They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  They cut off his head and carved him to ham, and we’re back into reality. With his head on a stick they ran around the screeching streets, while the rest of their fraternity went berserk. Just in case there were any shortages in heaven, girls as young as three were raped and then sent to the harems for more. Infants were disembowelled in their mothers’ arms, then the mothers were raped, and their sons were raped. Four thousand were massacred. A piece of human hell. There was no merciful God in Khartoum that night.31

  Twenty years later a statue to General Gordon was put up in Khartoum. He may well have smiled at the irony. He was a Victorian hero who hated the Victorians. A few months before his death (irrespective of his fate in the Sudan) he had made up his mind that he would never return to England, writing to his sister: ‘I dwell on the joy of never seeing Great Britain again, with its horrid, wearisome dinner parties, and miseries … its perfect bondage. At these dinner parties we are all in masks, saying what we do not believe, eating and drinking things we do not want, and then abusing each other.’

  In another letter, having delineated his view of the difference between ‘honour’ and ‘honours’, he wrote: ‘As a rule, Christians are really more inconsistent than “worldlings”. They talk truths and do not act on them. They allow that “God is the God of widows and orphans”, yet they look in trouble to the Gods of silver and gold. How unlike in acts are most of the so-called Christians to their founder! You see in them no resemblance to him. Hard, proud, “holier than thou”, is their uniform. They have the truth, no one else, it is their monopoly’ (Gordon’s emphasis).32

  The Queen never forgave Gladstone, ‘that wretched old madman’, for Gordon’s death, and it was a day of royal celebration when he resigned his office six months later, to be replaced by something more to Her Majesty’s taste.

  The man in question was a born aristocrat, a master of chicanery and scandal-management, a barefaced liar – a sort of Margaret Thatcher with class. His name was Viscount Lord Salisbury, and apart from a brief hiatus, he will remain Conservative Prime Minister throughout this book.

  The Victorians did nemesis very well. Salisbury didn’t like what had happened in the Sudan any more than Victoria did, and both were prepared to spend whatever it cost for revenge.

  It came a few years later, in uniform of course, in the shape of a forty-seven-year-old man called Kitchener. Although born in Ireland, Herbert Kitchener was a British soldier from the spurs up, fanatically committed to his Queen and country and the death ethic of his time.

  ‘General Kitchener, who never spares, himself, cares little for others,’ wrote a fresh-faced young soldier who had served under him, igniting fury amongst various old farts in the service clubs. The dispatch had come back to London from Egypt. Its author was a cavalry officer, an incredibly brave young fellow called Winston Churchill, who was augmenting his thin military income as a part-time war correspondent.

  ‘He treated all men like machines,’ wrote Churchill, ‘from the private soldiers, whose salutes he disdained, to the superior officers, whom he rigidly controlled. The comrade who had served with him and under him for many years, in peace and peril, was flung aside as soon as he ceased to be of use. The wounded Egyptian and even the wounded British soldier did not excite his interest.’33

  Kitchener was an imperious bully even when he didn’t need to be. On a previous expedition into British Egypt, he’d been present when some Arab had been tortured to death. He hadn’t liked the look of it, so from then on he carried a handy vial of strychnine in his pocket. He was a weird cove, and a very formidable foe.34

  In 1898 Kitchener went up the Nile like a dose of salts, crossed the Nubian desert on a thousand camels and arrived in the Sudan with every intention of sorting the matter out. His army was better equipped than perhaps any other on earth, sporting a relatively new invention of Sir Hiram Maxim, a true masterpiece of homicidal innovation. It was a .303 machine gun capable of firing six hundred rounds a minute, and it was to cost a great number of ‘astral virgins’ their credentials. Kitchener was utterly ruthless towards the enemy, his men, and himself. His campaign ended in a place not too distant from Khartoum, where after savage fighting he took a desert city called Omdurman.

  It was here that the Mahdi, responsible for Gordon’s death, was himself interred. Oh, my lord, can you imagine the power of a victorious British General standing in the sun of the Sudan? ‘Why man, he doth bestride the world.’ And like all megalomaniacs, dizzy with the toxins of his own ego, he was about to lose the plot. Like Baden-Powell in his pink bit of Africa, Kitchener freaked out.

  Eleven thousand Dervishes lay dead or dying on the battlefield, but there was one man Kitchener wanted to kill again. Despite the years that had passed since Gordon’s death, hate for the man who had caused it still gnawed Kitchener’s heart. The Mahdi’s successor the Khalifa, an ‘embodiment of the nationalist aspirations of the people over whom he had ruled’, had built a magnificent tomb for his predecessor. Though now riddled with Sir Hiram Maxim’s bulletholes it was the full Arabian works, tiled like an astonishing bathroom and topped with a golden dome.

  With Allah far from his mind, it was to this shrine that Kitchener went. He dug up the corpse of the Mahdi, and bashed his bones to bits with a hammer he’d brought specially for the purpose. This must have been quite a sight. When the buckets, or whatever, were full, Gordon’s nephew, Major W.S. Gordon, supervised the slinging of this infidel garbage into the Nile, an event the diplomatic language of London described as ‘Removal of the body to elsewhere’. By then, Kitchener had razed the Mahdi’s mausoleum to the ground.35

  When news of this retribution seeped out, it didn’t light up the day at Windsor. ‘The Queen is shocked by the treatment of the Mahdi’s body,’ wrote Lord Salisbury, to which the recipient of this telegram, the former British Consul-General of Egypt Lord Cromer, replied that while Kitchener had his faults, when all was said and done, it was a glorious victory, and ‘No one had done more to appease those sentiments of honour which had been stung to the quick by the events of 1885.’

  Yes, yes, yes, said the Queen. She liked all that, and was going to hand out some ribbon, but it was getting a terrible press. She felt it was very ‘un-English’, this destruction of the body of a man who, ‘whether he was very bad and cruel, after all, was a man of certain importance’. In her view, it savoured of the Middle Ages: ‘The graves of our people have been respected’, and so should ‘those of our foes’.36

  It seemed that filling graves didn’t bother Victoria, it was taking bodies out of them she didn’t like; and it was the trophy of the Mahdi’s skull that particularly flustered her – plus, she’d caught the back end of a rumour that Kitchener had turned it into some sort of flagon, or inkwell, with gold mounts. Kitchener offered various placatory explanations. His original intention, he wrote, was to send the skull to the Royal College of Surgeons (which had apparently gratefully received Napoleon’s intestines). Then he had changed his mind, and for religious reasons he’d rather not go into, had buried the offending cranium in a Muslim cemetery in the middle of the night. The inkwell and the flagon were merely vindictive gossip.

  Except they weren’t. I have good reason to question Kitchener’s veracity, and would put serious money on the true destination of the skull, and its purpose.

  My explanation will wait.

  The question here is, was Kitchener insane? Dragging a putrescent corpse from its grave and bashing what’s left of it to bits with a hammer isn’t normal, except to certain Victorian politicians. In the House of Lords, Lord Roberts said that any criticism of Kitchener was ‘ludicrous and puerile’, which makes one wonder what he would have thought of a gang of Arabs turning up at Canterbury Cathedral with crowbars to heave out the body of St Thomas à Becket.

  The Victorian Establishment always had it their own way, and therein lies the answer to my facetious question. Of course Kitchener wasn’t insane. He was one of the most revered officers in the British Army, and would g
o on doing what he did for another twenty years. He was a Boy’s Own hero, rewarded with a peerage, as Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. A top-hole chap and an intimate of the elite, he was the ruling class. Like his boss Lord Wolseley, and indeed like his King to be, he was an eminent Freemason.

  There was no deficiency in this man’s faculties – the exhumation and destruction of the Mahdi’s corpse wasn’t mad cruelty in the passion of battle, it was a calculated and premeditated act. What motivated Kitchener to dig up and violate that stinking cadaver was hate. Hate.

  With that hammer in his hand, Kitchener belonged to Satan.

  Satan, wrote Milton, ‘was the first That practised falsehood under saintly shew, Deep malice to conceal, couch’d with revenge’.

  In the autumn of 1888, no less a personage than Milton’s fearful inspiration was about his business of revenge in London’s East End. Like Kitchener, his intent was premeditated (he too carried a weapon of extreme suitability – not a hammer, but a knife). Unlike the revered soldier, the Ripper’s hate wasn’t so easily satiated. He rehearsed it again and again. And unlike Kitchener, the Whitechapel Fiend had a witty and macabre sense of fun.

  There are three things, even at this juncture, that can be stated with reasonable confidence about our ‘Simon-Pure’, as Sir Melville Macnaghten calls him in his monkey-brained book.37

  1) He was not a ‘madman’.

  2) He was physically and emotionally strong.

  3) And the one thing we can be absolutely certain of is that ‘Jack the Ripper’ did not look like ‘Jack the Ripper’.

  No fangs. No failures.

  Although complaints about underfunding and undermanning were endless, Whitechapel had not a few policemen on the beat. They were in plain clothes and in uniform, and they weren’t up to much. ‘The Chiefs of the various divisions, who are, generally speaking, disgusted with the present arrangement, will sometimes call one of these yokels before him to see how much he really does know. “You know, Constable, what a disorderly woman is?” “No,” said the Constable. The officer went through a series of questions, only to find that the man was ignorant of the difference between theft and fraud, housebreaking and burglary, and his sole idea of duty, was to move everyone on, that he thought wanted moving on.’38

  Constable Walter Dew, though perhaps smarter than most, was one of the above. He was a young beat copper at the time of the Ripper. Many years later he published an honest, if occasionally inaccurate, autobiography recalling his memories of the crisis. ‘Sometimes,’ wrote Dew, ‘I thought he [the Ripper] was immune. Was there something about him that placed him above suspicion?’39

  You nearly hit the nail on the head, Mr Dew, but it was more fundamental than that. It wasn’t something about the Ripper; I’m afraid it was something about you.

  When the Empress proclaimed that ‘No Englishman could commit such crimes,’ there was an implicit corollary. What she actually meant was, ‘No English gentleman could possibly commit such crimes.’

  ‘The London police regard the frock coat and the silk hat as the appenage of the gentleman, and no one so dressed is ever likely to be roughly handled, even if he forgets himself so far as to dispute a member of the force.’40

  Walter Dew couldn’t have seen Jack the Ripper if he had been standing on his big toe. Like a dose of curare, the lethal anaesthetic of class could stop a London copper in his tracks. Murderers and fiends, in this hierarchy of delusion, did not include anyone of a superior social position. Gentlemen only went to the East End to slum it, for a bit of a lark.

  Here’s a contemporary description of one such toff: ‘The most intense amusement has been caused among all classes of the London world by the arrest last week of Little Sir George Arthur on suspicion of being the Whitechapel Murderer. Sir George is a young Baronet holding a captaincy in the Regiment of Royal Horse Guards, and is a member of the most leading clubs in town.’

  He was also, just in case we haven’t quite got the picture, ‘a great friend of the late Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany’. Anyway, one night – and I’m so tickled I can hardly write it – Sir George joined the ‘scores of young men, who prowl around the neighbourhood in which the murders were committed, talking with the frightened women and pushing their way into overcrowded lodging houses’.

  This was obviously topping fun, and providing ‘two men kept together and do not make a nuisance of themselves, the police do not interfere with them’.

  It was all a heady wheeze, and now comes the quite delightful dénouement:

  He put on an old shooting coat and a slouch hat, and went down to Whitechapel for a little fun … It occurred to two policemen that Sir George answered very much the popular description of Jack the Ripper. They watched him, and when they saw him talking to women they proceeded to collar him. He protested, expostulated and threatened them with the vengeance of Royal wrath. Finally, a chance was given to him to send to a fashionable Western [i.e. West End] club to prove his identity, and he was released with profuse apologies for the mistake. The affair was kept out of the newspapers. But the jolly young baronet’s friends at Brooks’s Club considered the joke too delicious to be kept quiet.41

  In other words, you only had to flash the Victorian equivalent of a Platinum Amex to get an apology and be on your way. The French Sûreté, infinitely superior to its British equivalent at Scotland Yard, suffered no such upper-crust delusions. ‘Handcuffed Though Clearly a Gentleman’ is the title of this cartoon from 1892. Some English con artist called Ferguson Purdie had been arrested on a charge of pickpocketing at the Auteuil races. The French police had him in ‘cuffs’, and the Illustrated London News went into shock. He was Clearly a Gentleman! All the elements of British class absurdity and wooden-headed xenophobia are encapsulated in this little sketch.

  You couldn’t have got more ‘gentleman-like’ than the regal son of that most regal gentleman Edward, Prince of Wales. Prince Albert Victor, Victoria’s grandson and later the Duke of Clarence, one of England’s most eminent Freemasons, used to frequent a male brothel at the house of Charles Hammond, in Cleveland Street in the West End of London. It cost a guinea to sodomise a boy, and as befitted the Prince’s rank, the clientèle were strictly top nobs.

  The police had had an eye on the place for some while, keeping a discreet record of the aristocratic comings and goings. Among the officials assigned to this unsavoury calendar was Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline. (He was also on the streets with the Ripper enquiries, and was thus a busy man, of whom we shall be hearing more.)

  My interest in Cleveland Street isn’t limited to the sordid activities within, but includes the almost inconceivable criminal activity without. By the late 1880s the Victorian Establishment had become so profligate, so craven, that scandal was hissing everywhere, rupturing through the upper classes like air from a perished ball. Home Office staff were forever being rushed off their feet in a frenzy of patching, and repackaging black as a very dark shade of white. The rules had to be violated, manipulated, cheated and debased. In this case the law had to be made a whore to save the royal arse.

  This industry of unworthiness was the responsibility of the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews QC, commandant of the legal machine and its venal army of brown-nosed lawyers, lackeys and High Court judges. Like the military in their ursine headwear, these medieval-looking potentates under three and a half pounds of horsehair gurgled the draconian enactments of Victoria’s statutes.

  One such judge, James Fitzjames Stephen, who in due course will feature at the extreme peripheries of his paymaster’s wickedness, had an oblique connection with Cleveland Street. His son, James Kenneth Stephen, was tutor and off-peak lover to the Duke of Clarence. He was also a publisher of verses. As Oscar Wilde remarked when bitching about a similar talent, ‘He has nothing to say, and says it.’ Wilde was referring to Henry Somerset, an aristocratic second-rate melodist whose brother and co-buggerer Lord Arthur Somerset is to have some prominence in this story.

  Somerset was a close p
al of the Prince of Wales,42 and the Prince’s son, the Duke of Clarence, was a pal of Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Charles Warren. The Commissioner was actually a house-guest at Sandringham Palace in Norfolk for the celebrations of Clarence’s twenty-fourth birthday in January 1888.43 I don’t know if J.K. Stephen was there, but when Edward inadvertently got busted at an illegal gambling den, the police were chastened, and J.K.’s father was on hand to clarify what ‘illegal’ actually meant.

  ‘It is occasionally said,’ observed Judge James Fitzjames Stephen, ‘that the law as it stands exhibits practical partiality in the odious form of undue leniency to the rich in comparison with the poor. How can it be just, it is said, that the Prince of Wales and other people of the highest rank should go to Mr Wilson’s [gambling house] and play baccarat with impunity, whilst the newspapers are continually filled with accounts of raids upon gambling houses which do not do a tenth part of the harm? The answer, of course, is plain. There is all the difference in the world between keeping a house in which everyone may gamble, and private gambling which no one can share in without special invitation.’44

  In other words, a gentleman may ‘invite’ another to break the law, and be within the law by doing it, but if the culprit is not a gentleman and was not ‘invited’, the law must make a very necessary social adjustment.

  ‘It is true,’ hawked Justice Stephen, ‘that under 36 and 37 Vict. s. 3. that any man who plays or bets in any street, road, highway, or other public place with any cards or instruments of gaming … is a rogue and vagabond, and as such may be imprisoned by a magistrate for three months.’

  A king to be gets a cartoon, and a common man a cell. This apparently went down all right in West End drawing rooms and the more affluent Freemasonic lodges, but didn’t cut it so favourably for Masons in the United States.