Is it?
I think it’s laughable. How can any modern writer promote this drivel, much less agree with it? In preparation of his argument over Inspector Reid, Mr Sugden says of the disputed farthings, ‘It isn’t in the files’ – as though this could support anything more than the fatuousness of his point. What Mr Sugden doesn’t tell his readers is that there is nothing in these ‘files’ about anything much at all. Those available at the National Archive are titled ‘Unimportant Series’, and of these, eighteen folios are marked as ‘Destroyed’. What’s left are the dregs of anything that isn’t listed as ‘Missing’. What the ‘Important Series’ of Ripper files consisted of no one can say, because no one, including Mr Sugden, has ever seen them. Neither he nor I know what was included in the destroyed files, so we must move our thinking sideways a little.
Farthings were most certainly discovered at Chapman’s crime scene (put there by the Ripper), but before we arrive at why, it’s necessary to test Mr Sugden’s protestations over why they were not. Let it be said at the outset, I don’t need to prove the existence of these farthings. It is already established, two primary contemporary sources confirming it (Inspector Reid and the Telegraph). Independent of one another, and about a year apart, the consistency of their accounts is potent, and just about as good as it gets. The onus therefore is on Mr Sugden to corroborate his ‘myth’, and prove they were wrong.
On page 109 of his book he introduces us to his counter-farthing campaign. He tells us reporters converged on 29 Hanbury Street (its back yard being Chapman’s crime scene). Among them was a man by the name of Oswald Allen, who concocted a press report describing Chapman’s rings as having been wrenched from her finger and ‘placed carefully at the victim’s feet’.
Anyone who knows anything about Hanbury Street (including Mr Sugden and myself) knows this is incorrect. There were no rings at Chapman’s feet. But Oswald has nicely set Mr Sugden’s scene. He has established a foundation of inaccuracy as some kind of bookend by which we’re supposed to measure the rest of Sugden’s argument: i.e., Oswald Allen was wrong, ergo, so were Reid and the Telegraph. In other words, he’s pre-positioned his ‘myth’, and now goes on to try to associate it with fact, apparently hoping that the dismissal of one somehow proves the non-existence of the other.
But this isn’t an argument about rings. It’s an argument about coins. To associate the questionable with something under question is a tactic I’m suspicious of. It is my sincere wish not to misrepresent Sugden, therefore I quote him in full.
Reporters converged on 29 Hanbury Street like angry hornets on the morning of the murder. One of the earliest on the scene was Oswald Allen of the Pall Mall Gazette, and his report which appeared on the streets later in the day carried the assertion that Annie’s rings had been wrenched from her finger and placed at her feet. On the following Monday the Daily Telegraph printed another fable: ‘There were also found two farthings polished brightly, and, according to some, these coins had been passed off as half-sovereigns upon the deceased by her murderer.’ The farthings quickly passed into legend. Even two policemen later gave them credence. In 1889 Inspector Reid told a different murder inquiry that two farthings had been found on or about the body of Annie Chapman, and in 1910 Major Henry Smith alleged in his memoirs that two polished farthings had been discovered in her pocket. Neither man, however, had personally investigated the Hanbury Street case. Reid had been on leave at the time, and Smith, as Chief Superintendent of the City of London force, had no responsibility for policing Spitalfields. In succeeding years the rings and farthings became an obligatory part of the collection of items found at the feet of Annie’s corpse.51
And now the reality.
The Telegraph says nothing about rings, and nothing about feet, and therefore has nothing to do with any conflicting statements made by Oswald Allen. The association between him and the Telegraph is made only by Mr Sugden, so that he can package the two together and dismiss them as one. Moreover, Commissioner Henry Smith says nothing about farthings being discovered in Annie Chapman’s pocket. What he writes in his memoir (page 148) is this: ‘After the second crime I sent word to Sir Charles Warren that I had discovered a man very likely to be the man wanted. He certainly had all the qualifications requisite. He had been a medical student; he had been in a lunatic asylum; he spent all his time with women of loose character, whom he bilked by giving them polished farthings instead of sovereigns, two of these farthings having been found in the pocket of the murdered woman.’52
Nowhere does Smith mention Chapman. He refers to ‘the second crime’, which, as Mr Sugden must know, was Polly Nichols. I’m afraid that yet again Phil is indulging in a little ‘shameless selection’. In his own book (page ix) he nominates Annie Chapman as the fourth of Jack’s victims.
He must also know that Chapman’s pockets were entirely cut open so their contents could be purloined, and that nothing, including farthings, was found in what was left of them. And neither did Inspector Reid say that farthings were found ‘on or about the body of Annie Chapman’. What he said was: ‘In another case of this kind – the Hanbury Street murder – two similar farthings were found.’53 The word ‘on’ is an invention.
Mr Sugden seems a tad over-eager for his readers to believe that metal was left in situ on Chapman’s ritually murdered body when it was not. What he’s up to is, of course, his business. I leave ‘fair-minded students’ to ‘draw their own conclusions’. In the matter of farthings he’s made no case, merely taken a rather convoluted route to agree with himself. Plus, if a week at the seaside disqualifies Reid as a witness, I hate to think what the passage of a century does for Mr Sugden. His wishful thinking makes a lousy argument worse. For to dump Reid also means abandoning one of Ripperology’s darlings, the man responsible for wielding Bro Warren’s famous sponge.
Chief of H Division Whitechapel, Superintendent Thomas Arnold was also away on leave, from 2 to 28 September 1888.54 So what faith can we put in all his fabulous excuses for washing off a wall? ‘In consequence of a suspicion having fallen upon a Jew named “John Pizer”,’ he wrote, ‘… I was apprehensive that if the writing were left it would be the means of causing a riot.’
How could he know that? Arnold didn’t ‘personally investigate’ the case, and was away on leave throughout the Pizer saga. According to Mr Sugden’s hypothesis, as he wasn’t there he couldn’t have known anything about it. Thus all that infantile fibbing over riot and concern for Jews goes out the window, and none of the Pizer/riot rubbish can have any credibility.
While I agree 100 per cent with that, I don’t imagine Mr Sugden will. But you can’t have it both ways – one man’s holiday bringing ignorance, and another’s bringing comprehensive insight. Of course Arnold knew about Pizer, just as Reid knew about the farthings, and Robert Anderson, who was also away, knew about all of it. How? Because all were senior policemen, and someone had told them. They had access to a constant traffic of information, and until it was weeded into virtual transparency, there was something called ‘evidence’ in the files.
The Telegraph report remains sound, as does the testimony given by Reid. There were farthings on the ground at Chapman’s crime scene, and considering the overt Freemasonic piss-take it was, it would be surprising if there were not. Reid had been inadvertently indiscreet, but he had good reason for lowering the threshold over McKenzie, and when we arrive at her murder on 17 July 1889, it will be readily apparent why.
As we approach the end of the chapter, this may be as good a place as any to see the back of Pizer and his Jewish sensibilities. He was one of the witnesses called at the Chapman inquest, and he had a good day. It was clear to him, if to no one else, that the police had fitted him up. ‘I wish to vindicate my character to the world at large,’ he said. ‘I have called you in your own interests,’ replied Coroner Baxter, ‘partly with the object of giving you the opportunity of doing so.’
Pizer went on not only to exonerate himself of being ‘the Womb-Collector’
, but also to successfully reject all of the police accusations, including even his damning sobriquet. From the outset he protested that ‘Leather Apron’ was an invention of the Metropolitan Police, and that he had no idea he was called by such a name until Sergeant Thick had baptised him on arrest. Investigations by the press substantiated this, family and neighbours denying that Pizer had ever been known to them as ‘Leather Apron’. Thick had tailored Pizer to fit the crime, a fabrication the accused could barely comprehend: ‘Sergeant Thick who arrested me has known me for eighteen years.’55
‘Well, well,’ rejoined Baxter with shrewd dismissal. ‘I do not think it necessary for you to say more.’
Any more wouldn’t have been useful. Holiday or no holiday, everything Arnold said about Pizer is proved to be nonsense.
Almost from the beginning it became apparent to me that I wasn’t investigating a mystery, but why it was a mystery, and why, ludicrously, it remains so to this day. It became clear that Ripperology was the wholesaler of the mystique, and that to investigate Jack I’d constantly be running into gangs of revisionist paramedics.
The A to Z claims that contemporary criticism of the police was the result of ‘swamping the district with uniformed patrols, who the press claimed were a serious nuisance’. I am unaware of the press to which this refers. Certainly the police were seriously criticised in an eruption of public rage, but it was hardly for ‘swamping the district with uniformed patrols’. To present this as a consensus is absurd; to proffer it as any kind of excuse is reprehensible.
Virtually every contemporary criticism of the police was for the lack of them – be it from the Board of Works, the Whitechapel traders, Lusk’s Vigilance Committee or the student vigilantes operating out of Toynbee Hall. Why does anyone imagine the vigilante committees formed themselves? It was because of a lack of police, as is confirmed in the columns of almost every publication that had an opinion to give. Yet The A to Z sweeps all this aside and finds differently, elevating a bunch of non sequiturs into some kind of exemplary acquittal. An ape at the zoo could have made a better fist of it than Warren, and yet, ‘contrary to popular belief’, minces The A to Z, ‘the police investigation was professional and competent’.56
Tell it to the ghosts.
I do not care for corporate thinking, and therefore I do not like Ripperology. It seems to me to be a feeble thing, afraid of itself, forever looking over its shoulder in case one of its ‘experts’ like Mr Melvin Harris disagrees with something it says. In my view, few have done more to pollute this material than Ripperologists such as Mr Harris and many like him, who routinely underestimate the intelligence of their readers as parallel with their own. I don’t know if Mr Philip Sugden is hypnotised by this material, or is seeking to hypnotise others: a police inspector draws attention to some farthings and provokes an indignant diatribe of denial; a coroner proposes a risible camouflage effervescent with lies (‘the Womb-Collector’), and Mr Sugden obligingly asks how much truth there may be in it?
For what it’s worth, I’ve been a professional writer for the best part of forty years. I’ve researched widely, from the Manhattan Project to the Khmer Rouge, but until confronted with Ripperology I had never laboured through such an expulsion of syncopated crap masquerading as history in all my life. It knows all the ‘facts’, does Ripperology – knows the name of Elizabeth Stride’s home town in Sweden and the number of teeth in her upper jaw – but in respect of context, it hasn’t got a fucking clue. It seems to think the nineteenth-century governing classes (and their police force) were some kind of gold standard of propriety, and as a consequence the corporate effort (with one or two exceptions) is a ludicrous rehash of Victorian propaganda.
Coroner Bro Baxter gave a revealing demonstration of just how artificial this ‘mystery’ really was. It’s populated by a cast of walk-on conveniences, including ‘Leather Apron’ (a good all-rounder, both as bogus suspect and then as alibi for the destruction of evidence). And we mustn’t forget the ‘reward’ that became a ‘pardon’ for the ‘accomplice’ who didn’t exist.
Ripperology is somehow blind to it all, comic absurdities accepted as though they’d never appeared. It is a ‘mystery’ that was made up as it went along, characters being invented to fit the twists and turns of the limelit melodrama. Ripperology gawps in the stalls, starry-eyed at each new scene change and baffled by the special effects. It cannot, or will not, see the wires that make the mirrors move, or the bellows that fart out puffs of smoke. Instead, it gasps in the darkness of marvels – ‘Look! Look! It’s the Ink-Stained Journalist! I tell a lie, it’s the Insane Medical Student! Ha ha. But look! Who comes there? A suspicious-looking cove if ever I’ve seen one. Why, it’s the dear old cobbler who sold the tight shoes! It’s a wonderful show!! Who wrote it? Why, a man called Swanson, and he’s got lots and lots to come!! You should see the tricks he pulls before your very eyes! And you’ll never see how it’s done! There are Jews and Irishmen and masturbating dwarfs, Malays from ships in the Port o’ London, and cowboys even from the American Wild West!! All will pass before you! All will dazzle!!! There’s even a comedian singing a topical hit called “Vincent’s Code”. But you’ll never see the star of the Great Masonic Mystery Show, because he might fuck it all up, and he must forever remain a “Mystery”.’
In a previous chapter we saw how the police denied and destroyed their best ever evidence at Goulston Street. In the next, we will see how they denied and destroyed their best ever witness.
8
The Double Event: Part Two
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarasthustra
Of all the atrocities committed by Jack the Ripper, it is paradoxically his least successful that is the most revealing.
By that I don’t necessarily mean revealing of his identity, but rather of those struggling to conceal it. The tomfoolery masquerading as investigation into the murder of Elizabeth Stride is characterised by its brainlessness and breadth of deception, what the East London Observer recorded as ‘demoralisation and corruption inside the Metropolitan Police’.1 The East London Advertiser was more specific. ‘It is clear,’ it wrote, ‘that there is no detective force in the proper sense of the word in London at all.’2 In reality, it was worse than that. The Met was no longer a police force, but as a result of the efforts of certain senior officers had actually become a force for non-detection.
Ditto the coroners’ courts. Bro Wynne Baxter was back in the chair for Elizabeth Stride, and having all but shot his bolt with ‘the Womb-Collector’, he wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. Brothels have doubtless been managed with more propriety than Baxter brought to these proceedings. His enquiries into the destruction of Mrs Stride were a mere formality on the road to a predetermined outcome.
Stride, it will be remembered, was done to death at a place called Dutfield’s Yard, Berner Street, just off the Commercial Road. The Reverend Samuel Barnett of Toynbee Hall had been campaigning without success for more lighting there. ‘It is a dim, miserable looking place,’ reported the Globe. ‘Nowhere is the niggardly expenditure of gas more apparent than just before the court where the crime was committed.’ Almost all the adjacent premises were rented to small businesses – cigarette-makers, hatters, that kind of thing. Until Jack turned up there wasn’t much to distinguish Berner Street from the rest of the brickwork, except that a young Jew called Israel Lipski had snuffed his landlady (or was at least accused of having done so) in a nearby tenement a little over a year before.
Dutfield’s Yard was about halfway up the street, behind a set of wooden gates bearing the inscription HINDLEY TACK MANUFACTURE & A. DUTFIELD VAN AND CART BUILDER. To the right of the yard and forming part of its wall was a house patronised almost exclusively by immigrant Jews. It was the home of an establishment called the International Workingmen’s Educational Club, and if you were a hard-up Socialist from east of the Rhine, this was probably t
he place for you. There were classes and discussions, Marx was a god, and songs were sung past the small hours in a variety of mother tongues.
But the singing stopped abruptly that night, and by dawn the gates to the yard were secured and ‘jealously guarded’ by policemen. Important footsteps were on their way. Having done his best to wipe out all evidence at Goulston Street, Warren arrived here at about 7 a.m. to continue tidying up. Yet again, there was evidence to be destroyed. According to Walter Dew, then a twenty-six-year-old constable, but destined, as Chief Inspector, to become one of Scotland Yard’s most famous icons: ‘In the little Berner Street Court, quite close to where the body was found, detectives searching every inch of the ground came upon a number of grape skins and stones.’3
Once again we’re looking at a lead that could have caught the Ripper. Predictably it was suppressed by the Met, and it doesn’t fare any better today. Ripperology dismisses Walter Dew’s recollection of grape-skins with the same enthusiasm with which Mr Sugden denies Inspector Reid’s memory of farthings. Inevitably, of course, grape-skins will prove to have been found at Stride’s crime scene. Meanwhile, it was grape-skins and stones that freaked Warren, and for the same occult reason as the message that he washed off the wall. Dutfield’s Yard was literally splattered with what any honourable cop would have preserved as significant evidence, but being the cop he was, Warren allowed these grape-skins and stones to be washed down the drain.
Quite an achievement for a Commissioner of Police: he’d laundered two sources of evidence in a single night. The evidence of grapes would henceforth be hurried into the house of mirrors, and purged by the corrupt process of turning the most obvious of clues into the stuff of incomprehensible ‘mystery’.
They All Love Jack Page 28
