The Lizard had survived two world wars and was a romance from a long-ago past. The Hills sold the three-hundred-year-old farm house in 1950 and opened the small Rockland B&B. Mrs. Hill was telling Michael Raffael all this, and perhaps because he took the time to listen, she was reminded of the old guest book dated from 1877 to July 15, 1888, and dug it out of a cupboard. He “spent maybe thirty minutes flicking through it, mostly by myself,” when he came across drawings and the name “Jack the Ripper.” “From their position on the page in the book, from the style of handwriting and from the sepia ink I can assure you that the Jack entry was most probably contemporaneous with the book and the other entries around it,” he wrote to me after ABC’s Diane Sawyer interviewed me about Jack the Ripper on a Prime Time special.
I contacted Mrs. Hill, who verified that the book existed and had Jack the Ripper entries and some drawings, and I could see it if I liked. Within days I was on a plane to Cornwall.
I arrived with friends, and we were the only guests. The village was virtually deserted and swept by cold winds blowing up from the English Channel. Mrs. Hill is a guileless, shy woman in her early sixties who worries a lot about the happiness of her guests and cooks breakfasts far too big for comfort. She has lived in Cornwall all her life and had never heard of Sickert or Whistler but was remotely familiar with the name “Jack the Ripper.”
“I believe I know the name. But I don’t know anything about him,” she said, except she knew he was a very bad man.
The sketches Raffael was referring to when he alerted me about the guest book are ink drawings of a man and a woman on a stroll. The man, who is dressed in a cutaway and top hat, and has both monocle and umbrella, has “Jack the Ripper” written in pencil by his very big nose. He is staring at the woman from the rear, and a balloon has been drawn coming out of his mouth. “Aint she a beauty though,” he says.
The woman, in feathered hat, bodice, bustle, and flounces, says, “Ain’t I lovely.” In another balloon underneath is the comment, “only by Jack the Ripper.” What was neither noticed nor of much interest, perhaps, was everything else in this remarkable book. An ugly mole has been drawn on a woman’s nose, and penciled in under her clothes are her naked breasts and legs. The page is filled in with scribbles and comments and allusions to Shakespeare, most of it crude and snide. I took the book upstairs to my room, and other details I began to notice kept me up until 3:00 A.M., the space heater on high as the wind howled and the water pounded beyond my window.
The annotations and dozens of doodles and drawings and malicious remarks were astonishing and completely unexpected, and I suddenly felt as if Sickert were in my room.
Someone – I am convinced it was Sickert, but I will refer to the person as the “vandal” – went through that book with lead pencil, violet-colored pencil, and pen, and wrote rude, sarcastic, childish, and violent annotations on most of the pages:
bosh! fools, fool, a big fool, wiseass. Hell fool, Ha and Ha Ha, Dear Dear! Funny, O Lord, of girls oh fie (slang when encountering an immoral woman), garn (vulgar slang for gal), donkey (slang for penis), Dummkopf (German for idiot), ta ra ra boon de a (refrain of a music-hall song), henfool (seventeenth-century slang for a prostitute or mistress), Ballhead, Bosh! Bosh!! Bosh!!! or under “Reverend” scrawling “(3 times married),” or after another person’s name jotting “Became a Snob” or altering a guest’s name to read “Parchedigass.”
The vandal writes snide ditties on pages filled with cheery comments about what a lovely place Hill’s Hotel was, how comfortable it was, how good the food was, and how modest the rates were:
“As I fell out/They all fell in/The rest they ran away.”
“Rather a queer sort of place.”