BY SEAN WALSH
If you are one of those people who still puzzle over the identity of Jack the Ripper*, then the Whitechapel Society might be right up your narrow, cobbled, and pitch-black street. Founded some thirty years ago, its membership includes former and serving police officers, academics, tour guides, psychologists, psychics, lawyers and miscellaneous representatives of all trades and none. It meets every other month in a pub near the City of London.
The meetings are not primarily judicial. Apart from the academics, these people are realists; at some level they accept that it is increasingly unlikely that this serial killer will ever be brought before the beak. It is now some one hundred and forty years ago that he (?) murdered and mutilated five women in the Summer and Autumn of 1888**. Nobody attends in expectation of an Agatha Christie dénouement.
So why do they bother? Simple. What they do is important. Local history clubs and fellowships keep alive the language of earlier times. The Whitechapel Society acknowledges the genius of the Victorian euphemism, from which is woven patterns of speech far more creative and morally serious than the vanilla “non-judgemental” idiom to which we must these days conform – on pain of being judged unfavourably by middle-class women of a certain age.
Consider prostitution. The word “prostitute” seems harsh, but on the other hand the now obligatory “sex worker” seems like a dodge, even to the extent that it might plausibly trip off the tongue of a Sixth Form careers adviser. The expressions “lady of the night”, or even “unfortunate”, by contrast, suggest a suitable moral sensibility on the part of a narrator. They convey respect and sympathy, as opposed to thinly disguised pity and veiled condescension.
It is characteristic of these societies, then, that they create cultural and linguistic safe spaces. The proceedings of the Whitechapel Society also have a metaphysical resonance. The passage of time does not corrode the obscenity of these murders. To think otherwise is to be in the grip of chronological chauvinism. Sub specie aeternitas Jack’s crimes are happening in the here and now. The “Ripperologists” who engage in imaginative historical reconstruction are mindful of this. We could do worse than follow that example and acknowledge that our temporal situation risks an arbitrary prioritisation of the present over the past, and by implication of the future over the present.
I left Ireland some years ago when I moved from Liverpool to eventually settle in a quirky town in Wiltshire. The essence of this place is not just its geography, history, and hauntings. It’s also to be found in traditions of recreation. I’ve learned that if there’s one thing the English take seriously it’s their clubs.
C.S. Lewis wrote beautifully about this in The Four Loves. To gather around a shared interest is to create opportunities for unlikely friendships. What that interest is about is not as important as that it can be a surrogate for something perhaps as deep as a shared concern for truth. There is a right way to weave a basket, a protocol to finding and replacing that geocache, a correct procedure when it comes to evaluating this person’s credibility as a Ripper suspect.
The Inklings
Lewis, famously, was a member of the Inklings, an Oxford group dedicated to ale and literature, founded by the philosopher Owen Barfield and attended regularly by J.R.R.Tolkien. When I was an academic, I was involved in clubs like this and they’re all well and good but in honesty are less interesting than some of the more eccentric fellowships.
More tempting to my mind would be a subscription to the Official Reliant Owners Club which welcomes not just owners but “anyone who has a passion” for all things related to that brand of car. Also available are groups which cater for the inner psychopath, such as the Durham University Assassins Society, “one of the most active assassins’ societies” in the world, where members try to “kill” each other off “usually with a Nerf gun or a cardboard knife”.
One of my favourites is a bit of a cheat because it never actually existed, except in the imagination of Conan Doyle and those that freely enter the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes. The Red-Headed League pretty much did what it said on the tin. You needed to have that genetic glitch to join, and membership was restricted to one person, the gloriously named patsy Jabez Wilson.
If we are perplexed as to why collections of people meet semi-formally to pursue activities that seem to us pointless then, to borrow a spiritual axiom in play in my own Fellowship, that implies a disturbance in us, not them. Clubs are generators of social capital and speak to a deep human need, one which is at odds with the dreary managerialism which infects all the institutions of state. That need is the need to belong. And the more “eccentric” the club the more offensive it is to a governing class which is suspicious of any affection not directed in its direction.
This is why the Covid thing was so convenient to that class. It gave them the ability to imperil those affections under the guise of benign but necessary “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (another example of the toxic euphemism). The clubs were relocated to Zoom, and the consolations of genuine companionship were cancelled. Lockdowns were spiritual warfare. And the collateral damage which were their consequence is still unknown because its harms are not quantifiable.
Lewis in Four Loves:
“[In clubs] no one cares twopence about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race or previous history…That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts.”
Our clubs and societies are spiritually egalitarian celebrations of human eccentricities and affections. We should not be surprised when the state goes after them.
Sean Walsh is a former university teacher in the philosophy of mind. That was a while ago – but he keeps up with the subject. 2015-2017 he was slightly homeless. He now writes and is the very proud father of a wonderful child. He is grateful for everything he has.
*It was Aaron Kosminski.
**The victims were Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. Requiescats in pace.