Claude Reignier Conder, Victorian soldier,explorer, and scholar is the latest candidate for the dubious honour of being Jack-the-Ripper. There is nothing in the case against him to merit serious consideration but the clan of Conders is worth a brief note for their real and more positive achievements.

 

1: The Congregational Conder
2: The Oriental Conder
3: Death and the Nightingales
4: The Antipodean Conders
5: The Altaic Conder

The Conder name is a highly interesting one as it is traceable back to Prince Condé and the economic migration of his followers from the German Palatinate after the Thirty Years War. This group represented a wide range of religious non-conformities and seems to have carried more than its fair share of talent. More of a clan than a family, there are many branches who trace their names back to Condés, Conders and Konders, with a great many of them emigrating to Ireland and America. It is hazardous, therefore, to assume that all Conders are necessarily close relatives but it would appear that some of the most successful members of the English branch were descendants of Josiah Conder, 1789 - 1855, who was a London bookseller and author or editor of a 33-volume series of Geographical studies. Josiah was a prominent Congregationalist and was active in seeking to repeal British anti-Jewish laws. He also wrote the words of many hymns, many of which survive and are sung today, including Bread of Heaven.

A second Josiah Conder, 1852 - 1920, was the architect who played the most powerful rôle in introducing Western-style architecture to Japan from 1877 onwards. He was also a conduit for Oriental influence on Western taste, writing a book on Japanese Landscape Gardens in 1893. There was also an Edward Conder who in the following year published a book entitled The Hole Craft and Fellowship of Masonry.

Francis Roubiliac Conder was the author of The Men who Built Railways, published in 1868, testifying to the engineering interests of the family and to the artistic enrichment of the bloodline by descent from the celebrated French-born sculptor Louis François Roubiliac, 1705 - 1762. Probably the best known 18th Century sculptor working in England, Roubiliac was born in Lyon though little is known of his early life. His best known works include the full-length statue of Handel, 1738 and the bust of Newton, 1755. He is said to have had a predilection for making busts of ugly old men but it may simply be that the characters likely to be immortalized in busts were elderly. Bernini is cited as a strong influence and an Italianate sense of drama bordering on the grotesque caused him to design the tomb of Lady Elizabeth Nightingale, 1761, as a dramatic encounter in which Death as a skeleton threatens the woman with a spear while her husband, in vain, tries to shield her.

The two busiest Conders in their contrasting fields would seem to be the cousins Claude Reignier Conder, 1848 - 1910 and Charles Edward Conder, 1868 - 1909, and both, like Francis, were descendants of Roubiliac. While Colonel Claude Conder was an exemplary Victorian explorer, mapmaker and Biblical and Altaic scholar, Charles defied the family by pursuing an artistic career which first blossomed when he was exiled to Australia in 1884. He was placed under the supervision of an engineering uncle, William Jacomb Conder, a surveyor in the New South Wales Lands Department. Then there was a Hartwell Conder in Tasmania, a mining engineer whose achievements were solid enough but his immortality is for some of us ensured by his connection with the reported sighting of a sea-serpent in July 1913. This unusual event is mentioned in the book Lo! by Charles Fort.

Charles continued to paint in Australia and enjoyed some success, being associated with the Heidelberg School in Sydney; The Art Gallery of New South Wales bought his painting 'Departure of the Orient' in 1888. In 1890, he left Australia for Europe and within two years there were the first signs of failing health which may have been exacerbated by alcohol. On returning to Europe, he divided his time between England and France. His later work such as the Moulin Rouge, now in Manchester City Gallery, shows the influence of Dégas but he achieved his highest reputation as a painter of silk fans and as one of the original Yellow Book artists. His last years are a sad story of physical and mental decline which would appear to have been caused by a longstanding syphilitic infection. This contrast between the decadent artist and his muscular Christian cousin could have been intended for a book of moralities. It is interesting to compare the Australian open-air pictures with the later decadent style, though even the earliest paintings have a refinement and character. He is regarded as an significant figure in the history of Australian art and we can only speculate how different his development would have been had he remained there.

The association of Walter Sickert with the Whitechapel murders is well established: he appears to have had a fascination with them and produced a series of paintings, regarded in their day as pornographic and sadistic. The link has led some to associate him with a cover-up on behalf of the surgeon Sir William Gull and there has been a close examination of the paintings for clues. Sickert was taught to paint by Charles Conder and his tuition included the slightly macabre art of painting on chicken-skin. The most celebrated portrait of Conder was painted by William Rothenstein, 1872 - 1945, whose son Sir Jack Rothenstein, wrote "The Life and Death of Conder", which was published in 1938.

The Conders would appear to have produced no composer from their ranks but a fragile silk painting by Charles was the inspiration of a late and little known ballet by Sir Edward Elgar. The Sanguine Fan, Op.81, 1917, serves to remind us that this military-looking figure was much closer to the aesthetic movement of the nineties than to any form of muscular Christianity.

Yet it is Major Claude who has attracted the attention of some recent writers as a candidate for being Jack the Ripper. His association with Charles Warren, the Freemason and compulsive tunneler on Jerusalem's Temple Mount who became Police Commissioner at the time of the Whitechapel murders is said to have protected him from the consequences of his terrible crimes. "Warren's Mines" to this day are the deepest explorations of the Temple Mount site and the new Ripper theory is along the familiar lines of a Masonic cover-up. The problem with Claude Conder is that at the period of the murders, he was in charge of the engravings for the Ordnance Survey at Southampton and his activities are likely to be well documented, if the truth is really sought. He was also busy writing books, notably the volume on Palestine dated 1889. There is no sign of greater than usual Victorian mental imbalance in the book. The case against him seems to be that he was alive at the time, he was a Freemason and he served under Warren in Palestine. He is also said to have been a trained killer, which by definition is what marks a soldier from the rest of humanity while his expertise in Altaic languages is said to link him to some otherwise indecipherable clues in the Ripper case.

The mythos that the Ripper must have been somebody famous, able to call on an influential circle to cover up his guilt, grew ever more florid in the wake of the JFK investigations. The notion that this devil had to be a gentleman rests essentially on the medical knowledge ascribed to him and the supposed difficulty a working man would have had to wash away the bloodstains in private. The medical handiwork is disputed by the experts but, when we learn that the discoverer of the first official victim was on his way home from his job as a night-working horse-slaughterer, a small window opens into the real Whitechapel of the time. The belief that the crime can still be solved by following the clues in the case files, or relating the circumstances of the murders to background information is a tribute to the persistence of a genre invented by Poe. The ease with which the literary method could be applied to real life murders was demonstrated when Poe's own imagination was turned against him and readers began to whisper that the author of the Mystery of Marie Roget was rather too well informed about the case of Mary Cecilia Rogers for comfort. There are now so many Ripperologists that almost anything published will find a certain market and some good may come of it: how else would you package Victorian Social History for the remedial class?

 © James Beswick Whitehead, 2001