Is he or isn't he? THAT is the Question.

I have a Cabinet Photo from the studio of H.A. Chapman of Swansea, in Wales. On the back is printed the name John Williams. This photo was probably taken around 1898.

What if this old Cabinet Photo is really thee Sir John Williams and his friend,  the palaeographer John Evans?  Do you know who Sir John Williams was? He was a doctor who gave his library and money to start the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.  Indeed, in 1907 he was appointed the first President of that library.

 He was born in 1840 which would make the men in this photo about the right age (almost 60), portly gents dressed as if they had a bit of money and respectability. 

Sir John was also one of the men suspected of being Jack the Ripper! However, that was not until recently when a book written by one of  Sir John’s descendants who claimed that the victims knew the good doctor personally and that he killed them in trying to find the cause of infertility. All of this speculation is quite likely bunk.  Conjecture meets imagination when I look into the eyes of the men in this portrait.  If it is the only known portraiture done of him at this age, it would make it the only known photo of  Jack the Ripper.  Now there is a thought I’d like to contemplate for awhile, because it might make me a very wealthy woman indeed, heh heh heh....

In the meantime, while I enjoy this imaginative dream scene, I will write to the National Library in Wales to ask them if this picture could be their particular Sir John Williams or is it just another businessman, surgeon, or political fellow of the same era with the same name.   

What really intrigues me is that these two men are standing (well one is standing and one is sitting) looking straight into the photographer’s lense. They had lives busy, bustling, hither and thither whether they are those particular two Johns or not, whether one of them was Jack the Ripper or not.  The same is true of many, many men over the years of our human history. They have those public and private lives going on while they are alive, but the moment that is captured in a photograph, tells very little.  Just like a man who is a logger, by day, who comes home to his family, a dinner and maybe a pinochle party at night. He is also the man who rapes his young daughter and verbally berates his wife and children with more curse words than most people would use on a bad dog; and still that man could sit in a chair and look straight into the camera, looking as charming and as innocent as the Budha. 

So does the picture tell a lie?  No, it just tells a very small bit of the story. The generous John Williams gave his fabulous book collection to start a (now famous) library in Wales. The intelligent surgeon, John Williams, served as doctor to the Queen and her family.  The family man, John Williams had a wife but no children. So was he Jack the Ripper?  If he was, it was an awfully big secret to keep and it is NOT written in his eyes in this 112 year old picture.