Stephen Knight (1) (1951–1985)

You can stack rubbish to the sky, and at the end of the day...you have a very large stack of rubbish. I can see why the theory propounded by the author in this book was popular; it's a very anti-Establishment kind of thing, which mixes in the English royal family, the Masons, the Metropolitan Police and Scotland Yard, and lower-class victims brutally murdered. The only thing is, the theory, even on its face, requires so many "this is probable" type leaps of logic and faith that even before the book is half-way through, the theory collapses under the sheer weight of its absurdity. If you're looking for the origin of certain treatments of Jack the Ripper in fiction and non-fiction, this is the book for you. If you're looking for a serious treatment of the crime, forget it.… (altro)

In the middle 1980s, I visited a house in Northamptonshire called Sulgrave Manor, notable as the ancestral home of the Washingtons. We were conducted around this house by a guide who bore an uncanny resemblence to the late Larry Grayson (a well-known and rather camp tv personality and comedian of the time). At the end of the tour, we ended up in the attic where there was a small museum of Washington memorabilia. The guide let us look at this for a few minutes and then asked if we had any questions. "Yes," piped up one chap, an American. "I don't see any account here of Washington's Masonic connections. Why is this?" The guide looked embarrassed, shuffled his feet a bit, and mumbled something about how "We don't talk about that in this country."

The American went spare.

Afterwards, I was talking to him in the garden. He revealed himself to be a 33rd-degree Mason from Philadelphia. I explained that after Operation Countryman - the exposure of Masonry being used in London to cover collusion between the Metropolitan Police and the criminal fraternity - Freemasonry had got a bad press in the UK. And (through reading this book) I was able to tell him that the Grand Lodge in the UK would not admit, even to other Masons, that his degree of Craft even existed.

This book was topical in the middle 1980s. It remains useful background information today, for even though the Craft now has a more public face, it carefully chooses what it does and does not reveal.

The appendix, giving an account of the Masonic initiation ceremony, also confirms the account given in Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'....… (altro)

If this is the best 'Ripperologists' can do, its no wonder the mystery remains unsolved!

Given Knight could not see through the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh my hopes were not high, but even I did not expect to see 'The Protocols' cited as evidence of Masonic involvement in the murders.

I don't doubt Knight worked hard on researching a very cold trail, but any idea that this is 'case solved' is delusional.

Still, in naming Walter Sickert as a suspect, Joseph Sickert gave his father's legacy a significant boost, without actually pinning anything other than circumstantial evidence to him.… (altro)