Our discovery of “matching” watermarks has been a source of great excitement for all of us working the Ripper case, but I must admit that a not-so-good watermark moment came early in the investigation. The head of conservation at the Public Record Office, Mario Aleppo, contacted me and said his staff had found numerous other A Pirie & Sons watermarks and I might want to have a look. I immediately returned to London and discovered to my horror that the A Pirie & Sons watermarks were not on Ripper letters but on the stationery the Metropolitan Police were using at the time. I was shocked. For a moment, I was completely unnerved and thought my life might disintegrate right before my eyes. There has always been a theory that Jack the Ripper was a cop.
The A Pirie & Sons watermark on the Metropolitan Police stationery is the only other non-Sickert/Ripper-related A Pirie watermark I have found during my research, but I am happy to report that the watermark on the Metropolitan Police stationery is quite different from the one on the Ripper and the Sickert letters. The police stationery watermark has no date and includes the words LD and Register. The paper is of a different quality and color. It is eight by eleven inches and not greeting-card size. Besides the difference in the wording and design of the watermarks, the police paper is wove and the Sickert/Ripper paper is laid.
The firm Alexander Pirie 8c Sons, Ltd., got its start in the paper-making business in 1770 in Aberdeen, and its rapid growth and respected reputation resulted in the acquisition of cotton mills, plants, and factories in London, Glasgow, Dublin, Paris, New York, St. Petersburg, and Bucharest. A Pirie didn’t become a separate company until 1864, and from this information one might presume that there was no A Pirie &c Sons watermark prior to that date. However, existing records in Aberdeen do not indicate exactly when A Pirie began using its name on watermarks. A Pirie became a limited-liability company in 1882, merged with another firm in 1922, and went out of business at some point in the 1950s.
The records of A Pirie 8c Sons are preserved in a strong room at the Stoneywood Mills in Aberdeen. Keenly aware of my limitations as a paper-manufacturing or stationery expert, I asked antiquarian books and documents researcher Joe Jameson if he would go to Aberdeen and look through thousands of A Pirie records. For two cold, rainy days, he dug through boxes and was able to ascertain migraine-producing details about lime waste, rag boiling, paper machines, how many tons of soda were ordered, sediment removed from river water, shareholders, sketches of trademarks, types of paper manufactured – just about anything one might want to know about how paper was made from the late 1700s until the 1950s.
Over the better part of a century, tons of Alexander Pirie & Sons paper were shipped to London and other parts of the world. This prestigious company was proprietary and did not hesitate to sue if another manufacturer tried to delude the public into thinking its paper was made by A Pirie & Sons. The obvious question in this case is exactly what I asked Peter Bower: How common was the A Pirie watermark found on the three Ripper and eight Sickert letters?
After a thorough search of the company records, I can only say with certainty that while the paper may not be uncommon, as Bower said, it might be somewhat uncommon as personal stationery. It seems that A Pirie paper was used primarily for the printing of bankers’ and other business ledgers, business stationery, and nonwatermarked printing and lithographic printing paper. I have no idea which stationery shop the Sickerts used when Walter or Ellen ordered the blue-bordered stationery printed on A Pirie & Sons paper. The shop may not have been in London, and its records may no longer exist. I also can’t say how unique their particular watermark was, but it isn’t to be found in an A Pirie & Sons list of fifty-six trademark designs that were in the Aberdeen records.
But there is a very good chance I didn’t see their watermark in the examples I found because the Aberdeen records might be incomplete. I do know that in the only A Pirie & Sons catalogue I managed to get hold of, the list of their products for 1900 shows twenty-three designs, and the watermark of interest is not among them.