The Jack the Ripper Location Photographs: Dutfield's Yard and the Whitby Collection (12 page)

By the late 1890s she was superseded by newer liners from Germany and in 1907 she and her sister ship the
Campania
were replaced by the new Cunard liners the
Lusitania
and
Mauretania
. She made her last voyage on 7 July 1909.

However, whilst laid up at Huskisson Dock in Liverpool on 14 August 1909, she was gutted by fire, partially sank at her berth, and was sold five days later. She was broken up at Swansea, her contents being auctioned off. Indeed, items from the ship still regularly turn up on eBay to this day, mostly in the US. Film exists of passengers boarding the ship at Liverpool, taken by Mitchell and Kenyon in 1901 and held by the British Film Institute in London. The Captain for most of the Atlantic crossings at this time was Horatio McKay.

Having left the Thomas Cook party at Queenstown, the
Lucania
continued to Liverpool to begin the return journey to the US with new passengers, departing England on 16 June 1900.

The $970 cost of the trip would equate today to $25,000 or £15,000. This was not a trip taken by a woman of meagre means.

Thomas Cook used two main hotels in London for its travellers’ use but it is likely that our tourist was staying at The Langham. In the early years of tourism, richer transients were lodged in private houses but it is unlikely this would have still been occurring by 1900. The Langham was opened in 1865 as Europe’s first ‘Grand Hotel’ and is still a thriving concern situated in Portland Place, Regent Street. Many notable historic figures have been guests there such as Oscar Wilde, Henry Morton Stanley, William Gladstone, Henry Longfellow, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dvorak, Somerset Maugham, The Prince of Wales (Edward VII) and Napoleon III.

Given the delay in departure of the
Lucania
from New York and the time spent in Ireland (at that time still one country) and other parts of Great Britain (largely passing undocumented in this album) then it can be safely estimated that our tourist was in London at the very end of June and start of July 1900, but it is extremely unlikely that any precise date will become available.

What stands out is that the image of Dutfield’s Yard is completely out of keeping with the other photographs taken in the city. All the others were of popular tourist attractions in large open spaces and it is difficult to believe that a trip to a murder location connected to Jack the Ripper would have been on the official itinery. Given the full week in London, it is likely the photographer had some free time and arranged a private cab to take her to see one of the murder locations. At that time it was little more than a decade since the Whitechapel Murders had taken place; recent enough to be titillating, but distant enough to not incur outrage. It must remain a supposition, but there is a possibility that Berner Street was visited just before or after the trip to The Tower of London, a short distance away. It seems unlikely that a whole group of tourists would have disembarked at this point to view the scene, and only one man in the photograph (the one on the far right looking into the camera) appears well-dressed enough to be a tourist. One must also wonder why this location was chosen above the others. Certainly, the places where Martha Tabram and Mary Kelly were killed were deemed unsafe. The site of the Mary Ann Nichols murder was a bit of a distance further to the east and the location of Annie Chapman’s murder was in a private backyard. This really only leaves Mitre Square, where Catherine Eddowes died, and here as viable stops. Perhaps she took a cab and visited all the murder locations but only photographed this one? We will never know.

It is unusual that the photographs of Ireland follow those of England, even though the Cook itinery shows the stops in Ireland coming first. There is a possible explanation for this, the clues coming in the photographer’s narrative quite late in the album. Although the ink, browned with age, appears uniform throughout, later entries appear to be written in a smaller and more shaky, angular hand than the earlier comments. She uses the words ‘If my memory serves...’ by one image of Pompeii and on the next page she writes ‘Florentine Palace – the Vectis if I remember rightly, at this writing seventeen years later’. It is unlikely she would have remembered so many details and locations by 1917, probably in old age by that time, and so I have concluded it is likely that the photographs were possibly put into the album shortly after the trip, but that she gave up on writing comments at the time halfway through and finished those years later. The placing of some images out of order may simply be through quickly pasting them down and realising the order in which they should have been put afterwards. Though meticulous in some ways, in others the owner of the album was more slapdash. Nevertheless, almost every location in the album from the 1900 trip is identified.

There is a strong possibility that the photographer had an interest in the darker side of things. When a location has involved death or bloodshed, she has not shied away from commenting on it. In fact, she has made a point of stating the fact. ‘The scene of burning of Christian Martyrs’ in London, ‘Here stood the guillotine during revolution’ in Paris, ‘Crypts frescoed with bones of 4,000 monk ...(?) brother amid the skulls’ and ‘Monks are buried in holy earth from Jerusalem and taken up to make room for fresh corpses’ by a photograph of mummified Capuchin monks at Rome, ‘Lion’s dens, cells of prisoners, Nero’s box’ at the Coliseum and the graphic ‘Plaster cast of body entombed in wet ashes in Pompeii. Plaster was poured into mould left by decay of body. Bones intact. Most victims fell on their faces trying to shield them from the hot ashes’ at Pompeii. Such comments may have been thought a little unsuitable for genteel society at the time.

Mummified remains of Capuchin monks, from the album

Other comments give an intriguing glimpse into the life of the tourist. The best come from the time in Italy:

‘Rag Fair in Rome. Here you might pick up rare antiques or buy a pair of shoe strings. A child here spoke of the ‘ara’ in my teeth and I had to show my fillings to a crowd of poor peasant people. Had my mouth full of Roman heads’

‘Leaning Tower of Pisa. Beautiful alabaster building. Here I lay on my stomach on floor of upper storey and stuck my head over. Horses below looked like mice’

‘A couple of handsome gendarmes in Bordighera on the Riviera. The youngest blushed crimson when I asked him to pose. Beautiful uniforms’.

Mother and child by the sea in Naples, from the album

‘Italian mother feeding her bambino on shore of Mediterranean. When I first saw her she was picking ‘something’ off the head of an older child’

‘Public lavatory, Bordighera. Girl of fourteen in foreground feeding her baby. Italian infants were always feeding on cathedral steps and ‘all over the place’’

However, there was one vivid and extensive entry which would point me in the direction of further research:

‘Vesuvius from moving train. An Italian humorist tried to ask me about the ...(?) etc and afterward picked up some manuscripts (I was writing on the train) and pretended to read it to his party, convulsing them with laughter and exciting my curiosity almost fatally. This party urged me most hospitably to partake of their lunch of black bread and odorous cheese’. Part of the text was to lead me down a different type of alleyway to Dutfield’s Yard.

Finally, after the Naples photographs, there was no indication of the photographer’s return voyage to the US. Further correspondence with Paul Smith at the Thomas Cook Archives was to present this information:

‘I am afraid I cannot tell you the name of the ship on which your photographer returned from Europe to New York. However, I can confirm that it would not necessarily have been the ‘Lucania’.

We should have more luck with the dates, however. The
Excursionist
states that Tour No 22 lasted 103 days. This gives a return date of 12 September 1900 (or thereabouts).

The itinerary quoted in the ‘Excursionist’ also shows that Naples is the final port of call before New York. According to timetables in the archives, the shipping lines which operated a Naples-New York service were as follows: Anchor Line; Cunard Line (14 days’ journey time); Cyprien Fabre & Co (12 days); Hamburg-American Line (13/14 days); North German Lloyd Steamship Company (13 days); White Star Line (12/13 days). Unfortunately, the ‘Excursionist’
only shows the North Atlantic routes (between North America and Britain/France) rather than the Mediterranean routes and I do not have any separate timetables or shipping lists from 1900 (1906 is the closest).’

The next stage was, with the information already gathered, to attempt to identify the woman who took the Dutfield’s Yard photograph.

Trying to Identify the Photographer
Most of the research since the summer of 2008 has been trying to discover who owned the album and took the European vacation with Thomas Cook in the summer of 1900. As 125,000 Americans took pleasure trips to Europe that year, the words ‘needle’ and ‘haystack’ come to mind.

I began by contacting museum services in the US. My only possible starting point at this stage (before the Arizona information was known) lay in the Heinn label at the back of the album and its direct link to Milwaukee. I began my enquiries with Al Muchka of the Milwaukee Public Museum. He suggested I contact Steve Daly of the Milwaukee County Historical Society who, in turn, pointed me to Joe de Rose of the Wisconsin Historical Society, an organisation that was to prove very helpful in subsequent research. Various people working for this group undertook unpaid work to assist in uncovering some of the mysteries that still surrounded the album.

I made further enquiries with Larry Lingle, the original seller of the photographs, as to where he obtained the collection. That was, unfortunately, a dead end as he had himself obtained it by auction on eBay in 2005 and had not done anything with it since then.

Little could be assured about the photographer herself from the photographs. Even her age is indeterminate; she could be aged anything between 25 and 50. She appears to be blonde and is certainly slim. The photographs give her the impression of having been quite tall. She has an elongated face with a very wide mouth, square forehead, high cheekbones and a large but upturned nose. Her head shape is almost masculine.

Only one thing is likely regarding the home address of the photographer – she probably did not come from New York or New Jersey for the simple reason that she took a photograph of the Dewey Arch before embarkation. A local resident would not have photographed something so close to home as the first image in an album documenting a three-month break in another continent.

The photographer at the colonnades at St Peter’s, Rome, from the album

Detail of the photographer’s face