the 'lookout' at some distance off at a point mutually convened. The lookout, or 'middleman', then takes the letter to its intended recipient.
This sort of procedure appears to have been happening at 'Kelly's Library' , no. 21 Cleveland Street, (with variation where required). Gentlemen frequenting the area quite often (depending on their status) entered the little tobacconist's alone on the pretext of purchasing some tobacco or suchlike and collected letters that a private courier sent by their lover had left there. ( No need for another courier or runner in that specific case). Women recipients of secret correspondence such as Mary Kelly might well have to wait until a 'runner' collected the letter from the shop , placed it in the hands of a trusted agent or 'middleman' at some distance away, and then upon this middleman's delivering it into her hands directly. There were variations on the process, all with the aim of ensuring that letters were delivered discreetly and detectives or strangers surveying the secret delivery service were confused as to who exactly was the letter's sender and the letter's recipient.
Mary Kelly appears to have entered the little shop at no. 21 Cleveland Street to collect letters addressed to her often enough herself . Under Mary Kelly we look at Florence Pash's witness stories about Mary constantly slipping to the front of the tobacconist's shop queue, under various pretexts, an action which gave her the reputation of a cocky and haughty Madam. We know how her and Albert Edward's letters were intercepted by murderers organised by Special Branch known colloquially as 'Jack the Ripper.'

Little golden Victorian brass 'pauper's shoe' paperweight (right).
'Kelly's Library' was supervised by Catharine and John Kelly, in other words, by Catharine Eddowes, known as 'Kitty', and her partner, John. Both these were Special Branch agents, working for the 'Jenkinson Spy ring'.
In 1881, Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes teamed up with one 'John Kelly', a partner with whom she was to remain throughout the remaining seven years of her life. From 1881 to 1888 they were both living at the heart of Old Whitechapel, in bed-down lodgings at Flower and Dean Street, at the centre of a densely populated area renown for crime and confederate Irish terrorist activity in East London. She was instantly known as 'Catharine Kelly' ; she passed herself off as John Kelly's wife. By the Deputy of the Lodging House at Flower and Dean Street, Brick lane, Spitalfields, at the Eddowes Inquest :" I have known deceased and Kelly for the last seven or eight years, they passed as man and wife.."
Both Kitty Eddowes and John Kelly , known together in Whitechapel as 'Catharine Kelly and John Kelly' were assigned to monitoring Irish rebel activity for the head of Secret Service Under Secretary Edward Jenkinson. Catharine Eddowes aka Catharine Kelly was assigned to assassination detection.
'Catharine Kelly and John Kelly' were evidently placed over the little tobacconist's at no. 21 Cleveland Street, known to its regulars as 'Kelly's Library' by senior security officials. Catharine and John's remit in respect of the little tobacconist's was, evidently, surveying Prince Eddy's correspondence and watching his liaisons. Catharine, whose family and close friends called her 'Kitty' was known to locals as 'Catharine Kelly' , a local Whitechapel lady. Her and John's presence in Cleveland Street and Whitehapel was the efficient security surveillance arrangement Princes Eddy and Georgie would not have been without for a minute after Jenkinson's Secret Service annexe heard about the letter arrangement at 21., Cleveland Street. ( John and Catharine Kelly's 'library')
I think we can safely assume that 'John and Catharine Kelly', Littlechild and Jenkinson's Whitechapel spies, placed in Whitechapel since 1881, were seen by the Special Branch team as ideally placed to effectuate infiltration and control of the Prince's correspondence in Cleveland Street, given Prince Eddy's lover was being sheltered by confederates in Whitechapel. Catharine Eddowes aka 'Catharine Kelly' evidently became a regular feature of the little tobacconist's in Cleveland Street in about 1885.
In 1885, Catharine Eddowes met up with free spirited and artistic, musical acquaintance who enjoyed her company disinterestedly and returned innocent rebellious laughter to her life. She was not merely responding to orders; her life changed. She was enjoying freedom of choice. She had friendship. By 1888, instead of spying for Special Branch Secret Service annexe, she was spying on her employers, exploiting Special Branch information and helping rebel confederates associated to Prince Eddy structure their programme.
The little tobacconists' secret letter delivery arrangement may just as well have been named 'Kelly's Library' after its perhaps most special visitor, 'Mary Kelly', one of Prince Eddy's London lovers- perhaps his favourite. In aristocratic circles, love letter collections were long referred to as their owners' 'Libraries.'
In one respect, the situation resulting in 'The Whitechapel murders' is best interpreted as a 'security disaster' of the kind for which there is strictly no fallback strategem except the last resort. Catharine Kelly's remit, was alongside John, to keep the Prince safe from anyone to whom he was lending his authograph, his signature and his company, who might calculate upon his position and make their move accordingly. She was, it seems, to watch his correspondence and contacts and report these details to Special Branch directly. Catharine and John held a position of responsibility toward Senior Security Police.
Catharine Kelly used her experience as a spy and an agent to turn tables on her Security supervisors. Prince Eddy, who was old enough to decide it, had decided he definitley loved a young Stuart Catholic girl. His disposition validated his firm choice in every way; he was determined to the extent that he insisted that the Political playing field alter itself accordingly. (Prince Eddyie was want to be definite matters in relation to young Catholic women to the extent that his disposition was a genuine security concern, but it is not a relevant point in respect of Kitty Eddowes). He was about to be made Viceroy of Ireland. His father, the Prince of Wales, approved his taste in attractive Catholic Irish women irrespective of their threat to the Hanoverian status. Catharine Kelly, our 'Kitty', commissionned to survey Prince Eddy's liasons in the West and East End of London and report to Special Branch on his every move, decided she preferred to assist him, his inspiring friends and his Political colleagues in furthering his ambitious, somewhat romantic Political dream of uniting Hanoverian and Stuart descendants and bringing about a peaceful solution to the 'Irish Question.' She made use of her sspy position in repsect of the little tobacconists as no. 21 Cleveland Street and organised secret letters between Prince Eddy and his liaisons an connections, ( notably Mary Kelly) in flagrant defiance of the remit handed her by Special Branch section d.
'Catharine Kelly' was in a serious position. She had exchanged her loyalties to her Security supervisors for action expressing the loyalty she felt she owed to the Princes and their entertaining , motivated, resolute companions.
Our Catharine, confederate Stuart name 'KittyK' wasdrawing on all her acquired expertise and insider knowledge of Special Branch practice. Quite apparently. She had set herself the task of delivering letters on behalf of Prince Eddy and the Royal family for the sake of a cause she believed in on behalf of breakaway rebel confederates and young politicians whose claim she considered genuine, whose ways were apparently gentle.
***********

The Lost Prince...Stuart Ancestry

2007-11-11T06:45:00.000-08:00

What have you got in your hand?
A green bough.
Where did it first grow?
In America.
Where did it bud?
In France.
Where are you going to plant it?
In the Crown of Great Britain.

The Golden Rose Tree in the Basilica, Venice, bearing seven of the wild white roses that the eighteenth and nineteenth Century Stuarts deployed as their symbol.

Inferred by Oscar Wilde is his story 'The Nightingale and The Rose.'

As Charles Edward Casimir Stuart, the Bonnie Prince Charlie dwindled and died, United Irishmen of late eighteenth century Ireland changed the field behind the Golden Harp on the unofficial flag from blue to green, a colour that came to symbolise inspired rebellion. Emblems such as leaves, branches and 'liberty' trees symbolised rejuvenation and revolution.

During the 1860's and 70's Fenian movement in America and later England , the Unofficial Flag was taken up again. The Green field and Golden Harp now represented proactive Irish Nationalism, and the fight for Home Rule.

Folkore, like a gentle little girl, has a way with secret history. The little ditty and its 'green bough' invoke more than a reference to the new and powerful nineteenth century Fenian movement . In 1847, the Jacobites had been driven back. Bonnie Charlie had soon fled the far reaches of Scotland and taken refuge in Italy and France, where he later began work on the possibilities that might yet remain to his heirs , known and secret, who'd blossomed and put forth shoots.

In 1882, by Walter Sickert's account, a young boy was born to a Hanoverian Stuart Prince, heir apparent to the English throne, and a young Stuart girl.

Above, a lovely sketch apparently designed by Walter Sicker for the boy Jo, of his first Stuart ancestor, Charles I, during his marriage to Henrietta Maria.

Walter Sickert's secret pictures seem to suggest Jo's lineage combines the Royal House of Hanover, (crystallised by King George, hated of the usurped Stuarts,) the House of Saxe Coberg Gotha, (consequent hiers to the British Empire via King George's granddaughter Queen Victoria's marriage) and the Royal House of Stuart, pretenders to the British Empire and rightful claimants according to the Act of Succession. His inheritance apparently derives from Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, heir to the House of Hanover and the House of Saxe Coberg Gotha ( The throne of England) and 'Mary Kelly', heiress to the displaced House of Stuart.

A sketch of the deeply saddened face of Charles I, perhaps as he faced parliament, before his own ministers sentenced him to death. Drawn by Sickert, for the little boy.

In Sickert's secret pictures we have a layout that tells us that Stuart Confederates, Politicians, Fenian Leaders, Irish rebels and their supporters set out to unite the royal houses in one heir. Jacobite leaders appear to have been uniting a diverse multitude of back street rebels behind their endeavor to put the young pretender forward.

The boy Jo's or 'Joe's' combined inheritance will have dispensed with two centuries of politics that had nullified the dominant Stuart claim to the English throne apparent according to the terms of the Act of Succession.

Rebel Fenian and Jacobite factions to all intents and purposes had achieved their political aim in this little boy. In Young 'Jo' , the position of the House of Hanover was reversed entirely. The House of Saxe Coberg Gotha, ( the then House of Hanover) then headed by the Queen Victoria, would, if it recognised Jo as Eddie's heir, ( and consequently future King of England) have to make way for the old order that existed before the revisions made for convenience during the reign of William of Orange, ( Uniquely accorded the English throne to keep out the Stuarts) by the precincts of which the throne still belonged to Stuart Kings. Who could still, in theory, indeed in principle, exercise their full right to the Act of Succession. While Jo(e) lived, the British Empire was reduced to nothing but a potential, and the constitution was gone. Without him there could be no constitution.. because he lived.

'King of the Fenians.'

The is no 'constitutional crisis' thesis and no 'conspiracy theory' - or as we can now see it, 'Special Branch operation' vis a vis the Jack the Ripper Murders without evidence for Special Branch targeting the House of Stuart. There is no other constitutional threat to the British monarchy and aristocracy than the Lost House of Stuart: there never has been any other; and there never will be.

Click to enlarge. From Walter Sickert's secret pictures. Here, Walter Sickert appears to be entertaining the young Stuart boy 'Jo' with a picture of a Hanoverian 'Wiley King', usurper to the throne upon which he is seated, who experiences a terrible moment of Divine retribution for his evil and dastardly imposition. An extraordinary Arthurian creature flies through the sky and demonstrates the book of life, upon which the true King's name is presumably recorded. The usurper reels in horror at the sight of it, and his cowardly lion ( presumably Hanoverian) snivels behind him, trembling. Look at him, surrounded by all manner of malicious, wiley courtiers, corrupted elfins and slit eyed personas with devil's symbols. He's taken over the Palace. And 'Lo'! As he trembles before the elfin angel's message, a faithful Stuart messenger in renaissance style clothing ( who appears in other pictures visibly depicting the Stuart battles) boldly sets him in his place, indicating the Catholic Stuart rose, emblem of righteous triumph, lain at his feet. ( Compare the Wild White Rose to the rose in the Golden Rose Tree in St Mark's Basilica, Venice.)

Below, one of Walter Sickerts pictures for Jo/Joe. He draws Guinevere, kidnapped by Mordred, or perhaps rescued by Lancelot, on horseback. Beneath these two he vividly depicts King Arthur's early experience with the Sword in the Stone.

The King the Jacobites called Charles III, the 'Bonnie Prince Charlie', in dangerous exile in Southern France, is reported to have begun a Freemason's Lodge entitled 'The Pelican and the Rose' which adopted two distinct Catholic emblems; the ancient Heraldic Pelican , often depicted plucking out her heart, and the White Rose, the emblem of the Stuart dynasty. In keeping with aspirations demonstrated by a companion of his youth, Gustav III of Sweden, Charles Casimir Edward Stuart appears to have sought to recreate a romanticised ( ancient) regal history, using the eighteenth c. European Stuart Lodges and the history of the Knights' Templar as a means to an end. Gustav III emphasised the Vasa Kings; Bonnie Prince Charlie laid claim to a remote ancestral connection to King Arthur.

Freemasonry that evokes the French Templar Knights as well as the legends of the Knights of the Round table derives from Stuart innovations that began with King James II.

Walter Sickert drew 'Jo' a number of sketches of seventeenth century Stuart ancestors out on the battlefield, in their tasteful attire. In the following sketch, Walter follows the Stuart story from Charles Ist's losses on the battlefield through the period in which the young Prince Charles II trails after his Catholic matron, holding her hand, up until the time the young Prince Charles II restored England to the Stuarts, in 1660.

King Charles Ist's demise is shown top left. In the first picture, at the far left of the page, he's shown surrendering to a soldier who closely resembles Oliver Cromwell, Lord Governor of the Parliamentary Army in 1644. Walter Sickert depicts him surrendering at the battle of Naseby. The little sketch to the right of this one depicts a seventeenth century Parliamentary figure giving King Charles I his marching orders. Charles 1st is thrown out of his Palace and Kingdom and doomed to a period of chaotic exile in England that culminates in his trial and execution.

Down one level, we see the French King's Palace guards outside the entrance to a safe French refuge where King Charles II was sheltered while growing up, prior to his return to England.

There follow pictures of a young man playing with 17th c toys, clowns, hoopla hoops and slings, whose features clearly resemble those of Charles II. ( Note particularly the face of the youth at the centre, shown dangling his sling.) Walter Sickert appears to be telling Joe/Jo about an exiled Stuart King who'd gone before and comparing both their situations. The young King Charles II is also depicted in military costume not unlike his father's. He appears to be preparing for battle, and surveying the land. King Charles II, a covert Catholic, avenged his father in battle and restored the Stuart monarchy to England, Scotland and Ireland in 1660.

Down one level again and we have pictures of young men dressed as soldiers, then Frenchmen assisting King Charles II in battle, then the 'matchstick men' for which Sickert recently became, through his false accusers, somewhat notorious, ( in fact they're very suggestive of Walter Sickert's known influence on the artist Lowry, whom he tutored ) engaged in ferocious duels. At the bottom right hand corner we have the wise, gentle face of a seventeenth c Franciscan Monk. Not least, we have a picture of a very little future King Charles II holding a matronly Catholic hand ( bottom right hand corner ) and one of Charles II with a more elegant lady, apparently his mother Henrietta Maria ( at the centre, above the Venetian Court Jester depicted rolling the hoola hoop.)

*******

And so there the evidence at the origin of the rumours about the Jack rip murders and its apparent association with the Knights' Templar freemasonry element. A little prince with little feet and hands and a frail Stuart constitution, learning his history and the beauty in the legends set afoot by members of his ancestry through a series of pictures 'this is all about you, little boy'..traipsing through the back streets to Walter Sickert's 'the master's' in his worn out shoes 'in an ecstasy of wonder', to hear his wonderful..... stories.

Walter Sickert's secret work- The Face of Genius

2007-11-11T06:44:00.002-08:00

Walter Sickert, 'The juvenile lead', self portrait,1908. Currently at the Southampton art gallery.

No Ordinary Love - the Lost Prince - Eddy's Letters and Sickert's Art

2007-11-11T06:44:00.001-08:00

In keeping with his dispensation as from c 1990 for using regular artist- models as basic models to assist with painting someone from memory, Walter Sickert went on to paint Catharine Eddowes, our 'Kitty K' from several new perspectives, placing her in the context of the case history and the past... as seen fresh through the eyes of the young Stuart Prince, 'Jo' .

This sequence is particularly beautiful. Other related to the Casework are more beautiful still.

Walter Sickert chose a Music Hall singer, 'Chicken,' to model for him during the 1914-16 period which saw him painting the pianos he'd long kept at no.8, Fitzroy Street and the studio at Red Lion Square . She's a funny little bint, at best; Emily Powell, a young cockney who resided at the corner of the Street, at no. 26 Red Lion Square. Royal Academy members according to Baron and Shone (1992) were at a loss to figure out why Sickert would go out of his way to procure a model like her , suggesting to Miss Gosse's outraged indignation ' Chicken must quite clearly have adored her stout and would have rocked in drunken song in the alehouse on the jolliest behind.'

Below right: the 'Chicken' preliminary sketch., c 1914/16, private collection.

Notice that Walter Sickert's allowed us to see the full room as though we're looking in at them both, from the world of the mirror. He's depicted himself pulling out a mundane draw for material, and we get the impression he's about to begin a new work, a new story sequel. On the last occasion he allowed us to see him possibly pulling material from out of a drawer he was playing on some very precious piano keys. We can expect 'Chicken's modelling for him to help him structure telling scenes featuring 'KittyK' , our Catharine Eddowes.

Left: 'Chicken', c. 1914. Provenance Edward Le Bas, by descent. A family painting privately owned since Walter Sickert's day. First exhibited London, Eldar gallery, 1919 no. 35. Last shown reproduced in Bath, 1990.

A close look at 'Chicken' in this take on the introductory 'Mrs Barrett' clearly demonstrates that Walter Sickert's going to be using Chicken as a model to enable him to paint more of Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes. It won't come as any surprise that he goes on the use her in various poses that assist him in conjuring up KittyK .

Sickert's perhaps deliberately caricatured the original in order to avoid detracting from the introductory 'Mrs.Barrett's beauty and mystery. He's given Chicken a wickedly capricious look. The Music Hall starlet's memory of Walter Sickert appears to chime with many other people of her age: "The fun we used to have! I loved him so much." ( Sutton 1977 pp 175., in Baron and Shone, 1992.) She's kept her giggles to herself while modelling Kitty K at the grand piano, below, where her vivacious glare has melted into something quite different. The contra-jour light seeps through the window onto her back and shoulders; the place is flooded with music and memories. Sickert's beautifully captured her levity and lightness of movement.

Note how the glossiness on the lovely old piano extends to the full picture. " Chicken has been playing Les Comptes de Hoffman whil I have been painting her reflection at the piano." Sickert wrote in a letter to Ethel Sands.

Below, the first version of 'Tipperary', 1914. 50.7 cm x 40.5 cm; bequeathed to the Tate Gallery by Lady Cavendish Bentnick in 1940, after Sickert's death.

Why 'Tipperary' then Mr Sickert?

Going through the 'Tipperary' title puzzle, art experts suggest that Sickert was possibly riding the wave of 'national patriotism', applying the ditties the soldiers sang in war time ( i.e. 'Tipperary' )as titles to 'musical paintings'. Yet there is nothing so unlike Sickert as that; he is always making a send up and a display of British patriotic attitudes, let alone nationalist. In his own words, you can him on 'plumbing and offending the King', which (with habitual blasé) he rolls into one artistic context, causing his lecture audience to giggle .

He remarked at a lecture' Drawing is not simply trying to get a thing correct and despising entirely the particular instrument you are using. After all you would not do such a thing if you were playing the violin or the piano. Those instruments dictate the use you are to make of them. If in drawing you ignore that and you vilify it by trying to 'tidy up' you take away from drawing exactly that particular quality which drawing is. A drawing may be 'alive' or it may be 'dead' or it may appear to be correct but you must not mess it about. Joe Elvin used to say on some occasion when someone was rude to him on the stage- it was a very fine reply- "don't mess old England about". There is a great deal to be said for it, and there certainly is, for not messing drawing about. Leave the traces- leave the footsteps which have lead you where you want to go'. ( Walter Sickert, Lecture 30th November 1934, "Black and White Illustration.")

Another painting also called 'Tipperary', linked to the painting 'Tipperary' above, bears out the puzzle a little better:

Right: 'Tipperary', the second painting of that title. Authenticated by Lord Henry Cavendish Bentnick's handwriting on the back, 'Tipperary.'

The song 'It's a Long way to Tipperary' written by Judge and Williams was an extremely popular London Music Hall ditty in 1912, when it was regularly performed. It contains no mention of the military or the war whatever, hence the critics' puzzlement.

According to many Sickert experts ' ... a British soldier is represented leaning out of the window while listening to 'her' playing'. She, then, by this analysis would be reflected in a mirror to the soldier boy's left while he leans out of the window, looking at the garden in the daylight. The soldier's face is a little suggestive of the 'Universal Soldier;' perhaps, as with all Britons 1914, the loss of so many soldiers was on Walter Sickert's mind.......

Sickert's placement of objects and perspectives deployed are intentional. The picture is intended to be interpreted both this perspective and from yet another.

We can see the soldier boy from another perspective entirely, if we assume that he looks in through the window onto the room and the piano player from another world, where the light is quite different. As if he stands in a partition marked out by contra-jour light, looking in through the window that filters the same beautiful light onto the pianist's back in the first painting of the title 'Tipperary' ( shown two paintings above). In this case, he looks through the window that we can see exists beyond the first painting of the reflection of the pianist, in at the past. The 'soldier boy' looks in at the distant past at a woman whose face now entirely resembles 'Kitty K', our Catharine Eddowes. Her face is completely hidden . The young soldier boy hears her play the tune 'Tipperary' .

Note that the oval looking glass depicted above the piano is redundant; its frame hangs loose. The woman exists in the Jacobite 'looking glass world', where of course there are none of our mirrors. The soldier boy, from whichever perspective, is now beyond the world of mirrors and paintings; in the secondary interpretation of the picture he looks in from another world, where he lives, aving passed on- where the light is beautiful. Yet something, for him, is beautiful about the world of the little room and the piano... enough to draw him to a window onto the past.

The window is beset with the contra-jour light Sickert loved, according to the witnesses to his life.

No art critic has ever been able to identify the soldier looking through.

The funny little nose on the soldier boy is telling of the little caricature of a 'Stuart nose' .....the nose that Walter Sickert gave Jo's father, Prince Eddy, who in Sickert's secret sketches appears walking alongside a matron, tenderly holding a baby in his arms.

On the little extract from the Standard personals column 5th October 1888, there appears a message from Mary Kelly, who appears to have gone to the Standard during the week after Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes' death. 'Last saw you in a window in May', she writes -for 'Albert Edward', identifying herself without betraying her name. Clearly, she perceives that her lover's plans have been interfered with by people who've tracked down the lovers' 'informal courier arrangement' based at no. 21 Cleveland Street, and killed their courier, her friend, Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes...: ' Beware of false ones', she writes; - 'but never doubt my love.' ...'Last saw you in a window in May..' ' I have received neither letter or parcel.'... ' If only we could have spoken. '

Below, the relevant extract from the Song 'Tipperary', of Music Hall artists Judge and Williams, c 1912.(click) Readers are now privy to retained Special Operations information and the corresponding Sickert inferences, and can see what Walter Sickert intended by his reference to the song.

It's a long way to Tipperary,

It's a long way to go.

It's a long way to Tipperary

To the sweetest girl I know!

Goodbye Piccadilly,

Farewell Leicester Square!

It's a long long way to Tipperary,

But my heart's right there.

Paddy wrote a letter

To his Irish Molly-O,

Saying, "Should you not receive it

Write and let me know!"

"If I make mistakes in spelling,

Molly dear," said he,

"Remember, it's the pen that's bad,

Don't lay the blame on me!"

It's a long way to Tipperary...

Molly wrote a neat reply

To Irish Paddy-O

Saying Mike Maloney

Wants to marry me and so

Leave the Strand and Picadilly

Or you'll be to blame

For love has fairly drove me silly:

Hoping you're the same!

It's a long way to Tipperary...

'Jo', the lost Prince, was among the lost and forgotten soldiers, according to Walter Sickert's friend and student Marjorie Lilly...'he was lying in France, with a bullet through his brain....' ( This is of great concern. Special Branch more than knew about this prince. Do the military secret police just 'lose' a prince..)

We can see why the emergence of this song in wartime, when it was very popular, combined with the loss of Jo, inspired Walter Sickert to hire Chicken from the Music Halls and set to work on the Eddowes /Kitty/ Mrs. Barrett series again this time. ( By the labelling, he had last worked on the 'Mrs. Barrett' series in 1906..

Walter Sickert deployed the same 'light partition' that separates the soldier in the second 'Tipperary' painting from his past, in another picture in which he highlights the concept of the boy's idea of his father . He paints the illuminated interior of a familiar café, the 'Vernet's at Dieppe' as seen from the lovely Quai Henri IV, ( a favourite of his) . The painting's title, the Music Hall song 'O Nuit d'Amour' ( Oh Night of Love) is the recognisable link to the painting of the soldier boy 'Tipperary'. The song 'O Nuit d'Amour' belongs to Offenbach's famous bacharolle ' O Belle nuit, o' nuit d'amour' from the start of act II of 'Les Contes de Hoffman', which Sickert asked 'Chicken' to play on the piano while he painted her reflection.

Below: 'O Nuit D'Amour', c. 1922 ( dated 1922, possibly before) signed bottom right 'Sickert'. First Exhibited at the London Group, 1925, no. 71, London. Last Exhibited in 1975, at Eastborne and Guildford Galleries, no. 65. Prov .Miss E. M. Hewitt.

'O Nuit D'Amour', c 1925. ( see also description above.) The lovely café's been given an ethereal aspect, as if the spirits we can see inside its walls have come to pay a visit. The folk on the left gathered around the table evoke the mid eighteen hundreds in their mid seventeenth century flambouyant hats, (still in military England and France during Bonnie Prince Charlie's era, mid eighteenth century, and fashionable among the 'Order of the Rose', the pro-Stuart dandy group on the 1880's, of which Prince Eddie was a member). The violinist, to all appearances quiet as the night outside, plays the violin to a heightened pitch. The gentleman in the centre of the picture, seperated from the company by a partition of convaluted contre-jour light, seems to sit confined alone beneath the same strange chandelier that we find hanging inside the revealing little Sickert sketch of 21 Cleveland Street, 'Kelly's Library.' (shown again below.) Eddie.( Albert Victor Christian Edward.)

Prince Eddie's boy, young, alive and looking at the past might envisage his father in just such a way, sitting with the old Stuart Jacobites, separated from them by an era while the violin plays music from far beyond our ordinary world.

Walter Sickert had a penchant for renting studios once used by celebrated painters and writers he admired, and renting rooms close by these refuges, where he carried out his secret painting. It could be said to have given him a sense of security; he was creating a sense of place in a world that does not accommodate genuine artistic genius. He rented no. 15, Fitzroy Street from 1913 onwards as a private studio come living quarters, and close by, the studios at no. 8, Fitzroy Street, his old tutor James McNeil Whistler's old 1880's studios, which he deployed for teaching his students. ( Marjorie Lilly, 1971). .

Walter Sickert's lifestyle demonstrates a consistent habit of renting out rooms local to studios he rented and used for private study or teaching. 'A studio and a lifestyle' could almost have been his motto. He rented the artist Constable's one time studio at 76, Charlotte Street, a stone's throw from 21 Cleveland Street's tradesman's entrance (accessible via the back yard). He used 'Kelly's Library', the secret and informal postal service, as much as the other regulars, which, by his unpublished sketches, included James Whistler, Lord Arthur Somerset, Oscar Wilde, Montague Druitt, Prince George, Lord Heuston, Stuart and Irish Fenian confederates and rebels and many aristocrats among the 10th Hussars.... among many more.

In 1974, Walter Sickert's purported son 'Joseph Sickert' ( Né Joseph Gorman), (who, as shown, was in fact the artist Walter Sickert's grandson, via Annie Elizabeth Crook's daughter, Alice Margaret Crook..., Walter Sickert being the missing father on the birth certificate of Annie Crook..), claimed that Walter Sickert had told him that in 1888, he'd rented a room at 15, Cleveland Street, close by Hammond's club at number 19. As shown, no.19 was adjacent to the little tobacconists, 'Kelly's Library' , at no. 21. Whether or not rooms at no. 15 Cleveland Street were rented by Walter Sickert is a matter for research: it clearly isn't out of the question. Critics' insistance that W.S. never rented Constable's old Studios at Charlotte Street in his youth is refuted by the man himself, in a letter to the Times, written in his declining years. ( as seen in the posts below.)

Walter Sickert left us a sketch of Kelly' Library, 21 Cleveland Street (details of Special Branch evidence and its meaning here, click). His picture captures one of 21 Cleveland Street's visiting gents in the process of collecting his letter and the 'behind the counter' shop assistant Annie Crook, carefully overseeing the transaction. Click the picture to enlarge.

The piece above is titled 'The Laundry'. ( By Walter Sickert. All titles quoted are his.) It was probaby transferred to broadsheet canvas. This is how it appeared during the 'squaring up' process. The broadsheet canvas has not been recovered anywhere, but it might yet emerge from a private collection. This sketch allows us a glimpse into the mind of the genius secret storyteller (or ‘clue giver’). Notice the little upside down chandeleer, which he connects to the pictures 'O Nuit D'Amour.'

The sketch contains two merging scenes. A 'Tobacconist-confectionner's come informal Post Office arrangement', and a 'Laundry'.

Close ‘under the magnifying glass’ examination of the preparatory sketch (right) reveals a laundress etched in pencil beneath the point where the 'informal post office' gentleman visitor stands filing through the little cabinet, looking for his letter (see right). A laundress can be seen scrubbing a shirt on a scrubbing board she dips in soap-suds. Two situations combine: a 'Laundry', and an informal postal service/post office. ( Click the picture to enlarge.)

Were this picture transferred to broadsheet canvas, the complete painting would have two titles, in typical Sickert style.

Presumably, he considered it too risky to exhibit the sketch-picture, which clearly denotes a gentleman’s 'Informal Post Office' and a Cleveland Street shop front. Were it ever painted up and the final painting gallery exhibited, he might have had the first gallery painting title down as ‘Write me a letter'( after the music hall song), or suchlike-and the second title down as ‘The laundry.’

‘Kelly’s Library’ , the secret and informal post office arrangement at Cleveland Street, was a well kept secret that Walter Sickert couldn’t present to the art galleries atall. he never did. Clearly this little sketch wasn't going to be exhibited at the R.A. beside ' Blackbird of Paradise', the wonderful capricious picture of Mary Kelly , depicted as a Stuart, which the RA saved from destruction- for which gesture we owe them a lifelong debt. Or next to pictures of Kitty. He painted to keep the truth alive in the world, but, supervised by Special Branch throughout his life, he could never sit there demonstrating that this was what he was doing. He drew and painted for future generations, and he believed.

Right: the preliminary sketch for 'O Nuit' d'Amour' . ( Last at Sotheby's, 1982, lot. 69.)

Notice, just as though you were the curious independant child Mr Sickert would have you be, ( he has a particular disdain for state officiousness, policing, sententious art critics and ripper obsessives) that in the 'oil sketch' (right)there is a gilded mirror at the base of the steps. In such a mirror, the chandelier in Vernet's Café will appear 'upside down', taking the shape it takes in the revealing sketch of 'Kelly's Library', the secret postal service centre at no. 21 Cleveland Street, 1888. In 'O' Nuit d'Amour, Walter Sickert communicates the reason for the messages that passed through 'Kelly's library'. A Prince and his Stuart friends' love story.

In the exhibited Gallery picture ( see above) the mirror at the base of the steps has, needless to say, completely disappeared.

'Last saw you in a window in May', wrote the lovely Mary Kelly, 'Paddy's Irish Molly-O' to her Prince Eddie, in the little newspaper personal columns to which Walter Sickert refers. 'If only we could have spoken.'...

'Last saw you in a window in May.'

This is no ordinary love.

Dublinesque

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Down Stucco side streets

Where daylight is pewter

And afternoon mist

Brings lights on in shops

Above race guides and rosaries

A funeral passes.

The hearse is ahead

But after there follows

A troop of streetwalkers

In wide flowered hats

Leg-of-Mutton Sleeves

And ankle length dresses.

There is an air of great friendliness

As if they were honouring

One they were fond of;

Some caper afew steps,

Skirts held skilfully,

Someone claps time,

And of great sadness also,

As they wend away

A voice is heard singing

Of Kitty, or Katy,

As if the name meant once

All love, all beauty.

'Dublinesque', poem by Philip Larkin

Right: 'Une Rue a Dieppe', c 1898.

First exhibited in Paris,

Bernheim,1904

Last in London UK, 1960.

The parallels between 'une rue a Dieppe', and London's Cleveland Street with its no. 21, 'Kelly's Library' are distinct and obvious.

Walter Sickert and Catharine Eddowes

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The artist Walter Sickert had a great deal of time for Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes, aka Catharine Kelly, whose background , involvements and Whitechapel story he evidently knew. She's the principal subject in a series of pictures that demonstrate aspects to her personality, her life choices, her habits and hobbies, her situations, her terrible death.

Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes spent the best part of her youth devoted to an Irish Sergeant of the 18th Regiment, 'Thomas Conway', whom she met in 1861, when she was nineteen years old. She loved him, at least to the extent of leaving kith and kin for him and decorating her arm with a tattoo in his name, 'T C'. The census records show a sharp change in Catharine Eddowes' destiny around 1861; she leaves her Aunt Elisabeth's and William Eddowes' home in Wolverhampton and doesn't return until late 1862, where she's recorded living with her Uncle Thomas Eddowes at the Brick Hill, Baggot Street, Birmingham.

Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes, by her daughter Annie Phillip's Inquest account, seems to have been away in Dublin, Ireland, where she went gadding with the 18th regiment and met her long term partner Thomas. By Annie Phillips, Catharine's daughter, ( born 1863 ' Catharine Anne Conway') , on her father Thomas Conway: " ...."I have never seen the marriage lines though she always told me she was married"..."my mother told me he was in the Royal 18th Irish"....."he had been a pensioner since I was eight years old. I am now twenty three"...

We can ony speculate as to how little 'Catharine Anne' came about in 1863 and why Kitty so quickly came to a secluded place in Birmingham in 1862. It seems she fell quickly pregnant with a girl, and came home to England to give birth. Her Birmingham family however appeared not to have been sympathetic, unless Catharine was simply being her usual secret keeping self: 'Catharine Anne Conway' was born on 18th April 1863 at Yarmouth workhouse, Norfolk. Her mother registered her on the 18th May, stating the workhouse as her address.

There is no evidence either of a marriage certificate inscribed with the names Eddowes and Conway, nor of an absentee soldier's presence in her life until 1873, when Thomas Conway was discharged, whereupon she (promptly) gave birth to a second son, 'Alfred George Conway'. (Catharine Eddowes' first son, Thomas, was born in 1868, when Catharine 'Kitty' was, for a brief period, suddenly living in clean and comfortable lodgings at Westminster, in London. That boy lived, and his descendants tell their story, but there is no record of his birth).

By Catharine Eddowes' daughter Annie Phillip's 1888 account, Thomas Conway 'left the deceased (Eddowes) between 7 & 8 years ago purely on account of her drinking'. Conway, Sergeant in the 18th Royal Irish was not himself discharged until 1873; he and Catharine Eddowes were together after his eventual discharge for seven short years. They split in 1880.

The 'Black Country Bugle' printed two articles at the time of Eddowes' death suggesting that Catharine Eddowes, or 'Kate Conway, as she had liked to be known and Thomas (to whom the Bugle incorrectly refers to as 'Conway Quinn') had been dab hands at making a living 'hawking' books, peddling books on street corners, up and down the streets and at public open air meetings of various kinds; including at public executions, where people 'were willing to pay a penny to obtain a momento of such an occasion' . ( Black Country Bugle, October 1888). 'Conway Quinn', the Bugle insist, ' produced impromptu ballads about any event which captured the public interest, and made a fair living from rhyming talents which, he considered, would be better appreciated in London, hence their eventual move to the Metropolis. 'According to the Bugle: ' On one such trip to Stafford she experienced the trauma of seeing her own cousin, Christopher Robinson hanged for the murder of his Sweetheart at Wolverhampton- and then helping to sell copies to the assembled crowd, estimated to number around four hundred persons 'On the Fatal Morning'. ' ( Black Country Bugle, October 1888). (The newspaper quote 'On the Fatal Morning' infers the title of the Music Hall song Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes' and her beau composed).

It seems to have been during the late 1860's that Catharine Eddowes became a dab hand at composing rebel ditties . By the Bugle, 'her quick wit and repartee had played a major part in selling so many copies of her poetical companion's ballad at Stafford and he rewarded her with the price of a flowery hat form Wooley's in Bilston High Street, whilst he waited in The Market Tavern for Sam Sellman to 'run off' the extra order which would be their regular pitch on the following Monday.' The Black Country Bugle suggests the couple had 'returned form Stafford in style...leaving the coach at Wolverhampton the Jubilant poet hired a donkey cart and set off with Catharine for Bilston where he ordered another 400 copies from Sam Selman, the Church Street Printer.

Below, Sickert's sketched Catharine ' Kitty' Eddowes at her at the piano, composing one of her ballads (no doubt). He's recorded Catharine in one of her rather lovely hats.

He calls the little picture 'Kitty K.'

KittyK., The Large Plate'. Etching, signed in pencil Sickert, lower right, printed in black ink on laid paper in the second (final) state. 17.3 x 12.3 cms. One of two sketches Walter Sickert drew of one 'KittyK', who we recognise as Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes, in her twenties and then in her early forties. This one depicts her in her mid to late twenties. Etched in the studio at Red Lion Square. The Fine Art Society PLC at New York comments 'although it was lettered by an engraver, the artist had neither space for the title nor was a publisher given'. ( Pages Torn From the Book of Life, 2002). Kitty K was not included in the series published by the Carfax Art Gallery.

According to Walter Sickert's art student and good friend Marjorie Lilly, who met him in 1913:

' Sickert lavished royal hospitality on his classes at the Whistler. I remember one exquisite colour symphony in bronze, apricot and purple; a negro posed against the contra-jour lighting that he loved, with his grand piano reflected in the dusky glass. How looking glasses recall Sickert's work; those expressions of colour, liquid shapes floating like water plants in the flux of the tides, fleeing yet vivid, piquant yet ephemeral. Sometimes, when he was contemplating one of those compositions that he had built up for his students it reminded him of Tom O 'Shanter:

Or like the snowfalls in the river

One moment white, then melt forever

Or like the rainbow’s lovely form

Evanishing amid the storm.

The piano had a history which we were never told. One day when the permanent financial crisis was particularly acute, Christine suggested that he might be persuaded to sell it. But we soon found out that whatever sacrifices were necessary, he would never part with the piano. It enshrined some precious memory he would never disclose. However, it proved most useful for students when they were composing paintings; it supplied an interesting background with its sweeping curves and angles, instead of the ‘buff vacancy’ which surrounds the object in so many art schools, even to this day.' M.Lilly (' Sickert, The Painter and His Circle' 1971, on period c. 1916.)

References exist to a musical disposition in Catherine 'Kitty' Eddowes that tend to suggest she was probably the composer responsible for the ballads that played so harmoniously upon the public nerve wherever the talented lady and her Irish Sergeant went. Thomas Eddowes, ( born 9th December 1844 at Bermondsley), her little brother by two years, was discharged from the 45th regiment in 1861 on medical grounds. The report reads ' This boy was enlisted a year and a half since to be trained as a musician, but from the delicacy of his chest he has been exempted from playing a wind instrument. He has been frequently in hospital under the charge of "Asthenia" and it is not likely he will ever make an effective soldier....'

Walter Sickert painted one of his pianos circa 1916: ' No. 8 Fitzroy Street' . See below right. Property of the Tate Gallery, London, bequeathed by Lady Cavendish Bentnick, 1940, just after Sickert's death. This one he kept in the hallway beneath the stairwell at the Frith , 8 Fitzroy Street . (His studios at the Whistler). It seems to have been an unusual 'Square Grand' . If you look closely you can scarcely tell whether we can see him withdrawing a piece of paper from a desk drawer of whether he is, in fact, 'tinkering away at a piano'. His antique piano probably dates c 1850. It's clear ( as we'll see) that Walter kept a Grand Piano, the one mentioned by Marjorie Lilly. Probably at Red Lion Street as opposed to the Frith at no. 8 Fitzroy Street , which was so very close to the anarchist school where the rebels used to meet 1880-1888.

For the Eddowes family, musical ability was a fallback in troubled situations, a wellspring of comfort when times were hard, when the worst came to the worst. An artistic talent one exercised by default, to maintain one's stability. By the Inquest evidence given by Constable George Henry Hutt, Custody duty Offficer, who took over supervising the detained at 10.00 on the night Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes was murdered, 31st September 1888: ...' he visited the woman in the cell about every half hour from five minutes to 10.00 o'Clock until 1.00 o'Clock. She was sleeping when he took over the prisoners. At a quarter past 12 o'clock she was awake, and singing a little song to herself. At half past twelve, when he went to her, she asked when she was going to be let out, and he replied.."when you are capable of taking care of yourself." She replied that she was capable of taking care of herself then.'....

Below: 'Mrs Barrett', (no secondary title). 50.8 x 41.9 cm: signed bottom left, 'Sickert'. First exhibited 1928, London, Saville Gallery, no. 31. Last at Christies, 1992. Privately owned.

'Mrs Barrett' is the introductory painting in the well loved and perhaps most famous series. Perhaps the most revelatory and exciting in the 'connected series' collections in respect of the Whitechapel girls, given there is so much focused portraiture available of her. The series consistently depicts the same woman, painted from many different perspectives, at different stages in her life. Note her lovely great celebration of a hat, which appears on and off throughout the series, unless she's wearing an even better, more flamboyant great broad rim. Note the hairstyle, with the great flicky sides, also a key feature.

Sickert expert and art critic Wendy Baron asks, "Who was Mrs Barrett? Was she Italian?.. the arguement goes round in circles... Could Poplana Veneziana be one of the extant versions of Mrs Barrett"....? to name afew questions. ( Wendy Baron, 1992). Shone describes 'Mrs Barrett' here 'in gentler mood, the shadow of her wide straw hat lending mystery to her face with its light elusive smile, the curve of her mouth just echoing the brim of her hat.' The picture is just a little evocative of the famous Leonardo da Vinci, the 'Mona Lisa' smile.

Recognising this woman 'Mrs Barrett' as one and the same throughout the 'Mrs Barrett' series withjout having access to Secret Service Information comes through an astute awareness of Walter Sickert as artistic genius and master of caprice, which Sickert experts Baron and Shone admirably demonstrate. Numerous critics, caseworkers and art lovers have walked past Walter Sickert's detailed exposé on 'Mrs. Barrett', who, by the time she reached forty, was one of the three female members of the world famous Jenkinson Spy Ring. Catharine Eddowes, as 'Catharine Kelly', known as 'Kitty' is registered as one of Jenkinson's agents in the Special Operations Retained Archive, John Kelly's code/agent name appears to be 'Barrett'.

Above, we have her in her early years, as she was when she was cavorting about with her Irish Sergeant, wearing one of her 'one joyful day only' hats.

Sickert loved this lady to bits. No question. No subjects outside of Jo, Eddy, Mary Kelly and Annie Crook are sketched and painted at the different stages of their development in the way she is, apart from Sickert's wives. (Who get less attention). There is no populist or evocative erotiscism in the 'Mrs Barrett' series at any stage. She looks at us with the gentle eyes of deep friendship, particularly through paintings of her later years. Catharine Kitty Eddowes was on a par with Sickert intellectually and emotionally.

Right: The photograph of Catharine Eddowes' daughter Annie Phillip's (née Conway) great grandaughter, Catharine Phillip's grandaughter, Catharine Sarah Hall, and her little daughter.

Compare the picture of 'Mrs. Barrett' against the photo of the little Eddowes girl. Note how (as ever) a clear almost replicate likeness appears after four/five generations.

According to the Eddowes family Catharine Sarah Hall, the little girl's mother, was known to her family as 'Kitty'.

Thomas Conway is curiously absent from Catharine Eddowes' Inquest. Annie Philips is cross questionned only briefly by the Police lawyer: ' By Mr. Crawford:- She was not sure if her father was a pensionner from the Royal Irish. It might have been the Connaught rangers. Mr Crawford observed that there was a pensionner of the 18th Royal Irish named Thomas Conway, but he was not the Conway who was wanted. '

Thomas Conway was a Sergeant in the 18th Royal Irish in 1862. This is the Thomas Conway inscribed on Kitty Eddowes' arm. T. C. Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes' association with Thomas marked the beginning of a lifelong sojourn into the twilight world of confederate Irish activity among the Fenian Irish of Dublin and East London. Police did not want Thomas at the Inquest because he might have been recognised by those opposing informant activity. SpB would rather not have had Sergeant Thomas Conway and his Irish association brought into the Inquest proceedings, though hewas suggestibly the most relevant witness to Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes formative years. ' He was not the Conway that was wanted.'

In 1881, when she was about at the height of her powers, Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes teamed up with one 'John Kelly', a partner with whom she was to remain throughout the remaining seven years of her life. From 1881 to 1888 they were both living at the heart of Old Whitechapel in Flower and Dean Street at the centre of the most densely populated hotbed of crime and confederate Irish terrorist conspiracy in rebel East London. She appears to have instantly asked to be known as 'Catharine Kelly' and passed herself off as John Kelly's wife. By the Deputy of the Lodging House at Flower and Dean Street, Brick lane, Spitalfields, at the Eddowes Inquest :" I have known deceased and Kelly for the last seven or eight years, they passed as man and wife.."

Both Kitty Eddowes and John Kelly , known together in Whitechapel as 'Catharine Kelly and John Kelly' were spying on Irish rebel activity for the head of Secret Service Under Secretary Edward Jenkinson.

Catharine Eddowes aka Catharine Kelly and one 'John Kelly' was assigned to assasination detection. See below:

Above: From the book Special Branch Crime Department 1880-1920, in the Special Operations Retained Archive. Secret Service file reference no. 3060/52 , no. 214. Files listed/contained under 'Kelly.' Note that 'Catharine Kelly and John Kelly' have the same secret service file reference number.

Note that Catharine Eddowes, aka 'Catharine Kelly'- spelt with the C- has filed a report on the murder of a 'McDoughty' who apparently betrayed his violent Irish league by cleaving to another rebel group. Catharine Kelly will have been attending meetings at Berner Street and Fitzroy Street, perceived that he was in danger and on his death, gleaned information from confederate rebels who assassinated him by masquerading as a keen conspirator who enthused about their ideas. She'll then have handed a full report on the assassins to the Spymaster, Under Secretary Edward Jenkinson.

Jenkinson, according to the annotation, handed the file on her report to Section d Special Branch. Conceivably, there was more work to do on the McDoughty matter. That or Kitty aka Catharine Kelly regularly went through Melville, Littlechild and Anderson when she handed in her reports on the Irish assassinations. Given that here Jenkinson was handing a file on John Kelly to Section d at the same time as he was on Catharine, it seems he's asking Section d to Investigate both of them in respect of an assassination matter. He may be handing Section d details on Catharine Kelly and John Kelly for a more sinister purpose.

Throughout his service with Jenkinson and Melville of the Secret Service, John Kelly, Catharine Eddowes' aka 'Catharine Kelly's' partner was given an almost contrivedly normal, yet distinct name, 'Jim Barrett'. Hence Catharine Eddowes' becoming known as 'Mrs. Barrett' to those involved in Jenkinson's Secret service work.

Below, an extract from the list of agents who operated within the Special Branch annexe of the 'Jenkinson Spy Ring', two pages summing up their names and their pay, (1888, top.). Notice that for 1888, John Kelly, agent name 'Jim Barrett', was transferred from working exclusively for Jenkinson and Melville to SB's spy annexe, where he would immediately be working with Littlechild, Williamson and of course Assistant Commissioner Anderson, whose work for both the Secret Service Spy Ring and its section d Special Branch annexe was completely seamless. Special Branch are particularly in a flap about this little book at present. It contains endless references to the real and code names of the Jenkinson Spy ring and their liaison with Cheif John Littlechild.

Note the specific name spelling, 'Barrett'

We can see that on his transferral ( which the book makes clear was effectuated in late October 1888) 'Jim Barrett' was given a new 'agent name', 'Barber'. There's a note by the name:

Barber (New infiltrator ( inlr) Jim Barrett, per Ins. Melville.)

There exist numerous diverse reports on how Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes experienced a period of sorrow and destitution during the breakdown of her relationship with her first love Thomas Conway in 1880, which in the light of the Special Branch evidence have to be taken with a pinch of salt. It's clear though, that the life she lead was not an easy one. Some witnesses at her Inquest insist that the drink consoled her: " he was a teetoller, my mother and he were on bad terms because she used to drink..." ( her daughter Annie, at the Inquest, on her father Thomas Conway.)

Catharine Eddowes was 'produced before magistrates' on the 21st September 1881 at Thames Magistrates' Court charged with 'Drunk and Disorderly'. She was quickly assigned to the socially well placed and dreaded Magistrate Saunders who instantly discharged her without fine or penalty of any kind. Studies of the notorious Saunders' record of terrorising defendants and barristers alike reveal what an exception this was. Her complete release was almost certainly engineered by Police on a Special Branch directive.

There exist many reports throughout the late Victorian period on well placed Officials and Informants finding themselves unable to cope with their assignments and/or resorting to the bottle ( Cutbush, Dr Hebbert etc.). Having lived with an Irish informant for seven years Catharine will have had little choice in her new assignment to live with John Kelly in the East End of London. In terms of her remit, she'll have had to flesh out the life of a destitute Whitechapel prostitute if she was to spy for Jenkinson and Section d effectively.

Left, Sickert's beautiful masterpiece 'Putana a Casa', ('The Broken Prostitute.') Circa 1903-4, ( inscribed 1904 on verso) but conceivably painted much earlier. 46 x 38 cms. Signed top right Sickert. First Exhibited in Paris, at the Salon D'Automne, 1906 no. 1551 on Sickert's return from Italy. Currently the property of Patricia Cornwell, fiction crimewriter and self styled forensic analyst.

Note the hair, shaped almost like a french pastry, flicked right out at the sides, a characteristic of the paintings in the 'Mrs Barrett' series. Remember also that the female subject is intended to be approx. 23 years older than is in the introductory 'Mrs Barrett.'

Wendy Baron notes in her analysis that Sickert wrote a number of (unpublished) letters to Jaques Emille Blanche from Venice stating 1903-6 stating he was prioritising landscapes rather than portraiture. Sickert's Venetian full and half body portraits, mostly dated 1902-1906 appear however to have been prodigious at this time. 'Putana a Casa' , dated on verso 1906 is not a picture that extolls the essence of any Venetian model. " Perhaps many drawings were inscribed and innacuratley dated later'" Wendy asks? Nonetheless as Wendy states the painting demonstrates characteristics of Venetian paintings such as 'solitary props' and "little attempt to place figures convincingly within their settings". If 'Putana a Casa' was drawn using a Venetian model as a basic support, ( a definite possibility) its subject was intended to represent someone Walter Sickert had known and loved at an earlier period not exclusive of the 1880's. Walter Sickert was probably painting his record of events abroad in Venice and keeping the detail to himself.

The painting's current owner Patricia Cornwell correctly points out that 'Putnana a Casa' "resembles mortuary photographs of Eddowes and is suggestive of the mutilations to the right side of Eddowes' face."

Below: a digital copy of the only copy original of the mortuary photograph of Eddowes' face available for inspection in the National Archives; Taken by Felicity J Lowde, Courtesy Mario Aleppo, Head of Conservation.

Left: The Copy of the unique original of the mortuary photograph of Catharine Eddowes' face held at the National Archives, Conservation Unit, Kew Gardens, London. Author's photograph. Note the comparison between the picture and the painting.

It is more likely that Walter Sickert was acquainted with the mortuary pictures retained by Special Branch during his lifetime than that he murdered the woman he depicted in 'Putana a Casa' singlehandedly ( and hence knew her dying face) as Cornwell suggests.

Water Sickert could have obtained copies of the Mortuary photographs from only two sources. The Special Operations Retained Archives, to which access was/is no mean feat unless you are a Special Branch agent, and a small book published in 1899, 'Vacheur l'Eventreur et les Crimes Sadistiques' by Alexandre Lessagne which did not emerge until eleven years after the murders, six years before the loosely established date of many of the Sickert paintings printed on this page.

The question of whether or not Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes maintained her morale throug her last two years is relevant in that we can see that she was in the process of betraying Special Branch Senior Officials on the night she met her unhappy death. Our Catharine, 'KittyK' was proactive in her new found reason to live and was drawing on all her acquired expertise and insider knowledge of Secret Service and Special Branch practice. She had set herself the task of delivering letters and essential evidence over to Prince Eddy and the Royal family for the sake of a cause she believed in on behalf of breakaway rebel confederates and young politicians whose claim she felt was genuine, whose ways were gentle. Whilst employed as a spy in hardened East London, she met up with free spirited and artistic, musical acquiantance who enjoyed her company disinterestedly and returned joyful laughter to her life. So it seems. She had friendship. By 1888, instead of spying for Special Branch Secret Service annexe, she was spying on her employers, exploiting their information and helping rebel confederates structure their programme.

Below: 'KittyK, Small Plate'. ( Formal Title.) C 1920, etching and engraving, printed in black ink on laid paper. Etched either at the Frith or at Red Lion Street. 17.4 cms 11.7 ref: Bromberg 195. Copy in the Tate Gallery Archives, London, current. Last exhibited by the Fine Art Society, New York, 2002.

The face in the etching 'Kitty K ' ( Walter Sickert's title, as before) above clearly suggests the face in the 'Putana a Casa' and the National Archives picture. The angle of the face is the same; the flick of her hair, deliberatley scruffier than in pictures and paintings of the earlier days, is identical. As with his pictures of Kitty 'Mrs. Barrett' that demonstrate the lost Prince 'Jo's situation, Sickert's hidden her exact facial features (while continuing to demonstrate the case).

We can see more maturity , and there's more abandon in KittyK at this stage, in her last two years or so-presumably. Her dress is more casual, better toned to her own figure and lifestyle than anything dressy. She's as skilled and carefree as her clothes are ragged. Her hat's a little well worn. Check out the close up of her face ( right.) and compare it with 'Putana a Casa' and the mortuary photograph.

There is evidence to suggest that Thomas Conway, from 1886 onwards became very concerned about Eddowes' new lifestyle and her involvements. It was dangerous enough her working for Jenkinson's Special Branch annexe, reporting on terror and assassination in lawless London. Working for Jenkinson's agents inside Special Branch in order to double cross them was another matter, apparently; as far as he was concerned, 'beyond the pale'. No member of Special Branch would get either of his son's whereabouts from his ex. (That he treated his daughter as slightly more dispensible, while Kitty didn't, is in keeping with the character that emerges via the study of his past). By Catharine's daughter Annie Phillips, née Eddowes/Conway, giving evidence:.... "She ( Annie) had not the least idea where her father was living. He had no ill will against the deceased....he had left her mother purely on account of her drinking habits. ..witness frequently saw her mother after they separated; her mother applied to her for money. The last time she saw her mother alive was two months ago...witness used to live in King Street, Bermondsley- that was about two years ago. On removing from there witness did not leave any address. She had two brothers, Conway being their father. Her mother did not know where to find either of them; the information was purposefully kept from her. She supposed that that was in order to prevent her mother from applying to them for money.."

Sickert's aware of this phase, and captures Catharine Eddowes with tactfulness typical of the wit and light that was both their speciality. Below, he etches her for some of his friends ( sketch relating to the introductory ' Mrs Barrett' picture in the series)..

This cartoon (left) Walter Sickert named 'Thursday Afternoon'. ( Thought to have been etched in 1906.) Sent on a post-card to his friend Mrs Swinton. Now at Browse and Darby, London. It was not sent as an intimidating postcard; it was sent to a friend who shared the secret about how 'Kitty' died.. With a whisper at the base of the page... 'Look at this with your eyes half shut.'

'Thursday afternoon', 28th September 1888, Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes came back from her and 'husband' John's joint hop-picking expedition. According to her partner John Kelly's Inquest statement " ...We were hop picking until Thursday. We both went to the casual ward on Thursday night at Shoe Lane. I saw deceased on Saturday morning at eight o' clock.".

Between Thursday 28th Sept. and Saturday 30st (morning) Catharine 'Kitty' had been about her courrier business, which involved liasing with 'Albert Edward's' connections, collecting a letter from Walter Sickert destined for his lover Mary Kelly, that Saturday night. Catharine Eddowes wouldn't see another Thursday in this world after the 28th September 1888. Walter Sickert's mind goes back to that Thursday afternoon; the sight of her intuitive expression, (shown below), her clever eyes, her fleeting presence. He knew it and she knew it; she'd soon be off to leave a message at the 'Standard' newspaper Office about no ordinary correspondence.

If one follows Walter Sickert's instructions 'Look at this with your eyes half shut' , the cartoon of the face (left) universally accepted to be a rendition of 'Mrs Barrett' appears deluged in ominous cartoon blood.

Walter Sickert's focus on Catharine 'Kitty's Eddowes' appearance prior to her death at the hands of Special Branch Police is demonstrated in the Picture 'Mrs. Barrett' (below.) Pastels on canvas, c. 1895, ( date on verso, conceivably painted six years earlier). Property of The Tate Gallery, London, donated by Lady Cavendish Bentnick, 1940. Here 'Mrs. Barrett' wears the 'Collier de Perles' she's seen adorned with in another painting of that name, neatly covering the most vulnerable part of her jugular. A hand held high as if seized at the wrist in the dressing table mirror is not an incidental mixture of paint and shape, it also features in a mirror in an untitled Sickert portrait resembling Polly Nicholl's female descendants. 'String of Pearls' is a euphemism for the Institutions of Old London, including Chancery Lane. Catharine 'Kitty's' pearl necklace outlines the place where her neck was slashed across. She was assassinated delivering messages for a Prince.

A picture of Kitty K, Mrs Barrett, Catharine Eddowes, before she left for the Standard Newspaper. Kitty here looks at us with eyes of friendship and harmony of thought earlier described. There's an almost spiritual dimension to the painting. See how the pastel surrounding her to her left is suggestive of ripples of movement. As though her spirit, standing almost clear as day in front of Walter Sickert goes to leave, returns, and stays before us, the look of friendhip and trust implicit in her intelligent eyes.

Or like the snowfalls in the river

One moment white, then melt forever

Or like the rainbow’s lovely form

Evanishing amid the storm.

Note the fake fir trim of her coat, described on the Inquest list of property found on Kitty Eddowes at the scene of her death: '" Black cloth coat, imitation fir edging round collar, fur round sleeves, no blood on front outside, large quantity of blood inside and back"....( see below.)

Right: extract from the original Inquest papers, held at the Guild Hall, London, demonstrating the list of Catharine Eddowes' clothing found on her dead body.

Catharine 'Kitty's' last movements are outlined in 'The Night Catharine Eddowes died' and 'Kelly's Library,' where we discuss evidence revealing that Kitty on the night she died was in the process of collecting a message from 'Albert Edward's men destined for Mary Kelly which she was going to leave at 'Kelly's Library' , the little tobacconist's at no. 21, Cleveland Street (click).

The evidence explored on the referenced pages suggests she left a message for Mary Kelly in the personal columns of the Evening Standard on Albert Edward's behalf, signed 'Kittie ' : A letter awaits you, Kelly's Library. Kittie.' She went to meet Albert Edward's men in the early hours of the morning on the 30th September....and was intercepted by Chief John Littlechild, and murdered. 'Albert Edward's and Mary's activity had been detected and followed by Chief Inspector Littlechild. Catherine 'Kitty' Eddowes was therefore greeted by specific Special Branch agents, and met her death.

Kitty's message was printed by the Standard on the 5th October.

Below, ' Le Journal' ,Walter Sickert, circa 1906, ( French for 'The Daily Newspaper' ) another in the 'Mrs.Barrett' series. Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 40.6 cms. London, Private Collection. Here the message could not be clearer. Kitty Eddowes, aka Catharine Kelly or 'Mrs Barrett' has been murdered; she lies on her back, her mouth apparently slashed asunder, exactly as it appears in the Special Branch forensic photograph of her face. Her dead eyes gaze devastated, horrified, at the announcement in the personal columns in the back of a newspaper that was evidently published shortly after she died. She sees the little announcement bearing her name: she now sees that in the same little column there's also a message signed 'ALBERT EDWARD'.

Below : Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes in the mortuary, lain in her coffin, demonstrating the effect of the torture and violation she suffered. The original first copy of the first mortuary photos. Taken by Felicity J Lowde, Courtesy of Mario Aleppo, Head of Conservation, U K National Archives.

Note that Walter Sickert's picture of 'Mrs Barrett' in 'Le Journal' ( above) depicts Catharine's exact facial features and their wreckage and appears to derive from both mortuary pictures .

Walter Sickert clearly did access the mortuary pictures. The painting's been been constructed via the imagination of an artist who loved her well, who evidently did know about her last movements, who persued access to mortuary photos which were then retained in the Special Operations Archive, copies of which were for sale a decade after her death via one isolated publication in Southern France, 'Vacheur l'Eventreur et les Crimes Sadistiques' , 1899, by Alexandre Lecassagne.

Walter Sickert was determined to tell the story of Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes' betrayal and death.

Below, a picture of Catharine Sarah Hall, the one the Eddowes family of later generations called 'Kitty', great grandaughter of Catharine Eddowes, mother to the little girl in the photo high above who so resembles the painting of the younger 'Mrs Barrett' in her joyful hat. Catharine 'Kitty' Sarah Hall in her younger years.
Catharine Eddowes' great grandaughter. Her hair was auburn.Compare with the picture of Catharine Eddowes aka 'Mrs. Barrett' looking at us straight in the face before setting off for the 'Standard.' Compare to the young introductory picture of 'Mrs. Barrett'.

..'"Her age seems to fluctuate wildly from shy young woman to care worn middle age, to distinctive beauty just past her prime....." ( Wendy Baron, 1992.)

Psychology and ascendancy in the fine detail can be extraordinary . Notice that Kitty (above) enjoys wearing her pearls both high around her neck, encircled around the part where 'Mrs Barrett' wears them in 'Mrs Barrett', or resting them at the base of her neck exactly where 'Mrs Barrett' wears them in 'Le Collier des Perles.' ( below.) Of course the 'double collier' was fashion. But the placing of Kitty's pearls is exact.

Le 'Collier des Perles' (right) is the one painting in the 'Mrs Barrett' series where the subject is a little unlike our 'Kittie Catharine', though perhaps this is down to the unusual angle. It's deathlike, almost as if a lack of oxygen has suddenly stifled the subject; her eyes freeze their focus and turn inwards; perhaps Walter's again bringing out the unatural Security secret . The skull shape is Catharine Eddowes' exactly. The collier rests on base of her neck and almost suggests an opening such as would be made by a preliminary stab wound two inches above the gap between the top breast bones.

Below: the original Special Branch picture of Catharine Eddowes at the morgue, October 1888, lifted to standing position by wall hooks, for Scotland Yard photographers. Taken by Felicity J. Lowde, Courtesy of Mario Aleppo, Head of Conservation, National Archives, London U K. We can see her likeness a little, ( she been violated). The original is tiny, 7 x 4 cms, difficult to replicate or reproduce without considerable upgrades, hence the rarity of its circulation.

Right: 'Poplana Veneziana', c (dated) 1905, (probably before). From the 'Mrs Barrett' series.Pastel on Millboard, 66 x 44 . First exhibited Paris, Salon D'Automne, 1905, no. 1432. Currently in the Canada National Gallery, Otowa. Prov. the late Dr. Robert Emmonds.

Catharine Eddowes died in the very early hours of the 30th September, 1888. She was discovered lying dead in a heap near a street lamp in Mitre Square at 1.45 a.m. by Police Constable Watkins, City Police, with ' her face mutilated almost beyond identity, portion of the nose being cut off, the lobe of the right ear nearly severed, the face cut, the throat cut, and disembowled'. ( Suptd. Donald S. Swanson, 6th Nov. 1888, to the Home Office.) Compare the Popolana Veneziana's face and the face in the motuary picture above.

Catharine Eddowes died in the very early hours of the 1st October, 1888. She was discovered lying dead in a heap near a street lamp in Mitre Square at 1.45 a.m. by Police Constable Watkins, City Police, with ' her face mutilated almost beyond identity, portion of the nose being cut off, the lobe of the right ear nearly severed, the face cut, the throat cut, and disembowled'. ( Suptd. Donald S. Swanson, 6th Nov. 1888, to the Home Office.)

Compare the Popolana Veneziana's face and the face in the motuary picture above.

By Sickert experts Wendy Baron and Richard Shone, Poplana Veneziana's very probably 'one of the extant portraits of Mrs. Barrett' . These inform that the pastel picture on millboard has previously been known as 'Blackmail or Mrs. Barrett'. ( Baron and Shone, 1992 ). The myth about Mrs Barrett's double name 'Blackmail or Mrs. Barrett' was instigated by BBC researchers in the 1970's after they visited Joseph Sickert, who, by their account, pointed to the introductory picture 'Mrs Barrett' and told them that Walter Sickert had told him its title really ought have been 'Blackmail' and it was a picture of Mary Kelly.

Baron and Shone's 1990-1992 investigation into 'Poplana Veneziana' uncovered two titles, a gesture typical of cluemaster Sickert, but 'Blackmail' was not among them. 'Poplana Veneziana' is not a blackmailer; neither is the introductory 'Mrs. Barratt'. Nothing about either painting suggests Walter Sickert ever gave her such a title .

The old backing labels from 'Poplana Veneziana' were uncovered when the tableau was unframed in Ottowa, Canada, after its proprietor Dr Emmonds had died. Sickert had handwritten 'Poplana Veneziana' , (in English, 'The Venetian lady of the people'.) Presumably he named his painting with reference to his stay at the home town of past Stuart exiles, beautiful Venice. Nothing else on the back of the tableau; except, significantly, the address where he'd painted it, or to where he'd apparently had the original base millboard delivered, Constable's old studio, at 76 Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, London. Two hunded yards from 21, Cleveland Street, 'Kelly's Library'.

Baron and Shone, frequently nuisanced by allegations against Walter Sickert from simpletons wanting them to call him a self motivated serial killer, have reacted against the discovery of a possible secret studio frequented by Walter Sickert two hundred yards away from Cleveland Street, the centre of the old legends about the origins of the Whitechapel murders. The art cricts claim ' Whether or not Sickert's room was the same as that used by Constable has not been verified.'...'

This is refuted by Walter Sickert, who categorically states that he had a secret studio at Constable's old studio at 76 Charlotte Street. ( He often signed 'Richard Sickert' post 1913). His letter to The Times of the 24th September 1934 reads

SIR:- Mr. Hind's objections to the proposition re 76 Charlotte Street are unanswerable.
There was room for one painter to work in the studio, which I once occupied for some time, for an easel to hold what Constable used to call a 'six-footer', and the collection of small studies serving as notes. There was in his time light and relative quiet. One good thing only remains and that is the little circular disk designed by the society of arts, which has alsewhere mostly been supplanted by an unsuitable oblong bronxe elevation, usually blacked and polished like a boot. Of all people, painters can do without monuments, since they have in their lifetime erected their own, good, bad, or indifferent as the case may be.
I am Sir etc.RICHARD SICKERT.

Notwithstanding, Baron and Shone insist

The address on the label ( Constable's Studio) should probably be regarded as the one Sickert chose to give the organisers of the Salon D'Automne for the publication of the catalogue rather than where he worked. The interior is almost certainly 8 Fitzroy Street.'.( Baron and Shone, 1992).

....To which I would respond that whether or not 'Mrs Barrett' (as Popolana Veneziana) was painted so that she might appear as if she was seated in Fitzroy Street is irrelevant to where the 'squared up' ( transferred to canvas) painting was actually painted, that it is wholly impossible to tell from the back of a chair in a painting where a painting was painted atall , and that Sickert probably either painted Popolana Veneziana in Charlotte Street in the early/mid 1990's before leaving the country to travel through France and Italy. Or , given that the labels the back of Popolana Veneziana state 76, Charlotte Street, ( and not 35, the old house numbers) Walter Sickert probably had artist's material destined for use in 'series paintings' (which reveal volumes about the Whitechapel murder case) sent to Venice at the turn of the century via secret studios such as 76 Charlotte Street, in order to avoid officious serveillance or speculation.

According to the Tate, 'The Russian Girl' might have been Popolana Veneziana's 'Second Title'. ( Tate Gallery Modern British catalogue, vol. II, 1964, p.663.) Baron and Shone have published no suggestions as to its import; mine is that the 'second title' either infers an undiscovered Musical Variety song filled with hints about the case, or, perhaps, Tolstoy's lady, otherwise a favourite of the Hussars; 'Kitty.' The name Kitty was regularly used at the Russian Court in Petersbourg. It is exactly Walter Sickert to create a fanciful dimension to a woman's nickname, as with 'La Guissepina' and 'La Carolina.' It isn't difficult to see Eddie's B troop Hussars exploiting the substitute 'Kitty' for Katy where their courrier lass was concerned.

Via the two titles Walter Sickert may be combining an inference to a woman well known to people from both Venice and Russian Poland, to known refugees of descendants and relatives of the Bonnie Prince Charlie. In which case we have a further hint as to Jo's Stuart ancestry. Kitty Eddowes, a woman of the Stuart people.

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Dismissed by uninformed critics as a 'charwoman': here's another picture in the Mrs Barrett series. There is no evidence from Walter Sickert to suggest that 'Mrs Barrett' is Sickert's Charwoman, as Baron points out. She isn't. She's Catharine 'Kitty' Eddowes, who headed up what was known as 'Mrs Barrett's girls ( as appears in the reference in the Jack the Ripper' letters). Mrs Barrett's girls are the canonical Whitechapel 'Jack the Ripper' victims- along with others working as informal letter delivery girls for 'Kelly' Library'. Kitty deployed them to deliver messages and letters on behalf of Albert (Victor Christian) Edward and Mary Kelly, last of the 'Jack the Ripper' victims. She delivered the very important messages herself.

This picture is intriguing in that it resembles both the beautiful picture of Kitty in 'La Collier des perles' , an exact likeness to our Kitty-Catharine, and the picture of her in Poplana Veneziana. He seems to have combined the facial features of 'Kitty' before and after the destruction of her face. ' The red blouse.'

*******

Credits: Family Photos originally appeared in the Neil Stubbings publications, and are courtesy entirely of the Eddowes family. Copyright the Eddowes family. Do not use without acknowledgement under any circumstances. Preferably, do not use. Research Copyright, Felicity J Lowde. All Walter Sickert copyright matters mentioned herein. Forensic photographs of the original forensic photographs, taken by FJL, courtesy the National Archives, Kew Gardens, UK. Unpublished Jack the Ripper documents, Special Branch, New Scotland Yard. Special Branch Photographs Felicity J Lowde, taken with permission from Special Branch.

Curently the National Archives, in association with Nicolas Pierce, Special Branch Legal Services, are attempting to state that I never had special access to the National Archives Conservation Unit, which as we see, and will further see, is a complete lie. There is no other way to phrase it. We know how Special Branch are behaving. It is beyond words. Special Branch lawyers and their associates are being investigated in respect of recent abuses towards myself.

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Next, we'll take a closer look at 'Kelly's Library', and I'll tell you which music hall song is the most important to Tate Gallery artist Walter Sickert 'the cluemaster'.