Ganz and Maybrick were used to sharing applause. The quotation above is from The Freemason, and below is a programme from one of the many concerts in which they performed together at St James’s Hall.
Although Ganz runs into a mental block after 1876, his recollections of Michael Maybrick are positively encyclopedic compared to everyone else’s. We get glimpses at the peripheries from the likes of George Sims, but never a whisper from the insiders. Bro Sir Charles Santley (fellow member of the Savage, knighted in 1907) is a classic example, as close to Maybrick’s publisher, John Boosey, as he was to the star himself. ‘I had many spars with J. Boosey,’ he writes, ‘but we never quarrelled; we were very intimate friends; both personally and professionally.’110 He could have said the same for his friend Michael Maybrick, but he didn’t.
Featuring the biggest names of the day, the picture below appeared in Sphere Magazine in 1892. The great baritone Sims Reeves stands at its centre, Maybrick to the left of him on piano, and Santley to the right, above Madame Patey’s fan.
Santley wrote two autobiographies, Student and Singer: The Reminiscences of Charles Santley and Reminiscences of My Life.111 Neither so much as mentions Michael Maybrick. You don’t have to grow up in the same city, share the same teachers (in Liverpool and Milan), get a hit song dedicated to your daughter and another to yourself, and sing on the same stages for twenty-five years, to remember a man as famous as Michael Maybrick.
Yet he apparently made no impact on Santley. Maybrick described Santley as one of his bedrock friends, ‘of whom he cannot say too much’, and peculiar it is that Santley has nothing to say about him. It’s the same story in Santley’s archive at Liverpool. A lifetime of programmes and press cuttings and soirées with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, but not a scrap refers to the singer born next door and who until the sudden exit lived two streets away in St John’s Wood.
He does no better with Sims Reeves. ‘I take the opportunity to testify to the merits of that great artist,’ says Maybrick. And now let’s hear what Reeves has to say about him. Nothing. Two autobiographies and a definitive Life by Charles Pearce contain not a word about the composer whose songs Bro Reeves sang so often.112 Bro Arthur Sullivan also falls victim to the same uncompromising amnesia. Wheelbarrows of books exploring every facet of Sullivan’s life are completely in ignorance of his friendship with Maybrick. A cynic might find that somewhat incomprehensible, what with the two men being Masonic Grand Organist almost back to back. Some might wonder what it was about Maybrick that annulled the Masonic memory.
It’s with Frederick Weatherly that history runs out of excuses. His archive is housed at the British Library, and it would take a more acquiescent point of view than mine not to feel a trifle suspicious of the thirty-eight folios evidencing his life. Once again the name Michael Maybrick is nowhere to be discovered. There is of course a collection of Weatherly/Adams song-sheets, but not a single reference to the name behind the sobriquet. The only hint we get is an oblique mention in ‘Friend o’ Mine’, a lyric Weatherly wrote in 1913, which he sent ‘to the man I loved, a lifelong friend’, who predictably remains anonymous. ‘Stephen Adams’ was Weatherly’s collaborator, but it was Maybrick who was the lifelong friend, a fellow he saw ‘constantly, usually at his own house in Wellington Terrace’.113
How intriguing it is that a relationship lasting over forty years is not worthy of a single mention in Weatherly’s archive – not a letter, not a card, not a name scribbled in the margin refers to Michael Maybrick. Like Gilbert without Sullivan, Lennon without McCartney, Weatherly is without Maybrick. If you didn’t know better you might imagine that Weatherly was a one-man band, and you could hardly be blamed. Never mind Maybrick, by 1911 even ‘Stephen Adams’ had disappeared, Black’s Musical Dictionary elevating Weatherly from lyricist to actual composer of all Maybrick/Adams’s most famous songs.
Needless to say, neither Maybrick nor Adams gets an entry, his hit compositions now credited to someone else. This is probably what Mrs Harrison means by ‘enigma’. Nowhere is this more startling than in Maybrick/Adams’s absence from Sir George Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. This four-volume, 2,444-page shelf-bender references practically anyone who ever whistled through his teeth. But you will look in vain for the superstar who created some of the most celebrated music of the Victorian epoch.
At first glance this seems incomprehensible, because Maybrick’s soulmates Bro W.H. Cummings and Bro Sir Arthur Sullivan were contributory editors to Grove, and are named as such in all four volumes. How this Fraternal duo could have overlooked their equally famous contemporary might be regarded as ‘a bit of a mystery’ by those who indulge in such conundrums.
Sir Arthur Sullivan was one of Sir George Grove’s special friends – ‘perhaps his best friend’, according to one of his biographers – with the two men enjoying a more enduring relationship than that Sullivan shared with Sir Charles Russell. Sir George of course was on more than cordial terms with Bro Sir Charles Warren, mentoring him through his scrapes with the Palestine Exploration Fund, as he would later mentor the career of Bro William Hayman Cummings. It was Sir George who had secured Cummings’ appointment as Principal of the Guildhall School of Music.
Cummings began his rise to fame in opera, singing with the best of them at Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and many of the kingdom’s principal festivals. He and Maybrick first performed together in 1876 in the Three Choirs Festival at Hereford. Thereafter their paths followed an intersecting lattice. Cummings was a director of the Philharmonic Society, of which Maybrick and Ganz were associates, together with their ubiquitous hero Sullivan, who was a guarantor. Bro Cummings was a founder member of Orpheus, and like Maybrick and Ganz a member of the Savage and the Arts Club, the latter that exclusive rendezvous at the end of Conduit Street. Frederick Weatherly was also a member, as was W.H. Thomas, the fellow Artists Volunteer who taught the lads to sing at Toynbee Hall.114 Notwithstanding that some of his closest friends are listed as members in 1888, Maybrick’s blatant clear-out is again starkly in evidence. Club records purport to show that he never joined in the fun until 1896, and was only briefly a member before resigning in 1900.
Give me a fucking break.
Whoever cooked this up wasn’t as adept at meddling with documents as some of the competition. Maybrick actually resided at the Arts Club in 1884, and was a regular throughout that decade. His unctuous interrogation, published in the World magazine in 1890, is worth reiteration: therein he’s either doing his manly things – riding, rowing, etc. – ‘or enjoying the conviviality of the Arts Club’.115 Before Jack the Ripper took to the streets with his blade, Michael Maybrick can readily be found at the Arts, but after 1892 he’s apparently still four years away from joining?
So what reason can be divined for this erasure from the picture as surely as Trotsky was airbrushed out of history in Stalin’s Soviet Union? Michael Maybrick vanished with a similar alacrity to Lord Arthur Somerset. The noble faggot went to France, Maybrick to the Isle of Wight. Somerset was protected by the System, ‘men of rank’, as a previously quoted newspaper put it, who ‘stand by scoundrels of their order, no matter what their crimes are’.
I think we’re looking here at an explanation for the Fraternal amnesia. The answer is that Sir Charles Santley, Wilhelm Ganz, Sims Reeves, Col. Sir Robert Edis, Sir Frederick Leighton, William Cummings, Sir Frederick Weatherly and Sir Arthur Sullivan were all Freemasons, most of them intimates of the Bro King to be (as was Sir Charles Warren, husbanding his aproned police), and that’s why you won’t find Bro Michael Maybrick in their archives or books. Freemasonry was holding the ladder.
Weatherly didn’t get into Grove either, manifestly because of his association with Maybrick. You can’t have Tweedledum without Tweedledee. Maybrick betrayed the lot of them, but they didn’t dare betray him. He was too strategically positioned in the house of cards.
At the opposite end of the metaphor was of course the torture of Florence Maybrick. Trading an innocent life for
their own survival wasn’t a proposition worthy of the Establishment’s consideration. LP29 was a convict the authorities would have been pleased to forget. But not so her brother-in-law, whose hatred had migrated with him to the Isle of Wight. Although Florence was permitted almost nothing in her prison cell – even looking at freedom beyond the walls was punishable – Michael Maybrick’s unquenchable ‘spite’ against her managed to find a way in.
During her early years at Woking, James Maybrick’s brother Thomas wrote friendly letters with news of the children, and every year he sent their photographs, which Florence was allowed to keep in her cell for twenty-four hours on Christmas Day. To look at them through tears and kiss their ghosts was as close to them as she would ever get. Then, without explanation, the photographs ceased. Sacrificing one of her precious letters out, she wrote to Thomas to ask why, to which he replied that ‘Mr Michael Maybrick refused to permit it.’ Moreover, Michael wrote to the governor of the prison ‘to inform me that my son did not wish either his own or his sister’s photograph to be sent to me’.116 James Chandler Maybrick was twelve years old.
Whether or not she was immediately aware of Michael’s letter to the prison, Florence was suffering no delusions about who had put her into it. In 1895 a fellow inmate was released on a ‘ticket of leave’, and the whispered intimacies she had shared with Mrs Maybrick found their way (via Macdougall) into the press. ‘The principal topic of her conversation when talking of her case,’ reported the ex-prisoner, ‘was Michael Maybrick. She often used the expression that he was her “bitter enemy”, and said that he had always acted as a bitter enemy to her. He was her accuser, and it is her contention that it was in consequence of the charge he put upon her of poisoning her husband that she is in prison.’117
Florence had been incarcerated for seven years, with another seven to go. But neither Alexander Macdougall nor Helen Densmore ever lost hope, the latter motor-driven with rage. Macdougall had published his treatise on the case in 1891, supplemented thereafter with ever more ferocious attacks on the British Establishment from Densmore:
Mr Asquith, the successor of Mr Matthews, from first to last was invulnerable to any plea for her release, and yet Mr Asquith pardoned during his term 166 women for whom no claim of innocence was made. This is only another evidence that there exists some subtle reason that does not appear why such strenuous care is taken that this one woman should be held so firmly behind bars. The [British] press has been closed fast as a door at midnight against discussion of the facts … whether or not Mrs Maybrick shall end her unhappy life in prison, it is certain that some time the facts will be known, and her trial and condemnation and the refusal to investigate her case will make a dark page in the history of English criminal jurisprudence.
Accusing an ‘insane judge’ of being responsible for Florence’s conviction, Mrs Densmore then turned her ire on the police, ‘who were among the active conspirators against her. Mrs Maybrick is the victim, not only of legal injustice, but of a conspiracy formed at the time of her arrest, which has followed her through the trial and pursued her to the Home Office when the case was being considered there. Its venomous trail has been seen during all these years of her imprisonment, wherever and whenever an effort has been made for her release.’
Diplomatic exchange between Britain and the US in respect of Mrs Maybrick remained stalled until 1895. It then reanimated as if it had never gone away. In June that year the Conservatives were returned to power. Salisbury was back as Prime Minister, with a new installation as Home Secretary who was as slippery a piece of work as Matthews. He was Bro Sir Matthew White Ridley, Provincial Grand Master of Northumberland, and owner of an estate in that county of 10,000 acres.
It was Ridley’s turn to field the ceaseless barrage of criticism and petitions on Mrs Maybrick’s behalf, including yet another entreaty from Macdougall, published in 1896 as ‘Three Letters Addressed to Sir Matthew White Ridley, Bart’.118 These ‘letters’ were about a hundred pages apiece, and like everything else they were curtly ignored. In response to a question from an Irish Member in Parliament, the recalcitrant Bro ‘gave the usual evasive reply that he could give no hope of a speedy release. No reason; no explanation; and with an attitude that says, “We have the power to keep her, and we neither intend to release her, nor give any reason thereof.”’
By now even the press were beginning to believe something peculiar was going on. ‘The public cannot help feeling that the shadow of a great wrong is over us,’ wrote the Daily Mail in August 1896, echoed that same month in the Blackpool Times: ‘The impression grows with increasing strength that there is some mystery about the continued imprisonment of Mrs Maybrick.’
It was an opinion widely shared in America. ‘Some influence which does not appear on the surface was responsible for her continued detention,’ was the view of the Brooklyn Eagle, and it attracted some potent support. ‘Among them,’ writes Mr Trevor Christie, ‘was Clerk Bell, a leading attorney who was president of the New York Medico-Legal Society. Although he had never met Florence or her mother, he took up the cudgels with boundless energy, and on the tenth anniversary of her imprisonment became Chairman of the Maybrick Memorial Committee. He addressed new petitions to the Home Office and the State Department, and journeyed to Europe in the summer of 1898 to try and unravel the enigma.’
He got nowhere. It didn’t matter what the argument was or who it came from, the government were as deaf to it as the coppers had been blind in Whitechapel. And it was for the same reason.
‘It must have been a very strong influence that operated to induce the English Government to refuse the request of President McKinley,’ recorded Clerk Bell in his Medico-Legal Journal. ‘Sir Matthew White Ridley’s recent statement in the English Parliament shows that this official is under some peculiar restraint in his action in this matter. Some very deadly hostilities against this unfortunate exist which seem not only all-powerful but controlling on the Home Secretary.’
The all-powerful element was complicity between this exalted elite and a Freemasonic monster. No policeman dared to touch him, and no politician either. They were sick men. They were Jack’s whores. ‘My contention is that Mrs Maybrick has fallen a victim to this political disease,’119 wrote J.H. Levy, and like the rest of her allies, he was right.
Another question, by another Irish Member, was put to Ridley in the House of Commons. T.P. O’Connor, the editor of the Star, challenged the Home Secretary with yet another appeal for clemency. He received the usual evasive reply, but it was inadvertently more revealing than any answer preceding it. Ridley intimated that the Home Office was in possession of a ‘secret dossier’ on Florence Maybrick, proving her guilt. Thus, Mrs Maybrick was being held captive for life not because of the evidence that supposedly convicted her, but because of a ‘secret dossier’, suppressed at her ‘trial’, and so incendiary that it was ‘impossible for him to make it public’.
In other words, ‘the Maybrick Mystery’ wasn’t a mystery at all, but rather ‘the Maybrick secret’. What was the ‘secret’ that this Freemason knew, and by definition shared with Salisbury and his mob? Was the secret the reason Florence Maybrick was framed in one of the most despicable got-up outrages ever to poison an English court? Sixty-five years after it, a barrister of the Inner Temple gave his view of these proceedings. ‘Mr Justice Stephen,’ he wrote, ‘was regarded as the greatest authority on our criminal law. But, since the evil that men do alone lives after them, he is best remembered today as the judge who, more than any person, even her vindictive brothers-in-law, was responsible for the absurd conviction of Mrs Maybrick.’120
The British use a euphemism for corruption, called tradition – which brings us back to the Establishment and its bewigged ‘secret’. Was this ‘secret’ the reason James Maybrick was stripped of his Masonry in death? Was it the same ‘secret’ that corrupted every coroner presented with it, and turned the Metropolitan Police into a herd of idiots?
Was Bro Jack the Ripper the secret?
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‘The case of Mrs Maybrick is a most important one,’ argued J.H. Levy in his important book The Necessity for Criminal Appeal (1899). ‘When it is realised by the British public that Mrs Maybrick has been doomed to life-long imprisonment on the strength of a “secret dossier”, for a crime for which she has never been publicly tried, and on a warrant for an offence of which it is admitted she may be innocent, the result will be a revulsion of feeling such as has not been experienced in England for many a long day.’121
Justice was not something in which these morally disabled men had any interest. One hundred and thirty years later this bullshit of a so-called ‘secret’ still festers – our startlingly obvious Whitechapel Psychopath continues to attract a miasma of misguided protection from the Ripper industry. I don’t blame those who feel thus obliged, but at the end of this long toil, I rather pity them. Is Freemasology going to try to sustain its loony-tune ‘secret’ for the next 130 years?
History is a long time.
James Maybrick’s family crest, which he acquired in 1881, bears the legend ‘Tempus Omnia Revelat’ – ‘Time Reveals All’. It features a falcon (Horus the sky god) holding a sprig of acacia in its beak, in deference to the memory of Masonry’s first Grand Master, Hiram Abiff. After murdering James, Michael stole the crest for his carriage door on the Isle of Wight.
‘Time Reveals All’, and time’s up for Michael Maybrick. Jack the Ripper was a Victorian psychopath, he belongs to them, and posterity – for want of a word – should rejoice to be rid of him.
They All Love Jack Page 79
