The Five

by Hallie Rubenhold

  In the end, there is nothing to suggest that the mission was successful. If “the French Lady” was as sharp as Mrs. Boekü and other women in her position, she would have sold on Mary Jane’s valuable belongings long before her former girl showed her face again in Knightsbridge. To worsen matters, this venture into the west of London was perhaps indeed ill-judged.

  Apparently at some point after Mary Jane’s visit to her former landlady, a man came to the Ratcliff Highway in search of her. According to Joseph Barnett, to whom she told the story, a middle-aged man, calling himself “her father,” “tried to find her.” He must have been fairly determined, asking after her in the various pubs and drinking establishments and making inquiries among the young women who plied the streets. Eventually, she “heard from her companions that he was looking for her.” Mary Jane knew that this man was trouble and went out of her way to hide from him.9 Whatever his identity, he was almost certainly not Mary Jane Kelly’s father. Mrs. Felix insisted that Mary Jane had no contact with her family, “who had discarded her,” and Barnett too stated that “she saw none of her relations.” At the inquest in 1888, Barnett claimed that Mary Jane did harbor fears for her safety, though she never articulated who or what may have caused this anxiety.

  If Mary Jane was beginning to weary of life on the Ratcliff Highway and her arguments with her landladies, then this alarming visit may have compelled her to begin considering her future. Then, at some point between late 1886 and early 1887, what must have seemed the perfect solution to her problems appeared: someone fell in love with her. Young, pretty, and sexually alluring, Mary Jane would have had no shortage of admirers and, despite the area’s constantly shifting population, a number of regular clients. One of them was a twenty-seven-year-old plasterer from nearby Bethnal Green, called Joseph Fleming (or Flemming). As a laborer in the building trade, Fleming was not financially secure, and certainly far less comfortably off than the men whose hearts she might have captured in the West End. However, according to Mrs. McCarthy, whose house she left to live with Fleming, he was smitten and “would have married her.” It appears that Mary Jane reciprocated his feelings and confided her fondness for him to her female acquaintances.10 For a handful of months at most, the couple lived in what was probably no more than a single furnished room on Bethnal Green Road, or Old Bethnal Green Road, before the relationship fell apart.* The reason for this is unclear; Mary Jane’s friend Julia Venturney suggested that Fleming may have been violent and “ill used” Mary Jane.11 The first Mrs. McCarthy heard of Mary Jane’s change in circumstances was when her former lodger appeared at her door at two o’clock in the morning. She had come in search of a bed for herself and a male companion. The landlady seemed somewhat puzzled and asked “if she was not still living with the man who took her from the neighbourhood.” Mary Jane replied that the relationship had ended and that she had returned to soliciting. Mary McCarthy said no more, but took two shillings from her for the convenience of a room.12

  When Mary Jane parted with Joe Fleming, she did not wish to remain in Bethnal Green, nor did she want to return to the Ratcliff Highway. Instead she moved somewhere entirely new, to Spitalfields. Here she is said to have taken residence at Cooley’s lodging house on Thrawl Street and worked a patch around Aldgate. In his shamelessly romanticized memoirs of his tenure in the Metropolitan Police, Detective Chief Inspector Walter Dew claimed that he often caught sight of Mary Jane “parading along Commercial Street, between Flower-and-Dean Street and Aldgate, or along Whitechapel Road.” He asserted that she was always “fairly neatly dressed and invariably wearing a clean white apron, but no hat” as she promenaded down the road “in the company of two or three of her kind.”13 Dew’s comments about her outward appearance and demeanor were echoed by many who knew her. “She was one of the smartest, nicest looking women in the neighbourhood,” commented a missionary who was interviewed by the Evening News. She never failed to be “neatly and decently dressed, and looked quite nice and respectable.” Her neighbors too were charmed by her humor and kindness, claiming she was “a good, quiet, pleasant girl” and “well liked.” According to several, Mary Jane enjoyed singing and telling stories, especially about her time in the West End; now living in rough, filthy surroundings, she must have longed for her former locale. She “made no secret” about her previous adventures and regaled her companions with tales of how she drove about in carriages and “led a life . . . of a lady”; she even boasted that she had been to Paris. These stories, along with her fantasies about Ireland and “returning to her people,” seemed to capture the imagination of those she met. Yet these affectionate portraits of Mary Jane illustrate how well she had become adept at masking her feelings, an essential accomplishment for a so-called “gay woman.” In a rare moment of openness, she spoke candidly to her neighbor, twenty-year-old Lizzie Albrook, who seemed enchanted by Mary Jane’s worldliness. Mary Jane warned her off embarking upon a similar career, remarking that, in truth, “she was heartily sick of the life she was leading.”14

  Intriguingly, another description of Mary Jane Kelly exists that is much at variance with these generous comments. Tom Cullen, when researching his book on the murders in 1965, spoke with Dennis Barrett, who had been a boy in 1888 and claimed to remember Mary Jane. Barrett, who knew her as “Black Mary,” described her as “a bit of a terror.” When it came to soliciting trade outside the Ten Bells pub, she was as fierce as a bulldog. “Woe to any woman who tried to poach her territory . . . such a woman was likely to have her hair pulled out in fistfuls,” he remarked.15 Of course, Barrett’s boyhood identification of Mary Jane may be confused, but if this account is to be believed, then it presents two very disparate sides to her character. Mary Jane may have been skilled at presenting a sweet façade, but her internal life was one of turmoil and distress.

  A streetwalking existence in the East End could not have afforded Mary Jane much solace. The brief period of settled domesticity that she experienced with Joseph Fleming, however imperfect, must have come as a relief from the unpredictability and ever-present danger of soliciting. Not long after she and Fleming parted, she began to search for a similar but more stable arrangement. It soon presented itself as she touted for custom on Commercial Street, around March 1887.

  Joseph Barnett, the primary narrator of Mary Jane’s history, shot into her life like a comet, or so it appears from his one-sided description of their meeting. It occurred on a Thursday night, near Easter. Joseph was instantly taken with Mary Jane, whom he “picked up with” and invited for a drink at a public house. He discreetly omitted any mention of paying for sex with her, stating instead that he “arranged to see her the next day.” Not forty-eight hours into the relationship, Barnett was a man in love. By Saturday he had proposed that they move in together, and Mary Jane agreed. Joseph immediately secured a room in nearby George Street. “I lived with her from then, till . . . the other day,” he told the coroner eighteen months later.16

  In November 1888, as he stood before a judgmental middle-class coroner’s jury, Joseph Barnett did not leave the best impression of himself. Having been interviewed by the police for four hours, he was utterly terrified as he took the stand. His testimony was earnest but fraught, and he stammered and repeated his words. This was not the man whom Mary Jane Kelly had known, who was confident and determined when it came to acquiring what he desired.

  The Joseph Barnett she had met that night on Commercial Street was a twenty-nine-year-old blue-eyed, fair-haired Whitechapel man who had been born into an Irish family and who sported a fashionable mustache. Like many children of his class and era, Joseph had lost both of his parents by the age of thirteen and was raised by his older siblings. His brother introduced him at Billingsgate fish market and assisted him in getting a job as a porter, a specialist trade that required a license to transport goods to the vendors. This coveted position could earn a man a good living, if he was quick and strong. Joseph, who is described as being five foot, seven inches, and of a me
dium build, certainly seemed physically equipped for the work. Notwithstanding this, the couple still struggled for money. Both of them enjoyed a drink, and this habit was perhaps the source of the problem. In the roughly eighteen months they were together, Joseph Barnett and Mary Jane Kelly moved four times. They left their shabby room on George Street for another one on Little Paternoster Row, from which they were evicted for drunkenness and failing to pay their rent.17 From there they took up residence on Brick Lane before moving again, this time to a single room in Miller’s Court around March 1888.

  Miller’s Court, in the earlier part of the century, had consisted of two adjoining gardens belonging to 26 and 27 Dorset Street. This space had later been developed and turned into a set of cramped workers’ cottages in which thirty people lived, sharing three public toilets at one end of the courtyard. As the downstairs back parlor of number 26 faced onto a rather disagreeable view of a squalid yard, it was partitioned off from the rest of the house and rented out as 13 Miller’s Court. For the cost of four shillings and six pence a week, Mary Jane and Joseph made a home of this ten-by-twelve-foot space at the end of a dark alley. It was no better or worse than any of the other wretched hovels found along Dorset Street and contained only the sparsest of furnishings: a bed, a table, a disused washstand, a chair, and a cupboard. Someone, at some stage, attempted to brighten the grimy, bare surroundings by tacking a print titled “The Fisherman’s Widow” to a wall.

  Unfortunately, like everything contiguous to it, the gloom of Miller’s Court and the misery of those who inhabited it were inescapable. The owner, a slumlord known as John McCarthy (no relation to the McCarthys of Breezer’s Hill), described as “a bully” and one who swindled “poor people out of small sums,” appeared to favor compromised, lone women as tenants.18 Elizabeth Prater, who lived upstairs from number 13, had been deserted by her husband. Julia Venturney, at number 1, was a widow in her late forties working as a charwoman, while Mary Ann Cox, who called herself a “widow and an unfortunate,” resided at number 5. Although Mary Jane claimed that Barnett promised he would never “let her go on the streets” while she lived under his care, she apparently took on the rental of number 13 in her own name.19 McCarthy must have known that women, especially those who were known prostitutes, would always be able to make good on outstanding sums. The true test of this arrangement came in the late summer, when Joseph lost his job at Billingsgate. The reasons for this are unknown, but if the couple drank heavily enough to warrant eviction from their previous home, alcohol may have played a role in this misfortune too. With Barnett out of work, the debts to McCarthy, who also ran the adjoining chandler’s shop where tenants bought groceries, candles, and other necessities on credit, soon began to mount. By the beginning of November 1888 the couple had fallen six weeks behind in their rent and owed twenty-nine shillings to their landlord.

  It may have been McCarthy who had a word with Mary Jane about a return to soliciting. She would not have embraced this prospect willingly after more than a year of sharing a bed with only one, familiar partner. For nearly eighteen months she had not needed to inspect a strange man for signs of syphilis. She had not wondered how she would manage if she found herself pregnant. She had not stood hungry on a corner in the rain without a hat or shawl, smiling. She did not have to consider what she might do if the unwashed man she had just pleasured refused to pay her. It was Barnett who had insisted that she need not solicit while they lived together, that he would provide for them, and the anger and resentment she must have felt at him for having failed her would have been palpable. Unfortunately, however Joseph tried, he was unable to find any work other than odd jobs, which did not cover the cost of the rent. The couple began to argue, frequently and furiously. On one occasion while drunk, Mary Jane broke a pane of glass in the window beside their door. She stuffed it full of rags to stop the draft, but now damaged, it was not to be repaired.

  Although Joseph had met Mary Jane in the course of practicing her trade, after he had settled down with her, he did not wish to be reminded of her past. By contrast, Mary Jane was unashamed of it, though she did tread carefully around Barnett, who may have harbored a jealous streak. While Mary Jane lived at Miller’s Court, it is said she received letters from Ireland, which she claimed were from her mother, or possibly her “brother.” Interestingly, from August 1888, the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guard was based in Dublin, and it is equally probable that she was receiving correspondence, and possibly small sums, from a former paramour in the regiment.20 She also remained in contact with Joseph Fleming, who, according to Julia Venturney, visited her on occasion and “used to give her money.”21 Joseph Barnett was not aware of this and might not have taken kindly to their continued meetings. Apparently, Mary Jane was known to taunt him by mentioning his predecessor, of whom she stated “she was very fond.” However, what seemed to anger Barnett the most was Mary Jane’s frequent association with prostitutes, whom she brought into their home. This outrage was probably on account of his frustration at Mary Jane’s return to streetwalking, rather than a genuine annoyance at sharing his space with Mary Jane’s friends. As their disagreements continued to rage, Mary Jane eventually sent Joseph a very clear message: she valued her friendship with “gay women” more than she did her relationship with him.

  By October, Jack the Ripper’s killing spree was the talk and terror of everyone in Whitechapel. The residents of Dorset Street and Miller’s Court, home to so many vulnerable women, were especially anxious. Joseph claimed that during those tense months he and Mary Jane read the newspapers daily, hoping to learn that the murderer had been caught. However, while the criminal remained at large, Mary Jane decided to offer sanctuary to acquaintances who might otherwise have had to solicit or sleep rough. The first of these women was a prostitute known only as “Julia.”* Shortly after this, Mary Jane took in Maria Harvey, an unmarried laundress who hadn’t enough money for a bed and who left behind a litter of clothing in the room. These nocturnal guests were the last straw for Barnett. Although he recognized that Mary Jane had been moved by compassion, her actions were also obviously designed to push him out. He left her on October 30, though not without a great deal of remorse.

  In spite of their difficulties, Joseph obviously cared for Mary Jane. He took a bed at Buller’s Boarding House on the corner of Bishopsgate Street but made certain to look in on her. He also continued to search for work and hoped that they could be reconciled. In the early evening of Thursday, November 8, he rapped on her door. The window that had been shattered was still plugged with rags, and a coat that Maria Harvey had left in the room was hung across it as a makeshift curtain. On that night, Joseph might have pulled out the rag stopper and unlatched the door from within, as he and Mary Jane had done after losing the key, but this was likely to seem too forward. A candle was burning inside, and he noted that Mary Jane was not alone. She had been chatting with Lizzie Albrook, and when he arrived, Mary Jane’s neighbor excused herself. Mary Jane had only recently returned from drinking in the Ten Bells with a friend, Elizabeth Foster, but Barnett claimed that she was perfectly sober when he came to see her.

  The couple were together for about an hour. They may have conversed softly, or quarreled, or given in to their desires, but whatever occurred failed to shift the impasse. In the end, Joseph rose to leave and with sadness apologized to Mary Jane. “I told her that I had no work, and that I had nothing to give her,” he repeated at the coroner’s inquest, “for which I was very sorry.”22 Mary Jane, in a worn black velvet bodice and skirt, which had once been made of a fine material, watched him go.

  If Mary Jane Kelly was in any way heartbroken by the loss of her relationship with Joseph Barnett, she did not confide her sadness to any of her friends. Instead, she drew the customary mask over her face and carried on with her life, as she had done before.

  No one is absolutely certain where Mary Jane went after she bid farewell to Joseph Barnett. Mary Ann Cox, her neighbor at number 5, believed she saw Mary Jane with a man
turn from Dorset Street into Miller’s Court at around 11:45. She thought Mary Jane was very drunk, but none of the publicans in the area claimed that they had seen her or served her that night. According to Cox, Mary Jane and her male guest then disappeared into her room, but before they did, Mary Jane warned Cox that she was “going to have song.” The door then banged shut, and a glimmer of light began to shine from behind her crudely curtained window. After a moment or so of silence, Cox heard Mary Jane’s voice rise into the first verse of “A Violet Plucked from My Mother’s Grave When a Boy”:

  Scenes of my childhood arise before my gaze,

  Bringing recollections of bygone happy days.

  When down in the meadow in childhood I would roam,

  No one’s left to cheer me now within that good old home,

  Father and Mother, they have pass’d away;

  Sister and brother, now lay beneath the clay,

  But while life does remain to cheer me, I’ll retain

  This small violet I pluck’d from mother’s grave.

  Only a violet I pluck’d when but a boy,

  And oft’time when I’m sad at heart this flow’r has giv’n me joy;

  So while life does remain in memoriam I’ll retain,

  This small violet I pluck’d from mother’s grave.