Complete History of Jack the Ripper (22 page)

D
URING THE CENTURY
that has elapsed since the Hanbury Street tragedy authors have told and retold the story with undiminished appetite. Unfortunately few of them bothered to adequately research the facts first. After studying the primary evidence and writing the previous chapter I read the accounts of the Chapman murder given in more than a score of supposedly factual Ripper books. Not one was free from error and most were literally riddled with them. The five pages of text that one centennial volume devoted to Annie contained at least twenty-eight errors. In the six-page account of another I counted no less than thirty-two! Some of these books were so grossly misleading as to merit dismissal to the fiction shelves.

The longevity of errors, once made, is quite remarkable. Back in 1928, for example, Leonard Matters wrote that John Davis, the market porter who discovered Annie’s body, ‘lived in the very room overlooking the backyard.’ It was an error that would have been nailed by the most casual reading of the contemporary printed inquest testimony, for Amelia Richardson’s deposition made it quite clear that Davis lived in the front attic, at the top of the house and overlooking Hanbury Street. But William Stewart, undeterred by anything as vulgar as fact, seized and elaborated upon Matters’s statement. Davis, said Stewart, lived in a room ‘just above the cellar and within a few feet of the spot where the body was discovered.’ In this form the blunder survived at least until 1966, nearly forty years
after Matters, when Robin Odell incorporated it into the revised edition of his book
Jack the Ripper in Fact and Fiction.
Similarly, Donald McCormick’s gaffe that Annie’s killer extracted one of her kidneys, published back in 1959, is still alive and well, as a glance at Peter Underwood’s recent
Jack the Ripper: One Hundred Years of Mystery
will attest.
¹

Some fictions are almost as old as the murder itself. Repeated in book after book, they have marched relatively unscathed by research into our own day and have achieved the status of minor myths. Indeed, one might be forgiven for believing in the existence of an unspoken understanding amongst Ripperologists that once assertions have been committed to print they take the form of Holy Writ, that the oftener they are published the more authoritative they become, an attitude somewhat evocative of Lewis Carroll’s lines in
The Hunting of the Snark
:

For far too long these myths have clouded our understanding of the character and background of the victim, the details of the crime, even the appearance of the murderer, and it is high time that they were categorically refuted.

Until 1939 no one doubted that Dark Annie had been a prostitute. Then William Stewart dismissed the belief that all the Ripper’s victims were streetwalkers. Far from it, ‘there is abundant proof that Annie Chapman and Mary Kelly were “one-man” women and that the former was able to support herself by artificial flower making and crochet work.’ Inordinately proud of his discovery, Stewart adverted to it repeatedly. Thus, on a subsequent page, he tells us: ‘Several witnesses stoutly denied that Chapman was a regular streetwalker. According to them she was comparatively respectable, and as an artificial flower maker and crochet worker she was capable of earning sufficient money to keep her off the streets.’
²

Now, exploring the evidence for these assertions, we find that Stewart’s ‘abundant proof’ and ‘several witnesses’ comes down to
the inquest deposition of just one witness – Amelia Palmer. Amelia did, indeed, say that Annie was respectable. She never used bad language. Although often the worse for drink she was easily affected by liquor. And she was ‘a very industrious, clever little woman in crochet and things of that kind.’ But Amelia’s testimony is open to the objection that she was obviously trying to say the best of a friend of five years’ standing. Nor did she deny that Annie was a prostitute. In fact, under close interrogation she was obliged to concede that Annie had sometimes stayed out late and ‘was not particular how she earned her living.’
³
Timothy Donovan, moreover, told the inquest that Annie often tried to bring men with her to the lodging house. Perhaps, however, we should not cavil too much at Stewart on this point. At least there was
some
basis for his contention which is more than can be said for many of his other statements.

More durable misconceptions, popularized by Donald McCormick, surround Annie’s origins. ‘Of all the Ripper’s victims,’ he wrote in 1959, ‘she was the only woman with a respectable middle-class background. The fact that she had “known better days” did not endear her to some of the other prostitutes and she seems to have made a few enemies among them because of this . . . She had formerly lived at Windsor, where she was married to an Army pensioner, Fred Chapman, who was also a veterinary surgeon.’
⁴
Apart from Annie’s residence at Windsor there is little or no truth in any of these statements but they continue to be repeated today and figure in two of the centennial studies.

Amelia Palmer’s deposition, once again, is partly responsible for the misunderstandings. Amelia certainly did tell the inquest that Annie had been married to one Frederick Chapman, a Windsor veterinary surgeon, and this is possibly what Annie told her. But like many humble folk Annie seems to have been prone to romancing about her past as a means of enhancing her status in the eyes of present cronies. ‘The other women in the lodging house,’ noted the
Star
, ‘say that from what she had said at different times Dark Annie was well connected. She used to do crochet work, and, from her conversation it was evident she was a woman of some education.’
⁵
Amelia’s error was corrected on the second day of the inquest, however, when Fountain Smith, Annie’s brother, explained that she had been married to a coachman named John Chapman. The notion that Chapman had been an army pensioner, also false, originally sprang from garbled news reports which confused him
with Ted Stanley, the ‘pensioner’ who sometimes slept with Annie at 35 Dorset Street.

Research at St Catherine’s House does not suggest that Annie was of middle-class origin. Her parents were married in Paddington on 22 February 1842. They were George Smith of Harrow Road and Ruth Chapman of Market Street. Smith is described on the marriage certificate as a private in the second battalion of Lifeguards. His father, Thomas Smith, was a shoemaker, and Ruth’s father, William Chapman, belonged to the same trade. George never seems to have been promoted. On 25 February 1861, when his son Fountain Hamilton was born, he was still a private in the same regiment.

Before 1916 service in the army was always on a voluntary basis. In the mid-Victorian period the officer corps was dominated by a hierarchy of wealth, kinship and connection, but this was certainly not the case with the ‘other ranks’. Indeed, the long period of enlistment (nominally for life between 1829 and 1847), low pay and harsh discipline and conditions of army life for the rank and file meant that ‘going for a soldier’ tended to be seen as an act of desperation or last resort. There were a few gentleman rankers but recruitment was primarily from the unemployed and least skilled sections of the working-class.
⁶
Our evidence suggests overwhelmingly, then, that Annie’s father was of humble origin, a conclusion that is reinforced by the record of Annie’s own marriage in 1869. By then George Smith was dead but his former occupation is noted on the certificate as ‘servant’. Fountain Hamilton Smith, Annie’s brother, was a printer’s warehouseman in 1888.

The fact that Annie and her kin are recorded at respectable addresses is little indication of their social status since they were probably in service and living in the homes of their employers. In June 1873, for example, when Annie’s second daughter was born, the family were living at 17 South Bruton Mews, Berkeley Square, off New Bond Street, and their presence there is seemingly explained by a news report of 1888
⁷
which states that John Chapman had once been the valet of a nobleman who lived in Bond Street and had been forced to resign his position because of Annie’s dishonesty. We will encounter this situation again when we come to investigate the case of Elizabeth Stride, the next victim. Registered as a prostitute in her native Sweden, Elizabeth came to England in 1866 and found a place in the service of a gentleman living near Hyde Park. Three years later, when she married, her address was recorded as 67
Gower Street, probably the residence of her employer at the time.

Annie, then, did not spring from middle-class stock, although her experiences in service may well have enabled her to ape the attitudes and mannerisms of the well-to-do with some success amongst her lodging house friends. There is no evidence whatsoever that such affectations made her unpopular. The inquest depositions of Timothy Donovan and John Evans, indeed, state otherwise. ‘The deceased was always on very good terms with the other lodgers,’ said Donovan, ‘and the witness never had any trouble with her.’
⁸
The row with Eliza Cooper was the only one that Donovan could remember Annie being involved in. The cause? A bar of soap!

The most persistent myths about the murder itself concern Annie’s neckerchief, her rings and the contents of her pocket. All originated in erroneous press reports.

On the day of the murder the
Star
told its readers that the killer had cut Annie’s throat so fearfully that, thinking he had severed the head, he tied a handkerchief around the neck to stop it rolling away. This tale found its way into
The Times
two days later, into Walter Dew’s reminiscences in 1938, into McCormick’s influential
Identity of Jack the Ripper
in 1959 and most subsequent books. It is encouraging to see a number of studies (most recently those by Donald Rumbelow, Wilson & Odell, and Begg, Fido & Skinner) specifically refute the tale but it survives in several of the centennial studies, one of which added a grisly touch of its own: ‘His [Dr Phillips’] nimble fingers untied the handkerchief around the neck, but he was unprepared for the result: as he fumbled with the knot the head rolled sideways, attached to the body by only a thin strip of skin.’
⁹
Apparently this writer forgot, or never knew, that the killer had failed to sever the spinal column.

The truth was that the handkerchief belonged to Annie and was tied about her neck
before
the killer placed his knife to her throat. Timothy Donovan recalled for the inquest that Annie had been wearing a white cotton handkerchief with a broad red border about her neck when she left his lodging house that night. It was folded ‘three-corner ways’ and was tied in front of the neck with a single knot.
¹⁰

Reporters converged on 29 Hanbury Street like angry hornets on the morning of the murder. One of the earliest on the scene was Oswald Allen of the
Fall Mall Gazette
and his report, which appeared on the streets later in the day, carried the assertion that Annie’s rings
had been wrenched from her finger and placed at her feet. On the following Monday the
Daily Telegraph
printed another fable: ‘There were also found two farthings polished brightly, and, according to some, these coins had been passed off as half-sovereigns upon the deceased by her murderer.’ The farthings quickly passed into legend. Even two policeman later gave them credence. In 1889 Inspector Reid told a different murder inquiry that two farthings had been found on or about the body of Annie Chapman and in 1910 Major Henry Smith alleged in his memoirs that two polished farthings had been discovered in her pocket. Neither man, however, had personally investigated the Hanbury Street case. Reid had been on leave at the time and Smith, as Chief Superintendent of the City of London force, had no responsibility for the policing of Spitalfields.
¹¹

In succeeding years the rings and farthings became an obligatory part of the collection of items found at the feet of Annie’s corpse. In 1928 Leonard Matters started the ball rolling: ‘Another interesting fact in this case was that two brass rings which the woman wore were taken from her fingers, and the trumpery contents of her dress pocket – two or three coppers and odds and ends – were carefully laid out at her feet.’ It will be noted that Matters did not mention the farthings and did not state that the rings were found at Annie’s feet. But ten years later William Stewart went further. On one page he printed Allen’s report, on another he asserted that two farthings had been amongst the items arrayed at the feet of the corpse. In 1959 Donald McCormick put Matters and Stewart together: ‘Two brass rings, a few pennies and two farthings were neatly laid out in a row at the woman’s feet.’
¹²
As set down by McCormick the story was reaffirmed in a whole bevy of major Ripper books: Cullen (1965), Odell (1966), Farson (1973), Rumbelow (1975 and revised edition 1987), Knight (1976) and Odell & Wilson (1987). Occasionally a renegade Ripperologist ventured a dissenting voice – Richard Whittington-Egan in 1975, Melvin Harris in 1987, Paul Begg in 1988 – but by this time the legend had almost assumed the status of an imperishable truth. In full or in part it appears in two of the most recent Ripper books: Paul Harrison, a serving police sergeant himself, has two brass rings and two new farthings at the feet of the corpse; Messrs Begg, Fido & Skinner, in their
Jack the Ripper A to
Z, content themselves with two farthings ‘which may have been brightly polished.’
¹³