The Real Mary Kelly (33 page)
Read The Real Mary Kelly Online
Authors: Wynne Weston-Davies
31
The Maundrells moved to Kensington after the death of Robert John in 1883 but they appear to have retained their old house, 81 Camden Road. Walter Sickert rented it in 1917. In her book,
Sickert: The Artist and His Circle
, Marjorie Lilly wrote about an old Gladstone bag owned by Sickert on which he had painted ‘The Shrubbery, 81 Camden Road.’ This is also quoted by Patricia Cornwell in
Portrait of a Killer
. See also Matthew Sturgis,
Walter Sickert: A Life
. Harper Collins, London, 2005. Walter Sickert’s connection with the Maundrell/Macleod family is enigmatic but there seem to be so many hints in paintings such as ‘
Jack Ashore
’ and the coincidence of him living in one of their houses as to make it very likely that he knew them over a considerable period of time. Judging by Francis Craig’s divorce petition Ellen Macleod must have been a very well-known Madam in the Camden, Holloway, St Pancras area of London and, with her many literary and artistic connections, just the sort of person that the younger Sickert would have known.
Sickert certainly spent a lot of time at Kelmscott House, watching the boat race from there and playing rumbustious games in the garden (Sturgis).
Although no direct evidence for a friendship between Sickert and Sims has yet been found, it seems inconceivable that the two men did not know each other. Both their families were of a politically radical persuasion and friendly with William Morris. Both men were intimately connected with the theatre; Sims was a prolific playwright and Sickert, who had himself started life as an actor, retained a lifelong fascination with the theatre and the music hall. Both men were devotees of the Old Bedford Music Hall in Camden Town. Both were journalists and wrote for the same magazines and, perhaps more importantly, both men had an
appetite for the low life of London including gambling, consorting with prostitutes and attending prize fights. They shared many of the same friends including William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Charles Bradlaugh, Frank Harris and Richard Cobden.
Sickert was fascinated by prostitutes, who were the subjects of many of his paintings. It is not impossible that some of his models were girls that he met through Ellen Macleod. He was also deeply interested in the Ripper murders to the extent that he has himself been implicated or named as a suspect by many authors, notably Patricia Cornwell. In his later life he was a close friend of the author’s uncle, who said that on many occasions Sickert would hint darkly that he knew more about the affair than he was prepared to say.
32
Memoirs of E.T. Craig, one of the originators of the Co-operative Movement and historian of Ralahine
. Privately printed, London, 1885.
33
Garnett, R.G.,
E.T. Craig: communitarian, educator, phrenologist
. J Vocational Education & Training 1963;15:135–50.
34
The term ‘professor’ meant little more than teacher in the 19th century and did not imply that the bearer held a university post. E.T. Craig was largely self-educated but in his youth had attended the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute, the forerunner of UMIST, the present-day University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. Evans A. ‘E.T. Craig: proto-socialist, phrenologist and public health engineer’.
International Journal of Epidemiology
2008;37:490–505.
35
Ibid.
36
Combe, George.
Lectures on Phrenology
(Ed. Andrew Boardman). Simkin, Marshall & Co., London, 1839. Page 118.
37
His friend Edward Warren and his landlord John Reading both gave accounts of Francis’s curious inability to sustain a face-to-face conversation. Inquest reports in the
Fulham Chronicle
and the
West London Observer
, 13th March 1903.
38
Francis is known to have travelled to America in 1864 and he probably stayed there for two years. His friend Edward Warren described at his inquest Francis journeying to Paris in 1901 or 1902. Much of his journalism concerns journeys and travel including trips through the British countryside by canal boat and by tricycle.
39
Arrivals, New York, April 1864. A Francis Craig, aged 26, is shown amongst the passengers. There is no other information except that he had embarked at Liverpool. Francis was 26 at the time and examination of the England and Wales censuses from 1851 onwards show that there was no other Francis Craig of exactly his age resident in England or Wales.
40
Editorial,
Oxford Journal
, 5th January 1884.
CHAPTER FOUR
41
Seymour Street is actually in Marylebone rather than Euston but possibly Euston Square’s proximity to the station made it sound more commercial.
42
Fiona MacCarthy.
William Morris: A Life For Our Time
. Faber and Faber, London, 1994.
43
Edward Thomas Craig.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
.
44
The petition was a document setting out the reasons that the petitioner (Francis) was seeking a divorce. It could be written by anyone although was usually drawn up by a solicitor. The affidavit was a legal document
that had to be signed in the presence of a commissioner for oaths in which the petitioner swore that the contents of the petition were true. In Francis’s case the two documents were more or less identical.
45
53 Tonbridge Street was a matter of a few hundred yards from the house where Francis and Elizabeth had lodgings in Argyle Square. Elizabeth was being surprisingly reckless in carrying out her trade so close to home. It was even nearer to the lodgings that her brother Johnto occupied in Leigh Street at the time. Her total disregard for risk fits well with Mary Jane’s reported character in Whitechapel later.
46
Mary Jane Kelly told Joe Barnett that she was a widow and that her married name had been Davies, and both names are recorded in the Deaths Indexes for the October–December quarter of 1888 and on her death certificate, showing that the authorities considered that either name was as likely as the other to be her true name.
47
Journalists, then as now, have their names appended to their copy, reporters do not.
48
A flavour of the sort of easy-going informality that characterised Warren is that in the 1881 census he gave his wife’s name as Louie and his children’s names as Minnie, Florrie and Charlie.
49
Harry McBlain is the only one of Elizabeth’s clients who is identified by name in the divorce petition and no doubt that – and the fact that they met repeatedly during July and August of 1885 – is why he is named as the co-respondent. He was a widower, living with his two sons and four daughters in some comfort in a villa in Camden Town.
50
No evidence that Elizabeth and Francis actually spent time in Paris together has been found. Mary Jane Kelly told several people including Joe Barnett that she had been to Paris in the company of a gentleman
shortly before moving to the East End and Francis is known to have liked the city and to have travelled there at least once in later life. If they had any sort of honeymoon, Paris seems a plausible destination. The person she went to Paris with could equally well have been Harry McBlain.
51
Elizabeth’s brother John, known to his family as Johnto, was at the time lodging with the family of a Welsh dairyman in Leigh Street near to the Craigs’ home in Argyle Square. It would be natural for Francis to contact John after Elizabeth disappeared to seek news of her. If Elizabeth had written the letter to her brother he may have handed it over to Francis in a well-intentioned but misguided effort to re-unite the couple.
CHAPTER FIVE
52
According to Malcolm Barr-Hamilton, the archivist for Tower Hamlets, 306 Mile End Road was at the time directly opposite the old Beth Din Jewish hospital which still exists.
53
Notes attached to the divorce petition of Francis Spurzheim Craig. National Archives. Divorce Court File: 692. Appellant: Francis Spurzheim Craig. Respondent: Elizabeth Weston Davies Craig. Corespondent: Harry McBain. Type: Husband’s petition for divorce [hd]. J 77/354/692
54
Johnto is a common Welsh diminutive form of John. Strictly speaking it should be Ianto since there is no letter J in the Welsh language. It would be most improbable that a Welshman called Henry (in itself an unlikely name for either a Welshman or an Irishman to have been given at that time because of its English royal connections) would have been called Johnto by Scottish army colleagues. Elizabeth’s family habitually used the ‘–to’ diminutive form of boys’ names. John’s own eldest son Wynne would later be known as Wynnto in the family.
55
The police at the time and many historians since have searched the army records for evidence of a man called Henry Kelly serving with the Scots Guards at around this period. None have been found.
56
Sir Frederick Treves performed the first successful operation in Britain to remove an inflamed appendix at the London Hospital, Whitechapel, the following year, 1889. Before that time appendicitis frequently led to peritonitis and death. Elizabeth’s younger sister Margaret Maria had died of the condition in 1879.
CHAPTER SIX
57
The
East London Observer
, 8th September 1888, reporting the inquest of Mary Ann Nichols, said that it was opened by Baxter ‘fresh from his Scandinavian tour’.
58
East London Advertiser
, 8th September 1888. The recent use of this spelling by Bill Gates amongst others has been a matter of comment. It does seem fairly good evidence that the
Advertiser
’s reporter was familiar with American usage.
59
In death people often appear younger than their actual age. Philip Sugden noted in his book
The Complete History of Jack the Ripper
that the police estimates of the ages of the victims were all younger than they in fact turned out to be.
60
Notes attached to the divorce petition of Francis Spurzheim Craig. National Archives. Divorce Court File: 692. Appellant: Francis Spurzheim Craig. Respondent: Elizabeth Weston Davies Craig. Co-respondent: Harry McBain. Type: Husband’s petition for divorce [hd]. J 77/354/692.
61
It is likely that at least two copies of the documents existed, the one lodged with the High Court and Francis’s own one. Possibly his original solicitor Arthur Ivens kept another or that may have been handed over to Francis when he decided to act for himself in 1887. The one in The National Archives is undoubtedly the one from the High Court so Francis may have struck out paragraphs 5 to 9 on his own copy to satisfy Ellen Macleod.
CHAPTER SEVEN
62
East London Advertiser
, 23rd August 1888.
63
When given leave to be out of barracks for the evening, soldiers had to wear Walking-out Dress and infantry sergeants and below had to carry their bayonets slung from a scabbard above the left hip.
64
The Church of England Series 3 Wedding Service authorised for use from November 1977 was the first to mention the exchanging of rings in the Anglican Liturgy. Before then, in England it was usual only for the bride to wear a wedding ring. The wearing of wedding rings by men became popular in the United States following an advertising campaign by the American jewellery industry in the late 19th century.
66
Ibid.
68
Report of the inquest on Francis Spurzheim Craig, the
Fulham Chronicle
, 13th March 1903.
69
The depth of his feelings came out years later in a bitterly ironic editorial that he wrote for the
Indicator
attacking a recent Act of Parliament that, he thought, gave unwarranted succour to married women deserted to their husbands but no corresponding help to men deserted by, in his words, ‘bad, drunken wives’.
The Indicator
, January 22nd 1896.
70
Holmes, Ronald M. and Stephen T. Holmes.
Serial Murder
(3rd edn). Sage, Thousand Oaks, California, USA, 2010.
71
Morton, L.T.
London’s Last Private Medical School
. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. 84, 1991.
72
There has been an enormous amount of discussion by historians and Ripperologists and indeed by journalists and the police at the time as to whether the Ripper had anatomical training or surgical skill. Many have said that the rather crude way in which the abdomen of Catherine Eddowes in particular was opened indicates that he was not a skilled anatomist or dissector. This ignores the fact that the entire operation, from rendering Catherine unconscious, slitting her throat, exposing and opening her abdomen and then not only mobilising her small intestines and removing the descending colon but also removing both the left kidney and the reproductive organs took place in less than five minutes, in very poor light on the pavement of Mitre Square. Dr George Bagster Phillips was right in saying that it might have taken a surgeon upwards of an hour to do the same. It is hardly surprising therefore that an amateur who may have watched a few dissections many years before might have made a less than perfect job of it.
73
Examples of E.T. Craig’s artistic skill is evident from the engravings credited to him that accompany some of his books and pamphlets in the British Library collection. Francis was employed as a mapmaker by William Spalding in Cambridge from 1871 to 1875 and the resulting
Plan of Cambridge and its Environs
together with the map that he drew
on his deathbed are adequate proof of his draughtsman’s skills. In addition it is known that E.T. Craig was strongly in favour of children being taught to draw before they could read,
vide
: Evans A. ‘E.T. Craig: proto-socialist, phrenologist and public health engineer’.
International Journal of Epidemiology
2008;37:490–505.
