According to Miriam, that kiss quite literally brought about the death of everything Annie had fought to achieve.
Annie must have turned over every room in search of that bottle. It did not matter in the end whether she found it. “She went out” and “in less than an hour was a drunken mad woman.”
Annie’s failure, after more than a year of progress, completely devastated her. “She never tried again,” lamented her sister. Annie said to her, in words redolent with the profound suffering of the chronic alcoholic, “it was of no use, no one knew the fearful struggle . . . unless I can keep out of sight and smell, I can never be free.”
John had arrived at this realization as well. His wife’s return to her old habits found her once more wandering stupefied through the St. Leonard’s Hill estate. In the past, the Barrys had been lenient concerning the problems of their head coachman and his wife. It is likely that Annie’s residency at Spelthorne came about due to a gentle ultimatum issued by the family. Now that the Barrys moved in society’s highest circles, they could not risk the embarrassment of harboring a notorious and unpredictable inebriate on their grounds. Spelthorne was intended to cure Annie, and the failure of this plan was the last straw. Francis Barry made it known to his coachman that he would not indulge Mrs. Chapman any longer. John had two choices: remove Annie from his home or face dismissal.5
Although John had served his master since 1879, it is unlikely he would have received the sort of reference necessary to acquire another job as well remunerated or prestigious. As the father of two children, one severely disabled, it was necessary that he consider their long-term welfare.
The decision to separate appears to have been amicable, but it was not without heartbreak for both parties. John’s devotion to his wife, in spite of her affliction, demonstrates nothing short of genuine love. It would have been out of character for him to simply cut adrift the mother of his children and, in her fragile state, set her loose into the world. Just as placing Annie at Spelthorne had involved her entire family, they would have a role in deciding what was to become of her now. When John made arrangements to pay Annie a maintenance of ten shillings a week, it was almost certainly with a view to having her return to her mother’s home. Back at 29 Montpelier Place, Ruth and Annie’s siblings could watch over her. Ten shillings a week, some of which would have assisted Ruth in supporting her daughter, would have gone a long way toward buying some comfort and a few of the middle-class luxuries—perfumed soaps, inexpensive jewelry—to which Annie had grown accustomed. She would be better off among her devoted sisters, John would have reasoned, and perhaps might even stand a chance of recovering. With the support of her beloved family, Annie might just be all right.
Dark Annie
Although John’s scheme had been well-intentioned, it lasted little longer than it took for Annie to arrive in London. Whether it was a matter of weeks or days, Annie would have found it impossible to have lived under the auspices of her family. Neither her mother nor her sisters would have tolerated her drinking. The shame of her affliction, the shame of her inability to cure herself, and now, the shame of having failed as a mother and a wife, would have made a relationship with them almost impossible for her to bear. Miriam wrote that her sister told them “she would always keep out of our way” but that “she must and would have the drink.” Ultimately, Annie, like so many addicts, chose to live without those she loved rather than live without the substance she craved.
In previous attempts to recount the events of Annie Chapman’s life, one of the greatest oversights has always been a failure to examine how someone who had lived on a country estate in Berkshire and resided in Knightsbridge ended up in Whitechapel. This alteration in circumstance could not happen overnight; both geographically and socially, it is not a natural trajectory. Even for a person based in Knightsbridge, in the west of the capital, a sudden slip into financial hardship would not necessitate a relocation to the slums of Whitechapel in the east. The East End did not have a monopoly on cheap lodgings; they, along with destitution and criminality, could be found in large and small pockets throughout London. If Annie had found life insufferable at her mother’s house, she needn’t have traveled any farther than the streets across from Knightsbridge barracks to find a four-penny-a-night lodging house or a room for five shillings a week. Had she wished to avoid her family altogether, she might have strayed farther afield to the nearby down-at-heel neighborhoods of Chelsea, Fulham, or Battersea, or ventured to the center of London, to Marylebone, Holborn, Paddington, St. Giles, or even Clerkenwell or Westminster; lodgings might also be found south of the river in Lambeth, Southwark, or Bermondsey. There was no obvious reason why Annie, who had spent most of her life between Knightsbridge and the West End of London, would have had any cause or inclination to move to a part of town with which she had no familiarity—unless, of course, she knew of or accompanied someone there.
In the late nineteenth century, Notting Hill, just across Hyde Park and to the west, became notorious for its shabby working-class housing and deprivation. While many of its streets are marked in black on Charles Booth’s poverty map and are condemned in the notebooks of Booth’s social researchers as “hopelessly degraded,” others are simply described as being occupied by the working poor; residents whose windows were covered with “dirty curtains” and whose children wore “threadbare clothes.”1 Notting Hill’s proximity to the area of the city Annie knew best, while also lying beyond the immediate reach of her family, would have made the location a likely place for her to have settled. Here, she might maintain herself quietly, collecting her weekly allowance from the post office, while living in a single room and pursuing her drinking undisturbed. As an addict in a new community, it would not have been long before Annie discovered fellow travelers among her neighbors, especially in the local beer houses and pubs. It is likely that one such establishment was the place where she became acquainted with a man whom her friends would come to call “Jack Sievey.” It seems that “Sievey,” or “Sievy,” acquired his name on account of his profession as a maker of wire or iron sieves. Little more is known about him, except that he had a connection with Notting Hill and that he and Annie eventually became a pair, almost certainly on account of their shared love of drink.
It is difficult to fathom the emotional despair to which Annie must have succumbed when agreeing to part with her husband and children, and after turning her back on her mother and siblings. As one whose family subscribed to religious teachings and who strove to maintain respectability, Annie would have perceived her fall as an unredeemable one. According to the era’s definition of womanhood, she had failed. She had proven her inability to mother her children, to maintain a home for her husband, or to care for anyone, even herself. The female drunkard was considered an abomination, one who allowed “their most brutal and repulsive penchants to come to the surface,” one who “abandons herself to sensuality, and who . . . becomes unsexed in her manners.”2 Perversely, recognition of her own disgrace kept the “female inebriate” drinking “in order to drown her shame.” Although her transgressions were not of a sexual nature, Victorian society conflated the “broken woman” with the “fallen woman.” The woman who had lost her marriage and her home through her moral weakness was viewed with no less abhorrence than the woman who had engaged in extramarital sex. A woman who was “drunk and disorderly,” who embarrassed herself in public, who demonstrated no regard for her appearance, was considered as much of a degenerate as a prostitute. They became one and the same; outcast women. Just as was the case with Polly Nichols, Annie’s precarious position as a lone woman demanded that she find a male partner, despite the fact that she was still legally married. Whether or not she actually wished to throw in her lot with another man, her circumstances compelled her into what society would consider a state of adultery. However, this was a vicious circle. Annie was already considered morally ruined, so entering into a common-law relationship with Jack Sievey, which in legal terms rendered h
er an adulteress, no longer mattered.
Annie’s ties to Jack Sievey provide a possible explanation for her appearance in Whitechapel during the second half of 1884, where it is likely he went in search of work. Since her arrival in that part of town, all of what remained of Annie’s identity—the daughter of a guardsman, the wife of a gentleman’s coachman, the mother of two children, the woman who strolled through Mayfair and Hyde Park, who sat proudly for her photograph in gold hoop earrings and a brooch—was left behind in West London. Annie was only ever known as Sievey’s wife; Annie Sievey or Mrs. Sievey, and on occasion, as “Dark Annie,” on account of her wavy brown hair, now streaked with gray. Annie did not speak much of her past, so that even her new friends, including the kind and loyal Amelia Palmer, the wife of a former foreman at the docks, were told only scant facts. When asked about her children, Annie gave mocking answers, saying that she had a son who was unwell and “in hospital” and a daughter “who had joined the circus” or “lived abroad in France.” She told no one but Amelia the truth—that she was separated from her husband, who lived in Windsor, and that she had a mother and sisters with whom “she was not on friendly terms.” Amelia remarked that in spite of this, her friend remained “a very respectable woman” whom she “never heard use bad language.” Amelia also described Annie as “straightforward” and “a very clever and industrious little body” when she was sober.3
According to Amelia Palmer, the two friends met when Annie and Jack Sievey lived in and around Dorset Street. Although Dorset Street would not be crowned “the worst street in London” until the 1890s, its reputation for degradation was already well established. Even in the previous decade, it was composed almost exclusively of the cheapest, filthiest lodging houses and moldering, verminous “furnished rooms.” Journalists and social reformers who visited there remarked that it was thronged with criminals. Even Charles Booth, who had walked nearly every byway of the capital, expressed near disbelief at what he witnessed there: “The worst street I have seen so far, thieves, prostitutes, bullies, all common lodging houses.” The local police inspector, who escorted him, echoed his sentiments: “in his opinion [this is] the worst street in respect of poverty, misery, vice, of the whole of London. A cesspool into which had sunk the foulest & most degraded.” Booth remarked that even Notting Hill or Notting Dale (as the poorest part was known) “is not so bad as this. Notting Dalers he said were very poor, shiftless & shifting; always on the move, poor tramps who might stay a month in the Dale and then move on doing the round of the London casual wards & ending up again in the Dale.” Dorset Street, the inspector said, was different; it “might be stirred but its filth will always sink again in the same spot.”4
When Annie and her “new husband” came to live there, most of Dorset Street was owned by two landlords—John McCarthy and William Crossingham—each equally ruthless and unprincipled when it came to managing their crumbling, vice-teeming properties. “Mr. and Mrs. Sievey” were known to stay at lodging houses on the street, primarily number 30, where Amelia and her husband also lived, but when the pair had managed to reserve some money, they would rent a furnished room instead. While these rooms offered more privacy than a communal lodging house, many believed their condition to be “infinitely worse.” For ten pence a night, tenants might have a poorly ventilated room or one with broken windows, rotting wooden floors, damp walls, and ceilings with holes. Hot water was out of the question, and a stinking, malfunctioning toilet might be found at the top of the stairs or in the yard behind. The minimal furnishings, according to a journalist from the Daily Mail,consisted of “the oldest furniture to be found in the worst second-hand dealers in the slums. The fittings . . . are not worth more than a few shillings.”5 Annie’s new situation was a far cry from her parlor and living room at St. Leonard’s Hill. The recognition of this would have required still more drink to dull this memory and the emotions it aroused. Tragically, unlike most of the women residing nearby, Annie needn’t have lived in such reduced circumstances, on “the worst street in London.” Jack Sievey would have brought in an income and, failing that, they could always rely on ten shillings a week, Annie’s maintenance. This sum might have paid for a better room elsewhere, as well as for food and coal. Instead it paid for alcohol—at least until December 1886.
In that month, quite without warning, the weekly payments suddenly stopped. According to Amelia Palmer, Annie was so alarmed by this that she sought out her “brother or sister-in-law,” who, Amelia believed, “lived somewhere near Oxford Street in Whitechapel” in order to learn the cause.* John, she was informed, had fallen gravely ill. This news shook her so deeply that she determined she must see her husband and set off on foot to Windsor, in the midst of winter. She covered just over twenty-five miles in two days, trekking through West London and out beyond Brentford into the frozen countryside along the Bath Road. When it grew dark, she sought shelter at the casual ward at Colnbrook. Treading this road, alone with her thoughts, Annie must have turned over her every deed and each wrong turn in her mind. She had ample time to fret over her upcoming encounter and to worry about her children, even to feel heartsick at the thought of returning to Windsor and revisiting her past. All the while, she would fear arriving too late.
Staying the night at the casual ward set her back at least a morning, as she would be required to pick her share of oakum in exchange for her bed.* Upon her departure, she faced another five miles to New Windsor, the area she had known as a girl, off what was then called the Spital Road.* Before Annie had set out, she had learned of John’s retirement, due to ill health, six months earlier. She had been told by relations that he no longer lived on Francis Tress Barry’s estate, but rather he had taken a house on Grove Road, where he lived with the children for a time. Uncertain of his precise address, Annie stopped at the Merry Wives of Windsor, a pub on the corner of the street, and inquired after her husband. The publican distinctly recalled the visit from what he described as “a wretched looking woman having the appearance of a tramp.” Annie told him that she had “walked down from London” because she had “been told that her husband, who had discontinued sending her ten shillings a week, was ill.” She then hardened her expression and claimed “she had come to Windsor to ascertain if the report was true and not merely an excuse for not sending her the money as usual.”6 The publican pointed her in direction of John’s house—1 Richmond Villas, Grove Road—and “did not see her again.”
What next occurred is unknown. Presumably, Annie arrived prior to John’s death, on Christmas Day, though she did not linger long enough to witness his passing. At the time, he was being nursed by Sally Westell, an elderly friend from the nearby almshouses.7 The reunion between husband and wife must have been a bitter one indeed. Annie’s addiction and the collapse of their marriage had felled John completely. Annie’s sister Miriam described his appearance shortly before his premature death at age forty-five: “a white-haired, broken hearted man.” Whether Miriam knew it or not, John too had apparently taken to drinking. According to his death certificate, his demise was on account of “cirrhosis of the liver-ascites and dropsy.”*
John’s death devastated Annie. Whatever mercenary reasons she had cited for marching to Windsor and back, her interest in seeing her husband was more than purely financial. When she returned to Dorset Street, she cried as she recounted the details of her ordeal to Amelia.8 Annie would never be the same. “After the death of her husband,” her friend recalled, “she seemed to give way altogether.” Whether it was on account of losing the extra ten shillings or because Annie had grown morose and mournful, Jack Sievey decided he was done with John Chapman’s widow. In early 1887, he left her to return to Notting Hill. Now, without a husband or a common-law protector, Annie found herself entirely unsupported. Few women found it easy to survive in the slums without a male companion; it was therefore imperative that she find one.
For a time, it seems she took up with a hard-drinking peddler of chapbooks called “Harry the Hawk
er,” who also inhabited the lodging houses of Dorset Street, but this relationship did not last long. As Amelia described it, Annie was not happy and was increasingly unwell physically; her life had become “a pitiful case” marked by “drink and despondency . . . hunger and sickness.”9 Certainly by 1887 she had begun to suffer from what appears to have been tuberculosis, which, according to George Bagster Phillips, the divisional surgeon of police, had been longstanding and had begun to affect the brain tissue.* Although ill, Annie assiduously attempted to earn an income. Amelia reported that “She used to do crochet work, make antimacassars, and sell matches and flowers.” Saturdays were spent “selling anything she had” at Stratford Market, a hub for small traders who came from all over the surrounding countryside and the East End. In the late summer of 1888, despite her deteriorating health, Annie still insisted that she would join the annual migration into the fields of Kent to go hop picking, if her sister would send her some boots.
Not surprisingly, it was during this unfortunate period of her friend’s life that Amelia Palmer worried most about her. Curiously, Amelia claimed that she “was in the habit of writing letters for her friend” to “her mother and sister,” who, she seemed to recall, “lived near Brompton hospital.”* This statement raises a number of questions as to why Annie, who was able to read and write, would permit this. Was she at times too unwell to write, and in need of money, or was she simply too ashamed to do the asking? In her account of events, Miriam asserted that Annie would never disclose her address to her family, undoubtedly on account of shame and the fear that they might attempt to thwart her drinking. Nevertheless, although she remained estranged from them, Annie found it impossible to isolate herself from members of her family altogether. Miriam wrote that, on occasion, “she used to come to us at home . . . we gave her clothes and tried in every way to win her back, for she was a mere beggar.”
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