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First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk
Copyright © Punditbest Ltd 2015
The right of Bruce Robinson to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007548873
Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780007548897
Version: 2016-07-08
Dedication
In memory of Sergeant T. J. Hageboeck
of the Los Angeles Police
Epigraph
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate’er it touches, and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame
A mechanised automaton.
Shelley, 1813
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
1 All the Widow’s Men
2 A Conspiracy of Bafflement
3 The Mystic Tie
4 The Funny Little Game
5 The Savages
6 On the Square
7 The Ink-Stained Hack
8 The Double Event: Part Two
9 Rotten to the Core
10 ‘They All Love Jack’
11 On Her Majesty’s Service
12 The Mouth of the Maggot
13 A Gentleman’s Lair
14 ‘Orpheus’
15 ‘The Ezekiel Hit’
16 ‘Red Tape’
17 ‘The Spirit of Evil’
18 ‘The Maybrick Mystery’
19 Victorian Values
Appendix I: The Parnell Frame-Up
Appendix II: A Very Curious Letter
Acknowledgements
Sources
Picture Credits
Index
Also by Bruce Robinson
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
There is an aphorism. When you see a giant, make sure it isn’t a dwarf standing in a favourable light. Thus we approach ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’.
He’s in a house of smoke and shifting mirrors. There are glimpses of amorphous faces. Many Jack the Rippers are in here, feeding off what historical fragments their keeper can throw into the pit.
Middle-aged men with disturbing expressions lean over the safety rail, clutching files. These are the Ripperologists. They are waiting for the Rippers to come out.
‘There he is!’ bellows one. ‘It’s the wall-eyed onanist from Zadonsk! Look at him, he’s playing with himself! Can’t you see him? He’s got a satchel of wombs!’
Nobody can see him. Attention migrates to another man, and he’s just seen somebody else. ‘There, there,’ he barks, shuffling his Metropolitan Police files. ‘The Jew! The Jew!! Mark the Jew!!’
An inflamed, bespectacled authority fights his way to the front. ‘Shut this farce down!’ he demands. ‘You are all duped!’ He struggles to get a pedometer past a pack of egg sandwiches. ‘I’ve measured his routes,’ he charges, thrusting his instrument as proof. ‘I challenge you all with the routes!’
Insults begin to fly, and argument breaks out between him and a man with a compass. But the lights have already started to dim, and the shutters have gone up. It’s time for the Ripperologists to go home and save their arguments for another day.
This book has no interest in the house of mirrors, and despite selective admiration for some, no interest in Ripperologists. I don’t believe this collective could catch the object of its aspiration in a thousand years, and furthermore, I don’t believe in ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’ either.
We all know the story, at least the blurb on the paperbacks.
It is the autumn of 1888. The cobbled streets of Whitechapel echo to the chilling footsteps of a ruthless killer … Out of the foetid darkness came this subhuman nemesis of blood-hungry evil. Taunting the frantic police, he visited merciless death on five desperate women, nothing to speak as his witness but their hideously mutilated remains. He left no clue, but went as silently as he came, leaving nothing but a name that will forever be etched into the annals of criminal infamy: ‘Jack the Ripper’. Ah! Jack the Ripper. (Fog to taste.)
This book is a repudiation of virtually everything Ripperology has ever written. Anyone who wishes is welcome to have their Ripper back, and retire with him to the nearest gaslit alley. I tend towards a cynical point of view. In politics I expect the worst, and usually get it. But I had no idea of what I was in for with this. Buried in the ‘mystery’ of the Ripper atrocities is a scandal that ain’t much short of incredible. Exploring it was like pulling at a small, wizened root that as it disinters is discovered to be connected to an enormous root-system, deeper and more protectively concealed than I could ever have imagined.
I’ve spent rather a while enquiring into this ‘mystery’, and incrementally I have learned to loathe much of what was the Victorian governing class. Wealth was a deity in Victorian England, and everything was subservient to the maintenance of it. Underpinned by their ‘right to rule’, their cupidity and institutionalised hypocrisy, these defects constituted a potent amalgamation of the forces that conspired to turn this monster into a ‘mystery’.
There’s a perverse, almost heroic status that has evolved around this prick, as though he were someone special, rather than the epitome of all that is cruel, and a God-damned repugnance. His only claim to the extraordinary is his anonymity, his so-called ‘mystery’; and even that doesn’t belong to him, but was the gift of others.
There’s a hybrid of Ripperology responsible for a dizzying variety of publications over the last half-century. By a process of attrition and endless industry, this coterie of authors has come to ‘own’ this history. They are self-appointed ‘experts’ and guardians of flat-earth thinking. Under constrictions of the herd (and by some by design) they have constructed a formidable camouflage around this criminal. It is necessary to break through it before there is any possibility of discovering the identity of our Victorian psychopath.
Busting Jack entails an unravelling of the root-system that is way beyond the constipated strictures of Ripperology.
During the Second World War there was an interrogator for Army Counter-Intelligence by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Oreste Pinto. It was his task to break the cover of enemy spies, and he’s one of my weirder heroes. In 1942 Pinto had a man at the other side of his desk who instinct told him had to be an enemy agent. Before arriving at the Colonel’s office (just off The Strand in central London), this suspect had been through many searing investigations and survived them all. Notwithstanding that, the authorities continued to harbour suspicions; but nobody could break him. So what did Pinto think?
Pinto interrogated his man over a period of days. The suspect had an impeccable Oxford accent, excellent socio-geographic knowledge, backed up by documentation that was as good as it gets. Down to the last little parochial nuance, he had an answer for everything, and seemed totally and utterly kosher.
Even so, Pinto was convinced he was dealing with an exceptionally talented spy whose true provenance was Berlin. But he couldn’t crack him, so he invited him out to lunch. Ten minutes later they were walking up The Strand, about to cross it to go to the chosen restaurant when, as they stepped off the kerb, Pinto screamed, ‘Look out!’ – and he got his German because the bastard looked the wrong way.
‘We drive on the left in England, old boy.’
That is an expert in action. In that one inspired moment, all the lies, all the carefully contrived subterfuge, and all the mystery fell to bits. I’m afraid my narrative will take rather longer to make its point than that flash of inspiration from Pinto. But I believe that the Ripper is just as vulnerable. Nailing this aberration means looking beyond the masquerade and requires but a single word. So look out, Jack! We’re stepping off the kerb, and I’m going to bust your arse.
B.R.
2 May 2015
1
All the Widow’s Men
We must return to Victorian values.
Margaret Thatcher, 1983
Reactionary nostalgia for the proprieties of Victorian England is unfortunate, like a whore looking under the bed for her virginity. Thatcher was perhaps confused because there were no drug busts in nineteenth-century England, few prosecutions for cruelty to children, and little recorded sex crime.
But who needs to force his attentions, with twelve hundred harlots on the streets? There was sex aplenty, at prices all could afford. At the bargain end you could fuck for the price of a mug of tea.
As far as narcotics were concerned there was even less of a problem, because getting smashed wasn’t illegal. Any toff on his way to the Athenaeum could stroll into Harrods and demand half an ounce of their finest cocaine. There was no ‘war on drugs’. The only drug wars in the Victorian epoch were those conducted by Englishmen in soldiers’ uniforms trying to get the Chinese hooked. If they refused to become junkies, they murdered them. Hundreds were strung up outside their own homes. When Victoria’s Prime Minister Lord Palmerston had finally achieved stability of the market, the dealers moved in, shipping their opium out of British Calcutta – 5,000 tons a year by 1866. What today are quaintly called ‘street values’ were astounding, and the revenues to the Crown require no less a word. British ‘administrators’, i.e. pushers, computed that in Fukien province eight out of ten adults were addicted, and nine out of ten in Canton. A complete marketing success.1
One of the outstanding paradoxes of the Victorian age was its obsession with morality, when morality there was none. When it came to sex, Victorian hypocrisy rose to the very ether. The age of consent (determined by an all-male Parliament) was twelve. More often than not, however, consent didn’t come into it. Children were regularly sold into upmarket brothels as a leisure facility for gentlemen (little girls sometimes having their genitals surgically repaired to sustain the fiction of fresh goods). Champagne on the house, of course, padded chambers available on request. The beating of a common child into bloody insensibility with a whip may not have gained you the epithet of a ‘good egg’ at the club, but it wouldn’t have put you into prison either.2 It was men like W.T. Stead who got banged up for trying to do something about it.
William Thomas Stead was one of the great Victorians, a powerful and influential journalist, frequently vilified by the midgets of his trade who were anxious of his sincerity and success. He and Bramwell Booth, of Salvation Army fame, attempted to expose upper-class depravities by going out and buying a thirteen-year-old girl for a fiver. He published a full report of it in the Pall Mall Gazette, titled ‘The Modern Babylon’.3 This didn’t go down at all well with the Establishment (many politicians being punters), and the pair of them ended up in the dock at the Old Bailey.
‘Nothing less than imprisonment’, farted The Times. Mr Justice Lopes got on with it. ‘William Thomas Stead – I regret to say that you thought it fit to publish, blah, blah … and that you deluged our streets and the whole country with an amount of filth, blah, blah, blah … and I don’t hesitate to say, will ever be a disgrace to journalism.’4
Three months’ hard labour.
In 1888 you could fuck a child for five shillings, but you couldn’t read Zola. What the Establishment didn’t like about Emile Zola was his treatment of the working class, who he had the French neck to represent as human.
In his novel Germinal, for example, a coalminer not only falls in love with a girl Capital has reduced to an animal, but he also forms an embryonic trade union. Good God, two horrors in one! The Right Honourable’s wig must have lifted six inches into the air. Like Stead, Ernest Vizetelly (the British translator and publisher of Zola) got three months.
But there was a darker, deeper fear abroad in Zola’s mines, indeed in the minds of the Victorian Establishment. It was the voice from the abyss, the voice of Socialism, howling, ‘Enough, enough. Get off your all fours in the darkness, and stand on two feet like men.’
London was the richest city on earth. Bar none. A Baedeker guide of the period wrote: ‘Nothing will convey a better idea of the stupendous wealth of London than a visit to its docks.’ Eighteen months after an unprecedented working-class riot in Trafalgar Square in November 1887, London’s docks were hit by a cataclysmic strike.5 A Mr Norwood, for management, put it down to ‘dark deliberations of a Socialist Congress in Switzerland’. He was believed then, and might even be now. But I think the strike was more likely to have been caused by the habitual agony of three hundred men fighting over one job, the ‘most ravenous, that is, potentially the cheapest’, getting it. The rest could crawl off and die. And many did, one man actually starving to death on Cannon Street Road.
Enquiries were made into his accommodation:
In it is a woman lying on some sacking and a little straw, her breast half eaten away with cancer. She is naked but for an old red handkerchief over her breast and a bit of sail over her legs. By her side a baby of three and three other children. Four of them. The eldest is just nine years old. The husband tried to ‘pick up’ a few pence at the docks – the last refuge of the desperate – and the children are howling for bread. That poor woman who in all her agony tries to tend her little ones …6
The Queen sent a bunch of posies to the East End – not for the dying woman, but for the Sisters of Jesus, who were teaching girls to sew. In 1888, at Swan & Edgar, Piccadilly, you could order an evening gown and have these scrofulous, albeit industrious little Whitechapel fingers make it for you to wear at the soirée that very night. That very year, the Earl of Dudley threw a party for his ever-hungry but already overfed friend Edward, the Prince of Wales. The dinner service was specially made for the occasion by Sèvres. It had the royal glutton’s crest on it, and cost £22,000.
At about the time of the description of the dying woman in Whitechapel, historians liked to kid the British that they went to war over such outrages. Victorian schoolchildren were informed of one such escapade. It featured a stinking cellar full of men, women and children, and was colloquially known as ‘the Black Hole of Calcutta’.
I’ve read extensively about this ‘hole’, but details of its myth needn’t trouble us here. I raise it merely to point out that if Victorian educators wanted a hole to get uptight about, they could have had as many as would satisfy their indignation without the inconvenience of sending an army to India. A penny ride on a London omnibus would have taken them to Aldgate (Jack’s nearest and frequently used underground station), east of which were thousands of black holes more permanently frightful than anything in Bengal.
Here, the sub-British ate, slept and wiped their arses in cellars full of vermin and promiscuous death. It was a state of affairs nobody in government got into a particular tizz about, making one wonder if the outrage over sanitary conditions in Calcutta wasn’t something of a theatrical overreaction to get at something else.
In 1877 Victoria became Empress of India, but not of London’s East End. There was no money in it. Thus the Victorians managed to persuade themselves that this suburb of hell was nothing to do with them, and that poverty was somehow engendered by evil. Poverty was portrayed as a lack of morality, rather than a byproduct of greed. These bastards were conniving, thieving, degenerate, congenital criminals, born sinners, and if they’d only stop fucking each other, cherry blossom would sprout spontaneously up the Mile End Road.
One West End Nazi offered businesslike solutions to deal with the maggot-coloured infants sullying London’s streets. The following is from an elegantly produced little guidebook for tourists published by the Grosvenor Press in the 1880s, at the height of Victoria’s reign.
Observe the East End streets, and you will notice hundreds, and thousands of little children wandering about in mobs. Their food is scant and they come ten in a family. Like the wretched Hindus, whom a famine, that is really well deserved, has overtaken, and who supinely breed up to the last pound of rice, these Hindus of the East End take no thought for the morrow, and bring into existence swarms of children for a life of barbarism, brutality, and want in the midst of plenty. Yet our civilisation prates at the sanctity of this human life, and in the same breath speaks of the mercifulness of putting a horse with a broken leg ‘out of its misery’.7
In other words, kill them. Was the writer of the above mentally ill, or simply inured to the cruelties of his time? His words are quoted verbatim (only the emphasis is mine), but they give a kind of perspective. Of course there were giants of the philanthropic trades who fought against such ‘values’. But this book isn’t about the genius of Victorian England. It’s about the bad guys, and even the bad side of the good guys.
The nineteenth century was on its famous roll, and the name of the game was gain. Glittering times for those at the top, not so cosy for those pushing the juggernaut. A confederacy of enterprising Englishmen fought their way up – heroes and cowards, saints and shysters – dragging buckets for the gold. ‘I would annex the planets if I could,’ said Cecil Rhodes, staring up at Africa’s stars. On a more prosaic level, the common herd were required to stand behind cordons of policemen and wave little flags at the passing millionaires.
From time to time they were also required to shell out. Somehow the Victorian elite had managed to amend the mythological affection the peasants had for Robin Hood. It will be remembered that he robbed the rich and gave to the poor. The richest family on earth had turned that on its head. In advance of a Royal Wedding – ‘the Fairest Scene in all Creation’ – the nuptials of the Queen’s grandson George, Duke of York, the mob were instructed to buy the bride a present.
Dockyard labourers, longshoremen, river boat men, village peasants, mechanics, miners, parish school children, cottagers, weavers, carpenters, bricklayers – the whole, in a word, of the poorest and hardest worked members of the nation – were bidden, in terms which admitted no denial, to give up a day’s wage or the price of a week’s meals to assist in purchasing some necklace, bracelet, or other jewel for a young lady who is to be the future wearer of the crown jewels of Great Britain. Royalty in England makes a nation of snobs and sycophants out of a nation that otherwise would be sturdy and self-respecting.8
Not from my pen, but from that of a brilliant, now neglected writer of the time, ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée), who couldn’t be dismissed as a horrid Continental republican, because she was British. She continues, under the subheading ‘Physical Defects of the Royal Breed’:
Given their consanguinity in marriage, their hereditary nervous maladies, their imprisonment in a narrow circle, their illimitable opportunity of self-indulgence, the monotony, the acquisitiveness, which lie like curses on their lives, we must give them the honor that they remain as entirely sane as some of them do. They are, moreover, heavily and cruelly handicapped by the alliances which they are compelled to form, and the hereditary diseases which they are thus forced to receive and transmit. The fatal corporeal and mental injuries of the royal families due to what the raisers of horses call ‘breeding in and in’ cannot be overrated, and yet seem scarcely to attract any attention from the nations over which they reign. Mental and physical diseases are common to them, and so are certain attitudes, moral and political. They are almost all great feeders, and tenacious of arbitrary precedence and distinction. No one ever tells them the truth, they are surrounded by persons who all desire to please, that they may profit by them.9
Needless to say, this piece was never published in England, but in the American edition of Review of Reviews. If I were obliged to agree with only one phrase of it, it would be the last: ‘that they may profit from them’.
Victorian royalty was a gigantic conjuring trick, pomp and pretty circumstance designed to keep your eye off the ball: precisely the reason conjurors use a blonde with big tits. The trick was mother love (and love of mother). Victoria loved her people, and 310 million people loved her.
But this proposition sweats a bit under analysis. Her family feared her. Half the world feared her armies and her avarice – young men flocking to heaven in a brainwashed patriotic stupor at the bugle-call of her greed.
‘We must with our Indian Empire and large Colonies,’ wrote the Queen, ‘be prepared for attacks and wars somewhere or other CONTINUALLY.’ Her emphasis, but not her blood.10
By 1887 Victoria had been queen for fifty years. At her Jubilee celebrations she wept joyously at the battalions of young soldiers, but got a bit fraught when asked to contribute to the cost of the festivities. Marching feet might bring a sting of imperial hubris, but underlying it was the sentiment of a clapped-out cash register. It was made clear to ministers that if she had to pay, she’d never celebrate again.
She didn’t want to pay for her swarm, either. Victoria had twenty-two grandchildren, and by the time of her death, thirty-seven great-grandchildren.11 That’s fifty-nine junior royals with their hands in the till. By the late 1880s this regal cavalcade of indulgence at public expense was stretching political and fiscal credibility to breaking point. It had become too much even for the Conservatives. In an attempt to navigate cross-party dissent, the government quietly suggested that the Palace might want to police its own finances. Nothing radical, you understand: Fat Ed would still get his £128k a year; but could not the Queen herself see a way to appoint a committee that might, very delicately, ‘recommend economies, which, without interfering with your Majesty’s personal comfort, state, or dignity, [the loyal throat was cleared] might be made available as a fund out of which provision could be made either wholly or in part for the young members of the Royal Family?’12