Anyway, fearful of the fiery skies and quakes, the righteous citizen Lot had gone up into the mountains suffering the fear. When he got to the new location he lived in a cave with his two daughters, neither of whom had a husband. Both were worried about the preservation of their race. ‘There is not a man in the earth to come in unto us,’ the elder of them said. Therefore they devised a plan to get their dad rat-arsed on wine and take it in turns to fuck him. ‘Behold, I lay yesternight with my father,’ said the elder. ‘Let us make him drink wine this night also; and thou go in and lie with him that we may preserve the seed of our father.’ The younger one went in that night and got on with it, and ‘Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father and the first born bore a son and called his name Moab.’
About 3,500 years later, in August 1868, a Frenchman called Frederick Augustus Klein was in the area. Klein was a reverend attached to the Anglican Mission in Jerusalem. He was on his way up the eastern side of the Dead Sea, and stopped for rest one night in a town called Dhiban. A friendly-looking Arab pitched up and asked him if he wanted to see something no white man had ever seen before. Had the Arab been wearing a mackintosh, Klein might well have declined. However, he followed him into some ruins, where a large basalt slab was located. ‘This stone,’ recorded Klein, ‘was lying amongst the ruins of Dhiban, perfectly free and exposed to view, the inscription uppermost.’ Miraculously, the stone was in perfect condition. It was the inscription, of course, that was of interest, written in a very ancient script which, according to his guide, nobody had ever been able to decipher.
Mr Klein had just discovered the ‘Moabite Stone’.1
Various European legations operated out of Jerusalem, and Klein went through the doors of one. A pro-German citizen of Strasbourg, he laid the news of his discovery on the German archaeological equivalent of Charles Warren, a Freemason called Dr Heinrich Petermann. He was the very same man who had risked it with Warren in the bowels of Solomon’s Temple, consecrating the unique Masonic lodge, ‘Warren’s Lodge’, under the place where the three Assassins had murdered Hiram Abiff. Petermann immediately went about the business of securing the stone for his national museum. All this was conducted in utter secrecy, a bunch of Nubian thugs being hired by Petermann to guard his new treasure.
By the time Warren got whisper of it all the ingredients for a bitter controversy were in place. Facilitated by Sir George Grove and the Palestine Exploration Fund in London, Warren managed to bungle up an environment wherein the precious artefact was destroyed.
The Arabs would have sold the stone to anyone who wanted it for fifty cents, but by now the French also had wind of it. All this colonial interest aroused Muslim suspicion, and they started to get defensive. Warren went out to Dhiban one night, and there was a punch-up on the shore of the Dead Sea – ‘Blows were exchanged,’ says his biographer.
Make no mistake, it was the Germans’ stone. Petermann had actually secured its purchase and permission to transport it out of the country. That didn’t stop the British and the French from wanting it, or at least an impression of it, for their own national museums. It all got bitter, as everybody wanted a part of somebody else’s history. In obliging mood, the sons of Lot freaked out and smashed the thing to bits, resulting in plenty of shattered pieces to go around.
This was bad enough. Back in London, Sir George Grove made it worse. On 8 February 1869 he published a letter in The Times, claiming that Warren ‘has made a discovery that promises to be of great importance’. In fact Warren had discovered nothing, but by his interference he had had quite a lot to do with the stone’s demise. This was of little consequence to Grove, who ploughed on with his eulogy: ‘A few months ago, Captain Warren heard of a stone in the old country of Moab. The stone was then whole, but on finding that the Franks [Europeans] were enquiring for it, the Arabs broke it up into several fragments, which they hid in the granaries of their neighbouring villages.’2
Sir George’s letter went off like a bit of a bomb in Jerusalem, and Warren was transformed overnight into an international pariah. ‘It threw a completely false and discreditable light on Warren’s actions,’ lathered Watkin Williams. As far as his grandson was concerned, Warren was a Victorian giant, bestriding an inviolate plinth. Where there was fault it was always somebody else’s – in this case Grove’s: ‘By claiming him as the discoverer it put him wrong with Klein, it put him wrong with the Germans generally leaving them to infer that he had meddled in their affairs, it proclaimed to the British public that his enquiries had caused the destruction of the Stone, and that he had allowed the greater part of his discovery to pass into the hands of another nation.’3
All this was true, of course. With customary cack-handedness Warren had botched it. The French managed to get the stone, restore it, translate it, and shove it up in the Louvre. Petermann’s rage, shared by his countrymen (who, as history would have it, were presently engaged in a war with the French, and besieging Paris), was described by Williams as ‘irritation in German quarters’. ‘When I saw [Grove’s] letter,’ wrote Warren with some honour, ‘I saw but one course before me. I wrote home and resigned my connection with the Palestine Exploration Fund.’4
It was all very sore indeed. But there was another element here that didn’t get into the pages of Watkin Williams’s book. Ever shy of his hero’s Freemasonry, he neglected to mention the personal hurt this affair brought upon Warren. The fraternal bond between himself and Petermann was now smashed as surely as the stone itself. Grove had driven a wedge into the event of a lifetime, and it must have cut Warren to the quick.
‘Warren’s Lodge’, with its carved compasses and whatnot, together with the catastrophe of the ‘Moabite Stone’ were among the Commissioner’s most indelible memories, and were also to become an irresistible inspiration for Jack. Just as ‘Juwes’ had its source in the gloom of Warren’s past, so too would a funny little joke over ‘Moab’.
When Warren wasn’t digging, he was writing about digging. Before his summary disassociation from the PEF (happily later repaired) he had contributed a variety of papers for publication. The Fund produced quarterly statements, in which Captain Warren’s expertise was generously in evidence. In a table of ‘Conversion of Hebrew Sounds into Amharic’ (1876), we find his explication of ‘з’ (or something similar beyond the capacity of my typewriter): ‘where pronounced hard in Hebrew it seems to have become Qaf in Arabic, which is vulgarly pronounced as a hard “G” – instance – Gedoroth – Katrah’.5
This from a man who couldn’t work out ‘Juwes’ on an East End wall. Warren’s overriding passion, of course, was buried in the subterranean mysteries of Solomon’s Temple. It was the myth or reality of Hiram that had driven his shovel in those perilous foundations. What was the truth of it all? Then, as now, Freemasons looked for substance in the Hiram Abiff tradition.
At Shadwell Clerke’s consecration of the Quatuor Coronati on 8 November 1886, Bro Hayter Lewis read a paper, ‘On an Early Version of the Hiramic Legend’, a theme taken up by Warren himself at the formal inauguration on 3 March 1887: ‘My object this evening is to call attention to the orientation of Temples, with special reference to the Temple of Solomon and the Master Mason’s Lodge.’
An erudite dissertation followed, Biblical sources welded into Warren’s antediluvian perceptions of Masonry. He thought it was as old as the hills – at any rate, not much their junior. ‘With all mankind the Deity first abode in Heaven,’ he said, and the closest you could get to it was the mountaintops where sacrifices were made. ‘But as the worship of the heathen gradually degenerated’, the people began to look upon these high places ‘as the occasional haunts of the Gods’. It was primitive man who kept God at high altitudes, and it was Solomon who was to change all that. In a dream ‘God promised him the gift of wisdom’, and he came to realise that the hitherto stratospheric omnipotence could handle business just as easily at ground level. The rising of the sun in the east, and its setting in the west, could be represented by
symbol in the artifice of a great building. ‘Behold the Glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the East.’ Ergo, Solomon’s Temple and the subsequent orientation of every Masonic lodge thereafter. ‘The key to the whole subject,’ declaimed Warren, ‘may be found in the book of Ezekiel.’6
Ezekiel is a name to be remembered. The Ripper was to use the Book of Ezekiel as a virtual workshop manual in orchestration of the destruction he visited upon Mary Kelly. No prophet in the Bible is of more interest to Freemasonry than Ezekiel; or, by the time we get to Kelly, of more interest to me.
Meanwhile, Warren continued to argue his case, quoting again from the Book of Solomon: ‘Then spake Solomon. The Lord said he would dwell in thick darkness. I have surely built thee an house [my emphasis] to dwell in, a settled place for Thee to abide in forever. And Solomon stood before the altar of the Lord in the presence of all the congregation of Israel, and spread forth his hands towards heaven and said, Behold [the House of the Lord].’7
Inevitably, Warren moved on to this temple’s architect and builder, Hiram Abiff: ‘I have come to the conclusion that our legends are of an ancient date and have a substantial basis … I put forward as a solution that modern Masonry is a combination of the mysteries of the Hebrews, the Phoenicians, and the Egyptians, that it thus forms the chief of the triads running so remarkably through all Masonic Lore.’8
By the late nineteenth century, however, Masonry’s claims to antiquity began to look a bit shaky, its rituals and icons suggesting a more recent provenance. Not a lot stands sure against any objective enquiry, and this includes Hiram Abiff.
Perhaps Hiram was an eighteenth-century fabrication, ripped off from the Old Testament? Bro G.W. Speth, one of the founders of the Quatuor Coronati and Number 4 in its hierarchy, addressed just such a question in Builders’ Rites and Ceremonies: The Folk Lore of Masonry. His book doesn’t do a lot for the mystique of Hiram. It ‘not only shows the origin of the present day custom of burying coins under foundation stones, but also gives numerous instances both of “foundation sacrifices” and “completion sacrifices”’. These architectural horrors were based on ‘the old idea that stability of an edifice would be best secured by sacrificially immuring within it, the body of an artificer’.
Examples of this practice are to be found in the Bible. In Kings 1.16.34, a deluded God-fearer called Hiel the Bethelite buries his firstborn in the foundations of an important building as an amulet to fortune. Not quite confident of the efficacy of this sacrifice, Hiel similarly inters his younger son, Segub, under the city gates. Most hideously, it seems these kids were buried alive. I don’t know if Bro Speth had first-hand knowledge of uncovering these Old Testament horrors, but Warren unquestionably did. Such ‘foundation sacrifices’ were to be discovered all over the forgotten lands of Moab and Midian.
‘The widespread custom of “foundation sacrifice” survives in Palestine,’ wrote Biblical historian Stanley Crook in 1908, ‘when popular opinion required that blood shall be shed at the inauguration of every important new building.’ Blood was still gushing at the close of the nineteenth century, although by 1898 (for a jetty at Haifa) it was from a sheep instead of a child.9
The children of Solomon’s time were not so lucky, particularly as the King was more or less preoccupied with real estate. He built not only at Jerusalem, but at Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer (Kings 9.15). On the site of his great administrative building at Gezer, ‘a gruesome discovery was made’. Secreted in the foundations was the skeleton of a young girl – or at least the upper portion of it, for she had been sawn in half. She was estimated to have been about sixteen years old at time of death. Near the mouth of the cistern in which she was discovered were ‘the decapitated heads of two girls’. Unfortunately we have no picture of this sacrificial site, but a PEF photograph of another young female skeleton found at another dig gives the gist of it. This one was disinterred with her head intact, and replicating the other, had been ritually sawn in half.10
Bearing this unfortunate creature in mind, we now shift attention through thirty-five centuries to Charles Warren’s new police headquarters on Victoria Embankment. Retaining the name ‘Scotland Yard’ from its former location, this sprawling edifice was still under construction.
Cue the ‘Fiend’ and ‘Friend’ of the Commissioner. What a wheeze it would be to stick one down, in the style of a Moab sacrifice, in the foundations of Charlie’s new building, ha ha. Forty-eight hours after the ‘Double Event’ and its short-lived message on the wall, a labourer working in the rubble-filled vaults of New Scotland Yard discovered a curious parcel secured with strings. He thought it was discarded bacon, but investigation proved it to be the headless and armless torso of a young woman who had been sawn in half.
This archaeologically inspired piss-take would henceforth be known as ‘the Whitehall mystery’, or ‘the Scotland Yard Trunk mystery’. I’m not going to get into a protracted analysis of its ‘investigation’, because there wasn’t one. Jack’s outing into the bowels of New Scotland Yard was a shade too close to the Commissioner’s knuckle, and every effort was made to disassociate this outrage from the Ripper. The Met was characteristically ‘without a clue’. ‘The police never imagined there was any connection with the Whitechapel Murders,’ chimes The A to Z, ‘despite press speculation.’
To dismiss the link with J.T.R. as no more than ‘press speculation’ is to dismiss the Scotland Yard trunk in its entirety. We have nothing but the press. Jack’s ersatz sacrifice certainly can’t be examined from Metropolitan Police files, because there aren’t any. Not a scrap of contemporaneous paper is to be found: no statements, no interviews, no nothing. This is a crime as audacious as anything Alfred Hitchcock might have dreamed up, literally in the guts of the Commissioner’s emerging new headquarters, yet it is without a history?
The nearest we get to archive material is three meagre sheets (MEP05/271) summarising the atrocity as though it were a myth rather than a Ripper reality. Since these pages are dated October 1936, forty-eight years after the event, I imagine even the most acquiescent of ‘students’ might find them a bit late in the day. This lack of material reveals more than it tries to hide. Although the Met couldn’t wash away ‘the Scotland Yard Trunk mystery’, it was just as hysterically motivated to try to cover it up.
The new police building had been a while in coming. The riverside site had originally been intended for a grand opera house, but the scheme ran into financial difficulties. The backers couldn’t afford a roof, and what had been built was demolished. In 1885 the land was acquired by the Receiver of the Metropolitan Police, who went about the business of commissioning a new police headquarters.
A cartoon in Punch (1886) tells the dispiriting tale. The state had little use for opera singers, and preferring policemen to Rossini, one of the latter was kicked out in lieu of Warren and his unsteady gang.11
Designed by Norman Shaw, one of the leading architects of his age, New Scotland Yard was, according to the Echo, ‘at the very centre of our civilised community’. Not a stone’s throw from the Home Office, ‘it is beneath the very shadow of the House of Commons itself’. ‘They are the buildings,’ waxed the Echo, ‘which are intended as the new Metropolitan Police Headquarters, the future of our whole protective system!’12
The construction of New Scotland Yard was half complete. Scaffolding was up, and nascent stairways disappeared into the gloom of its foundations. Like a medieval dungeon they were a labyrinth of hazard and places where daylight never came. On 2 October 1888, together with his mate, a carpenter called Frederick Wildbore was early into the vaults. For the previous three weeks Wildbore had been working here from Monday to Saturday, hiding his tools overnight in a maze of recesses destined to become cells. In one of them he rediscovered something he’d been aware of in the darkness the day before, but had ignored. A light was struck, and the men found themselves looking at some kind of parcel. About two feet by three feet, wrapped in cloth and bound with strings, it had no smell, nor any attra
ction, and neither was inclined to touch it. Later that day Wildbore mentioned the find to his foreman, William Brown, who ordered the item to be brought into the light for examination.
Wildbore returned to the vaults in the company of a bricklayer by the name of George Budden. ‘I struck a light,’ said Budden, ‘and saw the top bare, and the rest wrapped up in some old cloth.’ Thinking little of it, he dragged it over a makeshift bridge into a part of the vault where there was daylight. ‘A lot of old strings of different sorts were tied up all round it several times across each way.’ Budden cut the strings, and to everyone’s shock they found themselves looking at the headless upper half of a woman’s body. ‘I was not alone when the parcel was opened,’ he said. ‘There were present the Foreman Bricklayer [William Brown] and Wildbore.’13
The coppers arrived in short order from nearby King Street, and the Divisional Surgeon was sent for. Whatever was said was said, and down they all went to the recess, where Detective Hawkins (A Division) made a preliminary inspection of the scene. The torso appeared to have been wrapped in some kind of dress material, another piece of which was discovered in the recess. The area where the parcel had been placed was seething with maggots.14
By now Dr Thomas Bond had arrived. A Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and Surgeon to the Met since 1867, it was he who was to prepare a report for Robert Anderson, determining that the Whitechapel murders were all the work of the same hand, and that their perpetrator ‘must have been a man of physical strength and of great coolness and daring’.
Such qualities were palpably in evidence here. The torso weighed fifty pounds, and how Jack had managed to transport it in unremitting darkness was everyone’s puzzle. ‘Not only would the risk of detection be very great,’ surmised The Times, ‘but he would also stand a good chance of breaking his neck.’ Such peril was corroborated by the workmen. Gaining access to the vault meant crossing a trench on a plank. ‘It was so dark, even in daytime,’ said Wildbore, ‘and people who didn’t know the place wouldn’t have found their way there.’15
They All Love Jack Page 44