Читать книгу They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper - Bruce Robinson - Страница 9

Customary use of artifice is the sign of a small mind, and it almost always happens that he who uses it to cover one spot uncovers himself in another.

La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

It is impossible to understand ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’ without an understanding of the Freemasonry. Masonry permeates every fibre of this conundrum, both as its inspiration and its stooge. To acquiesce to the proposition of this scandal as an impenetrable mystery is to prostrate one’s intellect before the savageries of Victorian spin. The ‘mystery’ is a manipulation, a piece of propaganda, like calling Nixon’s great felony ‘the Watergate mystery’, as I’m sure many among that gentleman’s associates would have been pleased to do.

‘We are all the President’s men,’ said Henry Kissinger, and no less were England’s ruling elite ‘all the Widow’s men’.

The degree of control this unique criminal exercised is indicated by the efforts of those who would still seek to protect him. Like courtiers from beyond the grave, they are essentially blameless, but also fools. Freemasonry may never have asked for Jack the Ripper (it certainly did not), but a combination of circumstance and moral turpitude made it his stupefied guardian.

Concealing the Ripper was not a Masonic conspiracy, but a conspiracy of Her Majesty’s executive, who almost without exception were Freemasons. In other words, it was a conspiracy of the System. The man they were required to be baffled by was ‘in house’, and unquestionably revelling in the security he’d spun about himself. The Ripper was smart, but not that smart. It is simply an insult to the Victorian police to believe that detectives like Moore, Reid and Abberline couldn’t have caught this prick in their sleep.

It goes without saying that there was nothing illaudable about being a Victorian Mason, any more than it was improper to enjoy membership of a tricycle club. But as I have said, this narrative is about the bad guys, and about one in particular who went rotten, and what that did to the rest of the barrel. Beyond that, I have no opinion on Freemasonry, no animosity towards it, no motive to wish it ill. My interest in Masonry is only inasmuch as it relates to ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’.

By the late nineteenth century this quasi-religious, highly conservative society was a power in the land, perhaps the most powerful, because of its ability to insinuate itself into powerful institutions – Parliament, the police, the press, the judiciary and the Crown. It’s worth reiterating that the heir to the throne, Bro Edward, Prince of Wales, was the most powerful Freemason on earth. His Chancellor, Bro Lord Halsbury, was the most powerful Law Lord, and Bro Sir Charles Warren the most senior copper in the Metropolitan Police. Excepting Home Secretary Matthews (and possibly Salisbury himself), every man at the Viscount’s cabinet table had sworn the Masonic oath.

The Prime Minister’s organic antipathy to democracy was generally well served by this cabal. In parallel with the elected government, the hidden constructs of Freemasonry facilitated a clandestine executive underpinning the power of the ruling class. ‘A government within a government’, as the American historian Henry Austin called it. At its head were the royals and estate-owning aristocrats, with their House of Lords – its laws, bishops and judges – at its servile root, an army of Pecksniffs: the town councillors, provincial chief constables, coroners, aldermen, magistrates and mayors. Throughout the kingdom, Freemasonry had managed a truly breathtaking infiltration of municipal and political representation, the Provincial Grand Master more often than not an area’s MP. Thus, from the remotest little town to the grandest of cities, the English political system was inalienably connected to a terminus of power of which the electorate knew nothing, and nobody was saying anything about. It was the secrecy of Freemasonry that allowed this occult telegraph to survive, which at the time of Jack the Ripper was hard-wired into the nucleus of government.1

It is a paradox of this narrative that before investigating a murderer, we must investigate the policeman who was pretending to hunt him.

London’s Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, Sir Charles Warren, was a forty-eight-year-old ex-military man and a Freemasonic obsessive. He was a lousy cop and a worse soldier;2 his God inclined to the hard right – probably something like Kitchener in freshly laundered clouds. Warren was an aggressive authoritarian who imagined all social ills could be solved with a truncheon. If you were superfluous to the System – sick, unemployed or Irish, for example – then you weren’t much better than a wog. In 1887 he went berserk on the back of a horse in London’s West End, and shafted the riff-raff as if he was up a delta in Matabeleland.

In was in Africa only two years before that Warren had lost the plot. The Prime Minister didn’t have a lot of time for ethnics, but so alarmed was Salisbury at Warren’s ‘overzealousness’ in Bechuanaland Protectorate that in September 1885 he personally recalled him. ‘His continuance in power was a real danger,’3 Salisbury wrote, and this ‘danger’ returned to London to be appointed Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

Like many in politics with energetic mouths, the Establishment had created the very circumstance it most feared. Without enough war to soak up the rabble, the plebs were getting frisky. On Sunday, 13 November 1887 a huge contingent of the Untermenschen, the starving and exasperated underclass, had descended on Trafalgar Square.

Warren’s intention was to kick them back to the slums where they belonged. Twelve hundred troops and sabre-wielding cavalry supplemented an army of truncheon-wielding cops. ‘I’ve never seen such police brutality,’ recalled Karl Marx’s daughter – but then, she would say that, wouldn’t she. Notwithstanding that, Warren’s subsequent replacement as Police Commissioner James Monro summed up the inevitable consequences of trusting anything on the street to his colleague. ‘I am bound to say,’ he wrote, ‘Sir C. Warren was just the man to have injudiciously, in some way or other, caused the very panic I was anxious to avoid.’4 Dozens were injured, and at least one man lost his life.

Warren managed to close down Trafalgar Square, but it’s perhaps worth noting that just a year later, in the dead of night, with not a mouse about, he was to claim that he couldn’t shut down a doorway in the East End. We shall be coming to the lamentable events of Goulston Street by and by.

The Establishment lauded Warren for his violence, and he went down on a knee for his Queen in May 1888. ‘Among the recipients of honours,’ beamed the weekly The Freemason, ‘were … Bro Sir Charles Warren, who was invested with the insignia of KCB [Knight of the Bath].’

Not everyone was quite so delighted. ‘In a single twelvemonth,’ reported the Daily News,

the martinet whose record of meddling and muddling extends over a good part of the British Empire, has destroyed the good feeling between the London police and the public, and replaced it by a feeling of bitter antagonism. It is not a case of Trafalgar Square only; that would be bad enough. But what the Square did wholesale, Sir CHARLES’s men, under the brutal initiative from Scotland Yard, have done in detail. During the last few weeks hardly a day has passed when some constable has not been convicted of gross insult and harshness to some peaceful inhabitant, supported by still grosser perjury. The London Magistrates have for the most part given up the police and rejected their evidence as worthless. The moral Miracle has become the Miracle of Lying … Major General Sir CHARLES WARREN, K.C.B., G.C.M.G., was far too lofty a personage to look after petty larcenies and street inebriates. His first Pyrrhic victory in bludgeoning the people out of the Square intoxicated him, and henceforth we have had nothing but a carnival of perjury, violence and discontent.

This condemnation of police ‘perjury’ and ‘lying’ was published on 1 September 1888, only a matter of days before Jack got his show on the street. We shall see how the perjury and lying escalated by increment as the assassin got into his stride.

I haven’t got much in the way of compliments for Warren as a policeman, but he must sincerely be celebrated in the arena in which he excelled. All too often he is characterised as an authoritarian disaster. Although merit attaches to the vignette, it is ultimately shallow, hawked by authors who interminably reiterate the content of each other’s books. By this corporate myopia they miss a fundamental that all but defines motive in the Ripper’s thinking. Warren was a ‘martinet’, sure, as Ripperology never tires of telling us. But he was also a talented and undeniably brave archaeologist, and it was Warren underground that was of subliminal interest to Jack.

As a young man, Captain Warren of the Royal Engineers was motivated by a duo of passions. It distorts neither to construe them as one. They were, as he saw them, the complementary sciences of Biblical and Freemasonic research. He was driven to prove that Freemasonry was of similar stuff to the Bible, and that by investigation of one, the other could somehow be validated. Such wishful thinking came together in the Holy Land, and here Warren is, in his own words, exploring a 3,000-year-old subterranean conduit in the guts of Jerusalem:

The water was running with great violence, one foot in height, and we, crawling full-length, were up to our necks in it, one hand necessarily wet and dirty, the other holding a pencil, compass, and field book, the candle for the most part in my mouth. Another fifty feet brought us to a place where we had to run the gauntlet of the waters, the passage being only one foot four inches high, we had just four inches of breathing space.5

Warren was digging his way into the Old Testament under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund. The PEF had been funded by various worthies and religious executives, including the Freemasons, as ‘a Society for the accurate and systematic investigation of the Archaeology, the Topography, the Geology and Physical Geography, the Manners and Customs of the Holy Land, for Biblical instruction’. Founded in 1865, its membership grew rapidly, with signatures that would include a roll-call of notables, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the great sculptor/painter Sir Frederick Leighton.

From its inception the Society had an advocate of ‘burning enthusiasm’ in its co-founder and first secretary, the forty-four-year-old George Grove. Trained originally as an engineer, Grove emerged as one of the Great Victorians, a man capable of transforming enthusiasm into practicality in whatever area his humanity pleased. He was said to have known much of the Bible by heart, thus it was natural for him to write a Concordance, plus about 1,000 pages of the Standard Bible Dictionary. If it interested him, Grove got it done. ‘His work from first to last,’ wrote the novelist and historian Walter Besant, ‘was literally a labour of love.’

Knighted in 1883, Sir George Grove comes out of the nineteenth century like an engine of benevolence. His infatuation with all things musical brought London its Royal College of Music, and his Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1879–89) is still internationally recognised as the standard work on the subject. ‘I have always been a mere amateur in music,’ he claimed with customary modesty. ‘I wrote about symphonies and concertos because I wished to try and make them clear to myself and to discover the secret of the things that charmed me.’

Short on charm but full of secrets were the vast underground ruins of what some believed were the remains of Solomon’s Temple at Jerusalem. In 1866 Grove approached the War Office on behalf of the PEF for archaeological assistance, and got twenty-six-year-old Captain Warren in response. It was a fortuitous liaison. The following year, together with his wife and little daughter and a handful of NCOs, Bro Warren and his party set sail for the Holy Land.

‘It was somewhat in the role of a Crusader that Warren accepted the charge,’ wrote his grandson and biographer Watkin Williams, ‘as he was stirred by a longing to reveal to the Christian world those sacred places hidden in the debris of many a siege and jealously guarded by the Turkish Mussulmans.’6 More accurately, Warren’s eagerness was in no small part because he was a member of the Knights Templar.

The story of that body’s godforsaken origins at the time of the Crusades needs little retelling here. For about two hundred years in the Middle Ages, the good guys (Christians) fought the bad guys (Muslims) for possession of the Holy Lands around Jerusalem. In the eleventh century the Turks had usurped control of Palestine and put their god in charge. Christian pilgrims were no longer welcome, and the proposition of liberating ‘the birthplace of the cross from the thraldom of the crescent’ began to resonate as a good idea. A mentally abnormal priest called Peter the Hermit went about Europe inciting a Holy War. ‘It’s the voice of God!’ he shrieked, when in fact it was the voice of the Pope, Urban II in Rome. The result was misery without end for a God that didn’t give a monkey’s. Urged on in atrocity by religious fanatics called Popes, the insanity went on and on. Tens of thousands would bleed their lives away, suffering every conceivable inhumanity. In 1099, under the banner of a French knight called Godfrey de Bouillon, the Muslims were temporarily driven from the Holy City, and the real estate returned to Christ.

Great congratulation and instant myth were bestowed upon the Soldiers of the Cross. After the usual protocols of butchery and rape, a barracks was constructed in their honour on the site of Solomon’s Temple, the exalted House of the Lord, and the ‘fame of the Knighthood of the Temple of Solomon began to spread through the enlightened [i.e. Christian] world’.

It was primarily in Europe, most especially France, that the returning knights evolved into the Templars. Initially received as heroes, but later reviled, outcast, imprisoned, and sometimes burnt to a cinder by papal diktat, the Knights Templar had to put up shutters to survive. They became a secret society, and over the centuries they developed into what is understood (in the higher degrees) as Christian Freemasonry.7

Below is the Earl of Euston, resplendent in his Knights Templar togs. Given his brush with the law, it was perhaps a happy circumstance that from the first, English jurisprudence shared an embryo with this cabal of covert Masonic tradition.

The Inner and Middle Temples at the ancient Inns of Court (off Fleet Street in the City of London) take their names from the House of the Lord in Jerusalem. ‘Within these precincts have lived and toiled many of our great statesmen,’ wrote barrister at law Colonel Robert Blackham, ‘to say nothing of a long unbroken line of eminent lawyers who in their turn succeeded in the illustrious order of the Knights Templars of Medieval fame.’8

That Freemasonry and the law should conflate so intimately is no accident. By the time of Victoria it would take a very long day to discover any member of the judiciary who wasn’t heir to that not entirely impartial root.

Captain Warren became a Templar in 1863, installed in the Cape Preceptory (60) while he was at Gibraltar with the Royal Engineers. Four years later, on the morning of 17 February 1867, he climbed to the summit of Mount Moriah (better known today as the Temple Mount) and looked across the city of Jerusalem from where the Crusaders had gasped their first short breath of victory. His guide would have told him what he already knew, that the plateau had been ‘flattened by centuries of disaster and detrition’, and that the mosque of Qubbat as-Sakhra now stood on the site of Solomon’s glorious temple. It was here that de Bouillon had raised his banners to Jesus Christ, and that the mysteries of the Templars had begun.

But it was a legend of deeper antiquity, almost 3,000 years before, that was predominant in Warren’s thoughts. Under his feet was the place of the Great Secret, from whence Freemasonry had come, but where no Freemason had ever been. Warren must have looked about him, wondering how he was going to get at it.

‘The Dome of the Rock’ at Haram el Sharif was sacred to whoever held it – Christian, Jew, Mohammedan alike – and once again it was under the flag of the Crescent Moon. Its holy places were forbidden to Christians, and it was second only to Mecca itself among the sacred sites of Islam. It is not surprising, therefore, that Warren and his diggers ran into immediate difficulties. They weren’t invited and they weren’t welcome. ‘The result,’ according to his grandson, ‘was that Warren had to work on the peripheries of Jerusalem and could reach few of the places he wanted.’

This is a distracting synopsis, and in no way correct. Watkin Williams was also a Freemason, which makes his account of his grandfather’s underground activities in Jerusalem somewhat circumspect. The reason is to attempt to diminish the reality of Warren’s Masonic expertise. The motive behind this subterfuge will soon explain itself. When Bro Williams writes that his grandfather ‘could reach few of the places he wanted’, he neglects to clarify that among the few was one of the only places he really wanted, and that was deep in the foundations of Solomon’s Temple. For so zealous a Freemason there could be no more enthralling place on earth. Such mystery, such occult romance was there, all waiting to be dug out. It couldn’t have been more exhilarating – nor more pertinent to my point. Here was something Masonry condemns with such venom in others, but congratulates in itself: a desire to penetrate ‘mystery’, and a compulsion to find the truth.

Truth is not biodegradable, even after 3,000 years. Nor did it evaporate from late Victorian England. Truth was what had brought Warren to Jerusalem, and it was what, in Masonic terms, he found. But in that terrible darkness there was a caveat that none could have anticipated, and if it reads a little melodramatic, it reads just about right. For in the undisturbed mysteries of this building lay the seeds of the Whitechapel Murderer.

While sojourned in Jerusalem, Warren’s life was at risk on an almost daily basis, both above and below the ground. Just as the rock threatened to crush him, the Muslims would quite literally have killed him had the extent of his excavations been known. ‘Our work was of such a nature,’ wrote Warren, ‘that, I may say, every week Sergeant Birtles had to act in such a manner as would, on active service, have assured him the Victoria Cross.’

Faced as they were with hostile Turks, catastrophic roof falls and causeways choked with antediluvian filth, this was no exaggeration. Everything in this alien place conspired to want them dead. But Warren triumphed. When the pit props ran out, he did without, and when the money ran out, he spent his own.

It isn’t possible to equate Warren’s dynamism here with his vacillating idiocy as a Police Commissioner twenty years later. To read of Warren in Jerusalem, and then of the neutered pomp of his failure in Whitechapel, is like reading about two different men. ‘His [archaeological] reports were being published in the English press,’ wrote Williams, ‘and causing intense interest.’ It is without question that these few Englishmen, clawing their way through thirty centuries of darkness, were men of justified fame. Warren’s resolve was indefatigable, his courage unkind to no one but himself. He earned his place in the history of Jerusalem, it’s his forever, and no one would ever wish to make ill of it.

But there was a psychopath who tried.

In terms of intellect, the Ripper was utilitarian, with no more sophistication than a spoiled child. Irrespective of the boundless efforts to swaddle him in cosmetic ‘mystery’, it is by his spite for Warren that he is betrayed. What a piece of work was this man, and what men were they that stood in his shame.

We are about to explore the Masonic, archaeological and deeply personal significance of this catastrophe for Warren. But before journeying into the ‘black night of the abyss’, we need to hear briefly from a voice of contemporary Masonry. It belongs to an initiate by the name of Bro McLeod, a Masonic authority we shall be hearing more of. Of Warren’s archaeological adventures in Palestine, he writes, ‘there are slight traces of Masonic activity in the Jerusalem interlude’.9

This is so dishonest you might want to call it bullshit. Warming to his topic, McLeod quotes Warren himself: ‘Whilst engaged in excavating among the ruins of the Temple of King Solomon, I had the pleasure of assisting at the holding of a Lodge, almost directly under the old Temple.’

‘Presumably,’ suggests Bro McLeod, ‘this must have been one of the projects of the American entrepreneur, Rob Morris, P.G.M. of Kentucky.’10

He presumes right.

But these ‘slight traces of Masonic activity’ can be compared with the slight traces of alcohol in Gordon’s gin. So slight were they that there’s actually a detailed architectural plan of their location, Warren memorialising the world’s most exclusive Masonic lodge with his very own name.

Consecrated as ‘the Reclamation Lodge of Jerusalem’, Warren amended its title to ‘Warren’s Masonic Hall’, a shift that could hardly be described as ‘slight’. This slight trace is the Christian equivalent of consecrating a church under Calvary, for it was above this very spot that the three wretched assassins Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum were supposed to have put Freemasonry’s first Grand Master, Hiram Abiff, to death.

Quite a significant environment for a young Freemason, wouldn’t you say? And even if it wasn’t, it was to become so, because it was here that Warren and his companions claimed to have brought Freemasonry back to the Holy City of Solomon for the first time in seven hundred years. It was Warren and his associates who participated in the establishment of the first and only Masonic lodge in Jerusalem since the time of Saladin and the Knights Templar. Only a dissembler with the disingenuousness of McLeod could call this ‘slight traces of Masonic activity’. It was in fact the apogee of Masonic aspiration, a spellbinding experience fraught with considerable danger. Islam had no truck with Freemasonry – to Muslims it was an infidel perversion, the stuff of heathen wizards – and had the Brethren been discovered there was an unexceptional risk of them losing their heads. But it was a dream, and would be one of the most indelible memories of Bro Charles Warren’s Masonic career.

At Goulston Street in the East End of London, it was to become his Marley’s Ghost. Jack was a complicated psychopath, from the Iago school of gentlemen. An ingredient of his amusement was the persecution of Warren, and it would hardly take an Alan Turing to decipher the word ‘Juwes’ that, as we will see, he wrote upon a wall.

We need to stroll a little further down memory lane, and we can start with Robert Morris. To nullify Charles Warren’s Masonic credentials, it’s also necessary to diminish those of Bro Morris. McLeod’s description of him as an ‘American entrepreneur’ is somewhat less than adequate. In reality he was a Masonic poet, author and lecturer, and one of the most celebrated Freemasons on earth. After his death the Brotherhood erected a shining monument to his memory at La Grange, Kentucky.11

Morris published many revered Masonic books, one of them detailing his sojourn in Palestine. ‘While in Jerusalem,’ he relates, ‘I held two Masonic meetings at the Mediterranean Hotel, near the Damascus Gate, in which assemblies several officers of the British warships lying at Joppa were present; also the venerable Brother Petermann, Prussian Consul, and Captain Charles Warren RE, who was in charge of the explorations. Nothing can exceed the zeal of our English Brethren upon such occasions.’12

The lodge numbers and names of the five Brits present are given, but the only Freemason of specific interest here is Warren, ‘the learned and zealous officer who has charge of the excavations going on here under the Palestine Exploration Fund’.13

It is of note that Morris describes Warren as ‘learned’, while McLeod dismisses him as ‘only a novice’, a falsehood that conveniently renders him incapable of understanding Jack’s message on the wall at Goulston Street. No such handicap is recorded in Jerusalem, where the translation of potentially Masonic hieroglyphs was a cause for excited enquiry all round. Indeed, the walls of Solomon’s Temple were scrutinised for any sign of them, Warren recording one such example in his own book, Jerusalem Underground (1876). And here he is, in happier darkness, intrigued by a Masonic signature.

Warren’s description of the symbols on the wall is more precise than in the woodcut: ‘A gallery was also driven,’ he writes, ‘where the rock was found to rise very rapidly, cutting the fourth course at 15 feet from the angle. On this course two red paint-marks were found, L’s overturned and reversed.’ An approximation of their size is given by the woodcut and in Warren’s description. A pair of ‘L’s overturned and reversed’:

Representing one of the archetypal symbols adopted by Freemasonry, the ‘squares’ discovered by Warren at Solomon’s Temple caused hearts to flutter and an exchange of correspondence in Freemasonic journals. In 1884 an American Brother wrote to the Philadelphia Keystone proclaiming that ‘Lieutenant Colonel Warren [the] energetic explorer, had made discoveries of the highest significance,’ and insisting that such symbols were indivisible from the ‘whole crux of the Masonic Legend [and] thus bear silent and unconscious witness to the loyalty and reality of our ancient Masonic traditions’.14 This ‘silent witness’ meant a lot to Freemasons, even if loyalty didn’t mean much to one rampaging through Whitechapel with a vengeful knife.

But I digress, and must return to Bro Morris and his Masonic rendezvous at the Mediterranean Hotel: ‘This gentleman [Charles Warren] in some extremely happy observations, expressed his pleasure at this meeting, called together under such singular circumstances, and was equally impressed with the importance of introducing Freemasonry, though cautiously and judiciously, into the Holy Land.’15

It wasn’t many days before the dream became a reality. On the afternoon of Wednesday, 13 May 1868, as a matter of fact. Setting off from outside the Jerusalem walls, Morris, Warren and the chosen few disappeared into the excavations: ‘Entering with a good supply of candles, we pushed southwards as far as we could penetrate, and found a chamber happily adapted to our Masonic purpose. An upright stone in the centre served us for an altar. About ten feet above the Master’s station there was an immense opening in the wall, which led, for aught I know, to the original site of the Temple of Solomon. We felt as we had never felt before,’ wrote Morris. ‘How impressive is a place that none but the All-Seeing-Eye can penetrate. Leaving my Bible open on the central stone, three burning candles throwing their lustre upon it, and the trowel, Square, etc., resting nearby, a few opening remarks were made by myself, to the effect that never, as far as I knew, had a Freemasons’ Lodge been formed in Jerusalem since the departure of the Crusading hosts more than seven hundred years ago; that an effort was now making to introduce this, the mother country of its birth; that a few of us brethren, providentially thrown together, desired to seal our friendship by the associations peculiar to a Masonic Lodge.’16

This would be heady stuff for anyone, never mind a bunch of enraptured Freemasons.

‘To break the long stillness of these ancient quarries by Masonic utterances, we had now assembled, and would proceed to open a Moot Lodge, under the title of Reclamation Lodge of Jerusalem. This we now proceeded to do in a systematic manner. A prayer was offered, echoing strangely from that stony rock that had heard no such sound for centuries, and the other ceremonies proceeded.’17

The ceremony over, there were ancillary delights, confirming that they were doing the right thing in the right Freemasonic place: ‘The vast quarry thus consecrated by Masonic forms shows at every point the marks of the chisel as well-defined as the day the workmen left it. Slabs of stone partially dressed are lying upon the floor, others partially cut out of the wall stand where a few more blows would detach them. Many emblems of crosses, Hebrew characters, etc., remain, and the next visitor will see among them the Square and Compasses, as cut by our hand.’18

We know what a couple of squares looked like. How about a couple of compasses? They would look like this:

These were the symbols cut by Warren and his party into the walls of ‘Solomon’s Temple’. Both ancient and modern, sacred and trivial, the compasses are as readily to be found in the twenty-first century as they are in the earliest Masonic documents. No less than the cross for Christians, the compasses can justly be characterised as an icon of Freemasonry. The tool of T.G.A.O.T.U. (The Great Architect of the Universe), they are wherever Masonry is – in paintings, engravings, etched into drinking glasses; and carved by Jack the Ripper into Catherine Eddowes’ face.

They are literally a Mason’s ‘Mark’, what Bro historian J. Fort Newton describes as ‘a mark by which his work could be identified’. The ‘trademark’, if you will, of Freemasonry.19

The ‘mystery’ of Whitechapel starts here, in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, as it must for all Brethren on their metaphoric journey in the footsteps of Hiram Abiff. ‘The road which we shall follow,’ writes Masonic historian J.S.M. Ward,

is like the Masonic pavement, checkered with black and white, and like that used in the RA [Royal Arch] it is flecked with crimson. We must descend into the black night of the abyss itself – the abyss of savagery and fear, and the lower we descend, the further back in time we venture, the blacker becomes the darkness, lit only by a glimmering ray – the unfaltering faith and quiet heroism with which man accepted the high office and the grim fate which savage and primitive ideas had assigned to them. Hiram, indeed, may be a real man of flesh and blood, who like thousands before and after him, has been sacrificed in the false belief that thereby the corn will be made to grow and the building to stand firm forever. That Hiram was not the last architect who was sacrificed on the completion of the building on which he had toiled these pages will show, and even today, in the dark corners of the earth humble, yet valent, representatives of our Master still follow the same bloodstained path that he once trod.20

Hiram Abiff was the First Master of Freemasons, and the architect of Solomon’s Temple. According to Masonic fable, he was murdered and buried underneath it. As Bro Ward says, he wasn’t the first or the last to pay with his life in this way: it is rumoured the architects of the Taj Mahal were either blinded or beheaded on completion of their task, a certain way of preventing them from ever building anything else that rivalled its magnificence.

Bro Ward’s pavement into the abyss takes us back to about 967 BC, the fourth year of King Solomon’s reign, when the husband of three hundred, father of seven hundred, and murderer of his brother Adonijah, began to build ‘the House of the Lord’ at Jerusalem. Its purpose, apart from self-celebration, was as a repository for the Ark of the Covenant (the chest containing the tablets on which God inscribed the Ten Commandments), wherein the cult of Yahweh could find a fixed place of worship. Details of its construction are to be found in the Book of Kings (6–7), and a good deal of this description found its way into the traditions of Freemasonry – indeed, every Masonic lodge ever built owes its symbolism to this mysterious pile. We learn that cedar was culled from the forests of the Lebanon, and monster stones said to be dressed with such fantastic precision in the quarries that no further hammer, saw or chisel was used. Hence, no metal tools were required at the building site. In deference to this fable, no metal – buttons, boxes or coins – is ever tolerated about a Freemason during induction: a tradition given full mischievous attention in the deadly Masonic games of Bro Jack.

It was a famed artisan in metal who became the first Grand Master of Masonic legend. All Freemasons are designated as ‘Sons of the Widow’, and Hiram Abiff was the first. ‘He was a widow’s son of the tribe of Nephtall,’ says the Bible, ‘a worker in brass; and he was filled with wisdom, and understanding, and cunning to work all works in brass.’ These were qualifications enough for King Solomon, who ‘sent and fetched Hiram out of Tyre’, hiring him to set about the business of adorning his temple by forging the biggest artefacts in metal yet seen on earth. ‘For he cast two pillars of brass,’ recounts the Book of Kings, ‘and he set up the pillars in a porch of the Temple; and he set up the right pillar and called it Jachim; and he set up the left pillar and called the name thereof Boaz.’

And it is here that Freemasonry integrates itself with the story of Solomon, adapting the Book of Kings to construct a mythology of its own.

The next picture, of a coffin, is a typical example of Hiram’s migration out of the Old Testament and into the mind-boggling eclecticism of Masonic symbol. The artwork comes from a third-degree (Master Mason) tracing board, and I reproduce it because it alludes to much of the great legend, including both the murder of Hiram and the skull-and-crossed-bones logo shared by the Knights Templar.

It’s in the essence of Masonry to conceal, and here (with the compasses above) we have Hiram’s name and accompanying date hidden in cipher. The letters above the skull read ‘H.A.B.’, for Hiram Abiff, and the date is in that curious Masonic calendar of Anno Lucis (year of light) 3000, about a thousand years before Christ. On either side of the plaque are the letters ‘T.B.’, representing the Biblical metal-worker Tubal Cain, an enigma we can do without. Distributed about the coffin are symbols of more pertinence. At its centre is Bro Ward’s chequered pavement, inviting our gaze into the mysteries of the temple where, according to Masonic legend, Hiram met his assassins. The tools of their trade, both manual and murderous, are also depicted. There are the square, the gavel and the rule. Above is a frond of acacia that sprang up like magic from the dead man’s ignoble grave.

We approach the murder of Hiram Abiff needing but one more player of antiquity to set the stage. An icon of Masonry, he is Ezekiel, a flaming mouth of the Old Testament whose sexual hang-ups read like a prognosis for the criminally insane. Big on revenge, Ezekiel was a sulphurous prophet of merciless righteousness, and of no small importance to the Ripper’s narrative.

The Temple of Solomon is manifest in the symbolic orientation of every Masonic lodge. But we need to travel via a hallucination to arrive at the place where Hiram met his death.

Into the endless violence that was Jerusalem came a Syrian king called Nebuchadnezzar, who flattened it yet again. Ezekiel was carried off in chains, and while a prisoner in Babylon he had his famous reverie of the reconstruction of ‘the House of the Lord’. ‘In the five and twentieth year of our captivity,’ he records, ‘in the visions of God brought He me into the land of Israel, and, behold, there was a man, whose appearance was like the appearance of brass, with a line of flax in his hand, and a measuring reed, and he stood at the gate. And the glory of The Lord came into the House by the way of the gate whose prospect was towards the East. So the spirit took me up, and brought me into the inner court; and behold, the Glory of the Lord filled the House.’

Ezekiel’s vision is full of measurements of such precision that twenty-five centuries later theologians were able to interpret it like an architect’s plan. Models were made and pictures drawn, presenting a romanticised idea of what the crime scene might actually have looked like. Hiram had built this sacred place, where the lamps flared on walls of pure gold. He had erected Jachim and Boaz, cast the bronze sea that stood outside on the backs of gargantuan bronze oxen, and jealous men, subservient to his genius, wanted to know how he’d done it.

They were Jewish craftsmen, Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, latterly known as the Three Ruffians, but originally called the Three Assassins.

On the day of his murder Hiram was alone in the building – at least, according to the legend he believed he was alone – when three figures emerged from three sides.

At the south gate he is accosted by the first of the Assassins. ‘Give me the Master Mason’s word,’ demands Jubela, ‘or I will take your life.’

‘I cannot give it now,’ protests Hiram. ‘But if you will wait until the Temple is completed, and the Grand Lodge assembles at Jerusalem, if you are worthy, you shall then receive it, otherwise you cannot.’

‘Talk not to me of Temple or Grand Lodges! Give me the word, or die.’

Thereupon, Jubela strikes Hiram across the throat with a twenty-four-inch gauge. In fear for his life, Hiram retreats to the west gate, where once more he is waylaid.

‘Give me the grip and word of a Master Mason,’ demands Jubelo, ‘or die.’

Again Hiram refuses, and Jubelo strikes him across the breast with a square. In desperation the Grand Master seeks exit via the east gate, only to find his way blocked again, by the last of the Assassins.

‘Give me the grip and password of a Master Mason,’ demands Jubelum, ‘or die.’

At the east gate threat becomes reality. Jubelum strikes Hiram a fatal blow to the forehead with his gavel, and the great architect falls dead to the temple floor.

It isn’t long before Solomon realises Hiram is missing, and a search party is sent out. Later in the day a crude grave is discovered, marked by an incriminating sprig of acacia. Soon after, the Assassins themselves are found, hiding like curs in a cave. With much lamentation and contrition, they are bound and brought back to face the wrath of Solomon. The severity of his judgement and subsequent punishments constitute the acme of revenge in Masonic ritual. All three murderous Jews are sentenced to die by the King, put to death in the following horrendous manner.

JUBELA: Vile and impious wretch, hold up your head and hear your sentence. It is my order that you be taken without the walls of the Temple, and there have your throat cut across from ear to ear, your tongue torn out by the root, your body buried in the rough sands of the sea, where the tide ebbs and flows twice in twenty-four hours.

JUBELO: Vile and impious wretch, etc., etc. It is my order that you be taken without the gates of the Temple, and have your left breast torn open, your heart and vitals taken from thence and thrown over your left shoulder, and carried to the valley of Jehosaphat, there to become a prey to the wild beasts in the field, and vultures of the air.

JUBELUM: Vile and impious wretch, etc. It is my order that you be taken without the walls of the Temple, and there have your body severed in two, and divided to the north and south, your bowels burnt to ashes in the centre, and scattered to the four winds of heaven.21

Pretty stringent even by Biblical standards. Mix it with a psychopath and you’re well on your way to Whitechapel. Permutations of these horrors can readily be identified in all of the Ripper’s victims. One was severed in two (‘the Scotland Yard trunk’), one had her bowels burnt to ashes (Mary Jane Kelly), more than one had her ‘vitals’ thrown over her shoulder (Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes), and all had their throats cut across. The vengeance and ritual execution is the story of the ‘Three Ruffians’, and to his profound amusement, it is the story Jack the Ripper was telling.

Infantile attempts to present Commissioner Warren as a Masonic novice, and thus incapable of recognising these horrors, is to wilfully misrepresent what all Masons knew, and who Warren actually was. In the year of the consecration of his Lodge of Masonic Research (1886), Warren’s fellow founding member Professor T. Hayter Lewis read a paper entitled ‘An Early Version of the Hiram Legend’, to which Warren replied in amused understatement, ‘I think I do know something about the Temple at Jerusalem.’22

Most certainly he did. He had its dirt in his fingernails, and scars on his back, and was probably better informed about Hiram Abiff and his Three Jewish Assassins than any other man on earth.

An almost endearing characteristic of Ripperology is its enthusiasm for taking some of the greatest liars of the nineteenth century at their word. They’ve got it into their heads that policemen like Sir Charles Warren and Assistant Met Commissioner Sir Robert Anderson are on their side, and that they’re all ‘mucking in together’ in the great conundrum of detection. Personally, I wouldn’t give the servants of so perfidious a System the benefit of a modest doubt. The subordinates of that exalted crowd were no more likely to have anything to do with the truth than their political paymasters.

They almost blew it at Cleveland Street, but nothing less than the same machine, and for much the same reasons, was at work to secure the anonymity of London’s ‘mystery fiend’.

The prostitutes of Whitechapel were under threat from more than just the hazards of their trade. There was also the constant virus of official disinformation. The bogey of ‘Leather Apron’ was speedily superseded by the truly awful prospect of ‘the Womb-Collector’. This extraordinary gent, whose provenance must wait, had no more substance than a whiff of scent from a passing tooth fairy. He was a figment of panicked imagination, and about as credible as Kosminski and his dazzling wrist. ‘The Womb-Collector’ was just one of many fabulous creatures invented by the authorities; he would later pupate into ‘the Insane Medical Student’, metamorphosing as and when required.

I’m not going to trouble the reader just yet with a roll-call of also-rans, who at this juncture are best left in their lairs. However, there is one ludicrous suspect (albeit of profound ancillary importance) that we need to haul into the light before returning him to his state-funded mausoleum at Frogmore in Windsor. He was a member of the very upper classes indeed, a Freemason, and far from the usual lairs, this one lived in a palace. He was, of course, none other than Queen Victoria’s dissolute grandson, Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence.

Problems for the fans of Clarence as Jack the Ripper get into the queue on page one. The least of them is that he was out of town, and provably so, when he needed to be in London murdering. The folly of perusing this effete little half-wit almost spares his inclusion in my list of no-hopers, but Clarence carries important luggage in which I have a more than casual interest.

Nobody could take this unfortunate royal as a serious contender, yet in his book The Final Solution (1976), an otherwise intelligent journalist called Stephen Knight did. His is a well-presented dissertation of comprehensive nonsense. Every facet of it is ridiculous. It is a twerp history.

So where did he get it? Well, without beating a way through the camouflage, like Kosminski (Robert Anderson), and ‘the Womb-Collector’ (a Masonic coroner), the Duke of Clarence originates courtesy of the System – to wit, the Metropolitan Police.

The theory promoting Clarence is so absurd it falls apart even as you tell it. But I’ll try to deal with its mechanics as quickly as I can. The gist is something like this.

Despite being a practising homosexual, and of a class that considered working people as shit, the Duke of Clarence, in a moment of regal amnesia, forgets all this and puts a bun in the oven of a whore called Annie Crook. We know he got her pregnant, because he hired future Ripper victim Mary Jane Kelly as a nursemaid. This compelling scenario is compounded by the fact that Crook is a Catholic, which was something up with which Buckingham Palace would not put. But being the decent chap he is, Clarence does the right thing and marries her in a secret ceremony, possibly over Hoxton way.

A major ingredient of this twaddle has already gone into the toilet. It seems implausible that Clarence should clandestinely marry a Catholic prostitute at a time when he was concurrently, and quite openly, attempting to marry a Catholic princess. The Palace wasn’t the problem. It was the Princess’s Catholic father, the pretender to the French throne the Count of Paris, who didn’t like the idea.

But back to the newlyweds. Marital bliss was rapidly soured by the nursemaid, Miss Kelly, who told her fellow Ripper victims Martha Tabram, Mary Anne Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes that it was her intention to blackmail the royal family with her royal secret. This had the potential of a cataclysmic scandal, and obviously required careful handling from the authorities, who decided the best way to deal with it was with a spree of ritualistic disembowelling.

It’s here the narrative gels. Because Clarence wasn’t well known for his intellect, a ‘brain’ is brought in to implement the plan. This was the property of Sir William Gull, erstwhile physician to Her Majesty, and a Freemason, although he didn’t know it. Further empiricisms militate against Gull in his role as the world’s most famous co-murderer. Not only are his Masonic credentials unproven, he was also so ill he could hardly get out of bed. Theorists tend not to entangle themselves in unwelcome technicalities, so Gull’s well-publicised infirmities could have been a cunning subterfuge to draw attention away from the reality of a seventy-one-year-old half-paralysed homicidal maniac suffering multiple strokes.

A driver called Netley was hired, disguises may well have been worn, and off they went to the East End. Absolute secrecy was paramount, of course. If this had got out it would have been as shattering a scandal as the one they were trying to conceal. But the plan already creaked under inherent weaknesses that had apparently gone unnoticed. If your desire is to maintain anonymity, it probably isn’t a good idea to excite the attention of 13,000 policemen and half the world’s press. But we can put this lapse down to Gull’s stroke. He also suffered from epilepsy, an attack of which would not have been ideal in the middle of trying to cut someone’s throat.

Nothing of this absurd chronicle, subsequently expanded to include the artist Walter Sickert (a relative of Annie Crook’s), has anything whatsoever to do with the Ripper. I read somewhere that a Sickert canvas has been interfered with in the hope of matching his DNA with the Ripper correspondence. I imagine this was fruitless, particularly as those letters have been handled by the equivalent of the entire Third Reich.

At a glance, this Clarence/Gull nonsense has all the ingredients of a transparent ruse (not from Knight, but from those who put him up to it). It reads like something set up so someone else can knock it down. There’s an air of Br’er Rabbit about it – ‘Please don’t throw me in the bramble patch,’ when in the brambles is exactly where our crafty rabbit most longed to be. In other words, ‘Please don’t accuse me of being the Ripper,’ when that’s precisely what certain not entirely impartial individuals most wished for.

When I set about researching this book I wasn’t thinking, ‘How can I have a go at Freemasonry?’ Nothing could have been further from my mind. I knew no more about it then than I knew about the Ripper himself. Had I discovered that virtually every name associated with my research had been a Jehovah’s Witness, I would have read every scrap I could find on Jehovah and whoever had witnessed what on his behalf. Had the history suggested a Seventh Day Adventist, a Catholic, Hindu, atheist or Jew, the procedure would have been the same. But everything I read escalated my consideration of Freemasonry.

There’s a website on the internet that proffers instructions for the Freemason on ‘How to field questions implicating Freemasonry in the crimes of Jack the Ripper’, or something like that, and that’s where I think Masons show a little too much ankle. I get it for the Victorians, but why is anyone bothered today? We’re talking about a time when Stanley was still in Africa, Utah wasn’t yet a state, and the Eiffel Tower was but three-quarters built. Isn’t it time to open the curtains?

Christianity is full of assassins. I could name a dozen Jesus monsters without leaving my chair. In my view, if anyone should have a defensive website, it’s the British Council of Jews. More Jews have been denigrated, slandered and falsely accused of these crimes than any other group on earth. I am not Jewish any more than I am an enemy of Freemasonry. My point is that modern Masonry is no more to blame for the crimes of Jack the Ripper than is the Catholic Church for the horrors of Gilles de Rais. Nobody ever treated Freemasonry with more contempt than Jack the Ripper. He is an ulcer in its belly. He made good men into fools and took joy at the doing, made liars out of everyone, and made Freemasonry his ridiculous dupe.

An ethos of institutionalised deceit serves to shroud this aberration. The website poses potentially hostile questions, and gives guidelines of suitable responses for the flustered Freemason.

1) Every allegation of Masonic involvement in the Ripper murders is based entirely on a story that Stephen Knight claims he was told by Joseph Sickert [the painter’s illegitimate grandson, so the story goes]. But in the Sunday Times on 18 June 1978 Sickert said of this story, ‘It was a hoax, I made it all up, it was a whopping fib,’ and pure invention.

2) Those who are familiar with Masonic ritual know that the mutilations of the Ripper murder victims’ bodies do not reflect any Masonic practices, rules, ritual, or ceremonies. Any seeming similarity is only slight, inaccurate, and circumstantial. And, contrary to Knight’s story, neither rings nor coins were removed from any of the murder victims.

3) Knight said Masonic penalties (which in any case are purely symbolic, not actual) mention having the heart removed and thrown over the left shoulder. But he admits it was the intestines, not the heart that were placed over some of the Ripper victims’ right shoulders. And it is questionable if Masonic ritual referred to any shoulder.

4) Whatever was meant by the ‘Juwes’ message found on a wall near one of the murder scenes, that the term has never been used in Masonic rituals and ceremonies, and the story of the ‘Three Ruffians’ had been removed from Masonic ritual in England [but not in the United States] seventy years before the Ripper murders took place.

5) The erasure of the ‘Juwes’ message near a murder site could have been a well-meaning attempt to prevent anti-Semitic mob violence against innocent people, since some were already thinking of blaming Jewish immigrants for some of these murders.

6) Even more significantly, the baby girl said to have been the child of Prince Eddy (Duke of Clarence) was born on 18 April 1885, so she had to have been conceived during a time when Prince Eddy was in Germany, while Annie Crook, the alleged mother, was in London.

7) Stephen Knight’s story says that Eddy and Annie met in Walter Sickert’s studio. But that building had been demolished in 1886; and a hospital was built on the site in 1887.

8) Dr Gull is supposed to have been the key man in the Ripper murders. But he was seventy-two [sic] at the time and had already suffered one heart attack and possible [sic] a stroke. Yet he is alleged to have brutally murdered five young and reasonably strong women in a carriage on public streets and discarded their mutilated bodies in public areas, all without anything being seen or heard by the large number of Londoners who were looking for and hoping to catch ‘Jack the Ripper’.

9) British laws, then and now in effect, say that any marriage of a member of the royal family can be set aside by the monarch, and any who marry a Catholic cannot inherit the crown. So, no murders were necessary even if the story of Prince Eddy’s marriage to Annie Crook were true. In any case, research shows that Annie Crook was not a Catholic.

10) Stephen Knight’s story is based on the theory that the British public would have been so scandalised by the story about Prince Eddy that they would have rebelled against the royal family and the British governing class.

11) The supposed police cover-up was probably simply due to lack of experience with murders such as these, as well as some degree of police and government incompetence. Most likely, these factors, not a Masonic conspiracy, prevented the capture of ‘Jack the Ripper’, whose identity will probably always remain unknown.

Points 1 to 5 are tosh, points 6 to 11 irrelevant. It’s not even a clever try; even its sequence is contrived.

‘Even more significantly,’ gushes the writer at point 6, when attempting to reduce the importance of the ‘Juwes’ message to less than that of Annie Crook’s ‘baby’. This represents a common and disreputable technique of trying to associate one disparate thing with another (in this case, fact with fiction), dismissing one in an effort to get rid of both. We are enjoined not to suspect Bro Clarence, as though Clarence were the only Freemason in London; and that proving Clarence had nothing to do with Jack the Ripper also proves that Freemasonry had nothing to do with Jack the Ripper either.

Clarence and Gull are patsies, straw men stuck up to be shot down at the funfair. In what brain could this ridiculous fable have germinated? Or rather, by what means could it have been disseminated? It came from what Mr Knight describes as an ‘impeccable source’, brokered by an official at Scotland Yard.

Our informant is a man who ‘can’t be named’, of course. He’s a man in the shadows, his intelligence dispensed on scraps of paper and sourced to ‘one of our people’, like something in a crummy B movie; or, more pertinently, like something that entrapped Ernest Parke eighty years before.

Knight fell for it, and wrote his book. ‘The contact,’ he explains in his introduction, ‘was anxious to be assured that the treatment of the subject was to be conscientious in the extreme, and that they genuinely hoped to provide a definitive account of the Ripper murders.’23

Why?

Why, after all that time, would Scotland Yard or its clandestine associates have wanted to provide a ‘definitive account’ of Jack the Ripper? They’d been sitting on files inaccessible to the public for almost a century. If openness was their intention, why not provide a definitive account themselves, or simply open the files to everyone at the National Archive? And why would Scotland Yard, or its associates, want to give currency to so scandalous a revelation as the Masonic involvement of a royal prince? After all, there isn’t the thinnest whiff of Masonry in connection with the Jack the Ripper murders in the entire Metropolitan Police archive. Apparently no copper on the ground in 1888 ever even considered it (except, most curiously, in those specially released secret files).

If they really exist, why are these declassified documents not in the National Archive at Kew? We don’t get so much as a scribble in respect of Clarence, Gull, Netley or Freemasonry. Why wasn’t even a scintilla of this material included when the body of proscribed Ripper files was finally released into the public domain in 1992?

Mr Knight might well have done better to have reserved his judgement and considered an alternative scenario. This was in 1975, which meant that the hundred-year rule classifying all things Ripper was rapidly running out. Could it be that certain ‘impeccable sources’ thought it might be in their interest to leak a bit of a bum steer (an inoculation), thus pre-empting further Masonic enquiry?

This claptrap attached to Clarence would certainly qualify, effectively neutering enthusiasm for further Masonic investigation.

Knight, and anyone who took him seriously, was made to look like an idiot. A cult of the narrow-minded evolved, abetted by ‘Ripperology’, and the beneficiary, of course, was Masonry. ‘At risk of seeming to dabble in sensationalism,’ writes the aforementioned Bro McLeod, ‘I touch on another matter that sheds some light on the scholarly competence and the intellectual honesty of such propagandists as the late Stephen Knight.’

The shameful excoriation of Knight that follows was published in 1986 (two years before Jack’s centenary in 1988) in the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, a journal of Masonic research founded a century before by Commissioner of Metropolitan Police Sir Charles Warren, and thereafter Masonry’s most prestigious periodical. With Knight as his target, McLeod sets out his stall:24

Soon after 1.30 in the morning of 30 September 1888, the fourth Whitechapel murder took place. The victim was Catherine Eddowes, also known as ‘Kate Kelly’. Within hours a policeman found a bloodstained scrap of her apron five hundred yards away, in a passage off Goulston Street; on the wall of the adjoining staircase he discovered a chalked message, ‘The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing.’ Commissioner Warren appeared on the scene before dawn, and ordered the words erased: indeed, he may have rubbed them out himself. The reason he later gave was to prevent anti-Jewish riot. But anti-Masonic writers assign an ulterior motive, that is, to protect the Freemasons; the word ‘Juwes’, they tell us, alludes to the three ruffians who murdered Hiram Abif, and were themselves later executed. Any such hypothesis meets more than one obstacle. (1) There is no indication that the graffito had any connection with the murder, or that it was written by the Ripper.25 (2) If he did write it, what on earth did he intend it to mean? Whether we take ‘Juwes’ to mean ‘Jews’ or ‘Ruffians’, the inscription makes no sense as a signature or a warning. (3) There is a decisive argument to exonerate Sir Charles from any charge of ‘covering up’ for the Masons. Admittedly certain pre-Union exposures name the Ruffians as Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, and with a certain amount of good-will one might imagine they could be referred to as the three ‘Juwes’ (though I have never encountered a Masonic source that did so). But they vanish from most English rituals at the Union, and by a generation later they would not have been recognised by an English Mason as Masonic allusions at all, let alone as specific references to vengeance, punishment or ritual execution – unless the Mason happened to be excessively antiquarian in his interest. And that [McLeod’s emphasis] Sir Charles Warren was not.26

There’s a bit of a faux pas here, to wit: ‘they would not have been recognised by an English Mason … unless the Mason happened to be excessively antiquarian in his interest’. In other words, a Mason who did happen to be excessively antiquarian might well recognise the Masonic significance. Otherwise, what’s the point of such an observation? It’s either Masonic, or it isn’t. If the ‘graffito’ has nothing to do with Freemasonry, why would it matter whether Bro Warren was an expert or not?

We have at least obtained an interesting clarification from Bro McLeod: a Freemason who was ‘excessively antiquarian in his interest’ might indeed conjugate the Masonic significance of the writing on the wall (what he and Ripperology call ‘graffito’).

Although conceding that the ‘graffito’ is possibly Masonic, Bro McLeod insists, with emphasis, that Sir Charles Warren had no such expertise. Which is presumably why he and Walter Besant had struggled from as far back as 1872 to inaugurate a Lodge of Masonic Research, finally succeeding with the establishment of the ‘Quatuor Coronati’ in 1886. At a meeting of that lodge in 1887, Sir Charles is quoted as saying ‘how amidst his active career, he had always kept up the study’.27

In a subsequent chapter it will become clear that Bro Warren was indeed ‘excessively antiquarian in his interest’; which ineluctably brings us back to internet fib number 4.

… the story of the Three Ruffians had been removed from Masonic ritual in England [but not in the United States] seventy years before the Ripper murders took place.

‘They would not have been recognised by an English Mason as Masonic allusions at all,’ says Bro McLeod, ‘let alone as specific references to vengeance, punishment or ritual execution.’

In reality, as all Masons know, the Jewish Ruffians hadn’t vanished from Masonic ritual at the Union (in 1813), but were actually as much a part of it in 1888 as they were in a Masonic lodge near you until 1987. All that had happened was that the ‘vengeance and ritual execution’ had been converted into a primitive alphabetical cipher. Masons like codes and conundrums (‘Juwes’ for example), and it was Police Commissioner Warren’s flagrant dissembling over what was written on a wall at Goulston Street that gives the Masonic game away.

This modern version of the Jubela, Jubelo, Jubelum myth, making specific reference to vengeance, punishment and ritual execution, comes from Notes on Ritual and Procedure, published in 1976 (that’s nineteen hundred and seventy-six). It features Solomon’s judgement on Jubela, Jubelum and Jubelo, incorporated into the First, Second and Third Degree Obligation (oath), as practised until 1987:

These several points I solemnly swear to observe … under no less a penalty, on the violation of any of them than that of having my t.c.a., my t.t.o.b.t.r. and b.i.t.s.o.t.s. at l.w.m., or a c’s l.f.t.s., where t.t.r.e.a.f.t.i. 24 hs. …

Which translates today exactly as it translated in 1888: ‘under no less a penalty, on the violation of any of them than that of having my t(hroat) c(ut) a(cross), my t(ongue) t(orn) o(ut) b(y) t(he) r(oot) and (my body) b(uried) i(n) t(he) s(and) o(f) t(he) s(ea) at l(ow) w(ater) m(ark) or a c(able)’s l(ength) f(rom) t(he) s(hore), where t(he) t(ide) r(egularly) e(bbs) a(nd) f(lows) t(wice) i(n) 24 h(our)s’.

So what’s all this ‘vanished in 1813’ tosh? The names may have been omitted, but the penalties remain the same. By the late 1960s there was a growing antipathy inside Freemasonry itself towards these verbal savageries. Many wanted rid of them, and (led in part by Churchmen) arguments for and against their abolition culminated in a packed debate at Grand Lodge in 1986. A summary of these proceedings by Bro Harry Mendoza was published in the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum. ‘There was a feeling of repugnance,’ wrote Mendoza, ‘felt by the candidate while his hand is on the volume of the sacred law [the Bible] to give a faithful promise to observe an Obligation which contains a barbarous and unenforceable penalty clause. Indeed, some have argued that by taking such an Obligation, they are taking the name of God in vain and thus violating the third of the Ten Commandments. Second,’ he continues, ‘it is a known fact that there are some brethren who have refused to participate any further in the Craft because they felt that what they had been asked to repeat was puerile, offensive or wholly out of keeping with what they understood to be the principles of Freemasonry. Third’ – and bearing the misguided Mr Stephen Knight in mind – their abandonment ‘would take a potent weapon from the hands of our adversaries’.28 Ha ha.

Mendoza then moves on to the arguments for their retention: ‘We’ve been using these Obligations for years, and there’s no good reason for changing them. The ritual was good enough for my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and it’s good enough for me.’ Moreover, ‘You are forbidden to alter the ritual,’ a rule that didn’t vanish with the Articles of Union, but actually predicates upon it: ‘There shall be the most perfect unity of Obligation, until time shall be no more.’

In the end the abolitionists won the day, and on 11 June 1986 ‘Grand Lodge resolved that “All references to physical penalties be omitted from the Obligations taken by Candidates in the three degrees.”’ ‘The Board,’ wrote Bro Higman, summing it up, ‘sees it as important that the resolution is put into effect as soon as possible, particularly in so far as it affects initiations. In any event, the change should be implemented not later than June 1987.’ That’s June, nineteen hundred and eighty-seven.29

Thus, from the summer of that year, there were to be no more throats cut across, no more vitals flung over shoulders, bodies cut in half or burnt bowels. But let me not impede Bro McLeod in his flow. This malevolent junk is to have all too short a shelf-life.

‘The estimable Mr Knight,’ he froths, ‘professes to have found “many Freemasons” who were willing to talk to him, and he alleges that he has consulted the works of such notable authorities as Father Hannah and Mr Dewer,30 and yet he seems to be blissfully unaware of the facts that I cite. I can only conclude that he was either incompetent or a liar. Is there some other possibility?’31

Yes, Bro McLeod, there is, and seeing as you introduce the word, how about that you are lying, that your invective, like the website referred to earlier, is a tribute to dishonesty, and that you are about as ingenuous as some ventriloquist’s dummy of a politician bewitched by his own propaganda.

Two questions require answers here. The first is, what happened to the ‘impeccable source’ who tipped Knight off? Where did he source this ludicrous Clarence twaddle, and why didn’t he speak up in Mr Knight’s defence? And second, why isn’t Bro McLeod directing some of his sanctimonious venom at that same source? The Metropolitan Police were given Knight’s manuscript before publication. On 28 August 1975, under an official Scotland Yard letterhead, the Departmental Record Office wrote to Mr Knight: ‘Thank you for sight of your draft typescript about Jack the Ripper, where you have clearly drawn on the contents of our Metropolitan Police files’ (my emphasis).32

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see through a camouflage like Bro McLeod’s. It’s perfectly obvious. Mr Stephen Knight was set up. In his investigations of Bro the Duke of Clarence and Bro the Earl of Euston eighty years before, another misguided but honest journalist, Ernest Parke, got shafted by a contrived ‘leak’ out of Scotland Yard. Mr Knight was simply a victim of a similar contrivance. Clarence was (and is) a greasy mirror put up between Masonry and the Ripper, a clumsy contrivance to warn others off. Nobody wants to look like a banana, so everybody (most especially Ripperology) stays away, the Masonic baby duly disappearing with the royal bathwater.

I’ve got no brief for Stephen Knight, but he didn’t wake up one wet weekend with a headful of malice towards some forgotten royal he’d never even heard of. Malice was there, but it didn’t originate with him. We know some official introduced Mr Knight to ‘one of our people’, a gent who became the primary source for the matter of his book. But who was this man, and where did he get it? From whence did this putrescent fairy tale emerge?

More than a dozen years before anyone had heard of Stephen Knight, a well-known and very excellent writer, Mr Colin Wilson, was invited to lunch at the Athenaeum. His host was an affable seventy-year-old retired surgeon named Thomas Eldon Stowell, CBE MD FRCS DIH. As well as a lot of letters after his name, Mr Stowell had a secret under his arse ‘that he’d been sitting on for thirty years’.

Over gulls’ eggs and claret, Stowell plunged into his topic, so stimulating Mr Wilson that he ignored every word of it. Wilson had written a series of articles for the London Evening Standard,33 Jack the Ripper being the theme. The crafty septuagenarian attempted to solicit the younger man’s complicity by informing him that ‘they were thinking in a very similar way regarding the murderer’s identity’, and that the assassin ‘was the Duke of Clarence’. This surprised Mr Wilson, because he’d been thinking of no such thing; indeed, he ‘had not even heard of that particular Duke’.34

It sounded like manure then, and it sounded worse sixteen years later, when Mr Wilson was commissioned to write a review of the same nonsense in Mr Stephen Knight’s recently published book. ‘What we are being asked to believe,’ wrote Mr Wilson,

is, basically, a far taller story than any of the other theories about the Ripper – the mad surgeon, the sadistic midwife, and so on. We are asked to believe, first of all, that Eddie, the Duke of Clarence, became a close friend of Walter Sickert. This is unsupported. We are asked to believe that he became sufficiently involved with a shop assistant to actually marry her – although like everyone else in the family, he was terrified of Queen Victoria, and knew that he might – almost certainly would – be King of England one day. We are asked to believe that the Queen’s physician, Sir William Gull, was party to the kidnapping of the shop assistant, and that he probably performed some grotesque operation on her to make her lose her memory. And then that Gull, with the approval of the Prime Minister, went around Whitechapel killing prostitutes with appalling sadism (when, after all, a single stab would have done the trick). Moreover, that Gull was a Freemason, and committed murders according to Masonic ritual. (The Prime Minister and Commissioner of Police were also Masons.) Mr Knight admits that Gull had a stroke in the year before the murders, but insists that he was still spry enough to wield the knife.35

Had Mr Wilson swallowed the bait, it would doubtless have been he who wore Mr Knight’s baleful mantle, and who would have been vilified in Freemasonic journals. But Wilson was too astute; Stowell was going to have to find himself another patsy.

In 1962 the allegations against Clarence had emerged in Paris, published by Hachette in a biography of Edward VII by Phillip Julian: ‘La mauvaise reputation du jeune homme se répandit dans l’opinion. Le bruit courait qu’il était Jack l’Eventreur.’ (And for those who don’t:) ‘The young man’s evil reputation soon spread. The rumour gained ground that he was Jack the Ripper.’36

The French leak went nowhere. If Stowell wanted it out, he was going to have to publish it himself. This he did, his revelation appearing in the Criminologist magazine in November 1970: ‘Jack the Ripper: A Solution?’ – a virtually identical title to that used by Knight for his book six years later: Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution.37

Though more appropriate to the National Enquirer, Stowell’s effort caused a flutter amongst the cognoscenti. ‘Did the Ripper Have Royal Blood?’ asked a wide-eyed Sunday Times that same month.38 Clarence barely had a brain, so the question isn’t even academic. The question is: what was this deceitful old man actually up to? If Stowell hadn’t opened his idiot mouth, there would have been no ‘one of our people’, and Knight wouldn’t have written his idiot book.

If Bro McLeod wants to condemn anyone for what he calls ‘scurrilous journalism’, he might want to consider redirecting his invective at Bro Thomas Eldon Stowell.

We have at last arrived at the source of this unsavoury fable. It came out of the mouth of a distinguished Freemason.

Bro Stowell’s association with Freemasonry was more than casual (a detail he might not have shared with Mr Wilson at the Athenaeum). The doctor with the ‘secret’ was a Worshipful Master as early as 1918, Provincial Grand Deacon (Cheshire) by 1928, and rose through Masonic ranks to become a Companion of the Holy Royal Arch (eighteenth degree) by the beginning of the Second World War. He was Most Excellent Zerubbabe in the Cornubain (450), and wrote its history.39

By the tenets of Masonry, Stowell was a scoundrel, caring not a rat’s arse for the oath he had sworn. ‘One of the most notable features of Freemasonry – one, certainly, which attracts, more than anything else, the attention of the profane world – is that veil of mystery – that awful secrecy, behind which it moves and acts. From the earliest periods this has invariably been a distinctive characteristic of the institution; and today, as of old, the first obligation of a Mason – his supreme duty – is that of silence and secrecy.’

And yet Stowell blows the whistle on Clarence?

It might therefore be as well for Masonry to amend the website, replacing any reference to Mr Stephen Knight with the name of Bro Stowell. Contemptuous of any tradition, it was a Freemason who dished the dirt on Bro the Duke of Clarence. Stowell’s corrosive but artful fantasies led in turn to the mind-numbing and outrageous accusations levelled against a genius called Walter Sickert, and it’s at that point I’ve got to let this nonsense go.

While Bro Stowell was occupied with trying to push Bro Clarence into the limelight, there were others just as anxious to get Bro Sir Charles Warren out of it.

As is established, Warren was Boss Cop, supreme authority (excepting the City) over about a dozen Metropolitan Police jurisdictions, which included an area of East London encompassing Whitechapel, known as H Division. His tenure in office from 1886 to November 1888 is an indisputable fact. Any Victorian newspaper, irrespective of its political bias, will tell you that while Jack was amusing himself, Warren was the policeman enjoined to catch him. I’d go so far as to say that anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Whitechapel Horrors would know that Bro Sir Charles Warren was concurrently Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

We now come to a man who was in apparent ignorance of it. As far as he’s concerned, Warren had absolutely nothing to do with the world’s most famous assassin – no crisis, no panic, no connection. Such idiosyncrasy of opinion is made remarkable by the fact that this individual worked at Scotland Yard, had access to classified files, and published a book purporting to be some kind of history of the Metropolitan Police.40

He is former Assistant Commissioner Major Maurice Tomlin, and Maurice thinks the most startling highlight of Warren’s career was the arrest of a girl in Regent Street. Since Tomlin is a source of such distinction, I quote him in full.

Sir Charles Warren’s administration would have gone forward, perhaps, without very much to make it in any way noticeable, had it not been for what is known as the ‘Cass’ affair. In this case, a ‘young person’, as she would have been called, was taken into custody by a Constable of the ‘C’ Division in Regent Street, on a charge of soliciting. Suspicious as her actions may have been, it was not considered proved that her motives were wrong; and the case was dismissed. The arrest therefore aroused considerable public agitation: as a result, not only the Commissioner of Police but the Home Secretary were involved in the censure. It was certainly open to doubt whether the action of the Constable was as wrong, and the conduct of the lady as correct, as was made out at the time: when the Constable was tried for perjury on account of the evidence he gave in the case he was acquitted without any blame whatever being attached to him, and he was reinstated in the force. The real history of the affair is that the behaviour of the defendant certainly gave the Constable ample grounds for acting as he did, and the defendant was very lucky to be able to convince the magistrate of her innocence in the matter. Except for the two unfortunate people concerned, it was not really such a very important case, but as we of our generation know, these apparently unimportant cases, arising out of the daily work of the Police, may, at any moment, develop into a ‘Sensation’; as a result, the administration of Sir Charles Warren was rather suspect by the public, and it is not to be wondered at that after a very short time he resigned in 1888.

So there we have it, a potted history of Warren’s exciting tenure at the Yard. He possibly also issued a few parking tickets to the odd horse and cart. This assessment of the Commissioner’s career was published in 1936, almost fifty years after the Ripper sensation.

Tosh like this is as fatuous as anything out of Bro McLeod. While he attempts to deodorise Warren’s Masonic competence, others try to diminish his role as Commissioner altogether. Predicated on quasi-official histories (almost always written by ex-policemen), we are invited to believe that it was James Monro, and not Bro Warren, who was Boss Cop at the time of the Ripper murders.41

It wasn’t only Tomlin who advertised this mirage. It was also pushed by another Assistant Commissioner, Sir Basil Thomson KCB, who incidentally ‘wrecked his career and reputation on being arrested for public indecency with a prostitute in Hyde Park’. Such regretful adventures up a whore’s skirt didn’t preclude him from writing The Story of Scotland Yard, published in 1935. According to Thomson, Bro Warren had just about evaporated as Jack got active, and it was Monro who was put up to take the Whitechapel flak. With quaint indifference to reality, Thomson writes this: ‘Mr James Monro, who had lately resigned from the C.I.D. was recalled to succeed Sir Charles Warren. He [Monro] had shown great ability in unearthing the perpetrators of the dynamite outrages, but the dynamite outrages had been suppressed, and the “Jack the Ripper” outrages had filled the public mind to the exclusion of all other questions.’42

What exactly is he trying to sell here? Monro was in enforced ‘resignation’ throughout the period in question, and had virtually nothing to do with the Ripper outrages. Anyone reading Thomson would get the impression that Monro had ‘succeeded’ Warren, and that it was he who was in charge when the Ripper ‘filled the public mind to the exclusion of all other questions’.

‘Feelings ran very high against the C.I.D.,’ continues Thomson, ‘for its failure to arrest the murderer.’ He neglects to point out that the Criminal Investigation Department was at that time managed by Robert Anderson. But so what for facts. This was James Monro’s scandal, not Bro Sir Charles Warren’s.

Not a newspaper in England was blaming Monro for failing to catch Jack the Ripper, and this isn’t surprising, because he wasn’t reappointed as Commissioner until Tuesday, 4 December 1888.43 He was barely mentioned in that context, if he was ever mentioned at all. But everyone with a newspaper to open was blaming Sir Charles Warren. No one could understand how such an abundance of clues ‘would seem to conspire to baffle the police’.

It’s curious that these two policemen, Thomson and Tomlin, both ex-Assistant Commissioners, could be so misinformed when it comes to their most infamous murderer. Maybe we’ll get a more accurate picture out of J.F. Moylan CB CBE, whose Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police was published in 1928. According to its preface, ‘The aim of the Whitehall Series [of which this was one] is to provide accurate and authoritative information, and this book has been written with the idea of giving such information about the Metropolitan Police. In 1888 “Jack the Ripper” caused crime to take the place of disorder as the mutual preoccupation of police and public. Great importance also attached about this time to that side of police work which is represented by the Special Branch and C.I.D. It was therefore not surprising that Sir Charles Warren’s place was filled by the return of Mr Monro, an expert on crime and creator of the Special Branch.’44

This artfully constructed paragraph is preposterous. By the time Monro got back to Scotland Yard, Jack the Ripper was officially, incorrectly and secretly declared dead. As far as the authorities were concerned, the problem had ‘committed suicide’ by drowning itself in the River Thames.

What does any of this have to do with Monro? Anyone of a cynical disposition might imagine there was someone (or something) out there trying to disassociate Bro Warren from Whitechapel, and to pretend that an entirely different policeman was sharing that never-to-be-forgotten relationship with Jack. But let us leave the last word to Assistant Commissioner Tomlin, who sums up my argument without inhibition: ‘A new Commissioner was, on this occasion, taken from serving Police Officers in the person of Mr Monro. His services in London had been with the C.I.D. since 1884. He had to cope with the dynamite campaign … He had also to deal with a very anxious time during the “Jack the Ripper” murders.’45

There it is, word for word. It was all down to James Monro, and Warren doesn’t even get a look-in.

‘I suggest that it’s very doubtful whether Warren took any active part in the Jack the Ripper investigation, as he had no control over the detective force.’

Who’s this?

It’s another voice hollering off the pages of the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum. Bro Brigadier A.C.F. Jackson is most happy to agree with Tomlin. ‘Such a reality would not have worried Knight,’ froths the Brig. ‘The personal communication between Knight and Bro Hamill is clear proof that the former was prepared to twist the facts to prove his anti-Masonic spleen.’46

Let’s hear one last gasp of condemnation for Mr Knight before abandoning this cardboard armour to the memory of Bro Thomas Eldon Stowell. I leave it to the above-named Bro J.M. Hamill, Master of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge, who in 1986 got up the following: ‘One point I would comment on’ – and one irresistible to Bro Hamill – ‘the treatment afforded to our First Master [Sir Charles Warren], by the late Stephen Knight in his Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (London, 1976), a scurrilous piece of sensational journalism masquerading as historical research. Knight claims that the Whitechapel murders were a Masonic plot to cover up an indiscretion on the part of HRH Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence (son of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, Grand Master 1874–1901).’47

For certain individuals of this ‘Lodge of Historical Research’, history is not something to be explored, but something to be owned. ‘The truth,’ as General Gordon wrote, ‘is theirs’ – and more often than not, it’s self-serving bollocks.

Freemasons habitually insist that their institution has nothing to do with Jack, yet by paralipsis they seek to control the mythos surrounding him. Anyone with the temerity to question it is reflexively branded ‘anti-Masonic’, as though that is the end of the argument. This is the bluster of bullies. By definition, a ‘mystery’ is in want of explanation. If nobody knows who the Ripper is, please stop telling me who he isn’t.

The predisposition to look at this material as ‘mystery’ is beguiling, but only if one accepts the police point of view. An avenue of books either promote or have fallen for the same old ramshackle tale. If a policeman wrote it, it’s enshrined, axiomatic amongst Ripperologists as a sacrosanct truth. There’s Swanson and his ‘marginalia’, Macnaghten and his ‘memoranda’, Littlechild and his ‘letter’. Ripperology is constipated with this junk. The policemen who never caught him are apparently to be construed as oracles after the event. The only senior policeman without an opinion on Jack the Ripper is the man who dared not give one, and that is the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, Bro Sir Charles Warren.

It’s noticeable that of his many books, Warren never got his pen dirty for the Whitechapel Murderer. We shouldn’t be surprised. What could he write? Of his determination to impede every facet of the investigation? Muse perhaps over the destruction of evidence by his own hand? Or reminisce over tactics to discredit honourable witnesses, no effort spared?

If a witness contradicted the police, he was by definition unreliable, mistaken, a kind of Walter Mitty character, too old, too confused, or all and any of the above that could be manipulated as a means to discredit him.

For the most part, Ripperology gives unqualified credence to the Victorian police. This is at odds with Victorian newspapers, which did not. For myself, I have no inclination to accept anything put about by Boss Cops, because all too often the police were lying. Theirs is a litany of disinformation, misinformation, contradictions, missing documents and bent coroners’ courts. I do not trespass beyond what I can prove. What we have here is an Establishment conspiracy – not some half-witted nonsense out of Stowell, but an agenda to conceal a Freemason, a ‘Mystic Tie’ wherein otherwise honourable men were coerced into becoming criminals in order to protect a criminal in their midst. I shall prove that Jack the Ripper was a Freemason, that what he called his ‘Funny Little Game’ was a perversion of Freemasonic ritual, and that its symbolism and traditions were the naked vernacular of these horrendous crimes. I shall prove, in fact, that Masonic symbol was Jack’s ‘calling card’, contemptuously left at every crime scene and displayed so flagrantly in the mutilated remains of Mary Jane Kelly that there was barely anything else. What is incredible, and ultimately disastrous for Warren, is that not only did this effervescent psychopath play his ‘Funny Little Games’ with Freemasonry, he played them with Warren himself. Warren was an inspiration to the Ripper, and the Commissioner’s past an ingredient of his malice.

The Ripper was on Warren’s case. It’s the big secret.

Jack hated Charlie, hated his rectitude and his evangelical hypocrisy. Most of all, he hated his authority. The more Warren tried to cover up, the more the Ripper raised the ante. You’d have to sit down and think about it to come up with a bigger piss-take than to secrete the body parts of a murdered girl in the foundations of the Boss Cop’s new building at New Scotland Yard.48 But then Jack sat down and thought, ever ruminating over new ‘larks’ with which to persecute old Charlie. Enormous effort was made to disassociate this particular outrage from the hand of ‘Saucy Jacky’, because the Ripper was doing his best to outrage Warren. It was a personal thing (he visited Scotland Yard twice). The cops couldn’t keep up, and were barely able to cover up. By this point they were on automatic pilot, laundering in the Ripper’s wake like a bunch of traumatised accomplices.

Isolating Charlie from Jack, in respect of the headless and sawn-in-half body at New Scotland Yard, was successful. Both the conned Victorian public and later Ripperology bought into a pantomime of two independent maniacs abroad who happened to share the same homicidal signature. And that signature was Freemasonry.

It is manifestly untrue to try to claim that ‘The story of the Three Ruffians had been removed from Masonic Ritual seventy years before the Ripper murders took place.’ With its vengeance, revenge and vicious punishment, that legend was still in place ninety-nine years after them. In other words, Bro McLeod’s ‘decisive argument exonerating Warren from a Masonic cover-up’ becomes a decisive argument in favour of investigating one.

We shall now be looking at the cover-up.