They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  Why?

  Why, after all that time, would Scotland Yard or its clandestine associates have wanted to provide a ‘definitive account’ of Jack the Ripper? They’d been sitting on files inaccessible to the public for almost a century. If openness was their intention, why not provide a definitive account themselves, or simply open the files to everyone at the National Archive? And why would Scotland Yard, or its associates, want to give currency to so scandalous a revelation as the Masonic involvement of a royal prince? After all, there isn’t the thinnest whiff of Masonry in connection with the Jack the Ripper murders in the entire Metropolitan Police archive. Apparently no copper on the ground in 1888 ever even considered it (except, most curiously, in those specially released secret files).

  If they really exist, why are these declassified documents not in the National Archive at Kew? We don’t get so much as a scribble in respect of Clarence, Gull, Netley or Freemasonry. Why wasn’t even a scintilla of this material included when the body of proscribed Ripper files was finally released into the public domain in 1992?

  Mr Knight might well have done better to have reserved his judgement and considered an alternative scenario. This was in 1975, which meant that the hundred-year rule classifying all things Ripper was rapidly running out. Could it be that certain ‘impeccable sources’ thought it might be in their interest to leak a bit of a bum steer (an inoculation), thus pre-empting further Masonic enquiry?

  This claptrap attached to Clarence would certainly qualify, effectively neutering enthusiasm for further Masonic investigation.

  Knight, and anyone who took him seriously, was made to look like an idiot. A cult of the narrow-minded evolved, abetted by ‘Ripperology’, and the beneficiary, of course, was Masonry. ‘At risk of seeming to dabble in sensationalism,’ writes the aforementioned Bro McLeod, ‘I touch on another matter that sheds some light on the scholarly competence and the intellectual honesty of such propagandists as the late Stephen Knight.’

  The shameful excoriation of Knight that follows was published in 1986 (two years before Jack’s centenary in 1988) in the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, a journal of Masonic research founded a century before by Commissioner of Metropolitan Police Sir Charles Warren, and thereafter Masonry’s most prestigious periodical. With Knight as his target, McLeod sets out his stall:24

  Soon after 1.30 in the morning of 30 September 1888, the fourth Whitechapel murder took place. The victim was Catherine Eddowes, also known as ‘Kate Kelly’. Within hours a policeman found a bloodstained scrap of her apron five hundred yards away, in a passage off Goulston Street; on the wall of the adjoining staircase he discovered a chalked message, ‘The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing.’ Commissioner Warren appeared on the scene before dawn, and ordered the words erased: indeed, he may have rubbed them out himself. The reason he later gave was to prevent anti-Jewish riot. But anti-Masonic writers assign an ulterior motive, that is, to protect the Freemasons; the word ‘Juwes’, they tell us, alludes to the three ruffians who murdered Hiram Abif, and were themselves later executed. Any such hypothesis meets more than one obstacle. (1) There is no indication that the graffito had any connection with the murder, or that it was written by the Ripper.25 (2) If he did write it, what on earth did he intend it to mean? Whether we take ‘Juwes’ to mean ‘Jews’ or ‘Ruffians’, the inscription makes no sense as a signature or a warning. (3) There is a decisive argument to exonerate Sir Charles from any charge of ‘covering up’ for the Masons. Admittedly certain pre-Union exposures name the Ruffians as Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, and with a certain amount of good-will one might imagine they could be referred to as the three ‘Juwes’ (though I have never encountered a Masonic source that did so). But they vanish from most English rituals at the Union, and by a generation later they would not have been recognised by an English Mason as Masonic allusions at all, let alone as specific references to vengeance, punishment or ritual execution – unless the Mason happened to be excessively antiquarian in his interest. And that [McLeod’s emphasis] Sir Charles Warren was not.26

  There’s a bit of a faux pas here, to wit: ‘they would not have been recognised by an English Mason … unless the Mason happened to be excessively antiquarian in his interest’. In other words, a Mason who did happen to be excessively antiquarian might well recognise the Masonic significance. Otherwise, what’s the point of such an observation? It’s either Masonic, or it isn’t. If the ‘graffito’ has nothing to do with Freemasonry, why would it matter whether Bro Warren was an expert or not?

  We have at least obtained an interesting clarification from Bro McLeod: a Freemason who was ‘excessively antiquarian in his interest’ might indeed conjugate the Masonic significance of the writing on the wall (what he and Ripperology call ‘graffito’).

  Although conceding that the ‘graffito’ is possibly Masonic, Bro McLeod insists, with emphasis, that Sir Charles Warren had no such expertise. Which is presumably why he and Walter Besant had struggled from as far back as 1872 to inaugurate a Lodge of Masonic Research, finally succeeding with the establishment of the ‘Quatuor Coronati’ in 1886. At a meeting of that lodge in 1887, Sir Charles is quoted as saying ‘how amidst his active career, he had always kept up the study’.27

  In a subsequent chapter it will become clear that Bro Warren was indeed ‘excessively antiquarian in his interest’; which ineluctably brings us back to internet fib number 4.

  … the story of the Three Ruffians had been removed from Masonic ritual in England [but not in the United States] seventy years before the Ripper murders took place.

  ‘They would not have been recognised by an English Mason as Masonic allusions at all,’ says Bro McLeod, ‘let alone as specific references to vengeance, punishment or ritual execution.’

  In reality, as all Masons know, the Jewish Ruffians hadn’t vanished from Masonic ritual at the Union (in 1813), but were actually as much a part of it in 1888 as they were in a Masonic lodge near you until 1987. All that had happened was that the ‘vengeance and ritual execution’ had been converted into a primitive alphabetical cipher. Masons like codes and conundrums (‘Juwes’ for example), and it was Police Commissioner Warren’s flagrant dissembling over what was written on a wall at Goulston Street that gives the Masonic game away.

  This modern version of the Jubela, Jubelo, Jubelum myth, making specific reference to vengeance, punishment and ritual execution, comes from Notes on Ritual and Procedure, published in 1976 (that’s nineteen hundred and seventy-six). It features Solomon’s judgement on Jubela, Jubelum and Jubelo, incorporated into the First, Second and Third Degree Obligation (oath), as practised until 1987:

  These several points I solemnly swear to observe … under no less a penalty, on the violation of any of them than that of having my t.c.a., my t.t.o.b.t.r. and b.i.t.s.o.t.s. at l.w.m., or a c’s l.f.t.s., where t.t.r.e.a.f.t.i. 24 hs. …

  Which translates today exactly as it translated in 1888: ‘under no less a penalty, on the violation of any of them than that of having my t(hroat) c(ut) a(cross), my t(ongue) t(orn) o(ut) b(y) t(he) r(oot) and (my body) b(uried) i(n) t(he) s(and) o(f) t(he) s(ea) at l(ow) w(ater) m(ark) or a c(able)’s l(ength) f(rom) t(he) s(hore), where t(he) t(ide) r(egularly) e(bbs) a(nd) f(lows) t(wice) i(n) 24 h(our)s’.

  So what’s all this ‘vanished in 1813’ tosh? The names may have been omitted, but the penalties remain the same. By the late 1960s there was a growing antipathy inside Freemasonry itself towards these verbal savageries. Many wanted rid of them, and (led in part by Churchmen) arguments for and against their abolition culminated in a packed debate at Grand Lodge in 1986. A summary of these proceedings by Bro Harry Mendoza was published in the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum. ‘There was a feeling of repugnance,’ wrote Mendoza, ‘felt by the candidate while his hand is on the volume of the sacred law [the Bible] to give a faithful promise to observe an Obligation which contains a barbarous and unenforceable penalty clause. Indeed, some have argued that by taking such an Obligation, they are taking the na
me of God in vain and thus violating the third of the Ten Commandments. Second,’ he continues, ‘it is a known fact that there are some brethren who have refused to participate any further in the Craft because they felt that what they had been asked to repeat was puerile, offensive or wholly out of keeping with what they understood to be the principles of Freemasonry. Third’ – and bearing the misguided Mr Stephen Knight in mind – their abandonment ‘would take a potent weapon from the hands of our adversaries’.28 Ha ha.

  Mendoza then moves on to the arguments for their retention: ‘We’ve been using these Obligations for years, and there’s no good reason for changing them. The ritual was good enough for my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and it’s good enough for me.’ Moreover, ‘You are forbidden to alter the ritual,’ a rule that didn’t vanish with the Articles of Union, but actually predicates upon it: ‘There shall be the most perfect unity of Obligation, until time shall be no more.’

  In the end the abolitionists won the day, and on 11 June 1986 ‘Grand Lodge resolved that “All references to physical penalties be omitted from the Obligations taken by Candidates in the three degrees.”’ ‘The Board,’ wrote Bro Higman, summing it up, ‘sees it as important that the resolution is put into effect as soon as possible, particularly in so far as it affects initiations. In any event, the change should be implemented not later than June 1987.’ That’s June, nineteen hundred and eighty-seven.29

  Thus, from the summer of that year, there were to be no more throats cut across, no more vitals flung over shoulders, bodies cut in half or burnt bowels. But let me not impede Bro McLeod in his flow. This malevolent junk is to have all too short a shelf-life.

  ‘The estimable Mr Knight,’ he froths, ‘professes to have found “many Freemasons” who were willing to talk to him, and he alleges that he has consulted the works of such notable authorities as Father Hannah and Mr Dewer,30 and yet he seems to be blissfully unaware of the facts that I cite. I can only conclude that he was either incompetent or a liar. Is there some other possibility?’31

  Yes, Bro McLeod, there is, and seeing as you introduce the word, how about that you are lying, that your invective, like the website referred to earlier, is a tribute to dishonesty, and that you are about as ingenuous as some ventriloquist’s dummy of a politician bewitched by his own propaganda.

  Two questions require answers here. The first is, what happened to the ‘impeccable source’ who tipped Knight off? Where did he source this ludicrous Clarence twaddle, and why didn’t he speak up in Mr Knight’s defence? And second, why isn’t Bro McLeod directing some of his sanctimonious venom at that same source? The Metropolitan Police were given Knight’s manuscript before publication. On 28 August 1975, under an official Scotland Yard letterhead, the Departmental Record Office wrote to Mr Knight: ‘Thank you for sight of your draft typescript about Jack the Ripper, where you have clearly drawn on the contents of our Metropolitan Police files’ (my emphasis).32

  You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see through a camouflage like Bro McLeod’s. It’s perfectly obvious. Mr Stephen Knight was set up. In his investigations of Bro the Duke of Clarence and Bro the Earl of Euston eighty years before, another misguided but honest journalist, Ernest Parke, got shafted by a contrived ‘leak’ out of Scotland Yard. Mr Knight was simply a victim of a similar contrivance. Clarence was (and is) a greasy mirror put up between Masonry and the Ripper, a clumsy contrivance to warn others off. Nobody wants to look like a banana, so everybody (most especially Ripperology) stays away, the Masonic baby duly disappearing with the royal bathwater.

  I’ve got no brief for Stephen Knight, but he didn’t wake up one wet weekend with a headful of malice towards some forgotten royal he’d never even heard of. Malice was there, but it didn’t originate with him. We know some official introduced Mr Knight to ‘one of our people’, a gent who became the primary source for the matter of his book. But who was this man, and where did he get it? From whence did this putrescent fairy tale emerge?

  More than a dozen years before anyone had heard of Stephen Knight, a well-known and very excellent writer, Mr Colin Wilson, was invited to lunch at the Athenaeum. His host was an affable seventy-year-old retired surgeon named Thomas Eldon Stowell, CBE MD FRCS DIH. As well as a lot of letters after his name, Mr Stowell had a secret under his arse ‘that he’d been sitting on for thirty years’.

  Over gulls’ eggs and claret, Stowell plunged into his topic, so stimulating Mr Wilson that he ignored every word of it. Wilson had written a series of articles for the London Evening Standard,33 Jack the Ripper being the theme. The crafty septuagenarian attempted to solicit the younger man’s complicity by informing him that ‘they were thinking in a very similar way regarding the murderer’s identity’, and that the assassin ‘was the Duke of Clarence’. This surprised Mr Wilson, because he’d been thinking of no such thing; indeed, he ‘had not even heard of that particular Duke’.34

  It sounded like manure then, and it sounded worse sixteen years later, when Mr Wilson was commissioned to write a review of the same nonsense in Mr Stephen Knight’s recently published book. ‘What we are being asked to believe,’ wrote Mr Wilson,

  is, basically, a far taller story than any of the other theories about the Ripper – the mad surgeon, the sadistic midwife, and so on. We are asked to believe, first of all, that Eddie, the Duke of Clarence, became a close friend of Walter Sickert. This is unsupported. We are asked to believe that he became sufficiently involved with a shop assistant to actually marry her – although like everyone else in the family, he was terrified of Queen Victoria, and knew that he might – almost certainly would – be King of England one day. We are asked to believe that the Queen’s physician, Sir William Gull, was party to the kidnapping of the shop assistant, and that he probably performed some grotesque operation on her to make her lose her memory. And then that Gull, with the approval of the Prime Minister, went around Whitechapel killing prostitutes with appalling sadism (when, after all, a single stab would have done the trick). Moreover, that Gull was a Freemason, and committed murders according to Masonic ritual. (The Prime Minister and Commissioner of Police were also Masons.) Mr Knight admits that Gull had a stroke in the year before the murders, but insists that he was still spry enough to wield the knife.35

  Had Mr Wilson swallowed the bait, it would doubtless have been he who wore Mr Knight’s baleful mantle, and who would have been vilified in Freemasonic journals. But Wilson was too astute; Stowell was going to have to find himself another patsy.

  In 1962 the allegations against Clarence had emerged in Paris, published by Hachette in a biography of Edward VII by Phillip Julian: ‘La mauvaise reputation du jeune homme se répandit dans l’opinion. Le bruit courait qu’il était Jack l’Eventreur.’ (And for those who don’t:) ‘The young man’s evil reputation soon spread. The rumour gained ground that he was Jack the Ripper.’36

  The French leak went nowhere. If Stowell wanted it out, he was going to have to publish it himself. This he did, his revelation appearing in the Criminologist magazine in November 1970: ‘Jack the Ripper: A Solution?’ – a virtually identical title to that used by Knight for his book six years later: Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution.37

  Though more appropriate to the National Enquirer, Stowell’s effort caused a flutter amongst the cognoscenti. ‘Did the Ripper Have Royal Blood?’ asked a wide-eyed Sunday Times that same month.38 Clarence barely had a brain, so the question isn’t even academic. The question is: what was this deceitful old man actually up to? If Stowell hadn’t opened his idiot mouth, there would have been no ‘one of our people’, and Knight wouldn’t have written his idiot book.

  If Bro McLeod wants to condemn anyone for what he calls ‘scurrilous journalism’, he might want to consider redirecting his invective at Bro Thomas Eldon Stowell.

  We have at last arrived at the source of this unsavoury fable. It came out of the mouth of a distinguished Freemason.

  Bro Stowell’s association with Freemasonry was more than
casual (a detail he might not have shared with Mr Wilson at the Athenaeum). The doctor with the ‘secret’ was a Worshipful Master as early as 1918, Provincial Grand Deacon (Cheshire) by 1928, and rose through Masonic ranks to become a Companion of the Holy Royal Arch (eighteenth degree) by the beginning of the Second World War. He was Most Excellent Zerubbabe in the Cornubain (450), and wrote its history.39

  By the tenets of Masonry, Stowell was a scoundrel, caring not a rat’s arse for the oath he had sworn. ‘One of the most notable features of Freemasonry – one, certainly, which attracts, more than anything else, the attention of the profane world – is that veil of mystery – that awful secrecy, behind which it moves and acts. From the earliest periods this has invariably been a distinctive characteristic of the institution; and today, as of old, the first obligation of a Mason – his supreme duty – is that of silence and secrecy.’

  And yet Stowell blows the whistle on Clarence?

  It might therefore be as well for Masonry to amend the website, replacing any reference to Mr Stephen Knight with the name of Bro Stowell. Contemptuous of any tradition, it was a Freemason who dished the dirt on Bro the Duke of Clarence. Stowell’s corrosive but artful fantasies led in turn to the mind-numbing and outrageous accusations levelled against a genius called Walter Sickert, and it’s at that point I’ve got to let this nonsense go.

  While Bro Stowell was occupied with trying to push Bro Clarence into the limelight, there were others just as anxious to get Bro Sir Charles Warren out of it.

  As is established, Warren was Boss Cop, supreme authority (excepting the City) over about a dozen Metropolitan Police jurisdictions, which included an area of East London encompassing Whitechapel, known as H Division. His tenure in office from 1886 to November 1888 is an indisputable fact. Any Victorian newspaper, irrespective of its political bias, will tell you that while Jack was amusing himself, Warren was the policeman enjoined to catch him. I’d go so far as to say that anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Whitechapel Horrors would know that Bro Sir Charles Warren was concurrently Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.