London: The inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic may have been influenced by the Freemasons, new evidence suggests. The secret archive of Freemasons has revealing extensive Masonic involvement in the controversial British investigation into the catastrophe.
It confirms that not only the judge who oversaw the British Wreck Commissioner’s inquiry into the disaster and leading investigators, but also some of those who escaped censure were Freemasons.
A US Senate inquiry into the sinking savaged the White Star Line and singled out the British Board of Trade for blame for lax regulations that allowed such a small number of lifeboats on the ship. However, the UK investigation, overseen by Lord Mersey, exonerated the Board of Trade. Lord Mersey himself, John Charles Bigham, was a Freemason, the records show, who was initiated in 1881 at the Northern Bar Lodge in London.
Crucially, it appears, so too was the president of the Board of Trade, Sydney Buxton, initiated in 1888 at Limehouse in East London, where he was the local MP at the time. The names of at least two of the inquiry’s five expert assessors — John Harvard Biles, a specialist in naval architecture, and Edward Chaston, the senior engineer assessor — can also be found in the Masonic archive.
Meanwhile Lord Pirrie, who was not only chairman of the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, which built the Titanic, but also one of the directors of White Star’s parent company, appears to have been a Freemason, too. He was born William Pirrie in Quebec in 1847.
The records show a William Pirrie initiated at St George’s Lodge in Montreal in 1904. Nic Compton, author of Titanic on Trial, told History.com: “The Titanic inquiry in Britain was branded a ‘whitewash’ because it exonerated most of those involved. Only three passengers were interviewed, and they were all from first class.
“The only person both inquiries heaped scorn on was the captain of SS Californian, the ship that had stood by about eight miles [12 kilometres] off, its crew watching the emergency flares being fired by Titanic, without doing anything about it until it was too late.”
Compton said the British inquiry got drawn into more populist issues, such as whether Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon had paid the crew of Lifeboat 1 a bribe not to go back and pick up swimmers. The passenger liner sank in the Atlantic on April 15, 1912, after colliding with an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.
More than 1,500 people died and there were 700 survivors. The British inquiry was headed by the Board of Trade, which had approved the ship, and some believed it could not be objective.
It concluded that the ship’s captain, Edward Smith, had done “only that which other skilled men would have done in the same position”, and neither White Star nor its parent company, the International Mercantile Marine Company, was found negligent. However the archive casts new light on the case.
“The records demonstrate the extensive involvement which Freemasons have had in British society,” said Diane Clements, director of the Library and Museum of Freemasonry.
The group may also have been behind protecting Jack the Ripper, believed to an obscure singer whose identity was shielded by fellow Masons, new records suggest.
A new book by Bruce Robinson, the director and screenwriter of the classic film Withnail and I, claims that the notorious Whitechapel murderer was a man named Michael Maybrick.
In the book They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper, Robinson argues that all of the Ripper killings bore the stamp of Masonic ritual, citing the symbol of a pair of compasses carved into the face of Catherine Eddowes, the removal of meal buttons and coins from the bodies of Eddowes and Annie Chapman.
He said the cryptic graffiti daubed on a wall in Goulston Street, which he claims was “the most flagrant clue of all”.
New archives prove for the first time that Maybrick and his brother James — who has previously been named as the Ripper — were both Masons. They reveal that Freemasons were in prominent positions in the Scotland Yard inquiry, including the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren and the man he appointed to be his “eyes and ears” on the case, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson. Two coroners who ruled on the murders, Wynne Baxter and Henry Crawford, and at least three of the police doctors who examined the bodies were also members of the Masons.
Maybrick, who was on the Supreme Grand Council of Freemasons, travelled the country as a performer. His entry in the carefully handwritten records describes him as a “vocalist”. It states that he was a member of the St Andrew’s Lodge from 1863 until 1887 — meaning he left a year before the nine-week period in 1888 when five women were murdered in the East End of London, in one of the biggest unsolved crimes in British history.
Sir Charles is said to have been a senior member of the Masonic Society. He was a founder member of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge and an authority on Freemasonic history and ritual.
Robinson told The Daily Telegraph: “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.”
