The Five Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction: A Tale of Two Cities

  Polly

  The Blacksmith’s Daughter

  The Peabody Worthies

  An Irregular Life

  “Houseless Creature”

  Annie

  Soldiers and Servants

  Mrs. Chapman

  Demon Drink

  Dark Annie

  Elisabeth

  The Girl from Torslanda

  Allmän Kvinna 97

  The Immigrant

  Long Liz

  Kate

  Seven Sisters

  The Ballad of Kate and Tom

  Her Sister’s Keeper

  “Nothing”

  Mary Jane

  Marie Jeanette

  The Gay Life

  Conclusion: “Just Prostitutes”

  A Life in Objects

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Sources

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 2019 by Hallie Rubenhold

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  Published in the UK in 2019 by Transworld Publishers.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Rubenhold, Hallie, author.Title: The five : the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper /Hallie Rubenhold.Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018038562 (print) | LCCN 2018041373 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328664082 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328663818 (hardcover)Subjects: LCSH: Jack, the Ripper. | Murder victims—England—London—Biography. | Working class women—England—London—Social conditions—19th century. | Whitechapel (London, England)—History—19th century.Classification: LCC HV6535.G6 (ebook) | LCC HV6535.G6 L6578 2019 (print) |DDC 362.88—dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038562

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Front jacket photographs © Richard Jenkins (woman) and © Silas Manhood (street)

  Author photograph © Sarah Blackie

  v1.0319

  Map by Liane Payne, based on 1851 edition of Reynolds’s Map of London

  For

  Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols,

  Annie Chapman,

  Elisabeth Stride,

  Catherine Eddowes

  &

  Mary Jane Kelly

  Introduction: A Tale of Two Cities

  There are two versions of the events of 1887. One is very well known, but the other is not.

  The first version, more frequently featured in history books, is the one that those who lived in late-nineteenth-century Britain wished to recall, the version they recounted to their grandchildren with a wistful smile. It is the story of Queen Victoria and a summer of celebrations for her Golden Jubilee. No more than a teenage girl when the nation’s weighty crown was placed upon her head, she had become, a half-century later, the embodiment of empire, and a suitably grand series of events had been planned to commemorate her fifty-year reign. On June 20, the precise day she had first mounted the throne, the crowned heads of Europe, Indian princes, dignitaries, and representatives from all corners of the empire, and even the Hawaiian queen, Lili‘uokalani, converged upon London. West End shopkeepers adorned their windows in red, white, and blue; Royal Standards and Union Jacks, festoons of flowers, and colored garlands could be seen hanging from every somber stone edifice. At night, the embassies and clubs, the hotels and institutions throughout St. James and Piccadilly threw the switches on the electric lights and turned on the gas jets, illuminating the giant crowns and the letters V and R affixed to their buildings. Her Majesty’s loyal subjects came to the center of the city from the suburbs and tenements; they punched their rail tickets from Kent and Surrey and pushed their way into the crowded streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of a royal coach or a princess in diamonds. They placed candles in their windows when the long summer twilight faded away, and toasted their monarch’s health with beer and champagne and claret.

  There was a service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey, a state banquet, a military review at Windsor, and even a children’s fete in Hyde Park for twenty-five hundred boys and girls. They were entertained by twenty Punch and Judy puppet shows, eight marionette theaters, eighty-six stereoscope displays, nine troupes of performing dogs, monkeys, and ponies, as well as bands, toys, and “gas inflated balloons,” before being treated to a lunch of lemonade, cake, meat pies, buns, and oranges. Throughout the summer there were commemorative concerts, lectures, performances, regattas, picnics, dinners, and even a yacht race. As the jubilee corresponded with the traditional London “season,” there were also lavish garden parties and balls. Ladies dressed up in that summer’s fashions: lace-trimmed, bustled dresses in black-and-white silk, and hues of apricot yellow, heliotrope, and Gobelin blue. A magnificent ball was held at the Guildhall, where the Prince and Princess of Wales entertained their visiting regal relations, as well as the prince of Persia, the papal envoy, the prince of Siam, and the Maharaja Holkar of Indore. All of high society danced beneath banners and cascading arrangements of perfumed flowers. Tiaras and tie pins sparkled in the mirrors. Young debutantes were introduced to suitable sons. The whirl of Victorian life spun round and round to the dreamy melody of a waltz.

  Then there is the other version.

  This is the tale of 1887 that most chose to forget. To this day, only a scant number of history books recount it, and surprisingly few people know that it occurred. Yet in that year, this story filled more newspaper column inches than did the descriptions of royal parades, banquets, and fetes put together.

  That jubilee summer had been exceptionally warm and rainless. The clear blue skies that presided over the season’s carefree picnics and al fresco parties had shriveled the fruit harvest and dried out the fields. Water shortages and an absence of seasonal jobs in agricultural labor exacerbated an already growing employment crisis. While the wealthy enjoyed the fine weather from beneath their parasols and from under the trees of their suburban villas, the homeless and poor made use of it by creating an open-air encampment in Trafalgar Square. Many had come to the center of town, looking for work at Covent Garden Market, where Londoners bought their produce, but a drought meant fewer boxes of plums and pears to lift and haul. With no money for lodgings, these migrants slept rough in the nearby square, where they were joined by an increasing population of unemployed workers who would rather live on the street than face the deplorable and demeaning conditions of the workhouse. Much to the horror of more fortunate observers, these campers could be seen making their morning ablutions and scrubbing their “vermin infested” clothing in the fountains, directly beneath the nose of Lord Nelson, high atop his column. When the autumn chill began to move in, so too did the socialists, the Salvation Army, and various charitable organizations, handing out Bibles, admission tickets to lodging houses, coffee, tea, bread, and soup. Tarpaulins were erected to create makeshift bivouacs; each day, impassioned speakers declared their messages from between the paws of the square’s mighty bronze lions. The excitement, the sense of community, and the free refreshments swelled the number of outcast Londoners, which attracted the police, which in turn brought the journalists. The newspapermen roamed among the square’s bedraggled population, collecting their names and stories.

  “Mr. Ashville” called himself “a painter and glazier by trade.” Out of work for twelve months, he had spent thirty-three nights sleeping on the Embankmen
t until the weather grew too cold. Then he moved to Trafalgar Square, hoping it might prove a bit warmer. Dejected and visibly worn down by his experience, he attempted to remain positive about his prospects of finding employment again one day.

  A soldier’s widow circled Trafalgar Square, selling matches to support her young son, but she hadn’t always lived like this. After failing to pay the final installment on her rent-to-own sewing machine, she lost her livelihood and the single room she had called home. She knew that going into the workhouse meant that her child would be separated from her. It seemed a better option to rough it in the square each night, with the boy curled up under her shawl.1

  An “elderly couple,” who had never before faced adversity, now slept on a stone bench in the square.2 The husband had been employed as a musical director at a theater, but an accident had left him unfit to work. With no savings, the couple soon fell behind on their rent and eventually were forced to make their bed under the stars. The thought of throwing themselves upon the mercy of their local workhouse was too shameful and frightening to consider.

  Hundreds, each with a similar tale to tell, came to Trafalgar Square to lay their head against the paving stones. It did not take long for political agitators to recognize that this congregation of the downtrodden was a ready-made army of the angry with nothing to lose. Londoners had long realized that Trafalgar Square sat on an axis between the east and west of the city, the dividing line between rich and poor; an artificial boundary, which, like the invisible restraints that kept the disenfranchised voiceless, could be easily breached. In 1887, the possibility of social revolution felt terrifyingly near for some, and yet for others it did not seem close enough. At Trafalgar Square, the daily speeches given by socialists and reformers such as William Morris, ­Annie Besant, Eleanor Marx, and George Bernard Shaw led to mobilization, as chanting, banner-waving processions of thousands spilled onto the streets. Inevitably, some resorted to violence. The Metropolitan Police and the magistrate’s court at Bow Street, in Covent Garden, worked overtime to contain the protesters and clear the square of those whom they deemed indigents and rabble-rousers. But like an irrepressible tide, soon after they were pushed out, they returned once more.

  On November 8, the police made a fatal decision. Sir Charles Warren, the commissioner of police, banned all meetings in Trafalgar Square. Those who had come to see this site, in the heart of London, as a rallying place for the common man and a forum for political action interpreted this as a deliberate act of war. Plans were made for a demonstration on the thirteenth of the month. Its pretext was to demand that the Irish MP William O’Brien be released from prison, but the grievances expressed by the protesters extended far beyond this particular cause célèbre. More than forty thousand men and women gathered to make their point, and two thousand police, along with the Queen’s Life Guard and the Grenadier Guards, were there to meet them. Almost immediately, clashes erupted. The police, wielding truncheons, fell on the protesters. Those participating in the march had been advised to demonstrate peacefully, yet many had come equipped with lead pipes, knives, hammers, and brickbats. Forty protesters were arrested, more than two hundred were injured in the riot, and at least two were killed. Unfortunately, Bloody Sunday, as it came to be known, did not signal the end of the conflict. The tinkling sound of smashing glass and the outbursts of public rage continued well into the start of the following year.

  Through these two disparate scenes moved two women whose lives and deaths would come to define nineteenth-century Britain; one was Victoria, who gave her name to the years 1837–1901. The other was a homeless woman called Mary Ann, or “Polly,” Nichols, who was among those encamped at Trafalgar Square in 1887. Unlike the monarch, Polly would be largely forgotten, though the world would remember with great fascination and even relish the name of her killer: Jack the Ripper.

  Roughly twelve months lay between the Queen’s Golden Jubilee summer and Polly Nichols’s murder on August 31, 1888. She would be the first of Jack the Ripper’s five “canonical” victims—those whose deaths the police determined were committed by the same hand in the district of Whitechapel, in London’s East End. A few days later, on September 8, the body of Annie Chapman was discovered in a yard off Hanbury Street. In the early morning hours of the thirtieth of that month, the Ripper managed to strike twice. In what became known as “the double event,” he claimed the lives of Elisabeth Stride, who was found in Dutfield’s Yard, off Berner Street, and Catherine “Kate” Eddowes, who was killed in Mitre Square. After a brief pause in his spree, he committed his final atrocity on November 9: a complete mutilation of the body of Mary Jane Kelly as she lay in her bed at 13 Miller’s Court.

  The brutality of the Whitechapel murders stunned London and newspaper readers around the world. The Ripper had cut the throat of each victim. Four of the five were eviscerated. With the exception of the final killing, these violent deaths occurred in open places, under cover of darkness. In each case, the murderer managed to abscond, leaving not a trace of his or their or her identity. Given the densely populated district in which these killings occurred, the public, the press, and even the police believed this to be remarkable. The Ripper always seemed one ghostly, ghoulish step ahead of the authorities, which bestowed upon the murders something extra terrifying and almost supernatural.

  The Whitechapel-based H Division of the Metropolitan Police did the best they could with their resources, but having never before faced a murder case of this scale and magnitude, they quickly found themselves overwhelmed. House-to-house inquiries were conducted throughout the area and a wide variety of forensic material was gathered and analyzed. The police were besieged with statements and letters from those who claimed to be witnesses, those offering assistance, and others who just liked spinning tales. In all, more than two thousand people were interviewed and more than three hundred were investigated as possible suspects. Even with assistance from Scotland Yard and the City of London Police, none of these efforts yielded anything useful. Genuine leads were certain to have been lost among the swirling wash of paper that the investigators had to process. In the meantime, as the constables scribbled into their notebooks and followed potential malefactors down dark alleys, the Ripper continued to kill.

  As the “Autumn of Terror” wore on, Whitechapel filled up with journalists. They hovered over this seam of sensationalist gold with pencils sharpened. Their presence amid the ongoing police investigation and an East End population living in a state of fear proved explosive. In the absence of any conclusive information offered by the police, the newspapers posited their own theories about the killer and his modus operandi. As the papers continued to fly off the newsstands, journalists became hungry for more content and new angles on the story. Inevitably, embellishment, invention, and “fake news” found their way onto the page. However, printing rumors and hotheaded opinion pieces that disparaged the efforts of the police did little to quell the anxiety of those who lived in Whitechapel. By the middle of September, residents were described as “panic-stricken”; most were too terrified to leave their homes at night. “Hooting and shouting” crowds gathered outside the police station on Leman Street, demanding the arrest of the killer, and local tradesmen, eager to take matters into their own hands, founded the Whitechapel Vigilance Society. All the while, the press speculated wildly about the identity of the culprit: he was a White­chapel man; he was a wealthy “swell” from the West End; he was a sailor, a Jew, a butcher, a surgeon, a foreigner, a lunatic, a gang of extortionists. The inhabitants of the neighborhood began to attack anyone who fit these descriptions; doctors toting medical bags were set upon, and men carrying parcels were reported to the police. Sickened by the grotesque events, many people nonetheless found themselves compulsively intrigued by them. Just as crowds grew outside Leman Street police station, so they also gathered around the sites of the murders. Some stood staring at the places where the vicious deeds had been committed in the hope of finding answers, while others were simply entranced b
y the horror of the spectacle.

  Because the police failed to apprehend and charge a suspect for any of the five murders, the itch to see justice meted out in the form of a trial was never salved. Instead, that which served to offer a few answers and a degree of closure was the series of coroner’s inquests, one for each killing. These were held publicly in Whitechapel and in the City of London in the wake of each murder and covered extensively by the newspapers. At a coroner’s inquest, as at a criminal trial, witnesses are called before a jury to give an account of events; the objective is to piece together a clear and official picture of how a death occurred. Most of the information that currently exists about Jack the Ripper’s five victims appears in witness statements given during the inquests; however, these accounts are problematic. The examinations lacked thoroughness, the juries asked few follow-up questions, and inconsistencies and vagaries in the testimonies were rarely challenged. Ultimately, the information disclosed over the course of the inquests only skims the surface of a far deeper and murkier well of potential answers.

  Investigations into the Whitechapel murders did, however, explicitly and convincingly expose a disturbing set of facts: the poor of that district lived in unspeakably horrendous conditions. The encampment and riots at Trafalgar Square were a conspicuous manifestation of what had been chronically ailing in the East End and other impoverished parts of London. It was a cough hacked in the face of the establishment. The emergence of Jack the Ripper was a louder and more violent one still.

  For most of Victoria’s reign, journalists, social reformers, and Christian missionaries had been decrying the horrors that they observed in the East End, but the situation grew even more acute during the 1870s and ’80s, as “the Long Depression” bore down on the economy. What work there was for London’s vast army of unskilled laborers—those who sewed and laundered the textiles, carried the bricks, assembled the goods, peddled in the streets, and unloaded the ships—was poorly paid and insecure. Casual work on the docks might pay no more than fifteen shillings a week; “sandwich board men” who carried advertisements through the streets might make one shilling, eight pence per day. To worsen matters, rents had been steadily climbing and lodgings were harder to come by. Large areas of lower-income housing across the capital had been destroyed to make way for railroads, and the creation of broad new thoroughfares, such as Shaftesbury Avenue, decanted London’s poor into fewer and more densely packed spaces.