Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (8 page)

J
ust twenty miles to the west of Swansea, not far from Carmarthen, stands the small whitewashed farmhouse of Blaenllynant, together with a cluster of stone outbuildings. They overlook a quiet mill pond at the end of a short grass track, just off the narrow Gwynfe Road. This idyllic setting, on the banks of the Afon Meilwch, a tributary of the river Tywi, was where John

Williams, the third of four brothers after David and Morgan, and his younger brother Nathaniel, grew up. When their father, David, farmer and part-time Methodist minister, died of typhoid fever in 1842, the task of raising the boys fell to David’s widow, Eleanor. John Williams’s mother was a force to be reckoned with. Within the family, her word was law; she expected obedience from her sons, and it is clear from such accounts as are available that she was not disappointed. John Williams’s biographer, Ruth Evans, said of her in
John Williams 1840-1926
: “There can be no doubt that she was the force behind all the early decisions about her son John’s career, and that by drawing on her wisdom and strength, doors were opened to him, which might have remained for ever closed.”

The young John Williams clearly enjoyed a happy childhood. During an address to aspiring medical students delivered at the University College of South Wales on 10 October 1900 entitled ‘The Training of Body and Mind for the Profession of Medicine’, he recounted some pleasurable aspects of his early years. These reminiscences provide a vital insight into his character. The local school in the nearest village, Gwynfe, was three miles away, though the long walk through idyllic countryside instilled in him a love of nature and physical exercise. He would frequently stop on the way to explore a pond and “the nest of an old crow demanded a daily visit on a high and solitary tree, and, if he were lucky, rob the eggs he found there.” Once at school, he enjoyed playing Hare and Hounds, mentioning that cricket was an unknown sport in those days. “The discovery of a gin [a trap to ensnare small animals] was a source of intense enjoyment and the division of its string afforded a doubly exquisite pleasure for it ensured puss [rabbit?] a free run and baulked the skilful poacher in his nefarious designs.”

Later in his address John Williams continued, “Such a boyhood as that which I have described braces the mind and body,
strengthens
the weak frame and makes healthy youths. I have to confess that I look back upon that period in my life not only as one of the pleasantest and brightest but also one of the best spent, for its effects have been my mainstay for the rest of my career.”

But one statement he made, more than any other, demonstrated Dr John Williams’s state of mind, and clearly established there were no demons in his past that might have driven him through the metamorphosis from happy innocent schoolboy to violent mass murderer: “A sane mind in a healthy body is the best reinsurance for any future training.”

At the age of fifteen, John Williams left his local school and attended the Normal School in Swansea. He intended to follow his father’s footsteps and train for a career in the ministry. However, encouraged by the principal, Dr Evan Davies, he developed an interest in natural science and in 1857 he left Swansea for Glasgow University where he studied mathematics for a year. His class voted him second prize for ‘general excellence’, which award was approved by his professor. On 20 July 1859, he bound himself as apprentice under a deed of indentures for five years to Dr W.H. Michael and Dr Ebenezer Davies, surgeons and apothecaries in Swansea, “to learn the art and science of Medicine and Surgery”. But just two years later in 1861, the year that the Prince Consort, Queen Victoria’s husband Albert, died, William’s burning ambition led him to abandon his training, and he entered University College Hospital in London where he continued his medical studies.

In 1864 Williams was appointed obstetric assistant and the next year he was promoted to house surgeon. In 1865, he was awarded the prestigious Certificate of Honour for Pathological Anatomy, and a gold medal, which he later melted down to make his wife’s wedding ring. By the age of twenty-seven, he had qualified both as a doctor and surgeon and worked at the Brompton Hospital for Consumption and at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. In neither position did he receive any pay – just free board and lodging – so he relied on his mother to support him financially. He could not remain in London on this basis indefinitely, and in 1867, the year he became licensed to practice medicine, he returned to Swansea and set up his surgery at 13 Craddock Street, near the town centre, where he practised as a G.P. for the next five years.

It was during this time that he met Richard Hughes’s daughter, Lizzie, who would become his wife. Maybe Lizzie saw in John Williams the same personality traits of rugged determination and arrogance that she so admired in her own father. Dr Williams was ten years older than Lizzie, as her father had been when he had married her mother. John Williams had risen above his humble farming origins to become a distinguished medical doctor; Lizzie’s father had been a tradesman and a maltster who had striven to become a successful businessman. The couple themselves had both lost a parent at an early age. John had lost his father at the tender age of two; Lizzie had lost her mother when she was five. Both surviving parents had strong personalities, but Lizzie’s father rarely, if ever, exercised restraint over his daughter. John Williams’s mother, the eldest of twelve children herself, was used to being obeyed. John and Lizzie loved their parents unconditionally, and both parents adored their children, influenced them greatly, and were eager to do what they thought was best for them; this undoubtedly included advising them on suitable marriage partners.

Richard Hughes would most certainly have recognised the characteristic of strong single-mindedness he shared with John Williams, the man who was now courting his daughter. On 13 January 1872, Hughes proposed Dr John Williams as a member of his Talbot Lodge of the United Grand Lodge of the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons of England in Swansea (number 1323), and if the impressive wedding ceremony he would eventually put on for the couple on 2 April 1872 was anything to go by, he clearly ignored the almost ten-year age difference and approved of his new son-in-law.

During the courtship period of John Williams and Lizzie Hughes’s it is probable that she visited him in his Craddock Street practice where she could have observed him during surgical
operations
. He might have shown her how to operate, isolate and remove a diseased organ swiftly, though there is no actual evidence that he did.

Speed of operating was essential, prior to the development of effective anaesthetics, because a patient undergoing surgery would experience the most unimaginable pain, no matter what method might be employed in the effort to alleviate it. The finest surgeons were measured by the speed at which they could operate and remove a diseased organ or infected limb quickly, rather than those who took more time to ensure perfection in their work. Pain was said to be God’s punishment for the wicked, and a purefying trial for the good. For a woman in labour, it was ‘a spiritual experience to be welcomed, since it would transform her into a self-sacrificing mother’. The practitioner, upon entering the operating room, often brought with him two bottles of whisky; one for the patient to ease the pain and, when that failed, the other for the doctor to help him bear his patient’s terrible screams.

It was not until the mid-1880s that anaesthetic began to become commonly used in surgical operations. The early pioneer Humphrey Davy (1778-1829) used nitrous oxide (laughing gas), a gaseous compound which patients inhaled to relieve the pain of an operation, but its effects were unreliable. Later, an American dentist, William Morton (1819-68), used ether, based on sulphuric acid and alcohol, but it was flammable, with a tendency to irritate the lungs. When, in 1853, Queen Victoria was given chloroform, developed by Professor James Simpson, for the birth of Prince Leopold in 1853 and again for the birth of Princess Beatrice in 1857, the practice of using anaesthetic became more popular, though the procedure involved some risk because the patient could easily die from an overdose.

It was only after the development of effective anaesthetics that the speed of surgery became less important than the quality of the surgical operation itself, though it was not until the early twentieth century that anaesthesia became more truly reliable and safer.

However, the doctors to whom John Williams had bound himself for five years from 1859, Dr Michael and Dr Davies, were of the old, pre-anaesthesia school, and the techniques they taught him were based on speed, rather than the slower and more meticulous surgery that he would come to learn and practice later.

But, human nature being what it is, it seems likely that if and when Dr John Williams demonstrated his surgical skills to his wife, his intention was to impress her by the speed at which he could perform a procedure, as much as by the skilful nature of his work.

In 1872, after Dr Williams’s appointment as assistant obstetric physician at University College Hospital (this time with pay), and during the years that followed, his wife may have maintained an interest in the surgical operations her husband performed in his private practice. She may have observed closely as he carried out the many abdominal operations that his specialisation demanded; the hysterectomy, noting how he divided the abdomen, lifted the viscera, the intestines, and then located and cut away the uterus. At other times he might have shown her how he managed
complications
affecting the fallopian tubes, and then again how diseased ovaries should be excised. Perhaps she watched him abort a baby, and learned what became of the small foetus after it was taken from its mother’s body. Such images would doubtless come back to haunt her in the years ahead.

It might have been at such times that Lizzie learned aspects of surgical technique. And what she learned she would always remember: which of the razor-sharp knives was best suited for the task at hand, where the incisions were to be made, how to locate a specific organ, and remove it from the body.

Before the wedding took place, Dr John Williams, like his
father-in
-law before him, also seized his opportunity. With the prospect of the Hughes family fortune beckoning, there was nothing to stop him from returning to the city that poverty and the cessation of financial support from his mother had forced him to leave.

The
South Wales Chronicle
of 3 April 1872 reported: “The
neighbourhood
of Landore, Morriston and the country round about was the scene on Tuesday last of almost unparalleled animation and excitement, consequent on the marriage of Miss M.E.A. Hughes, only child of Richard Hughes, Esq., of Ynystawe, the respected managing partner of The Landore Steel and Tinplate Works, to John Williams, Esq., M.D., who for some years has been practising in this town with distinguished success as a physician and has recently been elected under the circumstances of a particularly gratifying character to the honourable position of a place on the staff of University College Hospital, London.”

So was it love, cold-blooded ambition or perhaps his
domineering
mother, which persuaded Dr John Williams, at thirty-one years of age, to marry a wealthy young heiress almost ten years his junior and less than two months after her twenty-second birthday? Or was it that he
needed
a wife to inspire confidence in his female patients? Conceivably it was something of each: Ruth Evans noted Dr Williams’s comment about his new bride, as they were about to leave for their honeymoon in Europe, that, “Lizzie looked better than ever in travelling dress”.

Of the four brothers in the Williams household, only John married and so only he would be likely to father a legitimate child. When Eleanor Williams told her son that he was expected to father a child he undoubtedly assumed that he would. There was no reason of which he was aware why he and his healthy young bride should not soon become proud parents, in accordance with his mother’s wishes.

Richard Hughes’s generosity towards his daughter now also extended to his son-in-law. After making several trips to view suitable properties in London with Lizzie’s father in tow, they eventually settled on a large Georgian townhouse in the
fashionable
West End: 28 Harley Street, one of the most famous streets in Britain and much favoured by the medical profession. Hughes paid the princely sum of £250 for the residue of the lease which ended eleven years later, and the fixtures, furniture and effects for a further £693.18. This was at a time when a cottage in Wales, suitable for a labourer in one of the many tinplate works in and around Swansea, could be bought for as little as £20.

On 23 July 1872, John and Lizzie Williams left Swansea’s polluted industrial valley and moved into their fine London home. The young doctor was on the threshold of what would become a remarkable and successful medical career; Lizzie, at just
twenty-two
years of age, must have looked forward with considerable excitement to what the future and London might hold. No doubt she intended to be faithful to her marriage vows and, she must have thought, in time she would bear her new husband a child, perhaps a son, to continue the Williams family line.

B
y 1884, the Williamses had left Harley Street behind, the lease on their first London home having expired the previous year, and moved to a larger, even more imposing, residence at 11 Queen Anne Street, not far from Regent’s Park. It was needed to
accommodate
the growing collection of rare Welsh language books and manuscripts they had acquired; fine Swansea and Nantgarw china; Chippendale, Hepplewhite and Sheraton period furniture, and the pictures, etchings and prints, courtesy of John Deffett Francis (1815-1901), who founded Swansea’s art gallery and art library. But, despite the long years and fervent hopes, no children could be found playing in the Williams household.