The spike was no less miserable than the workhouse proper; the only thing that made a stay there bearable was its brevity. Nevertheless, demand for accommodation was constant. In the late afternoon, outside the casual ward door a line would begin to form. Admission usually began between five and six o’clock, and there was no guarantee that beds would be available for all comers, especially in the winter. Not unlike those entering the workhouse, inmates at the casual ward, having secured a place, were fed their skilly and then required to strip off their filthy street clothes. These were not washed, but rather “stoved” at a high temperature, to kill the lice and fleas. In exchange for their clothes, the inmates were given nightshirts; they changed into them after bathing in the blackened waters of the communal tubs. The American author Jack London, who passed a night in the spike while writing his exposé People of the Abyss, was horrified to observe that twenty-two inmates washed in the same water before using “towels wet from the bodies of other men.” London noticed that one of these men had a back covered in “a mass of blood,” the result of “vermin attacks.”
The combination of vermin, the uncomfortable straw-filled mattresses in narrow berths, and the air of menace within the dormitories made a decent night’s sleep difficult to come by. The social investigator J. H. Stallard, who passed a night in a women’s dormitory, claimed her stay was spent “in a state of constant misery the whole night through.” She remarked that she was “covered with vermin” and “. . . could neither sit nor lie.” In order to “get a breath of fresh air” in the close, unventilated room, she was forced to move “as near to the door as I could get” in the hope that some breeze might “come in through the narrow opening.”8 Although the inmates were locked in at seven o’clock and expected to get some rest, Stallard describes the general agitation that prevailed. Discomfort and disturbance punctuated the entire night; women were sick from the food, others came in drunk, children cried, fights broke out. Some just sat up chatting and “singing lewd songs” by the light of the single gas jet. Whether or not they had managed to catch some slumber, they were roused at six in the morning to begin their work. There was more skilly and stale bread, and then a second hellish night before release at nine the next morning.
One problem with spending the night at the casual ward was that it often hampered opportunities to find work the following day. Most laboring jobs began before 9 a.m., and those truly in pursuit of work may have had a long walk to get to a place of potential employment. If there was no work to be had and no money to be found for food or shelter on that next day, a vagrant would be forced to begin the cycle once more and join the line at another casual ward. The law prohibited vagabonds from returning to the same spike within a thirty-day period, so most tramped in a circuit among neighboring facilities, often using different names to evade the regulations. A tramp lived in an almost perpetual state of hunger, exhaustion, and discomfort: cold, rain-soaked, itching from bites, sore-footed from miles of walking in worn-out shoes, to say nothing of the psychological torment. Life was led hour by hour in search of an opportunity to earn or beg a few coins. If a tramp could find a day or even a few hours of employment, he or she might secure enough money for a night or so in a cheap lodging house. This was, of course, if the funds were not drunk away in a fit of despair. In the middle of the nineteenth century it was estimated that “seventy thousand persons in London . . . rise every morning without the slightest knowledge as to where they shall lay their heads at night.”9 Whether they passed an evening in a casual ward, a lodging house, or, as was frequently the case, beneath the stars, these tramps were what we today would recognize as London’s homeless population, and Polly was among their number.
In piecing together the narratives of those who fell victim to Jack the Ripper, it is remarkable that both the police and the press appear to have ignored the fact that a significant number of outcast women who slept in lodging houses also slept rough on a regular basis. A lodging-house bed, like a casual ward bed, was used in rotation with nights spent curled up in doorways. This pattern was an inevitable part of tramping. But as William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, asserted, this omission may not have been intentional; the well-to-do classes simply did not appreciate precisely what it meant to be homeless. “To very many, even of those who live in London, it may be news that there are so many hundreds who sleep out of doors every night,” he wrote in In Darkest England and the Way Out, one of the era’s most influential explorations of poverty:
There are comparatively few people stirring after midnight, and when we are snugly tucked into our own beds we are apt to forget the multitude outside in the rain and the storm who are shivering the long hours through on the hard stone seats in the open or under the arches of a railway. These homeless, hungry people are, however, there, but being broken-spirited folk for the most part they seldom make their voices audible in the ears of their neighbours.10
Rough sleepers may have felt invisible to “respectable society,” but they filled London in their numbers. In 1887 the estimate of those sleeping in Trafalgar Square varied between “more than two hundred” and “six hundred” each night. William Booth recorded 270 on the Thames Embankment and 98 in Covent Garden Market during one night in 1890.11 At least as many were believed to shelter in Hyde Park. However, these locations were only the most conspicuous haunts. Each of the capital’s neighborhoods was riddled with others. The area around Christ Church, Spitalfields, was another favorite, in addition to those “little nooks and corners of resort in many sheltered yards, vans, etc., all over London.”12
While the experience of homelessness in Victorian London was one of wretched misery for all who were forced to endure it, women like Polly, who found themselves without shelter, might also expect to become victims of sexual violence. As women who lived without male protection or a roof over their heads were considered outcasts, and outcasts were regarded as defective women, so it followed that outcasts were also morally corrupt and sexually impure. It was generally accepted by all levels of society, without question, that such women would do anything for food and a bed. Because they were desperate, they were there to be used. In some cases, their permission needn’t even be solicited.
Mary Higgs, a minister’s wife who went undercover as a female tramp to study the effects of poverty, was horrified to find that in her ragged dress she was continually verbally assaulted by men. “I had never realised before that a lady’s dress, or even that of a respectable working-woman, was a protection,” she wrote. “The bold, free look of a man at a destitute woman must be felt to be realised.” When staying at a casual ward she learned that the lecherous male porter had a key to her dormitory. When she complained about this, she was told that at another workhouse “the portress left the care of the female tramps to a man almost entirely,” and it was accepted that “he did what he liked with them.” On another occasion, when sleeping outdoors, she was approached by a man who “began to talk in a familiar and most disagreeable manner. He asked me where my husband was, and insinuated that I had been leading an immoral life” before suggesting that Higgs spend the night with him in exchange for a share of his breakfast. After five days of such treatment from the men she encountered, Higgs concluded, “I should not care to be a solitary woman tramping the roads.” At the time, Higgs was traveling with a female companion, but she found herself being warned by other women that if she tramped for any length of time, it would be necessary “to take up with a fellow.”13 Many women did, and therefore accepted the sexual advances of another vagrant in order to seal a relationship. Their “free” behavior was then used as further proof to reinforce the belief held by the police and the press that “all vagrant women were prostitutes.”
When J. H. Stallard visited a number of female casual wards, she heard stories similar to those told to Mary Higgs. In her account, Stallard related the story of “Cranky Sal,” a “grey-haired woman” whose face had been disfigured by a stroke. One day she noticed that Sal
ly had acquired a black eye. When Stallard inquired how she got it, Cranky Sal claimed it was “because I would not let a man do as he liked with me.” She explained that she had been on the New Cut in Lambeth when a “decently dressed” man offered to buy her a pennyworth of whelks and a two-penny pie. “Then we strolled along, and stopping at a doorway he offered me a shilling. He said that would get a lodging for the night . . . and he asked me if I was going to take his money, and I said Oh no! I don’t do business like that, and he gave me a violent blow.” When Sally approached a policeman for help, he laughed at her and joked “that the man must have a strong stomach to fancy such as me.” She met with a similar response from another officer, “who . . . refused to listen, and pushed her from the pavement into the middle of the street.” Stallard was moved by Sal’s plight and asked how she managed to survive on the streets. “It is hard to tell you,” she replied, seemingly uncertain as to how she managed to cope. “I do not do anything really bad. You know what I mean; I beg and pick up what I can, and go about anywhere for a bit of food or a night’s lodging. Sometimes I make do on what they give me at these places here; sometimes I get a few pence given me.”14
The selling of sex was not the sole means available to the female vagrant for acquiring sustenance and shelter, nor was it central to her ability to survive. Even if she did resort to it, “casual prostitution” among older women, who did not possess the physical allure of their younger counterparts, frequently did not involve penetrative intercourse, but rather manual stimulation or a grope up the skirt. Much of the era’s alarmist writing about impoverished and homeless women focused on the young who turned to prostitution without taking into account that older women faced a slightly different set of circumstances. For a woman no longer in her youth, there were other options. When work could not be had, begging, even among other beggars, could yield the pennies, and the cup of tea or piece of bread, needed to survive another day. As social commentators marveled, charity was “frequently derived from the lowest orders”; the most lethargic old female vagrants were tended to by “the energetic, prosperous mendicant” who “is called upon to give to those who are his inferiors in his profession.”15 The journalist George Sims remarked, “Friendly leads, whip-rounds, and benefits are nowhere so common as among the labouring classes whose earnings are precarious . . . the street-hawker or the dock labourer flings his sixpence into the hat extended for a poor cove he has never seen in his life without a second thought.” Among the homeless who frequented the lodging houses, these charitable practices were a way of life. Sims noted that if a man came into such a place “who has not the four pence to pay for his bed” and “his woes appear real, round goes the hat in a minute, and the other lodgers pay for his night’s rest.” Food too was divided among poorer lodgers: “a man, seeing a neighbour without anything, will hand him his teapot, and say, ‘Here you are, mate’ and offer him the leaves for a second brew.”16 Although not everyone was fortunate enough to have their bed and tea bought every night, this tradition of lending assistance was an invaluable aid to a tramp.
Polly’s experience of tramping would not have differed from that of other women. Initially, life on the street would have been shocking and distressing, and then gradually accepted with resignation. It is no wonder that by the time she was arrested in Trafalgar Square, in 1887, after nearly six months of vagrancy, the formerly respectable, well-behaved tenant of the Peabody Buildings had evolved into a disorderly, foul-mouthed menace.
Following her hearing on October 25, Polly was “released on her own recognisances,” but was instructed to go into the workhouse or face arrest.17 On this occasion, she complied and went directly to the nearest one, on Endell Street in Covent Garden. From here she was transferred to the Strand Union Workhouse in Edmonton, where she remained until December, when, evidently, she could bear her stay there no longer and discharged herself.
Invariably, when she traded the regimentation of institutional life for tramping, Polly was soon reminded of its hardships, especially in midwinter. On December 19 she turned up once more at the gates of Lambeth Union Workhouse, but it seems there was some question as to whether she still belonged to the parish where she once lived. After passing Christmas inside the workhouse, the one day of the year when inmates were fed a proper dinner of roast beef and plum pudding, Polly was sent on her way. Now uncertain as to what part of London she might legally call her home, Polly began to wander north of the river, toward Holborn. She passed several nights in the casual ward at Clerkenwell and managed to scrape together the pennies for three nights at a lodging house in Fulwood’s Rents, a dingy court off Chancery Lane, in the area she had known so well as a child. When she had run through what small amount of money she possessed, she handed herself over to Holborn Union Workhouse. Tramping in the cold and damp of January had taken its toll, and Polly soon fell ill, at which point she was transferred to the infirmary in Archway.18
While Polly was under Holborn Union’s care, the guardians, in accordance with the Poor Law, had to determine if she actually belonged there, or if some other Poor Law Union should be footing her bill in its own workhouse. After Polly had recovered, she was interviewed on February 13, 1888. It was then decided that she should be sent back to Lambeth, to the workhouse that had only just turned her out.19 On April 16, she was dispatched like a human parcel to Renfrew Road Workhouse. Shortly after her arrival there, Polly stood before the matron, Mrs. Fielder, who eighteen months earlier had placed her in service. One might imagine some sighing and scowling from both sides. Lambeth Union did not want Polly and was prepared to offer her another placement in domestic service, hoping for a better outcome this time.
Mrs. Sarah Cowdry of 16 Rosehill Road in Wandsworth, South London, had made it known to the Lambeth guardians that she and her husband would be willing to take a woman from the workhouse into their home as a servant. As observant Baptists, the Cowdrys wished not only to lend assistance to those less fortunate, but also to lead lives of moral rectitude, and to serve as examples to those receiving their charity. As chief clerk of works to the Metropolitan Police, Samuel Cowdry had undoubtedly acquired a certain understanding of the city’s social ills, and, perhaps in response, he and his wife had committed to a life of abstinence from alcohol.
On the morning of May 12, Polly Nichols arrived at the Cowdrys’ comfortable middle-class home with nothing more than the clothes on her back. As the only servant in a household occupied by one couple in their early sixties and an unmarried niece in her twenties, Polly’s duties would not have been especially demanding. She would be expected to clean the rooms and cook the meals, but also could enjoy her own attic room and her own bed, which must have seemed a luxury after months of tramping or suffering in the workhouse. As Polly had no attire befitting her station as a housemaid, Mrs. Cowdry would have provided her with at least one, if not two changes of clothes, along with a decent bonnet and shoes, a nightgown, caps, pinafores, a shawl, a pair of gloves, undergarments, and a variety of other accouterments, such as a hairbrush, combs, and pins. No middle-class mistress wanted her maid to appear ragged before her visitors.
During her first week at “Ingleside,” as the Cowdrys called their home, Sarah probably suggested that Polly write to her family and inform them of her whereabouts. Her mistress brought her paper and a pen, and Polly, perhaps for the first time in two years, gathered the courage to address her father:
I just write to say you will be glad to know that I am settled in my new place and going alright up to now. My people went out yesterday and have not returned so I am left in charge. It is a grand place with trees and gardens back and front. All has been newly done up. They are teetotallers and very religious so I ought to get on. They are very nice people and I have not much to do. I do hope you are all right and the boy [Polly’s elder son, who was then living with his grandfather] has work. So goodbye for the present.
Yours Truly,
Polly
Answer soon please an
d let me know how you are.20
What ensued over the next two months at the house in Wandsworth is unknown. In the beautiful warm days of summer, Polly might have considered her life a paradise compared to what she had known on the streets and in the casual wards. She had access to the Cowdrys’ peaceful garden; she wore clean clothes and had vermin-free hair. There would have been three meals a day; dinners that included meat, fruit, sweets, and other foods she may not have tasted since she parted with her family. She had a real bed, an employer who wished to help her, and no fear of drunken attacks in the middle of the night or abuse from the staff of the casual ward.
It is also possible that she was marched to chapel regularly, pressed into saying her prayers and studying her Bible, and made to feel ashamed of who she was and how she had led her life. And even if her employer was unstinting in her kindness and forgiveness, Polly may not have allowed herself to feel worthy of such comfort. Additionally, at the Cowdrys’ house Polly had no company other than her master and mistress and their niece, Miss Mancher, who would not be inclined to chat with her or share jokes and secrets. With no other staff for companions, Polly may have found that her days and nights were long and empty. She had too many hours in which to pine for all she had lost.
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