The quickest way to get a feel for the full strangeness of Sickert's Version Of The Story - which Edna by all accounts still endorses - is to read Simple Why Questions For Joseph Sickert.

March 2002: Joseph was still alive, according to the owner. I dipped into some royal histories and had the same grave doubts as Tom did about the Edward VIII abdication dating. That cannot be right. (The Same Snub turned out to be there in The Ripper And The Royals but different in detail.) The proprietor got out a useful book on the Camden Impressionists, of which Joseph's father Walter Sickert was, I learnt, easily the most highly rated. It may not be saying much compared to the French, but it's all we had in Camden and better than any group of its age in the UK. I gathered for the first time that it's his paintings after the murder of a young girl in Camden that have made some build theories that he himself was the Ripper. My tame and friendly local art and book expert said he thought that this was very far-fetched and it was clearly very hurtful to Joseph. Reading between the lines, he seemed to indicate, like other local people, that Joseph knows more than is good for him about this dark area.

25 January 2003: Same place, same owner, but it's only as an afterthought that I ask about Joseph having moved. "No, in fact he just died. Let me find the Camden New Journal article for you." He again was genuinely sad for the man yet seemed a trifle disturbed to mention him, even on his death, with others in the shop. As he took his time looking for the CNJ - which he never found, so I had to go around to their offices - I stumbled across The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, as described in Connection-Centric View.

Is there any real significance to the Royal Bank of Scotland putting "HRH" on Sickert's cheques, assuming that it actually does? I think in the States you can get pretty much anything you wanted printed on a check. Are there laws in the UK against non-RHs using "HRH"? (And why isn't it "HRH Joseph Sickert?") You have elsewhere suggested (on Sickert's Version Of The Story) that the presence of "HRH" on Sickert's cheques indicates a confirmation of his lineage by the Royal Bank of Scotland. Is this suggestion founded upon more than speculation -- Tom Kreitzberg

Firstly, there was no No Cheque Book In Sight in the book when I re-read it, so I must have heard that from Joe over the phone. Whether the HRH there is significant as evidence, on that I draw a blank cheque, as usual. You're obviously right on the ordering. This page was partly irony, given that by no means everyone accepted the title. It becomes something more poignant if you start Trusting Joseph Sickert.

The much more important overarching issue here, which lay behind Joseph's Royal Bank claims, is whether there was even tacit endorsement from the Royal Family themselves of Joseph's use of HRH. This is what is said in the half-page Camden New Journal obituary:

HRH Joseph Sickert, the lost 'royal'

Joseph Sickert - the alleged son of painter Walter Sickert - has died weeks short of his 50th wedding anniversary. The 77-year-old died in his sleep on Thursday at his home in Gilden Crescent where he lived with his wife Edna. ...

He told journalists the Ripper killings were explained by a clandestine plot by the Royal family and unmasked the Queen's physician William Gull as killer. He argued that Queen Victoria's grandson, the Duke Of Clarence, married a Catholic shopgirl and the murdered prostitutes had been attempting to blackmail the royal family. The marriage produced a daughter, who became Walter Sickert's mother [sic].

Oh dear. There's always one generational error in retelling the complex tale, it seems - the Daily Express did exactly the same kind of thing in their account of the Survival Of Prince Eddy during the Paul Burrell scandal. No, according to The Ripper And The Royals, Walter Sickert had an affair with Alice Gorman, daughter of Prince Eddy and Annie Crook, giving rise to her son Charles (that page has the little family tree) who became The Lost Prince of the BBC TV series ended last night, and then dear old Joseph. Let's return to the report:

Sceptics doubted this account - records show Sickert never fathered any children - but Joseph, who became a familiar face in Kentish Town and Gospel Oak, vehemently maintained his story was fact. Edna told the New Journal: "He took it all in his stride. He knew what the truth was and it didn't matter to him what others thought. He was HRH Joseph Sickert. The palace didn't mind him saying that. He was proud of it. -- p4, Camden New Journal, 16th January 2003

Let's put that in the mix with:

The brief biographies I've seen on Walter Sickert -- at least, those not on the "Joseph Sickert's Story" page of Jack the Ripper websites -- that mention it one way or another state that he died childless. Did the Camden Impressionists book happen to say anything? A simple DNA test would resolve the question of whether Joseph Sickert is the Queen's second cousin (if I have my consanguinity straight). (Or is the true basis for the protocol demanding one never touch royalty actually an attempt to prevent the unauthorized swabbing of royal DNA for just such a test?). -- Keith Braithwaite & Tom Kreitzberg

The official story is that he married three times and had no children. The unofficial one is that he fathered two sons illegitimately, Charles and Joseph, through his friend Annie Gorman. The key and clinching piece of evidence in The Ripper And The Royals for this being true of Joseph is that Harry Jonas, fellow painter and friend of Sickert from his Cleveland Street days, treated Joseph as Walter's son, giving him various personal effects of his father's after he died. A number of people interviewed Jonas about Sickert and the Ripper case, before he died, and his story lined up with Joseph's to just the degree you'd expect, if they were telling the same story but as independent witnesses. But there are forty or more witnesses that I'd like to cite from the book. Either everyone reads it on Why or not. Cool to put this up, though. The truth, as best we grasp it, has got to be the best memorial for the man. -- Richard Drake

Patricia Cornwell, an eccentric American crime novelist, has spent millions of dollars in an attempt to establish that Walter Sickert was Jack The Ripper. Among her "evidence" was his 1909 series of paintings, the "Camden Town Murders," based (more or less) on Jack's murders. Cornwell bought several Sickert paintings and had at least one torn apart in a quest for Sickert's DNA, hoping to match it to DNA found (or at least sought) on a presumably authentic Ripper letter. This seems like a lot of trouble to go through if Sickert's DNA is living in Kentish Town. -- Keith Braithwaite and/or Tom Kreitzberg

Joseph to some degree changed his mind on this, I've discovered. The puzzle is knowing how Walter Sickert knew so much without being part of the Ripper team and not getting the chop himself, come to that. At the end of Stephen Knight's book (1976) Joseph reluctantly accepts Knight's verdict that his dad must have been forced to have been part of the murder team, as a 33 degree freemason. He defends him rather bathetically by saying that his motive must have been to protect Annie and Eddy, whom he genuinely cared for. But by 1991 he had changed his view again, back to what his father had told him (and I in fact see no big reason to doubt this aspect, for the man would surely have had no desire to implicate himself in this terrible matter to his own son). Joe still accepted that Walter may well have been a 33 degree freemason, for he had taught Joe and his mother the super-secret handshake. One of the really cute things in the story is that they came to use this sign between themselves when Alice had become blind, for her son to reassure her in coming in that he was not an intruder or assassin. The BBC reportedly only learnt what the super-secret was from Joe! But by 1991 Joseph was arguing, and Melvyn Fairclough following this reasoning, that Walter Sickert was not involved in the murder but knew Mary Kelly and all the players, especially Eddy, from Cleveland Street, and remained in contact with Inspector Abberline, Eddy's bodyguard and chief detective for the Ripper case at Scotland Yard, over a number of years, which is partly how he came to know so many of the case details, which Abberline well knew had been suppressed at the highest levels.

But anyone would need to read The Ripper And The Royals on all this. I believe the basics of the story all the more having looked at the evidence again during the summer. But there is more than one view allowable, especially in this broader than broad-minded Pluralism Workshop. And, even in the one book, the testimony of around fifty witnesses to piece together or disallow. -- Richard Drake

Based on the evidence I've reviewed, I believe that Joseph Sickert could certainly use our prayers, but certainly not in order to be reconciled to the Windsors. -- Tom Kreitzberg

That Double Meaning has always been in my mind, of course, but now that he is dead and I've re-read the book and visited the American Church In London to pay my respects, I don't care too much for the apparently smarmy way of saying it.

Joseph never came across as a nutter, in print or on the phone. And I've met my fair share of Catholic nutters in Kentish Town. This Why exploration of a Minor Conspiracy Theory Badly Remembered was always going to be a long term effort. I would never have been interested enough on my own to have found out who was theorising what, but I'm glad to know Cornwell as another of the "Sickert as Ripper" theorists in addition to Knight.

Meantime, there was a fascinating quotation last night (April 2002) from Margot Asquith, wife of the old Prime Minister, from the 30s about Lord Dawson and George V, mentioned on Quote Unquote, a panel game on BBC Radio 4. It shows how a privileged member of the ruling class could joke about the King's Euthanasia Without Consent Or Bother in the sure knowledge that others in her circle were quite familiar with it. The panel game gaily provided details of the euthanasia as an explanation of the joke but didn't say so much about why the ordinary people of Britain weren't let into the little secret for fifty years or so. -- Richard Drake