“That was not what I asked you,” the coroner responded; “do you think she went away with anyone else?” he clarified, referring to the period when Kidney was involved with Elisabeth, not to an episode in the past, before Kidney knew her.5
Why she retained the details, not of the employer for whom she worked more than twenty years earlier, but of his brother, raises many questions. However, it is extremely revealing that Kidney volunteered the information in the context of being probed on the subject of men with whom his partner may have had a relationship. In what form this address appeared is also mysterious. As Elisabeth could not write, the details would have been inscribed by another hand and given to her. Perhaps it was a letter, written by the man himself, carefully preserved over the decades. Elizabeth had also obviously spoken of him and their history to Michael Kidney. Twenty years is a remarkably long time to recall someone who had simply been the brother of her employer.
It may have been on account of this illicit attachment that Elisabeth eventually left the Hyde Park residence. Whatever the state of affairs, her employer (or perhaps his brother) provided her with a good enough reference to enable her to acquire work elsewhere.
By the winter of 1869, if not earlier, Elisabeth had found employment working for a widow by the name of Elizabeth Bond. Mrs. Bond, as she was known to her two servants, ran a genteel lodging house, which rented furnished rooms to a respectable clientele at 67 Gower Street, around the corner from the furniture warehouses and shops of Tottenham Court Road. A Swedish maid, well-trained in a gentleman’s household in Hyde Park, would lend a certain air of sophistication to Mrs. Bond’s establishment, though Elisabeth’s chores consisted of the usual drudgery. While Mrs. Bond and her widowed daughter, Emily Williams, managed the business, Elisabeth and her fellow servant passed their days and nights trudging up and down the three flights of stairs with their scuttles of coal and buckets of water and trays laden with supper and tea. Those whose grates she scrubbed and beds she made were firmly of the middle class. Mrs. Bond’s lodgers at various times included a lecturer and fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; a Prussian merchant of “fancy goods”; a former brewer and his wife and daughter; a lawyer; and a widow “living on independent means.” Among them, from 1868 through 1869, was also a German musician, Charles Louis Goffrie, and his daughter, who lived at and gave singing and piano lessons from Mrs. Bond’s rooms.6 Once more, Elisabeth found herself among musicians, her workdays lightened by melody and perhaps a remembrance of those who had once lifted her from adversity.
During one of those afternoons or mornings, when Elisabeth was sent out to fetch provisions or visit the post office, she may have stopped at a local coffeehouse for some brief refreshment when she was noticed by a forty-seven-year-old carpenter from Sheerness. It is impossible to say how their meeting occurred or how their relationship progressed, if John and Elizabeth’s paths crossed on multiple occasions, on the street moving to or from work, or in the wooden stalls drinking a dark, sugared brew. Whatever the case, by the early months of 1869, they had become engaged.
Nothing is known about John Stride’s appearance—if he was a man of commanding good looks, or just plain and respectably turned out. By his late forties, he was certain to have been turning gray. What then did a very pretty twenty-five-year-old housemaid, who may have recently been the mistress of her rich employer’s brother, see in a modest maker of furniture nearly twice her age? In her midtwenties, Elisabeth knew that she would have to marry soon, and John, who had lived as a bachelor for many years, likely had put money aside. Perhaps too, after her tumultuous past, John’s affections seemed refreshingly genuine. She had experienced the harm men could do, and John Stride must have seemed a safe choice.
Interestingly, they were married neither in a Methodist chapel nor a Lutheran church, but rather at the Anglican church in Elisabeth’s parish—St. Giles-in-the-Fields, its lobster tail of a spire poking through the London soot. On that day, March 7, 1869, Elisabeth stood before the altar with no one from her life, neither family nor friend—to act as her witness. While Daniel Fryatt signed his name to the register alongside that of his constant customer and companion, the church sexton was made to perform this role for Elisabeth. There was nothing from her past that could intrude on her wedding day. She even chose to cite a false name for her father, “Augustus Gustafsson.” Her experience was one typical of an immigrant, one who wished no shadows or remembrances to fall upon this new chapter. How much her husband understood of her tragic experience in Gothenburg and the disease, which she still carried, is unknown.
The Strides’ marriage marked another fresh beginning in both of their lives. Their union was sealed by the birth of a business venture and a move to another part of town: Poplar, roughly six miles away, in the East End. This relocation would have been carefully considered. John Stride’s intention was to open a coffeehouse, but the possibility of carpentry work at the docks also offered a failsafe in case the business venture failed. The area’s thriving dockyards employed over two hundred full-time laborers and during the 1860s were undergoing an extension project that linked the North London Railway with the port. John’s brother George, a dock clerk, had established himself and his family there, and the convenience of nearby family was likely an equal draw to a couple who expected to soon have children of their own. By 1871, the two Stride brothers were joined by a third, Charles, who settled in Limehouse.
Within months of their wedding, the Strides had opened their new establishment on Upper North Street, in the heart of what was called Poplar New Town. This grid of recently built nineteenth-century streets to the north of the waterside was a mixed area of modest villas, middle-class terraced housing, and lodgings for laboring families. According to the writer Jerome K. Jerome, who lived there as a child in the 1860s, it was a place of contrasts, where “town and country struggled for supremacy,” where the surrounding marshes were still dotted with farms, and where herds of goats and cows might be driven through the streets. “Processions of the unemployed” moving between the docks and the workhouse were also a regular sight.7
In theory, the social composition of Upper North Street, with its grocers, apothecaries, dressmakers, and butchers, was no different from Munster Street, where John had studied Daniel Fryatt’s efforts at keeping a coffeehouse. The teachers, masons, servants, shipwrights, and laborers who lived alongside the shopkeepers would have been the Strides’ intended clientele, not the workers at the dockside. The coffeehouse’s position across the road from Trinity Methodist Chapel was also strategic. The costs of the lease and the initial investment in the business were presumably covered by John’s savings; Elisabeth too may have contributed. It is possible that John employed his skills as a carpenter to create or improve upon a traditional wood interior of plain booths, varnished partitions, and drop-leaf tables. With Elisabeth’s experience as a servant, she and John would have run their family business together. Charles Dickens describes the ubiquitous sight in working men’s coffeehouses of the “neat waitress” who was “economical of speech” but ever “ringing the changes between her two refrains of ‘coffee and slice’ and ‘tea and a hegg.’ ”8 A coffeehouse owner’s hours were long ones, but the couple could keep their own clock, and, for the first time, Elisabeth’s scrubbing, cooking, washing, and serving would have been performed not for an employer, but for the benefit of her husband and herself.
The difficulties the Strides were likely to have encountered came from competition with pubs. Despite the popularity of coffeehouses, not every working man was prepared to abandon alcohol and the jolly camaraderie of the local public house. While the coffeehouse may have had its dedicated adherents, a business could rise or fall based on its location: too many pubs and too few teetotalers nearby could close the shutters of even the most welcoming coffee room. By 1871, the Strides had learned this the hard way. They were forced to move their business to 178 Poplar High Street, where they hoped to attract a better trade. The failure of this first
venture would have come at a cost. It appears that John returned, at least part time, to his former calling, to recover the loss. On that year’s census, he reported his occupation not as a coffeehouse owner, but as a carpenter. Still, the Strides would not concede defeat and were just able to sustain their business.
In four years since they were married, no children had been born to the coffeehouse keepers. If Elisabeth had pregnancies, they were not brought to term, most likely on account of her condition. While her syphilis could not be communicated to John in its latent stage, there continued to exist a high risk of miscarriage and stillbirth. In an effort to bury her past, Elisabeth may have been too ashamed to confide her secret to John. Bringing syphilis into the marital home was considered a disgrace and a tragedy, but it was one for which errant husbands who visited prostitutes and who kept mistresses tended to be blamed. Medical texts generally addressed the problem from this perspective while partially exonerating the man for his conduct by claiming the root of the issue lay with the selfish immorality of those in the sex trade.9 The possibility that a man might choose to marry a woman with a sexual past, who had been exposed to the disease, seemed unconscionable. Elisabeth’s failure to become a mother in an era when a woman’s identity and purpose was defined by this role would have been devastating to her, especially as society and the church would have ensured that she shouldered the blame for her own misfortune. Elisabeth’s upbringing would have inculcated in her the belief that this was punishment for her sinful life. How John and his devout Methodist family viewed the situation is uncertain. While Stride maintained contact with his brother Charles, his wife, and his children during the early years of his marriage to Elisabeth, it seems that they began to drift apart after 1872. The Stride family appears to have been a divided one, and at no point were the fissures more evident than in the wake of the death of their revered patriarch.
In the early 1870s, William Stride was approaching his ninetieth birthday. Stubborn and determined until his last, he never once missed a meeting of the Sheerness Pier Commission. However, by the end of the summer of 1873, his health had begun to falter. On September 6 he died in the home he still shared with his son Daniel, and was attended by his daughter Sarah Ann. For one who had played such a prominent role in the development of Sheerness, the obituary in the local paper was rather sparing in words. It described him only as one “who was generally respected throughout the town.”10 No catalogue of his great deeds or selfless acts of charity appeared and, perhaps more revealingly, no mention was made of a devoted and grieving family.
With the exception of Daniel, no one among the Stride children had dedicated more of his or her adult life to their father than John. If anyone had a reason to expect something from William Stride’s will, it was his second-eldest son, who had forgone marriage until his forties and remained in Sheerness at the expense of his income and future financial security in order to serve his family. However, when the will was read on the thirtieth of that month, it was found to contain a number of surprises.
Daniel was handsomely rewarded with property. His father left him five houses on Stride’s Row and two houses on Victory Street, which included an additional “plot of ground, a stable, a coal shed, a workshop and a garden.” William Stride’s daughter Sarah Ann Snook, who had made her life only three doors down from her father, was also favored with two houses on Stride’s Row. John’s affluent brother Edward, who had remained in Sheerness, trained as a surgeon, and become the star of the family, was bequeathed a house on Stride’s Row as well.11 John received nothing, not even a mention or acknowledgment.
William Stride had played a vindictive game of favorites, sending a clear signal from beyond the grave as to who among his progeny had pleased or dishonored him. John’s eldest brother, William James, who had been born deaf and struggled financially as a laborer in Sheerness all of his life, was similarly excluded, as were all the sons who had abandoned their father for London.
It cannot be a coincidence that John and Elisabeth were forced to sell the lease of their coffeehouse within months of William Stride’s death. The collapse of their first endeavor on Upper North Street was likely to have left a debt, while attempting to buoy their fortunes with a second failing business would only have increased their arrears. In order to keep his concern afloat John may have had to borrow money, quite probably against the promise of inheriting property. When his father’s will left him disappointed, there was nothing more to be done but to shut the door for good on his ambitions and to attempt, in whatever way he could, to keep a roof over the couple’s heads.
Long Liz
It was nearly 8 p.m. The sky had darkened, and the moon had risen over the flat, silvery Thames. On the evening of September 3, 1878, summer was in retreat, and more than eight hundred passengers on board the Princess Alice, a pleasure cruiser filled with day-trippers and those returning from their holidays in Sheerness, were headed back to London. On deck, the ship’s band played a rousing polka, and couples gathered to dance and sing. Children chased one another across the slippery wooden decks, out of reach of their parents and nannies. Gentlemen read their newspapers and watched the passing shoreline—warehouses, docks, and factories disappearing into night’s shadow. As they approached North Woolwich Pier, it never occurred to those lulled by the gentle evening and the music that they were moving directly into the course of the Bywell Castle, an 890-ton ironclad coal freighter. By the time both ships realized that a collision was imminent, it was too late. The sharp point of the Bywell Castle’s bow plunged knifelike through the Princess Alice, tearing through the engine room and shearing the vessel in half. Within minutes, both parts of the ship were sucked into the depths of the sewage-filled Thames; panic-stricken passengers clung to its sides as it went under. The river was filled with bobbing heads, gasping for breath and crying out to loved ones across the black water. Parents held tight to their drowning children; women’s heavy skirts and metal bustles made it almost impossible for them to fight the pull of the tide. The Bywell Castle threw down ropes and lowered the few lifeboats stowed on board, but its crew was otherwise impotent to save the lives of so many.
More than 650 died in the tragedy, the greatest loss of life sustained in any Thames shipping disaster. The number of survivors was never confirmed, though estimates placed it between 69 and 170. Those who lived faced the horrific task of helping to identify the dead, who were daily pulled from the clasp of the murderous river. Entire families perished on the night of September 3. Many children, whose parents had gone off for the day, were left orphans. Wives and husbands were widowed; some had watched helplessly as a loved one swallowed water and slipped beneath the waves.
ThePrincess Alice disaster traumatized London. The story spread furiously among the communities surrounding the East End docks. Many had witnessed the events firsthand—seen the bodies, the wreckage—or listened with horror as others described what they had observed. As the impact of the tragedy was felt equally among those from Sheerness, the news of it must have landed especially hard on the Stride brothers in Poplar and Limehouse, who would have anxiously scanned the growing lists of the dead, searching for the names of family or friends and neighbors. Elisabeth took in the magnitude of the calamity with keen interest as tale after tale circulated in the newspapers and among those she knew.
By the time of the Princess Alice disaster, Elisabeth’s own life was in turmoil. Following the collapse of John’s final attempt to maintain his coffeehouse, their marriage had turned sour. The ensuing financial hardship and possibly other factors, such as the couple’s inability to produce children, may also have contributed to the friction growing between them. It is likely that drink had also begun to play a role.
In March 1877, eight years into their marriage, it appears that Elisabeth left John. Although this separation was to be temporary, she had nowhere to turn, and rather than opt for the workhouse casual ward, she chose to take her chances on the street. On March 24, she was picked up by the police un
der vagrancy laws, either for begging or sleeping rough, and forcibly taken to the workhouse. After this sequence of events, the Strides were reconciled, but their arguments and difficulties continued. Two years later, when John had fallen ill, Elisabeth appealed for aid from the Swedish Church, and in 1880, her name appears in workhouse records, once at Stepney Union in February, and a second time at Hackney Union in April, where the word “destitute” was written beside her entry.1
It was during this period, if not as early as September 1878, that Elisabeth alighted upon an ingenious method of supporting herself. If John could not provide for them, then she would have to use her wits to survive. A keen student of human nature, Elisabeth watched and listened and cogitated. As the autumn of 1878 wore on, she had heard a litany of horror stories about the victims of the Princess Alicedisaster. Noticing how these sorrowful tales of loss had led to outpourings of pity and offers of material compensation, she invented a narrative of her own. At the time, the newspapers were filled with information about the generosity of Londoners, who had raised more than £38,246 as part of a relief fund.2 Victims, survivors, and their families were urged to come forward with claims, and Elisabeth may have been inspired to do just this. In the weeks following the calamity, many were playing this game. On September 29, a twenty-one-year-old woman named Elizabeth Wood was sent to prison for a month after defrauding a Woolwich coffeehouse owner on the pretext that she had survived the disaster but lost her family.3 Similarly, the Princess Alice Fund rejected fifty-five applications for assistance from “those with no good reason.” Elisabeth Stride’s name does not appear among the list of survivors and, unless she employed an alias, neither was she successful in acquiring charity from the relief fund. It’s far more likely that her gains were made simply by peddling her story to concerned individuals.
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