J. E. Brewer - The Curse Upon Mitre Square

[dem bones]

To cash-in on the overwhelming success of the Whitechapel thread, a totally all over the place anti-review of a Ripper classic! First appeared on the mercifully aborted Whitechapel Gothic site in 2005 ....

J. E. Brewer - The Curse Upon Mitre Square (Simpkin Marshall, 1888). Down-loadable as a free PDF from Hollywood Ripper. Don't miss out!

Photo: The Bride of Demonik

Jack The Ripper: The Vampire "Theories"

Evening. Fell in with Louis De La Nuit's JACK THE RIPPER TOUR. Bit of a washout due to small attendance & wildly inclement conditions (i.e., it pissed down all night & everybody's "souvenir programme" got soggy), but Louis gamely led us around the back of Whitechapel station and explained how, on a previous visit, his friend saw a ghostly face projected on the wall of the crumbling boarding school in Bucks Row and a sudden gust of wind blew paperwork relating to the murders out of his briefcase. Louis has got this big thing about Saucy Jack having been a Vampire, so, you know, did he get TOO CLOSE and was this the Ripper's way of WARNING HIM OFF?

- Journal extract November 9 1995 *

Drac the Ripper. Once you start getting used to the idea, some rather choice items from the newspapers of the day and certain seemingly (at first glance) innocuous passages in such books as Robin Odell's Jack the Ripper In Fact & Fiction, Melvyn Fairclough’s caper The Complete Jack the Ripper, even Leonard Matters much derided promotion of 'Dr. Stanley' in The Mystery of Jack the Ripper can take on a dark, eerily suggestive meaning which, while surely at odds with what the authors intended, literally scream of what, for want of a better term, we'll refer to as "The Supernatural"... if you have the mind to let them.

Take the following example, from The Star, 8 Sept. 1888.

“London lies today under the spell of a great terror. A nameless reprobate - half beast, half man - is at large, who is daily gratifying his murderous instincts on the most miserable and defenseless classes of the community. The ghoul-like creature who stalks through the streets of London, stalking down his victims like a pawnee indian, is simply drunk with blood, and he will have more. Whitechapel is garrisoned with police and stocked with plain-clothes men. Nothing comes of it. The police have not even a clue. They are in despair at their utter failure to get so much as a scent of the criminal."

Three days earlier, the same newspaper provided the following description of early suspect John Pizer, AKA 'Leather Apron'.

“His expression is sinister and seems to be full of terror for the women who describe it. His eyes are small and glittering. His lips are usually parted in a grin which is not only not reassuring, but excessively repellent."

As though this were not enough to suggest the fellow had something of the Count Orlocks about him, author Bruce Paley adds that Leather Apron allegedly "possessed the highly unusual habit of walking without bending his knees". Or better still, from the East London Advertiser for 6 Oct. 1888 - this, two years before Stoker began work on Dracula.

“So inexplicable and ghastly are the circumstances surrounding the crimes. It is so impossible to account, on any ordinary hypothesis, for these revolting acts of blood that the mind turns as it were instinctively to some theory of occult force, and the myths of the dark ages arise before the imagination. Ghouls, vampires, bloodsuckers and all the ghastly array of fables which have been accumulated through the course of centuries take form and seize hold of the excited fancy. Yet the morbid imagination can conceive nothing worse than this terrible reality for what can be more appalling than the thought that there is a being in human shape stealthily moving about a great city with the thirst for human blood, and endowed with such diabolical astuteness as to enable him to gratify his fiendish lust with absolute impunity”.

The Curse Upon Mitre Square AD 1530-1888

It was against this backdrop of wild supernatural speculation that John Francis Brewer penned his pamphlet The Curse Upon Mitre Square AD 1530-1888 (Simpkin Marshall, 1888). Mr. Brewer did not shy from venturing an explicitly occult solution to the murder mystery. According to his researches - supplemented, it would seem, by a plot line that owed much to M.G.Lewis’s classic of Gothic excess, The Monk - Catherine Eddowes met her doom at the exact spot where once stood the altar stone of the Holy Trinity Priory which staged a particularly ghastly murder in 1530. The story goes that a misguided monk, Brother Martin, has got it into his head that the parishioner he’s lusted after is set upon scandalising the priory with some terrible revelation. Insane with guilt, he waits in ambush as she innocently goes about her devotions. After a partially successful attempt at carving her face off with a knife, the frenzied friar launches into unmistakable proto-Ripper mode. Suffice to say, much corpse-kicking and tearing out of gizzards ensue - indeed, Brewer trowels on the horrors with such gusto you wonder how come nobody ever thought to finger him as a suspect - until the place is awash in entrails and gore and his prey “trod out of all recognition”. Well, not quite. There is just enough left for Brother Martin to realise - too late! - that the pulped and broken rag doll strewn about the altar stone had once been ... his very own dear sister!

Understandably mortified at his alarming faux pas, the holy man plunges the knife into his own breast and expires beside her. For all their efforts, his colleagues cannot scrub out the bloodstains denoting it a cursed chapel. Unfortunately, Brother Martin’s wickedness failed to perish at the same rate as his corpse and he’d malingered in the district for three centuries plus seeking to demonically possess and manipulate the unwary that through them he might experience the vicarious thrill of committing further homicides (If you caught him on a good night he was also given to making predictions of appalling catastrophe).

As theories go, Brewer’s perhaps erred toward the sensational, but his ‘remote control Ripper’ is a godsend to die-hard ‘vampire’ theorists. What is unusual about the following example of an Undead Saucy Jack theory is that Brewer’s maniacal Monk doesn't’t warrant so much as a mention. Over recent years, Mr. Janos Blasko has forwarded me several of his articles pertaining to the case and I’m likewise indebted to him for keeping me informed as to whichever psychic impressions his alter-ego has picked up on his regular excursions to the murder sites. Never a man to settle for a mundane theory when a perfectly outrageous one will suffice, Janos kindly sent me an extraordinary piece, Jack the Ripper was a Thespian Vampire; A Scientific Clue, in which he pins the murders on Israel Schwartz, a witness to the Berner Street slaying. Janos seems to have formulated his theory while researching Dracula, and the gist of his report speculates on Schwartz’s arrival in England. Mr. Blasko posits that Schwartz was possibly of Transylvanian origin, and might therefore have sailed to this country aboard The Dimitri which famously went aground at Whitby in 1885. Janos doesn't like the idea of this at all. “Was Schwartz his real name. Might it not have been... ‘Bathori’?” he wonders. I think we can see where this one is heading, but how does the titular “thespian” fit into all this?

“One point in the murders has always puzzled researchers and police alike. How did the spout of victim Mary Kelly’s kettle get melted on the night she was killed? A fire of rags in her grate would not have produced the heat to have melted it. Here is a scientific clue to her killer. The killer needed great amounts of light to see. The oil lamps and candles of those days did little and went out with draughts of air. One source of light which floodlit theatres was limelight. The device used to make it could have melted the kettle. Limelight is produced by firing an acetylene torch-flame through a piece of lime, invented 1826 by Drummond. It was only used in theatres”

From Donald Rumbelow’s mighty The Complete Jack the Ripper, we learn that, even as the autumn of terror built to it’s jaw-droppingly obscene climax, the word on the street had it that Jack was conducting his campaign from out of a vault in the Jewish Cemetery on Brady Street. Disused since 1858 and tucked in just behind Bucks Row, this would certainly have been a convenient bolt-hole for our “vampire” to repair to having carried out the Nichols murder (interestingly, there was also a derelict - and, by all accounts, insalubrious - burial ground in Backchurch Lane, mere yards from the spot where Liz Stride breathed her last). So how, with the streets swarming with police and vigilantes, had he eluded capture on his forays to and from the burial grounds? Easy. He had extensive knowledge of the sewer system and fled the scene of each crime in the manner of The Phantom of the Opera.

There were others who'd hazard that, as with that other render of human flesh, the werewolf, our man was afflicted with moon madness when he committed his bestial crimes. Aleister Crowley, who, indirectly or otherwise, first implicated enduring suspect ‘Roslyn D’Onston’, proposed that the killer was a black magician who’d achieved invisibility with the second or third slaying (I’m inclined to agree with Simon Whitechapel who reckons that at best this was the usual case of The Great Beast demonstrating what a totally clued-in, finger on the pulse guy he was, at worst a classic example of him gleefully taking the piss out of the more gullible souls amongst his readership). One amusing, if possibly far-fetched theory of recent vintage has it that Jack - in this instance AKA the famed Royal Ripper ‘suspect’, Prince Albert Victor - was afforded a sham funeral in 1892, having already been secured, Elizabeth Bathory fashion, in the legendary sealed chamber at Glamis Castle, where he remained until death finally overtook him in 1933, hence the Strathmores’ adopting so tightlipped a policy in regard to their awesome “family secret”. Judging from a contemporary description of the involuntary prisoner - “a curious creature with an inhuman head, wrestling with an aged retainer who eventually contrived to carry the monster away”, let alone Rosemary Guiley’s rather more graphic invocation of one “hideously deformed ... [an], shaped monster with no neck, tiny arms and legs ... hairy torso” etc., - ‘Eddie’ had undergone a remarkable physical degeneration. We expect that his alleged henchman, Sir William Gull will be proved to have had something to do with this in the fullness of time. Perhaps he’d tried his hand at some proto-plastic surgery and screwed up something spectacular. Alternatively, we have the fact that Glamis can boast it’s very own vampire legend to fall back on indeed, the alleged suspect is also said to have been walled up undead in the confines of that very same dismal dungeon. What if the vampire bit Eddie ? What if Gull developed some serum akin to that which transformed Ralph Bates into Martine Beswick in Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde? What if ...

What if we leave this preposterous conspiracy theorizing to the ‘experts’ in such matters and check out the haunted pub instead?

Part II: The Haunted Pub will be inflicted upon you the next time i get the illiterate's equivalent of writers block. Best start praying that doesn't happen for, like, ever. ;D

The old board school in Bucks Row looking dead spooky before it's inevitable yuppie flats makeover. Photo: The Bride of Demonik

* In case you're wondering, I'm afraid I didn't hang around long enough to learn answer to this burning question or discover whether Mr. De La Nuit & fang faced friends got through the night without being butchered for their sins as, ten minutes into walkabout, I abandoned tour at precise moment party reached Liquormart. They were doing a special offer.