The Five

by Hallie Rubenhold

  Wherever Kate had spent Friday night, she and John Kelly were back at Cooney’s on Saturday morning, making themselves comfortable in the communal kitchen and turning their minds once again to finding their doss money. Eventually, this question compelled them out the door and onto the streets. They walked south, in the direction of Bishopsgate, probably with no particular destination in mind.

  By early afternoon they were in the vicinity of Houndsditch, a street at the center of the Jewish rag-selling trade, whose shop fronts were usually draped with stained calico petticoats and frayed woolen trousers. As John had pawned his boots the night before, it is possible that Kate had contemplated selling one of the many layers she wore beneath her chintz skirt and black cloth jacket. However, as it was Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, the couple would have only met with closed shutters.

  According to John, Kate then suggested that she would go to Bermondsey and attempt to get money from her daughter. This could not have been a serious proposal. It had been over two years since Kate had last spoken with Annie. She didn’t even know her address. Like so much of John’s story, the details of what happened here are “muddled” as well.

  It’s unclear where the couple had spent the afternoon until this point. Houndsditch was only a short walk from Flower and Dean Street, and many drinking establishments stood along the route. As residents of Whitechapel for seven years, Kate and Kelly would have had no shortage of acquaintances and convivial companions, many of whom would have been ready to “stand them a drink,” or several, returning similar favors from Kate and John. After a round or so, Kate may have thought that attempting to find Annie somewhere among the streets of South London no longer seemed impossible.

  When John and Kate parted, she assured him she would return by four o’clock. According to John, they hadn’t a penny between them as he watched her bob down Houndsditch toward Aldgate.

  Kate didn’t get very far. In fact, she did little more than turn the corner, once or even twice, onto Aldgate High Street, before she encountered someone who undoubtedly owed her a drink or two. Kate was not the sort to refuse, and her resolve, as it often did, disappeared with the contents of her first glass.

  At 8:30 that night, a woman sat in a heap against a wall at 29 Aldgate High Street, paralytic from drink. She babbled and sang and cursed, drawing the inevitable gawkers, some staring with amusement, others with genuine concern. This was hardly an unusual sight in Whitechapel. A passing police constable, Louis Frederick Robinson, seeing the crowd, decided to investigate. He found, at the center of it, a ­pitiful figure, with a bonnet of black velvet and straw tied to her drooping head. She reeked of alcohol. Robinson asked if any of the spectators knew the woman or where she lived. No one answered, although some present knew precisely who she was and even ran off to tell John Kelly that his “wife” had been collared for drunkenness.

  Robinson tried to lift Kate off the street, but her feet, laced up in men’s boots, were as shambling as those of a marionette, and she soon slipped sideways out of his hold. Only with the assistance of a colleague, Police Constable George Simmons, was Robinson able to lead the inebriated woman to Bishopsgate Police Station. Following protocol, they needed to record her name in the ledger before putting her in a cell.

  “What’s your name?” Robinson demanded.

  “Nothing,” Kate slurred.

  They placed “Nothing” in a cell, hoping she would soon sober up. Instead, she slid into a drunken slumber.

  At around 9:55 p.m. and then several times after, George Henry Hutt, the jailer at Bishopsgate station, looked in on her. At about a quarter past twelve, Kate woke up and began to sing to herself. This continued for about fifteen minutes, until Hutt came to see her in the cell.

  “When are you going to let me out?” she asked him, in a tired, raspy voice.

  “When you are capable of taking care of yourself.”

  “I’m capable of taking care of myself now.”

  This certainly was not the case. If Kate was entirely incapacitated at 8:30, it was improbable that she was fit and sober by 1 a.m., when Hutt decided to release her. She may have seemed steadier on her feet when she was led from the cell to the station office, but their prisoner was still intoxicated.

  “What time is it?” Kate asked the jailer drowsily.

  “Too late for you to get any more drink,” answered Hutt.

  “Well, what time is it?”

  “Just on one.”

  “I shall get a damned fine hiding when I get home,” she muttered, knowing this was all for show.11 When she lived with Thomas Conway, that would have been the truth.

  “And serve you right, you have no right to get drunk,” taunted Hutt, who, like Kate’s sisters and her daughter, would have agreed with the era’s thoughts on such a matter: that an errant wife deserved a beating.

  Before discharging her, James Byfield, who was manning the desk, once more quizzed her about her name and address. Kate, who had spent the better part of her life attempting to decoy casual ward and workhouse staff by inventing and swapping around names and addresses, knew exactly how to play this game. By this stage in her life, her contempt for authority was second nature.

  “Mary Ann Kelly,” she lied. She gave her address as “6 Fashion Street” and claimed she had just returned from hop picking, more exaggeration than fib, perhaps.12

  The police officers then handed her back the contents of her pockets, an assortment of necessities that Kate would have always kept on her person: six pieces of soap and a swatch of flannel, a small comb, a table knife with a white handle, and a metal teaspoon, her tin boxes of tea and sugar, an empty tin matchbox, a piece of red flannel that she used for keeping her pins and needles, a thimble, and a collection of menstrual rags. She refilled her skirts with her other possessions suitable for hawking: an empty red-leather cigarette case, two short black clay pipes, and a ball of hemp.

  Once she had assembled herself, Hutt showed her out.

  “This way, Missus,” he said, pushing open the swing door. Kate followed the passageway to the exit door. Hutt then politely reminded her to “pull the door to” when she left.

  “All right,” Kate replied. “Good night, Old Cock.”

  To Hutt’s irritation, she pulled the door only partially shut. He watched as she turned left out of the station, toward Houndsditch.13

  At 1 a.m., Kate’s first thought would be to determine the whereabouts of John. As he had been penniless when they parted, she had no reason to believe he would have been able to pay for a bed at Cooney’s. At any rate, by that hour the deputy keeper would be ejecting anyone who failed to produce their doss money. She had last seen John around Houndsditch, and her hazy-headed instinct would have been to return there, to ask those still in the drinking dens if they knew of his whereabouts.*

  The streets, with their handful of hissing gaslights, would have been as black as pitch in the earliest hours of September 30. Kate was accustomed to navigating the dark, and she knew the byways and passages of Whitechapel as well as she knew the bottom of a bottle. She had stumbled through them drunk on many a night. Here and there, lights were still burning, guiding her as she circled Houndsditch and wended her way along Duke Street, searching for a familiar face. Although it was late, Whitechapel’s streets were never entirely empty. There would always be people about—those like her—the drunk, the dispossessed, and the homeless—as well as the criminal. Some were in search of dark corners; others wandered toward their bed. After about twenty minutes, Kate must have concluded that her search was not likely to yield the answers she was seeking. She was tired and would have reconciled herself to spending another night sleeping rough. By now, for this forty-six-year-old woman, the routine was a familiar one. Kate knew how to sleep beneath the stars, how to find a less-painful way of laying her head against a hard wall, how to ignore the muck that gathered in her skirts or the trickle of wastewater that rolled over her feet.

  She found a spot in the far corner of Mitre Square, away f
rom the lamps dropping pools of light. Here, she lowered herself down, her back against the wall, as if it were a chair supporting her. As she did so, the assorted objects in her peddler’s pockets must have moved against one another. Among them were several small tin boxes filled with sugar and tea and pawn tickets. For one who carried no mementos of her family, who seemed determined to outrun a painful past and sever all ties, did these little items taunt her? Would the unexpected scent of tin remind her of Wolverhampton or the Old Hall Works or even her father? For all of her good humor, her singing and jolliness, Kate’s heart must have been sodden with injury.

  Kate closed her eyes against the night and reached for whatever respite she could find. Like all those without moorings, who drifted or “walked the streets,” she understood that it was only a matter of time before someone came along and moved her on.

  On the morning of September 30, a little girl came racing up the stairs to the top floor of 7 Thrawl Street. She banged on the door and called out to her neighbor, “Mrs. Frost,” that there was a gentleman to see her on the street and a police inspector with him. Mrs. Frost, who was also known as the widow Eliza Gold and, prior to that, Eliza Eddowes, moaned from her bed. She was very ill and could not get up. She promptly sent the child away.

  The girl returned to the men below and reported the message. The police inspector sent her back up the stairs again to implore Mrs. Frost to come down immediately, because the business was urgent. This time, he gave the little girl a message to report: “you must tell her that her sister is dead and she is required to identify the body.”

  Shaken to the core, Eliza came down to the street. Weak and sick but fully dressed, she was supported by a neighbor and her own son George. Together with the police inspector and John Kelly, they proceeded to the mortuary on Golden Lane.

  When the coffin lid was drawn back, Eliza let forth a stream of anguished wails. The intensity of her distress was such that it was necessary to lead her from the room.

  It was some time before she could compose herself enough to speak. Eliza claimed that though Kate’s face had been disfigured, she recognized her sister’s features perfectly well. The killer had not stripped her of that which distinguished her as an Eddowes. She burst into violent sobs once more as she related this to a journalist at the mortuary. “Oh my poor sister,” she cried, “that she should come to such an end as this!”

  In spite of their financial circumstances, the Eddowes family did not allow Kate to be dropped into a pauper’s grave; neither would the residents of Whitechapel permit her to be laid to rest without a resounding sendoff. Hundreds filled the streets for the funeral procession on September 8. In some places the crowds were so thick that they slowed the progress of the glass hearse and the mourning carriage that followed behind it. At Ilford Cemetery, where Kate was interred, nearly five hundred people gathered to pay their respects. Among them were members of the Eddowes clan who had not seen one another in years. In removing a family member, sisters, daughters, cousins, and aunts were pulled more tightly together; an act of reunion, which closed the now empty space at their center.

  Part V

  Mary Jane

  c. 1863

  November 9, 1888

  Marie Jeanette

  In the early 1880s a gentleman in search of the carnal pleasures on offer in London’s West End might find them rather more difficult to come by than in previous years. The Haymarket, once London’s whirling circus of vice, had been silenced in the previous decade. The doors to the decadent gilt-and-crimson Argyll Rooms, where wealthy “swells” swallowed champagne and danced until midnight with silk-swathed prostitutes, had been shut. The lights had been extinguished in Piccadilly’s “night houses,” the after-hours venues where the “fast set” and their “frail companions” repaired for cigars, food, and drink. Gone were the accommodation houses, where they might seek a convenient room afterward. Even the brothels, decorated with mirrors and damask, were shuttered. As a result, vice was forced to become fashionably discreet.

  Wealthy gentlemen, especially those favored by the well-dressed prostitutes living in St. John’s Wood, Brompton, or Pimlico, might be fortunate enough to receive an invitation to a private ball. A set of function rooms would be hired at a venue somewhere between Oxford Street and Marylebone for a group of about eighty guests: forty men and forty women. Each male guest would pay for a woman’s admission, which then covered the cost of the venue, the band, and the supper. To the casual observer, this gathering of gentlemen in top hats and evening dress, and beautiful young women in ball gowns and jewels, hinted at nothing untoward. As the sexual adventurer known only as “Walter” recorded in his memoirs, there was little that could be described as “immodest” or irregular about the occasion, with the exception that “no introductions were needed, and men asked any woman to dance . . . and women did not hesitate to ask men to dance . . .” However, following supper, the tone changed: “the dancing became romping, and concupiscence asserted itself . . . Suggestive talk was now the order of the night, bawdy words escaped, the men kissed the women’s shoulders as they waltzed, one or two couples danced polkas with their bellies jogging against each other, suggestive of fucking.”1 Eventually the evening came to an end; couples peeled off and departed in their carriages, to continue their revels in private, at the women’s lodgings in the leafy suburbs.

  It was into scenes like this that a woman calling herself Mary Jane Kelly arrived at some point in 1883 or 1884. The stories she told about herself likely contained some truth and some fiction, but no one has ever been able to ascertain which parts were which. She may have borrowed aspects of her identity from someone she knew, or reinvented herself altogether, a phenomenon that was fairly common for women of her profession.

  According to one version of her tale, Mary Jane was born in Limerick around 1863. Her father, a man thought to have been called John Kelly, took the family across the Irish Sea to Wales when she was very young and settled for a time either in Caernarvonshire or Carmarthen, where he was employed as the foreman of an ironworks. She claimed to have been one of nine children: six brothers who appear to have been younger and still living at home in 1888, and one named Henry, who, strangely, was called John or “Johnto” and served in the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guard. Mary Jane also had a sister, who she said was “very fond of her” and led a respectable life traveling “from marketplace to marketplace” with her aunt. Mary Jane claimed that at the age of sixteen, she had married a coal miner (or collier) named Davis or Davies who died in an explosion a year or two later. Following his death, she went to Cardiff, where she had family. While there, she spent “eight or nine months in the infirmary” and then fell in with a cousin “who followed a bad life.” Without admitting to it directly, she implied that this relative drew her into a life of prostitution. At some time around 1884, if not slightly earlier, she came to London “and lived in a gay house in the West End of the town.”2

  Mary Jane’s story, as she presented it to her erstwhile lover, Joseph Barnett, amounts to nothing more than a collection of disconnected snapshots. To others who knew her, Mary Jane offered slightly different versions of this tale. To one, she claimed that “she was Welsh, and that her parents, who had discarded her, still resided at Cardiff.” She stated that it was from there that she had come directly to London. “There is every reason to believe that she is Welsh, and that her parents or relatives reside in Cardiff,” reported another. Intriguingly, this source went on to say that Mary Jane arrived in London as early as 1882 or 1883 and came from a “well-to-do” set in Cardiff. She was described as “an excellent scholar and an artist of no mean degree.”3 Two other individuals, her landlord and a city missionary, claimed that Mary Jane had told them she was Irish and that she received letters from her mother, who still resided in Ireland.4 To confuse matters further, a neighbor stated that Mary Jane frequently spoke to her about her family and friends and that “she had a female relation in London who was on the stage
.” Mary Jane told other people that she had a two-year-old child, who would have been born around 1883.5

  Not a single statement made by Mary Jane about her life prior to her arrival in London has ever been verified. In 1888, inquiries were made both in Limerick and in Wales, to no avail. The search for a brother in the Scots Guard also yielded nothing. As news of her murder spread across the UK and around the globe, not one friend or relation from the past appeared to recognize Mary Jane Kelly’s name or any part of her history enough to have come forward. In subsequent decades, attempts to research her history have proven equally fruitless; no Kellys or Davieses or Mary Janes match up in censuses or parish records in Wales or in Ireland. The only likely conclusion is that the tale of Mary Jane Kelly’s life, including her name, was entirely fabricated.

  In the nineteenth century creating a new identity for oneself was relatively straightforward. A move to another town or even to another district and a change of moniker was easy enough. Inventing a new persona based on a manufactured history, an alteration in dress and manners, allowed many to pass successfully through different social strata, either above or below them. However, a higher quality of education and the indelible mark that it left on a person was far more difficult to either falsify or hide. An individual’s schooling came across not only in their ability to read or write, but in their speech, their bearing, their interests, and often in their artistic or musical accomplishments. While the poor had access only to the most basic instruction, the rising middle classes sought to distinguish themselves socially by investing in the education of their children so that their progeny might bear the stamp of respectability.