1: The Words of the Ballad

2: Poisoning an Arsenic Addict

3: Adam and Steve Milk the Royalty System

4: A Rough Trade in Angels

5: The Cross in the Margin

6: The Unclouded Splendour of Delusions

7: Blooming Revelations

8: On-wards to the Wake

9: Danny Boy meets the London Derrière

10: How a Great Organ took Adelaide to Heaven

Michael Maybrick alias Stephen Adams, 1880s photo

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2: Poisoning an Arsenic Addict

Stephen Adams was the pen-name adopted by the Liverpool-born singer Michael Maybrick, whose brother James was poisoned with arsenic in 1888. Florence, James's American-born wife, was convicted of murdering him. The case was later thrown in some doubt by the fact that James was an arsenic and strychnine addict, taking the poisons as supposed sexual stimulants, though the court did not hear of this. Michael played a major part in the early accusation of Mrs Maybrick, placing her under virtual house-arrest while his brother lay dying in agony. The case is often noted as a study in Victorian double-standards, Florence's extramarital affairs making her a convenient scapegoat, though her unfortunate decision to brew home-made cosmetics from arsenic fly-papers seems, if anything, even more puzzling today than it did at the time.

The poisoning was lurid enough but worse was to come: in 1992, a book was published which purported to be the secret diary of Jack the Ripper, pointing the finger at James Maybrick as author. This book, suturing the major shock-horror story of 1888, Jack-the-Ripper, to that of 1889, the Maybrick poisoning, was an elaborate hoax - the two stories have often appeared in sequence in popular crime compilations. The deficiencies of the Diary have been fully exposed by Ripperologists and I don't intend to recapitulate them here. Sufficient to say that when any previously-unknown document turns up and obligingly explains some popular mystery more or less completely, barge-poles are called for. However, on the other side of the world, the publication of the Diary prompted Derek Strahan's friend Amanda Pruden to mention to him casually that he might be dating a relation of Jack the Ripper, as Michael Maybrick had been her Great Uncle. As an Australian composer and writer with an interest in secret histories, Strahan was intrigued and wrote an article which revealed how "Stephen Adams" and his lyricist Fred. Weatherly, the Lennon and McCartney of their day, were believed by the family to have been lovers. Their relationship was terminated abruptly after the composition of The Holy City in 1892 and "Stephen Adams" had stopped writing songs completely by 1896. He married his servant and went to live in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, becoming Mayor and a respectable pillar of the community, though regarded as a chilly and distant character.

In this article, Derek Strahan noted that Adams' & Weatherly's greatest hit, The Holy City, a religiose ballad from 1892, seemed to be deeply coloured by Masonic symbolism. Both Michael Maybrick and Frederick Weatherly were enthusiastic Freemasons, not in itself at all unusual at the time in the context of Victorian homosocial habits. Mutual aid and charitable works seems to be all the Masonic agenda amounted to in most Lodges. The vast majority of candidates then as now would have learned the macabre symbols of their initiation and advance in the degrees of the Craft by heart. These observances are treated solemnly and Masonic ceremonies have impressed many, their powerful symbols of death and resurrection being intended to inspire awe. In recent years, the more blood-curdling oaths have been toned down in the face of the suspicions they fed. Even so, it seems unlikely that more than a very few Freemasons concerned themselves in depth with the meanings of their Craft. Indeed, it is a common criticism of the organization that rank and file members have little notion of the true aims and beliefs to which they submit. We shall see, however, that Weatherly, at least, took the Craft very seriously and it did inform his whole approach to popular lyric writing.

Anyone curious to learn Masonic secrets, down to the handshakes, watchwords and other signs can easily do so as they have been widely published with or without certain easy-to-guess omissions. It has, however, the reputation of being a hazardous study for the Profane, that is to say non-Masons. It is not the hazard of being found hanged under a bridge at low tide with your pockets full of bricks but rather the problem of floating out to sea on a raft of paranoid associations, brought on by too much exposure to the Masonic way with symbols. Borrowing from the Bible, Egyptology, Greek and Roman myth, Architecture, Music and Paintings, the Masons have put their mark on a very powerful and eclectic range of symbols. The student of the subject will soon see them everywhere and there are plenty of mad books to show how necessary it is to maintain a sense of proportion. The Masons have placed themselves at the centre of a web of symbols but it does not follow that they constructed that web. Consider, for instance, the implications of the fact that the earliest reference to a sinister "world-wide web" comes in an anti-Masonic lecture by Water Babies author Charles Kingsley. With all due care for our sanity, let us proceed.

The Royalty Ballad system meant that publishers promoted their songs by paying a royalty to famous singers to include them in concerts. The publishers would then name the singers on the sheet music covers by way of a seal of approval. In a way the ballad concerts played the promotional rôle that records would later play, the aim being to sell the music to amateurs for home performance, a very substantial market. The system arose during the 1860s and the name Ballad Concert first appears in the 1870s. Boosey & Co. were the leading publishers in this line. After training in Germany, Michael Maybrick arrived on the London ballad concert scene in the mid 1870s, adopting the name Stephen Adams as a writer of material for himself and others, notably the tenor Edward Lloyd. The sheet music advertised many songs as being by Adams and sung by Mr. Maybrick but knowledge of the pseudonym seems to have been widespread. Certainly by 1899, Lloyd was openly declaring the identity of Adams and Maybrick in a piece in the Musical Times. If this made-up name seems to trip off the tongue, could it be that the spelling disguises (St)Eve 'n Adam(s) at its core? There are of course some advantages to being listed at the top in advertisements of songs in alphabetical order. Or is the preacher's quip about Adam & Steve not quite so recent as we had thought?

Long before the jazz age, the trade in lyrics was an industry, with the authors advertising their services in periodicals, boasting of their fecundity. The Cloister-song was one very popular genre, where angelic singing children would be snatched away by angels for being too sweet. Heterodox religion is rife in the Victorian semi-sacred song. This period marked the height of the Oxford Movement, Puginesque Churches, William Morris stained glass and of mourning jewelry. Though it is generally held that the Victorian Ballad had nothing but the name in common with earlier traditional poems, some points of contact are clear. The ballad would not entirely shake off its supernatural history and many of the songs are about some kind of epiphany, often giving a religious twist to a phrase already heard e.g. "safe in his Father's arms."

To establish any occult strands in the Weatherly-Adams songs we would really need to pit them against control specimens from other writers to see if they stick out of the pile. That would be a daunting task. Weatherly was massively prolific and claimed to have penned some 3,000 lyrics. As a lawyer he was no doubt in a better position than most to defend his work against the pirates who made such inroads against the legitimate publishers until an effective Copyright Act in 1906. Derek Strahan estimates that Adams-Maybrick probably wrote about a hundred songs in all and, in collaboration with Derek, I have compiled a list of nearly 70 titles from the backs of old sheet-music. Yet it turned out that Derek Strahan was not, after all, the first writer to detect layers of arcane meaning in these old ballads. Before I name the man who got there first, however, I want to take a closer look at The Holy City to see if it is Christian, Masonic or both. Then to look at a possible source.

A first reaction to The Holy City is to feel it is more sentimental-Christian than Masonic. There is mention of the Cross and Hosannas to the King, even if Christ is not named. The children's choir is a mainstay of the ballad at this period. Here they are given the famous cry of the Crusaders on seeing the city: Jerusalem, Jerusalem!

On the other hand, the Cross is evoked in a manner which suggests that its mystery and shadow are dispelled by the shining and regenerated City. The Cross in the old pilgrim maps, is seen as outside the Temple Walls and here also it could be said to be marginalized. The light of God which denies no one does not occur in any orthodox Christian Apocalypse which would involve a Last Judgment. The identification of God with light also fits with a tradition that, for the highest degree Masons, the Temple of Solomon is understood as a pun on three names for the Sun-God, Sol-Om-On.

Semi-religious ballads were not of course hymns and were not submitted for approval to the Church authorities. As expressions of popular feeling, it is unlikely they were scrutinized for heresy, though stern critics like Shaw viewed them as tasteless twaddle. In so far as they are religious, the religion normally tends towards the Catholic in its visions of the heavens opening to admit orphans who are too good to live.

In his Autobiography, Piano & Gown, published in 1926, Fred. Weatherly lifts a corner of the veil to reveal that his whole approach to popular lyric writing was informed by some of the esoteric and intellectual aspects of Freemasonry. These days we expect to find multi-media and visual aids employed in the teaching of every subject but the Masons were pioneers in these arts. Each Degree of the Craft has its own illustrated board which forms a mnemonic for the candidate, reminding him of the vows he will make and the order of the ceremony. Furthermore the lay-out of the Lodge itself is a form of Memory Theatre, a stage which can be filled with the right props as the ceremony demands. It is an ancient art and one that has inspired a whole book by Dame Francis Yates. These lessons on the ways to the heart were not lost on Weatherly,

"I do not claim to be a "poet"; I don't pretend that my songs are "literary," but they are "songs of the people" and that is enough for me. Longfellow expresses better than I can what I mean:

Long, long afterwards in an oak

I found the arrow still unbroke;

And the song from beginning to end,

I found again in the heart of a friend . . .

"I was always taught that the opening line or lines of a song should give the picture, and then if people will talk while the song is being sung at all events they know what the song is about. Longfellow's "Village Blacksmith" has the sort of opening that a song requires:

Under a spreading chestnut tree

The village Smithy stands."

It is telling that Weatherly chooses the poetry of Longfellow to exemplify his ideal form of picture-verse. The American poet is not much read today but he summed up his hieroglyphic approach to knowledge in the obstinately memorable Hiawatha. The other poet Weatherly evokes is Burns and it is notable that in the figure of the Scots poet, he sees the figure of the psalmist David in a kind of visual reverie. He returns from this strange excursion to declare the Glory of God according to the Masonic formulation as, "no mere abstraction, no vision of a dreamer, but God the great Architect of the universe and Father of man." Burns and Longfellow and Weatherly were clearly blocks of the old stone, perfect squared ashlars whose pictorial poetry spoke to the heart, not merely the intellect.

Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions, first published in 1841, revised in 1852 and in print throughout Victorian times has a chapter about the Crusades. Albert of Aix is describing the march of the crusaders towards Jerusalem:

"...when the sun arose in unclouded splendour, the towers and pinnacles of Jerusalem gleamed upon their sight . . .no longer brutal fanatics but meek and humble pilgrims, they knelt down upon the sod, and with tears in their eyes, exclaimed to one another "Jerusalem! Jerusalem!"

The phrase The Holy City is actually used a few sentences earlier. This Jerusalem as Centre of the World is a potent image and a mysterious place in the mind. It appears at the end of Verdi's I Lombardi, where the distant city is viewed through the flap of the tent, as if a veil is torn. In that score, miraculous fountains spring up to accompany the vision. That opera was actually renamed Jerusalem when it was extended for the Paris Opera. This very popular work may or may not have been Weatherly's immediate source but the old chant would have been referred to often enough in Victorian days, when religious books poured from the presses and where many households allowed only "Sacred" material to alleviate the silence of the Sabbath. Albums of songs and pieces for Sunday use were essential for any respectable parlour and the semi-religious ballads had a stake in this market. While religious words and music of all kinds continues to flood from presses today, it is often an exercise in subsidised evangelism or restricted to particular regions. Songs such as The Holy City, however, were shrewdly commercial ventures, aiming to tap the fashion for religious sentiment rather than out of any instructional or improving agenda.

Armed with several stools full of old sheet music, old records and a working knowledge of the genre, it is tempting but treacherous to seek for personal meanings in these musty old songs. The ideas are often morbid and commonplace but they clearly held an appeal in those days when a high level of childhood mortality was a brute fact of life. Exposure to dozens of these things tends to drive home the extent to which they were nearly machine-made. Then as now, what determined a hit or a miss seems to have been luck rather than any secret ingredient and even the most successful figures like Adams and Weatherly produced many clinkers. However, there were surprises in store as I discovered the way this particular hit had been featured before in a rather surprising place.

Idly keying the words Maybrick and Freemason into a search-engine in 2001 brought up some forty references and midway down the first page of results, it became clear that James Joyce's Ulysses was worth exploring further. The 1922 modernist masterpiece had things to say about Florence Maybrick, Jack the Ripper, The Holy City as well as the Craft. It is not in itself surprising that the ballad should feature in the book, for James Joyce was the possessor of a beautiful tenor voice and had considered a professional singing career. He was well acquainted with the contents of the Victorian music-stool and Ulysses is studded with song references from beginning to end.

However there is something very suggestive in the way these particular references are arranged which could indicate that Joyce knew of some gossip to link the Maybrick case with the Ripper many years before the Diary emerged. While the Ripper Diary is certainly a fake, could it have arisen from this same Liverpudlian-Irish oral tradition linking the two cases. Here is the way Joyce disposes the evidence in the book.

Molly Bloom, an aficionado herself of Love's Old Sweet Song, brings up the alleged poisoner about seven pages into her celebrated stream-of-consciousness monologue, seeing her as a romantic figure:

"take that Mrs Maybrick that poisoned her husband for what I wonder in love with some other man yes it was found out on her"

Though disapproving of her as a "downright villain", Molly seems to be identifying with Florence as an adulteress and censors herself from contemplating the murder of her own aggravating husband. She dwells on the alleged modus operandi of arsenic taken from fly papers and comes to a rare pause for breath on the idea that they wouldn't hang a woman. They didn't hang Florence so it is clear Molly Bloom is thinking of her as a reassuring precedent.

Her husband Leopold Bloom's Masonic connections are brought out a few pages later, when Molly recalls his ploy of pretending to have set Lead Kindly Light to music to procure her a part in a performance of an unspecified Stabat Mater - presumably Rossini's or Pergolesi's. The Jesuits detected his imposture: "a freemason thumping the piano lead Thou me on copied from some old opera". This is a dense passage based around the traditional enmity of the Masons and Jesuits, suggesting some sort of continuing battle with ambiguous words and sacred music at its centre. Joyce raises the lid of the Victorian piano stool throughout the book, though Molly's light way with capitals disguises the Masonic pun "Lead thou me On". This is Joyce signalling behind her back, as it were, and probably behind Leopold's, as the identity of the Masonic GAOTU is supposedly a secret to rank-and-file Freemasons.

In the earlier Nighttown Chapter, Leopold Bloom is regaled with a performance of The Holy City from a gramophone. There is not just a passing reference to the song, it forms a sustained accompaniment to the arrival of Reuben J. Antichrist, with his only son, a hobgoblin. The vision of the End of the World which follows is surreal and satirical. Elijah delivers a hot gospel in the style of an American preacher. At the end, the gramophone seems to distort so badly that the words get mangled: "Whorusaleminyourhighhohhh . . .(the disc rasps gratingly against the needle.)" The next line is given to three Whores, covering their ears, suggesting that the Holy City has become Babylon. In fact, Babylon was the title of another Adams song.

Jack the Ripper is mentioned in the courtroom scene of the Nighttown sequence where it would seem for a moment as if Leopold Bloom is to be scapegoated for his acts of butchery by the Watchmen. They have arrested him in the act of feeding offal to a scavenging dog and refused his Masonic signals of distress. There is also a chalked message on the wall nearby, though in this case it is a phallic symbol. There is nothing in the text of Ulysses to suggest that Joyce knew that Stephen Adams was Michael Maybrick but it seems unlikely he did not, given his other detailed musical knowledge.

To sum up, we have Molly Bloom dreamily identifying with Florence Maybrick and her Freemason husband, in his nightmare, threatened with exposure as Jack the Ripper. These references are separated by many pages and the book is famously rich in allusions. Even so, it does raise the question of whether there were rumours of the period before 1922 to link Maybrick with the Ripper case. If this was an Irish rumour, could it have come out of Liverpool, home of the Maybricks and many Irish families? Perhaps it is a just a very curious coincidence. Wasn't it Wyndham Lewis's blunt opinion that Ulysses was like a vast turd of left-over Victoriana? There is a third view which is that for all his apparent scepticism, Joyce was a practical occultist whose literary methods of punning in depth and projecting the stream of his own consciousness onto his invented characters could open sources of knowledge otherwise hidden. The mischievous spirits would not of course mind whether they were conveying intimations of the atrocious Victorian crimes or of an atrocious hoax from the century after.

Florence's death sentence was commuted to a fifteen year jail term, just four days before her hanging was scheduled. It seems likely that high feelings in her native America swayed the British Home Secretary to intervene. Molly Bloom may well have been thinking of Florence Maybrick in1904 for it was on the 25th of January in that year, having served her full fifteen year sentence, she was released. Florence returned to America, wrote an autobiography, insisting on her innocence, then changed her name back to Chandler and lived an undramatic life until her death.

The gramophone gives rise to one possible musical anachronism in Ulysses. Bloomsday was 16th June 1904, so does Joyce make an untypical blunder in alluding to the His Master's Voice trademark in the scene where the bizarrely reincarnated Paddy Dignam returns as a dog to his grave? The picture was not used on record labels until 1909 - 10, though it could be found elsewhere in the company's brochures and other publicity, quite possible advertising - which was after all Mr Bloom's line of work. Joyce does not say it is on a record label, but it was not in 1904 the household name it was by the 1920s. Case not proved.

The apocalyptic vision of Ulysses was timed by Joyce to appear on his fortieth birthday in 1922, the same year, it turned out, as Yeats's poem The Second Coming, Eliot's The Waste Land and the establishment of the Irish Free State.

Had Ezra Pound not intervened by suggesting drastic cuts, we might all have been taught in school about the eruption of a Stephen Adams ballad into The Waste Land. Of course, without Pound's suggested abbreviations, the poem may not have seemed such a landmark. The famous opening line: "April is the cruellest month" was in fact some 54 lines into the poem, which had an original opening scene set in America. This cut section, which is especially rich in musical allusions, was eventually published in 1971, together with other suppressed sections of the poem. The song was The Maid of the Mill, a relatively early piece to words by Hamilton Aïdé, who also composed songs which Maybrick sang. It was part of the modernist agenda to draw out the mythic resonances of popular culture and both the titles and words of contemporary songs were treated as objects trouvés by Joyce and Eliot. In the familiar, published version of The Waste Land, Eliot quotes a non-standard version of a song with a Native American setting, Red Wing by Thurland Chattaway, set to music by Kerry Mills. In Eliot's version, the daughters of a Mrs Porter wash their feet in soda water. The genteel poet is evasive in his footnote, for the parody, which hails from Australia, is more highly-coloured than his lines suggest. The daughters concerned are prostitutes and the parts they wash are the most necessary ones for their trade. Sadly, my source is also coy at this point, leaving it uncertain if "twats" or "cunts" would be a more correct reading. Presumably, Eliot intended the line to be read as a printable euphemism but as knowledge of the bawdy song has faded, nonsense takes over, giving the lines an incongruous junior-school atmosphere.

Finnegans Wake - Joyce drops the apostrophe - is named nearly after a comic Irish song and this fine illustrated Metzler edition from about 1879 gives the composer as Dan Bryant, Irish Comedian. This version may be his but the ballad predates it and is normally described as anonymous or Irish-American. It seemed for a moment that Joyce's lost apostrophe was also missed from the cover but the volume has been guillotined and just the tiniest black dot as well as the spacing, indicates the apostrophe was once there. This scan concentrates on the image. For the record, the title is Finnegan's Wake with the strap-line Comic Irish Song. The words beneath read "Composed & Sung by the celebrated Irish Comedian Mr. Dan Bryant. In his inimitable character of Handy Andy. Ent Sta Hall. arranged by Michael Connelly Esqr. Price 3/-" The engraving is signed by Alfred Concanen, the leading sheet music illustrator of the day. The bottle bears the label "Kinaha . . .LL Whisk . . ."

Finnegans Wake is even more saturated in Freemasonry than Ulysses, Joyce finding unintended echoes of the Craft in the song's words which describe how one Tim Finnegan, a builder, falls from a ladder and rises again to scare his mourners at his wake. Joyce's technique of association is akin both to the occultist and the paranoid fantasist. While Ulysses tells a simple enough story in a bewildering kaleidoscopic manner, Finnegans Wake is usually described as the nightmare of a drunken publican, one HCE, though it has also been seen by McCluhan and others as a prophecy of the intertextuality of cyberspace. Finnegan, according to Bryant's version of the words lived on Dublin's Sackville Street - now O'Connell Street - whose Post Office was to be a focal point in the Easter Rising of 1916. Modern ballad usage places Finnegan in Walkin' Street and does not specify Dublin.

Joyce's Finnegans Wake defeats all but the most motivated of readers but its opening sentence is quite well known, joining as it does to the ending, like a serpent swallowing its tale (sic). And whose name appears like a ghost at this alpha and omega point? "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's"

If Joyce showed great interest in English ballads, then it was neatly reciprocated by Fred Weatherly's gift to Ireland: the words of Danny Boy. Assumed by generations of pub singers to be traditional, the words are twentieth century and were originally set to music by Weatherly himself in 1910. That song flopped. His sister-in-law actually sent him the Londonderry Air from America and it could therefore have been the Australian Percy Grainger's arrangement which stimulated the idea of applying the already-written words in 1913. This is a very roundabout way for an Englishman to receive a traditional Irish tune, but it seems to have been the way it happened. Even the name Londonderry Air sounds like a clue to the tune's geographical origin but it more likely derives from the name of Lady Londonderry, who collected it. It has been traced back to a lament called Mullaghmast, which commemorates a massacre in the year 1577.

The meaning of the words of Danny Boy is still debated among traditional singers, some see it as being about economic exile, others as about the IRA. The words seem romantic and the earliest recording I can find is by a woman. Yet later, it was most often sung by a man and could, just possibly, be taken to be a farewell to a son. A recruiting song for the IRA seems a most unlikely production for an English criminal lawyer, which was Weatherly's day job. Additional verses exist with clearer IRA references but they are not by Fred. Weatherly. The very ambiguous nature of his words was probably what made Weatherly the most popular lyricist of his day. This was not high poetry but something more akin to the production of verses for greetings cards. It seems an unlikely job for a one -ime Oxford tutor and the author of books on logic, but he made it pay. Audiences were allowed to project into the words whatever they wanted to hear. So perhaps these weird speculations are just continuing a very old tradition.

The ambiguity of the words of these ballads has been taken to be symptomatic of the Royalty Ballad market, enabling them to be sung by either sex. The provision of alternative words for each sex seems to have been a later idea and I have not seen it in songs of this date. Yet Danny Boy is very often sung by a man about a boy and a romantic interpretation cannot be said to be ruled out by the words, so much as rendered more or less invisible by the social context. The fact that the lover envisages his or her death certainly echoes the way in which a happy ending would be forbidden in the circumstances.

Close attention to the verses of ballads can throw up some surprises as we grapple with their alien preoccupations. I had noted a very peculiar ambiguity in the ending of Adelaide Proctor's poem A Lost Chord, which became The Lost Chord, when set by Sullivan:

"It may be that Death's bright Angel will speak in that chord again;
It may be that only in Heav'n I shall hear that grand Amen."

I wondered if the second clause was an amplification or an alternative? Is she asking whether the music comes from Heaven or Hell? And who exactly was Death's bright Angel? Could it possibly be Lucifer?

It turned out to be a careless reading which took the last lines out of their context. A truer meaning is that if she finds the chord in this life then it is an Angel making A Whisper of Heavenly Death or Todesverkündigen. Otherwise she will hear it again in Death itself. It is difficult to think of such a subject making much appeal today but the words made this a huge hit with the Victorians and it reflected their preoccupations. They may have seen in the poem the promise that life's dissonances would be resolved by Death. Read with modern eyes, it would appear that a religious cast is being given to a very sensual experience: the orgasmic thrill of a great organ chord raises the Victorian poetess to think of Heaven. She experiences a Little Death. Disappointingly, Arthur Sullivan's setting has nothing more sensual than a common major chord for climax.

The sentiment of the song is a paraphrase of the Lamartine quotation which heads the score of Liszt's tone poem Les Préludes: "What is life but a series of preludes whose end is Death?". It turns out that the origins of that piece lay in a planned Choral Symphony on the theme of the Elements and that the Lamartine connection was an afterthought. The fact that Lamartine, Liszt & Sullivan were Freemasons is probably entirely meaningless in this connection.

© James Beswick Whitehead, 2001

version V, 2nd April, 2001

version Vd, 7th July, 2006

version Ve, 10th August, 2006

(links to new Adams Songs Listing)

Visit Derek Strahan's Revolve Website to read the article that started me off on this mystery and to learn about an independent Australian composer with a great deal to say. RealAudio 5 will enable you to sample the music. Fascinating File on Beethoven too.