Carmichael Bruce writes that Packer’s man had a ‘rough voice’. East End labourers have rough voices – a ‘rough voice’ belongs to a man like Bill Sikes. In the only ‘statement’ we can reliably attribute to Packer (the one that appeared in the Evening News on 4 October) he said, ‘He spoke like an educated man, but he had a loud, sharp sort of voice, and a quick and commanding way with him.’
Bruce puts the suspect’s height at about five feet seven inches, then amends it to ‘about 1½ inch or 2 or 3 inches – a little higher than she was’. Elizabeth Stride was five feet two inches. By Carmichael Bruce’s calculation, the suspect could only have been five feet five. At one and a half inches taller than Stride, he would have been five feet three and a half inches.
We have arrived at the reason Mr Packer’s so-called ‘statement’ at Scotland Yard remains unsigned. In Sergeant White’s ‘statement’ of the same day, claimed as the second he took from the fruit-seller, Packer put the time at which the man and woman came to his shop at 12.30, reiterating what he had told the Evening News. This 12.30 was subsequently amended in the margin of Carmichael Bruce’s ‘statement’ to 11.30, and initialled ‘A.C.B.’. Carmichael Bruce had thus dumped an hour, and kept Packer in ignorance of the chicanery – hence no signature. This falsified ‘statement’ must be borne in mind when Swanson dismisses Packer as an elderly man who kept changing his story. In reality, and most scandalously, it was the Assistant Commissioner of Police who was making the changes.
In his impending overview of 19 October (a document held in reverence by certain Ripperologists), Swanson summarises Packer’s misbegotten relationship with the Met. He naturally makes no mention of the visit to Scotland Yard, or the names of the men who took him there. To open the doors of this place to ‘representatives of the press’ was to contradict everything Swanson had written and the police had enforced.
It had been a busy week for Batchelor and Le Grande. On 2 October they had taken Packer to the morgue in Golden Lane and shown him the body of Catherine Eddowes, pretending it was that of Elizabeth Stride. Who had instigated this test? Why were others who had identified Stride not put through the same procedure – morons like Mary Malcolm, for example? Packer came through with flying colours; it was Batchelor and Le Grande who failed. But if Packer had botched it, wouldn’t it have been a wonderful spoiler to leak to the press? Somebody was already at it before the ink was dry on Carmichael Bruce’s unsigned ‘statement’: the Star was putting the boot into Packer on that same afternoon: ‘The police most emphatically deny the truth of the story that has been published as to the discovery of the shopkeeper who had talked with the murderer and his Berner Street victim, and sold them grapes, and had seen them at the entrance of the fatal alley for ten minutes before the deed was done. The fact is that the alleged informant contradicts himself, and there is no evidence that there were any grapes in the possession of the woman.’11
Who told the Star Packer was contradicting himself? How did it know what was said in the hallowed confines of Carmichael Bruce’s office? How can the police ‘most emphatically deny’ grapes when the Assistant Commissioner has just initialled a ‘statement’ confirming them? It is only the timing that is in dispute. If the coppers didn’t like evidence as published in the Evening News, let them put Packer before a jury. After all, it was a ‘criminal conspiracy’ to prevent a witness from giving evidence. Instead, Warren preferred to try to discredit this turbulent witness via the very medium he excoriated.
It’s noticeable that Messrs Batchelor and Le Grande evaporate as quickly as they appeared. It seems that after the Sergeant White fiasco, their anonymous employer had no further use of them. They fall off the map. Le Grande’s role would only become public when he was back behind bars in 1889.
But never mind Batchelor and Le Grande. As usual, the guardians of the grail are falling over themselves to denigrate Packer – ‘the Legend of the Grapes’ – and get some mirrors up around the Met. The A-Team are so anxious to fall into line with Swanson that they facilitate invention for him. The worthless ‘statement’ taken by Carmichael Bruce is given a bit of a leg-up. Here’s what Mr Stewart Evans and Mr Don Rumbelow have to say about Packer’s ride to see the Boss Cop at Scotland Yard: ‘It seems the three did go to Scotland Yard, but they would not have been seen by the Chief Commissioner, who does not deal with the public at that level. It is likely that Packer saw a detective inspector, probably Moore, and a signed witness statement would have been obtained by him. The statement has not survived.’12
This nonsense is setting up a false prospectus and attempting to confirm it by drawing our attention to its non-existence. If Packer saw Moore, how come Moore signed his ‘statement’ ‘A.C.B.’? Alexander Carmichael Bruce is unequivocally established as being in the loop as a signatory to Warren’s ‘eyes and ears’ document referencing Bro Donald Swanson. Does anyone imagine the Metropolitan Police would allow themselves to drown in the impending onslaught of press humiliation if they had a signed statement from Matthew Packer? Enough bogus ‘statements’ are ascribed to Packer without inventing another one that ‘hasn’t survived’.
‘If further doubt needed to be cast on the whole Packer episode,’ continue Rumbelow and Evans, ‘we need look no further than one of the two private detectives involved.’13 A list of Le Grande’s extensive career in crime follows, rounding off with his last appearance in court before that frightener and servant of his age, Mr Justice Hawkins. The fearsome Hawkins slammed him up, and shut him up, by sentencing Le Grande to twenty years.
For reasons beyond any construction that I can understand, Mr Evans and Mr Rumbelow manipulate this tariff into further denigration of Packer. I’m afraid I can’t follow the logic. Does the fact that Le Grande is a criminal make Packer a liar? If the Kray twins arrive uninvited at Mr Evans’ and Mr Rumbelow’s respective front doors, are the two Ripperologists thereby converted into East End hooligans? Give me a break. Le Grande’s criminality has no bearing whatsoever on Matthew Packer’s character, and to suggest that it has is mischievous. I think it is infinitely more credible to locate the root of this deceit amongst the ‘clueless’ men in blue, who, as the Star quaintly put it, ‘were infected with the miracle of lying’. Evans and Rumbelow know nothing of this lying, but conclude their corporate forensics with: ‘Packer’s change of mind was no doubt influenced by a reward being offered by the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, and the changes he made to his story were no doubt made in the hope of collecting this reward.’
Once again we have an excrescence that disgraces the page. Moreover, it conveniently leaves out the far greater reward advertised by the City of London. It isn’t possible to slander the dead, but with this, Evans/Rumbelow come close. It seems that anything can be said, and anyone defamed, if the end game is to hide Warren. I don’t know where they sourced this caprice, but it’s probably from that most reliable of students, Mr Philip Sugden. He had a tilt at smearing Packer with something suspiciously similar. ‘Why should Packer seek to deceive the police?’ he asks with righteous burlesque.14
Mr Sugden is entitled to pose any question he likes, but such enquiry cannot be isolated to Matthew Packer. If Packer sought to deceive the police, a tribe of others were also in on the act. Rather, the question is, why did Diemschutz, Kosebrodski, Mrs Mortimer, PC Lamb and Chief Inspector Walter Dew seek to deceive the police? All, at one point or another, corroborate Packer. Why should Wynne Baxter have kept their evidence of grapes out of his court? Why should thirty other witnesses at Dutfield’s Yard be kept out, while a mad dipso-hag like Mrs Malcolm is invited in? Why should Baxter allow witnesses like her while denying Matthew Packer? Why should Packer have been taken clandestinely to Scotland Yard to have a ‘statement’ altered behind his back by Carmichael Bruce? Why did Sergeant White wilt in the presence of a scoundrel like Le Grande, and what happened to his ‘special book’? These adjuncts – if he’s in good faith – are all part of Mr Sugden’s question. Why should Mr Sugden ignore them?
As I say, his qu
estion is his prerogative, and he goes on to answer it. ‘It’s possible,’ he muses, ‘that the fantasy was designed to enhance this modest grocer’s status amongst his neighbours by providing him with the key role in the drama.’15
Is there the remotest glimmer of evidence that Packer bragged to his neighbours about the thrill of it all? Well, perhaps not. To compensate for the deficiency, Mr Sugden ventilates another theory. ‘A much more likely explanation,’ he flutes, ‘will be found in the sudden escalation in the scale of the reward money prompted by the double murder. On the night of the 1st and 2nd of October,’ he continues, ‘lured by the rewards, amateur sleuths appeared in force on the streets of the East End.’ And the next day the Star spoke of others ‘who turn in descriptions on the chance of coming near enough the mark to claim a portion of the reward if the man should be caught, just as one buys a ticket for the lottery’. Packer apparently to the fore, waving a cucumber. He’s already told the Evening News what he saw gratis, so why try to associate him with sleuths on the make? But let me not impede Mr Sugden in his creative flow. ‘This prescient columnist [in the Star] seems to have hit the nail on the head, for by then there seems little doubt that Packer had joined the gold rush.’16
I think it’s desirable not to get too intoxicated with one’s own invective, just as it’s as well to pay a little attention to fact. Where does this ‘little doubt that Packer had joined the gold rush’ come from? What microdot of evidence does Mr Sugden have for this moonshine? Where is the remotest sniff that Packer was trying to wring a buck out of Jack the Ripper? Did he go to Scotland Yard of his own volition? Did he ask for coin when he got there? With cops like Carmichael Bruce eager to hear him, Packer was in a better position to cut a deal with the authorities than any other man in Whitechapel. He was holding a bit of an ace. He could have shunned the Met (which had no reward on offer), hailed a cab and gone straight to the City for a word with Commissioner Smith.
Did he go to the City seeking £500? Did he go to the Vigilance Committee? Did he so much as ask anybody for the price of a halfpenny stamp? Did he? Is there really ‘little doubt that Packer had joined the gold rush’? It is the usual obfuscatory twaddle. Why should Mr Sugden seek to deceive his readers?
4 October 1888 was a tough day at Met HQ. On that day Fleet Street had published facsimiles of the ‘Dear Boss’ letter and the ‘Saucy Jacky’ postcard. Jack was having the time of his life, and the press was becoming more hostile by the day. Only four days in, and this was already shaping as a catastrophic month. The happy assassin was on Bro Warren’s case, and every day brought more to hide. PC Long was presently in court trying to hide the dissent over the destruction of the writing on the wall. Bro Crawford was in court hiding Lawende’s description, and Bros Phillips and Baxter were in another court trying to hide the grapes.
Packer aside, there was also the troubling little matter of the body of half a woman discovered two days earlier in the foundations of Warren’s offices-to-be at New Scotland Yard, and the frantic efforts to keep this archaeologically-inspired atrocity separate from the hits in Whitechapel. Jack was grinning and the Commissioner was scurrying, stunned by another victim in his own back yard, henceforth to be known as ‘the Scotland Yard mystery’.
On 5 October Warren received a letter from the Home Office. Matthews could be no less aware of the fruit-seller than anyone else. The already hyper-stressed Home Secretary basically wanted to know what the fuck was going on. Warren didn’t reply to the letter.
A day later, Packer was back in the newspapers. The Daily Telegraph published a sketch of the man who supposedly bought the grapes. This was everything Warren didn’t need. Many such portraits had already appeared in various publications without a murmur from Scotland Yard, this pair by way of illustration:
On the left is an all-purpose Yiddish Ripper, ‘eyes small and glistening, lips usually parted in a grin which is not only reassuring, but excessively repellent’. On the right is the ‘seafaring man’, with a red neckerchief and tufted anus. Nobody at Scotland Yard gave a toss for this rubbish, but Packer propositioned something rather different, and by their reaction we know it ramped up anxiety amongst the Boss Cops.
The Telegraph can tell its own story: ‘The above sketches are presented not, of course, as authentic portraits, but a likeness which an important witness has identified as that of the man who was seen talking to the murdered woman in Berner Street and its vicinity until within a quarter of an hour of the time she was killed last Sunday morning.’17 A quick roll-call of Baxter’s witnesses follows – William Marshall, James Brown, PC Smith – before the Telegraph arrives at the only eyes of real merit: ‘The evidence of another witness has yet to be taken, and this man seems to have had a better opportunity of observing the appearance of the stranger than any other individual, for it was at his shop that the grapes which the other witnesses saw near the body were bought.’18
The ‘other witnesses’ were of course those (like most newspapers) who were infected with ‘the Legend of the Grapes’, and who were also kept out of Wynne Baxter’s court. ‘This witness, Matthew Packer,’ continues the Telegraph, ‘has furnished information to the Scotland Yard authorities, and it was considered so important that he was examined in the presence of Sir Charles Warren himself. He has also identified the body of Elizabeth Stride as that of the woman who accompanied the man who came to his shop, not long before midnight on Saturday. In accordance with the general description furnished to the police by Packer and others, a number of sketches were prepared, portraying men of different nationalities, ages, and ranks of life.’19
The two drawings published in the Telegraph are the only sketches that were approved by Packer. The ‘general description’ published in the same newspaper is a compilation of the descriptions given by PC Smith and others at Baxter’s court. It is of the twenty-eight-year-old, five-foot-seven-inch man. Anything said in front of Baxter we can assume to be as bent as the evidence given by Dr Phillips and Mrs Malcolm. Either way, none of it can be attributed to Packer. His contribution in the Telegraph is without quotation marks, and is in fact lifted directly from the Evening News; it is not his description, but that of the now vanished police touts, Messrs Batchelor and Le Grande.
The police weren’t reticent to use Fleet Street when it suited (for example, the leak to the Star). They could have got rid of Packer by prosecuting him for ‘publishing information that may prejudicially affect the minds of the juror’, or at a minimum, humiliated him by releasing his ‘signed statement’ to the press. The problem was, they didn’t have a signed statement.
Even Scotland Yard’s most ardent apologists must recognise that there was an overwhelming obligation for Packer to appear at Baxter’s court. But instead of testing his evidence, these stultified accessories to Jack the Ripper tried to ride it out behind locked doors. It wasn’t only the Telegraph that was banging to get in. On 6 October the East London Advertiser delivered a whammy. ‘It is a matter of common knowledge,’ it wrote, ‘that some grapes were found in one hand of the murdered woman, so that the finding of a fragment of this grape-stalk, though important as binding the links of the evidence closer together, was scarcely necessary to establish the fact that the victim had been eating the fruit immediately before her death.’20
This isn’t Ripperology kissing Warren’s arse a hundred years later, it is a newspaper published in Whitechapel six days after Stride’s murder. It was ‘common knowledge’ that Stride was clutching grapes – everyone knew it, except the police and subsequently Ripperology. Here was a man who ‘had a better opportunity of observing the appearance of the stranger than any other individual’. Be this true or false, if there was a coroner’s court, they had to call the fruit-seller; they couldn’t continue the hearings without him. So they didn’t continue the hearings.
Baxter had galloped through witnesses on 1, 2, 3 and 5 October. Proceedings were then postponed for almost three weeks, to give the police a chance to further discredit Packer. They went about
it with purpose. On Monday, 8 October, a breathtakingly ridiculous article appeared in the Manchester Guardian. It seems likely that a provincial newspaper was chosen because nothing published in London would disgrace itself with such trash. It’s absurd enough to have come directly from Swanson, and it probably did. Under a sub-headline of ‘Police Precautions’, it kicks off with the usual spin: ‘Large bodies of plain-clothes men were drafted by Sir Charles Warren into the Whitechapel district from other parts of London, and these, together with detectives, were so numerous that in the more deserted thoroughfares almost every man met with was a police officer.’
Official Police Orders for 29 September naturally repudiate this crap. In reality, the number of constables was reduced by two, and the number from CID remained exactly as it was a week before. But never mind that, the article had barely touched upon its motive: ‘Supplementing the energy displayed by the police, hundreds of people living in the back streets sat up all night, whilst dozens of sturdy householders paid occasional visits to yards and other secluded spots in their immediate vicinity.’
The Guardian is all sympathy for the difficulties of the police, and goes on to render examples of the kind of ‘absurdities’ they were having to cope with. The purpose of the piece becomes clearer by the line. It is to establish an environment of ‘absurdities’, and to include Matthew Packer among them: ‘As a specimen of the vast amount of absurd “information” which is imparted to the police, and through which they have to wade, a man called at Commercial Street Police Station, stating that he had a clue. Upon inquiry, it was ascertained that he knew a man who cut a baby to pieces twenty years ago, and afterwards escaped to America, it being his impression that the baby mutilator might have returned and committed the recent horrible mutilations.’
Having set the scene with ‘the baby mutilator’, the text shifts without pausing for breath to Matthew Packer: ‘In that case [that of the baby mutilator] he said he could give a description. A sketch portrait of a man has been made by the Scotland Yard authorities [my emphasis] answering as nearly as possible to the description given by Matthew Packer, 44 Berner Street, and that of two other witnesses, who assert they saw the man, and actually conversed with him prior to committal of the murder.’
They All Love Jack Page 34
