Sir Albert stands next to Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, who himself stands next to one of his father’s pals, the Earl of Lathom. The Prince of Wales wears the Holy Cloak; Sir John George stands at his side with sword raised in a tradition of fealty stretching back to the Crusades. And last but not least, we see Masonic historian and Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, Bro Sir Charles Warren.
Warren was well in favour with his future King, a house-guest at the country pile where Edward would guzzle, gamble, hunt, and fuck other people’s wives. In January 1888 ‘The Prince and Princess of Wales were present at a special meet of the West Norfolk Hunt at Sandringham, the principal guests of their Royal Highnesses taking part in the sport.’ The occasion was Clarence’s twenty-fourth birthday, and ‘Bro Sir Charles Warren arrived at Sandringham on a visit that same day’.16 Broadening the legal side of life, Edward’s intimates further included Lord Brampton, ‘the clever, witty, and eccentric judge’ better known as Sir Henry Hawkins (who had put Ernest Parke in prison), and the corpulent Sir Charles Russell, who, as already noted, was to become a star performer in the so-called ‘Maybrick Mystery’.
All were members of a self-regulating occult matrix in which everyone knew everyone, and everyone knew in which direction the bowing was done. ‘In every age monarchs themselves have been promoters of the Art; in return Freemasons have always shown an unshakable devotion to the Crown and its legal government.’17 Fealty was the name of the game, and somewhere inside it was a psychopathic bomb that could have shafted the lot of them.
Jack the Ripper had the guile of Satan, and would bring catastrophe to any who had a mind to challenge him. He was the embodiment of corruption, and corrupted whatever came into his sphere. Fear was his power, far beyond Whitechapel. It was an idiosyncratic fear with implications right to the top.
Was Warren – or anyone else – going to put the ruling elite at risk for a handful of whores? Endless falsehoods answer the question, endless nonsense underlines it. In order to protect themselves the Establishment would do anything in their power to brazen out any criticism, fix any court, and tell any lie.
Warren wasn’t an evil man, far from it, but presented with so unique an evil he became its supplicant. I have to admit to a momentary sympathy for Charlie – a man of his age – when faced with the momentous dilemma on that wall at Goulston Street. Never mind Commissioner Smith’s City Police photographs, the pictures below were etched into the very essence of Warren’s being.
Warren had less than forty days to survive as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and he devoted every one of them to breaking the law. Motivated by misplaced loyalty and authoritarian hubris, a coterie of senior officers at Scotland Yard conspired to create and coordinate an environment that couldn’t have been more favourable to the psychopath in their midst.
‘The Whitechapel Murderer is certainly a marvelous being,’ wrote the New York Tribune. ‘He is not only able to carry out his bloody work without molestation, but may even have it in his power to overturn a government.’18
Jack had a ‘Funny Little Game’, and survival was the name of Warren’s, articulated most succinctly by the Birkett Committee some sixty years later. ‘The detection and suppression of crime,’ it opined, ‘is essential to good government in any society, but not so fundamental as the security of the state itself.’19
Audi, Vide, Tace.
7
The Ink-Stained Hack
Where law ends, there tyranny begins.
William Pitt, 1770
The function of the Establishment was (and is) the preservation of the Establishment. The Official Secrets Act was presented to Parliament in 1888 by Salisbury’s legal butler, Bro Sir Richard Webster. Made law in 1889, it has ever after been abused and become a bolt-hole for scoundrels.1
Concurrent with the Ripper scandal, literally on a day-to-day basis, the Salisbury government was engineering a ‘foul conspiracy’ (not my words, but those of the Lord Chief Justice Lord Coleridge in 1889) to destroy the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Parnell. Chief of the CID Sir Robert Anderson was the helmsman of this particular conspiracy, which is why the record has scant reference to him in respect of the Whitechapel Fiend. Anderson could lie like a back-alley slut, and was up to his dandruff in a clandestine duplicity. At the zenith of both his and Warren’s criminal activity (the autumn of 1888) he is supposed to have ‘gone on holiday’ to the Continent, when in reality he was secretly manipulating and conspiring with both press and Parliament in what it was hoped would be a death blow to Parnell and his dream of an independent Ireland.
Documents in respect of Anderson’s covert activities were originally classified under the ‘hundred-year rule’. But when the hundred years was up, they were reclassified to keep them secret in perpetuity. They are an ‘official secret’. So even today, in the twenty-first century, British citizens are not allowed to know what nineteenth-century policemen were up to.2
In respect of Jack the Ripper, the Metropolitan Police (MEPO) files are not working documents of an investigation, but largely heavily-weeded scraps of dubious concoction. They are not a record, but a ‘story’ as the System wanted it told, and it was Chief Inspector Donald Swanson who was chosen to tell it.
After the ritualistic murder of Annie Chapman on 8 September 1888, Charles Warren took two strategic decisions relating to the Metropolitan Police’s investigation. The first was a suffocating ban to prevent any information getting out; and the second, draconian control of all information within. Other than as a conduit for misinformation – the search for ‘lairs’, promoting the idea of a ‘Jew’, etc. – the press was to be kept at the end of a very long arm. ‘Under pain of dismissal,’ recorded a contemporary pressman, ‘the detectives refused information, even to accredited representatives of the London papers.’3
At Scotland Yard, things were no different. By a process later known as ‘compartmentalisation’, information was to be channelled upwards, as the exclusive property of an elite. On 15 September, exactly one week after Chapman’s death, Warren wrote, or more likely dictated, a memo (pomposity requiring a few self-congratulatory words before he got to his point). ‘I am convinced,’ he mused, ‘that the Whitechapel Murder case is one that can be successfully grappled with if it is systematically taken in hand. I go so far as to say that I could myself unravel the mystery provided I could spare the time and give individual attention to it.’4
Well, bravo to you, you self-serving idiot, and a pity it is you found time at five o’clock in the morning to apply individual attention to a wall.
‘I feel therefore,’ he continued, ‘the utmost importance to be attached to putting the whole Central Office work in this case in the hands of one man who will have nothing else to concern himself with.’
That man was a forty-year-old Scot, the aforementioned Swanson, ‘who must be acquainted with every detail [Warren’s emphasis]. I look upon him for the time being as the eyes and ears of the Commissioner in this particular case.’ Acquisition of Warren’s blighted organs wasn’t the end of it. ‘He must have a room to himself, and every paper, every document, every report, every telegram must pass through his hands. He must be consulted on every subject,’ insists the memo. ‘I would not send any directions anywhere on the subject of the murder without consulting him. I give him the whole responsibility … All the papers [Warren’s emphasis] in Central Office on the subject of the murder must be kept in his room. I must have this matter put on a proper footing, everything depends on a careful compliance with these directions.’5
Certainly the subterfuge Warren was initiating depended on compliance, and a paragraph added in his own hand is indicative of his determination to hammer the instruction home: ‘Every document, letter received [my emphasis] or telegram on the subject should go to his room before being directed when necessary. This is to avoid the possibility of documents being delayed or action retarded.’
Underneath are the initials of those in the loop: ‘A.C.B.’, Assi
stant Commissioner Alexander Carmichael Bruce, acknowledged the directive on the day it was written, as did ‘A.F.W.’, Chief Constable Adolphus Frederick Williamson, who noted, ‘seen 15/9/88’.6
Swanson’s mandate covers everything: every docket, document, plan and telegram, every ‘letter received’. For the time being, I want to confine interest to the receipt of just one such letter.
On 29 September 1888, the Central News Agency forwarded a letter it had received to Scotland Yard. It was marked for the attention of Chief Constable Williamson, who as signatory to Warren’s instructions was duty bound to pass it on to Swanson post-haste. Because both of them were in the same building, this shouldn’t have taken more than a minute or two.
Swanson was now looking at what is probably the most notorious document in this whole hideous pantomime. Known subsequently as the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, and considered to be the first outing of the Beast’s nom de plume, it is signed, ‘yours truly Jack the Ripper’.
25 Sept 1888
Dear Boss
I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I can’t use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck.
yours truly
Jack the Ripper
Don’t mind me giving the trade name.
Written at a right-angle below the main text and as an apparent afterthought:
Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it. No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now ha ha
Bro Donald Swanson (Lodge of St Peter’s 284)7 was an apt choice as Warren’s ‘eyes and ears’. It was his responsibility ‘to avoid the possibility of documents being delayed or action retarded’. Under such an uncompromising stricture, knowledge of ‘Dear Boss’ and the letter itself must have gone directly to Warren. We know he was in London, and Scotland Yard wasn’t a corner shop. If Superintendent Arnold can wake Warren in the middle of the night to inform him of some writing on a wall, it shouldn’t have been a difficult task for Swanson to inform his boss of the arrival of a letter in the middle of the day. Broad daylight, no telegraph or telephone required (although the boss had both). Chances are it was only a stroll into the next-door office.
The ramifications of this are startling. We are talking about 29 September, the daylight before the night of the ‘Double Event’. By any balance of probability, it means that Warren would have known about ‘Dear Boss’ when he scurried out of bed that night to wash off that wall. Indeed, I’d bet my low card it was the reason he did it. Following hard on his heels came a poster campaign that must rank amongst the most ridiculous in history.
The Metropolitan Police reproduced the letter and a subsequent postcard, and slapped posters up all over East London. The universal petition that ‘Any person recognising the handwriting is requested to communicate with the nearest police station’ was rendered a tad academic, since the only person who might have recognised it was the Commissioner of Police, and he’d just washed it off.
This novel reaction to evidence has been examined in a previous chapter. Without wishing to re-tread the cobbles at Goulston Street, and irrespective of the forever lost handwriting, I want to explore how ‘Dear Boss’ might otherwise relate to the writing on the wall. Take a look at this. It’s a letter from an intelligent citizen, published in the Daily News on 2 October 1888, and I think it gets close to identifying the problem.
Sir – As the track of the Whitechapel monster or monsters becomes more and more thickly besprinkled with the blood, and bestrewn with the mutilated remains of successive victims, there is something almost paralysing in the ghastly sameness with which the newspaper reports wind up:– ‘No clue to the identity of the murderer has yet been found’; ‘No circumstance speedily tending to the discovery of the criminal has yet been observed’; and, ‘It is understood that, although not the remotest clue has been discovered, the police have a theory,’ and so on ad nauseam … Now, Sir, is this not a matter of grave complaint against our detective system? It is easy to say that without something to work upon the police cannot be expected to smell the murderer out. Most emphatically I maintain that it is the duty of the detective to discover and pursue for himself clues suggested by such trifling indications as would escape the attention of the casual or the unskilled observer. We retain a large and expensive body of men, and we have the right to demand at their hands things which, except to specialists and experts, may rightly be called impossible. Sir Charles Warren, pious disciplinarian and enthusiastic soldier that he is, must feel deeply his responsibility for all this …
T.B.R.
That he did, but it wasn’t a responsibility as understood by this correspondent. T.B.R. perceptively identifies the ‘spin’ and reality of what was actually going on – NOTHING – but he doesn’t understand that Warren wasn’t interested in detection, but in the strategy of its avoidance. He was an iron filing at the mercy of a magnet, subject to a dynamic of which the public could have no inkling, and he would tell any porky, promote any falsehood, and rush to any location to facilitate the subterfuge. Bro Warren couldn’t catch Jack the Ripper: he was precisely the reason he was never caught.
Mr Paul Begg informs us that ‘the Masonic Conspiracy’, as he calls it, ‘has now been thoroughly discredited’.8 My response to this assertion is, by whom? Certainly not by Ripperology, or indeed by the Freemasons, whose protestations implode like a line of perished balloons. The single ‘thoroughly discredited’ contrivance is the bullshit put about by a Freemason in the first place, implicating the Duke of Clarence. Ripperologists who dismiss the chalked-up message do so with a superficial understanding of British Masonic ritual. Although wildly incorrect, Mr Begg at least concedes that ‘In the United States however, the names Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum, were and are used.’9
Well, that’s a start, and in terms of detection it may have been of interest to correspondents like T.B.R. The Victorian police may well have demonstrated what the Evening News described as ‘the nous of tailors’ dummies’,10 but even they were able to identify and draw attention to ‘Americanisms’ in ‘Dear Boss’. They could hardly do otherwise. The newspapers were doing it for them. ‘Boss, Fix me, Shant Quit and Right Away, are American forms of expression. The writer is probably an American,’ concluded the Daily Telegraph, which, with quite extraordinary accuracy, continued, ‘or an Englishman, who has mixed with “our cousins” on the other side of the Atlantic.’11
If Mr Begg can acknowledge the murderous trio of J.J.J. as familiar names in nineteenth-century American Freemasonry (just as they were, according to Bro Woodford, in English), and the police themselves are able to recognise American slang in ‘Dear Boss’, what’s the problem with considering an American Freemason, or someone pretending to be one, as ‘yours truly Jack the Ripper’? ‘Just for jolly’, Mr Begg? Just as part of ‘no clue too small’, as that inimitable investigative force Sir Robert Anderson so fastidiously put it?
We had an American Gatherer of Wombs; what’s wrong with an American Ripper? Or is that a forensic leap too far? It certainly was for Charlie Warren and his boys, who were leaping in the opposite direction. Warren and his minions speedily denounced ‘Dear Boss’ as a hoax, and predictably the hypnotised herd went along with him.
Ripperologist Mr Melvin Harris is not only an expert,
but according to his own dust-wrapper ‘one of the world’s top experts’, and Mr Harris tells us ‘Dear Boss’ is a fake. It’s the work of a juvenile ‘ink-stained hack’, he decrees, and let’s hear no more about it. ‘While the press fished around for copy,’ says Melvin, ‘an immature and irresponsible journalist decided to manufacture some of his own in the form of a mocking letter supposed to be penned by the killer himself. It was dated 25th September but not posted until the 27th, and not sent to the police or any specific paper but to the Central News Agency in Fleet St.’12
Irresponsible this creation certainly was, but it suggests more talent in the department of clairvoyance than journalism. Harris knows it now, and ‘yours truly’ knew it then, but who at the time knew that the next murder was imminent. ‘Keep this letter back,’ he instructs, ‘till I do a bit more work.’ And it’s clear that he himself kept the letter back – it’s dated 25 September, but was withheld until the 27th. It’s not difficult to suppose that he was trying to coordinate its arrival for maximum impact on Saturday the 29th.
The concept that this letter is a ‘hoax’ begins to evaporate with the reality of its premise. By way of comparison, let us say an anti-terrorist officer sits at Scotland Yard, and circuitously a letter arrives threatening to blow up a plane. That night, not one, but two aeroplanes are blown to pieces.
Is the letter a hoax? Or is the officer who tosses it in the trash – let’s say Inspector Melvin Harris – making an assumption that is beyond his intellectual capacity? There are many men and women whom I revere for their cognitive expertise, but Melvin isn’t one.
‘Hoax’ comes from ‘hocus pocus’, a world of Tinkerbell, conjurers and that most mesmerising of ingredients, ‘mystery’. It is the vernacular of deception, as in a magician’s trick. But where is the deception in a pair of cut-throats? Was that the work of a journalist, or a psychopath? Both the letter and the writing on the wall had the intention of mocking the police, and ‘Dear Boss’ came first. Unless Mr Harris believes the killer was influenced by a letter he couldn’t have seen (short of writing it himself), how could an ‘ink-stained hack’ predict not only the timing, but also the tone of a murderer? Or does he think it was an immature and irresponsible journalist who cut off and brought a piece of Catherine Eddowes’ apron to Goulston Street?
They All Love Jack Page 24
