The Five

by Hallie Rubenhold

  The day of September 29 was no different from any other for Elisabeth. The whitewashers had been in to smarten up the walls of 32 Flower and Dean Street. She and Ann Mills had cleaned the rooms after the men had finished. For completing this task, Elizabeth Tanner gave her six pence. Elisabeth then went to the Queen’s Head Pub on Commercial Street for a drink, where the deputy keeper saw her again. At the inquest Tanner mentioned in passing that Elisabeth had gone out “without a bonnet or cloak,” a point that would not have been lost on newspaper readers.21 In the slums, women who wished to show that they were available sexually often appeared “in their figure,” without items of clothing obscuring their appearance. However, it was equally well known for women selling sex to dress “gaudily” and for even the poorest to wear plumed and decorated hats. If Elisabeth had gone to the Queen’s Head Pub in order to solicit, she did not meet with much luck, as she and Tanner walked back to the lodging house together around 6:30. Presumably it was at this time when she may have paid the deputy keeper for her bed. Just as the newspapers reporting on Polly Nichols’s and Annie Chapman’s last movements were riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies, the same can be said for Elisabeth Stride. While some publications, like the Western Daily Press, affirmed that she did pay Elizabeth Tanner in advance for her stay that night, others, like theDaily Telegraph,stated the opposite. If Stride had paid for her bed, then her intention when she left number 32 that evening was certainly to return. Knowing that she would be out for at least several hours, she asked Catherine Lane to mind a length of green velvet that she had acquired, perhaps with a view to pawning it. Finally, before she stepped out the door, she sought to smarten up her appearance and borrowed a brush to rid the muck from her only set of clothes.

  Precisely where Elisabeth went and with whom is one of the more puzzling mysteries surrounding the deaths of the five canonical victims. As Elisabeth evidently avoided telling anyone details about her current or past life, it is impossible to conclude with much certainty what her designs were that evening. During the inquest, no one was able to say if she was involved with a man, or men, other than Michael Kidney. No one could comment on her typical habits—which places were her usual haunts and who might have been her regular companions, or if indeed she had any. Instead, her death merely left more questions about a woman whom no one could claim to have known at all. It is possible that Elisabeth may even have wanted it that way.

  Only a handful of demonstrable facts are known about what she did that night. From the autopsy report, it seems that she had eaten some potato, bread, and cheese. It is almost certain that she would have had a few drinks as well. At some stage in the evening, she had acquired a corsage, or nosegay—a single red rose tied with some maidenhair fern, which she or someone else attached to her bodice. She also had been carrying some cachous, or hard sweets, for freshening the breath. Either these had been purchased for her, or she had enough spare change to buy them. She had presumably gone out to socialize or to meet someone—possibly this was a prearranged occasion, or possibly not. She may have gone out with the intention of soliciting, or in the hope of finding a longer-term partner—or both. At the time she was wearing what the North London News described as “a rusty black dress of a cheap kind of sateen with a velveteen bodice over which was a black diagonal worsted jacket with fur trimming,” adding that her black crepe bonnet was too large for her; Elisabeth had stuffed the back of it with “a folded copy of a newspaper . . . with the object of making the article fit closer to the head.” Interestingly, the reporter also remarked that Elisabeth’s mode of dress was “entirely absent of the kind of ornaments commonly affected by women of her station.”22

  In the wake of her murder, a number of people came forward claiming to have sighted her that night, but due to poor lighting and the proven inaccuracy of witness perceptions, none of these claims are in any way verifiable.* Additionally, by the occasion of what came to be called “the double event”—the murders of both Elisabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes on the same night—the residents of Whitechapel were desperate to offer what assistance they could to end the murderer’s bloody rampage. With hindsight, the silhouette of any woman who had been seen in a doorway or on the street that evening with a man took on the form of Elisabeth Stride, an individual whose face these witnesses had never seen clearly and whom they didn’t know. Of all of the purported sightings, only one is most likely to have been Elisabeth.

  At around 12:45 a.m., a Hungarian man by the name of Israel Schwartz was walking along the Commercial Road and turned onto Berner Street. As he did so, he saw a man and woman having a disagreement. The woman stood facing the street, with her back toward the gate leading to an area called Dutfield’s Yard. As Schwartz proceeded up the road, the dispute became increasingly more heated. The man grabbed the woman, turned her around, and threw her onto the footway. The woman screamed three times, though not especially loudly. At this point, Schwartz, who did not want to interfere in what he believed was a domestic dispute, crossed the road. Just then, a man who had been standing in the darkness beside a pub lit a pipe and moved in Schwartz’s direction. Uncertain if the man was attempting to chase him off, Schwartz now began to panic and broke into a run. As he fled, he thought he heard the woman’s attacker cry out the word “Lipski”—a reference to Moses Lipski, a notorious murderer and also a term of abuse often leveled at Jews.

  Fifteen minutes later, Louis Diemschutz, a seller of costume jewelry, was on his way home when he discovered Elisabeth’s body lying in Dutfield’s Yard. When he found her, she lay on her side, facing a wall, in what looked like the fetal position. She held in her fingers a paper wrap of cachous. Diemschutz thought she appeared as if she had fallen asleep.

  At the time of the coroner’s inquest, both the police and the press believed the woman Schwartz had seen was likely to have been Elisabeth, due to the narrow window of time in which the sequence of events occurred. However, whether the assailant that Schwartz saw was the same man who would eventually murder her with a single cut across her throat can never be confirmed. Indeed, the question as to whether Elisabeth Stride was truly a victim of the malefactor known as Jack the Ripper, or the subject of another man’s violence, is as likely to remain as much of an enigma as will she.*

  Over the course of her life, Elisabeth had been a variety of things to many people; she had been both dark and light, a menace and a comfort. She had been a daughter, a wife, a sister, a mistress, a fraudster, a cleaner, a coffeehouse owner, a servant, a foreigner, and a woman who had at various times sold sex. However, the police and newspapers saw only another victim: an “unfortunate” who resided in a Whitechapel lodging house, a drunk, degenerate, broken-down woman far beyond the blush of youth. They depicted her passing as sad and unnecessary, but no great loss. These impressions, when set in typeface, would become fixed and for the most part unchallenged. There were no dissenting voices to object to this portrait and no attempt was made to paint a fuller one. No one cared to find her Swedish family and tell their story. No journalist sought out her in-laws, or possessed any true curiosity about her past, about the gentleman in Hyde Park, Mrs. Bond on Gower Street, or the customers in Poplar who had sat on the benches of her coffeehouse. Eventually, the opportunity to truly know Elisabeth Stride would slip away with her killer into the shadows.

  Sven Olsson would have read about the murder of two women in the early hours of September 30 long before he suspected that he knew one of them. As the clerk at the Swedish Church and the keeper of the reading room, he had seen Elisabeth Stride pass through the doors on a number of occasions. She was like many of their other impoverished parishioners: far from home, isolated, and in distress. Johannes Palmér, the church’s priest, found his posting to this degraded part of London dispiriting and, at times, infuriating. He had grown weary of thieves invading his church and contending with what he called the “parasitic” beggars, among whom Elisabeth Stride would have numbered.

  Olsson did not find the poor
as tiresome as did his priest, and so when the police approached him to identify someone who they believed was part of the Swedish community in the East End, he did not hesitate to lend his assistance.

  A hymnbook that he had given to Elisabeth Stride had been found among her possessions. After the trials she had endured, Elisabeth was unlikely to have felt the stirrings of devotion that the book was intended to arouse. Nevertheless, she kept it. She did not pawn it, as she had everything else. It held something of significance to her, perhaps some shadowy remembrance of a farmhouse in Torslanda.

  Sven Olsson must have understood that Elisabeth had no blood relations in England. There was no mother or brother to claim her, to mourn for her, to speak for her at the inquest, or even to provide her true name: Elisabeth Gustafsdotter. It fell to him, a stranger, to be all of this for her.

  After he said his piece at the inquest, after all his accented words were scrutinized by the coroner and the jury, Olsson felt he owed Elisabeth Stride one final duty.

  There was no one to pay for a hearse and ponies to parade her casket around the East End. The newspaper described her funeral as “sparse.” She was lowered, without any fanfare, into a pauper’s grave on October 6, at the East London Cemetery in Plaistow. Sven Olsson stood by to bid her farewell and utter a prayer for her in Swedish.

  Part IV

  Kate

  April 14, 1842

  September 30, 1888

  Seven Sisters

  On a mild morning in June 1843, George and Catherine Eddowes, burdened with baskets and bundles and whimpering children, boarded a canal boat in Wolverhampton. A journey by train to London would have been far quicker, but such a convenience was considerably beyond the means of the family of eight. Walking the distance, which would mean tramping along the country lanes from dawn until dusk for the better part of a week, was an unrealistic option for six children under the age of ten. Traveling by barge, alongside what few possessions the Eddowes may have owned, was the only sensible choice.

  The family spent roughly two days crowded onto the broad, flat vessel, which they shared with fellow passengers as well as the bargeman and a heap of bulky cargo: boxes, trunks, pieces of furniture, and barrels. If it rained, a small enclosed cabin, partially occupied by a coal stove, offered the only shelter. However, the sights along the Grand Union Canal would have kept the children occupied as the barge wound through Birmingham and the industrial landscape of the West Midlands. Leaving behind the familiar slag heaps and furnaces, the Eddoweses traveled through the unfamiliar scenery of southern England toward the capital, bisecting villages, weaving between farms, passing through green and yellow fields bright with wildflowers, spying ancient churches and country estates as they progressed. The intricate system of locks, which caused the boat to rise and fall with the water levels, as well as the sturdy workhorse that pulled them along, would have fascinated the nine-year-old Alfred and his sisters: eight-year-old Harriet, seven-year-old Emma, six-year-old Eliza, and four-year-old Elizabeth. The youngest sibling, Catherine (Kate), born the year before, on April 14, was not old enough to later recall any part of the journey, or even the circumstances that forced her family to leave Wolverhampton in the first place.

  Kate, or “Chick,” as her family called her, was scarcely nine months old when the shape of her father’s life began to change. For two generations, the Eddowes family had given their sons to the tinworking trade, one of Wolverhampton’s principal industries. As described in The Book of Tradesof 1820,a tinplate man was expected to not only forge “kettles, saucepans, canisters of all sorts and sizes, milk pails, lanterns, etc.” from sheets of tin but also to be proficient in coating ironware with a protective rust-resistant layer of the molten material. As a skilled profession, tinplate men would have been expected to enter their line of work at the age of fourteen through a seven-year apprenticeship, though by the early nineteenth century with the introduction of machinery, such traditional practices were on the wane. George Eddowes, who would have been among some of the last young men to have received the benefit of this form of intensive training, began his in 1822, at the Old Hall Works. Here, George and his younger brothers, William and John, toiled beneath the same roof as their father, Thomas, who in later years would be celebrated as the factory’s most senior worker. Under the sharp eye of his apprentice master, George would have learned how to wield “a large pair of shears to cut the tin into a proper shape and size” and “how to apply heat so as to solder the joints of his work.” For six days a week, from six o’clock in the morning until six at night in the summer, and from eight until eight in the winter months, he labored with his fellow apprentices at their workbench, learning the difference between the hammers for planishing, hollowing, and creasing, and when to use “the large or small anvils, the beak irons, chisels, gouges, knippers, plyers, squares and rules.” Only at the end of this rigorous period of instruction, which concluded when the apprentice presented a piece of tinware of his own creation to his examiners, was he granted the right to officially practice the trade. By the end of that seven-year period, the tinplate man had acquired not only an essential set of skills, but also a keen sense of identity as part of a community of fellow craftsmen.

  Since 1767, the Old Hall Works, a decaying Elizabethan manor house encircled by fields on the outskirts of Wolverhampton, had sat at the heart of tinworking life. The streets that radiated from it—Dudley Street, Bilston Street, and farther west, into the more rural surrounds off Merridale Road—became the traditional quarter of the tinplate man and the “japanner”: those who decorated and shellacked the tinware with elaborate painted designs. Men who had trained together as apprentices and then worked together in the factories also lived side by side in the weathered cottages and “back-to-back” houses that lined the streets. Families mingled and intermarried. Gossip spread quickly, especially in the local tinworkers’ public houses, the Merridale Tavern, the Swan, and the Red Cow.

  It was at the Red Cow that the Friendly Society of the United Operative Tin Plate Workers of Wolverhampton, or the “Tin Man’s Society,” had been meeting regularly since 1834. Concerns over the introduction of machinery had led to labor unrest in the 1820s; sensing that future conflict with the factory owners was inevitable, the organization began to draw up a strategy to protect the workers’ interests. All members were expected to contribute no less than five pence and no more than six shillings per week for a strike fund. Additionally, they compiled a “book of rates,” standardizing pay for their work, and by 1842 requested that all six of Wolverhampton’s tin factories sign up to it. Most employers followed suit, including William Ryton, the owner of the Old Hall Works, who was often celebrated among his peers as “a well-known friend to the working classes.”1 Unfortunately, not all of the town’s tin factory owners bore a similar reputation or regarded standardized pay to be in their interests; especially not Edward Perry, the man who had only recently employed George Eddowes and his brother, William. The response of the Tin Man’s Society was to call a strike, and by January 1843, Perry had “no less than thirty-five men . . . out of his employment.”2

  Edward Perry was no friend of the working man, and he would not abide labor action under any circumstances. Over the course of his career as a factory owner, he would use foreign workers, death threats, spies, and imprisonment to break strikes. Perry prided himself on possessing “a good knowledge of the rights of . . . labour, and especially of the laws relating to conspiracy.” Most important, “he felt sure the ignorance and the enthusiasm of . . . working men would give him an advantage.”3 On this occasion, he was determined to pursue, personally and with force, each employee who was in breach of contract. When Perry learned that his men were being enticed away to London under the protection of the union, he set out after them. With the assistance of informants and detectives, he tracked his errant employees to the metalworkers’ pubs of Clerkenwell and hauled them back under warrant. Once they were arrested for contravening the terms of t
heir employment, he had them tried and sentenced to two months of hard labor at Stafford Prison.

  Much as he had hoped, Perry’s decision to make no concessions began to divide the community of tinplate workers and japanners. Angry, hissing crowds of tin men began gathering outside the court building whenever Perry took the stand to prosecute his employees, and it was not long before the dispute degenerated into violence.

  As dedicated members of the Tin Man’s Society, the Eddowes brothers were among the thirty-five men who unlawfully walked out of Edward Perry’s factory. It was the brothers, along with a handful of other Society members, who sought to pressure their colleagues into joining the protest, promising that the organization would pay them “15 shillings a week as long as the calamity [the strike] lasted.” On January 9, Richard Fenton, “one of Perry’s men” who had refused to strike, was enjoying his ale at the Merridale Tavern when allegedly William Eddowes and two other tinworkers pushed through the door and began accosting him.