Ireland and the Ripper remain amongst the foulest stains on the nation’s officially secret underwear. It was to be another twenty years before Anderson’s leading role in the Parnell conspiracy was finally made public. Curiously, the revelation came from his own pen. In a series of self-congratulatory articles published in 1910, wherein he and Le Caron are elevated to the status of unsung heroes, he claimed that his involvement in the scandal had never really been much of a secret – ‘all of Fleet Street knew’. He added that his then superior at Scotland Yard, James Monro, had approved of his concoctions known as ‘Parnellism and Crime’.
Monro found the energy to disagree. All but bedridden, and on his way out in Scotland, he wrote from Aberdeen to his protégé Sir Melville Macnaghten, himself now Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, dismissing Anderson’s disclosures as yet another example of the man’s self-serving fictions: ‘the alleged statement of Anderson that it was agreed between him and me that he should write the letters & that they should be offered to The Times as the best medium for their publication is absolutely incorrect’.
Monro is here confusing Anderson’s articles with Pigott’s letters, a conflation that isn’t far off the mark, as they were virtually one and the same. Either way, he insisted he had nothing to do with any of it, and was prepared to get out of his sickbed to prove it: ‘I am willing to place myself at the disposal of the Home Office and give the fullest explanation of my action in the matter.’ The Home Office had no choice but to agree, calling Anderson’s revelations ‘a public scandal’ – not so much for having done it, but for having made it public.
A young Liberal Home Secretary, called Winston Churchill, declared that had the government known (as if they didn’t) about his activities, Mr Anderson would have been ‘instantly dismissed’. And a previous Home Secretary, the Gladstonian Sir William Harcourt, spoke for most in Parliament that session when he said with some acrimony, ‘Anderson should not have been running Scotland Yard.’
But between 1888 and 1901 the man who should not have been running Scotland Yard was running Scotland Yard, and to the great satisfaction of Salisbury’s government. An Irish Nationalist MP by the name of Jeremiah McVeagh put the scandal into perspective, regretting ‘that the circumstances of the case compel us tonight to deal with a miserable creature like Anderson, instead of with some of those more sinister figures which are lurking in the background of this black plot’. Dismissing Anderson as ‘one of the villains of the piece’, he said that the Police Commissioner was in fact merely a ‘pivot around which the whole conspiracy turned’.
In terms of evolving nineteenth-century democracies, the British ruling class had pulled off a formidable oxymoron. Its democracy remained feudal. There was no constitution, the country was a ‘Constitutional Monarchy’. The dukes, earls, barons and others sagging under regal anointment continued to own it. Fewer than five hundred families owned half of Scotland. At the system’s apogee was the worshipped royal family, without which none of the panto could exist. Its nearest contemporary comparison, perhaps, is the royal house of Saud in Saudi Arabia, where a succession of kings and their issue replace each other in perpetuity as hereditary heads of state. In the British example this was supplemented with an Anglo version of the Mullah, a confederacy of non-elected men in weird religious costumes, and others with an affection for wearing weasel fur (ermine) called the House of Lords.
The day a state becomes sick is the day it considers the protection of itself more important than the protection of its people. It conflates the protection of the people with a camouflaged reality of the protection of itself. It usually tells the people to be afraid of something or other, in direct proportion to its own interest. In this case it was Irish earth, engendering ‘Irish Terrorism’, and that is what it sold in its propaganda.
‘The Irish Frankenstein’ and ‘The Nemesis of Neglect’ were opposite sides of the same coin. They were society’s most dreaded bogeymen. But what the public didn’t understand was that, although of a vastly different dynamic, both represented an equal peril to the British ruling elite. Both were egregious players in the same Establishment nightmare, but an entirely contradictory approach was taken to the two threats. Every imaginable conjugation of law and state violence was evoked to suppress Ireland, while Jack was menaced by not so much as the distant echo of a police whistle. While infantry and riot police were the order of the day in Dublin, bent coroners’ courts and wilfully blind coppers constituted the state contingency in Whitechapel. The Micks got bullets, and Jack bafflement. Beyond a mystified Freemasonic Police Commissioner with a waterlogged sponge, Jack got no policing at all. This wasn’t by accident. It was by design. Concurrent with Anderson thrashing out his filthy articles for The Times, Irish journalists faced summary incarceration for having the temerity to publish an alternative point of view. Mass arrests of Irish MPs and their ‘terrorist’ countrymen continued throughout Bro Jack’s homicidal reign, but under no circumstances could there be an arrest of a psychopathic Freemason terrorising the people of London. Sir Charles Warren couldn’t have caught the Ripper in a hundred years, and neither could Sir Robert Anderson. That isn’t what they were there for.
Appendix II
A Very Curious Letter
Within days of assuming his tenure as Home Secretary, Asquith was in receipt of a letter from W.T. Stead, now the editor of a relatively new monthly magazine, the Review of Reviews:
Dear Mr Asquith, I have received a very curious letter from the Transvall [sic], which seems to me to be genuine. It purports to be the death-bed confession of a man of the name Harry Wilson, who accuses himself, and either his sister or wife (Elizabeth Wilson) of introducing the arsenic into the Maybrick House, in order to avenge themselves on Mrs Maybrick.
The man who made the confession died in Mashonaland, requesting with his dying breath that this letter should be sent to Sir Charles Russell. As Russell did not move in the matter he sent it to me. I feel that this letter imposes upon me a responsibility which I would very gladly hand over to you in case you are disposed to take the same view of it as myself.
As I shall probably publish the confession in the next number of REVIEW OF REVIEWS, I should be very glad to hear from you [as] there is no disposition on my part to do anything that would be contrary to your wishes, or your judgement as to what would be fit and proper under the circumstances.
Whether Asquith replied or not isn’t known, at least not by me. Six weeks later Stead duly published ‘Harry Wilson’s Confession’ in the October issue of his magazine. The article, for which the ‘confession’ was a catalyst, was a brilliant supplication on behalf of Florence Maybrick. It was titled ‘OUGHT MRS MAYBRICK BE TORTURED TO DEATH?’, and once again ‘the Maybrick Mystery’ was back on the boil. Stead rehearsed what he’d already told Asquith: that he’d received a letter from the Transvaal Republic, bearing the postmark of Krugersdorp, franked with four penny stamps, and dated 19 July 1892.
About twenty miles west of Johannesburg and nearly six thousand miles from London, Krugersdorp was a small coalmining town, and ‘of all places in the world’ the last anyone would have expected to hear anything of the name Maybrick. ‘On opening the missive,’ wrote Stead, ‘which reached me August 15th or 16th, I found it was dated “Rithfontein, July 10th 1892.” The extraordinary spelling, due to the effort of a South African Dutchman to spell English as he pronounces it gave the communication an unmistakable stamp of authenticity.’ I’ll skip the cod Dutch (‘yor Walubele and waid Rede Peper’), reminiscent of the phoney illiteracy in the scrawl to George Lusk, and go directly to Stead’s translation:
Mr. Stead.
Dear Sir
Please will you insert this in your valuable and widely read paper, in justice to a poor woman, who is still in prison for a crime another person has committed. It is about five months ago since (I was) in company with Harry Wilson from Mashonaland to the Transvall. He was sick with fever and at last died on January 14th, 1892. Before he died he
made the following confession, which he instructed me to send to Sir Charles Russell, barrister-at-law, London, England.
There were four of us who started back, and all three died from fever except myself. And as nothing has been done in the matter – Sir C. Russell has not moved in the matter, I hope that you, loving justice to your fellow men, will move in the matter. He died on the Limpopo flats on January 14th 1892, and was buried by me, and what is the worst part I was the only one of the four left to hear that miserable confession.
Trusting that you, loving justice, will take this into consideration, I will subscribe myself your most humble servant,
MOREAU MASINA BERTHRAD NEUBERG
Included with the letter was Mr Neuberg’s transcribed copy of Wilson’s ‘confession’.
Confession of Harry Wilson
He stated that he, in conjunction with a woman by the name of ____ ____, tampered with medicine which was intended for Mr Maybrick, put arsenic into the ____. He said because Mrs Maybrick and he could not agree, and he had a grudge against her. There was also another woman, he called her Sara, but I don’t remember the other name.
It was somewhere near Manchester, some time ago, and she is still in prison. He told me to send this statement to Sir Charles Russell, Barrister at Law.
Stead immediately contacted Russell, who forwarded him Neuberg’s earlier letter. Unfortunately it was without an envelope, and with no postmark there was no way of establishing an indisputable date or from where it was actually posted. However, the text was headed ‘Johannesburg’ and dated 25 March 1892. Once again, the ‘Dutch’ is rendered into English by Stead.
Sir Charles Russell.
Sir, – A man of the name of Henry Wilson made a confession to me in my tent at Mashonaland that he put arsenic into some medicine for the purposes of revenge on Mrs Maybrick, near Manchester, some years ago. She was convicted of the crime of murder and sent to prison for life, and he wants me to write to you his confession of the crime. He died, and was buried on the Limpopo River, near the drift crossing to the Transvaal.
‘CONFESSION OF HENRY WILSON’
He said he wanted to be revenged on Mrs Maybrick. He with a servant girl tampered with the medicine for Mr Maybrick, and put arsenic into it, but how much I could not get to know as he was delirious for fourteen days. He died and I buried him on the Limpopo Flats on the other side of the Transvaal two months ago. Trusting you will interest yourself on behalf of the woman Mrs Maybrick, I remain, your most humble servant,
M. M. BERTHRAD NEUBERG.
This is written on arrival from Mashonaland. I am sorry there is not another witness to this miserable statement, – M.M.B. NEUBERG.
‘Mr Neuberg was evidently profoundly convinced of the serious importance of the case,’ wrote Stead. ‘He seems to have written to Sir Charles Russell as soon as he got within range of a Post Office.’
Except he didn’t, and it’s at this point that Mr Berthrad Neuberg’s correspondence begins to look decidedly iffy. In fact this whole South African fraudulence is so transparent I can’t believe Stead gave it a moment’s credibility. But believe it he did, and so did Helen Densmore. I can only imagine that their desperation over Mrs Maybrick’s plight, combined with an ignorance of the locality the letters refer to, was the reason for their unaccountable naïvety.
This correspondence can be attacked from whatever angle one chooses. Let us start with the geography. The principal crossing of the Limpopo River out of Mashonaland into the Transvaal was at Baine’s Drift. Two hundred miles south of it was Pretoria, a city of 22,000 Boers and the capital city of the Transvaal. It was well served by post offices. Yet Mr Neuberg didn’t report anything untoward to the authorities there, or post his apparently vital letter either. Instead he kept travelling south for another thirty-five miles to Johannesburg. In all he has covered 235 miles from the Limpopo, where he supposedly buried Wilson on 14 January. Even at a snail’s pace of five miles a day, he would have arrived in Johannesburg on 1 March, more than three weeks before the date of his letter.
Thus he had time on his hands, certainly enough of it to seek assistance from those fluent in English to help him with translation – he couldn’t have wanted the contents of his letter kept secret, because he asked Stead to insert it in his ‘valuable and widely read paper’. How did Berthrad Neuberg know that the ‘Reweu of Reweujs’ – whose name he couldn’t even spell – was widely read? The Review of Reviews was published in America, Australia and England, but not in South Africa, and was definitely not widely read there. From whence did this semi-illiterate Dutchman acquire such insight into a foreign publication? We live in the age of the internet, but I couldn’t name a single periodical in Holland, much less a widely read one whose editor was a ‘lover of justice’.
Stead wrote that it was impossible to refuse to look into the matter, but unfortunately he was looking in the wrong direction. He might have asked, by way of example, why Berthrad Neuberg didn’t report his recent misfortunes to the police, or at least to the coroner’s office either in Jo’burg or Pretoria. Admirable as was Mr Neuberg’s concern for an unknown woman in a prison six thousand miles away, what about his dead companions up the track on the Limpopo Flats? Did none of them have a name, outside of Henry, or Harry, Wilson? Who were these men? Did no one miss them? Did no one report them missing? Did they not have wives, sisters, mothers, families of their own, and did not Mr Neuberg salvage what he could of their possessions, or perhaps a last dying message, to pass on to their loved ones? For a man of such Christian tenacity, he seems to have acted curiously out of character in respect of his deceased friends.
Neuberg claims he saw three of them into their graves, the last of them, on 14 January, being Wilson, who he says ‘was buried on the Limpopo Flats, near the Drift crossing to the Transvaal’. This returns us to Baine’s Drift, and Neuberg is lying. I quote from John Wellington, Professor of Geography at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg: ‘In the dry season this part of the course contains but a feeble stream a few inches deep, or there may be no flow at all, but just a series of pools on the rocky bed.’ This however is not the case in the rainy season, which reaches its peak in January. In that month the Limpopo explodes, surging over its banks and having been recorded, according to Professor Wellington, as reaching a level of twenty-six feet above its bed. The Flats are inundated, and the Drift quite impassable. In short, if Moreau Masina Berthrad Neuberg had buried Wilson on the Flats at the Limpopo crossing, he would have had to be wearing some sort of underwater respiratory apparatus.
Ernest Hemingway wrote, ‘All writers need a cast-iron bullshit detector,’ or words to that effect, and I could smell bullshit. Something was staring me in the face, some kind of riddle, some hidden conundrum, but I couldn’t see it. I had to step back, and keep stepping back, until I could.
It’s fortuitous that Stead printed a facsimile of the ‘confession’. I read it repeatedly before I actually started to look at it. I’ll get to the text by and by, but first let us consider this document without bothering with the words. What I noticed was that Moreau Masina Berthrad Neuberg and Jack the Ripper shared the curious idiosyncrasy of spontaneously enlarging their handwriting at the end of their text.
I thought I might well be looking at an element of the ‘Funny Little Game’, and that the key to it might be hidden in the ‘confession’. For reasons best known to himself, Stead had redacted a name from its text that he’d revealed in his letter to Asquith. It was Elizabeth Wilson. Originally the opening line of the confession read: ‘He stated that he, in conjunction with a woman by the name of Elizabeth Wilson, tampered with medicine which was intended for Mr Maybrick.’
The only Wilson in Battlecrease House was Michael Maybrick’s harsh little sidekick, Nurse Susan Wilson. She was present from 9 May until 18 May, and indeed had a brother called Henry, who was born in Doncaster, Yorkshire, in 1862. But unless Henry was ensconced in some convenient cupboard, or perhaps concealing himself behind the curtains, he was n
ever at Battlecrease. Maybrick died about forty-eight hours after Nurse Wilson arrived, and so tight a schedule would have presented Henry with a bit of a problem developing his grudge.
‘He said because Mrs Maybrick and he could not agree,’ explains the confession, ‘and he had a grudge against her.’
This bullshit invites another question. If his grudge was so extreme that he would poison James Maybrick in order to frame Florence, why not simply poison her? With the kind of access his sister enjoyed, he could just as easily have slipped Florence Maybrick a dose. The reason he didn’t is because he was a hundred miles away, and had never heard of her. In 1891 Henry Wilson was living with his parents in Doncaster, and he is recorded in that year’s census as a commercial painter. When he married in 1901 he was still living in Doncaster, and still up a ladder with a pot of paint. Goodbye Henry, it wasn’t you buried on the Limpopo, and neither was anyone else.
The question therefore isn’t who was Henry Wilson, but who was Moreau Masina Berthrad Neuberg? A dictionary of Dutch names tells us who he wasn’t, or rather what he wasn’t, and that was Dutch. Neither ‘Moreau’, nor ‘Masina’, nor ‘Berthrad’ appears, and neither does ‘Neuberg’, which if anything is German.
They All Love Jack Page 84
