While Florie served her prison term, many of those who had figured so prominently in her life were also trying, in their own ways, to escape what fate had dealt them.
* * *
When Alexander MacDougall published his study of the case after Florie’s conviction, he addressed the preface emotionally to Bobo and Gladys.
This work is dedicated to James Chandler Maybrick aged 8 years and Gladys Evelyn Maybrick aged 4 years by the author, with the sincere hope that it will enable them to feel during their lives that the word ‘MOTHER’ is not a ‘sound unfit to be heard or uttered’ by them AND that when they are old enough to be able to understand this record of the facts and circumstances connected with the charge put upon, and the trial of Florence Elizabeth Maybrick aged 27, her children may have, throughout their lives, the comfort of feeling that their mother was not proved to be guilty of the murder of their father JAMES MAYBRICK.
It did not work. Florie never saw her children again. James and Gladys went to live in London — not with Uncle Michael at first but with Dr Fuller and his wife, who were paid £100 a year to care for them. For the first few years that Florie was in prison, Thomas annually posted photographs of her children to her. But when James was old enough to be told about the tragedy of his parents he reacted badly. He adopted the name ‘Fuller’ and instructed Uncle Thomas to send no more pictures to the prison. This broke Florie’s heart; she felt as though her children had died.
‘The innocents — my children — one a baby of three years, the other a boy of seven, I had left behind in the world,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘They had been taught to believe that their mother was guilty and, like their father, was to them dead. They have grown up to years of understanding under another name. I know nothing about them. When the pathos of all this touches the reader’s heart he will realize the tragedy of my case.’
In March 1893, Michael Maybrick decided to break totally with the memories of his past — although the year before he had had even more music in print than the great Arthur Sullivan himself. He married his housekeeper, butcher’s daughter Laura Withers, at Marylebone Register Office and retired to live on the Isle of Wight. It was not a love match, they had nothing in common and never even took holidays together. But Laura was happy enough, driving around in her monogrammed carriage to Ryde’s main street, in order to give the shopkeepers the pleasure of saying they had served her.
Eventually, when the children were older, first James and then Gladys joined the Maybricks at Lynthorpe in Ryde. In November 1900, Michael was elected Mayor. Speeches at the inauguration referred to his ability to ‘produce grand harmonies from discordant notes’. It was an honour to which he was re-elected five times. He visited Osborne when Queen Victoria was there, he welcomed King Alfonso of Spain and represented the island at Westminster Abbey for the Coronation of George V. He undoubtedly worked hard to promote the island’s image — and his own.
His funeral in 1913 was the largest the island had ever seen. But he is remembered, nonetheless, with some amusement there today. Solicitor John Matthews says, ‘he was a chameleon type of man. He had no deep emotions and no close relationships. He dabbled in every committee possible but participated very little. At his funeral, among the astonishing array of wreaths was one from the Temperance Movement (but he drank), several from the churches (but he didn’t go to church), and from the cycling club (but he had no bicycle). His one-time world of international music was hardly represented.’
In December 1892, three months before his own wedding, Michael had persuaded his brother Edwin to abandon bachelor life. Edwin married Amy Tyrer and they had a daughter, also called Amy. Many years later, daughter Amy described her father as ‘absolutely a bachelor at heart. All his friends were bachelors. Some came over from America and they were all bachelors. Father used to invite them to dinner in the evening but there were never any women with them. At Easter, he would go off motoring with his men friends. He made me feel I was an unwanted child. He was never loving. I got my ears boxed on many occasions.’
Amy Maybrick sometimes spent summers on the Isle of Wight. She dreaded these visits when bored Aunt Laura fell asleep, while Uncle Michael played his gramophone interminably and the children were left to their own devices. ‘All the Maybricks were cold, very formal and they didn’t understand children at all,’ she said.
Her father, Edwin, died in 1928, leaving only £39 1s.8d. His funeral cost £5 7s.8d.
* * *
In 1911, James Fuller was 29 and working as a mining engineer in the Le Roi gold mine in British Columbia. He was engaged to a local girl and apparently free from the shadow that had clouded his childhood. On April 10th he telephoned his fiancée. That was the last time she spoke to him. James was later found dead alone in his laboratory. He had apparently mistaken a glass of cyanide for water. The verdict was accidental death. The Maybrick curse had taken its toll again.
In 1912, at the parish church of St Mary the Virgin, Hampstead, Gladys Maybrick married Frederick James Corbyn, known as ‘Jim’. Her guardian, Mrs Fuller, signed the register and when Michael died in 1913, Gladys’ name does not appear among the mourners nor do the newspapers record her sending a wreath. Was this the whiff of a family feud? Jim Corbyn’s family immediately cut off his inheritance because of Gladys’ notorious name.
During World War I Jim, a navy lieutenant, was awarded the OBE for his shore-based services but, on Gladys’ insistence, resigned when it was over and went into business. The Corbyns chose not to have children — Gladys was ashamed of being a Maybrick. In 1957, they built themselves a retirement bungalow not far from the sea, overlooking a beautiful isolated valley in South Wales. There, Gladys was a somewhat formidable and demanding neighbour. She didn’t like children at all, and members of the family still recall the dread with which, as youngsters, they had awaited the ‘state visits’ from Aunty Gladys and Uncle Jim. These were occasions for best clothes and formal behaviour.
Sally and I went to see the place in which the tragic little daughter of James and Florie chose to end her days. As we drove in through the gate I felt a shiver of disbelief. From the time of the trial Florie had had no contact at all with her daughter; there had been no exchange of photographs or letters. And yet the house in which Gladys died was a modest cedar bungalow, larger but otherwise similar in every way to the place in which her mother was found dead in 1941.
Just as extraordinary was yet another coincidence; when Gladys died in 1971 and the bungalow was cleared, relatives found medicines and pills in every pocket, every drawer, every cupboard. Like her father, she too was a hypochondriac.
What of Alfred Brierley? The history books tell different stories. Some say he emigrated to North Africa, others that he died in South America. Years after she was released from prison Florie gave an exclusive and painful interview to the Liverpool Post and Echo in which she admitted that during the years in prison she was buoyed up by the memories of Alfred. ‘I was foolish enough to think that I could find happiness with the man who offered me the love my husband denied me… bitter, bitter was my disappointment. The man for whom I had sacrificed everything had forgotten me during the years I had been trying to keep my heart young, in prison, for his sake.’
The truth about Brierley makes Florie’s words even more poignant. He did go to South America. There is a letter from him when in Venezuela, written to John Aunspagh, in which he reflects ruefully, ‘The women surely can kick up a devil of a dust with us men and a pretty face can sure lead a man to hell.’ In fact, Brierley returned to England, married twice, had a son and died in a nursing home in Hove, Sussex. He had been living in the beautiful Poynters Farmhouse in the village of Newick, East Sussex and is buried there in the shelter of St Mary’s Church at the foot of the South Downs. On his tombstone are the now moss-covered words: ‘And a sower went forth’.
George Davidson, Maybrick’s closest friend, hailed from an eminently respectable Scottish Free Church family. He was found, drowned, on a ble
ak stretch of the coast at Silecroft near Whitehaven, Cumbria, in March 1893. A reward of £10 had been offered for news of his whereabouts. According to the Whitehaven News of March 16th, ‘For about two or three weeks he had complained of being unable to sleep. He frequently got up during the night and went for a walk and a smoke around the square. On the morning of February 10th at about 10 a.m. he was found to be missing and has not been heard of since.’
He died, penniless and intestate, but left behind a gold watch, placed beneath his pillow. Was it Albert Johnson’s watch? Was the burden of such knowledge too much for Maybrick’s dearest friend? We shall probably never know.
And in 1927, Sarah Maybrick was certified dead of senile dementia in Tooting Bec Hospital, London. Paul Feldman found, among Trevor Christie’s papers, a copy of an article that had appeared in the American Brooklyn Eagle of July 27th 1894. It was headed ‘There are no flies on her’, and said, ‘Mrs Sarah Maybrick of Brooklyn asks that her daughter, Hester, be removed to an insane asylum. She imagines she has been deserted by her lover and flies whisper in her ear that he is faithless.’
If this was, indeed, James Maybrick’s Sarah Ann, how ironic that the girl who could, from her age, have been his daughter, was haunted by the twin nightmare of the Maybricks — faithlessness and flies.
* * *
Florie returned to England at least twice. The first time was in 1911 after she heard of Bobo’s death in Canada. Her remarks, also reported in the Brooklyn Eagle, on May 10th, are moving;
The past is dead. The boy has been dead to me for more than 20 years. Before the death of my husband … he provided that the children be brought up and educated and required to live in England until of age and if, then, they wished to continue under the patronage of his estate they must continue to reside on British soil. They were taken in charge by some of Mr Maybrick’s relatives and I never made any effort to communicate with them.
In 1927, she returned for what she hoped would be a family reconciliation. But according to Amy, Edwin’s daughter, he was ‘out’ at the time. Could there have also been a link between that visit and the death of Sarah Ann?
It is bitterness worse than death. I have longed for my children who were but babes at the time and the mother hunger in my heart was so strong that I felt I must make this journey now in the hope of seeing them … It seems terrible that the children I risked my life to bring into the world should think their mother guilty of the crime that left them fatherless. But that is the only construction I can put upon their attitude towards me now.
Who is Florie talking about? Bobo had been dead for 16 years. She had previously spoken of her feelings about his death. So who are the children she had come to see?
There had been so many rumours at the time of her trial that Florie was pregnant. Dr Hopper himself had mentioned the possibility. The Weekly Times and Echo was not alone in its inference that there were hidden reasons why Florie had been granted a reprieve.
It is understood that another important question arises in the case and one which the jury of matrons will be empanelled to try. Of course, if in the event of the jury finding the fact to be as is alleged, the execution would necessarily be postponed and probably would not take place at all. It is believed there has been no instance of the execution of a woman who, at the time of her trial, was in Mrs Maybrick’s supposed condition, since the execution of Margaret Waters nineteen years ago.
These stories were denied both in the press and later by the Baroness, but the rumours lingered. If Florie had given birth in prison, he or she would have been thirty seven.
In 1995, Paul Feldman lobbed another bombshell theory into the arena. His relentless search for Maybrick descendants has been chronicled in his book, Jack the Ripper: The Final Chapter. He believed he has discovered the truth about Florie’s ‘other child’, born, not in prison but, he says, in West Hartlepool when she was just 15 years old. This baby — a boy — was adopted but what may have happened next belongs later in the story.
Florie spent the rest of her old age in the small Connecticut town where she had gone to work as a housekeeper. The job did not last long and when the small income she received ceased to be enough she finally found the kindness that had eluded her through so much of her life. Neighbours and students from the nearby South Kent School for Boys saw to it that she always had groceries and other supplies.
As the years wore on, Florie became more and more reclusive, and as passers-by would note, ever more eccentric. Her odd little house had five small doors let into its sides to allow easy access for her cats, which according to the local newspaper, numbered anything from 17 to 75. When she could barely afford to feed herself she made sure she had over two litres of milk a day to feed her hungry companions. Hardly the care one would expect from a woman who, so many years before, had been damned by a package labelled ‘Arsenic. Poison for Cats’.
The ‘Cat Lady’, as she became known locally, managed to live out the last few decades of her life in Gaylordsville in anonymity. No one knew who she was, though they may have guessed from her bearing that she was a lady. And Florie never told a soul — not in words, anyway. When she gave a black lace dress to Genevieve Austin, she inadvertently left on a cleaning tag that read ‘Mrs Florence E. Maybrick’. For nearly 20 years Mrs Austin kept Florie’s secret. Only on the death of her neighbour did she alert the newspapers to the truth.
Florie was found dead on October 23rd 1941, the day before her late husband’s birthday. She was 79. Although she had been released from prison almost four decades earlier she had nonetheless served a life sentence. Only by becoming a recluse whose sole friends were her cats, did she hide from the scandal that followed her everywhere. But she could never escape. The death of Florence Elizabeth Chandler and her humble funeral in the school grounds was reported on many front pages — the tragic story of the former beauty, convicted of murdering her husband, was news all over again.
17
THE PAIN IS UNBEARABLE
In 1992, Michael Barrett too had felt the shadow of James Maybrick fall across his life. Once the Diary had found its way into his house, nothing was ever to be the same again. No one, least of all an invalid as he was, could withstand the battering to which he was subjected especially after publication of the hardback. He suffered phone calls in the night, the press camped on his doorstep and he was interviewed by Scotland Yard — an experience his former wife, Anne, will never forget. Yet he stuck convincingly to his story.
Sally and I had coffee with Tony Devereux’s three daughters in Liverpool at the beginning of our researches but, because of the confidentiality statement we were all trying to protect, we could not tell them then that the Diary had anything to do with the Ripper. We described it only as ‘James Maybrick’s Diary’. They have been very distressed since at the suggestion by the Diary’s disbelievers that their father was part of the forgery plot. Understandably they were angry with us all and insisted that they would have known if he had ever had the Diary in his house.
So we still had no idea of the origins of the Diary and because I knew there would be a need to update the paperback version of my book in October 1994 research continued.
1994 was a crazy year. By this time two research ‘camps’ had evolved, each believing fervently in the authenticity of the Diary. Paul Feldman was a man with a mission and although I admired his energy I was extremely concerned that he might be causing distress to ordinary folk in Liverpool. Behind the scenes, legal and political wrangles meant that there was virtually no contact between us. This complicated research and added to the sense of confusion.
We pressed Michael for more details; we spoke with his family and friends. We checked his handwriting and also that of Tony Devereux and Anne. Michael Barrett had always said he was convinced that Maybrick left the Diary in his office in Tithebarn Street on May 3rd 1889. So there was momentary excitement when I discovered that this office had only been demolished in the late 1960s to make way for a prestigious office block
, Silk House Court. Amusingly, among the tenants of Silk House Court was a reputable firm of laywers descended by way of mergers and new partnerships from Cleaver Holden Garnett and Cleaver, Florie’s solicitors. But, sadly, they said that they had never been put in charge of the Diary and so the trail went cold.
I hoped that if we could find some more of Maybrick’s handwriting our problems might be over. The Reference Library in Norfolk, Virginia, sent us wads of papers detailing his attendance and responsibilities at Cotton Exchange meetings. There was even a mention of letters. But they had long since vanished. Cotton Exchange records in Liverpool were also destroyed.
We hunted down the family of George Davidson and I talked to descendants of Sir Thomas Clark, his brother-in-law, whose family publishing firm still thrives in Edinburgh. They knew nothing. ‘To have a possible suicide in a prominent Free Church family would have been such a scandal it would have been hushed up.’
We had elevenses with Peggy Martin, Mary Cadwallader’s granddaughter, who was living comfortably with her husband in a bungalow near Dover. She told us of a gold watch once owned by Mary which they all believed had come from Battlecrease House. It was pawned years ago, so we shall never know. We sipped sherry in the beamed 18th century home where Alice Yapp’s great niece, Jo Brooks, lived with her husband. She placed on the table a silver locket and monogrammed teaspoon that she said with a wry smile, Alice claimed Florie had ‘given’ her. Jo also told us that there was a ‘whisper’ in her family that Alice Yapp was rather more than a servant to James even before he employed her.
The Diary of Jack the Ripper - The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick Page 25