Elisabeth’s tale was an elaborate one, colored with detail and drama designed to beguile the listener. She claimed that she had been aboard the Princess Alice with John and two of their nine children. She appears to have told some people that John was employed on the ship, and she and her children were accompanying him that day. When the pleasure cruiser was struck, they were separated; John had attempted to save the children, but he and the two young ones were snatched away by the river and drowned. Elisabeth, who found herself within one of the ship’s collapsing funnels, saw that a rope had been dropped by the Bywell Castle, and grabbed for it. In scaling her way to safety, she was kicked in the mouth by the man above her, which damaged her palate. Remarkably, she survived, or so she told those rapt by her story of courage. She went on to say that life as a widow was fraught with hardship. As she was unable to support her seven remaining children, she had placed them in the care of an orphanage in South London run by the Swedish Church. In the end, she had nowhere to turn but to a friend of her husband’s, and there she still found herself in dire financial need.
It is likely that Elisabeth knitted this story together from others she had heard, or lifted it wholesale from a person she had known. John Stride’s wife had never borne nine children, or if she had, the true tragedy may have lain in the fact that none survived birth. She may have instead endured nine failed pregnancies, or perhaps she had simply borrowed the number from John, who was one of nine siblings. Whatever the case, in the ensuing years Elisabeth would retell this tale enough times to convince everyone around her of its veracity. It would be the first step in rewriting her history and reframing what would become a malleable identity. She would also use it to distance herself from her husband; during periods when she was separated from him, she claimed he was dead.
In April 1881, the couple were again reconciled, though this time the reunion lasted only a handful of months. The census for that year found their circumstances considerably compromised. When once they occupied several rooms above their coffeehouse, their living space was now reduced to a single room in a house on Usher Road, in Bow. By December, John and Elisabeth had apparently agreed to part permanently. Like William Nichols and John Chapman, John Stride may have also consented to pay his wife a small maintenance as a formality of making their separation official. From this period, Elisabeth took up residence in Whitechapel, first on Brick Lane, and then, following a stay in the workhouse infirmary for bronchitis, at the lodging house to which she’d return repeatedly over the next six years: 32 Flower and Dean Street.
According to the writer Howard Goldsmid, “Flowrydean Street,” as its habitués called it, was no “rose by any other name,” but rather “one of the worst of the East-end slums.” It smelled “unwholesome” and looked “uninviting.”4 The Associated Press journalist who visited in 1888 described it in slightly more flattering terms, claiming that “for the East End” it had “a fairly presentable appearance.”
One side of the street is mainly occupied by a huge pile of modern buildings, intended for occupation by the families of artisans, and rented almost exclusively by a colony of middle-class Jews. The other side presents a far more dingy appearance. The brickwork of the houses is blackened with age, and doors and windows alike present the only too familiar aspects betokening the abode of the extreme poor.5
According to the article, all of the buildings on the dilapidated side of the street were registered lodging houses, and number 32 had beds for a hundred “dossers.” While Goldsmid described these dormitories as crawling with insects and rodents, “shamefully overcrowded, very-ill-ventilated, and . . . foul-smelling and unhealthy,” the AP journalist believed number 32 “seemed to look uncommonly comfortable” inside. Certainly, Elisabeth preferred it to other lodging houses, and over the years, came to regard it as a sort of base.
While living at 32 Flower and Dean Street, Elisabeth supported herself through “charring.” A charwoman, “the lowest trade of domestic—even lower than the maid of all work,” was an occasional servant who came to a home for a few hours to perform tasks for families who couldn’t afford live-in staff. The charwoman was generally older than the housemaid, “between 40 and 60,” and usually, as evidenced by her “dirty mob-cap, battered bonnet . . . tucked-up gown and bare, red arms,” impoverished.6 In addition to the two shillings she would receive for a day’s work, Elisabeth might also receive food: toast and tea, scraps of the family meal, or even a provision of sugar.
In the East End, the Jewish community, which comprised the majority of the population between Whitechapel High Street and Hanbury Street, relied on the services of gentile charwomen to assist them during the Saturday Sabbath. As religious custom forbade Jews from engaging in any form of work from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday, a charwoman was hired to light the fires, switch on the gas lighting, and cook and serve meals. As recent immigrants who had escaped persecution in Russia, Prussia, and the Ukraine, most families here did not speak English; Elisabeth learned to communicate with them in Yiddish. In fact, it is possible that she had acquired the rudiments of this language in Gothenburg. Haga, the working-class district where she had lived, was also the home of the city’s Jewish community.7 Working for Jewish families would also offer Elisabeth the security of knowing that fellow immigrants were not usually eager to discuss their pasts, and therefore were unlikely to make many inquiries into hers.
Living apart from John, in a different neighborhood, away from the West End and from Poplar, gave Elisabeth the opportunity to become whomever she wished. She had learned that shedding an identity was as simple as moving somewhere new. While she resided in Whitechapel, she was Elisabeth the widow and Elisabeth the disaster victim. She could be many things to many people; the farmer’s daughter had become a servant, and the servant had become a man’s mistress and a fallen woman. The fallen woman had become a prostitute, and then a rescued Magdalen. She had found herself an immigrant, a foreigner in a new land. She had likely been the paramour of a rich man and then the wife of a struggling carpenter. She had been a coffeehouse keeper and a workhouse inmate. She was Swedish, but she could speak English well enough to fool people into believing it was her first language. She may also at times have claimed to be Irish and used the name Annie Fitzgerald. When she chose to, Elisabeth could even transform herself into another woman’s sister.
In 1883, fate threw Elisabeth into the path of a woman named Mary Malcolm, a tailoress. It seems that the years spent squinting over a needle had ruined what remained of Mrs. Malcolm’s eyesight. Her attraction to the bottle probably did not help matters. One day, perhaps on the street or in a pub, she glimpsed Elisabeth Stride and was convinced it was her estranged sister, Elizabeth Watts. Mary had probably called out her sister’s name, and Elisabeth Stride had conveniently answered to it. The mistaken identity stuck, in part because Elisabeth was all too pleased to use this new relationship to her advantage.
When the tailoress gave her account of events, it appears she conflated the two women’s stories, weaving the details she understood of Elizabeth Watts’s life with those Elisabeth Stride had told her of her recent past. She claimed in her inquest testimony that her sister was colloquially called “Long Liz” and that she had lived with a man who ran a coffeehouse in Poplar. She also stated that she knew Elisabeth’s husband had died in a shipwreck, though recalling the precise circumstances proved problematic. As it happened, Elizabeth Watts’s second husband had genuinely died as a result of a shipwreck on the Isle of St. Paul, but these facts became entangled with Elisabeth Stride’s lies about the Princess Alice disaster. Knowing that her real sister had led a checkered life, which included at least two marriages and a period spent in an asylum, Mary Malcolm was inclined to believe that the bedraggled, impoverished woman she had met was this same person.*
From the time Mrs. Malcolm first encountered “her sister,” she claimed that drink was Elisabeth Stride’s primary failing. She was always in need of money, and Mary “had her doubts” about what sh
e did for a living. However, as family, she felt compelled to assist her. For the next five years, the two women met at least once a week, and sometimes more frequently. Mrs. Malcolm handed over two shillings to Elisabeth every Saturday at four o’clock on the corner of Chancery Lane. Occasionally she gave Elisabeth clothing as well. Regardless of appearances, Mary did harbor some doubts about Elisabeth. In fact, during the five-year period she met with her, she insisted on keeping Elisabeth at an arm’s length. Mrs. Malcolm had never invited “her sister” into her home, claiming, “I was always grateful to get rid of her.” When asked if her husband or anyone else had known about her meetings with “her sister,” she confessed, “No, I kept that from everyone. I was so ashamed.”8
Mary Malcolm’s shame in part may have stemmed from her persistence in maintaining the relationship with Elisabeth in spite of her concerns. So long as Mary did not scrutinize Elisabeth too closely, she could continue to fool herself, while Elisabeth successfully managed to hide from Mary the true circumstances of her life.
In October 1884, Elisabeth received word that John, whose health had been deteriorating for some time, had been admitted to the Stepney Sick Asylum. There, he died of heart disease at the age of sixty-three. He was buried on the thirtieth of the month, and within weeks, Elisabeth’s life rapidly spiraled downward.
Certainly it is no coincidence that by November 13, Elisabeth was arrested on the Commercial Road for soliciting.9 That she was also charged with drunk and disorderly behavior betrays her anguished state of mind. The desire to numb herself and her rage at the world were natural. Frederick Merrick, the chaplain of Millbank Prison, observed that most of his female inmates “loathed” selling sex on the streets and that “their repugnance to it could only be stifled when they were more or less under the influence of intoxicating drinks.”10 For her offenses, the judge gave Elisabeth a prison sentence of seven days’ hard labor. Following this, there is no evidence that she was ever arrested again for soliciting.
It was after John’s death that Elisabeth met and took up residence with another man, Michael Kidney. Kidney was a waterside laborer, a dockworker who loaded and unloaded vessels and earned some extra income as a volunteer in the army reserve. In his midthirties, he was several years younger than his new paramour but always assumed, based on her appearance, that they were roughly the same age. It is believed that the two met on the Commercial Road, though whether it was by accident or while Elisabeth was soliciting is uncertain. The relationship soon became a firm one, and the couple rented a series of dingy furnished rooms together, first on Devonshire Street and then on nearby Fashion Street. Like Elisabeth, Michael enjoyed drinking to excess, and he was no less angry or violent than she was when intoxicated. In January and June 1887, Elisabeth made complaints to police about Kidney’s brutality, though, like many women with an abusive partner, she later dropped the charges.11 However, Elisabeth was by no means a passive victim in her relationship. According to Michael, in the three years the two cohabited, Elisabeth left him twice and was gone, he estimated, “altogether about five months.” “She always returned without my going after her,” he boasted, because “she liked me better than anyone else.”12 On the occasions when she left him, Elisabeth regularly sought out a bed at the familiar surroundings of 32 Flower and Dean Street. The couple’s relationship was a complicated one, which was likely to have come unraveled not only on account of Elisabeth’s drinking and Kidney’s violence, but also due to infidelity. By the end of their time together, Michael was suffering from syphilis, for which he received treatment at Whitechapel infirmary in 1889. He would not have contracted this from Elisabeth, who was no longer contagious by the time she was living with him.
Interestingly, over the course of her many visits with Elisabeth, Mrs. Malcolm didn’t have an inkling of these tribulations. She claimed that she never knew Elisabeth to be involved with a man and that she had only a vague understanding that her “sister” was living in a lodging house, “somewhere in the neighbourhood of the tailors and Jews at the East End.” However, she did know that Elisabeth was undone quite frequently by drink and that she had come before the magistrate and “been locked up” on account of it.13
From roughly 1886 until her death, there does appear to be a distinct change in Elisabeth’s behavior. Her arrests for drunken disorderliness and obscene language increased markedly. By the end of summer of 1888, Elisabeth had been charged on no fewer than four occasions over three months. While this can undeniably be attributed in part to her dependency on alcohol, there may have been another contributing factor. It had been over twenty years since Elisabeth had contracted syphilis, and the disease would have potentially been entering its tertiary and final phase.
Neurosyphilis, or cerebral syphilis, as it was known in the late nineteenth century, presents in a variety of different ways when the disease begins to attack the brain and nervous system. The French physician Alfred Fournier, who conducted a study of the progress of the disease, identified “epileptic fits” as its first manifestation. Interestingly, as Mary Malcolm mentioned in her inquest testimony, Elisabeth had recently begun to suffer from such “fits.” This confused Mary, as she had never known her sister to have epilepsy.14 Apparently, Elisabeth’s seizures were so bad that there were occasions when the police had let her off charges on account of her condition. Had Elisabeth actually suffered from severe epilepsy throughout her life, it is unlikely that she would have been able to maintain her positions in service, or that Michael Kidney and others who knew her would have failed to mention any such condition at the inquest. It is also unlikely that the seizures were a sham. The police and magistrates would have seen every trick in the book to avoid a prison sentence and were unlikely to fall for any act that Elisabeth might feign.
In addition to seizures, neurosyphilis can lead to paralysis in some victims and dementia-like symptoms in others. A victim’s memory may falter, and the sufferer may become prone to hallucinations and delusions. Behavior becomes erratic, if not irrational, inappropriate, or violent. If Elisabeth was indeed suffering from the early stages of neurosyphilis, then her heavy drinking was likely to have disguised these symptoms, or at least offered an easy explanation for her increasing episodes of violence and obscene language. It is also possible that her symptoms themselves drove her to increase her alcohol intake in order to quell the pain or sense of disorientation.
Whether or not Elisabeth’s disease was to blame, her behavior while she lived in Whitechapel was decidedly secretive and deceitful. The scam she perpetrated on Mary Malcolm, as well as her insistence that she was a survivor of the Princess Alice disaster, may have demonstrated to her the gullibility in human nature. In the manner of some of the most experienced con artists, she appears to have learned how to milk this weak spot for financial gain. In her testimony, Mrs. Malcolm mentioned that Elisabeth had told her she had “a hollowness in the right foot,” caused by “an accident when she was run over by a machine” three years earlier. She had told Mary that she intended “to get some money” for it, but Mrs. Malcolm could not say “whether she ever got the money.”15 However, after viewing Elisabeth’s body, she noticed that the “hollowness” had mysteriously disappeared, a development for which Mary could not account. Mary Malcolm also raised another peculiar incident. She claimed that Elisabeth had one day left a naked baby girl outside Mary’s door. “I had to keep it until she fetched it away,” Mary continued. She was under the impression the infant was Elisabeth’s child, which she had had with a policeman.16 Michael Kidney, when questioned about this, was entirely baffled; “she never had a child by me and I never heard of her having a child by a policeman,” he commented.17 The child was unlikely to have been Elisabeth’s, but rather one she had acquired temporarily from an acquaintance or a “baby-farmer” for the purposes of begging.* The addition of an infant, swaddled, crying, and hungry in its “mother’s” arms, was a well-known ruse designed to tug on the heartstrings and purse strings of passersby. Elisabeth later returne
d for the baby. When Mary asked after it again, Elisabeth lied, saying that she had taken the girl to Bath, to live with the family of her first husband.*
Aside from Mary Malcolm, Catherine Lane, the wife of a laborer, was the only other person who claimed to know Elisabeth for a substantial period of time. Lane stated that they had met when Elisabeth first came to stay at 32 Flower and Dean Street, around 1881–82. She saw Elisabeth nearly every day during that time. As the lodging house was the nearest thing Elisabeth had to a permanent home, she made a habit of coming by to visit even while she was living with Michael Kidney. However, given the constancy of their association, it’s also surprising how little either Catherine, or Elizabeth Tanner, the deputy lodging-house keeper at number 32, actually knew about Elisabeth’s life. Neither knew her surname or her age. Whereas Michael Kidney believed her to be in her thirties, Elisabeth had chosen to tell Ann Mills, another resident at the lodging house, that she was “over fifty years of age.”18 No one seemed to know where she had been born. In addition to peddling her stories about the Princess Alice, Elisabeth chose to tell her friends that she was from Stockholm. Only Sven Olsson, the clerk of the Swedish Church to whom she applied regularly for charitable handouts, had a grasp of her true history from the details recorded in the church’s ledgers. Sadly, in all of the time she spent in Whitechapel, Elisabeth’s friendships appear to have never taken on any more than an ephemeral shape, where even those who thought they knew her were kept at an arm’s length.
In late September 1888, Elisabeth returned once more to 32 Flower and Dean Street after she and Michael Kidney had what Catherine Lane described as “words.” By now, Elisabeth was accustomed to these cyclical separations. She gathered her possessions and spoke to a neighbor, a “Mrs. Smith,” whom she asked to look after a Swedish hymnbook while she was away.19 Possessions of value were never safe in a lodging house, and 32 Flower and Dean Street was no different. It was here, on the twenty-sixth, where the social reformer Thomas Barnardo claimed to have encountered her in the communal kitchen, along with several other women. As a campaigner for children’s welfare, Barnardo had come to speak with the women about their experiences with children in lodging houses and how their lot might be improved. Instead, the female residents were more eager to discuss the Whitechapel murders, about which they “seemed thoroughly frightened.” At one point, a “poor creature who had evidently been drinking exclaimed somewhat bitterly; we’re all up to no good and no one cares what becomes of us. Perhaps some of us will be killed next! If anybody had helped the likes of us years ago we would have never come to this!”20 With hindsight, Barnardo claimed that he believed the woman who spoke those words might very well have been Elisabeth Stride. In truth, they all might have been Elisabeth Stride, and certainly Elisabeth strove to be all of those women—everyone and no one. She was anonymous: a woman with a mutable story, a changeable history, someone who had recognized that the world didn’t care about her, and chose to use that as a weapon in order to survive.
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