Was Blackheath Hockey Club player Montague Druitt the notorious London murderer dubbed Jack the Ripper?
Montague John Druitt was born in Wimborne, Dorset. He was a member of Blackheath Hockey Club from 1881 until his death in 1888. A Classics graduate from New College, Oxford University, Montague moved to London in 1881 to teach at Eliot Place School, a private boarding school of about 40 boys in Blackheath. In parallel, he pursued a legal career and qualified as a barrister in 1885. He is primarily remembered today as a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888.

Montague John Druitt, photographed c.1875 by William Savage, Winchester College. Public domain.
The Whitechapel murders
Mary Ann Nichols was found murdered in Whitechapel, East London on 31 August 1888. Her throat had been slashed. In the following months, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes (all killed in September) and Mary Jane Kelly (November 1888) were also found murdered in similar fashion. The police would link these brutal deaths to a single serial killer dubbed the Whitechapel Murderer, more commonly known as Jack the Ripper.

8 September 1888 edition of The Penny Illustrated Paper depicting the discovery of the body of the first canonical Ripper victim, Mary Ann Nichols. Public domain.
Montague Druitt: Ripper suspect
Montague Druitt was a keen cricketer who had played for Dorset County Cricket Club. Upon moving to London, he initially joined Blackheath Morden Cricket Club before he opted to put his strong wrists to use in hockey. He would also play for the prestigious Marylebone Cricket Club (the MCC). His strength and sporting prowess, medical knowledge gleaned from his surgeon father, and a family history of mental illness combined to make him a suspect in the Ripper murders.
The evidence against Montague is largely circumstantial but was given added weight by his untimely death. His body was found in the River Thames on 31 December 1888 and officially ruled a suicide. It was understood to have been in the river for a month or more. Montague’s death appears to have coincided with the end of the Whitechapel Murderer’s reign of terror.
Veiled references to Montague Druitt being the murderer would appear over subsequent years. Rumours circulated that the killer had drowned in the Thames and the contemporary Victorian journalist, George R Sims, reflected this in his memoir. The member of Parliament for West Dorset, Henry Farquharson, announced that Jack the Ripper was “the son of a surgeon”. Henry lived close to the Druitt’s family home and moved in the same Dorset social circles.
In 1894, Assistant Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten named Montague Druitt as one of three chief suspects in a private, hand-written memo. This document didn’t come to light until it was found in Melville’s papers in the 1960s. Other officials involved in the Ripper case believed that the murder of Alice McKenzie in July 1889 was the work of the same killer. Her murder took place seven months after Druitt’s death.
Jack the Ripper: a hockey legacy?
During the 1970s, conspiracy theories began to swirl that positioned Montague Druitt as the scapegoat in a wider plot of multiple killers. This plot involved the British royal family, specifically Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and his immediate circle.

Photograph taken in 1891 of Prince Albert Victor Duke of Clarence (1864-1892). From the Royal Collection. Public domain.
The prince was the eldest son of the future King Edward VII and the grandson of Queen Victoria. He was a keen hockey player having taken to the sport at Trinity College, Cambridge University and is rumoured to have been a secret member of Teddington Hockey Club, playing under a false name. Between 1886-1892 he was the first President of the Hockey Association, founded in 1886 as the governing body for men’s hockey in England.
The theories involving Montague Druitt and/or Prince Albert Victor in the Whitechapel Murders have been largely discredited. The plot involving the prince has since been dismissed as ridiculous by numerous writers. Montague’s involvement arguably holds greater sway than the conspiracy theory surrounding the prince. Later writers attest that Montague’s movements at the time of the killings would have made it difficult, though not impossible, for him to have committed the murders. The abrupt end to the Ripper killings upon Montague’s death (if you do not consider Alice McKenzie) remains a tantalising, circumstantial episode in this grim mystery.