Even with so little to go on, the Gazette was already well aware that ‘a very important link’ had been destroyed: ‘Witnesses who saw the writing state that it was similar in character to the letters sent to the Central News and signed “Jack the Ripper”. There is now every reason to believe that the writer of the letter and postcard (facsimiles are now to be seen outside every police station) is the actual murderer.’33
The infamous ‘Dear Boss’ letter and the publicity it inspired are the business of the next chapter. Suffice it to say that the police had received a letter and a postcard revelling in the murders, the latter describing the horror of Stride/Eddowes as a ‘Double Event’. As the Gazette says, facsimiles of these communications were posted outside every police station:
Any person recognising the handwriting is requested to communicate with the nearest police station.
‘The police are very anxious,’ affirmed the Gazette, ‘that any citizen who can identify the handwriting should without delay communicate with the authorities.’34
Unfortunately, one of the only men who might recognise it was the very man who had destroyed a sample of it. Now, if anyone had come along in the dead of night and started tearing these posters from the front of police stations, he’d have probably found himself in the cells of one of them. Yet a transfixed Commissioner of Police did worse than that: he was actually covering up a murderer’s tracks.
In concert with their pre-doomed posters, honest brokers at Scotland Yard printed thousands of flyers, which were to be distributed on 3 October. So here we have something rather singular in progress. 1) The Metropolitan Police approve the time and expense of publishing posters and thousands of door-to-door flyers. 2) Three days before these flyers are to be distributed, on 30 September, the Chief Officer of the Metropolitan Police wipes out the only evidence that might link these posters with London’s most wanted criminal.
By 11 October the press had a handle on this, and it was taking shape into a full-blown scandal. Following a sparse but basically accurate summary, the Gazette posed a rhetorical question:
WHO ORDERED IT TO BE RUBBED OUT?
… who was the infatuated person who thus in defiance of protest insisted in rubbing it out? It was none other than Sir Charles Warren himself! The fact would have been brought out in the inquest if the City Coroner had not feared to seem as if he was holding up Sir Charles Warren to contempt.35
This concession was the least of the favours the coroner was poised to offer. Had contempt not been overridden by deference (and other arcane considerations), this Masonic aberration could have been nailed. But, as always, the System looked after its own.
Keeping Warren out of court, however, didn’t keep him out of the newspapers, and the Gazette sent a reporter to try to get an interview at Scotland Yard. Predictably, its hopes were dashed. As PC Walter Dew and a variety of others record, the press was habitually ‘kept at arm’s length’ from Warren, and couldn’t get in to see the vainglorious oaf: ‘The representative saw Sir Charles Warren’s private secretary, who stated that, “Sir Charles Warren was in Goulston Street shortly after the murders, and if he had wished to make any communication to the press on the subject he would have done so then.”’36
An editorial followed, in which the newspaper succinctly put its finger on it: ‘Considering how promptly Sir Charles Warren contradicts any statement that can possibly be contradicted with any semblance of truth, his silence is equivalent of admission of the fact.’37
The fact is, Sir Charles Warren was up to his nostrils in lies that would soon overwhelm him. His tactic of silence persuaded no one. Even his City counterpart, Commissioner Smith, regarded Warren’s anxiety for the Jews as bogus, describing it as nothing more than ‘alleged’. And when, at seven o’clock on that infamous morning, Warren at last arrived for discussions with the City Police, Inspector McWilliam put aside conventions of rank and told him to his face that he had made a ‘fatal mistake’ – and fatal it proved to be. Warren’s brainless priorities were to become responsible for the death of Mary Jane Kelly and the sickening destruction of an innocent little child called Johnnie Gill.
The Pall Mall Gazette was among many who had already had enough. Incidentally, there was not a lot of ‘graffito’ about in 1888. Like the rest of Fleet Street, the Gazette referred to the Ripper’s message as
THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL
The case against the Chief Commissioner is overwhelming. The evidence given at the inquest yesterday proves that in all human probability the murderer left behind him in Goulston Street an invaluable clue to his identity, the obliteration of which has supplied the last conclusive demonstration required for the utter unfitness of SIR CHARLES WARREN for the place which he holds.38
Warren should have been summarily dismissed and prosecuted for misfeasance, if not conspiracy. Six weeks later, when the Ripper had driven this worthless menace out of office, an unworthy Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, attempted to sell the idea that Warren had ‘resigned’ over a minor procedural misdemeanour (re a Home Office minute of 27 May 1879), ‘by which officers attached to the Home Department were enjoined not to publish any work relating to the Department without the previous sanction of the Secretary of State’.
Warren had written some bland essay for Murray’s Magazine – reading it is like a dose of Seconal – but it was the excuse Matthews grasped. According to this hopeless lickspittle, the ‘rules’ didn’t allow such literary indiscretion, and the Commissioner would have to go.
Yet at Goulston Street, Warren broke every rule in the policeman’s book. ‘If SIR CHARLES WARREN,’ charged the Gazette, ‘had but read pages 248–9 of MR HOWARD VINCENT’S Police Code, he would have seen how flagrantly he was violating the first duty of a policeman in cases of murder.’
Vincent, MP for Sheffield Central and himself a prominent Freemason, had formed the CID in 1878, after a criminal scandal amongst Metropolitan cops, and following it, wrote his Police Code. Rule 18 summarises the whole, and in my view justifies the eternal condemnation of Bro Warren:
18: It must finally be remembered, in dealing with cases of murder, that any oversight, however trivial, any communication of information, any precipitancy, or any irregularity of procedure may be fatal to the end of justice … No irregularity will be countenanced … In cases of murder, everything must be done with the utmost celerity, every channel pursued to the exclusion of any individual theory, although every possible step must be taken to bring the murderer to justice, and to prevent his destroying the evidence of his own guilt.39
If Warren had gone through this ticking off with a pencil, he couldn’t have violated the prescription more effectively. ‘No irregularity will be countenanced’, say the Rules; ‘every channel pursued to the exclusion of any individual theory’ – and this to include, presumably, moonshine scenarios in respect of riot against the Jews.40
Rubbish from the start, by now the ‘anti-Semitic’ angle had all but collapsed. Fairy tales of mayhem had been supplanted by genuine resentment from Jews themselves, their voices naturally attracting less attention than the official spin. When the spelling became public, certain hysterical policemen at Scotland Yard continued to insist that ‘Juwes’ was what it wasn’t: ‘The police authorities attach a great deal of importance to the spelling of the word “Jews” in the writing on the wall,’ proclaimed an unnamed agency. ‘The language of the Jews in the East End is