Within days of assuming his tenure as Home Secretary, Asquith was in receipt of a letter from W.T. Stead, now the editor of a relatively new monthly magazine, the Review of Reviews:
Dear Mr Asquith, I have received a very curious letter from the Transvall [sic], which seems to me to be genuine. It purports to be the death-bed confession of a man of the name Harry Wilson, who accuses himself, and either his sister or wife (Elizabeth Wilson) of introducing the arsenic into the Maybrick House, in order to avenge themselves on Mrs Maybrick.
The man who made the confession died in Mashonaland, requesting with his dying breath that this letter should be sent to Sir Charles Russell. As Russell did not move in the matter he sent it to me. I feel that this letter imposes upon me a responsibility which I would very gladly hand over to you in case you are disposed to take the same view of it as myself.
As I shall probably publish the confession in the next number of REVIEW OF REVIEWS, I should be very glad to hear from you [as] there is no disposition on my part to do anything that would be contrary to your wishes, or your judgement as to what would be fit and proper under the circumstances.
Whether Asquith replied or not isn’t known, at least not by me. Six weeks later Stead duly published ‘Harry Wilson’s Confession’ in the October issue of his magazine. The article, for which the ‘confession’ was a catalyst, was a brilliant supplication on behalf of Florence Maybrick. It was titled ‘OUGHT MRS MAYBRICK BE TORTURED TO DEATH?’, and once again ‘the Maybrick Mystery’ was back on the boil. Stead rehearsed what he’d already told Asquith: that he’d received a letter from the Transvaal Republic, bearing the postmark of Krugersdorp, franked with four penny stamps, and dated 19 July 1892.
About twenty miles west of Johannesburg and nearly six thousand miles from London, Krugersdorp was a small coalmining town, and ‘of all places in the world’ the last anyone would have expected to hear anything of the name Maybrick. ‘On opening the missive,’ wrote Stead, ‘which reached me August 15th or 16th, I found it was dated “Rithfontein, July 10th 1892.” The extraordinary spelling, due to the effort of a South African Dutchman to spell English as he pronounces it gave the communication an unmistakable stamp of authenticity.’ I’ll skip the cod Dutch (‘yor Walubele and waid Rede Peper’), reminiscent of the phoney illiteracy in the scrawl to George Lusk, and go directly to Stead’s translation:
Mr. Stead.
Dear Sir
Please will you insert this in your valuable and widely read paper, in justice to a poor woman, who is still in prison for a crime another person has committed. It is about five months ago since (I was) in company with Harry Wilson from Mashonaland to the Transvall. He was sick with fever and at last died on January 14th, 1892. Before he died he made the following confession, which he instructed me to send to Sir Charles Russell, barrister-at-law, London, England.
There were four of us who started back, and all three died from fever except myself. And as nothing has been done in the matter – Sir C. Russell has not moved in the matter, I hope that you, loving justice to your fellow men, will move in the matter. He died on the Limpopo flats on January 14th 1892, and was buried by me, and what is the worst part I was the only one of the four left to hear that miserable confession.
Trusting that you, loving justice, will take this into consideration, I will subscribe myself your most humble servant,
MOREAU MASINA BERTHRAD NEUBERG
Included with the letter was Mr Neuberg’s transcribed copy of Wilson’s ‘confession’.
Confession of Harry Wilson
He stated that he, in conjunction with a woman by the name of ____ ____, tampered with medicine which was intended for Mr Maybrick, put arsenic into the ____. He said because Mrs Maybrick and he could not agree, and he had a grudge against her. There was also another woman, he called her Sara, but I don’t remember the other name.
It was somewhere near Manchester, some time ago, and she is still in prison. He told me to send this statement to Sir Charles Russell, Barrister at Law.
Stead immediately contacted Russell, who forwarded him Neuberg’s earlier letter. Unfortunately it was without an envelope, and with no postmark there was no way of establishing an indisputable date or from where it was actually posted. However, the text was headed ‘Johannesburg’ and dated 25 March 1892. Once again, the ‘Dutch’ is rendered into English by Stead.
Sir Charles Russell.
Sir, – A man of the name of Henry Wilson made a confession to me in my tent at Mashonaland that he put arsenic into some medicine for the purposes of revenge on Mrs Maybrick, near Manchester, some years ago. She was convicted of the crime of murder and sent to prison for life, and he wants me to write to you his confession of the crime. He died, and was buried on the Limpopo River, near the drift crossing to the Transvaal.
‘CONFESSION OF HENRY WILSON’
He said he wanted to be revenged on Mrs Maybrick. He with a servant girl tampered with the medicine for Mr Maybrick, and put arsenic into it, but how much I could not get to know as he was delirious for fourteen days. He died and I buried him on the Limpopo Flats on the other side of the Transvaal two months ago. Trusting you will interest yourself on behalf of the woman Mrs Maybrick, I remain, your most humble servant,
M. M. BERTHRAD NEUBERG.
This is written on arrival from Mashonaland. I am sorry there is not another witness to this miserable statement, – M.M.B. NEUBERG.
‘Mr Neuberg was evidently profoundly convinced of the serious importance of the case,’ wrote Stead. ‘He seems to have written to Sir Charles Russell as soon as he got within range of a Post Office.’
Except he didn’t, and it’s at this point that Mr Berthrad Neuberg’s correspondence begins to look decidedly iffy. In fact this whole South African fraudulence is so transparent I can’t believe Stead gave it a moment’s credibility. But believe it he did, and so did Helen Densmore. I can only imagine that their desperation over Mrs Maybrick’s plight, combined with an ignorance of the locality the letters refer to, was the reason for their unaccountable naïvety.
This correspondence can be attacked from whatever angle one chooses. Let us start with the geography. The principal crossing of the Limpopo River out of Mashonaland into the Transvaal was at Baine’s Drift. Two hundred miles south of it was Pretoria, a city of 22,000 Boers and the capital city of the Transvaal. It was well served by post offices. Yet Mr Neuberg didn’t report anything untoward to the authorities there, or post his apparently vital letter either. Instead he kept travelling south for another thirty-five miles to Johannesburg. In all he has covered 235 miles from the Limpopo, where he supposedly buried Wilson on 14 January. Even at a snail’s pace of five miles a day, he would have arrived in Johannesburg on 1 March, more than three weeks before the date of his letter.
Thus he had time on his hands, certainly enough of it to seek assistance from those fluent in English to help him with translation – he couldn’t have wanted the contents of his letter kept secret, because he asked Stead to insert it in his ‘valuable and widely read paper’. How did Berthrad Neuberg know that the ‘Reweu of Reweujs’ – whose name he couldn’t even spell – was widely read? The Review of Reviews was published in America, Australia and England, but not in South Africa, and was definitely not widely read there. From whence did this semi-illiterate Dutchman acquire such insight into a foreign publication? We live in the age of the internet, but I couldn’t name a single periodical in Holland, much less a widely read one whose editor was a ‘lover of justice’.
Stead wrote that it was impossible to refuse to look into the matter, but unfortunately he was looking in the wrong direction. He might have asked, by way of example, why Berthrad Neuberg didn’t report his recent misfortunes to the police, or at least to the coroner’s office either in Jo’burg or Pretoria. Admirable as was Mr Neuberg’s concern for an unknown woman in a prison six thousand miles away, what about his dead companions up the track on the Limpopo Flats? Did none of them have a name, outside of Henry, or Harry, Wilson? Who were these men? Did no one miss them? Did no one report them missing? Did they not have wives, sisters, mothers, families of their own, and did not Mr Neuberg salvage what he could of their possessions, or perhaps a last dying message, to pass on to their loved ones? For a man of such Christian tenacity, he seems to have acted curiously out of character in respect of his deceased friends.
Neuberg claims he saw three of them into their graves, the last of them, on 14 January, being Wilson, who he says ‘was buried on the Limpopo Flats, near the Drift crossing to the Transvaal’. This returns us to Baine’s Drift, and Neuberg is lying. I quote from John Wellington, Professor of Geography at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg: ‘In the dry season this part of the course contains but a feeble stream a few inches deep, or there may be no flow at all, but just a series of pools on the rocky bed.’ This however is not the case in the rainy season, which reaches its peak in January. In that month the Limpopo explodes, surging over its banks and having been recorded, according to Professor Wellington, as reaching a level of twenty-six feet above its bed. The Flats are inundated, and the Drift quite impassable. In short, if Moreau Masina Berthrad Neuberg had buried Wilson on the Flats at the Limpopo crossing, he would have had to be wearing some sort of underwater respiratory apparatus.
Ernest Hemingway wrote, ‘All writers need a cast-iron bullshit detector,’ or words to that effect, and I could smell bullshit. Something was staring me in the face, some kind of riddle, some hidden conundrum, but I couldn’t see it. I had to step back, and keep stepping back, until I could.
It’s fortuitous that Stead printed a facsimile of the ‘confession’. I read it repeatedly before I actually started to look at it. I’ll get to the text by and by, but first let us consider this document without bothering with the words. What I noticed was that Moreau Masina Berthrad Neuberg and Jack the Ripper shared the curious idiosyncrasy of spontaneously enlarging their handwriting at the end of their text.
I thought I might well be looking at an element of the ‘Funny Little Game’, and that the key to it might be hidden in the ‘confession’. For reasons best known to himself, Stead had redacted a name from its text that he’d revealed in his letter to Asquith. It was Elizabeth Wilson. Originally the opening line of the confession read: ‘He stated that he, in conjunction with a woman by the name of Elizabeth Wilson, tampered with medicine which was intended for Mr Maybrick.’
The only Wilson in Battlecrease House was Michael Maybrick’s harsh little sidekick, Nurse Susan Wilson. She was present from 9 May until 18 May, and indeed had a brother called Henry, who was born in Doncaster, Yorkshire, in 1862. But unless Henry was ensconced in some convenient cupboard, or perhaps concealing himself behind the curtains, he was never at Battlecrease. Maybrick died about forty-eight hours after Nurse Wilson arrived, and so tight a schedule would have presented Henry with a bit of a problem developing his grudge.
‘He said because Mrs Maybrick and he could not agree,’ explains the confession, ‘and he had a grudge against her.’
This bullshit invites another question. If his grudge was so extreme that he would poison James Maybrick in order to frame Florence, why not simply poison her? With the kind of access his sister enjoyed, he could just as easily have slipped Florence Maybrick a dose. The reason he didn’t is because he was a hundred miles away, and had never heard of her. In 1891 Henry Wilson was living with his parents in Doncaster, and he is recorded in that year’s census as a commercial painter. When he married in 1901 he was still living in Doncaster, and still up a ladder with a pot of paint. Goodbye Henry, it wasn’t you buried on the Limpopo, and neither was anyone else.
The question therefore isn’t who was Henry Wilson, but who was Moreau Masina Berthrad Neuberg? A dictionary of Dutch names tells us who he wasn’t, or rather what he wasn’t, and that was Dutch. Neither ‘Moreau’, nor ‘Masina’, nor ‘Berthrad’ appears, and neither does ‘Neuberg’, which if anything is German.
What interests me about this ‘confession’ is that via a surrogate (Henry Wilson) it describes precisely what I believe went down at Battlecrease House. It shares its narrative with the statement of the eavesdropping soldier Robert Reeves. Both Reeves and Wilson refer to a ‘servant girl’ as co-conspirator and vehicle by which the poison could be administered. Is it remotely conceivable that these two separate entities, one in prison in Brighton, England, and the other under fifteen feet of water in Mashonaland, could have independently come up with the same extraordinary story? Reeves got it because he’d overheard it, and the non-existent ‘Wilson’ got it from the same fucked-up brain. Only three people knew how James Maybrick had been murdered: Michael Maybrick, Edwin Maybrick and Robert Reeves. Reeves didn’t write this letter from South Africa, he was in a cell in Sussex. That leaves Edwin and Michael. It was Michael Maybrick who had a grudge against Florence (she called it a ‘spite’), and only Michael knew that Florence had been framed, because it was he who framed her.
Wilson’s ‘confession’ continues with further reference to a secret that nobody but an absolute intimate of James Maybrick could have known. Navigating the phoney Dutch syntax, here it is in English: ‘There was also another woman, he called her Sara, but I don’t remember the other name.’
She was Sarah Ann Robertson, James Maybrick’s mistress, with whom he is reputed to have fathered five children. At Florence’s insistence, and in deference to the reputation of her deceased husband, the name was never publicly mentioned. Wilson couldn’t have known it, even if he’d been real. But Mr Moreau Masina Berthrad Neuberg certainly did.
In 1892 it took about three weeks by ship and the new railway to get from England to Johannesburg. Named after its founder, a surveyor called Johannes Rissik, it was a city that appeared out of nowhere, and whose language was gold. In 1886 the richest seams of gold on earth had been discovered at Witwatersrand in the Transvaal. It was a motherlode stretching for fifty miles, and it would make multi-millionaires of men like Sir Cecil Rhodes. But for those who lived there it wasn’t the best of tidings. The Boers (indigenous Dutch) had farmed the Transvaal, in harmony with its endless horizons, for almost three hundred years. Gold wasn’t what these simple God-fearers were about, and they tried to keep it a secret – not because they wanted to harvest it, but because news of it would mean certain war with England. That came fifteen years later, with its hooligan destruction, burning of farms, public hanging of prisoners, and recourse to Britannia’s new invention of the concentration camp, where 26,000 Boer women and children were starved to death.
The poet and traveller Wilfrid Scawen Blunt described it as a ‘gangrene of Colonial rowdyism’, and it was everything the Boers had feared. ‘Johannesburg at present has no politics,’ wrote the journalist Flora Shaw in 1892; ‘it is much too busy with material problems. It is hideous and detestable; luxury without order, sensual enjoyment without art; riches without refinement; display without dignity.’ The riff-raff of the world descended upon the city, its population swelling by about 20,000 a year. Almost everyone but the Boers, the blacks and the unlucky hit the jackpot. Johannesburg was, said one of its burgeoning oligarchs, ‘Monte Carlo superimposed upon Sodom and Gomorrah’. Grandiose buildings went up, plush hotels, a stock exchange, and theatres to entertain the new rich. ‘Much of Johannesburg’s social life revolved around theatre and music hall, and some of the biggest names in contemporary entertainment found their way to the dusty, untidy settlement.’ They included some of England’s greatest stars, among them many of Maybrick’s chums. His lifelong friend Charles Santley sang there, as did Lionel Brough and Signor Foli (both performers at the concert Maybrick had organised on behalf of the Artists Volunteers in March 1889).
They were easy to find, but tracing Maybrick was of a different order. He may have been there for the nightlife, but he wasn’t there to sing. Like his co-existent celebrity ‘Jack the Snicker’, he was a frequent long-distance traveller. In a letter to the City Police dated 21 June 1889, the ‘Snicker’ writes of excursions to Spain, America and the Isle of Wight.
In 1884 Maybrick toured the USA, but comprehensive searches of passenger lists failed to turn up his name, and I knew I wasn’t going to find him on the extant itinerary of any steamer bound for South Africa. ‘I always go abroad as a private gentleman,’ Maybrick laughed, ‘for I wish to thoroughly enjoy myself.’ In 1892 there were no passports, no ‘security’, and no questions. You could get on a ship with one name and get off it with another. Plus, Maybrick was used to using sobriquets, composing as Stephen Adams, performing as Michael Maybrick, and killing with another appellation that dwarfed the pair of them in its fame. Anyone concocting ‘Moreau Masina Berthrad Neuberg’ could dream up any phoney name he liked. ‘Rithfontein’ was bogus, and as a postal address it didn’t exist. There was a ‘Rietfontein’ about five miles north-east of Krugersdorp, and another ten miles south, but they were nothing more than fields, prospectors’ mining claims (numbers 84 and 48 respectively), and barely a name on the map.
‘What is this “Cock and Bull” story,’ asked the South African Empire on 15 October 1892, ‘that Mr Stead has received from South Africa concerning the death of Mr Maybrick?’
One Harry Wilson, while on his way from Mashonaland to the Transvaal, falls ill with fever and dies on the road. His sole surviving travelling companion is a Mr M.M.B. Neuberg, and before Wilson passes from this world to the next, he narrates in his agonies how, having a grudge against Mrs Maybrick, he with a servant girl, tampers with the medicine for Mr Maybrick by putting arsenic into it, with the sole object of bringing Mrs Maybrick into a murderer’s dock. Neuberg says:– ‘I am sorry there is not another witness to this miserable statement.’ It certainly is regrettable, seeing that no one, unless it be Mr Stead himself, is likely to give any credence to the so-called confession. One is tempted to ask why Neuberg, on his arrival in the Transvaal, did not make known the story to the local press. It would have put pounds in his pocket. Was Harry Wilson known to anyone in the Transvaal? Did he die with any papers about him, and where are they? These and other questions naturally suggest themselves in connection with the elucidation of the mysterious death of Mr Maybrick. Mr M.M.B. Neuberg may have taken down the statement correctly as delivered by the dying man, but who would believe the story of such a deep-dyed villain as Harry Wilson wished to make himself out to be without any confirmatory proof of his guilt? Cannot Mr Neuberg give any reference as to his standing and respectability in South Africa?
The answer to that question is no, because the whole scenario is fake. Thus I was looking for a person (Michael Maybrick) whose pseudonym I didn’t know, and another (Harry Wilson) who didn’t exist. Plus, it was six thousand miles away and 130 years ago.
Before even thinking about Maybrick in South Africa, I had to eliminate him from England. No point trying to nail him on the veldt if he was provably in this country during the summer of 1892. I don’t know where or on what date Russell’s ‘Johannesburg’ letter was mailed, and I believe it was back-dated anyway (using his well-worn trick of the ship’s letterbox). As he quit the boat in Cape Town his fraud was already poised to return home. But because of Stead’s postmark I was obliged to accept that ‘Neuberg’ was probably in Krugersdorp on or about 19 July (although the letter is back-dated 10 July).
The effort to reduce Michael Maybrick’s British whereabouts to a simple list was an endless slog. But after protracted effort a schedule emerged. The last known date when he was definitely in London was Wednesday, 16 March 1892, when together with Charles Santley he sang his stuff at a concert in St James’s Hall. Another star who appeared on the Johannesburg stage, Madame Neruda, played the violin. Add to this the Ripper letter posted to the police in Marylebone five days later, and we get a marker at 21 March 1892.
The next date up was another Wednesday, 4 May 1892, when Maybrick was on the slate to attend a meeting of ‘The Supreme Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons’. His friend and Grand Master Bro Letchworth ‘announced that he had received a communication from Bro Michael Maybrick, Grand Organist, apologising for his inability to be present in Grand Chapter’. He never showed, and he never showed for his next engagement either. On 31 May the Pall Mall Gazette publicised a charity concert to be performed in aid of St Mary’s Hospital Fund, billed for 9 June at the Haymarket Theatre. Some of the biggest names in the business had promised to donate their talents. Maybrick was among them, but again he didn’t turn up. It wasn’t until a meeting of the Royal Society of Musicians on 11 July that Maybrick was unequivocally in London. There are therefore about 115 days – between 17 March and 10 July 1892 – that are unaccounted for. He could of course have had his feet up in Regent’s Park; or, if you were as certain as I was that ‘Mr Neuberg’ was in reality Michael Maybrick, he could equally well have travelled to South Africa.
The fastest ship on the route at that time, the Scot, made the trip from England to Cape Town in sixteen days. The conductor Sir Charles Hallé and his wife Wilma (stage name Madame Neruda) sailed on it. ‘We shall leave Cape Town on September 11th,’ he wrote to his son, ‘and be in London on the 27th.’
But let us assume Maybrick wasn’t aboard the Scot, and took something lazier. Allowing a generous twenty-one days out and twenty-one days back, that’s still seventy-three days available to waddle about the Transvaal and manipulate his fraudulent letters from Neuberg. Even if he hadn’t posted Russell’s letter from the ship but actually from Johannesburg, he could have been there to do it in the first week of April. Back-dating his text by nine days would have raised no questions, any more than Stead questioned his nine-day back-dated letter out of Krugersdorp.
In the American edition of Review of Reviews, W.T. Stead published a codicil to his plea for Mrs Maybrick: ‘The case has, from the first, aroused the most intense interest; and it has created much bitter indignation against the British Government for its denial of palpable justice to an American woman.’ A month later, ‘indignation’ had found a focus, as was reported in the British edition: ‘The United States Government has telegraphed to its Consul at Cape Town to take immediate steps to ascertain further particulars of the alleged confession.’ The Yanks were going to investigate, probably sending detectives into the Transvaal, and I think this put the wind up the British. If the Americans had found Michael in Johannesburg, the Maybrick scandal might well begin to unravel. Michael Maybrick was at the fulcrum of London Society, a man who knew the men. Many of them must have known he was out of town, and not a few must have known where he was; that, I think, is what spooked them, initiating Mr Asquith’s inexplicable shutdown.
Everything in South Africa that was feasible to research was researched, every extant newspaper, magazine and microfilm. It cost endless hours, without success. One last hope was the Government House (GH) archive at Cape Town, whose inventory was enormous.
But unfortunately there is a gap in these records at just the wrong year. Everything to do with diplomatic traffic (be it British or American) for 1892 is missing. Apologists will say the file simply went missing sometime in the last 130 years, while the more cynical might say that the file was pulled. Predicated on the cheats and deceits of the British authorities during the Ripper scandal, I am of the latter school.
After months of research I was left with the impossible coincidence of Robert Reeves and Harry Wilson attributing Mrs Maybrick’s frame-up to the same ‘servant girl’. I had the secret of ‘Sara’ and a Harry Wilson alive in Doncaster. But it wasn’t enough, and I couldn’t prove who ‘Neuberg’ actually was.
By now I had been researching Bro Michael Maybrick for rather a while, and considered myself somewhat au fait with the way he thought. He was a Mason and a murderer, described by Florence as a ‘brute’. He was a smartarse, smarter than everyone else, and was amused by the stupidity of his targets. Everything to do with his correspondence required thinking sideways, like him. He enjoyed the risky stuff – the Women of Moab, the Lady from Surrey, Yack and May-bee, to recall but a few. He was playing his Funny Little Game, and knowing his affection for puns and conundrums, I wondered if the bastard had tried his hand at an anagram. I couldn’t find Michael Maybrick in South Africa, but I still had the puzzle of Moreau Masina Berthrad Neuberg.
MOREAU/MASINA/BERTHRAD/NEUBERG
I BEGAN A BRUTE MASON MURDERER HA
