They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper

Product Information

In 2016 I also read ' In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile'. A book that reveals how Savile's relationships with members of the Royal family, and then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, helped him to get away with abuse on a horrendous scale. Robinson becomes quite upset at times as he reveals the wretched lives of the poor Whitechapel victims - angry that more wasn't done to relieve the sufferings of the poor of that era. I completely understand his feelings but that is no reason to use the F word 500 times in anger. In fact, Robinson has quite a vulgar mouth which I found hard to believe since he looked so angelic as a youth. Juwes' had to have been written by a Mason. Warren got his stupid arse out of bed that night to fulfil the spirit of the oath sworn by a senior Freemason, ie, 'I will protect any other Mason [from the consequences of their actions], murder and treason not excluded.'"

I don't think it's too much to ask of an author to write books in a civilized manner using good English instead of relying on cursing to make his point. The judicial malpractice Robinson reveals is staggering even by the standards of the Ripper trials that preceded it.There's a lot of anger, I say, in this book. "If there was one thing that kept me going as I immersed myself in the filthy f***ing miasma that was British politics in the Victorian era, it was rage. I was inflamed by what they did with that little boy." For the basic premise is that the killings were perpetrated by a rogue freemason. The incompetence of the police and other authorities - dominated by freemasonry - was breathtaking, but is explained by the fact that the killings were so obviously masonic in their execution that a cover-up was instigated. Robinson makes this case very persuasively and - bearing the above caveat in mind - I am convinced by his argument.

The centrepiece of Robinson's case is a stunning analysis of letters. My faith in him returned after all the chuntering about Masonic iconography; In all the interviews and books I've read and films I'd watched, don't think I'd found him intellectually formidable before, aside from humour, but here… Best of all is the relation of content in various letters to one another, and playing with words and phrases and oblique allusions. The textual analysis and psychology is rather awesome. Although I think we could have done with systematic mentions of which bits riffed on letters that had been published in newspapers. Drawings in two different letters are quite obviously by the same hand. Last time I stayed with Robinson he had no idea of the identity of his birth father. Now he has a photograph of the American and says he's just discovered two half-sisters living in the US. Pro: I accept Robinson's nominee as the actual JTR. It all makes so much more sense from this perspective.

That's a project, Robinson says, he urgently hopes to proceed with. There's also talk of a stage version of *Withnail & A book like no other – the tale of a gripping quest to discover the identity of history’s most notorious murderer and a literary high-wire act from the legendary writer and director of Withnail and I. Ripperology has long been a notorious crank subculture, and the online forums were fascinating to read, for a few hours, at least. By no means does everyone sound like a crank, rooting for their favourite suspect whilst ignoring holes and uncertainties in the case. Some do think the case will never be solved; some bring what looks like professional-style rigour to a micro-study (such as a recent book by a descendent of the suspect Chapman). He became chairman of the Isle of Wight Hospital, was a magistrate and was five times mayor of Ryde. He was also a Freemason. [3] He had been at Buxton for three weeks being treated for periodic gout when he died in his sleep of heart failure on 26 August 1913. [4] He was buried four days later at Ryde. As others have mentioned the language can be vulgar, but in most cases Robinson is using JTR's own words. His disdain for the ruling class and their lies and cover-ups is sometimes expressed in the form of sarcasm, and I enjoyed that. The author is passionate.. His dismissiveness of some of the more prominent "Ripperologists" is comical and also well-placed; for one thing, Robinson proves that some of the letters dismissed as hoaxes were in fact written by the killer.

Interviews give the impression that Robinson doesn't use the internet: it's obvious why someone who likes a quiet life, and who wants to control their own tendency to get caught up in obsessive research, might avoid it; nevertheless this is a pretty significant obstacle to examining and connecting with 21st century ripperology. (He mentions using a typewriter, and there was only one vague hint in the book towards anything online: the entirely sensible estimate that even these days – let alone 120 years ago – most people wouldn't be familiar with the name of a small foreign magazine.) Some authors are drawn to sexual crime out of a kind of voyeuristic fascination. Robinson is not among them. The dominant themes in his work, from The Killing Fields onwards, have been fury at injustice and a passionate empathy with the underdog. When conversation turns to his own childhood, it's not hard to understand why. How is it that so few people have identified him as the Ripper? "I don't want to sound facetious, but you might equally ask why nobody had previously invented the light bulb or discovered penicillin."The pungency of the language feels necessary as a way of standing up to horror; the possibility of swearing as armour, as defence, is one of those things some us who swear quite a lot would perhaps rather others didn't realise, the "muscularity" of the language overlaying soft vulnerability somewhere inside. The choice of words to reflect how Victorian society regarded prostitutes, in the manner of free indirect style, seems to have offended a few readers unfamiliar with the narrative form, but from time to time raw compassion appears, all the more emotive for the shift in tone: We can look at the photograph below as if it’s a monstrosity from some long-forgotten sideshow, a waxwork or a work of fantasy. But it isn’t, and it’s horrifying. This was a young woman, poor as dirt, but she had a life, it belonged to her, and the infinite sadism of this most horrendous of murderers has left her like this forever. As a writer, surely you're familiar with elevated levels of stress. "The thing with this book was that it was like doing 12 screenplays simultaneously. Holding such an enormous study in my head was an absolute nightmare. I used to go to bed at night feeling bilious from having this awful person in my head, and the awful people who protected him."

I*. In the meantime he is braced for the recoil from Ripperologists, tetchy historians and Freemasons. The last group's contemporary members are not criticised in the book. "That," says Robinson, "would be like blaming the modern army for General Haig's blunders in the First World War." But it's an unavoidable truth that, historically, English Freemasonry has not always responded kindly to criticism. It will, Robinson hopes, not be too interesting an autumn. A couple of the letters feel unconvincingly overinterpreted; for instance the commentary on the one signed 'Andy Handy', when compared with the text, sounds like too much has been read into it. As someone who has different handwritings for various levels of required legibility or contexts, and who also notices their writing change with mood and energy level, I don't need persuading that one person can write differently, whilst small similarities in letter shapes may show up. (I think pressure may be significant but a) you can't see it on photos, and b) little idea how that worked pre-biros. I wondered if there were different 'families' of writing among the letters. He didn't even mention the possible influence of habitually writing musical notation on the little wings on some letters, which would have added to his case.)Robinson's stepfather, educated at Rugby, "was constantly telling me I was stupid. I thought it was normal to hear my mother scream 'Stop it, you'll kill him' while I was being bashed. I was sent to the worst secondary modern available. I had chronic asthma.