What interests me about this ‘confession’ is that via a surrogate (Henry Wilson) it describes precisely what I believe went down at Battlecrease House. It shares its narrative with the statement of the eavesdropping soldier Robert Reeves. Both Reeves and Wilson refer to a ‘servant girl’ as co-conspirator and vehicle by which the poison could be administered. Is it remotely conceivable that these two separate entities, one in prison in Brighton, England, and the other under fifteen feet of water in Mashonaland, could have independently come up with the same extraordinary story? Reeves got it because he’d overheard it, and the non-existent ‘Wilson’ got it from the same fucked-up brain. Only three people knew how James Maybrick had been murdered: Michael Maybrick, Edwin Maybrick and Robert Reeves. Reeves didn’t write this letter from South Africa, he was in a cell in Sussex. That leaves Edwin and Michael. It was Michael Maybrick who had a grudge against Florence (she called it a ‘spite’), and only Michael knew that Florence had been framed, because it was he who framed her.
Wilson’s ‘confession’ continues with further reference to a secret that nobody but an absolute intimate of James Maybrick could have known. Navigating the phoney Dutch syntax, here it is in English: ‘There was also another woman, he called her Sara, but I don’t remember the other name.’
She was Sarah Ann Robertson, James Maybrick’s mistress, with whom he is reputed to have fathered five children. At Florence’s insistence, and in deference to the reputation of her deceased husband, the name was never publicly mentioned. Wilson couldn’t have known it, even if he’d been real. But Mr Moreau Masina Berthrad Neuberg certainly did.
In 1892 it took about three weeks by ship and the new railway to get from England to Johannesburg. Named after its founder, a surveyor called Johannes Rissik, it was a city that appeared out of nowhere, and whose language was gold. In 1886 the richest seams of gold on earth had been discovered at Witwatersrand in the Transvaal. It was a motherlode stretching for fifty miles, and it would make multi-millionaires of men like Sir Cecil Rhodes. But for those who lived there it wasn’t the best of tidings. The Boers (indigenous Dutch) had farmed the Transvaal, in harmony with its endless horizons, for almost three hundred years. Gold wasn’t what these simple God-fearers were about, and they tried to keep it a secret – not because they wanted to harvest it, but because news of it would mean certain war with England. That came fifteen years later, with its hooligan destruction, burning of farms, public hanging of prisoners, and recourse to Britannia’s new invention of the concentration camp, where 26,000 Boer women and children were starved to death.
The poet and traveller Wilfrid Scawen Blunt described it as a ‘gangrene of Colonial rowdyism’, and it was everything the Boers had feared. ‘Johannesburg at present has no politics,’ wrote the journalist Flora Shaw in 1892; ‘it is much too busy with material problems. It is hideous and detestable; luxury without order, sensual enjoyment without art; riches without refinement; display without dignity.’ The riff-raff of the world descended upon the city, its population swelling by about 20,000 a year. Almost everyone but the Boers, the blacks and the unlucky hit the jackpot. Johannesburg was, said one of its burgeoning oligarchs, ‘Monte Carlo superimposed upon Sodom and Gomorrah’. Grandiose buildings went up, plush hotels, a stock exchange, and theatres to entertain the new rich. ‘Much of Johannesburg’s social life revolved around theatre and music hall, and some of the biggest names in contemporary entertainment found their way to the dusty, untidy settlement.’ They included some of England’s greatest stars, among them many of Maybrick’s chums. His lifelong friend Charles Santley sang there, as did Lionel Brough and Signor Foli (both performers at the concert Maybrick had organised on behalf of the Artists Volunteers in March 1889).
They were easy to find, but tracing Maybrick was of a different order. He may have been there for the nightlife, but he wasn’t there to sing. Like his co-existent celebrity ‘Jack the Snicker’, he was a frequent long-distance traveller. In a letter to the City Police dated 21 June 1889, the ‘Snicker’ writes of excursions to Spain, America and the Isle of Wight.
In 1884 Maybrick toured the USA, but comprehensive searches of passenger lists failed to turn up his name, and I knew I wasn’t going to find him on the extant itinerary of any steamer bound for South Africa. ‘I always go abroad as a private gentleman,’ Maybrick laughed, ‘for I wish to thoroughly enjoy myself.’ In 1892 there were no passports, no ‘security’, and no questions. You could get on a ship with one name and get off it with another. Plus, Maybrick was used to using sobriquets, composing as Stephen Adams, performing as Michael Maybrick, and killing with another appellation that dwarfed the pair of them in its fame. Anyone concocting ‘Moreau Masina Berthrad Neuberg’ could dream up any phoney name he liked. ‘Rithfontein’ was bogus, and as a postal address it didn’t exist. There was a ‘Rietfontein’ about five miles north-east of Krugersdorp, and another ten miles south, but they were nothing more than fields, prospectors’ mining claims (numbers 84 and 48 respectively), and barely a name on the map.
‘What is this “Cock and Bull” story,’ asked the South African Empire on 15 October 1892, ‘that Mr Stead has received from South Africa concerning the death of Mr Maybrick?’
One Harry Wilson, while on his way from Mashonaland to the Transvaal, falls ill with fever and dies on the road. His sole surviving travelling companion is a Mr M.M.B. Neuberg, and before Wilson passes from this world to the next, he narrates in his agonies how, having a grudge against Mrs Maybrick, he with a servant girl, tampers with the medicine for Mr Maybrick by putting arsenic into it, with the sole object of bringing Mrs Maybrick into a murderer’s dock. Neuberg says:– ‘I am sorry there is not another witness to this miserable statement.’ It certainly is regrettable, seeing that no one, unless it be Mr Stead himself, is likely to give any credence to the so-called confession. One is tempted to ask why Neuberg, on his arrival in the Transvaal, did not make known the story to the local press. It would have put pounds in his pocket. Was Harry Wilson known to anyone in the Transvaal? Did he die with any papers about him, and where are they? These and other questions naturally suggest themselves in connection with the elucidation of the mysterious death of Mr Maybrick. Mr M.M.B. Neuberg may have taken down the statement correctly as delivered by the dying man, but who would believe the story of such a deep-dyed villain as Harry Wilson wished to make himself out to be without any confirmatory proof of his guilt? Cannot Mr Neuberg give any reference as to his standing and respectability in South Africa?
The answer to that question is no, because the whole scenario is fake. Thus I was looking for a person (Michael Maybrick) whose pseudonym I didn’t know, and another (Harry Wilson) who didn’t exist. Plus, it was six thousand miles away and 130 years ago.
Before even thinking about Maybrick in South Africa, I had to eliminate him from England. No point trying to nail him on the veldt if he was provably in this country during the summer of 1892. I don’t know where or on what date Russell’s ‘Johannesburg’ letter was mailed, and I believe it was back-dated anyway (using his well-worn trick of the ship’s letterbox). As he quit the boat in Cape Town his fraud was already poised to return home. But because of Stead’s postmark I was obliged to accept that ‘Neuberg’ was probably in Krugersdorp on or about 19 July (although the letter is back-dated 10 July).
The effort to reduce Michael Maybrick’s British whereabouts to a simple list was an endless slog. But after protracted effort a schedule emerged. The last known date when he was definitely in London was Wednesday, 16 March 1892, when together with Charles Santley he sang his stuff at a concert in St James’s Hall. Another star who appeared on the Johannesburg stage, Madame Neruda, played the violin. Add to this the Ripper letter posted to the police in Marylebone five days later, and we get a marker at 21 March 1892.
The next date up was another Wednesday, 4 May 1892, when Maybrick was on the slate to attend a meeting of ‘The Supreme Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons’. His friend and Grand Master Bro Letchwort
h ‘announced that he had received a communication from Bro Michael Maybrick, Grand Organist, apologising for his inability to be present in Grand Chapter’. He never showed, and he never showed for his next engagement either. On 31 May the Pall Mall Gazette publicised a charity concert to be performed in aid of St Mary’s Hospital Fund, billed for 9 June at the Haymarket Theatre. Some of the biggest names in the business had promised to donate their talents. Maybrick was among them, but again he didn’t turn up. It wasn’t until a meeting of the Royal Society of Musicians on 11 July that Maybrick was unequivocally in London. There are therefore about 115 days – between 17 March and 10 July 1892 – that are unaccounted for. He could of course have had his feet up in Regent’s Park; or, if you were as certain as I was that ‘Mr Neuberg’ was in reality Michael Maybrick, he could equally well have travelled to South Africa.
The fastest ship on the route at that time, the Scot, made the trip from England to Cape Town in sixteen days. The conductor Sir Charles Hallé and his wife Wilma (stage name Madame Neruda) sailed on it. ‘We shall leave Cape Town on September 11th,’ he wrote to his son, ‘and be in London on the 27th.’
But let us assume Maybrick wasn’t aboard the Scot, and took something lazier. Allowing a generous twenty-one days out and twenty-one days back, that’s still seventy-three days available to waddle about the Transvaal and manipulate his fraudulent letters from Neuberg. Even if he hadn’t posted Russell’s letter from the ship but actually from Johannesburg, he could have been there to do it in the first week of April. Back-dating his text by nine days would have raised no questions, any more than Stead questioned his nine-day back-dated letter out of Krugersdorp.
In the American edition of Review of Reviews, W.T. Stead published a codicil to his plea for Mrs Maybrick: ‘The case has, from the first, aroused the most intense interest; and it has created much bitter indignation against the British Government for its denial of palpable justice to an American woman.’ A month later, ‘indignation’ had found a focus, as was reported in the British edition: ‘The United States Government has telegraphed to its Consul at Cape Town to take immediate steps to ascertain further particulars of the alleged confession.’ The Yanks were going to investigate, probably sending detectives into the Transvaal, and I think this put the wind up the British. If the Americans had found Michael in Johannesburg, the Maybrick scandal might well begin to unravel. Michael Maybrick was at the fulcrum of London Society, a man who knew the men. Many of them must have known he was out of town, and not a few must have known where he was; that, I think, is what spooked them, initiating Mr Asquith’s inexplicable shutdown.
Everything in South Africa that was feasible to research was researched, every extant newspaper, magazine and microfilm. It cost endless hours, without success. One last hope was the Government House (GH) archive at Cape Town, whose inventory was enormous.
But unfortunately there is a gap in these records at just the wrong year. Everything to do with diplomatic traffic (be it British or American) for 1892 is missing. Apologists will say the file simply went missing sometime in the last 130 years, while the more cynical might say that the file was pulled. Predicated on the cheats and deceits of the British authorities during the Ripper scandal, I am of the latter school.
After months of research I was left with the impossible coincidence of Robert Reeves and Harry Wilson attributing Mrs Maybrick’s frame-up to the same ‘servant girl’. I had the secret of ‘Sara’ and a Harry Wilson alive in Doncaster. But it wasn’t enough, and I couldn’t prove who ‘Neuberg’ actually was.
By now I had been researching Bro Michael Maybrick for rather a while, and considered myself somewhat au fait with the way he thought. He was a Mason and a murderer, described by Florence as a ‘brute’. He was a smartarse, smarter than everyone else, and was amused by the stupidity of his targets. Everything to do with his correspondence required thinking sideways, like him. He enjoyed the risky stuff – the Women of Moab, the Lady from Surrey, Yack and May-bee, to recall but a few. He was playing his Funny Little Game, and knowing his affection for puns and conundrums, I wondered if the bastard had tried his hand at an anagram. I couldn’t find Michael Maybrick in South Africa, but I still had the puzzle of Moreau Masina Berthrad Neuberg.
MOREAU/MASINA/BERTHRAD/NEUBERG
I BEGAN A BRUTE MASON MURDERER HA
Acknowledgements
It’s been a long haul, and there are many to thank. First in line is my friend and researcher, Keith Skinner, who was there at the beginning of this book, and still there, fifteen Christmas trees later, at the end of it. Keith can work an archive like a bee in a meadow, and not a few of the names that follow come courtesy of his expertise. They are in no particular order, of no specific association, and apologies to anyone I’ve left out. Richard Booth and all at Booth’s Books, Hay-on-Wye. Derek Addyman and Anne Brichto at Addyman Books, and George at Greenway Books, and the Cinema Bookshop, all at Hay-on-Wye. Derek Warman (Isle of Wight), Tracy Steinback (USA), Anne Clarkson (South Africa), Frank Rickarby (The British Library), Trevor Glover and A.P. Pool (Boosey & Hawkes), Sir David Ramsbotham, Anne Graham, Andrew Birkin, James Scott (Madrid), Caroline Morris, Kate Clarke, Robert Gilbert, Caleb Carr, Dr Bruce S. Fisher (USA), Melissa Strickland and Pam de Montmorency (USA), Damian Russell, Terry Wilde, Paul Robinson (Freemasons’ Hall, Liverpool), Ian Sanderson (St George’s Lodge of Harmony, 32, Liverpool), Peter O’Toole (Artists Rifles), Liz Calder (Bloomsbury Publishing), Lord David Puttnam, Shirley Harrison, Robert Smith, Marie Campbell (Bradford), Rebecca Coombes and all at the library of Freemasons’ Hall, London, Stewart Evans, Paul Begg, Don Rumbelow, Susannah Garland, Johnny Depp, Norman Healy (Ireland), Lindsay Siviter, Caroline Morris, Andy and Sue Parlour, Alistair Owen, Caitlin Zenisek, Coral Atkins, Mick Brown, Will Self, Claire Reihill, Robert Lacey, Stephen Guise and everyone else at HarperCollins, including Minna. David Nochimson, Ed Victor and most of all Rand Holston, my agent, who has given me unceasing enthusiasm, wisdom and support. And finally, I want to use the last line I will ever write in this book to thank my beloved family, Sophie, Lily and Willow.
Sources
Chapter 1: All the Widow’s Men
1. ‘The British Opium Trade in Asia’, Review of Reviews (American edition), Vol. VI, August 1892/January 1893
2. Scotland Yard Case Book, by John Lock, Robert Hale, London, 1993 (p.131)
3. ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ 1885
4. The Case of Eliza Armstrong, by Alison Plowden, British Broadcasting Corporation, 1974 (p.134)
5. Salisbury: Victorian Titan, by Andrew Roberts. London, 1999 (pp.470–1)
6. Letter of Eleanor Marx, 23 June 1888. ‘In the East End 1888’ by W. J. Fishman, Duckworth, London, 1988 (p.22)
7. The London Handbook, The Grosvenor Press, London, 1897 (p.146)
8. Review of Reviews, Vol. xiv, New York, July 1896, No. 1 (p.77)
9. Ibid. (p.78)
10. The Letters of Queen Victoria, edited by George Earle Buckle. Second Series, Vol. 3 (p.38)
11. Queen Victoria, by Sidney Lee, London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1903 (p.495)
12. W. H. Smith, by Viscount Chilston, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1965 (pp.276–7)
13. Ibid. (p.277)
14. Bygone Punishments, by William Andrews, William Andrews & Co, London, 1899 (p.14). Note: The Punishment of multilation was uncommon before the reign of Henry VIII, but introduced by statute 33, Henry VIII, c. 12 (p.137)
15. The Age of Sex Crime, by Jane Caputi, The Women’s Press, 1987 (p.7)
16.The Green Bag vol.1, Boston, January 1889
17. Ibid.
18. The Criminal, by Havelock Ellis, Walter Scott, London, 1890 (p.93)
19. Ibid. (p.90)
20. Ibid. (p.20)
21. Vital Force or Evils and Remedies of Perverted Sexuality, by R. B. D. Wells, n. d., circa 1880 (p.7)
22. Dr Bond’s Report to Robert Anderson, submitted 10 December 1888
23. A Solution of Arsenic and Potash, o
r Soda. Dr Humphreys’ evidence at the ‘trial’ of Mrs Maybrick, Irving (p.132)
24. Jack the Ripper and the London Press, by L. Perry Curtis Jr., Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001 (pp.257, 272)
25. Oliver Cromwell: The Man and His Mission, by James Allanson Picton, 2nd edition, Cassell, Peter, Galpin & Co., 1883 (p.290 et seq.)
26. Review of Reviews, Vol. XV, 1897 (p.236)
27. Review of Reviews, Vol. II–9 September 1890 (p.235)
28. Review of Reviews Vol. XII, July/December 1895 (p.218)
29. The African Dream, by Brian Gardner, History Book Club, 1970 (p.176 et seq.)
30. Kitchener, by Philip Magnus, John Murray, London, 1985 (p.62)
31. The African Dream, by Brian Gardner (p.148)
32. General Gordon, a Christian Hero, by Seton Churchill, James Nisbet & Co., London, 1904 (p.271)
33. Real Soldiers of Fortune, by Richard Harding Davis, Collier & Son, London, 1906 (p.107)
34. Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, by the Author of King Edward the VII, James Nisbet & Co., London, 1914 (p.46)
35. Kitchener: Portrait of an Imperialist, by Philip Magnus, John Murray, London, 1958 (p.133)
36. Ibid. (p.135)
37. Days of My Years, by Melville Macnaghten, Edward Arnold, London, 1914 (p.62)
38. Today, edited by Jerome K. Jerome, Vol. 1, 20 January 1894 (p.13)
39. I Caught Crippen, by ex-Chief Inspector Walter Dew, Blackie & Son, London, 1938 (p.132)
40. The Grosvenor Press, 1897 (p.130)
41. New York World, 18 November 1888
42. The Freemason, 16 February 1889 (p.98)
43. The Freemason, 14 January 1888
44. The 19th Century, July 1891, and Review of Reviews Vol. III, No. 18 (p.77)
45. The Rough Ashlar; Virginia Grand Lodge, USA, September 1891 (p.42)
46. The Masonic Constellation Grand Lodge of Missouri, USA, July 1891 (p.3)
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