To get a handle on just how debased this Masonic fandango had become, we need to take another look at the ‘Double Event’, from the other side of that September night.
It’s just before 1 a.m. on Sunday, 30 September 1888. Commissioner Warren is still tucked up, the streets of Whitechapel are all but silent, sinister here and there in the intermittent gaslight, but predominantly black with rain. A coster turns into Berner Street, his cart hauled by an exhausted pony. It’s been a long day, and a long journey home from Westow Hill Market at Crystal Palace. The coster is a twenty-six-year-old part-time dealer in trinkets and cheap jewellery, a Russian Jew called Louis Diemschutz. He lived at, and was also steward of, the International Workingmen’s Club, where his wife was presently in the downstairs kitchen making tea. Neither she nor anybody else around Dutfield’s Yard had been aware of anything untoward that night. The usual crew had been in, chewing the usual fat – capital, exploitation, trade unions – and now they’d set the world to rights, they were all upstairs for the music.
Diemschutz must have heard the singing as he turned into the gates, which were open as usual, but now he was startled by a jolt as his pony refused the darkness. Something was spooking it, and no way was it going in there. ‘I couldn’t make out what was the matter,’ said Diemschutz, ‘so bent my head to see if there was anything to frighten him.’
Two minutes later Mrs Diemschutz was hysterical at the door, and the yard was full of people. ‘We struck a match and saw blood running from the gate and all the way down to the side door of the club.’ Stride’s throat had been so deeply cut it had almost taken her head off. Her bonnet had fallen to one side, and inside it, ‘apparently with the object of making the article fit closer to the head, was a folded copy of The Star newspaper’.4 Such was the sad and ignominious end of Elizabeth Stride.
The witnesses stared in shock, and some of them need names. A club member called Maurice Eagle didn’t want to look at the body – ‘the sight of blood upset me’ – so he looked for a policeman instead. Despite the ‘saturation’ he was out of luck: no officer was to be found. A Pole by the name of Isaac Kosebrodski takes up the story. ‘I went to look for a policeman at the request of Diemschutz,’ he told the Evening News, ‘but could not find one.’ Instead he ran into Eagle, who was still batting about the streets, and at last they discovered a pair of helmets in Commercial Road. One was dispatched for a doctor while Eagle ran on to Leman Street police station ‘and called out an Inspector’. Back at Dutfield’s Yard, Police Constable Lamb was the first uniform to pitch up. ‘On arrival of that officer,’ reported the Telegraph, ‘he perceived that the woman was lying on her left side, and was clutching some grapes in her right hand and sweetmeats in her left.’5 Superintendent Arnold arrived shortly after, together with Drs Blackwell and Phillips. ‘While the doctor was examining the body,’ recalled Kosebrodski, ‘I noticed that she had some grapes in her right hand and sweets in her left.’6
It cannot go unnoticed that we now have confirmation of Walter Dew’s recollection of ‘grape skins’ from two sources who were actually there, Isaac Kosebrodski and PC Henry Lamb, who independently of each other report grapes clutched in Stride’s right hand. Virtually every London newspaper published on the morning of 1 October carries a report of grapes being discovered at Dutfield’s Yard. By way of corroboration of Dew, Lamb and Kosebrodski, let’s hear from Mrs Fanny Mortimer, resident of 36 Berner Street, ‘four doors down from the tragedy’:
I was standing at the door of my house nearby, the whole time between half past twelve and one o’clock this [Sunday] morning, and did not notice anything unusual. I had just gone in doors and was preparing to go to bed, when I heard a commotion outside, and immediately ran out, thinking there was another row in the Socialists’ Club close by. I went to see what was the matter, and was informed that another dreadful murder had been committed in the yard adjoining the clubhouse, and on going inside I saw the body of a woman huddled up just inside the gates with her throat cut from ear to ear. The body was lying slightly on one side, with the legs a little drawn up as if in pain, the clothes being slightly disarranged, so that the legs were partly visible. The woman appeared to be respectable, judging by her clothes, and in her hand were found a bunch of grapes and some sweets.7
Could these be the same grapes seen by Lamb and Kosebrodski, their ‘skins and stones’ specifically referred to by Walter Dew? I pose the question only to those who seek to deny their existence, and move on to the next and most important witness, the man who actually discovered Stride’s still-bleeding body.
Louis Diemschutz had no reason to fabricate anything, much less any opportunity to concoct and coordinate so abstruse a fantasy as grapes to go with the shock of discovering a murdered woman with her throat cut. You’d have to be maladjusted or even mad to do it, and that was far from the impression Diemschutz gave to the press. ‘He is a Russian Jew but speaks English perfectly,’ wrote the Evening News. ‘He is a man with more intelligence than is usually to be found amongst men of his class, and in every way he is a credit to the neighbourhood in which he resides. This may not seem to be a compliment,’ it continued, ‘but we mean it as such, for our informant is, so far as we are able to judge, an honest, truth-speaking man, on whose evidence we feel that we are able to rely.’8
Such credence was given to Diemschutz’s statement that the Evening News published it under what is known as a kicker headline:
‘GRAPES IN HER HAND’
… In her right hand were tightly clasped some grapes, and in her left hand, she held a number of sweetmeats …
Even the contemporary sketch includes grapes clutched in Stride’s right hand. So stand by for the obligatory debriefing.
‘It is unlikely,’ writes Sugden, ‘that grapes were found at the crime scene.’9 That’s what he says, and apart from Inspector Walter Dew, Police Constable Henry Lamb, Mrs Fanny Mortimer, Mr Isaac Kosebrodski, Mr Louis Diemschutz, the Morning Advertiser, the Evening Standard, the Evening News, the Daily News, the Globe, the Telegraph and The Times, it’s hard to imagine why anyone might disagree.
As my detective friend at the LAPD was wont to articulate, ‘Give me a fucken break.’ We have five on-site witnesses confirming the grapes, and Mrs Rosenfield and Miss Eva Hartstein reported seeing ‘grape stalks’ at the very same location, bringing the number of attributable sightings to seven. Yet we are required to believe that these grapes were some kind of collective hallucination. Mr Sugden classifies them as a myth on a par with the troublesome farthings.
In reality, it wasn’t in the police’s interests for these grapes to exist, and by the time of Bro Wynne Baxter’s coroner’s court, they didn’t. Like the writing on the wall, they had been made to vanish. No way was anyone lying about the murder and the crime scene of Elizabeth Stride, or the grapes that went with it, except the Met and its fully compliant surgeon, Bro Dr Bagster Phillips.
In this malign world of smoke and mirrors it’s refreshing to confront a certainty. Either Louis Diemschutz and everyone else who was in Dutfield’s Yard is lying, or Bro Bagster Phillips is lying. There can be no middle ground. Phillips’s version of events must wait for Baxter’s courtroom. But before moving in that general direction, I want to take a last look at what Diemschutz is reported to have said. There are a variety of sources, and I select this from the Evening News: ‘Her hands were tightly clenched and when the Doctor opened them I saw that she had been holding sweetmeats in one hand and grapes in the other.’
Now, it seems to me that there are two words here that contribute enormously to the credibility of this statement. They are ‘tightly’ and ‘clenched’. By choosing them, Diemschutz was describing something he couldn’t possibly have either fabricated or known about, because it is a symptom of a rare condition, understood in 1888 only by those very well versed in forensics.
It’s called ‘cadaveric spasm’, and I travel forward half a century to find a description of the phenomenon by one of England’s most formidable fo
rensic scientists, Professor Sir Keith Simpson. ‘This is an uncommon event,’ he wrote, ‘consisting of a violent spasm of the muscles at the moment of death. The change most frequently involves the hand, which may remain gripping a weapon, clothing or grass, etc., affording evidence assisting in the reconstruction of events immediately preceding death from violence.’10
No photographs seem to have been taken at Stride’s crime scene, and certainly not of her hands. But Simpson’s description is accompanied by a picture of a woman’s hand in cadaveric spasm, tightly clenched just as Diemschutz described.
An earlier assessment of cadaveric spasm is to be found in Dr William R. Smith’s The Principles of Forensic Medicine, published in 1895.11 Describing sudden and violent death, Smith writes of the murdered person ‘clutching the object he held a moment before’. ‘This fact is of great importance from a medico-legal point of view,’ he continues. But not, apparently, at Dutfield’s Yard – because, like Philip Sugden, Dr Phillips was blind to the presence of the grapes.
Phillips was among a contingent of physicians called by the coroner, and it was principally he and Dr William Blackwell who made the first on-site inspection of Stride’s injuries. There had been no facial or any other evident mutilation, and it seemed almost certain that the arrival of Diemschutz had disturbed her killer: Mrs Mortimer was one among many who suspected that the Ripper ‘must have made his escape immediately under cover of the cart’.
By now the International Club members were enjoying a distinctly hostile attitude from the police. About thirty people were still on the premises, and the whole lot of them were suddenly under suspicion. The gates to the yard were locked and closely guarded, and no person was ‘allowed egress’. There were jibes in the press about the slamming of stable doors.
On the arrival of Superintendent Thomas Arnold from Leman Street, which took place almost simultaneously with that of the Divisional Surgeon Dr Phillips, ‘steps were taken to ascertain whether the members of the club were in any way connected with the murder’. Arnold’s concern for the sensibilities of the Jewish community was curiously absent here. Despite his comic lamentations over possible blame for the tribe of ‘Leather Apron’, he demonstrably had no problem stirring up anti-Semitic friction at Dutfield’s Yard. ‘After the body had been removed to St George’s mortuary,’ reported the Chronicle, ‘the detectives entered the club and made careful examination of the inmates. The names and addresses of all the men present were taken, and a vigorous search of persons and premises was instituted, much to the annoyance of the members. Their pockets were searched, their hands and clothes particularly scrutinised, and some of them allege they were made to take off their boots. All knives had to be produced, and each man had to give an account of himself before he was allowed to depart. Some of the members say that the detectives treated them badly, swearing at them and shouting, “You’re no foreigners, or else where’s your knives?”’12
It’s worth mentioning that it was a common prejudice amongst the ruling classes that only Jonnie Foreigner carried a dastardly knife. As the Illustrated London News succinctly put it, ‘Can there be anything more un-English?’13 Meanwhile, an Englishman who carried the sharpest knife in the business was busy with it about a mile away. After three hours of pissing away precious time, Arnold’s boys were coming to the end of their enquiries at Dutfield’s Yard. ‘It was five o’clock before the police finished their investigations,’ and it had been an entirely predictable waste of time. If PC Long and Dr Phillips knew of Eddowes’ murder by 3 a.m. at the latest, then so did Superintendent Arnold.14 Thus, if he’d scratched his nuts and screwed up his eyes real tight, he must have realised that Jack the Ripper could not possibly be one of the men at Dutfield’s Yard.
What the cops were actually up to here was ignoring the Ripper in favour of indulging in a bit of anti-Semitic spite. The International Workingmen’s Club had been under constant police surveillance throughout 1888, attracting multiple entries in the ‘Crime Department’s Special Branch’ ledger.15 The targets were primarily those who put the wind up the nobs – Jews and the Irish – and here was a heaven-sent opportunity to get in there and hassle them. My assessment isn’t idle, but is based on a verbatim account given by one of Special Branch’s most senior officers. In respect of that night at the club, Met Inspector Patrick McIntyre wrote: ‘Concerts and dancing took place here on Saturday nights … at the very moment when these people were indulging in festivity in an upstairs room, the “Ripper” was cruelly murdering an unfortunate in the courtway adjoining. It is worth noting that no kind of suspicion fell upon the Anarchists in this connection; no one believed for a moment that the anonymous stabber was one of their confraternity [my emphasis].’16
And yet it was 5 a.m. before they were allowed to go about their business. The waste of time is notable, because it was at 5 a.m. that Warren arrived at the wall in Goulston Street. Let us remind ourselves of his anxieties for the well-being of Leather Apron and his ilk: ‘The most pressing question at the moment was some writing on the wall evidently written with the intention of inflaming the public mind against the Jews … if the writing had been left, there would have been an onslaught upon the Jews’ etc., etc.
It’s a matter of record that a crowd had already assembled in Berner Street: ‘The fact that another murder had been committed soon became known,’ reported the Daily News, ‘and long before daybreak the usually quiet thoroughfare was the scene of great excitement.’17
Never mind the ‘onslaught’ and the ‘wrecking of property’; amongst this ‘great excitement’ there is no report of anything hostile beyond the odd non-recorded fart. Scores of people had arrived in Berner Street – ‘immense numbers’, according to the Daily News – yet there was not a rioter in sight. Surely someone could have popped over to Goulston Street and had a word in Charlie’s ear? Told the Boss Cop not to fret, there were already hundreds of people on the streets, and not a hint of a squabble anywhere?
Warren was all but having an epileptic fit over a bit of writing in a passageway. If he really believed the Ripper (or anyone) was attempting to inflame the public mind against the Jews, how about a dead body outside a Jewish club? By the logic invoked at Goulston Street, suspicion must fall massively upon these Jews. So what provision had Bro Sir Charles Warren made to protect them from anti-Semitic riot at Berner Street?
Answer: none.
Despite the predictions of mayhem, there had been a profound switch in attitude. If anything, the police were actually exacerbating whatever anti-Semitic sentiment might have been abroad. Warren claimed he was fearful of exciting it, while at Dutfield’s Yard the boys in blue were all but provoking it.
Anyone who believes Warren’s riot bullshit would probably have difficulty with the plots of Enid Blyton. This wasn’t a bit of chalk on a wall, it was a yard full of Jews with a murdered body in the middle of them. Did Arnold not think that pushing Jews about, locking them in with accompanying insults and demands to see knives, might not stimulate public animosity towards the denizens of this club, if not appear to be an outright intimation of guilt? Might not such provocative behaviour from a bunch of policemen precipitate the very riot they all claimed to be in fear of? This senseless alienation of potential witnesses at the club underscores the tosh put about to camouflage the reality behind Warren’s rapid adieu to his mattress.
The intrepid minders in Jack’s wake were only partially successful with the writing on the wall, but they did rather better with the grapes at Dutfield’s Yard. Even Ripperologists Mr Stewart Evans and Mr Don Rumbelow refer to ‘the Legend of the Grapes’.18 Over most Ripper matters I have a good deal of time for these gents, but in respect of the grapes they get themselves into a rather intriguing tangle.
Despite the universal ridicule for Coroner Baxter at the Chapman inquest, he had managed to reinstall himself for the inquest into Stride. And it’s from this farrago that Evans/Rumbelow source their idea of ‘the Legend of the Grapes’.
Let us have a b
rief recap of contemporary opinion of Bro Baxter and his court. A ‘Comic Coroner’, wrote the Truth, ‘should be retired summarily and quickly’. ‘Altogether preposterous’, said the Observer.19 ‘A scandalous exhibition of stupidity’, from the Telegraph. And lastly the Lancet, commenting on Baxter’s half-witted inventions, which ‘may probably lead to a diversion from the real track of the murderer’ – which was precisely what the System wanted, and the reason he wasn’t fired.
It is upon this utterly discredited individual that Mr Evans and Mr Rumbelow rely. He is a scoundrel. Unless there is a persuasive explanation for why seven independent eyewitnesses are lying, which includes an explanation for Stride’s cadaveric spasm, then the grapes and grape-skins at Dutfield’s Yard were no ‘legend’. These accounts come from people who were actually there, people whose eyes bore witness. So what is it about this affirmation of the presence of the grapes that Mr Evans and Mr Rumbelow construe as ‘legend’? Fortunately, they themselves answer the question. ‘They did not exist,’ they write, ‘as may be seen from the inquest evidence.’20
We have arrived at the nub of it. Mr Evans and Mr Rumbelow believe there were no grapes at Dutfield’s Yard because there were no grapes in Bro Baxter’s court. Oh dear, oh dear …
No grapes out of Baxter apparently proves that there were no grapes in Stride’s hand. Thus the man dismissed by the Lancet and the British Medical Journal as a dangerous menace is here made credible beyond doubt, while everyone else apart from this discredited Freemason is indulging in some inexplicable ‘legend’? Oh dear, oh dear …
Donald ‘Shifty Nib’ Swanson was Warren’s ‘eyes and ears’, but he wasn’t the only eyes and ears about. Warren himself was the eyes and ears of a higher authority, whose reach extended into every function of state. On the afternoon of 1 October 1888, the eyes and ears belonged to a Masonic coroner called Bro Wynne Baxter. His court was all about arriving at a foregone conclusion, in this case ‘murder by a person or persons unknown’. Predetermining the outcome of judicial proceedings was nothing special. Although that opinion might be seen as outrageous, it is not mine, but that of Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police James Monro.
They All Love Jack Page 29