The Five

by Hallie Rubenhold

  Then, of course, there was also the matter of drink and whether at that point in her life it was possible for her to live without it.

  On July 12, Sarah Cowdry sent word on a postcard to Renfrew Road Workhouse that Polly Nichols had absconded with clothing and goods worth three pounds and ten shillings. Polly had evidently packed up the belongings that Mrs. Cowdry had provided for her—the dresses, the bonnet, the shoes, the pinafores, and everything else—and taken her leave.

  It is doubtful that she had any plan in mind as she crept out the servant’s entrance at Ingleside. In her former itinerant existence, Polly would have grown accustomed to catering to her immediate needs. Returning to the workhouse would not have been on her agenda. With a variety of goods at her disposal she would have gone first to a pawnshop or a dealer of used clothing to turn a few of Mrs. Cowdry’s charitable gifts into ready cash. Although she would not have received full value for these items, she would have enough money for food and board at lodging houses for at least a couple of weeks. Her next stop was likely a public house.

  With a pocketful of change, it’s not surprising that Polly becomes untraceable from the middle of July until the first of August, on which date she spent a night at Grey’s Inn Casual Ward, along her tramping route to Whitechapel.* Here she knew there was a wealth of cheap lodging houses, which would allow her to spin out her hoard of coins for as long as possible. Of all the establishments she could have selected, Polly decided to take a bed at Wilmott’s Lodging House at 18 Thrawl Street. Unlike many other such businesses in the area, Wil­mott’s catered to female lodgers only; for a solitary woman, this was the safest accommodation available. At Wilmott’s, which housed up to seventy women, Polly shared what has been described as “a surprisingly clean” room with three others. This included an older woman named Ellen Holland, with whom Polly also occasionally split the price of a double bed.

  Ellen, who came to know Polly over the three weeks she lived at Wilmott’s, was evidently the only person there who formed anything like a friendship with the lonely woman. Ellen described her roommate as “melancholy” and said “she kept herself to herself,” as if “some trouble was weighing upon her mind.”21 The two women shared no acquaintances in common, and Ellen knew Polly to have no male companions, “only a female with whom she ate and drank for a few days,” as was usual practice among vagrant women.22 Holland also did not deny that Polly drank and that she had seen her the “worse for it” a couple of times.

  Polly Nichols’s last movements are largely known through the testimony that Ellen Holland offered at the coroner’s inquest into her friend’s death. Unfortunately, as there are no official transcripts of this hearing and since all documentation of the inquest has been lost, the only accounts that exist to paint a picture of events are those that appear in contemporary newspaper reports. Naturally, these rapidly scribbled summaries taken down by journalists in the courtroom are riddled with errors and inconsistencies. When written up as newsworthy stories, they were further shaped and embellished to suit the needs of the specific paper—sometimes to heighten sensation, sometimes to chop down a tale to fit the available column inches. Syndicated pieces were then sent out to smaller newspapers across the country. Journalists there, including some who had never even traveled to London or visited Whitechapel, cannibalized these stories, fabricating quotations and even interviews. Misinformation took root in the public consciousness as readily as it does today.

  According to Ellen Holland, Polly remained at Wilmott’s until roughly August 24, when it seems her funds were running short. It was common practice for a deputy keeper of a lodging house to extend credit for a night or so to those who were regulars; but Polly, who was not especially well known, did not receive this kindness. She was turned out. Once more, Polly was back on the street, tramping and reduced to acquiring a few coins and lodging where she could. Holland believed she had spent some time around Boundary Street, in Shoreditch, and a few nights at another lodging house called the White House in Whitechapel, on the notoriously wretched Flower and Dean Street.23 Until about 12:30 a.m. on August 31, Polly had been drinking in the Frying Pan, a pub on the corner of Thrawl Street. She was quite intoxicated when she left and, in spite of having drunk away her doss money, thought she might try to secure a bed at Wilmott’s, which she preferred to other lodging houses. The deputy lodging-house keeper was, however, not in the habit of handing out beds to penniless drunks and so sent Polly on her way. As she left, she attempted to hide her disappointment with a laugh and a sharp comment, saying that she would “soon get her doss money.”24

  Shortly before 2:30 a.m., Ellen Holland, returning from watching a large fire at Shadwell Dry Dock, encountered her former roommate on Osborn Street, heading toward the Whitechapel Road. Polly was not in a good way. She staggered and couldn’t walk straight. When Ellen stopped her, Polly slumped against a wall. Greatly concerned for her friend, Ellen kept her chatting “for about 7 or 8 minutes,” during which she attempted to convince Polly to return to Wilmott’s with her. However, Polly’s incident with the deputy keeper earlier that evening must have firmly convinced her that she would not be permitted to stay there that night. Polly bemoaned the fact that she had no money and appeared anxious that she had to “make up the amount for her lodgings,” though, as she could barely walk, any such undertaking did not seem likely.25 “I have had my lodging money three times today and I have spent it,” she said to Ellen, with drunken remorse, but for Polly this predicament could hardly have been a new one.26 The prospect of not having a bed for the night may not have been welcome but it was by no means a situation to which she was unaccustomed.

  Ellen Holland repeated this story to the police and then told it again at the coroner’s inquest, where journalists were in attendance to hear all of the details. However, before they had even listened to the full account, both the authorities and the press were certain of one thing: Polly Nichols was obviously out soliciting that night, because she, like every other woman, regardless of her age, who moved between the lodging houses, the casual wards, and the bed she made in a dingy corner of an alley, was a prostitute. Working from this assumption, the police and the press would form their theories about the killer. Initially, two possibilities were forwarded: the first was that a “high-rip gang,” or group who extorted money from prostitutes, had committed the murder; the second, which later gained more traction, posited a lone “prostitute killer.” Whichever scenario a person might favor, everyone was certain, without so much as a single shred of actual evidence to reinforce their convictions, that Polly Nichols was a prostitute.

  These assumptions subsequently had a hand in crafting the direction of the entire investigation, the coroner’s inquest, and the way that the story was reported in the newspapers, even though virtually everything in the testimonies of the three witnesses who knew Polly most intimately—Ellen Holland, Edward Walker, and William Nichols—runs counter to the preconception that she was engaged in prostitution. At times the coroner’s inquest became a moral investigation of Polly Nichols herself, as if the hearing was held in part to determine whether her behavior warranted her fate.

  When Polly last spoke to Ellen Holland on that night of August 31, she made it clear that she disliked her new accommodation at the White House. When Ellen asked her where she was staying, Polly claimed “she was living in another house together with a lot of men and women.” This was also variously reported as “a house where men and women were allowed to sleep.”27 The comment was made in contrast to the lodgings available at Wilmott’s, which were single sex and which she preferred. In reference to the White House, Polly stated that “she didn’t like to go there” and that “there were too many men and women.” She wanted to return to Wilmott’s and promised Holland that it wouldn’t “be long before she was back.”28

  At the inquest, the coroner several times posed questions to Ellen about her friend’s moral character, in the hope she would make an incriminating statement about Polly’s assum
ed profession. At each juncture, she made it perfectly plain that Polly was not what the officials insinuated. When Ellen was asked if she knew what her former roommate did for a living, Holland claimed she did not know. She answered similarly when pressed as to whether Polly stayed out late at night.

  “Did you consider that she was very cleanly in her habits?” he inquired.

  “Oh, yes; she was a very clean woman,” she replied.

  The coroner took the opportunity once more to question Ellen as to her comment that Polly intended to find the money for her lodgings. “I suppose you formed an opinion of what that meant,” he interjected.

  “No,” Ellen Holland stated adamantly. She reiterated that Polly was intent on returning to the single-sex lodging house.29

  So absolute were Ellen’s statements that a number of newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian,paraphrased the information she gave during her examination simply by stating, “the witness said she did not think the deceased was leading a fast [meaning immoral] life; in fact she [Nichols] seemed very afraid of it.”30

  It is hardly surprising that those most intent on presenting Polly’s character as insalubrious were the newspapers. Whether through sloppy note taking, the mishearing of testimony, or deliberate embellishment, journalists frequently twisted statements into those that cast a shadow over Polly’s moral character. When the coroner asked Edward Walker about his daughter’s behavior when she lived with him, in the wake of the breakdown of her marriage, he inquired as to whether Polly “was fast.” According to the Morning Advertiser,the Evening Standard, and the Illustrated Police News, his response was this: “No; I never heard of anything of that sort. She used to go with some young women and men that she knew, but I never heard of anything improper.”31 Yet theDaily News, in paraphrasing this statement, inserted something far more suggestive. “She did not stay out particularly late at night,” Walker is claimed to have said, while also purporting to add, “The worst he had seen of her was her keeping company with females of a certain class.”32 Whether Walker actually said this is debatable, as there are at least two competing versions of his testimony. Similarly, the coroner’s attempts to goad William Nichols into elaborating on his wife’s character only succeeded in casting doubt over his own behavior in light of his marriage breakdown. When asked why he discontinued Polly’s five-­shilling maintenance payments, he claimed that in the two-year period since their estrangement she had been living with “another man or men.”33 This provided the newspapers with all the evidence they required to judge Polly for being an adulteress and a “fallen woman”; however, Nichols never once asserted that his wife was making a living as a prostitute.

  When the story first broke, before anything substantial was known about Polly’s life, almost every major newspaper in the country carried a piece stating, “It was gathered that the deceased had led the life of an ‘unfortunate,’ ” in spite of also reporting that “nothing . . . was known of her.”34 In order to validate their assessment of her lifestyle, the papers set about slanting the slender facts available. Polly’s comment to the deputy keeper at Wilmott’s—“I’ll soon get my doss money, see what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now”—included the detail that she then gestured to a hat that no one had apparently noticed before. Some reporters used this to insinuate that she used an illicit method to acquire money.35 Whether Polly actually said this is questionable. And if she did, her meaning may have been quite innocent. Polly’s “jolly bonnet” was likely the one she had acquired from the Cowdrys a month earlier and planned to pawn so she could return to a familiar bed at Wil­mott’s. However, the truth of this detail, like so many others surrounding her final hours and her death, remains unknown. Like Ellen Holland, whose name the journalists could not even bother to confirm or record correctly, Polly was just another impoverished, aging, worthless female resident of a Whitechapel lodging house.* There was nothing else the police, the coroner, the newspaper scribblers, or their readers needed to learn about her.

  Ellen Holland remembered the clock on “Whitechapel church” striking half past two when she parted with her friend. She watched Polly, in her jolly straw bonnet edged with black velvet, sway off in the direction of Whitechapel Road and disappear gradually into the darkness.

  At that hour, Polly would know that her hopes of begging money for her doss were slim. With her head spinning from drink and exhaustion, she wandered, stumbling through the network of East End streets. She steadied herself against walls and the sides of buildings, feeling her way through the night, groping for a place that might become a bed. Polly would have learned how to locate such a spot—somewhere with a step or a slightly recessed doorway. The cavities beneath stairs, the landings in communal buildings, the semiprivate yards that lay just beyond unlocked gates, were the better places to attempt slumber. As one relatively new to the neighborhood, she would not have known the locations of Whitechapel’s secret sleeping corners, or even the name of the road onto which she had turned. Slight flickers of light from a window or a distant lamp would have guided her down Buck’s Row. She passed beyond a set of flat-front brick cottages, which offered no convenient nooks or porches, until the curb dipped and the wall became a gate, set back slightly from the footpath. She may have pushed on it and found that it refused to give way, or she simply slid down, with her back against it, to rest. Her heavy head would have slumped, and her eyes eventually shut.

  But for the postcard she wrote to her father in the final few months of her life, we have been left no clear glimpse into Polly Nichols’s thoughts. Ellen Holland saw, in the woman who slept beside her, something deeply melancholic; a personality folding in on itself, private, alienated, and grieving. However, from these rough outlines, a faint but distinct pattern of a woman can be defined. There is enough here still from which to observe her experiences, a way to understand her not as a fictional character, but as a person. Polly had been born among printing shops and presses, against the very backdrop where some of the most famous Victorian stories were fabricated. In death she would become as legendary as the Artful Dodger, Fagin, or even Oliver Twist, the truth of her life as entangled with the imaginary as theirs. She had been brought into the world along the Street of Ink, and it is to there, riding on its column inches, its illustrated plates, its rumor and scandal, that she would return: a name in print.

  On September 1, 1888, William Nichols prepared for the worst. Uncertain of what he was about to encounter, he felt he should dress appropriately and attired himself in mourning clothes: a long black coat, black trousers, a black tie, and a top hat. It was raining that day, and he must have felt physically sick as he stepped out the door and unfurled his umbrella, turning his back on his home on Coburg Road, where he lived with Rosetta and the children.

  He was to meet Inspector Abberline at the mortuary and view the body of the woman who, it was supposed, was his wife. It had been three years since he’d seen her, and he had no inkling of where she had gone in that time, though he could have hardly anticipated such a shocking turn of events. The police inspector warned him that he might have some difficulty recognizing Polly, but hopefully he would be able to provide a positive identification. He then escorted Nichols through a rear door and into a yard, and across it stood a modest brick shed. The men stepped inside, and Nichols faced the plain pine coffin. He removed his hat and braced himself as the lid was pulled back.

  Even with her injuries, with the stitched-up gash across her throat and the deep cuts along her body, William Nichols knew his wife. He recognized her small, delicate features and high cheekbones. Her gray eyes, though vacant now, were familiar to him, as was her brown hair, which since they had last met had become streaked with silver. This was indeed Polly, as he used to call her—the woman he had once dearly loved, and married. It was Polly, who had borne six of his children, who had comforted and coddled them, who had nursed him in times of illness, the woman with whom he had shared laughter and at least a handful of joys for sixteen years. It was Polly
, who at eighteen had been his girlish bride, holding her father’s arm as she walked down the aisle at St. Bride’s. They had been happy, even if only for a short while.

  Abberline noticed that the color had drained from Nichols’s face. He was noticeably shaken by the sight and then broke down.

  “I forgive you as you are.” He addressed Polly as if she were merely sleeping and the brutish cuts on her body had not ended her life. “I forgive you on account of what you have been to me.”36

  It took William Nichols some time to compose himself. The coffin lid was moved back into place, and Abberline showed the grieving husband back across the yard and into the station.

  Part II

  Annie

  September 1841

  September 8, 1888

  Soldiers and Servants

  The newspapers described the rain as torrential. It poured in buckets. It drenched everything. It seeped through wool cloaks and coats; it cascaded from the brims of hats. This was chilling February rain, certain to bring on chest ailments and fevers to those who persisted in standing in it, yet none of the spectators’ “spirits were in the least damped.” They came in the thousands, pressing against the rails of Buckingham Palace, and lined the route to St. James. Most of those assembled were, as the Morning Chroniclewrote, “generally of the working classes.” They “scrambled and pushed and squeezed” for a position allowing them to catch a glimpse of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in their wedding attire.1 Young men scaled trees, and police officers promptly yanked them down. On several occasions, the crowds threatened to move onto the parade route, but horse-mounted detachments of the Queen’s Life Guard, their shining breastplates partially covered by their scarlet winter capes, held them back. Excitement surged as a procession of carriages appeared. Loud whoops and cheers could be heard, followed by cries of “God save the queen!” The crowd heaved forward, reaching out their hands to touch the vehicles and the horses, to spy the bright blue eyes of the royal bride. The troopers of the 2nd Queen’s Life Guard advanced, cracking their whips above the heads of the masses, holding the line “with a mixture of firmness and good humour which won the approval of all present.”