The Real Mary Kelly (32 page)
Read The Real Mary Kelly Online
Authors: Wynne Weston-Davies
Taylor, Rosemary. ‘“The City of Dreadful Delight.’” William Morris in the East End of London’.
The Journal of William Morris Studies.
Winter 2009 (9–28)
Wolf, G. ‘A kidney from hell? A nephrological view of the Whitechapel murders in 1888’.
Nephrol Dial Transplant
(2008) 23:3343-3349.
LIBRARIES AND COLLECTIONS
The National Archives, Kew
The British Library, London
The London Metropolitan Archives, London
The Bodleian Library, Oxford
Gloucestershire County Libraries
Tower Hamlets Archives
Hammersmith and Fulham Archives
Kensington Library
Suffolk County Records Office
Durham County Archives
Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre
Powys Archives
British National Newspaper Archives, Colindale
Buckinghamshire County Library, Aylesbury
Hampshire County Library, Winchester
Bournemouth Library and Local Studies Centre
Westminster Library
Websites
Innumerable but particularly:
www.historyofphrenology.org.uk
CHAPTER ONE
1
The exact date of Mary Jane Kelly’s first appearance in the East End is unknown but the consensus of most contemporary sources is that it was late 1885 or early 1886.
2
Mrs Buki was first mentioned in a report in
The Star
, 12th November 1888. The informant may have been Mrs Mary McCarthy, her sister Mrs Elizabeth Phoenix or Joe Barnett. Why the reporter spelled her name in that way or whether that spelling was suggested to him by his informant(s) is not known.
3
Henry Mayhew gives many colourful accounts of the brothels, the music halls and the public houses of the Ratcliffe Highway and St. George’s Street in
London Labour and the London Poor
.
4
The Star
, 12th November 1888.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid. There were also reports in the
Morning Advertiser
and the
Daily News
on 10th November 1888, apparently by the same reporter, which quoted a woman who had known her when she lodged in Thrall Street before she met Joe Barnett, that categorically stated that she was Welsh and spoke Welsh fluently.
7
In Georgian London most prostitutes were second-generation Irish and as a result the names Moll or Molly were usually applied to them (
Source
: Rictor Norton,
The Georgian Underworld – A Study of Criminal Subcultures in Eighteenth-Century England
, published online and updated 28th January 2012). By the 1880s the famines resulting from the potato blight had caused massive Irish immigration into London and other cities. The resulting poverty forced even more Irish girls into prostitution and the soubriquet Kelly supplanted Molly as a generic term for a prostitute.
8
The Star
, 12th November 1888.
9
Evidence given by Joe Barnett at Kelly’s inquest. Marie Jeanette Kelly Inquest Papers MJ/SPC/NE. London Metropolitan Archives.
10
Neal Shelden,
Mary Jane Kelly and the Victims of Jack the Ripper
, Revised 2013.
11
The Star
, on 12th November, reported Joe Barnett as having said that while she was living at Pennington Street her father came looking for her but, tipped off by her friends, she kept out of his way. If it was Elizabeth, her actual father had been dead for ten years by 1885. Joe or her friends may have made the assumption that an older man looking for her must have been her father, or Elizabeth may have encouraged them to think that, but it is more probable that the older man was Francis who, at 49, was old enough to be her father.
12
The thorough research conducted by the Sheldens included the 1871, 1881 and 1891 censuses, rates books and electoral registers for Fulham, Tower Hamlets and Bow and builds an unassailable case for the identity of Mrs Boekü and the Morganstern brothers, proving that it is possible to solve mysteries by the use of modern computing power that baffled the police and countless historians for nearly 130 years.
CHAPTER TWO
13
Stout has several meanings and in the 19th century it was often used as a synonym for fit or healthy. Given that most other accounts, for instance that of Mrs Prater, describe her as good looking it is possible that this is what Mrs Phoenix intended.
14
For a graphic account of Dorset Street and others in the ‘wicked half mile’ and the slum landlords that controlled the area see
The Worst Street in London
by Fiona Rule.
15
There were at least three popular sentimental paintings of this name from which prints were made in the late 19th century. The one by Charles James Lewis (1830–1892) was the most popular and therefore most likely to have been the one on the wall of Miller’s Court.
16
Although this has been repeated by a number of previous authors it is not known what the evidence for this is. At the inquest Thomas Bowyer stated that it was the pane on the furthest side of the window that was broken and, if this is so, it appears that it would be impossible to reach the door catch by inserting an arm judging from contemporary illustrations. At least four people (Bowyer, McCarthy, Phillips and Abberline) looked through the broken pane and it seems extraordinary that none of them noticed that the lock on the door could be reached by inserting an arm if that had been possible.
17
Statement made by Joe Barnett to the Metropolitan Police at Commercial Street police station, 9th November 1888: ‘She had a brother called Henry who was in the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards, known amongst his comrades as Johnto.’ Evidence given by Joe Barnett at Kelly’s inquest. Marie Jeanette Kelly Inquest Papers MJ/SPC/NE. London Metropolitan Archives.
18
This statement by Joe Barnett at Mary Jane’s inquest seems to be the only evidence that she had met the man with whom she went to France at the French woman’s brothel near Knightsbridge (Joe Barnett did not say that it was actually
in
Knightsbridge as many others have done since, only ‘near Knightsbridge’). He seems to have made the assumption that that was where she had met him but there is no other evidence for it. If Mary Jane and Elizabeth were the same person it seems unlikely that she met Francis as a customer. The divorce petition appears to show genuine surprise that she was working as a prostitute and she would not have needed to use the story of being a widow if he knew her to be a prostitute.
19
Many people have reported that Joe suffered from echolalia based on transcripts of the evidence he gave at the inquest. This is not so much an impediment as a mannerism in which the final words of the previous speaker are repeated at the start of the subject’s response. It is particularly associated with the autism spectrum although there is no other evidence that Joe was autistic. His responses to the coroner’s questions and his frequent misunderstandings suggest that he may have had what today would be called a learning disability. The fact that the coroner thanked him kindly at the end of his testimony and congratulated him on the way he had dealt with the ordeal of giving evidence suggests that this was recognised at the time. It might not therefore be surprising if much of his evidence was confused and not to be relied upon.
20
It is not clear where they got this name from although it raises the
intriguing possibility that she was sometimes addressed by her friends by her actual Christian name. No British newspapers seem to have picked up on it.
21
Yet again it seems as if the more painstaking American reporters came closer to the truth than their British counterparts. In part that might be explained by the fact that most US foreign correspondents were salaried whereas the British reporters were largely freelance and therefore more prone to take shortcuts in their rush to outcompete their colleagues.
CHAPTER THREE
22
Frederick Stewart, the fourth Marquess was George Vane-Tempest’s elder half-brother and nephew of Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary who committed suicide in 1822. Frederick had married Lady Elizabeth Jocelyn, daughter of the Third Earl of Roden, in 1846 but their marriage was childless and they separated later when she converted to Roman Catholicism. Frederick lived a dissolute life thereafter and became insane, almost certainly as a result of tertiary syphilis. He died a recluse, confined in his own rooms for many years and looked after day and night by a private surgeon and several burly attendants. Ironically he died in White Rock Villa, St Leonards-on-Sea, a house owned by his estranged wife’s family.
23
The exact connection is not clear but both her father, Edward and a Gilder son, Charles, had been land surveyors in and around Aberangell, both probably employed by Sir John Edwards. It is also possible that Edward in his youth may have been a part-time member of the Montgomeryshire Militia of which his employer was colonel and William Gilder was Captain and Adjutant. Landowners who were also colonels of militia or yeomanry regiments expected their labourers and younger male house servants to be members of their unit and they were often given time off in order to fulfil their military obligations.
If Elizabeth had grown up knowing the Gilders it would be natural that she might seek out the family and their alter egos, the Maundrells, once she arrived in London.
24
Entries in 1851 and 1861 censuses, the Montgomeryshire Militia Rolls and
The London Gazette
. William Gilder’s bankruptcy took place in 1838, the year of Queen Victoria’s Coronation. It was a year of great celebrations, balls,
levées
and military parades. His colonel, Sir John Edwards, was foremost in making a lavish display which Gilder no doubt did his best to keep up with. With a wife and six daughters between the ages of 12 and 24 to provide ball gowns for, the price of his own ornate dress uniforms and entertaining, the cost must have placed a disastrous strain on his meagre military salary. He spent the rest of his long life paying off his creditors.
25
Even conservative estimates put the
per capita
number of prostitutes compared with the population of London as much higher in the 18th and 19th centuries than it is today.
Source
: Tony Henderson,
Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730
–
1830
. Longman, London and New York, 1999.
26
Evidence for Ellen Macleod’s love of all things French includes the entry in the 1851 census where as a precocious 7-year-old she has obviously dictated her place of birth to the English enumerator as ‘France, Côtes du Nord, Barach près de Lannion,’ even including the accents although the bemused enumerator has misplaced these. Her only daughter Helen Kathleen followed her on to the stage and had a very successful career, specialising in French productions and French language parts.
27
William Macleod had an exemplary service record, acting as secretary to several admirals and commanders of the Far East Fleet, where his considerable linguistic talents would have stood him in good stead. Suddenly and inexplicably, in 1895, he was sent home in disgrace having
suffered a breakdown attributed to strain and alcohol. This may have coincided with his discovery that his wife had been a prostitute and the Madam of many brothels. It is tempting to look at Walter Sickert’s picture ‘
Jack Ashore
’, in which a dejected older man sits slumped at the head of a bed from which is rising a large naked woman with pendulous breasts, and imagine that this represents the moment when William Macleod realised that his marriage was finally over. He was eventually passed fit for Home Service only and retired in the rank of Paymaster in Chief. He appears never to have returned to his wife and when he died in 1937 he left his entire estate of £2,289.13.11 (a tidy sum in those days) to their only child Helen Kathleen.
28
At various times the extended Maundrell/Gilder family lived in at least seven different London addresses and owned several more. After the death of Robert John Maundrell in 1883, Frederica’s name appears as the ratepayer or Head of the Household of their principal residences. Francis Craig’s divorce petition names her sister as the ‘occupier’ of at least three brothels in the Holloway district of London and mentions three others which may also have been part of her empire, so it seems as if the two sisters owned or leased an extensive property portfolio.
29
Source
: Steven Clarke,
Dirty Bertie: An English King Made in France
. Century, London, 2014. The Prince of Wales had a
fauteuil d’amour
(love seat) specially made and kept in the Hindu room at
Le Chabanais
. Exquisitely made in the
Louis Quinze
style, it had a velvet upholstered platform to support his considerable bulk, gilded stirrups and curved uprights for added traction. It enabled the heir to the British throne and up to two women to engage in sexual activity in an almost infinite variety of positions. It has recently been re-discovered and is now being restored by the original makers. It is interesting to speculate what the majority of his future subjects would have made of it had they known of its existence at the time.
30
Today Collingham Place is definitely in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea but the boundary between Kensington and Knightsbridge is ill-defined on 19th-century maps. Joe Barnett said that Marie Jeanette had worked in a French brothel ‘near Knightsbridge’ and Collingham Place would certainly have fitted that description.