Even though it was all so confusing to Warren, at least one man at the Home Office could have confirmed it. According to his secretary Ruggles-Brise, Home Secretary Matthews spoke fluent Yiddish, and could have nailed this nonsense in its tracks. But that wasn’t exactly in the Establishment’s interest, so what the hell, maybe the Jews did call themselves ‘Juwes’.42
‘Much indignation,’ continued the Star, ‘is felt among the Jews at these repeated and unjustifiable attempts to fasten the responsibility for these dastardly crimes on them.’
‘Juwes’ was a word that had motivated Superintendent Arnold into an uncompromising regard for the safety of Jews, and now ‘Juwes’ was a word accusing them. But the clique at Scotland Yard had to fasten blame on someone – anyone but Bro Jack – and the Yids didn’t seem to understand that, together with the Irish, they were the first-call scapegoats for diversionary prejudice. Far from being protected, their position was now entirely reversed, and we’re back where we started, with the thick-necked tribe of ‘Leather Apron’.
It was a Jew what done it! Or an Irishman talking foreign! Flouting every forensic protocol in the book, Warren not only didn’t prevent the Ripper from ‘destroying the evidence of his own guilt’: he did it for him.
‘Any irregularity may be fatal to the ends of justice,’ wrote Vincent. But justice wasn’t what Warren was about. The last thing anyone wanted was an arrest, God forbid. It would have put an entire (and clandestine) ruling elite in the dock – its morals, its monarchy – and would possibly have had the cataclysmic side-effect of extirpating Freemasonry from the judiciary, the police and the royal family for all time.
Justice? Forget it. Fuck who he killed, so long as the bastard doesn’t interfere with their divine right to rule. The Ripper must and would go free. Justice didn’t mean diddly-shit to a rotten little whore like Matthews – ‘a pitiful creature’, observed the Star, ‘a poor and spiritless specimen of the race of smart adventurers who creep into politics by the back door’.43
It was the exit about to be used by Warren.
‘The chaos and bitterness at Scotland Yard surpasses belief,’ wrote the Gazette.44 ‘There is no confidence anywhere, but discontent everywhere, and this discontent is felt most keenly in the headquarters of the force – in Scotland Yard.’ But
MR MATTHEWS is satisfied with SIR CHARLES WARREN. And SIR CHARLES WARREN is no doubt satisfied with MR MATTHEWS. What a Home Secretary! He is indeed a worthy counterpart to the Chief Commissioner, but he is alone in his satisfaction. The City Police are not the only constabulary whose chiefs are in a state of indignation over Scotland Yard. The Chief Constables of our great municipalities are looking on with amazement at the incredible folly which is being displayed at headquarters, and with shame and indignation … it is a black and burning disgrace for the government to allow such a state of things as we have brought to light to remain a single day without prompt and vigorous action.45
A black and burning disgrace it was. But what the hostile press didn’t understand was that the ‘crapulous decrepitude’, as the Chronicle put it, was in fact organised crisis management.
I don’t believe for a second that Warren went down to Goulston Street via Commercial Road police station, as he claimed. The siren call came from Leman Street, where sat the ‘crapulous’ Arnold. In my view the inclusion of Commercial Road is mere upholstery to distract attention from his ‘most pressing question’. And as a matter of fact, I don’t think he went to Leman Street either, but directly to the Freemasonic message on the wall.
Arnold wrote, ‘An Inspector was present by my directions with a sponge for the purpose of removing the writing when the Commissioner [Warren] arrived on the scene.’ And that’s exactly where he did arrive, at a gallop, his brain sizzling like a putrescent egg.46
We’ll perhaps never know the content of Arnold’s never-seen telegraph to summon Warren, but you can bet the bank it had nothing to do with snoring Jews. Only a respectable historian or a hapless Freemason would believe that, and those who do are welcome to it. Every scintilla of evidence, however, points to a more arcane commission. It suggests that Arnold was under strict instructions not to interfere with – shall we say – possible ‘Occult manifestations’ until the past Grand Master of the world’s only Lodge of Masonic Research had personally inspected them.
‘If we had been called upon,’ wrote the disparaging Gazette, ‘to imagine what would afford the public an exact measure of SIR CHARLES WARREN’s utter incapacity for the work he has in hand, we could not have conceived anything more cruelly conclusive than this.’47 (And that includes Baxter’s ‘Womb-Collector’.)
It was at this instant of cruel conclusiveness at Goulston Street that ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’ was assured. There could be no turning back, no deviation from the lie, nor honour for the victimised fraternity that had to tell it. Freemasology is still rushing around with the sponge. ‘There is no indication,’ chirps Bro McLeod, ‘that the Graffito had any connection with the murder, or that it was written by the Ripper.’ Useful support comes as usual from Mr Sugden, who having censored Warren and laughably misrepresented Vincent’s Code, now reminds us that ‘Chief Inspector Swanson referred to the writing as “blurred” which suggests it might have been old.’48
In which case it’s got nothing to do with murdered women, and couldn’t possibly have caused a riot. You can’t have it both ways – old when you’re trying to disconnect it from the Ripper; fresh when you’re trying to sell the ‘riot’.
In reality, Swanson suggested no such thing as ‘old’. If his words suggest anything at all, it is that he was, as usual, tampering with the record. Outside that, two certainties negate the fictions of Bro Inspector Donald Swanson. 1) He never saw the writing. 2) Neither Warren nor Arnold (much less PC Long) says anything about its physical characteristics in their November essays. So what makes Swanson think it was ‘blurred’?
What Arnold said is that ‘it was in such a position that it would have been rubbed by the shoulders of persons passing in & out of the building’. ‘Would have been rubbed’ is different from ‘blurred’, thus the ‘it could have been there for ages’ idea (conveniently divorcing the writing from the apron) has no substance. Such cavalier inaccuracies can mean the difference between the detection of a murderer and a murderer getting off scot-free, as I’m sure Bro Inspector ‘Shifty Nib’ Swanson and his pusillanimous Boss knew well.
But what of that most excellent pie-baker, Bro McLeod? Appropriating Ripperology’s burlesque jargon, he denies any connection between the writing and the Ripper. Mr Fido and his bunions would agree. But I do not, and neither did the chief of London’s Criminal Investigation Department.
From the autumn of 1888 the CID was under the command of a virulent Christian, the already mentioned Robert Anderson.49 Himself a master baker, Anderson was the last man you would want to trust with an autobiography, although twenty-two years later he was engaged in just such a publication, serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine.
It’s tiresome to judge the deficiencies in Anderson’s record by what’s in his memoir and what’s kept out of it – the writing on the wall at Goulston Street being confined to the latter. Neglect of this notorious topic generated an irate response