They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  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 th
e 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 ex
perience 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