Tag: actress

Tragedy in the Temple and a stabbing by a Dorset Street resident; all part of daily life in 1880s London

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Lloyd’s Weekly newspaper offered its readers (as the title suggests) a way to catch up with all the news, scandal, gossip, and ‘police intelligence’ that had been carried by the dailies in the preceding week. This Sunday paper had a little more time to frame stories or to carry features than the time limited Daily News or Morning Post did.

It was a very popular newspaper, selling over 1m copies on one day in February 1896, more than its closest rivals the News of the World and Reynold’s Newspaper. It lasted until the 1920s but didn’t survive the financial crisis at the end of that decade.

At the end of June 1889 Lloyds carried a full page of reports from the Metropolitan Police courts, ranging from a case of tea merchant obtaining credit by false pretenses to a valet that stole two gold sovereign coins. By the late 1880s the method of court reporting was well established and the typology of crime and social issues (such as poverty, unemployment, suicide) were very familiar to readers. Individual cases were routinely given a headline (such as ‘Strange Case’ or ‘An Unfortunate Visit to London’), which was not always the case earlier in the century.

Two in particular caught my eye this morning, an attempted suicide in the City and the stabbing of a woman in Deptford. The Deptford case involved was heard at Greenwich Police court but the accused – James Collins – was a resident of Whitechapel. Collins, a 68 year-old wood carver had previously cohabited with Emma Edwards in rooms at 17 Dorset Street, Spitalfields.

Dorset Street was an address that was all too familiar to readers who had been following the news story of 1888. The desperate poverty of Dorset (or ‘dosset’) Street had been highlighted after the brutally mutilated body of Mary Kelly was discovered in a room there in November 1888. Many researchers believe that Kelly was the final victim of the killer known only as ‘Jack the Ripper’, but other (myself included) beg to differ.

Emma Edwards told the magistrate at Greenwich (a Mr Kennedy) that she was walking along Griffin Street in Deptford when she saw her former lover in the street. She noticed ‘the gleam of a knife’ in his hand and suddenly she ‘felt herself stabbed’. She survived and Collins was arrested. In his defense he said it was an accident; he carried knives for his work and she must had fallen against one in his pocket.

The police were able to provide testimony that Collins had threatened Emma on more than one occasion, promising to ‘settle’ her ‘at the first opportunity’. Mr Kennedy sent him to prison for six months for aggravated assault.

The newspaper reports are full of accounts of casual male violence towards women and we should remember this in the context of the ‘Ripper’ murders. However you wish to depict the Whitechapel killings the perpetrator was a misogynistic serial murderer who operated in a society where working class women were placed firmly at the bottom of the social ladder; a reality that enabled him to kill almost without impunity. He was no caped crusader or criminal mastermind, as some versions of the mystery continue to suggest.

At the Mansion House along with the fraudulent tea merchant Sir Andrew Lusk was sitting in for the Lord Mayor. Lusk (no relation I think to the famous ‘Mishter Lusk’ who was sent a piece of human kidney during the Whitechapel murders) served as an MP until 1885 and was Lord Mayor in 1874/5. He was quite old in 1889, being in his late 70s.

By contrast Florence Ross was a young woman with her life ahead of her. An actress or dancer in the music hall, Ross was living with her sister in 1889 while she went through a period of ‘rest’. Whether that ‘rest’ implied she was ill, had fallen pregnant, or was simply unemployed, is not made clear from the report but I think we might speculate.

Florence Ross was rescued from a fountain in Middle Temple gardens where she had tried to drown herself. A policeman saw her rush to the water and jump in and so acted quickly to pull her out. The gardens are close by the Embankment and what is now Temple underground station.

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Whatever the reality she was lucky and survived but attempted suicide was an offence and so she was placed in the dock at Mansion House to answer for it. She said little or nothing by way of explanation but the magistrate decided to see what ways the court could find to help her. He remanded her for a week while enquiries were made. The Illustrated Police News later included its artist’s impression of her attempt in its 6 July edition. Sadly no paper seems to have recorded the outcome of those enquiries. Florence’s was one story amongst many, one human tragedy in a city which was witnesses to countless acts of violence, desperation, and cruelty each and every day, only a handful of which made the pages of the metropolitan press.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, June 30, 1889; The Illustrated Police News, Saturday, July 6, 1889]

 

 

 

Drew’s new book (co-authored by Andy Wise) is published by Amberley Books. It is a new study of the Whitechapel murders of 1888 which offers up a new suspect, links the ‘Jack the Ripper’ killings to the unsolved ‘Thames Torso’ crimes, and provides the reader with important contextual history of Victorian London. The book is available on Amazon here

The actress and her ‘lunatic’ husband

L0011787 Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, Southgate, Middlesex: panoramic

Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in the late 1800s. Munster House was much smaller but I can’t find a surviving image of it.

The Victorian Police Courts acted as a place of public record in two key ways. First there was a formal method of recording the business that took place there (although sadly very few of these records survive). Secondly, the newspapers reported on what went on in court (even if this was partial and somewhat anecdotal). So if you wanted to make an announcement or a statement of fact relating to the law the police court was a good place to do it.This was clearly the intention of Mr W. Doveton Smyth, a solicitor, when he approached the bench at Westminster in late January 1888.

Mr D’Eyncourt gave Doveton Smith permission to make a statement in relation to a complaint that had come before the court on the previous day. That had been brought by a Mrs Lloyd, who was described as an actress. She had complained that following her marriage to Mr Lloyd he had been whisked away by his family and placed in a lunatic asylum for his own good. Mr Smyth had investigated the circumstances and had come to report on what had transpired since.

The background appears to have been that Mr Lloyd’s family did not approve of his choice of bride. Despite the fact that he was 30 years of age (and she was 25) and so capable of ‘knowing his own mind’ they had moved to separate the couple. The disapproval stemmed not from any difference in age but instead in class. The Lloyds were a wealthy and very respectable family, Mr Smyth explained, and the new Mrs Lloyd was an actress – something that at the time was not deemed to be ‘respectable’ at all.

The pair had married at St. Mary’s church, Clerkenwell on the 17 December 1887 and had known each other for at least two years. Mrs Lloyd had been married previously, to an army officer who had died. The widow was also the sister of a solicitor, a very respectable profession as Mr Smyth was keen to point out. Since all Police Magistrates were trained barristers at law Mr D’Eyncourt was hardly going to disagree with his analysis.

Following the wedding, Smyth continued,  the ‘bridegroom seems to have indulged heavily in stimulants, and he was brought to such a condition that it was thought desirable that he should be put in confinement for a short time’.

This sounds a bit like a modern celebrity checking himself into the Priory to detox but I don’t think Mr Lloyd was given a choice in the matter. Two weeks after the wedding he was taken to Munster House Lunatic Asylum in Fulham where he remained until Mr Smyth visited him the day before his appearance in Westminster Police Court. The solicitor said that he spoke with Mr Lloyd for about an hour:

‘I must say, sir, that he has entirely recovered; and I think that all parties admit that if he was insane, he is now perfectly sane. I am bound to say he appears to be treated with the utmost kindness and consideration: but naturally he is anxious to obtain his liberty’.

D’Eyncourt enquired if he was asking for any help from him that day.

‘No sir’, replied the solicitor. He had met with the Commissioners of Lunacy which oversaw the care of the mentally ill in Victorian asylums, and they had agreed to look at Mr Lloyd’s case forthwith. Had they not I suspect Mr Smyth would have asked the magistrate’s help in taking the case to a Judge in Chambers so a court order could be obtained to secure the man’s release.

Having made his statement Mr Smyth withdrew but was back a few hours later clutching a telegram. This was from the Commissioners to Mrs Lloyd and it confirmed that they had authorised the ‘complete discharge of her husband from the asylum’. So it seems that Mrs Lloyd’s determination to get her new husband out of an institution where his family had imprisoned him had borne fruit. He was to be freed and Mr Smyth saw this as a very ‘happy termination of the case’.

Mr D’Eyncourt seems less sanguine about it; ‘I hope so’ he concluded, perhaps suspecting that a family so determined to go to such lengths to thwart what they saw as a social climber marrying into their clan were unlikely to make life easy for the newlyweds. Time would tell and now the whole affair was in the public domain, and a good name dragged through the newspapers.

[from The Standard, Wednesday, January 25, 1888]