‘At twenty minutes past five [a.m.],’ records the Lloyd’s reporter, ‘we left the mortuary after the interview most kindly accorded by Dr Gordon Brown.’9 The journalist who conducted this exclusive interview in the presence of Eddowes’ corpse and effects was Bro Thomas Catling, Worshipful Master of the Savage Lodge, habitué of the Savage Club, and intimate of fellow member Bro Michael Maybrick.
The ‘Savage’ was a bohemian hangout for writers, artists, musicians and journalists. According to an official club memoir of the time, ‘There is no place in the world, perhaps, where more amusing copy can be picked up than is to be had for the asking at the Savage Club.’10 Everyone in London was talking about Jack, and it’s no stretch to imagine what an informed ‘Ripper insider’ might be telling his fellow members in the smoking room of the Savage – and Catling was known for his mouth. ‘Mr Catling tells us of his astounding feats in nosing out copy,’ continues the memoir, ‘in obtaining the earliest information in respect of murder … For obvious reasons many of the good things are not for publication.’ This was the currency of smoking-room gossip, ‘to be had for the asking’ at the club.11
Thus, from Catling’s notebook to a dozen eager ears (including those, I hazard, of Michael Maybrick), the unpublishable details of Mitre Square were told. That a Liverpool cotton broker could have known about an empty tin matchbox in London’s East End is, I’m afraid, no great mystery, but is in fact rather mundane. From Bro Catling to Bro Michael, and then passed just as easily to James. He was Michael’s brother, and a frequent visitor to his London residence at Regent’s Park. Had either written the so-called ‘Diary’, the mysterious ‘inside information’ becomes no mystery at all.
Does that not blow a rather sizeable hole in Harris’s misplaced certainty that prior to 1987 there is no possible way that James Maybrick could have known about the matchbox? Either one of the Brothers Maybrick could comfortably have been aware of this information ninety-nine years before Mr Rumbelow rediscovered it. Ergo, the Liverpool ‘scrapbook’ purporting to have been written by Jack the Ripper can easily be associated with the name Maybrick, via Bro Thomas Catling.
Too abstruse for the Harris school? All right, let’s knock Catling out of the equation and go directly to the source. I refer to none other than the man up to his elbows in Catherine Eddowes’ guts, forty-five-year-old surgeon to the City Police and fellow of the ‘Mystic Tie’ since 1868, Bro Dr Frederick Gordon Brown.
Brown, with his gregarious tongue, would have been even more worth listening to than Catling – presupposing you had a particular interest in the case, and were inclined to ask. Like Catling, Dr Brown was a regular on the Maybrick circuit, sharing more than one enclave of rendezvous. He was a member of both the Savage Club and the Savage Club Lodge (2190), a pal of top London nobs and a familiar figure on the social scene.12
According to the weekly The Freemason, under the heading ‘Grand Lodge Representatives’ we learn that ‘To represent another Grand Body near one’s own is considered a very high honour.’ Bro Dr Gordon Brown and Bro Michael Maybrick did precisely that at a Grand Soirée at the Holborn Restaurant, a favoured haunt of members of Orpheus Lodge. Maybrick was co-founder of Orpheus Lodge and Chapter (1706), which later in this book will get a chapter of its own. On the night in question, Saturday, 26 October 1889, ‘Grand Lodge was represented by Bros Edwin Lott P.G.O., Doctor Gordon Brown G.S. and Michael Maybrick P.M.’
When the speeches started, it is recorded that ‘In responding for the Grand Lodge Officers, Bro Maybrick remarked that the position he held as G.Org. [Grand Organist] reflected honour upon the Lodge, because he believed he owed his office to the fact of his being Past Master of the Lodge.’ Bro Dr Gordon Brown ‘made effective replies for the visitors who were strong in force’. ‘The commendably short speeches,’ continues The Freemason, ‘were interrupted with music. Bro Maybrick sang the solos of the National Anthem.’13
Though the events of the evening took place in 1889, there is abundant evidence that Dr Brown and Michael Maybrick were well known to each other a good time before that. The initials ‘GS’ after Brown’s name stand for Grand Steward. He was first elected in this capacity of service to Grand Lodge in 1887. The following year he took a breather, becoming PGS (Past Grand Steward), and we find him as such together with GO Michael Maybrick at a Grand Lodge celebration in that same year, its ensuing banquet presided over by none other than ‘I thought they were girls’ the Earl of Euston. ‘A beautiful vocal and instrumental concert was given under the direction of Bro Sir Arthur Sullivan,’ one of Maybrick’s close melodious pals.
The Lord Mayor of London, Bro Sir Polydore de Keyser, was a prominent member of the exalted who were present. Among the newly elected Senior Grand Deacons was Bro Edmund Ashworth, a fellow member of James Maybrick’s St George’s Lodge of Harmony at Liverpool. Bro the Earl of Lathom was in the chair, supported by Bro Hugh Sandeman, thirty-third degree, Past Grand District Master of Bengal and member of Michael Maybrick’s St George’s Chapter (42), London.
The ‘Mystic Tie’ could not be more in evidence, and it returns us briefly to the Liverpool of James Maybrick. ‘It is a truism,’ announced The Freemason of 20 October 1888, ‘to say that West Lancashire (wherein is Liverpool) is one of the strongholds of Freemasonry in this country.’ A Past Master and very present member of James Maybrick’s St George’s Lodge of Harmony was Colonel Le Grande Starkie, an enormously wealthy landowner with 12,000 acres of Lancashire to prove it. Another member was Lord Skelmersdale, a.k.a. the above-mentioned Earl of Lathom, who like Starkie had a few fields out of town. Lathom was old money and a lot of it, and, second only to the Prince of Wales himself, the most important Freemason in England. At his seat at Ormskirk in 1888 he threw a week of parties celebrating a visit to the province by the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury and his wife, but under less festive circumstances his duties were usually confined to London.
Earl Lathom was Lord Chamberlain to Her Majesty the Queen, entrusted with the ‘well being of her swans’ and, on a more prosaic level, vetting guest lists for the Palace soirées. To this end he wore an enormous symbolic ceremonial key, a reminder that ‘everyone the Queen receives must wear the white flower of a blameless life’ – which makes one wonder how half her relatives got in. The picture opposite shows him in business at the Palace (he’s the man in tights with the long beard), standing next to Edward’s wife, the Princess of Wales, who was herself standing in for Queen Victoria. The Prince himself is to the right, under the chandelier, and to his right is the bald bulk of Prime Minister Lord Salisbury.
Concurrent with the ceremonial key and the organisation of the Masonic affairs of Lancashire, the Earl, among a select few, was also a member of a London Obligation, once again named in honour of St George. This was St George’s Chapter (42), a confluence of well-heeled members of the Masonic hierarchy wherein we discover fellow member Bro Michael Maybrick. Thus, with membership of (32) in Liverpool and (42) in London, Lord Chamberlain to the Queen Bro the Earl of Lathom forms a distinctive link between the Masonic activities of Bros Michael and James Maybrick.
But you would never know it, unless you were prepared for a very protracted search indeed. As far as the records at Freemasons’ Hall in London are concerned, James Maybrick wasn’t even a Freemason. As will become clear, he has been quite spirited away. This presents a