BLOODY JACK Chapter Nine

 

I don't think it was more than a few seconds after lorry driver Charles Cross and his reluctant companion disappeared around the eastern corner of Buck's Row and Court Street, before Police Constable John Neil appeared at the far western end of the passage called Baker's Row. The dangers of his beat were manifest by the length of PC Neil's nightly walk. 

Working at the outer edges of Bethel Green - “J” - division -  the debonair PC Neil (above) had last passed down Buck's Row, walking on the north side of the street, at about 3:15 that Friday morning, 31 August, 1888. Now, just about 3:45,  he was walking down that dark canyon again, west to east, on the south side of the street. As P.C. Neil said later, “There was not a soul about”.

As he approached where the Row narrowed,  PC Neil saw what he called “a figure” lying on the sidewalk, her head to the west, toward Bakers' Street, “...lying length ways... her left hand touching the gate.” The gate was the locked stable gate and the woman was lying in the short “driveway” of the Brown and Eagle Wool Warehouse (below, #1). Neil later testified, “I examined the body by the aid of my lamp, and noticed blood oozing from a wound in the throat. She was lying on her back, with her clothes disarranged. I felt her arm, which was quite warm from the joints upwards. Her eyes were wide open. Her bonnet was off and lying at her side, close to the left hand.”

At that moment, Neil heard the distinctive footsteps of a fellow Bobby's wooden souled shoes, and he flashed his lamp toward Brady Street. The Bobby crossing Buck's Row at Brady Street was PC John Thain. He hurried to Neil's assistance. Neil told PC Thain that a woman had been murdered, and added, “Run at once for Dr. Llewelklyn."  The doctor, Rees Ralph Llewelklyn, lived at 157 Whitechapel Road, just one block south and half a block west (above, #4), about 300 yards away - and opposite the London Hospital. And as Thain rushed off to fetch the doctor, Neil heard the approach of yet another constable. Neil did not inquire as to where this officer had come from, just sent him immediately to Bethel Green station house at the corner of Ainsely Street and Bethel Green Road, to fetch an ambulance cart. PC Neil knew that mission would take half an hour or more, and so alone in the dark with the dead woman, he waited for the arrival of the doctor.

It was now just before 4:00 in the morning. On his way to Whitechapel Road, PC Thain made a deter to Harrison, Barber and Company,  a slaughter-house (map above, #3)  on Winthrop Street, where his cloak had been left by the day constable, who had borrowed it. As he retrieved his garment, Thain told the three men working that night  -  Henry Tomkins, James Mumford and Charles Britten – that a murder had been committed on Buck's Row, and then hurried off with his cloak to fetch the doctor. The men had been working since 8:00 p.m. Thursday night, and since the murder scene (above, white arrow) was literally just around the corner, Thomkins and Bitten decided to have a look. They left James Mumford behind to watch the premises.

Dr. Llewelklyn (above)  was a 38 year old unmarried graduate of the University of London, who had received his Medical degree in 1874, and was accepted into the Royal College of Surgeons a year later, and made a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1876. After 12 years in practice at the same location, he was also the official Medical Officer for the Metropolitan Police Holborn (E) division on Bow Street. And in one other way he was uniquely qualified to respond to this particular murder scene - although why would not be apparent for several hours. Dr. Llewelklyn was a member of the British Gynaecological Society.

By the time PC Thain returned with Doctor Llewelklyn, it was well after 4:00 in the morning. Thain was surprised to see  Thomkins and Bitten had beaten him back,  and he took it as his duty to keep those two men away from the body.  Dr. Llewelklyn immediately determined the woman (above) was dead, and that she had “severe injuries to her throat. Her hands and wrists were cold, but the body and lower extremities were still warm...I believe she had not been dead more than half-an-hour.” That would have timed the murder just after PC Neil had made his previous pass down Buck's Row. After noting that there were no indications of a struggle and there was very little blood around the neck wounds, and no more than a half a wine glass of blood on the pavement around her - indicating most of the injuries were inflicted post mortem – Dr. Llewelklyn “...told Officer Thain to see she was taken to the mortuary...” and left to return to his home.

While the doctor was making his exam, PC Neil ordered Constable Thain to take control of the scene while he began pounding on the gate of the Brown and Eagle stable. When no one responded, Neil then went back down the street to the Essex Wharf warehouse, where the night watchman said he had heard nothing. Neil returned to the scene just as the third officer, PC Jonas Mizen,  returned from Bethal Green station with the ambulance cart (above). Once the doctor released the body, the two officers loaded the dead woman onto the cart and they began to push her toward the Montegue Street Mortuary.

Just about then, Sargent Kirby from the Bethal Green station arrived to take charge of the scene - or what remained of it. PCs Neil and Mizen were pushing the ambulance toward the Montague Street mortuary, so, by 4:20  that morning, less than an hour after her murder, not much more than 30 minutes after the discovery of her body,  and with two gawkers having already peered at her corpse, the dead woman had been removed from the scene, and a young boy from a house across the street had commenced to washing the blood off the cobblestones. And so far everything that had been done, was according to Metropolitan Police regulations.

It was at the mortuary that things went "pear shaped". It was after 4:30 in the morning when 53 year old Robert Mann, a ten year Whitechapel Workhouse resident because of “confusion” and a Mortuary attendant, opened the shed for Constables Neil and Mizen. They transferred the body to an exam table (above), and left. And then Mann locked the shed again, and went to his spare institutional breakfast. After eating,  Mann and his 68 year old assistant and fellow workhouse inmate, James Hatfield, returned to the mortuary, and, trying to be helpful, decided to strip and wash the body.

Perhaps the infirmary nurses who were supposed to preform this function, were unavailable at this time of day.  But the two men, one easily confused because of an injury and the other given to “fits”,  were left alone with the only valuable piece of evidence in this murder case, to exercise their own intuitive. With Mann's assistance Hatfield cut the clothes off the body, and dropped them on the dirt floor. Before they could do more damage,  Detective Inspector John Spratling from Bethnal Green Division arrived. He stopped the morgue attendants from any further tampering with the evidence, and sent for Dr. Llewelkyn to come at once.

It seems likely that neither Mann nor Hatfield ever had any idea what they had done wrong. And it also seems likely that their transgression had no substantial impact on the case. But their errors provided their “betters” with some one socially beneath them to blame for the failure to stop a horror they had not yet even begun to understand.

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TOWER OF BABBLE THREE

 

I believe that Michael Ventris dozed off when, well after one in the morning of 6 September, 1956, his car crossed the center line at high speed and slammed head on into a truck pulled over in a “lay-by” on the Barnet Bypass (above)  20 miles from his London home. Seatbelts were still not standard, so the man who broke the "“Linear B code" was killed instantly. The lorry driver insisted the headlamps of his disabled truck were on. And a coroner’s jury even ruled the tragedy an accident. Yet, to this day, there are many who suggest it was a suicide.

There is no question that Michael George Francis Ventris  fit the profile of a person at risk. His upbringing had been coached by the step father to psychoanalysis, Carl Jung (above), who had treated and maybe seduced Michael's mother, Dorothea. He drilled in to her that “Michael was not to be touched by anybody. This was to avoid him having complexes,” she said.  

His genetic father, a gentle and loving man, died of tuberculosis when Michael was a teenager. While still in college Michael married a “rich society beauty”. But when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, his mother lost the income she had inherited from Michael's domineering grandfather. In July of 1940 Dorothea was found dead in a Welsh seaside hotel, having taken an overdose of the first commercially available barbitruate sleeping pill - Barbitone.

Michael dropped out of college in 1942, and then served three years as a navigator aboard a Royal Air Force bomber - a service which suffered a 44 ½ % death rate. Michael's son would say decades later, “My father was a private person...In fact he seemed rather remote” That isolation from his family led to his divorce. Three years before his death Michael Ventris was hailed as having scaled “the Everest of Greek archeology” by decoding the Minoan texts. But it seems that left him with perhaps the most epic case of post-partum depression in history.

Michael's career as an architect had been built promoting team work, but after reaching the linguistic summit of solving Linear B, there were few colleges interested in hiring him.  At 34 years of age he lacked academic credentials in that field. But I still don't think he intended on hitting that truck.

Those who decipher ancient texts often earn a reputation for instability.  In the 1870's George Smith (above), then an assistant at the British museum, was the first man in 5,000 years to read the story of the Assyrian holy man named Utnapishtim,  who survived a great flood by building a boat for his family and animals. 

Smith was so excited by the discovery of what was clearly an early version of Noah's Ark written in cuneiform Assyrian, that he began rushing about, tearing off his clothing. But despite the legends, he was stopped before he got completely naked, and never made it into the hall. Insanity, is not the greatest danger to archaeologists or linguists.  That threat is just being human.

Arthur Evans (above), the legendary archaeologist who between 1900 and 1906 had uncovered the palace at Knossos, on Crete, and had struggled for forty years to read the 5,000 year old language he uncovered scattered about the place.  Evans had engaged and encouraged the greatest linguists in the world to examine the 3,000 baked clay fragments recording the culture's language. He was certain it represented something new in history, and referred to the culture as Minoan and the language as “Linear B”. But when Evans died in May of 1941, he had managed to deciphered just one word: “total”,. It appeared at the bottom of many of the tablets.

Next the American, Professor Alice Kober  (above) took the lead in the search, and methodically cataloged the 90 plus signs used in “Linear B”, discovering the triple suffixes (as in English “Britain/Briton/British”) which seemed to connect the symbols on the fragments. At first, like Evans, Alice thought the mystery language must be “Minoan”. But near the end of her brief life, Alice decided it could be Etruscan. But when she died in 1950, the problem was still unresolved.

Michael Ventris had been familiar with Linear B all his adult life. When he was 13 (above) this “pleasant and humorous, if solitary boy” had encountered Evans at a museum exhibit, and impudently asked if it were true the language was not yet deciphered.

In 1940, at age 18 he had published his first academic paper on Linear B. In 1948 he got his degree in architecture, but he also met Professor Alice Kober, who was visiting  Oxford University, and later corresponded with her. They did not like each other, but Michael cut off the communication only because he was trying to concentrate on architecture. But then, as his Bauhaus minimalist work was falling out of favor, Michael found himself surrendering again to his obsession with decoding Linear B.

Languages always came easily to him. He was raised for a time in Switzerland, the mountain nation with three official languages. Michael was proficient in Spanish, French, German, Polish, Italian, Greek, Ancient Greek and Latin, and, after just one week of exposure, he was participating in conversations in Swedish. But he was having no luck decoding Linear B. 

Then, one evening, while his wife was preparing for a dinner party, the frustrated architect turned to Alice Kober's triplets, and it occurred to him to apply them phonetically to place names, but not in Etruscan but in ancient Greek. What if, he wondered, the first character in a particular triplet was pronounced as “ko”, the next “no” and the last for 'so”? Could it be that simple, that obvious: Knossos? Just then the guest arrived and Michael had to leave his work.

But while his wife was preparing to serve the desert, Michael Ventris stole back to his study. Abruptly the triplet names of several other sites on ancient Crete fell into place. With a start Michael came to the realization that the language of Linear B was not Minoan, or Etruscan, but Greek. Arthur Evans had been wrong. Alice Kober had been wrong. All the hundreds of linguists who had studied Linear B before him had been wrong. 

The truth was so obvious it might have been uncovered decades earlier, except for Arthur Evan's (above) immediate determination that it could not be Greek. Evan's so dominated the study of Knossos, that his fundamental assumption had even confused Alice Kober. Michael returned to the party and shared the excitement with his guests. He did not tear his clothing. But one of the dinner party guest happened to be a producer for BBC Radio, and the next day she put Michael in front of a microphone to share his excitement with the world.

It should have inspired an earthquake of coverage. But 1 July, 1953, the day Michael Ventris walked into the BBC Radio booth and announced his solution to the Linear B puzzle, was the day after Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of England, and the same day news broke that a month earlier, on 29 May, 1953,  New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay had peaked Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world.

It did not help that once Linear B was decoded (above), it related no great epics of heroes and gods. The translations merely recounted the inventory of storage rooms, the numbering of everything from livestock, to drinking vessels and furniture, to grain and grapes. It was the tax receipts. But...

"... Because of finger and palm prints and writing styles left by the authors, we now know there were only 100 scribes writing at Knossos, and another 32 at Pylos. These numbers are so low they suggest a religious order restricting access to the knowledge of writing. The priests scribes kept a running total (the first word deciphered by Evans in the 1920's) in the soft clay, wetting it to add and subtract from the inventories. The tablets and their counts would not be fired, and the numbers set in stone, until the palaces containing them burned down, in the Bronze Age Apocalypse of Minoan culture, some time after 1375 B.C..

Two weeks before his terminal accident, Michael Ventris wrote a letter to the editor of the Architect's Journal, the publication of the Architectural Association. Michael was leaving the field, explaining, “I’ve come to the conclusion that...you’d be justified in writing me off...All I can ask you is to temper your justified anger with a little compassion.” It was almost as if Michael had assumed the role of Utnapishtim, and was appealing to his god for understanding. 

Two weeks later Micheal Ventrs was dead. And his achievement and his passing are both proof that for the last 5,000 years and probably the next 5,000, all humans are on the same journey. It is not our achievements or our failures, or our insights or our false assumptions that bind us together, not our gods, or our nations, nor even our dreams, our nightmares or aspirations. It is the journey itself.

And that is why the study of Archeology, and Linguistics and psychology, are all important only because they provide perspective about the journey. Utmapsihtim, and King Minos, Arthur Evans and Edmund Hillary, Queen Elizabeth II, Dorothea Ventris, Karl Jung, Alice Kober – they are all fellow travelers, heading to the same destination - oblivion. Best celebrate the trip.

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TOWER OF BABBEL TWO

 

I doubt you would have heard of the English monk Roger Bacon were it not for his corpulent boss  Pope Clement The Fat, AKA Clement IV.  He was famous for only three things. First, he was really fat. Secondly, he really hated Jews. And third, he ordered the “brilliant, combative, and somewhat eccentric” Franciscan Friar Roger Bacon to write a compendium of philosophy and science.

Bacon's “Opus Majus” laid the foundation for our world, beginning with the startling suggestion that since humans are made of the same stuff as the stars, we should be able to understand the stars.  Further, Bacon wrote, "Grammar is one and the same in all languages, substantially, though it may vary, accidentally, in each of them"  He was thus hinting that all languages, because they all used the same human organs and human brains,  must have the common ancestors. Eight centuries later, Bacon still appears correct about both of those ideas. 

It makes you wonder how far Bacon's mind might have taken us  had not fat Clement IV died just four yeas after becoming Pope. With Clement's early demise Roger Bacon lost his financial and moral support.  

Roger went right on thinking great thoughts, even when he had to hide them from his new regressive church superiors (above), inventing the magnifying lens among other things, but since the Cardinals would not chose Clement's successor for three years, Europe had to wait another two hundred years for The Renaissance, which  Roger had been trying to midwife into existence. The Black Death putting half of Europe in mass graves did not help, but the singular death of the anti-Semitic fat man was a real blow to the evolution of humanity.

The theory of a Universal Grammar, first postulated by Roger Bacon and most recently by Noam Chomsky, is supported by the existence of “cognates”.   

As Bacon pointed out in 1254, cognates are words which share "the same linguistic family or derivation”. Such as:  “la misma familia lingüística o derivación” (Spanish), “a mesma família lingüística ou derivação” (Portuguese), “la stessa famiglia linguistica o derivazione” (Italian), “la même famille linguistique ou dérivation” (French), “la mateixa família lingüística o derivació (Catalan), “din aceeasi familie lingvistice sau derivare” (Romanian)..or, in English, lexical cognates. They make up about  quarter of  all English words .  

The reality of Universal Grammar makes the work of code breaking possible, and drew Alice Elizabeth Kober into the Minoan labyrinth created by little Arthur Evans.  Remember him?

On the day in 1928 when 18 year old Alice Kober (above) received her Bachelor's Degree from Hunter College in Manhattan, she confidently announced she would decode Evan's mysterious Linear B language. It was not merely that Alice was arrogant. As far as I can tell she had no ego about her science. But she was very, very, very smart. And she knew it.

Alice got her Phd from Columbia in 1932, excavated in Greece, and in 1940, landed a job as an assistant to Sir John Linden Myers, professor of Ancient History at Liverpool University. Myers had worked directly under Professor Arthur Evans. And when age and illness had forced Evans into retirement, Myers took over his work on Linear B. But Myers didn't get very far.

Alice Kober agreed the mother tongue of Minoan was probably Etruscan, a culture which dominated the northern Italian peninsula after about 700 B.C. The rational as handed down from Evans to Myers and now to Alice, was that because the Linear B inscriptions were found on Etruscan amphora at several Minoan sites on Crete, it had to be based, at least in part, on Etruscan. 

During World War Two Professor Myers went to work for the Royal Naval Intelligence service. That left Alice, now a professor herself at Brooklyn College in New York City (above), as the leading expert still working on decoding Linear B. And she decided to make a fresh start.

Alice chose our old friend, frequency analysis. She knew the 90 characters generally acknowledged as Linear B, did not represent a phonetic alphabet like modern languages, but closer to Egyptian hieroglyphics.   Evans himself had suggested it might use voice inflection to define tenses, with the nouns changing their endings to fit past, present and third person perfect. But that also made a paper translation all the more difficult. So Alice began to collect every crumb of information she could about all of the 90 most probable Linear B symbols, as well as the two hundred possible ones. And she taught herself ancient Greek, Akkadian, Sumerian, Sanskrit and Egyptian, so she could do that.

Had this been a modern research project, Alice would have input it all into a computer. But the world's first one of those had just been built to crack the German Enigma codes, and its very existence was so secret, the allies officially referred to it as the “Ultra Secret”.  So Alice had little choice but to use 3X5 inch “index cards”. When the war caused a shortage of those, she scavenged paper from old calendars, greeting cards and catalogues, even stealing library index cards. She carefully filed her homemade index cards into handmade drawers constructed from empty cigarette cartons provided by her addiction to nicotine.

Alice explained the problem in a 1948 paper published by the American Journal of Archeology. “People often say,” she wrote, “ that an unknown language written in an unknown script cannot be deciphered. They are putting the situation optimistically. We are dealing with three unknowns: language, script and meaning.... Forty years of attempts to decipher Minoan by guessing....have proved that such a procedure is useless. Minoan cannot be deciphered, because we do not know if "Minoan" existed....If, as seems probable, it was a highly inflected language, it should be possible to work out some of the inflection pattern.” And she ended that paper with a warning about speculation. “When we have the facts, certain conclusions will be almost inevitable. Until we have them, no conclusions are possible.

After a full day of teaching, Alice would return to her home in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, which she shared with her widowed mother. There is no record she ever had a romantic life. Perhaps Alice was gay, or had little sexual drive. But for whatever reason, her life was clearly devoted to Linear B. After dinner and grading papers, she would engage her opponent. Said one writer, familiar with her work, “She suffered no fools. She demanded precision of herself and others. She spoke and wrote in no-frills, spin-free English, direct and blunt, prickly and undiplomatic”.

I wonder what old King Minos would have thought, had he caught a glimpse of Alice around a corner in the labyrinth of ages, her research scattered across the kitchen table, a cigarette balanced on the edge of an ashtray, its smoke curling romantically to the ceiling, as Alice shuffled and rearranged the 186,000 cards she had created, and the symbols and notes they contained. Like an alchemist she was trying to conjure an ancient world out of what came to be called her “Triplets”, three-word sets she had uncovered, with similar suffixes. Deciphering an entire language out of that would be a real magic act. And she darn near pulled out a rabbit

Prophetically, Alice had delivered a lecture on Linear B in 1948, in which she did speculate about the doors which a solution to Linear B might unlock - and might not.. “We may find out if Helen of Troy really existed, if King Minos was a man or a woman...On the other hand, we may only find out that Mr. X delivered a hundred cattle to Mr. Y on the tenth of June 1400BC.” After learning of her terminal cancer diagnosis, Alice wrote to a colleague, “The important thing is the solution of the problem, not who solves it. ” She died on 16 May, 1950, at the age of just 43, with the great mystery of her life unresolved.

The odd thing is, just after the end of the war in Europe, in 1945, Alice had met the solution to the great mystery.  She had traveled to England, to visit with her mentor Professor Sir John Myers. He had arraigned a brief meeting between Alice and a man he thought was a promising young architectural student named Michael Ventris (above). The meeting did not go well. Alice was an academic, the daughter of blue collar parents, respected for her hard won achievements in science and the byzantine politics of academia. Michael was the son of a wealthy family, raised by a mother influenced by the cold and imperial psychiatrist Carl Jung. They were both socially inept to a degree and managed to say just the wrong things to each other. But being socially inept, they did not hold it against each other, and exchanged a few letters over the next five years, all strictly on the topic of Linear B. And oddly, that was where the solution would be found, in the unpleasant pauses in their conversations.

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