Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman (9 page)

In one of life’s tragic ironies, John Williams, by this time a
world-renowned
gynaecologist, had still not become a father. Despite all the couple’s efforts, including a two-month cruise to the West Indies in 1881, which they hoped would result in a pregnancy, Lizzie had proved stubbornly infertile. Dr Williams was distraught. Not only did he crave a child, he had failed his mother, and must have thought that he had let himself down too.

But while his personal life was aching for want of a child, his professional life was thriving. In 1886, Queen Victoria appointed him as physician accoucheur to her youngest and favourite child, H.R.H. Princess Beatrice, wife of Prince Henry of Battenberg, who was expecting a baby towards the end of that year. The birth of a boy on 23 November, which was expected to be difficult because the young princess was a haemophiliac, was successful. Dr Williams received further royal patronage, and his private practice flourished. The following year he was appointed Professor of Obstetric Medicine at University College Hospital and came to be considered as the leading obstetrician in London. He had reached the peak of his professional career.

Not only was Williams celebrated by becoming a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and the Obstetrical Society of London, he was given similar honours in Germany and America, while universities in Aberdeen, Glasgow and Wales bestowed their honorary degrees on this great physician.

By the summer of 1888, Williams was forty-seven years old and Lizzie thirty-eight. This meant that she was fast approaching the age when giving birth might be dangerous, especially for a first child, even if there was an experienced gynaecologist close at hand. Today, one in six couples experience difficulty when trying to conceive a child; in those days, the odds would have been no less. According to a report by the Royal College of Obstetricians (March 2011), women over thirty-five are prone to fertility problems, while those in their late thirties or early forties are more likely to have a miscarriage. The Williamses would have been fully aware that their chances of becoming parents were diminishing with every passing year, and their hopes must have been fading drastically, if indeed they had not already been abandoned, giving way to deep (even manic) depression, grief and despair. It must have been a crushing disappointment for them both and inevitably coloured their relationship.

There seems little doubt that when they married, the Williamses took it for granted that they would one day become parents. This, even though Dr John Williams would have known that infertility was a distinct possibility. But as the years passed and the realisation dawned that Lizzie Williams might be unable to conceive, they would have experienced a wide range of emotions: shock at first, followed by envy of women who had conceived, then resentment, anger and a period of saddened disbelief. Perhaps Lizzie Williams found herself unwilling or unable to confide in anyone about her distress, to reveal her true feelings (which have been likened to the death of someone close), even to her husband, who might have difficulty understanding the reason for her mood swings. It would have been an overwhelming, life-changing event, forever spoiling their relationship, plans and dreams for the future, ruining
friendships
and straining family bonds.

That the problem lay with Lizzie Williams, and that it was she who was infertile, was never in any doubt, although it is equally likely that it may have been Dr John Williams who was unable to father a child.

While my father and I were unable to locate any medical records or even diary entries that might throw some light on Lizzie Williams’s emotional state at this time, her condition was one affecting so many women of childbearing age, both then and today, that it is possible to speculate about the effects that her infertility might have caused in the marriage.

It is now well recognised that reactions differ from one
individual
to another, that they are subject to cultural and social factors, even the importance placed on having a child by the parties to the marriage. Both Dr John and Lizzie Williams wanted a child; he, it seems – encouraged by his mother – more than she. A baby was the cement that might have held their marriage together, and if that were not possible, the very future of their relationship was in doubt. She likely felt a seething anger at what she may have thought was a serious failing on her part, and bitter resentment towards her mother-in-law, Eleanor, other mothers and all pregnant women. Perhaps she felt a sense of guilt, and thought that her infertility was a punishment for some long-forgotten transgression; she may been uncomfortable around friends who had children of their own, so that her frustration and mood swings pushed them away from her, leaving her feeling even more isolated. She may have harboured emotions of hatred, or even disgust, towards her own body, feeling that it had let her down. It is within the uterus that gestation – life – begins, and it is this organ, above all others, that identifies a human being as a woman. Lizzie’s uterus, this most significant of all female organs, was useless to her, perhaps leading to feelings of inadequacy and that she was in some way less than a woman and sexually unattractive.

There is no doubt that Lizzie Williams’s infertility placed a great strain on the marriage. She may have felt that she was under constant threat of abandonment – however unlikely that was – and perhaps Dr John Williams, himself disappointed, angry and
resentful
, displayed his wrath towards her and showed his feelings, thereby increasing her fears, and the schism between them.

Their sex life may have disappeared and, with it, the love and closeness normally experienced by fertile married couples. Or they may have timed the sexual act to coincide with ovulation, but it would, by that stage, have been performed as an attempt to procreate, rather than for enjoyment.

Dr John Williams’s mother would have added to the heavy burden that Lizzie Williams already felt. It is certain that Eleanor Williams, anxious that her only married son should provide her with a grandchild, would have pressed the issue both before and frequently during the marriage. This too would have placed the couple’s relationship under further, enormous strain.

For such a woman as Lizzie Williams, accustomed from childhood to having everything she wanted, it must have seemed almost incomprehensible to her that she was being denied a baby by her own body: her feelings of despair were exacerbated by the steady stream of women patients who found their way to Dr John Williams’s consulting rooms, wards and clinics, many seeking abortions, to rid themselves of their unwanted babies.

Above all, she would have seen it as grossly unjust that the worthless, middle-aged, disease-ridden hags, the gin-soaked alcoholics who clamoured for Dr John Williams’s services to perform an abortion, as he did on Mary Ann Nichols in the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary, were fertile and produced babies by the score. She, even though of child-bearing age, who read her Bible, attended chapel, and performed so many charitable works, was infertile – and she would have resented them for it.

This brings us rather neatly to the point: exactly what were the services that Dr John Williams, gynaecologist, provided to his destitute female patients at the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary and Leman Street’s Eastern Clinic, also in Whitechapel, the poorest district of London?
The Medical Directory
of 1900 makes no mention of Dr John Williams working in either establishment, yet a thorough investigation by author Tony Williams confirmed that he worked in both places, although at the same time stating that it was illegal for him to do so. He suggested that it was for the purposes of his research and for philanthropic reasons, but my father and I believe that his sole motivation to work in the poverty-stricken East End was for a reason far more fundamental than that.

Before the Abortion Act of 1967, abortion was illegal, except where the doctor was acting to save the life of the mother, or if continuing the pregnancy would result in physical or mental harm. Consequently, pregnant women who wished to abort a child, and whose lives were not in danger, might resort to back-street abortionists or to other self-induced methods to terminate their pregnancies. This frequently led to injury, infection, infertility and sometimes even death. According to figures supplied by the Metropolitan Police, more than 8,000 prostitutes walked the streets of London plying their trade, more than 1,200 of them in Whitechapel alone. However, newspapers at the time estimated their numbers to be ten times that figure. Whichever is correct, the services of these women could be bought for the same price as a glass of cheap gin or a bed for the night in a lodging house, though clean sheets, if required, cost a halfpenny more.

Pregnancy, for these desperately poor and unfortunate women, was an inconvenient occupational hazard, and termination of the pregnancy, an unpleasant – but necessary – solution. No doubt cheap abortions were available, but those would involve great risk. It would have been considered that it was far better to play it safe, pay a little more and employ the services of an experienced, willing and discreet gynaecologist, if one could be found at a reasonable price.

There was one reason, and one alone, why Dr John Williams worked in London’s East End and that was to make money. His hospital salary would not have taken him very far with the Harley Street lifestyle he was obliged to maintain, and we believed that Lizzie Williams would have been what today might be described as ‘high maintenance’. We assume that even the generosity of Richard Hughes had its limits.

It is simply inconceivable that the women who lived in the slums and overcrowded lodging houses, so many of them selling their bodies as a means of survival, would have required Dr Williams’s services for any reason other than to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Whether it was needed on medical grounds – that the life or health of the mother was at stake – was quite another matter. No one would dare to question the word of an eminent doctor on such an issue.

What toll might the sight of countless small bundles – the aborted foetuses – have taken on Lizzie Williams’s already
devastated
emotions? Unable to bear a child herself, but watching or even just knowing that her husband was performing his grisly task in the course of his work, not just once, but time and time and time again.

How must she have felt when her husband returned home from Windsor Castle on that great day, late in 1886, when he attended the difficult birth of Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Alexander, born on 23 November? A pathetic, but irreconcilable mixture of pride, envy, resentment and anger, because her husband, who could do so much for so many women, could do nothing at all for her.

Dr John Williams’s research into the causes of infertility in women, and the search for a cure, had become a desperate, personal crusade. Any feelings that he may have felt would have been set aside for his work. Lizzie Williams would have had no such welcome diversion. But despite all his efforts at University College Hospital, he was getting nowhere, and, according to his
great-great
-nephew, Tony Williams, the marriage had gone sour. So what were the couple to do? The only option available to Lizzie Williams was to carry on with her life as best she could, and learn to live with her emotional nightmares. She still had what remained of her marriage, she had a fine home, she was heir to a fortune, and her father’s money was always readily available.

But it is highly probable that Lizzie’s husband decided to look elsewhere for sexual gratification; it would not have been the first time Dr John Williams had strayed outside the marriage. London offered many temptations, especially for a professional man with money and a roving eye. If, as Tony Williams has suggested, he happened to meet a woman he had known previously, an
eye-catching
woman much younger than himself, even younger than Lizzie – who was rather plain, and the young woman made herself available to him, it is possible that he would have seen her as an opportunity to father his child. This would have fulfilled his desire, and his mother’s wish. Or perhaps such a woman just satisfied the doctor’s sexual appetites.

If Lizzie had discovered about his affair, she would have been incensed. Already pushed to the edge of insanity as a consequence of her infertility, it is almost possible to imagine the scene that would have followed: the tears, the arguments, the recriminations, the insults thrown from both sides. John Williams might have displayed his customary indifference and arrogance, while his wife would have been furious, but frustrated by her sheer helplessness.

The discovery would have been Lizzie Williams’s worst
nightmare
, the culmination of her secret fears. Being unable to bear her husband a child, when
that
was what they so desperately wanted, was bad enough; it was the one element missing from their lives that might have saved their relationship. But the thought that he might be physically involved with another woman, one who was capable of bearing his child while Lizzie could not, and who might destroy what was left of their marriage, would have been almost unbearable. So what could she do?

Probably nothing at all.

There was little that a sad and lonely Victorian housewife could do in such a situation. While the love might have disappeared from their marriage, it was most unlikely that her husband would leave her. Even if he did, she was not entirely dependent on him. Thanks to her wealthy father, Lizzie Williams was financially secure in her own right. There was nothing she could do about her childlessness, the stresses it brought, or her loveless marriage; she just had to bear the pain and make the best of things.

Then the unexpected happened and it came like a bolt from the blue. Something from the past caught up with the Hughes family and brought with it terrifying consequences that turned Lizzie Williams’s world upside down, changing everything.

In the spring of 1888, the Landore Tinplate Works, of which Lizzie’s father was now managing partner, ran into financial
difficulties
. The company had enjoyed a good run but was too successful an enterprise to go unchallenged indefinitely. The secret methods of production which Daniel Edwards had learnt, and taken from Richard Hughes, enabled him to set up his own company in competition with Hughes’s company. The Dyffryn Works Ltd, established in 1874, was a huge operation, with three mills driven by steam. Located in the lower Swansea Valley, and also on the banks of the river Tawe, it was considered to be a model tinplate works, and Edwards employed an even greater number of workers than the Landore Tinplate Works.