They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

Jack wasn’t writing for an audience of more than a century hence (many of whom would affect a myopia worthy of the Victorian police), but to be understood then, specifically to taunt, bewilder or personally sting the hamstrung comedians pretending to hunt him. Virtually everything he wrote was intended to ridicule the ‘authorities’, most especially senior policemen, to whom he referred as ‘po-lice’ in a caveman’s hand, and then as ‘po-lice’ as a copperplate man, on 15 and 23 October respectively.

  In best Neanderthal style, the following letter is in fact a sophisticated lampoon:

  November 5/88

  London

  Sir

  From the shoe black at. 11. o.clock this morning I saw A man go in to mr Barclay & son he had A bag in his hand and it snap open and I saw to feet and A head of A human Person he had A large knife in his pockit. at the corner of farringdon st and fleet Lane yours truly

  andy-handy

  This apparently meaningless hoax came through the letterbox at Scotland Yard on 6 November 1888. At a glance it looks like the work of a half-wit. But I’m not looking at the writing. I’m looking at the thinking. As with Warren and his wall, this letter demonstrates an inside knowledge of its target’s past, and is infinitely more cunning than its handwriting. What we have here is a joke within a joke. A couple of weeks before this letter was mailed, Punch aimed a jibe at the CID and its founder, Howard Vincent. His outfit (under Anderson) was such a waste of time, the magazine printed his name backwards.

  Jack despised religion, and enjoyed belittling the religion of others, Charles Warren in particular, but in this case it’s Warren’s pious sidekick Anderson who gets the sacrilegious taunt. Of immediate note is the signature. The writer didn’t sign himself ‘andy-handy’ by accident. He meant it to mean something, and in the context of the Criminal Investigation Department it might seem obvious. Reversing the name (as in the Punch joke) we get ‘Handy Andy’, a fictional Irish buffoon starring eponymously in a comic novel published in 1858 by Samuel Lover. Handy Andy is an all-round idiot who gets into all sorts of scrapes: ‘A fellow who had the most singularly ingenious knack of doing everything the wrong way. So the nickname the neighbours stuck upon him was Handy Andy, and the jeering jingle pleased them.’19

  Who could this correspondent have been thinking of when he chose the ‘jeering jingle’? Born in Dublin in 1841, and unquestionably an Irish idiot, the chief of London’s CID springs to mind. As a role model I think ‘Handy Andy’ was bang on Jack’s opinion of Robert Anderson, an evangelical twerp with a head full of God and a loathing for the people of Ireland. But that wouldn’t have been enough for the Saucy Purger. He’d have wanted a sting in it, preferably religious, to stick it to Anderson like a stamp. I knew ‘Andy’ meant Anderson, but what was the key to the insult? I couldn’t imagine, and started to scratch at it.

  When Anderson was a young man he’d seen some sort of ‘light’, and considered a career in the cloth. ‘It’s astonishing when I think of the number of people who have been saved,’ wrote the Lord’s young salesman. Proffering salvation, he tramped about Sligo with another religious fanatic, preaching the sort of stuff you’re better advised to keep to yourself.

  Anderson’s God was embraced by the Irish like a finger down the throat. ‘The evangelists were treated to a crusade of abuse and ridicule,’ observed the missionary’s son and biographer, ‘one newspaper accusing them of preaching for filthy lucre’ – and of getting their tainted funds from London.20

  Anderson’s back-up on the stump was a pea-eyed oddity called George Trench, whose lucubrations were so welcome that the Micks stabbed his horse to death under him.

  When Trench had had enough he left for home, writes Anderson Junior. ‘Some doggerel verses in a newspaper, described the quarrel which led the “Trencher” to desert his pal, “Handy Andy”.’21

  Anderson had acquired a nickname, and herein was Jack’s joke. ‘Handy Andy’ was about as insulting as the Irish could get, and it would do just as well for the Ripper. Resurrecting and reversing the ‘jeering jingle’ to make it even more foolish appealed to Jack’s sense of fun, reminding the chief of London’s CID that he was, and remained, a public laughing stock.

  But Anderson was not in the league of the Masonic zombie running the show. Let’s kick this off with a recurring Warren theme. ‘Next one I cop I’ll send you the toes and earols for your supper,’ says Jack, and continuing this cannibalistic motif, we shift into an area where Warren himself becomes the dinner.

  7. 11. 88.

  Dear Boss

  I am writing you this while I am in bed with a sore throat but as soon as it is better I will set to work again on the 13th of this month, and I think that my next job will be to polish you off and as I am a member of the force I can soon settle accounts with you, I will tear your liver out before you are dead and show it to you. And I will have your kidneys out also and frie them with pepper and salt and send them to Lord Salisbury as it is just the sort of thing that will suit that old Jew and I will cut of your toes and slice off your behind and make macaroni soup of them and I will hide your body in the houses of parliament so you grey headed old pig say your prayers before I am ready …

  ‘Frie’ is the usual nonsense, while the more difficult words ‘parliament’ and ‘macaroni’ are spelled correctly. The text comes with some artwork: ‘this is your portrait.’

  Ten days later a similarly inspired wag sent a portrait of himself:

  These triangular little bodies in profile, with legs at opposite corners and an identical rearward tilt, are unquestionably drawn by the same hand. Neither was ever published, so the first could not have influenced the second. They look like the work of a ten-year-old – ‘Charlie and Jack’, stars of the Ripper Show, one having a bad time and the other the time of his life. Their creator is certainly having fun with the calligraphy. The handwriting in the first letter, with the drawing of Warren (7 November), is crude but conventional. That in the second, with the self-portrait (16 November), is more informal, accelerating from the quasi-literate into a full freaked-out, Kürten-like explosive mess.

  Predicated on the drawings, it is absolutely certain that these letters were written by the same man. Thus, different handwriting does not mean a different author.

  Permutations of artifice rage in Jack’s correspondence, hallmarks of a singular breeding-place of thought. The letters are not one-offs from a reservoir of oafs stationed throughout the land, but an interconnected narrative, no less relevant to understanding the psyche of the Ripper than the links between the murders themselves.

  The joker who sent in the portrait of Warren writes only about Warren, while in identical vein, the same man who sent in a ‘photo’ of himself writes only about himself, and has one or two interesting things to say:

  I live in George St, very comfortably. I’m 30 years old, tall and dark … if you can’t find me you’re a lot of fools

  Yours Truly Joe the cats meat man

  Look out old Charlie Warren

  Heres my photo Im considered a very handsome Gentleman

  The writer locates himself not in Whitechapel, but in one of the more salubrious areas of London’s West End. George Street runs parallel to Regent Street, connecting Conduit Street to Hanover Square – where in 1884 Michael Maybrick claimed residence at the Arts Club. Maybrick’s niece Amy Maine’s judgement of her uncle as ‘exceptionally handsome’22 was shared by his music publisher John Boosey, whose offices were about a minute’s walk away, at 295 Regent Street.23

  To get traction on these letters I needed something that connected the Ripper to this area. At the same time I was looking for something to connect the Ripper to Warren, some hidden link they may have shared. It was simple enough in terms of my candidate – both he and Warren, for example, could be found at the Savage Club, and both were members of the United Services Club. But I needed something more specific, and therefore by definition more difficult. I was looking for a letter that could be related to Warren and just as easily to Mi
chael Maybrick. In other words, a letter with the Ripper as pig-in-the-middle.

  Superficially, Warren and Maybrick had much in common. Both were top-end gents of the Establishment, both liked uniforms, Warren in the togs of the Royal Engineers, Maybrick the Artists Volunteers. Both were generals – Warren for real, Maybrick as an adopted nickname: he called himself ‘Blucher’, after the famous Prussian general who saved Wellington’s reputation at the Battle of Waterloo. The great Blücher was an ardent Freemason, as were Warren and Maybrick. But perhaps most curious of all, both the policeman and the musician owed their fame to Jerusalem: Warren for digging under it, and Maybrick for his hit composition about it, ‘The Holy City’.

  The novelist and fellow founder of the Quatuor Coronati, Walter Besant, put it down for Charlie: ‘It is certain that nothing will ever be done in the future to compare with what was done by Warren. Whatever else may be done, his name will always be associated with the Holy City which he first recovered.’

  Ditto for Maybrick. The sheet music for ‘The Holy City’ made it the best-selling song of the entire nineteenth century.24

  To judge by Jack’s surviving letters, the weeders had burnt the midnight oil. I believe the ‘Yack the Ripper’ envelope referred to earlier survived because they didn’t understand it. No civil servant is going to sit there scratching it over an anonymous ‘hoaxer’s’ use of the word ‘Yack’. This one crept through with its Freemasonry intact. But I was looking for something else.

  I was looking for a letter that expressed some sort of specific association between Warren and Maybrick. The Ripper had to have made mistakes, and the weeders censoring in his wake had to have missed more than just ‘Yack’. In fact they missed much more. But Conduit Street was one of the first links I found.

  London W

  Dear Boss

  Back again & up to the old tricks. Would you like to catch me? I guess you would well look here – I leave my diggings – close to Conduit St to night at about 10.30 watch Conduit St & close round there – Ha-Har I dare you 4 more lives four more cunts to add to my little collection & I shall rest content

  Do what you will you will never trap

  Jack the Ripper

  Watch P.C. 60 C. light moustache shaven clean rather stout he can tell you almost as much as I can

  G.F.S. [crossed through]

  F place. R. St. W.

  At the time of the murders, the Post Office listed 28,000 streets in London; and out of all those, the Ripper chose to draw attention to Conduit Street.

  A more dramatic opposite to Whitechapel you couldn’t get. Conduit Street links Bond Street with Regent Street, right at the heart of London’s West End. Piccadilly is to the south, and within two minutes you can be drinking champagne at the Café Royal.

  Jack’s interest in Conduit Street became my interest. Why would a man signing himself ‘Jack the Ripper’ shift his thinking so purposefully away from the East End?

  The geography is intriguing. Eight months after the ‘tall and dark … very handsome Gentleman’ had nominated George Street as his place of residence, this correspondent had put himself in precisely the same area. We had one Ripper that lived in George Street, and another who was apparently to be seen that night in a street running into it. What was the story here?

  This Conduit Street letter was received by the Met about a week after the murder of Alice McKenzie in Castle Alley, Whitechapel, on the night of 17 July 1889. Warren had slung his hook the previous December. Although he was no longer Boss Cop, Jack had continued writing to him. ‘Back again & up to the old tricks’ is a reference to the apparent lull in activity since the atrocity of Mary Kelly on the morning of 9 November 1888, which had finally forced Warren to resign. As far as the public were conditioned to believe, Kelly was last of the series, ‘investigation’ replaced by ‘mystery’, and flogged off as such by Ripperology to this day. We will come to Kelly by and by. Meanwhile, let us try to unravel this ‘R(egent) St(reet) W(est)’.

  As is well established, Warren, like Anderson, was an Evangelical Christian, which I imagine would have put a smirk on the Purger’s chops. The departed Boss was a Bible-driven Masonic archaeologist, so it was no great leap in thinking to wonder if ‘diggings’ could be anything to do with his archaeological activities under Solomon’s Temple in the Holy City.

  Were such a connection to exist, it would consolidate my reasoning about the obliteration of the writing on the wall. Solomon’s Temple was the inspiration behind that (and all the lying that went with it). Was Yack joking over something similar in Conduit Street? And if so, where did it fit in the ‘Funny Little Game’?

  I could see two possible reasons for Jack’s use of the word ‘diggings’. Could it be a pun on ‘digs’, where the Ripper might have a residential connection? Or did it refer to an archaeological investigation – ‘diggings’ – where the connection might be Bro Warren’s? It turned out to be both.

  At 9 Conduit Street was the Society of Biblical Archaeology. Post Office records reveal that its Secretary was a Mr W.H. Rylands. Did that name mean anything to me? It most certainly did. He was Bro William Harry Rylands, First Senior Warden and founder member of Warren’s Quatuor Coronati Lodge of Masonic Research. In terms of seniority, he was second only to Warren himself.

  Warren was Number 1 on the exalted list, and Rylands Number 2; thus 9 Conduit Street had become an interesting address.

  As Secretary of the Society of Biblical Archaeology and past Grand Steward of Quatuor Coronati, Rylands kept a foot in both camps. Others were similarly disposed: William Simpson, Number 9 in Quatuor Coronati and its Worshipful Master, was Honorary Librarian of the Biblical Archaeologists, and the Reverend Charles Ball, Number 18 in the Quatuor Coronati, was a council member.

  Lifting the lid on the SBA revealed not only the Masonic link between Warren and Conduit Street, but some interesting ancillary names. We’re at the nucleus of the British Establishment. Bro Lord Halsbury is an egregious example. This most accommodating of government lawyers was also Grand Warden of English Freemasons. Not a few of the names in evidence have, or are about to have, an unwitting place in Jack’s narrative, not least Bro William Wynn Westcott, to whom Jack would dedicate a murdered child. There is also Bro Witham Matthew Bywater, Number 10 in the Quatuor Coronati, who had the distinction of being Grand Sword Bearer in Michael Maybrick’s Orpheus Chapter.

  Bywater and Rylands were as close to Warren as they proved close to my candidate. Rylands was not only a leading member of Warren’s Quatuor Coronati and Secretary to the Biblical Archaeologists, but also an officer of the Supreme Chapter of Royal Arch Masons, a covenant whose Grand Organist was Michael Maybrick.

  I determined that my criteria for the link between Warren and Maybrick had to be non-negotiable. I wasn’t simply looking for an affiliation between a pair of Freemasons, but something more definitive, putting both Maybrick and the Ripper in Conduit Street.

  This isn’t me choosing a street. It’s supposed to be a ‘hoaxer’. And out of all the streets in London, he’s hit on one with potent associations to Warren. That’s about a 28,000-to-one shot. If this could be dismissed as coincidence, I’d like to up the odds a little.

  ‘Watch Conduit St & close round there,’ taunts Jack. I looked where he suggested, at Conduit Street, and found my candidate.

  As I’ve indicated, archive material vis à vis Michael Maybrick is very rare. There is no collection of Maybrick/Adams, as there is for every one of his equally famous contemporaries. After much research I was in possession of but one Michael Maybrick letter, and it turned out to be the lucky one. The address at which it was written is given as 9 Conduit Street, meaning its author sharing the same front door with Rylands’ outfit. ‘Digs’ and ‘diggings’ had coalesced, and I had my Warren/Ripper/Maybrick connection.

  It’s from this letter that I discovered Maybrick’s epithet for singing as ‘the shouting business’ – or rather ‘businefs’: the entire text is written with the median ‘f’ for ‘s’.r />
  I don’t know at exactly what date Michael Maybrick was in residence at 9 Conduit Street, or what he was doing in the same building as the Society of Biblical Archaeology. Maybe he kept rooms there – a rehearsal room, or a West End pied-à-terre? What’s incontestable is that Conduit Street was as clearly in the picture to Maybrick as it was to Jack the Ripper.

  The letter is addressed to ‘My dear Berringer’, and is too long to reproduce in full. Dated Dec[ember] 10, it’s unfortunately without a year, although the typeface of the colophon – an ‘M’ along with a round-topped ‘M’ – is typical of the 1880s, and virtually identical with a round-topped ‘M’ of 1889 as used by the Artists Volunteers.

  The Ripper had described himself as a ‘tall, handsome man’, with an undisclosed association to Conduit Street. Michael Maybrick was a tall, handsome man, with an address in Conduit Street. In one of his letters the state-protected maggot brags, ‘It’ll be a clever man who catches me.’ I think you overestimate yourself, Jack. You and the laughable guardians of your anonymity seem as transparent to me as any shop window in Regent Street, London, West.

  But let us stay with the Biblical theme – which, with Warren as its muse, the Ripper certainly did. Warren’s Biblical digging gives a natural segue back into his archaeological exploits in the Holy Land (the Land of Moab, to be precise), and an embarrassing event there that would have tickled Jack pink.

  12

  The Mouth of the Maggot

  For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.

  Hamlet

  The Land of the Moabites has classic unsavoury Old Testament origins: ‘And it came to pass, God destroyed the cities of the plain.’ (I can’t help wondering whether this destruction wasn’t as a result of earthquakes releasing storms of flammable, religious-looking petroleum gas, 3,500 years before oil companies got in on the act.) Mix such flaming erudition with lightning and simple minds, and you’ve got a decent amount of ‘wrath’. Ditto a supply of gas to ‘the Burning Bush’.