Tag: Catherine Eddowes

A cross-dressing copper and the Whitechapel murderer?

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The ‘From Hell or ‘Lusk’ letter 

In mid October 1888 the London, national and even the world’s press were full of the news of the Whitechapel murders. It was the sensation story of its day and has remained one of the most discussed crime news stories of all time.

On the evening of the 16 October George Lusk, a builder and head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, received a disturbing parcel in the post. The parcel contained a badly written letter and a piece of human kidney. The so-called ‘From Hell’ or ‘Lusk’ letter has been the subject of fierce speculation amongst those interested in the case. It was not signed ‘Jack the Ripper’ and the portion of kidney gave it extra credence, since it was commonly known that the killer had removed one of Kate Eddowes in Mitre Square.

Ultimately we can’t be sure if the ‘From Hell’ letter, or any of the communications received by the press and police, were from the murderer or the work of attention seekers and cranks. They all, however, demonstrate just how much public interest there was in the Ripper case.

The police hunt for the killer was at its apogee in October and may have contributed to the fact that there was a lull in murders that lasted just over a month. The police were out in force and watching anyone they suspected might be involved. Evidence of this can found in all sorts of places including this report of proceedings in the Clerkenwell Police court.

James Phillips and William Jarvis, two cab washers, were brought before Mr Bros charged with a serious assault on a police detective. The court heard that on the 9 October detective sergeant Robinson was on duty in Phoenix Place. DS Robinson was in disguise, dressed in women’s clothing so he could watch ‘a man supposed to be the Whitechapel murderer’.

According to the report Jarvis attacked him, throwing him to the ground and stabbing him before Phillips rushed in and started kicking him. A man named Doncaster came to assist the policeman and he was also wounded. Eventually the pair were arrested and charged.  Mr Bros committed the men for trial, accepting £20 each in bail. Jarvis was tried at the Middlesex quarter sessions where he was convicted and sent to Pentonville prison for six weeks.

[from The Morning Post, Wednesday, October 17, 1888]

“Good-bye, Tom, I have done for my missis, and I am going to do for myself”; murder in the East End in 1888

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The Isle of Dogs, 1899 (Manchester Road runs south-east parallel to Blackwall Reach)

In early October 1888 London was gripped by the ‘Ripper’ murders. As far as the press and public were concerned an unknown assassin had brutally murdered six women in a small area of East London and the police had no clue as to his identity. Police patrols had been stepped up and the newspapers were becoming inundated with fake letters from people purporting to be the murderer, and correspondence offering advice on how to catch him. Between the end of September (when both Elizabeth Stride and Katherine Eddowes were murdered on one night) and the 9th November (when Mary Kelly’s body was found in Miller’s Court) the killer seems to have lain low, avoiding the redoubled attentions of the police.

Meanwhile over at the Thames Police Court Mr Lushington was hearing the case of a man accused of murdering his wife. Levi Bartlett was a 57 year-old general dealer who lived and worked in Poplar. He and his wife, Elizabeth, ran a small shop on Manchester Road on the Isle of Dogs, selling mostly milk. He had been held on remand since the incident had happened back in August, because after killing his wife he had attempted to cut his own throat with a razor.

Even by October he was a weak man and was allowed to sit in court rather than stand through the evidence. Elizabeth’s sister, Emma Mears, testified that Levi and her sister had live together for many years before they married, and had now been married for about five years. During all of that time, she said, the dealer was ‘nearly always drunk’.

By all accounts when he was sober, Levi was a good man but that was rare. When in his cups he was abusive and violent and dipped into the shop’s till to feed his drinking habit.  Not surprisingly then quarrels between him and Elizabeth were frequent and loud.

On the 18th August 1888 Emma visited Elizabeth and found her sitting crying. When she asked what the matter was her long suffering sibling said:

‘Can’t you see the old villain is drunk again, and hasn’t been to bed since two this morning’. This was punctuated by the dealer’s loud denials, ‘don’t you believe her’ he shouted. He then asked for 2d for gin.

‘No, you villain, you have had enough now’ was his wife’s response. This provoked Bartlett to threaten her:

‘I will mark you for this tonight’, he declared.

More abuse was exchanged and before she left Emma told her her sister to fetch a policeman if her husband hit her again. Perhaps because Levi was frequently drunk and abusive no one really expected what was to happen next, although the signs were there. At some point on Sunday morning (19 August) the former stevedore attacked his wife with a hammer, fatally wounding her,  before admitting his crime to George Jones who he had employed as a milk delivery man.

Jones later related the dramatic scene to the Old Bailey court as he was woken up by his master:

‘between 4 and 5 in the morning I was awoke by the prisoner coming into my room—he asked French if he had got any drink—French said no, he had forgot to bring any; the prisoner shook hands with French and said “Good-bye, you won’t see me no more alive”—he then went back to his own room, he seemed sober then—in about twenty minutes he came into our room again, and again bid French good-bye; he then came to me and said “Good-bye, Tom, I have done for my missis, and I am going to do for myself”—he shook hands with me and went out of the room’.

Bartlett then visited his old friend Benjamin French who had lodged with the Bartlett’s for 14 years. He also bids him ‘goodbye’ which left the dock labourer perplexed and not a little concerned. It was French that finally fetched a policeman, police sergeant Doe (30KR), who found Bartlett sitting on his bed ‘in his shirt, bleeding from the throat; the front of his shirt was covered with blood—he had a razor in his right hand’. Having taken the razor from him he summoned a doctor and then took him to hospital.

Bartlett, who had earned the nickname ‘Mad Dick the jockey’ (his middle name was Richard) was fully committed for trial at the Old Bailey. There, on the 22nd October 1888 he was convicted of murdering Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s sister testified to the years of abuse that she had suffered at Levi’s hands while the former dock worker’s best friend Benjamin said he had never heard a cross word between them. Drink was Bartlett’s downfall and it seems he simply could not function with it or without it. Ultimately this cost both him and his wife their lives; having recovered from his own suicide attempt Levi Richard Bartlett was hanged at Newgate Gaol on 13 November 1888.

Such a tragic event may well have created many more ‘headlines’ than it did in 1888 had there not been a supposedly crazed serial killer on the loose. This was, of course, a much more typical homicide for nineteenth century London than the series that has occupied the attention of researchers for over 120 years. Most murderers are men, and most of their victims (many of whom are women) are close to them – as wives, partners, lovers and acquaintances. The ‘Ripper’ killed strangers, and that made him all the more difficult (indeed almost impossible) to catch.

[from The Standard, Saturday, October 06, 1888]

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

 ‘Silently, swiftly, and remorselessly’: the mythologising of a serial killer in the London press

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On the evening of the 1 October 1888 the Standard newspaper carried this report on page four:

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This was the infamous ‘double event’ when the killer known only as ‘Jack the Ripper’ killed twice within a matter of hours. We might it strange that it wasn’t ‘front page news’ as such a crime would be today but then nineteenth-century newspapers tended to carry adverts on the cover page, not news.

The Whitechapel murders were the news story of the day, relegating almost all other stories to ‘second best’ and bringing hoards of journalists, ‘dark tourists’, and ‘slummers’ to the East End to see where it all happened and to talk to the nervous locals.

The Standard went on to discuss the murders in a longer article on the same page. It described the killer as having an ‘absolutely demonical thirst for blood’ and dubbed him ‘a human fiend’. It also credited the murderer with ‘a swiftness, a dexterity, a noiselessness, and, we might almost say, a scientific skill’ which it suggested was a ‘very rare accomplishment in the class from which murderers are commonly drawn’.

Given that most of the murderers convicted at the Old Bailey in the nineteenth century might reasonably be described as working class and given that the Victorians blamed most serious crime on the so-called ‘criminal class’ (a class existing below the ranks of the working class), it follows that this editorial’s writer held a fairly low opinion of the ordinary working class man in the street.

The Standard launched in 1827 as an evening paper, and later a morning edition as well. It briefly challenged The Times for daily circulation and we might see it as a serious conservative organ. It was hardly likely then to be widely read by the working man.

The report of Catherine Eddowes’ murder in Mitre Square is full of quiet admiration for the ‘skill’ of the murderer:

 ‘Silently, swiftly, and remorselessly , the murderer performed operations which a practiced surgeon, working with all his appliances about him, could hardly have effected in the time; and then, as usual, disappeared, leaving not a shred of evidence behind by which he could be traced’.

The Standard was, like many of the other papers of the day, helping (albeit indirectly) to create the myth of ‘Jack the Ripper’; he was (so this rhetoric suggested) a fantastical figure who roamed the streets and attacked women at will, right under the noses of the impotent police force. He possessed almost super human skills, had a bestial nature, and an intelligence or animal cunning that far exceeded any of the other denizens of the East End or the ‘plod’ that were searching for him.

The Standard did call for calm and dismissed ideas (circulating elsewhere) that the murders were a reflection of the state of Britain in the 1880s:

‘Terrible as they are’, it said, the murders ‘do not show either that society is rotten to the core, or that human life is less safe in the centre of London than it is in the wilds of Texas. We are not all liable to be hacked to pieces in the streets, or murdered in our beds, because some diabolical maniac can decoy the outcasts of the pavement into dark corners and kill them’.

Finally the paper wrote that the killer must be caught and it urged the police to concentrate their efforts on the area in which the murders took place. The killer must be local it stated:

He was either a ‘resident of in a particular quarter of the East End, or, at any rate, an habitué there. He must have a haunt near the western portion of the Whitechapel-road, from which he issues before the commission of one of his crimes, and to which he ventures swiftly after the deed is done’.

The paper was at pains to dismiss the idea that the killer was a doctor or surgeon but it believed that he must have a working knowledge of anatomy, or at least was familiar with the dissection of ‘of the human or animal body’. He could be caught however, by persistent and determined police work, a task the Standard declared, that it had confidence the police could and would fulfil.

So, in this brief editorial from the day after the ‘double event’ we get very many of the themes associated with the Ripper murders. There is the notion of the mythical killer, the press attention, the moral panic that consumed London, the impotence (or otherwise) of the Metropolitan Police, the nature of the victims, elite attitudes towards the lower class, and the idea that the East End of London and killings there reflected in some ways the cancer at the heart of the British Empire.

This is why I continue to research and teach about the Whitechapel murders, because it is a rich source of discussion and debate about so many things in late Victorian London, and this is why so many people remain fascinated by the topic.

[from The Standard, Monday, October 01, 1888]

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

One of the ‘Buck’s Row Slaughterers’ appears in court in September 1888

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I promised that this blog would return to the events of 1888 and the so-called Whitechapel or ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders. In the early hours of Sunday, 30 September, the body of Elizabeth (‘Long Liz’) Stride was discovered by the gates of Dutfield’s Yard in Berner Street. Her throat had been cut but she hadn’t been mutilated. Most experts agree that Liz’s killer had probably been disturbed in his murderous acts by the return to the yard of a trader in cheap jeweler, Louis Diemshutz, and his cart.

Liz’s death was only the first that night. An hour or so later Catherine Eddowes was murdered in Mitre Square on the City Police’s patch. The killer had much more time to carry out his ‘work’ here and Kate’s body was horribly mutilated.  The pair of killings have been dubbed the ‘double event’ after the press received a letter (and subsequent postcard) from someone purporting to be the murderer. Both missives were likely to have been sent by a journalist or mischief-maker and helped to raise the feeling of panic in the East End.

Meanwhile the police courts continued their business as normal, prosecuting  petty crime, domestic violence, and drunkenness on a daily basis. Liz Stride had herself been before the local magistracy on more than one occasion in the years and months leading up to her death.

On the 30 September that Sunday’s edition of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper reported that the owner of the slaughter house in Winthrop Street had brought a prosecution for theft against one of his employees. Robert Whiffen (25), a horse slaughterer, was accused of stealing a diamond ring valued at £30.

The proprietor, (who was not named in the report) said he had lost the ring on the 18 August and had asked around at work. No one knew anything, or at least no one would say so. So he pursued his enquiries and when these drew more blanks he went to the police.

Acting on a tip off (in the form of a letter handed to the prosecutor) the police managed to trace the ring to a butcher in Mile End. Moss Joel testified before Mr Montagu Williams at Worhsip Street, telling him that he had bought the ring for £2 from the prisoner and sold it on for £2 15s. He could not recall who he sold it to however, even when Mr Williams pressed him to. The magistrate smelt a rat and suggested that things would go ‘awkwardly’ for Joel if ‘did not find the man’ he sold a £30 ring to. He remanded Whiffen in custody and dismissed the butcher to go and try harder to find the missing jewelry.

The Winthrop Street slaughterhouse was just yards from Bucks Row, where Polly Nichols had been murdered in late August 1888. The paper was well aware of this of course and headlined this report accordingly, terming it the ‘Buck’s Row Slaughterers’. At the time horse slaughters were suspected of being involved in the murders and my recent book presents a likely suspect who works in the horsemeat trade.  I argue that this man (James Hardiman) possibly worked for Harrison and Barber, the capital’s preeminent horse slaughters.

The Winthrop Street yard was owned by Albert Barber and it was he who brought the charge against Robert Whiffen. A ring valued at £30 in 1888 would be worth around £2,500 today so it is clear that Albert Barber was a very wealthy man. There was plenty of money in horse slaughtering, but it was a dirty and very hard trade and someone that was prepared to work hard and whenever required (as we believe Hardiman was) could expect to enjoy the confidence of his masters and the freedom to use their business premises at all hours of the day and night.

Very useful if you want to kill people as a well as horses…

Robert Whiffen was tried for the theft on the 22 October and convicted. He was sent to prison.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, September 30, 1888]

A ‘she cannibal’ in court for biting off her victim’s nose

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I have spent the last two weeks following the metropolitan police courts in one year, 1888, the year of the Whitechapel murders. I’ll return to 1888 in a couple of weeks to pick up the unfolding case at the point of the ‘double event’ – the murders of Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes on the night of the 30 September. But today it is worth reminding ourselves that the area of Whitechapel and Spitalfields was synonymous with violence  throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.

Catherine Simpson was well known to the police, and to her neighbours, as a violent woman. Anne Atkins was no angel but on this occasion she was the victim of a brutal assault which arose out of jealousy and, possibly, a misplaced attempt at defending some sense of ‘respectability’ in a part of London where poverty and degradation was ubiquitous.

The attack in question had happened in late August 1860 but as a result of Anne’s injuries it didn’t come before the magistrate at Worship Street until 15 September. Even then Anne was barely able to stand to give her evidence, and trembled at the very sight of her abuser.  Nor did the court do that much to protect her at first, allowing Simpson to cross-examine her directly for several minutes, something that clearly traumatized her victim.

The court was told that on 21 August Simpson had confronted Anne at her front door in Dorchester Street, Hoxton, demanding to know: ‘what business had you with my husband last night?’

Anne explained that she had seen Simpson’s husband that night but he’d not been with her, he’d been with another, much younger, woman. This didn’t satisfy Catherine who called Anne a prostitute and ‘other bad names’. Clearly Simpson either believed Anne was having an affair with her spouse or was tempting him away from her. She may even have genuinely believed that Anne was a prostitute, although it is more likely that this was simply a convenient and oft used term of abuse in working class communities like this.

Anne’s reacted to being called a ‘whore’ by slapping the other woman around the face and turning to shut the door. Catherine wasn’t easily deterred however, and followed her inside. There she grabbed Anne’s shoulders, pulled her towards her, and bit her nose. She bit down hard and left her victim with a bloody mess where her nose once was. Spitting the end of her nose on to the ground, she left.

Anne was quickly taken to hospital where the house surgeon, George Payne, did his best for her. She had lost a lot of blood he later testified, and it was almost three weeks before she was fit to be discharged. After her initial recovery she developed erysipelas, now described as a rash that can be treated with antibiotics. In 1860 however antibiotics were not available and the doctor feared that Anne might die. Fortunately she didn’t.

Catherine was forthright that the attack she’d made was provoked, not only by Anne’s alleged dalliance with her husband but because not only had she slapped her, she’d also spat in her face. As she defended herself and cross-examined Anne the other woman struggled and trembled in the witness stand. Even when the clerk acted as an intermediary, asking the questions on Catherine behalf,  Anne was so distraught that the prisoner had to be removed from the court for a while.

Various witnesses testified to the assault, including Louisa Cox who had screamed and ran for a policeman when she saw Simpson’s mouth covered in blood as she spat out Anne’s broken nose. Simpson was remanded for further enquiries, the evidence against her being considerable and the court being told that she had ‘a propensity for [this] class of offence’. She’d once served a week in gaol for biting sergeant Copping of K Division and was clearly a violent individual.

Reynolds’s Newspaper described Simpson as a ‘she cannibal’ and the whole sorry incident would have done nothing to dispel the view that the East End of London was a den of iniquity where violence, vice and crime  were rife.

[from Reynolds’s Newspaper, Sunday, September 16, 1860]

‘I don’t convict a man for stealing a turnip and I won’t convict a man for stealing an empty champagne case, worth nothing’: A lucky escape in Mitre Square

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Yesterday’s blog concerned a violent assault in Berner Street, where Liz Stide was murdered on 30 September 1888. Today’s is about a theft committed in Mitre Square, the other killing site on the night of the so-called ‘double event’.

A night watchman – whose name wasn’t given in the newspaper’s report – testified at Guildhall Police court to hearing a noise on the International Tea Company’s premises in Aldgate. He went off to investigate and discovered a man trying to carry off a packing case. He called the police and the man was arrested.

On 11 September the man was placed in the dock and gave his name as Andrew Birke, he said he was a shoemaker. The magistrate, Sir Andrew Lusk, asked the night watchman what the value of the packing case –which had been entirely empty when Birke stole it – was.

‘I don’t know sir’, he replied.

‘It isn’t worth much, say 1d’, Sir Andrew suggested.

‘It is worth more than 1d, the man insisted, ‘but its not the value. This man has been convicted before, and I have known a man to be sent to prison for stealing a turnip’.

‘Well, I don’t convict a man for stealing a turnip’ said the justice; ‘and I won’t convict a man for stealing an empty champagne case, worth nothing’.

He then turned to the prisoner and told him ‘ I shall discharge you; but mind you don’t touch anybody’s property, in case you get into trouble’.

Two weeks later PC Watkins found Catherine Eddowes’ body in Mitre Square and one of the first people he spoke to was George Morris, an ex-policeman who worked as a night watchman for Kearly & Tonge, wholesale grocers in the square (see the 1887 map of the square, right). 10Mitre_Square_1887Morris had seen nothing untoward that night and entirely missed the killer brutally murdering Kate and removing her kidney and uterus.

However Kearly & Tonge were tea merchants so perhaps the unnamed watchman was Morris. This would make sense of his desire to see Birke prosecuted and punished as a thief despite the petty nature of the crime. Morris might have known him to be a villain and his comment about knowing someone convicted of stealing a turnip also rings true if he was formally a police officer. Sir Andrew Lusk was – as far as I am aware – no relation to George Lusk, the chair of the Whitechapel Vigilance society who was to receive a portion of a human kidney in the post a few days after the murder. Whether this came from Kate Eddowes is impossible to say.

So, first Berner Street then Mitre Square, it is strange how these coincidental connections appear just before the ‘double event’ happened.

[from The Morning Post, Wednesday, September 12, 1888]

‘Another Whitechapel outrage’ in Berner Street

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The panic over the Whitechapel (or ‘Jack the Ripper’) murders were really beginning to set in by the second week of September 1888. Martha Tabram, Polly Nicholls and Annie Chapman had all been murdered in the past few weeks. Annie was found in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street in the early hours of Saturday 8 September, and crowds soon gathered to watch the police investigation unfold.

On the 10th William Seaman, a local builder, was accused of attempted murder at the Thames Police court.  Charles McCarthy testified that he had been walking along Ellen Street at about midnight on Saturday when he’d heard a scream. It seemed to be coming from Berner Street and he hurried off in that direction.

There was a chemist’s shop at number 82 and McCarthy found the chemist, John Simkin, his beard covered in blood, slumped over his counter. A hammer was on the counter and Seaman was standing nearby. The elderly chemist was hurt but still alive and conscious. He told McCarthy ‘here is the hammer he hit me with’ and handed it to him.

Seaman made no attempt to run away and when the police arrived he was taken quietly into custody. Constable 85H deposed that when he arrested Seaman his prisoner declared: ‘I shan’t tell you what I did it for, but I will tell the magistrate’. The man had been drinking he added. Since John Simkin was bedridden and recovering from his injuries the justice, Mr Saunders, remanded Seaman in custody while enquiries continued.

The chemist didn’t recover sufficiently until early October and so Seaman remained in custody till then. On Sunday 7 October Reynold’s carried areport of his committal for trial. The senior investigating officer was Inspector Thresher of H Division (who presumably wasn’t otherwise busy with the ‘Ripper’ case). Simkin testified that Seaman had entered his shop and asked to purchase some alum and zinc. While the chemist sorted the order hit him twice with the hammer, for no obvious reason. Having promised to explain his actions the accused chose now to keep silence and was fully committed for trial at the Old Bailey.

He appeared there on the 26 October 1888 and all he would say in his defense was that he’d been drinking. The jury convicted him of grievous bodily harm (rather than the more serious offence of attempted murder). The court was told he had a previous conviction for burglary – a sentence of 14 years  – and so the judge now sent him away for a further seven years of penal servitude.

By then Whitechapel was in full ‘Ripper panic’ mode. On the 30 September, a few weeks after the incident Liz Stride had been found dead in Berner Street, just yards away from Mr Simkin’s chemist’s shop. An hour later Catherrine Eddowes was brutally murdered in Mitre Square. The pair of murders have been dubbed the ‘double event’ after the Central News agency received a handwritten letter and then a follow up postcard from someone purporting to be the killer. The postcard read:

I was not codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip, you’ll hear about Saucy Jacky’s work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldn’t finish straight off. had not the time to get ears for police. thanks for keeping last letter back till I got to work again.

It was signed ‘Jack the Ripper’.

[from The Morning Post, Tuesday, September 11, 1888; Reynolds’s Newspaper , Sunday, October 7, 1888; The Morning Post, Saturday, October 27, 1888]

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 and other bookshops 

Poor life choices force ‘Annie’ out on the streets of Whitechapel in September 1888

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When I worked in retail in the 1990s (long before I changed career to become a historian) there were a couple of occasions where I had to investigate cases of theft by employees. I was a shop manager and was sometimes deployed by one of the directors to troubleshoot underperforming shops or to help recruit for new stores. In one store there was  problem with money going missing; someone was pilfering,  either from the tills or the safe. In the end we discovered it was the manager.

Confronted with it he confessed and said he’d been borrowing money as he was struggling to pay some debts. He said he always intended to pay the money back, he saw it as a loan (albeit and unauthorized one) not stealing. Suffice to say that’s not how the director or the company’s owner saw and he was out on his ear. He was lucky no prosecutions followed.

There is a fine line of course between borrowing and theft, one that best avoided if you want to stay on the right side of the law. Annie Franks crossed that line in September 1888. The 18 year-old shop girl lodged with Julia Regan in her digs in New Court, Whitechapel. Regan had taken the girl in while her folks were away in Kent helping to bring in the hop harvest. She’d done so because Annie looked lost and Julia needed the company.

Annie had been there a few weeks when Julia missed a pawnbroker’s ticket she’d kept in a sugar basin in her room. She’d pawned some clothes in order to get some cash but now she was ready to redeem the ticket and collect them. She asked around to see if anyone had seen it and neighbour told her that Annie had shown it to her, and claimed Julia had sold it to her for 3d.

It was a lie and it soon transpired that Annie had taken the ticket and retrieved the clothes for herself. Julia was angry and provably quite hurt, so she went to the police. Annie broke down under questioning and admitted her crime to PC 77H. She only meant to borrow the clothes while she too went ‘hopping’ and she fully intended to give the items back on her return.

That was a lie as well because a little investigation showed that she’d already pawned them once more. In court at Worship Street Annie must have cut a forlorn figure in the dock. Her youth was in her favour but Mr Saunders was told that since she’d moved to Spitalfields she had ‘taken up with a lot of bad characters’. The police also reported that she had a previous conviction for theft as a servant. That decided things for her and the magistrate: he sent her to prison for seven days.

If you are familiar with the events of 1888 in the East End you might know that New Court was an alleyway that ran off Dorset Street to the north. There were two others: Paternoster Row and Miller’s Court. Miller’s Court was where Mary Kelly lived in the autumn of 1888 and where she died on the night of the 9 November. Lots of people lived and worked in this desperately crowed and poverty riven part of Whitechapel but there was a chance, a real one perhaps, that Annie knew Mary and certainly she would have been affected by the terror that was meted out on the inhabitants of the East End that summer and autumn.

All the women killed by the ‘Ripper’ were out late at night or in the early hours of the morning. They were living a hand-to-mouth existence, staying in cheap rooms or boarding houses where they could, and earning money by prostitution when they had to. They had all enjoyed more comfortable and settled lives previously but drink, bad luck, or tragedy had best each of them which was why they were on the streets and vulnerable.

Annie – by virtue of her own poor decision making and the sentence handed down by Mr Saunders was now on a critical downward pathway towards a similar fate. Let’s hope her employer took her back when she came out of gaol or that she did indeed escape to the country to pick hops. Let’s hope she didn’t end up like Martha, Polly, Annie, Liz, Kate and Mary Jane walking the streets in the hopes of finding enough money for her ‘doss’. After all just two days after Annie’s court appearance another ‘Annie’ (Annie Chapman) was found murdered in Hanbury Street, barely ten minutes walk from New Court.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, September 07, 1888]

‘She’s a bad woman and no wife of mine’: the man with five wives finally meets his match

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‘Trial for Bigamy’ by Eyre Crowe A.R.A. (1897)

On Christmas day 1890 Ann Riley married Charles Valentine Smith, a 40 (or possibly 36) year-old saddle and harness maker in North London. It wasn’t a great success; the couple quarreled constantly until in the middle of April 1891 they agreed to separate.

Ann had her doubts about Charles from the start and suspected he’d been married before. She had asked him (it may well have been one of the things they argued about) and he denied it, but admitted living with a woman for a few years before he met Ann.

On the 28 April, while Ann was out, Charles visited his old familial home and retrieved a silver pocket watch which he said he’d been given as a wedding present. When Ann discovered the watch was missing however, she flew into a rage and determined to get even with him.

Acting on her hunch that the saddler was a bigamist she took herself to Somerset House to consult the marriage registers. After some searching she found him. Her suspicions confirmed, Ann now took her husband to court, for the theft of the watch and for deceiving her into believing he was free to marry her.

The detective that arrested Smith, DS Couchman, testified that the prisoner had admitted that he’d been married previously but said that his ex-wife was ‘a bad woman’ and ‘no wife’ to him.  It didn’t excuse the reality that they were still legally wed however, divorce being a much harder (and more expensive) process in 1891 than it is today.

The magistrate quizzed Ann on whether she knew her new husband was already attached to someone else. This was the line that Smith took, claiming he’d told her very early on so she knew what she was getting into. Ann said he had initially told her he was married but had later denied it. I guess she ended up choosing to believe her own marriage was legitimate, when it clearly was not. Charles was remanded in custody for week while investigations continued.

On 4 July he was back before the beak at the North London Police court and now it was revealed that Charles was a repeat offender. He had been successfully prosecuted for bigamy by the family of Ann Connolly who he’d married over 20 years earlier. At that time he’s already been married to another woman for five years. He got nine month’s in prison but didn’t learn his lesson from it.

After he got out of gaol he joined the army (that would have been in 1870 probably) and he married once more. This new wife quickly discovered his history, left him, and married someone else. His first wife died and in October 1882 he married his fourth, at St Mary’s, Islington.

The justice, Mr Haden Corser, having listened to this disreputable man’s story, sent him back to the Central Criminal Court to be tried for bigamy once more. At his trial, on 28 July 1891, the jury was told that not only had he married five women, he had fathered at least two children who he had left destitute when he abandoned their mother. The common sergeant sitting as judge sent him to prison for 15 months at hard labour.

By modern standards his record of relationships might not seem too bad. It is not uncommon for someone to have multiple monogamous relationships or even to marry several times. What Smith did wrong (very wrong in fact) was to neglect to divorce one wife before he married the next. For women in the Victorian period this was a particularly callous and uncaring crime because it robbed them of the respectability that legitimate marriage ensured. It meant they had no rights and their children were rendered illegitimate.

[from The Morning Post, Monday, June 22, 1891; The Morning Post, Monday, July 6, 1891]

For many working class women living in the roughest parts of late Victorian London marriage was an unaffordable luxury. Nevertheless women were keen to demonstrate that they were in a  serious relationship and so common law marriages – recognised but he community if not by church and state – normalised things. Women like Catherine Eddowes (who sometimes used the name Kelly) or Annie Chapman (who was occasionally Sivvy) would use their partner’s name just as a bonafide spouse would. For more on the reality of life in 1880s Whitechapel and the two sets of murders that dominated to news stands of the time why not try Drew’s new history of the Jack the Ripper case, published by Amberley Books this June.

This new study of the Whitechapel murders of 1888 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 to order on Amazon here.