They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  The above is a nineteenth-century Knights Templar logo, showing the skull and crossed bones. Not a mark was found on Johnnie’s neck or face, but skulls don’t have ears, so Jack cut them off.

  ‘There was not a spot of blood upon any of his clothing except his collar, which, strangely enough, in view of the entire absence of injury to the neck, was saturated with blood.’94 According to the Bradford Telegraph, it was ‘perfectly soaked halfway up’.95 This may have seemed strange to a provincial newsman, but in the context of the Ripper’s set-dressing it wasn’t strange at all. Bro Bagster Phillips would have recognised its significance instantly. In both Masonic and Rosicrucian ceremony the (crimson) collar is notable, and it wasn’t random that Jack carefully steeped the boy’s collar in his own blood. The Rosicrucians share their outfits with ‘the distinctive sign of the Templars’ (white chemise with a red edge). ‘May its colour always remind you that it was tinged with innocent blood’ (Grand College of Rites, Vol. 5).

  Barrit was constantly in and out of court at the dictate of London, his jailers liaising regularly with the Met: ‘The authorities are in communication with the London police, as it is thought probable that there is some connection between the crime and the Whitechapel murders’ – and Withers actually travelled to Scotland Yard to coordinate strategy.96 Bro McGowan kept shop while he was away, chaperoning the milkman’s appearances before the Worshipful Justices – and Right Worshipful they were, including Bro Alderman Thomas Hill, Bro Alderman John Hill, Bro William Oddy, Bro John Ambler, and in the chair, Bro John Armitage. Complementing this lot was the Treasury Prosecutor, Bro James Freeman (Prince of Wales Lodge).97

  Given the glaring innocence of William Barrit, and the evidence suppressed in respect of the Ripper, is it not an abiding scandal that this conclave of worshipful lackeys was allowed anywhere near a court of law? Would any citizen in control of their senses have considered this tribunal as worthy? Forget astonishment, the public would surely have been stunned had they known of the institutionalised criminality coming out of London. Even Bro McGowan was later to admit, ‘It was London responsible for pressing the charges.’98 I can hear the dirty little whispers of Robert Anderson.99 But as will become apparent, Barrit was nothing more than a dry run for the prosecution of Florence Maybrick. In both conspiracies the Crown was seeking the ultimate penalty. Both Barrit and Florence were to suffer death as scapegoats for Jack.

  Viscount Lord Salisbury had no problem hanging the occasional innocent Mick, and there was enthusiasm for his brand of justice in Bradford.100 On 18 January 1889, the Bradford Pioneer reported Chief Constable Withers as relishing thoughts of the scaffold for Barrit, saying that he was ‘weaving the rope’.101 But the popular tide had turned in the milkman’s favour, and the same newspaper referred to Withers’ coppers as ‘a shame throughout the nation’:

  The chief ground of complaint against the police consists in their studied attempts to manufacture evidence against Barrit and in their wilful withholding of facts which were sufficient at the outset to clear him. We have the fullest authority for saying that the police were in possession of knowledge which entirely removed suspicion from Barrit.102

  It was this knowledge – the Freemasonic saturation, by way of example – that, like Bro Bagster’s autopsy report, was ruthlessly suppressed, and remains unobtainable to this day. Fuck justice, fuck the law, fuck Johnnie Gill’s devastated family, fuck his mother who took flowers to her child’s grave every Sunday for the next thirty-seven years, and fuck the milkman, his wife and their baby; we’re talking about a threat to a system here, all the way up to the Worshipful Grand Master and his Parisian fuck-chair. If you can frame a giant like Charles Parnell, what problem does a twenty-three-year-old provincial milkman with a horse and cart present?

  Between the coroner and the magistrates, Barrit was hauled into court five times to listen to the ever-escalating inventions of the police. PC Arthur Kirk was one of the first helmets to attend the discovery of the corpse. He got off his ‘burley’ arse in front of the Worshipfuls to claim he’d patrolled the alleyway at Back Belle Vue and Back Mellor Street throughout the preceding night. He said he had tried Barrit’s stable doors on many occasions, and found them locked. This was important, because Withers’ deceit relied on the stable as the crime scene, from which his sleepless witness had heard the ‘sawing’ which could only have been the work of William Barrit, because only he had a key.

  Craven was quick to prove that Kirk was lying through his teeth. He’d been nowhere near Barrit’s stable that night, and he certainly didn’t try its door. It couldn’t have been locked, because the key to lock it had been lost weeks before.103 Moreover, Craven proved that the spooky ‘sawing’ was the sound of Barrit’s horse eating oats from its bucket, and scraping it along the stone floor.

  Kirk had previous in respect of lying about his nocturnal rounds. He’d been admonished and fined for the same offence eighteen months before: he claimed to have been on his beat when in fact he was swilling booze in a pub.104 It is curious, is it not, that on the former occasion he was punished, while in this instance, with a man’s life in the balance, Withers didn’t so much as peep?

  Next up was Police Constable Haigh. Under interrogation, Craven brought him to the vital point of the ‘thighs protruding’ at either side of the head. ‘Did not the legs protrude from under the top of the coat?’ The stooge was on the spot, and contradicting Lodge, Bucke and himself, he replied, ‘No, only the head.’

  Craven was now in possession of the original notes, and of course he knew Haigh was lying. The next question would prove it, and there was a sudden rush of sweat to the helmet. Desperate to escape, PC Haigh decided to throw a fit. ‘The witness was seized with illness during his examination,’ recorded the Shipley Times, ‘and had to retire.’105 The justices then conveniently adjourned.

  There was a similar fiasco at the concurrent coroner’s proceedings, when a letter from Dr Hime brought the coroner, Bro John Hutchinson, into a comparable fluster. As yet unaware of its incendiary nature, Hutchinson had it read into the record, and very quickly wished he hadn’t. Dr Hime offered to place evidence ‘derived from his postmortem examination of the unfortunate little boy Gill’, together with evidence ‘from other sources’, at the coroner’s disposal:

  I feel the failure to bring the criminal to justice is no less a misfortune than the cruel murder he has perpetrated. Some of the evidence of Doctor Roberts and myself is in direct conflict with the medical evidence already laid before you in this case, and consequently opposes the conclusions founded on this portion of the evidence.106

  What’s all this ‘bring the criminal to justice’ nonsense? They had their criminal, with his milk cart, and were doing just that. Hime’s letter was ‘a very improper thing indeed. I’m surprised Doctor Hime should have so far forgotten himself to send such a letter.’107 Hutchinson had it struck out. He was sure that ‘the gentlemen to whom it had been read [the jury] would take no notice of it, and he regretted very much that Hime had sent the letter’.

  What was denied to the jury found its way into the newspapers. In an interview with the Yorkshire Herald, Dr Roberts clarified various points of his associate’s critique. He said their conclusions differed ‘very materially indeed’ from evidence given by doctors on behalf of the prosecution: ‘There would have been a direct conflict,’ he said, ‘so far as the immediate cause of death was concerned. I am entirely at variance with Dr Lodge in his statements that two “stabs” to the chest were the cause of death. I do not consider them stabs at all, and am confident they were not given until after death.’108 Rejecting Lodge’s conclusions as make-believe, he continued, ‘It would have been impossible for stabs to have been given in that position without cutting through the left lung, which was unhurt. They were simply cuts made through the integuements between the ribs for the purpose of reaching the heart.’109 He further agreed with Dr Hime’s assertion that the internal mutilations were inflicted with a small knife, such as a b
utcher might use on a sheep: ‘It is inconceivable,’ he said, prepared to swear it on oath, ‘that the clumsy bread-knife which the police produced could have done them.’110

  The physicians’ intercession knocked on into the magistrates’ court, and was found similarly offensive by the Crown Prosecutor Bro Freeman. Posturing in servility to his London puppet-masters, he squawked that ‘On behalf of the Treasury [the Crown] he must protest against Mr Waugh, or Doctor Hime, or any other person seeing the witnesses for the prosecution.’ To which Mr Waugh for the defence replied, ‘He must protest against the action of the police in having obtained the evidence of one of the witnesses, and having given just so much as was against the prisoner, and kept back all that was favourable to the prisoner.’111

  And so it went on, Waugh and Craven daily taking the prosecution to pieces. Freeman was running out of road, and forced into Withers’ world of fantasy. Seeking the acquiescence of his fellow Bros on the bench, he requested their patience to allow him time to present a witness who would blow the defence out of the water.

  Bro Armitage asked who the witness was, and what was the nature of his evidence. Like a sneak whispering in the toilets, Freeman said he ‘would rather keep it a secret’, and he ‘could not disclose the name of the witness’.112 Mr Waugh was getting angry, and asked that the name of the witness be given before the court adjourned. On Freeman’s refusal, Waugh lost it. ‘This conduct on behalf of the Treasury was the most extraordinary conduct he had ever seen in a court of justice.’ He added that ‘He would remind the Bench that this was not a Star-Chamber enquiry or an Inquisition, but a Court of Justice.’ Unfortunately for Barrit and his counsel, a star chamber is precisely what it was. These geezers had nothing whatever to do with justice, and ‘after conferring with Brother magistrates on the Bench’, they decided in favour of Freeman and adjourned.113

  Outside the court, Barrit had made a legion of new friends. His parish vicar, the Reverend J. Whitaker, had organised a defence fund, and a community that had little gave what they could. Its Chairman, Mr Morrison, set the tone of a packed meeting, describing the prosecution of Barrit as ‘the most scandalous piece of injustice that had ever occurred in the history of England’114 – which suggests he wasn’t too familiar with English justice. In just a few months it would cast its putrescence over Mrs Maybrick.

  Meantime, the Reverend Whitaker was on his feet attacking it. ‘It was a downright sin and shame,’ he said, ‘to have put the Barrit family to the great amount of cost and suffering,’ and he hoped they would make their voice heard throughout the kingdom, ‘in order to show their abhorrence at these iniquitous proceedings. There was nothing against Barrit except that his wife had bought a new carving knife. They might as well come to any of their houses and say because they had their knives cleaned they had committed one of these dreadful Whitechapel murders. They had been disgusted with the Bradford police, who had spared no pains either in lying, nor prompting other people to lie.’

  The Reverend was composing a letter to the government, demanding compensation for the milkman’s unwarranted suffering and costs. ‘The letter would be signed by himself and Mr Craven, and would be forwarded [via Morrison] to the Home Secretary.’115

  I have some belated bad news for them. It was the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, who was engineering the case against Barrit, and while he was at it, was sanctioning the Bradford police to commence proceedings against the Reverend Whitaker himself. Withers was taking care of it, while Barrit was a victim of Sir A.K. Stephenson KCB, Solicitor to the Treasury and Director of Public Prosecutions. It was Stephenson who made it an imprisonable offence to read Zola (and the milkman could have furnished the plot for one of his novels). Stephenson was at the epicentre of Matthews’ legal shenanigans, a minion of executive corruption, dishing it out as required in the vernacular of autocratic pomp.

  A correspondent by the name of William B. Gordon understood what was in progress and on 12 January 1889 wrote a damning letter to the Bradford Observer:

  The public should now be informed, if they want to know how the institutions work for which they pay, what investigations the Public Prosecutor made of the statements laid before them by Mr Withers before he took on himself the responsibility of prosecuting. So far as has yet been shown to the public, the share of A.K. Stephenson in this abortive prosecution, has been to read the statement sent up by Mr Withers, and instruct Mr Freeman to prosecute. Had Sir A.K. Stephenson, on receipt of Mr Withers’ statement, himself come down to sift the evidence in private, and ascertain its real bearing, it can hardly be believed that we should have heard anything of the charges against Barrit, who would therefore have been discharged without suffering as he has done in mind and pocket. As it is, not only has an innocent man been needlessly harassed, but the real murderer has had placed before him in public prints most valuable hints as to the best means of getting rid of any remaining traces of his guilt.116

  The Ripper had all the hints (and help) he needed, thank you very much, and Mr Gordon was wasting his ink. Neither he nor Craven could have anticipated the depths to which the prosecution would sink – until the appearance of Withers’ ‘secret witness’.

  John Thomas Dyer was an unemployed labourer, and literally a half-wit. Withers had to apply to three separate physicians in an attempt to get a certificate certifying he was competent to appear in court. Dyer could remember nothing, not even the date he was born, yet he had remarkable recall when it came to William Barrit. He claimed to have seen him in Back Belle Vue at 6.20 a.m. on Saturday, 29 December 1888, roughly an hour before the discovery of Johnnie’s body.

  ‘I went straight up Lumb Lane,’ he said, ‘and turned down the back of Belle Vue [where] I saw the milkman, Barrit. He had a parcel which he carried in front of him.’ Hutchinson, the coroner, asked if he knew Barrit. He replied: ‘Yes, I know him by his walk. He used to tease me on Manningham Lane, about the Salvation Army. When Barrit came out of the stable door he held the bundle under one arm and shut the door with the other. The bundle appeared to be a very heavy one. I did not notice the colour of the bundle, but it was wrapped up like a bundle of clothes.’ Did he speak to him? ‘Yes, I said, “Good morning, sir, Bless the Lord, Hallelujah,” but he did not say anything and hung down his head.’ Did he have any doubt about the man being Barrit? He did not, and was sure of it. Hutchinson then turned his attention to Withers, who wanted to present his ‘certificates from the medical men’ to the jury. A glance at the witness made them superfluous, and Craven stood to exploit the obvious.

  In response to his opening question, Dyer said, ‘I am twenty years of age, but do not know the year in which I was born.’

  ‘Do you know how to get to know?’

  ‘By going to the Register Office.’

  ‘Do you know the year?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  No barrister willingly asks a question to which he doesn’t already know the answer, and Craven’s next was, ‘Have you ever been in a court before?’ Dyer confirmed that ‘he’d been in a court four years ago, and also last year as a witness’.

  ‘Do you remember having been there at any other time?’

  ‘Yes, sir, eight years ago.’

  ‘What were you there for then?’

  ‘I was locked up for being with bad boys.’

  Clearly he’d been led astray by the corrupted whispers of others. Craven established that he’d served two and a half years in a reformatory school, where they didn’t teach him any figures, ‘Because they could not teach me anything.’

  How then could he be sure it was at 6.20 a.m. on Saturday, 29 December, that he’d seen Barrit? ‘I’m sure it was,’ said Dyer, ‘because the same day I got three-pence as a Christmas Box.’

  ‘Does anybody else tease you?’

  ‘Lots of people.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they think I’m a bit silly.’117

  Dyer’s deposition was so transparently got-up it wouldn’t have made it past the Mad Ha
tter. Withers applied for another adjournment, and the jury complained about the absence of the accused. To both points the coroner replied ‘that he was loath to close the enquiry without having the subject thoroughly exhausted [but] he could not overlook the fact that already the case had been adjourned four times’. Withers finally won his adjournment, and minus Barrit, they were all back in the same seats fourteen days later.

  During the hiatus, Hutchinson’s opinion had swung decidedly in favour of Withers and his par-brained witness. Addressing the jury he said, ‘He could scarcely find language in which to convey to their mind the importance of Dyer’s evidence.’ If it were true, ‘then it became an important question whether or not it brought around Barrit an irresistible chain of circumstantial evidence which he was called upon to answer. If they believed Dyer, and the testimony which corroborated him [rubbish like the “sawing”], then it would be their duty to return a verdict of wilful murder against William Barrit.’118 The jury duly returned such a verdict, and the milkman was committed for trial at the West Riding Assize Court at Leeds.

  Having condemned their man, the authorities wasted no time in hastening him to the gallows. On the following day, 9 February, six weeks before he stood trial at the assizes, they deemed him guilty with a phoney entry on Johnnie’s death certificate. Under ‘Cause of Death’ it reads: ‘That William Barritt did feloniously wilfully and of malice aforethought Kill and murder the said John Gill.’ It remains on the certificate to this day.

  Dyer was put up to lie in service of an irredeemably corrupted executive who themselves were in service to a Freemasonic nightmare. The attempt to camouflage the Ripper behind Barrit exposes the mind-boggling duplicity behind the rest of the Scotland Yard walk-ons – Kosminski, Ostrog, Pizer, et al. – not to mention the ridiculous comedy turns from the non-existent Nautical Man, assorted short-arses, and the Fiend on the Float in the Thames. The police and politicians had murmured of an ‘accomplice’ when they were ‘it’, prepared to add Barrit to the roll-call of Jack’s victims with a bit of judicial murder on his behalf.