Though more appropriate to the National Enquirer, Stowell’s effort caused a flutter amongst the cognoscenti. ‘Did the Ripper Have Royal Blood?’ asked a wide-eyed Sunday Times that same month.38 Clarence barely had a brain, so the question isn’t even academic. The question is: what was this deceitful old man actually up to? If Stowell hadn’t opened his idiot mouth, there would have been no ‘one of our people’, and Knight wouldn’t have written his idiot book.
If Bro McLeod wants to condemn anyone for what he calls ‘scurrilous journalism’, he might want to consider redirecting his invective at Bro Thomas Eldon Stowell.
We have at last arrived at the source of this unsavoury fable. It came out of the mouth of a distinguished Freemason.
Bro Stowell’s association with Freemasonry was more than casual (a detail he might not have shared with Mr Wilson at the Athenaeum). The doctor with the ‘secret’ was a Worshipful Master as early as 1918, Provincial Grand Deacon (Cheshire) by 1928, and rose through Masonic ranks to become a Companion of the Holy Royal Arch (eighteenth degree) by the beginning of the Second World War. He was Most Excellent Zerubbabe in the Cornubain (450), and wrote its history.39
By the tenets of Masonry, Stowell was a scoundrel, caring not a rat’s arse for the oath he had sworn. ‘One of the most notable features of Freemasonry – one, certainly, which attracts, more than anything else, the attention of the profane world – is that veil of mystery – that awful secrecy, behind which it moves and acts. From the earliest periods this has invariably been a distinctive characteristic of the institution; and today, as of old, the first obligation of a Mason – his supreme duty – is that of silence and secrecy.’
And yet Stowell blows the whistle on Clarence?
It might therefore be as well for Masonry to amend the website, replacing any reference to Mr Stephen Knight with the name of Bro Stowell. Contemptuous of any tradition, it was a Freemason who dished the dirt on Bro the Duke of Clarence. Stowell’s corrosive but artful fantasies led in turn to the mind-numbing and outrageous accusations levelled against a genius called Walter Sickert, and it’s at that point I’ve got to let this nonsense go.
While Bro Stowell was occupied with trying to push Bro Clarence into the limelight, there were others just as anxious to get Bro Sir Charles Warren out of it.
As is established, Warren was Boss Cop, supreme authority (excepting the City) over about a dozen Metropolitan Police jurisdictions, which included an area of East London encompassing Whitechapel, known as H Division. His tenure in office from 1886 to November 1888 is an indisputable fact. Any Victorian newspaper, irrespective of its political bias, will tell you that while Jack was amusing himself, Warren was the policeman enjoined to catch him. I’d go so far as to say that anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Whitechapel Horrors would know that Bro Sir Charles Warren was concurrently Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
We now come to a man who was in apparent ignorance of it. As far as he’s concerned, Warren had absolutely nothing to do with the world’s most famous assassin – no crisis, no panic, no connection. Such idiosyncrasy of opinion is made remarkable by the fact that this individual worked at Scotland Yard, had access to classified files, and published a book purporting to be some kind of history of the Metropolitan Police.40
He is former Assistant Commissioner Major Maurice Tomlin, and Maurice thinks the most startling highlight of Warren’s career was the arrest of a girl in Regent Street. Since Tomlin is a source of such distinction, I quote him in full.
Sir Charles Warren’s administration would have gone forward, perhaps, without very much to make it in any way noticeable, had it not been for what is known as the ‘Cass’ affair. In this case, a ‘young person’, as she would have been called, was taken into custody by a Constable of the ‘C’ Division in Regent Street, on a charge of soliciting. Suspicious as her actions may have been, it was not considered proved that her motives were wrong; and the case was dismissed. The arrest therefore aroused considerable public agitation: as a result, not only the Commissioner of Police but the Home Secretary were involved in the censure. It was certainly open to doubt whether the action of the Constable was as wrong, and the conduct of the lady as correct, as was made out at the time: when the Constable was tried for perjury on account of the evidence he gave in the case he was acquitted without any blame whatever being attached to him, and he was reinstated in the force. The real history of the affair is that the behaviour of the defendant certainly gave the Constable ample grounds for acting as he did, and the defendant was very lucky to be able to convince the magistrate of her innocence in the matter. Except for the two unfortunate people concerned, it was not really such a very important case, but as we of our generation know, these apparently unimportant cases, arising out of the daily work of the Police, may, at any moment, develop into a ‘Sensation’; as a result, the administration of Sir Charles Warren was rather suspect by the public, and it is not to be wondered at that after a very short time he resigned in 1888.
So there we have it, a potted history of Warren’s exciting tenure at the Yard. He possibly also issued a few parking tickets to the odd horse and cart. This assessment of the Commissioner’s career was published in 1936, almost fifty years after the Ripper sensation.
Tosh like this is as fatuous as anything out of Bro McLeod. While he attempts to deodorise Warren’s Masonic competence, others try to diminish his role as Commissioner altogether. Predicated on quasi-official histories (almost always written by ex-policemen), we are invited to believe that it was James Monro, and not Bro Warren, who was Boss Cop at the time of the Ripper murders.41
It wasn’t only Tomlin who advertised this mirage. It was also pushed by another Assistant Commissioner, Sir Basil Thomson KCB, who incidentally ‘wrecked his career and reputation on being arrested for public indecency with a prostitute in Hyde Park’. Such regretful adventures up a whore’s skirt didn’t preclude him from writing The Story of Scotland Yard, published in 1935. According to Thomson, Bro Warren had just about evaporated as Jack got active, and it was Monro who was put up to take the Whitechapel flak. With quaint indifference to reality, Thomson writes this: ‘Mr James Monro, who had lately resigned from the C.I.D. was recalled to succeed Sir Charles Warren. He [Monro] had shown great ability in unearthing the perpetrators of the dynamite outrages, but the dynamite outrages had been suppressed, and the “Jack the Ripper” outrages had filled the public mind to the exclusion of all other questions.’42
What exactly is he trying to sell here? Monro was in enforced ‘resignation’ throughout the period in question, and had virtually nothing to do with the Ripper outrages. Anyone reading Thomson would get the impression that Monro had ‘succeeded’ Warren, and that it was he who was in charge when the Ripper ‘filled the public mind to the exclusion of all other questions’.
‘Feelings ran very high against the C.I.D.,’ continues Thomson, ‘for its failure to arrest the murderer.’ He neglects to point out that the Criminal Investigation Department was at that time managed by Robert Anderson. But so what for facts. This was James Monro’s scandal, not Bro Sir Charles Warren’s.
Not a newspaper in England was blaming Monro for failing to catch Jack the Ripper, and this isn’t surprising, because he wasn’t reappointed as Commissioner until Tuesday, 4 December 1888.43 He was barely mentioned in that context, if he was ever mentioned at all. But everyone with a newspaper to open was blaming Sir Charles Warren. No one could understand how such an abundance of clues ‘would seem to conspire to baffle the police’.
It’s curious that these two policemen, Thomson and Tomlin, both ex-Assistant Commissioners, could be so misinformed when it comes to their most infamous murderer. Maybe