They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  The ‘mystery’ attached to Kelly is as sickening as it’s artificial, a confection silencing the British press and initiating a tide of speculation that in our day is frankly ridiculous. In the opinion of The News from Whitechapel, a consensus of shock had muted Fleet Street. ‘There was,’ it surmises, ‘an unspoken acknowledgement that the death of Mary Kelly went far beyond all that preceded it; a sense that some invisible dreadful line in murder news had been crossed.’58

  This nonsense is straight out of the Macnaghten school of journalism, and about as intellectually astute as an episode of Scooby-Doo. Since when have newspapers, and particularly Victorian newspapers, ever had enough of blood and gore? ‘If it bleeds, it reads’ was the Street’s historic dictum. Jack was money, and a lot of it, and there was no lack of reporters trying to get the lowdown on Miller’s Court. We’re looking therefore for a motive for this imposed silence, a motive superseding circulation wars and light years beyond rectitude.

  It is of course an ‘unspoken acknowledgement’ of a ruling elite in the timeless business of saving their arses. I think a comment in the French press at the time of Cleveland Street is nearer the truth: ‘La presse officiel s’est ligué pour cacher ces crimes et étouffer par un silence de mort cette grave question de moralité nationale.’59 (The official press are in league to hide the crimes and hush up with a deathly silence this serious question of national morality.)

  As an addendum to the above, in reference to MacDonald’s law-breaking haste, we read in The News from Whitechapel that ‘Later writers have tended to view his actions with suspicion, but this shows a misunderstanding of Victorian inquests, which typically only ran for one or two sessions.’60

  A critic of less generosity than myself might dismiss this as bollocks. Wynne Baxter held a total of fourteen sessions for his three victims – four for Nichols, five for Chapman and five for Stride. On that form, MacDonald might have pushed his enquiries somewhat beyond the recollections of a drowsy woman with a kitten on her tit. A nobbled coroner and a mute press are hardly the handmaidens of justice. The Ripper made a mockery of a court, silenced Fleet Street, and brought about the dismissal of the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police.

  Not bad going for a serial murderer.

  The Spectator had a more plausible explanation for the press clam-up following Kelly and thereafter. Although itself of a conservative bent, it wrote that British journalists ‘are taught and tempted to seek rewards which limit their independence, fetter them in their work, and very often, we fear, will be found seriously to interfere with the acuteness of their judgement … the approval of a Premiere will be more than the approval of a people; and “good newspaper policy” will mean neither independence nor the adroit reflection of popular opinion, but careful attention to that which is known to be pleasing to the head of the Government, or to those who are believed to have influence on its decisions.’

  Salisbury’s government was putrid with self-interest, and serviced some of the fattest rats in the sewer. Just about everything to which the Spectator alluded was to be found daily in the house newspaper of the ruling elite, The Times. As far as it was concerned, the Ripper’s expulsion of Warren constituted ‘Loss of a valuable servant’ (something of an understatement). Entirely exonerating him for his comedic failure, it suggested that the prostitutes of Whitechapel were ‘accessory to their own deaths’, and at fault for not managing their own protection: ‘It might have been supposed that they would have organised some system of mutual supervision and companionship in their dreadful trade. It is quite unreasonable to blame the police in such circumstances for failing to give protection, and hardly less unreasonable to condemn then for failing to detect the murderer.’61 In other words, anybody who expected the police to catch Jack the Ripper was being ‘unreasonable’, and the homeless and penniless were to be blamed for not instituting their own police force.

  After Kelly’s murder the burlesque of pretending that Charles Warren was trying to catch the Ripper came to an end. This crisis of lying simply couldn’t be sustained. Either Warren must go or the Ripper must. As it happened, both were to disappear, although in the case of the latter, only insofar as press coverage was concerned.

  According to Macnaghten, Charlie was ‘knocked out’62 by Jack, and it’s one of the only reliable things he had to say. Sharper minds at the Home Office were perfectly cognisant of the glaring symbiosis between this murderer and the Commissioner of Police. It looked as if any day now Jack was going to invite Warren out to dinner. The question that could no longer be avoided was, if Warren and his Freemasonry went, would the Ripper and his perversion of Freemasonry go too? Such a dilemma must have haunted many a discussion, although for public consumption the Home Office was obliged to behave like the worst of Ripperology: stumped, baffled, not a clue, etc.

  Those who were Masons – and that’s most of them – knew perfectly well what the symbolism of these crime scenes meant: from what had sprung Warren from his slumbers all the way down to why Kelly’s kettle was melted in the grate. Attempting to navigate the atrocity at Miller’s Court, a retrospective ‘resignation’ was cooked up to deny Jack yet another humiliating triumph. They would say that Warren had resigned the day before, on 8 November.

  This shifty bit of calendar work didn’t convince anybody, including even the Tatler: ‘It was very curious,’ it opined, ‘that Sir Charles Warren should have sent in his resignation on the eighth, just one day previous to the latest murder by the Whitechapel maniac.’63 Of course he hadn’t, and once again it was the unfettered American press that was in charge of reality. ‘The Whitechapel mysteries,’ wrote the New York Daily News, ‘have forced Sir Charles Warren, Chief of the Metropolitan Police, to resign. What other consequences will follow cannot be fully foreseen, but the resignation of the Home Secretary is highly probable and the overthrow of the Tory government is not an impossibility.’64

  It quite seriously was not. On 11 November the New York Times explained:

  A motion to adjourn the House of Commons has been put down and a resolution attacking both Matthews and Warren will be moved. The division is regarded by some members of the government with apprehension. Urgent telegraphic whips have been sent to the Irish members who are still in Ireland, begging them to come over in time for this division, the effect of which may be to upset the Ministry or at least to sorely damage it. London members will vote almost solidly against Matthews, for their constituents are all up in arms against the existing police inefficiency.

  But that’s not the story the British got. For them, Warren’s departure was nothing to do with a production line of corpses. It would be ‘unreasonable’ to blame the police for that. However, an excuse for his resignation was required to put before the public. They couldn’t cite misfeasance of duty, because everybody had been living with that for the last four months. Plus, his ‘occult motives’ were taboo. What then was there? The Pecksniffs went to work, and dug out some arcane rule instituted (and forgotten) in 1879 that prohibited coppers from writing for the press without the prior consent of the Secretary of State. In October Warren had published an article of tranquillising tedium in a rag called Murray’s Magazine. He made no secret of it, and nobody paid it any attention. If the Home Office felt like getting tetchy it could have reacted on 19 October, when the Star announced the piece’s imminent publication:

  WARREN TAKES UP THE PEN

  The forthcoming issue of Murray’s Magazine will contain an article upon the police of the metropolis by Sir Charles Warren.65

  Nobody so much as blinked, but three weeks later it was elevated to an offence comparable to the claim that the Earl of Euston had fled to Peru. Warren had broken the rules, and would have to go. Never mind that he’d repeatedly broken the rules with similar articles in a variety of publications, most topically the Contemporary Review. As recently as 10 October 1888 he’d published an abbreviated but almost identical piece about the police in The Times. That was neither here nor there. It was the rule he br
oke nine days later that was unpardonable, and in the interests of democratic hygiene it must be adhered to. The ‘rules’ were the ‘rules’, and what does it matter that he broke every rule in Vincent’s book when he destroyed evidence at Goulston Street?

  Warren’s exit was as farcical as the reason given for it. Nobody with a brain bigger than a currant could have believed it was nothing to do with Kelly. It was the Pall Mall Gazette that spoke up for reality with a front-page cartoon. Warren hasn’t lost his mount jumping a wall called Murray’s Magazine.

  In a risible attempt at diversion, Home Secretary Matthews threw the considerable weight of his legal department behind absolutely nothing. The upshot was the offer of a ‘Pardon to any accomplice’ of the murderer. This non-existent homicidal ‘accomplice’ was immediately elevated to a status beyond that enjoyed by the Insane Medical Student and the Nautical Man. Information on him was vague, but it can be assumed that he was less than five feet five inches tall, and was probably a cohabitant of the ‘lair’. Needless to say, no accomplice came forward, but the police kept arresting people who looked like him.66

  ‘Matthews’ explanation of the rationale of a pardon offer is, quite frankly, unbelievable,’ writes Mr Sugden, and once again I’m happy to agree with him. ‘There was no evidence whatsoever that more than one man had been involved and Doctor Bond said so in his report.’67 And so did internal (and secret) reports at the Home Office: ‘It is generally agreed that the Whitechapel murderer has no accomplices that could betray him.’ Matthews, as usual, was gulling the public.68

  Meanwhile Warren clung on, and it wasn’t until December that London was finally rid of him. The logistics of the buffoon’s evaporation are of little interest. It’s what came after him that compounds the misfortune. Any remote hope of apprehending the Whitechapel Fiend was now abandoned. A religious fanatic and a liar of incontestable talent was now in charge at Scotland Yard.

  Robert Anderson didn’t give a monkey’s for catching Jack the Ripper, and said so. He claimed that on his return from his ‘holiday in Paris’ on 8 October 1888, Matthews had confronted him with ‘We hold you responsible to find the murderer.’ To which Anderson replied, ‘I decline the responsibility.’ Having established this novel attitude for a senior policeman towards a serial killer, Anderson went on (in echo of The Times) to remonstrate that current police attempts to nail the bastard were ‘wholly indefensible and scandalous’. It was not the Ripper who should be arrested, but his victims. ‘These wretched women were plying their trade under definite police protection. Let the police of that district, I urged, receive orders to arrest every known “street woman” found on the prowl after midnight, or let us warn them the police will not protect them.’ It is no longer Jack who prowls looking for a victim, it is the victims who ‘prowl’, making themselves targets for the perfectly reasonable attentions of a psychopath with his knife. ‘Though the former course [arrest] would have been merciful,’ concluded the masterful detective, ‘it was deemed too drastic and I fell back upon the second’ – which, to reiterate, meant no police protection at all. This, then, was the stated policy (pre Kelly) of the incoming Boss of Metropolitan Police.69

  16

  ‘Red Tape’

  Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.

  Milton

  After the Kelly atrocity, all the police had to offer in lieu of investigation was lies. Jack’s immunity was guaranteed by the state. They were never going to catch him, so they decided to make him dead.

  Sir Melville Macnaghten later clarified the deceit in his book. ‘In all probability’, he wrote, the Whitechapel Murderer ‘put an end to himself soon after the Dorset Street affair in November 1888’. A homely stab at psychoanalysis is then conscripted to colour the fantasy: ‘After the awful glut at Miller’s Court’, Macnaghten concluded that ‘his brain gave way altogether and he committed suicide; otherwise the murders would not have ceased’.1

  Leaving aside the fact that the murders had not ceased, but were to escalate in their ferocity, the only substance underpinning Macnaghten’s forensic breakthrough was an unidentified stiff hauled out of the River Thames. The corpse got the timing about right, but managed little else. His death certificate reads:

  Unknown male, about 45 years, of unknown occupation. Died 24th November 1888 [in] River Thames off Hermitage Stairs, Wapping. Cause of death, ‘Violent suffocation by drowning, evidence insufficient to show under what circumstances.’2 (Wynne Baxter)

  It isn’t stated that he was wearing ‘button boots and gaiters with white buttons’, or a ‘black tie with horse-shoe pin’, as in the breakthrough supplied by Hutchinson, but it was apparently sufficient to qualify him as the Whitechapel Fiend? And if not him, there were others. Following Kelly the Thames bore a veritable flotilla of Jack the Rippers, including that sad little non sequitur, Montague J. Druitt.

  In March 1889 a member of George Lusk’s Vigilance Committee, Mr Albert Bachert, claimed that he was ‘sworn to secrecy’ by some unnamed officer in the Metropolitan Police. Once his secrecy was pledged he was told, ‘The man in question is dead. He was hauled out of the Thames two months ago and it would only cause pain to relatives if we said any more than that.’3

  Whether Bachert’s story was reliable is anybody’s guess, but my guess is that it is probably true. Police lies are an adequate provenance for police rumour. Thereafter the corpse attracted further credentials. A covenant of similarly questionable and hardly impartial authors were at their typewriters converting fiction into fact. Writing of his granddad, Bro Sir Charles Warren, Bro Watkin Williams has this: ‘My impression is that he believed the murderer to be a sex-maniac who committed suicide after the Miller’s Ct. murder – possibly the young doctor whose body was found in the Thames on 31 December 1888.’

  Assistant Under Secretary at the Home Office, Bro Sir John Moylan, was happy to agree: ‘The murderer, it is now certain, escaped justice by committing suicide at the end of 1888’ – an opinion endorsed by the Assistant Commissioner of the CID Sir Basil Thompson. ‘In the belief of the police,’ he wrote in 1913, ‘he was a man who committed suicide in the Thames at the end of 1888.’ Thus the powers had spoken, and Jack the Ripper was officially no more – and you better believe it, because as Bachert was warned, ‘His oath to secrecy was a solemn matter,’ and ‘Anyone who put out stories that the Ripper was still alive, might be proceeded against for causing a public mischief.’

  Congratulations to the river for solving one of history’s vilest mysteries. But strange it is that they all knew of the ‘suicide’ in 1888, yet in the official files (that were to remain closed for the next hundred years) there isn’t a scintilla of documentation to support it. Not a paragraph, not a word. It was evidently so secret they kept it a secret from themselves.

  In his memoir published in 1914, Macnaghten was one of the first to return public attention to it. When he arrived at Scotland Yard as Assistant Commissioner in June 1889, he recalled that he was confronted with a postbag that ‘bulged large with hundreds of anonymous communications on the subject of the East End tragedies’. Among them were one or two that caught his attention, probably because of the ditties composed by J.T.R.

  I’m not a butcher, I’m not a Yid,

  Nor yet a foreign Skipper,

  But I’m your own light-hearted friend,

  Yours truly, Jack the Ripper.4

  ‘The above queer verse,’ wrote Macnaghten, ‘was one of the first documents which I perused at Scotland Yard.’ If Sir Melville was with us now, I’m sure he’d wish he hadn’t made it public. It was Queen Victoria herself who suggested, in November 1888, that the Ripper was perhaps a seaman from a foreign ship that periodically visited London. Her letter was sent privately to the Home Secretary, and remained classified for years.5 For the Ripper to have knowledge of Her Majesty’s correspondence meant, at minimum, that he had access to the exchange of confidential gossip. As Mr Melvin Harris writes, ‘This could only have happened if the Ripper was highly placed social
ly.’6

  In other words, he was on the inside, and that is a proposition Mr Harris doesn’t like the sound of at all. Dismissing the ‘Skipper’ verse as an irrelevance, he plunges forth with the usual bombast, berating fellow Ripperologists for their infantile curiosity. For anyone to believe the verse is anything beyond a common hoax is ‘incredibly naïve’. ‘Oddly enough,’ he adds, ‘Colin Wilson, too, takes this seriously when he comments, “Queen Victoria had suggested that the police should check on all foreign skippers coming ashore.” This was not public knowledge,’ he agrees, while sermonising from above, ‘but a little extra thought would have shown that the verse does no more than sum up speculations that were widely toyed with at the time. Seamen, especially foreign seamen, were certainly objects of suspicion, and if you want a nautical crew term to rhyme with Ripper, what else are you going to choose but Skipper? It’s as simple and insignificant as that.’7

  Except it ain’t.

  Wilson was right to be intrigued, and it’s Melvin, with his self-imposed myopia, who might have profited from ‘a little extra thought’. The association of Skipper and Ripper is not unique to Macnaghten’s stash at the Yard, and is not so easy to dismiss. Approximately three weeks after Victoria’s confidential letter to Home Secretary Henry Matthews, preceding Macnaghten’s postbag by seven months, somebody else posted a letter from Taunton, Somerset, in the south-west of England. Dated 4 December 1888, it’s signed ‘Jack The Skipper’.

  Although virtually unintelligible, this tangle of words would evolve into one of the most important letters Jack ever wrote. Only one word is clearly written, the word he intended to be understood. It is ‘Weston’, a coastal town in Somerset, and in a page or two its significance will begin to be explained.