by Trow, M. J.
On 31 May, with only days to go before her daughter’s murder, Catherine Jackson saw Elizabeth in the Queen’s Road, Chelsea. The girl’s first instinct was to run, but she stayed put and told her mother all her woes. Exactly what Catherine was doing out of the workhouse is not clear, but she may have been trying to find work. Elizabeth told her mother that John Faircloth was the father of her child and that he had left her. At that last meeting, Elizabeth was wearing a cheap brass ring on her wedding finger.
John Faircloth probably was the father. But if Elizabeth was seven months pregnant in early June 1889, she conceived the previous November, which meant that the shadowy ‘Charlie’ could have been responsible or even Elizabeth’s former employer which would explain why she left Chelsea so precipitately.
‘If she was a whore God will bless the hand that slew her,’ wrote the anonymous crank to the Central News Agency back in October in connection with the Whitehall Mystery, ‘for the women of Moab and Midian shall die’.2 Moab and Midian were biblical cities of the Old Testament, steeped in the kind of licentiousness we associate with Sodom and Gomorrah. And there were powerful elements in Victorian society that had a pious, high-and-mighty attitude towards prostitution. So all-prevailing was this, especially among the literate middle class, that the subject could not be discussed openly, still less written about. Out of this came the euphemism ‘the oldest profession’.
One of the very few who dared to be open about the subject was ‘General’ William Booth of the Salvation Army. Booth operated originally from the Mile End Waste in the East End in 1865, bringing comfort and the promise of salvation to the hopeless. He wrote In Darkest England and the Way Out in 1891, two years after the torso killings stopped. In the business of saving lives and souls, Booth’s ‘Sally Army’ girls worked from Angel Alley off the Whitechapel Road and had hundreds of cases of prostitution on their register. The cases do not make pleasant reading but they paint a picture of working-class life very different from anything we know today. The twenty-first century’s bogeyman is the paedophile and frightened, ignorant parents demand lists of these people and their addresses ‘so they can keep their children safe’. Most examples of sexual abuse of children are actually committed by family members or neighbours. Incest was not even regarded as a crime until 1908. ‘E C’, Booth’s records tell us, was ‘aged 18, a soldier’s child, born on the sea. Her father died and her mother, a thoroughly depraved woman, assisted to secure her daughter’s prostitution.’ ‘E A’ was ‘17 … left an orphan very early in life and adopted by her godfather, who himself was the means of her ruin at the age of 10’. Another orphan, ‘E’ married a soldier who left her pregnant. ‘Being on the verge of starvation, she entered a lodging house in Westminster and “did as other girls”.’
The ‘Great Social Evil’, as prostitution was called by the 1870s, had a fascination for the Victorians. Prostitutes were ‘unfortunates’, ‘ladies of the night’, ‘scarlet sisters’, rather as they are ‘workers in the sex industry’ today and there was a hierarchy among them as in many other professions. Henry Mayhew, publishing his brilliant London Labour and the London Poor eleven years before the first torso murder, divides prostitutes into eight categories, although his dividing lines were of necessity blurred and he may not have been quite accurate. He was after all a forty-something middle-class sociologist (the term had not been invented in his day) and he seemed to want just to talk to the girls. Many of them called him ‘a funny old party’.
At the top of the tree came the prima donnas, the kept mistresses. The best known of these was Catherine Walters, known as Skittles, who wore ridiculously tight riding habits to encourage aristocratic suitors on Rotten Row of a morning. Those ladies were beautiful, educated, often talented musicians and actresses and cost a fortune to maintain. Their houses are still there in James Street and Duke Street and some of them were friends of royalty. Next came the convives, still ‘an ornament to their sex’ but less expensive. Many of them seemed to have been happy to have their rent paid, their wardrobes provided and the odd present, like a sewing machine, given to them. Below those groups came 2a, b and c, operating at the same level, but organized in different ways. The independents worked alone, street walkers, but elegant and refined. They could be found centred on the Haymarket and its environs in the mid-century, but increasingly along the Strand and some of the fashionable London squares. The Rose Tattoo murder of October 1884 has a link here.
Mayhew divided 2b in half. The board lodgers were given board (i.e. food and a bed); the dress lodgers were given board and dress. In both cases, they worked under a woman who ran a brothel. Since Paris was regarded as the centre of sin by most Englishmen, European terms were often used. The brothel was the bordello; the mistress was the madame. In the West End, there were ‘poses plastiques’ and ‘tableaux vivantes’, the equivalent of pole-dancing but without the pole. Gentlemen out on the town could spend an evening or all night at the bordellos – in Mayhew’s day Kate Hamilton’s in the Haymarket was the best known – dinner and champagne were on offer too. The Man of Pleasure’s Pocket Book written in the 1850s and regularly updated, carried advertisements for girls. Mrs Merton’s ‘sister hills’ were ‘prominent, firm and elastic’. Mrs Woodford’s breasts were ‘rather small, but as plump and hard as an untouched virgin’s’.
Some of these women were street walkers, usually venturing out at four in the afternoon and letting men take them to dinner, the theatre or a dance before ‘earning her supper’. Such women were noticeable when drunk in their hired finery, but otherwise they blended with ‘respectable’ ladies and that sometimes posed a problem for the police.
Commentators at the time – and historians, since – have focused on this ‘gay’ life (the term meant female prostitution) because it is exciting, exotic and involves famous names. Edward, Prince of Wales and his circle, the Duke of Brunswick and the Marquis of Waterford mixed with social reformers like Mayhew, Charles Booth, William Booth and even the leader of the Liberal Party, William Gladstone. We are concerned with groups 3 to 6 on Mayhew’s list. The low lodging women and the sailors’ and soldiers’ women are the whores lit by the spotlight of the Ripper. Of interest too, potentially, are Mayhew’s lowest of the low, the park women and the thieves’ women.
So much research has been carried out on Jack’s victims that we almost expect East End prostitutes to be middle-aged. Martha Tabram was 39, but looked much older. Polly Nichols was 45; Annie Chapman two years older; Liz Stride was 45; the woman who died on the same night, Kate Eddowes, was 46; Clay Pipe Alice McKenzie was probably 45. Only Mary Kelly was in her twenties. Yet all the torso killer’s victims were probably between 23 and 35 and if we are trying to home in on the sort of women who were his targets, we should concentrate on the younger ‘motts’3 of London. In this category of course comes Mary Kelly herself, but the Ripper case has highlighted other prostitutes’ names who were her age or younger.
Lizzie Albrook was about 20 in 1888. She lived in Miller’s Court, Dorset Street, in the same enclave as Mary, whom she visited on the night of her murder on 8/9 November. Lizzie worked in a lodging house in Dorset Street and may not yet have been on the game. Mary frequently warned the girl ‘whatever you do don’t you do wrong and turn out as I have’.4 Elizabeth Burns, known as One-Armed Liz, was 18. She was attacked on 18 September 1888 by the deranged and dangerous Charles Ludwig, who threatened her with a knife in Aldgate. She was rescued by the timely arrival of a patrolling policeman. Frances Coles was known as Carrotty Nell, a good-looking blonde 26 years old at the time of her murder on St Valentine’s Day 1891. Wounds to her throat when she was found lying in Swallow Gardens under the railway arches near Chambers Street, Whitechapel led the press and for a while the police to speculate that this was another Ripper killing. She was probably killed in a ‘domestic’ by her current ‘bully’, a violent ship’s fireman called James Sadler, but there was insufficient evidence against him.
Mary Jones would have been called a ma
dame in the West End. She was about 24, the same age as Elizabeth Jackson and was charged with brothel-keeping by Inspector Arthur Ferrett of H Division on 7 December 1888. Her ‘colleague’ Gertrude Smith was much older (57) and was sentenced to a £10 fine with 5 guineas costs. It is likely that this was the result of a routine clampdown, irrespective of the Ripper murders, as the police from time to time were pressured by do-gooders and the Christian lobby to clean up London.
Rose Mylett was another victim attributed to the Ripper. Also known by her street names of Drunken Lizzie Davis and Fair Alice Downey, she lived at a variety of East End addresses before 20 December 1888 when her body was found in Clarke’s Yard near Poplar High Street. She had not been robbed (there was still ½d in her pocket) and the body was still warm when Constable Robert Goulding found her at quarter past four in the morning. The medical opinion, via the ubiquitous Dr Thomas Bond, was that she had died of natural causes as a result of accidental strangulation due to her tight-necked bodice. As there was no alcohol in her stomach and she had been seen arguing with a couple of sailors the previous evening, the ever-irascible coroner, Wynne Baxter, begged to differ and instructed the jury to return a verdict of ‘Murder by person or persons unknown’. It is possible (although unlikely) that Bond was genuinely at a loss to explain this one and bowed to Metropolitan pressure from Robert Anderson himself. Rose Mylett was 26.
With the exception of Mary Kelly, it seems from what we know that the rest of Jack’s victims began as respectable women, married and often with children, but that drink and bad luck drove them to the streets. Taking a random 100 cases of women who had turned up in General Booth’s Salvation Army Rescue Homes, his analysis was as follows. In 1890, 14 per cent had ‘fallen’ because of drink (compare a tentative figure of 85 per cent of Jack’s victims); 33 per cent had been seduced, and saw themselves as ‘ruined’; 24 per cent had become prostitutes because of the bad company they kept – perhaps ‘Charlie’ and John Faircloth fitted this role in the case of Elizabeth Jackson. Only 2 per cent were driven by poverty and 24 per cent accosted men through ‘wilful choice’. These figures came from the statements of the girls themselves and cast doubt on the usual line that the appalling poverty of the East End was a direct cause of prostitution. That said, of the 100 women under Booth’s spotlight, only 48 of them were decently dressed; 52 were either destitute or in rags.
‘The profession of a prostitute’, wrote General Booth, ‘is the only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice.’5 And they started young, often with the connivance of their parents in order to bolster the weekly income. Children were a commodity in Victorian England, to be stuffed up chimneys or sent down mines. Do-gooders like Lord Shaftesbury worked long and hard to end the abuse of child labour, but Acts of Parliament only went as far as factory owners and children’s parents were prepared to let them go. Small outlets like sweat shops in which girls worked for long hours making clothes were exempt from such legislation and the ‘climbing boys’ act had only recently been passed when the torso murders began. So if children were routinely exploited by adults in the workplace, why not sexually?
Superintendent Joseph Dunlap of C Division, who would become involved in the latest of the torso murders, gave evidence before a committee of the House of Lords at the behest of the London Society for the Protection of Young Females in 1881. He admitted there was a great deal of juvenile prostitution in his Division, focusing on one brothel in particular, where girls as young as 12 were available. Until 1885 the age of consent was 12 and a change of the law in that year only raised it to 13. Pornographic photographs offered for sale in London were of 7 and 10 year olds whose ‘secret charms are completely devoid of hair as nature has not yet given them these revolting tokens of puberty. Like grown up ladies these little girls indulge in all debauchery.’6
Dunlap’s recent raid on the brothel had uncovered ‘elderly gentlemen’ in bed with two girls who regarded the whole thing as a joke. The cost was 6 shillings for two girls; 4 shillings for one. No charge was made against the children or the client. The brothel-keeper was committed for trial. The superintendent’s view was that teenagers become prostitutes because it was a better option than the drudgery of the ‘tweeny’ or downstairs maid. The hands of the torso victims were well-manicured (except Elizabeth Jackson who apparently bit her nails) because in all probability they were prostitutes. A serving girl’s hands would be red from the washing and scrubbing, her nails broken and chipped from black-leading the grate and making the fire.
In the year of the Ripper, Beatrice Potter Webb wrote an article for the Nineteenth Century magazine called ‘Pages from a Workgirl’s Diary’. Like other (usually male) journalists who went underground to record the life of the poor, she took various menial jobs in the sweated trades and mixed with girls who took to the streets when times were hard. There were no trade unions yet for these girls and much of the work was tough and dangerous. Flower and chestnut sellers standing all day in the pouring rain; match sellers freezing on street corners; match-makers whose bones were rotten with the effects of phosphorus – who could blame any of them for selling herself for a larger profit? One of the girls told Beatrice Webb about a brothel run by ‘Mother’ Willit in Gerrard Street, near Shaftesbury Avenue, in the heart of the West End:
So help her kidnies, she al’us turned her gals out with a clean arse and good tog [clothes] and as she turned ’em out, she didn’t care who turned ’em up, cause ’em was clean as a smelt and as fresh as a daisy.7
Unlike European cities where red light districts were beginning to develop (the Parisian police kept a register of brothels and they were sanctioned by law) London’s Unfortunates could be found almost anywhere. In the East End, Spitalfields and Whitechapel – the Abyss – were legendary, but the docks had their centres of sin too. The Ratcliffe Highway was once considered the most dangerous street in the country, crammed with pubs and brothels to entertain the vast number of foreign sailors constantly in port in the biggest dock system in the world. Shadwell High Street, Brunswick Street, Frederick Street, these and others like them were places where a cheap, willing girl could be found at any time of the day or night. Henry Mayhew recorded some of them – Cocoa Bet, Salmony-faced Mary Anne, Black Sarah. They plied their trade out of the Duke of York and the Ship and Shears, the Half Moon and the Seven Stars. And if anyone objected to the fact that several of these ladies were coloured, a poem of the time put everything in context –
The night when her sable o’ershades us,
Will veil all the pomp of the day,
Then Sall8 is as good as my lady,
And cats are all equally grey.9
Back in the West End, where Elizabeth Jackson and probably the other torso victims earned their living on the streets, one brothel, run by Madame Audray in Church Street, Soho, had a rather revolting sales pitch in the guide books available for men-about-town. It compared itself with an abbatoir.
This abbess [Audray] has just put the kipehook [kibosh] on all other purveyors of the French flesh market. She does not keep her meat too long on the hooks, though she will have her price; but nothing is allowed to get stale here. You may have your meat dressed to your own liking and there is no need of cutting twice from one joint; and if it suits your taste, you may kill your own lamb or mutton for her flock is in prime condition and always ready for sticking.10
One man who took her literally was the torso killer.
Chapter 8
The Pinchin Street Torso:
Whitechapel, 10 September 1889
On 4 September 1889, while police numbers began to be cut back again in the once-more quiet wake of the Ripper murder of Alice McKenzie, a letter was sent to the City Police. It was postmarked SE5, the area around Camberwell and Denmark Hill, and was unsigned. On the face of it, it was a typical ‘nosey neighbour’ letter, similar in vein to dozens that had been received over the past eleven months. This one, though was very detailed and almost apologetic.
; I think a murder was committed last night at 65 Gt. Prescott St. It may have been the young servant who I was told had been made [maid] to one of the daughters in the day. I heard another was to be killed to day if some one told. The mistress told me in the afternoon if the young servants did not please her she sent them away. Some in the house wanted me to be killed but the eldest daughter would not allow it. I think some one was brought in and his [illegible] of one night before. I am very sorry to say this and am sorry that the family should be Jewish. I would ask if it would not be possible for a detective from London not known here to take the furnished bedroom and by God’s help put a stop to what I fear is a practice of young women brought in and then murdered. I am very sorry to have to give information but I must please God … If I did not tell it would seem as if I connived at the shedding of blood.
The unsigned letter was passed to Leman Street police station and found its way into the hands of Inspector Edmund Reid, in charge of H Division’s CID. Reid was one of the most colourful policemen involved in hunting the Ripper, the Weekly Despatch going so far as to call him ‘one of the most remarkable men of the century’. He was an amateur actor, singer, conjuror and balloonist who would eventually figure as Detective Dier in the thrillers of the novelist Charles Gibbon. Reid’s later memoirs prove that he was woefully wide of the mark in his analysis of the Whitechapel murders and he dismissed this letter as he knew the woman who wrote it and she was insane.
Even so, someone was bringing young women in somewhere and murdering them and the next one would take place only a few hundred yards from Great Prescott Street.
John Cleary visited the offices of the New York Herald to report a killing. A policeman, he told the newsdesk, had found a body at about 11.20pm on Saturday 7 September in Back Church Lane, some 300 yards from the Berner Street site of the killing of Long Liz Stride. Cleary had learned this from a personal friend, a police inspector he had met by chance in Whitechapel High Street. Two reporters, anxious to capitalize on what may well have been another Ripper killing, asked Cleary to go to the site with them, but he refused. He also now modified the story to the effect that his informant was an ex-officer, no longer serving with the Met. Back Church Lane was deserted and at Leman Street police station, the reporters learned that no murder had taken place there. With so many bogus letters being sent to the police and journalists, the whole incident was written off as a hoax.