* * *
Where was James Maybrick in 1871? He was back in Liverpool after the death of his father in June 1870. According to the 1871 census he was with his 54-year-old mother, Susannah, at 77 Mount Pleasant. He was unmarried. His occupation is described simply as ‘commercial clerk’, whereas brother Thomas was a ‘cotton merchant’ and Edwin a ‘cotton merchant/dealer’. He was in business with G. A. Witt, Commissioning Agent, in Knowsley Buildings, Tithebarn Street, off Old Hall Street. Two years later, he was still working with Witt from the same, overcrowded premises, where some 30 cotton merchants and brokers were crammed into one building. Maybrick established Maybrick and Company, Cotton Merchants, around this time and Edwin eventually joined him as a junior partner. The building was finally demolished in the late 1960s to make way for an imposing modern development, Silk House Court. Witt’s main offices in London, which Maybrick visited from time to time, were in Cullum Street, on the boundaries of the City and Whitechapel.
It was a rough world, vigorously characterised in 1870 in the April 30th edition of the local magazine, Porcupine. An article headed ‘Cotton Gambling’ described the ever-more unscrupulous world that had attracted Maybrick. A once prestigious trade changed almost overnight after the cotton famine that followed the American Civil War; it became a business open to ‘anyone, with no capital whatever, anyone with a shadow of credit’, reported the magazine.
In 1868 a system of ‘bear’ sales had been introduced which was similar to that of the London Stock Exchange. This involved ‘selling cotton you have not got in the hope you may cover the sale by buying at a lower price at a later period.’ It brought to the market an element of pure gambling. ‘It is to be regretted’ noted Porcupine that ‘the Cotton Brokers’ Association should have given their sanction to this system of trade and thus lower the tone and character of the market.’
Maybrick was an opportunist who thrived in this world of ruthless competition. In 1874, when he was 35, he went off to start a branch office in the newly booming cotton port of Norfolk, Virginia. Like many others, he divided his time between London and America, working in Virginia during the picking season from September to April, then returning home to Liverpool in the Spring.
Norfolk had been ruined by the Civil War, but its recovery had been energetic. One third of the town’s 37 square miles was water-logged, especially round the mosquito-infested Dismal Creek Swamp. To encourage foreign investment, a piped supply of fresh water was needed. So the water system was modernised and the improved conditions coincided with the opening of the railway connecting Norfolk with the cotton growing states of the Deep South. The town was transformed into a successful international port, nearly half of whose ships plied between Liverpool and America.
In the year that Maybrick arrived in Norfolk, the town’s Cotton Exchange was set up, giving rise to a tidal wave of commerce back and forth across the Atlantic. Three years later, while Maybrick was living in York Street with Nicholas Bateson and a negro servant, Thomas Stansell, he caught malaria. When the first prescription of quinine did no good, a second, for arsenic and strychnine, was dispensed by Santo’s, the chemist on Main Street.
‘He was very nervous about his health,’ recalled Bateson, when he later testified for the defence at Florie’s trial. ‘He rubbed the backs of his hands and complained of numbness in his limbs. He was afraid of paralysis. The last year I lived with him he became worse. He became more addicted to taking medicines.’
When it was his turn to give evidence, the servant Stansell remembered running errands for Maybrick during their time in Norfolk. ‘When I brought him the arsenic, he told me to go and make him some beef tea… he asked me to give him a spoon… he opened the package and took a small bit out. This he put in the tea and stirred it up.’
Stansell was surprised at the quantity of pills and potions in Maybrick’s office. ‘I am,’ the cotton merchant once told him ‘the victim of free living.’
Maybrick’s constant companion at this time was Mary Howard (also described as Hogwood), who kept one of the most frequented whorehouses in Norfolk. Years later, Mary pulled the rug from under Maybrick’s reputation. She gave a deposition to the State Department in Washington in which she said:
I knew the late James Maybrick for several years, and that up to the time of his marriage [to Florie] he called at my house, when in Norfolk, at least two or three times a week, and that I saw him frequently in his different moods and fancies. It was a common thing for him to take arsenic two or three times during an evening. He would always say, before taking it: ‘Well, I am going to take my evening dose.’ He would pull from his pocket a small vial in which he carried his arsenic and, putting a small quantity on his tongue, he would wash it down with a sip of wine. In fact, so often did he repeat this that I became afraid he would die suddenly in my house, and then some of us would be suspected of his murder. When drunk, Mr James Maybrick would pour the powder into the palm of his hand and lick it up with his tongue. I often cautioned him but he answered ‘Oh, I am used to it. It will not harm me.’
The chemical element, arsenic, is found widely in nature, usually associated with metal ores. It has claimed innumerable victims, including, it is believed, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was possibly fatally poisoned by arsenic in the colouring of his prison sitting-room wallpaper in St Helena. But it has also had a wide variety of medicinal and other uses. For example, in the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I used arsenic as a cosmetic, applying it to her face to make it more white, just as Florie Maybrick used an arsenical preparation for her complexion. In 1786 Dr T. Fowler reported on the medical benefits of arsenic in cases of fever and sporadic headaches. Fowler’s Solution was a popular tonic in Maybrick’s time. The Greek word for arsenic — arsenikon — means ‘potent’. Maybrick, like many men of his day, believed that it increased his virility. Because he was addictive by nature, he became hooked.
* * *
The year 1880 was crucial for Maybrick, for at the age of 41 he fell in love. He was booked, as usual, to return to Liverpool aboard the SS Baltic. The Baltic was one of the White Star Line’s powerful screw-driven trans-Atlantic steamers, designed to ‘afford the very best accommodation to all classes of passengers.’ The six-day voyage cost 27 guineas.
On March 12th the Baltic, in the command of Captain Henry Parsell, steamed from New York. Among the 220 first-class passengers was the impulsive, cosmopolitan Belle of the South, Florence Chandler, known as Florie. Only 17, she was in the care of her mother, the formidable Baroness Von Roques, and they were on their way to Paris. Also on board was the ladies’ friend, General J. G. Hazard, living in Liverpool and he introduced Maybrick to them in the elegant bar.
Maybrick learned that the lively 5’ 3” strawberry blonde hailed from America’s high society. She had been born on September 3rd 1862, during the American Civil War, in the sophisticated city of Mobile, Alabama. Her mother, Carrie Holbrook, ‘a brilliant society woman’, was a descendant of President John Quincy Adams and Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase.
Among other achievements, Carrie’s swashbuckling Yankee father had founded the town of Cairo, Illinois, which Charles Dickens was to condemn after a visit in 1842 as a ‘place without one single quality, in earth or air or water to commend it.’ Darius Holbrook himself, Carrie’s father, was caricatured as Zephaniah Scadder in Martin Chuzzlewit. Her uncle, the Reverend Joseph Ingraham, had enjoyed an adventurous career as a soldier of fortune and had written blood and thunder novels.
Florie’s father, William Chandler, had been a wealthy merchant and Florie was born in the magnificent family home on Government Street (demolished in 1955 to make way for the Admiral Semmes Motor Hotel). But Florie never knew her father for he died on July 4th 1862, two months before she was born, leaving her and her older brother, Holbrook St John, fatherless. His headstone reads: ‘William G. Chandler. Gifted and good, the Joy, the Pride, the Hope and the Light of our life.’
He was only 33. The entire family was convinced that his
wife Carrie had poisoned him and, although there was not a shred of evidence, Carrie was ostracised by Mobile society and moved the children away to Macon, Georgia. Six months later, she married the distinguished soldier Captain Franklin du Barry, but he too died unexpectedly, aboard ship bound for Scotland, soon after their marriage.
From then on for several years little Florie and her brother seem to have been feathers on the wind, blowing this way and that between Paris, England, New York and Cologne. In about 1869 the family lived for two years in a house called The Vineyards, at Kempsey near Worcester. A German governess was educating the children, and local residents remembered Madame du Barry as a fine, handsome woman and good company. The house was always full of visitors.
When she returned to America she entered, with gusto, the ribald social life of New York. It was a frenetic, violent often scandalous time after the Civil War, known as ‘The Flash Age’ and Madame du Barry lived it to the full. She mixed in New York society where families such as the Vanderbilts were her friends. During 1870-71, back in Europe, she was caught up in the Siege of Paris, as a result of which she fell in love again. This time it was the dashing Prussian Cavalry Officer, the Baron Adolph von Roques, who fell prey to her attentions.
But the marriage was a disaster. The couple led ‘an adventurous life’ from Cologne to Wiesbaden and on to St Petersburg, squandering money, incurring massive debts and leaving devastation everywhere they went. Even so, Florie recalled, through rose-coloured spectacles, what must have been the appallingly lonely confusion of that time. She was virtually fatherless and being lodged, as it suited her mother, with relatives and friends. Yet in her autobiography, My Fifteen Lost Years, she wrote:
My life was much the same as that of any girl who enjoys the pleasures of youth with a happy heart… My special pastime however was riding and this I could indulge to my heart’s content when residing with my stepfather, Baron Adolph Von Roques, now retired, was at that time a cavalry officer in the Eighth Cuirassier regiment of the German army and stationed at Cologne.’
Her writing reveals ingenuousness and a preference for glossing over the true facts which coloured the rest of her life. She could never face unpleasant reality and surrounded herself with cheap fiction, dreams, and, towards the end, with cats. There is no mention in her story that the Baron beat her mother and finally left her in 1879 when Florie was 17 years old.
James Maybrick must have appeared to Florie to be the perfect mix: at once the mature father figure she had never known and a worldly self-assured man with a taste for dangerous living. And she, he must have imagined, was to be his entrance into a class and a way of life that were not his by birth but to which he, nevertheless, aspired. She would bring him cachet among the socially-conscious worthies of Liverpool and, perhaps, a fortune. With breathtaking speed Maybrick swept young Florie off her feet and by the end of the voyage he had proposed. When they disembarked in Liverpool, plans were already being made for a stylish wedding the next year.
There followed a truly action-packed year. But what, I wonder, was really afoot in the Maybrick family at this time? In March 1880 James returned to tell his widowed mother of the hasty engagement. She was by now living in a boarding house run by an old friend, Mrs Margaret Machell at 111, Mount Pleasant. It seems inconceivable that she knew nothing of Sarah Ann or of the children she was alleged to have borne. Did Susannah express disapproval of his behaviour? If so, Maybrick was unmoved and by April was strolling the chestnut-lined streets of Paris with his bride-to-be.
On May 1st his mother died. He was present at her death but living at Ashley Broad Green. Her death certificate states the cause of death, curiously, as ‘Bronchitis Hepatic’.
Ruth Richardson, author of Death, Dissection and the Destitute and an expert on Victorian death certificates said: ‘This is odd. It doesn’t really make sense. I have not seen one quite like it.’ Bronchitis concerns the bronchial tract. Hepatic means ‘of the liver’. But there is nothing which accurately explains what was really wrong with Susannah’s liver. We can only wonder. Did she have a drink problem? Or had she become addicted to drugs like her son? Or could there possibly have been another, more sinister, explanation?
James’s mother was dead. She was no longer able to cast a shadow over the proceedings by revealing ‘any lawful impediment’ why her son should not marry Florence Elizabeth Chandler.
With typical delusions of grandeur, the cotton merchant arranged for the ceremony, 14 months later, to be at the suitably named St James’s Church, not in Liverpool but in Piccadilly, one of the most fashionable settings in London. At the ceremony, which was conducted by the Reverend J. Dyer Tovey, the bride wore a gown of pleated satin and ivory lace and her bouquet was of white columbines with lilies of the valley. The bridegroom, 24 years her senior, wore a white satin waistcoat embroidered with roses and lilies of the valley and a cutaway coat lined with elaborately quilted satin.
Florie’s brother, Holbrook St John, came from Paris to give her away. Although Maybrick’s brothers Edwin, Thomas and Michael were there, he must have been disappointed that there was no great enthusiasm for the match. Michael, who dominated the trio, was sceptical. Guests reported, with some justification, that he did not believe the Baroness’ tales of estates to be inherited but saw in her scheming a crafty plot to secure for herself a settled British home in her old age. (After Florie’s trial, however, she wrote somewhat fancifully to the Home Secretary that Florie had no pecuniary temptation to murder as she had assisted the family for years.)
At the time of the wedding, Maybrick had taken out an insurance policy, with Florie as beneficiary, for £2,000, which he later increased to £2,500. He also set up a trust fund of £10,000, a sum equal today to 40 times this amount, but he never paid in a penny. Florie herself had a small income of £125 a year from her grandmother’s house in New York, and there was occasional income from her late father’s lands near Mobile. There was hardly enough money to finance the kind of façade that the newly married Maybricks wished to present.
From the outset, the match was founded on deception: even the marriage certificate reveals Maybrick in his true colours. His profession he gives as ‘esquire’, his father’s as ‘gentleman, deceased’ and his residence as St. James’s.
Hardly more than a child, why should Florie suspect that his life was based on hypocrisy and deceit? Besides she had known little else herself. Nevertheless she would soon discover the awful truth that there was, already, a ‘Mrs Maybrick’.
A DARK SHADOW LAYS OVER THE HOUSE, IT IS EVIL.
Eight months after the wedding, on March 24th 1882, James Chandler, affectionately known as ‘Bobo’, was born to the Maybricks. He was a sickly, premature baby and Florie had a difficult birth.
That spring, Maybrick returned with the family to America. For the next two years they spent half their time in Liverpool, half in Norfolk, Virginia, living in a rented house in Freemason Street. At 8 a.m. every morning Maybrick left home and walked to work. Rather than go directly to his office in Main Street near Boston Quay, he would stop at C.F. Greenwood’s, a chemist in Freemason Street, to buy his daily supply of arsenic.
It was during this time that John Fleming, a merchant sailor from Halifax, Nova Scotia, spotted him adding a greyish powder to hominy grits (an American form of porridge). Later he recalled Maybrick telling him: ‘You would be horrified, I daresay, if you knew what this is. It is arsenic. We all take some poison, more or less. For instance I am now taking arsenic enough to kill you. I take this arsenic once in a while because I find it strengthens me.’
From the chemist Maybrick would go on to the Cotton Exchange, where exporters, brokers and buyers mingled. Lunch was at one p.m. and the rest of the day was spent on letters and paperwork before calling at one of Norfolk’s many clubs. The minutes of the Cotton Exchange record his regular attendance as a committee member.
Florie later wrote in a letter that it was about this time that her husband started rubbing the backs of his hands
. What she did not know was that dry, itchy skin is one of the long term symptoms of arsenic abuse.
Maybrick was hardly alone in his indulgence. Use of arsenic, along with strychnine, which had similar effects, was a rapidly growing fashion among professional men in both Britain and America. Indeed, the Liverpool Citizen commented at the time of Florie’s trial:
We are all perfectly aware that men-about-town are much in the habit of taking these dangerous drugs, strychnine, arsenic and what-not, as they are of drinking champagne and smoking tobacco. Why, we are told there is enough taken on the Exchange Flags alone to poison all Castle Street.
When once they contract the habit of arsenic eating they remain slaves for life… Once they enter on the downward path, there is no looking back, as it is asserted by toxicologists that if they are ever prevented obtaining their daily dose they may say, with truth ‘the pains of Hell got hold of me’ and they experience all the dreadful horrors of slow arsenic poisoning.
The classic specialist book, The Materia Medica of Homeopathic Remedies by Dr James Tyler Kent (1849-1916) was first published in 1912. It is a medical practitioners’ book not readily found on public library shelves. It gives an analysis of arsenic addiction:
Arsenic affects every part of man; it seems to exaggerate or depress almost all his faculties… The anxiety that is found in arsenic is mingled with fear, with impulses, with suicidal inclinations, with sudden freaks and with mania… there is a burning in the brain the stomach the bladder and the throat. The skin itches with burning. The mental symptons show… a disturbance of intellect and will. He thinks he must die.
The Diary of Jack the Ripper - The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick Page 7