The reason for this paucity of enthusiasm, of course, was that Scotland Yard didn’t dare show any interest, because if it had it would have made the destruction of the writing on the wall all the more outrageous. You can’t put a guard up around vital evidence and then destroy it. In other words, the more defensive initiative it took, the more impossible it would have been to justify Bro Warren’s hooliganism. So it took none.
It was left to the City Police to search the model dwellings at Goulston Street, which Inspector McWilliam did at once. In spite of the frenetic activity of his men, the Met had to keep up the illusion that the writing on the wall was nothing more than a bit of anti-Semitic scribble. Arnold had to pretend it didn’t matter much, and thereafter everyone else had to pretend the same. Hence the coordination of the triple fictions presented to posterity by PC Long, Warren and Arnold himself some five weeks later.
For his contribution to this corrupt policing, Arnold was given an immediate £25 pay rise, a reward that miffed the East London Observer. Commenting on the ‘obloquy cast on our local police during the recent murders’, it considered this ‘rebuke from headquarters’ a somewhat unusual ‘punishment’.14
As has been mentioned, this dawn visit to the mysterious East was Warren’s first appearance there in respect of these crimes. The previous murders of Nichols and Chapman had never brought him anywhere near the place, and neither did a pair of murdered women now. Now that he was here, he was indifferent to the ripped-up whores. The ‘most pressing question’ was what was written up on a wall in front of him, and once he’d confirmed what it was, he wanted it gone.
Contemporary photographs suggest that the streets of Whitechapel were replete with such inscriptions, and if any reflection of Victorian society, much of it would have been anti-Semitic. So what’s the deal?
The answer is that the writing on the wall wasn’t specifically anti-Semitic at all, and even if it was, it hardly required the attention of London’s Commissioner of Metropolitan Police.
Would today’s Commissioner fire up the Jag at four in the morning to expunge the words ‘Fuck Islam’ written on an East End wall? He might, in certain circumstances, want it secured, but with two cut throats on the slate, it wouldn’t exactly be the place he visited first. Charles Warren was the man who brutally put down a riot of thousands in a public place as large as Trafalgar Square, yet we’re required to believe that slumbering Jews and their phantom adversaries were the ‘most pressing’ of his concerns.
Now, this concept of spontaneous affray amongst a non-existent rabble had clearly never occurred to City Commissioner Smith. Although its location was outside his jurisdiction, he had the temerity to think that this writing was of high forensic value, and had organised for it to be photographed. After all, it was a very strange text, by now empirically associated with a very strange ritual murder in Mitre Square. Even if it was presently indecipherable, would not photographs of this writing be of great worth? What if there was a hidden message? Could this not evolve into the breakthrough ‘clue’ Scotland Yard insisted it was praying for?
Dream on, Smith. Warren wanted rid of it precisely because it was the breakthrough clue. By definition, it became one of the most remarkable clues in criminal history – one Commissioner of Police wanted at all costs to preserve it, while another Commissioner of Police wanted it gone. This astonishing counterpoint of opinion is the pivot point of ‘the Ripper mystery’.
‘I do not hesitate myself to say,’ wrote Warren, ‘that if the writing had been left, there would have been an onslaught upon the Jews, property would have been wrecked, and lives would probably have been lost.’15
Even the Victorians refused to buy into this crap, and when it leaked there was a furore. How can such drivel cut it for Ripperologists today? I want to laugh in its face, it’s so ridiculous. If it had been remotely true, anyone with a shirt-cuff could have scrubbed the message out at once, and Warren could have stayed, more usefully, in bed. I doubt such a point was ever made to so distinguished a personage. Nevertheless, compromises were offered by the City Police. The only remote intimation of anti-Semitism was the word ‘Juwes’. So how about erasing just that, and getting a picture of the rest? Ergo, a photograph of
The — are
The Men that
will not
be blamed
for nothing
‘The — are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’? Good God! Warren couldn’t permit stuff as volatile as that to remain on a public wall! As Arnold had pointed out, the writing was still there for anyone to see (and presumably an imaginative hoodlum might fill in the missing word, and riot).
All right then, said the exasperated City cops, how about erasing ‘Juwes’, hanging a blanket over the rest, and only taking it down momentarily when there was enough daylight for a photograph?
No deal. This building was a hive of snoring Israelites. They’d be abroad soon, and who would be able to stop them, or anyone else, from tearing off the blanket? Or, in Warren’s own words, ‘[It] could not be covered up without danger of the covering being torn off at once.’16
I dislike the expression, but you couldn’t make it up. It’s an argument worthy of that half-wit detective played by Peter Sellers. But this wasn’t an actor with a latex nose, it was Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of Metropolitan Police.
What Warren lacked in argument, he made up for in rank. This was his manor, and the evidence had to go. So there it was. After thirty-five minutes of dissent, just after 5.30 a.m. the writing was washed off, the most senior policeman in the kingdom personally supervising the obliteration of the most revealing clue the Ripper had ever left. And to do that, of course, to wipe out the clear Masonic connotation, was precisely the reason Bro Warren had quit his bed for a scuttle down to the East End.
Warren, with his fantasy riot, was lying like a kid with jam around his mouth. It seemed to have escaped his attention that he controlled a police force almost half the size of the entire US Army. Admittedly, 13,000 policemen would have caused a bit of a crush around a doorway, but how about fifty, or even five? Not a mile away, in Mitre Square, Inspector Izzard and his constables had secured the entire area and shut it down. The square was about eighty feet by seventy-five, and with three entrances and three exits it was patently a tad more difficult to control than a doorway. ‘The [City] Police and Detectives speedily mustered in force,’ reported journalist and eyewitness Thomas Catling. ‘Every avenue leading to Mitre Square was closely guarded.’ You couldn’t get in, and you couldn’t get out.
By contrast, the criminal farce at Goulston Street wasn’t even a crime scene. A single copper could have secured it, and indeed one had, replicating the circumstance at Dutfield’s Yard, where PC Lamb had been obliged to take temporary and single-handed control of the landscape created by the murder of Elizabeth Stride. ‘I put a constable at the gate and told him not to let anyone in or out,’ deposed Lamb. ‘When further assistance came a constable was put in charge of the front door.’
When Warren finally showed up at Dutfield’s Yard, it was only to sniff around like a valet after the Ripper. The place was crawling with evidence requiring suppression. Anything that couldn’t be immediately dismissed would be taken care of in the next few days. Courtesy of its Commissioner, the Metropolitan Police had just become amongst the most corrupt police services in the world.
But the betrayal had hardly begun.
In respect of ‘Juwes’, and setting a trend for future apologists (almost all of Ripperology), Warren figured out a slim fiction in his efforts to try to explicate the writing: ‘The idiom does not appear to be written in English, French, or German, but it might possibly be that of an Irishman speaking a foreign language. It seems to be