They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  What a dance I’m leading all these fools in London. Why I’m passing them by the dozens against Scotland Yd way & don’t i laugh & say damn fools, you work them too hard, poor fellows.

  The police, alias po-lice, think themselves devilish clever I suppose, they’ll never catch me at this rate you donkeys, you double faced asses.3

  The Commissioner of the most powerful police force on earth is treated like a twat. A majority of the letters to Sir Charles Warren are consistent in their pitying animosity, calling him a ‘friend’ while berating him as an imbecile. It is the voice of a spiteful child, a brat-man who hated authority almost as much as he hated women. The first he mercilessly vilified, and the second he slaughtered.

  Authority figures are an obsessive target: the Prime Minister is an ‘old jew’, the monarch an ‘old bitch’ and the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police an ‘old pig’. He took joy in pressing the castrated old stooge’s buttons, trashing everything he held precious: his religion, his Masonry, his sovereign – ‘four more to do then I’ll kill the bloody old queen’. A construct of anti-Warren venom permeates these letters, a train of thought as clear as the writing on the wall. Warren’s past is the Ripper’s present, his homicidal muse, as would be sensationally realised in the so-called ‘Scotland Yard Trunk mystery’. We’re back in ‘Bible Land’ for this one, so personal to Warren that it would attract more lies than Goulston Street.

  ‘Very numerous and searching enquiries have been made’, wrote Warren on 25 October 1888, explaining to his worthless little pal of a Home Secretary that ‘these have had no tangible results so far as regards the Whitechapel Murders, but information has been obtained which will no doubt be useful in future in detecting cases of crime’.4

  So it all turned out rather well, then? This letter was written about a fortnight before a significant amount of Mary Kelly was carried away in a bucket, and little more than three weeks after Catherine Eddowes was robbed of her kidney and womb. But at least it’ll help them catch a few pickpockets? This is a scandalous statement to have come from a Commissioner of Police, and scandalous for a Home Secretary to blithely accept.

  Warren should have been fired on the spot, and under any other circumstances it’s likely he would have been. But these weren’t like any other circumstances, and this wasn’t like any other murder inquiry. Jack had them by the nuts, and they were rushing around in a frenzy to hide the Masonry while simultaneously concocting the ‘mystery’. To have a hope in hell of selling it required lying on a monumental scale, so of course the Ripper correspondence had to be converted into ‘hoax’.

  By the middle of October 1888 a handful of letters had mystically been transmuted into thousands. As myth would have it, the Met was ‘swamped’ by the crazed inventions of evil hoaxers seeking to undermine and confuse. Ripperology was to endorse this fantasy with enthusiasm. In sympathy with the Victorian police, later ‘experts’ designated these letters as a loony sideshow, and a relentless burden on Scotland Yard that could safely be dismissed. After all, how could anyone cope with, let alone isolate anything genuine from, this avalanche of postal deceit?

  In reality, there wasn’t much avalanche, but an awful lot of deceit. There were no letters ‘in their thousands’, to the Metropolitan Police or anyone else. ‘It is said,’ wrote Warren’s biographer and grandson, Bro Watkin Williams, ‘that Scotland Yard received about 1,200 letters daily.’5

  Said by whom?

  As far as I can determine, said by no one but Watkin Williams himself. From where did he source this information? Who said the Met got twelve hundred letters a day? Or even ten?

  It certainly wasn’t said by his grandfather, Sir Charles Warren, who was the target of most of them. On 10 October 1888, at the height of the supposed deluge, Warren put in an official report to the Home Office. ‘We have received scores of hoaxing letters,’ he wrote.6 A ‘score’ is twenty, and ‘scores’, in the common understanding of the word, is less than one hundred. Warren did not say ‘We’ve received thousands of hoaxing letters,’ or even hundreds, but ‘scores’.

  Three score? Four score?

  Let us again go for the common understanding, based if you like on the Biblical dose of life expectancy – ‘three score years and ten’, in other words about seventy. Let us reasonably conclude, then, that by 10 October 1888 Scotland Yard had received about seventy so-called ‘hoax’ letters. By the time he sneaked out of the nightmare about a month later, Warren had written (in the very article that was supposed to have caused his resignation), ‘It may be mentioned that among the several hundred letters received from correspondents of all classes lately about the Whitechapel Murders …’7

  Here the Commissioner is confirming ‘several hundred’ as the total number of letters received throughout his disastrous tenure, an estimate confirmed by his successor, Sir Melville Macnaghten, who many months later wrote of inheriting a postbag that ‘bulged large with hundreds of anonymous communications on the subject of the East End tragedies’.8

  Both Macnaghten and Warren agree that this correspondence was at maximum ‘hundreds’, or ‘several hundred’. So why did Bro Watkin Williams invent tens of thousands of non-existent letters? By his own computation, October 1888 alone would have produced about 36,000.

  It’s only necessary to open his Life of General Sir Charles Warren at any page you like for the answer: he’s trying to save his grandfather’s face. If the police were ‘drowning in letters’, it’s easier to excuse their treacherous inability to select the key correspondence that would facilitate arrest of the homicidal maggot. But with only two or three hundred to examine, such a subterfuge falls to bits. Hence thousands upon tens of thousands of make-believe letters are conjured into a bewildering torrent, with not a clue among them.

  It should be noted that a majority of the hundreds of letters had nothing to do with ‘hoaxers’, but were sent to Scotland Yard by concerned members of the public, writing in with suggestions and offers of assistance. They were thanked by Warren for their efforts: ‘He has been quite unable to respond in a great number of instances,’ peeped The Times on 18 October, ‘and he trusts that the writers will accept this acknowledgement in lieu of individual replies. They may be assured that their letters have received every consideration.’

  When the Victorian police declared all the Ripper letters a ‘hoax’, Ripperology jumped on it like free money. It was a birthday present for the ‘experts’, and it gave a leg-up to every daft candidate in the book. If you didn’t have to worry about the letters, you didn’t have to worry about much at all.

  Try fitting Kosminski to an Edinburgh postmark, or Michael Ostrog to Liverpool or Leeds. Forget it – the lights go out. These letters were dispatched from all over the country, and even if only one in ten was genuine, that knocked out practically every candidate on offer. So Ripperologists relished dumping the letters, and simply adored the word ‘hoax’. ‘Hoax’ gave potential credibility to their man, and it was magnificently official – a MEPO, no less. Lips could be pursed together, and the field was wide open. Lord Randolph Churchill? Why not? Lewis Carroll? Mark that man!!! Denial of the letters meant that any concocted idiocy could stand for nomination, and if they got lucky, it might even get the nod from Melvin Harris.

  Let us navigate this Victorian propaganda and look at these letters as if we’re intelligent coppers of today. Seemingly at random, they were coming from all over the kingdom, with hardly a city that didn’t have a ‘Ripper wannabe’.

  Let’s start by asking an obvious question. When did these letters ‘flood in’ from the provinces? October 1888. When did the killings in Whitechapel abate? October 1888. After the Double Event of 30 September, there were no murders in the following month. Might that not mean that the individual who had been killing women in London couldn’t do it because he was mainly out of town? I’ll get into the geography presently. For the moment I want to stay with the philosophy, to consider myself an open-minded cop with no occult preconditioning.

 
; So here we are, squatting in Scotland Yard with seventy-odd letters. Apart from the recurring name ‘Jack the Ripper’, are these letters conceivably linked? In most the handwriting looks very different, no question about that. But maybe their author had a talent for disguising it? Maybe it gave him pleasure? It’s worth a moment to quote an example of just such a man (also a psychopathic killer) who had just such a talent. He could change his handwriting, or copy the handwriting of others, at will, and was described by authorities at Scotland Yard as ‘the greatest forger they had ever known. John George Haigh could write whole letters in the hand of a dozen or more people … at a second’s notice he could switch from one style to another. A forgery of fifteen pages was described by experts at Scotland Yard as “a masterpiece”.’9

  The ‘mystery’ who was Jack the Ripper may well have been possessed of a comparable talent, so the question I posed myself was: could the letters, at least many of them, have a similar chameleon-like provenance, and be the work of one man?

  Ripper mail was arriving from as far apart as Aberdeen in the north and Penzance in the extreme south-west. We’re looking at different paper, different pens, and different ink. If they were mailed by the same man, how could this possibly be? What is it that might take a man to such disparate places at opposite ends of the land?

  I think the first thing we might want to look at is a profession. What might be his métier? In our day we might consider an aeroplane pilot, or a truck driver. But this is Victorian England, with no planes and no trucks. If he were to travel these huge distances, it would have to be by railway. So what might cause him to do this? What job, if job it were, would take him to all these apparently unconnected locations – from Folkestone to Bristol to Glasgow, and many places in between? Pass me today’s newspaper.

  These are the tour dates of a contemporary artist whose name is without relevance to this book. Pressure of dates means a fair amount of tramping about – Dublin, Bristol, Glasgow … But what of the Ripper’s day? What kind of mileage could a Victorian concert singer expect to put in?

  Miss Ada Crossley was just such a singer. In an interview with Cassell’s Saturday Journal she spoke of the stresses of a performer’s life:

  Of course the amount of travelling that one is called upon to do is trying. Here is what I did in one ordinary week this year. I had two vacant dates – Wednesday, October 31st and Thursday, November 1st – and being in the North of England I returned to London with the intention of enjoying a little rest. Now, on these two days, Miss Clara Butt had arranged to appear at Derby and Nottingham, but having fallen ill she asked me to take her place, and I consented, at absolutely a moment’s notice. No sooner was I out of one train than I had to dash into another. Well, on the Friday I left Nottingham and sang that same afternoon at St James’s Hall. The next afternoon I fulfilled an engagement at the Queen’s Hall at three, and an hour later I was speeding on my way to Manchester, where I sang the same evening. But this was not all. At the conclusion of the concert I drove to an hotel, got into my travelling dress, and took the midnight train for London, arriving at six o’clock. I thus covered nine hundred miles in four days.10

  Ada may have missed some sleep, but she was no exception. For the successful artiste such distances were de rigueur. ‘He was always travelling,’ wrote C.E. Hallé of his father, the conductor Sir Charles Hallé. ‘Many and many a time he would travel, say, from Manchester to Edinburgh, conduct a rehearsal in the afternoon, and a concert in the evening, and return to Manchester that same night, reaching home at four or five o’clock the next morning.’11

  Vast distances went with the music. I shall come to Michael Maybrick’s migrations in due course, but for the moment I include an itinerary of one-nighters by someone enjoying a very similar career to his.

  Although, as the composer of the songs he sang, Maybrick was very much wealthier, he and Mr Durward Lely shared much in common. Both were figures of urban celebrity, fellow members of the Savage Club, and both intimates of Sir Arthur Sullivan, Lely frequently singing a leading role in his blisteringly tiresome Savoy operas. In 1892 the Musical Herald published a list of Lely’s dates. It’s only by chance that this record has survived, but because of the similarities of their lifestyles it could equally apply to Charles Santley, or Sims Reeves, or Michael Maybrick.

  According to this correspondent, ‘the distance travelled is astounding’. Apart from Lely’s opera commitments, ‘he fills up the vacant evenings with concert engagements elsewhere’.

  By any measure it’s a punishing schedule – Liverpool, London, Leeds, and back to London. Had Lely been of the inclination, he could have posted as many perplexing letters from far-flung locations as he liked. Without the singer, the geography seems insane, the letters arbitrary. But one-night stands make the link – and that, I believe, is how Jack the Ripper posted his.

  Jack couldn’t kill in London in October 1888, because he was constantly in and out of it. It’s noticeable that Lely’s tour dates (September to December 1888) all but synchronise with the dates of the Ripper’s provincial correspondence. The postmarks of the letters frequently put the Ripper and Lely in permutations of the same towns – Edinburgh, Liverpool, Bolton, Bradford, Derby, Leeds and Dublin, to name but a few. Wherever Lely crooned a quickie (although on a different date, of course), someone signing himself ‘Jack the Ripper’ would invariably post a single letter.

  It is also noticeable that having mailed a single letter from a particular town, the Ripper ‘hoaxer’ always packs it in. So, far from suggesting the work of independent ‘hoaxers’, I believe this ghost itinerary points to the work of one man, dashing from city to city, following a similar concert circuit to that of Mr Durward Lely.

  I think the Ripper (like Michael Maybrick) was touring the provinces in the autumn of 1888, and because he was obsessive and very much enjoyed murdering, he took advantage of his engagements to keep the fun alive. Miss the fun and you miss the Fiend. So I’m looking for puns, syllogisms, acronyms and metaphors, all the juvenile word-play that kept him amused. But above all I’m looking for evidence supporting the hypothesis of a solitary Beast on the road.

  A link presents itself immediately, and it is one of many characteristics these ‘regional hoaxers’ share. The ‘hoaxers’ don’t claim to live in the town they’re writing from, but are always passing through, generally disparaging the place they’re in and looking forward to the next. Thus we have a phalanx of disgruntled Rippers travelling through the country seeking urban content. Birmingham sucks? How about Bolton, Burnley or Liverpool? But there’s no peace for the wicked: wherever ‘they’ go, dissatisfaction is inevitable. By way of example is this dispatch from the Midlands, postmarked 4 October 1888:

  Dear Gentlemen – I have got to Bolton, and have got a scent of another Girl of mine that has been at London and I shall do it for her. i have one to do in Bolton – and one to finish in Burnley Lancashire before Oct 14th and I will give myself up at Manchester this part of country is slow and innocent I am getting sick so I will not be long before I have finished my work

  Yours Jack the Ripper

  I have written this in a hurry I have not got a stamp, its to late but I shall stay at Bolton until I accomplish my work and then go to Burnley

  Jack the Ripper

  Another move is effected overnight. 5 October: ‘Have arrived here [Bradford] after a pleasant journey.’ 8 October: ‘I am as you see by this note amongst the slogging town of Brum [Birmingham].’ 10 October: ‘I am in Lester [sic] for a holiday.’ On the same day comes another from Edinburgh, then London on the 12th and Colchester on the 13th. Leeds and Bristol via Portsmouth and London, and then it’s ‘Off to Brum today, post this on me way,’ which he did, on 19 October.

  If these correspondents are independent ‘hoaxers’, how come they’re all doing the same thing? How can it be that all of them are incessantly travelling? This migration is a shared compulsion as the ‘team’ move through the provinces, managing by some curious unspoken interc
ourse to participate in synchronised thinking.

  All of them are on the road, but that’s just the beginning of it. These ‘hoaxers’ share more than just telepathic intelligence, they also pool technique. Apart from ‘Dear Boss’, no facsimile of an envelope was ever made public. Yet out there in the sticks our supposedly independent ‘hoaxers’ share an identical joke on their envelopes. Many of them were working simultaneously for the Queen.

  ‘O.H.M.S.’ (On Her Majesty’s Service) is a piss-take of Victoria, and an egregious theme. Examples of ‘O.H.M.S.’, written in full or as initials, are to be found on envelopes of 12 and 18 October and 9, 10, 12 and 13 November 1888, reappearing on 18 February 1889, and again, after an almost two-year gap, on 6 December 1890.

  Unless these ‘hoaxers’ were sharing notes on the road, or perhaps meeting at some unknown ‘hoaxers’ HQ’, by what species of telepathy were they able to indulge in the same joke?

  The last example illustrated is the most interesting of them all. ‘On her majestys service’ is dated 24 September 1888, and therefore precedes ‘Dear Boss’ by about three days. It set a precedent for future Ripper correspondence before anyone had even seen the infamous name.

  Jack was to repeat ‘O.H.M.S.’ in a variety of guises, busting the variations of penmanship wide open. How could anyone possibly copy the theme of this unpublished and totally unacknowledged envelope? It establishes a consistency of thinking, and you don’t have to think too hard to understand why Warren chose to ignore it.