GEORGE HUTCHINSON

I’m not sure that one can be ‘agog’ to prove something, but we’ll let that pass. What this is all about is the claim by
Matthew Packer, a Berner Street greengrocer to have sold grapes to Elizabeth Stride an hour or so before she was found
dead. At about 11:00pm a man and a woman, whom he subsequently identified as Elizabeth Stride, bought some grapes
from his shop. He recalled that it was raining heavily at the time and that he watched the couple getting soaked as they
ate the grapes. When Elizabeth Stride’s body was found a short time later, it was examined by Dr Blackwell, who stated
that her clothes were dry (or, as he peculiarly expressed it, ‘not wet with rain’.) I concluded that if Stride’s clothes
were dry, she could not have been the woman who bought the grapes from Packer. However, a few pages earlier I had
said that it was raining hard when two men saw a man and a woman they afterwards identified as Stride leaving a pub
in nearby Settles Street. Mr Robinson writes: ‘So, at 11:00pm it was pissing down in Settles Street, while 100 yards away
in Berner Street it was as dry as a bone?’
Well, no. I’m not quite that thick. There is no doubt that Dr Blackwell examined Elizabeth Stride, but it is not certain
that Stride was the woman seen leaving the pub in Settles Street, so I concluded that if Stride’s clothes were dry, she
couldn’t have been the woman seen leaving the pub in the rain and who ate Mr Packer’s grapes in Berner Street. All well
and good. However, Mr Robinson has produced another examining doctor who said Stride’s clothing was sodden, and Mr
Robinson has made better use of the weather information than I did (or obtained more detailed weather information
than I did) and he rightly challenges my conclusion, forcing a re-examination of the evidence. Fantastic. I’m all for reexamining
the evidence. But what I am not too happy about is Mr Robinson’s suggestion that I wanted - if that is the
inference to be drawn from ‘agog’ - to prove Packer a liar. I might be an oaf, but I am an honest one. I interpret the
source material as best I can. I do not have a hidden agenda.
Staying with the grape-selling Mr Packer: there was a sketch, apparently of a boy, which Mr Packer contemptuously
dismissed as not having the remotest resemblance to a man he’d seen with the women he believed to have been
Elizabeth Stride. Mr Robinson says that the creation of this sketch was ‘duplicitous garbage’ instigated only by those
seeking to deceive. He continues, ‘and only those seeking to deceive could invest it with credibility. Ripperologist Mr
Paul Begg seizes upon it without inhibition…he creates an outrageous sentence which suggests Packer is rejecting the
sketches he approved in the Telegraph.’ Now, what Mr Robinson is contentedly prattling on about is that the Daily
Telegraph published two sketches side by side. One was of a fresh-faced young man, the other of an older man with
a pencil moustache. Either I never knew about the sketch of the boy, or, if I knew about it, I stupidly dismissed it
from my mind as unimportant. Anyway, I thought the Telegraph’s sketch of the young man was the picture Packer was
contemptuously dismissing.
It was a mistake. I don’t mind my mistakes being exposed. We all make them and I am considerably less interested
in the making of mistakes than I am in the correction of them. I am concerned with establishing the facts and if I know
one thing without a shadow of doubt it’s that my mistakes are made honestly. I do not, never have, and never will do
something with the deliberate intention of deceiving someone.
Turning to the writing on the wall at Wentworth Model Dwellings, in the 1970s the late Stephen Knight argued in his
best-selling Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution that ‘Juwes’, hitherto dismissed as a mis-spelling of ‘Jews’, was in fact
a Masonic word. In Masonic tradition the architect of King Solomon’s temple, Hiram Abiff, was murdered by three men
named Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum. When they were caught, King Solomon decreed that they should be executed in
specific ways, these ways being symbolically enacted in Masonic ritual. The men were known collectively as the Assassins
or the Ruffians, and Stephen Knight claimed that they were also known as the Juwes. In the late 1980s, when I was
researching my book Jack the Ripper: The Uncensored Facts, I was told by the librarian at Freemason’s Hall that ‘Juwes’
was not a Masonic word. Almost as an afterthought he added that Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum had not featured in
Masonic ritual since the beginning of the 19th century.
Mr Robinson has found a Masonic encyclopaedia which shows that in fact Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum were alive and
kicking like Tiller Girls in late 19th century British Masonic tradition. I have no idea why I was told differently, but Mr
Robinson takes pages to excitedly drive home this mistake, if mistake it be, and in the process obscures the fact that
‘Juwes’ was not a Masonic word and was not the collective name for Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum.
In fairness to Mr Robinson, he does clearly admit that ‘Juwes’ was not a Masonic word. What he says, though, is that
at the murder scenes the Ripper left evidence suggesting a symbolic re-enactment of the ritual executions of Jubelo,
Jubela, and Jubelum. He also argues that ‘Juwes’ was a word clue, similar to some Masonic puzzles, and that Sir Charles
Warren, an expert at Masonic word games, would have immediately recognised as referring to Jubelo, Jubala, and
Jubelum - their names all begin ‘JU’, which could be verbalised as Ju’s, pronounced ‘Juws’ and spelt ‘Juwes’.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 79