Copyright

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

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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

In other words, can you cough up a bit for the kids?

This was construed by the Queen as a piece of common insolence, as was made pretty evident by the tone in which she batted it back. Clearly she thought it iniquitous that she should be expected to shell out. Her Prime Minister, Viscount Lord Salisbury, was the recipient of the bleat. It was ‘most unjust’, wrote the Queen, ‘that she, in her old age, with endless expenses, should be asked to contribute’. Furthermore, she considered herself ‘very shamefully used in having no real assistance for the enormous expense of entertaining’ (at her own Golden Jubilee). Did not Salisbury realise what all this guzzling cost?

Next day she had another seethe at the ingratitude of the masses, via their Parliament. ‘The constant dread of the House of Commons is a bugbear. What ever is done you will not and cannot conciliate a certain set of fools and wicked people who will attack whatever is done.’13

These ‘fools and wicked people’ were actually the taxpayers, a large number of whom were living in abject poverty – which in Her Majesty’s view was about all the excuse they had for not understanding the price of Cristal champagne. Is this letter not as illuminating as it is astonishing? The richest woman on earth considered poor people who wouldn’t give her money ‘wicked’.

‘Oh, but she was a wrenching, grasping, clutching covetous old sinner, and closed as an oyster.’ I vandalise Dickens’s Christmas masterpiece, but his description of Ebenezer Scrooge is appropriate here. I think Dickens found his Miss Havisham in Queen Victoria – his creation a bitter old woman in white, and his muse this caustic old broken heart in endless black. Since the death of her husband Albert in 1861 she had lived in a perpetual funeral, grieving for her lost love and cut off from reality like Havisham in her rotting wedding gown.

The Victorians were subjects of this wretched widow, and in her presence kept a straight face. You had to polish your boots, assume a stiffened aspect, and pretend that everything in the world was serious. Fun was behind her back. In my view, Victoria’s permanent grief invented Victorian hypocrisy. You couldn’t get your hand up at an endless funeral, and had to pretend outrage if somebody else did. This ethic of counterfeit rectitude survives in not a few British newspapers to this very day.

But then, the name of the game is expediency: what do you want to make people think? Politics is reducible to that last defining question: who do you prefer, our liars or theirs?

I reproduce the following because they save me writing a paragraph (and also because they serve as a vivid metaphor for the so-called official ‘Ripper Files’ of the Metropolitan Police). They come from the same newspaper, on the same day, but for a different audience. I always imagined a ‘balanced view’ at Mr Rupert Murdoch’s Sun meant a big pair of tits given equal prominence towards the camera. But this demonstrates that it too is capable of a little political sophistication. These two front pages concern the introduction of the euro. The one on the left is for the British reader, whose government is anti-European, and that on the right is for the Irish, whose government is pro.

The problem for the Victorians (and some of the wilder of the Ripperologists) was that they equated ‘evil’ with ‘insane’. In terms of nailing our Whitechapel monster, this is a mistake; but the Victorian public were conditioned to think in this direction by the police and by the newspapers.

Jack the Ripper was no more ‘insane’ than you or me. A psychopath, yes, but not insane. Was Satan insane? I don’t think so. For a while he was part of the in-crowd, a dazzling angel, Lucifer, the Bringer of Light. God didn’t kick him out of heaven because he was a nut, but simply because he was a nasty piece of work. During his reign, Henry VIII had 72,000 people put to death, and he also liked to cut ears and noses off. Was Henry insane? Probably not, just a Tudor despot who was intolerant of Catholics and others who didn’t subscribe to his theological diktat.14

Is Iago insane? Not noted for his difficulty with words, the greatest writer who ever lived gave this infinitely evil bastard but one line of explanation: ‘I hate the Moor.’ What if it’s as simple as that? With all reverence to Shakespeare, I will change one word: ‘I hate the Whore.’

Jack wasn’t the first, or the last, to make women a target of hate.

He went over there, ripped her clothes off, and took a knife and cut her from the vagina almost all the way up, just about to her breast and pulled the organs out, completely out of her cavity, and threw them out. Then he stooped and knelt over and commenced to peel every bit of skin off her body and left her there as a sign for something or other.

The italics aren’t mine, but Jane Caputi’s, whose book The Age of Sex Crime this comes from.

‘Left her there as a sign for something or other’.

As with much in Caputi’s book, her judgement here is precise. Although her description echoes aspects of the Ripper’s crime scenes, she’s actually writing about a squad of American soldiers who have just beaten and shot a Vietnamese woman to death. The perpetrator here is a representative of USAID. ‘Such crimes are indistinguishable from the crimes of Jack the Ripper,’ writes Caputi; ‘both are meant to signify the same thing – the utter vanquishment and annihilation of the enemy.’15

You don’t have to be ‘insane’ to cut people up, no matter how fiendishly you do it. You just have to hate enough. The Whitechapel Murderer was a beast who hated women (one young American woman in particular), but no way was he insane.

In 1889 an American lawyer wrote about the Ripper scandal in a Boston legal journal called the Green Bag. Considering his piece is contemporary, it is quite remarkable in its perceptions, and is not remotely taken in by the forest of nonsense being put out at the time. It’s far too long to reproduce in its entirety. This edited version therefore is mine, as are the emphases.

It is surprising that, in the present cases, there has been a failure to discover the perpetrator of the deeds; for they have not been ordinary murders. Not only are the details as revolting as any which the records of medical jurisprudence contain; they are also marked by certain characteristics which at first sight would seem to afford a particularly strong likelihood of the crimes being cleared up. The very number of the crimes, the almost exact repetition of the murderer’s procedure in each, the similarity of hour and circumstances, the elaborate mutilation of the bodies … these things might not unnaturally be expected to give some clue.16

My kind of lawyer. I couldn’t agree more, exploration of the words ‘marked by certain characteristics’ being the aspiration of this book.

Yet this abundance of circumstance gives none. So far from giving a clue, they would seem to conspire to baffle the police.

The writer goes on to dismiss the theory of a ‘homicidal maniac’ as an unreliable proposition:

It is the very atrocity of the Whitechapel murders that gave rise to the theory of their being the work of a madman. It is not a novel line of reasoning, this. Only let the deed be surpassingly barbarous, and the ordinary mind will at once leap to the conclusion that it was a maniac who wrought it. Now, the inference is quite fallacious. Some of the most barbarous murders on record have been perpetrated by admittedly sane men – men on whose perfect soundness of mind no doubt has ever been cast. The mutilation of the bodies of these wretched women in East London, taken by itself, is no indication whatever of insanity on the part of the perpetrator of the deeds. The craft and the cunning evinced in the murders seems little to consist with insanity. The rash and uncalculating act of the lunatic is not here. No doubt there are on record a few isolated cases of considerable caution being shown on the part of insane homicides; but we are not acquainted with any which approach to the present display of prudence and circumspection. The craftiness of these deeds is astounding; and the highest tribute to it is the fact that all attempts at detection have been made in vain hitherto. The actual execution of his foul deeds must have been swift and dexterous, and shows coolness of hand and steadiness of purpose. These things are all markedly in the direction of disproving insanity.17

But that wouldn’t do for the hierarchy at Scotland Yard; it was not even up for consideration. For mischievous reasons that will explain themselves, the authorities needed a maniac, preferably a foreigner or a Jew.

Havelock Ellis’s hysterically funny but apparently serious book The Criminal (1890) gives a thumbnail sketch of the kind of thing the Metropolitan Police were trying to sell. The following is a description of one such murderer in the dock:

Imagine a sort of abortion, bent and wrinkled, with earthy complexion, stealthy eyes, a face gnawed by scrofula, a slovenly beard framing a yellow bilious face of cunning, dissipated and cruel aspect. The forehead is low, the hair black and thrown backwards, the muscles of a beast of prey. His repellent head was photographed on my memory, and lighting up the sinister features with a sinister gleam, two small piercing eyes of a ferocity which I could scarcely bear to see.18

This perceived horror and ‘lair-dweller’ – as widely prescribed for our world-famous gent – was an unquestioningly well-enjoyed camouflage, relished and accepted not only by the press and public, but by a majority of experts (the Ripperologists of their day): Jack was a Hebrew frightener with the eyes of a ferret, a sort of Elephant Man with no laughs, and on a moonless night his complexion approached hues of the earth from a freshly violated grave:

The eye of the habitual criminal is glassy, cold, and fixed; his nose is often aquiline, beaked, reminding one of a bird of prey. The jaws are strong, the canine teeth much developed, the lips thin, nystagmus frequent, also spasmodic contractions of one side of the face, by which the canine teeth are exposed.19

Now, I don’t know about you, but if I was a hardened, streetwise East End whore, half-sloshed and desperate for fourpence or not, I would definitely avoid going up an alley with this man. Forget the canine teeth, it’s the spasmodic contractions of one side of the face that would do it for me.

No whore in Christendom is going to entertain it. But just in case she does, there’s more. Let’s overlook Talbot and his ‘degenerate ear’ (1886), and move straight to Ottolenghi (1888), who described the ‘extraordinary ape-like agility noted in criminals’, a characteristic sometimes accompanied by ‘unusual length of arm’; he also drew attention to the prevalence of the ‘prehensile foot’. In 1886 Giovenale Salsotto apparently found ‘abundant hair round the anus’. So you knew what to look out for.20

What the Victorians feared in their Ripper was a manifestation of their own prejudices, and it was rubbish like this that got women killed. ‘Your suspect, ladies, is an anthropophagite goon, and local Israelite. Avoid large noses and hair round the anus and you’ll be all right.’

It all kicked off with this, fly-posted and hawked all over the East End immediately after the murder of Annie Chapman, with no complaints from the police.

Another murder of a character even more diabolical than that perpetrated in Buck’s Row, on Friday week, was discovered in the same neighbourhood, on Saturday morning. At about six o’clock a woman [Chapman] was found lying in a back yard at the foot of a passage leading to a lodging-house in Old Brown’s Lane, Spitalfields.

The hunt was now on for a man called John Pizer, a.k.a ‘Leather Apron’, who was ‘known to carry knives’. This was not entirely unreasonable, since his trade was as a boot-finisher – which is presumably why he also wore an apron.

Pizer was a Jew, well known to the police in Whitechapel. In the light of what was to evolve, it is noticeable that the authorities showed little care for Hebrew sensibilities. When they weren’t accusing Jews, the police were destroying potential vital evidence in the ridiculous pretence of protecting them from anti-Semitic attack. As will be seen, from various schools of Ripperology there’s been a catalogue of excuses for the police concerning the obliteration of some writing on a wall at Goulston Street, near the scene of one of the murders. (Ripperology calls this writing ‘graffito’. This unhelpful sobriquet has attracted a good deal of explaining away and very little explaining.) But, as is my intention to demonstrate, not a few senior policemen had a vested interest in the maintenance of bafflement and the dissemination of fairy tales.

Let’s just have a brief look at the sad case of another utterly innocent little Jew, called Kosminski. His star rose when certain Ripperologists gave credibility to a bit of worthless moonshine in the margins of a book. This scribble is known, with some reverence, as ‘the Swanson Marginalia’.

Donald Swanson was a Met cop, and the book in question, in which he proffered his note, was a volume of reminiscence by Sir Robert Anderson, who at the time of the Ripper crimes was the head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) at Scotland Yard.

Hearts got in a flutter at the discovery of this ‘marginalia’. Amongst other non-starters, one of the names endorsed as a possible suspect by Swanson was the aforementioned Kosminski, who, according to the later Assistant Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten, was a prime candidate due to his addiction to ‘solitary vices’ – in other words, jerking off.

Here’s what a Victorian expert on jerking off has to say:

The sin of Onanism is one of the most destructive evils ever practised by fallen man. It excites the power of nature to undue action, and produces violent secretions which necessarily and speedily exhaust the vital principles. Nutrition fails; tremors, fears and terrors are generated; and thus the wretched victim drags out a miserable existence, till superannuated, even before he has time to arrive at man’s estate, with a mind often debilitated, even to a state of idiotism, his worthless body tumbles into the grave, and his guilty soul (guilty of self-murder) is hurried into the presence of his Judge.21

To give credibility to Macnaghten (and Swanson too), one must give credibility to this. Kosminski may have been a local imbecile, but if he was creating pathological history by masturbating himself into a froth of homicidal lunacy, surely these sessions would have taxed his imagination to something beyond a bunch of toothless, half-drunk hags? We can’t know what Kosminski was tossing off about, but I can’t believe it was over Annie Chapman in her underwear.

More often than not, sexual killers seek to destroy the object of their attraction, a phenomenon corroborated by some notable contemporary criminologists. ‘I only shoot pretty girls,’ said David Berkowitz, a.k.a. ‘the Son of Sam’. By any modern understanding, the Ripper wasn’t a masturbator. It was hate rather than sex that attracted him to whores. As a matter of fact, we might question whether he was any more sexually motivated than Jane Caputi’s charmer. What he unequivocally was, was a powerful, cunning, intelligent man, attributes confirmed by one of the more objective voices of the time, police surgeon Dr Thomas Bond, who wrote: ‘The murderer must have been a man of physical strength and great coolness and daring.’22

In Kosminski’s case, I imagine the tossing arm must have been highly developed, engendering a formidable bicep, and this speaks in his favour. But other than fitting the loony Yid stereotype, Kosminski is just about as likely a Ripper as the man with the involuntary spasmodic contractions exposing his canine teeth.

If the Ripper got hold of you, you were dead. He overwhelmed an entire society, let alone his victims. Apart perhaps from Mary Jane Kelly (and that’s a big perhaps) there were no defensive injuries, not even a moment to hurl a scream at the night. He owned you. You were dead. This nineteenth-century psychopath could have snuffed anyone he liked, anywhere he liked – men, women and children – and indeed he did kill all three.

Kosminski was a ninety-eight-pound simpleton, living off crusts in the gutter, with the physique of an underfed ten-year-old. How do we know this? Because people watched the sad little idiot: the police watched him, he was a face in the East End, as was that other maligned Israelite John Pizer, who incidentally successfully sued at least one newspaper for defamation.

In respect of suspects, the opinions of Assistant Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten are not to be taken too seriously; any more than are those of his governor, the notable anti-Semite Sir Robert Anderson, or for that matter the man at the coalface of this débâcle (the washer-off of the so-called ‘graffito’), the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, Sir Charles Warren.

These individuals’ peculiar judgements and selective certainties were designed for the Victorian mob. They are opinions from the world of banjo-playing niggers and patent medicines, where the same sugar-coated dose of chalk and arsenic cured asthma, cancer, tuberculosis and piles.

And that’s my tiff with the Ripperologists. They think like Victorians, and they think like each other. If a supposed ‘authority’ said it, irrespective of any possible agenda, they gobble it up like the universal quack remedy Fowler’s Solution.23 (Written on a wall, it’s ‘graffito’, written by a copper, it’s ‘Grail’.) I can only speak for myself, but I decline to swallow such nostrums. The baseline for me is simple: if some greased unguent ‘for coughs, colds, sore holes and pimples on your dick’ is now considered obsolete, and if masturbation doesn’t drive you screaming to the grave, why cling to this hotchpotch of Victorian propaganda and misinformation, when today we’re dealing with something we can discover something about? I’m frankly not interested in what some ludicrous copper has to say about ‘solitary vices’. The Victorians’ hypocrisy was like a self-induced blackmail of their own intelligence, and that was how the proles were conditioned into deference: work your arse off, wave a flag, and go to heaven. Are we to suppose that we are to function at the discretion of such fictions today?

The Jew myth takes a close second to the most preposterous Ripper assumption of them all, the ‘no Englishman could commit such a crime’ myth.24 Very popular in its day. From whence this quaint homily originated it is hard to tell, but it was commonly agreed amongst the newspapers, and the Empress herself was known to share it. Anyone with sufficient IQ to get out of bed should decline to give it a moment of credibility.

Jack the Ripper was a killer in a killer state, and in my view more likely to have been an Englishman than a citizen of any other nation on earth.

Between 1870 and 1900, the British were involved in 130 wars. ‘Pax Britannica’ was an oxymoron. The only Pax was in Britannica; the rest got the blade. Englishmen were killing foreigners to the limits of their maps; barging into Australasia, Afghanistan, Africa, slaughtering them in Mashonaland, Nyasaland, Matabeleland. They were wading through swamps to kill them in Burma, climbing mountains to kill them in Tibet. So rank was the avarice, so organised the homicide, they had to put a user-friendly label on it. ‘Bring Christianity and Civilisation to the poor savage,’ said the Great White Queen. And that’s what they got, although not in that order. Bullets first, Bibles delayed. British imperialism was an enormous bulldozer of Christian murder, its participants wringing goodness out of genocide. It could find excuses to kill people in places it had never heard of, to pick fights with Hottentot, Watusi, Zulu, Masai, find justification to wreak vengeance on Maori at the opposite ends of the earth. Hundreds of thousands were murdered as the Christian soldiers marched on, their insatiable God barking to the fore.

In South Africa the starvation of women and children became British government policy. It was here during the Boer War that the British invented the concentration camp – literally a camp in which to concentrate your enemies: in this case the families of the Boer army whom the Brits were having some difficulty trying to defeat in battle. So they went for the wives and kids. Thousands died like the child in the snap below. Meanwhile, Boss Officer Field Marshal Lord Roberts ordered the destruction of all animals and the burning of all crops and farms within ten miles on either side of any railway line the enemy had attacked.

I include this picture because it is as shocking as anything our ‘mystery man’ in Whitechapel ever did, and for me it pretty much sums up the calling card of nineteenth-century Christian imperialism. Such hideous cruelties did not receive the press coverage or the public notoriety of Jack’s atrocities, even though by imperial standards he was barely an amateur.

Nowhere was the imperial narrative more wretched than in the maintenance of England’s first overseas conquest: Ireland.

Salisbury called the Irish ‘Hottentots’ in response to their aspirations for Home Rule. ‘I decline,’ he lathered, ‘to place confidence in a people who are in the habit of using knives and slugs.’ No filthier cant ever came out of a human mouth. The English had been unwelcome occupiers of Ireland for seven bloody centuries, their tenure secured only by indiscriminate use of the bullet and the blade. Generations took English lead, and thousands more their bayonets.

In 1649 the mother of them all had arrived. He was the fifty-year-old commander of the New Model Army, Oliver Cromwell. Ugly as a tortoise and clad like one in a corset of steel, he brought his God with him and shipped into Dublin with a zealous commitment to the Almighty’s work: ‘The sword without, the terror within.’ Intoxicated with Biblical fervour and high on his own juice, Cromwell took his Protestant militia from city to town, town to village, exterminating Catholics as he went.

Like the Victorians after him, this monster purported to believe that his colonial enterprise was ordained by God, and it was a God ‘who would not permit His wrath to be turned aside’.

The massacres were fêtes of blood, down to the last innocent baby. Those who weren’t immediately put to the sword were stripped and left to starve. Some women had their hands and arms cut off, ‘yea, jointed alive’, wrote one contemporary observer, ‘to make them confess where their money was’ (my emphasis).

Those who were spared were shipped out in bondage, 50,000 of them in all. The first slaves in the British West Indies, at Barbados, were Irish men, women and children.

According to Victorian academic James Allanson Picton, the most effective piece of artillery in the English army was the name ‘Oliver Cromwell’: ‘He made it a terror, and it has remained a curse.’ A curse it was, a damnation visited upon Ireland that would endure for another 272 years.25

‘Without exception’, wrote Her Majesty’s most despised journalist, Henry Labouchère MP, the British were ‘the greatest robbers and marauders that ever existed’. Their plunder, said he, was ‘hypocritical’, because ‘they always pretended it was for other people’s good’.

One exponent of this benevolence (and never mind the bollocks) was Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, Commander in Chief of the British Army. ‘War,’ he opined, ‘is good for humanity’:

Wherever we hoist our flag, there we honestly strive – not always, I confess, with complete success – to establish those immutable principles of even-handed justice, and of improved morality … As a nation, we can point with pride to territories once barbarous but now civilised, in every corner of the globe. The wars which extend our frontiers bring new territory under the influence of missionary work, of our laws, and civilisation.26

An alternative view of this ‘missionary work’ was recorded by a Swedish cleric called Charles Lumholtz in Victoria in 1888: ‘To kill a native of Australia is the same as killing a dog in the eyes of the British colonist.’ Expanding his critique, Lumholtz writes: ‘Your men made a point of hunting the Blacks, every Sunday [presumably after church] in the neighbourhood of their cities … systematically passing the whole day in that sport, simply for pleasure’s sake [his emphasis].’

And what a pleasure it must have been: ‘A party of four or five horsemen prepare traps, or driving the savages into a narrow pass, force them to seek refuge on precipitous cliffs, and while the unfortunate wretches are climbing at their life’s peril, one bullet after another is fired at them, making even the slightly wounded lose their hold, and falling down, break and tear themselves into shreds on the sharp rocks below.’27

Cracking shot, Johnny! Thank you, sir!

‘Although local law (on paper) punishes murder,’ continues Lumholtz, ‘it is in reality only the killing of a white man which is called murder’ (again, his emphasis).

Just who did these Christian civilisers think they were kidding? From which of their Ten Commandments did they consider themselves exempt? You can stuff all that twaddle, old boy. They’re infidels with a different god.

Which unquestionably was true. All tanned foreigners in receipt of British lead were subject to the delusion of a different god (it was only their gold that was real). In India they had one god with three heads, and in England we had three gods with one head: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Consequently, it’s quite likely that God looked more like a British officer with half a bear on his head than a man with a bone through his nose.

Twenty-five thousand black bears a year were slaughtered to make hats for the British Army, and fashionable London ladies liked their hummingbirds skinned alive, a technique which apparently added lustre to the chapeau.28

Meanwhile, back in Africa, where the degraded races wore fur and feathers, white men were endlessly hacking at jungle to get at the loot. This was dark and dangerous territory; the continent was still largely unexplored. It was therefore always possible to face sudden confrontation with wild and dangerous men. There was a high chance, for example, of Sir Cecil Rhodes, or Major R.S. Baden-Powell, suddenly springing upon you from the thicket.

Baden-Powell was one of Wolseley’s breed of chaps, ‘an ambitious little man’ who on the side ‘enjoyed dressing up at concert parties and singing in a falsetto voice’. He was also known to enjoy the company of Boy Scouts.

Powell marched his column of fighting men from the beaches of the Gold Coast into deep up-country, his task once again ‘to bring back the gold’ and to destroy the religious practices of the Ashanti. When they got to their destination, a town called Kumasi, the King of the Wogs was asked to produce 50,000 ounces of gold, and spare us the mumbo-jumbo. Only six hundred ounces were forthcoming, creating a bit of a letdown amongst the visitors, who were already half-dead from the march. Baden-Powell concluded that the King and his mother should be taken back to the coast in default.

No one in Kumasi liked the idea of this, because ‘The Queen Mother, as with many African peoples, was an extremely important figure in the hierarchy.’ Obviously a peculiar lot. Notwithstanding that, Baden-Powell and his boys set about the business of teaching these heathens a history lesson of the type untaught in British schools. In their rage for gold they battered their way through temples and sacred mausoleums, pillaging anything of value in an ‘orgy of destruction that horrified the Ashanti who witnessed it’.

With their royal family as prisoners, the Africans stood by ‘like a flock of sheep’. There was not much for the civilisers to do before bidding their farewells except to ‘set fire to the holiest buildings in town’. ‘The feeling against the niggers was very intense,’ wrote Powell, ‘and the whites intended to give them a lesson they would not forget.’29

Some of them haven’t.

The other side of the continent was of no less colonial interest, but here things weren’t going so well. All the ingredients of a major imperial cock-up were in situ, focusing on a city in the southern Sudan called Khartoum. The Sudan had been annexed by the British, but now they wanted out. On paper this looked relatively easy: bring in the camels, evacuate all the people on our side, get them back to Egypt, and we’ll sort out the details later.

George Eliot’s brilliant aphorism, ‘Consequences are without pity’ – or words to that effect – proved its fidelity here. Before anyone knew it, Khartoum was under a siege that was to last 317 days. An army of 30,000 religious fanatics under the messianic Mahdi, a sort of Osama bin Laden of his day, wanted to kill everyone in Khartoum and take the city back into the bosom of Mohammed. But unhappily, they faced the indomitable might of the British Empire, which in this case was one man. His name was Major General Charles George Gordon.

From time to time I agree with the dead, even with a reactionary conservative politician. After Gordon’s death amid the disaster of Khartoum, Sir Stafford Northcote got on his feet in the House of Commons and told nothing less than the truth. ‘General Gordon,’ he said, ‘was a hero among heroes.’ I find nothing to contradict that. Gordon was a hero, no messing with the word. ‘If you take,’ continued Northcote, ‘the case of this man, pursue him into privacy, investigate his heart and mind, you will find that he proposed to himself not any idea of wealth and power, or even fame, but to do good was the object he proposed to himself in his whole life.’

Gordon’s government betrayed him. As far as the Conservatives were concerned – and again they were probably right – the villain in the whole affair was an irascible old Liberal the serfs had made the mistake of re-electing. Prime Minister William Gladstone was a man of compassion and large mind, but he couldn’t make it up over the Sudan. ‘God must be very angry with England when he sends us back Mr Gladstone as first minister,’ wrote Lord Wolseley. ‘Nothing is talked of or cared for at this moment but this appalling calamity.’30

Wolseley doubtless felt his share of guilt. It was he who had sent Gordon, at the age of fifty, to sort out the problem of the southern Sudan. Throughout the searing heat of that dreadful autumn of 1884 Gordon wrote frequently to London: send us food, send us help, send us hope. Despite the headlines and the Hansards full of unction, the dispatches went unheeded, and Gladstone’s vacillations became the tragedy of Khartoum.

The infidel was closing in, at least to the opposite bank of the Nile. This didn’t cost Gordon any sleep: he had a better God than theirs, and more balls than the lot of them put together. ‘If your God’s so clever,’ he taunted, ‘let’s see you walk across the Nile.’ Three thousand tried it, and three thousand drowned. The rest kept an edge on their scimitars, waiting for the word of the Almighty via the Mahdi. They were a particularly fearsome, in fact atrociously fearsome, mob. According to British propagandists they didn’t give a toss about death, because heaven was its reward. They apparently believed that saucy virgins were going to greet them in Paradise, handing out the wine and honey. I have to say, it doesn’t sound much different from the Christian facility, although our corpses don’t get the girls.

January 1885 baked like a pot. The 14,000 inhabitants left in Khartoum had eaten their last donkey, and then their last rat. Nothing was left to constitute hope but relief from the British, and failing that, death.

‘I shall do my duty,’ wrote Gordon. And he did. There are various accounts of his death, and though this one’s untrue, it’s the first I ever read, in the Boy’s Own Paper fifty years ago. He deserved so romantic an obituary. Death came on the night of 26 January, when thousands of infidels breached the city walls. Upstairs in the palace that was serving as government house, Gordon changed into his dress uniform, combed his hair and donned polished boots. With a revolver in one hand and a sword in the other, he came downstairs to meet them.

They cut off his head and carved him to ham, and we’re back into reality. With his head on a stick they ran around the screeching streets, while the rest of their fraternity went berserk. Just in case there were any shortages in heaven, girls as young as three were raped and then sent to the harems for more. Infants were disembowelled in their mothers’ arms, then the mothers were raped, and their sons were raped. Four thousand were massacred. A piece of human hell. There was no merciful God in Khartoum that night.31

Twenty years later a statue to General Gordon was put up in Khartoum. He may well have smiled at the irony. He was a Victorian hero who hated the Victorians. A few months before his death (irrespective of his fate in the Sudan) he had made up his mind that he would never return to England, writing to his sister: ‘I dwell on the joy of never seeing Great Britain again, with its horrid, wearisome dinner parties, and miseries … its perfect bondage. At these dinner parties we are all in masks, saying what we do not believe, eating and drinking things we do not want, and then abusing each other.’

In another letter, having delineated his view of the difference between ‘honour’ and ‘honours’, he wrote: ‘As a rule, Christians are really more inconsistent than “worldlings”. They talk truths and do not act on them. They allow that “God is the God of widows and orphans”, yet they look in trouble to the Gods of silver and gold. How unlike in acts are most of the so-called Christians to their founder! You see in them no resemblance to him. Hard, proud, “holier than thou”, is their uniform. They have the truth, no one else, it is their monopoly’ (Gordon’s emphasis).32

The Queen never forgave Gladstone, ‘that wretched old madman’, for Gordon’s death, and it was a day of royal celebration when he resigned his office six months later, to be replaced by something more to Her Majesty’s taste.

The man in question was a born aristocrat, a master of chicanery and scandal-management, a barefaced liar – a sort of Margaret Thatcher with class. His name was Viscount Lord Salisbury, and apart from a brief hiatus, he will remain Conservative Prime Minister throughout this book.

The Victorians did nemesis very well. Salisbury didn’t like what had happened in the Sudan any more than Victoria did, and both were prepared to spend whatever it cost for revenge.

It came a few years later, in uniform of course, in the shape of a forty-seven-year-old man called Kitchener. Although born in Ireland, Herbert Kitchener was a British soldier from the spurs up, fanatically committed to his Queen and country and the death ethic of his time.

‘General Kitchener, who never spares, himself, cares little for others,’ wrote a fresh-faced young soldier who had served under him, igniting fury amongst various old farts in the service clubs. The dispatch had come back to London from Egypt. Its author was a cavalry officer, an incredibly brave young fellow called Winston Churchill, who was augmenting his thin military income as a part-time war correspondent.

‘He treated all men like machines,’ wrote Churchill, ‘from the private soldiers, whose salutes he disdained, to the superior officers, whom he rigidly controlled. The comrade who had served with him and under him for many years, in peace and peril, was flung aside as soon as he ceased to be of use. The wounded Egyptian and even the wounded British soldier did not excite his interest.’33

Kitchener was an imperious bully even when he didn’t need to be. On a previous expedition into British Egypt, he’d been present when some Arab had been tortured to death. He hadn’t liked the look of it, so from then on he carried a handy vial of strychnine in his pocket. He was a weird cove, and a very formidable foe.34

In 1898 Kitchener went up the Nile like a dose of salts, crossed the Nubian desert on a thousand camels and arrived in the Sudan with every intention of sorting the matter out. His army was better equipped than perhaps any other on earth, sporting a relatively new invention of Sir Hiram Maxim, a true masterpiece of homicidal innovation. It was a .303 machine gun capable of firing six hundred rounds a minute, and it was to cost a great number of ‘astral virgins’ their credentials. Kitchener was utterly ruthless towards the enemy, his men, and himself. His campaign ended in a place not too distant from Khartoum, where after savage fighting he took a desert city called Omdurman.

It was here that the Mahdi, responsible for Gordon’s death, was himself interred. Oh, my lord, can you imagine the power of a victorious British General standing in the sun of the Sudan? ‘Why man, he doth bestride the world.’ And like all megalomaniacs, dizzy with the toxins of his own ego, he was about to lose the plot. Like Baden-Powell in his pink bit of Africa, Kitchener freaked out.

Eleven thousand Dervishes lay dead or dying on the battlefield, but there was one man Kitchener wanted to kill again. Despite the years that had passed since Gordon’s death, hate for the man who had caused it still gnawed Kitchener’s heart. The Mahdi’s successor the Khalifa, an ‘embodiment of the nationalist aspirations of the people over whom he had ruled’, had built a magnificent tomb for his predecessor. Though now riddled with Sir Hiram Maxim’s bulletholes it was the full Arabian works, tiled like an astonishing bathroom and topped with a golden dome.

With Allah far from his mind, it was to this shrine that Kitchener went. He dug up the corpse of the Mahdi, and bashed his bones to bits with a hammer he’d brought specially for the purpose. This must have been quite a sight. When the buckets, or whatever, were full, Gordon’s nephew, Major W.S. Gordon, supervised the slinging of this infidel garbage into the Nile, an event the diplomatic language of London described as ‘Removal of the body to elsewhere’. By then, Kitchener had razed the Mahdi’s mausoleum to the ground.35

When news of this retribution seeped out, it didn’t light up the day at Windsor. ‘The Queen is shocked by the treatment of the Mahdi’s body,’ wrote Lord Salisbury, to which the recipient of this telegram, the former British Consul-General of Egypt Lord Cromer, replied that while Kitchener had his faults, when all was said and done, it was a glorious victory, and ‘No one had done more to appease those sentiments of honour which had been stung to the quick by the events of 1885.’

Yes, yes, yes, said the Queen. She liked all that, and was going to hand out some ribbon, but it was getting a terrible press. She felt it was very ‘un-English’, this destruction of the body of a man who, ‘whether he was very bad and cruel, after all, was a man of certain importance’. In her view, it savoured of the Middle Ages: ‘The graves of our people have been respected’, and so should ‘those of our foes’.36

It seemed that filling graves didn’t bother Victoria, it was taking bodies out of them she didn’t like; and it was the trophy of the Mahdi’s skull that particularly flustered her – plus, she’d caught the back end of a rumour that Kitchener had turned it into some sort of flagon, or inkwell, with gold mounts. Kitchener offered various placatory explanations. His original intention, he wrote, was to send the skull to the Royal College of Surgeons (which had apparently gratefully received Napoleon’s intestines). Then he had changed his mind, and for religious reasons he’d rather not go into, had buried the offending cranium in a Muslim cemetery in the middle of the night. The inkwell and the flagon were merely vindictive gossip.

Except they weren’t. I have good reason to question Kitchener’s veracity, and would put serious money on the true destination of the skull, and its purpose.

My explanation will wait.

The question here is, was Kitchener insane? Dragging a putrescent corpse from its grave and bashing what’s left of it to bits with a hammer isn’t normal, except to certain Victorian politicians. In the House of Lords, Lord Roberts said that any criticism of Kitchener was ‘ludicrous and puerile’, which makes one wonder what he would have thought of a gang of Arabs turning up at Canterbury Cathedral with crowbars to heave out the body of St Thomas à Becket.

The Victorian Establishment always had it their own way, and therein lies the answer to my facetious question. Of course Kitchener wasn’t insane. He was one of the most revered officers in the British Army, and would go on doing what he did for another twenty years. He was a Boy’s Own hero, rewarded with a peerage, as Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. A top-hole chap and an intimate of the elite, he was the ruling class. Like his boss Lord Wolseley, and indeed like his King to be, he was an eminent Freemason.

There was no deficiency in this man’s faculties – the exhumation and destruction of the Mahdi’s corpse wasn’t mad cruelty in the passion of battle, it was a calculated and premeditated act. What motivated Kitchener to dig up and violate that stinking cadaver was hate. Hate.

With that hammer in his hand, Kitchener belonged to Satan.

Satan, wrote Milton, ‘was the first That practised falsehood under saintly shew, Deep malice to conceal, couch’d with revenge’.

In the autumn of 1888, no less a personage than Milton’s fearful inspiration was about his business of revenge in London’s East End. Like Kitchener, his intent was premeditated (he too carried a weapon of extreme suitability – not a hammer, but a knife). Unlike the revered soldier, the Ripper’s hate wasn’t so easily satiated. He rehearsed it again and again. And unlike Kitchener, the Whitechapel Fiend had a witty and macabre sense of fun.

There are three things, even at this juncture, that can be stated with reasonable confidence about our ‘Simon-Pure’, as Sir Melville Macnaghten calls him in his monkey-brained book.37

1) He was not a ‘madman’.

2) He was physically and emotionally strong.

3) And the one thing we can be absolutely certain of is that ‘Jack the Ripper’ did not look like ‘Jack the Ripper’.

No fangs. No failures.

Although complaints about underfunding and undermanning were endless, Whitechapel had not a few policemen on the beat. They were in plain clothes and in uniform, and they weren’t up to much. ‘The Chiefs of the various divisions, who are, generally speaking, disgusted with the present arrangement, will sometimes call one of these yokels before him to see how much he really does know. “You know, Constable, what a disorderly woman is?” “No,” said the Constable. The officer went through a series of questions, only to find that the man was ignorant of the difference between theft and fraud, housebreaking and burglary, and his sole idea of duty, was to move everyone on, that he thought wanted moving on.’38

Constable Walter Dew, though perhaps smarter than most, was one of the above. He was a young beat copper at the time of the Ripper. Many years later he published an honest, if occasionally inaccurate, autobiography recalling his memories of the crisis. ‘Sometimes,’ wrote Dew, ‘I thought he [the Ripper] was immune. Was there something about him that placed him above suspicion?’39

You nearly hit the nail on the head, Mr Dew, but it was more fundamental than that. It wasn’t something about the Ripper; I’m afraid it was something about you.

When the Empress proclaimed that ‘No Englishman could commit such crimes,’ there was an implicit corollary. What she actually meant was, ‘No English gentleman could possibly commit such crimes.’

‘The London police regard the frock coat and the silk hat as the appenage of the gentleman, and no one so dressed is ever likely to be roughly handled, even if he forgets himself so far as to dispute a member of the force.’40

Walter Dew couldn’t have seen Jack the Ripper if he had been standing on his big toe. Like a dose of curare, the lethal anaesthetic of class could stop a London copper in his tracks. Murderers and fiends, in this hierarchy of delusion, did not include anyone of a superior social position. Gentlemen only went to the East End to slum it, for a bit of a lark.

Here’s a contemporary description of one such toff: ‘The most intense amusement has been caused among all classes of the London world by the arrest last week of Little Sir George Arthur on suspicion of being the Whitechapel Murderer. Sir George is a young Baronet holding a captaincy in the Regiment of Royal Horse Guards, and is a member of the most leading clubs in town.’

He was also, just in case we haven’t quite got the picture, ‘a great friend of the late Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany’. Anyway, one night – and I’m so tickled I can hardly write it – Sir George joined the ‘scores of young men, who prowl around the neighbourhood in which the murders were committed, talking with the frightened women and pushing their way into overcrowded lodging houses’.

This was obviously topping fun, and providing ‘two men kept together and do not make a nuisance of themselves, the police do not interfere with them’.

It was all a heady wheeze, and now comes the quite delightful dénouement:

He put on an old shooting coat and a slouch hat, and went down to Whitechapel for a little fun … It occurred to two policemen that Sir George answered very much the popular description of Jack the Ripper. They watched him, and when they saw him talking to women they proceeded to collar him. He protested, expostulated and threatened them with the vengeance of Royal wrath. Finally, a chance was given to him to send to a fashionable Western [i.e. West End] club to prove his identity, and he was released with profuse apologies for the mistake. The affair was kept out of the newspapers. But the jolly young baronet’s friends at Brooks’s Club considered the joke too delicious to be kept quiet.41

In other words, you only had to flash the Victorian equivalent of a Platinum Amex to get an apology and be on your way. The French Sûreté, infinitely superior to its British equivalent at Scotland Yard, suffered no such upper-crust delusions. ‘Handcuffed Though Clearly a Gentleman’ is the title of this cartoon from 1892. Some English con artist called Ferguson Purdie had been arrested on a charge of pickpocketing at the Auteuil races. The French police had him in ‘cuffs’, and the Illustrated London News went into shock. He was Clearly a Gentleman! All the elements of British class absurdity and wooden-headed xenophobia are encapsulated in this little sketch.

You couldn’t have got more ‘gentleman-like’ than the regal son of that most regal gentleman Edward, Prince of Wales. Prince Albert Victor, Victoria’s grandson and later the Duke of Clarence, one of England’s most eminent Freemasons, used to frequent a male brothel at the house of Charles Hammond, in Cleveland Street in the West End of London. It cost a guinea to sodomise a boy, and as befitted the Prince’s rank, the clientèle were strictly top nobs.

The police had had an eye on the place for some while, keeping a discreet record of the aristocratic comings and goings. Among the officials assigned to this unsavoury calendar was Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline. (He was also on the streets with the Ripper enquiries, and was thus a busy man, of whom we shall be hearing more.)

My interest in Cleveland Street isn’t limited to the sordid activities within, but includes the almost inconceivable criminal activity without. By the late 1880s the Victorian Establishment had become so profligate, so craven, that scandal was hissing everywhere, rupturing through the upper classes like air from a perished ball. Home Office staff were forever being rushed off their feet in a frenzy of patching, and repackaging black as a very dark shade of white. The rules had to be violated, manipulated, cheated and debased. In this case the law had to be made a whore to save the royal arse.

This industry of unworthiness was the responsibility of the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews QC, commandant of the legal machine and its venal army of brown-nosed lawyers, lackeys and High Court judges. Like the military in their ursine headwear, these medieval-looking potentates under three and a half pounds of horsehair gurgled the draconian enactments of Victoria’s statutes.

One such judge, James Fitzjames Stephen, who in due course will feature at the extreme peripheries of his paymaster’s wickedness, had an oblique connection with Cleveland Street. His son, James Kenneth Stephen, was tutor and off-peak lover to the Duke of Clarence. He was also a publisher of verses. As Oscar Wilde remarked when bitching about a similar talent, ‘He has nothing to say, and says it.’ Wilde was referring to Henry Somerset, an aristocratic second-rate melodist whose brother and co-buggerer Lord Arthur Somerset is to have some prominence in this story.

Somerset was a close pal of the Prince of Wales,42 and the Prince’s son, the Duke of Clarence, was a pal of Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Charles Warren. The Commissioner was actually a house-guest at Sandringham Palace in Norfolk for the celebrations of Clarence’s twenty-fourth birthday in January 1888.43 I don’t know if J.K. Stephen was there, but when Edward inadvertently got busted at an illegal gambling den, the police were chastened, and J.K.’s father was on hand to clarify what ‘illegal’ actually meant.

‘It is occasionally said,’ observed Judge James Fitzjames Stephen, ‘that the law as it stands exhibits practical partiality in the odious form of undue leniency to the rich in comparison with the poor. How can it be just, it is said, that the Prince of Wales and other people of the highest rank should go to Mr Wilson’s [gambling house] and play baccarat with impunity, whilst the newspapers are continually filled with accounts of raids upon gambling houses which do not do a tenth part of the harm? The answer, of course, is plain. There is all the difference in the world between keeping a house in which everyone may gamble, and private gambling which no one can share in without special invitation.’44

In other words, a gentleman may ‘invite’ another to break the law, and be within the law by doing it, but if the culprit is not a gentleman and was not ‘invited’, the law must make a very necessary social adjustment.

‘It is true,’ hawked Justice Stephen, ‘that under 36 and 37 Vict. s. 3. that any man who plays or bets in any street, road, highway, or other public place with any cards or instruments of gaming … is a rogue and vagabond, and as such may be imprisoned by a magistrate for three months.’

A king to be gets a cartoon, and a common man a cell. This apparently went down all right in West End drawing rooms and the more affluent Freemasonic lodges, but didn’t cut it so favourably for Masons in the United States.

Edward, Prince of Wales was Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of England, and thus the most powerful Freemason on earth. But omnipotence did not faze the Yanks. They’d got rid of kings and kingdoms almost everywhere, except in their Bibles: ‘The Prince of Wales, as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of England, should, in the opinion of many, be charged with conduct unbecoming in a Mason.’ That was from the Rough Ashlar.45 Another title, the Masonic Constellation, threw an even bigger rock: ‘What will the Masons do in the matter? Cringe at the feet of such an unworthy person; lick the spittles that fall from such unworthy lips? … The Fraternity in America should take some decisive steps in the matter of the disgrace that he had brought upon the Craft … A common gambler and rake … Strip the tarnished jewels from his breast, try him for gambling and adultery, and expel him from their halls.’46

All I can say to that is, dream on. The hysteria from the colonies was not only disingenuous, it was naïve – the intention of the British Masons being precisely the opposite. This American seemed to have forgotten who was running the place. He had even more to say, but he was wasting his time: ‘It is the duty of Masons in England to guard with jealous care the purity and high standing of our loved order. There is no palliation or mitigation in such cases, and those who shield or protect are equally guilty.’47

You can say that again. But nobody ever did. The ‘equally guilty’ responsible for shielding and protecting fellow criminals in the matter of scandal (at Cleveland Street, for example) were, almost to a man, eminent members of the ‘loved order’.

Condemnation of the Prince of Wales was not restricted to American Freemasons. It also came from the British public. They wrote letters to the authorities, the newspapers and the police. There was irate criticism even from a famous murderer – the following came from ‘Jack the Ripper’, or at least from a correspondent signing himself thus: ‘A word of warning, beware, and protect your low immoral pot-bellied prince. God has marked him for destruction and “mutilation”.’

Not exactly an echo of the popular press, though Fleet Street wasn’t friendly either. All in all, it was another lousy day in utopia.

But this little fracas for Edward was as nothing – wasn’t even a pimple on the bum – to the truly awful scandal that had come down the pike but twelve months before, and threatened to destroy his son.

An oppressive fact about the Victorian ruling estate was its isolation. You were in it, or you were not. Its encircling walls weren’t entirely visible until you ran into one. Then they were high and hard. The upper classes could slam a door in your face that you couldn’t even see. It is another fact, similarly invisible, that perhaps as few as 10,000 members of this class ran the affairs of 310 million people.

Reading its contemporary journals and dainty lady-press, the claustrophobia (I want to say incestuousness) of the Victorian elite seems remarkable. It seemed that everyone knew everyone, and everyone knew everyone else. The upper classes gave an illusion of living in one enormous mansion, residing there like superior strangers, and existing only for garden parties and fireworks around the lake. Blood (no matter how thin) or money (and a lot of it) were the only ways in. Though from time to time, of course, the System absorbed those on whom its survival relied: the bishops and lawyers, the judges and generals, and Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police.

Plus, there were those it slept with or who otherwise amused it, people toys, like Lillie Langtry or Oscar Wilde.

Edward, Prince of Wales was a philistine who didn’t give much for their product, but loved the company of artists. Two of the most celebrated of the age were close personal friends: the little composer with his peculiarly British talent Sir Arthur Sullivan, and a true giant of his epoch, the painter Sir Frederick Leighton.

Both of these complimentary-ticket holders of the upper class (like Oscar Wilde) were Freemasons, as were a staggering number of the class they entertained.

Unlike Freemasonry today, the Craft had its own class hierarchy, centralising like everything else in London, and above all at its gentlemen’s clubs. Forget the histrionics over Parliament – that was just a floor show for the proles. In the clubs they were all players in the same game, and it was at White’s, Pratt’s, the Athenaeum and their like that political business was actually done.

Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, was a member of the Athenaeum, as were Home Secretary Henry Matthews, Judge James Fitzjames Stephen, Arthur Sullivan and Frederick Leighton. And so, for the record, were two other gentlemen we shall be hearing a great deal more of, Sir Charles Russell QC MP and London’s Boss Cop, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren.

Just before it hit the fan at Cleveland Street, Prince Albert Victor had a night out. It was one of many such soirées organised to celebrate the sovereign’s birthday: ‘Prince Albert Victor dined with the First Lord of the Treasury, among other guests being Bros [“Bro” means Brother in the Freemasonic vernacular] the Marquis of Hertford, the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, the Earl of Carnarvon, the Earl of Zetland, the Earl of Londesborough, Lord Randolph Churchill, M.P., Sir Hicks Beach, Bart, Lord Harlech, Sir John Mowbray, Bart, and Sir W. Hart-Dyke, Bart, M.P.’ Other distinguished Masons feasting in honour of their monarch that week were Bros ‘Lord George Hamilton, M.P., as First Lord of the Admiralty, the Duke of Portland, as Master of the Horse, the Earl of Mount Edgecombe, as Lord Steward, and the Earl of Lathom, as Lord Chamberlain.’48

I do not mention these names without purpose, nor seek to make an idle point. Many of the Freemasons here mentioned will acquire a specificity as the narrative proceeds.

At another banquet at Arlington Street, Lord Salisbury entertained the Prince of Wales and his ever circulating phalanx of toadies and mattress-muck: the toast, a décolletage of diamonds in the waxy light, was the same all over London: ‘To Her Majesty the Queen.’

It was at about this time Verdi became popular with London’s window-cleaners, whistling while they polished to the air of ‘La Donna è mobile’ lyrics courtesy of the fellows of their class.

Arseholes are cheap today

Cheaper than yesterday

Little boys are half a crown

Standing up or lying down

Bigger boys are three and six

They are meant for bigger pricks …

Henry James Fitzroy, Earl of Euston, was a six-foot-four-inch aristocrat, who in his top hat must have cleared seven feet. His close friendship with Edward and Albert Victor says something about all three. Euston was a classic pile of shit, squandering family money in pursuit of endless good times. Decadence appeared to be his life’s ambition, and was one of the few activities at which it could be said he excelled.

‘Of distinctly Bohemian tastes,’ wrote an early biographer, ‘he soon got into a “set” that was anything but a desirable one. A host of parasites looked upon him as their prey, to be exploited and sucked dry. Nor did the women ignore him. His women friends, however, were not of the description who would have been welcomed in Belgravian drawing rooms. Not that they, for their part, had any desire to be in them. They were much more at home in the green rooms of the lesser theatres and the Haymarket night houses.’49

It was at one of these dives that Euston fell for the wide eyes and rosewater of Kate Smith, a well-known West End slut. He had married and abandoned her by the age of twenty-four. His career in debauchery then flourished. There were plenty of other pretty faces in lipstick, although not all of them belonged to girls. It took a while for Euston to work out what kind of sex he liked, and he ended up liking all of it. By the late 1880s this enormous ex-Guards officer was a not uncommon sight in the nancy shadows of Piccadilly.

On a late afternoon of May or June 1889, a youth emerged out of them proffering the Earl a card: ‘“Poses Plastique”, Hammond, 19 Cleveland Street. W.’

According to Euston, when called to explain himself at a subsequent magistrates’ court, his interpretation of the term ‘Poses Plastique’ meant no more than a glass of champagne and the pleasant scrutiny of a little girl’s genitals. He went along to Cleveland Street and was, he claimed, surprised to find no girls.

He would be more easily believed, at least by this writer, had he said he was surprised to find so many of his aristocratic friends. There was, for example, Lord Arthur Somerset (‘Podge’), a fellow intimate of the Prince of Wales. That very year, the Prince had travelled with Podge to Paris in a railway compartment shared by their musical pal Sir Arthur Sullivan.50 Was Podge – a notorious homosexual – another innocent victim bamboozled by some scoundrel in Piccadilly? And then there was dear Lord Beaumont, and Lord Ronald Gower, and dozens of other guileless aristocrats, all of whom had traipsed to Cleveland Street only to discover (with corporate shock) that it was a homosexual brothel.

The secret machine was shoved into gear. When Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli said, ‘Royalty cannot survive without Freemasonry, and Freemasonry cannot survive without Royalty,’ he spoke nothing less than the truth. It is what Masonry called ‘the Mystic Tie’.

Not a year before, the Earl of Euston had been installed as Provincial Grand Master of Northants and Huntingdonshire, and the following day he and the Duke of Clarence were star guests at the laying of a foundation stone at the New Northampton Infirmary. Having promised in his inaugural speech to do all he could ‘to advance the interests of Freemasonry’, Euston positively sweated unction in his address of thanks to the Duke:

We recognise with pride the honour done to our ancient and honourable fraternity by so many members of your Royal House, who have entered its Lodges, and done excellent work of brethren of the mystic-tie, and we trust that that connection, so intimate and so valued in the past, may have a long continuance in the future. More especially we beg your Royal Highness to convey to his Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, our most Worshipful Grand Master, the assurance of our dutiful submission and obedience.51

Euston practised his Masonic submission under a multiplicity of disciplines. He was a member of Studholm Lodge, St Peter’s Lodge, Lodge of Fidelity, De La Pre Lodge, Bramston Beach Lodge, Royal Alpha Lodge, Stour Valley Lodge, Grafton Lodge, Fitzwilliam Lodge, Military Lodge, Pegasus Lodge, Foxhunter’s Lodge, North and Hunts Master’s Lodge, Studholm Chapter, London, and Grafton Chapter, London.52

There is, however, one Chapter that you will not find in his obituaries, nor in his official CV at Freemasons’ Hall. It is an order of the Knights Templar – a Christian adjunct of Freemasonry that claims its genesis from the time of the Crusades – called ‘the Preceptory of Saint George, the Encampment of the Cross of Christ’. Amongst its august membership was another ‘Christian’ degenerate and friend of Euston, and he is the subject of this book.53

Meanwhile, on the morning of 5 July 1889, Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline went to Great Marlborough Street police court seeking a warrant for the arrest of Charles Hammond, the owner of the establishment in Cleveland Street, and others involved in the ‘Poses Plastique’. The instrument was granted, charging that Hammond ‘did unlawfully, wickedly and corruptly conspire, combine, confederate and agree to incite and procure George Alma Wright, and diverse other persons to commit the abominable crime of buggery against the peace of Her Majesty the Queen’.54

A novel way of putting it, but the game was up for Cleveland Street. One or two of its adolescent tarts were already in Abberline’s custody. A postboy called Newlove thought it most unfair that he and other lads should be isolated for blame. ‘I think it’s hard,’ he told Abberline, ‘that I should get into trouble while men in high positions are allowed to walk free.’

Meaning precisely what?

‘Why,’ replied Newlove, ‘Lord Arthur Somerset goes regularly to the house at Cleveland Street, so does the Earl of Euston and Colonel Jervois.’55

A cell door slammed on Newlove, but it didn’t shut the mouths. A disturbing rumour was beginning to do the rounds, and it wasn’t long before Hamilton Cuff, the Assistant Public Prosecutor, was writing to his boss.

‘I am told,’ wrote Cuff, ‘that if we go on a very distinguished person will be involved,’ a man then identified only by the glittering initials of ‘P.A.V.’.56

Prince Albert Victor’s father, the Prince of Wales, was in Berlin at the time, hobnobbing with relatives. On receipt of the news he roared back into London – first stop, the offices of Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary. The matter was reported coast to coast in the United States, although somehow the British press overlooked it. The Washington Evening Star wrote: ‘The Prince of Wales is as much concerned about the matter as anybody else, for he went personally to the Home Office this week to see Secretary Matthews … the police can show him the name of Albert Victor, among those the telegraph boys mention as having visited the house.’57

Matthews’ legal machine, already haemorrhaging under pressure from the man who was now asking even more of it, was nevertheless at the ready. Two things had to be done, and quick. 1) Dangerous mouths had to be silenced, and 2) Somebody had to be found to blame. The law simply couldn’t tolerate postmen backing their anuses onto whoever they felt like. Whatever happened, however it was managed, and whoever was to suffer, Prince Albert Victor was not at that house, on any night, or ever.

The Government will go to all lengths to secure convictions of the men it wishes to punish just as it will go to all lengths to shield the men that it desires shall escape punishment.

If the reader can believe this is a statement born of partisan bigotry, I can only refer him to the exposures which are now rending ‘respectable’ London in twain, where all the great resources of the ‘greatest empire of the modern world’ are being used to save the heir to the crown, and his worthy associates, Lord Ronald Gower, and the rest of the Marlborough House set, from exposure, their crime being, as all the world knows, the same as that for which Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, if Holy Writ is to be believed.

If the real information can be got, Scotland Yard is willing to pay for it at the market rates; under any circumstances there is always a supply to meet the demand; and if the real article cannot be had the bogus is always forthcoming.58

As the scandal ran for cover, the public were largely kept at a distance. Newspapers murmured, but Fleet Street didn’t need any instructions in deference. As with the crisis of Bro Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson some fifty years later, British newspapers declined to print what the whole chattering world was talking about. In the 1880s, as in the 1930s, it was the American press that forced their hand. A London special to the New York World elaborated:

The English newspapers are at length beginning to do something more than throw out dark hints as to the existence of a great scandal. Labouchère, without mentioning the names of the criminals, charges with complete accuracy, that the Home Office has fettered [Warren’s successor] Police Commissioner Monro’s hands, and he threatens to make things warm for Secretary of State Matthews when Parliament reassembles … The names known and generally talked about thus far in connection with the case are those of Lord Arthur Somerset, Lord Beaumont, Lord Euston, Lord Ronald Gower, and one official of high rank, now in India [i.e. Prince Albert Victor].59

As soon as the danger hit, Clarence was put on a boat heading for Hyderabad, so he could waste some tigers and any elephants he didn’t happen to be sitting on. This regal AWOL wasn’t his decision. Like everything else in this wretched creature’s life, it was the System that decided: they knew what colour the incoming was, but they didn’t yet know the size of the fan. The Washington Evening Star continued: ‘Mr Labouchère talked about the scandals at a crowded meeting in Lincoln Saturday night, remarking that the hideousness was so much the subject of general comment that London conversation was becoming almost as horrible as London vice.’60

It was indeed a circumstance inviting not only public revulsion at the unquenchable lawlessness of the royal mob, but potentially also a dozen years in jail.

For a few breathtakingly terrible weeks the scandal seemed to be spiralling out of government control, the duration of Clarence’s sojourn overseas increasing in direct proportion to the crisis. At its inception it was announced: ‘With respect to the proposed visit to India of Prince Albert Victor, it has been arranged that his Royal Highness shall arrive in Bombay early in November.’ To which The Freemason added on 5 October 1889: ‘It has been decided that Prince Albert Victor shall extend his visit to Burmah, the newly acquired territory of the Empress Queen. This will so considerably prolong the trip, that His Royal Highness will not be able to return to England for at least six months.’

And it might require longer than that. On 19 November the Washington Evening Star reported: ‘Ten days ago, it looked as though official pressure was going to succeed in hushing up the tremendous aristocratic scandal … there was a general feeling it would never get into the courts. Now the prospect is different.’

The public were becoming truly disgusted with this charade, particularly in light of an announcement that ‘costly apartments being fitted up for Prince Albert Victor in St. James Palace’ were to be funded at the pleasure of the taxpayer. ‘It has become obvious,’ summarised the Washington Evening Star,

that there has come to be in the past few days, a general conviction that this long-necked, narrow-headed young dullard was mixed up in the scandal, and out of this had sprung a half whimsical, half serious notion, which one hears now proposed about Club Land, that matters will be so arranged that he will never return from India. The most popular idea is that he will be killed in a tiger hunt, but runaway horses or a fractious elephant might serve as well. What this really mirrors is a public awakening to the fact that this stupid, perverse boy has become a man, and has only two lives between him and the English Throne.61

And the seat of kings was what it was all about. Nobody gave a toss for this effete little useless pederast – that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t Albert Victor caught with his trousers down in Cleveland Street, it was an entire ruling ethic, the thing you waved your flag at – a class of the few enjoying unspeakable privilege at the expense of the many they despised. The Establishment didn’t give a monkey’s who P.A.V. buggered, they’d known about Cleveland Street for years. It was the fact that it had leaked out that freaked them, and they were stupefied with anxiety at the damage this could do to the world’s greatest conjuring trick.

If anything happened to Edward, his son was what they got. His tutor, John Neale Dalton, had described ‘an abnormally dormant condition of mind’. At Cambridge University, to which the dope was sent, one of his instructors doubted whether he could ‘possibly derive much benefit from attending lectures’, as he ‘hardly knows the meaning of the word, to read’.62

However, at all costs, the absurdity of reverence for this twerp had to be maintained. A sudden coronary for his father, Fat Ed, was very much on the cards. Gluttony was his pleasure, and his pleasure was out of control. When he sat down to eat it was a virtual suicide attempt. ‘He is a very dangerous guest,’ complained a Permanent Secretary. ‘He once got into Lord Cairns’ dining-room, and ate up the Judge’s luncheon.’63 Trained handlers in Marienbad and Baden Baden had failed to solve his gut. Plus, there was the fornicatory urge in the groin whose onslaught he could not negotiate – men got swindled of their wives in the bedrooms of their own country houses. But it was in Paris that Edward got into full adulterous stride. Fluent in several languages, he spoke German better than English (he had a thick German accent64), adored all things Parisian, and had a keen interest in French furniture.

Known as the ‘siège d’amour’, this contraption was manufactured to suffer the enormous regal bulk while His Majesty guzzled vintage and shagged two at once. The future Edward VII was never a ‘Victorian’, he simply waited for history to catch him up. Like a sort of cement-mixer in a top hat, he risked apoplexy on a daily basis, and the whole fucking lot of them could have been up the Mall in black crêpe next Saturday.

Prince Albert Victor wasn’t a person, but a ‘thing’ to be protected. Without a king you couldn’t have a queen, and without either you couldn’t have viscounts, dukes, duchesses, knights, barons, earls, lords, ladies, high sheriffs, and 10,000 other unctuous little dogsbodies walking backwards in buttons and bows. Master of the Horse, Master of the Rolls, Mistress of the Robes, Groom of the Stole, Grand Order of the Bloat and Most Noble Star of the Transvaal Murderer, all gone, all as shattered crystal without a king. A dozen centuries would go up in smoke, and history would be the property of people like Gladstone – ‘this most dangerous man’, wrote Victoria. ‘The mischief Mr Gladstone does is incalculable, instead of stemming the current and downward course of Radicalism, which he could do perfectly, he heads and encourages it.’65

Nobody understood this better than the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. The right to rule was his blood’s ingredient, its lineage fermenting backwards for half a thousand years. Salisbury disliked democracy, considering property ‘in danger’ from it, and all ‘social legislation was necessarily a change for the worse’.

Victoria was very happy with Salisbury, and Salisbury would have done anything, anything, to protect the Crown. He would lie for it, cheat for it, empower the wicked to trample the innocent; he would incarcerate for it and, if necessary, put to death for it, exercising the full might of that pliable little strumpet he owned, called law.

It is rumoured in London that Sir Charles Russell has given up his brief for Lord Euston in the libel action connected with the Cleveland Street scandal and accepted one from the Prince of Wales. He will watch the case on behalf of Albert Victor, whose name has been persistently dragged into the affair. It is evidently Lord Euston’s tactics to cripple Editor Parke by heaping up costs by means of legal motions and other expensive processes.66

The above is a not inaccurate summary of developments (we will come to editor Parke and the ‘libel’ shortly). In escalating panic the government brought in its most enthusiastic Gunga Din. He was a society barrister and a personal friend of the Prince of Wales, the aforementioned Sir Charles Russell QC MP.

Russell had defended Euston before, and lost, and Edward before, and won. He was a formidable courtroom operator whose arrogance and ambition had modified his grasp on reality. I don’t know if barristers have to swear an oath to uphold what is true, any more than do prime ministers, but Russell had little care for truth, other than when it could act as a servant to himself. There was nothing Russell wouldn’t do for Russell. His entire career was a dedication to heaving his corpulent Belfast frame up to and beyond the next rung. Consequently, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for the rabble fighting for their Crown, including appearing for the prosecution in the matter of a dangerous journalist.

Although this was the age of the telegraph and the fledgling electric light, it must be remembered that in certain areas we may still be supposed to be in the age of King Richard III. The mechanics were as crude and as transparently ugly: ‘Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous’ – as indeed had the top-hatted heirs of Shakespeare’s villainous hunchback.

The Parke referred to was Ernest Parke, a bit of a firebrand reporter on the Star who would later evolve into its most famous editor. At the time of the scandal Parke was thirty-one, and the Star less than two years old. Loud and radical and no friend of the Establishment, he was a new kind of journalist, in the vanguard of a new breed of mass-circulation newspaper. Like its proprietor, first editor and legend of Fleet Street, the great T.P. O’Connor, the Star was always ready to offer a hand to the underdog and a boot up the arse to his oppressor.

More often than not, it was Parke who put it in. His style was uncompromising and to the point. ‘The Metropolitan Police is rotten to the core’ was but one of his journalistic pronouncements (which doubtless endeared him to those he accused).67 Parke was passionate and enterprising, and worked at two newspapers to prove it. In parallel with his efforts at the Star, he was sole editor of a new evening newspaper called the North London Press. It stood apart from Fleet Street in more than just its title. Parke claimed to have the name of every pervert who had ever gone through the door at Cleveland Street, and, against the advice of men like O’Connor, declared that he would publish them.68 Such infatuation with what he perceived as justice may well have been admirable, but it was also dangerous, and Parke was rapidly moving out of his depth.

In another London postal district, ominous voices were murmuring. The owners of not a few of them were in possession of regular armchairs at clubs like the Carlton and Athenaeum: ‘The social position of some of the parties will make a great sensation, this will give very wide publicity and consequently will spread very extensive matter of the most revolting and mischievous kind, the spread of which I’m satisfied will produce enormous evil.’69

It’s hard to believe that this opinion was coming from the supreme officer of law in the land. It was the contribution of Lord Halsbury, the Lord Chancellor, giving his view on the contempt held for his own statutes by a certain class of upmarket bugger. In other words, ‘enormous evil’ did not reside in the illegality of sodomy, only in the dissemination of the news of it. As with gambling, a different law must apply. Halsbury was by now committed to the perversion of the course of justice, and was thus himself an accessory.

The facts are in the hands of the Home Office and of Scotland-yard, but as some of the greatest hereditary names of the country are mixed up in the scandal, every effort is being made to secure the immunity of the criminals. Indeed, I am credibly informed that

THE HOME OFFICE

is throwing obstacles in the way of prompt action on the part of Scotland Yard, and trying to get the persons concerned out of the country before warrants are issued. Very possibly, our Government of the classes is of opinion that the revelations which would ensue, were the criminals put on their trial, would deal a blow to the reign of the classes, and to the social influence of the aristocracy. Let them, however, understand that they will not be allowed to protect their friends. It would be really too monstrous if crimes, which, when committed by poor ignorant men, lead to sentences of penal servitude, were to be done with impunity by those whom the Tory Government delights to honour.70

When the maggots started spilling out of Cleveland Street there was a rush for the coastal ports. Prime Minister Lord Salisbury personally tipped off Lord Arthur ‘Podge’ Somerset (via Sir Dighton Probyn, Treasurer to the Prince of Wales) that, with great regret, Her Majesty’s Government was no longer able to bury a warrant for his arrest, and that it would be issued immediately – that is, immediately he was on the boat.

The gangplanks were bottlenecks of panicking homos. They cleaned out the lot. Charles Hammond, lessee of the brothel, was allowed to salvage his furniture before scuttling circuitously to Belgium with a youth. As soon as he was safely ensconced there, Permanent Secretary to the Home Office Sir Godfrey Lushington strolled out of the Athenaeum to procure a warrant for his arrest.

The Yard headed off to the Continent, forcing their quarry out of non-extraditable France, only to discover in Brussels that the British government had no enthusiasm for such extraditions. The Home Secretary, Matthews, was informed by the Prime Minister that he didn’t ‘consider this a case in which any official application could be made’. The Liberal MP and publisher Henry Labouchère had an alternative point of view. ‘If it had not been intended to extradite Hammond,’ he asked, ‘what was their object in hustling this man from France to Belgium?’ A good question, and while no one was answering it, Hammond and his boy took off for America with further judicial pretence in hot pursuit.

But no one was actually interested in arresting Hammond – he was the last thing the Establishment needed in court. Instead it was Inspector Abberline who was put up to take the flak. ‘Coming to the facts of the case,’ reported The Times, ‘the police had received all the information it was possible to obtain in this matter. Inspector Abberline had on that date [July 1889] all the information in his hands. But for some reason he did not act. Counsel considered that the whole cause of the mischief that had arisen through the spread of these disgraceful scandals, was the conduct of Inspector Abberline in allowing the man Hammond to leave the country. A more remarkable introduction to a prosecution in which it was suggested that the course of justice had been perverted never could be imagined.’71

Such sentiments were of course dwarfed by the concurrent scandal of the Ripper. Abberline was perverting the course of justice in precisely the same way ‘justice’ was made laughable in respect of Jack. Both the Fiend and the Arse-Seller were immune from Victorian law. What the authorities wanted from Hammond – and the only thing they wanted – was a clutch of letters he kept about his person, acquired no doubt through his connections with the Post Office trade. Having lost his income as a brothel keeper, the fear was that he’d create a new one through blackmail. These letters contained the goods on Somerset, Euston, P.A.V. et al., and were worth a good deal of money. They were also of inestimable value to anyone trying to prove the case.

A detective called Partridge was dispatched from London with instructions to ‘secure the letters at any price and at all hazards’. He at last caught up with Hammond in California, and got hold of the letters in the name of justice, at a price unknown. On his way back to England he ran into a man in San Francisco who introduced himself as ‘Tyrell’, and stated that he had been ‘sent out from London to aid Partridge’.

With the letters now in his possession, what aid Partridge might have needed is unclear. But after presenting ‘credentials and testimonials’, Tyrell gained Partridge’s confidence and the keys to the ‘zealously guarded’ box containing the letters, which mysteriously ‘disappeared one night’, along with Tyrell.

Like so many bits and pieces of unwanted history, Mr Tyrell and his stolen letters were never heard of again. His evaporation meant, of course, that those for or against the accused at Cleveland Street had either lost or secured irreplaceable evidence, depending on whose side you were on.

It was at about this time that someone walked into the Star offices and presented Ernest Parke with the journalistic equivalent of a Mickey Finn. The informant told him that, like ‘Podge’ Somerset, the Earl of Euston had made a run for it. This was sensational news, exclusive to the Star. But when editor T.P. O’Connor heard it, and more importantly, who had offered it, he declined to have anything to do with the story. Parke, however, fell for it, and published it in his own newspaper, informing his readers that Euston had fled for South America, and was heading for Peru.72

For Salisbury’s government this was manna from heaven – no seraphim could have dealt better news. By any standards, something remarkable had happened. Suddenly, it wasn’t a question of Euston raping boys, but the unspeakable outrage of a newspaper accusing him of going to Peru! A storm of indignation raised itself inside the political Establishment. Lethal nonentities reached for their wigs. How dare any man accuse another of going to Peru? He hadn’t even been to Ramsgate!

In reality, the only place Euston had been was to Boulogne, to visit fellow arse-artist Somerset, and coordinate their story.

Literally overnight, Parke was a pariah, a dangerous little North London Zola, menacing the freedoms of an unfettered press and clean sheets in general. Peru? The ignominy of it! The man must be crushed with the full wholesome mechanism of pure Victorian law.

Parke had been set up, sold a pup, conned by a breed we shall be hearing more from. I was certain that this bum steer could be sourced back to Scotland Yard, but it wasn’t until the 28 January 1890 edition of a conservative magazine called the Hawk turned up that I could confirm it:

It may be remembered that Parke said he had certain evidence to prove that he acted in good faith (as I believe he did), which, however, he could not bring forth without sacrificing confidences. I have no confidences placed in me, and so I am sacrificing nothing. It is alleged that the way the information reached the Star was by an officer employed at Scotland Yard. It is also said that having promised to supply Parke with proof when the time arrived, when called on by Parke to fulfil his promise, the officer said he was instructed by his superiors to give no more information.73

Scotland Yard made no comment. Euston sued Parke for criminal libel, and the guilty were back in business. It’s hard to believe that this actually happened. Even the sanctimonious voice of conservative Fleet Street could hardly believe it. ‘We have no sort of sympathy with the prosecutor, Lord Euston,’ wrote the Standard, virtually inviting prosecution itself, ‘who admitted quite enough about his own tastes and pursuits to show that he has very little claim to the respect of persons of decent life.’

(Not a lot of irony there, then? Euston was a bosom pal of the future King, actually becoming Edward VII’s aide de camp in 1901. But then, the Standard wasn’t in line for the throne, so nobody bothered with twaddle like that.)

The judge initially selected to hear the case was kicked off, and replaced by another of more ferocious disposition. Out of the Athenaeum shuffled yet another intimate friend of the Prince of Wales, the Honourable Mr Justice Hawkins, later Baron Brampton, a vengeful seventy-two-year-old Catholic with a profound affection for coin.

Hawkins was notorious for his greed. ‘On the make’ was what they said of him, this disagreeable feature of character ameliorated only by his fondness for the oiled rope. He was known as ‘Hanging Hawkins’, although he was said to have a quite energetic fear of death himself.74

On this mercifully non-hanging occasion, Hawkins was to represent the apogee of institutionalised corruption for and on behalf of the Victorian ruling elite. Never mind what Albert Victor and his homosexual associates had been up to, this was the judge who had recently put a schoolboy into prison for five years for doing the same thing. ‘I was horrified by the apparent brutality of the sentence,’ wrote an official who had been present at the Old Bailey, ‘and the thought that if the youth had belonged to a different class in society his offence would have been treated quite differently and never have been made public at all.’75

And that’s what this venal pantomime was all about. As far as Hawkins was concerned, it was making upper-class buggery public that was the very grave offence. Parke stood before this ancient bigot to hear what Disraeli had described as ‘Truth in Action’ – in other words the process of British law.

Ernest Parke, you have been convicted of an offence which deserves the most condign punishment. I must say that I think a more atrocious libel than that of which you have been guilty has never been published by any man in circumstances than those in which you have published this libel … You had nothing before you but the idlest rumours, suggesting to you that amongst other persons Lord Euston had been guilty of this abominable crime … This was a wicked libel, published without any justification whatever … I feel it my duty to pass upon you a sentence which I hope, besides being a punishment to you, will be a warning to others.76

Those last six words being the salient point. Twelve months for telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The elation of the government was as spiteful as it was predictable. A reactionary weekly, the Saturday Review, positively levitated with glee: ‘The man Parke’s clients lust, first, for personal news, secondly, for dirty personal news, thirdly, for dirty personal news, if possible about persons with titles. He gives it to them; and the law has given him twelve months imprisonment. This is excellent. This man Parke is one of a gang.’ But not all were so partisan, and not a few knew exactly what this was about. ‘As we expected,’ wrote the editor of Reynold’s News,

the result of the trial of the young journalist Parke, has raised a storm of indignation not only at home, but abroad. The whole affair is considered part and parcel of the plan intended to whitewash the police and government from all participation in the frightful miscarriage of justice that has taken place … In his virulent address to the jury, and when passing what we can but consider a most vindictive sentence on the accused, Judge Hawkins emphatically declared that the libel was one of the grossest ever published without a single extenuating circumstance, and Mr Parke was made an example to others who dare tamper with the name of our virtuous and noble aristocracy. What, then, is the conclusion come to? Why, that the authorities were more anxious to conceal the names of those who patronised the horrible den of vice, than punish the principal patrons of the hideous place. Why were the wretched telegraph boys taken to the Old Bailey, whilst Lord Arthur Somerset, being duly warned of what had occurred, made his escape? All this requires, but we suspect will not obtain, satisfactory explanation.

This was the only part of this journal’s outrage that history confirmed. When the scandal finally bloomed into ritual debate at the House of Commons, it had already been controlled. By now Somerset had dissolved into the south of France, never to return. But here come all the Right Honourable Pecksniffs to yak it all over.

For the government, Attorney General Sir Richard Webster QC MP, also of the Athenaeum, spoke the only words of truth to come out of his mouth that night. ‘No good is done,’ he reminded the House, ‘by reporting cases of this description, and it is generally to the credit of reporters of the press, that they almost invariably refrain from reporting them.’77

Please bear this statement in mind.

In this instance, Webster was not alluding to Parke, but to the jailing of a pair of Cleveland Street victims, two boys hustled off in secrecy to serve relatively short terms of incarceration in exchange for keeping their traps shut.

Henry Labouchère, the aforementioned Member for Northampton, known to Queen Victoria as ‘that horrible lying Labouchère’, and to her son Edward, Prince of Wales, as ‘that viper Labouchère’, wasn’t so easily silenced. He’d come into that neo-Gothic marquee of duplicity burning with indignation at the jailing of Ernest Parke; and more than that, he had something to say about the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury.

My first charge is that Lord Salisbury and others entered into a criminal conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice. Instead of making every effort to punish offences, as far as I can see, every effort has been made to hush up the matter … Two boys have been sent to prison. Salisbury, and several other gentlemen ought also to be prosecuted. We have heard a good deal lately about criminal conspiracy. What is this case but a criminal conspiracy by the very guardians of public morality and law, with the Prime Minister at their head to defeat the ends of justice?78

You can’t really say it any clearer than that.

Labouchère’s use of the term ‘criminal conspiracy’ is interesting. It’s worth noting that not all conclusions of ‘conspiracy’ in respect of the events of 1888–89 are figments of modern imagination. This famous Victorian politician was arguing at the coalface of one such ‘conspiracy’, and it is his choice of word. Salisbury’s administration was in permanent ‘criminal conspiracy’, and as with the ‘nuclear industry’ of our day, telling the truth was not an option – it had to lie to survive.

Labouchère rehearsed his points, including the unusual protocol of a British Prime Minister tipping off a wanted criminal. ‘The importance of the point here,’ he said, ‘is why did Lord Salisbury interfere in the matter? Was it the responsibility of a Prime Minister and a Foreign Secretary to mix himself up in such matters? If he knew a warrant was going to be issued, surely the last thing a man in his official position should have done, was to communicate the fact to a friend of Lord Arthur Somerset?’ Then there was the associated peculiarity of the two boys, sentenced covertly and whisked away from the Old Bailey in secret.

Well, it was nothing of the sort, rejoined Webster: ‘The charge against Her Majesty’s Government is that it was agreed between the prosecuting and defending counsel with the knowledge of the Treasury Solicitor, that the accused should have light sentences as the price of silence, and that corrupt bargain was made with the knowledge of those in authority. I think the house will agree that, if true, more infamous conduct was never charged against persons in authority.’79

It was true. Half the Conservative House did agree, and the other half didn’t. Webster had, in fact, succinctly summarised the case he was put up to argue against (something he would do with less success in the ‘criminal conspiracy’ against the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Parnell*). With an appearance of ‘almost celestial virtue’ he repudiated the existence of this supposed ‘wicked and corrupt bargain’ between the courts and the Conservative government, at which a variety of Members rose, Ernest Parke’s boss T.P. O’Connor among them:

The Attorney General assumes an air of the most virtuous indignation because my Honourable Friend (Mr Labouchère) spoke for an arrangement between the prosecution and defence. The Attorney General is an experienced lawyer of many years practice, and he knows that arrangements of this kind are common … these arrangements between one side and the other are as common almost as criminal trials. In spite of all the Attorney General says, I maintain that there was such an arrangement here, and the object and meaning of it was to close the mouths of the persons in gaol, and in that way to save the criminals who their confessions might have exposed.80

The essence of the response from Sir Richard Webster was basically, ‘Not guilty, but I promise you we won’t do it again.’ It is axiomatic amongst lawyers that you do not propose a question to which you do not know the answer, and here Webster slipped. Referring to brothel-master Charles Hammond and his boy, who had come in for their share of invective, Sir Richard had this to say: ‘As to the circumstances under which Hammond did go to America, my own mouth is closed. I should be perfectly willing, and some day I shall be allowed, to state them. The Honourable and Learned Gentleman, the Member for South Hackney, knows them as well as I do.’81

The Honourable and Learned Gentleman in question was Sir Charles Russell, who immediately professed complete ignorance of the matter. ‘I know nothing about them,’ he said.

This was too ridiculous a falsehood for even Sir Richard Webster to swallow, and although Russell was on the same bent agenda, he replied, ‘The Honourable and Learned Gentleman’s memory misleads him,’ which is another way of saying, ‘You are lying like the label on a bottle of snake-oil.’

Indeed he was. Russell had appeared for a man called Newton (this on behalf of the Prince of Wales). On the application to move the case to the Queen’s Bench, Newton’s affidavit stated ‘that he had been a party to getting Hammond to go away on account of the blackmail he was levying on people in England’.

Who might these ‘people in England’ be? And rather than the police sending Partridge (and the mysterious Tyrell) to America with wads of cash, why wasn’t Hammond extradited from Belgium and prosecuted for the very serious crime of blackmail? It was a question for which the Establishment didn’t require an answer; and anyway, it was all over bar the shouting, the business of the House complete except for the ritual expulsion of Labouchère.

He was finally ordered out of the pantomime by means of a parliamentary device enforced from time to time against Members who persisted in telling the truth.

LABOUCHÈRE: I am obliged to speak frankly and truly in this matter. I assert, if I am obliged to do it, that I do not believe Lord Salisbury.

THE SPEAKER: I must call on the Honourable Member to withdraw the expression.

LABOUCHÈRE: I decline, sir, to withdraw.

And as a matter of fact he repeated it. The First Lord of the Treasury, the successful newsagent W.H. Smith, got to his feet.

‘It is my duty to move that Mr Henry Labouchère be suspended from the service of this House.’

MPs call themselves ‘Honourable’ because nobody else would. The House divided. There was a vote. Ayes 177, Nos ninety-six. The Ayes had it, and out Labouchère went.82

The End.

The Scandal of Cleveland Street affords an opportunity to take a look at the Victorian ruling class on the run. With survival in mind, extremes of criminal behaviour were no problem. It was ruthless as Herod. After a breather of two or three weeks, on 3 March 1890 Salisbury got up in the Lords and fibbed like a slut, and that was just about that. As his recent biographer Andrew Roberts tells us, ‘He shrugged it off.’

The thrust of Salisbury’s speech was immediately to raise the matter over which his conduct ‘had been called into question’: ‘My Lords, it is said that I met with Sir Dighton Probyn, with the view of enabling a person who was exposed to a serious charge to escape from justice.’ He then went on to describe how he had done precisely that, while insisting that he hadn’t. He’d just come back from France, he said, where at Dover, he found a telegram from Probyn, asking if he could meet Salisbury in London.

I had no notion what it was about … I replied that I should be passing through town, and that he would find me at the Great Northern Railway Station in time for the 7 o’clock train … Sir Dighton Probyn came to see me there. He then informed me what he wanted to do was to ask whether there was any ground for certain charges which had been made in the newspapers against sundry persons whom he named. My reply was, that so far as I knew, there was no ground whatever for them … I think I added – but of that I am not quite certain – that rumours had reached me that further evidence had been obtained, but I did not know what its character was. My Lords, I am not ashamed to say that is all I recollect of a casual interview for which I was in no degree prepared, to which I did not attach the slightest importance … and I may add that I can aver in the most confident manner that the suggestion which has been made that a man of Sir Dighton Probyn’s character and career could have appointed an interview with me for the purpose of worming out matter which he might use for the purpose of defeating the ends of justice is the wildest and most malignant imagination that has ever been conceived.83

Note how this most expert liar transfers the accusation onto Sir Dighton Probyn. Is this not the most astonishing casuistry? Salisbury had deflected criticism of his own propriety into a question of the honour of Sir Dighton Probyn.

Except, that same night, Probyn had tipped ‘Podge’ Somerset off, and he had quit London with the alacrity of a rat up a drainpipe. The next day, Probyn had written to the Prime Minister, ‘I fear what you told me last night was all too true,’ a mystery of circumstance confirmed by a letter to Probyn from the Prince of Wales: ‘Your interview with Somerset must have been a very painful one.’

In reality, Sir Dighton Probyn and the Prince’s Private Secretary, Sir Francis Knollys, had been rushing around like a pair of hysterical waiters for months, battling for the homosexual corner in the wildest and most malignant way to defeat the ends of justice.

Salisbury’s fiefdom was intoxicated with corruption, poisoned with its own iniquity. A year before, the Liberal leader Gladstone had put his knuckles on his hips and surveyed the Conservative benches opposite. His contention was ‘that no government during the past half century had shown so unblushing and unscrupulous a contempt for the law as had that of Lord Salisbury’.

He was alluding here to another great and concurrent scandal, the conspiracy to defame and destroy Charles Parnell. The Parnell scandal featured government perjury, forgery, slander, bent courts and imprisonment of the innocent, establishing new benchmarks of political deceit by what Gladstone called ‘the foulest and wickedest means’.

The Cleveland Street and Jack the Ripper scandals were from the same stable, and were managed with no less élan, requiring little more from the ruling elite than instinct. If the Crown was under threat – be it from a nancy prince or a Monster with a Blade – it was a threat to them all. And they all knew – every baron, every earl, every duke – that, provided the monarch remained supreme, then so did its most ardent beneficiaries, this to include Queen’s Councillors, Most Honourable Judges, senior policemen and arse-licking MPs. They were the Royal Courts of Justice, not the people’s courts, and I do not exaggerate when I say they were almost exclusively staffed by Freemasons.

In respect of Cleveland Street, the victims, low-class working boys, went to prison, and the perpetrators, guilty as it got, walked free. Bro Euston, Bro Clarence and his dad, Bro the King-to-be, were all Freemasons, and that was not without significance. To join the Masons in the nineteenth century wasn’t like signing up at the golf club, because Victorian golf clubs didn’t exercise the power of the state. Golf clubs couldn’t hang people, or incarcerate them for life. In the matter of Clarence, we are talking about the ability of Freemasonry to seriously interfere with the administration of the law. The most senior Law Lord in England, the Lord Chancellor Lord Halsbury, was a Freemason. The man who framed charges on behalf of the government, the Solicitor General Sir Edward Clarke QC MP, was also a Freemason. In his memoir, Bro Clarke tells us: ‘I kept up my Masonic work until I became a Member for Plymouth. Then I practically abandoned it for twenty years.’84

And why was that?

‘Because I wished to avoid the slightest possibility of it being connected with politics.’

In which case, he must have had less sentient aptitude than the three famous monkeys. By the late nineteenth century Freemasonry and politics were inextricable, the Houses of Parliament resembling an enormous and permanent Freemasonic lodge. To vote Conservative in the late 1880s was to vote for the Conservative (Freemasonic) and Unionist Party. Without effort, I was able to identify 338 Freemasons in the Parliament of 1889. You could safely add another fifty.

Freemasonry likes to kid itself, or perhaps others, that it is apolitical, a bit like Henry Ford’s dictum concerning the colour of his cars: ‘Any politics, providing it’s Conservative.’ From its invention in the early eighteenth century, Freemasonry has been a deeply reactionary proposition, clandestinely linking the authorities of state. It isn’t necessary to read between the lines to understand this – just read the lines themselves: ‘Freemasons have always shown an unshaken devotion to the Crown’; ‘Loyalty to the King is an essential principle of Freemasonry.’85 Thus, when Labouchère told his certain truth, there might well have been a fraternal tendency to squash it and kick the Honourable Member out. To lie on behalf of the royals had become a noble requisite, a means by which one demonstrated one’s ‘loyalty’, not to the British people, but to the ruling system; and that included Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence.

‘In order to serve in the Commons and Cabinet, I had to tell eighteen lies under oath,’ wrote ex-Labour Cabinet Minister Tony Benn in 2003.86 He says he found this ‘deeply offensive’. ‘Above all,’ he continued, ‘the existence of an hereditary monarchy helps to prop up all the privilege and patronage that corrupts our society; that is why the Crown is seen as being of such importance to those that run the country – or enjoy the privileges it affords.’

One of the founders of Mr Benn’s party had a not dissimilar point of view, although his was posted over a century before. ‘In these modern days,’ wrote Keir Hardie, ‘there is nothing for a King to do except to aid in the work of hoodwinking the common people. The role assigned to him is that of leading mime in the pantomime in which the great unthinking multitude is kept amused while it is being imposed upon. A King is an anachronism, and is only kept in being as a valuable asset of the ruling class.’87 Like Mr Benn, Mr Hardie had difficulties with his sovereign oath.

Now let’s add another one. It’s the Masonic oath:

I do solemnly promise, vow, and swear, that I will always and at all times love the Brotherhood heartily and therefore will charitably hide and conceal and cover all the sins, frailties and errors of every Brother to the utmost of my power.88

It doesn’t come clearer than that, and at least half of Queen Victoria’s Parliament had sworn to this. One can either believe that these promises were useful to the state, or one can believe that they were not. For those inclined to the latter opinion, the question must surely be, what then was the purpose of them? Why take such an oath if the corporate intention was to dishonour it?

Was Bro the Duke of Clarence not in trouble? Was Bro the Earl of Euston not in the same boat? Had not these parliamentary Brethren taken their Freemasonic oath? Did they not ‘hide and conceal and cover, all the sins, frailties and errors of every Brother’ to the utmost of their power? And if not, why not? If they did not, their treachery is doubly compounded.

Courtiers Bro Sir Francis Knollys and Bro Sir Dighton Probyn had taken this oath, as had a ruling executive with supremely vested interests in making it stick.

When His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales first heard of Euston’s complicity in the Cleveland Street scandal, he wrote, ‘It is really too shocking! A married man whose hospitality I have frequently accepted!’ So shocked was he that he invited him to dinner. On 13 March 1890, Euston was a guest of His Highness at a banquet celebrating one hundred years of the Prince of Wales Freemasonic lodge.89 Some interesting names were present, including many we shall be hearing more of. They included the Chamberlain to the Queen the Earl of Lathom, and Colonel Thomas Henry Shadwell Clerke, Secretary to the English Freemasons and Masonic Secretary to Edward himself. Like Euston, Shadwell Clerke was a personal friend of my candidate, both enjoying membership of the Knights Templar ‘Encampment of the Cross of Christ’.

Bro the Prince of Wales and Bro Lathom were to be found once again at another Masonic celebration at the very heart of the English law, in Lincoln’s Inn. The evening was devoted to the consecration of a new lodge, the Chancery Bar, its membership restricted to the legal profession. The other guests included the Lord Chancellor, Bro Lord Halsbury, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Bro Lord George Hamilton, plus a galaxy of wigs: Bro Judge Sir H. Lloyd, Bro Sir Forrest Foulton, Bro Sir Frank Lockwood QC MP, Bro Mr Staveny Hill QC MP, Bro Mr Jones QC MP, Bro E.H. Pember QC, Bro D.R. Littler QC, Bro F.A. Philbrick QC, and Bro Colonel Le Grande Starkie.

Bro the Prince of Wales, who had just been made an Honorary Member of the Chancery Bar, said in a speech of thanks: ‘I am a Mason. I am glad to think that on this occasion the great legal profession and the great Masonic Brotherhood are more intimately connected tonight than perhaps they have ever been before. (Cheers from all.)’90

Arsonists in charge of the firehose.

Which brings us to our last esteemed guest at that occasion, a man of whom it was written, ‘Englishmen are far from purists in judging the manners and life of their aristocracy. What they cannot tolerate is the sight of names which they have been accustomed to regard with respect surrounded by low and contaminating associations.’91 The guest was, of course, Bro the Earl of Euston.

The function of the Establishment was to look after the Establishment. Prying journalists could be jailed, and lippy MPs shown the door. Cleveland Street was a rank perversion of the course of justice, its puppet-masters senior Freemasons, and its puppets the Masonic herd.

‘The Mystic Tie’.

We must move on from Euston and his brothel, leaving the final comment on Cleveland Street to a journalist of the day: ‘The determination of men of rank to stand by scoundrels of their order, no matter what their crimes are, and the certainty with which they can count upon men who have merely a brevet claim to associate with them to help them out.’92

I think that is precisely put, and worth repeating. ‘The determination of men of rank to stand by scoundrels of their order, no matter what their crimes are’ is a statement of inestimable importance when trying to come to terms with the scandal of Jack the Ripper.

* See Appendix I, ‘The Parnell Frame-Up’.

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