It is a paradox of this narrative that before investigating a murderer, we must investigate the policeman who was pretending to hunt him.
London’s Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, Sir Charles Warren, was a forty-eight-year-old ex-military man and a Freemasonic obsessive. He was a lousy cop and a worse soldier;2 his God inclined to the hard right – probably something like Kitchener in freshly laundered clouds. Warren was an aggressive authoritarian who imagined all social ills could be solved with a truncheon. If you were superfluous to the System – sick, unemployed or Irish, for example – then you weren’t much better than a wog. In 1887 he went berserk on the back of a horse in London’s West End, and shafted the riff-raff as if he was up a delta in Matabeleland.
In was in Africa only two years before that Warren had lost the plot. The Prime Minister didn’t have a lot of time for ethnics, but so alarmed was Salisbury at Warren’s ‘overzealousness’ in Bechuanaland Protectorate that in September 1885 he personally recalled him. ‘His continuance in power was a real danger,’3 Salisbury wrote, and this ‘danger’ returned to London to be appointed Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
Like many in politics with energetic mouths, the Establishment had created the very circumstance it most feared. Without enough war to soak up the rabble, the plebs were getting frisky. On Sunday, 13 November 1887 a huge contingent of the Untermenschen, the starving and exasperated underclass, had descended on Trafalgar Square.
Warren’s intention was to kick them back to the slums where they belonged. Twelve hundred troops and sabre-wielding cavalry supplemented an army of truncheon-wielding cops. ‘I’ve never seen such police brutality,’ recalled Karl Marx’s daughter – but then, she would say that, wouldn’t she. Notwithstanding that, Warren’s subsequent replacement as Police Commissioner James Monro summed up the inevitable consequences of trusting anything on the street to his colleague. ‘I am bound to say,’ he wrote, ‘Sir C. Warren was just the man to have injudiciously, in some way or other, caused the very panic I was anxious to avoid.’4 Dozens were injured, and at least one man lost his life.
Warren managed to close down Trafalgar Square, but it’s perhaps worth noting that just a year later, in the dead of night, with not a mouse about, he was to claim that he couldn’t shut down a doorway in the East End. We shall be coming to the lamentable events of Goulston Street by and by.
The Establishment lauded Warren for his violence, and he went down on a knee for his Queen in May 1888. ‘Among the recipients of honours,’ beamed the weekly The Freemason, ‘were … Bro Sir Charles Warren, who was invested with the insignia of KCB [Knight of the Bath].’
Not everyone was quite so delighted. ‘In a single twelvemonth,’ reported the Daily News,
the martinet whose record of meddling and muddling extends over a good part of the British Empire, has destroyed the good feeling between the London police and the public, and replaced it by a feeling of bitter antagonism. It is not a case of Trafalgar Square only; that would be bad enough. But what the Square did wholesale, Sir CHARLES’s men, under the brutal initiative from Scotland Yard, have done in detail. During the last few weeks hardly a day has passed when some constable has not been convicted of gross insult and harshness to some peaceful inhabitant, supported by still grosser perjury. The London Magistrates have for the most part given up the police and rejected their evidence as worthless. The moral Miracle has become the Miracle of Lying … Major General Sir CHARLES WARREN, K.C.B., G.C.M.G., was far too lofty a personage to look after petty larcenies and street inebriates. His first Pyrrhic victory in bludgeoning the people out of the Square intoxicated him, and henceforth we have had nothing but a carnival of perjury, violence and discontent.
This condemnation of police ‘perjury’ and ‘lying’ was published on 1 September 1888, only a matter of days before Jack got his show on the street. We shall see how the perjury and lying escalated by increment as the assassin got into his stride.
I haven’t got much in the way of compliments for Warren as a policeman, but he must sincerely be celebrated in the arena in which he excelled. All too often he is characterised as an authoritarian disaster. Although merit attaches to the vignette, it is ultimately shallow, hawked by authors who interminably reiterate the content of each other’s books. By this corporate myopia they miss a fundamental that all but defines motive in the Ripper’s thinking. Warren was a ‘martinet’, sure, as Ripperology never tires of telling us. But he was also a talented and undeniably brave archaeologist, and it was Warren underground that was of subliminal interest to Jack.
As a young man, Captain Warren of the Royal Engineers was motivated by a duo of passions. It distorts neither to construe them as one. They were, as he saw them, the complementary sciences of Biblical and Freemasonic research. He was driven to prove that Freemasonry was of similar stuff to the Bible, and that by investigation of one, the other could somehow be validated. Such wishful thinking came together in the Holy Land, and here Warren is, in his own words, exploring a 3,000-year-old subterranean conduit in the guts of Jerusalem:
The water was running with great violence, one foot in height, and we, crawling full-length, were up to our necks in it, one hand necessarily wet and dirty, the other holding a pencil, compass, and field book, the candle for the most part in my mouth. Another fifty feet brought us to a place where we had to run the gauntlet of the waters, the passage being only one foot four inches high, we had just four inches of breathing space.5
Warren was digging his way into the Old Testament under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund. The PEF had been funded by various worthies and religious executives, including the Freemasons, as ‘a Society for the accurate and systematic investigation of the Archaeology, the Topography, the Geology and Physical Geography, the Manners and Customs of the Holy Land, for Biblical instruction’. Founded in 1865, its membership grew rapidly, with signatures that would include a roll-call of notables, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the great sculptor/painter Sir Frederick Leighton.
From its inception the Society had an advocate of ‘burning enthusiasm’ in its co-founder and first secretary, the forty-four-year-old George Grove. Trained originally as an engineer, Grove emerged as one of the Great Victorians, a man capable of transforming enthusiasm into practicality in whatever area his humanity pleased. He was said to have known much of the Bible by heart, thus it was natural for him to write a Concordance, plus about 1,000 pages of the Standard Bible Dictionary. If it interested him, Grove got it done. ‘His work from first to last,’ wrote the novelist and historian Walter Besant, ‘was literally a labour of love.’
Knighted in 1883, Sir George Grove comes out of the nineteenth century like an engine of benevolence. His infatuation with all things musical brought London its Royal College of Music, and his Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1879–89) is still internationally recognised as the standard work on the subject. ‘I have always been a mere amateur in music,’ he claimed with customary modesty. ‘I wrote about symphonies and concertos because I wished to try and make