This artfully constructed paragraph is preposterous. By the time Monro got back to Scotland Yard, Jack the Ripper was officially, incorrectly and secretly declared dead. As far as the authorities were concerned, the problem had ‘committed suicide’ by drowning itself in the River Thames.
What does any of this have to do with Monro? Anyone of a cynical disposition might imagine there was someone (or something) out there trying to disassociate Bro Warren from Whitechapel, and to pretend that an entirely different policeman was sharing that never-to-be-forgotten relationship with Jack. But let us leave the last word to Assistant Commissioner Tomlin, who sums up my argument without inhibition: ‘A new Commissioner was, on this occasion, taken from serving Police Officers in the person of Mr Monro. His services in London had been with the C.I.D. since 1884. He had to cope with the dynamite campaign … He had also to deal with a very anxious time during the “Jack the Ripper” murders.’45
There it is, word for word. It was all down to James Monro, and Warren doesn’t even get a look-in.
‘I suggest that it’s very doubtful whether Warren took any active part in the Jack the Ripper investigation, as he had no control over the detective force.’
Who’s this?
It’s another voice hollering off the pages of the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum. Bro Brigadier A.C.F. Jackson is most happy to agree with Tomlin. ‘Such a reality would not have worried Knight,’ froths the Brig. ‘The personal communication between Knight and Bro Hamill is clear proof that the former was prepared to twist the facts to prove his anti-Masonic spleen.’46
Let’s hear one last gasp of condemnation for Mr Knight before abandoning this cardboard armour to the memory of Bro Thomas Eldon Stowell. I leave it to the above-named Bro J.M. Hamill, Master of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge, who in 1986 got up the following: ‘One point I would comment on’ – and one irresistible to Bro Hamill – ‘the treatment afforded to our First Master [Sir Charles Warren], by the late Stephen Knight in his Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (London, 1976), a scurrilous piece of sensational journalism masquerading as historical research. Knight claims that the Whitechapel murders were a Masonic plot to cover up an indiscretion on the part of HRH Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence (son of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, Grand Master 1874–1901).’47
For certain individuals of this ‘Lodge of Historical Research’, history is not something to be explored, but something to be owned. ‘The truth,’ as General Gordon wrote, ‘is theirs’ – and more often than not, it’s self-serving bollocks.
Freemasons habitually insist that their institution has nothing to do with Jack, yet by paralipsis they seek to control the mythos surrounding him. Anyone with the temerity to question it is reflexively branded ‘anti-Masonic’, as though that is the end of the argument. This is the bluster of bullies. By definition, a ‘mystery’ is in want of explanation. If nobody knows who the Ripper is, please stop telling me who he isn’t.
The predisposition to look at this material as ‘mystery’ is beguiling, but only if one accepts the police point of view. An avenue of books either promote or have fallen for the same old ramshackle tale. If a policeman wrote it, it’s enshrined, axiomatic amongst Ripperologists as a sacrosanct truth. There’s Swanson and his ‘marginalia’, Macnaghten and his ‘memoranda’, Littlechild and his ‘letter’. Ripperology is constipated with this junk. The policemen who never caught him are apparently to be construed as oracles after the event. The only senior policeman without an opinion on Jack the Ripper is the man who dared not give one, and that is the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, Bro Sir Charles Warren.
It’s noticeable that of his many books, Warren never got his pen dirty for the Whitechapel Murderer. We shouldn’t be surprised. What could he write? Of his determination to impede every facet of the investigation? Muse perhaps over the destruction of evidence by his own hand? Or reminisce over tactics to discredit honourable witnesses, no effort spared?
If a witness contradicted the police, he was by definition unreliable, mistaken, a kind of Walter Mitty character, too old, too confused, or all and any of the above that could be manipulated as a means to discredit him.
For the most part, Ripperology gives unqualified credence to the Victorian police. This is at odds with Victorian newspapers, which did not. For myself, I have no inclination to accept anything put about by Boss Cops, because all too often the police were lying. Theirs is a litany of disinformation, misinformation, contradictions, missing documents and bent coroners’ courts. I do not trespass beyond what I can prove. What we have here is an Establishment conspiracy – not some half-witted nonsense out of Stowell, but an agenda to conceal a Freemason, a ‘Mystic Tie’ wherein otherwise honourable men were coerced into becoming criminals in order to protect a criminal in their midst. I shall prove that Jack the Ripper was a Freemason, that what he called his ‘Funny Little Game’ was a perversion of Freemasonic ritual, and that its symbolism and traditions were the naked vernacular of these horrendous crimes. I shall prove, in fact, that Masonic symbol was Jack’s ‘calling card’, contemptuously left at every crime scene and displayed so flagrantly in the mutilated remains of Mary Jane Kelly that there was barely anything else. What is incredible, and ultimately disastrous for Warren, is that not only did this effervescent psychopath play his ‘Funny Little Games’ with Freemasonry, he played them with Warren himself. Warren was an inspiration to the Ripper, and the Commissioner’s past an ingredient of his malice.
The Ripper was on Warren’s case. It’s the big secret.
Jack hated Charlie, hated his rectitude and his evangelical hypocrisy. Most of all, he hated his authority. The more Warren tried to cover up, the more the Ripper raised the ante. You’d have to sit down and think about it to come up with a bigger piss-take than to secrete the body parts of a murdered girl in the foundations of the Boss Cop’s new building at New Scotland Yard.48 But then Jack sat down and thought, ever ruminating over new ‘larks’ with which to persecute old Charlie. Enormous effort was made to disassociate this particular outrage from the hand of ‘Saucy Jacky’, because the Ripper was doing his best to outrage Warren. It was a personal thing (he visited Scotland Yard twice). The cops couldn’t keep up, and were barely able to cover up. By this point they were on automatic pilot, laundering in the Ripper’s wake like a bunch of traumatised accomplices.
Isolating Charlie from Jack, in respect of the headless and sawn-in-half body at New Scotland Yard, was successful. Both the conned Victorian public and later Ripperology bought into a pantomime of two independent maniacs abroad who happened to share the same homicidal signature. And that signature was Freemasonry.
It is manifestly untrue to try to claim that ‘The story of the Three Ruffians had been removed from Masonic Ritual seventy years before the Ripper murders took place.’ With its vengeance, revenge and vicious punishment, that legend was still in place ninety-nine years after them. In other words, Bro McLeod’s ‘decisive argument exonerating Warren from a Masonic cover-up’ becomes a decisive argument in favour of investigating one.
We shall now be looking at the cover-up.
3
You shall be