GEORGE HUTCHINSON

J A C K T H E R I P P E R
They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper
They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper
Bruce Robinson
London: 4th Estate, 2015
www.4thestate.co.uk
ISBN: 978007548873
hardcover/ebook; 850pp; illus; notes & sources; index
£25.00 hardcover / £14.99 Kindle
2015 opened with a conspiracy book and the publishing year almost comes to a close with a
conspiracy book. They All Love Jack has apparently taken fifteen years to write and cost an estimated
£500,000 to research, and it claims that Jack the Ripper was a Victorian superstar and Freemason
named Michael Maybrick, that he left signs of Masonic ritual at the murder scenes, and that the
Victorian establishment in the shape of Sir Charles Warren and almost any other Freemason who
swam within reach worked themselves into a frenzy to hide the fact.
The Freemasons are at the heart of several hundred conspiracy theories. The Freemasons were supposedly responsible
for organising the eighteenth-century ancien régime (the old regime in France). Freemasons and the Jews were
responsible for World War I, according to Friedrich Wichtl’s book The World War, World Freemasonry, World Revolution.
Freemasonry features in the Holy Blood, Holy Grail nonsense about the bloodline of Christ. The Freemasons faked the
Apollo moon landings, and according to David Icke, leaders of Illuminati-Masons are reptilian humanoids from another
dimension.
I, for one, would need a very compelling reason to buy into any Freemason theory.
The idea that the Freemason-dominated Victorian Establishment worked itself into a froth to hide the evidence that
Jack the Ripper was himself a Freemason probably wouldn’t persuade even a retarded gnat if the tale had been told
by a less accomplished storyteller than Bruce Robinson, but Robinson lays out his his case in overwhelming detail and
the force of his own conviction carries the incautious reader on a roller-coaster ride to what they might conclude is the
truth. But this story isn’t the truth.
I usually avoid reading reviews of the books I am reviewing, but in this case I knew that mainstream reviewers would
lack the specialist knowledge to properly assess Robinson’s claims, but I wanted to know their reaction to the overall
argument. Reading the reviews revealed rather bewildered reviewers who were in the main underwhelmed by the book.
In the Daily Telegraph Mick Brown stated the obvious, ‘Robinson is not a historian; he is a dramatist…’
Robinson is indeed a storyteller and he doesn’t pretend to be anything else. He’s certainly doesn’t pretend to be an
historian, and that’s just as well because he doesn’t come close to being one. Writing of the argument exhaustively laid
out in this book, Rosita Boland asked in the Irish Times,‘Would it all stand up before a panel of history-PhD assessors?’
She gives an unadorned answer, ‘No.’
The important distinction between historians and dramatists is that the former deal with facts and evidence, whilst
the latter deal with entertaining things like storylines. As P D Smith observed in the Guardian, whether or not you are
persuaded by Robinson’s theory, his book is ‘still a bloody good read’. It may well be, but the historian has higher goals
and would find little satisfaction in providing ‘a bloody good read’ when the theory they want to persuade their peers
is dumped in the rubbish bin. Mr Robinson isn’t dispassionate. He is unashamedly biased. He wears his subjectivity like
a badge of honour. Robinson’s argument is personal. He is clearly very passionate. Sometimes he’s overwhelmed by his
passions. Occasionally I worried about his blood pressure. ‘Rarely has a book on Jack the Ripper been written with such
visceral anger,’ wrote P D Smith in The Guardian. Robinson’s authorial voice is ‘scabrous’, wrote Mick Brown in The Daily
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 76