There is a reference in the Diary, probably entered in March 1888, to a communication from brother Thomas requesting Maybrick to meet him in Manchester, where Thomas lived in the suburb of Moss Side. He was then manager of the Manchester Packing Company. Maybrick apparently agreed, although his mind was already preoccupied with matters other than business.
Tomorrow I travel to Manchester. Will take some of my medicine and think hard on the matter… I will force myself not to think of the children…
Time is passing much too slowly. I still have to work up the courage to begin my campaign. I have thought long and hard over the matter and still I cannot come to a decision when I should begin. Opportunity is there, of that fact I am certain… My medicine is doing me good, in fact I am sure I can take more than any other person alive.
Just as Maybrick used Michael and Witt as his ‘cover’ for his journeys to London, so Thomas provided a reason for a business trip to Manchester. The train to Manchester ran direct from Aigburth Station and the journey took just over an hour. It was there, in Manchester, that the Diary suggests Maybrick tried his first murder.
My dear God my mind is in a fog. The whore is now with her maker and he is welcome to her. There was no pleasure as I squeezed. I felt nothing. Do not know if I have the courage to go back to my original idea. Manchester was cold and damp very much like this hell hole. Next time I will throw acid over them.
According to David Forshaw such behavioural ‘try-outs’ are common. Studies of a number of psychopathic patients have shown them to be preoccupied with sadistic sexual fantasies. ‘Over time’ he explains, ‘these became more extreme and they started to act out parts of the fantasy… For example, following potential victims.’
If Dr Forshaw is correct and the Manchester murder was a ‘try-out’ which gave Maybrick no pleasure, this would account for the fact that in the Diary he refers only to the aspect of killing which really thrilled him — the cutting and ripping.
Police records are incomplete, coroners’ records have been destroyed and, so far, we have found no murder in Manchester in February or March 1888. Henry Mayhew, in his classic London Labour and London Poor (first published in 1851 and reprinted many times) estimated there were probably 80,000 prostitutes working in London alone and a strangulation in Manchester would not have merited more than a simple routine investigation. Even the vicious murder of Emma Smith, who was mutilated in London in April 1888, was not widely reported.
In the Manchester attack the Diarist is acting entirely as could be expected of a potential serial killer. But if the Diary has been forged, its author is laying banana skins in his path by daring to weave fact and fiction together into the story.
From the beginning Maybrick is compelled to record his thoughts and deeds on paper. David Forshaw says his language is that of a man playing games, perversely giving himself confidence by pretending to be less clever than he is. There is a morbid delight in distorting grammar, in solecisms and in word play.
It is not uncommon for intelligent, but insecure people to adopt a less educated personality on paper. There are many errors of spelling, grammar and punctuation which appear to play no part in the Diary’s verbal games. While these may well be part of the less educated persona Maybrick adopted, they could result from genuinely modest schooling, for Maybrick was a self-made man with no pretensions to learning.
The entire undertaking was dangerous, of course, which is probably why it was easier for Maybrick to write in the security of his office, away from the prying eyes of his family and servants. After several entries he speaks of ‘returning’, presumably to Battlecrease House, and there is nothing to contradict the idea that the whole Diary was written in Knowsley Buildings. Even here he would have needed to exercise extreme caution to protect his secret from his book-keeper, George Smith, or his young clerk, Thomas Lowry.
If Smith should find this then I am done before my campaign begins… I am beginning to believe it is unwise to continue writing. If I am to down a whore then nothing shall lead the persuers [sic] back to me and yet there are times when I feel an overwhelming compulsion to place my thoughts to paper…. However, the pleasure of writing off all that lays ahead of me… thrills me so. And oh what deeds I shall comit. For how could one suspect that I could be capable of such things, for am I not, as all believe, a mild man, who, it has been said would never hurt a fly.
Thomas Lowry, the 19-year-old clerk, son of a Liverpool clog maker had, in 1888, been with Maybrick and Co for five years. He played no part in his employer’s personal life, at least on the face of it.
His appearance as a witness for the prosecution at Florie’s trial was short and contained no clues as to his relationship with Maybrick. So, once again, the Diary enters into the dangerous realm of fiction, describing apparently historic events but which any good researcher might later debunk with facts. Mrs Hammersmith is another example. The Diary refers twice to a Mrs Hammersmith but on the second occasion the name is unclear and seems to be spelt differently. Who was the mysterious Mrs Hammersmith whom Maybrick says he ‘encountered’ in the drive?
Hammersmith is a very unusual surname. We could find no Hammersmiths in the Liverpool street directories of the time. Robert Louis Stevenson mentions a Major Hammersmith in his book The Suicide Club.
If this document is not the work of Maybrick, then its author is again writing with the imagination of a novelist. There is a dramatic episode with Lowry which similarly cannot be sourced in any newspaper or book. It is powerful and leaves us longing to know more. Its very simplicity is convincing. A forger would have been tempted to embellish.
If I could have killed the bastard Lowry with my bare hands there and then I would have done so. How dare he question me on any matter, it is I that should question him. Damn him damn him damn him. Should I replace the missing items? No that would be too much of a risk. Should I destroy this? My God I will kill him. Give him no reason and order him poste haste [sic] to drop the matter, that I believe is the only course of action I can take. I will force myself to think of something more pleasant.
Whatever the interfering young Lowry had said or done had placed him in more danger than he realised. He seems to have known far more than was good for him. But exactly what did he know? Whatever the ‘missing items’ were and whatever the ‘matter’ was, Lowry’s appearance is completely convincing. For a second the office door to Maybrick and Co is ajar and we catch a fleeting glimpse of a dark corner of Maybrick’s personality; one which the scandal-hungry press never reported. It is the same James Maybrick that Florence Aunspaugh saw threatening Nurse Yapp but did not reveal until she was an old lady.
* * *
There was a regular train service from Liverpool to London Euston and Willesden Junction and the journey took about five hours. When there James sometimes went to fashionable Regents Park where he stayed with his brother. Michael’s neighbours in Wellington Mansions included an editor, an artist, a fine-art publisher, three comedians and Arthur Wing Pinero, the famous dramatist.
Maybrick was not relaxed in the company of his arrogant, self-satisfied younger brother, but the Regents Park chambers were comfortable and convenient and provided a base for visiting Michael’s friend, Dr Charles Fuller, in his endless quest for medicaments.
I will visit Michael this coming June. June is such a pleasant month, the flowers are in full bud, the air is sweeter and life is almost certainly much rosier. I look forward to its coming with pleasure. A great deal of pleasure.
June, to which he looked forward so much, started disappointingly unsettled and wet that year, but by the end of the month a heatwave brought water rationing to Liverpool. Commerce was fair — ‘steady but idle’ was how the newspapers put it.
According to the Diary, James went to see Michael with the idea of starting his ‘campaign’ but something went wrong. He was not ready; he had not laid his plans carefully enough although the urge to strike was becoming almost too much for him to control. Indeed he was force
d to resort to using Michael as his jailer.
How I succeeded in controlling myself I do not know. I have not allowed for the red stuff, gallons of it in my estimation. Some of it is bound to spill onto me. I cannot allow my clothes to be be blood drenched, this I could not explain to anyone, least of all Michael. Why did I not think of this before? I curse myself. The struggle to stop myself was overwhelming and if I had not asked Michael to lock me in my bedroom for fear of sleepwalking, to which I had said I had been prone to do recently, was that not clever? I would have done my dirty deeds that very night.
How Michael, almost alone, was able to testify later that he never saw James take drugs or knew of his habit, is inconceivable. For reasons best known to himself he must have been hiding what he knew to be the truth.
We know from the medical evidence at Florie’s trial that her husband was in an increasing state of panic about his health that June and this is clear too from the Diary. His usual hypochondria fuelled a craving for medical attention and a downward spiral of drug abuse. Between June and September he paid about 20 visits to Dr Arthur Hopper of Rodney Street, the family physician. He complained of violent headaches that had begun in June, around the time of the Royal Ascot race meeting, along with the numbness in his feet and legs.
Had the advantages of modern science been available to Dr Hopper, he would have realised that his patient’s health was in a dangerous condition. But the doctor was sceptical and unsympathetic about Maybrick’s hypochondria, as well as irritated that his patient was dosing himself between visits with remedies recommended by friends. One of these, Fellows’ Syrup, was a brew containing arsenic, strychnine, quinine, iron and hypophosphites. Maybrick also doubled the dose of Dr Hopper’s prescriptions when he felt they were having no effect. The doctor warned him that he would ‘do himself a great injury’.
Strychnine pills were formerly sold widely for a variety of medical purposes, especially as a tonic or an aphrodisiac. Their long term effects have never been studied according to doctors at the Poisons Unit at Guy’s Hospital, London. Pills containing strychnine are no longer marketed and are considered ineffective and dangerous. However, the substance is sometimes used to ‘cut’, or increase the volume of, street drugs such as amphetamines. Its presence in the body can result in excessive neuron activity although, under strict medical supervision, it has a participatory role in the treatment of impotence, among other complaints.
James Maybrick used strychnine pills recklessly, like sweets. Once Maybrick gave Dr Hopper some prescriptions written for him by Dr Seguin in New York, a city he had often passed through on business. They were for strychnine and nux vomica, a strychnine-based medicine popular with Victorians that was also used as an aphrodisiac.
Dr Hopper destroyed them. ‘I thought he was seriously hipped’, he said at Florie’s trial, explaining that this meant Maybrick ‘attached too much importance to trifling symptoms.’
At Easter there was a family holiday at the Hand Hotel, in Wales and in July, at the doctor’s suggestion, Maybrick went off to take the waters at Harrogate Spa, Yorkshire. He booked into the Queen Hotel, a modest establishment, and his name was duly recorded in the Visitors’ Register, a regular feature in the Harrogate Advertiser. He stayed there, alone, for four days.
Goodwood Races at the beginning of August were a social must for the Maybricks. They journeyed together down to the gloriously situated racecourse in Sussex, where they met John Baillie Knight, Florie’s childhood friend and his Aunts Margaret and Harriet Baillie, who were friends of the Baroness. Afterwards they all dined together at the Italian Exhibition in Kensington, London.
The Misses Baillie, who owned property and industrial premises in London, had first become acquainted with the Baroness and her daughter at a small hotel in Switzerland. Florie had stayed with them several times as a girl and they visited Liverpool after her marriage. They later told their nephew that they had noticed all was not well between the Maybricks. John and Florie did not meet again until 1889, but she wrote to him several times and confided her unhappiness at her husband’s infidelities.
Such domestic details are hardly described in the Diary which focusses only on the relentless progress of his campaign of terror. Thoughts of murder and little else obsessed him and drove him to use it as a confessional.
* * *
On August 6th — Bank Holiday Monday — at the same time as Maybrick was in the South with Florie, a prostitute, Martha Tabram, was murdered in Whitechapel, London. She had been out drinking and looking for men in the evening. At 4.50 the next morning she was found in a pool of blood on the first floor landing of George Yard Building. She had suffered 39 stab wounds, mainly to her breasts, stomach and genitals.
Many Ripperologists believe that Martha was killed by an unidentified soldier — the Guards private who was her last client. But the press and police decided that she and Emma Smith, who had been murdered on April Bank Holiday Monday were victims of the same man. When the terror began in earnest that autumn, they linked Martha Tabram and Emma Smith with the Whitechapel killings of Jack the Ripper. At the time, the public believed they were all committed by the same maniac.
Some time during August, several weeks after his last stay with Michael, Maybrick went down to London again. But this time the Diary says that he rented a room in Whitechapel.
TOMORROW I WILL PURCHASE THE FINEST KNIFE MONEY CAN BUY, NOTHING SHALL BE TOO GOOD FOR MY WHORES.
I have taken a small room in Middlesex Street, that in itself is a joke. I have paid well and I believe no questions will be asked. It is indeed an ideal location. I have walked the streets and have become more than familiar with them …I have no doubts, my confidence is most high. I am thrilled writing this, life is sweet, and my disappointment has vanished. Next time for sure.
Middlesex Street is today better known as Petticoat Lane, site of the famous London street market. After the first two murders the police concluded that the murderer must have had a hideaway somewhere in the vicinity but no one has yet found it. The Diary’s suggestion that Middlesex Street was the location could explain the Ripper’s ability to move freely around the neighbourhood, an easy place in which a stranger could have gone to ground.
Nearby, according to the street directory of 1888, lived Mrs Polly Nathan, who ran the fish and chip shop; Solran Berlinski, a rag merchant; George Bolam, cowkeeper; Isaac Woolf, a dealer in playing cards, and Samuel Barnett who ran the coffee rooms.
Why Middlesex Street was a joke we can only guess. Perhaps Maybrick liked its titillating name. Or perhaps it was because Middlesex Street was the commercial centre for London’s Jewish Community and therefore the focus of anti-semitic unrest. Maybrick had already made it clear in the Diary that he was no friend of the Jews.
Why not let the Jews suffer? I have never taken to them, far too many of them on the Exchange for my liking.
Towards the end of his life, however, he seems to have felt remorse over this prejudice. After meeting a former colleague on the Exchange floor, he wrote:
I felt regret for was he not Jewish. I had forgotten how many Jewish friends I have. My revenge is on whores not Jews.
There are a number of genuine reasons why Middlesex Street was a good choice as a hideout. It was reasonably close to the office of Gustavus Witt but, more importantly, the boundary between the rival Metropolitan Police and the City Police lay down the centre of Middlesex Street. It would not have been too difficult to profit from a conflict of interests and tease the police by border-hopping from side to side.
Before the 19th century, Whitechapel was an area of respectable merchants and quiet prosperity. But by 1888 the area had declined. The dingy back yards and stinking, rubbish-littered alleys surrounding Middlesex Street were over-populated and violent. There were hundreds of lodging houses where, for threepence a night, a bed could be bought in a fetid, unheated room. Those with no money slept in gutters or in stairwells. Families squeezed, seven to a tiny room, with one bed and broken, rag-plugged
windows. There was a choking stench of urine, mildew and rotting fruit, vegetables and fish. There were at least 1,200 ‘unfortunates’ working the area. Like so many Victorian working class women, they were mostly old before their time, worn out by inhuman conditions, poverty, beatings and drink.
On August 18th, less than two weeks before the first attack in Whitechapel, Maybrick’s brother Edwin left for America, aboard the SS Adriatic. Dr Forshaw believes this is significant. Emotionally, the absence of the devoted younger brother would have left James free from restraint. Effectively, there was no one looking over his shoulder when he said that he was off to London on business. And so the scene was set.
At 12.30 a.m. on Friday August 31st, Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly, left the Frying Pan public house in Brick Lane, Whitechapel, and walked into history. Polly Nichols had been refused lodgings at 18 Thrawl Street but, undeterred, was overheard saying: ‘I’ll soon get my doss [rent] money.’ She went off, wearing a ‘jolly new bonnet’, to earn her bed for the night. She looked young for a woman in her early forties and Dr Rees Ralph Llewellyn, who eventually examined her body, commented on the ‘surprising cleanliness of her thighs’. But she was an alcoholic, and drink and lodgings had to be paid for.
Polly Nichols was seen by at least three people, wandering the murky streets, looking for a customer in need of a ‘fourpenny knee trembler’. The clock on the parish church of St Mary Matfellon struck 2.30 a.m. as she staggered off along Whitechapel Road. There she must have met her killer. By 3.40 that morning she was dead.
The Diary of Jack the Ripper - The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick Page 10