They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  The absentee soldier went home ‘to my young girls house, number 5 Vaughn Street, Toxteth Park, and told her brother John Crane, all I had heard them two young men say. He said, “Don’t you have anything to do with it, you might get caught and taken back to your regiment.” So I said nothing about it. Soon after I was taken by Detective Wilson in Manchester Street one night so soon after I heard how Mrs Maybrick poisoned her husband and was sent for trial. I didn’t think it worthwhile to say anything about it, but it has been on my mind ever since, I even think of it at night when I lay awake, that such a thing could be done against a lady that is innocent.’42

  Reeves was lying awake in a prison cell. He’d been slammed up for ‘warehouse breaking’ at Sussex Assizes and sentenced to five years’ hard. He was guilty, but not as guilty as the insects who jailed Florence Maybrick. Reeves insisted on making his statement, but the venal crew suppressed it. It was to remain classified as a secret Home Office file for the next hundred years.43

  Reeves’s statement was smothered by the authorities as ‘absurd’. But had he not heard what he claimed to have heard, how could he even remotely have known the secret of James Maybrick’s murder? It’s taken rather a while to uncover the truth about Bro Michael Maybrick, and by any objective view it is beyond incredible for a near-illiterate like Robert Reeves to have dreamed up so complementary a narrative, ad hoc, in a prison cell. Everything Reeves said is substantiated in its entirety by fact. Moreover, it is borne out by realities that were then unknown.

  Before, during and after the ‘trial’, the press had saturated the public mind with sensation about arsenic. Mrs Maybrick was an ‘arsenic poisoner’. That’s what the judge said, and that is what was said in every newspaper from Liverpool to London. Yet Reeves dismisses this, and doesn’t talk about arsenic at all. He says James Maybrick was murdered with laudanum (liquid morphia). If he was making it all up, why risk his credibility with unnecessary invention? A man telling an absurd tale would have surely kept within the ‘known facts’.

  Reeves’s statement annihilates the rubbish underpinning Florence Maybrick’s conviction. Had Alexander Macdougall been aware of it, I think it would have caused friction enough to ignite his pen. He didn’t know about Reeves, but in his subsequent treatise of 1891 he set out his suspicions concerning laudanum. An empty bottle of it had been ‘discovered’ by Alice Yapp in a chocolate box inside one of Mrs Maybrick’s trunks. It had clearly been secreted there to incriminate her, as is consistent with Reeves’s statement: ‘“How will you manage this?” The other said, “I will manage that alright with the servant. I will get her to put a bottle of laudanum in Mrs Maybrick’s drawers.”’

  Macdougall wanted to know where this bottle had come from, and why it was ignored by the police. ‘There ought to have been no difficulty in the way of the police finding out whether she had been buying a bottle of a solution of morphia. And then again, why was the label, “Solution of Morphia”, left on, and the name of the druggist scratched off? Solution of Morphia is a white liquid, which looks like water. If a person was engaged in crime, I can understand their taking off the words, “Solution of Morphia”, but they were left on, and the chemist’s name erased!’44

  I suggest it was because the laudanum had been obtained in London, and its source erased precisely to prevent the cops from tracing it – not that they gave a toss for detection. Nobody apart from his murderers knew that James Maybrick had been dispatched with a hotshot of morphia – except this easy-to-dismiss convict Robert Reeves.

  We come now to the last and most important of the soldier’s revelations, a subterfuge not even Macdougall was ever cognisant of, and that is the theft of James Maybrick’s business: ‘the whole business will fall to us you know and we shall be two lucky fellows’.

  James Maybrick’s will, dated 25 April 1889, makes absolutely no mention of Edwin. He doesn’t get a paperclip. James bequeathed ‘all my worldly possessions, including life-insurances, cash, shares, property – in fact everything I possess – in trust with my brothers Michael & Thomas Maybrick for my two children, James Chandler Maybrick & Gladys Evelyn Maybrick’ (my emphasis).

  It was a trust that wasn’t honoured. On 14 October 1889, Michael handed over all shares in James’s business to Edwin: ‘Transfer of shares from James Maybrick (decd) to Edwin Maybrick.’45 It was undoubtedly as reward for services rendered, but that isn’t the immediate point. Unless Robert Reeves had somehow accessed the records of the Liverpool Cotton Brokers Association (while simultaneously serving five years in prison), there is no conceivable way he could have known what a ‘lucky fellow’ Edwin was to become other than in the way he described. Reeves was telling the truth about these toxic gentlemen, proving that it’s not entirely beyond the realms of imagination for a Freemason like Michael Maybrick to indulge in a sideline of murder.

  This might be a convenient point at which to note that while the Whitechapel Fiend was concentrating his attentions on a forthcoming homicide in Liverpool, his fan base of travelling ‘hoaxers’ were somehow aware of the interlude, and ceased to mail their letters. For some arcane reason, the team of provincial Jack the Rippers had fallen into group silence? Ha ha.

  But let us return to the real thing. In hindsight the events unfolding at Battlecrease are as clear as day, but for those in that woeful house, most especially Florence, it must have seemed like the inexplicable progress of a blighted dream.

  Dr Humphreys was in and out like he was paying rent. He was just one of many in attendance. Most frequently present were James’s eternal friend George Davidson and another pal from the Cotton Exchange, Charles Ratcliffe, who he’d known since the Virginia days. They sat and listened, and were as baffled as the bedridden wreck himself. He complained incessantly of a phantom ‘hair in the throat’ that caused him to ‘hawk’. Plus, he had a tongue like garbage. Humphreys stuck to his ‘dyspepsia’ theory, but clearly didn’t have a clue. His patient had gone from sick to sicker, alternating the vomiting with bouts of diarrhoea. The consistently ineffectual physician decided the best way to stop both was to allow nothing in. Apart from an increasing variety of prescribed medicines, Maybrick was denied any liquids whatsoever, including even water. He could chew on a wet towel and suck an occasional ice cube, and that was about it.

  His thirst became an ancillary torture. He begged the cook for some lemonade, which came up from the kitchen and was promptly confiscated by Florence.46 Although she was only trying to follow the doctor’s strict instructions, this prohibition was publicly used against her as an example of her heartlessness. Subsequent to her conviction, an anonymous letter signed ‘Antifiction’ appeared in the Liverpool Courier. It serves as an example of the malignancy directed at this woman, its author as sour with spite as he or she was well-informed: ‘… this confiding innocent wife could snatch from the hand of the nurse the lemonade that was to quench the parching thirst of her “darling” husband while in the agonies of death’.47

  Such venom might well have spilled from what Charles Ratcliffe described as the ‘Female Serpants’48 in daily commute through Battlecrease House. Alice Yapp and Matilda Briggs, by way of example. Another bedside regular was of course Edwin, but there was no such press condemnation for him. Despite Humphreys’ stringent ban on liquids, on 5 May Edwin pitched up in the sickroom bearing James a brandy and soda. We needn’t speculate what was buried within it. The ricochet came within half an hour as Edwin was attempting to ply him with ‘a dose of physic’. Because no one suspected him, Edwin proffered this information himself at the ‘trial’.49

  ‘I don’t question the brother’s actions at all,’ said the Irish Judas, and no one did, except Alexander Macdougall. He wrote a blistering assault on Edwin’s interference. ‘It was an outrageous piece of presumption on his part, and might have caused his brother’s death!’50 Had he been aware of Reeves’s statement, he would have known that such presumptions ultimately did.

  On the following day, Humphreys pulled another bottle from his bag.
What the hell, he’d tried everything else – this was good old Fowler’s Solution, whose active ingredient was arsenic. A minute amount of arsenic, one tenth of a grain, was finally discovered in Maybrick’s viscera, and this was probably its source. Whether it was or wasn’t (he could handle fifty times more), the only certainty is that he wasn’t getting dosed with arsenic by his wife, and she would never have been accused of it without the irredeemable wickedness of Briggs and Yapp. This pair shared a trade in whispers, knew everything, and what they didn’t know they invented. ‘The most pathetic part about it,’ wrote Florence Aunspaugh, ‘was that Mrs Maybrick did not have the brain to realise their attitude towards her. Had she sensed their enmity and been more cautious, conditions would have been very different, and much better for her.’51

  They were about to get very much worse.

  Florence Maybrick wasn’t stupid, but she wasn’t particularly clever either. Even had she been the ace in the pack, I think it’s unlikely she, or anyone else, could have been aware of the degree of raw evil about to be unleashed against her. It was driven by a psychopath whose métier was control. By stealth and force of personality he had assembled a formidable team, each with their individual motives for animosity towards Florence, that by his nature he was able to exploit. He chose Yapp for her spite, Briggs for her jealousy, and Edwin for his greed. Michael Maybrick himself constituted the binding ingredient, which was non-negotiable HATE.

  He had further potent allies under his spell, not least the London and Liverpool police, including their coroners and courts. This was a state as sick as anything in Gulliver’s Travels, its people, wrote Swift of his barely disguised kingdom of ‘Tribnia’ (Britain), made up of ‘Discoverers, Witnesses, Informers, Accusers, Prosecutors, Evidencers, Swearers, together with their several subservient and subaltern Instruments’, and ‘all under the colours, the conduct, and pay of ministers of state’.

  Sir Charles Russell QC was one such citizen, who suppressed vital evidence to the gross detriment of his client. A document that would have exonerated her never saw the light of day. Conversely, he sanctioned focus on a letter that by any equity should have been struck out as inadmissible. It was from Florence to Brierley, of counterfeit date but claimed to have been written on Wednesday, 8 May 1889. The prosecution rode in on the back of it. Written in pencil, it was spore for the ugly brain of Fitzjames Stephen, wherein it served to ferment his wild misogynies. I’ll be taking a closer look at this letter, but for the moment restrict myself to its opening lines.

  Wednesday

  Dearest

  Your letter under cover to John K— came to hand just after I had written to you on Monday …

  ‘John K’ was Florence’s London friend John Baillie Knight, who in March was acting as an intermediary for her illicit mail to Alfred Brierley. While she was under sentence of death in Walton Jail, Brierley swore an affidavit on Florence’s behalf. It was destined for the Home Secretary in expectation of a reprieve, and he was very frank: ‘I never was improperly intimate with her until our meeting in London on 22nd March last. We parted abruptly at the Hotel in Henrietta Street on Sunday, the 24th March. When we so parted on the 24th March it was distinctly understood that we would not meet again except in public, and I for my part had finally resolved that I would not again be tempted into a similar position.’

  Among other things pertaining to their defunct affair, which was over on 24 March 1889, Brierley wrote: ‘If Mrs Maybrick wrote to me on Monday the 6th May, I never received it, and am informed and believe that the word “you” on the second line is a mistake for “him”.’

  In other words, he believes her letter originally read: ‘Your letter under cover to John K— came to hand just after I had written to him on Monday.’52

  Brierley was quite right, except that it wasn’t a ‘mistake’. Florence’s letter to him of Wednesday, 8 May (which he didn’t receive either) had been tampered with by an unfriendly hand. Somebody was trying to pretend that Florence was still embroiled in an adulterous relationship with Brierley. Before arriving at who this snake might be, we need to make a brief detour a few weeks hence, to an article in the Liverpool Daily Post of 3 June. Published under a bold headline, while Florence was being held in isolation on remand, it’s a sniff of the rot to come. It’s also the reason (were he not at the core of it) why Russell should have had all such correspondence struck out as inadmissible. ‘It was bruited about in the course of Saturday,’ reported the Post (one of Liverpool’s most prestigious newspapers),

  that the police have resorted to an extraordinary stratagem, in order to procure evidence of a peculiar character, which they require in the case. The story goes that at their instigation a lady was employed to write a letter to a person well known in Liverpool, purporting to come from Mrs Maybrick. It is alleged that the writing so closely resembled that of the prisoner as to have deceived the person to whom it was addressed, and to have brought from him a response. This remarkable proceeding, we are informed, took place immediately prior to Mr Maybrick’s death.53

  If this were true – and it was true – it tells us all we need to know about the confederacy of gangsters operating out of Liverpool while disguised as policemen. ‘It was a direct imputation of FORGERY against the Police,’ charged Macdougall, ‘engaged in getting up this case against Mrs Maybrick!!’ That it was, and the police made no denial. ‘Do the people of this country intend to allow criminal trials to be got up in such a way?’ I’m afraid the answer was yes. Yes, when they all but hanged William Barrit; yes, when they bullied the waiter Alfred Schweisso into perjury; yes, when they were snooping about in the bushes outside Flatman’s Hotel. The police in Victorian England were simply the thug-end of Victorian ‘law’. They were accountable to no one but the System they serviced, and it was as corrupt as they were. A cartoon from the New Statesman of many years ago hits the nail on its head, and saves me writing a paragraph.54

  So who was it who was messing around with Florence Maybrick’s correspondence? Who owned the deceitful pencil, and how could he/she have had such a familiarity with Florence’s handwriting?

  According to Florence Aunspaugh, Mrs Matilda Briggs had her snout into everything. When the Maybricks were out, Briggs was in, snooping into every corner and drawer of the residence. For one so minded, getting a sample of Florence’s handwriting would be simple as a smile. ‘She was supposed to be Mr and Mrs Maybrick’s guest,’ wrote Aunspaugh, ‘yet she was on far more intimate terms with Yapp than she was with Mrs Maybrick.’55

  In his account of the ‘mystery’, Trevor Christie writes: ‘It is undoubtedly true, that an amorphous, loosely organised cabal was operating at Battlecrease House to snare Florrie in some misdeed that would break up her marriage and deprive her of her children; but, whatever its objective, it was certainly not to hound her to the gallows.’56

  I agree with Christie vis à vis the domestic wipe-out, but I take a less sanguine view in respect of the noose. Michael Maybrick exploited Yapp and Briggs, offering certain base satisfactions. But they didn’t know what was intended on his side of the deal. His hatred for Florence Maybrick was of a different order, and on Wednesday, 8 May 1889 he made his opening move.

  On the previous day Briggs claimed he’d sent her a telegram, ‘informing me that his brother was very ill and requesting me to go and see him’.57 The next morning, she and her equally unsavoury sister, Mrs Hughes, turned up at Battlecrease House. Before they made it through the door, Yapp beckoned to them from across the lawn. ‘Thank God, Mrs Briggs, you have come,’ she said, ‘for the mistress is poisoning the master.’ Mrs Hughes was naturally taken aback, and asked what reason she had for making so dreadful an accusation. ‘She then told us about the flypapers,’ said Briggs, ‘and how the food intended for Mr Maybrick had been tampered with by his wife. We were so shocked by what she said that we went up at once to his bedroom. Mrs Maybrick followed us immediately and was apparently angry, telling us we had no right to be there, but that if we would go downst
airs she would let us know all about his symptoms.’58 Briggs doesn’t say whether she let Florence know about Yapp’s accusation concerning the ‘flypapers’.

  Yapp’s monstrous lie was to become one of the reasons Mrs Maybrick would spend the next fifteen years of her life in a prison cell. By what possible contagion of mind could Yapp have conceived such a charge? She doesn’t even have herself as an alibi. Under cross-examination by Fat Jack for the prosecution, she was asked:

  ADDISON: Did you suspect your mistress?

  YAPP: No, sir.

  ADDISON: When you saw the fly-papers, did you suspect her?

  YAPP: No, sir.

  ADDISON: When you did see them, what then?

  YAPP: I did not think anything of them.59

  So what the fuck are you talking about, Alice Yapp? These flypapers arrived at Battlecrease House on or about 24 April, and were seen soaking quite openly in Mrs Maybrick’s dressing room. They were, as everyone in the house knew, a cosmetic preparation for the forthcoming bal masqué to which Florence would be escorted by Edwin on Tuesday, 30 April.

  If Yapp thought nothing of the flypapers in April, why is she suddenly converting them into weapons of murder in May? She was in the house when the so-called ‘London Medicine’ that had practically coffined James arrived. When he was blasted with strychnine on 27 April, she assisted when Florence administered a mustard emetic to save her husband’s life. Why did she not run round in circles then, yelling ‘Poison!’ at Mrs Briggs – ‘Thank God you’ve come, Mrs Briggs, someone in London is poisoning the Master!’