Bruce Robinson's They All Love Jack

[Steven]

Previous shite I posted on here about the book.

Bruce reading out the introduction to They All Love Jack.

The infamous Ruby Wax interview.

[studpuppet]

Baggys I'm Judy so I can get my hands on those knockers.

You think she slaps Richard's hands away then?

[Famous Mortimer]

I just read that Bruce Robinson was due to do an interview with Will Self as part of "Guardian Live". Does anyone know if it went ahead? There's no information about it on the Guardian's website any more.

[Steven]

I just read that Bruce Robinson was due to do an interview with Will Self as part of "Guardian Live". Does anyone know if it went ahead? There's no information about it on the Guardian's website any more.

I know he did one with Self a good while back before the release of the book, he also interviewed him after the release before an audience at a Guardian Live Event last October. Also one he did for the Hay Festival, still available.

[Famous Mortimer]

I just read that Bruce Robinson was due to do an interview with Will Self as part of "Guardian Live".

he also interviewed him after the release before an audience at a Guardian Live Event last October

cheers mate

[Steven]

cheers mate

I expect this is your typical internet sarcasm. There were tickets because I remember checking, and recall looking for transcripts or audio and video afterwards and not a jot was in evidence. It also isn't listed on the Guardian Live archive, Robinson was definitely doing a press tour so maybe Self couldn't make it and it didn't take place in the end? Rather Self-less. Self did make posts advertising it on Twitter which are deleted now, certainly doesn't seem to mention anything about it ever happening at the present moment..

This is on their cached page that's been removed:

Guardian Live | Bruce Robinson and Will Self - looking for Jack the Ripper

Wednesday 14 October 2015, 7pm–8.30pm
St. Leonards Shoreditch Church, London, E1 6JN
£15
Partners/Patrons save £3 (20% off and no fees)

'I have seen pictures of the dead victims, and read coroners' reports. These women are infinitely more interesting than the identity of their killer.'

Join award-winning film director Bruce Robinson (Withnail & I) for a discussion with novelist Will Self about his 12-year search for the true identity of Jack the Ripper.

More than 100 years after the Jack the Ripper murders, the unsolved mystery of the killer's identity continues to grip our imagination. Writers including Patricia Cornwell and amateur detectives - most recently Russell Graham have trawled through the case files to advance their own theories. Chief suspects have included Prince Albert, Lewis Carroll, Walter Sickert and Lord Randolph Churchill.

In his new book, They All Love Jack, award-winning film director Bruce Robinson (Withnail & I) explains his own 12-year investigation of the case and reveals his candidate for history's most infamous murderer. He also explores the murky world of late Victorian society, its villains, hypocrites and institutionalised corruption. Join him in conversation with novelist Will Self at St Leonard's Church in the heart of London's Whitechapel. The church has its own historical connection to the story: the funeral of Mary Kelly, the Ripper's last victim, took place there.

Running time 90 minutes

Wheelchair users and visitors who require an assistant may bring a companion free of charge. To book a free companion ticket please email guardianlive.events@theguardian.com

So maybe try e-mailing them for information?

[Famous Mortimer]

I just finished it (well, I've got the appendix to go yet). Robinson makes a decent case, and absolutely lays bare the way that Freemasonry no doubt sent many an innocent person to prison. The Victorian establishment was a pile of shite and no mistake.

But...well, I'll take one bit from near the end, discussing Michael Maybrick's life after he left London and moved to the Isle of Wight for good. Robinson paints this picture of him as a miserable recluse, enjoying the company of no-one and doing nothing. Yet, a quick scan of information about him reveals he served as a magistrate, and was Mayor of Ryde five times. Not exactly the impression you'd get if you only read the book.

Having not read any other books about the case - because I don't really care all that much, I just bought this thanks to Serge's recommendation - I've no idea if the other suspects are quite as unlikely as Robinson is making out. But not enough to read any more books.

It works fantastically well as a book about London in that era, and the rotten system we had in control of us back then, but as a definitive whodunnit? Dunno.

[Steven]

Only just heard this more recent Robinson interview where he expands on a few things not covered in the book - some people have raised why didn't Maybrick kill in his more later years. Robinson counters that he may not have killed in his exile on the Isle of Wight, but before that he did kill Florence Maybrick's son in Canada, nine women in Texas and six women in Jamaica just for starters..

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

What was for pudding

[gatchamandave]

What was for pudding

Something from Yorkshire ?

[biggytitbo]

Only just heard this more recent Robinson interview where he expands on a few things not covered in the book - some people have raised why didn't Maybrick kill in his more later years. Robinson counters that he may not have killed in his exile on the Isle of Wight, but before that he did kill Florence Maybrick's son in Canada, nine women in Texas and six women in Jamaica just for starters..

Pull the other one sunshine

[Paul Calf]

I'm no kind of expert on this (the last book I read on Ol' Jack was Stephen Knight's now thoroughly discredited Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution) but the case he makes for Warren's - and the rest of the Brother Cops' - obstructiveness is pretty watertight. Haven't seen the evidence for Maybrick's guilt yet, but in light of the evidence gathered, it's hard to see this as anything other than establishment figures closing ranks to protect themselves.

I haven't read anything quite so compelling in some time. But yeah, some of the photos are a bit much.

[Paul Calf]

Finally got around to finishing this yesterday and I think he's nailed it. It's going to be very hard for anyone to honestly counter this theory because everything is impeccably evidenced.

[biggytitbo]

I thought almost everything in the book was convincing and well argued apart from the specific case against Maybrick, which is pretty thin in my opinion. Still I think Robinsons work has changed the game for Ripper research and a lot of the old guard who are very sniffy about it need to let go of their old assumptions and canards because they are busted by this book.

[Steven]

I thought almost everything in the book was convincing and well argued apart from the specific case against Maybrick, which is pretty thin in my opinion. Still I think Robinsons work has changed the game for Ripper research and a lot of the old guard who are very sniffy about it need to let go of their old assumptions and canards because they are busted by this book.

He does show Maybrick was obviously sending lots of confessional letters to the police with details he couldn't have known, most of these letters were filed as 'hoaxes' however. Yes, they're somewhat anonymous but have enough details to link to Maybrick - which is the point with a lot of serial killers, they need to take credit for their efforts for aggrandisement purposes. Though this is the problem with Maybrick, he was obviously the subject of a massive cover-up hence why it's hard to find out exactly what the police knew as they were hiding evidence, and when they weren't doing that they were making a load of shit up.

This made-up shit is what most of the Ripperologists obsess over which usually leads them to chase their own tails indefinitely - like assuming the Ripper worked 'quickly' because PC Watkins was on his beat through Mitre square every 7 minutes without thinking maybe the cunt wasn't on his beat and in the pub or fucking a prozzie instead -which he was literally reprimanded for doing a few years earlier. People so stultifyingly naive they never question the authority of institutions such as the police.

The police were plainly up to a load of shit because they were simutaneously putting it about a Jew was responsible while at the same time saying they were destroying evidence and quashing such rumours to protect the Jewish community in Whitechapel. Very convenient.

[Paul Calf]

Yeah. Reading Robinson's analysis of the Goulston Street message, it's hard to understand how it was ever successfully written off as a random graffito.

[Steven]

Bruce reckons Dunblaine was another Freemasonic cover-up.

I've been re-reading the book and surprised how many first-hand details he managed to wring out of witness statements in the press of people who actually saw and spoke to the ripper etc and suppresed by the police and judges and were completely shut out of appearing in court for any inquiries (which they subsequently replaced with any old cunt such as one old biddy who had dreams about seeing the Ripper's face) and how swathes of Ripperology have plonked down thoroughly on the side of the police with discounting and washing any of the actual evidence away, accent, physical description, grapes, the fucking lot.

[Paul Calf]

I was amazed by that. I think he's right that 'Ripperologists' like their mystery to sustain their little cottage industry and don't really have any incentive to look at the evidence properly.

[Steven]

I was amazed by that. I think he's right that 'Ripperologists' like their mystery to sustain their little cottage industry and don't really have any incentive to look at the evidence properly.

I think it's quite a habitual thing in certain areas of 'research' that later books basically are predicated on what previous authors have written on the subject, without ever going back to the actual first-hand evidence, always swirling around the plughole without ever getting to the plumbing as it were. Obsessed with authority figures too, one fact will be shunted out the door if the other fact comes out of the pursed mouth of anybody with a more notable badge of office. It's the same with things such as the Kennedy Assassination, but also you need to at least acknowledge the premise that the people gathering the evidence you're reviewing are actually trying in earnest to obfuscate the truth which in the case of the Kennedy Assassination or The Whitechapel Affair is the actual crux of it.

There'll be a witness report in some paper or other, and once you get the same witness' affidavit there'll be vital details changed or notable by their glaring omission, or in the case of Mattew Packer who sold him the grapes - and the best witness to the Ripper there ever was reported - his witness statement was not even signed as he most probably never saw it as the police doctored it enough to claim he was an unreliable witness and therefore omitted from the inquest. It didn't matter that he saw and spoke to the man who was with Elizabeth Stride immediately prior to death before or indeed subsequently melingering around his shop and was in fact receiving death threats for releasing his description to the press, all 'hoaxes' according to The Boys In Blue with big metal tits on their head.

[sponk]

I originally wrote a long post that I think was interesting enough to resurrect this thread, but I lost that last night so here's the less interesting, from memory version of that post.

It's one of the most amazing, exciting, and ridiculous books I've ever read. When Bruce finally got around to presenting his case against Maybrick it was like being in a jury in front of the world's best / most unhinged prosecutor. I was never fully convinced of Maybrick's guilt, but some of the circumstantial evidence was pretty remarkable.

Two Ripper letters naming two streets, one in London that Michael had a flat in, and another in Liverpool, a short walk from his brother James's house. According to Robinson there were 40,000 streets in London at that time. Michael singing in Bradford on the night Johnie Gill was murdered, and the Ripper letter six weeks earlier promising to murder a boy in the city as a Christmas present for Charlie Warren.

With all of this evidence, it's a shame that Robinson ruins his own credibility by spouting so much ridiculous, easily falsifiable nonsense elsewhere in the book. As another poster has said, he claims Maybrick was "told to get out" of London by the Masons and forced to live a quiet life on the Isle of Wight, neglecting to mention that he was mayor of Ryde 5 times and had the biggest funeral in the history of the Isle. He also, amazingly, cites Maybrick's omission from a music encyclopedia as further evidence, because "anyone who's ever whistled was included" in Grove's Dictionary of Music, but Maybrick wasn't. As if the Masons had a word with the writer's of Grove's and said "yeah, Stephen Adams is Jack the Ripper, please don't include him in the book because we want him written out of history. Thanks guys." Makes me wonder why the Masons had the HUNDREDS of  musical contemporaries of Maybrick listed here kept out of Grove's too. Were they all serial killers? Or is the book just not nearly as comprehensive as Robinson makes out?

Obviously these are pretty minor bones to pick with such an extraordinarily well-researched book, but if I can disprove some of his claims in five minutes on Google, what else did he get wrong?

Edit to add that I hope I'm not the only one who found the Ripper letters darkly comical. I couldn't help but read them in the voice of Peter Cook's Clive. "The old Queen is none other but one of those old ores i have been up her arse and shot sponk up her."

He knows.

[touchingcloth]

Have they caught this springy boi yet?

[timebug]

I have posted elsewhere on this subject; I read the book, was overwhelmed by the minutiae that Robonson bungs in for 'flavour' but ultimately, alas, unconvinced that he had nailed the identity of the killer. A good read with plenty of useful background, and if you wanted to know about Victorian corruption/sleaze/and Masonic antics,packed full of such goodies! But ultimately (IMO) an unsatisfying concoction that fails to deliver what it sort-of-promises.

[biggytitbo]

Well the old DNA story has resurfaced with a new test on the Eddowes shawl again pointing the finger at Kosminski. I don't know how legit it is, but Kosminski is a much more credible subject than Robinsons. That said, his book is still right up there with the best and most important Ripper books, he contributes so much to the deeper context of the times and the social, political and esoteric aspects that his suspect seems almost incidental to the value of the book.

[Mr. Internet]

Well the old DNA story has resurfaced with a new test on the Eddowes shawl again pointing the finger at Kosminski. I don't know how legit it is, but Kosminski is a much more credible subject than Robinsons. That said, his book is still right up there with the best and most important Ripper books, he contributes so much to the deeper context of the times and the social, political and esoteric aspects that his suspect seems almost incidental to the value of the book.

I'm rather hoping that it's not him, partly because I enjoyed the book so much but mostly because of all the anti-Semitic shite that would inevitably foul up on account of it.

[Paul Calf]

Yeah, Kosminski really is a suspect for the times isn't he? Polish, Jewish and a tradesman.

I'm still convinced of the Maybrick case, with the possibility that James knew more than he was letting on.

The real tragedy of that story - disputed accusations of serial murder obviously aside - is the story of Florence.

[sponk]

Yeah, Kosminski really is a suspect for the times isn't he? Polish, Jewish and a tradesman.

I'm still convinced of the Maybrick case, with the possibility that James knew more than he was letting on.

What do you mean exactly?

[Paul Calf]

I think James at least knew about the murders and that Michael had some kind of hold on him.