The Five

by Hallie Rubenhold

  On November 10, following Elisabeth’s regular health examination, Maria, in her bonnet and winter cloak, would have been waiting for her outside the inspection house to escort her to her new life. This offer of work, of a home, and a hand held out in sympathy was an exceptional stroke of good fortune. According to the law, such an offer of work was the only way, outside marriage, for a woman to have her name struck from the police register. It was a rare opportunity to restart her life and restore her reputation. What it was precisely that made Maria Wiesner choose Elisabeth from among the many faces at the Kurhuset will remain unknown, but it is possible that something in Allmän Kvinna 97’s tragic story moved her. Perhaps it was because they were of a similar age and both came from villages in the west of Sweden. Perhaps Maria, who had been married for two years, was in need of a companion as well as a servant. Perhaps too, she saw in Elisabeth a religious devotion and a genuine desire to alter her fate.

  To have a servant’s name stricken from “the register of shame,” an employer had to write a letter of surety to the police, vouching for the future character and conduct of the former public woman. On November 13, three days after Elisabeth had followed Maria to the Wies­ners’ first-floor apartment, her employer wrote, “The servant-maid Elisabeth Gustafsson was engaged in my service on November 10 and I am responsible for her good conduct as long as she stays in my service.”* On the subsequent day, Elisabeth was required to undergo one final health inspection. The doctor pronounced that her cure had been a success, and Allmän Kvinna 97 was no more.

  It can only be hoped that Elisabeth’s time with the Wiesners was happy. As 27 Husargatan was owned by an army sergeant who had played the trumpet in the orchestra with Carl Wiesner, the apartments appear to have been let to a number of his associates. Beside the owner, Johan Fredrik Bergendahl, the Wiesners shared the building with another army trumpet-player, Frans Oscar Malm, and an army widow and her children. This year, as winter closed in and returned its heavy, cold darkness to the city, Elisabeth found herself amid candlelight, a hearth fire, and music.

  In the nineteenth century, it was music and art that drew all the disparate strands of society together. Although those who produced entertainment tended to hail from the working or “artisan” class, those who participated in and sponsored cultural endeavors were frequently some of the wealthiest and most influential members of the community. Artists, like their well-endowed patrons, traveled internationally; they mixed with a variety of people of all nationalities and could gain access to the ears of those in power. It is likely that it was through music that Elisabeth was given her next opportunity.

  The commercial expansion of Gothenburg, which began in the eighteenth century, continued at a rapid pace through the nineteenth. The city’s large port and access to raw materials, such as timber and ore, attracted a significant amount of foreign investment from the British, who saw grand possibilities for making their fortunes. Families such as the Dicksons, the Keillers, and the Wilsons started shipping empires. David Carnegie opened an investment bank, a sugar refinery, and a brewery. Gothenburg soon became a draw for British master brewers, as well as for Scottish and English engineers, who were contracted to design railways and sewage systems. The British community exerted such a presence that Gothenburg soon acquired the nickname “Little London.”

  Gothenburg’s “Little Londoners,” who largely came from Scotland, were also some of the city’s most generous philanthropists. James Jameson Dickson, his brother, and his father raised the money to fund the Gothenburg Orchestra and played a vital role in the lives of the musicians. The leader of the Gothenburg Orchestra and director of Gothenburg’s military band, Josef Czapek, was Carl Wiesner’s friend and had been his employer; Czapek also served as the organist at the English Church, the very heart of the British community. It was likely to have been through this network that the Wiesners were made aware of a position for a maidservant wishing to travel with a British family back to London.

  It is possible that Maria and Elisabeth had discussed Elisabeth’s feelings about Gothenburg. Although no longer on the police register or working as a prostitute, she only needed to step outside the door of the Wiesners’ home onto Husargatan to see the faces of those who remembered what she had been. Each day, in the shops or at the market, she might encounter former clients, the owners of the coffeehouses, or women who shared her former profession. The police too would continue to watch her. So long as she remained in the city, Elisabeth could never escape her past, and so the possibility of beginning again in London, as a housemaid to an affluent family, must have seemed a gift from providence.

  If fate had not already been generous, it bestowed on her one final offering. It is believed that while she lived with the Wiesners, Elisabeth received an inheritance of sixty-five crowns, said to be from the estate of her deceased mother.9 However, as Swedish law stated that women under the age of twenty-five were not able to inherit money in their own right and that property belonged to a woman’s husband after death, it is likely that this money indeed came from a different source.10 It was not uncommon for a man parting from his mistress to offer her such a payment as recompense for any misfortune he had visited upon her. Wherever it came from, the relatively small sum would have helped Elisabeth purchase items necessary for her new life: clothing, shoes, hats, perhaps even a trunk for traveling.

  In early February, the snow lay thick along the city streets. Gothenburg’s canals were slicked over with ice. At the port, on February 7, 1866, dockworkers, sailors, and passengers were wrapped in wool and fur against the sharp cold. Elisabeth stood among them, preparing to board one of the London-bound ships whose funnels pushed toward the sky, pumping out warm clouds into the frozen air.

  Five days earlier, she had filed her application for immigration to England and submitted a certificate of altered residence for the capital city. On the form she stated that she was traveling without her family. She had only recently turned twenty-two and would be the only Swede to immigrate to London that day.11 She would not be traveling on one of the crowded immigrant ships that sailed to Hull, but in a certain degree of comfort with her new British employers. As she stood on deck or watched the peaks and domes of the city’s skyline diminish through the windows, she could not have felt much remorse. Gothenburg had left a cruel mark upon her, one that would always remain, no matter where she called home.

  The Immigrant

  Few men commanded respect in Sheerness like William Stride. He was the sort of somber local figure at whom townspeople tipped their hats but were afraid to smile. Stride had done everything a laboring man could to improve his life and clamber into the ranks of the property-owning bourgeoisie. He had begun his career around 1800, doing work on the docks as a shipwright, but after decades of prudent saving and investment, he came to make his money in the development of land and the sale of houses. By the 1840s, he was living in one of his own buildings, on an entire street of homes that bore his name: Stride’s Row. The man who had formerly repaired and constructed ships had become a commissioner of Sheerness Pier, and if anyone ventured to ask him what he attributed his success to, Stride would almost certainly have cited his devotion to God.

  Shortly after his marriage in 1817, Stride converted to Methodism, a religion to which he adhered strictly throughout his life and which governed his every decision. In spite of his comparative wealth, Stride, his wife, Eleanor, and their nine children had an austere and abstemious existence. For most of it, the couple and their expanding family chose to inhabit one of the cottages on Stride’s Row. According to the strictures of their faith, the Strides would have eschewed any of the outward signifiers of affluence: no expensive clothing, no jewelry, and nothing but the simplest furnishings. There would be no dancing, no theater, and no cards games; they upheld a weekly day of fasting. Most important, in this town of sailors and seaside amusement, the family shunned alcohol. In spite of the fact that he was abundantly able to do so, William Stride never employed a live-in se
rvant, even after the death of his wife in 1858.

  Into this environment of restraint and self-control, John Thomas Stride was born in 1821. As the second-eldest child, John was initiated into his father’s profession and trained to become a carpenter. While the busy dockyards at Sheerness would have offered men of John’s trade ample opportunities for work in the early part of his life, by the mid-nineteenth century, when iron came to replace wood in the construction of ships, employment would have become more difficult to secure. It is likely that this contributed to the reason why John, unmarried at the age of forty, continued to live at home, caring for his elderly father and keeping watch over his youngest brother, Daniel, who appears to have struggled with mental health issues. That year, in 1861, a difficult situation at home may have come to a head when John caught Daniel stealing six pounds, eleven shillings, and six pence from John’s top drawer. William Stride would not have looked kindly on such behavior, and it is likely that it was his decision to denounce Daniel to the police. Daniel was arrested, imprisoned, and tried at the petty sessions in March, where John refused to prosecute him and instead secured his brother’s release.1 It was not long after this incident that the frustrated carpenter decided to leave Sheerness and seek work in London.

  In the 1860s, any Londoner wishing to purchase a well-made set of dining chairs or a fashionably designed sideboard would pay a visit to one of over seventy furniture-making establishments situated around the northern part of Tottenham Court Road. The area, which spread from Marylebone Road eastward for over a mile to St. Pancras railway station, was filled with factories, warehouses, and shops where the scent of freshly cut mahogany and oak perfumed the air. By the time John Stride arrived in London, the city’s “furniture district” was home to 5,252 employees who worked in every aspect of the trade, from upholstering to cabinetmaking to sales. Stride, with his box of carpenter’s tools, would have been able to acquire work easily at one of the numerous workshops.

  He also took lodgings within the area, in the home of Charles Leftwich, at 21 Munster Street, just off the Euston Road. Leftwich, who made his money as a lead merchant, a property rental agent, and an occasional inventor of plumbing devices, was a respectable middle-class family man whose finances were not beyond taking in a lodger to fill a spare room. John, a single, middle-aged Methodist who was accustomed to a quiet, teetotal life, was the ideal boarder. Nonetheless, the Leftwich family, tended to by two servants, likely maintained a socially discreet distance from John. Leaving for work as early as dawn and returning late, the carpenter would have taken his meals apart from the family—in his room, in the kitchen, or sometimes at Daniel Fryatt’s coffeehouse at 6 Munster Street.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, the coffeehouse, often associated with the intellectual pursuits of the Georgian era, was experiencing a revival among all ranks of London’s working men. Open from as early as 5 a.m. to as late as 10 p.m., these establishments offered simple meals of chops, kidneys, bread and butter, pickles, and eggs, along with cups of sugared coffee. The latest newspapers and periodicals were also available to read or to hear read aloud, but no alcohol was served. Coffeehouses became a retreat for those who had taken abstinence pledges or simply for men who wished to enjoy a convivial environment somewhere other than the pub. Factory workers and craftsmen who once drank porter in the mornings now stopped on their way to work to buy a penny roll and a cup of hot caffeine. Later in the day the busy atmosphere of the coffeehouse mellowed into something more restful for those on their way home from work. Patrons were encouraged to take their time amid the partitioned, dark-wood booths, enjoying a plate of pork chops, perusing the lightly stained periodicals. “In the evenings these places become reading rooms,” wrote one observer. “They are convenient to thousands of persons who have not the comforts of domesticity at home. The good fire, the bright light, the supply of newspapers and magazines, and the cup of simple beverage, are obtainable for a few pence . . .”2

  John Stride, without a wife or family and far from the familiar Kentish coast, must have passed many an hour in this pleasant environment, conversing with Fryatt and contemplating the possibility of opening a similar establishment. As a man in his forties, John would have no longer been able to ignore the physical strains of slaving over a carpenter’s bench or in a furniture factory six days a week. Like his father, he recognized the worth of investing hard labor in a business that might generate a larger and more comfortable income, and might one day support a wife and children.

  Like most skilled laborers, John had limited opportunities to meet women because of the length of his working day. Such socializing typically occurred at pubs, public parks, music halls, or church events. Coffeehouses, too, offered some possibilities.

  Generally, women did not frequent these dark-wood rooms, which smelled of brewing coffee and fat and echoed with gruff male conversation. However, shop girls, servants, and those who worked for a daily wage often came in for coffee and a penny bun while on an errand for their mistress or for a lunch of soup, fruit, and tapioca pudding. This is most likely how John Stride came to meet a young housemaid from Sweden called Elisabeth Gustafsdotter.*

  When she first arrived in London, in the winter of 1866, Elisabeth lived nowhere near the busy commercial surroundings of Tottenham Court Road, but in an elegant townhouse on the fringe of Hyde Park. At midcentury, few locations in the city were more synonymous with wealth and gentility than the streets encircling the beau monde’s favorite spot for promenades. Although the identity of Elisabeth’s employer remains a mystery, his social status is not. Elisabeth would have taken her place within a household of servants in the home of a prosperous, cosmopolitan family not unlike the Dicksons, who traveled regularly between Sweden, Britain, and continental Europe to superintend their shipping, iron, and timber empire. Such a prestigious position in domestic service came with high stakes. Now part of a hierarchy of staff, Elisabeth had to submit to the governance of a housekeeper or a butler in a grand home spread over several floors, a stark change from serving a generous, lower-middle-class mistress in a handful of rooms. A position working for a gentleman came with a new set of rigid rules; clean hands, a straight back, and a silent tongue were essential. Elisabeth’s eyes were never to meet those of her master or mistress. If, while crossing a hall or ascending a staircase, she encountered a member of the family, she was to turn her face to the wall. The demands of the job, the unfamiliar culture, and the new language would have presented many challenges to a young maidservant from Sweden.

  When she accepted the offer of a job in London, Elisabeth also decided to settle permanently in Britain. Although it was not required that every Swede who moved to London register with the Swedish Church, it appears to have been an administrative formality for those who had applied for permanent residency in the UK. The journey from Hyde Park to the Swedish Church in Prince’s Square in the East End of London would have been a time-consuming one for a servant allocated no more than a day off per month. By the time Elisabeth was able to make her way there, five months had elapsed since her arrival in Britain. Ultimately, her errand appears to have been carried out at the behest of her employer in the course of preparing for a move abroad. Elisabeth, who could not write, gave her name to the clerk of the church, who inscribed it on the register, along with a note stating her occupation and that she was single. At the same time, Elisabeth also expressed her intention to travel to Brest, in France, one of the centers of the shipping industry, and applied for a change of residency.3 Whether she did indeed follow her employers to France is unknown; a line was later drawn through her application by another hand, perhaps before the intended departure or after a return to London.

  The circumstances that led Elisabeth to leave her position in Hyde Park are unclear, but a strange inference made during the coroner’s inquest in 1888 hints at a possible scandal, not unlike the one she may have been embroiled in at Gothenburg. Commentators have remarked that Elisabeth had been blessed with beautif
ul features. Chief Inspector Walter Dew observed wistfully that notwithstanding her trials and tribulations, “traces of prettiness remained in her face.”4 As a young woman in London, with an exotic foreign accent, a high forehead, and dark wavy hair, she would have caught the eye of many admirers. One of these, a policeman, courted her while she lived with her employers at Hyde Park, though due to the long hours she worked, it is not difficult to conceive how this relationship failed to blossom. However, it would appear that someone closer to home may have also had a claim on her affections.

  More than twenty years later, Michael Kidney, a witness at the inquest into Elisabeth’s death, was questioned about the details of his own romantic relationship with her. He implied that it was stormy but that he treated Elisabeth as he might a wife, regardless of the fact that she left him on several occasions.

  “Do you know anyone else she has picked up with?” asked the coroner.

  “I have seen the address of the brother of the gentleman, with whom she lived as a servant somewhere near Hyde Park,” he replied, with what seems, at first, to be a strange non sequitur.