They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  Enter, unbeknown to himself, arsenic addict and serial adulterer James Maybrick, a Freemason belonging to a London lodge whose Saturday meetings required him to travel from Liverpool to London at weekends. A man who had lived in America and was married to an American, and who had continuing business affairs in that country.

  Michael Maybrick framed his brother James as Jack, offed him with a hotshot of poison, then framed Florence for the murder. I do not doubt that at the time of the outrage Michael’s ruse was believed, and the authorities willingly bought into the revelations that his fucked-up brother James was Jack. James’s credentials were persuasive, and their informant was a gentleman of impeccable honour.

  How devastating it must have been for the broken-hearted Michael. How hard he must have fought against it, exploring every avenue to prove himself wrong. But the ‘facts’ were no alibi to James, and in matters of such gravity, ties of blood must take second place to duty, and duty required the tip-off.

  P.S. Florence Maybrick knows all. ha ha

  By this means, with the cunning of Satan, Michael assured his own immunity and brought the executive gratefully on side.

  When we get to the criminal atrocity known in the vernacular as ‘the trial of Florence Maybrick’, it will become evident just how deeply the authorities were implicated. Michael would exploit them all – government, Freemasonry, police – and all would readily acquiesce in deference to their own survival.

  James Maybrick’s Freemasonry has successfully been kept a secret for 130 years. Tracing his Masonic records took more time than it gives me pleasure to remember. It was an endless toil, and there are no surprises in that. If you wanted to cover up the Ripper you would most certainly have to cover up James.

  Although the staff of the library at Freemasons’ Hall in London were as accommodating as ever, as far as they were concerned James Maybrick was definitely not a Mason: ‘Further to your enquiry, we have checked our records for the above name without success.’

  No one was lying – they just didn’t know.

  But secrets in one attic aren’t necessarily secret in another. On my travels through the archives I came across a bit of doggerel by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It tells the tale of long winter afternoons beyond the cobwebs of forgotten archives:

  No action, whether foul or fair,

  Is ever done, but it leaves somewhere

  A record, written by fingers ghostly,

  As a blessing or a curse, and mostly

  In the greater weakness or greater strength

  Of the acts which follow it, till at length

  The wrongs of ages are addressed,

  And the justice of God made manifest.7

  I know little about God, but James Maybrick was a prominent Freemason in Liverpool, as well as a respected businessman. Like the rest of the elite of the city – its Members of Parliament, its worthies and mayors – he was a member of at least three lodges: the St George’s Lodge of Harmony (35), the Liverpool Chapter (19), and another Royal Arch chapter, Jerusalem (32).

  The earliest reference I found to him having taken the oath is dated 31 December 1869, and thereafter he remained in distinguished Freemasonic company until the day of his death.

  Cataloguing James’s Masonic history would mean a clog of documents, and I’ve banished most of them. But below, by way of example, is an entry from the annual register of St George’s Lodge of Harmony, dated 24 January 1877. I include it because it’s midway through James Maybrick’s occult career, and is signed by him as newly elected Lodge Secretary: ‘The W.M. [Worshipful Master] then nominated the following Brethren as officers for the ensuing year [James Maybrick is fourth on the roster], who were invested with their collars.’

  Ten years later, on 26 October 1887, James is recorded as a ‘Visitor’ to the same lodge. Evidently he must have resigned from it. But the important point here is that he would not have been allowed, even as an ex-member, to visit St George’s more than once.

  The rules are clear, and sanction only one such entry, but as the documents attest, James had also visited St George’s Lodge of Harmony in the previous year, on 27 October 1886. There is no way he could have done so without being a proven member of another Freemasonic lodge, and it is this lodge that is the bedrock of the big secret.

  In this chapter I want to develop the argument that before murdering him on 11 May 1889, Michael Maybrick ‘set up’ his brother James as the mad, Freemasonic Whitechapel Fiend.

  Nobody but a madman would have so promiscuously decorated his crime scenes as Jack. He either was a madman, or he had reasons for pretending to be one. Nobody would dispute that his primary motive was a hatred of women, and whores in particular; even the hierarchy of one of the state’s most corrupt institutions could acknowledge that. But the Metropolitan Police were wilfully blind to anything beyond it. The Ripper was ‘unique’, said Sir Charles Warren. The Ripper was ‘unique’, said Sir Robert Anderson. The Ripper was ‘unique’, said Dr Bagster Phillips. And all three of them said, ‘He never left a clue.’

  The glaring signature he left in his wake must have somehow conspired to baffle all of them, and in their wake Freemasology has spent the passing decades nourishing the ‘mystery’. Book after book investigates the anonymous monster, differing in choice of culprit, but unanimously agreeing that no matter who the Ripper was, there is hysterical and overwhelming evidence to prove a negative. And that is that Jack the Ripper wasn’t a Freemason. Ha ha.

  The clues Jack left, the Americanisms, the weekend dates on which he chose to murder, the falsification of documents that would later emerge at Florence Maybrick’s ‘trial’, and most especially the glaring onslaught of Masonic symbolism at his crime scenes, were not by accident, but as Dr Gordon Brown said, ‘by design’; and they would serve Michael Maybrick well when the time came to point the finger of ‘reluctant accusation’ at James.

  Coming from Michael, distraught as he was but honourable as he was, James was a ringer for Jack. Moving in the society he did, it wouldn’t have been too much of a challenge for Michael to float a whisper that possibly, just possibly, it was his brother who hated his harlot wife enough to kill whores as her surrogate. After all, James was a junkie, much as it pained Michael to say it, already half insane with his addiction and about as stable as a snake when intoxicated. To dose himself as he did was in itself a species of madness, and it was well known that arsenic was a sexual stimulant, fuel for the homicidal furnace.

  Smashed on poison and hatred, James might well tip into periods of transient lunacy, visiting his passion for revenge on the metaphorical equivalent of his wife. In these storms of monomania his desire for retribution would own him, he would become both judge and jury, his own little Solomon, ‘Yack the Ripper’, sequestrating his victim’s metal and dishing out penalties according to the grotesque perversions of an insane Freemason.

  Thus was brother Jim converted into Bro Jack.

  Until the death of Alice McKenzie, or more accurately, until the death of James Maybrick, all the Ripper’s victims were killed either side of or over weekends. Martha Tabram was murdered on Monday, 6 August (a Bank Holiday weekend); Mary Ann Nichols on Friday, 31 August, Annie Chapman on Saturday, 8 September, Catherine Eddowes and Elizabeth Stride on Sunday, 30 September, and Mary Jane Kelly, on Friday, 9 November, all in 1888.

  To be the Whitechapel Fiend, James would have had to travel down from Liverpool to London at the weekends, and would have needed a reason to do so. It’s the same reason that denies his Freemasonry, burying it with a posthumous imposition of secrecy.

  The son of the god Apollo, Orpheus was a kind of antediluvian Elvis, blowing the Ancient Greeks away with his lyre. He was said to play with such magic that wild animals would come to listen, and even the trees bowed to him. He is no less revered in Freemasonry. ‘Orpheus’ (1706) was also the name of one of Michael Maybrick’s more prominent London lodges.

  The archive of ‘Orpheus’ is not stored at Freemasons’ Hall, but under t
he aegis of the lodge itself. For well over a year I attempted to access these records, and was out of luck for every week of it. At first I was told the documents had been ‘checked by the secretary’, and that ‘there was little in them about Michael Maybrick’ – which isn’t surprising, because three months later I was informed that ‘all of the Orpheus documents had gone missing’. It was therefore beyond my imagination to know what the secretary had ‘checked’ – but forget it, I was not going to get to look at them. It was a disappointment, but kosher. These were private papers, and I had to accept the right of the lodge to impose whatever sanctions it wished. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t research the Orpheus Lodge (1706).

  Its history was written in 1977 by its then Grand Master, Bro T.G.E. Sheddon. A copy of his book was presented to the library at Freemasons’ Hall, and together with a meagre dossier and one or two random bits and pieces, that was it for 1706. I’ve no reason to believe that Bro Sheddon was anything other than an honourable man, writing from the archive he could access. But this says something about the archive, because his work is shot through with staggering inaccuracies. Orpheus was essentially a musicians’ lodge, its founders being among the outstanding talent of the day. Michael Maybrick was one of them, and it was he, together with about half a dozen others, who successfully petitioned for its constitution, a warrant approving it being issued by the Grand Lodge on 11 June 1877.

  Its founding first officers included Bros William Alexander Barrett, Frederic Davison, William Hayman Cummings and Michael Maybrick. Orpheus was consecrated that same year by the Provincial Grand Master of the Isle of Wight, Bro Hyde Pullen, assisted by the Gentleman Usher to HM Queen Victoria, Captain N.G. Phillips. At the top of the Masonic tree, Phillips was Sovereign Grand Commander of the Ancient and Accepted Rite, and had been a member of the Supreme Council of Freemasons since 1864. Orpheus’s inaugural event was followed by a celebration at Freemasons’ Hall on Saturday, 18 August 1877, and a tradition was thus established. As the opening lines of Sheddon’s history record:

  Orpheus has always been a Saturday Lodge. In the fifty years covered by this history three hundred and forty meetings were held, three hundred and twenty seven of them on Saturdays, a truly emphatic indication of preference maintained to this day, for not in the last twenty years has any meeting been held on any other day.8

  To visit Orpheus, and indeed to be Jack the Ripper, meant you had to be in London over a weekend. I had been pestering the library for months over the lack of material on Orpheus and had got nothing but Sheddon (which by then I had a copy of anyway), when suddenly a new document turned up. It was a photocopy of the original Orpheus Petition, and I assumed it must have been a concession from the Lodge Secretary. I think it was sent in good faith, but there was something immediately iffy about it. It would be easy to look at this piece of paper and see nothing but its age. And that would be precisely the wrong way to look at it.

  It’s obviously Victorian, and looks the part, but plays it like a ham. It purports to show that Orpheus Lodge absolutely didn’t meet on any Saturday during the crucial killer months of August, September, October, and the first three weeks of November. In other words, should anyone consider any association between Orpheus and the East End murders, here was the antidote.

  The petition purports to establish that Orpheus Lodge absolutely didn’t meet on any Saturday during those crucial killer months. That’s what it says, and it’s transparently false. ‘The meetings were adjusted,’ writes Sheddon; ‘they were originally the last Saturdays in October.’ In a few words he contradicts the phoney petition, which ‘originally’ called for no meetings in October at all. Bro Sheddon was doubtless sincere, but careless in his research and gulled by bogus documents. A glance at The Freemason of 20 October 1888 (page 612) trashes both Sheddon and the petition. Orpheus meetings habitually took place on the last Saturday of October, in this instance, Saturday, 27 October 1888.

  The problem with this petition, and much like it, is its crudity – it leaps at you like some junk politician on TV. The actual dates for meetings of Orpheus Lodge were August, September, October, November, and through to the following April. The Freemason for 5 May 1888 has this: ‘Orpheus Lodge (1706). The last meeting of the season was held on Saturday 28th April, after which the Brethren enjoyed the usual musical treat offered by this lodge.’ There were no meetings in May, June or July.

  This wished-for autumn hiatus simply didn’t exist, and in serial contradiction of himself, Bro Sheddon’s history is replete with Orpheus assemblies in August, September, October and November: ‘The Lodge library contains a bound volume of such programmes covering every meeting from October 1880 to April 1890’ (page 14); ‘His death was announced to the Lodge in October’ (page 25); ‘Hodson duly ascended the Master’s Chair on 25th of October’ (page 41). Orpheus was in fact at its most active during the months the petition denies. The question, of course, is, why would anyone attempt to pretend anything different?

  Was James Maybrick a member of Orpheus? With no access to the lodge archive it seemed impossible to prove either way. But in this caper you’ve got to keep stepping back, and I started to explore other London lodges. There were so many that I restricted the search to those associated with Michael Maybrick.

  Frederic Davison was a fellow founder of Orpheus and a very eminent Mason. He was to prove the worth of Longfellow’s words, ‘No action, whether foul or fair, is ever done, but it leaves somewhere a record.’ On 21 October 2001 I received a reply to a letter, via the library at Freemasons’ Hall, from the aforementioned Secretary of Orpheus. ‘With regard to James Maybrick the Secretary has confirmed that he was definitely not a member of Orpheus Lodge.’9 It doesn’t get any clearer than that; but I was asking a question to which I already knew the answer. Either the Lodge Secretary was wilfully concealing the truth (and I imagine nobody could blame him for that), or his records had been weeded like a municipal flowerbed. Because a member of Orpheus Lodge James Maybrick most definitely was.

  Attention to security is paramount in Freemasonry. It is virtually impossible to get into a working lodge or chapter without comprehensively proving your right to be there. ‘No Brother may be admitted to a Lodge unless he is personally known to, and vouched for by one of the brethren present, or unless he be well vouched for after due examination.’ ‘The Grand Master has no more right to pass the Tyled door of a Lodge without permission than has a superior officer to pass the guard without giving the password.’ ‘No Companion no matter how exalted in rank, should ever be permitted to enter without first being reported.’10

  You didn’t just waddle in.

  These strictures are ubiquitous and applicable to all Masonic assemblies. It’s a merciless rule, number 15 in the Constitutions, applied vigorously and without exception: ‘You promise that no visitor shall be received into your Lodge without due examination, and producing proper vouchers of his being initiated into a regular Lodge.’11

  And yet, according to the Secretary of Orpheus, all the above was waived on the night of 6 June 1878, when James Maybrick decided to pop into the Westminster and Keystone Lodge.

  Among the ‘Visitors’ to the Westminster and Keystone that night was ‘J. Maybrick. Orpheus 1706’. If James ‘was definitely not a member of Orpheus Lodge’, he must have somehow faked his way in, and it apparently bothered no one. Were that true, he would have made Masonic history. There is no way James Maybrick could have put a foot through the door of the Westminster and Keystone Lodge, and no way he could have been signed in as a member of Orpheus (1706), without producing his credentials.

  The letter from the Secretary of Orpheus Lodge is utterly unsound. The documentation from the Westminster and Keystone speaks for itself. It’s in the archives of that very lodge, and no amount of bluster can change it. James Maybrick’s presence is corroborated in a pamphlet published years later, in 1907, by the W and K.

  Wherein is an alphabetical list of its visitors:

  It’s not at all surpri
sing that James should have visited Westminster and Keystone. His own Past Grand Master at Liverpool (St George’s 32) and Chamberlain to Her Majesty Queen Victoria, the Earl of Lathom, was a member, as was its Worshipful Master, Colonel Le Grande Starkie, a man of vast estates and like the Earl a Freemason of considerable clout. Colonel Edis of the Artists Volunteers was also a member, and Frederic Davison (of Orpheus) one of its founders.

  James Maybrick was a Freemason, and it’s subsequent interference with documents that attempts to pretend he wasn’t. I don’t seek to impugn the integrity of anyone currently at Freemasons’ Hall. The conspiracy to airbrush James out of his own history was cooked up a very long time ago. Curiously, or perhaps significantly, about a hundred years later his name was once again to become a focus of conjecture, with the emergence in 1992 of the so-called ‘diary’ linking James to the Ripper. Of particular interest to this narrative is that similar sensitivity to his name was occupying unknown ‘fingers ghostly’ over a century before.

  My correspondence with the library was blowing holes in the camouflage. ‘I’ve contacted the Supreme Council,’ wrote the ever diligent librarian, ‘and although they have been unable to give me any information regarding his Lodge membership, they’ve given me details of his membership of a Rose Croix Chapter.’

  James Maybrick

  Liverpool Rose Croix Chapter No 19

  Perfected on the 24th January 1873

  Profession: Broker

  Address: Normanston, Christchurch Road, Claughton, Cheshire

  Resigned: 1874

  Apparently the only document they could dig up associating James Maybrick with Freemasonry was his ‘resignation’ from it? Even with every benefit of the doubt, this was ridiculous. If anyone at Supreme Council had wanted to check James out they needed to look no further than their own yearbooks. If he’d resigned in 1874, how is it that he’s listed as an eighteenth-degree Freemason in 1888?