They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  These extra coppers had come into the frame literally days before the authorities would decide it was all over. As Macnaghten insists in his silly memoir, the Ripper had ‘drowned himself in the Thames’ on or about 10 November 1888, and his reign of terror was done. Ha ha.

  I don’t want to get into the ‘Ripper suicide’ here, nor his subsequent slaying of Alice McKenzie et al. I mention McKenzie only to illustrate the difference between Warren’s paper police and the helmets his successor actually put on the street.

  James Monro had been reinstated as Commissioner for eight months when Jack hit McKenzie on 17 July 1889. Immediately, on the same day, Monro made a request to the Home Office for more police, enabling us to contrast the utility of a relatively honest cop with the wretched little trickster preceding him. There was no fanfare in the press, but with accountable bureaucracy we can follow a logical and simple paper trail. On 17 July 1889 Monro’s letter is recorded in the Home Office ‘Confidential Entry Book’, confirmed by Police Order indexes, and two days later, on 19 July, printed in ‘Police Orders’ themselves.39 H Division was immediately augmented by the additional policemen Warren could never find: one divisional inspector, five sergeants and fifty constables. Six months after McKenzie’s death, Whitechapel was still being patrolled by an extra 150 police officers. Despite Charlie’s publicity stunts (bloodhounds in Hyde Park, for example), and for all his support by the conservative press, there is not a single reference following the Double Event to any augmentation of officer numbers that can be officially confirmed. Warren’s instructions are as invisible as his phoney police.

  Public disgust at this pest’s ineptitude, and at the Warren/Matthews alliance, meant that it was the people themselves who were forced to take the initiative. As early as September 1888 they were demanding government-funded rewards for information leading to the apprehension of the killer. This proved as contentious as the hordes of transparent constables. Within twenty-four hours of the Stride/Eddowes calamity, the City authorities had posted a reward of £500, with the full backing of its Commissioner of Police. It took Warren and pals six days to announce that there would be no reward at all.

  Incredulity and anger greeted the news. At a Board of Works meeting on 6 October, Mr Maurice Abrahams spoke for all. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘should the head of one department stand out against the whole of the metropolis in this matter? Ninety-nine men out of a hundred were in favour of a reward being offered, and surely all the sense and all the intellect of this country was not centred in one man?’

  Certainly not the intellect, but the survival of a degenerate System was centred on one man – Warren was merely its exposed figurehead. This was about ‘Victorian values’, about the maintenance of a vice-like grip on the honeypot. Behind the scenes all the usual obfuscatory processes were proceeding apace. From the first it was obvious that neither the Met nor Matthews wanted anything to do with any financial inducements that might have contributed to catching this prick. Never mind what the City did – they had no control over the City – the last thing the Met needed was any extra prying eyes on the streets.

  George Lusk and his men were the only totally committed boots on the block. ‘The exertions of the Committee have been redoubled,’ reported Lloyd’s Weekly on 16 September, ‘some of the members in couples now perambulating the streets from midnight to dawn.’ When Lusk wasn’t perambulating, he was continuing to canvass for a reward. His Committee wrote to Her Majesty, who was probably too busy auditing her possessions to reply.40 But he kept on writing to the newspapers, and by extraordinary coincidence a letter from Lusk and his associate Joseph Aarons was published in the Morning Post on 1 October, directly underneath the text of the first appearance of the ‘Dear Boss’ letter. I think it more than likely that Jack took almost as much satisfaction in Lusk’s contribution as he did in his own. I also think it likely that it was here that he became aware of the fun he might have with the name George Lusk.

  Victoria’s insouciance reflected the official trend. Despite his endless approaches, the authorities didn’t want to engage with Lusk. The record is full of his supplications, mirrored with the dismissive responses from the Home Office. No, they didn’t want to go to his meeting. No, they didn’t want to cough up funds. ‘NO GOVERNMENT REWARD’, confirmed Lloyd’s, publishing both Lusk’s letter to the Home Secretary and the weasel’s reply. Mr E. Leigh-Pemberton of the Home Office dutifully did the deed:

  I am directed by the Secretary of State to acknowledge receipt of your letter of the 16th inst., with reference to the question of an offer of a reward, and I am to inform you that had the Secretary of State considered the case a proper one for the offer of a reward he would at once have offered one on behalf of the government, but that the practice of offering rewards for the discovery of criminals was discontinued some years ago because experience showed that such offers of reward tended to produce more harm than good.41

  So bugger off.

  On the publication of Leigh-Pemberton’s letter, wrote Lloyd’s, ‘a tremendous storm of indignation was roused in the breasts of the public, and fierce denunciation of the Home Office authorities was heard at every house and at every street corner. Meetings were held at over forty places for the one purpose of denouncing the letter, which was described by one speaker as “the lamest piece of officialism ever issued from a government office”.’

  It was also a lie. Rewards for the apprehension of criminals were in fact issued by the Home Office whenever it took Matthews’ fancy; Leigh-Pemberton’s sneaky reference to their discontinuance ‘some years ago’ was nothing but another waft in the orchestrated smokescreen. Rewards were in fact issued all the time. For example, we find this entry from the ‘Secret Council Minutes’ at Bradford a little over twelve months before (I’m interested in Bradford for reasons that will introduce themselves):

  Saturday 6 August 1887. Murder Case: Wrote to Home Secretary [Matthews] as to reward.

  Saturday 13 August 1887. Murder Case: Letter from Home Secretary [Matthews] offering £100 reward.

  One hundred pounds, or even fifty, would have done George Lusk very nicely. His local MP, Samuel Montagu, had personally offered £100, which the Home Office had duly refused. He had also offered to print posters at his own expense, which it also refused. This miffed Montagu, because shortly before, according to the East London Observer, ‘In a case of a man who was shot, the police put up notices offering a reward that was privately offered.’ Now, at the Ripper’s convenience, it was against Home Office policy.

  Curious, ain’t it? Matthews doesn’t mind slipping a hundred quid Bradford’s way to ease their homicidal woes, but won’t approve a penny to try to catch this sack of shit. Was there something so different about these two murderers? The camouflage of fake precedent behind which Warren/Matthews were hiding was set out by Warren in a letter to the Home Office that it would then parrot back to Lusk. ‘The practice of offering rewards was discontinued some time ago,’ he wrote, ‘because experience showed that in their general effect such offers produced more harm than good, and there is a special risk that the offer of a reward might hinder rather than promote the ends of justice.’

  There was also a ‘special risk’ of an innocent woman having her guts ripped out. When Warren writes of promoting ‘the ends of justice’, he doesn’t say which end he meant. The supposed cessation of rewards was in fact nothing to do with the citizenry, but had been introduced in 1884 in an attempt to stamp out police corruption. What the then Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt and the then Assistant Commissioner James Monro had done in 1884 was intended to bust up an iniquity that was fertilising villainy inside the Met, and it was inside the Met – self-evidently not in the City – that such rewards had been terminated. Many innocent Victorians must have languished in jail to supplement the incomes of Her Majesty’s Metropolitan Police.42

  In ignorance of, or indifferent to, the domestic issues of Scotland Yard, George Lusk continued to batter at the Home Office. On 7 October he w
rote to Matthews: ‘It is my duty to humbly point out that the present series of murders is absolutely unique in the annals of crime, that the cunning, astuteness and determination of the murderer has hitherto been, and may possibly still continue to be, more than a match for Scotland Yard and the Old Jewry [City Police] combined and that all ordinary means of detection have failed. This being so I venture most respectfully to call your attention to the fact that the only means left untried for the detection of the murderer has been the offer of a government reward.’43

  Matthews was a lawyer, and Lusk was not, and he should have taken more care of his words. In his final paragraph he went on to make an error of the kind upon which lawyers thrive, suggesting ‘a government proclamation of a really substantial reward with the extension of a free pardon to any person not the actual assassin’.44

  Matthews ignored the ‘reward’ and jumped on the ‘pardon’. Home Office minutes reveal that after consultation with Warren and Anderson, he decided that a ‘pardon’ would be just dandy, pulling a fast one that would ease their ignoble confederacy off Jack’s hook. In a memo that followed the meeting we can see the actual process of twisting Lusk’s words. ‘Say to Mr Lusk,’ it advises, ‘that the expedience of granting a reward [deleted] pardon to persons not actually concerned in the commission of the murders and not implicated in the terrible guilt of contriving or abetting them, has been more than once under the consideration of the Secretary of State.’45 That same day, Warren endorsed the scam. ‘In reply to your immediate letter just received,’ he wrote to Matthews, ‘on the subject of Mr Lusk’s proposal as to a pardon to accomplices in the Whitechapel Murders …’

  Mr Lusk proposed no such thing. His specific demand for a reward in respect of a killer who exists has been transformed into a pardon for a nebulous accomplice who almost certainly does not. The Home Office itself had concluded as early as 10 September, ‘It is generally agreed that the Whitechapel Murderer has no accomplices [my emphasis] who could betray him.’46 In other words, it was prepared to offer a ‘pardon’ based on a proposition of an accomplice who it knew didn’t exist. Warren and his treacherous little legal chum in Whitehall were all too aware that the Ripper was a one-man band, and it was also the general view of informed opinion inside and outside the Met. Police surgeon Dr Gordon Brown reiterated it during his questioning at Catherine Eddowes’ inquest. ‘Are you equally of opinion,’ he was asked, ‘that the act would be that of one man, one person only?’ ‘I think so,’ replied Brown. ‘I see no reason for any other opinion.’ And even in his ludicrous summing-up, neither did Coroner Langham: ‘The medical evidence conclusively demonstrated that only one person could be implicated.’ Such a conclusion was later repeated by the man who shovelled a good deal of Jack’s next victim, Mary Jane Kelly, into a bucket. ‘There is no evidence he had an accomplice,’ wrote police surgeon Dr Thomas Bond. The ‘Murderer’s Accomplice’ had no more credibility than the ‘Ink-Stained Hack’, but was promoted with equal vigour.

  Ignoring everything but Warren and Matthews’ own predetermination, the offer of a pardon for this non-existent creature was made official, but only inasmuch as he may have had a hand in the murder of Mary Jane Kelly. ‘The offer of a pardon was confined to the one murder,’ pronounced Matthews on 12 November, three days after Kelly’s death – and never mind the other victims. Basking in his own duplicity, Matthews had managed to write off the whole series. There would be no reward, no pardon (except in respect of Kelly); and soon after, there would be no possibility whatsoever of catching the son of a bitch, because, subsequent to Kelly, the Ripper himself was to be designated as dead and floating about in the Thames.

  Thus, for fans of Macnaghten’s memoir, the pardon offer was somewhat short-lived, existing only between Kelly’s murder on 9 November 1888 and Jack’s ‘death’ on 10 November 1888. We note a Home Office comment appended, with remarkable synchronicity, to Matthews’ statement, wherein Kelly is absurdly nominated as ‘the last of the series of East End murders’. ‘This step,’ continues the memo, ‘was taken on 10th November 1888, after consultations with the cabinet.’

  So there we have it. No reward and a worthless pardon, Mary Kelly designated as the last of the victims, and Jack’s only true accomplices lounging at Downing Street and Scotland Yard.

  ‘Mr Matthews has neither courage nor opinions,’ wrote the Star on 13 November, ‘but only the base instinct of self-preservation.’ It was ever thus. What we’re looking at here is a catastrophic failure inside the executive, ‘filings’ moving with the magnet, matched in my lifetime only by Tony Blair’s nefarious decision to join in with the American oil grab in Iraq. ‘The illegal we do immediately,’ quipped Henry Kissinger. ‘The unconstitutional takes a little longer.’

  Ha ha.

  Blair was afraid to admit that his nation’s foreign policy belonged to a foreign nation, just as Warren and his culpable mob were afraid to admit that their investigation of Jack the Ripper belonged to Freemasonry. But with customary nous, the residents of Whitechapel knew the truth in their bones, knew very well that the authorities were lying. Once again it was Ernest Parke’s newspaper, the Star, that gave insight into the anger fermenting in London’s East End: ‘We have heard the wildest stories as to the reason which popular opinion in Whitechapel assigns for Mr Matthews’ obstinate refusal to offer a reward. It is believed by people who pass amongst their neighbours as sensible folk that the government do not want the murderer convicted, that they are interested in concealing his identity.’47

  This was erroneously dismissed even by the paper that printed it, but just like the multitudes who marched in London’s streets in opposition to war over the nonsense of WMD, so the people of Whitechapel intuitively knew the score with J.T.R. They thought they were being lied to, and they were right.

  Warren’s investigative endeavour was a melody from the Land of Make-Believe. Provided Jack could be kept isolated in the East End, nobody in the ranks of the Establishment gave much of a toss. Salisbury’s constituency was the public at large, and for them the unfathomable romance of ‘mystery’ was spun, the Met representing itself as a beleaguered outfit doing its best, when in fact it was a corrupted burlesque that couldn’t have done worse.

  I am the terror of the town,

  My fame spreads far and near.

  Six women have I now cut down

  While live the rest in fear.

  About a dozen yards or so

  From the policeman on his round

  A murder I commit, and Lo!

  The Murderer can’t be found.

  With Fiendish grin, I watch the crowd

  That hurries to the spot:

  And in its midst, I laugh aloud

  To think they find me not …

  Next were I to stop and cry,

  ‘Hi, policeman, I am he!’

  I wonder will he make reply,

  ‘I’ll wait, sir, till you flee.’

  Do what I will, with all the skill

  By which my crime’s attested,

  Right under their nose,

  As I tread on their toes,

  I cannot get arrested …

  ‘All hope of discovering Mrs Chapman’s murderer must now be abandoned,’ jibed the Tatler. ‘The Police have got a clue!’ In fact the police were drowning in clues their revolting mentor was only too pleased to provide. Chapman had had her throat cut across, her abdomen ripped open, and her intestines ‘placed’ over her left shoulder. A ring or rings were ‘wrenched from her fingers’,48 and ‘two farthings polished brightly’ were found at her feet. ‘The law about any metallic substance,’ wrote Bro historian A.F.A. Woodford in 1878, ‘is so well known to Freemasons, even to the Entered Apprentice, that we need not dilate upon it here. Money and any metallic substance are equally forbidden, symbolically, as we shall remember for two reasons.’49

  I referred earlier to the controversy over the farthings as ‘trivial’, but they couldn’t be more important. It is apparent that Bro Jack was both punish
ing his victims and initiating them into his funny little Masonic hell; and coins, particularly coins that shone like brass, become intriguing props in the frolic. In conjunction with Chapman’s symbolic mutilations, the presence of farthings would represent a clue of extreme significance. In this context they become no more trivial than spent cartridge cases after a death from gunshot. They are the cherry on the ritual cake.

  Q: Why were you deprived of all metal?

  A: Because money is an emblem of vice.

  Look out – Mr Sugden’s back, and he definitely doesn’t like the farthings. He’s convinced himself that these coins are the product of a journalist’s imagination, and that the ‘myth’ of the farthings has somehow cross-infected one of the senior policemen working the case. But it wasn’t just the Telegraph that reported the farthings at Chapman’s crime scene. At the inquest of another victim, Alice McKenzie, the local head of Whitechapel’s CID, Inspector John Reid (nine months later and now with his guard down), was questioned at the coroner’s court.

  FOREMAN: In previous cases was any similar coin found as that which you picked up in this instance? [A farthing was found under McKenzie’s body]

  INSPECTOR REID: In the Hanbury Street case [Chapman] two farthings were found.

  Mr Sugden doesn’t like this at all, and with Gradgrindian authority he tells us the policeman is wrong. There is little to argue with over the ritualistic injuries, nor the totemic positioning of items at Chapman’s feet, so he makes a song and dance over something he says wasn’t even there. He finds no favour with farthings for reasons that are diametrically opposed to mine. Predictably, he defers to the Warren school of detection, all but commiserating for lack of that vital scream. ‘In the light of these [investigative] disappointments,’ he writes, ‘Chief Inspector Swanson’s remark that the Chapman investigation “did not supply the police with the slightest clue to the murderer” is perhaps understandable.’50