It is unknown why George and Catherine determined to send Kate, in particular, to the Dowgate School. Birth order certainly played a role, but it is likely that Kate also demonstrated an aptitude for learning, a spark that set her apart from her brothers and sisters. In later years, Emma recalled her sister’s youthful personality as being “. . . lively . . . , warm hearted and entertaining,”10 while other acquaintances remarked that Kate “possessed an unusual degree of intelligence.”11 Because the school admitted children as young as six, it is probable that she began her education there in 1848, possibly alongside Emma. Every morning and every evening after 4 p.m., Kate would have crossed back and forth along London Bridge, just like her father. Dressed in the blue-and-white uniform she had stitched herself, she would weave her way between the leather market and Guy’s Hospital, between factories and tanneries, squinting against the sun in summer and swathed in a wool cape in winter.
It is difficult to know what exactly were Kate’s experiences at the Dowgate School; her name does not appear in any of the minutes that record exceptional or poorly behaved pupils. It might be assumed that she was an average and obedient student. As a charity, Dowgate attracted the interest of a number of benefactors who wished to see the children excel, but who also believed that education should be imparted with kindness. The trustees instructed the master and mistress to “abstain as much as it is possible from inflicting severe chastisement.” Instead, during the period that Kate would have attended the school, prizes were made available by wealthy subscribers to encourage good behavior: “A book was to be awarded to the boy who had best conducted himself and a work box to the girl in a like manner.” The master and mistress decided to “leave the award of the prizes to the children themselves . . . so that they had selected the boy and girl who were really the most worthy.”12
The school’s eminent donors were also eager to offer the children special opportunities. On June 26, 1851, Edmund Calvert, the owner of the nearby Calvert and Co. Brewery, hosted a day’s outing for the 124 pupils at the Bridge, Candlewick and Dowgate School to the recently opened Crystal Palace, in Hyde Park. The spectacle of the Great Exhibition, one of the first world fairs, housed within a magnificent glass-plate structure, was unlike anything seen before in Britain. Resembling an enormous greenhouse, with an interior of 990,000 square feet, the structure towered to a height of 128 feet and housed more than 15,000 exhibitions from around the world. The array of objects on display was staggering. Masterpieces of technological advancement—printing presses, steam hammers, and locomotive engines—shared the space with vast porcelain vases from China, furs from Canada, a fifty-kilogram lump of gold from Chile, and the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which was kept in a cagelike safe, illuminated by gas jets. International exhibitors paraded in their native dress; men in turbans, embroidered robes, and gold-threaded textiles chaperoned their country’s treasures. “Whatever human industry has created you find there,” wrote the author Charlotte Brontë, of her visit. There were
great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have created. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth—as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it thus, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect.13
The Crystal Palace would have dazzled ten-year-old Kate Eddowes. That morning, she and her classmates, accompanied by the schoolmaster and schoolmistress, were conveyed by horse-drawn vans, specially provided by the brewery, “to the great centre of attraction.” One hundred twenty-four little cap-covered heads were counted in and out, and guided in orderly lines through what must have seemed a fairyland. Children who had seen little beyond the basic interiors of their home and schoolroom would have been mesmerized by the circus-like swirl of the exotic. Then, after “having enjoyed themselves for some hours in the many attractions of the place, they were conveyed back at about six o’clock in the evening to the brewery.” Here, “an excellent dinner was prepared for them,” and they dined in the company of the heads of Calvert and Co. After toasts were made, the children rose to their feet and sang the national anthem “in a highly effective manner.”14 This would have been an exceptional occasion for the children of Dowgate School, and Kate would be unlikely to forget it or the splendors she had briefly glimpsed.
Childhood, for the sons and daughters of the Victorian laboring classes, was a short and fleeting phase of life, which was often curtailed abruptly by family circumstances. In Kate Eddowes’s case, what schoolroom pleasures she may have enjoyed were to come to a conclusion by 1856. Kate’s fourteenth birthday in April of that year, which would have ordinarily marked the end of her education, also coincided with the dissolution of Perkins and Sharpus, her father’s employer. Whether George was easily able to find further work is unknown, but certainly there would have been an added urgency in seeing his daughter placed swiftly into employment. However, it is possible that the upheaval visited upon the Eddowes family in 1855 brought her days as a schoolgirl to a close earlier than this.
For the better part of 1855, Kate’s mother, Catherine, was suffering from a terrible cough and fever. Her family would have watched her grow weak and thin. It is likely they knew the cause of her torment even before she received the diagnosis of consumption. One of the elder daughters would have nursed her, and George, with little choice in a house of three or so rooms now occupied by eight family members, continued to sleep beside his ailing wife as she perspired and sputtered up blood. By November, as the chill and damp set in, she had worsened. Kate was only thirteen when she lost her mother on the seventeenth of that month. Catherine, whose body had been ravaged by childbearing, physical labor, and poor nutrition, had, at forty-two, lived the average number of years for a woman of her class at that time.
A reorganization of household responsibilities followed in the wake of Catherine Eddowes’s illness and death. In an account written in 1888, Emma claimed that as the second eldest, it was left to her to manage the home and look after Alfred and the four youngest siblings, all still under the age of twelve. However, these arrangements were only to prove temporary. In 1857, less than two years after tuberculosis claimed his wife, George too began to sicken.15 The family expected the inevitable, and by September, the elder Eddowes daughters had begun to consider their futures. On the twenty-seventh, Elizabeth, at the age of nineteen, agreed to marry her beau, Thomas Fisher, a neighbor, then only eighteen years old and described as a laborer. Under other circumstances, George may have hoped for a husband with better prospects, but at least one of his girls would have been legally married and settled in a home of her own when he departed this life. While deathly ill, George, with the assistance of his daughters, attended the wedding, at St. Paul’s, Bermondsey, on Kipling Street, a short but difficult walk from their home on King’s Place. Here, he gave away Elizabeth and came forward as a witness, to put his cross upon the register beside his name. The occasion, during that gloomy autumn, would have been a bittersweet one, and would have marked out the final weeks in which the Eddoweses would ever live together as a family.
As the leaves reddened and dropped and October became November, the question of what would be done with Alfred and the younger children following their father’s death loomed large for the two elder sisters. Emma’s account, which appeared in the Manchester Weekly Times, suggested that Harriet was already settled with (though not married to) Robert Carter Garrett, a “carman,” or deliveryman.16 Eliza had acquired a place in service, and the newly wedded Mrs. Fisher and her husband were running a bird shop in Locks Fields.17 Emma recognized that
she needed to support herself in full-time employment, so when an opportunity arose in a good household on Lower Craven Place in Kentish Town, north of the river, she left the care of the children and the nursing of her father to Harriet.
It may have initially been their plan, between them, to assume responsibility for their siblings, but as the family was so large, this would be no simple undertaking. The question of who would look after Alfred became “a constant source of trouble” for the elder sisters, but for some unspecified reason, Emma claimed they were most concerned about Kate. “We wished especially to get her away,” she recalled. At fifteen, it is likely that Kate was profoundly affected by the loss of her mother, and the impending death of her father would surely have only worsened her grief. It is possible that Emma and Harriet believed their sister required more guidance and stability than they could provide, or perhaps they felt that Kate, bright and educated, was capable of further improvement under the watchful eye of the family. Whatever the case, Harriet had a letter sent to her uncle and aunt, William and Elizabeth Eddowes, in Wolverhampton, “to see if she could get Kate a situation away from London.” Her relations agreed to this but were unable to provide the train fare. With time running short, Emma, who never failed to paint herself as the most resourceful among the sisters, took matters into her own hands and approached her employer. “My mistress,” she recalled thirty-one years later, “upon learning our unfortunate position, paid Kate’s fare to Wolverhampton.” And that was that. Whether Kate had any say in the matter that would ultimately come to determine the course of her life is doubtful.
Given the family’s limited resources, the fate of the other Eddowes children was a foregone conclusion. Neither Elizabeth and Thomas Fisher nor Harriet and Robert Garrett had the means to support thirteen-year-old Thomas, twelve-year-old George, seven-year-old Sarah Ann, five-year-old Mary, or twenty-five-year-old Alfred. On December 9, a week after the death of their father, perhaps even on the day of his funeral, Alfred and the three youngest were sent to Bermondsey Union Workhouse as orphans. Thomas joined them there the following day. It cannot be imagined that George went to his grave easily in the knowledge that the seams that held his family together would be torn apart upon his death.
As for Kate, alone on a Wolverhampton-bound train, December 1857 marked the end of her childhood. She would leave behind all she had ever known for a place she did not remember, to live among strangers with whom she shared nothing but a surname.
The Ballad of Kate and Tom
A stranger to Wolverhampton would never have guessed that the romantic sixteenth-century moated manor house, surrounded by the fields off Bilston Street, housed one of the city’s hives of industry. Like virtually everything in this town, the once proud home of a family of wealthy wool merchants had given itself to the advances of commerce and progress. Notwithstanding the carefully laid out flower beds and ornamental goldfish ponds, the Old Hall Works was no different inside than any of the other factories that lined the streets and filled the courtyards of the soot-choked town. Its former kitchens were “utilised for tinning . . . goods”; its large open fireplace contained “vans of molten metal and grease,” while “the kitchen floor was strewn with pans and dish covers in the process of tinning.” The grand oak staircase, which sat at the center of the house, “instead of leading to the state ballroom, now led to warehouses where women and girls were employed in wrapping up goods.”
Onto the south part of the mansion, a functional modern brick extension had been built, which was filled with the constant thump and hiss of steam presses in the stamping room. In the polishing shop adjacent to it, women stood for as many as twelve hours a day, repeatedly rubbing shellacked japanware to a brilliant finish. Nearby in what were called “the lions’ cages,” the red-hot japanning stoves were stoked, while two powerful engines rattled and chugged beside a boiler and a burnishing mill.
Amid these furnaces and machinery was a room filled with vats of acid over which a collection of women, known as “scourers,” wielded what were called “pickling forks.” With their hair tightly bound inside their caps, and their clothing protected by heavy aprons, they used their long-handled tongs to dip a piece of recently forged tinware into an oxide bath in order to prepare it for the japanning process. Once the debris had been stripped off, the piece would be dried in sawdust. This entire process would then be repeated, again and again, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the summer and 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the winter, six days a week. Burning eyes, raw throats, and the occasional industrial accident were all to be expected.
Work as a scourer was a good position, William and Elizabeth Eddowes would have lectured their niece Kate, and they had done her proud by securing it for her. Three generations of Eddoweses had toiled at the fires and workbenches of the Old Hall Works, including her father, and after the industrial disputes of the 1840s, the factory owner, Benjamin Walton, welcomed the family back into his workforce and offered them a fair wage. However, a factory job as a scourer was not likely the “situation” that Kate’s sisters, Emma and Harriet, or even the Dowgate School had envisioned for a pupil who had been educated for a life in domestic service.*
A new chapter of Kate’s life had begun as her train from London had passed through the deadened, scorched landscape of the West Midlands, a region that had recently come to be called “the Black Country.” An industry of chain-making, brick-baking, and steel-forging had arisen from the land, fed by a thirty-foot-deep vein of coal that ran through the countryside. Those who did not graft in factories or before furnaces, hammered at the seam itself, drawing forth the lifeblood that sustained the engines. By day the chimneys rained soot; by night the forges glowed demonically through the darkness. Even for those accustomed to horrific scenes of misery, the spectacle presented by a journey through the Black Country could come as a shock. Dickens described the hellish spectacle: “On every side, and far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air.” The approach to Wolverhampton was crowded with “mounds of ashes,” beside “strange engines that spun and writhed like tortured creatures clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their agonies.”1 Although Kate had grown up in the shadow of London’s tanneries and factories, this new environment shaped by heavy industry would have seemed as foreign and strange to her as did her family in Wolverhampton.
It is likely that the first time Kate had ever met her father’s brother, William, and his wife, Elizabeth, was when she, with her small collection of childhood possessions, came to live at their house at 50 Bilston Street. Her cousins—William, age thirteen; George, age seven; and five-year-old Lizzie—would have stared at her with hesitant and curious eyes. Sarah, the eldest, at fourteen, would have made a perfect companion, someone with whom Kate would have shared a bed and her thoughts. Kate would also have been introduced to her grandparents, Thomas and Mary, who lived around the corner, and her uncle John and his four young children. How willing the Eddowes clan had been to embrace their London relation is unknown. Another mouth to feed was never an entirely welcome prospect, though at fifteen, Kate was certain to earn her own keep and contribute to the household income. The sad loss of both parents was commonplace enough, and no excuse for not pulling one’s weight; Kate would have been put out to work without delay.
By the time Kate entered her late teens, her cousin Sarah had left the family home to become a servant, but her position within the family was soon filled by the birth of Aunt Elizabeth’s final child, Harriet. After working long hours, Kate would have been called upon to assist with domestic duties as well; cooking, cleaning, and looking after her cousin Lizzie as well as bringing in the extra shillings. It was probably at about this period in her life that Kate bega
n to acquire what her uncle described as “a jolly disposition”: a fondness for drinking and keeping what he called “late hours.”2 The tinworkers’ public house, the Red Cow, stood only a few doors down the road from her home, a convenient escape from the close quarters and family pressures beneath her uncle’s roof.
As an outsider, the extent to which Kate ever felt a true sense of belonging among the Wolverhampton Eddoweses is questionable, and by the summer of 1861 she had grown both restless and reckless. According to members of her family, the turning point came when Kate was caught stealing from the Old Hall Works.
While passing through the drying rooms or packaging areas, it would not have proven too difficult to slip a tin card case, a small box, or a pen tray into a pocket or within her garments. Not every pawnshop was scrupulous about determining the origin of the objects it accepted in exchange for money. Someone weary of laboring over an acid bath day upon day might have felt that such a risk was worth taking. Unfortunately, the Old Hall Works was full of eyes, and at least one pair fell upon Kate.
Kate was scolded and dismissed, but she was not brought before the magistrate. This was probably because of the Eddoweses’ longstanding relationship with the factory owners. The mortification she had caused her family was extreme and the shock of her actions reverberated from Wolverhampton to London as Emma and Harriet, the architects of her new life, received word of her disgrace. Back at 50 Bilston Street, the recriminations would have been thunderous. In later years, Sarah Eddowes, who became Mrs. Jesse Croote, the wife of a Wolverhampton saddler and horse dealer, recounted the family drama to a newspaper reporter.3 According to Sarah, this incident would come to define Kate’s future life, and the Wolverhampton Eddoweses would neither forget it nor forgive her for it. At nineteen, Kate once again packed her belongings to make a new start. On this occasion, she herself determined her destination and set out for Birmingham, a fourteen-mile walk to the south. There she hoped to find refuge with a more sympathetic member of the family.
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