With one or two notable exceptions (and they know who they are), I’m reticent about having Ripperology accompany me further into this enquiry, and look forward to being free of it once I move beyond the ‘canonical’ murders. I tire of its blindness, constipated thinking and phoney academia. I tire of its ‘shameless manipulation’. Ripperology is like a gang of shagged-out seagulls in the wake of a phantom steamer. From time to time something might come over the side: ‘Quick, boys! Dive! Dive! It might be a “marginalia”, or even another Jew!’ Squabbling and counter-squabbling ensue, squawking from those known for it, parsimonious smiles from those who know better, and the HMS Canonical ploughs on.
Meanwhile, in respect of Mr Sugden’s invitation to ‘source it here’, he writes, ‘fair-minded students may draw their own conclusions’. Well, I’m not a ‘student’, but here are mine. My conclusions are that Scotland Yard under Bro Sir Charles Warren was corrupt from its back door to the front, and, as the Star put it, ‘rotten to the core’. That message on the wall is truly the E=MC2 of Jack the Ripper. It’s the paradox explaining why he was never caught, and why he so easily could have been. That he had the balls to write it, and then to mock it with the apron, is indicative of how he understood his own immunity.
No serial killer worth the name is going to leave homicidal garbage lying around a crime scene as Jack the Ripper did. He was tossing Freemasonry about like confetti. The whole mechanic of this got-up ‘mystery’ reeks of amateur dramatics, and that’s precisely what it was: stage-managed theatricals construed as a ‘lark’ in the capsized psyche of a very unusual gentleman indeed. The Ripper was a ‘recreational’ killer in the literal sense of the word: a totally sane, highly intelligent psychopath whose sense of fun animated in some esoteric area of his thinking where humour and homicide collide.
The very obviousness of who they were looking for prevented the police from looking. The Machine had seized. It was moribund, paralysed with anxiety. To quote the brilliant journalist Simon Jenkins, ‘the cynic’s maxim that every organisation ends up being run by agents of its enemy’ couldn’t be more apposite. In respect of this terrible murderer, London now had no police force. It was in the hands of its enemy. The more outrageous he was, the more the police must cover him up. They were like Christians charged with preserving the anonymity of a Judas in their midst.
The dynamic of Warren’s dilemma was soon to overwhelm him, and would palpably threaten the System itself. ‘The question now turns on a matter of policy, as if fresh murders were committed the public at large might make such an outcry that it might affect the stability of the government,’ were Warren’s own words in his statement of 6 October 1888. He was echoing an editorial in the Star of a few days before, warning of the ‘urgent need to bring light to Whitechapel before the district gave birth to a revolution that would “Smash the Empire”, bringing about a republican regime’. Unknown to the public, the obverse of this argument (actually catching the murderer) was just as dangerous. Jack had something in common with the System, and the System had something in common with Jack. Both he and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had sworn the same Masonic oath:
The point of a pair of compasses is placed upon his left naked breast, and he himself holds it with his left hand, his right being laid upon the Gospel opened at Saint John.
‘I [Charles Warren] of my own free will and accord, I promise before the Great Architect of the Universe and this right Worshipful Lodge, dedicated to St John, do hereby and herein most solemnly swear that I will always hale, conceal, and never reveal any of the secrets or mysteries of Freemasonry that shall be delivered to me now, or at any time hereafter, except it be to a true and lawful Brother, or in a just and lawful Lodge of Brothers and Fellows, him or them whom I shall find to be such, after just Trial and due Examination. I furthermore do swear that I will not write it, print it, cut it, paint it, stint it, mark it, stain and engrave it [and presumably photograph it] or cause it to be done, upon anything movable or immovable, under canopy of Heaven, whereby it may become legible or intelligible [my emphasis] or the least appearance of the character of a letter, whereby the secret Art may be unlawfully obtained. All this I swear [under the usual penalties of t.c.a. etc.] with a strong and steady resolution to perform the same without hesitation, mental reservation, or self evasion of mind in any way whatsoever.’55
In other words, wash off the wall. ‘A Royal Arch Mason,’ wrote Avery Allyn in 1831, ‘would have felt consciously bound to conceal; having taken an oath, under penalty of death, to conceal the secrets of a Companion Royal Arch Mason, murder and treason not excepted.’
Welcome to the ‘Funny Little Game’.
Mirth was what the Ripper was about. He liked jokes and anagrams and juvenile riddles, he loved the profanity and blasphemy of it all. Part of his thinking was like that of a vicious schoolboy mocking the grown-ups; and the greater society’s affront, the greater his merriment. Solemn oaths sworn by the grown-ups were an amusement to the Ripper, like a fart in church. ‘The Gospel of St John is especially important to Freemasons,’ wrote the prolific early-nineteenth-century scholar of Freemasonry, the Reverend George Oliver, ‘because it contains the fundamental principles of the order of which he was Grand Master and patron saint. And every Brother ought always to remember that he had laid his hand on that Gospel, and is thence bound never to withdraw his love from his Masonic Brothers and fellows, in compliance with the doctrines contained in that sacred book.’56
Bollocks. Ha ha.
Every outrage dragged Warren further out of his depth, and by implication the System of which he was a totem. The following, published in 1875, expresses a somewhat contradictory point of view to the Reverend Oliver’s:
Can you trust the fortunes of your country and the safety of your family to men, however honourable and high-minded they may be, who have committed themselves to the guidance of an authority unknown to themselves, who are confederated under the most fearful sanctions of a secret oath, and who are compelled to an inexorable silence, even though tenets should be revealed and orders transmitted from which their innermost soul recoils with unutterable loathing? Sick at heart, driven half-mad at the revelation of the hideous secret, they dare not go back; and oppressed with a deadening despair, they are forced to connive at deeds which they utterly abhor.
Although this sounds a bit like the penalties for the Victorian masturbator, I think it is a generally accurate representation of what was going on inside Warren’s head. I think he was driven ‘half mad’, as well as driven from office, by Bro Jack the Ripper. The Masonic oath may now mean nothing more than an allegorical rendition of ‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ but in the nineteenth century it ran the country. A Brother was required to keep all of a Brother’s secrets, and in the case of the Royal Arch, ‘murder and treason not excepted’.
By now the anger at Warren’s subservience to the ‘unspoken’ had migrated. In both Europe and the United States the press was short on flattery. ‘Great indignation,’ reported the New York Tribune, ‘had been expressed in England respecting the too apparent and official helplessness and ignorance of the elementary methods of detection … If a really clever officer was to go to work and discover the murderer, it is all but certain that he would for his pains receive a tough snub from headquarters for going outside the scope of his instructions. Herein lies the whole secret of the immunity from arrest of the Whitechapel Murderer.’57
It doesn’t get any clearer than that. Nor, in my view, more accurate.
After Goulston Street there could be no turning back – the press would howl, for sure, but most of the public were in the dark, and the rest swallowing Fowler’s Solution. Providing the nightmare could be confined to an East End slum, the executive had a