The Diary of Jack the Ripper - The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick

by Harrison, Shirley

  Dr Kent talks of ‘screaming with pains’, delirium in bed, and says the arsenic patient is always freezing (despite the burning sensations) and longing for warmth. Apart from the fact that Florie noticed James rubbing his hands, no other symptoms of arsenic addiction were mentioned at her trial nor in the literature that appeared subsequently. Yet they unconsciously colour the narrative of the diary from beginning to end.

  My hands are cold….. Summer is near… the warm weather will do me good… the pain burned into my mind… June is such a pleasant month… I am afraid to go to sleep for fear of my nightmares reocurring… I feel a numbness in my body… I do not have the courage to take my life. I pray each night I will find the strength to do so but the courage alludes me…

  Whoever wrote this diary had either discovered the symptoms of arsenic addiction such as described in the Materia Medica or he had experienced the real thing.

  * * *

  Coal began to replace cotton as Norfolk’s prime export, so in March 1884 James decided to take his wife and young Bobo home to Liverpool for good. On August 22nd 1884 James posted his letter of resignation from the Norfolk Cotton Exchange. By now they were renting a brand-new detached house in Liverpool, called Beechville, in the exclusive suburb of Grassendale. He and Florie went for drives in a horse and carriage, played whist and, above all, shared a love of horse racing: they were constant visitors to Aintree, home of the world-famous Grand National.

  The Maybricks were accepted at Liverpool’s social centre, the Wellington Rooms in Mount Pleasant, where carpet was laid over the pavement for the five annual balls, and ladies emerged from carriages ‘dressed with such gorgeousness as befits the wives and daughters of the wealthiest men in Britain’s greatest seaport.’ Maybrick also belonged to the fashionable Palatine Club. The Diary refers to dining at the club with ‘George’ — his closest friend was businessman George Davidson. But socially, the couple did not quite qualify for what was known as the ‘currant jelly set’. Like many status-seeking Victorians, Maybrick became a Freeman of the City, although he was not mentioned among the worthies in up-market journals. Nor did his marriage and the return to Liverpool contain a drug habit that was becoming more pernicious. He had ready access to drugs through his cousin, William, who worked for a wholesale chemist, John Thompson, at 58 Hanover Street. When William was dismissed in 1886, Maybrick even asked Thompson to reinstate him but the move failed. (Cousin William died in October 1888 in Liverpool Workhouse).

  No matter, for Maybrick already had another source for his ‘medicine’: a dispensing chemist named Edwin Garnett Heaton in Exchange Street East. Heaton served him for about ten years in total, over which time the dose he prescribed had increased from four to seven drops. (Arsenic was commonly dispensed in liquid as well as in powder form.) Maybrick went regularly to the shop, sometimes five times a day, for what the chemist described as his ‘pick-me-up’ to ‘excite passion.’ Seven drops five times a day would be nearly equivalent to one third of a grain of arsenic, and one grain is enough to kill. When Maybrick went away on business trips Heaton would make up several bottles containing eight or sixteen doses.

  The drug was clearly having an impact on Maybrick. Florie’s brother Holbrook St John Chandler, who was by now a doctor in Paris, became concerned about his brother-in-law’s behaviour and wrote: ‘I don’t pretend to know his tricks, but he has forbidden Florie telling us a word of his affairs and has completely thrown dust in her eyes. We, unfortunately, cannot write to her or hear from her except through him, and he dictates her letters. I greatly regret this most unexpected attitude of Maybrick’s, turning out to be such a bully and a brute, but such being the fact we have to protect ourselves as far as practicable.’ About the same time, the Baroness wrote that James had forced Florie to suggest: “that I best allow my house to be sold. I ought to take an attic room and do my own work; it was absurd to keep a servant or a little dog (my only companion).”

  About this time Maybrick contacted a Pauline Cranstoun in London, who had advertised that she cast horoscopes and so was able to diagnose obscure diseases. Her story is mentioned by J.H. Levy in his book on the Maybrick case, The Necessity for Criminal Appeal (1899). ‘He wrote me’, she said, ‘a strange account of his various ailments and told me he was in the habit of taking large quantities of arsenic, and put it in his food as he found that the best and safest way of taking it. He said it aided his digestion and calmed his nerves.’

  In an interview with the New York Herald after Florie’s trial, Pauline Cranstoun said: ‘I wrote to him that he should stop using arsenic or it would certainly result in his fatal illness some time. I received no reply from him to that.’

  Sadly, Levy tells us, all that correspondence was destroyed. (Pauline Cranstoun could have an interesting background, which we are still researching. Richard Lancelyn Green in his book The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes (Penguin 1983) refers to a letter received by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1903 from a lady living with “the Hon Pauline Cranstoun, daughter of the 10th Baron Cranstoun”.)

  During 1884 there was a brief economic downturn in Britain. Friends said that Maybrick became as worried about his money as he was about his health. Florie herself had never been taught to budget. She was extravagant in her passion for pretty clothes, which she bought in quantity from Woollright’s. The fashionable department store in Bold Street was a snare for any clothes-conscious woman, with its glossy image and immense stock of furs, jewellery and exotic fabrics. It was hardly surprising that family tempers were becoming frayed. As the Baroness wrote to her lawyer in New York: ‘My poor little girl is completely in the power of her husband and he does not prove a son to me.’

  In December of that year, Florie’s brother fell ill with consumption and died four months later. Maybrick went alone to his funeral in Paris, presumably because it was not the custom for women to attend. But why did Florie not use this sad occasion to visit her grieving mother?

  Florie had few close friends. To the ladies of Liverpool she was an outsider. Two exceptions were the sisters, Matilda Briggs, a former admirer of Maybrick, and Louisa Hughes, who called regularly. After her brother’s death, Florie asked Mrs Briggs for a loan of £100 to quieten creditors, which she repaid in instalments.

  On July 20th the following year a daughter, Gladys Evelyn, was born. In attendance was the dapper, sharp-featured Dr Hopper, from Rodney Street, who had cared for the Maybricks since their marriage. Gladys’s birth did nothing to restore marital bliss. In 1887 a distraught Florie discovered what others already knew: there was someone else in her husband’s life.

  Who was this woman — referred to several times in the Diary? Could she have been Sarah Ann Robertson who disappeared from the records between 1876 and 1891? There is no evidence of her whereabouts at this time. Is it possible that she followed James to Liverpool?

  So far, we do not know. Florie’s friend, John Baillie Knight, said in an affidavit in 1889 that Florie had told him in 1888 that she knew that Maybrick had a woman in Liverpool. The local papers at the time of Florie’s trial also reported that a woman was living in Liverpool who had been his mistress for 20 years. When visited by Michael and Edwin she was found to possess jewellery and clothes belonging to Florie, which she said had been given her by James in part payment for money lent. Moreover, William Stead, the editor of the Victorian weekly magazine Review of Reviews, and Bernard Ryan, in his 1977 book The Poisoned Life of Mrs Maybrick, both maintain that 1887 was when, at Florie’s insistence, the couple moved into separate beds.

  In Richard Whittington Egan’s, Murder, Mayhem and Mystery in Liverpool he speaks of Maybrick’s increasing absences and the ‘long lonely nights’ that Florie endured.

  In the Spring of 1887 when a scarlatina epidemic swept Britain and five year old Bobo became ill, Florie remained to look after him while, somewhat unconventionally, James and the children’s nurse Emma Parker took Gladys away to Wales for six weeks. They stayed at the Hand Hotel in Llangollen. The hotel seems to have b
een a family favourite; James had stayed there previously with Florie and Gertrude Janion and in 1889 the register records him on holiday there with four male companions.

  When he returned, Maybrick cut Florie’s allowance for food, servants’ wages and other household expenses. In October that year she wrote to ‘my darling Mammy’ that Maybrick had made only £125 profit in the previous five years and that his assets were reduced to £1,500. She claimed that they had been using capital to furnish their home and complained:

  I am utterly worn out and in such a state of overstrained nervousness I am hardly fit for anything. Whenever the doorbell rings I feel ready to faint for fear it is someone coming to have an account paid and when Jim comes home at night it is with fear and trembling that I look into his face to see whether anyone has been to the office about my bills… my life is a continual state of fear of something or somebody. There is no way of stemming the current. Is life worth living? I would gladly give up the house and move elsewhere but Jim says it would ruin him outright. For one must keep up appearances until he has more capital to fall back on to meet his liabilities, since the least suspicion aroused, all claims would pour in at once and how could Jim settle with what he has now?

  Maybrick was far from consistent and not always honest in his handling of their finances. When he died he left over £5,000, the equivalent of about £200,000 today. He was not as impoverished as Florie believed. In addition to all the financial worries, Florie was also concerned about the well-being of little Gladys. In the same letter she adds:

  Nurse is quite changed since baby’s birth. Poor little mite, it gets neither petting nor coaxing when I am not with it and yet it is such a loving little thing and ready with a smile for every cross word that nurse says to her. I cannot understand why she does not take to the child. I am afraid she is getting too old for a young baby and has not the… patience to look after Gladys which she had for Bobo. With him it was a labour of love, with poor little Gladys it is a labour of duty only.

  So it was that a new nurse — Alice Yapp — described by the Liverpool Echo as a ‘somewhat prepossessing young woman’ joined the family in September 1887. She lived with her then employers, Mr and Mrs David Gibson, in Birkdale, Southport. Maybrick again flouted convention by going alone to engage her. This was considered the task of the lady of any household. There were hints in the newspapers that relations between James and Alice Yapp were not all that they should have been.

  The strain on Florie became even more intense. She knew — what no one else realised — that her life was out of control. She was in debt and worried about her husband’s drug habit, his health and his infidelity. In addition to suspecting adultery, Florie was by now also worried that her husband was overdosing himself on his ‘medicines’. Friends who saw Maybrick occasionally when they came on business trips from America remarked at his broken and rapidly ageing condition, despite the fact that he was still only 48. Such was Florie’s state of mind when she first met the personable 36-year-old Alfred Brierley.

  * * *

  In the winter of 1887/8 the Maybricks gave a dinner party. Alfred Brierley, a Liverpool cotton broker was among the guests. His company, Brierley Wood and Co., was in Old Hall Street, just around the corner from Maybrick’s office.

  Brierley was born in Rochdale, in 1851, and grew up with nine brothers and sisters. The Brierleys were pillars of the community, having risen within the security of the Church of England and the Tory party to a position of considerable affluence and influence, thanks to the cotton trade. Streets were named after them. Brierley was unmarried, attractive and susceptible. Later he always insisted, unconvincingly, that he met Florie only in company throughout the next year and that they were no more than ‘distant acquaintances’.

  Troubled as she was by her husband’s affairs, Florie was herself a flirt, an animated woman who loved the attention of men. Moreover, as she explained to her mother, ‘He was kind to me.’

  In Liverpool, in those censorious times, it would have taken very little for a high-spirited girl from America’s Deep South to step out of line. And this was someone who, according to an American friend, had grown up in a ‘swift place, where the women were much swifter.’ There, an unchaperoned girl might join a group of male and female friends on a Saturday evening to take a chartered river boat and dance and drink all night before returning home to sleep all day. Such behaviour would not have been tolerated in Victorian England. Whatever the truth about Florie’s feelings for Brierley, or whether she had even begun to indulge them as early as 1887, the Diary implies that James Maybrick nursed a growing paranoia about her suspected infidelities.

  * * *

  Probably in March 1888, the Maybricks moved from Grassendale to Aigburth, less than a mile away, into the far more imposing and better situated Battlecrease House, on which they took a five year lease. They were accompanied by nurse Yapp, gardener James Grant, who had just married the former housemaid Alice, and the waitress Mary Cadwallader. Cook Elizabeth Humphreys and housemaid Bessie Brierley (no relation) joined them later in the year.

  The quality of the Maybricks’ female staff was remarkable. A reporter described the girls at the time of Florie’s arrest: ‘One thing struck me with interest and wonder, not unmingled with admiration, was the smart appearance of the female servants and nurses… they were all dressed “à la mode”, and the cook, especially, looked very fascinating, not to say coquettish.’

  Alice Yapp had grown up with a brother and four sisters in the Nag’s Head, Ludlow, Shropshire, where her parents were innkeepers. The girls were always extremely well dressed.

  Mary Cadwallader, known as ‘gentle Mary’, grew up on a 160 acre farm, also in Shropshire, and was privately educated. Why Mary, eldest of 14 children, went into service is a mystery. She was tiny, with deep auburn hair, and was generally described as a ‘lady’. She shared the Maybricks’ passion for horses, rode well and every week asked a man friend to put sixpence on a horse for her since women were not allowed to bet. Years afterwards she kept a white rabbit and took it for walks on a lead.

  Neither of these girls was of the servant class.

  The couple’s neighbours in Riversdale Road were professional people and businessmen, although cows wandered up and down the lane and made the going heavy for carriages. Florie wasted no time in furnishing the house in style. Every room had velvet carpets, and curtains in dark red plush lined with pale blue satin. The gold-painted furniture was upholstered in dark red with blue. Maybrick’s den, which was always locked, had deep, comfortable leather chairs. It was here that he kept wine, cigars, tobacco, cards and the poker chips he used while entertaining men friends. Upstairs, his dressing room, which was reached through the main bedroom, was forbidden territory to everyone.

  That summer there was a guest at Battlecrease from whom, in later life, would come some recollections of the strange domestic scene.

  ‘Little Miss’ was Maybrick’s pet name for young Florence Aunspaugh, a boisterous eight-year-old American, who stayed with the family while her father, John, head of Inman Swann and Co. of Atlanta, Georgia, was in Europe.

  When she was an old lady in America, Florence told her story to author Trevor Christie. Most of the notes made by Christie did not appear in his book Etched in Arsenic. Along with these notes, the unused material has only recently come to light. Stored in the archives at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, it figures prominently among the many archives and memorabilia that have proved invaluable to me in the present reconstruction of the couple’s life and times. Florence told Christie:

  Battlecrease was a palatial home. The grounds must have consisted of five or six acres and were given most excellent care. There were large trees, luxuriant shrubbery and flowerbeds. Dotted around the grounds were little rock nooks or summer houses, with seats, covered with old English ivy and other running vines. A conservatory was near the house and a pair of peacocks roamed the grounds… running through the grounds was a small, natural stream of wa
ter, part of which had been broadened and deepened to form a small lake… this pool was stocked with fish and swans and ducks were swimming on the surface. I think I remember the pool better than anything else as I fell in it twice and was pulled out by the yard man.

  Mr Maybrick was very fond of hunting and had quite a few dogs… I saw six horses, a pair of handsome looking blacks which were always hitched to the carriage, a pair of greys which were hitched to what they called the trap, and two bay saddle horses: one Mr Maybrick used, the other Mrs Maybrick.

  To young Florence, Florie was a beguiling figure:

  The crowning glory of her person was her hair. It was blonde, but not the dead faded-out type of yellow, had just enough of a tinge of red in it to make a glossy, rich golden.

  Mrs Maybrick’s eyes were the most beautiful blue I have ever seen. They were a large, round eye of such a very deep blue that at times they were violet; but the expression was most peculiar… you would focus your eyes on hers with a steady gaze and they would appear entirely without life or expression as though you were gazing into the eyes of a corpse. Utterly void of animation and expression. As you continued your gaze her eyes seemed to change and have the look of a frightened animal.

  At no time was there any expression of intellectuality, either in eyes or face, yet there was a magnetic charm about her countenance that… seemed irresistible.

  She was extremely conscious of her beauty and attractiveness and courted admiration, especially from the male sex. She seemed to be very fond of being very close to them… I have seen her pat a man on the top of his head, put her arm on another’s arm and rest her hand on another’s knee. She acted that way before Mr Maybrick. Since I have reached the years of maturity I have wondered that he tolerated it, but he did.