7

The Ink-Stained Hack

Where law ends, there tyranny begins.

William Pitt, 1770

The function of the Establishment was (and is) the preservation of the Establishment. The Official Secrets Act was presented to Parliament in 1888 by Salisbury’s legal butler, Bro Sir Richard Webster. Made law in 1889, it has ever after been abused and become a bolt-hole for scoundrels.1

Concurrent with the Ripper scandal, literally on a day-to-day basis, the Salisbury government was engineering a ‘foul conspiracy’ (not my words, but those of the Lord Chief Justice Lord Coleridge in 1889) to destroy the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Parnell. Chief of the CID Sir Robert Anderson was the helmsman of this particular conspiracy, which is why the record has scant reference to him in respect of the Whitechapel Fiend. Anderson could lie like a back-alley slut, and was up to his dandruff in a clandestine duplicity. At the zenith of both his and Warren’s criminal activity (the autumn of 1888) he is supposed to have ‘gone on holiday’ to the Continent, when in reality he was secretly manipulating and conspiring with both press and Parliament in what it was hoped would be a death blow to Parnell and his dream of an independent Ireland.

Documents in respect of Anderson’s covert activities were originally classified under the ‘hundred-year rule’. But when the hundred years was up, they were reclassified to keep them secret in perpetuity. They are an ‘official secret’. So even today, in the twenty-first century, British citizens are not allowed to know what nineteenth-century policemen were up to.2

In respect of Jack the Ripper, the Metropolitan Police (MEPO) files are not working documents of an investigation, but largely heavily-weeded scraps of dubious concoction. They are not a record, but a ‘story’ as the System wanted it told, and it was Chief Inspector Donald Swanson who was chosen to tell it.

After the ritualistic murder of Annie Chapman on 8 September 1888, Charles Warren took two strategic decisions relating to the Metropolitan Police’s investigation. The first was a suffocating ban to prevent any information getting out; and the second, draconian control of all information within. Other than as a conduit for misinformation – the search for ‘lairs’, promoting the idea of a ‘Jew’, etc. – the press was to be kept at the end of a very long arm. ‘Under pain of dismissal,’ recorded a contemporary pressman, ‘the detectives refused information, even to accredited representatives of the London papers.’3

At Scotland Yard, things were no different. By a process later known as ‘compartmentalisation’, information was to be channelled upwards, as the exclusive property of an elite. On 15 September, exactly one week after Chapman’s death, Warren wrote, or more likely dictated, a memo (pomposity requiring a few self-congratulatory words before he got to his point). ‘I am convinced,’ he mused, ‘that the Whitechapel Murder case is one that can be successfully grappled with if it is systematically taken in hand. I go so far as to say that I could myself unravel the mystery provided I could spare the time and give individual attention to it.’4

Well, bravo to you, you self-serving idiot, and a pity it is you found time at five o’clock in the morning to apply individual attention to a wall.

‘I feel therefore,’ he continued, ‘the utmost importance to be attached to putting the whole Central Office work in this case in the hands of one man who will have nothing else to concern himself with.’

That man was a forty-year-old Scot, the aforementioned Swanson, ‘who must be acquainted with every detail [Warren’s emphasis]. I look upon him for the time being as the eyes and ears of the Commissioner in this particular case.’ Acquisition of Warren’s blighted organs wasn’t the end of it. ‘He must have a room to himself, and every paper, every document, every report, every telegram must pass through his hands. He must be consulted on every subject,’ insists the memo. ‘I would not send any directions anywhere on the subject of the murder without consulting him. I give him the whole responsibility … All the papers [Warren’s emphasis] in Central Office on the subject of the murder must be kept in his room. I must have this matter put on a proper footing, everything depends on a careful compliance with these directions.’5

Certainly the subterfuge Warren was initiating depended on compliance, and a paragraph added in his own hand is indicative of his determination to hammer the instruction home: ‘Every document, letter received [my emphasis] or telegram on the subject should go to his room before being directed when necessary. This is to avoid the possibility of documents being delayed or action retarded.’

Underneath are the initials of those in the loop: ‘A.C.B.’, Assistant Commissioner Alexander Carmichael Bruce, acknowledged the directive on the day it was written, as did ‘A.F.W.’, Chief Constable Adolphus Frederick Williamson, who noted, ‘seen 15/9/88’.6

Swanson’s mandate covers everything: every docket, document, plan and telegram, every ‘letter received’. For the time being, I want to confine interest to the receipt of just one such letter.

On 29 September 1888, the Central News Agency forwarded a letter it had received to Scotland Yard. It was marked for the attention of Chief Constable Williamson, who as signatory to Warren’s instructions was duty bound to pass it on to Swanson post-haste. Because both of them were in the same building, this shouldn’t have taken more than a minute or two.

Swanson was now looking at what is probably the most notorious document in this whole hideous pantomime. Known subsequently as the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, and considered to be the first outing of the Beast’s nom de plume, it is signed, ‘yours truly Jack the Ripper’.

25 Sept 1888

Dear Boss

I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I can’t use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck.

yours truly

Jack the Ripper

Don’t mind me giving the trade name.

Written at a right-angle below the main text and as an apparent afterthought:

Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it. No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now ha ha

Bro Donald Swanson (Lodge of St Peter’s 284)7 was an apt choice as Warren’s ‘eyes and ears’. It was his responsibility ‘to avoid the possibility of documents being delayed or action retarded’. Under such an uncompromising stricture, knowledge of ‘Dear Boss’ and the letter itself must have gone directly to Warren. We know he was in London, and Scotland Yard wasn’t a corner shop. If Superintendent Arnold can wake Warren in the middle of the night to inform him of some writing on a wall, it shouldn’t have been a difficult task for Swanson to inform his boss of the arrival of a letter in the middle of the day. Broad daylight, no telegraph or telephone required (although the boss had both). Chances are it was only a stroll into the next-door office.

The ramifications of this are startling. We are talking about 29 September, the daylight before the night of the ‘Double Event’. By any balance of probability, it means that Warren would have known about ‘Dear Boss’ when he scurried out of bed that night to wash off that wall. Indeed, I’d bet my low card it was the reason he did it. Following hard on his heels came a poster campaign that must rank amongst the most ridiculous in history.

The Metropolitan Police reproduced the letter and a subsequent postcard, and slapped posters up all over East London. The universal petition that ‘Any person recognising the handwriting is requested to communicate with the nearest police station’ was rendered a tad academic, since the only person who might have recognised it was the Commissioner of Police, and he’d just washed it off.

This novel reaction to evidence has been examined in a previous chapter. Without wishing to re-tread the cobbles at Goulston Street, and irrespective of the forever lost handwriting, I want to explore how ‘Dear Boss’ might otherwise relate to the writing on the wall. Take a look at this. It’s a letter from an intelligent citizen, published in the Daily News on 2 October 1888, and I think it gets close to identifying the problem.

Sir – As the track of the Whitechapel monster or monsters becomes more and more thickly besprinkled with the blood, and bestrewn with the mutilated remains of successive victims, there is something almost paralysing in the ghastly sameness with which the newspaper reports wind up:– ‘No clue to the identity of the murderer has yet been found’; ‘No circumstance speedily tending to the discovery of the criminal has yet been observed’; and, ‘It is understood that, although not the remotest clue has been discovered, the police have a theory,’ and so on ad nauseam … Now, Sir, is this not a matter of grave complaint against our detective system? It is easy to say that without something to work upon the police cannot be expected to smell the murderer out. Most emphatically I maintain that it is the duty of the detective to discover and pursue for himself clues suggested by such trifling indications as would escape the attention of the casual or the unskilled observer. We retain a large and expensive body of men, and we have the right to demand at their hands things which, except to specialists and experts, may rightly be called impossible. Sir Charles Warren, pious disciplinarian and enthusiastic soldier that he is, must feel deeply his responsibility for all this …

T.B.R.

That he did, but it wasn’t a responsibility as understood by this correspondent. T.B.R. perceptively identifies the ‘spin’ and reality of what was actually going on – NOTHING – but he doesn’t understand that Warren wasn’t interested in detection, but in the strategy of its avoidance. He was an iron filing at the mercy of a magnet, subject to a dynamic of which the public could have no inkling, and he would tell any porky, promote any falsehood, and rush to any location to facilitate the subterfuge. Bro Warren couldn’t catch Jack the Ripper: he was precisely the reason he was never caught.

Mr Paul Begg informs us that ‘the Masonic Conspiracy’, as he calls it, ‘has now been thoroughly discredited’.8 My response to this assertion is, by whom? Certainly not by Ripperology, or indeed by the Freemasons, whose protestations implode like a line of perished balloons. The single ‘thoroughly discredited’ contrivance is the bullshit put about by a Freemason in the first place, implicating the Duke of Clarence. Ripperologists who dismiss the chalked-up message do so with a superficial understanding of British Masonic ritual. Although wildly incorrect, Mr Begg at least concedes that ‘In the United States however, the names Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum, were and are used.’9

Well, that’s a start, and in terms of detection it may have been of interest to correspondents like T.B.R. The Victorian police may well have demonstrated what the Evening News described as ‘the nous of tailors’ dummies’,10 but even they were able to identify and draw attention to ‘Americanisms’ in ‘Dear Boss’. They could hardly do otherwise. The newspapers were doing it for them. ‘Boss, Fix me, Shant Quit and Right Away, are American forms of expression. The writer is probably an American,’ concluded the Daily Telegraph, which, with quite extraordinary accuracy, continued, ‘or an Englishman, who has mixed with “our cousins” on the other side of the Atlantic.’11

If Mr Begg can acknowledge the murderous trio of J.J.J. as familiar names in nineteenth-century American Freemasonry (just as they were, according to Bro Woodford, in English), and the police themselves are able to recognise American slang in ‘Dear Boss’, what’s the problem with considering an American Freemason, or someone pretending to be one, as ‘yours truly Jack the Ripper’? ‘Just for jolly’, Mr Begg? Just as part of ‘no clue too small’, as that inimitable investigative force Sir Robert Anderson so fastidiously put it?

We had an American Gatherer of Wombs; what’s wrong with an American Ripper? Or is that a forensic leap too far? It certainly was for Charlie Warren and his boys, who were leaping in the opposite direction. Warren and his minions speedily denounced ‘Dear Boss’ as a hoax, and predictably the hypnotised herd went along with him.

Ripperologist Mr Melvin Harris is not only an expert, but according to his own dust-wrapper ‘one of the world’s top experts’, and Mr Harris tells us ‘Dear Boss’ is a fake. It’s the work of a juvenile ‘ink-stained hack’, he decrees, and let’s hear no more about it. ‘While the press fished around for copy,’ says Melvin, ‘an immature and irresponsible journalist decided to manufacture some of his own in the form of a mocking letter supposed to be penned by the killer himself. It was dated 25th September but not posted until the 27th, and not sent to the police or any specific paper but to the Central News Agency in Fleet St.’12

Irresponsible this creation certainly was, but it suggests more talent in the department of clairvoyance than journalism. Harris knows it now, and ‘yours truly’ knew it then, but who at the time knew that the next murder was imminent. ‘Keep this letter back,’ he instructs, ‘till I do a bit more work.’ And it’s clear that he himself kept the letter back – it’s dated 25 September, but was withheld until the 27th. It’s not difficult to suppose that he was trying to coordinate its arrival for maximum impact on Saturday the 29th.

The concept that this letter is a ‘hoax’ begins to evaporate with the reality of its premise. By way of comparison, let us say an anti-terrorist officer sits at Scotland Yard, and circuitously a letter arrives threatening to blow up a plane. That night, not one, but two aeroplanes are blown to pieces.

Is the letter a hoax? Or is the officer who tosses it in the trash – let’s say Inspector Melvin Harris – making an assumption that is beyond his intellectual capacity? There are many men and women whom I revere for their cognitive expertise, but Melvin isn’t one.

‘Hoax’ comes from ‘hocus pocus’, a world of Tinkerbell, conjurers and that most mesmerising of ingredients, ‘mystery’. It is the vernacular of deception, as in a magician’s trick. But where is the deception in a pair of cut-throats? Was that the work of a journalist, or a psychopath? Both the letter and the writing on the wall had the intention of mocking the police, and ‘Dear Boss’ came first. Unless Mr Harris believes the killer was influenced by a letter he couldn’t have seen (short of writing it himself), how could an ‘ink-stained hack’ predict not only the timing, but also the tone of a murderer? Or does he think it was an immature and irresponsible journalist who cut off and brought a piece of Catherine Eddowes’ apron to Goulston Street?

This history is choke-fed with the kind of mind-numbing vaudeville propagated by men like Harris. It is endless and everywhere, erupting down the years like an anaesthetising virus. ‘Who christened the phantom killer with the terrible sobriquet of Jack the Ripper?’ asks R. Thurston Hopkins, a long-dead forefather of the Harris school. ‘That is a small mystery in itself,’ he says. ‘At the time the police bag bulged with hundreds of anonymous letters from all kinds of cranks and half-witted persons who sought to criticise or hoax the officers engaged in following up the murders.’13

To acquiesce in the face of such damned silliness is not only to compromise reality, but also to miss the most important credential of the ‘Dear Boss’ letter.

And that is that it was the first.14

‘Dear Boss’ was not one of hundreds plucked from a bulging postbag. It was a one-off. At the time of its receipt it was unique. Within twenty-four hours, two women lost their lives in Whitechapel; can even the most ardent apologist persist with the asinine certainty of ‘hoax’?

‘Sir,’ wrote a correspondent to the Daily Telegraph on 5 October 1888,

Permit me to suggest in reference to the tragedies that are presently occupying the mind of everyone:–

1) That the idea that the letters attributed to the murderer could have been a ‘practical joke’ or ‘hoax’ is quite untenable. It is inconceivable that any human being, even the most degraded, could joke on such a subject. Rather, the more degraded the class, the more sympathy there would be with the unfortunate women. Whereas, these letters breathe the very spirit of such a murderer.

2) It is unlikely that the man’s dress or exterior is at all in keeping with his crimes. Probably he is well dressed, and his entire appearance is such as to totally disarm suspicion, otherwise women would not trust themselves in his company in the way that they seem to do.

In my view this contemporary opinion is worth more than five hundred Melvin Harrises. Later in the narrative I shall confirm the provenance of much of Jack’s correspondence. Meanwhile, let it be said, the Central News Agency made no attempt to exploit this letter. It was forwarded directly to the police, who clearly considered it genuine enough to slap it up all over East London. Why Warren was forced into its publication is a matter I’ll presently explore, and we can use Mr Harris’s world-class expertise as a stepping stone.

As Melvin is not best-known for his original thinking, I wanted to find out from where he had purloined his opinion. This didn’t waste much of my morning. His ‘ink-stained hack’ surfaced from the inkwell of Sir Melville Macnaghten, the man who gave us a lead on Kosminski, a.k.a. ‘the Whitechapel Wanker’. ‘In this ghastly production,’ Sir Melville wrote of ‘Dear Boss’ in 1914, ‘I have always thought I could discern the stained forefinger of a journalist.’

But Macnaghten wasn’t yet at Scotland Yard at the time of the murders, so he can’t be Harris’s source. We therefore descend the autobiographical ladder from 1914 to 1910, where no less a figure than Sir Robert Anderson waits with support for Melville and Melvin. ‘The “Dear Boss” letter,’ writes Anderson, ‘now preserved in the Police Museum at New Scotland Yard, ‘is the creation of an enterprising young journalist.’15

So, in other words, the very outfit that put the posters up (Scotland Yard) declares that ‘Dear Boss’ is false? By definition, they then are also hoaxers? It’s something to get your mind around. But wait a minute, the barmy pulpiteer isn’t yet spent: ‘Having regard to the interest attached to this case, I am almost tempted to disclose the identity of the murderer and of the pressman who wrote the letter above referred to.’16

The identity of the murderer? Holy Christ, that’s a statement from the chief of London’s CID. Not only could he have arrested some ‘ink-stained hack’, he could also have arrested Jack the Ripper! What was the problem, Bob?

‘The only person who ever got a good view of the murderer unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him; but he refused to give evidence against him.’

What a rotter. I bet he was a Hebrew.

‘In stating that he was a Polish Jew, I am merely stating a definitely ascertained fact.’17

I don’t know where to attack this horseshit first. Let us not forget who’s writing it. This was the head of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, writing of 1888. Allow me to give a brief reprise. Anderson says he knew the writing on the wall was genuine, ‘chalked up by the murderer’, but colluded at its public suppression. And he says he knew ‘Dear Boss’ was fake, yet connived at its promotion, plastering posters on what may well have been the same bloody wall.

This endless contradictory junk is pawed over by Ripperologists in their tireless quest for answers that do not involve police duplicity, when such answers there are none. Macnaghten and Anderson are doormen at the house of mirrors, touts selling tickets for the ‘Mystery Show’. There was no ‘Irresponsible Journalist’, no ‘Ink-Stained Hack’, just as there was no ‘Womb-Collector’, ‘Goulston Street Hoaxer’ or ‘Nautical Man’. Irresponsibility was the prerogative of the Metropolitan Police. At the time ‘Dear Boss’ went up on posters, somebody at Scotland Yard clearly considered it genuine enough to publish. This is where historical reality must impinge on even the misplaced certainties of Melvin Harris. There’s no way a man saturated in this affair, like Inspector Moore, is going to spend half an afternoon comparing the text with the inventions of some ink-stained idiot whose identity is supposedly already known to Robert Anderson. Mr Harris is trying to pull out a rabbit without a hat. His empiricisms are in fact confections culled from the memoirs of a pair of easily discredited liars.

The police knew ‘Dear Boss’ was about as genuine as it got, but as the unarrestable purger proceeded with his rampage, certain hallmarks of his correspondence had become very un-OK. It was therefore decided, almost simultaneously with the publication of ‘Dear Boss’, that all letters from Jack, both the fake and the real, were to be surreptitiously tainted with the word ‘hoax’. A process of transparent but enduring spin kicked in, men like Macnaghten retrospectively mopping up spilt milk just as Charlie Warren did at the wall.

The trashing of evidence was by now endemic, posing the question, why put the ‘Dear Boss’ posters up in the first place?

We come to the nub of Warren’s dilemma, and yet again it was Jack calling the shots. Early in the morning of 1 October, the Central News Agency received another communication. Subsequently known as ‘Saucy Jacky’, it was a postcard signed ‘Jack the Ripper’:

I was not codding dear old boss when I gave you the tip, you’ll hear about saucy Jacky’s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off. had no time to get ears for police thanks for keeping the last letter back till i get to work again – Jack the Ripper.

Receipt of this card coincided with the first public appearance of ‘Dear Boss’, its text only reproduced early that same morning in the Daily Post. Hoax or not, it was assumed by press and public alike that the letter and the postcard were the work of the same pen. Later that day the evening papers printed the text only of both, the reaction to them summarised by the Evening News:

It is not necessarily assumed that this has been the work of the murderer. The idea that naturally occurs being that the whole thing is a practical joke. At the same time the writing of the previous letter immediately before the commission of the murders of yesterday was so singular a coincidence that it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that the cool, calculating villain who is responsible for the crimes has chosen to make the post a medium through which to convey to the press his grimly diabolical humour.

In my view this is a very reasonable supposition, which a variety of apologists have been trying to navigate ever since. If you want to ascribe the entire Ripper correspondence to hoaxers, it is first necessary to discredit the most important letter of them all. Experts like Melvin Harris have applied themselves to the task with muscular zeal, and where Harris flunks it, Mr Philip Sugden picks it up. Both deny that ‘Dear Boss’ has any connection with the murderer, and both deny any reason to assume one, since the threat to Eddowes’ ears wasn’t carried out.

‘The next job I do,’ forewarned the letter, ‘I shall clip the lady’s ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly.’

‘The threat was not carried out,’ counters Mr Sugden. ‘Claims made on behalf of the Jack the Ripper letter and postcard are easily refuted.’18

I think they may be a little more difficult to refute than he imagines. Obviously, had there been an assault on Eddowes’ ears, it would massively up the ante in favour of the genuineness of ‘Dear Boss’. In fact, it would then be foolish to claim the letter was a hoax. For how could any hoaxer predict the intentions of an unknown psychopath with such astonishing specificity? If ears, or an ear, had been cut off, only the murderer could have written ‘Dear Boss’.

‘Unfortunately for the argument,’ writes Mr Sugden, ‘the medical records tell a different story. Dr Gordon Brown, examining Kate’s body in Mitre Square, did discover that the lobe of her right ear had been severed. But one detached earlobe does not constitute evidence of any attempt to remove both ears and, given the extensive mutilation of Kate’s face and head, can hardly be deemed as significant.’19

Mr Sugden may pursue any argument he pleases, but he might want to check out Gordon Brown’s medical report with a little more precision. Reading from his notes at the inquest, Dr Brown said, ‘The lobe and auricle of the right ear were cut obliquely through.’20

Auricle: The external ear, or that part of the ear that is prominent from the head.

The definition comes from Webster’s Dictionary, 1888. Thus, according to Dr Gordon Brown, the Ripper had amputated Mrs Eddowes’ right ear in its entirety. This included the lobe. We have a mortuary sketch that clearly shows her right ear as missing, and it is a reality confirmed in various postmortem photographs. Where this ‘auricle’ went is not accounted for.

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Brown’s original drawing shows a dark slash in place of the amputated ear, its absence confirmed by the photograph of Eddowes in her coffin, where instead of an auricle there is a black hole. This is hardly the trivial distraction of an accidentally severed lobe. Contrary to Mr Sugden, I think this amputated ear may well constitute evidence of an intention to amputate the other. But as stated in ‘Saucy Jacky’, maybe the murderer didn’t have the time or the security to harvest both.

Meanwhile, congratulations to our immature and irresponsible ‘ink-stained hack’. He must have been some hot scribe, with a facility of insight little short of the supernatural. Hitherto, the object of his fantasy had not mutilated the head or face of any previous victim, knife activity being kept to the torso. But now, in perfect synchronicity with his homicidal muse, both the ‘ink-stained hack’ and Jack the Ripper move on to new territory, one threatening ears, and the other actually cutting one off. It is to be hoped that this ink-stained journalist with a talent to access the future had a triumphant career, beyond the ersatz blather of Mr Melvin Harris and Mr Philip Sugden.

Ever eager to get into line behind the ‘authorities’, Ripperology took up the task of misinformation, the following being a contribution from The A to Z: ‘Since the “Dear Boss” letter was published in the morning papers on October 1st, when the “Saucy Jacky” card was posted, the latter might easily have been an imaginative hoax by another hand.’

I want to evaluate this ‘might easily’. To explore it, I will separate these so-called hoaxers into Hoaxer A and Hoaxer B, being ‘Dear Boss’ and ‘Saucy Jacky’ respectively.

Let’s have a look at that word ‘easily’ in relation to Hoaxer B. Firstly, how does he know whether the Ripper has cut off two ears, one ear, or none? Dr Brown’s report on the missing ear was not yet in the public domain. Thus either Hoaxer B must have access to inside information (like the Maybricks with their matchbox), or he is the murderer. But conjecture over ears pales into insignificance compared with the next hurdle Hoaxer B must surmount. The A to Z correctly states that ‘Dear Boss’ was published on 1 October, in the same dawn as ‘Saucy Jacky’, but neglects to mention a problem of some circumstance for Hoaxer B, and that is the matter of the handwriting.

The printed, typeset text of ‘Dear Boss’ was published in the Morning Post of 1 October, but not in facsimile of the handwriting it was written in. As far as Hoaxer B could know, ‘Dear Boss’ might have been written in capitals, slanting forwards, slanting backwards, in copperplate or ignorant scrawl.

For access to the physical appearance of the handwriting, Hoaxer B would have had to wait for another three days before the facsimile posters went up. If Hoaxer A and Hoaxer B were not one and the same, Hoaxer B must have been rushing around London like the proverbial blue-arsed fly. Not only would he have to be certain of his ears, contradicting ‘Dear Boss’ and championing a negative, he would also have had somehow to discover the printworks where the Met were preparing to set up the facsimiles for their as yet unprinted posters. And it is here that, like the ‘ink-stained hack’, his talents truly bloom. By some photo-telepathic gift, as yet unexplained, Hoaxer B was able to reproduce the handwriting of Hoaxer A’s ‘Dear Boss’ as accurately as if it had come in on a fax.

Former CID officer and handwriting specialist Douglas Blackburn approaches the analysis of such enigmas as ‘Dear Boss’ and ‘Saucy Jacky’ on the premise of something he calls ‘the law of probabilities’. ‘It is asking too much,’ he writes, ‘to expect one to believe that there should be two different persons, probably strangers, who possess the same peculiarities of penmanship.’21

It is ‘asking too much’ for anyone to believe it. So, by way of experiment, I ask the authors of The A to Z to look at the text of this page, and at four in the morning, on any windy corner of choice, to reproduce a single line of it in my handwriting, or anything that even vaguely approximates it.

‘Might easily’ has become ‘frankly ridiculous’.

By mid-morning on 1 October 1888, two newspapers, the Evening News and the Star, had run the text – but not the facsimile – of the Ripper correspondence. ‘A postcard bearing the stamp London E October 1, was received this morning,’ reported the Evening News. ‘The address and subject matter being written in red and undoubtedly by the same person from whom the sensational letter already published was received Thursday last.’

It’s interesting to note that both the Evening News and the Star acknowledge the Central News Agency as their source, and not the Metropolitan Police. There appears to have been no consultation with the police on whether the letters should be published, and pressure of time suggests that no authority was sought. It seems ‘Saucy Jacky’ was too hot a news item to risk a tangle with red tape, and in deference to commercial interests, it went out immediately. By ten that morning the cat was out of the bag.

That same day, the original ‘Dear Boss’ came into the hands of Commissioner Henry Smith of the City Police, The Times commenting, ‘No doubt is entertained that the writer of both communications, who ever he may be, is the same person.’

That didn’t do a lot for The A to Z, and I can guarantee it didn’t do a lot for Warren. Twenty-four hours earlier he’d ruffled not a few feathers in the City, Smith being particularly sour after Warren’s failure to protect the writing on the wall.

Irritability among the City Police was great, as was the antipathy of the press (although Fleet Street was as yet ignorant of the farce at Goulston Street). Any more dismissal of evidence, or potential evidence, and Smith might have gone bananas. If Warren had tried to trash these letters (as his mendacious pals were later to do), a dangerous public row might have erupted between the City and the Met. Warren could hardly rub out one lot of handwriting and just as casually dismiss another. He didn’t obliterate the writing on the wall in order for it to become public – he wanted it to stay a secret, so as to avoid precisely the furore it caused when it got out.

I therefore suspect Smith of being a more likely reason the posters were stuck up than any pressing desire from Warren. Maybe posters would draw the sting of denying Smith his photographs. Plus, there were tactical advantages. First, it would make the press and the public think the police were actually doing something – which, apart from covering up, they were not. And second, a poster campaign would hopefully distract attention from Scotland Yard’s flagrant ineptitude.

Week one of October 1888 must have been amongst the worst of Charles Warren’s life. It wasn’t Saucy Jacky doing the rushing about, but rather the reverse. Jack was out of control, and it was Dear Old Boss who had to run in the night. He must have been traumatised with apprehension, gone to work expecting to find a body hanging over the telegraph wires or a head in his desk drawer. Certainly, as will be explored, on 4 October a headless piss-take was discovered in the vaults of his new building at New Scotland Yard. Oh my God, did they ever struggle to navigate that one. Everywhere Warren looked was murder, and with it came the inevitable condemnation. The people were ‘bitterly angry’, and the press reflected it. ‘In the East End of London these two latest atrocities have caused a reign of terror,’ bawled the Evening Post.

Feelings of hopelessness, horror, and despair spread through the crowded populations on Sunday evening. Thousands of people are thronging the scenes of the murders, and people are angrily crying out against Mr Matthews, the Home Secretary, and against the futility of the work of the police. They are indignantly discussing amongst themselves what they consider the proven ineptitude of the police. They point out that it is only after the murders are committed that the police come into play at all; that they are never at the right spot at the right moment; and that what ever their preparations and organisation may be, there stands the indisputable fact that nothing is accomplished.22

A day later, on 2 October, the Whitechapel Board of Works sent a stringent letter to Warren demanding an increase in the number of police in Whitechapel: ‘This Board regards with horror and alarm the several atrocious murders recently perpetrated within the district and its vicinity and calls upon Sir Charles Warren so to regulate and strengthen the police force in the neighbourhood as to guard against any repetition of such atrocities.’23

Caught in the headlights, Warren sought an exit by blaming everyone but himself. He replied the following day, rejecting demands for more coppers while reproaching Jack’s victims for their lack of entrails. ‘I have to point out,’ he wrote, ‘that the carrying out of your proposals cannot possibly do more than guard or take precautions against repetition of such atrocities so long as the victims actually, but unwittingly, connive at their own destruction.’24

In other words, Catherine Eddowes was complicit in the loss of her ear, kidney and womb. She shouldn’t have been walking around flaunting such stuff at a murderer. Fury was the response, and it’s difficult to select from the cacophony of outraged newspapers. ‘Warren must know,’ spat a Socialist rag called Justice, ‘that a vast majority of East End prostitutes are compelled to earn the 3 or 4 pence for their bed before they can obtain a night’s lodging.’

If he knew, he didn’t care any more than did his neighbour at number 64 Eaton Place. Turning the argument on its head, Warren marginalises the Ripper and again focuses on the victims as the problem. ‘I have to request and call upon your Board,’ he lathers, ‘to do all in your power to dissuade the unfortunate women about Whitechapel from going into lonely places in the dark with any persons. The unfortunate victims appear to take the murderer to some retired spot and place themselves in such a position that they can be slaughtered without a sound being heard; the murder therefore takes place without any clue to the criminal being left’ (my emphasis).25

The Boss Cop has just contradicted any notion of assessing clues, and actually dismisses the utility of having a detective force at all. His forensic capability is reduced to overhearing a scream. That’s what he says. If no one shouts, or no one screams, no clue to the criminal is left.

Even by Warren’s standards this must rank as one of the biggest pieces of shit ever to have come out of Scotland Yard. He says he wants a scream, but unless he’s more stupid than despicable he must know he’s never going to get one. All postmortem evidence (for example, that given by Dr Brown) suggests that Jack silenced his victims in an instant, so it can’t be imagined how this clown in a hat thought anyone could yell with their head half off.

‘You will agree with me,’ wrote Warren (which nobody in Whitechapel did), ‘that it is not desirable that I should enter into particulars as to what the police are doing in the matter. It is most important that our proceedings should not be published, and the very fact that you may be unaware of what the detective department is doing is only the stronger proof that it is doing its work with secrecy and efficiency.’26

Almost a hundred years later, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Robert Mark was rejecting such junk in the columns of the Observer. ‘Detectives at the Yard,’ he wrote, ‘sheltered behind “a fictional police detective mystique” made all the easier by denial of proper facilities for the press.’27

Plus ça change. This nonsense didn’t cut it with Mark in the late twentieth century any more than it did with Fleet Street in 1888. ‘Warren’s letter,’ determined the Star, ‘is pitiful to read. We are asked to believe that because we hear nothing of discoveries by detectives, that only shows the detectives are especially active and energetic, and we are told for the thousandth time that the Metropolitan Police are hopelessly handicapped in dealing with a situation like this for want of reserves to draw on in an emergency.’

The Star had put its finger on it. On the one hand Warren was bemoaning the lack of police, and on the other bolstering them with dishonest claims of covert activity. We now come to this missive’s greatest contradiction and most vital deceit: ‘A large force of police have been drafted into the Whitechapel District.’28 The ‘saturation’ of the East End with an influx of cops is a favourite amongst the Fowler’s drinkers, swallowed whole and broadcast in all the popular books. Bearing Superintendent Thomas Arnold in mind, hear this from a leading Ripperologist: ‘Clearly the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields at this time were saturated with the dedicated men of the Metropolitan Police.’29

Clearly they were not. With a ‘dropsical eye’ on the Socialist mob, Victoria herself was nagging Scotland Yard. She feared ‘that the detective department is not as efficient as it might be’.30 You can say that again. And she did, the royal anxieties summoning new fiction out of Robert Anderson. ‘In reply to the Secretary of State’s enquiry,’ he wrote, ‘I have the honour to report that since the 8th September, the date of the Hanbury Street murder [Chapman], extra police precautions have been taken in the districts of the murders.’

‘Extra police precautions’ is not the same thing as ‘extra police’. It just sounds like it. Everything Anderson writes sounds the part, including the figures he gives for November: ‘The Division has been augmented by 1 Sergeant and 42 Constables, in addition to which 70 Constables have been supplied nightly from other divisions to fill the vacancies caused by men being supplied in plain clothes as above, and to patrol the Division; giving a total of 8 Sergeants and 112 Constables for night duty.’

I have no doubt that cosmetic displays for the press were occasionally organised, rather as a municipal toilet might be freshly painted for a visiting royal, but there is not a scrap of evidence – none whatsoever – in the record to substantiate Anderson’s claims of a radical augmentation of Whitechapel’s police.

Whitechapel belonged to Jack and his ‘Funny Little Game’, and some sections of the press were beginning to understand this, in both its overt and covert manifestations. After the dispatch of the next cunt in the Genius’s collection, Reynold’s News published an article that was as devastating as it was perceptive:

We have been assured that specially trained officers, both in uniform and plain clothes, are daily and nightly on the watch against another crime … Well, another was provided … and because the murderer – quite naturally, of course – from the point of view of the game [my emphasis] between him and authority, escaped once more … Must he oblige the police by committing the murder under their noses? They have exhibited an incapacity that amounts to imbecility, and whether it is the outcome of divided counsels in high quarters, or sheer incompetence, the result is the same.

For ‘divided counsels in high quarters’, read ‘Masonic paranoia’. By December Charles Warren had been replaced as Metropolitan Police Commissioner by James Monro, and we shall shortly be in a position to compare the window-dressing put up by the former with the reality of more police on Whitechapel’s streets under the latter.

In the meantime, camouflage of the royal-toilet variety continued. ‘The most extraordinary precautions were taken,’ enthused the Daily Chronicle on 8 October. ‘Large bodies of plainclothes men were drafted by Sir Charles Warren into the Whitechapel District from other parts of London.’ These were presumably members of the same large body of men who were so secret that nobody had ever seen them.

By contrast, Smith had his men on the City streets in unmistakable uniform. ‘The City Police,’ continued the Chronicle, ‘far from being outdone in their exertions to ensure the protection of the public, more than doubled their patrols, so that almost every nook and cranny of the various beats came under police supervision every 5 minutes.’ Meanwhile, needless to add, Warren’s undercover contingent sustained their remarkable invisibility. Punch magazine suffered from no delusions about the number of police on the street, and neither did the citizens of Whitechapel.

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The caption reads:

FIRST MEMBER OF ‘CRIMINAL CLASS’: ‘FINE BODY O’MEN, THE PER-LEECE!’

SECOND DITTO: ‘UNCOMMON FINE! – IT’S LUCKY FOR HUS AS THERE’S SECH A BLOOMIN’ FEW ON ’EM!!!’

On the day this cartoon was published, 13 October, the East London Observer reported a ‘Great Meeting at Spitalfields’, being a congregation of the irate who turned up to hear speeches from local worthies and dignitaries ‘condemning the police’ and demanding ‘better police protection’.

‘The incompetency of the Metropolitan Police Force,’ declared Mr J. Hall, to unanimous agreement, ‘had never been better exemplified than when three murders were allowed to take place without any steps being taken to increase that force [my emphasis]; or when, after all these terrible crimes had been committed, they still refuse to offer a reward.’31 Clearly no one in the hall had read the Chronicle, because not a voice was raised to the contrary. Where exactly were the extra police? These people lived and worked in the killing zone, and they well knew that the joke in Punch better represented their circumstances than anything coming out of treacherous Charlie. The local police were themselves appalled, insisted Mr Hall, ‘so disgusted with the manner in which they were tyrannised over, that he veritably believed that they were not at all disinclined for a strike against Warren and the Home Secretary’.

Interspersed with cheers or cries of ‘Shame!’, speaker after speaker condemned the ‘demoralisation and corruption of the Metropolitan Police Force’.32 We can but pity the honest cop on the street. His adversary was not only the most dangerous criminal in England, but also potential nemesis of the traumatised rabble in Whitehall, terrified that he might be caught.

‘We have had enough of Mr Home Secretary Matthews,’ declared the Telegraph with corrosive sincerity, ‘who knows nothing, has heard nothing, and does not intend to do anything. It is clear the detective department at Scotland Yard is in an utterly hopeless and worthless condition: that were there a capable director of CID [rather than Anderson] the scandalous exhibition of stupidity revealed in the East End inquests and the immunity enjoyed by criminals committing murder after murder, would not have angered and disgusted the public feeling as undoubtedly it has done.’ The paper demanded a clean sweep of red tape.

Red tape and spin were all Warren had. Two days after the perversion of Masonic ceremony had put an end to the life of Annie Chapman, the Echo became the designated vehicle for official propaganda: ‘the hundred and fifty police who, it is asserted, have been drafted down into this neighbourhood’.33 The only word of substance here is ‘asserted’, because these additional coppers were a figment of the imagination. Nothing had happened except an exchange of correspondence between Charlie and the Home Office. In one flight of fancy, Warren claimed that he was about to write to the Secretary of State asking for three hundred additional men – six hundred boots on a worthless scrap of paper.34

Amidst all the outrage and anguish, letters to The Times and waste-of-ink petitions to government, a moustached face had come to the fore. He was a forty-nine-year-old builder and decorator living off the Mile End Road, by the name of George Lusk.

At their wits’ end with Warren, Lusk and a bunch of local tradesmen had formed a Vigilance Committee. If the cops couldn’t catch the bastard, they would try, and night after night they congregated to patrol the streets. At the same time, as Chairman of the Committee, Lusk wrote to whoever he thought might listen – which was basically nobody: at a meeting of the Committee it was announced that ‘a third letter sent to the Home Secretary remained unanswered’. Despairing at the official indifference, they pledged to press on, adjourning their meeting with a vote of thanks ‘passed by acclamation, to the City Commissioners of Police’.

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It is praise for Smith and condemnation for Warren that tells the tale of public feeling in the streets. They could see Smith’s police, but could only read about Warren’s. While preparing its own foredoomed letter, there was exasperation on the part of the Board of Works over Warren’s practice of importing in replacement men from different divisions. A contribution from the Reverend Dan Greatorex of Whitechapel exemplified the point. ‘He regretted,’ he said, ‘the frequent change of police divisions which was now the custom. If a neighbourhood was to be properly guarded, the constable should be permanently in charge of it, and know by sight almost every person in it. The new system made this impossible and was breaking down.’35

The Star agreed, and stuck it to Charlie. He had wrecked the police force, ‘disorganised it utterly, and thinking he had a genius for stamping out dangerous social tendencies [after suppressing the disorder at Trafalgar Square], let the rank crop of crime and misery grow untouched and uncared for’.

Warren’s system meant that units of police came and went, but it doesn’t mean that the number of constables was increased. On the day of the Board of Works meeting, Anderson authorised thirty-seven H Division coppers to wear civilian clothes. Thus, instead of thirty-seven helmets, there were thirty-seven bowler hats. These fellows were the mainstay of Warren’s ‘stronger proof’ that the detective department was ‘doing its work with secrecy and efficiency’. I’m sure they were doing their tyrannised best, but a change of hat turns no one into a detective, any more than it increases the aggregate number of police on the streets.

On 22 October Arnold wrote to Warren summarising the realities of the H Division picture. Reacting to the tradesmen’s petition, he begged to report: ‘It is impossible to at all times keep a constable on each Beat as owing to the number of men absent from duty from sickness, leave, attending the Police Court, or sessions [at night?] or employed on special duties, which are necessary, but for which no provision has been made.’

No mention of the phantom three hundred. The division has men missing, ‘for which no provision has been made’.36 Arnold makes it clear he can’t even cover the regular beats with so much as a single constable. Even if he had been able to do so, many commentators had identified ‘beats’ as the essence of the policing problem. ‘They go on Beats it takes them more than half an hour to cover,’ noted the Bradford Observer. ‘Beats of a night policeman should not be of uniform length. At present a criminal who knows his district can usually tell to a nicety, after an officer has passed a given spot, how long it will take to bring him to the same spot again.’37

If some provincial hack knew this, then so did Jack the Ripper. In our day it’s possible to access at least some information that was kept well hidden from the recalcitrant mob in EC2. We can actually see what the police numbers were on a day-to-day basis. Such information is contained in ‘Police Orders’, published at Scotland Yard for each twenty-four-hour period and signed off by senior officers – Warren, Anderson, Carmichael Bruce, etc.

Beginning prior to the death of Chapman on 1 September 1888, and throughout the following two months, there isn’t a single reference either to the murderer or to any increase in the number of police. Not one. The week-ending figures for uniformed police in Whitechapel in H Division are as follows:

1 September