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Did Winston Churchill try and stop Sir Charles Warren from ‘cloning’ the Ripper?
The Following essay has been sourced primarily from my book. ‘Francis Thompson and the Ripper Paradox’ which it has that the Ripper was a Lancashire born poet.
The Commissioner of the Police Department, during the Whitechapel murder investigation of 1888, was Sir Charles Warren. On Thursday November 8,the day before the murder of Mary Kelly. Warren tendered his second resignation to the Home Secretary. In his letter to Henry Matthews, Warren's resignation blamed the murderer when he wrote that his department’s failure to capture the ripper was due to,
‘the extraordinary cunning and secrecy which characterize the commission of the crimes.'
It seems that ten years later, Sir Warren tried copying the crimes. Circumstantial evidence shows that Warren used a war in a secret experiment to make more of the same murderer. It appears he tried to stage a mass Ripper event, one where he selected thousands of unknowing men on how they fit his description of the Ripper. He then sent them into battle under similar conditions that the Ripper would have faced. The world knows little of Jack the Ripper, only that he was a maniac who, all within in a half-square kilometer, went on killing spree. The Ripper attacked always at night, working under time pleasure and ready, at any moment, for a policeman’s lamp that would give away his position. After the Ripper murders, in a remote battlefield in South Africa, Warren commanded the British in the Battle of Spion. Military Historians view this battle as one of the worst military disasters in modern history. Warren strategy was to have a select group of men fight on a half-square kilometer plateau of a small hill. He had the men armed only with knives, fight at night under time pressure. He had ordered his men to sneak into the area and he later revealed their position to the enemy Boars who machined gun them by waving his lamp. 243 of the men he sent into a battle were killed and more lives would have not been lost if had not been for Churchill and Gandhi.
In 1888, the year of the Ripper murder, Sir Warren was forty-eight years of age and had already lived an active life that had seen him mostly soldering overseas. Educated at Cheltenham, Sandhurst and Woolwich, Warren joined the Royal Engineers in 1857 and ten years later, he was Commander of the Royal Engineers of Saukin and Governor of the Red Sea Littoral. Warren served in Palestine and there carried out archaeological work. Warren spent the years, between 1867 and 1869, authenticating biblical sites under government orders. Warren explored and mapped places such as the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This is a Jewish sanctuary believed to have once housed the Ark of the Covenant. Warren's bizarre excavation methods, that included the examination of the southeast corner of the Temple area whilst standing on his head, earned him the name of Jerusalem Warren. He also explored the Plain of Philistia and did a reconnaissance of central Jordan. In 1870, Warren was posted to Africa where, between 1876 and 1897, he was the Special Commissioner for the Colonial Office. In 1882, Warren was sent to the Sinai desert to seek out Professor Archibald Palmer. The professor had vanished whilst on a clandestine mission to gain support from Bedouin tribes. Warren determined that the Professor had been killed and brought his murderers to justice. This effort earned Sir Warren his knighthood.
During the, 1877 to 1878, Kaffier War Sir Warren commanded the Diamond Fields Horse and was badly wounded in battle. Returning to England in 1880, Warren was Chief Instructor for the School of Military Engineering in Chatham. In 1884, he was dispatched to Africa once more to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum. When Sir Warren became Commissioner of Police, it was felt that his experience would do a great deal to modernize the police. Beneath Sir Warren was three Assistant Commissioners who had the status of Justice of the Peace. This meant that they could issue warrants for arrest or search premises without having to gain permission from a court magistrate. Immediately below the three Assistant Commissioners were four Chief Constables. Sir Warren created the rank of Chief Constable. Their purpose was to liaison between the Assistant Commissioners and Divisional Superintendents, thus speeding up the transfer of orders. Unfortunately, it soon seemed apparent that Sir Warren was more concerned with uniforms than police grievances. His annual reports, for example, were largely on dress code and ordering the right type of boots and saddles for his mounted forces. Sir Warren also brought in harsh penalties for officers found to be drunk on duty. Drill practice, long ago abolished was reintroduced. His manner with sections of the press was uncompromising and his response to complaints of police brutality was unforgiving. Resentment for his policies had quickly grown. It became evident that Warren was intent on militarising the police.
Added to all this was growing friction between Sir Warren and his police Inspectors. Warren found them to be unprofessional and made noises about removing plainclothes inspectors altogether. He saw inspectors as foreign to the militaristic model that he felt the police should follow with each officer in uniform. Sir Warren showed little tolerance for the public's concerns of their freedoms being suppressed and the tide of public support had almost turned completely against him. Even more so when, on November 13 1887, there occurred what became known as 'Bloody Sunday'. This was when homeless protestors refused to disperse from Trafalgar Square. Sir Warren ordered the police to fire into the crowd. Two people died and 150 others were injured. An odd trait shown by Warren was his use of poetry in his drafted orders. One example, upon law and order in Trafalgar Square reads,
'The Commissioner has observed there are signs of wear
On the Landseer Lions in Trafalgar Square.
Unauthorised persons are not to climb
On the Landseer lions at any time.'
On January 23rd, 1998, Warren again replicated a similar terror while residing safely in a wagon in South Africa. His wagon was a few kilometres from a hill, near Spion Kop, in South Africa. Upon the hill was a plateau about half-square kilometre in size. It was during the second Boer War fought between Great Britain and the Afrikaner republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Sir Warren had been given orders to capture Spion Kop. The soldiers were told that it was considered a key strategic site, though not long after the battle the victorious Boar army abandoned it. Sir Warren's troops had assembled elven kilometres from the hill. His plan was to capture Spion Kop under the cover of darkness. He gave orders forbidding the men to smoke in case the Boers saw them. Sir Warren was in command of 22,000 Troops collectively designated as the fifth Division. Sir Warren ordered 20,000 men to wait and ordered 2,000 men, mainly from the mainly Lancashire Fusiliers, into battle. The enemy Boers at first numbered 600 troops. A delay of 26 hours, in which Sir Warren supervised the transport of his personal baggage across the Tugela River, allowed a further 6,000 of the enemy to gather. His men were told that each would be given a sandbag to fill and use for protection. They were told that food and water supplies would be available along the way. They were told that two guides would meet them at the base of the hill. They were also told that digging tools would be waiting. As dusk fell, his men began the long march to the base of the hill. The sandbags were not given out. The food and water did not arrive. One of the guides fled and the other became paralysed with fear. The Digging tools had vanished. After travelling across rough ground and fording watercourses for eleven kilometres, Sir Warren's 2000 soldiers reached the base of Spion Kop and began the 490-meter upward trek. They were placed under the command of General Woodgate, who at fifty-five, had to be carried. Exhaustion had already caused many men to fall down asleep. As the soldiers climbed, sometimes on their hands and knees, it began to rain. Their path consisted of old goat trails that rapidly churned to mud. The men, who moved in darkness, in concordance with Sir Warren's orders, to gain an element of surprise, were dismayed to see that ex-policeman-Warren’s hurricane lamp could be seen shining from his wagon at Three Tree Hill down on the plains below. Giving away their presence to the enemy Boers. There had been no previous recognizance of Spion Kop.
At 3.30 am, the men, who had been ordered to unload their magazines, at the main camp and fight only with fixed bayonet, were relieved to find that steep hill gave way to a flat plateau. It held a small dugout and 200 Boer troops. The Boers fled wounding three soldiers. Believing that they had reached the summit of Spion Kop, the men, under gathering fog, began to dig in and wait for daylight. As the sun rose and the fog lifted, they found that they were not actually at the top of the hill at all but a third of the way down, on an exposed plain measuring a half-square kilometre with knives their only weapons. The trenches they had built had walls of loose earth measuring a height of thirty-six centimetres. Combined enemy fire, which included five field guns, rained down from the Boers above, them killing 1,700 of the 2,000 British. Ants attacked the remaining men who cowered in ditches under the now blistering heat.
As the day wore on, wounded stragglers fled down the hill to be met by Winston Churchill the future WWII Prime Minister. Then a young lieutenant, Churchill had broken ranks from Warren's larger idle force of 20,000 and ascended on foot. (Alice Meynell, the wife of Francis Thompson's publisher, already knew Winston Churchill, meeting him at Stafford House where the Duchess of Sutherland held Friday tea parties.) Churchill, ignoring the orders of his commanding officers, began to rally the routed British forces. Warren, who ten years earlier had failed to capture Jack the Ripper, ordered Churchill's arrest. As the carnage continued, the dead and wounded were carried away by stretcher-bearers under the command of Mohandas Gandhi, the future Indian Prime Minister, who in 1888, during the Ripper murders, was living in London. The Battle of Spion Kop has now become infamous for being one of the bloodiest battles in Boer History. Eventually the British took the hill and then they soon abandoned it.
Richard Patterson.
The Following essay has been sourced primarily from my book. ‘Francis Thompson and the Ripper Paradox’ which it has that the Ripper was a Lancashire born poet.
The Commissioner of the Police Department, during the Whitechapel murder investigation of 1888, was Sir Charles Warren. On Thursday November 8,the day before the murder of Mary Kelly. Warren tendered his second resignation to the Home Secretary. In his letter to Henry Matthews, Warren's resignation blamed the murderer when he wrote that his department’s failure to capture the ripper was due to,
‘the extraordinary cunning and secrecy which characterize the commission of the crimes.'
It seems that ten years later, Sir Warren tried copying the crimes. Circumstantial evidence shows that Warren used a war in a secret experiment to make more of the same murderer. It appears he tried to stage a mass Ripper event, one where he selected thousands of unknowing men on how they fit his description of the Ripper. He then sent them into battle under similar conditions that the Ripper would have faced. The world knows little of Jack the Ripper, only that he was a maniac who, all within in a half-square kilometer, went on killing spree. The Ripper attacked always at night, working under time pleasure and ready, at any moment, for a policeman’s lamp that would give away his position. After the Ripper murders, in a remote battlefield in South Africa, Warren commanded the British in the Battle of Spion. Military Historians view this battle as one of the worst military disasters in modern history. Warren strategy was to have a select group of men fight on a half-square kilometer plateau of a small hill. He had the men armed only with knives, fight at night under time pressure. He had ordered his men to sneak into the area and he later revealed their position to the enemy Boars who machined gun them by waving his lamp. 243 of the men he sent into a battle were killed and more lives would have not been lost if had not been for Churchill and Gandhi.
In 1888, the year of the Ripper murder, Sir Warren was forty-eight years of age and had already lived an active life that had seen him mostly soldering overseas. Educated at Cheltenham, Sandhurst and Woolwich, Warren joined the Royal Engineers in 1857 and ten years later, he was Commander of the Royal Engineers of Saukin and Governor of the Red Sea Littoral. Warren served in Palestine and there carried out archaeological work. Warren spent the years, between 1867 and 1869, authenticating biblical sites under government orders. Warren explored and mapped places such as the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This is a Jewish sanctuary believed to have once housed the Ark of the Covenant. Warren's bizarre excavation methods, that included the examination of the southeast corner of the Temple area whilst standing on his head, earned him the name of Jerusalem Warren. He also explored the Plain of Philistia and did a reconnaissance of central Jordan. In 1870, Warren was posted to Africa where, between 1876 and 1897, he was the Special Commissioner for the Colonial Office. In 1882, Warren was sent to the Sinai desert to seek out Professor Archibald Palmer. The professor had vanished whilst on a clandestine mission to gain support from Bedouin tribes. Warren determined that the Professor had been killed and brought his murderers to justice. This effort earned Sir Warren his knighthood.
During the, 1877 to 1878, Kaffier War Sir Warren commanded the Diamond Fields Horse and was badly wounded in battle. Returning to England in 1880, Warren was Chief Instructor for the School of Military Engineering in Chatham. In 1884, he was dispatched to Africa once more to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum. When Sir Warren became Commissioner of Police, it was felt that his experience would do a great deal to modernize the police. Beneath Sir Warren was three Assistant Commissioners who had the status of Justice of the Peace. This meant that they could issue warrants for arrest or search premises without having to gain permission from a court magistrate. Immediately below the three Assistant Commissioners were four Chief Constables. Sir Warren created the rank of Chief Constable. Their purpose was to liaison between the Assistant Commissioners and Divisional Superintendents, thus speeding up the transfer of orders. Unfortunately, it soon seemed apparent that Sir Warren was more concerned with uniforms than police grievances. His annual reports, for example, were largely on dress code and ordering the right type of boots and saddles for his mounted forces. Sir Warren also brought in harsh penalties for officers found to be drunk on duty. Drill practice, long ago abolished was reintroduced. His manner with sections of the press was uncompromising and his response to complaints of police brutality was unforgiving. Resentment for his policies had quickly grown. It became evident that Warren was intent on militarising the police.
Added to all this was growing friction between Sir Warren and his police Inspectors. Warren found them to be unprofessional and made noises about removing plainclothes inspectors altogether. He saw inspectors as foreign to the militaristic model that he felt the police should follow with each officer in uniform. Sir Warren showed little tolerance for the public's concerns of their freedoms being suppressed and the tide of public support had almost turned completely against him. Even more so when, on November 13 1887, there occurred what became known as 'Bloody Sunday'. This was when homeless protestors refused to disperse from Trafalgar Square. Sir Warren ordered the police to fire into the crowd. Two people died and 150 others were injured. An odd trait shown by Warren was his use of poetry in his drafted orders. One example, upon law and order in Trafalgar Square reads,
'The Commissioner has observed there are signs of wear
On the Landseer Lions in Trafalgar Square.
Unauthorised persons are not to climb
On the Landseer lions at any time.'
On January 23rd, 1998, Warren again replicated a similar terror while residing safely in a wagon in South Africa. His wagon was a few kilometres from a hill, near Spion Kop, in South Africa. Upon the hill was a plateau about half-square kilometre in size. It was during the second Boer War fought between Great Britain and the Afrikaner republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Sir Warren had been given orders to capture Spion Kop. The soldiers were told that it was considered a key strategic site, though not long after the battle the victorious Boar army abandoned it. Sir Warren's troops had assembled elven kilometres from the hill. His plan was to capture Spion Kop under the cover of darkness. He gave orders forbidding the men to smoke in case the Boers saw them. Sir Warren was in command of 22,000 Troops collectively designated as the fifth Division. Sir Warren ordered 20,000 men to wait and ordered 2,000 men, mainly from the mainly Lancashire Fusiliers, into battle. The enemy Boers at first numbered 600 troops. A delay of 26 hours, in which Sir Warren supervised the transport of his personal baggage across the Tugela River, allowed a further 6,000 of the enemy to gather. His men were told that each would be given a sandbag to fill and use for protection. They were told that food and water supplies would be available along the way. They were told that two guides would meet them at the base of the hill. They were also told that digging tools would be waiting. As dusk fell, his men began the long march to the base of the hill. The sandbags were not given out. The food and water did not arrive. One of the guides fled and the other became paralysed with fear. The Digging tools had vanished. After travelling across rough ground and fording watercourses for eleven kilometres, Sir Warren's 2000 soldiers reached the base of Spion Kop and began the 490-meter upward trek. They were placed under the command of General Woodgate, who at fifty-five, had to be carried. Exhaustion had already caused many men to fall down asleep. As the soldiers climbed, sometimes on their hands and knees, it began to rain. Their path consisted of old goat trails that rapidly churned to mud. The men, who moved in darkness, in concordance with Sir Warren's orders, to gain an element of surprise, were dismayed to see that ex-policeman-Warren’s hurricane lamp could be seen shining from his wagon at Three Tree Hill down on the plains below. Giving away their presence to the enemy Boers. There had been no previous recognizance of Spion Kop.
At 3.30 am, the men, who had been ordered to unload their magazines, at the main camp and fight only with fixed bayonet, were relieved to find that steep hill gave way to a flat plateau. It held a small dugout and 200 Boer troops. The Boers fled wounding three soldiers. Believing that they had reached the summit of Spion Kop, the men, under gathering fog, began to dig in and wait for daylight. As the sun rose and the fog lifted, they found that they were not actually at the top of the hill at all but a third of the way down, on an exposed plain measuring a half-square kilometre with knives their only weapons. The trenches they had built had walls of loose earth measuring a height of thirty-six centimetres. Combined enemy fire, which included five field guns, rained down from the Boers above, them killing 1,700 of the 2,000 British. Ants attacked the remaining men who cowered in ditches under the now blistering heat.
As the day wore on, wounded stragglers fled down the hill to be met by Winston Churchill the future WWII Prime Minister. Then a young lieutenant, Churchill had broken ranks from Warren's larger idle force of 20,000 and ascended on foot. (Alice Meynell, the wife of Francis Thompson's publisher, already knew Winston Churchill, meeting him at Stafford House where the Duchess of Sutherland held Friday tea parties.) Churchill, ignoring the orders of his commanding officers, began to rally the routed British forces. Warren, who ten years earlier had failed to capture Jack the Ripper, ordered Churchill's arrest. As the carnage continued, the dead and wounded were carried away by stretcher-bearers under the command of Mohandas Gandhi, the future Indian Prime Minister, who in 1888, during the Ripper murders, was living in London. The Battle of Spion Kop has now become infamous for being one of the bloodiest battles in Boer History. Eventually the British took the hill and then they soon abandoned it.
Richard Patterson.