They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  Shuttleworth addressed himself to the Chief Warder of Walton Jail, ordering him to ‘Put up Florence Maybrick,’ and she was duly brought up into the dock from a subterranean cell. Flanked by a male and a female warder, Florence was dressed in the black crêpe of a widow’s weeds, black gloves, black bonnet and a transparent black mourning veil.

  The court was airless and crowded, with many society ladies peering through opera glasses, and thousands more milled in the streets outside. There had been a vigorous black market in tickets, some paying a week’s wages to get in. ‘There have only been two celebrated trials in Liverpool in the last quarter of a century,’ wrote the Daily Post, ‘that have attracted anything like so much interest.’

  The bewigged Freemason, a counterpart to Bro McGowan at Bradford, read out the indictment for murder and asked, ‘How plead you?’ Mrs Maybrick replied with one of the few truths to be heard in this place that day: ‘Not guilty.’

  The guilty wore the wigs. By that I mean there wasn’t a man under one of them whose sole and primary interest was anything other than the protection of the elite they represented. Jack the Ripper was a stick of dynamite right up its arse, and thus justice didn’t come into it. From the get-go it was apparent that Bro Russell was not only complicit on behalf of the prosecution, but actually the conductor of it.1 Under any other circumstances this Houdini of the courtroom would have had his client out of there in time for lunch. But these weren’t any other circumstances, and it’s surely a testament to his litigatory skills that he could ‘pretend a defence’ and pull off such a conjuring trick so publicly. The charge of murder by means of arsenic culled from flypapers was ridiculous. It was, as Russell said himself, ‘rotten’. To defend it was a pushover – he could have phoned it in, but instead, by criminal dishonour, he contrived to lose it.

  Addison was responsible for the first onslaught of lying. Clutching a wad of got-up rubbish, he stood to enunciate the prosecution’s case. ‘May it please your Lordship,’ he intoned: ‘Gentlemen of the Jury, it is my duty, in conjunction with my learned friends, to lay before you evidence in support of the indictment you have just heard read. Each and every one of you know that the charge against the prisoner at the bar is that she murdered her husband by administering him doses of arsenic, and it would be idle in me to suppose that each and every one of you do not know some of the circumstances of the case, either by means of the press or in other ways, and that probably you have discussed the matter, but I know equally well that …’

  It was here that Russell made the first of his many interventions. Less than a minute in, and ‘Fat Jack’2 had already strayed into hazardous territory. According to H.B. Irving’s transcript of the trial, ‘Sir Charles Russell leaned across and whispered to Mr Addison, who, nodding assent, said, “It has been suggested to me, and probably it is right, that, except the scientific witnesses, all the witnesses be requested to leave the court.” The witnesses [and jury] then withdrew,’ says Irving. This incidentally didn’t include the scientific witnesses, because they were not yet in court. Out they all trooped, ‘with the exception of Michael Maybrick who was allowed to remain’.3

  Now, I don’t know much about the protocols of Victorian courts, but is it not extraordinary that Mrs Maybrick’s principal accuser should stay in his seat while confidential legalities were debated? What did it have to do with Michael Maybrick, and where were the principal witnesses for the defence? The latter part of the question has an easy answer: there weren’t any. All dangerous voices – like that of Baroness von Roques, by way of example – had been kept out.

  A huddle formed, and the whispering began. So what was it that these men in robes and Michael Maybrick secretly discussed? Irving skips over it, and gives no clue, and you can scour the Liverpool press without an answer. Whatever was debated at Sir Charles Russell’s request was intended to stay unheard forever.

  However, there’s always a caveat, enshrined in my favourite ditty: ‘No action whether foul or fair, is ever done but it leaves somewhere a record.’ In this instance the honour falls to an American newspaper, published a day later in New York: ‘The most important thing during the day,’ it reported, ‘was the production of the long rambling letter which Mr James Maybrick wrote to his brother Michael, on the 29th of April last, just eleven days before he [James] died.’4

  What these bastards were discussing was the ‘Blucher’ letter, and it was on behalf of the prosecution that Russell caused it to be suppressed. He got a red light when Addison blundered into recent press reports in which a redacted version of the letter had appeared. Its full contents would of course have summarily destroyed the prosecution’s case. Here was a man, supposedly murdered with incremental doses of arsenic, admitting that he was killing himself with doses of strychnine: ‘The Doctor finally came again but could not make it indigestion this time and the conclusion he came to was the Nuxvomica [strychnine] I had been taking. Doctor Fuller had poisoned me as all the symptoms warranted such a conclusion.’

  Far from his wife being the perpetrator, the deceased was accusing nux vomica, abetted by Michael Maybrick’s London physician. This letter was the invoice to Mrs Maybrick’s innocence, and could have paid for her liberty there and then. Michael had forged it as a cover for ‘the London Medicine’, and now it had come back with the potential to bite them right in their lousy arses. Russell should have waved it in Addison’s face, but by suppressing it he became no less treacherous than Yapp.

  Excerpts from the ‘Blucher’ letter had twice been published in the Liverpool press, timed on both occasions to inflict maximum damage on Florence. Its first outing in the Liverpool Courier of 3 June preceded the decision to prosecute at the coroner’s inquest, and it appeared again in the Liverpool Daily Post on 31 July, coinciding with the opening day of Mrs Maybrick’s ‘trial’. The publication of ‘Dear Blucher’ on that day couldn’t have been more damaging to Florence Maybrick. It was a redacted version, with references to strychnine and ‘Doctor Fuller had poisoned me’ edited out. The text of the original, which was presently in Russell’s hand, would have set Florence free; the text as published condemned her.

  ALLEGED REMARKABLE LETTER OF THE DECEASED

  We have it on the authority of a gentleman who affirms that he saw the document that, prior to his visit to London in April last, the late Mr James Maybrick wrote to his brother, Michael, a letter, which in view of the present circumstances is extraordinary.5

  Never mind that it was post his London visit and consultation with Fuller, the ‘gentleman’ in question can have been none other than Michael Maybrick, and this posed a dilemma for Russell. He needed to keep the jurors’ minds well away from questions raised by the press, not least of which was who caused the ‘Blucher’ letter to be published? On 28 May Michael had given evidence before the coroner, and said absolutely nothing about it.

  I’m not a Victorian barrister, but Alexander Macdougall was, and according to him the withholding of this letter from a coroner’s jury was an act of ‘criminal suppression’.6 If it was an act of ‘criminal suppression’ before a coroner’s jury, it had now become an act of ‘criminal conspiracy’ amongst the brigands in this court.

  Not even Macdougall knew that this letter had also been withheld at the trial, but we know that the full text was the subject of debate, because it was copied simultaneously by Bro Swift and found its way into the Home Office files (HO 144/1639/A50678).

  The craftily pruned article of 31 July continues:

  He states that on returning home he was seized with a rigidity of the limbs and a general feeling of sickness which quite prostrated him. Proceeding to comment on the inability of the doctors to diagnose his complaint, he goes on to bitterly deplore their confusion of ideas, and to express an emphatic opinion that, ‘this time Dr — cannot say that I am suffering from a violent attack of indigestion’. Towards the end of the epistle he again reverts to the strange malady which affects him, and adds that the medical men will perhaps be able to tell what is t
he matter with him when, for the benefit of future generations they have examined his remains.

  ‘Every Juryman who took his seat that morning,’ writes Macdougall, ‘may be taken as having read this scandalous paragraph.’7 Without the references to nux vomica and Dr Fuller, it reads as Michael intended it to read, i.e. that someone was poisoning his brother, and it was the woman standing in the dock.

  The function of any judge is to appear for the Crown, and Fitzjames Stephen couldn’t have done it better. Following this judicial interlude with Russell and his pal Michael Maybrick, the jury and the rest of the spectators were allowed to resume their seats.

  À propos of that, and although I dislike the expression, what happened next beggars belief. Having just discussed James Maybrick’s self-administered dose of strychnine on 27 April, and his conviction that Dr Fuller was poisoning him with the London Medicine, Addison was back on his feet, primed to reanimate his charlatan accusations: ‘It was on the 27th of April that the first illness occurred, which we say was caused by arsenic. The illness he had that day was attributed to an overdose of medicine, but the doctor will tell you there was nothing put in the medicine to make him ill at all, but arsenic was later found in the medicine.’

  This was a fiction, and Russell squatted there like the scoundrel he was and listened to it. No arsenic was found in ‘the London Medicine’, because Florence threw what was left of it down the drain and thereafter trashed the bottle. ‘The next day was Sunday the 28th of April, at that time he was undoubtedly very ill, and the consequence was that Doctor Humphreys was seen, and he will tell you that Mrs Maybrick told him she attributed the illness to some bad brandy which her husband had at the races.’8

  She said no such thing. And it was most certainly nothing to do with what he had at the races. It was pre the races, and it was Alice Yapp who converted the strychnine into brandy. What Florence said was that she believed it was the ‘white powders’ James was taking that might contain strychnine. Humphreys acknowledged this at the magisterial hearings, but by the time of the ‘trial’ he had quite forgotten it.

  What Addison was doing, and Russell allowed him to do, was to artfully conflate Fuller’s prescriptions, made up at Clay & Abrahams pharmacy on 24 April, with ‘the London Medicine’ that arrived by post at Battlecrease on 26 April.

  On 1 August, the second day of the ‘trial’, Dr Fuller travelled up from London to appear in the witness box. His evidence is salutary, presenting the Irish Judas (should he remotely have cared for it) with yet another glaring opportunity to win his case. ‘These prescriptions,’ deposed Fuller, producing them, ‘are the ones I prescribed on the 14th of April for him. The one is an aperient, and the other a tonic, with liver pills.’ On the following weekend he saw James again: ‘The dyspeptic symptoms of which he complained had partially disappeared. I therefore slightly altered the prescription and wrote another. None of the three prescriptions contained arsenic in any shape or form.’9

  Because ‘the London Medicine’ and the ‘Blucher’ letter had been kept secret from both him and the jury, Fuller could have had no idea of the murderous brew (now ascribed to him) subsequently winging its way via the mails. Poisoning James was nothing to do with him, but get ready for this: ‘Deceased told me he had been taking a pill which he said I had prescribed for his brother. This however was not the case. I had not prescribed it.’10

  Had you not?

  This was a trial for murder, with a potential rope at the end of it. It was a case of premeditated poisoning, and Florence Maybrick’s defence counsel had just heard that Michael Maybrick was giving his brother ‘pills’ that he mendaciously claimed were prescribed for him by Dr Fuller. A chimp in a wig would have leapt on it. Any barrister worth the name would have put Michael Maybrick into the witness box post haste, demanding to know what these ‘pills’ were, why he had lied about them, and why he had attributed them to Dr Fuller. Instead, without the merest enquiry, Russell said, ‘He told you he had been taking some pills you had prescribed for his brother,’ and without waiting for an answer, cunningly buried that statement under another question, ‘and you understand him to say that was the only medicine he had recently been taking?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fuller, falling right into it, and from now on these unexplained ‘pills’ (and ‘the London Medicine’) went into the casual vernacular of the trial as ‘Dr Fuller’s Medicine’.

  Had Russell wished to pursue these mysterious ‘pills’ (which of course he did not), he would have needed to look no further than a recent Liverpool newspaper. On 25 May the Liverpool Weekly Post had had this: ‘Some weeks ago he [James] went up to London to consult a leading physician as to his ailments, and this gentleman, in addition to some other medicine, prescribed for him certain pills. Mr Maybrick took them (doubling the dose), and told a friend he had felt much worse for it. He made a second visit to London and on this occasion the physician told him he had done wrong because the pills consisted largely of strychnine. This story Mr Maybrick told to one or two of his friends on the Cotton Exchange, and doubtless led to the suggestion that he had overdosed himself with other dangerous medicines.’11

  Here was another document Russell could have waved in the prosecution’s face. His entire case could have been argued from the text of this one newspaper article. It was dangerous stuff, hence his intervention at Addison’s clumsy mention of the press: ‘The statement that Mr Maybrick was in the habit of taking medicine in which active poisons were an ingredient is confirmed by the opinions of other friends … these confident statements as to the nature of the medicines taken by him point to the probability that the serious charge brought against Mrs Maybrick may be totally unfounded.’12

  Unfounded they certainly were, but such reports raised questions that the court could well do without. Several of them spring easily to mind. Where were ‘these men from the Exchange’, and why didn’t Russell produce them as witnesses? Why were not these ‘friends’ brought into court to make their confident statements? Where were the witnesses who could speak to the ‘pills’ that had made James ill (a precursor of the London hotshot, similarly raw with strychnine), which had been given to him under false pretences by his brother Michael Maybrick?

  The defence didn’t need Robert Reeves’s statement. No eavesdropping required – it was said openly by Fuller, and confirmed in a fucking newspaper.

  What else do we need to know about the treachery of this Hibernian pimp, Russell? He laboured to keep up a mask of ‘defence’, a running charade of advocacy. As a cover for James’s use of arsenic he managed to find a couple of irrelevancies in Virginia, USA, both of whom acknowledged that about a decade ago he had been known occasionally to take arsenic for medicinal purposes. Apparently he took it for malarial fever, but beyond that the slate was clean. One of these Americans, a Mr Thomas Stansell, had been James’s servant, and was black. ‘His ebony skin and woolly head,’ commented the Liverpool Review, ‘conjured up a host of recollections in one’s mind. One thought of distant cotton-plantations, of piccaninnies, of the hunted slave and the planter’s whip.’ And it was precisely for these recollections that Russell had hauled him in. Liverpool had prospered from shipping this kind of cargo, and Russell wasn’t averse to exploiting the city’s shadow of prejudice. Addison couldn’t even bring himself to call Stansell by name, referring to him as ‘the black man’. Whatever he had to say about his master’s former arsenic habits was regarded as little more than the comic performance of a nigger minstrel. He said, ‘Iss sar’ for ‘Yes sir,’ and all that was missing was a banjo.

  Is it not remarkable that Russell could find such a witness on the other side of the Atlantic, yet was incapable of accessing crucial witnesses less than a mile away? The Cotton Exchange was crawling with men like Mr Dalgleish and Morden Rigg, both of whom had given written statements to Florie’s solicitors Richard and Arnold Cleaver, and both of whom were willing to appear in her favour and give their depositions under oath. Apart from Rigg and his wife there were a host o
f others who could have torn up the prosecution’s case like shit-paper. Where, by way of example, were Valentine Blake, Charles Ratcliffe, George Davidson and Captain Irving? It was Ratcliffe who wrote of James ‘dosing himself as usual’, and Irving who’d heard from Edwin Maybrick that his brother was ‘killing himself with that damned strychnine’. But most important of all, where was Florence’s mother, Caroline von Roques, who could have confirmed flypapers as a commonly used cosmetic, and who was as well apprised of her son-in-law’s addiction to lethal toxins as any of the rest?

  However, none of these were in the scheme of things. Florence Maybrick had to be silenced. Sir Charles Russell had no more care for her innocence than Sir Charles Warren had for Jack the Ripper’s guilt. They were myrmidons of a System that would descend to any misfeasance to preserve itself. If Russell was to lose on behalf of the prosecution, it was essential that he present Michael Maybrick as ‘innocent’ of his brother’s arsenic addiction, and further that he represented James Maybrick himself as a mahatma of clean living who barely took any medicines at all.

  Cross-examination of the Maybrick brothers established that they were probably the only men within a five-mile radius of the corpse who knew nothing of their brother’s drug-taking. Edwin claimed complete ignorance of arsenic or anything else. During questions regarding Irving’s dinner date at Battlecrease House he left out both the captain and the drugs. The reference to James ‘killing himself with that damned strychnine’ had entirely slipped his mind. ‘I dined with him that evening,’ he said, ‘and he appeared to be in his usual health. So far as I knew my brother on the whole enjoyed very good health. From time to time he took ordinary liver medicine.’