FROM Jack sheridan the ripper
Folkestone
Nov 11 1888
Dear Boss
I am getting on the move Lively baint i made a good Job last time getting better Each time a good joke i played on them three Laides one Died two frighened Next time a woman and her daughter ta ta
Dear Boss
This card, with its reversion to silly handwriting, was mailed from Folkestone, a seaside town in Kent, approximately 250 miles south of Leeds. According to Whittington’s first letter from Leeds (13 November), ‘The Man that wrote the letter from folkstone Is the Man that Committed The last 3 murders and that Man is William Onion’.
Setting ‘William Onion’ aside, the Folkestone card could only have been written by the Leeds correspondent, and following the hidden mathematics, there is therefore a definitive connection between ‘Whittington’ in Leeds and ‘Jack the Ripper’ in Folkestone.
Whittington and the Ripper are one and the same.
If Miss Ada Crossley could travel nine hundred miles in four days, my candidate could easily do less than a third of that in two. My suspicion was that he had a singing engagement at a theatre in Folkestone (that was perhaps concurrently performing a play by Sheridan), and then jumped a train for another gig in Leeds; just like blue-arsed Ada.
The name ‘Whittington’ was intriguing because, like ‘Andy Handy’, it referred to someone who actually exists. ‘Richard Whittington the Second’ is not the kind of name your average ‘hoaxer’ would cook up. It meant something in the hidden mathematics. The genuine Richard Whittington was a socially motivated Christian who taught disadvantaged boys. I presumed his anonymous surrogate might somehow be up to the same thing.
I won’t trouble the text with the mountain of hours it took to get to the obvious, but the solution brought me right back into ‘the heart of the terrorised area’.
Michael Maybrick’s fellow soldier and musical associate in the Artists Volunteers, Captain W. Henry Thomas, taught singing at Toynbee Hall in an assembly called ‘the Whittington Club’. Named after a living Christian icon, the Whittington Club enjoyed a royal inauguration in February 1885. It was on his first official outing after coming of age (and doubtless his last ever visit to the East End) that Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, did the honours. A scribe from The Freemason was in situ to record the regal verbals: ‘the few hearty and encouraging words he addressed to the lads on that occasion showed what an affectionate feeling he entertained for the welfare of his fellow creatures’.13
The Reverend Barnett was also present, contributing a few words of his own, the irony of which must have been entirely lost on the royal dullard. Barnett said he had chosen to speak ‘because he had lived through the growth of the Institution from a refuge to the culmination that day of the Whittington Club’. ‘In their satisfaction,’ he continued, ‘it seemed to him that they should not forget that the existence of such institutions suggested profound dissatisfaction. In a country where a leisured class had to kill time as an employment, it was a shame that hundreds of boys should grow up neglected, untrained, and wild’ in a kingdom ‘overburdened with wealth’.14
It isn’t recorded whether Albert Victor said ‘Hear, hear,’ but let us stay with Captain W. Henry Thomas. The first issue of the Toynbee Record, dated October 1888, has this: ‘The singing classes are taught by Mr W. Henry Thomas, the well known conductor of popular ballad concerts.’15 It was Thomas who would conduct the concert directed by Maybrick at the Artists’ Royal Gala six months hence, the pair representing the musical elite of the regiment, their names invariably found on the same programme, frequently linked together.
Thomas taught the lads to sing at the Whittington, and I don’t doubt that he would have been delighted to have such assistance as he could get. He and Maybrick were masters of the Athenaeum Lodge,16 fellow members of the Arts Club, and had a further association via the Guildhall School of Music, where Thomas lectured and Maybrick sponsored an annual ‘Ballad Prize’. An invitation to assist at the Whittington from a close friend and fellow Artist may well have appealed, and I think that’s where ‘Richard Whittington the Second’ acquired his new name.
The Whittington attracted a variety of West End notables. Another young talent, destined for fame and in later years a knighthood, was William Rothenstein, who taught drawing to boys at the club. ‘To become a worker in Whitechapel seemed an adventure,’ he recalled. ‘The East End was a part of London remote and of ill repute, which needed missionaries, it appeared, and it flattered my esteem to be one of these.’17
At the Whittington boys received instruction in an assortment of classes, including drawing, singing and military drill. Rothenstein was invited to join the ‘Whittington Cadet Corps’ as an officer. ‘I fancied myself in a uniform with a sword,’ he wrote, but ultimately declined, leaving the military stuff to a career soldier from the Artists Volunteers.
Lord (then the Honourable) Paul Methuen was an aristocrat and a professional soldier who would climb to the very top of the military tree. He was a personal friend of Colonel Robert Edis (acting commander of the Artists Volunteers), and had himself commanded the regiment in field exercises.
The Artists’ biographer H.R.A. May records:
Col Edis seemed to be acquainted with a vast number of distinguished people of every rank and profession, from Royalty downwards. I can also well recollect the evenings ‘at home’ given by Sir Robert [Edis] at which all the notables in Art, Literature and Drama might be met. Some very fine smoking concerts were arranged at which some of the best talent in London gave their services, including Lionel Brough, Brandon Thomas, Michael Maybrick, and many others. During his period of command many notable persons visited us, not only the Prince of Wales, but the Duke of Cambridge, Lord Roberts, Lord Wolseley, and Lord Methuen.18
The Honourable Lord Methuen was in charge of the lads’ military training at the Whittington Club, and was singled out for special mention in the Toynbee Record of November 1888: ‘Col the Honourable Paul Methuen has greatly helped in reorganisation and giving new life to the Corps.’
From Sir Frederick Leighton down, the Artists Rifles Volunteers were all over Toynbee Hall. Not only were some of Michael Maybrick’s most intimate friends, including Thomas, Methuen and Leighton, at Toynbee, but so were legions of boys and everything he liked to go with them – uniforms and music – like a Junior Artists V – a squad of disciplined youth in army togs sounds irresistibly Maybrick to me. There was bayonet training and classes in music drill. To join friends and fellow toffs doing Christian good – just like Richard Whittington – may not have been entirely disagreeable to a psychopathic Freemason of the Bundy/Maybrick ilk. After all, he could come and go whenever it suited, and if midnight struck, there were always comfortable rooms ‘for those staying at odd times’.
Had Rothenstein, Methuen, or indeed W. Henry Thomas, been Jack the Ripper, they would have enjoyed a most agreeable cover at the Whittington Club while proffering their respective skills.
I want to take a brief look at a couple more letters before exploring the murder of Martha Tabram at Toynbee’s back door.
The first, dated 3 October 1888, comes out of a Midlands city, Stoke-on-Trent, and is addressed to the Lord Mayor of London.
Oct 3rd 1888
Honord Sir
Having heard about the Horrid Murders in London – And the Monsters not caught I thought one of the best ways to capture them! would be to drefs a number of Young Men in Girls clothes.
The suggestion of drefsing men in female attire is a perverse signature that reiterates itself throughout the Ripper correspondence: ‘Pafs when the man is in female attire’ (1 October); ‘Dress some of your smart detectives in women’s clothes’ (2 October). A letter dated 7 October 1888 and signed ‘Homo Sum’ will suffice for many more:
… I will suggest a mode by which it is possible the wretch who has committed these recent murders in London may be entrapped and brought to justice. As he seeks for hi
s victims amongst women of the class termed ‘unfortunate’, I suggest that strong but relatively slight constables should be arraigned in women’s clothes or as to resemble women …
Transvestism is featured in the City letters, just as the joys of murder are in the Met’s. But more egregious is the continuing religious theme. We had an Irishman playing ‘vicar’ in Mr Marsh’s shop, a reverend in Leeds who signed himself ‘Richard Whittington the Second’, and we have yet another reverend here. The 3 October letter from Stoke-on-Trent is signed by a theologian of similar standing to Richard Whittington.
Charles Wilkinson was a star of the Victorian pulpit. Born in Ireland in 1823, he rose through a variety of dioceses to become Honorary Chaplain to Queen Victoria, and later served the religious needs of her son Edward, Prince of Wales. Whittington and Wilkinson were evangelical icons conjoined in the same brain. Both are another jibe at the detested god of the Establishment, and both have an abstruse connection to Toynbee Hall.
The letter is signed ‘Chas Wilkinson – Artist V’.
How dangerous can ego get? Replete with its instructors from the Artists Volunteers, the Whittington Club was a thirty-second walk from Leman Street police station (where that Vidocq of British detectives, Superintendent Thomas Arnold, was brewing tea).
Not that Jack gave a toss for such trivialities as Bro Warren’s ‘Po-lice’. Just as he teased with the men of God, he even teased with his own name, linking all three in a snickering intimation of Toynbee Hall.
A letter out of Scotland, constituting one of what I call the ‘McRipper clump’, arrived from the environs of Edinburgh in early October 1888. It crops up with two others (one of extreme importance) posted from the same area within forty-eight hours of each other.
Once again we’re looking at ego ‘mathematics’. The letter’s signature, ‘May – bee’, didn’t happen by accident, any more than ‘Artist V’ – it meant something to the person who wrote it. Whichever way you look at it, its first half represents the first syllable of my candidate’s name, and the curious spelling of its second half represents the last syllable of the place I was investigating.
May – brick
Toyn – bee
‘May – bee’
Michael Maybrick, his ‘Artist V’ and ‘Richard Whittington the Second’ reek out of Toynbee Hall like homicidal DNA. At most it was a few minutes’ walk from every crime scene, and only seconds from two of them. Even the most constipated of intellects would have to concede that Toynbee Hall would make a most inspired ‘lair’ for a visiting gentleman psychopath. Above suspicion, you could snuff at will and hasten back – a wash and brush-up and pickle your kidney – and with chalk in your pocket and ‘Juwes’ on your mind, stick on a hat and take a stroll at your ease up Goulston Street.
Nobody was looking into Toynbee Hall. It was people in there who were doing the looking out – pillars of the Establishment like Bro Sir Frederick Leighton and Bro Michael Maybrick.
À propos of that, I can’t help thinking of Robert Ressler’s psychopathic ambulance driver, who contrived to take responsibility for picking up the bodies of those he had murdered.19 I think Yack also immersed himself in the drama of his victims. ‘I was in the crowd at Berner Street,’ claims an October scrawl.
‘If the police have a series of five homicides,’ writes Ressler, ‘that demonstrate the same MO, we advise looking most closely at the earliest one, for it will most likely have “gone down” closest to the place where the killer lived or worked or hung out … Often that first crime is not thoroughly planned, but succeeding ones will display greater forethought.’20
Had I been a detective in 1888, with or without cognisance of these letters, I’d have taken Toynbee Hall to pieces. I would have been particularly interested because the first Ripper hit happened so close to its premises. The crime scene actually shares a name with Toynbee Hall (George Yard Buildings), abutting St George’s Yard, where in summer months cadets from the Whittington played their open-air concerts.
It is unlikely that Henry Thomas’s lads were playing in the quadrangle over the first weekend of August 1888. The sky was leaden, and at around 50° Fahrenheit the temperature was unseasonably cool for the time of year. At about 2.30 a.m. in the dregs of that Monday, a Bank Holiday, J.T.R. was within the shadows of Toynbee Hall. He had a knife in his pocket, and possibly a bayonet. He may or may not have killed before. But tonight there was no option. The rage and expectation were of such intensity he wouldn’t know whether what he felt was excitement or anguish.
One woman was in his thoughts. If fault there was, it was hers. She was a cunt, and he hated cunts. He was going to put one down.21
At about 3.30 a.m. a cab driver by the name of Albert Crow was returning home to George Yard Buildings. According to testimony at the inquest, ‘As he was passing the first floor landing he saw a body on the ground. He took no notice as he was used to seeing people lying about there. He did not know whether the person was alive or dead.’
Tabram was an alcoholic who had been drinking heavily that night. She was last seen alive with a soldier almost three hours before. It’s possible that for want of a bed, and anaesthetised from the booze, she crashed out in St George’s Yard; it is also possible that it was there that her killer discovered her, and opportunistically attacked her in her sleep. But that is unlikely, because like Elizabeth Stride her hands were clenched when she was found.22 More likely she ran into her client in the alley backing onto Toynbee Hall.
No official documentation of Tabram’s injuries survives, but we can be confident that she was silenced by strangulation before her assailant got busy with the knife. A single penetrative wound to the heart would have caused instant death. However, police surgeon Dr T.R. Killeen believed all the wounds were inflicted while she was alive. This means her killer must have strangled her after she was dead, an absurd proposition. We know Jack was a novice, but he was not a half-wit.
I don’t know the effect (nor the order in which they were delivered) of a precise thirty-nine stab wounds divided between the liver (five), stomach (six), left lung (five), right lung (two) and heart (one), but following strangulation, I find it hard to believe she was alive for all or any of them.
Killeen had accounted for nineteen stabs out of thirty-nine. That leaves twenty wounds in some unidentified place. Swanson compiled a characteristically vague retrospective the same month. He confirmed that the surgeon had found ‘thirty nine wounds on the body, and neck, and private part with a knife or dagger’. (Doubtless a Toynbee Hall bayonet.)
On 11 August the East London Observer quoted Killeen as saying, ‘The lower portion of the body was penetrated in one place, the wound being 3 inches in length and one in depth.’ I think he was being economical with the truth. Why be so specific over nineteen stab wounds and so insouciant over the other twenty? There was much blood under Tabram, and palpably as much coyness over its source in the coroner’s court. ‘There was scarcely anyone present except the authorities and those connected with the case,’ reported the East London Observer, ‘the public being conspicuous by their absence.’
We shall never know what the court actually heard, but it seems suspiciously likely that Tabram’s genitals were the focus of the Ripper’s assault. ‘The circumstances of this awful tragedy are surrounded with the deepest mystery.’23
If Martha Tabram was the first of Jack’s victims, Alice McKenzie was the last – at least the last in Whitechapel of interest to this narrative. McKenzie was a thirty-seven-year-old part-time whore with syphilis. At some time after midnight on the morning of 17 July 1889 she had her throat cut across in Castle Alley, an archetypal Ripper haunt running parallel to Goulston Street. Like his first hit at St George’s Yard it was close to home, less than a minute away from Toynbee Hall.
According to The Times, ‘This alley, which is entered by a passage not more than a yard in width, is entirely shut off from view of the main road, and would hardly be observed by the ordinary passer by.’ Various houses a
nd commercial properties backed into the darkness. Although the area was densely populated (Jews and doss-houses), nobody went up Castle Alley after dark unless they had to, really had to, and under such circumstances ‘people generally enter from the Spitalfields end, especially at night on account of the dark and lonely nature of the alley, as well as the evil reputation it has always borne among the respectable portion of the inhabitants. The vans and other vehicles which crowd the thoroughfare,’ continued The Times, ‘notwithstanding the fact that the alley is lighted with three lamps, afford ample cover and secrecy for crime and violence.’
At about 12.45 a.m., McKenzie and her assassin walked up this thoroughfare in the intermittent rain. ‘The exact spot where the body of the unfortunate woman was found was between two wagons, fastened together with a chain. Right against the wagons was a street lamp, and it was against this that the body of the murdered woman was discovered (at 12.50 a.m.) by a police officer.’
McKenzie’s throat had been cut but minutes before. As with Elizabeth Stride, it would seem her killer had been disturbed. Her clothes were hauled up and her legs were wide apart, but only desultory mutilation had been performed. Even so, it ‘bore a striking resemblance to the atrocities which so shocked and sickened London during the latter part of last year’.
Eight months had elapsed since the butchery of Mary Kelly. For this reason, and others of a more sinister genesis, the police didn’t want to believe that McKenzie was part of the Ripper series, and had convinced themselves, and tried to convince everyone else, that the destruction of Kelly was the last of the outrages. The Fiend’s apparent termination of his homicidal activity seemed inexplicable, and itself became an ingredient of the ‘mystery’. Why had he stopped? A ‘monomaniac’ doesn’t just toss in the towel and buy a newsagent’s shop in Bournemouth. He goes on killing until something prevents him. So what happened?
They All Love Jack Page 50
