Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and

[curious4]

That club

Hello Roy,

Thank you! Just the point I have been trying to make for some considerable time. I'm not saying that no anarchist ever came near a working mens' club, I'm sure even the Women's Institute nurtured a viper or two in its capacious bosom, but the aim of the clubs was to promote workers' rights, to entertain and to provide a place for working men to get together. It was a socialist club.

Best wishes,
C4

[Roy Corduroy]

Thank you for that, Stewart, to get the conversation back on track about Secret Societies and all. In fact, I have Spiro's book on order from a library across town, so to participate better.

An interesting article, Curious4, thank you. It deals with reaction to the murders.

I do feel the Berner Street Club in 1888 is somewhat misunderstood, seen through the lens of 125 years of socialist thought and nationalization since then. At the time it was, above all, a nascent union hall. Socialism meant, in a real sense, unionism. Worker's rights, organizing. Such as when the IWEC was used as the headquarters for the Match Girls strike the next year. Great Britain, outside of the miners, was not very unionized then. It was the primary goal of socialists.

That didn't stop people from calling the IWEC anarchists, but they weren't. Anarchists blow up things and one of them assassinated President McKinley in a few more years.

Roy

[Lechmere]

Yes an interesting article.
Standard working men's clubs are not really like the Berner Street Club - which was a far left wing political club.
Working mens' clubs were and are special clubs - based largely around cheaper beer, comradeship, cliquishness, and social activities.
I know of two in Bethnal Green that still operate.

[Tom_Wescott]

Hi Curious4, what's this in reference to? It certainly has no bearing on the Berner Street club.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[curious4]

That club again

Hello all,

Found this article by Gregg Jon Jones recently and found it interesting. Seems there was a hidden agenda - but not on the part of the members.

Quote: "Pre-existing class tensions escalated following the outbreak of the Whitechapel murders and led the middle classes to conclude that social reformation was the safest way to counter the perceived threat of revolution. The idea was to use reform as a tool to for social control by imposing 'safe' ideological values. The path of least resistance was believed to be through the introduction of working men's clubs. These working men's clubs would in effect be a sort of Trojan horse which would appeal to the working-class men while surreptitiously indoctrinating the working-class man into middle-class ideology and values. It was believed that class tensions, which existed due to working-class ignorance, would be replaced by class mutuality once the working class realised the interdependence of the respective classes (Price, 1971: 118)."

The whole article is well worth reading at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_...alissue/jones/ and is entitled "Murder, Media and Mythology: The Impact the Media's Reporting of the Whitechapel Murders had on National Identity, Social Reform and the Myth of Jack the Ripper" published 2013 in "Reinvention - An International Journal of Undergraduate Research" by Gregg Jon Jones.

Best wishes,
C4

[Lechmere]

Yes that is interesting.
I would guess that the circumstances of the double event were playing heavily on Warren's mind and he was trying to justify cleaning the graffiti off the wall. It implies he thought the graffiti was by the culprit - a view I share.
I think that note says more about Warren's state of mind than anything else.

[Fisherman]

Warren´s suggestion is of course a nice reminder of how close the police were to capturing their killer at the time. There will have been many other suggestions too, some of them more or less odd, that never made their way into the written material. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

The best,
Fisherman

[Stewart P Evans]

Interesting to note...

It is interesting to note that Sir Charles Warren's recorded thoughts on the identity of the murderer, set down in his own fair hand in a note to the Home Office in October 1888, were that the murders 'may possibly be done by a secret society' although the 'double event' was, in his opinion, 'done by someone desiring to bring discredit on the Jews and Socialists or Jewish Socialists.' Ergo, they may have been 'done by a renegade socialist to bring discredit on his former comrades.'





So, I guess, conspiracy theories were also considered, even in 1888.

[Lechmere]

Tom
I’m not accusing everyone of engaging in conspiracy theories!
Only some people.
I would suggest that these bits and pieces don’t actually suggest a conspiracy.

Indeed there are non-Governmental conspiracies. Several have been suggested with respect to the Ripper case – Freemasons, Fenian’s, Macnaghten, Sims and the Druitt family etc.

While technically a conspiracy is a criminal act that involves more than one person, would we say that the Fred and Rose West killings were the result of a conspiracy? Or just two sickoes working together?
If say (obviously hypothetically) Le Grand and Batchelor acted together in carrying out the murders then would it be because they were a pair of sickoes, or would it be because they were acting for some other design?
This is just me, but if they were doing it just because they were a pair of sickoes, then I would not regard it as a conspiracy.
If the case was made that they had some other purpose (I can’t imagine what of the top of my head) then I would colloquially call it a conspiracy.

The bits and pieces put forward about the Irish angle, it seems to me, are meant to imply that there was more of a formal conspiracy behind the Ripper murders rather than a couple of sickoes acting in concert with each other.
Or alternatively taken to imply that Scotland Yard considered the possibility that there may have been a hostile political conspiracy behind the Whitechapel murders. With the proviso that Anderson, Macnaghten and Swanson were at pains to conceal this line of enquiry from any of their official internal reports.
I see nothing concrete to suggest this – just some unrelated bits and pieces being unrealistically stitched togther.

Regarding the Le Grand material I will await your book. I am sure the prospect a fist full of Yankee Dollars will not cloud your judgement when drawing conclusions from those reports and court transcripts.

[Tom_Wescott]

Hi Lech,

What's with accusing everyone of "conspiracy theories" simply because we choose to discuss pieces of evidence that might suggest such a thing? And why must we hold to the dogma that the Ripper was one man working alone? If there were even two, then you have a conspiracy. If there was only one killer but someone else was aware of what he was doing, then again you have a conspiracy. It needn't be a wicked web of government agents to constitute a 'conspiracy'.

And I must say your personal biases have clouded your reading of the Le Grand material. But I'll certainly keep your perspective in mind.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Lechmere]

I haven't suggested there was a conspiracy - I have pooh-poohed it.
I suggested that a mad Irishman using the 'troubles' as some sort of deranged justification for his 'mission' was a possibility.
However I would suggest that any such internalised justification would in all probability be 'dishonest' and a cover for his own squalid yearnings.

I haven't suggested these sources have been faked.
I dispute they are connected. Some of them anyway.
I think the Met General Crime index entry is quite possibly connected to the contempt of court allegation.

[auspirograph]

It is one thing to suggest that the killings were part of a Fenian conspiracy to undermine the authority of the British Government in the eyes of the struggling masses.

I have suggested no such thing, you have.

It seems you are reading far too much into it and seeing conspiracies where none exist.

These primary sources are official and have not been faked.

[Lechmere]

Tom
I wasn’t perhaps being very clear.
The chain that makes up the evidence for an extremist suspect is constructed by fitting together pieces that don’t fit.
That is invariably how conspiracy theories work: unconnected events are connected purely because – in this case – they are all broadly ‘Irish’ related.
Invariably these unconnected events have totally unrelated and mundane roots.
Such as the entry in the Met register which I am fairly sure relates to the contempt of court accusation – which happened roughly at the right time and involved a suggestion that the Irish Home Rulers were tied up somehow with the Whitechapel murderer.
But instead, this contempt of court allegation is even incorporated into theory by murky suggestions that more lay behind it.

I am not connecting Le Grand to the Irish extremist theory.
I’ve read the transcript from the June 1889 trial and press reports and it seems to me that Lewis regarded Le Grand as a charlatan and disbelieved that Le Grand had actually been employed in matter relating to the Parnell case. This is backed up by Le Grand’s assistant Hall, who in evidence painted a picture of an enquiry agency that had not been successful in generating any enquiry business.

[Tom_Wescott]

Hi Lech. You might be fitting together pieces that don't fit. And yes, Le Grand most likely was employed in the Parnell commission. It's known from other sources he was following around certain MPs at the right time, and the moment he threatened in court to produce documents proving himself, everyone - including the great George Lewis - gave him his way to prevent this from happening.

Not sure where you're getting at with 'conspiracy theories'. What does that mean? I'm certainly not suggesting Le Grand was a Fenian or an extreme nationalist. Are you suggesting these sources that are being referenced have somehow been faked? That's what I would call a conspiracy theory.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Lechmere]

Ah Tom
But what do these suggestions of an 'extremist' suspect actually rely on?

A couple of vague entries on the Special Branch ledger?
"McGrath, William – suspicious Irishman at 57 Bedford Gardens"
"McGrath, William - said to be connected to Whitechapel murders".

Littlechild’s reference to Tumblety?

This reference by Douglas G. Browne in The Rise of Scotland Yard (1956)?
"A third head of the CID, Sir Melville Macnaghten, appears to identify the Ripper with the leader of a plot to assassinate Mr Balfour at the Irish Office."
Unsubstantiated and probably based on a misunderstanding of Macnaghten’s memoirs.

As I said earlier – this is how conspiracy theories work on those prone to clutching to them – unconnected and inaccurate snippets are tangled together.
Usually the explanation is more mundane and less exciting – such as the explanation I gave which also explains why the file was under ‘General’.

And Le Grand as the detective agency connected to the Parnell Commission? Le Grand made claims to that effect but are they believable? Do you believe him?