They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  From the moment of Arnold’s intercession, every imaginable effort was made to trash the importance of the writing on the wall. At first sight, Jack’s ‘schoolboy’10 scrawl was enough to send PC Long running. An Inspector from Commercial Road ran with him. But subsequent to that, no Metropolitan policeman was allowed to comprehend the matter of it. Priceless evidence linking Catherine Eddowes to the writing was to be transformed and repackaged into something else.

  Superintendent Arnold, a copper of thirty-five years’ experience, put in a report of that night’s proceedings as if he were some kind of social worker, engaged above all else to look out for the sensibilities of the Jews. I reproduce it in full.

  H Division

  6th November 1888

  I beg to report that on the morning of 30th Sept last my attention was called to some writing on the wall of the entrance to some dwellings No 108 Goulston Street Whitechapel which consisted of the following words ‘The Juews [sic] are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’, and knowing that in consequence of a suspicion having fallen upon a Jew named ‘John Pizer’ alias ‘Leather Apron’ having committed a murder in Hanbury Street a short time previously a strong feeling existed against the Jews generally, and as the building upon which the writing was found was situated in the midst of a locality inhabited principally by that sect, I was apprehensive that if the writing were left it would be the means of causing a riot and therefore considered it desirable that it should be removed having in view the fact that it was in such a position that it would have been rubbed by the shoulders of persons passing in & out of the building. Had only a portion of the writing been removed the context would have remained. An Inspector was present by my directions with a sponge for the purpose of removing the writing when the Commissioner [Warren] arrived on the scene.

  T. Arnold Supd.11

  The word ‘bullshit’ doesn’t rise to the occasion. You couldn’t even call it tosh. This was a doorway, in the middle of the night. PC Long felt confident of securing it with a single policeman whom he had instructed ‘to see that no one entered or left the building in my absence’. But where was everyone now? Apart from a solitary cop whistled up from his adjoining beat, not a man from the Met is ever reported as being on guard at Goulston Street.

  Instead, in grotesque disproportion to the circumstance, the Jews were elevated to a status they had never previously enjoyed, and that would never come their way again. Hitherto, virtually every fantasy of police suspicion had fallen upon a Jew, and Jews were the focus of practically every false accusation and arrest. Yet that wasn’t convenient here. The Jews were suddenly the Met’s best mates; none more so than Mr John Pizer (a.k.a. ‘Leather Apron’), a Jew, according to Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, ‘of unusually thick neck’, a ‘disgrace to their tribe’,12 who on this occasion Arnold was manipulating into a vulnerable alibi.

  Never mind any suspicions over evidence of a ‘Double Event’ that are glaring at him; he’s concerned, he says, about the suspicion that fell upon Pizer in ‘consequence’ of the murder at Hanbury Street. Poor thick-necked Pizer’s Hebrew sensibilities have been transformed into a reason for destroying the most flagrant ‘clue’ Jack ever left. Yet the cops had hounded this innocent Yid through every casual ward and lodging house in Whitechapel, stirring up anti-Semitism as they went. ‘The public are looking for a monster,’ noted the weekly Public Opinion, à propos of Pizer, ‘and in the legend of “Leather Apron” the Whitechapel part of them seem to be inventing a monster to look for.’13 As will be discovered at Eddowes’ inquest, it was a policeman, appropriately named Thick, who invented this toxic junk.

  Arnold’s highly selective hand-wringing for the Jews is bogus. ‘A strong feeling existed against the Jews,’ he laments. But this was as nothing compared to the strong feeling, amongst Jews and everyone else, that existed against the psychopath in their midst.

  Arnold was a Superintendent of detectives, and the general idea is that he was hunting one of history’s most infamous and dangerous criminals. Yet not once in his cowardly ‘report’ does he mention that the writing on the wall may well have been the work of that very man. Not once does he allude to the piece of apron, proved unequivocally to have been taken from Eddowes, and thus of inestimable importance to the writing above it. Not once does he refer to the City Police, and their efforts to preserve such evidence rather than, insanely, for it to be destroyed. And not once does he refer to that tiresome little sideline of cut throats and guts all over the pavement about a mile away.

  So obscene and implausible is Arnold’s explanation, you wouldn’t want to tell it to a snake. What we’re witnessing here is a breath-taking perversion of justice, bricklaying the cornerstones of the great ‘mystery’. Like Bro Baxter and his non-existent ‘Womb-Collector’, the whole Goulston Street episode reeks of pusillanimous deceit. While the City had its officers on the street – Collard, Izzard, Downes, Foster, Marriot, Outram, Lawley, Halse, Hunt, McWilliam and Commissioner Smith himself – Scotland Yard sent no one, and had but one senior officer, John Reid, working the Stride murder in isolation at Dutfield’s Yard.

  The reason for this paucity of enthusiasm, of course, was that Scotland Yard didn’t dare show any interest, because if it had it would have made the destruction of the writing on the wall all the more outrageous. You can’t put a guard up around vital evidence and then destroy it. In other words, the more defensive initiative it took, the more impossible it would have been to justify Bro Warren’s hooliganism. So it took none.

  It was left to the City Police to search the model dwellings at Goulston Street, which Inspector McWilliam did at once. In spite of the frenetic activity of his men, the Met had to keep up the illusion that the writing on the wall was nothing more than a bit of anti-Semitic scribble. Arnold had to pretend it didn’t matter much, and thereafter everyone else had to pretend the same. Hence the coordination of the triple fictions presented to posterity by PC Long, Warren and Arnold himself some five weeks later.

  For his contribution to this corrupt policing, Arnold was given an immediate £25 pay rise, a reward that miffed the East London Observer. Commenting on the ‘obloquy cast on our local police during the recent murders’, it considered this ‘rebuke from headquarters’ a somewhat unusual ‘punishment’.14

  As has been mentioned, this dawn visit to the mysterious East was Warren’s first appearance there in respect of these crimes. The previous murders of Nichols and Chapman had never brought him anywhere near the place, and neither did a pair of murdered women now. Now that he was here, he was indifferent to the ripped-up whores. The ‘most pressing question’ was what was written up on a wall in front of him, and once he’d confirmed what it was, he wanted it gone.

  Contemporary photographs suggest that the streets of Whitechapel were replete with such inscriptions, and if any reflection of Victorian society, much of it would have been anti-Semitic. So what’s the deal?

  The answer is that the writing on the wall wasn’t specifically anti-Semitic at all, and even if it was, it hardly required the attention of London’s Commissioner of Metropolitan Police.

  Would today’s Commissioner fire up the Jag at four in the morning to expunge the words ‘Fuck Islam’ written on an East End wall? He might, in certain circumstances, want it secured, but with two cut throats on the slate, it wouldn’t exactly be the place he visited first. Charles Warren was the man who brutally put down a riot of thousands in a public place as large as Trafalgar Square, yet we’re required to believe that slumbering Jews and their phantom adversaries were the ‘most pressing’ of his concerns.

  Now, this concept of spontaneous affray amongst a non-existent rabble had clearly never occurred to City Commissioner Smith. Although its location was outside his jurisdiction, he had the temerity to think that this writing was of high forensic value, and had organised for it to be photographed. After all, it was a very strange text, by now empirically associated with a very strange ritual murder in Mitre Square. Even if it was presentl
y indecipherable, would not photographs of this writing be of great worth? What if there was a hidden message? Could this not evolve into the breakthrough ‘clue’ Scotland Yard insisted it was praying for?

  Dream on, Smith. Warren wanted rid of it precisely because it was the breakthrough clue. By definition, it became one of the most remarkable clues in criminal history – one Commissioner of Police wanted at all costs to preserve it, while another Commissioner of Police wanted it gone. This astonishing counterpoint of opinion is the pivot point of ‘the Ripper mystery’.

  ‘I do not hesitate myself to say,’ wrote Warren, ‘that if the writing had been left, there would have been an onslaught upon the Jews, property would have been wrecked, and lives would probably have been lost.’15

  Even the Victorians refused to buy into this crap, and when it leaked there was a furore. How can such drivel cut it for Ripperologists today? I want to laugh in its face, it’s so ridiculous. If it had been remotely true, anyone with a shirt-cuff could have scrubbed the message out at once, and Warren could have stayed, more usefully, in bed. I doubt such a point was ever made to so distinguished a personage. Nevertheless, compromises were offered by the City Police. The only remote intimation of anti-Semitism was the word ‘Juwes’. So how about erasing just that, and getting a picture of the rest? Ergo, a photograph of

  The — are

  The Men that

  will not

  be blamed

  for nothing

  ‘The — are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’? Good God! Warren couldn’t permit stuff as volatile as that to remain on a public wall! As Arnold had pointed out, the writing was still there for anyone to see (and presumably an imaginative hoodlum might fill in the missing word, and riot).

  All right then, said the exasperated City cops, how about erasing ‘Juwes’, hanging a blanket over the rest, and only taking it down momentarily when there was enough daylight for a photograph?

  No deal. This building was a hive of snoring Israelites. They’d be abroad soon, and who would be able to stop them, or anyone else, from tearing off the blanket? Or, in Warren’s own words, ‘[It] could not be covered up without danger of the covering being torn off at once.’16

  I dislike the expression, but you couldn’t make it up. It’s an argument worthy of that half-wit detective played by Peter Sellers. But this wasn’t an actor with a latex nose, it was Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of Metropolitan Police.

  What Warren lacked in argument, he made up for in rank. This was his manor, and the evidence had to go. So there it was. After thirty-five minutes of dissent, just after 5.30 a.m. the writing was washed off, the most senior policeman in the kingdom personally supervising the obliteration of the most revealing clue the Ripper had ever left. And to do that, of course, to wipe out the clear Masonic connotation, was precisely the reason Bro Warren had quit his bed for a scuttle down to the East End.

  Warren, with his fantasy riot, was lying like a kid with jam around his mouth. It seemed to have escaped his attention that he controlled a police force almost half the size of the entire US Army. Admittedly, 13,000 policemen would have caused a bit of a crush around a doorway, but how about fifty, or even five? Not a mile away, in Mitre Square, Inspector Izzard and his constables had secured the entire area and shut it down. The square was about eighty feet by seventy-five, and with three entrances and three exits it was patently a tad more difficult to control than a doorway. ‘The [City] Police and Detectives speedily mustered in force,’ reported journalist and eyewitness Thomas Catling. ‘Every avenue leading to Mitre Square was closely guarded.’ You couldn’t get in, and you couldn’t get out.

  By contrast, the criminal farce at Goulston Street wasn’t even a crime scene. A single copper could have secured it, and indeed one had, replicating the circumstance at Dutfield’s Yard, where PC Lamb had been obliged to take temporary and single-handed control of the landscape created by the murder of Elizabeth Stride. ‘I put a constable at the gate and told him not to let anyone in or out,’ deposed Lamb. ‘When further assistance came a constable was put in charge of the front door.’

  When Warren finally showed up at Dutfield’s Yard, it was only to sniff around like a valet after the Ripper. The place was crawling with evidence requiring suppression. Anything that couldn’t be immediately dismissed would be taken care of in the next few days. Courtesy of its Commissioner, the Metropolitan Police had just become amongst the most corrupt police services in the world.

  But the betrayal had hardly begun.

  In respect of ‘Juwes’, and setting a trend for future apologists (almost all of Ripperology), Warren figured out a slim fiction in his efforts to try to explicate the writing: ‘The idiom does not appear to be written in English, French, or German, but it might possibly be that of an Irishman speaking a foreign language. It seems to be the idiom of Spain or Italy. The spelling of Jews is curious.’17

  But not as curious as J-u-w-e-s. Anyway, you can take your pick. He’s certainly not English, but he could be a Mick.

  Warren’s speculations remind me of nothing so much as Ebenezer Scrooge when presented with the reality of Marley’s Ghost. ‘You may be a bit of undigested beef,’ he hazards, ‘a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.’ Like Scrooge, Warren dared not acknowledge what was staring him in the face.

  Attempts to explain away the writing on the wall have become the stimulus for some amusing invention. Anyone who thinks Warren’s ‘riot’ was a trifle fanciful should stand by for the contribution of Ripperologist Mr Martin Fido:

  I postulate (quite speculatively) that a Gentile customer bought something that proved NBG, and the Jewish vendor refused to take it back. (The Wentworth Street old and cheap shoe market was on the street just outside the model dwellings, which were almost entirely occupied by Jews.) On taking back (say) a pair of unwearably uncomfortable shoes, the buyer is met with some bland refusal to accept responsibility (‘Well, they fitted you this morning, my friend!’), and chalks up his angry anti-Semitic comment ‘The Jews won’t take responsibility for anything’ on a nearby wall.18

  And having made himself quite clear, he then throws his portion of Catherine Eddowes’ bloody apron under it.

  Citing imaginary shoes in preference to an established piece of apron isn’t useful. Neither is it useful to attempt to change the quote. Such fantasy in preference to reality is also popular in Masonic quarters, whose explanations can often be juxtaposed with Ripperology without drawing breath.

  Where the two become one and the same, we’re presented with what I call ‘Freemasology’. For a classic example of this, enter Bro Dennis Stocks, who quotes Mr Martin Fido – or is it the other way around? ‘It is highly likely,’ surmises Bro Stocks, ‘that the writing was simply and hastily scrawled by a disgruntled customer who had less than satisfactory service from one of the numerous Jewish craftsmen in the area and wrote his frustrations on the wall that the Jews won’t take responsibility for anything, especially, presumably bad workmanship.’19

  It would require earth in place of a brain to buy into this. By proffering it, both Mr Fido and Bro Stocks are reducing the mental capacity of the City detectives to that of apes. Is that what they’d have us believe? That seasoned coppers living and working in East London didn’t know the difference between evidence in a murder case and a bit of scribble about aching feet?

  The City Police boundary went down the middle of Whitechapel, at what is now called Petticoat Lane. Was local knowledge so vastly different on opposite pavements – tight shoes at one side of the thoroughfare, and a murderer’s calling card at the other? Smith isn’t going to send for a camera, and Warren isn’t going to get into a thirty-five-minute tizz, over a pair of fucking shoes.

  I’m afraid there’s a bloody great hole in the lifeboat, and I conclude that Mr Fido is either pulling our leg, or is bewitched by some arcane consideration he declines to share.

  Warren’s lunacy caused outrage that threatened to e
nmesh the entire Metropolitan Police. To try to diminish what he did is in fact to demean oneself. It isn’t the City Police who are the monkeys. Plus, as is clear to anyone who bothers to know anything about it (excepting Mr Fido and Bro Stocks), the Ripper didn’t write ‘Jews’. He wrote ‘Juwes’.

  ‘It’s a mystery,’ writes Ripperologist Mr Paul Begg, ‘why anyone ever thought that “Juwes” was a Masonic word.’20

  If Mr Begg was here – and he’d sincerely be welcome – I’d like to ask him what his credentials are for broadcasting so flamboyant a certainty. ‘Juwes,’ he writes, ‘is supposed to be the collective name for Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum … they featured in British Masonic rituals until 1814, but they were dropped during the major revision of the ritual between 1814 and 1816.’

  N(o) t(hey) w(ere) n(ot), and Mr Begg is misinformed, reiterating almost word for word the misinformation put about by Bro McLeod. To accept it is to buy into a deception, fatal to any hope of understanding the writing on the wall. ‘By 1888,’ continues Mr Begg, again resonant of McLeod, ‘it is doubtful if many British Masons would have even known their names.’

  This pushes beyond the word ‘fib’.

  The names Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum can in fact be found in any late-nineteenth-century Masonic encyclopedia. We need reach no further than for a volume authored by Warren’s pal and fellow founder of the Quatuor Coronati, Bro Reverend A.F.A. Woodford. In 1878 Woodford edited Kenning’s Cyclopaedia of Freemasonry, and here’s what one of the epoch’s foremost Masonic scholars has to say about the Three Jewish Assassins: