This testimony was a lie, of course, because they didn’t yet have the letter – at least not a useful version of it. It wasn’t until three days later, when Michael and his cohorts ransacked the house, that Mrs Briggs got her pencil out to forge it. The accusations on which the Crown relied were got up by Michael Maybrick on the evening of his arrival. At risk of repetition they were: 1) murder by arsenic obtained from flypapers; and 2) a letter intercepted by Alice Yapp that would ‘prove’ a continuing adulterous relationship between Mrs Maybrick and Brierley. Once he’d got his story straight and drummed it into his co-conspirators, Michael took the lethal package around to Dr Humphreys.
On the following day he repeated it to Humphreys in the presence of Dr Carter. Saturating his fictions with arsenic, he said, ‘Mrs Maybrick’s infidelity to her husband is positively known.’100 How did Michael know that? Who told him that? In his evidence at the ‘trial’ the bastard said:
SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: You were aware, of course, were you not, of a dispute having arisen to this man Brierley?
MICHAEL MAYBRICK: I did not hear the nature of the dispute. I had heard there had been a dispute.
SIR CHARLES RUSSELL: As far as you are aware, your brother died entirely in ignorance of the guilty meeting in London?
MICHAEL MAYBRICK: Yes, I am convinced of it.101
To borrow an expression of disbelief from Charles Ratcliffe, doesn’t that exchange just cork you? How could any counsel for the defence, never mind a man of Russell’s experience, use the word ‘guilty’ in respect of his client? All the Crown desired to prove was arsenic and adultery, and with the ‘guilty meeting in London’, the Irish Judas had just conceded them half of their case.
Russell should have torn Maybrick’s tongue out by the root, but he didn’t, electing to suppress what everybody knew. If James knew nothing of the affair with Brierley, who told Michael Maybrick? It wasn’t Florence, and it wasn’t Brierley, so we’re left with Briggs, or the helmets in the hedge outside Flatman’s Hotel. Did the police tell him, or did he tell them? Like his godforsaken associates, Michael Maybrick spat nothing but lies. Everybody, and most especially James, knew about Florence’s adultery. Dr Hopper knew about it. John Baillie Knight knew about it. Charles Ratcliffe knew about it, writing to John Aunspaugh, ‘James had got wind of the Flatman’s Hotel business.’ But Michael had to deny that James had any such knowledge, because it would have exposed the infamous letter to Brierley for the forgery it was. ‘Jim informed Michael last month,’ wrote Florence in her letter to Dr Hopper, admitting once again that she ‘had sinned’. The point is an important one, and worth reiteration: no way could she have written to Brierley in May that ‘he [James] is perfectly ignorant of everything’, when James had told Michael all about it in April. And curious it is that along with ‘Blucher’ this letter to Hopper was yet another text denied to the gentlemen of the jury.
The ability to manipulate comes with the credentials of a psychopath, and this can clearly be read in the behaviour of those converted into heartless automatons at Battlecrease House. It wasn’t too much of a challenge. All stood to gain from the indulgence of Michael’s hatred, which according to Florence Aunspaugh was primed for just such a trigger. Briggs hated the slut because she’d purloined James and then run off to fuck some other wretch. She had fucked Edwin, fucked some solicitor in London, and now Briggs was going to fuck her.
Yapp’s share of the hatred was similarly primitive. She hurled insults at the helpless woman as she lay abandoned in her own filth. A request for water was met with, ‘Get up and get it yourself.’ Yapp was as pitiless as her homicidal mentor, and flaunted her reward: ‘She has made good use of her position to possess herself of many of Mrs Maybrick’s dresses and such like, and in court, she actually had with her an umbrella which was the property of Mrs Maybrick.’102
And what of James’s clothes? In the prosecution’s quest for arsenic (no matter how insignificant), inordinate effort was made to exhume various body parts from six feet under. But what of such enterprise of the defence? What of half a dozen waistcoats hanging in James Maybrick’s closet? If the City Analyst could paw his way through jars of the deceased’s viscera looking for arsenic, could not the indefatigable Irishman have spared a glance into one or two of his pockets? It was a waistcoat pocket that was specifically referred to by Dalgleish in his deposition to Coroner Brighouse. Both the Cleaver brothers and Sir Charles Russell were well aware of it, but had no more interest in arsenic (or arsenic residuals) than they had in Dalgleish himself.
Such scandalous insouciance did not apply to the New York Herald. In a series of questions to Home Secretary Matthews, it had asked, ‘Do you know where Mr Maybrick’s clothes are? Do you appreciate the tremendous importance of these clothes in this case? Do you know that one white powder (or perhaps fifteen thousandths of a grain of one) would have saved Mrs Maybrick’s life?’
It was the usual waste of ink. Matthews wasn’t going to trouble himself with facts. The pleas and petitions for Mrs Maybrick’s release, and the presentation of fresh evidence that should have secured it, hit a wall as impenetrable as the granite incarcerating her. It didn’t matter what the newspapers wrote, what Macdougall wrote, or what the wife of the President of the United States wrote – they believed this innocent woman was all there was between themselves and an Establishment catastrophe. Cleveland Street was a pleasure in comparison. Thus, nothing made any impression on Her Majesty’s henchmen, or on Michael Maybrick either. They kept this young woman in hell so this old woman could get on with the grinning.
In 1892 Henry Matthews moved his worthless arse out of the Home Office, and Michael Maybrick also moved house. He relocated from his apartments at Clarence Gate, Regent’s Park, to a snazzy residence half a mile north, at 52 Wellington Road, St John’s Wood, Marylebone. Not long after the move (with an apparent loss of interest in Whitechapel but referencing Maybrick’s new postal district), the Ripper mailed one of his now infrequent scrawls.
Its receipt was reported by Reynold’s News: ‘An unstamped letter, for which 2d had to be paid, was received at Marylebone Police Court on Wednesday, addressed to The Boss, Police Court, Marylebone. Its contents were as follows: “March 21st, Jack the Ripper – I am just about to commence my tricks at Regent’s Park, and will give myself up when I’ve finished.”’103 In other words, the letter refers to the neighbourhood Maybrick had just left and the one he had just moved into – Regent’s Park and Marylebone respectively.
Meanwhile, the famous composer must have looked about his new property with a good deal of satisfaction. It was a large villa in one of London’s most salubrious quarters (Santley lived just around the corner), and he was making shedloads of money. This was in fact the year he hit the really big one. With ‘Nancy Lee’ in 1876 and ‘The Holy City’ in 1892, we can bookend the Weatherly/Adams partnership. The first made Maybrick a star. With the second he’d put down a score that was to become the single most popular song of the nineteenth century. ‘The Holy City’ outsold all the rest of his compositions put together; in sheet music alone it sold over a million copies, leaving Sir Arthur Sullivan and the rest staring after it. ‘Though I must not boast of such things,’ boasted Maybrick, ‘“The Holy City” has had as large, if not larger, sale of any contemporary song ever written.’104 It filled the Boosey coffers, and Maybrick’s ego was on afterburn. He was a man at the summit of fame, basking in radiance – or as his niece chose to put it, ‘raised to the celestial plains’.
And then he disappeared.
Michael Maybrick went up the gangplank with the velocity of Lord Arthur Somerset at the height of the Cleveland Street scandal. Apart from a couple of abortive appearances in 1893, he bailed out of London, slammed the door on his gilded high life, and crept away to marry a forty-year-old butcher’s daughter from Hammersmith.
No beauty, but he didn’t care for that sort of thing in women anyway, or much for the rest of it. They married on 9 March 1893 in a register office in Marylebone, wi
th Dr Fuller and his wife (who now fostered Florence’s kids) as witnesses. Laura Withers had been Michael Maybrick’s housekeeper in a house she would never get to live in as its mistress. The newlyweds had already set up home at a spread called ‘Lynthorpe’ on the Isle of Wight, where Maybrick would live in self-imposed exile for the remaining nineteen years of his life.
Sounds a bit odd, don’t it? Especially for a man who liked limelight and arse? It was as if McCartney had vanished into wilful obscurity after ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Hey Jude’.
But something more extraordinary yet was simultaneously in progress. Everyone who knew him forgot that they ever had. Even his most enduring friends were struck with a stultifying amnesia concerning the name Michael Maybrick. It was stripped from the corporate memory. A most intriguing facet of this phenomenon was Maybrick’s own participation, because he enabled it, actively going about the business of shedding his name like a serpent sheds its skin. Just as Bro James was relieved of his Freemasonic past, so too was Bro Michael extirpated from his musical world.
This wasn’t just leaving London. It was a rout from his association with everything in it. Within a very few weeks he had detached the name Maybrick from every aspect of his social, musical and Masonic affiliations, resigning from the Artists Volunteers, the Savage Club, the Philharmonic Society, the Arts Club, and the Orpheus and St George’s chapters. The shouting was over. At the apogee of his triumph with ‘The Holy City’, Michael Maybrick transformed himself from a celebrity as hot as Sullivan into an anonymous recluse married to a fat woman on the Isle of Wight.
Odd, ain’t it?
Some might even call it a mystery, but I think it more likely to be an extension of the 1892 shutdown. The Hawk didn’t bolt its door by accident; Asquith didn’t deny Mrs Maybrick’s meagre concessions by accident, any more than the British government terminated all further diplomatic exchange with the USA in respect of her imprisonment.
I was of the view that these sanctions were somehow connected with Maybrick’s concomitant and summary evaporation. In short, I didn’t believe it was Michael Maybrick who had disappeared into obscurity, but Bro Jack the Ripper. I thought that something had spooked them,* and that the System that had formerly been so accommodating now had urgent reason to see the back of him.
Miss Fanny Davies, the pianist and regular amongst those who performed at Toynbee Hall, took over Michael’s lease and moved into the house at St John’s Wood. Apart from entries in forgotten rate-books there is little now to remember it. The house is long since demolished, and there is no record of Michael’s sojourn there, who he entertained, or indeed what its interior looked like. But I got luckier with the house on the island. A distant relative of Laura Withers had been traced to Connecticut, and thanks to her generosity I was able to acquire photographs of the interior of ‘Lynthorpe’.
The picture opposite was taken in the 1920s, after Maybrick’s death. His widow had wired the place for electricity, but in Michael’s day it was lit with oil lamps and candles. At intervals these glum rooms were underscored with the resonance of an organ. Michael kept it in his study, and kept his study door locked. Apart from the sombre music, virtually nothing was heard of Michael Maybrick for the next seven years.
Michael’s brother Edwin’s daughter, Amy Maine, supplies one of the few insights into life at Lynthorpe that we have. As a little girl she was sent there for her summer holidays, and dreaded every moment of it. ‘Michael wasn’t fond of children,’ she said, ‘and didn’t want anything to do with them.’ Children were to be seen (as infrequently as possible) and never heard.
Amy’s bedroom in the attic was above Michael’s, and if she arose too early and made a noise on the floorboards, ‘my Aunt came up in her dressing gown and very upset because she said I must go back to bed at once or it would wake my Uncle and he’d be upset for the whole day’. Her memories of Laura were scant. Once attractive, or so Amy had been told, she was now hefty, with khaki-coloured hair. ‘She was of a very ordinary family, really,’ and definitely not the kind of date Michael would have been comfortable with at the Café Royal. Amy was allowed bread and jam, or bread and butter at tea-time, but never bread, butter and jam, and that just about sums this place up. ‘All the Maybricks were very cold,’ said Amy, ‘very formal.’ The house itself was cold, ‘heated in winter by an oil-stove of some kind in the dining room’. She remembers her uncle as ‘vain, arrogant, dictatorial’ and bereft of friends. Maybrick spent most of the day in his study, and she doesn’t recall any visitors. He was a member of a local cycling club but didn’t own a bike, a member of the yacht club but didn’t have a boat. He never talked about his past, his interest in the Artists Volunteers or his life as a singer, and never spoke of Freemasonry.
As the lamps were lit, more often than not there was an after-dinner ritual, when all would troop into the hall to listen to Michael’s choice of music. ‘He was one of the first people on the island to own a gramophone. He was sent one by Boosey’s because he wrote to them complaining that some of his songs had been recorded out of context. To pacify him they gave him a very beautiful gramophone, and he would bring records out in the evening, and we sat in the sort of alcove in the hall, and he played these records – very, very long pauses between, while he dusted each record with a silk handkerchief or a camel-hair brush. It all had to be very proper. My aunt lay on the couch and went to sleep. She wasn’t musical at all.’
It is a portrait of excruciating stagnation: a provincial Hausfrau dozing in her bulk, a bored little girl on a chair, and a forlorn murderer dusting off his Mozart through endless Victorian evenings, gramophone records his only friends.
‘Michael is an enigma,’ writes Shirley Harrison. ‘He is hardly ever mentioned in the diaries or reminiscences of many of his famous contemporaries.’105 I think Mrs Harrison may well have invented a new definition for the word ‘understatement’.
It might be argued that hardly anybody in our day has ever heard of other celebrated Victorian performers like Santley, Ganz or Frederick Weatherly. The difference between them and Michael Maybrick is that if you want to discover them, you simply have to look. There are comprehensive archives. All have written books or had books written about them.
Michael Maybrick wrote nothing, and nobody wrote anything about him. The nearest we get is a memoir by Weatherly, written thirteen years after Maybrick’s exit, wherein a lifetime of association merits little more than a page. The Trinity College of Music has never heard of its former Vice President: ‘There is nothing in the Jerwood Library, including the Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection, on this singer/composer, and we have no record of the Maybrick (Ballad) Prize.’106 Not a scrap either in the National Archives: its collection of ‘Opera Singers, Vocalists, Singers, in the P.R.O. Archive of Photographs (1863/1913)’ doesn’t have a scintilla of Michael Maybrick. Ditto the three-volume Two Centuries of Music in Liverpool. You may as well look in the non-record records of the Arts Club, or for that matter the nothing at Toynbee Hall.
I’ve wasted more hours than I care to mention searching for the elusive name, returning time after time to the archives of great and insignificant libraries, scouring the indexes and peering past closing time into the footnotes of Christ knows how many thousands of books. I wasn’t alone. I had endless assistance, most notably from an insider at the greatest library on earth. My contact at the British Library went way beyond the call of duty. He trawled the collections, accessed avenues of shelves, hunting for the name Michael Maybrick. But he found just about nothing. ‘It’s been a virtually fruitless task going through the various memoirs we have here,’ he wrote, making the point with an awesome list of titles. ‘George R. Sims’ My Life was the only book in which I found any mention of Michael Maybrick.’107 Bro Sims sets a very low standard and precedent for the rest. He remembers Maybrick, but only as some sort of transient at a funeral in 1877. It was reminiscent of James and his Freemasonry; or if you will, James and his arsenic. Sir Charles Russell could discover no
one beyond the 1870s who would confirm he even took it, and I could find no one beyond that same decade who would admit to knowing Michael Maybrick.
Stuck in the same time-warp, Russell’s buddy Bro Ganz does no better, blacking out in 1876. His autobiography Memories of a Musician was published in 1913. Although it overflows with anecdote for everyone in Maybrick’s circle – Santley, Sims Reeves, Sullivan et al. – the best he can do for the man himself is to rake up a forty-year-old memory: ‘I was first to accompany him,’ he recalls, ‘at a concert at Stratford in Essex.’108 The song was ‘Nancy Lee’, and that’s it for Bro Ganz. It seems to have entirely slipped his mind that he was one of Maybrick’s closest friends, accompanying him at innumerable concerts throughout the 1880s, most especially at St James’s Hall in London.
It had also slipped his mind that he was an enthusiastic member of Orpheus Lodge, where on Saturday, 30 October 1880, Michael Maybrick was installed as Worshipful Master. Among those present were some of Maybrick’s dearest, including Masonic Secretary to the Prince of Wales Colonel Thomas Shadwell Clerke, William Hayman Cummings (of whom more in a moment), and the absent-minded Bro Wilhelm Ganz. Ganz was yet another groupie of the Prince, ‘a personal friend’, according to Bro T.G.E. Sheddon, ‘and of the Royal Family, many of whom he taught at St James’s Palace … He was the accompanist par excellence of his day and played for all the best singers’109 – which, at risk of a lousy segue, puts him back on stage with his pal Michael Maybrick: ‘Bro Wilhelm Ganz’s Matinee Musicals were held at the Marlborough Rooms on Tuesday last [in July 1882] the attendance being such as might be expected on such an occasion. Madame Antoinette Stirling, Miss Santley, and Bro Michael Maybrick were principal vocalists, Bro Ganz [accompanying on] piano.’
They All Love Jack Page 78