Did the Freemasons influence the Titanic AND Jack The Ripper enquiry?

Nudge nudge, wink wink.

For centuries upon centuries, Freemasonary has remained a veritable goldmine for conspiracy theorists the world over, the tentacles of this highly furtive cabal allegedly reaching into the upper echelons of arts and science, politics and commerce, and entertainment and film.

Now we could be closer to knowing how far the influence of this fraternal organisation really goes.

A closely guarded list containing the identities of two million Freemasons throughout history is set to be published online by the genealogy firm Ancestry, with famous pledges said to have included Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Winston Churchill, Edward VII, George VI, Edward VIII, Ernest Shackleton and Sir Alexander Fleming to name but a few.

The first big revelation to come from this secret archive is that the inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic may have had an unusually high level of Masonic involvement, suggesting the group scuppered proceedings to protect members who could have been deemed culpable for the maritime disaster.

Following the tragedy in which 1,503 people lost their lives, a US Senate inquiry into the sinking went after both Liverpool’s White Star Line shipping company for a poor build and also the British Board of Trade, headed by Sydney Buxton. for negligently allowing such a small number of lifeboats to be fitted on the ocean-liner.

Well now the names of at least two of the UK inquiry’s five expert assessors - Prof John Harvard Biles, a specialist in naval architecture, and Edward Chaston, a senior engineer – have been found in the Masonic archive, as has Lord Mersey's, a Freemason initiated in 1881 at London’s Northern Bar Lodge and the figure who oversaw the whole investigation on home shores.

And Sydney Buxton? You guessed it: he was a Freemason too, inducted at Limehouse in East London in 1888, back when he was local MP.

Coincidentally, a new book from Withnail & I director Bruce Robinson claims that Jack the Ripper was a singer called Michael Maybrick, kept from prosecution by the forces inside the Freemasons.

Writing in All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper, the author claims all the murders bore hallmarks of masonic rituals (the group’s symbol, a pair of compasses, carved into the face of one victim) and that Maybrick and his brother James, a suspect, were both Masons, as were two senior police officers, three police doctors and two coroners involved in the case.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Robinson said:

“It was endemic in the way England ran itself. At the time of Jack the Ripper, there were something like 360 Tory MPs, 330 of which I can identify as Masons.

“The whole of the ruling class was Masonic, from the heir to the throne down. It was part of being in the club. Part of the whole ethic of Freemasonry is whatever it is, however it’s done, you protect the brotherhood – and that’s what happened.

“They weren’t protecting Jack the Ripper, they were protecting the system that Jack the Ripper was threatening. And to protect the system, they had to protect him. And the Ripper knew it.”

The Stonecutters may have made Steve Guttenberg a star, but that’s nothing on those Ripper allegations.

[Via: The Independent]