The Ripper and I

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NEW FICTION
The Gap Of Time
Jeanette Winterson
Vintage £16.99
Jeanette Winterson takes on some
mighty themes – bereavement,
forgiveness, sexual jealousy – in this
contemporary version of The
Winter’s Tale. The book is the first
of a major new series, in which
well-known novelists give
Shakespeare a modern twist, and Winterson rises to
the challenge with some ingenious touches. The
hero’s paranoid fears that his wife is cheating on
him are grimly suited to the age of spy cameras; the
foundling Perdita is reborn as a singer; and
Shakespeare’s trusty courtier Camillo becomes a
prize creep called Cameron. It is all good fun,
delivered with brio if lacking the original’s
emotional heft.
Max Davidson
Undermajordomo Minor
Patrick deWitt
Granta £12.99
Patrick deWitt’s Booker shortlisted
The Sisters Brothers offered a wry take
on the gunslinging Wild West. His
latest novel is a gothic fairy tale with
an equally silly title. It’s set in an
unnamed corner of what seems to be
central Europe, where graceless young
Lucien Minor leaves home to work in Castle Von
Aux, whose mad baron wanders the halls naked,
pining for his absent wife. Lucien falls for the
village’s comely Klara, who alas has ties to the
manly Adolphus. Love hurts – and often leads, in
this patchwork plot, to something nasty in the
‘Very Large Hole’ outside the castle. There’s a hint
of Cold Comfort Farm and Stella Gibbons’s
woodshed and wit, while an errant salami evokes
J P Donleavy, but deWitt’s genre-bender drifts into
darker areas that almost spoil the merriment.
Jeffrey Burke
Now Is The Time
Melvyn Bragg
Sceptre £18.99
The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 is a
somewhat overlooked episode in
English history, in which Wat Tyler
and his cohorts tried – and failed –
to overthrow the aristocratic
establishment while remaining loyal
to the youthful King Richard II.
Melvyn Bragg’s 21st novel provides an intelligent
re-enactment of these events. Though the
exposition appears uneven at times and his
approximation of 14th century dialect occasionally
jars, Bragg brings his historical characters vividly to
life and conveys a real sense of the appalling
disparity in living conditions. The novel gathers
unstoppable pace as the original poll tax uprising
hurtles towards its brutal and unedifying conclusion.
Simon Humphreys
T
hose whom the gods wish to
destroy,’ runs the proverb,
‘they first make mad.’ But how
to make them mad? How about
setting them on the trail of
Jack the Ripper?
There are five or six books a year published
about Jack the Ripper. They have titles like
Case Closed and The Final Solution. Each of
them promises to reveal the Ripper’s true
identity, until the next book comes along.
He was a policeman; he was a doctor;
he was a clergyman, a barrister, a fish porter,
a journalist. He was an American; he was a
Freemason; he was a Jew. He was a she.
He was King George V’s brother, Sir
Winston Churchill’s father, Queen Victoria’s
physician. One author argued that he was
Dr Barnardo (‘of that, there can be no doubt’).
Another argued, just as fervently, that he was
Lewis Carroll, and singled out phrases from
Alice In Wonderland which contain anagrams
that point to a full confession.
Fourteen years ago, the American crime
novelist Patricia Cornwell published Portrait
Of A Killer: Jack The Ripper – Case Closed,
pointing her finger at the great English painter
Walter Sickert. She spent $2 million on
research, buying 32 of his paintings and cutting one of them into pieces in the vain hope
of finding a clue. When her theory was dismissed by British critics, she bought full-page
advertisements in The Independent and The
Guardian begging that her work be taken
seriously, and arguing that the Ripper’s victims ‘deserve justice’.
And now comes the longest, and maybe
the oddest, of them all. Bruce Robinson, the
author and director of the classic British
comedy Withnail And I, has spent the past 12
years and £500,000 researching and writing
the 800-page They All Love Jack, which is
confidently subtitled Busting The Ripper.
It is a strange, mind-boggling mixture of
pedantry and craziness in which Robinson’s
attempts to set out his extraordinarily complex argument in sober, rational terms are
continually undermined by sugar-rushes of
sudden mad invective. ‘So look out, Jack!’ is
the way in which he concludes his introduction. ‘We’re stepping off the kerb, and I’m
going to bust your a***.’
Anyone coming blind to the book might
think it a collaboration between Dr David
Starkey and Johnny Rotten. Among the principal characters, we are told that Prince Albert
Victor was ‘this effete little useless pederast’,
the Chief Constable of Bradford a ‘f******
idiot’, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan
Police ‘a self-serving idiot’, Lord Kitchener
‘belonged to Satan’, the Earl of Euston was
‘a classic pile of s***’ and the Home Secretary
‘a rotten little whore’.
It could be argued that these frequent bouts
of Tourette’s add drive to what might otherwise have been an impenetrable maze of
rumour, speculation and conspiracy. But they
also undermine Robinson’s credibility as a
disinterested historian, and his ability to build
up a convincing case, particularly as the story
he tells is as far-fetched as can be.
In brief, he contends that Jack the Ripper
was a successful Victorian songwriter and
man-about-town called Michael Maybrick,
whose brother James has previously been
named as Jack by other sleuths, or ‘Ripperologists’, as they term themselves. ‘Not that
I’m accusing devotees of James Maybrick of
imbecility,’ he adds, ‘simply that they’re up
the right a******* on the wrong elephant.’
As well as having been, in Robinson’s considered judgment, a cold-blooded, psycho-
28 •
CYANMAGENTAYELLOWBLACK
National
CRAIG
BROWN
NON FICTION
They All Love Jack:
Busting The Ripper
Bruce Robinson
Fourth Estate £25
★★★★★
pathic serial killer, Michael Maybrick was an
eminent Freemason. So, ‘the last thing anyone
wanted was an arrest, God forbid. It would
have put an entire (and clandestine) ruling
elite in the dock... Justice? Forget it. F*** who
he killed so long as the b****** doesn’t interfere with their divine right to rule. The Ripper
must and would go free’.
This entailed a cover-up of Olympian proportions, involving virtually anyone who was
anyone in Victorian society. ‘The more outrageous he was, the more the police must cover
him up.’ Maybrick’s motive remains a little
misty, but it clearly had something to do with
sex. Was he a homosexual? ‘I don’t actually
know if Maybrick was homosexual, but predicated on that infallible adage, “If it walks like
a duck, etc”, he was probably a bit of a ducky.’
A
t the same time, Maybrick
was after revenge, however
broad-based. ‘It’s my view
that he killed these women
as surrogates, punishing
them for the sexuality of
another, and I believe one woman in particular was on his mind. She was a mother-angel
who had proved herself lower than the
filthiest whore.’
The woman in question was Florence, adulterous wife of his brother James, who might
possibly have once spurned a sexual advance
from Michael (assuming he was going through
a heterosexual phase). After multiple killings
– many more, argues Robinson, than have
previously been acknowledged – ‘Michael
Maybrick framed his brother James as Jack,
offed him with a hotshot of poison, then
framed Florence for the murder’. Florence
was then wrongly convicted, primarily
because everyone involved, including her
defence counsel, was in on the conspiracy.
‘Let me just stop and interview myself here,’
interjects Robinson, like TV’s Chatty Man.
‘Are you saying that Michael Maybrick set
James Maybrick up as Jack the Ripper,
murdering him with the state’s acquiescence,
and blaming Florence Maybrick for the deed?
‘How about 100 per cent?’
After the trial, Michael Maybrick, aka
Jack the Ripper, retired to the Isle of Wight
where, according to the author, he bowed to
Establishment pressure and ‘transformed
himself from a celebrity into an anonymous
recluse’, staying in his study, with his door
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What made the director of Withnail And I waste
12 years of his life and £500,000 of his own
money to prove that Jack the Ripper was really
a Victorian Paul McCartney in disguise?
locked for years on end. ‘It was as if
McCartney had vanished into wilful
obscurity after Yesterday or Hey Jude.’
All very well, but Robinson neglects to
mention that, during this period, Michael
Maybrick was five-times Mayor of Ryde,
Chief Magistrate of the Isle of Wight,
President of the Ryde Philharmonic
Society and Chairman of the Isle of Wight
Conservative Association, as well as
representing the Isle of Wight at the
coronations of King Edward VII and King
George V at Westminster Abbey. It only
takes a click on Google to find his long
and glowing obituary in the Isle of Wight
County Press: ‘Few could make a more
acceptable after-dinner speech than he.
All the sunshine of his nature, all his
evident joy of life... were poured forth in
abundance, and he played on his audiences as he played the piano or organ,
with the hand of a master.’
Has an ‘anonymous recluse’ ever been
more celebrated, more gregarious? This is
far from the only place in the book where,
confronted by awkward facts, Robinson
either organises his own cover-up or
smudges the truth. For instance, it suits
his purpose to suggest that Florence’s
defence counsel, Sir Charles Russell, was
secretly acting on behalf of the prosecution in ‘one of the most despicable got-up
outrages ever to poison an English court’.
Yet Kate Colquhoun, who published an
impartial account of the trial last year,
saw no evidence for this, and even commended Russell’s summing-up as ‘a
masterclass in legal oratory, tunnelling
effectively under the prosecution’s case,
reminding them repeatedly of the uncertainty that existed’.
Other forthright statements by Robinson
evaporate under even the most momentary inspection. Over and over again,
Robinson succumbs to the traditional
temptations of the conspiracy theorist:
admitting only those pieces of evidence
that tally with his conclusion; allowing
conjecture to solidify, within a few sentences, into certainty; attributing lack of
proof to evidence of a cover-up; detecting
pseudo-meaningful patterns in random
events; and dismissing contradictory
expertise as necessarily bogus.
And here lies the path to madness. He
reminds me of someone manically scrubbing onions in the hope of finding the
real onion at the centre.
For instance, though he admits ‘I know
nothing of graphology’, he refuses to let
his ignorance hold him back. ‘Experts
have been at work on this letter,’ he writes
of one of the Ripper’s mad scrawls, ‘and
have determined that it was written by a
“semi literate person” with a particular
pen; and from this I determine that they
are experts at bugger-all.’
He can also be very slapdash. The very
first sentence on page one of the book turns
out to be made up: words he attributes to
Margaret Thatcher – ‘We must return
to Victorian values’ – were in fact never
said by her. Why didn’t he check?
Eight hundred pages later, at the very
end, Robinson copies Lewis Carroll conspiracists by uncovering an anagram that
he presents as the final proof. His evidence lies buried in a letter he argues
was secretly written by Michael Maybrick
but which is signed:
MOREAU MASINA BERTHRAD
NEUBERG
Who is the mysterious Neuberg? Hey
presto! He discovers that, if you jig the
letters about, it turns into:
I BEGAN A BRUTE MASON
MURDERER HA
But, on the other hand... there are 26
letters in the alphabet, offering infinite
possibilities for anagrams, meaningful or
otherwise. Take this one, for instance:
if you jiggle about with:
BRUCE ROBINSON
it turns into:
ONION SCRUBBER
Spoo-keeey!
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Below and right: 1888 newspaper
coverage of the Ripper murders. Inset
below: Michael Maybrick in a ‘Musical
Celebrities’ cigarette card portrait, 1911