Читать книгу They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper - Bruce Robinson - Страница 11

Ignorance worships mystery, reason explains it.

Robert G. Ingersoll

In the early hours of Sunday, 30 September 1888, the Ripper made two hits. The first was an aborted liaison at a place called Dutfield’s Yard, off Berner Street in Whitechapel, where he attacked and murdered a forty-four-year-old part-time whore, Elizabeth Stride. It seems his postmortem activity was interrupted by the arrival of a young coster, Louis Diemschutz, with his pony and cart. Sensing something untoward, the animal shied in the darkness, and it was probably in the few moments of ensuing confusion that the assassin made himself scarce.

Like an Argentine toad – touch the bastard and die – our Purger must have been almost toxic with homicidal adrenaline. For him, murder wasn’t even half the story. What motivated him was ritual. He wanted body parts, trophies, wanted to leave his ‘mark’, a pleasure denied him at Dutfield’s Yard by the arrival of Diemschutz and his nag.

The hunt for more action took him west, into the City – over the state line, so to speak, and therefore into a location that made some sense. Stride had been slaughtered on Charles Warren’s patch in Whitechapel. Jack was now out of there, relatively safe in an entirely different police district, a part of London under the aegis of another ex-military man, Assistant Commissioner Major Sir Henry Smith.

At about 1.30 a.m. the killer ran into his next victim, a forty-six-year-old drunk called Catherine Eddowes. The encounter tells us something about the Ripper’s extraordinary credentials as a psychopath. Not an hour before, he’d cut so deep into a woman’s throat that he was down to the vertebrae, yet here he clearly manifested no sign of physical or mental duress beyond that of a man taking a leisurely stroll. A blood-drenched cliché scuttling for a ‘lair’ he was not. There could have been no blood, no exposed canines – nothing to alert this streetwise woman at all. Jack was clearly a man in complete control, and within minutes he had control of Eddowes. The unfortunate woman had just got out of a police cell, where she’d been banged up for a few hours to sleep off the gin. ‘I shall get a damned good hiding when I get home,’ she told the copper who released her. She never made it, but became world-famous instead.

Mrs Eddowes was murdered in Mitre Square, Aldgate, at about 1.45 a.m., suffering horrendous mutilations which probably included Elizabeth Stride’s share too. For it seems very likely that the disturbance at Dutfield’s Yard put in its invoice here. The killer cut her throat, then flayed her in sexual insult, creating a classic Ripper atrocity.

‘The throat was cut across to the extent of 6 or 7 inches,’ recorded City Police surgeon Dr Gordon Brown. ‘The intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder – they were smeared with some feculent matter. A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design. The lobe and auricle of the right ear were cut obliquely through … Several buttons were found in the clotted blood after the body was removed.’

No clues, of course, except for the usual cornucopia. It’s a virtual repeat of Chapman, although in Eddowes’ case the intestines were placed on the right, rather than the left, shoulder. Brown’s autopsy was comprehensive, and I’ll get back to it. Meanwhile, I want to concentrate on the injuries inflicted upon the face. Much hatred was lavished there, with apparently random mutilation. But as with everything else in Jack’s signature, there is always a message for Charlie Warren:

There was a deep cut over the bridge of the nose, extending from the left border of the nasal bone down near to the angle of the jaw on the right side of the cheek. This cut went into the bone and divided all the structures of the cheek except the mucous membrane of the mouth. The tip of the nose was quite detached from the nose by an oblique cut from the bottom of the nasal bone to where the wings of the nose join the face. A cut from this divided the upper lip and extended through the substance of the gum over the right lateral incisor tooth. About half an inch from the top of the nose there was another oblique cut. There was a cut on the right angle of the mouth as if the cut of a point of a knife. The cut extended an inch and a half, parallel with the lower lip.

This is crazy stuff, an uncoordinated frenzy of spite. However, the last cuts Brown describes are very different from the rest, and were almost certainly the last the Ripper made on this occasion. ‘There was a cut on each side of the cheek,’ he notes, ‘a cut which peeled up the skin, forming a triangular flap about an inch and a half.’

Complementary of each other, these are the only duplicated injuries to the face. No slashing here: rage has given way to balance and control. Irrespective of the darkness and the risk of discovery, it was a steady hand and deliberate thinking that cut this precise duo of marks. Like the items ‘placed in order or arranged’ at Chapman’s feet, and the piece of Eddowes’ intestine ‘placed between the body and the left arm’, these cuts were made by ‘design’.

No one would deny that Jack was into ritual. So what did these marks mean, to him or to anybody else? Predicated on Dr Brown’s measurements, we can get an actual-size idea of how they looked.

Ring any bells? Probably not if you’re writing an article for the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, but they look like a pair of compasses to me. Let us hear it again from Bro Warren, recalling the most indelible adventure of his Masonic life. Among the stones of Solomon’s Temple, he wrote, ‘the next visitor will see … the Square and Compasses, as cut by our hand’.

‘A Master Mason, in teaching apprentices,’ writes Masonic historian Bro Dr J. Fort Newton, ‘makes use of the Compasses and the Square.’1 Over the next few pages I want to explore the proposition, to examine whether these curious symbols meant anything to Warren. (The compasses on Mitre Square. Ha ha.)

But a problem immediately presents itself, and it’s the same problem that faced Jack. The scene of Eddowes’ murder on the Square wasn’t in Warren’s manor, so if he’s to enjoy the ‘Funny Little Game’, some ingenuity must be employed. The question was, how could Eddowes be connected with Stride, the duo becoming the single and simultaneous presentation of a ‘Double Event’ to the tortured and ridiculous Boss Cop?

As with Annie Chapman, Jack cut Eddowes’ pockets open. As with Chapman, he was looking for all things metal. His hunt for metal was part of the ‘Funny Little Game’. No novice Mason can decline this timeless ritual, and in Jack’s Masonic nightmare, nor could any victim.

Every piece of metal in Eddowes’ possession was removed, and strewn about her body. They included tin boxes, a tin matchbox, a small metal cigarette case, a knife, a metal teaspoon, a metal thimble ‘laying off the finger’, and several metal buttons ‘found in the clotted blood after the body was removed’. The rules of the psychotic game also demanded body parts. Trophies. Eddowes’ left kidney and uterus were extracted with rudimentary skill. These organs ‘would have been of no use for any professional purpose’, noted Dr Brown, excusing himself of any support for Baxter’s ‘Womb-Collector’.

When Jack had finished, he sliced off a piece of Eddowes’ apron – ‘about a half of it’, according to testimony given at the inquest. These Victorian aprons were around nine feet square. So we’re looking at a sizeable piece, something in the order of four or five square feet of cloth. The consensus amongst Ripperologists is that he used it to wipe blood and excrement from his knife and hands. But he could have done that just as well without cutting it off. I think he used it to wrap the kidney and uterus (the Telegraph described the purloined sheet of apron as ‘wet with blood’, suggesting more than a hand-wipe).

Although Eddowes had satisfied the signatory requirements of Jack’s idea of fun, one thing was missing from the equation, and that was Warren. It was probably at this juncture that the metaphorical light went on. Rather than discarding the repugnant piece of cloth (wrapping body parts or not), the Ripper decided to convert this specific of City evidence into an intriguing ‘Metropolitan clue’. It’s my view that he carried this piece of apron out of one police jurisdiction and into another simply because he didn’t want to entirely throw away the success of Eddowes on City Commissioner Smith.

For about fifteen minutes he walked east with his apron and his trophies, back into Warren’s precinct of the Met. Why he didn’t run into a tidal wave of coppers following the Stride murder isn’t explained. Were there no patrols out hunting him? Apparently not. The police didn’t seem to be bothered with him any more than he seemed bothered by them. Warren’s claim that he had saturated Whitechapel with extra police requires explanation, and will later be exposed for the fairy tale it was. ‘By the supineness and fatuous stupidity of the police,’ jibed the Yorkshireman, ‘one would have thought that for their own credit’s sake the authorities would have organised such a system of espionage and patrol over that terror-ridden portion of the metropolis that an attempted repetition of such crimes would be instantly detected.’

Meanwhile, the ‘lair’ idea has taken a bit of a bashing. Jack wasn’t looking for anywhere to hide, and he still had some way to walk. Had any copper cared to stop him, he might well have wondered what this man’s business was with a nine-inch blade and bits and pieces of a woman’s body. But no one was going to question Gentleman Jack, and he knew it.

And here’s something of interest. After leaving the Eddowes crime scene, Jack vanished for the best part of forty-five minutes. During this time the kidney, and almost certainly the uterus as well, were transferred into a preservative – subsequently determined, for the kidney, to be spirits of wine (i.e. alcohol). Trophies pickled, he was left with the piece of bloody apron. Virtually every other assassin on earth would now be scurrying anxiously to conceal this tell-tale piece of evidence, to destroy it in any way he could.

But not Jack.

At about 2.30 a.m., doubtless spruced up, he emerged from his inspired choice of digs. He was looking for an appropriate surface on which to write his funny little Masonic teaser for Warren, and he found it in the entrance of some tenements in Goulston Street, Whitechapel. The wall was black, and so was the passage. He could stand off the street without being seen. It was in this doorway that he left his bloody clue and, having a stick of chalk about him, wrote on the wall above it:

The Juwes are

The men that

Will not

be blamed

for nothing.

About half an hour later a thirty-three-year-old constable called Alfred Long was proceeding down Goulston Street. His beat that evening had brought him past this doorway before, but he’d noticed nothing unusual. Now he stopped and shone his light at the writing on the wall.

I was on duty at Goulston Street on the morning of 30 Sept: at about 2.55 a.m. I found a portion of apron covered in blood lying in the passage of the doorway leading to Nos 108 to 119 Model Dwellings at Goulston Street.

Above it on the wall was written in chalk ‘The Juews [sic] are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’ I at once called the P.C. on the adjoining beat and then searched the staircases, but found no traces of any persons or marks. I at once proceeded to the station [Commercial Road] telling the P.C. to see that no one entered or left the building in my absence. I arrived at the station about 5 or 10 minutes past 3, and reported to the Inspector on duty of finding the apron and the writing.

The Inspector at once proceeded to Goulston Street and inspected the writing. From there we proceeded to Leman St [police station] and the apron was handed by the Inspector to a gentleman I have since learned is Dr Phillips. I then returned back on duty at Goulston Street about 5.2

Police Constable Long obviously believed he’d found something of importance, otherwise why post the guard and get the Inspector? The Inspector obviously concurred, otherwise why at once proceed with Long and his evidence to Whitechapel’s most senior cop at Leman Street? It was the first disastrous move of this notorious night.

Other than for his description of the discovery of the piece of apron and his rush to Leman Street, Long’s account is unsound on virtually every level. It had been tailored to harmonise with the requirements of his superiors, most notably Warren, but also Thomas Arnold, the fifty-three-year-old Superintendent of H Division at Leman Street, who went into zombie-like mode to take charge of the proceedings.

The first hint of iffiness about Long’s account is its date. His report is not that of a constable on duty in late September, but a curious retrospective written about five weeks later. It is curious too that Warren and Arnold should have created their retrospective accounts of the Goulston Street saga on precisely the same date, 6 November 1888. Even by the risible standards of the Metropolitan Police, this was unacceptable practice.

‘An officer’s duty requires that as soon as practicable after hearing any important statement he shall record it in writing,’ wrote the chief of the CID at Scotland Yard, Robert Anderson, adding that should he find any officer in neglect of that duty, ‘I should lose all confidence both in his judgement and his truthfulness’.3 Despite the source, I couldn’t have put it better. What PC Long concocted in November is in no way an accurate account of what happened on that September night. Such adventures in amnesia also dominate the nonsense cooked up by Superintendent Arnold. It seems that as far as Arnold was concerned, Long and his apron were meaningless. Both he and Long appear to have been smitten by lassitude, Long telling us that he remained at Leman Street as though neither he nor Arnold knew diddly-shit about the atrocity in Mitre Square.

With its customary precision, Ripperology supports this fiction. Here’s what page 256 of its Ripper ‘dictionary’, The Jack the Ripper A to Z, has to say about Long’s appearance at the Eddowes inquest: ‘He was mildly criticised by a juror for not conducting a thorough search of the rooms in the building, but reasonably replied that he did not know of Eddowes’ murder.’

Imagine, if you will, consulting a source of supposed reference, a dictionary of zoology by way of example, looking for ‘dog’: ‘Dog – A member of the cat family, such as ducks.’

I exaggerate the point only to make it. Never mind the editorial slant – ‘reasonably replied’ – this entry is so inaccurate it qualifies as fiction. PC Long knew perfectly well of Eddowes’ murder in Mitre Square, and said so at her inquest: ‘When I found the piece of apron I at once searched the staircases leading to the buildings. Having searched I at once proceeded to the station. Before proceeding there I had heard of a murder having been committed, I had heard of the murder in Mitre Square.’4

And so had Arnold. And so had Bro Dr Bagster Phillips. I love the way Phillips is presented here, as though he was just hanging around at the police station for the doughnuts. In fact he and Arnold had been busying themselves at Dutfield’s Yard: ‘The arrival of the Superintendent [Arnold] took place almost simultaneously with that of the Divisional Surgeon [Phillips].’5 Soon after, Phillips was on his way to Mitre Square. ‘Before we moved the body,’ deposed Dr Gordon Brown at the inquest, ‘Dr Phillips was sent for, as I wished him to see the wounds, he having been engaged in a similar case recently.’6

While Warren was still in bed, Acting Commissioner of City Police Major Sir Henry Smith was already on the scene. ‘By the time the stretcher had arrived,’ he recorded, ‘and when we got the body to the mortuary, the first discovery we made was that about half the apron was missing. It had been severed by a clean cut.’7

This missing piece of apron instantly became the motor for frenzied City enquiries – find the other half, you might find the murderer. Bro Dr Phillips was in and out of all of this, involved well before PC Long rushed in with his bloody half of the apron. It was a startling piece of evidence, and given Long’s admitted awareness of the Mitre Square murder, a potentially vital link between Eddowes and the writing on the wall. Yet Long’s concoction thirty-six days later, on 6 November, makes no mention whatever of the significance of his find. The Mitre Square Eddowes/Goulston Street link had been quite forgotten.

Detective Halse of the City Police gave evidence that he too was at Goulston Street at precisely the time PC Long reported that he was there: ‘I came through Goulston Street at 2.20 a.m.,’ he said. And PC Long said: ‘I passed the spot where the apron was about 2.20.’ It therefore seems logical to suppose that Halse himself was the probable source of Long’s information about the second murder. Detective Halse was in plainclothes, PC Long was not, and as the former was desperately looking for a murderer and a piece of apron, it is likely that he would have quizzed the uniform about anything he might have seen.

But when Long actually found the bloody piece of apron and pitched up with it at Leman Street police station forty-five minutes later, Superintendent Arnold immediately did absolutely nothing.

While City cops sweated their arses off in Whitechapel’s streets, Arnold scratched his at the police station. He sent nobody to secure Goulston Street, and nobody to search the building. What he did was to telegraph Bro Charlie Warren at home, who couldn’t get his socks on fast enough to get down to Goulston Street and destroy the evidence.

Chief of the City Police Detective Department, Inspector James McWilliam, also put out a telegraph: ‘I wired Scotland Yard [at 3.45 a.m.].’ Result: nil. Nothing. The City had more than half a dozen of their top detectives on the street; Scotland Yard sent nobody, showing no more interest than Arnold. If it wasn’t a waste of ink, one might well ask what happened to the Met’s senior detectives, such as Frederick Abberline, Walter Andrews and Henry Moore?

Meanwhile, PC Long had his feet up at Leman Street, with nothing to do. He says he stayed at the police station until he went back on duty at 5 a.m., but it is a challenge to believe it. Long says nothing in his statement about the arrival of three of Commissioner Smith’s detectives, minutes after his own, and nothing of what importance they attached to his discovery.

They were City officers – DC Halse, DS Lawley and DS Hunt – hotfoot from Mitre Square, who had heard of the writing and the piece of apron found under it, and were aware of its vital importance, even if Superintendent Arnold was predisposed to ignore it.

At the inquest, where PC Long was put up as a tongue-tied patsy, Detective Halse had this to say: ‘I came through Goulston Street at 2.20 a.m. and then went back to Mitre Square and accompanied Inspector Collard to the mortuary. I saw deceased stripped and saw a portion of the apron was missing. I went back with [Commissioner] Major Smith to Mitre Square where [we] heard that a piece of apron had been found at Goulston Street. I then went with Detective Hunt to Leman Street police station. I and Detective Hunt went on to Goulston Street where the spot was pointed out where the apron was found.’

Who did the pointing out? Neither the unnamed Met Inspector who had accompanied Long to Leman Street, nor the unnamed PC who was then on guard duty at Goulston Street was called at the inquest to give his version of events. I suggest that the most logical person to have pointed out where the apron was found would be the man who found it. And seeing that Long had nothing to do at Leman Street, I suggest that it was he who did the pointing. To contest what is a virtual certainty would also require an explanation of why neither Long nor Arnold made any mention of the arrival of the City detectives in their respective fabrications. Perhaps neither of them noticed Detectives Halse, Lawley or Hunt? Perhaps they were on the toilet, or brewing tea? Perhaps indeed it was some other anonymous person from the Tinkerbell Squad who took this phalanx of City detectives back to Goulston Street to point out where the apron was found? Perhaps the nameless Inspector, or a copper whistled up from the adjoining beat? But neither of these had found the bloody piece of cloth, and, like the professional investigator he was, Halse would have wanted to know exactly where such momentous evidence had been discovered. Was it to one side of the writing to which it referred, or the other? Or directly beneath it? Lacking any detective from the Met, Halse and his fellow City men would have wanted to know all and everything, including Long’s first thoughts and immediate actions when he had discovered such a prize.

According to Halse, he saw some chalk writing on the black facia of the wall: ‘I remained there and sent [a message to McWilliam] with a view to having it photographed.’ City Inspector McWilliam takes up the narrative:

I had been informed of the murder [of Eddowes] and arrived at the detective office at 3.45 after ascertaining from [Inspector] S.S. Izzard what steps had been taken in consequence of it. I wired to Scotland Yard informing the Metropolitan Police of the murder and went with D.C. Downes to Bishopsgate Station & from thence to Mitre Square. I there found Major Smith, Superintendent Foster, Inspector Collard & several Detective Officers. Lawley and Hunt informed me of finding the apron & the writing on the wall, the latter of which I ordered to be photographed and directed the officers to return at once and search the ‘Model’ Dwellings [108–119 Goulston Street] and lodging houses in the neighbourhood. I then went to the mortuary in Golden Lane, where the body had been taken by direction of Dr Gordon Brown and saw the piece of apron – which was found at Goulston Street – compared with a piece the deceased was wearing & it exactly corresponded.8

Still not a Metropolitan Police officer in sight, and we had better enjoy this description of a proper and professional City police investigation while we may. Bro Warren was on his way.

We are about to get into one of the most extraordinary mind-games ever played by two human beings. It’s a game in which one side is predetermined to win, and the other must pretend not to lose. The rules of the ‘Funny Little Game’ were chosen by the dominant player, and were exclusively Freemasonic. It was a clever strategy by a clever psychopath. Freemasonry was an arena in which the killer was omnipotent and the System was most exposed. To protect itself, the System was obliged to protect him – and that’s about the size of the ‘mystery’.

What Long, Arnold and Warren were later to write of that September night was an outrage. The City Police were busting a gut to find the bastard, whereas Arnold was fretting over how he might dismiss the evidence that had been left by him.

On essay day, 6 November 1888, Arnold was to write: ‘I was apprehensive that if the writing were left it would be the means of causing a riot.’ (In which case, why hadn’t he already ordered up a hundred police as a contingency plan?) As a complementary fiction, from Warren, we read: ‘Having before me the report that if it [the writing] was left there the house was likely to be wrecked.’9

This threat of the demolition of numbers 108–119 Goulston Street had never occurred to any officer of the City Police, and is nowhere to be found in Arnold’s November composition. So what ‘report’ is Warren referring to? Does anyone imagine that imminent riot and attendant calamity was the tenor of the wire City Inspector McWilliam had sent to Scotland Yard?

I don’t think so. There had been two murders in the last two hours. Who was to say there wouldn’t be a third? Why wasn’t every available Metropolitan policeman in London on the street? Indeed, why wasn’t Warren, like Commissioner Smith, already down there, having been telegraphed about the earlier discovery of Elizabeth Stride’s body? Plus, if the writing on the wall was really so volatile, why had Arnold left it showing at all? Why dither for another hour and a half over something that could be covered up and guarded within two minutes?

If, as was subsequently claimed, the writing was nothing more than a bit of inflammatory scribble (‘graffito’), why was it necessary for Warren to see it for himself before it was destroyed? If he needed to see it, he could have seen the City’s intended photographs, so avoiding any problems with the local residents – who McWilliam’s search was going to wake up anyway. So what was it that actually brought the treacherous buffoon scuttling out of his bed? Anyone of an enquiring mind might think there was a little more to it than anxiety about a possible riot in the deserted streets. That perhaps there was some arcane agenda, and that it was the true reason for the Bro Commissioner’s nocturnal haste.

From the moment of Arnold’s intercession, every imaginable effort was made to trash the importance of the writing on the wall. At first sight, Jack’s ‘schoolboy’10 scrawl was enough to send PC Long running. An Inspector from Commercial Road ran with him. But subsequent to that, no Metropolitan policeman was allowed to comprehend the matter of it. Priceless evidence linking Catherine Eddowes to the writing was to be transformed and repackaged into something else.

Superintendent Arnold, a copper of thirty-five years’ experience, put in a report of that night’s proceedings as if he were some kind of social worker, engaged above all else to look out for the sensibilities of the Jews. I reproduce it in full.

H Division

6th November 1888

I beg to report that on the morning of 30th Sept last my attention was called to some writing on the wall of the entrance to some dwellings No 108 Goulston Street Whitechapel which consisted of the following words ‘The Juews [sic] are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’, and knowing that in consequence of a suspicion having fallen upon a Jew named ‘John Pizer’ alias ‘Leather Apron’ having committed a murder in Hanbury Street a short time previously a strong feeling existed against the Jews generally, and as the building upon which the writing was found was situated in the midst of a locality inhabited principally by that sect, I was apprehensive that if the writing were left it would be the means of causing a riot and therefore considered it desirable that it should be removed having in view the fact that it was in such a position that it would have been rubbed by the shoulders of persons passing in & out of the building. Had only a portion of the writing been removed the context would have remained. An Inspector was present by my directions with a sponge for the purpose of removing the writing when the Commissioner [Warren] arrived on the scene.

T. Arnold Supd.11

The word ‘bullshit’ doesn’t rise to the occasion. You couldn’t even call it tosh. This was a doorway, in the middle of the night. PC Long felt confident of securing it with a single policeman whom he had instructed ‘to see that no one entered or left the building in my absence’. But where was everyone now? Apart from a solitary cop whistled up from his adjoining beat, not a man from the Met is ever reported as being on guard at Goulston Street.

Instead, in grotesque disproportion to the circumstance, the Jews were elevated to a status they had never previously enjoyed, and that would never come their way again. Hitherto, virtually every fantasy of police suspicion had fallen upon a Jew, and Jews were the focus of practically every false accusation and arrest. Yet that wasn’t convenient here. The Jews were suddenly the Met’s best mates; none more so than Mr John Pizer (a.k.a. ‘Leather Apron’), a Jew, according to Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, ‘of unusually thick neck’, a ‘disgrace to their tribe’,12 who on this occasion Arnold was manipulating into a vulnerable alibi.

Never mind any suspicions over evidence of a ‘Double Event’ that are glaring at him; he’s concerned, he says, about the suspicion that fell upon Pizer in ‘consequence’ of the murder at Hanbury Street. Poor thick-necked Pizer’s Hebrew sensibilities have been transformed into a reason for destroying the most flagrant ‘clue’ Jack ever left. Yet the cops had hounded this innocent Yid through every casual ward and lodging house in Whitechapel, stirring up anti-Semitism as they went. ‘The public are looking for a monster,’ noted the weekly Public Opinion, à propos of Pizer, ‘and in the legend of “Leather Apron” the Whitechapel part of them seem to be inventing a monster to look for.’13 As will be discovered at Eddowes’ inquest, it was a policeman, appropriately named Thick, who invented this toxic junk.

Arnold’s highly selective hand-wringing for the Jews is bogus. ‘A strong feeling existed against the Jews,’ he laments. But this was as nothing compared to the strong feeling, amongst Jews and everyone else, that existed against the psychopath in their midst.

Arnold was a Superintendent of detectives, and the general idea is that he was hunting one of history’s most infamous and dangerous criminals. Yet not once in his cowardly ‘report’ does he mention that the writing on the wall may well have been the work of that very man. Not once does he allude to the piece of apron, proved unequivocally to have been taken from Eddowes, and thus of inestimable importance to the writing above it. Not once does he refer to the City Police, and their efforts to preserve such evidence rather than, insanely, for it to be destroyed. And not once does he refer to that tiresome little sideline of cut throats and guts all over the pavement about a mile away.

So obscene and implausible is Arnold’s explanation, you wouldn’t want to tell it to a snake. What we’re witnessing here is a breath-taking perversion of justice, bricklaying the cornerstones of the great ‘mystery’. Like Bro Baxter and his non-existent ‘Womb-Collector’, the whole Goulston Street episode reeks of pusillanimous deceit. While the City had its officers on the street – Collard, Izzard, Downes, Foster, Marriot, Outram, Lawley, Halse, Hunt, McWilliam and Commissioner Smith himself – Scotland Yard sent no one, and had but one senior officer, John Reid, working the Stride murder in isolation at Dutfield’s Yard.

The reason for this paucity of enthusiasm, of course, was that Scotland Yard didn’t dare show any interest, because if it had it would have made the destruction of the writing on the wall all the more outrageous. You can’t put a guard up around vital evidence and then destroy it. In other words, the more defensive initiative it took, the more impossible it would have been to justify Bro Warren’s hooliganism. So it took none.

It was left to the City Police to search the model dwellings at Goulston Street, which Inspector McWilliam did at once. In spite of the frenetic activity of his men, the Met had to keep up the illusion that the writing on the wall was nothing more than a bit of anti-Semitic scribble. Arnold had to pretend it didn’t matter much, and thereafter everyone else had to pretend the same. Hence the coordination of the triple fictions presented to posterity by PC Long, Warren and Arnold himself some five weeks later.

For his contribution to this corrupt policing, Arnold was given an immediate £25 pay rise, a reward that miffed the East London Observer. Commenting on the ‘obloquy cast on our local police during the recent murders’, it considered this ‘rebuke from headquarters’ a somewhat unusual ‘punishment’.14

As has been mentioned, this dawn visit to the mysterious East was Warren’s first appearance there in respect of these crimes. The previous murders of Nichols and Chapman had never brought him anywhere near the place, and neither did a pair of murdered women now. Now that he was here, he was indifferent to the ripped-up whores. The ‘most pressing question’ was what was written up on a wall in front of him, and once he’d confirmed what it was, he wanted it gone.

Contemporary photographs suggest that the streets of Whitechapel were replete with such inscriptions, and if any reflection of Victorian society, much of it would have been anti-Semitic. So what’s the deal?

The answer is that the writing on the wall wasn’t specifically anti-Semitic at all, and even if it was, it hardly required the attention of London’s Commissioner of Metropolitan Police.

Would today’s Commissioner fire up the Jag at four in the morning to expunge the words ‘Fuck Islam’ written on an East End wall? He might, in certain circumstances, want it secured, but with two cut throats on the slate, it wouldn’t exactly be the place he visited first. Charles Warren was the man who brutally put down a riot of thousands in a public place as large as Trafalgar Square, yet we’re required to believe that slumbering Jews and their phantom adversaries were the ‘most pressing’ of his concerns.

Now, this concept of spontaneous affray amongst a non-existent rabble had clearly never occurred to City Commissioner Smith. Although its location was outside his jurisdiction, he had the temerity to think that this writing was of high forensic value, and had organised for it to be photographed. After all, it was a very strange text, by now empirically associated with a very strange ritual murder in Mitre Square. Even if it was presently indecipherable, would not photographs of this writing be of great worth? What if there was a hidden message? Could this not evolve into the breakthrough ‘clue’ Scotland Yard insisted it was praying for?

Dream on, Smith. Warren wanted rid of it precisely because it was the breakthrough clue. By definition, it became one of the most remarkable clues in criminal history – one Commissioner of Police wanted at all costs to preserve it, while another Commissioner of Police wanted it gone. This astonishing counterpoint of opinion is the pivot point of ‘the Ripper mystery’.

‘I do not hesitate myself to say,’ wrote Warren, ‘that if the writing had been left, there would have been an onslaught upon the Jews, property would have been wrecked, and lives would probably have been lost.’15

Even the Victorians refused to buy into this crap, and when it leaked there was a furore. How can such drivel cut it for Ripperologists today? I want to laugh in its face, it’s so ridiculous. If it had been remotely true, anyone with a shirt-cuff could have scrubbed the message out at once, and Warren could have stayed, more usefully, in bed. I doubt such a point was ever made to so distinguished a personage. Nevertheless, compromises were offered by the City Police. The only remote intimation of anti-Semitism was the word ‘Juwes’. So how about erasing just that, and getting a picture of the rest? Ergo, a photograph of

The — are

The Men that

will not

be blamed

for nothing

‘The — are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’? Good God! Warren couldn’t permit stuff as volatile as that to remain on a public wall! As Arnold had pointed out, the writing was still there for anyone to see (and presumably an imaginative hoodlum might fill in the missing word, and riot).

All right then, said the exasperated City cops, how about erasing ‘Juwes’, hanging a blanket over the rest, and only taking it down momentarily when there was enough daylight for a photograph?

No deal. This building was a hive of snoring Israelites. They’d be abroad soon, and who would be able to stop them, or anyone else, from tearing off the blanket? Or, in Warren’s own words, ‘[It] could not be covered up without danger of the covering being torn off at once.’16

I dislike the expression, but you couldn’t make it up. It’s an argument worthy of that half-wit detective played by Peter Sellers. But this wasn’t an actor with a latex nose, it was Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of Metropolitan Police.

What Warren lacked in argument, he made up for in rank. This was his manor, and the evidence had to go. So there it was. After thirty-five minutes of dissent, just after 5.30 a.m. the writing was washed off, the most senior policeman in the kingdom personally supervising the obliteration of the most revealing clue the Ripper had ever left. And to do that, of course, to wipe out the clear Masonic connotation, was precisely the reason Bro Warren had quit his bed for a scuttle down to the East End.

Warren, with his fantasy riot, was lying like a kid with jam around his mouth. It seemed to have escaped his attention that he controlled a police force almost half the size of the entire US Army. Admittedly, 13,000 policemen would have caused a bit of a crush around a doorway, but how about fifty, or even five? Not a mile away, in Mitre Square, Inspector Izzard and his constables had secured the entire area and shut it down. The square was about eighty feet by seventy-five, and with three entrances and three exits it was patently a tad more difficult to control than a doorway. ‘The [City] Police and Detectives speedily mustered in force,’ reported journalist and eyewitness Thomas Catling. ‘Every avenue leading to Mitre Square was closely guarded.’ You couldn’t get in, and you couldn’t get out.

By contrast, the criminal farce at Goulston Street wasn’t even a crime scene. A single copper could have secured it, and indeed one had, replicating the circumstance at Dutfield’s Yard, where PC Lamb had been obliged to take temporary and single-handed control of the landscape created by the murder of Elizabeth Stride. ‘I put a constable at the gate and told him not to let anyone in or out,’ deposed Lamb. ‘When further assistance came a constable was put in charge of the front door.’

When Warren finally showed up at Dutfield’s Yard, it was only to sniff around like a valet after the Ripper. The place was crawling with evidence requiring suppression. Anything that couldn’t be immediately dismissed would be taken care of in the next few days. Courtesy of its Commissioner, the Metropolitan Police had just become amongst the most corrupt police services in the world.

But the betrayal had hardly begun.

In respect of ‘Juwes’, and setting a trend for future apologists (almost all of Ripperology), Warren figured out a slim fiction in his efforts to try to explicate the writing: ‘The idiom does not appear to be written in English, French, or German, but it might possibly be that of an Irishman speaking a foreign language. It seems to be the idiom of Spain or Italy. The spelling of Jews is curious.’17

But not as curious as J-u-w-e-s. Anyway, you can take your pick. He’s certainly not English, but he could be a Mick.

Warren’s speculations remind me of nothing so much as Ebenezer Scrooge when presented with the reality of Marley’s Ghost. ‘You may be a bit of undigested beef,’ he hazards, ‘a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.’ Like Scrooge, Warren dared not acknowledge what was staring him in the face.

Attempts to explain away the writing on the wall have become the stimulus for some amusing invention. Anyone who thinks Warren’s ‘riot’ was a trifle fanciful should stand by for the contribution of Ripperologist Mr Martin Fido:

I postulate (quite speculatively) that a Gentile customer bought something that proved NBG, and the Jewish vendor refused to take it back. (The Wentworth Street old and cheap shoe market was on the street just outside the model dwellings, which were almost entirely occupied by Jews.) On taking back (say) a pair of unwearably uncomfortable shoes, the buyer is met with some bland refusal to accept responsibility (‘Well, they fitted you this morning, my friend!’), and chalks up his angry anti-Semitic comment ‘The Jews won’t take responsibility for anything’ on a nearby wall.18

And having made himself quite clear, he then throws his portion of Catherine Eddowes’ bloody apron under it.

Citing imaginary shoes in preference to an established piece of apron isn’t useful. Neither is it useful to attempt to change the quote. Such fantasy in preference to reality is also popular in Masonic quarters, whose explanations can often be juxtaposed with Ripperology without drawing breath.

Where the two become one and the same, we’re presented with what I call ‘Freemasology’. For a classic example of this, enter Bro Dennis Stocks, who quotes Mr Martin Fido – or is it the other way around? ‘It is highly likely,’ surmises Bro Stocks, ‘that the writing was simply and hastily scrawled by a disgruntled customer who had less than satisfactory service from one of the numerous Jewish craftsmen in the area and wrote his frustrations on the wall that the Jews won’t take responsibility for anything, especially, presumably bad workmanship.’19

It would require earth in place of a brain to buy into this. By proffering it, both Mr Fido and Bro Stocks are reducing the mental capacity of the City detectives to that of apes. Is that what they’d have us believe? That seasoned coppers living and working in East London didn’t know the difference between evidence in a murder case and a bit of scribble about aching feet?

The City Police boundary went down the middle of Whitechapel, at what is now called Petticoat Lane. Was local knowledge so vastly different on opposite pavements – tight shoes at one side of the thoroughfare, and a murderer’s calling card at the other? Smith isn’t going to send for a camera, and Warren isn’t going to get into a thirty-five-minute tizz, over a pair of fucking shoes.

I’m afraid there’s a bloody great hole in the lifeboat, and I conclude that Mr Fido is either pulling our leg, or is bewitched by some arcane consideration he declines to share.

Warren’s lunacy caused outrage that threatened to enmesh the entire Metropolitan Police. To try to diminish what he did is in fact to demean oneself. It isn’t the City Police who are the monkeys. Plus, as is clear to anyone who bothers to know anything about it (excepting Mr Fido and Bro Stocks), the Ripper didn’t write ‘Jews’. He wrote ‘Juwes’.

‘It’s a mystery,’ writes Ripperologist Mr Paul Begg, ‘why anyone ever thought that “Juwes” was a Masonic word.’20

If Mr Begg was here – and he’d sincerely be welcome – I’d like to ask him what his credentials are for broadcasting so flamboyant a certainty. ‘Juwes,’ he writes, ‘is supposed to be the collective name for Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum … they featured in British Masonic rituals until 1814, but they were dropped during the major revision of the ritual between 1814 and 1816.’

N(o) t(hey) w(ere) n(ot), and Mr Begg is misinformed, reiterating almost word for word the misinformation put about by Bro McLeod. To accept it is to buy into a deception, fatal to any hope of understanding the writing on the wall. ‘By 1888,’ continues Mr Begg, again resonant of McLeod, ‘it is doubtful if many British Masons would have even known their names.’

This pushes beyond the word ‘fib’.

The names Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum can in fact be found in any late-nineteenth-century Masonic encyclopedia. We need reach no further than for a volume authored by Warren’s pal and fellow founder of the Quatuor Coronati, Bro Reverend A.F.A. Woodford. In 1878 Woodford edited Kenning’s Cyclopaedia of Freemasonry, and here’s what one of the epoch’s foremost Masonic scholars has to say about the Three Jewish Assassins:

JUBELA, JUBELO, JUBELUM: Words familiar to Masonic students, but about which little can now be said distinctly … in our opinion they are a play on words. (p.368)21

Thus, despite protestations of extinction in 1814, they were in reality ‘words familiar to Masonic students’ in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

‘They are a play on words,’ writes Woodford, and they most graphically became one at Goulston Street. ‘Juwes’ is nothing more complex than an infantile sobriquet for Ju(bela), Ju(belo) and Ju(belum) – or if you want to make an ‘in-house’ Masonic joke of it, ‘Juwes’.

But Mr Begg has no sympathy for such exotic sources as Woodford, and argues it away like Bro Warren. ‘Juwes,’ he insists, ‘is not and has never been a Masonic word, nor has “Juwes” or any word approximating it ever appeared in British, Continental or American Masonic rituals.’22 I(t) i(s) a M(ystery), etc., etc.

Mr Philip Sugden agrees with Mr Begg’s ‘mystery’ angle, citing him as ‘one of the most dependable students of the case’. I have to disagree. You can’t have it both ways, demonstrate confusion and claim authority.

Of course ‘Juwes’ isn’t a Masonic word. It isn’t a word at all. But it is a play on words, like ‘Krazy Kat’. ‘Sponk’ isn’t a word either, but was anyone in the Metropolitan Police innocent of what it meant? With reference to HRH Queen Victoria, a correspondent signing himself ‘Jack the Ripper’ wrote ‘I shot sponk up her arse.’ Does anyone imagine he didn’t know how to spell ‘spunk’? The word is used like a toy, intentionally deformed to increase its potency, heightening an already adequate and shocking insult.

‘Juwes’ comes from the same brain; and incidentally, it wasn’t written for the average sightseer who might happen to be taking a constitutional around Whitechapel in the dead of night. It was written with a specific man in mind, a Masonic historian, and the very man who got out of bed for it. His nickname was ‘Jerusalem Warren’, and in my view he is part of the same funny pun.

Let us just remind ourselves of Warren’s ineptitude in the matter of weird words and arcane hieroglyphics in respect of Bro McLeod’s dismissal of his expertise. The following is part of a letter he wrote to the PEF, dated 18 June 1875:

I would call attention to the manner in which many modern Arabic words may differ from Hebrew or Aramaic, just as do modern Spanish words from the Latin. Thus we have in Latin and Spanish respectively:– Porcus, puerco; Bono, bueno; Bos, Beuy; Capillus, Capillulus, Cabelluelo, Cornu, cuerno; Ternpus, tiempo: And we have in Hebrew and Arabic:– Socho, Shuweikeh; Saphir, Sawafu, etc. Following on this track we obtain from Luweireh, Loreh; Dawaimeh, Dumeh; Suweimeh, Sumeh; Kawassimeh, Kassimeh; Hawara, Hara; etc. No doubt there are many known differences in European languages which may be found also to apply to Hebrew and Arabic. I have to suggest that a few simple rules on this subject might be arrived at which would aid the explorer in rapidly making a tentative examination of any Arabic word in order to test its likeness to Hebrew or Canaanitish.23

I suggest that ‘a few simple rules’ on Jack the Ripper might also be arrived at. Assistant Commissioner Robert Anderson offers handy assistance in one of his many theological volumes. ‘Take these words, for instance,’ he writes: ‘“The Lord Jehovah is my strength and my song; He also is become my salvation.” Now, to the believer, as such, the question of the spelling or the etymology of the name is of no more importance than that of the type in which it is printed [or written on a wall in chalk]. The only practical question is whether he has the conception which the name is intended to call up [my emphasis].’24

Warren knew everything there was to know about the teasing etymology of ‘Juwes’, Assassins and Ruffians. He knew the half-dozen variations for the name of Hiram, including Chirum, Chiram and Churani, in Samuel, Kings and Chronicles respectively. He knew the name Jehovah, Ye’hovah or Iehuvah, and could read any one of them in Hebrew. There was no question under heaven that Warren didn’t understand the significance of the word ‘Juwes’, and to suggest otherwise presupposes intellectual challenge from a potato.

‘Respectable historians,’ opines Masonic scholar Bro Hamill, ‘have always taken the “Juwes” inscription to be an expression of anti-semitism prevalent in the East End of London in the 1880s and 1890s.’25

How disrespectful is that? Does Bro Hamill really mean that anyone who has the temerity to question Freemasonry in respect of Jack the bloody Ripper is not respectable? Exactly who are these ‘respectable historians’? And on whose terms does he define ‘respectable’? Is Edward, Prince of Wales exempt from criticism over his multiple adulteries because he was a Freemason? Does Freemasonry make cheating inside a marriage respectable? Was Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, respectable when risking life imprisonment for buggering about with that idiot Euston at a harem of Post Office boys? And what about the conniver who most ludicrously nominated him as Jack the Ripper’s assistant, Worshipful Master Bro Thomas Stowell CBE. Oh dear, oh dear, how disrespectful was that?

Reality can be offensive, but springing to your feet and waving your rectitude about won’t change it. All cults, all creeds, all religions have their murderers (King Solomon murdered his brother). I’m sorry if this history offends, but carving a woman from her genitals to her throat is not a ‘respectable activity’, and I regret to say that a Freemason is no more exempt from committing such a crime than is any other man.

Mr Sugden says, ‘Only by shameless selection of evidence can the Masonic theory be invested with apparent credibility’26 – whereas, to the contrary, I believe it is only by shameless manipulation that it can be dismissed. Mr Sugden and Bro Hamill are flogging a substantial untruth, and an Everest of evidence doesn’t accommodate such shameless distortion.

As far as Masonry is concerned (and for that matter the gang-thinking of Ripperology), you can have as many suspects as you like: masturbators, womb-collectors, medical students, doctors, slaughtermen, Irishmen, sailors, cowboys, and no end of Jews. But what you can’t have is the most egregious Israelites of them all. After the Clarence/Sickert inoculation, it isn’t permitted to consider the ‘Mystic Trio’, infamous among Freemasons for their shouldered entrails and throats cut across.

Nothing is more important than this Masonic taunting of Bro Warren at Goulston Street. The mocking on the wall is the sum of the whole of Jack the Ripper, a key to his psyche – and, by the insanity of his reaction, Bro Sir Charles Warren’s too.

Here’s what Warren (and some other hand) put together as his 6 November report. I bother here only with the first couple of sentences: ‘On the 30th September on hearing of the Berners [sic] Street murder after visiting Commercial Road station I arrived at Leman Street station shortly before 5 a.m. and ascertained from Superintendent Arnold all that was known relative to the two murders. The most pressing question at that moment was some writing on the wall at Goulston Street evidently written with the intention of inflaming the public mind against the Jews.’27

Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but if my intention was to inflame the public against the Jews, I think I could have chosen somewhere more provoking than a pitch-black doorway in the middle of the night. Perhaps under a street lamp? Plus, where did this phantom inflamer get his piece of apron, a technicality Warren declines to address anywhere in his preposterous essay. Like Arnold, he doesn’t mention it at all: ‘The most pressing question at that moment was some writing on the wall at Goulston Street’.

This ‘most pressing question’ is most curiously expunged from Mr Sugden’s version of Warren’s report. He reproduces it as ‘I … went down to Goulston Street … before going to the scene of the murder.’28

Why Mr Sugden should take it upon himself to censor Warren is of course his prerogative – he may write what he likes, as do I – so long as we both avoid ‘shameless selection’. I don’t know what his intentions are, but by fiddling about with this sentence, he defuses the urgency associated with the writing on the wall, which by Warren’s own admission was ‘the most pressing question’.

This ‘most pressing question’ becomes mind-boggling in context. Less than a mile away are two murdered women, and it’s likely that the man who killed them isn’t much further off. Is not he the most pressing question? What instruction did the Commissioner issue in respect of his apprehension? Where was the urgent call for his top detectives and ancillary support?

For a stupefied Freemason like Warren, a guardian of the ‘Mystic Tie’, the wall was indeed ‘the most pressing question’, which, with the subsequent assistance of Ripperology, he successfully managed to present as merely a bit of racist scribble.

But Warren knew rather different. Another Masonic historian and expert practitioner, an American scholar by the name of Albert Pike, wrote about Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum some twenty years before anyone had heard of Goulston Street. His book, published in 1872, is called Morals and Dogma, and is a classic of Masonic erudition. In respect of the homicidal trio Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, he wrote: ‘That in the name of each murderer are the two names of the good and evil Deities of the Hebrews, for Yu-Bel is but Yehi-bal or Yeho-bal, and that the three final syllables of the names, a, o, um (Life-giving, Life-preserving, Life-destroying), are represented by the mystic character, Y.’29

The mystic ‘Y’ is explained in simple terms by a contemporary Masonic academic, Dr B. Fisher, in whose book (as in Morals and Dogma) the Three Assassins Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum are referred to in their original form, as Yubela, Yubelo and Yubelum, spelt with the mystic Hebrew ‘Y’.30 Albert Mackey’s Lexicon of Freemasonry (1855) underlines the convention: ‘In all these names the J is to be pronounced as in Y.’

Warren, of course, was hip to such occult minutiae, and so was Jack the Ripper. Three days after writing his funny little ‘Juwes’ message at Goulston Street, he posted a letter to Bro Warren, on the envelope of which he changed the ‘J’ in his trade-name to ‘Y’, creating ‘Yack Ripper’.

Thus we have Yubela, Yubelo, Yubelum and Yack. Postmarked 4 October 1888, this envelope is important because it reveals knowledge of the writing on the wall almost a week before the press got wind of it. The earliest significant mention of anything untoward at Goulston Street began to leak about 8 October – this, by way of example, from the Pall Mall Gazette:

A startling fact has just come to light. After killing Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square, the murderer is now known to have walked to Goulston Street, where he threw away the piece of the deceased woman’s apron on which he had wiped his hands and knife. Within a few feet of this spot he had written upon the wall, ‘The Jews shall not be blamed for nothing.’ Most unfortunately one of the police officers gave orders for this writing to be immediately sponged out, probably with a view to stifling morbid curiosity it would have aroused.31

No mention of riot or the destruction of buildings, not even an eyebrow raised in the direction of anti-Semitic onslaught, just probable ‘morbid curiosity’, which in reality was about all the writing would have got. But the Gazette was in no doubt of the magnitude of the error of its obliteration: ‘In doing so a very important link was destroyed, for had the writing been photographed a certain clue would be in the hands of the authorities.’32

Even with so little to go on, the Gazette was already well aware that ‘a very important link’ had been destroyed: ‘Witnesses who saw the writing state that it was similar in character to the letters sent to the Central News and signed “Jack the Ripper”. There is now every reason to believe that the writer of the letter and postcard (facsimiles are now to be seen outside every police station) is the actual murderer.’33

The infamous ‘Dear Boss’ letter and the publicity it inspired are the business of the next chapter. Suffice it to say that the police had received a letter and a postcard revelling in the murders, the latter describing the horror of Stride/Eddowes as a ‘Double Event’. As the Gazette says, facsimiles of these communications were posted outside every police station:

Any person recognising the handwriting is requested to communicate with the nearest police station.

‘The police are very anxious,’ affirmed the Gazette, ‘that any citizen who can identify the handwriting should without delay communicate with the authorities.’34

Unfortunately, one of the only men who might recognise it was the very man who had destroyed a sample of it. Now, if anyone had come along in the dead of night and started tearing these posters from the front of police stations, he’d have probably found himself in the cells of one of them. Yet a transfixed Commissioner of Police did worse than that: he was actually covering up a murderer’s tracks.

In concert with their pre-doomed posters, honest brokers at Scotland Yard printed thousands of flyers, which were to be distributed on 3 October. So here we have something rather singular in progress. 1) The Metropolitan Police approve the time and expense of publishing posters and thousands of door-to-door flyers. 2) Three days before these flyers are to be distributed, on 30 September, the Chief Officer of the Metropolitan Police wipes out the only evidence that might link these posters with London’s most wanted criminal.

By 11 October the press had a handle on this, and it was taking shape into a full-blown scandal. Following a sparse but basically accurate summary, the Gazette posed a rhetorical question:

WHO ORDERED IT TO BE RUBBED OUT?

… who was the infatuated person who thus in defiance of protest insisted in rubbing it out? It was none other than Sir Charles Warren himself! The fact would have been brought out in the inquest if the City Coroner had not feared to seem as if he was holding up Sir Charles Warren to contempt.35

This concession was the least of the favours the coroner was poised to offer. Had contempt not been overridden by deference (and other arcane considerations), this Masonic aberration could have been nailed. But, as always, the System looked after its own.

Keeping Warren out of court, however, didn’t keep him out of the newspapers, and the Gazette sent a reporter to try to get an interview at Scotland Yard. Predictably, its hopes were dashed. As PC Walter Dew and a variety of others record, the press was habitually ‘kept at arm’s length’ from Warren, and couldn’t get in to see the vainglorious oaf: ‘The representative saw Sir Charles Warren’s private secretary, who stated that, “Sir Charles Warren was in Goulston Street shortly after the murders, and if he had wished to make any communication to the press on the subject he would have done so then.”’36

An editorial followed, in which the newspaper succinctly put its finger on it: ‘Considering how promptly Sir Charles Warren contradicts any statement that can possibly be contradicted with any semblance of truth, his silence is equivalent of admission of the fact.’37

The fact is, Sir Charles Warren was up to his nostrils in lies that would soon overwhelm him. His tactic of silence persuaded no one. Even his City counterpart, Commissioner Smith, regarded Warren’s anxiety for the Jews as bogus, describing it as nothing more than ‘alleged’. And when, at seven o’clock on that infamous morning, Warren at last arrived for discussions with the City Police, Inspector McWilliam put aside conventions of rank and told him to his face that he had made a ‘fatal mistake’ – and fatal it proved to be. Warren’s brainless priorities were to become responsible for the death of Mary Jane Kelly and the sickening destruction of an innocent little child called Johnnie Gill.

The Pall Mall Gazette was among many who had already had enough. Incidentally, there was not a lot of ‘graffito’ about in 1888. Like the rest of Fleet Street, the Gazette referred to the Ripper’s message as

THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL

The case against the Chief Commissioner is overwhelming. The evidence given at the inquest yesterday proves that in all human probability the murderer left behind him in Goulston Street an invaluable clue to his identity, the obliteration of which has supplied the last conclusive demonstration required for the utter unfitness of SIR CHARLES WARREN for the place which he holds.38

Warren should have been summarily dismissed and prosecuted for misfeasance, if not conspiracy. Six weeks later, when the Ripper had driven this worthless menace out of office, an unworthy Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, attempted to sell the idea that Warren had ‘resigned’ over a minor procedural misdemeanour (re a Home Office minute of 27 May 1879), ‘by which officers attached to the Home Department were enjoined not to publish any work relating to the Department without the previous sanction of the Secretary of State’.

Warren had written some bland essay for Murray’s Magazine – reading it is like a dose of Seconal – but it was the excuse Matthews grasped. According to this hopeless lickspittle, the ‘rules’ didn’t allow such literary indiscretion, and the Commissioner would have to go.

Yet at Goulston Street, Warren broke every rule in the policeman’s book. ‘If SIR CHARLES WARREN,’ charged the Gazette, ‘had but read pages 248–9 of MR HOWARD VINCENT’S Police Code, he would have seen how flagrantly he was violating the first duty of a policeman in cases of murder.’

Vincent, MP for Sheffield Central and himself a prominent Freemason, had formed the CID in 1878, after a criminal scandal amongst Metropolitan cops, and following it, wrote his Police Code. Rule 18 summarises the whole, and in my view justifies the eternal condemnation of Bro Warren:

18: It must finally be remembered, in dealing with cases of murder, that any oversight, however trivial, any communication of information, any precipitancy, or any irregularity of procedure may be fatal to the end of justice … No irregularity will be countenanced … In cases of murder, everything must be done with the utmost celerity, every channel pursued to the exclusion of any individual theory, although every possible step must be taken to bring the murderer to justice, and to prevent his destroying the evidence of his own guilt.39

If Warren had gone through this ticking off with a pencil, he couldn’t have violated the prescription more effectively. ‘No irregularity will be countenanced’, say the Rules; ‘every channel pursued to the exclusion of any individual theory’ – and this to include, presumably, moonshine scenarios in respect of riot against the Jews.40

Rubbish from the start, by now the ‘anti-Semitic’ angle had all but collapsed. Fairy tales of mayhem had been supplanted by genuine resentment from Jews themselves, their voices naturally attracting less attention than the official spin. When the spelling became public, certain hysterical policemen at Scotland Yard continued to insist that ‘Juwes’ was what it wasn’t: ‘The police authorities attach a great deal of importance to the spelling of the word “Jews” in the writing on the wall,’ proclaimed an unnamed agency. ‘The language of the Jews in the East End is a hybrid dialect, known as Yiddish, and their mode of spelling the word “Jews” would be “Juwes”.’

In other words, the Jews were accusing themselves – the Ripper was a Yid, and only a Yiddish-speaking fiend could have written it. ‘This is absolutely incorrect,’ countered the Star, correctly. ‘The Yiddish word for Jew is Yidden, the word “Yiddish” meaning, of course, the language of the Yiddens.’41

Even though it was all so confusing to Warren, at least one man at the Home Office could have confirmed it. According to his secretary Ruggles-Brise, Home Secretary Matthews spoke fluent Yiddish, and could have nailed this nonsense in its tracks. But that wasn’t exactly in the Establishment’s interest, so what the hell, maybe the Jews did call themselves ‘Juwes’.42

‘Much indignation,’ continued the Star, ‘is felt among the Jews at these repeated and unjustifiable attempts to fasten the responsibility for these dastardly crimes on them.’

‘Juwes’ was a word that had motivated Superintendent Arnold into an uncompromising regard for the safety of Jews, and now ‘Juwes’ was a word accusing them. But the clique at Scotland Yard had to fasten blame on someone – anyone but Bro Jack – and the Yids didn’t seem to understand that, together with the Irish, they were the first-call scapegoats for diversionary prejudice. Far from being protected, their position was now entirely reversed, and we’re back where we started, with the thick-necked tribe of ‘Leather Apron’.

It was a Jew what done it! Or an Irishman talking foreign! Flouting every forensic protocol in the book, Warren not only didn’t prevent the Ripper from ‘destroying the evidence of his own guilt’: he did it for him.

‘Any irregularity may be fatal to the ends of justice,’ wrote Vincent. But justice wasn’t what Warren was about. The last thing anyone wanted was an arrest, God forbid. It would have put an entire (and clandestine) ruling elite in the dock – its morals, its monarchy – and would possibly have had the cataclysmic side-effect of extirpating Freemasonry from the judiciary, the police and the royal family for all time.

Justice? Forget it. Fuck who he killed, so long as the bastard doesn’t interfere with their divine right to rule. The Ripper must and would go free. Justice didn’t mean diddly-shit to a rotten little whore like Matthews – ‘a pitiful creature’, observed the Star, ‘a poor and spiritless specimen of the race of smart adventurers who creep into politics by the back door’.43

It was the exit about to be used by Warren.

‘The chaos and bitterness at Scotland Yard surpasses belief,’ wrote the Gazette.44 ‘There is no confidence anywhere, but discontent everywhere, and this discontent is felt most keenly in the headquarters of the force – in Scotland Yard.’ But

MR MATTHEWS is satisfied with SIR CHARLES WARREN. And SIR CHARLES WARREN is no doubt satisfied with MR MATTHEWS. What a Home Secretary! He is indeed a worthy counterpart to the Chief Commissioner, but he is alone in his satisfaction. The City Police are not the only constabulary whose chiefs are in a state of indignation over Scotland Yard. The Chief Constables of our great municipalities are looking on with amazement at the incredible folly which is being displayed at headquarters, and with shame and indignation … it is a black and burning disgrace for the government to allow such a state of things as we have brought to light to remain a single day without prompt and vigorous action.45

A black and burning disgrace it was. But what the hostile press didn’t understand was that the ‘crapulous decrepitude’, as the Chronicle put it, was in fact organised crisis management.

I don’t believe for a second that Warren went down to Goulston Street via Commercial Road police station, as he claimed. The siren call came from Leman Street, where sat the ‘crapulous’ Arnold. In my view the inclusion of Commercial Road is mere upholstery to distract attention from his ‘most pressing question’. And as a matter of fact, I don’t think he went to Leman Street either, but directly to the Freemasonic message on the wall.

Arnold wrote, ‘An Inspector was present by my directions with a sponge for the purpose of removing the writing when the Commissioner [Warren] arrived on the scene.’ And that’s exactly where he did arrive, at a gallop, his brain sizzling like a putrescent egg.46

We’ll perhaps never know the content of Arnold’s never-seen telegraph to summon Warren, but you can bet the bank it had nothing to do with snoring Jews. Only a respectable historian or a hapless Freemason would believe that, and those who do are welcome to it. Every scintilla of evidence, however, points to a more arcane commission. It suggests that Arnold was under strict instructions not to interfere with – shall we say – possible ‘Occult manifestations’ until the past Grand Master of the world’s only Lodge of Masonic Research had personally inspected them.

‘If we had been called upon,’ wrote the disparaging Gazette, ‘to imagine what would afford the public an exact measure of SIR CHARLES WARREN’s utter incapacity for the work he has in hand, we could not have conceived anything more cruelly conclusive than this.’47 (And that includes Baxter’s ‘Womb-Collector’.)

It was at this instant of cruel conclusiveness at Goulston Street that ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’ was assured. There could be no turning back, no deviation from the lie, nor honour for the victimised fraternity that had to tell it. Freemasology is still rushing around with the sponge. ‘There is no indication,’ chirps Bro McLeod, ‘that the Graffito had any connection with the murder, or that it was written by the Ripper.’ Useful support comes as usual from Mr Sugden, who having censored Warren and laughably misrepresented Vincent’s Code, now reminds us that ‘Chief Inspector Swanson referred to the writing as “blurred” which suggests it might have been old.’48

In which case it’s got nothing to do with murdered women, and couldn’t possibly have caused a riot. You can’t have it both ways – old when you’re trying to disconnect it from the Ripper; fresh when you’re trying to sell the ‘riot’.

In reality, Swanson suggested no such thing as ‘old’. If his words suggest anything at all, it is that he was, as usual, tampering with the record. Outside that, two certainties negate the fictions of Bro Inspector Donald Swanson. 1) He never saw the writing. 2) Neither Warren nor Arnold (much less PC Long) says anything about its physical characteristics in their November essays. So what makes Swanson think it was ‘blurred’?

What Arnold said is that ‘it was in such a position that it would have been rubbed by the shoulders of persons passing in & out of the building’. ‘Would have been rubbed’ is different from ‘blurred’, thus the ‘it could have been there for ages’ idea (conveniently divorcing the writing from the apron) has no substance. Such cavalier inaccuracies can mean the difference between the detection of a murderer and a murderer getting off scot-free, as I’m sure Bro Inspector ‘Shifty Nib’ Swanson and his pusillanimous Boss knew well.

But what of that most excellent pie-baker, Bro McLeod? Appropriating Ripperology’s burlesque jargon, he denies any connection between the writing and the Ripper. Mr Fido and his bunions would agree. But I do not, and neither did the chief of London’s Criminal Investigation Department.

From the autumn of 1888 the CID was under the command of a virulent Christian, the already mentioned Robert Anderson.49 Himself a master baker, Anderson was the last man you would want to trust with an autobiography, although twenty-two years later he was engaged in just such a publication, serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine.

It’s tiresome to judge the deficiencies in Anderson’s record by what’s in his memoir and what’s kept out of it – the writing on the wall at Goulston Street being confined to the latter. Neglect of this notorious topic generated an irate response from at least one contemporary critic: ‘He might have recalled – but did not – the crass stupidity of Scotland Yard men who wiped out from the wall of the labourers’ buildings in Goulston Street, the only tangible piece of evidence ever obtained pointing to the identity of Jack the Ripper.’

This ruffled the old bigot’s vanity, and more in self-defence than defence of Scotland Yard, Anderson produced a typically disingenuous response. ‘I beg to assure you,’ he wrote, ‘that here you do an injustice, not only to me, but to the Criminal Investigation Department. The night on which the murder in question was committed I was on my way home from Paris, and great was my indignation when, next day, I heard of what you rightly call an act of “crass” stupidity. But the Scotland Yard men were in no way responsible for it – it was done by officers of the uniform force in the division, under the order of one of my colleagues.’50

Converting Warren into a nameless ‘colleague’, he blames the uniforms – blames anyone but the man responsible – but nevertheless confirms that it was Jack the Ripper who was responsible for the writing on the wall. Let us be in no doubt here. This isn’t Mr Fido with his cobblers, but the opinion of the most exalted officer in London’s CID, Robert Anderson KCB. He had reason enough to keep his trap shut in 1888.

If you could get a cigarette paper between Anderson’s teeth, he was probably lying. Bewitched by his own self-righteousness, he didn’t know the difference between lies and expediency. Mystery was expedient in the autumn of the Ripper, but now, in 1910, with his reputation under threat, he considered that sufficient autumns had gone by for the regurgitation of some truth. Blaming the uniforms, and still camouflaging Warren, he wrote: ‘The exact words of the “mural inscription” which the murderer chalked upon the wall, were the Jews were not the men to be blamed for nothing’ (my emphasis).51

Anderson’s anti-Semitism is responsible for the mis-spelling of ‘Juwes’, but he is unequivocal that it was the Ripper who wrote the message. Stand by for the ‘mystery’ paramedics, eager to explain Anderson’s statement away. Ripperologists Mr Melvin Harris and Mr Philip Sugden work themselves into rather a froth over it, and would have us believe that when Anderson says ‘the “mural inscription” which the murderer chalked upon the wall’, he actually means that he didn’t chalk it, and that virtually every Victorian newspaper, plus the Commissioner of Police for the City of London, his detectives, and Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police Robert Anderson himself, are mistaken. To qualify this adventure in casuistry, Mr Sugden seeks out minor inconsistencies in Anderson’s recollections, and elevates them into ‘glaring errors’.52 These ‘glaring errors’ are then attached to the writing on the wall, and the confection assaulted as a package. Disqualification of trivialities apparently brings entitlement to repudiate the whole. Reminiscent of Chapman’s farthings (to be considered in due course), such argument is of little merit. What Anderson is doing is confirming the established conviction of Detective Halse, Inspector McWilliam and Commissioner Smith. Were all of them similarly out to lunch? Mr Sugden’s attempts to dismiss Anderson climax in one of the most extraordinary concoctions concerning ‘prejudice’ that I’ve ever read.

Because I – and everybody else who voiced an opinion – know perfectly bloody well that ‘Yack’ wrote that Masonic message on the wall, we are comically dismissed as ‘Anderson partisans’. Sugden can’t attack the evidence, so he attacks the person reading it. ‘The committed Anderson partisan,’ he heaves, ‘may not be willing to internalise the implications of this or indeed any evidence that runs counter to his prejudice, but it is important, nevertheless, to set it down and source it here so that rational and fair-minded students may draw their own conclusions.’

‘Source it here’? This isn’t a source, it’s Sugden’s opinion. The source is Sir Robert Anderson, not an apologist in 1994 who disagrees. What in Christ’s name is going on here? Why is it that every time there might be some light cast upon the ‘mystery’ it is stamped on, navigated, dismissed and feebly argued away?

The question, of course, is rhetorical.

The ‘fair-minded students’ Mr Sugden favours – like the ‘respectable historians’ of Bro Hamill – may well be willing to indulge this fanciful sophistry dismissing Anderson, but they cannot so easily dismiss a contemporary and rather more impartial source supporting him. This man wasn’t a ‘student’ at all, but a senior detective at Scotland Yard by the name of Chief Inspector Henry Moore, a policeman who, like Anderson, was not kept short of inside news on the Ripper. Moore’s statement corroborating Anderson is very relevant, because it precedes Anderson by a dozen years, and was kept secret for a further ninety.

I don’t want to get into the Ripper correspondence quite yet, but in 1896, right out of the blue, Scotland Yard received another letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. Whether it was genuine or not is immaterial to the question in hand, although the passage of time should not automatically condemn it as a hoax. A century later, the American serial killer Dennis Rader would wait almost twenty years before recommencing his taunting letters to the Kansas police.

Scotland Yard supposed it was a hoax. ‘Considering the lapse of time,’ wrote Chief Inspector Moore after careful comparison with previous correspondence, ‘it would be interesting to know how the present writer was able to use the words – “The Jews are people that are blamed for nothing” – as it will be remembered that they are practically the same words that were written in chalk, undoubtedly by the murderer, on the wall at Goulston St. Whitechapel, on the night of September 30th 1888, after the murders of Mrs Stride and Mrs Eddowes.’53

‘Undoubtedly [written] by the murderer’, says Moore. Are those who disagree with Sugden now ‘Inspector Moore partisans’? It must be remembered that Moore’s statement was not for public consumption. He had no reason to dissemble: his report was to remain internal to Scotland Yard.

So, we have two very senior policemen of one point of view, and Bro McLeod, Mr Sugden and another Ripperologist called Harris of another. We also have the entire known opinion of the City Police, shared by an overwhelming majority of the contemporary press. Mr Sugden may care to review what he means by ‘prejudice’, and what reason his active imagination can divine for Inspector Moore making his statement up.

Earlier in this narrative I wrote that I didn’t sit down wondering how I could have a go at Freemasonry. The same must be said for Ripperology. I had no idea the ‘mystery’ would be cowering behind two shields. Let me try to demonstrate the point. Sir Charles Warren, who had more to conceal than most, called the inestimably important writing on the wall at Goulston Street ‘the writing on the wall at Goulston Street’. Every eye that looked upon it, every newspaper, whether friend or foe of the police, called it ‘the writing on the wall at Goulston Street’. Ripperology calls it ‘the Goulston Street graffito’. My question is, from whence comes this fanciful vocabulary? What is the point of amending what the Victorian police themselves called ‘the writing on the wall’ to rewrite it as scribble?

‘Graffito’ is a word that manipulates thinking. In contemporary use, ‘graffito’ is a pejorative loaded with connotation, like its plural form ‘graffiti’ – the trivial and worthless scribbling of louts. Such negative association is not useful when considering the writing on the wall at Goulston Street.

‘Graffito’, ‘canonical’, ‘marginalia’ – they are all prescriptions of Ripperology, all nonsense, and nothing whatever to do with Jack the Ripper. ‘Canonical’ means ‘generally accepted’, and is used to mean five victims, confining Jack’s outrages to the East End of London. But who says he only murdered five, and who says they were restricted to the East End? Well, none other than that fount of dispassionate accuracy Sir Melville Macnaghten, for one. And Sir Melville and his associates had a harsh agenda, and much reason for isolating the Ripper show to a quintet of unfortunates in Whitechapel.54

The problem with this valueless lexicography – ‘canonical’ and its like – is that although meaningless, it is cute; it sounds as if it means something, and its nuisance is absorbed into a constricting vernacular. ‘Marginalia’ invests a note in the margin of Anderson’s highly suspect autobiography (published in 1910) with more significance than the writing on a wall in Whitechapel (1888) that unequivocally was written by the murderer.

This message, for that’s what it was, was – outside of Mary Jane Kelly and Johnnie Gill – probably the most meaningful piece of evidence the Ripper ever left. But because it doesn’t conjugate with the questionable requirements of Ripperology, it’s reduced to a bit of scrawl called ‘graffito’, and the enthusiasts fall for it, hook, line and Sugden.

With one or two notable exceptions (and they know who they are), I’m reticent about having Ripperology accompany me further into this enquiry, and look forward to being free of it once I move beyond the ‘canonical’ murders. I tire of its blindness, constipated thinking and phoney academia. I tire of its ‘shameless manipulation’. Ripperology is like a gang of shagged-out seagulls in the wake of a phantom steamer. From time to time something might come over the side: ‘Quick, boys! Dive! Dive! It might be a “marginalia”, or even another Jew!’ Squabbling and counter-squabbling ensue, squawking from those known for it, parsimonious smiles from those who know better, and the HMS Canonical ploughs on.

Meanwhile, in respect of Mr Sugden’s invitation to ‘source it here’, he writes, ‘fair-minded students may draw their own conclusions’. Well, I’m not a ‘student’, but here are mine. My conclusions are that Scotland Yard under Bro Sir Charles Warren was corrupt from its back door to the front, and, as the Star put it, ‘rotten to the core’. That message on the wall is truly the E=MC2 of Jack the Ripper. It’s the paradox explaining why he was never caught, and why he so easily could have been. That he had the balls to write it, and then to mock it with the apron, is indicative of how he understood his own immunity.

No serial killer worth the name is going to leave homicidal garbage lying around a crime scene as Jack the Ripper did. He was tossing Freemasonry about like confetti. The whole mechanic of this got-up ‘mystery’ reeks of amateur dramatics, and that’s precisely what it was: stage-managed theatricals construed as a ‘lark’ in the capsized psyche of a very unusual gentleman indeed. The Ripper was a ‘recreational’ killer in the literal sense of the word: a totally sane, highly intelligent psychopath whose sense of fun animated in some esoteric area of his thinking where humour and homicide collide.

The very obviousness of who they were looking for prevented the police from looking. The Machine had seized. It was moribund, paralysed with anxiety. To quote the brilliant journalist Simon Jenkins, ‘the cynic’s maxim that every organisation ends up being run by agents of its enemy’ couldn’t be more apposite. In respect of this terrible murderer, London now had no police force. It was in the hands of its enemy. The more outrageous he was, the more the police must cover him up. They were like Christians charged with preserving the anonymity of a Judas in their midst.

The dynamic of Warren’s dilemma was soon to overwhelm him, and would palpably threaten the System itself. ‘The question now turns on a matter of policy, as if fresh murders were committed the public at large might make such an outcry that it might affect the stability of the government,’ were Warren’s own words in his statement of 6 October 1888. He was echoing an editorial in the Star of a few days before, warning of the ‘urgent need to bring light to Whitechapel before the district gave birth to a revolution that would “Smash the Empire”, bringing about a republican regime’. Unknown to the public, the obverse of this argument (actually catching the murderer) was just as dangerous. Jack had something in common with the System, and the System had something in common with Jack. Both he and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had sworn the same Masonic oath:

The point of a pair of compasses is placed upon his left naked breast, and he himself holds it with his left hand, his right being laid upon the Gospel opened at Saint John.

‘I [Charles Warren] of my own free will and accord, I promise before the Great Architect of the Universe and this right Worshipful Lodge, dedicated to St John, do hereby and herein most solemnly swear that I will always hale, conceal, and never reveal any of the secrets or mysteries of Freemasonry that shall be delivered to me now, or at any time hereafter, except it be to a true and lawful Brother, or in a just and lawful Lodge of Brothers and Fellows, him or them whom I shall find to be such, after just Trial and due Examination. I furthermore do swear that I will not write it, print it, cut it, paint it, stint it, mark it, stain and engrave it [and presumably photograph it] or cause it to be done, upon anything movable or immovable, under canopy of Heaven, whereby it may become legible or intelligible [my emphasis] or the least appearance of the character of a letter, whereby the secret Art may be unlawfully obtained. All this I swear [under the usual penalties of t.c.a. etc.] with a strong and steady resolution to perform the same without hesitation, mental reservation, or self evasion of mind in any way whatsoever.’55

In other words, wash off the wall. ‘A Royal Arch Mason,’ wrote Avery Allyn in 1831, ‘would have felt consciously bound to conceal; having taken an oath, under penalty of death, to conceal the secrets of a Companion Royal Arch Mason, murder and treason not excepted.’

Welcome to the ‘Funny Little Game’.

Mirth was what the Ripper was about. He liked jokes and anagrams and juvenile riddles, he loved the profanity and blasphemy of it all. Part of his thinking was like that of a vicious schoolboy mocking the grown-ups; and the greater society’s affront, the greater his merriment. Solemn oaths sworn by the grown-ups were an amusement to the Ripper, like a fart in church. ‘The Gospel of St John is especially important to Freemasons,’ wrote the prolific early-nineteenth-century scholar of Freemasonry, the Reverend George Oliver, ‘because it contains the fundamental principles of the order of which he was Grand Master and patron saint. And every Brother ought always to remember that he had laid his hand on that Gospel, and is thence bound never to withdraw his love from his Masonic Brothers and fellows, in compliance with the doctrines contained in that sacred book.’56

Bollocks. Ha ha.

Every outrage dragged Warren further out of his depth, and by implication the System of which he was a totem. The following, published in 1875, expresses a somewhat contradictory point of view to the Reverend Oliver’s:

Can you trust the fortunes of your country and the safety of your family to men, however honourable and high-minded they may be, who have committed themselves to the guidance of an authority unknown to themselves, who are confederated under the most fearful sanctions of a secret oath, and who are compelled to an inexorable silence, even though tenets should be revealed and orders transmitted from which their innermost soul recoils with unutterable loathing? Sick at heart, driven half-mad at the revelation of the hideous secret, they dare not go back; and oppressed with a deadening despair, they are forced to connive at deeds which they utterly abhor.

Although this sounds a bit like the penalties for the Victorian masturbator, I think it is a generally accurate representation of what was going on inside Warren’s head. I think he was driven ‘half mad’, as well as driven from office, by Bro Jack the Ripper. The Masonic oath may now mean nothing more than an allegorical rendition of ‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ but in the nineteenth century it ran the country. A Brother was required to keep all of a Brother’s secrets, and in the case of the Royal Arch, ‘murder and treason not excepted’.

By now the anger at Warren’s subservience to the ‘unspoken’ had migrated. In both Europe and the United States the press was short on flattery. ‘Great indignation,’ reported the New York Tribune, ‘had been expressed in England respecting the too apparent and official helplessness and ignorance of the elementary methods of detection … If a really clever officer was to go to work and discover the murderer, it is all but certain that he would for his pains receive a tough snub from headquarters for going outside the scope of his instructions. Herein lies the whole secret of the immunity from arrest of the Whitechapel Murderer.’57

It doesn’t get any clearer than that. Nor, in my view, more accurate.

After Goulston Street there could be no turning back – the press would howl, for sure, but most of the public were in the dark, and the rest swallowing Fowler’s Solution. Providing the nightmare could be confined to an East End slum, the executive had a shot at brazening it out. They had plenty of scapegoats and plenty of allies. They could blame the victims themselves, as both Warren and Anderson did. But also on-side was the class fascism of their time. For those who represented the debris of ‘Victorian values’ there were not only upmarket recommendations of genocide in the snootier London tourist guides, but useful letters like this, published in ‘the world’s premier newspaper’, The Times:

Sir, – will you allow me to ask a question of your correspondents who want to disperse the vicious inhabitants of Dorset Street and Flower and Dean Street? There are no lower streets in London, and if they are driven out of these, to what streets are they to go? The horror and excitement caused by the murder of the four Whitechapel outcasts imply a universal belief that they had a right to life. If they had, then they had the further right to hire shelter from the bitterness of the English night. If they had no such right, then it was, on the whole, a good thing that they fell in with the unknown surgical genius. He at all events had made his contribution towards solving the ‘problem of clearing the East End of its vicious inhabitants’. The typical ‘Annie Chapman’ will always find someone in London to let her have a ‘doss’ for a consideration. If she is systematically ‘dispersed’, two results will follow. She will carry her taint to streets hitherto untainted, and she herself will [illegible] in larger sums than before for the accommodation. The price of a doss will rise from 8 pence to 10 pence or a shilling, the extra pennies representing an insurance fund against prosecution and disturbance.58

Annie Chapman’s life is valued at two pennies above the market rate, so all six victims added together to a shilling. By this computation the Ripper would have had to kill 120 women to cost a quid. This correspondent’s address, 64 Eaton Place (just around the corner from Charles Warren), reveals more about him than his text. Here is a voice from one of the most salubrious areas of London; it’s the voice of the class the System served to protect. The calamity of these atrocities is reduced to the impact they might have on Eaton Place and its environs, including Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and the Athenaeum. In short, these homeless scum have brought the hand of ‘genius’ upon themselves, and are better dead than spoiling the view around here.

Reality is turned on its head, and it is the victims who are the vicious. I think such heartlessness explains the government’s shrewd assumption that, provided information could be carefully managed, the majority would buy into the ‘mystery’, and nobody else who mattered would give tuppence of a damn.