by Andy Conway
Charles Hinton's Scientific Romances, including What is the Fourth Dimension? and A Plane World, were published as a series of nine pamphlets by Swan Sonnenschein & Co. during 1884–1886. They are referenced in Alan Moore’s From Hell, and also in Touchstone (5. Let’s Fall in Love for the Last Time) where Danny is reading them on a Kindle he’s taken to 1934.
A blonde woman, her skirts flowing around her ankles, walking up from New Street. You may see this woman in the late-Victorian photograph of New Street at the Touchstone website. It presented such a vivid picture of the top of New Street, where Christ Church curves into Council House Square, that I couldn’t resist writing it into the story.
Catherine Eddowes. The fourth canonical victim of Jack the Ripper, Eddowes was born in Graisley Green, Wolverhampton on 14 April 1842 and was murdered in Mitre Square, London, on 30 September 1888 on the night of the ‘Double Event’.
After splitting from her family in 1881, she met John Kelly at Cooney’s common lodging-house at 55 Flower and Dean Street, Spitalfields, and they remained a couple until her death. She was described as being five feet tall, with dark auburn hair, hazel eyes, and a tattoo that read ‘TC’, for Tom Conway, in blue ink on her left forearm. Friends of Eddowes described her as ‘intelligent and scholarly, but possessed of a fierce temper’ and ‘a very jolly woman, always singing’.
She is often described as a prostitute, but unlike the other Ripper victims, there is no proof that she ever took to selling her body. It is also debatable that she was an alcoholic. Frederick Wilkinson, deputy at Cooney’s, testified that Catherine ‘was not often in drink’, wasn’t in the habit of walking the streets and he had never heard of or seen her being intimate with anyone other than Kelly. Kelly himself claimed no knowledge of her ever walking the streets, and said that she ‘sometimes drank to excess but wasn’t in the habit.’ Her sister, Eliza Gold, claimed that Catherine ‘was of sober habits.’
In my depiction of her I’ve avoided any inference that she was a prostitute, because I feel it was the truth, but have dismissed the sobriety angle because I feel it was a lie, or at best an attempt not to speak ill of the dead. The evidence points to her being an alcoholic, and not just the pathetic circumstances of her last day alive.
William Bury. A very recent addition to the now 200-strong Ripper suspect throng, although he was a real suspect back in 1889 when he was executed for the murder of his wife exactly three months after the Whitechapel murders.
The two books that fully outline the case for William Bury being Jack the Ripper are Jack the Ripper: Unmasked by William Beadle, and Euan Macpherson’s The Trial of Jack the Ripper (The Case of William Bury 1859—89).
While I remain open on whether Bury actually was the Ripper, I do think that Beadle’s book makes a convincing case, and I could not resist the temptation to include in my fiction a Ripper suspect with strong ties to Birmingham.
In 1887, Bury was making a living as a hawker, selling small items such as lead pencils and key rings on the streets of Snow Hill, Birmingham. Naturally, this is a whole year before the events of this book, and I’ve had to resort to a convoluted fictional ruse to get him back in Birmingham again in July 1888, a month before the Whitechapel murders begin. But the picture of him hawking pencils on Colmore Row is such a beautifully vivid one, I couldn’t resist it. And it’s perhaps not unfeasible that if he did return to Birmingham he would opt for the living that he’d tried there the year before.
Hello, old man. A curious form of address, which William Beadle notes two possible Ripper suspects used. The first was to Patrick Mulshaw in Winthrop Street straight after the murder of Polly Nichols in Bucks Row, from an innocent passerby who knew a murder had taken place before it was news. The second, the mysterious man who bought grapes for Elizabeth Stride from fruiterer Matthew Packer. Two men we might strongly suspect of being Jack the Ripper, and both using ‘old man’ as a form of address.
An incongruous deerstalker hat. At least two witnesses refer to Ripper suspects wearing a deerstalker, along with many other types of hat. It is incongruous because a deerstalker was a hunting hat, to be worn by a gentleman in the country, certainly not something any urban dweller should be wearing (which is why Arthur Conan Doyle never referred to Sherlock Holmes as wearing one in any of his stories).
The array of hats worn by the Ripper can be daunting. With the Elizabeth Stride murder alone, the same man who was seen with her for the best part of two hours was described by five witnesses as wearing 1) a tall, black billycock hat (bowler), 2) a round, peaked cap, 3) a soft, felt, kind of Yankee hat, 4) a dark, hard-felt deerstalker, and 5) a black cap with peak. All apparently the same man, and all within the same hour and three quarters before the murder, one of the witnesses being a policeman (who saw a deerstalker).
A little later that night — and we have to accept this is the Ripper because he’s seen with Catherine Eddowes only moments before her death at the entrance to Church Passage — and he’s wearing 6) a grey cloth cap with a peak. I make that six different hats in three hours.
There is also some added confusion in that I’ve seen a second description of the Church Passage sighting, by witness Joseph Lawende, where he describes the hat as a deerstalker, not a grey cloth cap with a peak.
Albert Road, Queen Street, Alfred Road, Victoria Street. I admit to taking a perverse delight in having my characters run up and down streets whose names point to the Royal Conspiracy, even in a book that de facto puts forward a totally different suspect.
The real Thomas Conway. Having put myself into the Touchstone universe as a time travelling author (see, The Reluctant Time Traveller short story, first published in Station at the End of Time, but soon to form part of Touchstone Origins), I couldn’t resist playing with the notion that Thomas Conway might be an incarnation of myself on my future time travels. There is just enough mystery about the real Thomas Conway to make it an interesting proposition that he might not have been all he appeared, not least his use of the name Quinn to draw his pension, and his disappearance at the time of Catherine Eddowes’ inquest (although it is reported that he later came forward to have himself eliminated as a suspect).
Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower was being built this year and was widely regarded as an affront to God’s authority.
The duelling president. In 1888, General Boulanger insulted Floquet, Prime minister of France, who responded with a challenge. Boulanger had the choice of weapons and chose swords. Being a soldier, ten years younger than his opponent, it looked as though odds were on his side. But he was badly wounded in the throat: Floquet was the victor. The British press were scathing about the duel, as duelling had been outlawed in England about fifty years beforehand.
Cemetery shoot out. Paris was hit by a wave of strikes in 1888 and anarchists and communists waged an open gun battle in Père Lachaise cemetery.
Artists who duelled. On 29 April 1888 the painters Félix Dupuis and Eugène Habert fought a duel with pistols in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, and Dupuis was killed. The incident, which sparked off a national debate about the legality of duelling, received wide coverage in the press. Habert was acquitted by the court in June.
The Michelson–Morley experiment was published in 1887 and attempted to detect the relative motion of matter through the ‘aether wind’. The experiment’s failure initiated a line of research that eventually led to special relativity, and has been referred to as ‘the moving-off point for the theoretical aspects of the Second Scientific Revolution’.
Ernst Mach. Ernst Mach’s critique of Newtonian ideas of absolute space and time were an inspiration to the young Einstein, who credited Mach as being the philosophical forerunner of relativity theory.
End of days pronouncements were particularly popular in 1888, the year that brought us Jack the Ripper (and, as Alan Moore so cleverly points out in From Hell, the conception of Adolf Hitler). Bitter weather in January and February apparently led to calls in Birmingham that the Day of Judgement had arrived, but I ha
ve found no evidence of this. That hasn’t stopped me including it in my story, though.
I know things, see? This is where I concoct a conspiracy that would bring Thomas Conway, Catherine Eddowes and William Bury to Birmingham at the time I need them to be there. Nothing as grand as the Royal Conspiracy — just a squalid attempt to steal a pension book — but it gives me a valid reason to get these real people, who all had passed through Birmingham at one time or another, together in July 1888, seeing as historical documents put all three as being most likely in Whitechapel at the time. But is it simply about the pension book? Catherine seems to be talking about something much bigger; something that might indeed be a blackmail attempt regarding a member of the Royal family. Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t. It would be doubly ironic if she was, seeing as her only part in the Royal Conspiracy seems to have been due to mistaken identity.
Right round the Wrekin. The Wrekin is a hill in east Shropshire, England. “All around the Wrekin’ or ‘Running round the Wrekin’ is a phrase common in the Midlands to mean ‘the long way round’.
Sherlock Street. Birmingham City Council claims on its website that Arthur Conan Doyle got the name of his most famous character from Sherlock Street, where he once bought a violin. I have seen no proof of this assertion, but it’s a great myth. It is also thought that he took inspiration for the name of The Hound of the Baskervilles from John Baskerville, then buried in Christ Church, Birmingham. Baskerville House stands close by on the other side of Paradise Place.
The ballad that Catherine Eddowes sings here is lifted from a fascinating Ripper Casebook article by Jarett Kobek: May My End A Warning Be: Catherine Eddowes and Gallows Literature in the Black Country.
Thomas Wyre, Robert Upton and James Berry. This was indeed a busy week for state executioner James Berry, who performed two hangings in quick succession, so I have surmised that it might also have been a busy and quite lucrative week for a gallows balladeer like Thomas Conway. I would certainly see him back in the Midlands for a double event of this nature.
Robert Upton was sentenced to death for murdering his wife, Emma, after attacking her with an iron bar. There were a good many witnesses to the event seeing as he chased her down the street and fought off passersby who tried to disarm him. He was hanged at Oxford Castle on 17 July 1888, but executioner James Berry botched the hanging after miscalculating the necessary length of rope and Upton was almost decapitated, causing a national outcry and questions in parliament.
The same night, Berry arrived in Worcester to hang Thomas Wyre the next morning. Wyre had murdered his son with Harriet Bytheway by throwing him down a disused well, apparently a crime plotted by both of them, as Wyre claimed he’d informed her of the deed over lunch immediately afterwards and she did not report the child missing. This execution went without a hitch.
Incidentally, James Berry also hanged one other person in our story: William Bury.
Wiley’s Temperance Hotel. There is no Wiley’s listed among the temperance hotels of Birmingham in Hawes’s Handbook to Temperance Hotels, 1888. The total list for the city are: Adams in Snow Hill, Clarke’s in the Bull Ring, Cobden’s on Corporation Street, Couch’s in New Hall Street, Corbett’s on Paradise Street, The New Waverley on High Street, and The Trevelyan, on New Street. (Not listed in Hawes’s guide but clearly evident in Kelly’s Directory 1888 is the Colonnade Hotel a little further up New Street, which is listed as a temperance hotel, so it’s possible there were other temperance hotels not listed in Hawes’s guide, and Wiley’s might be one of them.)
But a charming news cutting from the July 20, 1889 edition of the Birmingham Daily Post, tells the story of a Mr Thomas Montgomery, proprietor of Wiley’s Temperance Hotel in Snow Hill, Birmingham, being summoned under the Criminal Law Amendment Act for permitting his house to be used as a brothel on several dates... Detective Taylor stated that he and two officers had watched the defendant’s premises for several nights, and saw men and women of disreputable character enter. The same women visited the hotel on more than one occasion with different men. — For the defence, Mr Hebbert said the defendant had only been the tenant for a short while. He had done all he could to conduct a respectable business. He had refused to accommodate people he had reason to believe were not respectable, and was unaware of the character of the persons spoken to by the officer... A fine of £10 and costs was imposed.
As this is a whole year after the events of Buried in Time, and in view of Mr Montgomery’s assertion that he had only recently taken over the hotel, it is quite possible that Wiley’s Temperance Hotel was, in fact, Adams Temperance Hotel in 1888. I’ve gone with the later name, though, because I love the story, and a temperance hotel being used as a brothel just deserves the name Wiley. (I am indebted to Howard Brown of Pennsylvania, who posted this cutting on the JTRForums).
Horse racing. There’s no real reason for Conway to give up his livelihood for a few coins, but I’ve tried to create one here. It seems to me that a man who was so staunchly teetotal might be a recovering alcoholic, and that his addictive personality, successfully quashed in the matter of drink, might have found an outlet in gambling.
Déjà vu. Of course, it’s a running joke in the Touchstone saga that Danny, whichever year he travels to, always seems to end up arrested and thrown in a cell.
Ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling! I’m a fire engine! On Catherine Eddowes’ last day alive, she was arrested for being drunk and disorderly on Aldgate High Street. It is reported that she was causing great amusement to passersby by imitating a fire engine. This part of the story is probably an invention, but I couldn’t resist making a reference to it here.
like a gull. An obvious, perhaps too obvious, reference to that other prime Ripper suspect, Sir William Wythey Gull.
“Murder!” she screamed. This was apparently the cry that was heard the night Mary Kelly was killed in Miller’s Court, though apparently far too commonly heard in the East End for anyone to bother investigating further. Beadle (195-201) alleges that it is perhaps solely responsible for the mistaken attribution of 2 a.m. being the time of death for Mary Kelly, citing 10 a.m. as much more likely.
Mitre Square. This dream chapter flashes forward in time to allow Daniel to witness Catherine Eddowes’ murder at the hands of Jack the Ripper in Mitre Square, London, on the night of the ‘Double Event’.
The other scene is from Touchstone (6: Fade to Grey), where Rachel flits through time to witness, and foil, the Yorkshire Ripper’s attempted murder of Dr Upadhya Bandara in 1980.
Two rings. Rings were taken from several of Jack the Ripper’s victims and it has been conjectured that he kept something (other than the body parts) from every victim as a trophy. William Beadle notes that in the possession of William Bury after his arrest were ‘articles of jewellery of very inferior metal’, a thimble, an earring and a book, all of which might have been trophies taken from the Ripper’s victims.
Mary Ann Kelly. Catherine Eddowes did indeed flee the city of London to go hop picking in early September 1888, returning to London on 27 September. On the last night of her life, while under arrest for being drunk and disorderly, she gave the name of her common law husband’s ex-wife, Mary Ann Kelly. In view of the fact that the final canonical Ripper victim was a different Mary Kelly, there has been much conjecture that Jack the Ripper killed Catherine Eddowes thinking she was the Mary Kelly of Miller’s Court. I suppose Buried in Time suggests the opposite: that William Bury killed various East End prostitutes while he was searching in vain for Catherine Eddowes.
Cryptically, the day before her murder, Eddowes told the superintendent of Mile End Casual Ward that she had come back to claim the reward money for the capture of the serial killer, claiming she knew who it was (according to a report in the East London Observer). In my fiction, I make it clear why that might be the case. Many ripperologists dismiss her comment as meaningless blather (and even dispute it ever having been said), but sadly, whether she knew the identity of the Ripper or not, she met him only about 24
hours after claiming she knew him.
The Freemasons’ Arms on Mary Street. Another nod to the Royal Conspiracy that I couldn’t resist making, but it also directly references Catherine’s fate: ending up as Jack the Ripper’s fourth canonical victim, mistakenly identified as Mary Kelly, lying dead in Mitre Square.
He knew that this day had shaken his old certainties to their foundations. Arthur Conan Doyle was very much a rationalist, but famously performed an about turn in later life, becoming a champion of spiritualism and the supernatural. While it’s likely the deaths of several loved ones caused this intellectual volte face, for the purposes of my own little fiction, I have tried to suggest that this encounter with Danny Pearce might have been the cause.
It was like playing Blind-Man’s Buff. Turn round three times and catch whom ye may! This presages the press attack on the police over the Whitechapel murders. In Punch, 22 Sep 1888, the police were depicted as blindfolded, being taunted by several sub-human examples of the Victorian working class.
Snow. Britain's favourite prophet, medieval wise woman Mother Shipton, had said the world would come to an end when summer turned into winter. Snow did fall in Birmingham on the 10th July, 1888.
Seven London Ripper victims. The first canonical Jack the Ripper murder, of Polly Nichols, took place on 31 August 1888, the last, of Mary Kelly, on 9 November 1888, but Beadle makes a case for them starting earlier than that, and finishing later. In his book he adds Martha Tabram on 7 August (which would be just under a month after this story), then after the canonical five, Rose Mylett on 19 December and, of course, William Bury’s wife Ellen Bury on 9 February 1889 in Dundee.
This chapter shows Danny witnessing all seven of the London murders Beadle ascribes to William Bury.