They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  Maths was not a problem for a journalist by the name of George Sims, who wrote a weekly column for the Referee under the title ‘Mustard and Cress’. Sims’ derisive comments don’t do a lot for the idea that nobody said anything about Freemasonry in connection with the murders until the arrival of Mr Stephen Knight.

  On 9 September 1888, the day after Chapman’s death, Sims wrote this: ‘The police up to the moment of writing are still at sea as to the series of Whitechapel murders – a series with such a strong family likeness as to point to one assassin or firm of assassins’ (my emphasis).

  ‘Assassins’ and ‘ruffians’ are interchangeable in the mythos of Freemasonry. Notwithstanding that, what did Sims have in mind when he wrote of a ‘firm of assassins’? Is it the same question posed in a pamphlet dedicated to Bro Sir John Corah, published in Anno Lucis 4954? ‘What is this drama of Assassination?’ he asks. ‘And whence is it derived?’1

  Sims needed no explanation. He was a Freemason himself, and on 16 September 1888 he returned to his theme. ‘The police may be playing a game of spoof [swindle, humbug or fraud, according to The Oxford English Dictionary], but the fact remains that in no suggestion made by the authorities up to the present is the slightest technical knowledge of the “speciality” of the Whitechapel atrocities shown.’

  Bro Sims doesn’t elucidate what he means by ‘speciality’,2 but that didn’t prevent him adding a bit of cynical doggerel to underline his drift:

  The Summer had come in September at last,

  And the pantomime season was coming on fast,

  When a score of detectives arrived from the Yard

  To untangle a skein which was not very hard.

  It puzzled the Bar, and puzzled the Bench,

  It puzzled policemen, Dutch, German and French,

  But ’twas clear as a pikestaff to all London ’tecs,

  Who to see through a wall didn’t want to wear specs.

  ‘Clear as a pikestaff’ it was, to Bro Sims as it is to me. But the Metropolitan Police didn’t want to see anything, through spectacles or anything else. Warren and his ‘’tecs’ would have seen nothing worth investigating if they’d been staring at the Ripper in action through an open window.

  During the stalled Chapman inquiry, Inspector Abberline of H Division, Whitechapel, consulted with Detective Inspector Helson of J Division, CID, an officer who was (or should have been) still working on the Nichols horror at Buck’s Row in Whitechapel. There were clear similarities between the two cases, and Abberline was palpably having a problem with his. According to the Daily Telegraph on 15 September, ‘Inspector Abberline himself says that the Police Surgeon [Bro Dr George Bagster Phillips] has not told him what portions of the body are missing.’3

  Is this not extraordinary – that a police surgeon should hoard evidence to himself? If true, it means that Abberline was in the dark, riding around on flat tyres. ‘From independent testimony,’ continues the Telegraph, ‘it has been gathered that the description of them [body parts] would enable the jury, if not the public, to form some idea of the motive of the singular crime, and at the same time it would perhaps enable the police to pursue their investigations on a wider basis, and probably with the object of showing that the guilty man moves in a more respectable rank of life than that to which the larger proportion of the inhabitants of Spitalfields and Whitechapel belong.’

  At this point, then, the mutilations peculiar to Chapman had not yet been revealed to the public, nor apparently to one of Whitechapel’s most senior detectives. Astonishing as it seems, we have a police surgeon withholding evidence crucial to Abberline’s investigation. Hence the Inspector’s liaison with Helson. No progress there, either. Joseph Helson was no more forthcoming than, and just as baffled by it all as, Bro Dr Bagster Phillips. ‘They have nothing to suggest,’ was the sum total of it, according to the Daily News, ‘and in the case of Nichols, to judge by an observation of Inspector Helson on Saturday, they have no hope of any further evidence.’4

  In which case we may as well look at a photograph to pass the time. Inspector Joseph Helson is the Freemason with the beard on the right.

  So that’s that, then. Bro Helson doesn’t know any more than Bro Dr Bagster Phillips. Meanwhile, Phillips was poised to show equal reticence in a coroner’s court.

  The coroner in question was a forty-four-year-old solicitor, fond of elegant clothes and his own opinions. By any definition, and certainly his own, Wynne Baxter was a man of importance. He had written one of the standard works on the coroner’s trade, Judicature Acts and Rules, and, never shy of his stature in the Victorian scheme of things, his telegraph address was ‘Inquest London’. Conservative to the marrow but of sincere social conscience, Baxter had risen inexorably through Establishment ranks, becoming Junior High Constable in 1880 and first Mayor of his home town, Lewes, the following year. In 1887 he’d been elected as Coroner for East Middlesex (Whitechapel included), and in that capacity almost all of Jack’s outings became the business of his court. He presided over inquests into Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Rose Mylett, Alice McKenzie and Frances Coles.

  Baxter was Establishment to his manicured fingertips, but he was no Establishment stooge. Minions of the state were no less immune to his searching invective than stupid witnesses (the cops got a crisp bollocking over allowing Nichols to be removed to the morgue without noticing she’d been disembowelled).

  An adjournment in respect of Nichols meant that Baxter’s summing-up was delivered in concurrence with the inquest following it. He was thus able to compare the postmortem atrocities she had suffered with those of Chapman. ‘The similarity of the injuries in the two cases was considerable,’ he observed. ‘There were bruises about the face in both cases, the head nearly severed from the body in both cases.’ It was at this point that his perceptions diverged from those of the police surgeon assigned to Nichols: ‘Doctor Llewellyn seemed to incline to the opinion that the abdominal injuries were inflicted first, and caused instantaneous death; but, if so, it seemed difficult to understand such desperate injuries to the throat. Surely it might well be that, as in the case of Chapman, the dreadful wounds to the throat were first inflicted and the abdominal afterwards?’ ‘That was a matter of importance,’ he remarked, ‘when they [the jury] came to consider the possible motive there could be for all this ferocity.’

  A matter of importance indeed; and but for the intervention of the System via Bro Dr Phillips two days later, a matter that would doubtless have been explained. Phillips was a Pecksniff of classic self-delusion whose misguided loyalties would debase Baxter and turn his court into a national laughing stock.

  The inquiry into the death of Annie Chapman began on 12 September 1888 at the Working Lads’ Institute, Whitechapel. It was a virtual rerun of Nichols. A string of witnesses and protracted testimony over who, what and where led to the inevitable verdict ‘Wilful murder against some person or persons unknown’.

  The hearings lasted over five sessions. In my view there was only one witness of real significance, and he was the one who didn’t want to talk. Bro Dr Phillips arrived on day three. His evidence was punctilious and comprehensive, until he came to the tender question of the mutilations. There was then a change of tone. These horrors, he insisted, had been performed after death, and therefore had no relevance to the cause of it.

  Predicated on such vacuous nonsense, it was of no importance that, for example, John George Haigh dissolved his victims in acid after shooting them through the head.5 It was a .45 bullet that killed them, and the carboy brimming with H2SO4 was merely a bit of local ephemera. There was nothing left of Haigh’s last victim but a couple of gallstones and a pair of dentures. Teeth with no face, but what a story they chattered. You don’t need to be William Shakespeare to hear whispers from the throats of the dead. But according to The Times, Phillips ‘thought that he had better not go into further details of the mutilations, which could only be painful to the feelings of the jury and the public’.

&
nbsp; The jury weren’t here for a lullaby, and this was tosh. Baxter formulated this view with more diplomacy. ‘The object of the enquiry,’ he reminded Phillips, ‘is not only to ascertain the cause of death, but the means by which it occurred. Any mutilations which took place afterwards may suggest the character of the man who did it.’

  ‘The character of the man who did it’ was precisely what Phillips was trying to avoid. While feigning concern for the sensitivity of others, his posture was actually obscene, of utility to no one but the bloody outrage rampaging around Whitechapel. Phillips was covering up, cynically playing the same shabby card Warren was about to pull from his sleeve in Goulston Street.

  Stand by for the obligatory dose of fairy dust, courtesy once again of Mr Philip Sugden. ‘Phillips was not party to an Establishment hush-up of any royal scandal,’ he soothes. ‘He was simply conforming to the code of practice that Howard Vincent had bequeathed to the CID, a code that required the utmost discretion on the part of police officers in all cases in which the identity of the culprit has not been established.’6

  Irrespective of the fact that Bro Dr Phillips was not a police officer, this is one of the most singularly ridiculous sentences in Mr Sugden’s book. I shall be returning to ‘Vincent’s Code’, and the contempt in which Warren held it, in the following chapter. Meanwhile, to evoke Vincent here is to reduce his ‘Code of Practice’ to the musings of Donald Duck.

  Are we supposed to believe that Phillips was withholding information for the public good, that ‘caution’ was somehow the bedfellow of impending forensic breakthrough? Was he poised – together with the indefatigable efforts of Scotland Yard – for a triumphant exposition that would make sense of Vincent and shortly reveal all? I’m afraid not. In fact, nothing could be more distant from reality. At Elizabeth Stride’s inquest some few weeks hence, Bro Phillips would dissemble like a common delinquent, and at the shameful ‘inquest’ into the death of Mary Jane Kelly he attempted not to show up at all.7

  Vincent’s Code? The only man laughing was a psychopath. Plus, I’d like to know to which code Mr Sugden refers. I have a copy of Vincent (1881), and in the context of homicide he properly makes no reference to a coroner’s court. He had no jurisdiction in such a place – its procedures were conducted under the Rules of the Coroner. I suggest some other excuse for Phillips’s obfuscation must need to be hammered to fit. Nor should we forget the superannuated nonsense riding pillion: ‘Phillips was not party to an Establishment hush-up of any royal scandal.’ Well, thanks for that, but I think we’ve already got the gist, which I believe appears as points 6 to 11 of Instructions to a Freemason under interrogatory distress.

  But at least there’s something over which Mr Sugden and I can agree: Phillips was not party to a hush-up of any royal scandal (Bro Stowell hadn’t yet invented it), and the Duke of Clarence had nothing whatsoever to do with Jack the Ripper. Clarence was not Jack. And let it be understood that by hauling this hapless royal idiot back from the grave to dismiss ‘royal scandal’ does not by a process of osmosis dismiss an ‘Establishment hush-up’. No, Phillips was not covering up for the royal family. But yes, he was covering up for Freemasonry.

  A week later he was back on the witness stand, and this time Baxter wasn’t in the mood for waffle. Once again he wanted to know about the mutilations, and once again Bro Phillips didn’t want to tell him.

  BAXTER: Whatever may be your opinions and objections, it appears to me necessary that all the evidence that you ascertained from the postmortem examination should be on the records of the court for various reasons which I need not enumerate. However painful it may be, it is necessary in the interests of justice.

  DR PHILLIPS: I have not had any notice of that. I should be glad if notice had been given me, because I should have been better prepared to give evidence.

  This pretence hit the deck when Baxter offered another postponement. Such delay was worthless if it meant returning to the issue, and Phillips declined. What exactly did Phillips think he was there for? He was a police surgeon called to give evidence at a coroner’s court, and ‘notice’ of his requirements was surely implicit in his summons. Shuffling his notes, he tried to get away with a rehash of the evidence he’d already given: ‘I think it is a very great pity to make this evidence public. Of course, I bow to your decision, but there are matters which have come to light now which show the wisdom of the course pursued on the last occasion, and I cannot help reiterating my regret that you have come to a different conclusion.’

  How Baxter was supposed to arrive at a conclusion over matters he was unaware of isn’t explained. He was just as much in the dark as everyone else. Phillips then went on to rehearse his descriptions of the bruises on Chapman’s face, as though this were the information everyone sought. Both Baxter and the jury had heard it before, but apparently it was all they were going to get.

  DR PHILLIPS: When I come to speak of wounds on the lower part of the body I must again repeat my opinion that it is highly injudicious to make the results of my examination public.

  BAXTER: We are here in the interests of justice and must have all the evidence before us.

  Exasperated with this obstruction, Baxter ordered that ‘several ladies and [newspaper messenger] boys in the room should leave’. Phillips had now run out of excuses, but still flapped about like something the tide had left. Shifting from jurors’ sensibilities, he had a go at the ‘ends of justice’: ‘In giving these details to the public, I believe you are thwarting the ends of justice.’

  Baxter had had enough, and so had the jury.

  BAXTER: We are bound to take all the evidence in the case, and whether it be made public or not is a matter for the responsibility of the press.

  FOREMAN: We are of opinion that the evidence the doctor on the last occasion wished to keep back should be heard.

  Several jurymen endorsed this with cries of ‘Hear, hear.’

  ‘I have carefully considered the matter,’ ruled Baxter, ‘and have never before heard of any evidence requested being held back.’ Considering that during his long career Baxter was to preside over thousands of such hearings, this was quite a statement. Doing to death by unpleasant means was the stock in trade of a coroner’s court, and he had never before heard of any evidence being held back. So what was the game, doc?

  ‘I have not kept it back,’ whined Phillips. ‘I have only suggested it should not be given out’ (which to the average ear sounds remarkably like keeping it back). Presumably he was defending the police’s claim that there was ‘not the slightest clue to the murderer’. Well, if he never left a clue, why withhold it?

  In reality the mutilations didn’t represent anything as mundane as a ‘clue’, but were the essence of what these murders were, duplicated with escalating symbolic ferocity time after time. They were irrefutable evidence of ritualistic murder, and the only question outstanding was: What was the ritual?

  Baxter had skated into dangerous territory, insisting on his court’s rights even as the ice cracked under his feet.

  BAXTER: We have delayed taking this evidence as long as possible, because you said the interests of justice may be served by keeping it back; but it is now a fortnight since this occurred, and I do not see why it should be kept back from the jury any longer.

  DR PHILLIPS: I am of opinion that what I am about to describe took place after death, so that it could not affect the cause of death you are enquiring into.

  BAXTER: That is only your opinion, and might be repudiated by other medical opinion.

  DR PHILLIPS: Very well, I will tell you the results of my postmortem examination.

  The newspapers declined to print his description, which was ‘totally unfit for publication’ according to The Times. Seekers of sensation would have to make do with the medical journal the Lancet, which limited itself to précis: ‘It appears that the abdomen had been entirely laid open; that the intestines, severed from their mesenteric attachments, had been lifted out of the body and placed by the shoulder of t
he corpse.’8

  Chapman’s shocking list of injuries must have chilled the court, and especially the coroner who had demanded it. As the doctor enunciated each telling word, Baxter must have realised what all the reticence was about. Bro Phillips was describing a ritualised enactment of Freemasonic penalty, something any Freemason would have recognised immediately. Bro Wynne Baxter was a Freemason, and recognise it he surely did.

  I have no doubt that (with the exception of the case of the Ripper) both Phillips and Baxter were men of integrity. But, like Shelley’s pestilence, Jack poisoned the very soul of all that was honourable, and with Baxter we can actually see the process of enmeshment in action. Cue the ‘Mystic Tie’. By tradition it is juries that are nobbled. In this case the process was reversed. At the next and last session of Chapman’s inquest, this seasoned coroner, of previously unimpeachable repute, concocted one of the most ridiculous lies ever told in a coroner’s court.

  Baxter had put his foot in it, and it was now incumbent upon him to conjure up something that might serve to explain away Jack’s Masonic surgery in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street. As the finale to his deliberations, the compromised Bro Coroner implanted a preposterous fiction in the jury’s mind. The Ripper had made off with Chapman’s uterus, and this, according to Baxter, was the crux of the matter. Repugnant as this act was, monstrous as it was, there was no reason to suspect that anything other than market forces was at play, ‘For it is clear,’ he shitmouthed, ‘there is a market for the object of the murder.’