They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  Meaning that even Swanson is dismissing ‘Schwartz’. He says ‘it is not clearly proved’, when it is only he who is trying to prove it. ‘This rather confused’, says a note in the margin, and you might consider that an understatement. It’s a musical chairs of nonsense, and would have been proved so if legitimate witnesses hadn’t been suppressed.

  Elizabeth Stride went willingly into that yard, at ease with her well-spoken paramour, beguiled by a treat of grapes. This ‘Schwartz’ rubbish would barely persuade an intelligent child, and would need lies piled on lies to sustain it. The first came out of that notable reptile Anderson a few days later.

  Under pressure of Home Office correspondence he wrote: ‘With ref. to yr letter &c. I have to state that the opinion arrived at in this Dept, upon the evidence of Schwartz at the inquest of Eliz. Stride’s case is that the name Lipski which he alleges was used by a man whom he saw assaulting the woman in Berner Street on the night of the murder, was not addressed to the supposed accomplice but to Schwartz himself.’41 It’s my emphasis, and this is the Chief of London’s Criminal Investigation Department. It hardly merits repetition, but ‘Schwartz’ did not appear at Stride’s inquest, and Anderson is lying through his teeth.

  ‘Schwartz’s evidence was in the highest degree material,’ dribbles The A to Z. ‘It would be a serious offence for the police to withhold an important witness from the coroner, and Wynne Baxter was not a coroner who would let any defalcation of duty pass lightly.’42

  Ha ha. So why did they withhold it?

  Their answer is in Pecksniffian tradition. Avoiding the only point at issue, which is Anderson’s lying in respect of his claimed appearance of ‘Schwartz’ at the Stride inquest, they press their fingertips together and come up smiling with this: ‘So there remains the possibility that Dr Robert Anderson’s passing remark [sic] in the exchange of memos over the cry of “Lipski” was accurate and not a slip of the pen: that he meant what he said when he wrote, “the evidence given by Schwartz at the inquest in the Elizabeth Stride case”, and he was not misremembering.’43

  Not misremembering? What the fuck are they talking about? Robert Anderson is lying about ‘Israel Schwartz’. Hammers of condemnation fell upon Matthew Packer for so much as (correctly) suggesting that it was raining, but when Anderson is disgorging lies, it becomes subsumed as a ‘passing remark’. We’re in the world of make-believe and ‘slipping pens’. Well, the pen kept slipping when, a day later, Bro Warren heaved up the same lie. ‘With reference to your letter of the 29th ulto,’ he wrote, ‘I have to acquaint you, for information of the Secretary of State, that the opinion arrived at upon the evidence given by Schwartz at the inquest in the Elizabeth Stride case [my emphasis] is blah blah and furthermore blah blah …’44

  Why should London’s Commissioner of Metropolitan Police seek to deceive the Home Office? If this charade were not toxic with deceit, if ‘Schwartz’ were remotely the witness Shifty had claimed him to be, then it is beyond credibility that he wasn’t called to any one of the five sessions of the inquest.

  Two men – Matthew Packer and Joseph Lawende – had seen Jack the Ripper, and both were shut up. The public were helpless, but not brain dead, and everyone knew Baxter’s court was a farce. ‘We need not go beyond the Coroner’s inquest for illustrations of stupidity,’ was the damning verdict of Lloyd’s, and the statement of a sister paper merits repetition: ‘It is a matter of common knowledge that grapes were found in one hand of the murdered woman.’45

  Packer had seen the Ripper, and Warren knew it. He took a fatal decision on behalf of his epoch that has long passed utility. Nothing could more endorse the importance of the sketches approved by Matthew Packer than the effort put into discrediting them.

  Jack the Ripper wasn’t a Martian, or some other kind of extra-terrestrial being. He wasn’t a criminal genius. He was a psychopath shielded by servants of the Victorian state. Had Warren really wanted to nail this miscreation, he could have done so in short order. There would have been no red neckerchiefs or half-witted clairvoyants, no washing off of walls and the rest of the fantastic tosh. Witnesses would have had their evidence heard and properly tested, whether it concerned grapes or anything else. Above all, the fruit-seller would have been allowed to tell his story, the sketches of the man he had seen would have been admitted, and perhaps – just perhaps – the press, the public and London’s police would have been looking for the right man.

  There is nothing so patient as truth. It was Freemasonry’s adopted saint, St John, who said ‘The truth will set you free.’ Masonry could rid itself of this hideous millstone, and the good news is, there would be no blame attached to it. The culprit was the age. Contemporary Masonry is no more responsible for the sins of the nineteenth century than today’s generals are culpable for the idiot decisions of generals in the First World War. The Prime Minister at that time, Lloyd George, famously said, ‘If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know.’ Ditto Jack the Ripper. We are in the twenty-first century. It’s time for the dark soul of this fabricated ‘mystery’ to be consigned to history and be gone.

  10

  ‘They All Love Jack’

  If you’re hanging on to a rising balloon, you’re presented with a difficult decision. Let go before it’s too late? Or hang on and keep getting higher? Posing the question, how long can you keep a grip on the rope?

  Danny the dealer

  Michael Maybrick called his singing ‘the shouting businefs’, and it was a trade at which he excelled. By the late 1880s he was at the zenith of his career and the high end of London’s elite. ‘Of course no one could mistake Mr Maybrick,’ enthused the Tatler magazine, ‘or Mr Lawrence Kellie.’1

  The Tatler was at the Royal Institute covering another plunge into the jewels, lies and perfume, the kind of soirée Michael Maybrick invariably enjoyed in the company of a younger man. Kellie was a looker, a bit of a throb on the concert circuit himself, although with nothing like the fame of his date. At the time of the sighting Kellie was twenty-four, and Maybrick, like the ladies he charmed, of an unaudited age. ‘He possesses the muscle and brawn of an ideal Life Guardsman,’ beamed a society rag, ‘and his passion for every form of outdoor pursuit has enabled him to retain the full vigour of youth much longer than the rest of his contemporaries.’ He looked thirty-five, shrugging off a dozen years with ease.2

  Not a minute from the bash at the Institute was Maybrick’s local in Regent Street. The Café Royal was about as close to Paris as London got. Its tabletops were marble, and the champagne endless. If you could afford the vintages you could come in here and listen to Oscar Wilde creasing them all with his epithets. It was all too too utterly divine. ‘One sat there night after night,’ recalled Jimmy Glover, ‘together with every sort of art, genius, and talent, all came to this, at that time, the only real “intime” café in London.’ A musician of note himself, Glover was a habitué of the Royal. ‘I have played dominos with Michael Maybrick,’ he wrote, ‘who composed a hundred great songs as Stephen Adams,’ and who was among the most famous men in the room.3

  A magazine called the New Era described the Maybrick/Adams phenomenon: ‘It will not have been forgotten that Mr Maybrick displayed early talent for composition, but it was not until 1876 that it was reserved for “Stephen Adams” to produce a ballad that is probably the most successful ever written.’

  ‘Nancy Lee’ was a sensation without precedent. It sold like Harry Potter, and put a fortune into the Maybrick/Adams bank account. ‘No song has ever gained such enormous popularity,’ said the New Era. ‘Everyone was singing it, humming it, or whistling it in the street, dinned into every ear, morning noon and night. Mr Maybrick has much to answer for,’ it continued in mock admonishment, ‘in having given forth this inspiration to the world, for it seems to have fallen like a spell on every individual capable of making musical sounds.’4

  It certainly fell like a spell on the singing stars of the day,
and Maybrick was suddenly up there with them. It may seem hard to believe, but he was as famous as Wilde, or his lifelong pal Sir Arthur Sullivan, whose music his far outsold. No one I know had ever heard of Michael Maybrick/Stephen Adams, and until I became enmeshed in his story, neither had I. But then, I’d never heard of Signor Foli either, nor Trebelli, Sims Reeves, Edward Lloyd or Charles Santley, all of whom were blazing stars in the last quarter of Victoria’s reign.

  Charles Santley was Michael Maybrick’s hero. It was by one of those freaks of history that their lives were destined to entwine. Both were born in the great seaport of Liverpool, and almost in the same street. The Orpheus gene was in their bloodlines, and both were probably listening to music before they could talk. Santley’s father was a talented amateur who took singing lessons from Maybrick’s uncle (another Michael), and thus before birth they shared an inter-family association.5

  Born in 1834, seven years before Maybrick, as a child Santley learned violin and piano, but his talent for singing was greater than his ability at the two instruments put together, and by the age of fifteen he was elected a performing member of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society. Maybrick’s gifts were scarcely less precocious. When he was fourteen one of his neophyte compositions was played at the Covent Garden Opera House in London. He won a prize for ‘harmonious invention’,6 and followed Santley into an association with their fellow Liverpudlian W.T. Best, a virtuoso performer and composer on the church organ. Maybrick’s affinity for the great bulldozer of an instrument was immediate, and he was blasting on the keyboards of St George’s church when he wasn’t singing solos in its choir.

  Meanwhile, Santley had taken his talent to Italy, where he trained under Geatano Nava, a singing teacher of international repute who in just a few years was to get another young aspirant from Liverpool. Maybrick had gone to study composition under Hans Richter at Leipzig, where to the astonishment of everyone, including apparently himself, a fine baritone voice was discovered. This put him back in Santley’s footsteps. At the age of twenty-one he too went to Milan, to perfect his entry into the shouting business under Nava.

  By the late 1860s, and back on home turf, Santley was already a star. Together with Sims Reeves his name got the capital letters, while Michael Maybrick climbed the bills in their wake. In June 1870, after an inauspicious spell with Carl Rosa’s opera company, Maybrick was united with Santley at a major concert at St James’s Hall in London. Conducted in part by Santley’s friend and mentor Wilhelm Ganz (soon to become an intimate of Maybrick), it was a farewell tribute to a wilted diva whose name no longer matters.

  Habitually on the same bill over the ensuing concert seasons, Maybrick and Santley consolidated their friendship, sharing the same midnight carriages and sometimes the same digs. ‘I dined with Maybrick and Santley at their comfortable old fashioned hostelry at Edgbaston,’ recalled Walter McFarren, ‘and had a jolly good afternoon and evening with them.’7

  This was in about 1872, by which time Maybrick was already writing the ballads that were to bring him international fame. He’d formed a partnership with a Bristol-born lawyer and lyricist by the name of Frederick Weatherly, and together they’d already enjoyed a couple of inconsequential hits. Maybrick sang them both, but farmed them out with more success to an established concert regular called Edward Lloyd. ‘The Warrior Bold’ became the catalyst for another lasting association, and Lloyd also sang Maybrick’s next two efforts, ‘True Blue’ and ‘True to the Last’, conglomerates of patriotism and vapid sentiment that were lapped up by Victorian audiences.

  Maybrick was now in with the in-crowd, sharing the cream provided by a ravenous market. Nowhere was this more evident than at St James’s Hall, Piccadilly, where a music publisher and promoter by the name of John Boosey invented a new kind of concert.

  Boosey represented or published the music of a galaxy of stars. Arthur Sullivan was one, and Michael Maybrick another. Almost everyone with a name, or a name to make, appeared at the St James’s concerts – the ‘pops’, as they were known – and for a decade or more the profits were stratospheric: ‘They were the days when the ship of the publishers sailed forth with cargoes of sheet music and returned to harbour with much weight in gold.’ Maybrick was becoming rich, the golden boy at Boosey’s offices just up the road at 295 Regent Street.

  By the middle of the 1880s, two sets of partners dominated the musical money machine. The first, of course, with their Savoy operas, was W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, who with Nanki-Poo and the rest of it owned London’s West End. The other pair of names were ‘Stephen Adams’ (Michael Maybrick) and Frederick Weatherly. The Musical World had this: ‘A setting of Mr F.C. Weatherly’s words by Stephen Adams was received by the audience with acclamations. Author and composer have worked together with reciprocal intents that remind us of the combined efforts of Sir Arthur Sullivan and Mr Gilbert.’8

  Maybrick was at the top of his game, hit after hit streaming from his pen. Between 1880 and 1890 he and Weatherly released almost fifty songs, some sung by Maybrick, most by Lloyd, and many outselling even ‘Nancy Lee’. At the end of the decade a journalist from the World interviewed the prolific songwriter in his bachelor apartments at Clarence Gate, Regent’s Park. By now Maybrick was an officer in the ‘Artists Rifles’, an eccentric adjunct of Her Majesty’s armed forces that we’ll arrive at in a page or two.

  CELEBRITIES AT HOME

  ‘Pleasant melodies must have pleasant surroundings’ was a favourite axiom of ‘Stephen Adams’ long before he set all England singing such familiar airs as ‘Nancy Lee’, ‘The Midshipmite’ and ‘They All Love Jack’. The chimes of a clock have scarcely died away before you turn into a sunny room, where the stalwart lieutenant of the ‘Artists’ is hard at work before a table littered with quill pens and almost as many boxes of cigars and cigarettes. As he talks to you of the last Easter (Artists) manoeuvres or of the next meeting of the Grand Lodge (for ‘Stephen Adams’ has risen to the Masonic rank of Grand Organist), he runs his hands involuntarily over the keys, but the stirring chorus you listen to is not that of the ‘Entered Apprentice’, but the potential lineal successor of ‘They All Love Jack’.9

  It’s hardly necessary to comment on that last little inadvertent beauty, but I interrupt to point out that the honour of Masonic Grand Organist was bestowed on Maybrick in 1889. A year or two previously the accolade belonged to Sir Arthur Sullivan, and before him to Wilhelm Ganz.

  When ‘Stephen Adams’ is not working, he is either drilling at Somerset House, imbibing ozone at his Isle of Wight cottage, rowing on the Thames, riding over Highgate Hill, or enjoying the conviviality of the Arts Club. Michael Maybrick puts his whole strength and soul into everything he does. He regards his exercise out of doors and the social evenings he spends at one or other of his clubs as the most welcome preparation for his labours at home.10

  The quality that most strikes me about this article is the overbearing ‘maleness’ of it all – male clubs, male Masonry, male army, and a lungful of bracing masculine air on the Isle of Wight. In the whole text there isn’t the remotest sense of the feminine. It’s all oars, horses, cigars and ‘Artists Volunteers’, Maybrick’s entire social orbit being amongst those who sweat. I get the impression that no woman has ever been in this apartment, except perhaps to clean it. The Earl of Euston liked an arse, in an amateur sort of way, and all the indications are of something similar here.

  ‘One item of family mythology which interests me,’ writes Mr Derek Strahan (whose wife is apparently a great-niece to Maybrick), ‘concerns the relationship between Michael and his librettist, Fred Weatherly, which was always thought by the family to have been a close personal one, in other words, gay.’11

  Such a proposition tends to focus my take on the above-mentioned Mr Lawrence Kellie. His family home was on the coast at Shanklin, near Maybrick’s cottage on the Isle of Wight. I took a look at a contemporary Who’s Who to see if the two shared any interests. Kellie, recreations: Yachting, Cycling and Tennis. Maybrick
, recreations: Yachting, Cycling and Cricket. I don’t actually know if Maybrick was homosexual, but predicated on that infallible adage, ‘If it walks like a duck, etc.,’ he was probably a bit of a ducky.

  In 1886 he joined the army, the 20th Middlesex (Artists) Rifles, known as the ‘Artists Volunteers’. This wasn’t exactly the bully-beef end of the military – most of its members would have been just as at home at the Café Royal as in the officers’ mess, and were certainly there more frequently. The Artists was an elite corps of some of the most impressive artistic and musical talents alive. England’s greatest living painter, Sir Frederick Leighton, was Honorary Colonel, and his subordinates a confederation of celebrity.

  Many of the painters had names that remain world-famous: Millais, Frith, Alma-Tadema, and a National Gallery of others, including Dickens’s illustrators Luke Fildes and Marcus Stone. Sir Henry Irving was but one of the many theatrical stars. ‘Among musicians,’ says the official history, ‘Sir Arthur Sullivan and Michael Maybrick (then one of our Captains and better known as Stephen Adams), the whole forming a most wonderful collection of eminent men.’ Virtually without exception, they were Freemasons. ‘There had always been a strong esprit de corps in the Artists,’ wrote J. Bromfield, in demobbed reminiscence, ‘and a species of Freemasonry, analogous to the spirit among the old boys of our public schools.’12