The nineteenth century was on its famous roll, and the name of the game was gain. Glittering times for those at the top, not so cosy for those pushing the juggernaut. A confederacy of enterprising Englishmen fought their way up – heroes and cowards, saints and shysters – dragging buckets for the gold. ‘I would annex the planets if I could,’ said Cecil Rhodes, staring up at Africa’s stars. On a more prosaic level, the common herd were required to stand behind cordons of policemen and wave little flags at the passing millionaires.
From time to time they were also required to shell out. Somehow the Victorian elite had managed to amend the mythological affection the peasants had for Robin Hood. It will be remembered that he robbed the rich and gave to the poor. The richest family on earth had turned that on its head. In advance of a Royal Wedding – ‘the Fairest Scene in all Creation’ – the nuptials of the Queen’s grandson George, Duke of York, the mob were instructed to buy the bride a present.
Dockyard labourers, longshoremen, river boat men, village peasants, mechanics, miners, parish school children, cottagers, weavers, carpenters, bricklayers – the whole, in a word, of the poorest and hardest worked members of the nation – were bidden, in terms which admitted no denial, to give up a day’s wage or the price of a week’s meals to assist in purchasing some necklace, bracelet, or other jewel for a young lady who is to be the future wearer of the crown jewels of Great Britain. Royalty in England makes a nation of snobs and sycophants out of a nation that otherwise would be sturdy and self-respecting.8
Not from my pen, but from that of a brilliant, now neglected writer of the time, ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée), who couldn’t be dismissed as a horrid Continental republican, because she was British. She continues, under the subheading ‘Physical Defects of the Royal Breed’:
Given their consanguinity in marriage, their hereditary nervous maladies, their imprisonment in a narrow circle, their illimitable opportunity of self-indulgence, the monotony, the acquisitiveness, which lie like curses on their lives, we must give them the honor that they remain as entirely sane as some of them do. They are, moreover, heavily and cruelly handicapped by the alliances which they are compelled to form, and the hereditary diseases which they are thus forced to receive and transmit. The fatal corporeal and mental injuries of the royal families due to what the raisers of horses call ‘breeding in and in’ cannot be overrated, and yet seem scarcely to attract any attention from the nations over which they reign. Mental and physical diseases are common to them, and so are certain attitudes, moral and political. They are almost all great feeders, and tenacious of arbitrary precedence and distinction. No one ever tells them the truth, they are surrounded by persons who all desire to please, that they may profit by them.9
Needless to say, this piece was never published in England, but in the American edition of Review of Reviews. If I were obliged to agree with only one phrase of it, it would be the last: ‘that they may profit from them’.
Victorian royalty was a gigantic conjuring trick, pomp and pretty circumstance designed to keep your eye off the ball: precisely the reason conjurors use a blonde with big tits. The trick was mother love (and love of mother). Victoria loved her people, and 310 million people loved her.
But this proposition sweats a bit under analysis. Her family feared her. Half the world feared her armies and her avarice – young men flocking to heaven in a brainwashed patriotic stupor at the bugle-call of her greed.
‘We must with our Indian Empire and large Colonies,’ wrote the Queen, ‘be prepared for attacks and wars somewhere or other CONTINUALLY.’ Her emphasis, but not her blood.10
By 1887 Victoria had been queen for fifty years. At her Jubilee celebrations she wept joyously at the battalions of young soldiers, but got a bit fraught when asked to contribute to the cost of the festivities. Marching feet might bring a sting of imperial hubris, but underlying it was the sentiment of a clapped-out cash register. It was made clear to ministers that if she had to pay, she’d never celebrate again.
She didn’t want to pay for her swarm, either. Victoria had twenty-two grandchildren, and by the time of her death, thirty-seven great-grandchildren.11 That’s fifty-nine junior royals with their hands in the till. By the late 1880s this regal cavalcade of indulgence at public expense was stretching political and fiscal credibility to breaking point. It had become too much even for the Conservatives. In an attempt to navigate cross-party dissent, the government quietly suggested that the Palace might want to police its own finances. Nothing radical, you understand: Fat Ed would still get his £128k a year; but could not the Queen herself see a way to appoint a committee that might, very delicately, ‘recommend economies, which, without interfering with your Majesty’s personal comfort, state, or dignity, [the loyal throat was cleared] might be made available as a fund out of which provision could be made either wholly or in part for the young members of the Royal Family?’12
In other words, can you cough up a bit for the kids?
This was construed by the Queen as a piece of common insolence, as was made pretty evident by the tone in which she batted it back. Clearly she thought it iniquitous that she should be expected to shell out. Her Prime Minister, Viscount Lord Salisbury, was the recipient of the bleat. It was ‘most unjust’, wrote the Queen, ‘that she, in her old age, with endless expenses, should be asked to contribute’. Furthermore, she considered herself ‘very shamefully used in having no real assistance for the enormous expense of entertaining’ (at her own Golden Jubilee). Did not Salisbury realise what all this guzzling cost?
Next day she had another seethe at the ingratitude of the masses, via their Parliament. ‘The constant dread of the House of Commons is a bugbear. What ever is done you will not and cannot conciliate a certain set of fools and wicked people who will attack whatever is done.’13
These ‘fools and wicked people’ were actually the taxpayers, a large number of whom were living in abject poverty – which in Her Majesty’s view was about all the excuse they had for not understanding the price of Cristal champagne. Is this letter not as illuminating as it is astonishing? The richest woman on earth considered poor people who wouldn’t give her money ‘wicked’.
‘Oh, but she was a wrenching, grasping, clutching covetous old sinner, and closed as an oyster.’ I vandalise Dickens’s Christmas masterpiece, but his description of Ebenezer Scrooge is appropriate here. I think Dickens found his Miss Havisham in Queen Victoria – his creation a bitter old woman in white, and his muse this caustic old broken heart in endless black. Since the death of her husband Albert in 1861 she had lived in a perpetual funeral, grieving for her lost love and cut off from reality like Havisham in her rotting wedding gown.
The Victorians were subjects of this wretched widow, and in her presence kept a straight face. You had to polish your boots, assume a stiffened aspect, and pretend that everything in the world was serious. Fun was behind her back. In my view, Victoria’s permanent grief invented Victorian hypocrisy. You couldn’t get your hand up at an endless funeral, and had to pretend outrage if somebody else did. This ethic of counterfeit rectitude survives in not a few British newspapers to this very day.
But then, the name of the game is expediency: what do you want to make people think? Politics is reducible to that last defining question: who do you prefer, our liars or theirs?
I reproduce the following because they save me writing a paragraph (and also because they serve as a vivid metaphor for the so-called official ‘Ripper Files’ of the Metropolitan Police). They come from the same newspaper, on the same day, but for a different audience. I always imagined a ‘balanced view’ at Mr Rupert Murdoch’s Sun meant a big pair of tits given equal prominence towards the camera. But this demonstrates that it too is capable of a little political sophistication. These two front pages concern the introduction of the euro. The one on the left is for the British reader, whose government is anti-European, and that on the right is for the Irish, whose government is pro.
The problem for
the Victorians (and some of the wilder of the Ripperologists) was that they equated ‘evil’ with ‘insane’. In terms of nailing our Whitechapel monster, this is a mistake; but the Victorian public were conditioned to think in this direction by the police and by the newspapers.
Jack the Ripper was no more ‘insane’ than you or me. A psychopath, yes, but not insane. Was Satan insane? I don’t think so. For a while he was part of the in-crowd, a dazzling angel, Lucifer, the Bringer of Light. God didn’t kick him out of heaven because he was a nut, but simply because he was a nasty piece of work. During his reign, Henry VIII had 72,000 people put to death, and he also liked to cut ears and noses off. Was Henry insane? Probably not, just a Tudor despot who was intolerant of Catholics and others who didn’t subscribe to his theological diktat.14
Is Iago insane? Not noted for his difficulty with words, the greatest writer who ever lived gave this infinitely evil bastard but one line of explanation: ‘I hate the Moor.’ What if it’s as simple as that? With all reverence to Shakespeare, I will change one word: ‘I hate the Whore.’
Jack wasn’t the first, or the last, to make women a target of hate.
He went over there, ripped her clothes off, and took a knife and cut her from the vagina almost all the way up, just about to her breast and pulled the organs out, completely out of her cavity, and threw them out. Then he stooped and knelt over and commenced to peel every bit of skin off her body and left her there as a sign for something or other.
The italics aren’t mine, but Jane Caputi’s, whose book The Age of Sex Crime this comes from.
‘Left her there as a sign for something or other’.
As with much in Caputi’s book, her judgement here is precise. Although her description echoes aspects of the Ripper’s crime scenes, she’s actually writing about a squad of American soldiers who have just beaten and shot a Vietnamese woman to death. The perpetrator here is a representative of USAID. ‘Such crimes are indistinguishable from the crimes of Jack the Ripper,’ writes Caputi; ‘both are meant to signify the same thing – the utter vanquishment and annihilation of the enemy.’15
You don’t have to be ‘insane’ to cut people up, no matter how fiendishly you do it. You just have to hate enough. The Whitechapel Murderer was a beast who hated women (one young American woman in particular), but no way was he insane.
In 1889 an American lawyer wrote about the Ripper scandal in a Boston legal journal called the Green Bag. Considering his piece is contemporary, it is quite remarkable in its perceptions, and is not remotely taken in by the forest of nonsense being put out at the time. It’s far too long to reproduce in its entirety. This edited version therefore is mine, as are the emphases.
It is surprising that, in the present cases, there has been a failure to discover the perpetrator of the deeds; for they have not been ordinary murders. Not only are the details as revolting as any which the records of medical jurisprudence contain; they are also marked by certain characteristics which at first sight would seem to afford a particularly strong likelihood of the crimes being cleared up. The very number of the crimes, the almost exact repetition of the murderer’s procedure in each, the similarity of hour and circumstances, the elaborate mutilation of the bodies … these things might not unnaturally be expected to give some clue.16
My kind of lawyer. I couldn’t agree more, exploration of the words ‘marked by certain characteristics’ being the aspiration of this book.
Yet this abundance of circumstance gives none. So far from giving a clue, they would seem to conspire to baffle the police.
The writer goes on to dismiss the theory of a ‘homicidal maniac’ as an unreliable proposition:
It is the very atrocity of the Whitechapel murders that gave rise to the theory of their being the work of a madman. It is not a novel line of reasoning, this. Only let the deed be surpassingly barbarous, and the ordinary mind will at once leap to the conclusion that it was a maniac who wrought it. Now, the inference is quite fallacious. Some of the most barbarous murders on record have been perpetrated by admittedly sane men – men on whose perfect soundness of mind no doubt has ever been cast. The mutilation of the bodies of these wretched women in East London, taken by itself, is no indication whatever of insanity on the part of the perpetrator of the deeds. The craft and the cunning evinced in the murders seems little to consist with insanity. The rash and uncalculating act of the lunatic is not here. No doubt there are on record a few isolated cases of considerable caution being shown on the part of insane homicides; but we are not acquainted with any which approach to the present display of prudence and circumspection. The craftiness of these deeds is astounding; and the highest tribute to it is the fact that all attempts at detection have been made in vain hitherto. The actual execution of his foul deeds must have been swift and dexterous, and shows coolness of hand and steadiness of purpose. These things are all markedly in the direction of disproving insanity.17
But that wouldn’t do for the hierarchy at Scotland Yard; it was not even up for consideration. For mischievous reasons that will explain themselves, the authorities needed a maniac, preferably a foreigner or a Jew.
Havelock Ellis’s hysterically funny but apparently serious book The Criminal (1890) gives a thumbnail sketch of the kind of thing the Metropolitan Police were trying to sell. The following is a description of one such murderer in the dock:
Imagine a sort of abortion, bent and wrinkled, with earthy complexion, stealthy eyes, a face gnawed by scrofula, a slovenly beard framing a yellow bilious face of cunning, dissipated and cruel aspect. The forehead is low, the hair black and thrown backwards, the muscles of a beast of prey. His repellent head was photographed on my memory, and lighting up the sinister features with a sinister gleam, two small piercing eyes of a ferocity which I could scarcely bear to see.18
This perceived horror and ‘lair-dweller’ – as widely prescribed for our world-famous gent – was an unquestioningly well-enjoyed camouflage, relished and accepted not only by the press and public, but by a majority of experts (the Ripperologists of their day): Jack was a Hebrew frightener with the eyes of a ferret, a sort of Elephant Man with no laughs, and on a moonless night his complexion approached hues of the earth from a freshly violated grave:
The eye of the habitual criminal is glassy, cold, and fixed; his nose is often aquiline, beaked, reminding one of a bird of prey. The jaws are strong, the canine teeth much developed, the lips thin, nystagmus frequent, also spasmodic contractions of one side of the face, by which the canine teeth are exposed.19
Now, I don’t know about you, but if I was a hardened, streetwise East End whore, half-sloshed and desperate for fourpence or not, I would definitely avoid going up an alley with this man. Forget the canine teeth, it’s the spasmodic contractions of one side of the face that would do it for me.
No whore in Christendom is going to entertain it. But just in case she does, there’s more. Let’s overlook Talbot and his ‘degenerate ear’ (1886), and move straight to Ottolenghi (1888), who described the ‘extraordinary ape-like agility noted in criminals’, a characteristic sometimes accompanied by ‘unusual length of arm’; he also drew attention to the prevalence of the ‘prehensile foot’. In 1886 Giovenale Salsotto apparently found ‘abundant hair round the anus’. So you knew what to look out for.20
What the Victorians feared in their Ripper was a manifestation of their own prejudices, and it was rubbish like this that got women killed. ‘Your suspect, ladies, is an anthropophagite goon, and local Israelite. Avoid large noses and hair round the anus and you’ll be all right.’
It all kicked off with this, fly-posted and hawked all over the East End immediately after the murder of Annie Chapman, with no complaints from the police.
Another murder of a character even more diabolical than that perpetrated in Buck’s Row, on Friday week, was discovered in the same neighbourhood, on Saturday morning. At about six o’clock a woman [Chapman] was found lying in a back yard at the foot of a passage leading to a lodging-ho
use in Old Brown’s Lane, Spitalfields.
The hunt was now on for a man called John Pizer, a.k.a ‘Leather Apron’, who was ‘known to carry knives’. This was not entirely unreasonable, since his trade was as a boot-finisher – which is presumably why he also wore an apron.
Pizer was a Jew, well known to the police in Whitechapel. In the light of what was to evolve, it is noticeable that the authorities showed little care for Hebrew sensibilities. When they weren’t accusing Jews, the police were destroying potential vital evidence in the ridiculous pretence of protecting them from anti-Semitic attack. As will be seen, from various schools of Ripperology there’s been a catalogue of excuses for the police concerning the obliteration of some writing on a wall at Goulston Street, near the scene of one of the murders. (Ripperology calls this writing ‘graffito’. This unhelpful sobriquet has attracted a good deal of explaining away and very little explaining.) But, as is my intention to demonstrate, not a few senior policemen had a vested interest in the maintenance of bafflement and the dissemination of fairy tales.
Let’s just have a brief look at the sad case of another utterly innocent little Jew, called Kosminski. His star rose when certain Ripperologists gave credibility to a bit of worthless moonshine in the margins of a book. This scribble is known, with some reverence, as ‘the Swanson Marginalia’.
Donald Swanson was a Met cop, and the book in question, in which he proffered his note, was a volume of reminiscence by Sir Robert Anderson, who at the time of the Ripper crimes was the head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) at Scotland Yard.
Hearts got in a flutter at the discovery of this ‘marginalia’. Amongst other non-starters, one of the names endorsed as a possible suspect by Swanson was the aforementioned Kosminski, who, according to the later Assistant Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten, was a prime candidate due to his addiction to ‘solitary vices’ – in other words, jerking off.
They All Love Jack Page 2
