Life in the underworld - industrial revolution

January 1889. In a morning with couple of minus degrees under, Chief Inspector Donald Swanson and myself, The Times magazines criminological journalist, has just arrived at Silvertown railway station and we both have our agendas full of names and places from the East End district which we must go through to investigate two murderers which were committed one month right after the other. The district, in which the crimes have been committed, reveals extreme poverty, sub-standard houses, homelessness, drunkenness and endemic prostitution. One of the first victims lived in the heart of the rookery in Spitalfields so we must start it from there.
According to the preliminarily data which Scotland Yard provide us, Annie Chapman was born Eliza Ann Smith. She was the daughter of George Smith of the 2nd Regiment Life Guards and Ruth Chapman. Her parents married nearly six months after her birth, on 22 February 1842, in Paddington. Smith was a soldier at the time of marriage and later became a domestic servant. On the 1 of May 1869, she married her maternal relative John Chapman, a coachman, at the All Saints Church in the Knightsbridge district of London. For some years the couple lived at addresses in West London, and they had three children: Emily Ruth, Annie Georgina and John Alfred Chapman. Mrs. Elizabeth Long, a close acquaintance of Annie Chapman and the last person who saw her alive is welcoming us warmly: “Please, take a seat gentleman and have a Garibaldi; they are fresh baked.” She is proving a remarkable memory and an organized mind when she started: “In 1881 the family moved to Windsor, Berkshire, where Annie’s husband, John, took a job as coachman to a farm bailiff. But young John had been born disabled, while their firstborn, Emily Ruth, died of meningitis shortly after at the age of 12. Soon afterward, both of them took to heavy drinking unfortunately and separated in 1884. By the time of her death, young John was said to be in the care of a charitable school and the surviving daughter Annie Georgina, just a young lady back then, traveling with a circus in the French Third Republic.” She interrupting her thoughts by asking us if we maybe might like a cup of tea than she resumes “Annie was very civil and industrious when sober but I have often seen her worse for drink. In the week before her death she was feeling ill after being bruised in a fight with Eliza Cooper, a fellow resident in Crossingham's lodging house at 35 Dorset Street. The two were rivals for the affections of a local hawker called Harry, but Eliza claimed the fight was over a borrowed bar of soap that Annie had not returned.”
According to the lodging house Deputy, Tim Donovan, and the watchman, John Evans, Annie Chapman eventually moved to Whitechapel, where in 1886 she was living with a man who made wire sieves; because of this she was often known as Annie "Sievey" or "Siffey". After she and her husband separated, she had received an allowance of 10 shillings a week from him, but at the end of 1886 the payments stopped abruptly. On inquiring why they had stopped, she found her husband had died of alcohol-related causes. The sieve-maker left her soon after, possibly due to the cessation of her income. By 1888, Annie Chapman was living in common lodging houses in Whitechapel, occasionally in the company of Edward "the Pensioner" Stanley, a bricklayer's labourer. She earned some income from crochet work, making antimacassars and selling flowers, supplemented by casual prostitution.
Before we left, Mrs. Elizabeth Long testified that she had seen Annie talking to a man at about 5:30 a.m. just beyond the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. Mrs. Long described him as “over forty, a little taller than Annie, of dark complexion, and of foreign, "shabby-genteel" appearance. He was wearing a deer-stalker hat and dark overcoat.” If correct in her identification of Annie Chapman, it is likely that Mrs. Long was the last person to see Mrs. Chapman alive besides her murderer.

While moving on with our investigation, our next stop is made at the Salvation Army where we meet our interviewer for the second person murdered. Mary Jane Kelly also known as "Marie Jeanette" Kelly, "Fair Emma", "Ginger" and "Black Mary", Mary Kelly's origins are obscure and undocumented, and much of it is possibly embellished. According to Joseph Barnett, the man she had most recently lived with, Kelly had told him she was born in Limerick, Ireland—although whether it was the county or the city is not known—around 1863, and her family moved to Wales when she was young. Barnett reported that Kelly had told him her father was named John Kelly and that he worked in an iron works in either Caernarfonshire or Carmarthenshire. Barnett recalled Kelly mentioning having seven brothers and at least one sister. Both Barnett and a former roommate named Mrs. Carthy claimed that Kelly came from a family of "well to do people". Mrs. Carthy described Kelly being "an excellent scholar and an artist of no mean degree"—despite this, Barnett told that she often asked him to read the newspaper reports of the murders to her, suggesting that she was illiterate.

The Metropolitan’s Police had again been receptive and supplied the following information: “Around 1879, Kelly was reportedly married to a coal miner named Davies, who was killed two or three years later in a mine explosion. She claimed to have stayed for eight months in an infirmary in Cardiff, before moving in with a cousin. It is at this point that she is considered to have begun her career as a prostitute. There are no contemporary records of her presence in Cardiff. Kelly apparently left Cardiff for London in 1884 and found work in a brothel in the more affluent West End of London. Reportedly, she was invited by a client to France but quickly returned, disliking her life there. Kelly, who liked to affect the French name "Marie Jeanette", could have made up the story of her early life as there is no corroborating documentary evidence, but there is no evidence to the contrary either.”

By some, Kelly had been known as "Fair Emma", although it is not known whether this applied to her hair color, her skin color, her beauty, or whatever other qualities that she had. When drunk, Kelly would be heard singing Irish songs; in this state, “she would often become quarrelsome and even abusive to those around her, which earned her the nickname "Dark Mary." McCarthy said "she was a very quiet woman when sober but noisy when in drink." Barnett first met Kelly in April 1887. They agreed to live together on their second meeting the following day. In early 1888 they both moved into 13 Miller's Court, a furnished single room at the back of 26 Dorset Street, Spitalfields. It was a single twelve-foot square room, with a bed, three tables and a chair. Kelly's door key was lost, so she bolted and unbolted the door from outside by putting a hand through a broken window beside the door. A German neighbor, Julia Venturney, claimed Kelly had broken the window when drunk. Barnett worked as a fish porter at Billingsgate Fish Market, but when he fell out of regular employment and tried to earn money as a market porter, Kelly turned to prostitution again.

Fellow Miller's Court resident and prostitute, Mary Ann Cox, who described herself as "a widow and unfortunate", declare seeing Kelly returning home drunk in the company of a stout ginger-haired man wearing a bowler hat and carrying a can of beer at about 11:45 p.m. Cox and Kelly wished each other goodnight. Kelly went into her room with the man and then started singing the song "A Violet I Plucked from Mother's Grave When a Boy." She was still singing when Cox went out at midnight, and when she returned an hour later at 1:00. Elizabeth Prater had the room above Kelly's and when she went to bed at 1:30, the singing had stopped.
As our working day came to the end, we save our questions for tomorrow for the prospects we have left at the Workhouse.

By Carmen Nymoen
Special thanks to the UK Metropolitan Police