This ruffled the old bigot’s vanity, and more in self-defence than defence of Scotland Yard, Anderson produced a typically disingenuous response. ‘I beg to assure you,’ he wrote, ‘that here you do an injustice, not only to me, but to the Criminal Investigation Department. The night on which the murder in question was committed I was on my way home from Paris, and great was my indignation when, next day, I heard of what you rightly call an act of “crass” stupidity. But the Scotland Yard men were in no way responsible for it – it was done by officers of the uniform force in the division, under the order of one of my colleagues.’50
Converting Warren into a nameless ‘colleague’, he blames the uniforms – blames anyone but the man responsible – but nevertheless confirms that it was Jack the Ripper who was responsible for the writing on the wall. Let us be in no doubt here. This isn’t Mr Fido with his cobblers, but the opinion of the most exalted officer in London’s CID, Robert Anderson KCB. He had reason enough to keep his trap shut in 1888.
If you could get a cigarette paper between Anderson’s teeth, he was probably lying. Bewitched by his own self-righteousness, he didn’t know the difference between lies and expediency. Mystery was expedient in the autumn of the Ripper, but now, in 1910, with his reputation under threat, he considered that sufficient autumns had gone by for the regurgitation of some truth. Blaming the uniforms, and still camouflaging Warren, he wrote: ‘The exact words of the “mural inscription” which the murderer chalked upon the wall, were the Jews were not the men to be blamed for nothing’ (my emphasis).51
Anderson’s anti-Semitism is responsible for the mis-spelling of ‘Juwes’, but he is unequivocal that it was the Ripper who wrote the message. Stand by for the ‘mystery’ paramedics, eager to explain Anderson’s statement away. Ripperologists Mr Melvin Harris and Mr Philip Sugden work themselves into rather a froth over it, and would have us believe that when Anderson says ‘the “mural inscription” which the murderer chalked upon the wall’, he actually means that he didn’t chalk it, and that virtually every Victorian newspaper, plus the Commissioner of Police for the City of London, his detectives, and Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police Robert Anderson himself, are mistaken. To qualify this adventure in casuistry, Mr Sugden seeks out minor inconsistencies in Anderson’s recollections, and elevates them into ‘glaring errors’.52 These ‘glaring errors’ are then attached to the writing on the wall, and the confection assaulted as a package. Disqualification of trivialities apparently brings entitlement to repudiate the whole. Reminiscent of Chapman’s farthings (to be considered in due course), such argument is of little merit. What Anderson is doing is confirming the established conviction of Detective Halse, Inspector McWilliam and Commissioner Smith. Were all of them similarly out to lunch? Mr Sugden’s attempts to dismiss Anderson climax in one of the most extraordinary concoctions concerning ‘prejudice’ that I’ve ever read.
Because I – and everybody else who voiced an opinion – know perfectly bloody well that ‘Yack’ wrote that Masonic message on the wall, we are comically dismissed as ‘Anderson partisans’. Sugden can’t attack the evidence, so he attacks the person reading it. ‘The committed Anderson partisan,’ he heaves, ‘may not be willing to internalise the implications of this or indeed any evidence that runs counter to his prejudice, but it is important, nevertheless, to set it down and source it here so that rational and fair-minded students may draw their own conclusions.’
‘Source it here’? This isn’t a source, it’s Sugden’s opinion. The source is Sir Robert Anderson, not an apologist in 1994 who disagrees. What in Christ’s name is going on here? Why is it that every time there might be some light cast upon the ‘mystery’ it is stamped on, navigated, dismissed and feebly argued away?
The question, of course, is rhetorical.
The ‘fair-minded students’ Mr Sugden favours – like the ‘respectable historians’ of Bro Hamill – may well be willing to indulge this fanciful sophistry dismissing Anderson, but they cannot so easily dismiss a contemporary and rather more impartial source supporting him. This man wasn’t a ‘student’ at all, but a senior detective at Scotland Yard by the name of Chief Inspector Henry Moore, a policeman who, like Anderson, was not kept short of inside news on the Ripper. Moore’s statement corroborating Anderson is very relevant, because it precedes Anderson by a dozen years, and was kept secret for a further ninety.
I don’t want to get into the Ripper correspondence quite yet, but in 1896, right out of the blue, Scotland Yard received another letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’. Whether it was genuine or not is immaterial to the question in hand, although the passage of time should not automatically condemn it as a hoax. A century later, the American serial killer Dennis Rader would wait almost twenty years before recommencing his taunting letters to the Kansas police.
Scotland Yard supposed it was a hoax. ‘Considering the lapse of time,’ wrote Chief Inspector Moore after careful comparison with previous correspondence, ‘it would be interesting to know how the present writer was able to use the words – “The Jews are people that are blamed for nothing” – as it will be remembered that they are practically the same words that were written in chalk, undoubtedly by the murderer, on the wall at Goulston St. Whitechapel, on the night of September 30th 1888, after the murders of Mrs Stride and Mrs Eddowes.’53
‘Undoubtedly [written] by the murderer’, says Moore. Are those who disagree with Sugden now ‘Inspector Moore partisans’? It must be remembered that Moore’s statement was not for public consumption. He had no reason to dissemble: his report was to remain internal to Scotland Yard.
So, we have two very senior policemen of one point of view, and Bro McLeod, Mr Sugden and another Ripperologist called Harris of another. We also have the entire known opinion of the City Police, shared by an overwhelming majority of the contemporary press. Mr Sugden may care to review what he means by ‘prejudice’, and what reason his active imagination can divine for Inspector Moore making his statement up.
Earlier in this narrative I wrote that I didn’t sit down wondering how I could have a go at Freemasonry. The same must be said for Ripperology. I had no idea the ‘mystery’ would be cowering behind two shields. Let me try to demonstrate the point. Sir Charles Warren, who had more to conceal than most, called the inestimably important writing on the wall at Goulston Street ‘the writing on the wall at Goulston Street’. Every eye that looked upon it, every newspaper, whether friend or foe of the police, called it ‘the writing on the wall at Goulston Street’. Ripperology calls it ‘the Goulston Street graffito’. My question is, from whence comes this fanciful vocabulary? What is the point of amending what the Victorian police themselves called ‘the writing on the wall’ to rewrite it as scribble?
‘Graffito’ is a word that manipulates thinking. In contemporary use, ‘graffito’ is a pejorative loaded with connotation, like its plural form ‘graffiti’ – the trivial and worthless scribbling of louts. Such negative association is not useful when considering the writing on the wall at Goulston Street.
‘Graffito’, ‘canonical’, ‘marginalia’ – they are all prescriptions of Ripperology, all nonsense, and nothing whatever to do with Jack the Ripper. ‘Canonical’ means ‘generally accepted’, and is used to mean five victims, confining Jack’s outrages to the East End of London. But who says he only murdered five, and who says they were restricted to the East End? Well, none other than that fount of dispassionate accuracy Sir Melville Macnaghten, for one. And Sir Melville and his associates had a harsh agenda, and much reason for isolating the Ripper show to a quintet of unfortunates in Whitechapel.54
The problem with this valueless lexicography – ‘canonical’ and its like – is that although meaningless, it is cute; it sounds as if it means something, and its nuisance is absorbed into a constricting vernacular. ‘Marginalia’ invests a note in the margin of Anderson’s highly suspect autobiography