It’s here the narrative gels. Because Clarence wasn’t well known for his intellect, a ‘brain’ is brought in to implement the plan. This was the property of Sir William Gull, erstwhile physician to Her Majesty, and a Freemason, although he didn’t know it. Further empiricisms militate against Gull in his role as the world’s most famous co-murderer. Not only are his Masonic credentials unproven, he was also so ill he could hardly get out of bed. Theorists tend not to entangle themselves in unwelcome technicalities, so Gull’s well-publicised infirmities could have been a cunning subterfuge to draw attention away from the reality of a seventy-one-year-old half-paralysed homicidal maniac suffering multiple strokes.
A driver called Netley was hired, disguises may well have been worn, and off they went to the East End. Absolute secrecy was paramount, of course. If this had got out it would have been as shattering a scandal as the one they were trying to conceal. But the plan already creaked under inherent weaknesses that had apparently gone unnoticed. If your desire is to maintain anonymity, it probably isn’t a good idea to excite the attention of 13,000 policemen and half the world’s press. But we can put this lapse down to Gull’s stroke. He also suffered from epilepsy, an attack of which would not have been ideal in the middle of trying to cut someone’s throat.
Nothing of this absurd chronicle, subsequently expanded to include the artist Walter Sickert (a relative of Annie Crook’s), has anything whatsoever to do with the Ripper. I read somewhere that a Sickert canvas has been interfered with in the hope of matching his DNA with the Ripper correspondence. I imagine this was fruitless, particularly as those letters have been handled by the equivalent of the entire Third Reich.
At a glance, this Clarence/Gull nonsense has all the ingredients of a transparent ruse (not from Knight, but from those who put him up to it). It reads like something set up so someone else can knock it down. There’s an air of Br’er Rabbit about it – ‘Please don’t throw me in the bramble patch,’ when in the brambles is exactly where our crafty rabbit most longed to be. In other words, ‘Please don’t accuse me of being the Ripper,’ when that’s precisely what certain not entirely impartial individuals most wished for.
When I set about researching this book I wasn’t thinking, ‘How can I have a go at Freemasonry?’ Nothing could have been further from my mind. I knew no more about it then than I knew about the Ripper himself. Had I discovered that virtually every name associated with my research had been a Jehovah’s Witness, I would have read every scrap I could find on Jehovah and whoever had witnessed what on his behalf. Had the history suggested a Seventh Day Adventist, a Catholic, Hindu, atheist or Jew, the procedure would have been the same. But everything I read escalated my consideration of Freemasonry.
There’s a website on the internet that proffers instructions for the Freemason on ‘How to field questions implicating Freemasonry in the crimes of Jack the Ripper’, or something like that, and that’s where I think Masons show a little too much ankle. I get it for the Victorians, but why is anyone bothered today? We’re talking about a time when Stanley was still in Africa, Utah wasn’t yet a state, and the Eiffel Tower was but three-quarters built. Isn’t it time to open the curtains?
Christianity is full of assassins. I could name a dozen Jesus monsters without leaving my chair. In my view, if anyone should have a defensive website, it’s the British Council of Jews. More Jews have been denigrated, slandered and falsely accused of these crimes than any other group on earth. I am not Jewish any more than I am an enemy of Freemasonry. My point is that modern Masonry is no more to blame for the crimes of Jack the Ripper than is the Catholic Church for the horrors of Gilles de Rais. Nobody ever treated Freemasonry with more contempt than Jack the Ripper. He is an ulcer in its belly. He made good men into fools and took joy at the doing, made liars out of everyone, and made Freemasonry his ridiculous dupe.
An ethos of institutionalised deceit serves to shroud this aberration. The website poses potentially hostile questions, and gives guidelines of suitable responses for the flustered Freemason.
1) Every allegation of Masonic involvement in the Ripper murders is based entirely on a story that Stephen Knight claims he was told by Joseph Sickert [the painter’s illegitimate grandson, so the story goes]. But in the Sunday Times on 18 June 1978 Sickert said of this story, ‘It was a hoax, I made it all up, it was a whopping fib,’ and pure invention.
2) Those who are familiar with Masonic ritual know that the mutilations of the Ripper murder victims’ bodies do not reflect any Masonic practices, rules, ritual, or ceremonies. Any seeming similarity is only slight, inaccurate, and circumstantial. And, contrary to Knight’s story, neither rings nor coins were removed from any of the murder victims.
3) Knight said Masonic penalties (which in any case are purely symbolic, not actual) mention having the heart removed and thrown over the left shoulder. But he admits it was the intestines, not the heart that were placed over some of the Ripper victims’ right shoulders. And it is questionable if Masonic ritual referred to any shoulder.
4) Whatever was meant by the ‘Juwes’ message found on a wall near one of the murder scenes, that the term has never been used in Masonic rituals and ceremonies, and the story of the ‘Three Ruffians’ had been removed from Masonic ritual in England [but not in the United States] seventy years before the Ripper murders took place.
5) The erasure of the ‘Juwes’ message near a murder site could have been a well-meaning attempt to prevent anti-Semitic mob violence against innocent people, since some were already thinking of blaming Jewish immigrants for some of these murders.
6) Even more significantly, the baby girl said to have been the child of Prince Eddy (Duke of Clarence) was born on 18 April 1885, so she had to have been conceived during a time when Prince Eddy was in Germany, while Annie Crook, the alleged mother, was in London.
7) Stephen Knight’s story says that Eddy and Annie met in Walter Sickert’s studio. But that building had been demolished in 1886; and a hospital was built on the site in 1887.
8) Dr Gull is supposed to have been the key man in the Ripper murders. But he was seventy-two [sic] at the time and had already suffered one heart attack and possible [sic] a stroke. Yet he is alleged to have brutally murdered five young and reasonably strong women in a carriage on public streets and discarded their mutilated bodies in public areas, all without anything being seen or heard by the large number of Londoners who were looking for and hoping to catch ‘Jack the Ripper’.
9) British laws, then and now in effect, say that any marriage of a member of the royal family can be set aside by the monarch, and any who marry a Catholic cannot inherit the crown. So, no murders were necessary even if the story of Prince Eddy’s marriage to Annie Crook were true. In any case, research shows that Annie Crook was not a Catholic.
10) Stephen Knight’s story is based on the theory that the British public would have been so scandalised by the story about Prince Eddy that they would have rebelled against the royal family and the British governing class.
11) The supposed police cover-up was probably simply due to lack of experience with murders such as these, as well as some degree of police and government incompetence. Most likely, these factors, not a Masonic conspiracy, prevented the capture of ‘Jack the Ripper’, whose identity will probably always remain unknown.
Points 1 to 5 are tosh, points 6 to 11 irrelevant. It’s not even a clever try; even its sequence is contrived.
‘Even more significantly,’ gushes the writer at point 6, when attempting to reduce the importance of the ‘Juwes’ message to less than that of Annie Crook’s ‘baby’. This represents a common and disreputable technique of trying to associate one disparate thing with another (in this case, fact with fiction), dismissing one in an effort to get rid of both. We are enjoined not to suspect Bro Clarence, as though Clarence were the only Freemason in London; and that proving Clarence had nothing to do with Jack the Ripper also proves that