The Five

by Hallie Rubenhold

  For many years, Wolverhampton’s renowned Peacock Inn, where Kate’s mother had once stirred sauces and baked pies, was also a venue for bare-knuckle boxing matches. Throughout the 1850s, the inn yard was regularly cleared, sod laid, and a ring pitched for prize fights. Among those to appear was the English heavyweight champion and local hero William Perry, also known as the “Tipton Slasher,” as well as Joe Goss, who went on to make his pugilistic fortune in the United States. It is likely that here too Tom Eddowes, also known as “The Snob,” fought his way into his niece’s heart.

  Bare-knuckle boxing had been big business in England since the eighteenth century. Jack Broughton had attempted to formalize the sport and lend it a sense of gentlemanly and patriotic merit. With the patronage of the Prince of Wales, boxing schools intended to “impart the art of pugilism” appeared in London. A burgeoning sports press helped to create a buzz around prize matches by publishing pre-fight taunts between participants. British men of all classes were hooked, and matches governed by Broughton’s rules became popular nationwide. Contestants stripped to the waist, wrapped wadding around their fists, and slugged it out for cash.

  Fighters generally came from working-class backgrounds, and the Midlands contributed a number to their ranks. A few pugilists carved out full-time careers in the sport, but many more were amateurs, who occasionally put aside their leather aprons and laid down their tools to step into the ring. Tom Eddowes was one of these. A shoemaker, or “snob,” by trade, Eddowes supplemented his income through the exercise of brute strength.

  Born in 1810, Uncle Tom had already seen his best fighting years by the time Kate watched him raise his fists. But because prize money of up to twenty-five pounds a side was at stake, Thomas Eddowes did not go eagerly into retirement. As late as 1866, the country’s foremost sports newspaper, Bell’s Life in London, was advertising a match between “Ned Wilson and Tom Eddows (alias The Snob),” two “old Birmingham men” who had spent years cultivating their boxing talent.4

  Just as it is today, the early-nineteenth-century boxing match was as much theatrical entertainment as it was a sports competition. Before the introduction of the Marquess of Queensbury’s rules in 1868, boxers were permitted to wrestle as well as throw punches.5 Posed at the center of the ring, in a bare-chested display of physical prowess, competitors would have appeared as heroic actors on a stage, while the prospect of a large prize fight, announced in bills plastered about town, would have seemed as thrilling as the arrival of the circus.

  The designated day followed an established order of events. A crowd of men in top hats and flat caps would gather, eagerly checking the time, fiddling with their watch chains, tucking their hands into their waistcoat pockets. Eventually, the combatants would appear, one after the other, each accompanied by a second and a bottle-holder responsible for refreshing and sponging down the fighter between rounds. The pugilists would shake hands, and a coin toss would decide who could choose his corner. Once these formalities were concluded, the men would strip down and “have their drawers examined” to ensure that there had been no “insertion of improper substances.” Only then could the fight officially commence.

  While it would not have been expected for “respectable” ladies to be present at such matches, the attendance of working-class women would have been neither encouraged nor entirely frowned upon. It is likely that Kate watched her uncle from amid the crowds, slightly starstruck; not only by his strength and talent as a fighter, but by his ability to command the attention of a rapt audience. Whatever relationship they formed, whether it was one based on a niece’s admiration of an older family member, or common interests, Kate came to believe that her Uncle Tom would offer her the sort of home and sympathy she did not find in Wolverhampton.

  In 1861, Tom Eddowes and his wife, Rosannah, were living at the heart of Birmingham’s industrial center. Across the way, Eldridge & Merrett’s pin works, an imposing brick mill with thrusting smokestacks, pounded out tiny steel pins and needles. At Brooks & Street, a few doors down, brass wire was woven into sieves and spark guards, while at Thomas Felton’s manufactory, carriage lamps and chandeliers were smelted into shape. The smaller workshops along Bagot Street were occupied mostly by toy makers and gun makers, the trade that lent its name to the area: the Gun Quarter. Birmingham differed little in appearance from Wolverhampton. Brick had been built upon brick, and all of it was smudged with thick black coal dust.

  The Eddoweses’ residence, in a courtyard off Moland Street, was situated amid the incessant thud and chug of heavy machinery. There would scarcely have been a quiet hour in the day when an engine did not crank loudly or a cloud of smoke did not hang over them. Mercury and other metals discharged from manufacturing plants made the neighborhood’s water unfit to drink; residents relied on deliveries from a cart. Their courtyard house, constructed of late-eighteenth-century brick, would have seen its share of wear after nearly a hundred years. With a room on both the first and second floors, as well as a ground-floor kitchen and a cellar, the house would have provided sufficient enough space for the couple and their two youngest children: sixteen-year-old John, who made brass tubing at a local factory, and twelve-year-old Mary, who remained at home to assist her mother. When Uncle Tom was not throwing punches in the ring, he was driving nails into shoes, either in a room partially converted for that purpose or in a nearby workshop.

  In nineteenth-century working-class families, distant relations would receive a welcome proportionate to their ability to contribute practical or financial support to a household. Whatever plan Kate had made for living in Birmingham, work was an inescapable part of it. But if she had hoped to avoid returning to factory drudgery, she was to be sorely disappointed. Kate knew tinwork, and Birmingham had plenty of it. It wasn’t long before Uncle Tom had found her a position much like the one she had left behind in Wolverhampton. No longer a scourer, Kate now sat at a long table with polishing cloths, rubbing newly shellacked japanware trays and working their surfaces to a high sheen, so that somewhere, in a house with a parlor, a serving maid could deliver tea to her mistress on an object pretty enough to make the visitors envious. Kate’s hours would have been the same: rising at dawn or in early darkness, home for supper, and then to sleep, in a bed shared with her cousin Mary, in a room divided by a curtain from the snores of John, or Kate’s uncle and aunt. It did not matter where she fled—to Wolverhampton or Birmingham, to the household of a pugilist or a tinplate worker. She could expect that this routine would command her life until she married. Then it would be her own mother’s life; the pain of childbearing, the weariness of child rearing, worry, hunger and exhaustion, and eventually, sickness and death.

  The wet Indian heat smothered the listless soldiers of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment. As they rested in the shade of Asirgarh Fort’s ruined mosque, they played cards, polished their boots, and listened to stories. There were always stories to be told: stories from back home in Ireland, stories from the jungles, battle stories, stories of willing women with wanton smiles and dark skin or twinkling eyes and fair faces.

  The man his commanding officers called Thomas Quinn would listen to such tales with a keen interest. Quinn, or Thomas Conway, the name he received at birth on November 21, 1836, in County Mayo,6 was a collector of and later a peddler of stories, though he never recounted the tale explaining the reason for his change of name. Men who wished to escape their past, whether a broken marriage or a situation far worse, frequently assumed a new identity when they “took the Queen’s shilling” and enlisted. In October 1857, Thomas Conway had done just that.

  When he marked a cross by his name on the enlistment roll, Conway likely knew he was destined for India. Word had reached Britain in September of the rebellion of British East India troops near Delhi, which had grown and threatened to spread through the north of the country. The Sepoy Mutiny supplanted the Crimean War in newspaper headlines as British troops, scarcely recovered from the sieges of the Black Sea, left for the dust of the subcontinent. T
he call for reinforcements became urgent, and Thomas had received barely a month of training before he, along with the rest of the second brigade of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment, boarded the steamship Princess Charlotte, bound for Bombay. For a young man on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, who had seen little beyond rural life and sod houses, this would prove to be the greatest adventure of his life. India would offer him a rich harvest of stories.

  The journey by sea took three months, but not one of the sights he glimpsed along the way—not the flying fish or the sharks or the swells of the Cape of Good Hope—was nearly as alien and exotic as India. When the men landed at Bombay, many Irish and English recruits found themselves completely bewildered by the hectic, colorful scenes. They gawped at women wrapped in bright silk saris, wearing nose rings, and jingling with bangles. They were bewildered by the bold scent of ginger and garlic and by the dozy buffaloes shuffling through the marketplace. At times the extreme differences in culture and climate proved too difficult to adjust to, and many found themselves succumbing not only to “the rigours of the weather” but to “the melancholy of homesickness.”

  It was the former rather than the latter that felled Thomas Conway during his Indian adventure. The humidity entered his chest. He coughed and wheezed so much during marches that he was eventually sent to the army hospital in Madras, where the cool breezes were expected to revive him. Unfortunately, the mutiny was put down before he managed to recover. Upon his return to Dublin in 1861, the army’s senior medical officer examined him and soon determined that he would never recover. Conway’s “Physical disability and continual infirmity” was diagnosed as “the result of former illness, principally rheumatism and chronic bronchitis.” To make matters worse, the doctor also detected that Conway, age twenty-four, suffered “from a disease of the heart.” As a consequence, it was recommended that he be discharged; his papers noted, rather favorably, that the soldier’s disorder was “partially, if not entirely attributable to military service and climate and not intemperance or other vice.”7

  With a bad heart and a weak chest, Thomas could neither soldier nor return to casual labor, the occupation which had sustained him prior to joining the army.* While this news would have been disquieting for a young man without formal training in a trade, his consolation would come in the form of a pension, to be paid twice yearly. Generally, privates’ pensions, especially for those like Thomas Conway, who had served only four years and six days, were menial sums, enough to supplement a worker’s income, but not to replace it. According to his records, he was eligible to receive six pence per day, an amount that over the years was reassessed and adjusted upward or downward by one penny, based on any improvement in his medical condition.8 Thomas would be forced to find some way of subsisting that did not involve swinging a hammer, mowing hay, or lifting burdensome loads.

  As a child in rural Ireland, Conway would have come to know the chapmen, or chapbook men, peddlers who plodded the roads through County Mayo, visiting farms, taverns, and turf-roofed houses. Chased by dogs and followed by curious children along his route, the chapman carried a linen pack filled with an assortment of useful goods and materials for those without access to a nearby shop. Part vagabond, part town crier, part wily salesman, the chapman was viewed with a mixture of suspicion and welcome. He moved from village to settlement to town, collecting and sharing information, news, and gossip wherever he landed, which was for some villagers his most essential role. However, a good hawker knew his business and understood how to make the most out of every stop. Farmers’ wives and daughters were enticed by scissors, combs, thimbles, knives, ribbon, thread, buttons, and even brooches and small toys, which he spread over the kitchen table. He also carried an array of printed material, in particular, chapbooks—short pamphlets decorated with woodcut engravings, which recounted everything from fairy tales to biographies, poems, and short stories. At the taverns and pubs, the chapman might pull out his collection of broadside ballads—songs printed on a single large sheet, which told of the loss of love or detailed the story of a bloody crime. These lyrics were usually set to a well-known tune, so a purchaser could throw down a penny, grab the broadside, and launch into a new song over a pint of ale.

  The chapbook seller’s life was entirely peripatetic. Each day began with an empty stomach and no promise of a bed. The History of John Cheap the Chapman, a chapbook usually found in the pack of most chapbook peddlers during the first half of the nineteenth century, offers some insight into the daily life of those who took to the road with their wares. The narrator of the tale makes it clear that the hazards and discomforts frequently more than outweighed the adventures. Falling into a ditch or a sewer, escaping the wrath of a farmer’s dog or the horns of a bull, were among the ever-present dangers. He grumbles over the inconvenience of sleeping on wheat sacks, in a field of kale, or beside a cow on a cold winter’s night. He barters with farmers’ wives for a bowl of soup or cabbage and often complains of “travelling all day and getting neither meat nor bread nor ale, going from house to house.” Nonetheless, peddling offered a degree of freedom rare in other walks of life. There was something romantic in slipping the ties of a typical nineteenth-century existence. Wandering, living by his wits, encountering different sorts of characters, and visiting new places, a chapman was beholden to no one, not family, community, church, or employer. For some, that liberation was thrilling.

  Not surprisingly, life as a chapman appealed to single men without families, though, much like modern traveling salesmen, marriage was certainly seen as no impediment to pursuing this profession. Those thought most suited to it were former soldiers, who, it was believed, were already accustomed to long marches and hardship.

  Becoming a chapman must have seemed a logical choice for Thomas Conway, who since his teens had been no stranger to a nomadic existence. The Great Famine, which devastated the Irish countryside in 1845–52, fell hardest upon County Mayo. By 1851, nearly 30 percent of the population of the region had died or immigrated. Thomas was no exception. At the time he enlisted in 1857, it appears he had already moved across the Irish Sea to Yorkshire, where he had been working as a casual laborer near Beverley. Upon his discharge from the army, on October 14, 1861, he claimed his pension, paid a visit to relations in Kilkerry, and returned to England, this time to Newcastle, where he stood a better chance of making a living. With the money he’d been paid, the young Irishman purchased goods to fill his pack and set out on the peddler’s path, which took him south to Coventry and then to London, before he arrived in Birmingham by the summer of 1862.9

  The stories differ as to how Kate Eddowes and Thomas Conway met. According to one account, at twenty years of age, she was “a nice looking girl with a very warm heart.” He was a gray-eyed Irishman with light brown hair and a talent for telling tales. Both Sarah Croot and Emma Eddowes claimed that Kate met him in Birmingham, but Uncle Tom Eddowes insisted, with a certain displeasure, that this was not the case. It was not under his watch that “she formed the acquaintance of this man Conway.” Whatever the truth was, nine months into her life in Birmingham, at about the time she would have met Thomas Conway, Kate declared a sudden desire to return to Wolverhampton, the direction in which Conway was headed.

  Thomas Conway certainly cut a romantic figure, with his tales of tigers and fragrant jungles, with his songs and his sack of stories. His engaging patter would have enchanted strangers in every pub and marketplace. He was footloose and went where the wind blew him. It was understandable that Kate, jolly, outgoing, and open, would find him attractive and his lifestyle a possible alternative to the drudgery of her situation.

  The Eddoweses were not pleased by this turn of events, and Kate discovered as much when she appeared back at Bilston Street. Thomas Conway was never well liked by Kate’s family—not by William and Elizabeth, her cousin Sarah, her Uncle Tom, or even her sisters in London. It is no mystery why. Judged medically unfit by the army and with no real occupation, as well as no home, no family, and no reliabl
e income beyond a paltry pension of six or seven pence per day, this Irish drifter was like a figure in a Victorian cautionary tale about whom young women were warned. Any liaison with his kind was seen as a ticket to poverty, starvation, and the workhouse. Worse still, if Conway had offered to marry Kate, he demonstrated no real hurry to exchange vows.

  Still, this did not discourage Kate’s attachment: she was, according to an account of events in the Black Country Bugle, completely “infatuated with the handsome, poetical Irishman.” Aunt Elizabeth eventually gave her an ultimatum: end the affair with the penny-ballad salesman, or leave the house.* Kate chose the latter and moved into a lodging house with Thomas. The timing of this rupture was important; by July of that year, 1862, she was pregnant.

  While the Eddoweses would have been ashamed and embarrassed by their niece’s predicament, pregnancy out of wedlock was not unusual. Among the more privileged classes, chastity was considered a measure of a young woman’s character and her worth on the marriage market, but virginity did not hold the same significance for the working classes. Their lives were governed by practical concerns. The innocent femininity cultivated in middle- and upper-class girls was not expected of their working-class sisters. Commentators of the period expressed concern that sexualization of the laboring classes occurred at a very young age on account of cramped domestic arrangements. With living space in short supply, and family members, other relatives, and even visitors sharing bedrooms and beds, bodily privacy and modesty were luxuries they simply could not afford. The sights and sounds of sexual activity were part of everyday life; temptation and experimentation were a consequence of exposure. In addition, lack of room at home pushed young teenagers outside, beyond the watchful gaze of parents. As a young woman told the pornographic writer “Walter,” “There are lots of girls about . . . their mothers don’t care what they do . . . when they’s about thirteen or fourteen years old they won’t be kept in, they is about the dark streets at night . . .” She went on to explain that “the girls went with the coster boys who are their sweethearts” and that “a virginity was a rarity at fourteen years old.” Henry Mayhew made similar discoveries when interviewing teenage girls employed in “slopwork,” or the manufacture of cheap clothing. One confessed to him, “I am satisfied that there is not one young girl that works at slop work that is virtuous, and there are some thousands in the trade.”