Alice Margaret Crook

Origin

Little is known about Alice Crook, save that she was born in 1885 and her mother was Annie Crook. Her father’s name was not given on her birth certificate. She and her mother were paupers, and she spent most of her childhood in and out of workhouses. She married William Gorman, and together they had five children. She died in 1950.

Major Story Arcs

In the early 1970s a man named Joseph Gorman came forward, calling himself Joseph Sickert and claiming to be the illegitimate son of Alice and the famous English painter Walter Sickert, with whom she had an affair. He claimed that Alice’s mother, Annie, had secretly married Prince Albert Victor, then second in line to the throne, and the Prince was Alice’s father. Alice and her mother were kept in a home on Cleveland Street where the Prince would visit them often, until their affair was uncovered by Queen Victoria and the Prime Minister, who ordered the apartment raided. Alice, he said, escaped from the raid because she was with her nanny, Mary Kelly, who then left the girl to be raised by nuns. He alleged that the Jack the Ripper murders were carried out by William Gull to silence Mary Kelly and her friends, who were aware of the embarrassing affair and were attempting to blackmail the government with this information.  

This theory, commonly dubbed the “royal conspiracy”, has been widely discredited for a number of reasons. While it is true that Annie and Alice both existed, and Gorman was indeed Alice’s son, he was one of five children born to her and her husband, William Gorman; there is no evidence he was the product of an affair. Alice herself would have been conceived sometime in the summer of 1884, when the Prince was in Germany and thus unavailable to father her. Alice herself later stated that her father was named William Crook, which was the name of her grandfather, and has been suggested by some to indicate that she was the product of an incestuous union between Annie and her father, though there is of course no proof of this conjecture.  

It has also been pointed out that no records exist of the marriage between the Prince and Annie, and even if they had married, their marriage would have been invalidated because he had failed to gain the approval of his grandmother, voiding it through the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. As well, the home in which Annie was alleged to have been kept along with her daughter, 6 Cleveland Street, had been torn down before April of 1888, and both she and Alice were paupers, with no indication they were receiving money from a wealthy patron. Gorman claimed that Annie was a Catholic, but there is no evidence to support it, and even if it were true it would have simply removed Albert Victor and any children produced by the union, including Alice, from the line of succession, due to the Act of Settlement of 1701.  

There is no indication that Alice and Walter Sickert knew one another, let alone were engaged in an affair. Further, there is no indication that Sickert knew any member of the royal family, nor that he knew Annie. There is also no proof that he knew the victims of the Ripper, or that they knew each other, Annie or Alice. Even if they had known one another, the chances that their story of a royal illegitimacy would have been believed were fairly slim. Alice herself never made any such claims.

Shortly after the book putting the claims forward, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, was published, Joseph Gorman retracted his testimony and admitted he had fabricated all of it. Nonetheless, the royal conspiracy theory has remained immensely popular, especially in popular fiction, where Alice most notably appeared as a child in Eddie Campbell and Alan Moore’s From Hell. She also appeared in the film “adaptation”, where she was played by Poppy Rogers