They All Love Jack
Page 17
JUBELA, JUBELO, JUBELUM: Words familiar to Masonic students, but about which little can now be said distinctly … in our opinion they are a play on words. (p.368)21
Thus, despite protestations of extinction in 1814, they were in reality ‘words familiar to Masonic students’ in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
‘They are a play on words,’ writes Woodford, and they most graphically became one at Goulston Street. ‘Juwes’ is nothing more complex than an infantile sobriquet for Ju(bela), Ju(belo) and Ju(belum) – or if you want to make an ‘in-house’ Masonic joke of it, ‘Juwes’.
But Mr Begg has no sympathy for such exotic sources as Woodford, and argues it away like Bro Warren. ‘Juwes,’ he insists, ‘is not and has never been a Masonic word, nor has “Juwes” or any word approximating it ever appeared in British, Continental or American Masonic rituals.’22 I(t) i(s) a M(ystery), etc., etc.
Mr Philip Sugden agrees with Mr Begg’s ‘mystery’ angle, citing him as ‘one of the most dependable students of the case’. I have to disagree. You can’t have it both ways, demonstrate confusion and claim authority.
Of course ‘Juwes’ isn’t a Masonic word. It isn’t a word at all. But it is a play on words, like ‘Krazy Kat’. ‘Sponk’ isn’t a word either, but was anyone in the Metropolitan Police innocent of what it meant? With reference to HRH Queen Victoria, a correspondent signing himself ‘Jack the Ripper’ wrote ‘I shot sponk up her arse.’ Does anyone imagine he didn’t know how to spell ‘spunk’? The word is used like a toy, intentionally deformed to increase its potency, heightening an already adequate and shocking insult.
‘Juwes’ comes from the same brain; and incidentally, it wasn’t written for the average sightseer who might happen to be taking a constitutional around Whitechapel in the dead of night. It was written with a specific man in mind, a Masonic historian, and the very man who got out of bed for it. His nickname was ‘Jerusalem Warren’, and in my view he is part of the same funny pun.
Let us just remind ourselves of Warren’s ineptitude in the matter of weird words and arcane hieroglyphics in respect of Bro McLeod’s dismissal of his expertise. The following is part of a letter he wrote to the PEF, dated 18 June 1875:
I would call attention to the manner in which many modern Arabic words may differ from Hebrew or Aramaic, just as do modern Spanish words from the Latin. Thus we have in Latin and Spanish respectively:– Porcus, puerco; Bono, bueno; Bos, Beuy; Capillus, Capillulus, Cabelluelo, Cornu, cuerno; Ternpus, tiempo: And we have in Hebrew and Arabic:– Socho, Shuweikeh; Saphir, Sawafu, etc. Following on this track we obtain from Luweireh, Loreh; Dawaimeh, Dumeh; Suweimeh, Sumeh; Kawassimeh, Kassimeh; Hawara, Hara; etc. No doubt there are many known differences in European languages which may be found also to apply to Hebrew and Arabic. I have to suggest that a few simple rules on this subject might be arrived at which would aid the explorer in rapidly making a tentative examination of any Arabic word in order to test its likeness to Hebrew or Canaanitish.23
I suggest that ‘a few simple rules’ on Jack the Ripper might also be arrived at. Assistant Commissioner Robert Anderson offers handy assistance in one of his many theological volumes. ‘Take these words, for instance,’ he writes: ‘“The Lord Jehovah is my strength and my song; He also is become my salvation.” Now, to the believer, as such, the question of the spelling or the etymology of the name is of no more importance than that of the type in which it is printed [or written on a wall in chalk]. The only practical question is whether he has the conception which the name is intended to call up [my emphasis].’24
Warren knew everything there was to know about the teasing etymology of ‘Juwes’, Assassins and Ruffians. He knew the half-dozen variations for the name of Hiram, including Chirum, Chiram and Churani, in Samuel, Kings and Chronicles respectively. He knew the name Jehovah, Ye’hovah or Iehuvah, and could read any one of them in Hebrew. There was no question under heaven that Warren didn’t understand the significance of the word ‘Juwes’, and to suggest otherwise presupposes intellectual challenge from a potato.
‘Respectable historians,’ opines Masonic scholar Bro Hamill, ‘have always taken the “Juwes” inscription to be an expression of anti-semitism prevalent in the East End of London in the 1880s and 1890s.’25
How disrespectful is that? Does Bro Hamill really mean that anyone who has the temerity to question Freemasonry in respect of Jack the bloody Ripper is not respectable? Exactly who are these ‘respectable historians’? And on whose terms does he define ‘respectable’? Is Edward, Prince of Wales exempt from criticism over his multiple adulteries because he was a Freemason? Does Freemasonry make cheating inside a marriage respectable? Was Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence, respectable when risking life imprisonment for buggering about with that idiot Euston at a harem of Post Office boys? And what about the conniver who most ludicrously nominated him as Jack the Ripper’s assistant, Worshipful Master Bro Thomas Stowell CBE. Oh dear, oh dear, how disrespectful was that?
Reality can be offensive, but springing to your feet and waving your rectitude about won’t change it. All cults, all creeds, all religions have their murderers (King Solomon murdered his brother). I’m sorry if this history offends, but carving a woman from her genitals to her throat is not a ‘respectable activity’, and I regret to say that a Freemason is no more exempt from committing such a crime than is any other man.
Mr Sugden says, ‘Only by shameless selection of evidence can the Masonic theory be invested with apparent credibility’26 – whereas, to the contrary, I believe it is only by shameless manipulation that it can be dismissed. Mr Sugden and Bro Hamill are flogging a substantial untruth, and an Everest of evidence doesn’t accommodate such shameless distortion.
As far as Masonry is concerned (and for that matter the gang-thinking of Ripperology), you can have as many suspects as you like: masturbators, womb-collectors, medical students, doctors, slaughtermen, Irishmen, sailors, cowboys, and no end of Jews. But what you can’t have is the most egregious Israelites of them all. After the Clarence/Sickert inoculation, it isn’t permitted to consider the ‘Mystic Trio’, infamous among Freemasons for their shouldered entrails and throats cut across.
Nothing is more important than this Masonic taunting of Bro Warren at Goulston Street. The mocking on the wall is the sum of the whole of Jack the Ripper, a key to his psyche – and, by the insanity of his reaction, Bro Sir Charles Warren’s too.
Here’s what Warren (and some other hand) put together as his 6 November report. I bother here only with the first couple of sentences: ‘On the 30th September on hearing of the Berners [sic] Street murder after visiting Commercial Road station I arrived at Leman Street station shortly before 5 a.m. and ascertained from Superintendent Arnold all that was known relative to the two murders. The most pressing question at that moment was some writing on the wall at Goulston Street evidently written with the intention of inflaming the public mind against the Jews.’27
Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but if my intention was to inflame the public against the Jews, I think I could have chosen somewhere more provoking than a pitch-black doorway in the middle of the night. Perhaps under a street lamp? Plus, where did this phantom inflamer get his piece of apron, a technicality Warren declines to address anywhere in his preposterous essay. Like Arnold, he doesn’t mention it at all: ‘The most pressing question at that moment was some writing on the wall at Goulston Street’.
This ‘most pressing question’ is most curiously expunged from Mr Sugden’s version of Warren’s report. He reproduces it as ‘I … went down to Goulston Street … before going to the scene of the murder.’28
Why Mr Sugden should take it upon himself to censor Warren is of course his prerogative – he may write what he likes, as do I – so long as we both avoid ‘shameless selection’. I don’t know what his intentions are, but by fiddling about with this sentence, he defuses the urgency associated with the writing on the wall, which by Warren’s own admission was ‘t
he most pressing question’.
This ‘most pressing question’ becomes mind-boggling in context. Less than a mile away are two murdered women, and it’s likely that the man who killed them isn’t much further off. Is not he the most pressing question? What instruction did the Commissioner issue in respect of his apprehension? Where was the urgent call for his top detectives and ancillary support?
For a stupefied Freemason like Warren, a guardian of the ‘Mystic Tie’, the wall was indeed ‘the most pressing question’, which, with the subsequent assistance of Ripperology, he successfully managed to present as merely a bit of racist scribble.
But Warren knew rather different. Another Masonic historian and expert practitioner, an American scholar by the name of Albert Pike, wrote about Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum some twenty years before anyone had heard of Goulston Street. His book, published in 1872, is called Morals and Dogma, and is a classic of Masonic erudition. In respect of the homicidal trio Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, he wrote: ‘That in the name of each murderer are the two names of the good and evil Deities of the Hebrews, for Yu-Bel is but Yehi-bal or Yeho-bal, and that the three final syllables of the names, a, o, um (Life-giving, Life-preserving, Life-destroying), are represented by the mystic character, Y.’29
The mystic ‘Y’ is explained in simple terms by a contemporary Masonic academic, Dr B. Fisher, in whose book (as in Morals and Dogma) the Three Assassins Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum are referred to in their original form, as Yubela, Yubelo and Yubelum, spelt with the mystic Hebrew ‘Y’.30 Albert Mackey’s Lexicon of Freemasonry (1855) underlines the convention: ‘In all these names the J is to be pronounced as in Y.’
Warren, of course, was hip to such occult minutiae, and so was Jack the Ripper. Three days after writing his funny little ‘Juwes’ message at Goulston Street, he posted a letter to Bro Warren, on the envelope of which he changed the ‘J’ in his trade-name to ‘Y’, creating ‘Yack Ripper’.
Thus we have Yubela, Yubelo, Yubelum and Yack. Postmarked 4 October 1888, this envelope is important because it reveals knowledge of the writing on the wall almost a week before the press got wind of it. The earliest significant mention of anything untoward at Goulston Street began to leak about 8 October – this, by way of example, from the Pall Mall Gazette:
A startling fact has just come to light. After killing Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square, the murderer is now known to have walked to Goulston Street, where he threw away the piece of the deceased woman’s apron on which he had wiped his hands and knife. Within a few feet of this spot he had written upon the wall, ‘The Jews shall not be blamed for nothing.’ Most unfortunately one of the police officers gave orders for this writing to be immediately sponged out, probably with a view to stifling morbid curiosity it would have aroused.31
No mention of riot or the destruction of buildings, not even an eyebrow raised in the direction of anti-Semitic onslaught, just probable ‘morbid curiosity’, which in reality was about all the writing would have got. But the Gazette was in no doubt of the magnitude of the error of its obliteration: ‘In doing so a very important link was destroyed, for had the writing been photographed a certain clue would be in the hands of the authorities.’32
Even with so little to go on, the Gazette was already well aware that ‘a very important link’ had been destroyed: ‘Witnesses who saw the writing state that it was similar in character to the letters sent to the Central News and signed “Jack the Ripper”. There is now every reason to believe that the writer of the letter and postcard (facsimiles are now to be seen outside every police station) is the actual murderer.’33
The infamous ‘Dear Boss’ letter and the publicity it inspired are the business of the next chapter. Suffice it to say that the police had received a letter and a postcard revelling in the murders, the latter describing the horror of Stride/Eddowes as a ‘Double Event’. As the Gazette says, facsimiles of these communications were posted outside every police station:
Any person recognising the handwriting is requested to communicate with the nearest police station.
‘The police are very anxious,’ affirmed the Gazette, ‘that any citizen who can identify the handwriting should without delay communicate with the authorities.’34
Unfortunately, one of the only men who might recognise it was the very man who had destroyed a sample of it. Now, if anyone had come along in the dead of night and started tearing these posters from the front of police stations, he’d have probably found himself in the cells of one of them. Yet a transfixed Commissioner of Police did worse than that: he was actually covering up a murderer’s tracks.
In concert with their pre-doomed posters, honest brokers at Scotland Yard printed thousands of flyers, which were to be distributed on 3 October. So here we have something rather singular in progress. 1) The Metropolitan Police approve the time and expense of publishing posters and thousands of door-to-door flyers. 2) Three days before these flyers are to be distributed, on 30 September, the Chief Officer of the Metropolitan Police wipes out the only evidence that might link these posters with London’s most wanted criminal.
By 11 October the press had a handle on this, and it was taking shape into a full-blown scandal. Following a sparse but basically accurate summary, the Gazette posed a rhetorical question:
WHO ORDERED IT TO BE RUBBED OUT?
… who was the infatuated person who thus in defiance of protest insisted in rubbing it out? It was none other than Sir Charles Warren himself! The fact would have been brought out in the inquest if the City Coroner had not feared to seem as if he was holding up Sir Charles Warren to contempt.35
This concession was the least of the favours the coroner was poised to offer. Had contempt not been overridden by deference (and other arcane considerations), this Masonic aberration could have been nailed. But, as always, the System looked after its own.
Keeping Warren out of court, however, didn’t keep him out of the newspapers, and the Gazette sent a reporter to try to get an interview at Scotland Yard. Predictably, its hopes were dashed. As PC Walter Dew and a variety of others record, the press was habitually ‘kept at arm’s length’ from Warren, and couldn’t get in to see the vainglorious oaf: ‘The representative saw Sir Charles Warren’s private secretary, who stated that, “Sir Charles Warren was in Goulston Street shortly after the murders, and if he had wished to make any communication to the press on the subject he would have done so then.”’36
An editorial followed, in which the newspaper succinctly put its finger on it: ‘Considering how promptly Sir Charles Warren contradicts any statement that can possibly be contradicted with any semblance of truth, his silence is equivalent of admission of the fact.’37
The fact is, Sir Charles Warren was up to his nostrils in lies that would soon overwhelm him. His tactic of silence persuaded no one. Even his City counterpart, Commissioner Smith, regarded Warren’s anxiety for the Jews as bogus, describing it as nothing more than ‘alleged’. And when, at seven o’clock on that infamous morning, Warren at last arrived for discussions with the City Police, Inspector McWilliam put aside conventions of rank and told him to his face that he had made a ‘fatal mistake’ – and fatal it proved to be. Warren’s brainless priorities were to become responsible for the death of Mary Jane Kelly and the sickening destruction of an innocent little child called Johnnie Gill.
The Pall Mall Gazette was among many who had already had enough. Incidentally, there was not a lot of ‘graffito’ about in 1888. Like the rest of Fleet Street, the Gazette referred to the Ripper’s message as
THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL
The case against the Chief Commissioner is overwhelming. The evidence given at the inquest yesterday proves that in all human probability the murderer left behind him in Goulston Street an invaluable clue to his identity, the obliteration of which has supplied the last conclusive demonstration required for the utter unfitness of SIR CHARLES WARREN for the place which he holds.38
Warren should have been summarily dismissed an
d prosecuted for misfeasance, if not conspiracy. Six weeks later, when the Ripper had driven this worthless menace out of office, an unworthy Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, attempted to sell the idea that Warren had ‘resigned’ over a minor procedural misdemeanour (re a Home Office minute of 27 May 1879), ‘by which officers attached to the Home Department were enjoined not to publish any work relating to the Department without the previous sanction of the Secretary of State’.
Warren had written some bland essay for Murray’s Magazine – reading it is like a dose of Seconal – but it was the excuse Matthews grasped. According to this hopeless lickspittle, the ‘rules’ didn’t allow such literary indiscretion, and the Commissioner would have to go.
Yet at Goulston Street, Warren broke every rule in the policeman’s book. ‘If SIR CHARLES WARREN,’ charged the Gazette, ‘had but read pages 248–9 of MR HOWARD VINCENT’S Police Code, he would have seen how flagrantly he was violating the first duty of a policeman in cases of murder.’
Vincent, MP for Sheffield Central and himself a prominent Freemason, had formed the CID in 1878, after a criminal scandal amongst Metropolitan cops, and following it, wrote his Police Code. Rule 18 summarises the whole, and in my view justifies the eternal condemnation of Bro Warren:
18: It must finally be remembered, in dealing with cases of murder, that any oversight, however trivial, any communication of information, any precipitancy, or any irregularity of procedure may be fatal to the end of justice … No irregularity will be countenanced … In cases of murder, everything must be done with the utmost celerity, every channel pursued to the exclusion of any individual theory, although every possible step must be taken to bring the murderer to justice, and to prevent his destroying the evidence of his own guilt.39