They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  It was the exit about to be used by Warren.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The question, of course, is rhetorical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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