We now come to a man who was in apparent ignorance of it. As far as he’s concerned, Warren had absolutely nothing to do with the world’s most famous assassin – no crisis, no panic, no connection. Such idiosyncrasy of opinion is made remarkable by the fact that this individual worked at Scotland Yard, had access to classified files, and published a book purporting to be some kind of history of the Metropolitan Police.40
He is former Assistant Commissioner Major Maurice Tomlin, and Maurice thinks the most startling highlight of Warren’s career was the arrest of a girl in Regent Street. Since Tomlin is a source of such distinction, I quote him in full.
Sir Charles Warren’s administration would have gone forward, perhaps, without very much to make it in any way noticeable, had it not been for what is known as the ‘Cass’ affair. In this case, a ‘young person’, as she would have been called, was taken into custody by a Constable of the ‘C’ Division in Regent Street, on a charge of soliciting. Suspicious as her actions may have been, it was not considered proved that her motives were wrong; and the case was dismissed. The arrest therefore aroused considerable public agitation: as a result, not only the Commissioner of Police but the Home Secretary were involved in the censure. It was certainly open to doubt whether the action of the Constable was as wrong, and the conduct of the lady as correct, as was made out at the time: when the Constable was tried for perjury on account of the evidence he gave in the case he was acquitted without any blame whatever being attached to him, and he was reinstated in the force. The real history of the affair is that the behaviour of the defendant certainly gave the Constable ample grounds for acting as he did, and the defendant was very lucky to be able to convince the magistrate of her innocence in the matter. Except for the two unfortunate people concerned, it was not really such a very important case, but as we of our generation know, these apparently unimportant cases, arising out of the daily work of the Police, may, at any moment, develop into a ‘Sensation’; as a result, the administration of Sir Charles Warren was rather suspect by the public, and it is not to be wondered at that after a very short time he resigned in 1888.
So there we have it, a potted history of Warren’s exciting tenure at the Yard. He possibly also issued a few parking tickets to the odd horse and cart. This assessment of the Commissioner’s career was published in 1936, almost fifty years after the Ripper sensation.
Tosh like this is as fatuous as anything out of Bro McLeod. While he attempts to deodorise Warren’s Masonic competence, others try to diminish his role as Commissioner altogether. Predicated on quasi-official histories (almost always written by ex-policemen), we are invited to believe that it was James Monro, and not Bro Warren, who was Boss Cop at the time of the Ripper murders.41
It wasn’t only Tomlin who advertised this mirage. It was also pushed by another Assistant Commissioner, Sir Basil Thomson KCB, who incidentally ‘wrecked his career and reputation on being arrested for public indecency with a prostitute in Hyde Park’. Such regretful adventures up a whore’s skirt didn’t preclude him from writing The Story of Scotland Yard, published in 1935. According to Thomson, Bro Warren had just about evaporated as Jack got active, and it was Monro who was put up to take the Whitechapel flak. With quaint indifference to reality, Thomson writes this: ‘Mr James Monro, who had lately resigned from the C.I.D. was recalled to succeed Sir Charles Warren. He [Monro] had shown great ability in unearthing the perpetrators of the dynamite outrages, but the dynamite outrages had been suppressed, and the “Jack the Ripper” outrages had filled the public mind to the exclusion of all other questions.’42
What exactly is he trying to sell here? Monro was in enforced ‘resignation’ throughout the period in question, and had virtually nothing to do with the Ripper outrages. Anyone reading Thomson would get the impression that Monro had ‘succeeded’ Warren, and that it was he who was in charge when the Ripper ‘filled the public mind to the exclusion of all other questions’.
‘Feelings ran very high against the C.I.D.,’ continues Thomson, ‘for its failure to arrest the murderer.’ He neglects to point out that the Criminal Investigation Department was at that time managed by Robert Anderson. But so what for facts. This was James Monro’s scandal, not Bro Sir Charles Warren’s.
Not a newspaper in England was blaming Monro for failing to catch Jack the Ripper, and this isn’t surprising, because he wasn’t reappointed as Commissioner until Tuesday, 4 December 1888.43 He was barely mentioned in that context, if he was ever mentioned at all. But everyone with a newspaper to open was blaming Sir Charles Warren. No one could understand how such an abundance of clues ‘would seem to conspire to baffle the police’.
It’s curious that these two policemen, Thomson and Tomlin, both ex-Assistant Commissioners, could be so misinformed when it comes to their most infamous murderer. Maybe we’ll get a more accurate picture out of J.F. Moylan CB CBE, whose Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police was published in 1928. According to its preface, ‘The aim of the Whitehall Series [of which this was one] is to provide accurate and authoritative information, and this book has been written with the idea of giving such information about the Metropolitan Police. In 1888 “Jack the Ripper” caused crime to take the place of disorder as the mutual preoccupation of police and public. Great importance also attached about this time to that side of police work which is represented by the Special Branch and C.I.D. It was therefore not surprising that Sir Charles Warren’s place was filled by the return of Mr Monro, an expert on crime and creator of the Special Branch.’44
This artfully constructed paragraph is preposterous. By the time Monro got back to Scotland Yard, Jack the Ripper was officially, incorrectly and secretly declared dead. As far as the authorities were concerned, the problem had ‘committed suicide’ by drowning itself in the River Thames.
What does any of this have to do with Monro? Anyone of a cynical disposition might imagine there was someone (or something) out there trying to disassociate Bro Warren from Whitechapel, and to pretend that an entirely different policeman was sharing that never-to-be-forgotten relationship with Jack. But let us leave the last word to Assistant Commissioner Tomlin, who sums up my argument without inhibition: ‘A new Commissioner was, on this occasion, taken from serving Police Officers in the person of Mr Monro. His services in London had been with the C.I.D. since 1884. He had to cope with the dynamite campaign … He had also to deal with a very anxious time during the “Jack the Ripper” murders.’45
There it is, word for word. It was all down to James Monro, and Warren doesn’t even get a look-in.
‘I suggest that it’s very doubtful whether Warren took any active part in the Jack the Ripper investigation, as he had no control over the detective force.’
Who’s this?
It’s another voice hollering off the pages of the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum. Bro Brigadier A.C.F. Jackson is most happy to agree with Tomlin. ‘Such a reality would not have worried Knight,’ froths the Brig. ‘The personal communication between Knight and Bro Hamill is clear proof that the former was prepared to twist the facts to prove his anti-Masonic spleen.’46
Let’s hear one last gasp of condemnation for Mr Knight before abandoning this cardboard armour to the memory of Bro Thomas Eldon Stowell. I leave it to the above-named Bro J.M. Hamill, Master of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge, who in 1986 got up the following: ‘One point I would comment on’ – and one irresistible to Bro Hamill – ‘the treatment afforded to our First Master [Sir Charles Warren], by the late Stephen Knight in his Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (London, 1976), a scurrilous piece of sensational journalism masquerading as historical research. Knight claims that the Whitechapel murders were a Masonic plot to cover up an indiscretion on the part of HRH Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence (son of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, Grand Master 1874–1901).’47
For certain individuals of this ‘Lodge of Historical Research’, history is not something to be explored, but something to be owned. ‘The truth,’ as General Gordon wro
te, ‘is theirs’ – and more often than not, it’s self-serving bollocks.
Freemasons habitually insist that their institution has nothing to do with Jack, yet by paralipsis they seek to control the mythos surrounding him. Anyone with the temerity to question it is reflexively branded ‘anti-Masonic’, as though that is the end of the argument. This is the bluster of bullies. By definition, a ‘mystery’ is in want of explanation. If nobody knows who the Ripper is, please stop telling me who he isn’t.
The predisposition to look at this material as ‘mystery’ is beguiling, but only if one accepts the police point of view. An avenue of books either promote or have fallen for the same old ramshackle tale. If a policeman wrote it, it’s enshrined, axiomatic amongst Ripperologists as a sacrosanct truth. There’s Swanson and his ‘marginalia’, Macnaghten and his ‘memoranda’, Littlechild and his ‘letter’. Ripperology is constipated with this junk. The policemen who never caught him are apparently to be construed as oracles after the event. The only senior policeman without an opinion on Jack the Ripper is the man who dared not give one, and that is the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, Bro Sir Charles Warren.
It’s noticeable that of his many books, Warren never got his pen dirty for the Whitechapel Murderer. We shouldn’t be surprised. What could he write? Of his determination to impede every facet of the investigation? Muse perhaps over the destruction of evidence by his own hand? Or reminisce over tactics to discredit honourable witnesses, no effort spared?
If a witness contradicted the police, he was by definition unreliable, mistaken, a kind of Walter Mitty character, too old, too confused, or all and any of the above that could be manipulated as a means to discredit him.
For the most part, Ripperology gives unqualified credence to the Victorian police. This is at odds with Victorian newspapers, which did not. For myself, I have no inclination to accept anything put about by Boss Cops, because all too often the police were lying. Theirs is a litany of disinformation, misinformation, contradictions, missing documents and bent coroners’ courts. I do not trespass beyond what I can prove. What we have here is an Establishment conspiracy – not some half-witted nonsense out of Stowell, but an agenda to conceal a Freemason, a ‘Mystic Tie’ wherein otherwise honourable men were coerced into becoming criminals in order to protect a criminal in their midst. I shall prove that Jack the Ripper was a Freemason, that what he called his ‘Funny Little Game’ was a perversion of Freemasonic ritual, and that its symbolism and traditions were the naked vernacular of these horrendous crimes. I shall prove, in fact, that Masonic symbol was Jack’s ‘calling card’, contemptuously left at every crime scene and displayed so flagrantly in the mutilated remains of Mary Jane Kelly that there was barely anything else. What is incredible, and ultimately disastrous for Warren, is that not only did this effervescent psychopath play his ‘Funny Little Games’ with Freemasonry, he played them with Warren himself. Warren was an inspiration to the Ripper, and the Commissioner’s past an ingredient of his malice.
The Ripper was on Warren’s case. It’s the big secret.
Jack hated Charlie, hated his rectitude and his evangelical hypocrisy. Most of all, he hated his authority. The more Warren tried to cover up, the more the Ripper raised the ante. You’d have to sit down and think about it to come up with a bigger piss-take than to secrete the body parts of a murdered girl in the foundations of the Boss Cop’s new building at New Scotland Yard.48 But then Jack sat down and thought, ever ruminating over new ‘larks’ with which to persecute old Charlie. Enormous effort was made to disassociate this particular outrage from the hand of ‘Saucy Jacky’, because the Ripper was doing his best to outrage Warren. It was a personal thing (he visited Scotland Yard twice). The cops couldn’t keep up, and were barely able to cover up. By this point they were on automatic pilot, laundering in the Ripper’s wake like a bunch of traumatised accomplices.
Isolating Charlie from Jack, in respect of the headless and sawn-in-half body at New Scotland Yard, was successful. Both the conned Victorian public and later Ripperology bought into a pantomime of two independent maniacs abroad who happened to share the same homicidal signature. And that signature was Freemasonry.
It is manifestly untrue to try to claim that ‘The story of the Three Ruffians had been removed from Masonic Ritual seventy years before the Ripper murders took place.’ With its vengeance, revenge and vicious punishment, that legend was still in place ninety-nine years after them. In other words, Bro McLeod’s ‘decisive argument exonerating Warren from a Masonic cover-up’ becomes a decisive argument in favour of investigating one.
We shall now be looking at the cover-up.
3
The Mystic Tie
You shall be cautious in your words and carriage, that the most penetrating stranger shall not be able to discover or find out what is not proper to be intimated; and sometimes you shall divert a discourse, and manage it prudently for the honour of the worshipful fraternity.
Colonel T.H. Shadwell Clerke, Masonic Constitutions (1884)
In chronological terms, Annie Chapman was the third in the series, but it was the most shocking yet in terms of Masonic signature. Mrs Chapman was a forty-seven-year-old nothing with progressive lung disease that would probably have killed her if the Ripper hadn’t. In the early hours of Saturday, 8 September 1888, in want of four pennies for a bed, she went out hawking the only thing she had. Just before six o’clock that same morning, her grotesquely mutilated body was discovered in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Whitechapel.
Her killer had clearly performed some kind of postmortem ritual. Her throat was cut across, her abdomen had been slashed open and her intestines removed, and deposited on her left shoulder. A ring or rings had been wrenched from her fingers, and together with her womb were missing from the crime scene. The assailant had also cut her pockets open, making a neat display of their contents at her feet. Amongst ‘other articles’ these consisted of a piece of muslin and a pair of combs. ‘There was also found,’ reported the Telegraph, ‘two farthings polished brightly’ – coins soon to be named ‘the Mysterious coins’, and to become the subject of trivial controversy.
A little over a week before Annie Chapman, a forty-three-year-old dipso called Mary Anne (‘Polly’) Nichols had suffered a primitive version of the same penalty. She had her throat cut across, her entrails hauled out and a worthless ring purloined from her finger. It is very probable that her murderer took it.
As has been mentioned, the removal of metal is axiomatic in Masonic ritual – ‘What ever he [or she] has about him made of metal is taken off,’ order the statutes of lodge initiation, ‘as buckles, buttons, rings, boxes, and even money in his pocket is taken away.’
No chance of any leap in forensic thinking here, then? It seems worth thinking about to me, particularly in the context of Scotland Yard’s comic mantra, ‘No clue too small.’
Bearing ‘clues’ in mind, and as a consideration, is it not possible that the assassin was indulging in some kind of postmortem compulsion that dictated entrails on a shoulder and the removal of metal? No need to get off one’s perch about it – just consider it along with a cut throat, cut pockets and coins as part of a broadening debate.
The following enquiry, in respect of metal, is one of the first put to an Entered Apprentice on Masonic initiation:
WORSHIPFUL MASTER: Brother, your Conductor thinks you have money about you. Search yourself. (Candidate feels in his pockets and insists he has none.)
SENIOR DEACON: I know the Candidate has money and if he will suffer me to search him, I will convince you of it.
In the above example, the Senior Deacon surreptitiously supplies the coins, and it’s my view that Jack supplied the farthings that were found near Annie Chapman’s body. Although these coins were described in contemporary press reports, a stalwart voice with special historic insight raises conjecture. Boss Ripperologist Mr Philip Sugden denies that they were there, citing Dr Phillips (who conducted the autopsy) as impeccable supp
ort for his argument. Because neither Phillips nor Inspector Chandler mentions coins at the inquest, hey presto, they couldn’t have been there. But Bro Dr Phillips is no more reliable than Bro McLeod, and both occasionally suffer the tribulations of amnesia. Memory loss is a shared phenomenon among certain Masons that will grip the corporate brain as we progress with this narrative. In the meantime, if the metaphor can be forgiven, I’d like to argue the toss of these coins in a later chapter, leaving the politics of metal until then.
On Wednesday, 26 September 1888, presiding over Chapman’s inquest, the coroner, Mr Wynne Baxter, said this: ‘But perhaps nothing was more noticeable than the emptying of her pockets and the arrangement of their contents with business-like precision in order near her feet.’
These murders were part of an evolving homicidal signature, the significance of which would have been as clear to Charles Warren as the nose on his face. For the sake of illustration, I’d like to consider Chapman’s demise from a different perspective. Let us create and evaluate an alternative battery of mutilations. Instead of a throat cut across, let us suppose the fatal wound was a deep gash, as might be caused by a spear or something similar thrust into her side. And let us imagine, subsequent to death, that her killer had opened her arms into the position of a crucifixion, and had taken the time (and the risk) to drive rusty nails through the palms of her hands, then positioned these nails at her feet before he fled. Would you not expect that someone of even moderate intelligence might hazard the possibility that the murder was the work of a ‘religious nut’? A one-eyed vicar up for the day could put it together. Yet of inquisitiveness over a similarly glaring distortion of Masonic ritual there was none. Warren and his detectives were positively stumped. There were no clues whatever, they said. No scream, and nothing to go on. ‘So far from giving a clue,’ comes a perceptive echo, ‘they would seem to conspire to baffle the police.’ ‘It exemplifies their worst fault,’ agreed the Daily News: ‘they cannot put two and two together.’
They All Love Jack Page 12