At a time when sexual relationships tended to result in pregnancy, many couples waited until conception or even birth to marry. However, others among the laboring class might reject marriage altogether and instead choose to cohabit. Those in certain professions, such as ballad sellers and costermongers (sellers of fruit and vegetables), whose work required mobility, were more inclined to the latter arrangement. In theory, a certain fluidity in relationships could suit both the man as well as the woman. The need for a man to follow work, sometimes quite far afield, left the woman he was partnered with free to form another relationship closer to hand. Because of these dynamics, many couples did not feel the need to legitimize their union in a church, although a significant number regarded their bond as permanent and remained together for life, or at least for extended periods. As nineteenth-century journalists and social reformers discovered, working-class communities tended to refrain from probing the circumstances of their friends’ and neighbors’ relationships and lived by a simple rule: if a couple said they were married and behaved accordingly, then they were. “Ask if the men and women living together . . . are married, and your simplicity will cause a smile,” wrote the social crusader Andrew Mearns. “Nobody knows. Nobody cares.”10 However, this is also not to suggest that attitudes toward cohabiting couples were not full of contradiction and nuance. Landlords and employers, who in many cases belonged to the same social class, could be quick to evict or dismiss those discovered not to be legally wed, and women naturally bore the brunt of any social persecution, especially if illegitimate children were involved. Whereas a man might walk away from cohabitation and suffer no ill consequences, a dependent woman, with reduced earning potential and mouths to feed, might find herself instantly plunged into penury.
When Kate threw in her lot with Thomas Conway, she would have been fully aware of the risk involved. Yet life with him seemed preferable to her present circumstances. Sarah Croot intimated that the couple did not remain long in Wolverhampton, and soon after set out together toward Birmingham.
Joining forces with Kate would have had advantages for Thomas. In addition to having a woman at his side to cook and do his laundry, Kate might prove to be a useful business partner. In rural areas, a man could easily work on his own selling chapbooks and assorted small items door to door, but in larger villages, market towns, and cities, he needed a different approach. Public visibility was important to making sales.
Conway and Kate belonged to a class of peddlers whom Henry Mayhew described as “flying stationers” or “general paper sellers.” There were different types. The “running patterer” walked through the streets and squares, shouting out titles and summaries of broadsides and chapbooks. The “standing patterer” sought out a patch on the corner of a street or outside a pub and with a silver tongue seduced buyers from across the road with tales of accidents, scandal, battles, horrors, and executions. Both the standing patterer and the running patterer were often accompanied by a female “chaunter,” who would assist by singing or reciting passages of a ballad as her male companion flogged the broadside to passersby. Together the couple might also perform duets or engage in theatrical repartee. As an extrovert who had been taught music at school and loved singing, street performance would have suited Kate’s inclinations far better than factory work.*
When Thomas Conway set out to make his living as a chapbook seller, he may have aspired to write his own material but had no means of achieving this aim. As the cross he marked on his army discharge papers demonstrated, Thomas was illiterate. Kate was not. Whatever inspiration he had gathered from his adventures in India (and such stories made for highly popular ballads in the 1850s and ’60s) would had to have been dictated and transcribed before he had met Kate. Allowing her to take on this role made the entire endeavor more economical. One can imagine the couple hunched over a pub table; Kate with inky fingers acting the scribe to Conway’s poet, furiously scratching out words, arguing, recomposing, and singing the verses to themselves. Under such circumstances, it would be difficult to conceive that Kate did not have a hand in the composition of these works.11
Although Kate had escaped a conventional life, her chosen path was not necessarily as happy or carefree as she might have hoped. Pattering in towns and selling chapbooks door to door in rural areas did not pay especially well. Mayhew wrote that the average earnings taken in by such a vendor were roughly ten to twelve shillings a week. In order to earn twelve shillings, one had to be willing to write and sell anything: ballads, chapbooks, poems, and pamphlets. Illness, drunkenness, or any other unforeseen situation would have made this impossible. Itinerant life had its miseries: sodden, frozen, filthy clothing, a rumbling belly, and often a lack of shelter. For Kate, occasions for enjoying a bath or wearing freshly laundered clothes would be limited. In rural areas, the couple might successfully beg for a bed, but in cities they had to depend on crowded, unpleasant lodging houses and the workhouse casual wards, if they didn’t sleep rough. What little Kate and Thomas possessed they carried with them, which made them prey to robbers and tricksters. To brave the hazards of a gypsy existence while pregnant would be even more wretched. It is hardly a wonder then, that in April 1863, in her ninth month of pregnancy, Kate found herself knocking on the workhouse infirmary doors at Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk.
For a woman who had no guarantee of a bed, a workhouse infirmary where she might go to bear a child would have seemed a welcome respite. By the 1860s, all workhouses accommodated destitute expectant mothers, though the guardians in many cases sought to distinguish between “deserving married women” and “the fallen,” who arrived to bear children out of wedlock. When Kate appeared at the gates, she gave her name as Catherine Conway and claimed she was married to “a labourer.” Thomas may have accompanied her there, or more likely placed her in the care of the workhouse while he set out in search of work.
Although Conway could rest assured that his “wife” had a roof over her head, the workhouse infirmary was by no means a safe haven for childbirth. Dedicated maternity wards were an exception; most women in the throes of labor were placed in the general ward, alongside patients with a variety of ailments and contagious diseases, from tuberculosis to smallpox and syphilis. Sanitation was universally appalling. The Poor Law reformer Louisa Twinning reported that during her visit to a women’s ward, she discovered that a broken lavatory had been left to degenerate into an open sewer, cleaning was performed without disinfectant, and infants were delivered without the use of soap and water. At the infirmary at Yarmouth Workhouse, where Kate gave birth to her daughter, Catherine “Annie” Conway, on April 18, 1863, the gas jets were regularly left on to keep rats away. However unpleasant the setting, Kate likely found it far preferable to delivering her first child in the mud by the side of a road. The presence of tiny Annie Conway would slow the couple’s progress through town and country only slightly. In fact, an infant strapped to Kate’s back or nestled against her breast might move people to offer the family an extra loaf of bread or a comfortable place to rest. In the years that followed Annie’s birth, the couple continued to roam, traveling as far north as Newcastle, then down to Hull before returning to Coventry. Briefly, in June 1864, they stopped in London, perhaps Kate’s first visit back since her departure from the city. Over the course of the family’s wanderings, Kate would become accustomed to laying Annie down to sleep in stable stalls and churchyards, against walls, or under trees as the rain thrashed, drenching her clothes as she attempted to shelter her infant. This mode of life could never have felt entirely satisfying, though she must have found something that sustained her; the joy of performance, the singing and the storytelling, and the composing of tales. And drink would have helped too, when money allowed for it.
If it was at Conway’s insistence that they tramp the country from end to end in search of success, then ironically enough, he was to find it back in Staffordshire, directly under the nose of the Eddowes family.
In the dawn-touched hours of January 9
, 1866, spectators bundled in scarves and shawls began to gather in the yard at Stafford Gaol. There had not been a hanging for a “crimson crime” for some time, so people had risen especially early and come from the surrounding towns and villages to watch a murderer, Charles Christopher Robinson, twitch and wiggle like a fish on a line. The vendors of tea and coffee and hot milk had set up their stalls. The crowd filled their stomachs with currant buns, boiled eggs, sheep’s trotters, and cakes. Although the popular enthusiasm for public executions had begun to wane by the 1860s, a hanging could still rouse as much excitement as a fair or a market day. Workers from factories and mills would have stopped by on their way to work; neighbors met and chatted, and hawkers came to sell their wares. Among those elbowing and jostling for a good view of the drop, Kate and Thomas Conway had set out their pitch.
Hanging days were big business for ballad and chapbook sellers, who belted out the murderer’s supposed lamentations in rhyme and song. Nothing sold better than criminal tales, and as soon as an execution was announced, every penny bard and printer in the county scrambled to get a version of the story in ink. Often, these “true” last confessions, some purportedly spoken on the gallows, were being sold in the prison yard before they were even uttered. Executions would have been Kate and Thomas’s bread and butter. Much of the traversing that they did would have been in order to reach the county towns in which these events were scheduled to take place. However, this hanging would have been of particular importance to the couple, as Charles Christopher Robinson was Kate’s distant cousin.
Like Kate, Charles had been left an orphan and was raised in the home of Josiah Fisher, a relation who worked as a house agent in Wolverhampton. As a man of some standing and wealth, Fisher acted as the guardian to another family member in distress, Harriet Seager, the sister of his son’s wife. As Seager was close in age to Charles Robinson, a romantic attachment developed, and eventually the couple became engaged, though Harriet remained wary of her fiancé’s quick temper and tendency to be jealous. On August 26, 1865, Robinson was spotted wandering about the garden in a fury, unwashed, unshaven, and wearing no more than his shirt. After he found his sweetheart, an argument ensued; Robinson attempted to grab and kiss Harriet. She ducked his advances, and he slapped her. The couple parted angrily — Robinson was not prepared to forgive Harriet for quarreling with him. A short time after, a servant spotted him striding downstairs to the scullery with his razor. Frantic noises and a gunshot alerted the household that something was wrong. They discovered Robinson, howling and screaming; he had unsuccessfully attempted to shoot himself and was about to draw a razor across his neck. At his feet, in a pool of blood, lay Harriet Seager, “with a gash in the throat that had laid the spine bare.”12
How well Kate knew her cousin is unknown, but she and Conway would have been determined to make something of this connection. Wolverhampton Archives possesses a copy of one of the only publications believed to be linked to the pens of Thomas Conway and Kate Eddowes: A Copy of Verses on the Awful Execution of Charles Christopher Robinson for the Murder of his Sweetheart, Harriet Segar of Ablow Street, Wolverhampton, August 26, written to be sold at the hanging in 1866.13 The ballad takes an interesting perspective. Whereas many authors would have written a dramatic account of the killing or shaped the events into a tale of murderous love, the lyrics instead paint Robinson as a remorseful figure, worthy of pity.
Come all you feeling Christians,
Give ear unto my tale,
It’s for a cruel murder
I was hung at Stafford Gaol.
The horrid crime that I have done
Is shocking for to hear,
I murdered one I once did love,
Harriet Segar dear.
Charles Robinson is my name,
With sorrow was oppressed,
The very thought of what I’ve done
Deprived me of my rest:
Within the walls of Stafford Gaol,
In bitter grief did cry,
And every moment seemed to say
“Poor soul prepare to die!”
I well deserved my wretched fate,
No one can pity me,
To think that I in my cold blood,
Could take her life away,
She no harm to me had done,
How could I serve her so?
No one my feelings now can tell,
My heart was so full of woe.
O while within my dungeon dark,
Sad thoughts came on apace,
The cruel deed that I had done
Appeared before my face,
While lying in my prison cell
Those horrid visions rise,
The gentle form of her I killed
Appeared before my eyes.
O Satan, Thou Demon strong,
Why didst thou on me bind?
O why did I allow thy chains
To enwrap my feeble mind?
Before my eyes she did appear
All others to excel
And it was through jealousy,
I poor Harriet Segar killed.
May my end a warning be
Unto all mankind,
Think on my unhappy fate
And bear me in your mind.
Whether you be rich or poor
Your friends and sweethearts love,
And God will crown your fleeting days,
With blessings from above.
While Kate would have watched nooses tighten around the necks of many villains, to have witnessed the execution of a blood relation would surely have proven a different experience. Whether or not Kate was affected by the sight of her kinfolk, clad in mourning, their veils drawn about their faces, will never be known. Neither will it be known if they recognized her, the impertinent chanteuse bellowing her verses into the chilly air, declaiming the injustice of murder.
If the Black Country Buglecan be believed, Kate and Tom’s ballad turned an exceptional profit that day. The couple fared so well that they were able to “return from Stafford in style, booking inside seats on Ward’s coach with the proceeds.” The takings allowed Conway to invest in a donkey and cart and order another four hundred copies from his printer in Bilston, which the couple then sold “at their regular pitch on the following Monday.” It is said that Thomas rewarded Kate “with the price of a flowered-hat.” “Such was their lifestyle,” continued the piece, “that they lived for a spell in lodgings at Moxley,” a village outside Wednesbury. This was the stroke of good fortune that Conway had been hunting for. Rather than rest on his laurels, it is suggested that he set his sights on a permanent move to London, “where his rhyming talents . . .would be even more fully appreciated.”14
The veracity of the Black Country Bugle’s account of the couple’s lives has always been thought questionable, but Thomas Conway’s pension records confirm that the pair began to spend more time in London from this period. Their decision to settle in the capital may have been driven in part by Conway’s ambitions, but also by other factors. If Kate had learned anything since the death of her parents, surely it was that her true family were not those who lived in Wolverhampton. London was the home of her youth and the home of her sisters, and after years of roaming, it was now time for the prodigal daughter to make her return.
Her Sister’s Keeper
Emma had always attempted to do what was correct. As the second-eldest girl of a large brood, she had been handed bawling infant after bawling infant. She had been taught to stir the soup, change the baby’s filthy diapers, and keep the toddlers from the hot coals and the carriage wheels. She had kept an eye on her brother Alfred, helping him when he had seizures, offering protection to an older sibling who could not return the favor. It was Emma who nursed her dying mother, Emma who sought to comfort her sick father. It was Emma who learned to read and write, and then went out to service in order to support her brothers and sisters. It was Emma who agonized over how these orphaned children were to live when they no longer had a home.
Emma sent Kate to Wolverhampton, hoping for the best, while she continued in her post, dutifully scrubbing, washing, and serving a middle-class family and quietly saving what she earned. Around 1860, at the age of twenty-five, she met James Jones, a neighbor of her sister Harriet, who lived in Clerkenwell. James and his family were tallow chandlers, or those who made and sold candles, once an esteemed profession with its own guild in the time before gas lamps and domestic gas jets began to extinguish the trade. Emma did what was expected of a woman of her era: on November 11, she married the man who had courted her. Only after that did the children begin to arrive: six in total.
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