Complete History of Jack the Ripper

by Philip Sudgen

  At first there seemed little enough to go on. The dead woman looked about forty. She was thin and about five feet in height. She had dark auburn hair and hazel eyes.

  Her clothes were old and dirty. The main items were a black straw bonnet trimmed with green and black velvet and black beads; a neckerchief of red gauze silk; a black cloth jacket with imitation fur edging around the collar and fur edging around the sleeves; a dark-green chintz skirt, patterned in Michaelmas daisies and golden lilies, with three flounces; a man’s white vest; a brown linsey dress bodice with a black velvet collar and brown metal buttons down the front; a pair of brown ribbed stockings, mended at the feet in white; a pair of men’s laced boots; and a piece of old white apron. She wore no drawers or stays but there were plenty of undergarments: a grey stuff petticoat, a very old dark-green alpaca skirt, a very old ragged blue skirt and a white calico chemise.

  The quantity and condition of the woman’s clothing, and the nature of her belongings, stamped her as a vagrant or, at best, a frequenter of common lodging houses. Her belongings consisted of a large white handkerchief, one blue striped bedticking pocket and two unbleached calico pockets, a white cotton pocket-handkerchief, twelve pieces of white rag, a piece of white coarse linen, a piece of blue and white shirting, two small blue bedticking bags, two short clay pipes, one tin box containing tea and another containing sugar, one piece of flannel and six pieces of soap, a small tooth comb, a white-handled table-knife, a metal tea-spoon, a red leather cigarette case with white metal fittings, an empty tin match-box, a piece of red flannel containing pins and needles, and a ball of hemp.1

  An examination of the body and its effects yielded possible leads. There was a tattoo (the initials ‘T.C.’) in blue ink on the dead woman’s left forearm. And there was the mustard tin picked up by Sergeant Jones from beside the body. It contained two pawntickets. One was for a man’s flannel shirt, pledged in the name of Emily Burrell, 52 White’s Row, on 31 August for 9d. The other was for a pair of men’s boots, pledged in the name of Jane Kelly, 6 Dorset Street, on 28 September for 2s. 6d. Both items had been pledged at the shop of Joseph Jones, 31 Church Street, Spitalfields.2 When the police tried to trace these women they discovered that the addresses given were fictitious. In White’s Row, Spitalfields, there was no No. 52. And at 6 Dorset Street no one by the name of Jane Kelly was known to the occupants. But it was the publicity accorded these leads by the press that succeeded in identifying the dead woman. For on the evening of Tuesday, 2 October, a middle-aged labourer walked into Bishopsgate Street Police Station and said that he thought he knew her. His name was John Kelly.3 The deceased, he said, was Kate Conway alias Kelly, a woman he had been living with for seven years at Cooney’s lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean Street.

  Kate’s real name was Catharine Eddowes and in some ways she was the most likeable of all the murderer’s victims. Mrs Eliza Gold, her married sister, spoke of her as a “regular jolly sort”, and Frederick Wilkinson, the deputy at Cooney’s, where Kate regularly stayed, knew her as a “very jolly woman, always singing.” In 1888 friends in Kate’s native Wolverhampton still remembered her. To them she was an “intelligent, scholarly woman, but of fiery temperament.” Her history, quarried from contemporary records, is set down here in full for the first time.4

  Kate’s parents, George and Catharine (née Evans) Eddowes, were married at Bushbury, near Wolverhampton, on 13 August 1832. They were a young couple. George, a tinplate worker, was twenty-one, his bride only sixteen.5 Catharine would bear George twelve children. The earliest were Alfred (born 1833 or 1834), Harriet (1834), Emma (1835), Eliza (1837) and Elizabeth (1838 or 1839).

  In 1841, when the household was recorded in the national census, it was ensconced at Graisley Green, Wolverhampton, amidst a community of tinplate workers. And it was there, on 14 April 1842, that Kate was born. Her birth certificate renders her name Catharine, like that of her mother, but no matter. To her family she was known by the nickname ‘Chick’, to John Kelly and the friends of her later life simply as ‘Kate’.

  The early 1840s were years of prosperity for the tinplate industry in Wolverhampton. But despite this George Eddowes, in search of a better future for his burgeoning brood, took the family to London not long after Kate’s birth. In December 1844, when the second son, Thomas, was born, they were living at 4 Baden Place, Bermondsey, in what is now the Borough of Southwark. Soon there were even more mouths to feed – George (1846), Sarah Ann (1850) and Mary (1852). The 1851 census found them at 35 West Street, Nelson Street, in Bermondsey. Harriet and Emma, the oldest girls, were not listed with the others. Since neither had yet married it is probable that they were in domestic service and living in the houses of their employers. Alfred, the oldest boy, was recorded as an idiot. Eliza was a domestic servant. And Elizabeth, Kate, Thomas and George were still at school.

  Kate’s schooling is a bit of a mystery. Press reports of 1888 aver that she was educated at Dowgate Charity School but Neal Shelden, a modern scholar, opts for St John’s Charity School in Potters Fields, Tooley Street. The first is unlikely because Dowgate is in the City of London, on the north side of the river. The school in Potters Fields, a charity school for girls for the parish of St John, Horselydown, was merged with St Olave’s Grammar School in 1899. Unfortunately, only one admissions register, covering 1842–7, survives. Neither this, nor the minutes up to 1857, which list all applicants, contain Kate’s name.

  The prosperity for which George Eddowes laboured eluded him and tragedy eventually dispersed his family in the 1850s. Two children – John (1849) and William (1854) – died in infancy. Then, on 17 November 1855 at 7 Winters Square, Bermondsey, Catharine Eddowes died of tuberculosis. George himself died two years after that.

  Harriet and Emma were already in service, and Elizabeth married in 1857, but some of the younger children were admitted to the Bermondsey Workhouse and Industrial School. Kate should have fared better. Emma wrote to an aunt, Mrs Elizabeth Eddowes, and persuaded her to take her. Mrs Eddowes lived with her husband William, a tinplate worker, and three children at 50 Bilston Street, Wolverhampton. Sadly Kate did not settle. Only a few months after the youngster had returned to Wolverhampton Mrs Eddowes wrote to Emma and told her that Kate had robbed her employer and run away to Birmingham, where she was living with an uncle in Bagot Street. The uncle is listed in the 1851 census. He was a shoemaker named Thomas Eddowes and he lived at No. 7, Court 5, Bagot Street, with his wife Rosanah and their children Jane, Thomas and Mary. But Kate didn’t stay long with him either. It was in Birmingham a few years later that she met and fell in love with Thomas Conway and the couple decided to live together.

  Almost nothing is known about Conway. Even his correct name is in doubt. From about 1873 he was drawing an army pension by virtue of service in the 18th Royal Irish Regiment, in which, as the police discovered, he had enlisted under the name of Thomas Quinn. During his later years he supplemented his pension by working as a hawker. Kate’s life with Conway is also very shadowy. They never married. But they lived together for nearly twenty years and produced three children. On 3 August 1885 Annie, the oldest, married Louis Philips, a lamp-black packer, in Southwark. Annie was then twenty years of age. Kate’s other children, both boys, were born in about 1868 and 1873. Conway tattooed his initials, ‘T. C.’, on Kate’s left forearm.

  It was with Conway that Kate returned to London. At the beginning of 1881 they were living at 71 Lower George Street, Chelsea, but soon after that they separated. Kate’s sister Elizabeth blamed Conway for the failure of the relationship. ‘My sister left Conway because he treated her badly,’ she said. ‘He did not drink regularly, but when he drew his pension they went out together and it generally ended in his beating her.’ Emma, the sister who had tried to provide for Kate after their parents had died, heard about the beatings too. But she felt that Kate’s own drinking was the root of the problem: ‘On the whole, I believe they lived happily together; but there were occasional quarrels between them, owing to my si
ster’s habit of excessive drinking. She has been seen with her face frightfully disfigured [i.e. beaten] . . . I fancy he [Conway] must have left her in consequence of her drinking habits.’ Annie Philips, testifying before the inquest, corroborated Emma’s fancy. She explained that her father was a teetotaller, that he lived on bad terms with Kate because she drank. ‘He left deceased between 7 and 8 years ago,’ said Annie, ‘entirely on account of her drinking habits.’

  In 1881 Kate met John Kelly in the common lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean Street. He was to be her companion and this her home for most of the rest of her life. Three days after Kate’s death Kelly told the Star how their friendship started: ‘It is nigh on to seven years since I met Kate, and it was in this very lodging house I first set eyes on her. We got throwed together a good bit, and the result was that we made a regular bargain. We have lived here ever since, as the people here will tell you, and have never left here except when we’ve gone to the country together hopping. I don’t pretend that she was my wife. She was not.’

  Kate’s friends and acquaintances insisted that she was not a prostitute. During the winters she worked as a charwoman for the Jews or hawked trifles about the streets. Kelly picked up labouring jobs in the markets. For the greater part of the summers they tramped the countryside together, hop-picking, fruit-picking or hay-making. ‘She would never do anything wrong,’ said Eliza, Kate’s sister, ‘I cannot imagine what she was doing in Mitre Square.’ John Kelly told the inquest that although Kate sometimes drank to excess she did not solicit. When they were together, he maintained, she regularly came home about eight or nine at night. And Frederick Wilkinson, the lodging house deputy, spoke well of Kate and Kelly when he appeared before the coroner. They were, by his account, pretty regular in paying their rents. They lived on good terms with each other. They did, admittedly, sometimes quarrel when Kate had been drinking but that was not often and he had never seen Kelly drunk. Kate herself was generally in bed between nine and ten and Wilkinson had never known or heard of her ‘being intimate with anyone but Kelly’.

  Such protestations carry little conviction. Eliza was perhaps unwilling to speak ill of a sister. Kelly would have been anxious to scotch any suggestion that he lived off Kate’s immoral earnings and Wilkinson that he ran a disreputable house. Besides which it would presumably have been very difficult for anyone to talk of the faults of the murder victims in a community still grieving their loss. Kate probably did indulge in some casual prostitution. Certainly her indigent lifestyle distanced her from her relatives.

  After the break with Thomas Conway she kept in touch with Annie Philips, her daughter, for some time. Indeed, in 1886, she nursed Annie during her confinement. But soon after that Annie moved from King Street, Bermondsey, without leaving a forwarding address and at the time of the murder she had not seen Kate for two years. It is possible that Annie’s flit had been deliberately designed to give her mother the slip because Kate had frequently pestered her for money. Certainly Annie admitted at the inquest that the addresses of her two brothers had been withheld from Kate to prevent her scrounging from them. However, a story Eliza told the press suggests otherwise. ‘It’s rather strange,’ she said, ‘one of them [Kate’s children], the girl that’s married [Annie], came to me last week and asked me if I had seen anything of her mother. She said it was a very long time since she had seen her. But it was a long time since I had, too, and I told her so.’

  At least three of Kate’s sisters had settled in London. In 1888 Eliza Gold, now widowed, was living at 6 Thrawl Street, Spitalfields, and Mrs Elizabeth Fisher, another sister, was living at 33 Hackliffe Street, Greenwich. Emma, now Emma Jones and married to a packer, lived at 20 Bridgewater Place, Aldersgate Street. Neither Eliza nor Emma got on with Kate. Eliza told the press that they were not on the best of terms and that she had not seen Kate much more than once or twice since she had been cohabiting with Kelly. At the inquest she said that she had not seen her for three or four weeks although that may have been because Kate was away hop-picking. Emma admitted in her press statement that she had not been on good terms with Kate for many years because ‘she led a life that was not to my liking.’ They met but rarely. Perhaps, upon such occasions, Kate’s displays of remorse were intended to elicit Emma’s sympathy and hence tap her purse. Or perhaps Kate looked at her sister and saw – but for a wasted life – what she herself might have become. Whatever the cause, when Kate came to visit her, recalled Emma, she ‘used always to cry when she saw me, and say, “I wish I was like you”.’

  Nevertheless, Kate seems to have found a loyal consort in John Kelly. Little of their precarious life together has come down to us but occasional glimpses of them may be had in the stark records of the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary. Kelly was admitted on 31 December 1886 for rheumatism and discharged to the workhouse on 24 January 1887. Kate was treated at the infirmary for a ‘burn of foot’ from 14 to 20 June 1887. She was admitted under the name of Kate Conway and her religion was noted as Roman Catholic. Then, on 24 November 1887, Kelly was readmitted suffering from frost-bite. He was discharged on 28 December 1887. On all of these occasions Kate and Kelly were admitted to the infirmary from 55 Flower and Dean Street.6

  The autumn of 1888 found them hop-picking at Hunton, near Maidstone, in Kent. According to the Star, Kelly remembered it this way:

  We went hopping together mostly every year. We went down this year as usual. We didn’t get on any too well, and started to hoof it home. We came along in company with another man and woman who had worked in the same fields, but who parted with us to go to Chatham when we turned off towards Maidstone. The woman said to Kate, ‘I have got a pawnticket for a flannel shirt. I wish you’d take it, since you’re going up to town. It is only in for 9d., and it may fit your old man.’ So Kate took it and we trudged along. It was in at Jones’s, Church Street, in the name of Emily Burrell.

  Walter Besant’s romantic portrait of hop-picking depicts the roads to London after the season as being ‘strewn with the old boots discarded by the hoppers when they bought new ones on their way home.’7 At Maidstone our couple certainly had enough money for Kelly to buy a pair of boots from Mr Arthur Pash in the High Street and for Kate to invest in a jacket from a shop nearby, but by the time they got back to London, on Thursday, 27 September, they were flat broke. That night they slept in the casual ward at Shoe Lane.

  On Friday they woke up destitute. Kelly managed to earn sixpence ‘at a job’ but this was not enough to buy them a double bed for the night at Cooney’s (single beds were priced at 4d. per night, doubles at 8d.). ‘Here, Kate,’ said Kelly, ‘you take 4d. and go to the lodging house and I’ll go to Mile End [casual ward].’ Kate would not hear of it. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘you go and have a bed and I will go to the casual ward.’ She had her way. That night Kelly stayed at Cooney’s and Kate went to the casual ward at Mile End, where she would have to perform some menial task such as picking oakum in return for shelter.

  They teamed up again at eight the next morning, Saturday, 29 September, the last day of Kate’s life. Kelly looked ruefully at his new boots. ‘We’ll pop [pawn] the boots,’ he announced, ‘and have a bite to eat anyway.’ ‘Oh, no, don’t do that,’ protested Kate, but this time Kelly insisted on having his way. Kate took the boots to Jones’ shop at 31 Church Street and was paid 2s. 6d. Kelly waited at the door in his bare feet. After buying tea and sugar they had enough left over for breakfast and ate it in the kitchen at Cooney’s. It was their last meal together. Kelly then resolved to try his luck in the markets, Kate to go to her daughter in King Street to see what she could do. When they parted in Houndsditch at about two that afternoon John Kelly was worried about his partner. He reminded her of the murders and begged her to return home early. Kate promised to be back no later than four. Her parting words, as Kelly remembered them four days later, were: ‘Don’t you fear for me. I’ll take care of myself and I shan’t fall into his hands.’8

  Kate did not see her daughter that Saturday. Anni
e, indeed, had left King Street since Kate had last visited her there. In the summer of 1887 she seems to have been living at 15 Anchor Street, Southwark Park, and at the time of the Mitre Square murder her address was 12 Dilston Grove, Southwark Park Road. Yet – somewhere, somehow – Kate found money. For when we glimpse her next, at 8.30 that evening, she was helplessly drunk in Aldgate High Street.

  At that time a crowd outside No. 29 in the High Street attracted the attention of PC Louis Robinson 931. Pushing his way to its centre he found a woman lying drunk on the pavement. The constable picked her up and leaned her against the shutters of No. 29 but she slipped sideways. Then, summoning PC George Simmonds 959 to his assistance, he managed to get her to Bishopsgate Street Police Station. James Byfield, the station sergeant, remembered the woman being brought in, supported between two constables, at about 8.45. She smelt strongly of drink. When they enquired her name she replied: ‘Nothing.’

  The woman was placed in a police cell to sleep it off. That night PC George Hutt 968, who came on duty at 9.45, visited the prisoner several times. At 11.45 he found her out of her stupor and singing to herself. And at 12.30 she asked him when she would be allowed to go. ‘Shortly,’ replied Hutt. ‘I am capable of taking care of myself now,’ she said.

  Twenty-five minutes after that Sergeant Byfield told Hutt to see if any of the prisoners were fit to be discharged and Hutt, judging the woman to have sobered up, unlocked her cell and escorted her back to the office. As he did so she asked him what time it was.

  ‘Too late for you to get any more drink,’ he replied.

  ‘Well,’ she insisted, ‘what time is it?’

  ‘Just on one.’

  ‘I shall get a damned fine hiding when I get home then.’

  ‘And serve you right,’ Hutt retorted. ‘You have no right to get drunk.’

  In the office she gave her name and address as Mary Ann Kelly of 6 Fashion Street, Spitalfields, and was discharged. ‘This way, missus,’ said Hutt, pushing open a swing door. It admitted her to the passage leading to the street door and as she reached the street door Hutt called: ‘Please pull it to.’ ‘All right,’ replied the woman, ‘good night, old cock.’ A moment later she had passed through the door, pulled it almost closed, and turned left towards Houndsditch. Mitre Square was just eight minutes’ walk away.9