You can fake the handwriting, but not the pissy little intellect. It advertises itself. A glance at the archive of these so-called ‘hoaxes’ reveals another notable characteristic: an antipathy towards paying for stamps. Of the surviving envelopes, barely one is pre-paid, the rest almost all require postage to be coughed up by the recipient, i.e. Warren and the Metropolitan Police.
There’s a childish spitefulness about this – like the police in China, who apparently send an invoice for the price of the bullet to relatives of the loved one they have just shot. Jack would have enjoyed the joke, and in similar spirit occasionally created his own postal service. But even then he only volunteered half: ‘J.R. Postage 1d’. But a twopenny insult to the cops.
It’s worth mentioning that Michael Maybrick didn’t like stamps either. In a letter to his friend and publisher John Boosey he wrote, ‘You talk of stamps!!! what are they for???’
Whether Maybrick’s dislike of stamps is significant or not, it’s true to say that, excepting postcards, stamps were rarely used by anyone signing himself ‘Jack the Ripper’.
The Victorians created a magnificent railway network. You could get anywhere, and usually fast: in 1888 the fastest train in the world plied between Edinburgh and London (Euston). Posting an identically dated letter from either city (and stops in between) was perfectly feasible for any traveller in J.T.R.’s day.12
The first ‘Limited Mail Train’ steamed out of London for Scotland in 1859. By 1885 special mail trains were running on the London and North Western Railway and the Caledonian Railway between London and Aberdeen, and a similar system operated on the Great Western Railway between London (Paddington) and Penzance. One of the innovations of this service was the provision of a ‘late fee box’, enabling mail to be posted while a train was at a station. Thus, while changing trains at any one of the major junctions, you could pop your missive into ‘the letter box on the side of the carriage, kept open while the train is standing in a station’.13 In his travels throughout the provinces, a smart-arse like the Whitechapel Murderer may well have availed himself of this facility. By this means each letter became a phoney alibi for the next – ‘post this on me way’.14
Because Aberdeen was a mail terminus, it was there that letters would pick up their postmarks, and I suspected that most of the Scottish Ripper correspondence would be sourced to that city. In fact, apart from Glasgow and a ‘McRipper clump’ around Galashiels, all the Scottish letters originate in Aberdeen.
In two letters, dated 3 October and 1 November 1888, the same correspondent, ‘J. Gordon’, apparently writes from two different addresses in Aberdeen: 9 Bridge Street and 52 Leadside Road respectively.
Both letters have a pharmacological theme, accusing ‘medical men’ of being responsible for the Ripper’s crimes. But what makes the 1 November letter interesting is its reference to Matthew Packer: ‘Please allow me to suggest Sir that you may depend on the Whitechapel Murderer attempting to kill the only person who can identify him, namely the fruitsellers.’
A London correspondent signing himself ‘Jack the Ripper’ was of the same view. But the police were not, and they had made a big deal of publicly dismissing Packer. Yet this ‘Scotsman’, living four hundred miles away in two different houses, remains unconvinced.
None of these provincial ‘hoaxers’ ever puts a foot wrong. While they’re on the road they are somehow miraculously aware that their hero is similarly indisposed, because no ‘hoaxer’ is ever caught out, and the postmarks on their letters are always dates on which the Ripper did not kill.
On occasion Jack would send a telegram. Not a few rags of the day criticised post office clerks for accepting a transmission signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, although you’ve got to wonder, what they were supposed to do about it? Personally, I would’ve avoided attempting a citizen’s arrest, and would have been only too pleased to send the bloody thing as instructed. But things weren’t actually that straightforward. Henry Labouchère described the way one of the telegrams was dispatched with his customary guile: ‘This telegram was not handed in at a post office in the usual way, but stamped and deposited in a letter box, whence it was taken in the ordinary course when the box was cleared to the nearest telegraph office and dispatched. Now it is not everyone even among the educated classes who is aware that a telegram can be sent in this manner. To my mind, this is one more indication that the Whitechapel assassin is more likely to belong to the “classes” than the “masses”.’15
I give attention to this revealing opinion not only for its allusion to an educated man, but because we’re about to see a further use of sophisticated and cunning postal conjuring tricks, particularly in respect of transatlantic mail services out of Liverpool.
The trick by which Jack sent a letter to the London cops via Philadelphia is one of his cuter efforts. Letters were arriving from all over the country, and right in the middle of them comes a Jack the Ripper letter mailed from the USA. One man can’t be in two countries at once, which is handy if you’re trying to push the idea of ‘hoax’.
There were several letters ‘posted in America’. First up is this apparently baffling taunt ‘from Philadelphia’. Designated simply ‘Philadelphia Docket No 1157’, it has no date and no surviving envelope, but its journey from the United States is certain. It was received by the Metropolitan Police in London towards the end of October 1888.
It’s not by accident that this is one of the very few Ripper letters without a date. It’s undated, because the sender didn’t know when it would arrive.
Honorably Sir
I take great pleasure in giving you my preasent whereabouts for the benifit of the Scotland Yard Boys. I am very sorry that I did not have time to finish my work with the London Whores and regret to state that I must leave them alone for a short while I am now safe in New York and will travel over to Philadelphia and when I have the lay of the locality I might take a notion to do a little ripping there. Good bye “dear friend” I will let you here from me before long with a little more Culling and Ripping I said so and I fancy I will make it 40 on account of the slight delay in operations
Yours lovingly
“Jack”
the ripper
To take this letter at face value would mean that ‘Jack’ the Ripper had gone to America, and there are certain plausible reasons for imagining he had. The writer seems well informed of Jack’s intentions, citing a ‘slight delay in operations’, which in October 1888 was indeed the case. There were no murders while Michael Maybrick was on provincial tour, or rather when Jack was in Philadelphia. ‘I am very sorry that I did not have time to finish my work with the London Whores,’ he writes, ‘and regret to state that I must leave them alone for a short while’.
How can there be two Jacks writing simultaneously from either side of the Atlantic? The answer is that one of them wasn’t. Jack didn’t go to New York, but a letter written by Jack the Ripper did. This tricky little wheeze ‘from Philadelphia’ was in fact posted out of Liverpool, possibly about 10 October, giving it time to get to New York, get some provenance, and return directly to London. How was this done? Well, rather as mail was bounced around England on the railways.
In 1888 the fastest transatlantic liner would make Liverpool to New York in under a week. There were a variety of companies to choose from, Cunard and White Star being the most famous. ‘On many of these ships sea post-offices are established, where mails are sorted in transit and made ready for delivery at the completion of the voyage.’16
This picture shows one such sorting office in action. Speed was of the essence, and on a ship’s arrival in New York a special tender pulled alongside, and the mails were on their way long before the passengers disembarked. The tender with its canvas mail-chute is shown opposite, ‘so that as soon as it is landed it may be scattered at once to its various destinations without going to a district office to be sorted’.
Jack the Ripper would have had no difficulty in introducing his letter into the system at Liverpool.
All that was necessary was to board a ship and post it in a sea-mail box.
In those days, of course, citizens didn’t have to conduct their lives in a state of relentless obstruction and paranoia. There were no body checks, no X-rays, and no passport control. A gentleman could come and go aboard these great ocean liners as he pleased, and this was especially true in the case of Michael Maybrick, who may well have known some of the captains. His brother James certainly did: Captain P.J. Irving of the White Star Line was a personal friend, and left his ship the Republic to dine with the Maybricks at their Liverpool home a week before James’s murder.
‘Jack’ may well have shaken Captain Irving’s hand on a crisp October morning as the Republic prepared to sail. Just happened to be at the docks, perhaps, and thought he’d pop aboard and wish Irving good day. And if not his ship, then one of many others, availing himself of the postbox as he left.
I want to examine the provenance of another ‘American’ letter out of Liverpool. It’s addressed to the Lord Mayor of London, and has important connotations in respect of the destruction of Florence Maybrick, to be explored in a later chapter.
Its author dates it 20 July 1889, three days after the murder of Alice McKenzie and ten days before the commencement of proceedings against Florence for murdering her husband James. The letter purports to originate from Washington, DC, but transparently does not. Even the date blows it. The author writes the date as ‘20/7/’89’, putting the day before the month, as all Englishmen do; whereas if he were really the American he pretends to be, he would have written 7/20/89, following the convention of putting the month first, as all Americans do (9/11, by way of example).
An Englishman wrote this date, and I can illustrate the point with the envelope, which fortunately survives:
The month of course precedes the day on the New York harbour stamps: 7/20/89. The letter’s claim of origin in Washington is phoney: once again it was bounced out of New York. Like the Philadelphia letter, this one travelled from the Liverpool docks, copped a stamp from a maritime sorter, and immediately began its journey home.
The crossed ‘7’ in his date tells us something else about this English correspondent. He was educated, and had almost certainly lived in Continental Europe. The bar on the ‘7’ was doubtless a slip of the mental nib after he had written the French word ‘pardonnez’.
My Lord!
Important
Pardon the liberty to address your Lordship about that horrid bestial brute of a murderer of those poor lost Girls at Whitechapel – “Jack the Ripper”! … That reprobate must be taken away from the good City of London and its formerly so good police, the best of the world, as I have read often, and I get – perhaps – a logical idea (thought) to it … it may – at first – look peculiar (or strange) perhaps ridiculous –: Who can assert Your Lordship, that ‘Jack the Ripper’ don’t walk along in the dress of a woman …
And so it rambles on, ad infinitum, before finally arriving at the shared obsession of many of Jack’s letters, that a man of ‘high muscular power should dress himself as a woman’.
Whether from ‘Washington’ in the US or Leeds in the UK, transvestism is a common signature of the letters. But from wherever they were mailed, most dispatches resonate with spite for authority, and particularly the buffoon at Scotland Yard. Warren is the addressee of no fewer than twenty-seven of the surviving letters. Allowing for occult weeding and loss over the years, we can assume that he received about twice that number, perhaps fifty or sixty; in other words, about 71,942 fewer than those invented by Bro Watkin Williams.
Michael Maybrick himself had many styles of handwriting, and used many different pens – his table was ‘littered with quill pens’, noted the New Era article. And he was prone to some unusual affectations of style.
Early in my research I travelled to the Isle of Wight, and was fortunate to acquire a copy of the postcard. At the time I had no idea how rare examples of Maybrick’s correspondence would prove to be. Anyway, something about the handwriting in the address to Maybrick’s niece Doris in Liverpool focused my attention, and it won’t take the reader a moment to realise what it was. When you spot it, you’re looking at my first abstruse but possible link between Michael Maybrick and Jack.
It is of course ‘Mifs’ for ‘Miss’, spelled with the long or medial ‘s’, as in ‘Bofs’ for ‘Boss’ in many of Jack the Ripper’s letters. ‘Dear Bofs’ is at the head of a letter addressed to Warren at Scotland Yard on 10 November 1888, the day after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly. Scrawled in thick blue pencil and purporting to have been sent ‘From Hell’, it is largely illegible, and characteristically has no stamp.
According to the Department of Manuscripts at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the use of an ‘f’ for ‘s’ was obsolete by the beginning of the nineteenth century, ‘discarded in favour of the ordinary S and seldom seen after 1800 except as an affectation’.17
This is interesting, because ‘an affectation’ is an ego thing, a kind of written vanity. I went after it, and the V&A was right. By the late nineteenth century the long ‘s’ was regarded as effete, but was not entirely extinct, its use confined to the sort of gentleman who considered himself of particular merit. Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert, who would serve as ambassador to London from 1889 to 1893, used it, as did the Queen’s Lord Chief Justice, Lord Coleridge. It was a grandiloquent statement of self. Amongst the riff-raff it was non-existent. It was certainly never used by the barely literate, any more than it would have been common to a chimpanzee writing home.
I was intrigued by ‘Bofs’, because this ‘f’ for ‘s’ turns up all over the Ripper correspondence. We get ‘clafs’ for class and ‘pafs’ for pass from Jack, and most notably ‘businefs’ for ‘business’ from Michael Maybrick.
I didn’t believe for a second that ‘Dear Bofs’ was the work of a ham-fisted oaf. Rather, it was an obvious and artful contrivance.
Here’s another example, received by the City Police about a week before Eddowes’ pillaged kidney was so dramatically to reappear. Once again it has all the hallmarks of a venomous piss-take. It spells ‘can’t’ as ‘cunt’, and, in a sort of cod Scottish vernacular, ‘house’ as ‘hoos’ (like the stage-Irish ‘sor’ for ‘sir’).
… from mi youar frend … Wat if [is] a frend too mi … der if [is] agrat sicret … inded after i left … My self a tropi … Ring and of a tropi …
It seemed to me that this unsigned contribution was referring to Eddowes’ kidney and Chapman’s similarly missing rings. Either way, it demonstrates an artifice that betrays the calligraphy. No struggling illiterate is going to use a median ‘s’ with handwriting that looks like a louse crawling in ink.
Irrespective of ‘f’ for ‘s’, Maybrick indulged further idiosyncrasies, often under- and overlining capitals in his text. We see it on the postcard to his niece, over the ‘W’ in ‘Waterloo’, and it’s well demonstrated in the many contracts signed between himself and his publisher John Boosey.
Two peculiarities are of note in one such contract: the under- and overlining of the capital ‘H’ in ‘Hero’, and the affectation of a spur on the capital ‘S’.
Both signed Maybrick (Stephen Adams), here’s another, with a capital ‘L’ under- and overlined, and spurs on two capital ‘S’s:
Compare these with a letter from the Ripper dated 8 October 1888 – again featuring spurs on the ‘S’:
Identical affectations appear on a postcard addressed to Major (in fact Superintendent) Foster of the City Police:
We have an under- and overlined capital ‘M’ in ‘Major’, and every capital ‘S’ in the text is decorated with a spur:
October 16 1888
Dear Major
Has it not occoured to you that your men are unable to find “Jack” because he “Mitre Square’d” them
Yours J. N. K.
The letter was mailed on 16 October, to coincide with Lusk’s receipt of the kidney. ‘Mitre Square’d’ is a transparent reference to Freemasonry.
18 According to this correspondent, it wasn’t only Eddowes who got the Masonic treatment, it was all Jack’s victims, inculcating a collective blindness in the Met, and the reason its men were unable to find Jack. In other words, it’s Masonry that’s hiding him. I think this text supports the proposition that Eddowes was intentionally cajoled into Mitre Square to play by the rules of the ‘Funny Little Game’.
The inverted ‘V V’ marks cut in her face were not in the public domain for another hundred years, and outside the authorities there is no way that anyone but her assassin could have known about them – no one, that is, except an ‘accomplice’ of the Ripper by the name of M. Baynard. Jack had obviously told him about the compass joke ‘on the square’, because he includes it here as a mocking gesture at the bottom left-hand corner.
Curious that Ripperology doesn’t leap to its feet at this as it does over ‘Tin Matchbox Empty’. If nobody could have known about the tin matchbox prior to 1987, how does M. Baynard know about the inverted ‘V V’ in 1888?
11/11/1888
To: Kings X Police Station
Sir,
Being an accomplice of “Jack the ripper” am able to tell you that he will sail from Liverpool, for “New York” on Thursday next
Yours truly
M Baynard
‘New York’ is in inverted commas because he isn’t actually going there, although another letter quite possibly is. We shall be returning to M. Baynard in due course.
These letters are not about the handwriting, but a train of thought with a spiteful grin and a lot of pens. To understand their author’s thinking, it’s necessary to understand his targets.
They All Love Jack Page 42