It has been suggested that out of all of those duped into foreign prostitution, at least one in three women who agreed to go abroad was already working in the sex trade and “anxious for a change.” W. T. Stead, in an 1885 series of articles, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” explored the murky world of the trade in women and underage girls. He recounted the story of “Amelia Powell,” who found herself transported from London to a brothel in Bordeaux. While never openly admitting to it, Amelia insinuated that she had worked as a prostitute after leaving her husband placed her “on the verge of destitution.” She claimed that “a friend in an honest position” was eager to introduce her “to a certain Greek” who ran a cigar shop on Regent Street. This man promised that he could get Amelia and three other women “excellent situations” in Bordeaux. It did not take much persuading to get her to go. Amelia explained why: “I grasped the suggestion . . . as affording the means of escaping from the associations and sufferings with which I was so painfully familiar in London.”16 However, they were not long in Bordeaux before the reality of their “excellent situations” was made clear to them. According to Amelia, once inside the maison close,“our clothes were taken away, and we were tricked out with silk dresses and other finery” as a way of forcing a debt on them and making it impossible for them to leave without being accused of theft. Amelia was told that she owed her madam eighteen hundred francs, both for the clothing she was compelled to wear and “the cost of the commission for being brought over.” She was instructed that once she had paid down this sum by entertaining gentlemen, she might be free to leave, but she soon learned that this too was impossible: “When the account shows that you have only four or five hundred francs against you, the mistress sets to work to induce you, by cozening, cajoling, or absolute fraud, to accept other articles of clothing. Thus you go on month after month.”17
Such ruses had been common practice in brothels for centuries and were just as likely to catch seasoned sex laborers off guard as they were to entrap the novice. Those involved in international sex trafficking worked discreetly and in advance, plotting out their maneuvers, so that a woman destined for overseas trade would not guess what awaited her. It is probable that Mary Jane’s French landlady had some role in sending her to Paris and colluded with “the gentleman” to place her in a brothel there. Whatever the case, she seemed certain enough that Marie Jeanette would have no need for her trunk of pretty gowns when she arrived at the maison close.
Once inside, life within these houses was tightly regulated. To keep the streets free of the nuisance of prostitution, the law restricted the women’s movements in and out of a maison close.They were permitted in public only during certain hours and even then were not allowed to congregate in groups, loiter near the door, or even make themselves visible through the window; a brothel’s windows had to remain shuttered. Additionally, all new recruits were expected to register with the Police de Moeurs (the regulating authority) and submit to twice-weekly examinations for venereal disease. If indebtedness to the brothel was not enough to break the will of a trafficked woman, the strict code governing her personal freedom would have done that on its own. Once caught within the rigid jaws of a foreign maison close,a woman, with no friends and unable to communicate in French, had little hope of escape.
Mary Jane must have sensed this. She later explained the situation to Joe Barnett by telling him that she had gone to Paris, but since she “did not like the part,” she did not stay. Barnett seemed to indicate that by “part,” she meant “the purpose” of her journey there. She returned after no more than a fortnight. How she managed to wriggle free from the snare is another mystery altogether. As Sallecartes mentioned in his interview with Stead, it was not unusual for girls to “have their suspicions aroused” and “take alarm” after they arrived abroad. If Mary Jane was as well educated as has been suggested, she would have had at least a basic grasp of French, which perhaps gave her an advantage. A madam knew that if one of her “human parcels,” as they were called, was able to communicate with the police, she could pose a real threat. However, even after the captive had been delivered to her destination, dangers for the traders and the brothel keepers remained. According to statute, anyone (and often it was an amenable customer of the maison close) who suspected illegal trafficking might appeal to the Police de Moeurs, who were “bound by law to release any English girl detained in a brothel against her will, even if she has not paid her debt.”18 Setbacks such as these were not taken lightly by the traffickers or the brothel, both of whom would be out of pocket when a girl was released. Perhaps more troubling to them still, there would be a young woman at large who could attest to their crimes.
As Stead was keen to point out, international slave traders were not people with whom to trifle. These rings were managed by extremely dangerous men, mostly “ex-convicts, who know too well the discomforts of the maison correctionelle.” They would feel no compunction at “removing an inconvenient witness” in order to escape another conviction.19 Although Mary Jane had not intended to do so, by fleeing her captors she had made some fearsome enemies. Although she managed to outrun them in Paris, she would never again find life easy in London.
The Gay Life
During the summer months, ships from the northern French port of Boulogne, carrying travelers from Paris, landed at St. Katherine’s Wharf, beside the Tower of London. Disembarking passengers coming down the gangway were more likely to turn west toward the center of the city, rather than cross the road and turn east. Just beyond the confusion of the docks—the piles of luggage and cargo, the blasts of steam, and the smell of ship’s tar—rattled the constant traffic of the Ratcliff Highway. At first sight, the road seemed a bustling center of maritime business, stuffed with marts offering ship utensils, lamp depots, seamen’s outfitters, and a few dingy gin palaces. But farther along the thoroughfare, the area’s true character became obvious. Cheap lodging houses replaced the shops of ship chandlers; beer houses nestled beside pubs and music halls, thrumming with the sounds of sin.
The Ratcliff Highway was as much a neighborhood as it was a road, bearing its own identity and an economy fueled largely by the steady influx of ships and sailors who stalked its streets in search of drink and sex. At the end of the century it still retained the reputation for violence it had acquired in 1811 when seven people were murdered in their beds in one of England’s first serial killings. In spite of the blazing gaslights and the bouncy polka melodies, the Ratcliff Highway was a dark and miserable place. The smashing of glass and of jaws, the spilling of drink and of blood, occurred regularly among the multilingual customers who filled the music halls and drinking cellars. Late into the night, as merrymakers stumbled about in search of unlicensed pubs and opium dens, the highway and the surrounding streets echoed with shrieking, arguing, singing, and copulating.
Mary Jane Kelly certainly did not intend that her life should take her to the Ratcliff Highway, but the situation in which she had found herself left her little choice. Had it been safe to return to the West End, she might have continued to do business in her former manner. Prostitutes at the middle to upper end of the trade did not work in isolation; they would have acquired networks of friends and knowledge of other landlady-procuresses whom they could contact when in need of a new situation. It was also not uncommon for such women, in a pinch, to call upon good clients or former lovers for assistance. Mary Jane would have had a number of people to whom she might have turned and easily resumed her place in the promenade of the Alhambra and the dining room of the Café de l’Europe, had she believed there was no risk of being discovered there by someone who might harm her. Instead, she chose to turn east from St. Katherine’s Dock, for the Ratcliff Highway.
Little more than a ten-minute walk from the dock stood 79 Pennington Street, on the corner of Breezer’s Hill. Until 1874, the soot-covered brick building, which faced onto warehouses, had been the Red Lion public house. Only recently converted into a home, in 1885 it was inhabited b
y the Millers, a German family of tailors, and a Dutch couple, Eliesbeth Boekü and Johannes Morgenstern, and their twin infant daughters.
Mrs. Boekü, as she called herself, had been born in the Netherlands as Eliesbeth Bluma, the daughter of a sugar-baking family who appear to have immigrated and settled on Pennington Street during her youth. Eventually, Eliesbeth married a man from the Dutch community, Louis Boekü, who claimed to be a gas fitter. However, rather mysteriously for one earning a laborer’s wage, Mr. Boekü began to acquire property. By 1880, if not earlier, 79 Pennington Street came into his possession. Boekü apparently rented the former Red Lion to the Millers, who, under his authority, took to subletting rooms to prostitutes. This was not an uncommon practice; rents could be easily collected by simply turning a blind eye to the activities of one’s tenants. While the Millers tended to his dirty work, Louis Boekü was content to live elsewhere, with his wife and family. However, following his death in 1882, Eliesbeth decided to take control of her husband’s investment and, along with her new common-law partner, Johannes Morgenstern, moved into 79 Pennington Street, upstairs from the Millers.
When Mrs. Boekü and Morgenstern assumed residence in the former Red Lion, it would have been with a view to making a career from the sex trade. Seventy-nine Pennington Street was likely to have been only one of several similar properties that Louis Boekü had acquired for this purpose. Interestingly, at about the same time that Eliesbeth and Johannes moved to Pennington Street, Johannes’s brother, Adrianus Morgenstern, moved to a property in Poplar with a woman named Elizabeth Felix. According to Adrianus’s descendant, this house was also used as a brothel.1 While Mrs. Boekü was evidently a determined entrepreneur, it was only with the assistance of the Morgensterns that this endeavor truly became a family enterprise.
While the Boekü-Morgensterns occupied at least one of the upstairs rooms at number 79, the former pub had several more to rent. In 1881, three young women—Mary Beemer and Ada King, both twenty-one, and twenty-year-old Emily Challis—were living there. According to the census, they were engaged in entertaining two visiting sailors at the time the enumerator called. When Mary Jane, a pretty twenty-two-year-old “gay girl,” turned up at the door, she was just the sort of lodger that Mrs. Boekü would have been seeking. It is unknown how much of her past she revealed to her new madam, but if the name Kelly was not her real one, then it is likely she adopted it at this point. Upon her return from France, Mary Jane did not wish to be found and if her pursuers were hunting for a Welsh woman, then it would have behooved her to have become Irish by assuming one of the country’s most ubiquitous surnames and slipping into anonymity.
If Mary Jane had arrived at 79 Pennington Street penniless, Mrs. Boekü could be assured that she would soon earn the price of her rent, though the establishments, the clientele, and even the practices along the Ratcliff Highway were somewhat different from those of Piccadilly. “Ratcliff and Wapping have ways of their own,” wrote the social reformer Edward W. Thomas, “and in no particular could this be better illustrated than in the conduct of the sailors and the women . . .”2 During a visit to the area, Thomas observed that a certain protocol existed among prostitutes when it came to recruiting customers. The women and their pimps and procuresses kept abreast of when the vessels were due into port, and “when a ship arrives in the docks, so many of the women as are disengaged go down to the entrance, and there and then endeavor to inveigle the seamen . . .” These attachments would become binding for the duration of a sailor’s time ashore. According to Thomas, mariners had a custom of selecting their “particular girl,” and the Ratcliff Highway sex trade used this fully to its advantage. A sailor’s chosen “girl” would then “accompany him hither and thither, always in the neighbourhood, carousing by night . . . and sleeping by day” with her in her bed. During this time, should his interest wane, “he is fought for by his paramour, as long as his money remains unexhausted.”3 When his purse was empty or his shore leave had ended, there was always the next shipload of seamen or the usual methods of trade to fall back on: streetwalking and attracting business in one of the many public houses, gin palaces, or music halls.
As moralists noted, women from the Ratcliff Highway seemed to tout for trade more brazenly than those in the West End and other parts of the city. Given that the demand for commercial sex quite literally swelled with the tide, the police found it difficult to regulate prostitution and restrain the proliferation of brothels there. “Gay women” walked the streets openly, without much fear of the authorities. Thomas observed that “not a bonnet or head-dress of any kind . . . nor indeed any superfluous clothing,” even on the coolest nights, could be seen as these women passed by for an evening stroll.4 He further remarked that “many of them were remarkably well-clothed,” though their low-necked gowns, which “were equally limited in length,” and their “jewelry of a cheap and flashy kind” made them “very conspicuous.”
The better sort of “gay women,” those who were young, or at least bore a youthful appearance, could be found in the public singing-rooms. To draw in seafaring custom, most of these smoke-filled drinking dens were decorated with a nautical theme, their walls daubed with crude seascapes, anchors, and mermaids. Dancers with rouged faces, dressed in diaphanous material, performed amid wooden waves, while singers melodramatically reminisced about lovely lasses left on shore. With the exception of the women and a few locals, most of the audience spoke Swedish, Danish, German, Portuguese, Spanish, or French, and didn’t understand a word of what was being sung. Still, they were happy to slump on the wooden benches, quaff the bar dry, and fondle their girls until a fight broke out.
As in the more expensive West End, an evening’s entertainment along the Ratcliff Highway revolved around drink. However, the savvy women in the sex trade tippled with care. Unfamiliar customers, whether sailors or swells, could be dangerous. To fill one with a bottle of champagne or several glasses of gin was like placing a bullet in one of the chambers of a gun and spinning it. A woman could never predict what sort of john he would be once intoxicated (or even while sober). If she was fortunate, he might slip into a stupor; if she was less so, he might beat her senseless. Her best defense was to remain clear-headed, which could prove difficult if her customer constantly refilled her glass. One of the era’s ladies of pleasure wrote that when she was with a client, “It was seldom necessary to drink.” She would only “touch the glass to the lips” before discreetly depositing the contents elsewhere.5 However, drink also offered a convenient escape from a miserable existence. It dulled the fear of unwanted pregnancy and disease, a very real possibility in every penetrative encounter. It obliterated the horrors of intimacy with a man who was physically repellent, and it quieted, even for a short time, feelings of self-loathing, guilt, and pain, and traumatic memories of violence. Mary Jane Kelly was likely to have drunk throughout her career in the sex trade, but after her return from France, this habit seems to have grown into a bad one. Mrs. Boekü’s “sister-in-law,” Elizabeth Felix (or Mrs. Phoenix, as she was erroneously called in the papers), observed Mary Jane’s behavior firsthand. She was “one of the most decent and nicest girls [you could meet] when sober,” Felix stated, but became “very quarrelsome and abusive when intoxicated.”6 Even for a family like the Boekü-Morgensterns, who would be accustomed to such conduct among many of their soul-dead, disillusioned boarders, Mary Jane’s “indulgence in intoxicants” had started to make her “an unwelcome friend.”7 Eventually, either Mary Jane herself or her landlords decided it was time for her to leave. However, when she did go, it wasn’t very far.
Next door to the former Red Lion was 1 Breezer’s Hill, a boarding house that belonged to Mrs. Rose Mary (or Mary Rose) McCarthy and her husband, John. The McCarthys’ establishment, like 79 Pennington Street, provided beds for women like Mary Jane and their guests.* They were also running an unlicensed public house on the premises, which not only sold alcohol unlawfully, but used prostitutes to inveigle “sailors and oth
er unwary persons into these places,” where they were then robbed.8 Whether Mary Jane was involved in these activities is unknown, but presumably in such an environment, the McCarthys were not as concerned about her angry drunken antics, so long as she was capable of paying her rent.
Whether Mary Jane was able to comfortably discharge her debts to landlords and landladies is questionable, particularly where the Boekü-Morgensterns were concerned. Mrs. Felix recalled an incident that she claimed occurred shortly after Mary Jane arrived at 79 Pennington Street. Whether it was because Mary Jane was in desperate need of funds or because Mrs. Boekü had convinced her she had nothing to fear, the two women decided they would attempt to reclaim Mary Jane’s trunk of expensive dresses from her former landlady in Knightsbridge. Although undoubtedly eager to have her possessions once again, Mary Jane could not have felt easy about returning to a part of London where she was known. In an attempt to reassure her boarder and perhaps demonstrate to the French madam that Mary Jane was now under the protection of the Morgensterns, Mrs. Boekü traveled with her across town on this errand. It was likely to have been the first time since her return from Paris that Mary Jane had seen these familiar streets, and trepidation must have gnawed at her.
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