London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (30 page)

IMAGINING THE LIVES OF EAST END PROSTITUTES: THE VICTIMS OF THE RIPPER

Finally we might spend some time looking at the sort of women that walked the streets of Whitechapel. Hundreds if not thousands of women chose this desperate option in the last decades of the nineteenth century and, as we noted earlier, few if any have left behind them any indication of why they did so. In recent years one of the more heartening developments in `ripperology' has been a movement to reveal the lives of the Ripper's five canonical victims. This has not been an easy exercise since working-class lives typically produce little in the way of documentary evidence. These women have achieved fame or have, rather, drawn the attention of the world because they were brutally murdered by an unknown assassin who has resisted investigators' best efforts to unmask him for over a century. One might ask who cares about the victims? Perhaps because we now live in an age where the victim is increasingly prominent in discussions about crime or, more cynically, because there is precious else new to write about the Whitechapel case, the histories of Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Kate Eddowes and Mary Kelly are now of increased interest. This was particularly evident at the Jack the Ripper exhibition in 2008 at the Museum of London Docklands which stated its intention of contacting the relatives of the deceased in advance of its opening. To date there has only been one volume dedicated to the victims, by Neal Stubbings Shelden, which is useful if a little uninspiring in its presentation.48 It does, however, along with what little we might glean from the police reports and press cuttings, help us imagine the lives of these five East End prostitutes and thereby project a composite image of the low lodging house `unfortunate' that Hemyng was at pains to describe.

We have already noted some of the circumstances of the Ripper's victims in Chapter 2. All but Mary Kelly were well into their thirties or forties, all had experienced broken relationships at least in part because of their personal struggles with alcoholism. Each one of them had friends and family who would have missed them but were drawn from the very bottom rung of society and as a result, had these women not been murdered in such a brutal and sadistic manner, the murders might have failed to register in the wider public consciousness. Even now their deaths have not been marked by any official memorial in the area in which they lived and worked. Some enterprising individual has stencilled their names on the streets in which they died but apart from their graves there is little or nothing to remember them by. The same fate is likely to befall the 13 victims of Peter Sutcliffe or the five women murdered by Stephen Wright in Ipswich.

So what can we add to the memory of the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper? Well, in the case of Mary Kelly very little at all. As Sheldon notes she has left us almost nothing apart from the unreliable evidence provided by her boyfriend Joseph Barnett. Kelly hailed from Limerick in Ireland, one of a family of eight children. Her family crossed the Irish Sea to Carmarthenshire where her father worked `as a gaffer at an ironworks'. 4' Kelly married a local man and after he died in a mining accident she decamped to Cardiff (where, according to Thomas Williams, she met and became Dr John Williams' lover). It was at this point that Kelly, aged about 18 or 19, fell into prostitution. By 1884 Kelly had been up to London and had travelled to France and back, escaping the clutches of a Continental madam who would have imprisoned her in a brothel as we have seen. She avoided that fate but met a worse one. All of this is largely conjecture since the real Mary Kelly is as elusive as her killer. Again this provides the conspiracy theorists with more ammunition. Walter Dew says he remembered Kelly as a frightened woman and had often seen her `parading along Commercial Street, between Flower-and-Dean Street and Aldgate, or along Whitechapel Road 's0 But then by November 1888 surely most East End prostitutes were living with the fear that they might be the next victim of the Ripper. That this did not stop them going out to look for customers should not surprise us; they prostituted themselves because they had little other way of existing.

Mary Ann Nichols had married in 1864 to William Nichols, a printer from Oxford, and by 1876 the couple were living in the newly built Peabody Estate in Duchy Street in Stamford Hill. They must have been earning enough money and living a respectable working-class life to have been able to afford the rent and meet the strict criteria that Peabody buildings required. However, there it seems that Mary and William had a temporary separation in 1876, perhaps on account of Mary's drinking or because William was having an affair with another resident in the block. Whatever the truth the pair finally parted in at Easter 1880 and Mary moved away. She turned up in the records of the Lambeth workhouse in 1882 and 1883 before moving in with Thomas Drew, a blacksmith, for about a year. This relationship also failed and by 1887 Mary was back in the workhouse. The final twist in Mary's life was in May 1888 when she wrote to her father to tell him that because of her good attitude in the workhouse the guardians there had found her a position in service in Wandsworth with Mr and Mrs Cowdry. Mary told her father, with a touch of irony perhaps, `they are teetotalers and very religious so I ought to get on. They are very nice people and I have not much to do' In July the workhouse received a letter in which Mrs Cowdry suggested that Mary had run away from service with property amounting to £3 l Os. Mary went north and moved into a lodging house in Spitalfields and prostituted herself to pay the rent and feed her drink habit. A good-tempered and very small woman, Mary clearly struggled with life and failed to take advantage of the last opportunity that was given her.

Annie Chapman married her husband, John, in Knightsbridge in 1869. John was a coachman and by 1873 when Annie had produced two children, he was working in the employ of a member of the nobility in Bond Street. Shelden is unsure why Chapman left this position but speculates that it might have been because of Annie's dishonesty or poor behaviour. He did, however, eventually manage to obtain work out of town in Berkshire in the household of Sir Francis Tress Barry who was to serve as MP for Windsor from 1890 to the memorable election of 1906 (which saw the beginning of the end of `Country House' government). By the end of the 1870s Annie had already succumbed to alcoholism and this may well have caused her to lose as many as five babies in her lifetime. She had returned to London in 1880 with her crippled son, John Alfred, to seek medical help at a London hospital. She may also have remained in London because her husband had little time for her when she was drinking. She returned to Berkshire in 1882 but, having supposedly weaned herself off the drink in London, soon found herself reaching for a bottle when she was with John. On 26 November her eldest child died of meningitis. Emily Chapman was only 12 years old and the grief the family felt only exacerbated Annie's alcoholism. Within two years her drinking habit had reached such a state that she was effectively expelled from her home by her husband's employers. Annie self-destructed at this point and went on the tramp, eventually ending up in Spitalfields living in a common lodging house and relying on prostitution. Annie received an allowance from John but this abruptly stopped in the summer of 1886 when he fell ill and was forced to give up his job in Berkshire. When Annie Chapman died in a backyard on Hanbury Street she was about 47 and had a terminal illness affecting her lungs and brain. She seems to have been a well-mannered woman, literate, industrious and quiet who only turned to prostitution when she had no other options.''

Elizabeth Stride's story has already been told in part in Chapter 2 with the supposed loss of her family in a maritime disaster. Stride had arrived in London in 1866 from Sweden where her family name was Gustafdotter. Aged 26 she married John Stride, a man considerably older than herself, and `opened a coffee hall' in Poplar, East London two years later in 1871. Her life seems to have been one of fantasy fuelled by alcohol, which may explain her claim that her husband was killed when the Mary Alice sank on the Thames in September 1877. Despite this the census records that Neal Shelden has consulted suggest that in 1881 the couple were still living in Poplar but separated that year. Stride was admitted to the Whitechapel workhouse infirmary just after Christmas 1881 and was discharged on 4 January 1882 and placed in the workhouse proper. Thereafter she appears to have lived in Flower and Dean Street in a common lodging house, as her fellow victims Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman had. John Stride died in 1884 and soon after Liz Stride made one of her frequent appearances before a police magistrate for being drunk and disorderly. She found the company of another East End resident, Michael Kidney, but this was another difficult relationship that probably ended when she accused him of assaulting her in 1887. Her story matches that of the other women killed by `Jack' `Long Liz' (so called because she was unusually tall at 5 ft. 5 in.) was an alcoholic whose relationship collapsed and, losing the financial support of her husband, fell into casual prostitution and a desperate life in and out of the workhouse.

Catherine Eddowes was born in Wolverhampton and only settled in London, with her common law husband Thomas Conway, in 1868 when she was 26. By then she was already an alcoholic. In 1871 she and Thomas were living in Southwark where Catherine was working as a laundress and they had two children aged 7 and 3. She had a third child in 1873 at the nearby workhouse, though the couple were not inmates. In 1881 the family were living in Chelsea and their children were attending school. All was not well, however, and in a familiar scenario the couple split up, with Thomas citing his common-law wife's drinking as the main reason. Catherine went to live in Spitalfields were her sister had gone some years previously and she alternated between prostitution and piecework in and around Brick Lane. Here she met a local market labourer called John Kelly and moved into his digs on Flower and Dean Street. The couple stayed together but both seem to have enjoyed a drink and Catherine was, like Liz Stride, to make at least one appearance at the Thames Police Court. Her drinking almost saved her life. When PC Robinson found her outside a shop on Aldgate High Street at 8.30 p.m. one night he tried to get her to stand up but she was far too drunk. She was taken to Bishopgate Police Station and allowed to sober up. At 1 a.m. she was sent on her way after giving a false name and address as Mary Anne Kelly and wishing the constable a cheery `Good night, old cock' Three quarters of an hour later another policeman found her mutilated body in Mitre Square. According to Neal Stubbings Shelden hundreds lined the route of her funeral as testament to her popularity.52

Catherine Eddowes does seem to have been a less desperate woman than Nichols, Chapman or Stride. Perhaps her popularity explains the crowds but then again perhaps this was merely a reflection of the publicity that surrounded the case and the fact that she was, at that point, the most brutally murdered of the four victims. That was to be surpassed in the slaying of Mary Kelly, and the evisceration of her corpse is almost made manifest in the lack of any real biographical detail about her.

Overall Neal Stubbings Shelden is to be commended for his painstaking research into the five canonical victims of the Whitechapel murderer even if his book would have greater merit if he had been much more circumspect in listing his sources. As a result much of this information is open to challenge and as with so much of the case we are not necessarily that much closer to the truth. However, a pattern has clearly emerged from these mini biographies of the murdered women. They were all prostitutes but they did not start out that way. These women largely fell into prostitution as their lives collapsed. They shared an experience of failed marriages, lost children, poverty and petty crime. Much of this was due to alcoholism but this in itself probably reflected the desperate nature of their lives. They must also have shared this experience with thousands of other women in the East End and elsewhere. If we can create a composite of the common prostitute in the East End then she probably resembles someone like Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman or Kate Eddowes: a woman down on her luck, without a solid working male partner, unable to find regular `respectable' employment and forced to sell herself in order to find a bed for the night and enjoy the pennyworth of gin that helped her forget how miserable her life was.

CONCLUSION

In late Victorian London prostitution occupied the minds of many social commentators, journalists, feminists and reformers as well as magistrates and the policing authorities. Prostitution was a problem: a social problem and an individual problem for the women involved. Indeed we might add that it has ever been thus and remains the case today. The Ripper's victims were prostitutes of the lowest class and as a result in this chapter we have not looked at the more affluent end of the sex trade - at the expensive brothels of the West End and at the lives of courtesans and escorts that catered to a wealthy clientele. These establishments rarely suffered from interference from the police since the men that frequented them had important connections to protect. But `Jack's victims would not have been able to find work in the bright lights of the West End - their ravaged lives determined that the dark streets, alleys and court of the East End was where they would work. They may have shared their West End sisters' need for money but they also exchanged their favours for little gain. Theirs was a desperate existence and one that in at least five cases ended in tragedy.

Prostitution was not a crime per se, in that few women were prosecuted for selling their bodies. However, prostitutes were viewed as a part of the `criminal class' that was closely associated with the East End of London. The existence of this class is far from clear but Whitechapel and its environs was certainly a breeding ground for crime and criminality, as Chapter 7 will outline.

7

Crime and the Criminal Class