Based on the way he assembled his clipping book, I would say that he didn’t get around to it until after his retirement. When he died in 1929, this collection of newsprint remnants of his shining career remained the property of his descendants, who eventually donated it to a person or persons unknown. I knew nothing about it until early in 2002 when I was doing further research in London and an official with the Yard showed me the eight-by-eleven book bound in black. I don’t know if it had just been donated or had just turned up. I don’t know if it actually belongs to Scotland Yard or perhaps to someone who works there. Exactly where this little-known clipping book has been since Abberline pasted it together and when it turned up at Scotland Yard are questions I can’t answer. Typically, Abberline remains mysterious and offers few answers even now.
His diary is neither confessional nor full of details about his life, but he does reveal his personality in the way he worked cases and in the comments he wrote. He was a brave, intelligent man who kept his word and abided by the rules, which included not divulging details about the very sorts of cases I expected and hoped to find hidden between his clipping book’s covers. Abberline’s entries abruptly stop with an October 1887 case of what he called “spontaneous combustion” and do not resume until a March 1891 case of trafficking in infants.
There is not so much as a hint about Jack the Ripper. One won’t find a single word about the 1889 Cleveland Street male brothel scandal that must have been a briar patch for Abberline, as accusations included the names of men close to the throne. To read Abberline’s diary is to think the Ripper murders and the Cleveland Street scandal never happened, and I have no reason to suspect that someone removed any related pages from the cuttings book. It appears Abberline chose not to include what he knew would be the most sought-after and controversial details of his investigative career.
On pages 44-45 of his diary, he offers an explanation for his silence:
I think it is just as well to record here the reason why as from the various cuttings from the newspapers as well as the many other matters that I was called upon to investigate that never became public property – it must be apparent that I could write many things that would be very interesting to read.
At the time I retired from the service the authorities were very much opposed to retired officers writing anything for the press as previously some retired officers had from time to time been very indiscreet in what they had caused to be published and to my knowledge had been called upon to explain their conduct – and in fact – they had been threatened with action for libel.
Apart from that there is no doubt the fact that in describing what you did in detecting certain crimes you are putting the criminal closer on their guard and in some cases you may be absolutely telling them how to commit crime.
As an example in the Finger-Print detection you find now the expert thief wears gloves.
The opposition to former officers writing their memoirs did not deter everyone, whether it was the men of Scotland Yard or the City of London Police. I have three examples on my desk: Sir Melville Macnaghten’s Days of My Years, Sir Henry Smith’s From Constable to Commissioner, and Benjamin Leeson’s Lost London: The Memoirs of an East End Detective. All three include Jack the Ripper anecdotes and analyses which I think the world would be better without. It is sad that men whose lives and careers were touched by the Ripper cases would spin theories almost as baseless as some of those offered by people who weren’t even born at the time of the crimes.
Henry Smith was the Acting Commissioner of the City of London Police during the murders of 1888, and he modestly writes, “There is no man living who knows as much of those murders as I do.” He declares that after the “second crime” – which may have been Mary Ann Nichols, who was not murdered in Smith’s jurisdiction – he “discovered” a suspect he was fairly sure was the murderer. Smith described him as a former medical student who had been in a lunatic asylum and had spent “all of this time” with prostitutes, whom he cheated by passing off polished farthings as sovereigns.