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In his novel Germinal, for example, a coalminer not only falls in love with a girl Capital has reduced to an animal, but he also forms an embryonic trade union. Good God, two horrors in one! The Right Honourable’s wig must have lifted six inches into the air. Like Stead, Ernest Vizetelly (the British translator and publisher of Zola) got three months.
But there was a darker, deeper fear abroad in Zola’s mines, indeed in the minds of the Victorian Establishment. It was the voice from the abyss, the voice of Socialism, howling, ‘Enough, enough. Get off your all fours in the darkness, and stand on two feet like men.’
London was the richest city on earth. Bar none. A Baedeker guide of the period wrote: ‘Nothing will convey a better idea of the stupendous wealth of London than a visit to its docks.’ Eighteen months after an unprecedented working-class riot in Trafalgar Square in November 1887, London’s docks were hit by a cataclysmic strike.5 A Mr Norwood, for management, put it down to ‘dark deliberations of a Socialist Congress in Switzerland’. He was believed then, and might even be now. But I think the strike was more likely to have been caused by the habitual agony of three hundred men fighting over one job, the ‘most ravenous, that is, potentially the cheapest’, getting it. The rest could crawl off and die. And many did, one man actually starving to death on Cannon Street Road.
Enquiries were made into his accommodation:
In it is a woman lying on some sacking and a little straw, her breast half eaten away with cancer. She is naked but for an old red handkerchief over her breast and a bit of sail over her legs. By her side a baby of three and three other children. Four of them. The eldest is just nine years old. The husband tried to ‘pick up’ a few pence at the docks – the last refuge of the desperate – and the children are howling for bread. That poor woman who in all her agony tries to tend her little ones …6
The Queen sent a bunch of posies to the East End – not for the dying woman, but for the Sisters of Jesus, who were teaching girls to sew. In 1888, at Swan & Edgar, Piccadilly, you could order an evening gown and have these scrofulous, albeit industrious little Whitechapel fingers make it for you to wear at the soirée that very night. That very year, the Earl of Dudley threw a party for his ever-hungry but already overfed friend Edward, the Prince of Wales. The dinner service was specially made for the occasion by Sèvres. It had the royal glutton’s crest on it, and cost £22,000.
At about the time of the description of the dying woman in Whitechapel, historians liked to kid the British that they went to war over such outrages. Victorian schoolchildren were informed of one such escapade. It featured a stinking cellar full of men, women and children, and was colloquially known as ‘the Black Hole of Calcutta’.
I’ve read extensively about this ‘hole’, but details of its myth needn’t trouble us here. I raise it merely to point out that if Victorian educators wanted a hole to get uptight about, they could have had as many as would satisfy their indignation without the inconvenience of sending an army to India. A penny ride on a London omnibus would have taken them to Aldgate (Jack’s nearest and frequently used underground station), east of which were thousands of black holes more permanently frightful than anything in Bengal.
Here, the sub-British ate, slept and wiped their arses in cellars full of vermin and promiscuous death. It was a state of affairs nobody in government got into a particular tizz about, making one wonder if the outrage over sanitary conditions in Calcutta wasn’t something of a theatrical overreaction to get at something else.
In 1877 Victoria became Empress of India, but not of London’s East End. There was no money in it. Thus the Victorians managed to persuade themselves that this suburb of hell was nothing to do with them, and that poverty was somehow engendered by evil. Poverty was portrayed as a lack of morality, rather than a byproduct of greed. These bastards were conniving, thieving, degenerate, congenital criminals, born sinners, and if they’d only stop fucking each other, cherry blossom would sprout spontaneously up the Mile End Road.
One West End Nazi offered businesslike solutions to deal with the maggot-coloured infants sullying London’s streets. The following is from an elegantly produced little guidebook for tourists published by the Grosvenor Press in the 1880s, at the height of Victoria’s reign.
Observe the East End streets, and you will notice hundreds, and thousands of little children wandering about in mobs. Their food is scant and they come ten in a family. Like the wretched Hindus, whom a famine, that is really well deserved, has overtaken, and who supinely breed up to the last pound of rice, these Hindus of the East End take no thought for the morrow, and bring into existence swarms of children for a life of barbarism, brutality, and want in the midst of plenty. Yet our civilisation prates at the sanctity of this human life, and in the same breath speaks of the mercifulness of putting a horse with a broken leg ‘out of its misery’.7
In other words, kill them. Was the writer of the above mentally ill, or simply inured to the cruelties of his time? His words are quoted verbatim (only the emphasis is mine), but they give a kind of perspective. Of course there were giants of the philanthropic trades who fought against such ‘values’. But this book isn’t about the genius of Victorian England. It’s about the bad guys, and even the bad side of the good guys.
The nineteenth century was on its famous roll, and the name of the game was gain. Glittering times for those at the top, not so cosy for those pushing the juggernaut. A confederacy of enterprising Englishmen fought their way up – heroes and cowards, saints and shysters – dragging buckets for the gold. ‘I would annex the planets if I could,’ said Cecil Rhodes, staring up at Africa’s stars. On a more prosaic level, the common herd were required to stand behind cordons of policemen and wave little flags at the passing millionaires.
From time to time they were also required to shell out. Somehow the Victorian elite had managed to amend the mythological affection the peasants had for Robin Hood. It will be remembered that he robbed the rich and gave to the poor. The richest family on earth had turned that on its head. In advance of a Royal Wedding – ‘the Fairest Scene in all Creation’ – the nuptials of the Queen’s grandson George, Duke of York, the mob were instructed to buy the bride a present.
Dockyard labourers, longshoremen, river boat men, village peasants, mechanics, miners, parish school children, cottagers, weavers, carpenters, bricklayers – the whole, in a word, of the poorest and hardest worked members of the nation – were bidden, in terms which admitted no denial, to give up a day’s wage or the price of a week’s meals to assist in purchasing some necklace, bracelet, or other jewel for a young lady who is to be the future wearer of the crown jewels of Great Britain. Royalty in England makes a nation of snobs and sycophants out of a nation that otherwise would be sturdy and self-respecting.8
Not from my pen, but from that of a brilliant, now neglected writer of the time, ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée), who couldn’t be dismissed as a horrid Continental republican, because she was British. She continues, under the subheading ‘Physical Defects of the Royal Breed’:
Given their consanguinity in marriage, their hereditary nervous maladies, their imprisonment in a narrow circle, their illimitable opportunity of self-indulgence, the monotony, the acquisitiveness, which lie like curses on their lives, we must give them the honor that they remain as entirely sane as some of them do. They are, moreover, heavily and cruelly handicapped by the alliances which they are compelled to form, and the hereditary diseases which they are thus forced to receive and transmit. The fatal corporeal and mental injuries of the royal families due to what the raisers of horses call ‘breeding in and in’ cannot be overrated, and yet seem scarcely to attract any attention from the nations over which they reign. Mental and physical diseases are common to them, and so are certain attitudes, moral and political. They are almost all great feeders, and tenacious of arbitrary precedence and distinction. No one ever tells them the truth, they are surrounded by persons who all desire to please, that they may profit by them.9
Needless to say, this piece was never published in England, but in the American edition of Review of Reviews. If I were obliged to agree with only one phrase of it, it would be the last: ‘that they may profit from them’.
Victorian royalty was a gigantic conjuring trick, pomp and pretty circumstance designed to keep your eye off the ball: precisely the reason conjurors use a blonde with big tits. The trick was mother love (and love of mother). Victoria loved her people, and 310 million people loved her.
But this proposition sweats a bit under analysis. Her family feared her. Half the world feared her armies and her avarice – young men flocking to heaven in a brainwashed patriotic stupor at the bugle-call of her greed.
‘We must with our Indian Empire and large Colonies,’ wrote the Queen, ‘be prepared for attacks and wars somewhere or other CONTINUALLY.’ Her emphasis, but not her blood.10
By 1887 Victoria had been queen for fifty years. At her Jubilee celebrations she wept joyously at the battalions of young soldiers, but got a bit fraught when asked to contribute to the cost of the festivities. Marching feet might bring a sting of imperial hubris, but underlying it was the sentiment of a clapped-out cash register. It was made clear to ministers that if she had to pay, she’d never celebrate again.
She didn’t want to pay for her swarm, either. Victoria had twenty-two grandchildren, and by the time of her death, thirty-seven great-grandchildren.11 That’s fifty-nine junior royals with their hands in the till. By the late 1880s this regal cavalcade of indulgence at public expense was stretching political and fiscal credibility to breaking point. It had become too much even for the Conservatives. In an attempt to navigate cross-party dissent, the government quietly suggested that the Palace might want to police its own finances. Nothing radical, you understand: Fat Ed would still get his £128k a year; but could not the Queen herself see a way to appoint a committee that might, very delicately, ‘recommend economies, which, without interfering with your Majesty’s personal comfort, state, or dignity, [the loyal throat was cleared] might be made available as a fund out of which provision could be made either wholly or in part for the young members of the Royal Family?’12
In other words, can you cough up a bit for the kids?
This was construed by the Queen as a piece of common insolence, as was made pretty evident by the tone in which she batted it back. Clearly she thought it iniquitous that she should be expected to shell out. Her Prime Minister, Viscount Lord Salisbury, was the recipient of the bleat. It was ‘most unjust’, wrote the Queen, ‘that she, in her old age, with endless expenses, should be asked to contribute’. Furthermore, she considered herself ‘very shamefully used in having no real assistance for the enormous expense of entertaining’ (at her own Golden Jubilee). Did not Salisbury realise what all this guzzling cost?
Next day she had another seethe at the ingratitude of the masses, via their Parliament. ‘The constant dread of the House of Commons is a bugbear. What ever is done you will not and cannot conciliate a certain set of fools and wicked people who will attack whatever is done.’13
These ‘fools and wicked people’ were actually the taxpayers, a large number of whom were living in abject poverty – which in Her Majesty’s view was about all the excuse they had for not understanding the price of Cristal champagne. Is this letter not as illuminating as it is astonishing? The richest woman on earth considered poor people who wouldn’t give her money ‘wicked’.
‘Oh, but she was a wrenching, grasping, clutching covetous old sinner, and closed as an oyster.’ I vandalise Dickens’s Christmas masterpiece, but his description of Ebenezer Scrooge is appropriate here. I think Dickens found his Miss Havisham in Queen Victoria – his creation a bitter old woman in white, and his muse this caustic old broken heart in endless black. Since the death of her husband Albert in 1861 she had lived in a perpetual funeral, grieving for her lost love and cut off from reality like Havisham in her rotting wedding gown.
The Victorians were subjects of this wretched widow, and in her presence kept a straight face. You had to polish your boots, assume a stiffened aspect, and pretend that everything in the world was serious. Fun was behind her back. In my view, Victoria’s permanent grief invented Victorian hypocrisy. You couldn’t get your hand up at an endless funeral, and had to pretend outrage if somebody else did. This ethic of counterfeit rectitude survives in not a few British newspapers to this very day.
But then, the name of the game is expediency: what do you want to make people think? Politics is reducible to that last defining question: who do you prefer, our liars or theirs?
I reproduce the following because they save me writing a paragraph (and also because they serve as a vivid metaphor for the so-called official ‘Ripper Files’ of the Metropolitan Police). They come from the same newspaper, on the same day, but for a different audience. I always imagined a ‘balanced view’ at Mr Rupert Murdoch’s Sun meant a big pair of tits given equal prominence towards the camera. But this demonstrates that it too is capable of a little political sophistication. These two front pages concern the introduction of the euro. The one on the left is for the British reader, whose government is anti-European, and that on the right is for the Irish, whose government is pro.
The problem for the Victorians (and some of the wilder of the Ripperologists) was that they equated ‘evil’ with ‘insane’. In terms of nailing our Whitechapel monster, this is a mistake; but the Victorian public were conditioned to think in this direction by the police and by the newspapers.
Jack the Ripper was no more ‘insane’ than you or me. A psychopath, yes, but not insane. Was Satan insane? I don’t think so. For a while he was part of the in-crowd, a dazzling angel, Lucifer, the Bringer of Light. God didn’t kick him out of heaven because he was a nut, but simply because he was a nasty piece of work. During his reign, Henry VIII had 72,000 people put to death, and he also liked to cut ears and noses off. Was Henry insane? Probably not, just a Tudor despot who was intolerant of Catholics and others who didn’t subscribe to his theological diktat.14
Is Iago insane? Not noted for his difficulty with words, the greatest writer who ever lived gave this infinitely evil bastard but one line of explanation: ‘I hate the Moor.’ What if it’s as simple as that? With all reverence to Shakespeare, I will change one word: ‘I hate the Whore.’
Jack wasn’t the first, or the last, to make women a target of hate.
He went over there, ripped her clothes off, and took a knife and cut her from the vagina almost all the way up, just about to her breast and pulled the organs out, completely out of her cavity, and threw them out. Then he stooped and knelt over and commenced to peel every bit of skin off her body and left her there as a sign for something or other.
The italics aren’t mine, but Jane Caputi’s, whose book The Age of Sex Crime this comes from.
‘Left her there as a sign for something or other’.
As with much in Caputi’s book, her judgement here is precise. Although her description echoes aspects of the Ripper’s crime scenes, she’s actually writing about a squad of American soldiers who have just beaten and shot a Vietnamese woman to death. The perpetrator here is a representative of USAID. ‘Such crimes are indistinguishable from the crimes of Jack the Ripper,’ writes Caputi; ‘both are meant to signify the same thing – the utter vanquishment and annihilation of the enemy.’15
You don’t have to be ‘insane’ to cut people up, no matter how fiendishly you do it. You just have to hate enough. The Whitechapel Murderer was a beast who hated women (one young American woman in particular), but no way was he insane.
In 1889 an American lawyer wrote about the Ripper scandal in a Boston legal journal called the Green Bag. Considering his piece is contemporary, it is quite remarkable in its perceptions, and is not remotely taken in by the forest of nonsense being put out at the time. It’s far too long to reproduce in its entirety. This edited version therefore is mine, as are the emphases.
It is surprising that, in the present cases, there has been a failure to discover the perpetrator of the deeds; for they have not been ordinary murders. Not only are the details as revolting as any which the records of medical jurisprudence contain; they are also marked by certain characteristics which at first sight would seem to afford a particularly strong likelihood of the crimes being cleared up. The very number of the crimes, the almost exact repetition of the murderer’s procedure in each, the similarity of hour and circumstances, the elaborate mutilation of the bodies … these things might not unnaturally be expected to give some clue.16
My kind of lawyer. I couldn’t agree more, exploration of the words ‘marked by certain characteristics’ being the aspiration of this book.
Yet this abundance of circumstance gives none. So far from giving a clue, they would seem to conspire to baffle the police.
The writer goes on to dismiss the theory of a ‘homicidal maniac’ as an unreliable proposition:
It is the very atrocity of the Whitechapel murders that gave rise to the theory of their being the work of a madman. It is not a novel line of reasoning, this. Only let the deed be surpassingly barbarous, and the ordinary mind will at once leap to the conclusion that it was a maniac who wrought it. Now, the inference is quite fallacious. Some of the most barbarous murders on record have been perpetrated by admittedly sane men – men on whose perfect soundness of mind no doubt has ever been cast. The mutilation of the bodies of these wretched women in East London, taken by itself, is no indication whatever of insanity on the part of the perpetrator of the deeds. The craft and the cunning evinced in the murders seems little to consist with insanity. The rash and uncalculating act of the lunatic is not here. No doubt there are on record a few isolated cases of considerable caution being shown on the part of insane homicides; but we are not acquainted with any which approach to the present display of prudence and circumspection. The craftiness of these deeds is astounding; and the highest tribute to it is the fact that all attempts at detection have been made in vain hitherto. The actual execution of his foul deeds must have been swift and dexterous, and shows coolness of hand and steadiness of purpose. These things are all markedly in the direction of disproving insanity.17
But that wouldn’t do for the hierarchy at Scotland Yard; it was not even up for consideration. For mischievous reasons that will explain themselves, the authorities needed a maniac, preferably a foreigner or a Jew.
Havelock Ellis’s hysterically funny but apparently serious book The Criminal (1890) gives a thumbnail sketch of the kind of thing the Metropolitan Police were trying to sell. The following is a description of one such murderer in the dock:
Imagine a sort of abortion, bent and wrinkled, with earthy complexion, stealthy eyes, a face gnawed by scrofula, a slovenly beard framing a yellow bilious face of cunning, dissipated and cruel aspect. The forehead is low, the hair black and thrown backwards, the muscles of a beast of prey. His repellent head was photographed on my memory, and lighting up the sinister features with a sinister gleam, two small piercing eyes of a ferocity which I could scarcely bear to see.18
This perceived horror and ‘lair-dweller’ – as widely prescribed for our world-famous gent – was an unquestioningly well-enjoyed camouflage, relished and accepted not only by the press and public, but by a majority of experts (the Ripperologists of their day): Jack was a Hebrew frightener with the eyes of a ferret, a sort of Elephant Man with no laughs, and on a moonless night his complexion approached hues of the earth from a freshly violated grave:
The eye of the habitual criminal is glassy, cold, and fixed; his nose is often aquiline, beaked, reminding one of a bird of prey. The jaws are strong, the canine teeth much developed, the lips thin, nystagmus frequent, also spasmodic contractions of one side of the face, by which the canine teeth are exposed.19
Now, I don’t know about you, but if I was a hardened, streetwise East End whore, half-sloshed and desperate for fourpence or not, I would definitely avoid going up an alley with this man. Forget the canine teeth, it’s the spasmodic contractions of one side of the face that would do it for me.
No whore in Christendom is going to entertain it. But just in case she does, there’s more. Let’s overlook Talbot and his ‘degenerate ear’ (1886), and move straight to Ottolenghi (1888), who described the ‘extraordinary ape-like agility noted in criminals’, a characteristic sometimes accompanied by ‘unusual length of arm’; he also drew attention to the prevalence of the ‘prehensile foot’. In 1886 Giovenale Salsotto apparently found ‘abundant hair round the anus’. So you knew what to look out for.20
What the Victorians feared in their Ripper was a manifestation of their own prejudices, and it was rubbish like this that got women killed. ‘Your suspect, ladies, is an anthropophagite goon, and local Israelite. Avoid large noses and hair round the anus and you’ll be all right.’
It all kicked off with this, fly-posted and hawked all over the East End immediately after the murder of Annie Chapman, with no complaints from the police.
Another murder of a character even more diabolical than that perpetrated in Buck’s Row, on Friday week, was discovered in the same neighbourhood, on Saturday morning. At about six o’clock a woman [Chapman] was found lying in a back yard at the foot of a passage leading to a lodging-house in Old Brown’s Lane, Spitalfields.
The hunt was now on for a man called John Pizer, a.k.a ‘Leather Apron’, who was ‘known to carry knives’. This was not entirely unreasonable, since his trade was as a boot-finisher – which is presumably why he also wore an apron.
Pizer was a Jew, well known to the police in Whitechapel. In the light of what was to evolve, it is noticeable that the authorities showed little care for Hebrew sensibilities. When they weren’t accusing Jews, the police were destroying potential vital evidence in the ridiculous pretence of protecting them from anti-Semitic attack. As will be seen, from various schools of Ripperology there’s been a catalogue of excuses for the police concerning the obliteration of some writing on a wall at Goulston Street, near the scene of one of the murders. (Ripperology calls this writing ‘graffito’. This unhelpful sobriquet has attracted a good deal of explaining away and very little explaining.) But, as is my intention to demonstrate, not a few senior policemen had a vested interest in the maintenance of bafflement and the dissemination of fairy tales.
Let’s just have a brief look at the sad case of another utterly innocent little Jew, called Kosminski. His star rose when certain Ripperologists gave credibility to a bit of worthless moonshine in the margins of a book. This scribble is known, with some reverence, as ‘the Swanson Marginalia’.
Donald Swanson was a Met cop, and the book in question, in which he proffered his note, was a volume of reminiscence by Sir Robert Anderson, who at the time of the Ripper crimes was the head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) at Scotland Yard.
Hearts got in a flutter at the discovery of this ‘marginalia’. Amongst other non-starters, one of the names endorsed as a possible suspect by Swanson was the aforementioned Kosminski, who, according to the later Assistant Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten, was a prime candidate due to his addiction to ‘solitary vices’ – in other words, jerking off.
Here’s what a Victorian expert on jerking off has to say:
The sin of Onanism is one of the most destructive evils ever practised by fallen man. It excites the power of nature to undue action, and produces violent secretions which necessarily and speedily exhaust the vital principles. Nutrition fails; tremors, fears and terrors are generated; and thus the wretched victim drags out a miserable existence, till superannuated, even before he has time to arrive at man’s estate, with a mind often debilitated, even to a state of idiotism, his worthless body tumbles into the grave, and his guilty soul (guilty of self-murder) is hurried into the presence of his Judge.21
To give credibility to Macnaghten (and Swanson too), one must give credibility to this. Kosminski may have been a local imbecile, but if he was creating pathological history by masturbating himself into a froth of homicidal lunacy, surely these sessions would have taxed his imagination to something beyond a bunch of toothless, half-drunk hags? We can’t know what Kosminski was tossing off about, but I can’t believe it was over Annie Chapman in her underwear.
More often than not, sexual killers seek to destroy the object of their attraction, a phenomenon corroborated by some notable contemporary criminologists. ‘I only shoot pretty girls,’ said David Berkowitz, a.k.a. ‘the Son of Sam’. By any modern understanding, the Ripper wasn’t a masturbator. It was hate rather than sex that attracted him to whores. As a matter of fact, we might question whether he was any more sexually motivated than Jane Caputi’s charmer. What he unequivocally was, was a powerful, cunning, intelligent man, attributes confirmed by one of the more objective voices of the time, police surgeon Dr Thomas Bond, who wrote: ‘The murderer must have been a man of physical strength and great coolness and daring.’22
In Kosminski’s case, I imagine the tossing arm must have been highly developed, engendering a formidable bicep, and this speaks in his favour. But other than fitting the loony Yid stereotype, Kosminski is just about as likely a Ripper as the man with the involuntary spasmodic contractions exposing his canine teeth.
If the Ripper got hold of you, you were dead. He overwhelmed an entire society, let alone his victims. Apart perhaps from Mary Jane Kelly (and that’s a big perhaps) there were no defensive injuries, not even a moment to hurl a scream at the night. He owned you. You were dead. This nineteenth-century psychopath could have snuffed anyone he liked, anywhere he liked – men, women and children – and indeed he did kill all three.
Kosminski was a ninety-eight-pound simpleton, living off crusts in the gutter, with the physique of an underfed ten-year-old. How do we know this? Because people watched the sad little idiot: the police watched him, he was a face in the East End, as was that other maligned Israelite John Pizer, who incidentally successfully sued at least one newspaper for defamation.
In respect of suspects, the opinions of Assistant Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten are not to be taken too seriously; any more than are those of his governor, the notable anti-Semite Sir Robert Anderson, or for that matter the man at the coalface of this débâcle (the washer-off of the so-called ‘graffito’), the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, Sir Charles Warren.
These individuals’ peculiar judgements and selective certainties were designed for the Victorian mob. They are opinions from the world of banjo-playing niggers and patent medicines, where the same sugar-coated dose of chalk and arsenic cured asthma, cancer, tuberculosis and piles.
And that’s my tiff with the Ripperologists. They think like Victorians, and they think like each other. If a supposed ‘authority’ said it, irrespective of any possible agenda, they gobble it up like the universal quack remedy Fowler’s Solution.23 (Written on a wall, it’s ‘graffito’, written by a copper, it’s ‘Grail’.) I can only speak for myself, but I decline to swallow such nostrums. The baseline for me is simple: if some greased unguent ‘for coughs, colds, sore holes and pimples on your dick’ is now considered obsolete, and if masturbation doesn’t drive you screaming to the grave, why cling to this hotchpotch of Victorian propaganda and misinformation, when today we’re dealing with something we can discover something about? I’m frankly not interested in what some ludicrous copper has to say about ‘solitary vices’. The Victorians’ hypocrisy was like a self-induced blackmail of their own intelligence, and that was how the proles were conditioned into deference: work your arse off, wave a flag, and go to heaven. Are we to suppose that we are to function at the discretion of such fictions today?
The Jew myth takes a close second to the most preposterous Ripper assumption of them all, the ‘no Englishman could commit such a crime’ myth.24 Very popular in its day. From whence this quaint homily originated it is hard to tell, but it was commonly agreed amongst the newspapers, and the Empress herself was known to share it. Anyone with sufficient IQ to get out of bed should decline to give it a moment of credibility.
Jack the Ripper was a killer in a killer state, and in my view more likely to have been an Englishman than a citizen of any other nation on earth.
Between 1870 and 1900, the British were involved in 130 wars. ‘Pax Britannica’ was an oxymoron. The only Pax was in Britannica; the rest got the blade. Englishmen were killing foreigners to the limits of their maps; barging into Australasia, Afghanistan, Africa, slaughtering them in Mashonaland, Nyasaland, Matabeleland. They were wading through swamps to kill them in Burma, climbing mountains to kill them in Tibet. So rank was the avarice, so organised the homicide, they had to put a user-friendly label on it. ‘Bring Christianity and Civilisation to the poor savage,’ said the Great White Queen. And that’s what they got, although not in that order. Bullets first, Bibles delayed. British imperialism was an enormous bulldozer of Christian murder, its participants wringing goodness out of genocide. It could find excuses to kill people in places it had never heard of, to pick fights with Hottentot, Watusi, Zulu, Masai, find justification to wreak vengeance on Maori at the opposite ends of the earth. Hundreds of thousands were murdered as the Christian soldiers marched on, their insatiable God barking to the fore.
In South Africa the starvation of women and children became British government policy. It was here during the Boer War that the British invented the concentration camp – literally a camp in which to concentrate your enemies: in this case the families of the Boer army whom the Brits were having some difficulty trying to defeat in battle. So they went for the wives and kids. Thousands died like the child in the snap below. Meanwhile, Boss Officer Field Marshal Lord Roberts ordered the destruction of all animals and the burning of all crops and farms within ten miles on either side of any railway line the enemy had attacked.
I include this picture because it is as shocking as anything our ‘mystery man’ in Whitechapel ever did, and for me it pretty much sums up the calling card of nineteenth-century Christian imperialism. Such hideous cruelties did not receive the press coverage or the public notoriety of Jack’s atrocities, even though by imperial standards he was barely an amateur.
Nowhere was the imperial narrative more wretched than in the maintenance of England’s first overseas conquest: Ireland.
Salisbury called the Irish ‘Hottentots’ in response to their aspirations for Home Rule. ‘I decline,’ he lathered, ‘to place confidence in a people who are in the habit of using knives and slugs.’ No filthier cant ever came out of a human mouth. The English had been unwelcome occupiers of Ireland for seven bloody centuries, their tenure secured only by indiscriminate use of the bullet and the blade. Generations took English lead, and thousands more their bayonets.
In 1649 the mother of them all had arrived. He was the fifty-year-old commander of the New Model Army, Oliver Cromwell. Ugly as a tortoise and clad like one in a corset of steel, he brought his God with him and shipped into Dublin with a zealous commitment to the Almighty’s work: ‘The sword without, the terror within.’ Intoxicated with Biblical fervour and high on his own juice, Cromwell took his Protestant militia from city to town, town to village, exterminating Catholics as he went.
Like the Victorians after him, this monster purported to believe that his colonial enterprise was ordained by God, and it was a God ‘who would not permit His wrath to be turned aside’.
The massacres were fêtes of blood, down to the last innocent baby. Those who weren’t immediately put to the sword were stripped and left to starve. Some women had their hands and arms cut off, ‘yea, jointed alive’, wrote one contemporary observer, ‘to make them confess where their money was’ (my emphasis).
Those who were spared were shipped out in bondage, 50,000 of them in all. The first slaves in the British West Indies, at Barbados, were Irish men, women and children.
According to Victorian academic James Allanson Picton, the most effective piece of artillery in the English army was the name ‘Oliver Cromwell’: ‘He made it a terror, and it has remained a curse.’ A curse it was, a damnation visited upon Ireland that would endure for another 272 years.25
‘Without exception’, wrote Her Majesty’s most despised journalist, Henry Labouchère MP, the British were ‘the greatest robbers and marauders that ever existed’. Their plunder, said he, was ‘hypocritical’, because ‘they always pretended it was for other people’s good’.
One exponent of this benevolence (and never mind the bollocks) was Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, Commander in Chief of the British Army. ‘War,’ he opined, ‘is good for humanity’:
Wherever we hoist our flag, there we honestly strive – not always, I confess, with complete success – to establish those immutable principles of even-handed justice, and of improved morality … As a nation, we can point with pride to territories once barbarous but now civilised, in every corner of the globe. The wars which extend our frontiers bring new territory under the influence of missionary work, of our laws, and civilisation.26
An alternative view of this ‘missionary work’ was recorded by a Swedish cleric called Charles Lumholtz in Victoria in 1888: ‘To kill a native of Australia is the same as killing a dog in the eyes of the British colonist.’ Expanding his critique, Lumholtz writes: ‘Your men made a point of hunting the Blacks, every Sunday [presumably after church] in the neighbourhood of their cities … systematically passing the whole day in that sport, simply for pleasure’s sake [his emphasis].’
And what a pleasure it must have been: ‘A party of four or five horsemen prepare traps, or driving the savages into a narrow pass, force them to seek refuge on precipitous cliffs, and while the unfortunate wretches are climbing at their life’s peril, one bullet after another is fired at them, making even the slightly wounded lose their hold, and falling down, break and tear themselves into shreds on the sharp rocks below.’27
Cracking shot, Johnny! Thank you, sir!
‘Although local law (on paper) punishes murder,’ continues Lumholtz, ‘it is in reality only the killing of a white man which is called murder’ (again, his emphasis).
Just who did these Christian civilisers think they were kidding? From which of their Ten Commandments did they consider themselves exempt? You can stuff all that twaddle, old boy. They’re infidels with a different god.
Which unquestionably was true. All tanned foreigners in receipt of British lead were subject to the delusion of a different god (it was only their gold that was real). In India they had one god with three heads, and in England we had three gods with one head: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Consequently, it’s quite likely that God looked more like a British officer with half a bear on his head than a man with a bone through his nose.
Twenty-five thousand black bears a year were slaughtered to make hats for the British Army, and fashionable London ladies liked their hummingbirds skinned alive, a technique which apparently added lustre to the chapeau.28
Meanwhile, back in Africa, where the degraded races wore fur and feathers, white men were endlessly hacking at jungle to get at the loot. This was dark and dangerous territory; the continent was still largely unexplored. It was therefore always possible to face sudden confrontation with wild and dangerous men. There was a high chance, for example, of Sir Cecil Rhodes, or Major R.S. Baden-Powell, suddenly springing upon you from the thicket.
Baden-Powell was one of Wolseley’s breed of chaps, ‘an ambitious little man’ who on the side ‘enjoyed dressing up at concert parties and singing in a falsetto voice’. He was also known to enjoy the company of Boy Scouts.
Powell marched his column of fighting men from the beaches of the Gold Coast into deep up-country, his task once again ‘to bring back the gold’ and to destroy the religious practices of the Ashanti. When they got to their destination, a town called Kumasi, the King of the Wogs was asked to produce 50,000 ounces of gold, and spare us the mumbo-jumbo. Only six hundred ounces were forthcoming, creating a bit of a letdown amongst the visitors, who were already half-dead from the march. Baden-Powell concluded that the King and his mother should be taken back to the coast in default.
No one in Kumasi liked the idea of this, because ‘The Queen Mother, as with many African peoples, was an extremely important figure in the hierarchy.’ Obviously a peculiar lot. Notwithstanding that, Baden-Powell and his boys set about the business of teaching these heathens a history lesson of the type untaught in British schools. In their rage for gold they battered their way through temples and sacred mausoleums, pillaging anything of value in an ‘orgy of destruction that horrified the Ashanti who witnessed it’.
With their royal family as prisoners, the Africans stood by ‘like a flock of sheep’. There was not much for the civilisers to do before bidding their farewells except to ‘set fire to the holiest buildings in town’. ‘The feeling against the niggers was very intense,’ wrote Powell, ‘and the whites intended to give them a lesson they would not forget.’29
Some of them haven’t.
