Our informant is a man who ‘can’t be named’, of course. He’s a man in the shadows, his intelligence dispensed on scraps of paper and sourced to ‘one of our people’, like something in a crummy B movie; or, more pertinently, like something that entrapped Ernest Parke eighty years before.
Knight fell for it, and wrote his book. ‘The contact,’ he explains in his introduction, ‘was anxious to be assured that the treatment of the subject was to be conscientious in the extreme, and that they genuinely hoped to provide a definitive account of the Ripper murders.’23
Why?
Why, after all that time, would Scotland Yard or its clandestine associates have wanted to provide a ‘definitive account’ of Jack the Ripper? They’d been sitting on files inaccessible to the public for almost a century. If openness was their intention, why not provide a definitive account themselves, or simply open the files to everyone at the National Archive? And why would Scotland Yard, or its associates, want to give currency to so scandalous a revelation as the Masonic involvement of a royal prince? After all, there isn’t the thinnest whiff of Masonry in connection with the Jack the Ripper murders in the entire Metropolitan Police archive. Apparently no copper on the ground in 1888 ever even considered it (except, most curiously, in those specially released secret files).
If they really exist, why are these declassified documents not in the National Archive at Kew? We don’t get so much as a scribble in respect of Clarence, Gull, Netley or Freemasonry. Why wasn’t even a scintilla of this material included when the body of proscribed Ripper files was finally released into the public domain in 1992?
Mr Knight might well have done better to have reserved his judgement and considered an alternative scenario. This was in 1975, which meant that the hundred-year rule classifying all things Ripper was rapidly running out. Could it be that certain ‘impeccable sources’ thought it might be in their interest to leak a bit of a bum steer (an inoculation), thus pre-empting further Masonic enquiry?
This claptrap attached to Clarence would certainly qualify, effectively neutering enthusiasm for further Masonic investigation.
Knight, and anyone who took him seriously, was made to look like an idiot. A cult of the narrow-minded evolved, abetted by ‘Ripperology’, and the beneficiary, of course, was Masonry. ‘At risk of seeming to dabble in sensationalism,’ writes the aforementioned Bro McLeod, ‘I touch on another matter that sheds some light on the scholarly competence and the intellectual honesty of such propagandists as the late Stephen Knight.’
The shameful excoriation of Knight that follows was published in 1986 (two years before Jack’s centenary in 1988) in the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, a journal of Masonic research founded a century before by Commissioner of Metropolitan Police Sir Charles Warren, and thereafter Masonry’s most prestigious periodical. With Knight as his target, McLeod sets out his stall:24
Soon after 1.30 in the morning of 30 September 1888, the fourth Whitechapel murder took place. The victim was Catherine Eddowes, also known as ‘Kate Kelly’. Within hours a policeman found a bloodstained scrap of her apron five hundred yards away, in a passage off Goulston Street; on the wall of the adjoining staircase he discovered a chalked message, ‘The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing.’ Commissioner Warren appeared on the scene before dawn, and ordered the words erased: indeed, he may have rubbed them out himself. The reason he later gave was to prevent anti-Jewish riot. But anti-Masonic writers assign an ulterior motive, that is, to protect the Freemasons; the word ‘Juwes’, they tell us, alludes to the three ruffians who murdered Hiram Abif, and were themselves later executed. Any such hypothesis meets more than one obstacle. (1) There is no indication that the graffito had any connection with the murder, or that it was written by the Ripper.25 (2) If he did write it, what on earth did he intend it to mean? Whether we take ‘Juwes’ to mean ‘Jews’ or ‘Ruffians’, the inscription makes no sense as a signature or a warning. (3) There is a decisive argument to exonerate Sir Charles from any charge of ‘covering up’ for the Masons. Admittedly certain pre-Union exposures name the Ruffians as Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, and with a certain amount of good-will one might imagine they could be referred to as the three ‘Juwes’ (though I have never encountered a Masonic source that did so). But they vanish from most English rituals at the Union, and by a generation later they would not have been recognised by an English Mason as Masonic allusions at all, let alone as specific references to vengeance, punishment or ritual execution – unless the Mason happened to be excessively antiquarian in his interest. And that [McLeod’s emphasis] Sir Charles Warren was not.26
There’s a bit of a faux pas here, to wit: ‘they would not have been recognised by an English Mason … unless the Mason happened to be excessively antiquarian in his interest’. In other words, a Mason who did happen to be excessively antiquarian might well recognise the Masonic significance. Otherwise, what’s the point of such an observation? It’s either Masonic, or it isn’t. If the ‘graffito’ has nothing to do with Freemasonry, why would it matter whether Bro Warren was an expert or not?
We have at least obtained an interesting clarification from Bro McLeod: a Freemason who was ‘excessively antiquarian in his interest’ might indeed conjugate the Masonic significance of the writing on the wall (what he and Ripperology call ‘graffito’).
Although conceding that the ‘graffito’ is possibly Masonic, Bro McLeod insists, with emphasis, that Sir Charles Warren had no such expertise. Which is presumably why he and Walter Besant had struggled from as far back as 1872 to inaugurate a Lodge of Masonic Research, finally succeeding with the establishment of the ‘Quatuor Coronati’ in 1886. At a meeting of that lodge in 1887, Sir Charles is quoted as saying ‘how amidst his active career, he had always kept up the study’.27
In a subsequent chapter it will become clear that Bro Warren was indeed ‘excessively antiquarian in his interest’; which ineluctably brings us back to internet fib number 4.
… 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.
‘They would not have been recognised by an English Mason as Masonic allusions at all,’ says Bro McLeod, ‘let alone as specific references to vengeance, punishment or ritual execution.’
In reality, as all Masons know, the Jewish Ruffians hadn’t vanished from Masonic ritual at the Union (in 1813), but were actually as much a part of it in 1888 as they were in a Masonic lodge near you until 1987. All that had happened was that the ‘vengeance and ritual execution’ had been converted into a primitive alphabetical cipher. Masons like codes and conundrums (‘Juwes’ for example), and it was Police Commissioner Warren’s flagrant dissembling over what was written on a wall at Goulston Street that gives the Masonic game away.
This modern version of the Jubela, Jubelo, Jubelum myth, making specific reference to vengeance, punishment and ritual execution, comes from Notes on Ritual and Procedure, published in 1976 (that’s nineteen hundred and seventy-six). It features Solomon’s judgement on Jubela, Jubelum and Jubelo, incorporated into the First, Second and Third Degree Obligation (oath), as practised until 1987:
These several points I solemnly swear to observe … under no less a penalty, on the violation of any of them than that of having my t.c.a., my t.t.o.b.t.r. and b.i.t.s.o.t.s. at l.w.m., or a c’s l.f.t.s., where t.t.r.e.a.f.t.i. 24 hs. …
Which translates today exactly as it translated in 1888: ‘under no less a penalty, on the violation of any of them than that of having my t(hroat)