As far as publicly available records are concerned, James Maybrick was not a Freemason. Freemasons’ Hall in London had never heard of him. ‘Further to your enquiry we have checked our records for the above name without success,’ was their honest response – honest because he’d been cleaned out a very long time ago. Such frustrations were ignored as I looked for another source, my researcher Keith later mining a basement at a Liverpool library where we finally got lucky. I now had an abundance of proof that the poor murdered bastard was a Bro. Intense enquiry at last resulted in a letter from Supreme Council (Royal Arch), together with a document. It purports to suggest that James was indeed a Freemason, but only briefly, between perfection (i.e. induction) on 24 January 1873 and resignation in 1874.
Although it looks the part – i.e. it is Victorian – it took only seconds to realise that this document was decidedly iffy. It’s titled ‘Return of Members of the *** *** *** Liverpool Chapter *** Liverpool’.
Liverpool Chapter by the name and number of what? (Apparently by the name and number of ****.) By now I knew rather a lot about my subject, was familiar in fact with most of the long-forgotten names that appeared with James on the Chapter’s members’ list. Like him, many were cotton brokers, and one or two instantly stood out. Horace Seymour Alpass, by way of example, was listed as ‘mort’ (dead) in 1881, when in reality he was very much alive, expiring, according to his death certificate, on 31 August 1884. By contrast, James Gaskell, soundly dead on 26 April 1868, is here listed as paying his Masonic dues in November 1873. James Maybrick’s ‘resignation’ is equally problematic. Reliance on this document would give the impression that he quit Masonry in 1874, when in fact at that date his Masonic career was poised to flourish.
Meanwhile, a fascinating paradox has presented itself. We now consider two candidates who were Freemasons – a half-witted homosexual son of the heir to the throne of England, and an arsenic-eating middle-aged cotton broker from Liverpool. Bro Clarence and Bro James share Masonry in common, but manifest vastly different provenances. It was a distinguished Freemason, the aforementioned Bro Thomas Stowell, who brought Clarence’s name into the public domain as a bogus Ripper suspect, and it was Freemasonry that since 1889 had kept James Maybrick out of it. Upon Maybrick’s demise the System was panicked into believing it had urgent reason for denying his Masonry, and simultaneously silencing his wife. When the time came, the Establishment closed ranks, abandoning James like a man with plague, denying his Masonry even if it meant hanging an innocent woman. The Crown got up phoney charges against Florence, and in a ‘trial’ as filthy and corrupt as any on God’s earth, consigned her to life imprisonment. This is known as ‘the Maybrick Mystery’, an adjunct of mind-boggling wickedness sharing its taproot with ‘the Mystery of Jack the Ripper’.
Both ‘mysteries’ were fabricated to protect the ruling elite, and Bro Michael Maybrick was the nucleus of both.
6
Make the Moor thank me, love me, and reward me for making him egregiously an ass.
Iago
Complementing ‘Juwes’, there was another funny little Masonic jest for Charlie Warren about a mile away from Goulston Street. When Catherine Eddowes was released from her lock-up at Bishopsgate police station, she asked the duty officer what time it was. Just before one o’clock, he replied – ‘Too late for you to get another drink.’ Somewhat the worse for wear, she vanished out of the police station with the stated intention of going home.
Eddowes lived at number 6 Fashion Street, an inappropriately named Whitechapel slum directly east of Bishopsgate.1
By any assessment, the place of her death was not on her way home. Around some corner the most dangerous man in London was looking for just such a sweetheart, and in his company Eddowes walked away from Fashion Street and directly south. At any turn in this gloomy labyrinth he could have chosen to kill her. Instead he escorted her to a location of gaslight and multiple windows in which, if anything, he was actually more exposed.
In my view, her assassin took her to Mitre Square ‘by design’, as a requisite of his ‘Funny Little Game’. Cutting compasses into her face up some anonymous back alley would not have conjured the symbolism he was after. What Jack wanted to leave as ‘his fearful sign manual’2 was the ubiquitous and most recognisable Masonic icon of them all, ‘compasses on the square’.
Eddowes was initiated into the ‘Funny Little Game’ with the full Jubelo – her throat cut across, entrails hauled out, and all metal removed. ‘The intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder,’ deposed Dr Gordon Brown at the inquest. ‘A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm.’
CITY SOLICITOR: By ‘placed’, do you mean put there by design?
BROWN: Yes.
Yet we’re enjoined to believe that the symbols carved into Eddowes’ face are a meaningless afterthought. That you can ‘design’ with flopping intestines, but not with the point of a knife. That you can carry a piece of this woman’s apron as a beacon for a message, and then write something above it of no discernible meaning or consequence, and that ‘Juwes’ and a Mason’s Mark are indecipherable abstractions.
Two slayings that night meant two concurrent but quite separate coroners’ courts. The City was an independent entity, responsible to the Corporation of London, and immune to interference from the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police. The Met couldn’t manipulate and control this court as it was to manipulate and make preposterous the inquest into the death of Elizabeth Stride.
City Coroner S.F. Langham, a sixty-five-year-old blueblood behind rectitudinous pince-nez, had spent his entire professional life listening to stories of the dead. First appointed Deputy Coroner for Westminster in 1849, he moved to the City, where he was promoted to Boss Coroner in 1884. His official address was ‘Coroner’s Office, City Mortuary, Golden Lane’,3 and it was here on 4 October 1888 that the inquest into the murder of Catherine Eddowes began. Proceedings were watched by Inspector McWilliam and Assistant Commissioner Smith himself.
The attendance of such eminent spectators is perhaps indicative of the importance the City attached to the case, further underlined by the presence of its thirty-eight-year-old star solicitor. Henry Homewood Crawford was one of the smartest brains on the block. A polyglot, a musician and a talented amateur actor, in the words of a contemporary biography, ‘He may fittingly be described as Attorney General of the City. He is legal advisor to the Right Hon the Lord Mayor, legal advisor to the Aldermen in their capacity as Justices to the City, and also to the Commissioner of Police. He is the City Public Prosecutor, and, apart from the recorder and Common Sergeant, is necessarily the active legal luminary in the Corporation.’4 In short, ‘the active legal luminary’ was no dope. Co-author of A Statement of the Origin, Constitution, Powers and Privileges of the Corporation of London, he knew his City business, and was one day to become its Lord Mayor. Although he began by seeking Langham’s