Kate and Thomas Conway’s destructive and abusive relationship limped on into 1881. Although they are recorded on the census that year as living together with their two sons in Chelsea, in a room at 71 Lower George Street, by autumn, the couple had split up. When journalists later interviewed Conway and his daughter, neither could recall the precise date when this event occurred; however, Thomas was quick to paint himself as the victim. According to his version, he had found it necessary to leave Kate on account of her drinking, and he made certain to take his children with him when he went. The Eddowes sisters disputed this narrative. Elizabeth claimed that her sister had left Thomas “because he treated her badly,” though Annie added that “Before they actually left each other she [Kate] was never with him for twelve months at a time.”8 The separation had been a long time in the making; when it came it offered respite to both parties.
For a time following the breakdown of her relationship with Thomas Conway, Kate appears to have turned to her sister Elizabeth for assistance, though this arrangement did not last for long. Much like Emma and Harriet before her, Elizabeth soon found her sister’s behavior insupportable. In September 1881, Kate was once again charged with drunken disorderliness and dragged off the streets as she spewed obscenities at passersby. On this occasion, the magistrate spared her a prison sentence. However, where the law was forgiving, her family was not, and by the end of that year, Elizabeth too had broken off relations with her younger sister.
Now without Elizabeth, without Thomas Conway or her sons, without Emma or Harriet, Kate sought out the only remaining sister with whom she still maintained a bond: Eliza.
At some time prior to 1881, Eliza Gold had become a widow. Although she had been the wife of a butcher, a practitioner of a respected skilled trade, the family had struggled financially. Apparently no provisions were made in the event of Eliza’s widowhood, and consequently, as was the case for so many women of her station in life, Eliza’s circumstances were significantly compromised by bereavement. With no savings or pension and a son not yet old enough to earn a proper wage, Eliza had to attach herself to the affections of another partner as quickly as possible.* Little is known about Charles Frost, the man she came to call her second husband. Both had been widowed, and in the tradition of many working-class men and women who formed relationships following bereavement, they chose not to officially solemnize their vows. In an interview, Eliza claimed that her “husband” “worked at the waterside unloading cargoes of fruit” and occasionally sold penny-farthing books at Liverpool Street station.9
Until the death of James Gold, Eliza had always lived near her sisters, either in Clerkenwell or Hoxton, but widowhood and Charles Frost brought her to Whitechapel. At least since 1881, the Frosts inhabited a garret room at 6 Thrawl Street, with Eliza’s son and a daughter from Frost’s previous relationship. Eliza’s new address was far from desirable. Whereas both the poor and the more comfortably off lived in Hoxton, Thrawl Street was one of the most notorious sinks of poverty in Spitalfields.10 It was here that Kate came to visit her sister, almost certainly to beg a coin or two off her, if not a meal or a narrow space in one of their beds. For a time, Eliza must have given Kate some much-needed solace.
That year, whenever she had the four pence to do so, Kate rented a bed at 55 Flower and Dean Street, a lodging house around the corner from her sister. “Cooney’s,” as it later came to be called, was also the doss house of choice for John Kelly, the man who would come to fill Thomas Conway’s empty boots. In John’s words, which bear all the hallmarks of journalistic embellishment, he “first laid eyes” on Kate while she was staying there. After “being throwed together a good bit,” the two took a liking to each other “and decided to make it a regular bargain.”*
If the Eddowes women had taken a disliking to Thomas Conway, their disdain for John Kelly seems to have been even greater. As far as Emma was concerned, Kate’s life “went from bad to worse” when she left Thomas Conway; at least when she lived with her abuser “her home was clean and comfortable.”11 After taking up with John, she had no home, only a vile temporary bed at a doss house. Although Kelly was described as “quiet and inoffensive,” which was more than could be said for Thomas Conway, in the eyes of Kate’s family, he possessed one major failing that Thomas did not: he drank, heavily. Annie, who blamed her mother for tearing apart the family, was unequivocal about her feelings for John Kelly: “I’ve never spoken to him and I don’t like him.”12
Despite her family’s sentiments, once free of her abuser, Kate settled into a happier, though no less erratic life. She and John shared a love of the bottle, and their conviviality made them popular with fellow lodgers at Cooney’s.* According to newspaper interviews with those at 55 Flower and Dean Street, Kate was always ready with a song and didn’t hesitate to spare her last four pence for someone who hadn’t made their doss money. For a time, both she and John worked; Kate, like Elisabeth Stride, took on charring for Jewish families in the area, while John labored at the market—though this income was disappointing and rarely reliable.
Although the couple came to regard 55 Flower and Dean Street as their home, they, like most who inhabited Whitechapel’s lodging houses, could not afford to spend every night there. Their income ebbed and flowed; sometimes there was money to pay for a bed, and sometimes there was not. At the inquest John made it clear that he and Kate might pass the night at Cooney’s, at number 52 Flower and Dean Street, in the casual wards, or on the streets. Kate, who had spent much of her life slumbering with the night sky as her blanket, was well known among the rough sleepers in Spitalfields. In the wake of her murder, a handful of homeless women were among the first to come forward to identify her. She was cited as one of “10 to 20 houseless creatures who are without the means of paying for their beds” who regularly curled up in a shed off Dorset Street.*
Kate and John Kelly’s hand-to-mouth existence did not permit them to linger for too long in any one place. Casual ward records indicate that, from 1883, the couple made regular excursions to Kent in order to find work, roaming between London, Dartford, Seven Oaks, and Chatham. Kate never abandoned hawking, which had become to her as much of a way of life as it was a means of earning an income. After twenty or more years of wandering, of sleeping in fields or passageways, she may have found this free existence more familiar and comfortable than a settled life could ever be. As she learned from Thomas Conway, a peddler was beholden to no one: not employers or landlords or even family.
After Kate took up with John Kelly, even her sister Eliza and Kate’s own daughter, Annie, attempted to distance themselves from her. Annie had left home in her teens, choosing to cohabit with and later marry a lampblack packer called Louis Philips. According to Annie’s statements at her mother’s inquest, Kate hounded the couple, frequently appearing at their door, intoxicated and begging for handouts. The situation became intolerable, and the Philipses were forced to move in order to avoid her. Annie complained that so long as her mother drank, it was impossible to maintain a normal relationship with her. In August 1886, the situation came to a head. Annie, preparing to give birth to her third child, appealed to her mother for assistance. Kate agreed to be present with her daughter in her “period of confinement” but insisted on receiving pay for it. Annie grudgingly obliged, only to discover that her mother had taken the money and gone out “to get too much to drink.” “The result,” Annie commented, “caused unpleasantness . . . we did not part on very good terms.”13 Little more than a week after giving birth, Annie had thrown Kate out and decided she would have no more to do with her. The Philipses moved from their home on 22 King Street in Bermondsey and did not leave a forwarding address.
Perhaps what Kate liked best about John Kelly was that, unlike members of her family, he demanded little of her. Although everyone who knew them, from Kate’s sisters to the couple’s friends at Cooney’s lodging house, attested that the pair “had a sincere attachment for each other” and that Kate “never went with any other ma
n,” their connection appears to have been one based more on practicality than emotional intimacy.14 John called Kate his wife, but she preferred to bear the surname Conway, belonging to the man to whom she insisted she was legally married. Although the couple behaved as spouses, Kate used John’s name only when it proved convenient. John never seemed to ask too many questions of Kate. He kept his distance from her family, never inquiring about her relationship with Annie, never speaking to her about Thomas Conway, and apparently never venturing to intrude on Kate’s inner thoughts. Despite living as her partner for seven years, he knew surprisingly little about her—not even that she had been born in Wolverhampton. As he and others confirmed at the inquest, they rarely argued; Kelly recalled only one occasion when “they had words” before Kate returned to him a few hours later.15
First and foremost, Kate and John Kelly were companions committed to each other’s daily survival. By the time that Kate had found John, she had known the violence of Thomas Conway’s fists, the scorn of her children and sisters, the deaths of at least two infants, and the trauma of her own parents’ demise. She had experienced the degradation of the workhouse, the general disgust of society, and had grown acquainted with starvation and illness.* Under such circumstances, what mattered most was the here and now: getting the drink that dulled the pain and the food that stopped the hunger. John Kelly’s company, his protection on the street, and his occasional income made life easier. For a woman who had so little, this in itself would have proven comfort enough.
“Nothing”
For those living in the poorer parts of London, the end of the summer meant one thing: the opportunity to earn some money and enjoy themselves in the Kentish countryside, bringing in the hop harvest. For many, hop picking was as close as they would ever come to having an actual vacation. It offered a chance to enjoy the fresh air, the campfire camaraderie, and the free barrels of beer and cider laid on by the farmers. Each September, thousands of city dwellers poured into the area; the marginally better off arrived by train, while many more walked the roads from London. In a good year, such as 1890, an estimated fifty to sixty thousand men, women, and children arrived for the hop harvest, where they were paid two pence a bushel for their labor and were housed in huts, sheds, or barns near the hop gardens.
With free accommodation and drink on offer, Kate and John Kelly were not about to miss this opportunity to fill their pockets and their bellies. They had been regulars among the hop pickers in the past years, and in the summer of 1888, joined the procession of Londoners heading south to Kent. Unfortunately, they and the others discovered an especially poor harvest that season. TheEcho remarked that workers found “the hops were not considered worth picking” in many parts of the county. “After trying many quarters for work,” laborers were forced “to walk back to London, having earned nothing.”1
Kate and John had set out toward the end of August, to work in the orchards and berry fields where hands were needed to bring in the fruit harvest. This was part of their usual circuit through Kent, and the two would have been hawking as well as picking up odd jobs until the hops were ready for picking. Gradually, the couple worked their way to Maidstone, where they would have heard that the hop crop was slightly better. As a county town, Maidstone also offered Kate and Kelly an opportunity to acquire some necessities for the work ahead; John needed a new pair of boots, along with a jacket, which he purchased from a pawnshop. The two then headed to Hunton, a village about five miles away, where, like other prospective pickers, they soon discovered that the crop was so sparse that “outsiders could get nothing to do.”2 Disappointed, they decided to “hoof it back” to London.3
The pair arrived in town on the evening of Thursday, September 27. Having eaten and drunk their way through the money they had earned in the countryside, they were forced to seek lodgings that night at the casual ward at Thavies Inn, on Shoe Lane. After years on the tramp, Kate and John had become experts at selecting the best spike in which to lay their heads, and Thavies Inn was a favorite. In spite of the rules set forth in the 1882 Casual Poor Act, which required all inmates to be detained for a minimum of two nights, to complete a full day’s labor picking oakum and breaking stones prior to release, Shoe Lane was more liberal in its approach, and was cited as a place to which “paupers flocked” because “detention and work are not enforced.”4 This concurred with John Kelly’s account of events; he and Kate were released early on Friday morning, which then allowed him to find some work at Spitalfields Market. By that afternoon, he had earned sixpence, which would cover the expense of a night’s lodgings for one of them, but not both. Later, John, not wishing to look like a negligent husband in the wake of his partner’s murder, claimed in his official statement that he offered to tramp to Mile End casual ward while Kate took four pence for a bed at Cooney’s. “No, you go and have a bed and I will go to the casual ward,” Kate protested, according to John. However, what was actually agreed upon and what came to transpire is a bit more “muddled,” as John himself admitted to the coroner.
Much of what is known about Kate and Kelly’s movements in September comes from his confused account; several versions of which appeared in the newspapers.* Initially, he stated that Kate went off to Mile End at around 3 or 4 p.m. on Friday afternoon, to line up for a bed, but under questioning, he revealed that this was not in fact a truthful record of events. The coroner produced a pawn ticket for a pair of boots that John said he had put in hock, dated Friday the twenty-eighth. John was taken aback by this; originally he had claimed that he pawned the boots the next day, on Saturday morning, and bought food and drink with the two shillings and six pence it provided. “It was either Friday night or Saturday morning. I am all muddled up,” he stated, as the lie began to unravel. He further revealed that it was in fact Kate who had pawned the boots that Friday night, while John stood in the doorway in his bare feet.* “Had you been drinking when the pawning took place?” the coroner asked him. “Yes,” Kelly admitted sheepishly. His confession made it plain to the jury why his memory of the events was poor.5
In fact, neither Kate nor John would have eaten since leaving Thavies Inn that morning, and filling their rumbling stomachs with food and drink would have been foremost on their minds. The six pence that John had earned had evidently been spent buying alcohol, which accounted for the state he was in while he and Kate pawned his boots. According to John’s testimony, “the greater part” of the two shillings and six pence they received was then used in purchasing provisions, which were to last them through the next morning.6 The couple bought tea and sugar, which Kate loaded into her skirt pockets, and probably a few more drinks. By the end of the evening it would be apparent that they had run through most of the pawn money, and so they decided that John should have the four pence for a single lodging-house bed. That night John Kelly stayed not at number 55 Flower and Dean Street, but at number 52, while Kate was most likely not among the casuals at Mile End. Not only is there no record of her admission, but Mile End did not share Thavies Inn’s lax enforcement of regulations. Had Kate taken a bed there, she would have been detained for two nights in order to pick oakum. Instead she appeared to meet John the following morning at the unfeasibly early hour of 8 a.m. John apparently had been loath to mention that Kate almost certainly slept rough that night, perhaps even in the shed off Dorset Street.* However, in light of the recent murders in Whitechapel, he knew that an admission of this would not have reflected well on him.
The coroner and the jury were naturally skeptical of John Kelly’s narrative, but not simply because many of his statements did not add up, but because they, like the police and the press, were convinced that the killer was targeting prostitutes. The testimony of those who knew Kate well did not, however, support the notion that she was in the sex trade. John Kelly, Kate’s sister Eliza Gold, Kate’s daughter, and even Frederick William Wilkinson, the deputy lodging-house keeper at Cooney’s, provided no such evidence. Wilkinson, who claimed a seven-year acquaintance with the couple, s
tated with certainty that he “never knew or heard of [Kate] being intimate with anyone but Kelly.”7 The coroner also pressed John on this point. He claimed that throughout the time he had been with her, he never knew of her “going out for immoral purposes at night”; neither had she ever “brought [him] money in the morning after being out.” He stated categorically that he would never have suffered such a situation.8
Unfortunately, while defending Kate’s honor, John used a turn of phrase with a double meaning. When he stated his concern over their lack of doss money, he claimed that he didn’t want to “have to see her walk about the streets at night.” The coroner picked up on this immediately.
“What do you mean by ‘walking the streets’?” he asked.
John clarified: “Well Sir, many a time we have not had the money to pay for our shelter, and have had to tramp about.”* “Walking the streets,” as explained by William Booth in his book Darkest England,referred to the rough sleepers’ never-ending nocturnal quest for somewhere quiet to rest before a patrolling constable moved them along. According to Howard Goldsmid, rough sleeping and walking the streets were a common way of life for those who frequented the lodging houses on Thrawl Street, Dorset Street, and Flower and Dean Street. When not lying “on the kerbstone, in the gutters, on heaps of rubbish, anywhere,” they could be seen walking “up and down with their hands in their pockets, and their dull sleepy eyes almost closed.”9 Regrettably, at the inquest, John’s answer to the coroner’s question about “walking the streets” did little to dissuade many journalists from persistently identifying Kate as a prostitute. According to the Telegraph, which was echoing the prejudices of its era while also attempting to tell a more salacious story, homeless women and women who sold sex were one and the same. The newspaper reported that Kate regularly bedded down on the street, or in a shed, alongside other “houseless waifs, penniless prostitutes, like herself . . .”10
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