1. Mary Jane Kelly said she had a brother named Henry in the Scots Guard. Henry Sinclair, grandfather of the builder of Rosslyn Chapel, came from a family of Scots Guard. Sinclair promoted the association of Rosslyn with many Arthurian legends and Arthur Sullivan, named Arthur of course, wrote incidental music for a King Arthur opera.
You want to give me 3 similarities for a random example? Are you sure? I happen to actually believe in the Rule of Three, as expressed by Goldfinger. One is happenstance, Two is coinicidence and Three is enemy action!
I tend to think these types of Grail legend/stories/hoaxes are a vestige of the 60s. I have 2 examples starting in the 70s. A third, if you could come up with one, would at least prove to me it’s more than mere coincidence.
Henry Sinclair, a member of the Royal Scots Guards, a regiment founded in 1642, built Rosslyn Chapel?
There may be some confusion with the Garde Ecossaise, formed c. 1420 and another William Sinclair but alanpeters.tripod.com/knightstemplar.... says a William Sinclair, probably a nephew of the William Sinclair who build the chapel, was the first to join the Scots Guard and there were four Sinclairs in the regiment in the 16th Century.
David B. - 04 May 2008 10:09 AM
Howard Brown [...] is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror
*pfeeep!* Unsupported assertion, that’s a five yard penalty and loss of down!
Agreed. Granted, with advances in DNA, we can trace family lines with some freakish accuracy. Determining exactly who is related to which notable historical figure is largely done purely on the say-so of whoever wrote the history of the family tree. One great-grandmother who felt it more fashionable to tell people she was related to the princess than the scullery maid, and your data goes out of whack on an epic scale.
Also, being able to trace lineage to a given ancestor becomes increasingly unimportant, the further back you go. The number of people ‘related’ to Genghis Khan is staggering, but that’s mostly because he lived so long ago.
Scientists *have* determined that all humans share a common female genetic ancestor. Does this mean that at one time there was only one female? Nope. It means that her progeny spread far enough that there are no isolated human tribes that they didn’t interbreed with, eventually.
Why should the mystical Milk Marketing Board be sought overseas? No: parsimony suggests we should look closer to home – and it then becomes immediately clear that what was in fact meant was the Milk Marketing Board of Scotland. To see how this is obvious, we need to go back, of course, to Norman times.
The Sainted King David I of Scotland – who was in his youth a hanger-on at the court of King Henry I of England and who there experienced long exposure to Norman and Anglo-French culture - granted land in Midlem, Eildon, and (most significantly) Bowden to monks from Selkirk. From that time (1128) to the present day a church founded by those monks has stood in Bowden. Why is this significant? Consider the Milk Marketing Board of Scotland: which Scottish politician sponsored the Scottish Milk Marketing Scheme (Consolidation) Approval Order of 1989? Why, who else but Lord Sanderson of Bowden!
Lest any miss the obvious significance to this, Charles Russell Sanderson belongs of course to the family Sanderson – a family descended from Alexander, a Norman noble granted lands in the county of Durham! And surely it cannot be coincidence that Bowden is a name shared by the Bowden family, who were granted lands in Chesire by William of Normandy?
Indeed, it is interesting to note that Cheshire is the home of a famous cheese which was actually mentioned in the Domesday book. Of course milk is made from cheese, and William was a noted Statist; mere speculation is beyond the scope of this little article, and I hesitate to rely on what might be seen by some as mere circumstantial evidence, but is it really going too far to wonder whether the establishment of the Milk Marketing Board by an heir of the Normans might not have been yet one more step in a yet-ongoing Norman conquest of this great and once-free nation of ours? And, further, to wonder whether dominance of the milk and milk-derivatives industry might not lie at or close to the heart of this pernicious scheme? More research is needed before we may confidently assert such a link - but I think such questions must occur to any serious thinking man, and even to some women.
This is the earliest source I’ve found online to this Ripper Davinci Code Hoax. It’s from a Jack the Ripper thread on the Oak Island forums, second last entry, by someone using the username Harry Oakes. It won’t link up so I’ll quote some of it here. Dated June 2007:
Did Mary Jane Kelly, last victim of Jack the Ripper, have a child with Sir Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan or is this the latest version of the infamous Royal Conspiracy theory made famous by Stephen Knight?…
Mary? Prostitute? A secret baby?… Where have we all heard that before?… For the last few years, Dan Brown’s Davinci Code has rocked the world. Coincidentally, tracing this latest rumour takes us right to another man named brown. This time it’s Howard Brown of jtrforums.com, the place for all things Ripper.....
“This is just like Dan Brown, Pierre Plantard, and Holy Blood Holy Grail!” said a source from jtrforums.com. “I think it’s a hoax!”
“Certainly not our Arthur!” said a shocked source from Sullivan Archives online.
The verdict from Ripperologists and Sullivanites alike seems to be unanimous. It’s a hoax.
H. Oakes
I wouldn’t doubt Arthur shagged Mary if she was within 100 miles of the Savoy. She is said to have had a gentleman friend who took her to France in 1884. Arthur went to France in 1884. She also said she had a relative on the stage and lived in Knightsbridge. It’s hard to dismiss offhand.
This is the earliest source I’ve found online to this Ripper Davinci Code Hoax. It’s from a Jack the Ripper thread on the Oak Island forums, second last entry, by someone using the username Harry Oakes. It won’t link up so I’ll quote some of it here. Dated June 2007:
Did Mary Jane Kelly, last victim of Jack the Ripper, have a child with Sir Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan or is this the latest version of the infamous Royal Conspiracy theory made famous by Stephen Knight?…
Mary? Prostitute? A secret baby?… Where have we all heard that before?… For the last few years, Dan Brown’s Davinci Code has rocked the world. Coincidentally, tracing this latest rumour takes us right to another man named brown. This time it’s Howard Brown of jtrforums.com, the place for all things Ripper.....
“This is just like Dan Brown, Pierre Plantard, and Holy Blood Holy Grail!” said a source from jtrforums.com. “I think it’s a hoax!”
“Certainly not our Arthur!” said a shocked source from Sullivan Archives online.
The verdict from Ripperologists and Sullivanites alike seems to be unanimous. It’s a hoax.
H. Oakes
I wouldn’t doubt Arthur shagged Mary if she was within 100 miles of the Savoy. She is said to have had a gentleman friend who took her to France in 1884. Arthur went to France in 1884. She also said she had a relative on the stage and lived in Knightsbridge. It’s hard to dismiss offhand.
If she’s recorded as going to France in 1884 and he can be proved to have been in France in 1884 at the same time then yes, that is perhaps something.
But it still has nothing whatsoever to do with Dan Brown. Like I said:
1. Mary is a common name because it’s used in the Bible. Especially popular amongst poor Irish Catholic girls, who comprised most of the protitutes in Whitechapel. There would have been literally thousands of prostitutes called ‘Mary’.
2. A secret baby is a very, very, very common cliche in fiction. And in real life, thousands of girls of good families got knocked up, had the child in secret which was sent to an orphanage and the mother usually to a convent. Conversely the amount of royals who’ve sired bastards is beyond measure. Nil points.
3. Two people called ‘Brown’. One of the most common names possible. There must be hundreds of thousands of people called ‘Brown’ in the world right now.
Coincidences are only important if they’re not ridiculously likely. You can’t connect the dots because two people share a very, very common name or one book has a common plot element of another, especially if that plot elemtn is in countless other books. I bet someone could connect Winnie the Pooh to Jack the Ripper if we had to.
