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London Research Trip, May 2012

28 May

Christ Church, Spitalfields.

So anyway, I went on the most amazing research trip to London last Friday. The plan was pretty simple – stay in the heart of my beloved Spitalfields and take photographs and notes to help me while writing The Ripper Novel which is a time slip book incorporating both 1888 and 2012 Whitechapel. This wasn’t a hardship at all as my family come from Whitechapel and I’ve been kicking about the place off and on for longer than I can remember, although when my grandparents moved us back from Scotland they opted to live in Essex rather than go back to the East End, alas. I still regard it as my cultural, spiritual and ancestral home though so it’s always nice to go back.

I arrived at lunchtime on the Friday, ditched my stuff at my hotel on Osborn Street, which is at the end of Brick Lane and a bustling thoroughfare lined with Turkish and Indian cafes and shops and then headed out for a wander around in the simmering heat. I took photographs of interesting graffiti and visited Ripper Site Number Two – busy and faintly insalubrious Hanbury Street, where Annie Chapman’s body was found in the backyard of number 29.

Hanbury Street.

After this I had a trip to All Saints where I tried on a profusion of dresses, all of which were too big and too long for me and then went to have lunch in Spitalfields Market before strolling down Brushfield Street and then along to Middlesex Street and Goulston Street, where the infamous ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing‘ graffiti and a piece of Catherine Eddowes’ apron were discovered in a doorway.

I then walked on to Mitre Square, which was Ripper Site Number Four via Ripper Site Number Five, which is that pokey service road at the side of White’s Row car park which marks the former site of the notorious and long vanished Dorset Street. Miller’s Court, where Mary Jane Kelly’s body was discovered was on the left of the street but it’s all been pulled down now.

Mitre Passage.

I couldn’t quite remember where Mitre Square was at first as I usually go at dusk and all the sunlight was a bit discombobulating but then turned a corner and there was Mitre Passage in front of me looking as dark and eerie as always. I felt a distinct chill in the air as I walked down Mitre Passage and it even seemed a bit like all sound was muted as well. Due to the movements of the police that fateful night in 1888, we can be fairly sure that the Ripper made his escape down Mitre Passage after murdering Catherine Eddowes…

I lurked in Mitre Square for a while waiting for this tour group to go away. They’re clustered in the spot where Catherine Eddowes’ body was found. As a Ripperologist, I am in no position to complain about the interest other people may have in Jack the Ripper but I’m a bit bemused by daylight Ripper tours. It’s much better to go at night! Another group came in after this one and I was a bit perturbed to hear the guide coming out with all sorts of antiquated nonsense about the case. He was also in the habit of emitting hideous shrill eldritch screams. In broad day light! What must the people in the surrounding offices think?! One day, however, I will do a tour and IT WILL BE AWESOME.

Poor old Catherine Eddowes was found on approximately this spot.

The entrance to Mitre Passage from Mitre Square. The Ripper probably made his escape this way. Or did he?

I went back to Spitalfields after this, pausing at the Hummingbird Bakery for a restorative slice of vanilla cake before wandering through the market and then back along Brick Lane. I carried on along Old Montague Street until I reached Durward Street, which is Ripper Site Number One. Back in 1888, Durward Street was known as Bucks Row and it was here on the 31st of August 1888 that Polly Nichols’ body was discovered on the pavement by the old board school, which is the tall building in the photograph.

Entrance to Durward Street aka Bucks Row.

The old board school building, which was there in 1888 and loomed over the site where poor Polly’s body was found.

After this, I went back to my hotel to get ready for the evening and felt really at home and happy as I listened to the call to prayer floating over Spitalfields while putting on my makeup. I’d arranged to meet some friends in the Princess Alice on Commercial Street and had an ace evening drinking gin and being remarkably silly. There was a LOT of gossip involving misuse of disliked names, tiaras, inappropriate wearing of bridesmaids dresses and MORE about dreadful people and I even had a proposal of marriage! However, we have a rule that What Happens At Gin And Whores Stays At Gin And Whores so my lips are sealed. After the pub I went up Brick Lane for a curry with my friends Del and Miranda, which was great fun. People always tut a bit at me when I say that I never feel at all unsafe in Whitechapel but it’s true – I walked back to my hotel alone at 2am without any qualms at all.

The next morning I packed up my stuff and then went for a walk across Whitechapel High Street to Henriques Street, which is Ripper Site Number Three. Back in 1888, Henriques Street was known as Berner Street and it was here that Elizabeth Stride’s body was discovered on the night of the 30th September – the first of what is known as The Double Event Murders. To be honest I’m not even sure that she was one of the Ripper’s victims but that’s no reason to forget all about her as I believe all these women should be remembered. I just wish they’d got as much concern and attention in life as they did after death.

Approximate spot of the entrance to the yard where Elizabeth Stride’s body was found.

Henriques Street is a miserable little road but when you recall how bustling and busy Whitechapel High Street was back in the late Victorian era, you start to get a real appreciation for how flagrant the Ripper was. This is also true of Hanbury Street and Dorset Street – both were busy and well populated. Bucks Row and Mitre Square, however, were altogether lonelier.

After leaving Henriques Street I walked towards the City, unintentionally going past Mitre Square as I went. It’s not actually that great a distance but certainly not ‘a few streets away’. However, my feet automatically took me that way as I headed to the City so if Elizabeth Stride was also murdered by the Ripper, I couldn’t dispute that his route may also have taken him past Mitre Square.

It was a real eye opener to visit all of the Ripper sites again as it gives a real feel for the areas and also the distance between them. In popular imagining, the murders all took place within a very small area but actually they were fairly widely apart. It’s possible to walk between all five with ease but they aren’t a few streets away from each other either.

After all this, I walked through the deserted City (hardly anyone lives there so virtually everything closes down at the weekend) past the Gherkin and those lovely old City churches that stand serenely in the midst of glinting blue glass office buildings and relentless modernity and on to Austin Friars.

Not the greatest outfit for a sweltering summer’s day in the City: All Saints dress and Doc Marten boots!

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am a HUGE FAN of Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel and so I couldn’t resist a trip to see the site of Austin Friars, which was the main residence of Thomas Cromwell. Nothing now remains of the huge mansion complete with gardens and tennis courts that he built there for himself and his sprawling household but I think you can still get some sense of it. Austin Friars is a small quiet gated street tucked away in the streets in between London Wall and Old Broad Street. You have to concentrate very hard to imagine even the faintest essence of Thomas Cromwell in the air but what it does underline is the fact that he was very much a City Man with a residence that even in the sixteenth century was at the very heart of the old City and at the centre of the London financial world with its guilds, aldermen and banking houses.

I was extremely moved to stand on the site of Thomas Cromwell’s home, which is now the Drapers’ Hall at the end of Throgmorton Street and even wept a little tear for him. Or at least for the Cromwell that Mantel conjured up, whom I am madly in love with. In the pub the night before, I joked about falling through my own time slip and ending up in Tudor England where I would show Thomas Cromwell my iPhone and recommend that he tries Cut The Rope. Sadly, however, the sun shone and a slight breeze rose making the trees in the small gated garden rustle their green skirts enticingly but there were no sightings of long dead men.

I carried on through the city, past the Crutched Friars (Thomas Wyatt was given the Crutched Friars church after the Dissolution and apparently pulled it down to build a tennis court) and on to the London Wall where I ate a peaceful lunch in a pretty garden on one of the high walks leading to the Museum of London. My first London job after leaving university was in Moorgate and I always smile to myself a bit when I walk past what was my office, remembering the callow goth that I once was. Oh dear.

The London Wall is dotted with ruins from a long gone age.

I paid a quick visit to the Museum of London, conscious that I had a bus and train to catch back home to Bristol and wanted to have a last drink in the sunshine at Spitalfields Market before I went. I bought presents, including fab tea towels with eighteenth century ladies on them and books about the Great Fire for the Seven Year Old. In the museum itself I was particularly taken with this dress, which was worn by a little girl in honour of the Queen’s coronation in 1953. How lovely! I’m surprised no one has produced replicas.

SUCH a pretty dress!

Anyway, that was the end of my research visit. I’ll be back again once the Olympics have gone away as I glimpsed quite a few old pubs and winding alleyways that are just crying out for exploration. There was a wedding at Christ Church, Spitalfields on Saturday morning and the sound of bells really gladdened my heart as I made my way home.

The London of Jack the Ripper: Then and Now – Robert Clack & Philip Hutchinson

22 Apr

As pretty much anyone who reads this blog on even an irregular basis will already know, I’ve been a committed and occasionally committable Ripperologist for well over twenty years now and recently made the eerie discovery that great x 3 grandfather was in H Division in 1888 and most likely living in the Whitechapel police station on Commercial Street at the time of the murders.

I say eerie but actually it’s not that much of a coincidence really – my interest in Jack the Ripper is down to my grandmother, who raised me. She came from the east end of London and was a scion of one of those sprawling Cockney clans with their gangsters, strange vaudeville songs of interminable pointlessness, rhyming slang, music hall relatives, affection for EELS, insane ADORATION of West Ham football club (when my great grandmother died, the club sent a, hopefully appropriately coloured, wreath to her funeral – do they do that for everyone, I wonder?) and horror stories about the Blitz. As a result, despite being born in Scotland and very far from the bells of St Mary-le-Bow, I’ve pretty much always considered myself to be culturally a Cockney because that’s what I grew up with. When we moved from Scotland to Essex, it felt like we were almost home. Almost but not quite…

I’m only partially joking when I tell people that the Hitcher from The Mighty Boosh is my ideal man.

Oh no, wait, EELS!

Elements of the past and the future combining to make something not quite as good as either…

I should make that my motto.

I will now use this unusually insightful Mighty Boosh quote to clumsily lead on to the main CRUX of this already tiresomely rambling post, while simultaneously saving face by pretending that this is some sort of post modern meta conceit. Or something.

Due to all of the above, I couldn’t resist reading a book about Jack the Ripper’s London – especially as I am currently supposed to be writing a novel set in that time of dank misery and pea souper fogs but don’t get me started on that or I’ll get all angsty and you wouldn’t like that. Being the innovator that I clearly am, I decided to give it a whirl on my Kindle despite it having illustrations, which is something I have hitherto failed to encounter in a Kindle book.

The Ten Bells pub on the corner of Hanbury Street. To be honest, the Ten Bells has undergone quite a transformation in the many years since I first saw it.

To my surprise, the pictures were still clear and easy to look at although I suspect they are somewhat smaller than the printed versions and also in black in white whereas I think some of the printed ones may be in colour?

Whitechapel today – elements of the past and future that actually, to my eyes, look pretty good together. I’m irreverent and love the element of surprise though.

Anyway, mechanics aside, this is a great little book and one that anyone interested in the Ripper murders would find pretty fascinating not least because it doesn’t just cover the so called Canonical Five but also features several other murders that have on occasion been ascribed to the Ripper including Emma Smith, Alice McKenzie, Frances Coles and the Pinchin Street Torso.

Hawksmoor’s Christ Church looming over Commercial Street.

While there is a very basic explanation of the crimes and a brief biography of each victim, the real emphasis is on the area itself with fascinating photographs of the crime scenes and places (some rather obscure) associated with the murders as they were in Victorian times and how they appear now.

I was completely enthralled by this but moved too as just as the Ripper murders themselves open an unusually vivid and detailed window into the lives of abandoned women in Victorian times, comparing photographs of the east end as it was in 1888 and how it is now is an eye opening experience when you realise that whole streets have been swept away like so much detritus not just in the aftermath of the Blitz but as the result of urban planning. Saddest of all, I suppose is the demise of Dorset Street, dubbed the ‘Worst Street in London’ and considered so terrible a locale that it was demolished and replaced by well, nothing much at all.

View from the top of White’s Row car park looking down at what used to be Dorset Street and the approximate spot of the entrance to Miller’s Court. Mere moments before taking this photograph I accidentally smacked my car door on a concrete post while opening it and enraged my husband so much that there was almost another murder on that site…

Maybe I’m just annoyed because all of the development in Spitalfields makes it more difficult for me to imagine what it must have been like in 1888 when my ancestor was on his beat or the 1930s when my great grandfather worked at Truman’s on Brick Lane. It’s not all bad though as it is still possible to catch the odd glimpse of the old Whitechapel – just take a stroll down Artillery Lane, Hanbury Street or Gunthorpe Street at night.

Artillery Lane.

In summary therefore, I’d recommend this book not just to those who want to know more about the Ripper murders but also anyone interested in the changing face of London.

Check it out:

The London of Jack the Ripper: Then and Now — a bargain at £2.87 if you have a Kindle.

The Worst Street in London: Foreword by Peter Ackroyd — a SUPERB book if you’re interested in the social history of London’s east end and now available for Kindle for £5.93.

The Pleasures of Men – Kate Williams

22 Jan

‘Catherine Sorgeiul lives with her Uncle in a rambling house in London’s East End. She has few companions and little to occupy the days beyond her own colourful imagination.

But then a murderer strikes, ripping open the chests of young girls and stuffing hair into their mouths to resemble a beak, leading the press to christen him The Man of Crows. And as Catherine devours the news, she finds she can channel the voices of the dead, and comes to believe she will eventually channel The Man of Crows himself.

But the murders continue to panic the city and Catherine gradually realizes she is snared in a deadly trap, where nothing is as it first appears.
And lurking behind the lies Catherine has been told are secrets more deadly and devastating than anything her imagination can conjure …‘

The Victorians were really keen on microcosm paintings, panoramic views of their society crammed full of faces, stories and activity like so many over dressed ants all busying themselves at the same time. William Powell Frith’s amazing sprawling The Derby Day and The Railway Station are perfect examples of this particularly Victorian genre, where the viewer is invited to greedily observe everything, their eyes scanning the myriad of different faces, pausing here and there to ponder what their story is.

In recent years, the ‘Victoriana’ novel has gained popularity and almost become a genre in its own right. Like the microcosm paintings of Frith, there are rules to this genre, certain period set pieces that must be included, descriptions and observations of a more contemporary nature that must be made and they are invariably populated by a vast cast of characters, mostly incidental but who must be described in great and lurid detail.

The Pleasures of Men by Kate Williams is one such book. I was very much looking forward to reading it, anticipating something akin to Michel Faber’s brilliant The Crimson Petal and the White. Now, The Pleasures of Men is very similar to The Crimson Petal but only in so far as most other ‘Victoriana’ novels are – there’s the usual description of dirt, decay and damp. The wails of unfortunate babies follow the characters wherever they venture. People drink gin like it’s about to run out. There’s an awful lot of prostitutes.

There are other similarities – like Faber’s Sugar, Catherine, the heroine of The Pleasures of Men is damaged by her past and keen on feverishly writing down fantasies that involve violence, death, murder and destruction. Fascinated by a serial killer, known as The Man of Crows, she writes lurid accounts of his murders and eventually decides to venture out into the city at night to walk in his footsteps, believing herself ‘protected’ by the evil that she has always been told dwells inside her.

This was a complex and often deeply unpleasant book. I’ve seen complaints that it is over written and I’d be inclined to agree with that assessment but I believe that it is intentionally so. The writing is full blown, lavish, feverish and often over wrought, creating a really horrible, almost suffocatingly intense atmosphere of heat, dust and dirt as observed by a sexually obsessed, disturbed Victorian teenager who has spent time in a lunatic asylum.

The narrowness of a young Victorian girl’s life is well described here – not just that of Catherine with her peculiar circumstances but those of her over dressed acquaintances, who sexually torment their maids and fantasise about serial killers while slyly keeping watch for suitable young men.

At times though, the plot, which when you think about it isn’t really all that complicated (you’ll be disappointed when you discover the identity of the Man of Crows) veers not so much into confusion as into vague slapdashness, almost as if the writer herself lost interest about a hundred pages before the end (which was a bit of a damp squib all things considered) and decided that she didn’t care who the Man of Crows was or who he murdered any more. I can’t blame her for that – I didn’t really care either.

Would I recommend this book? Well, yes and no. If you are in the mood for a dip into the revolting iniquity of London’s east end in the 1840s and have a thing for Victorian asylums and the deranged meanderings of cooped up young girls as well as splendid Victorian set pieces like visits to pie shops, trips to gin dens and a splendidly disastrous visit to the vaudeville theatre then you’ll almost certainly love this. Otherwise you’ll probably start to feel a bit queasy and long for something a bit less histrionic.

Personally, although I did, I think, rather enjoy myself while reading it (and also feel slightly alarmed as I have written about similar themes in my own Victorian effort), I went off and had a long bath when I’d finished reading and splashed the water about a bit while muttering ‘A MILLION POUND ADVANCE? A. MILLION. POUNDS?’ over and over again until I felt like booking myself in for a nice restorative stay at Catherine’s lunatic asylum, the lovely sounding Lavenderfields.

Having said that, I fully expect this to be made into a film at some point in the near future…

Ps. Where is the woman’s right hand in the cover photograph? Haha, now that I have made you look, you will never be able to UNSEE.

Inside Christ Church, Spitalfields

13 Jan

I’ve written about Christ Church, Spitalfields before but couldn’t resist writing about it again as it is such a stunning building and people don’t often seem to go inside to appreciate just how beautiful and harmonious the interior is.

Christ Church was built between 1714 and 1729 by Nicholas Hawksmoor and I think displays his genius more than any of his other constructions. It looms ominously over the dark Victorian buildings that surround it and dominates the Spitalfields area.

It is of course well known as a central location from the infamous Ripper murders of Autumn 1888, which, bar one, took place in the streets around the church. Fans of the book and film From Hell will recognise it as the classically austere white church beside the Ten Bells pub, where the victims allegedly drank and tried to attract punters. In those days it was a magnet for the prostitutes, dispossessed and hopeless of the area, who congregated on its white steps, which overlook Commercial Street.

More recently, the church has been the object of an amazing restoration project and has now been revealed in all of its glory. I was literally dumbstruck with admiration and awe when I stepped inside for the first time, the noise and bustle of busy Commercial Street fading away to a distant buzz as I walked around its light filled, luminous and serene space.

We’re planning to have a vow renewal ceremony on our fifth wedding anniversary this year, and I really want to have it at Christ Church. My great great great grandfather was married in Christ Church but they only let people whose parents or grandparents were married there have weddings there, alas.

All of the photographs in this post were taken by myself. I hope you enjoy them!

A quick visit to the Ten Bells, Spitalfields

12 Jan

The Ten Bells is right next to Christ Church in Spitalfields and directly opposite the entrance to the now trendy and bustling Spitalfields Market. There has been a pub on the corner of Fornier Street and Commercial Street since 1752, but the Ten Bells as we know it now has only been in existence since Victorian times, when it served the locals of Spitalfields and the porters and clientele of the market over the road.

The pub has an unsavoury reputation thanks to its connections to the Jack the Ripper case as two of the victims, Annie Chapman and Mary Jane Kelly are known to have drunk there, although obviously it is not known if Jack the Ripper himself was a customer.

The Ten Bells was briefly known as The Jack the Ripper between 1976 and 1988, but the brewery eventually forced into changing the name back to the original again after women’s groups, quite rightly, argued that a notorious murderer of women should not be commemorated by having pubs named after him.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the Ten Bells over the years. I still remember the very first time I went there: it was 2002 and I was going out with someone who lived in Wapping. It didn’t take me long to persuade him to walk with me up to Whitechapel at night so that I could poke around the murder sites and see Spitalfields for myself. He spent the entire evening worrying about being mugged or worse, but I was in love with the area from the first moment that I set foot in it. I knew that I would feel at home anyway, of course as my family came from there and I had always felt a deep link to the East End of London but I wasn’t prepared for quite how much I would love it.

I like to imagine my ancestors drinking there and the Truman’s sign never fails to make me smile as my great grandfather was a manager at their Brick Lane brewery in the last century. While HIS grandfather was a H Division police sergeant living in the Whitechapel police station during the Ripper investigation in 1888.

The first time we went to the Ten Bells, by now a thriving, dimly lit and hipster cool bar filled with a curious mix of cool young things and awkward looking tourists in anoraks, I found it unbearable though – the music, chatter and laughter were all too loud and I found myself needing to leave almost immediately, disappointed that it wasn’t at all how I expected it to be. To make matters worse, while we were standing by the door, I became convinced that I could feel someone put their hands on my waist, only to look around and realise that there was no one standing anywhere near me. Spooky!

And then to make matters even worse, my boyfriend then went a bit mad when we got back to his flat and claimed that voices in his head were telling him to hurt me. We didn’t last very long, as you can imagine. Actually, that’s not true as actually I almost ended up married to him, until merciful, blessed fate intervened.

After this, I made occasional forays into the Ten Bells but was always quickly forced out by the noise and hubbub and, I don’t know, a feeling of pervasive, intense gloom. I persevere though and on the last visit miraculously got a table at which to drink our gin. Even more miraculously, it was beside the window so we had an amazing view up and out at Christ Church looming over us. My companion told me that I looked somewhat wonderful with the flickering candlelight and gloomy looks up at the ominous white church, but I expect I just looked slightly crazed. It has that effect, you see. Or maybe it’s just the GIN.

I’ve noticed that the new owner has given it a face lift, which is probably much needed but I do miss the essential seediness. There’s a cool pop up restaurant in the top floor function room at the moment, the outside is freshly painted and, crikey, is that an awning as well? I have my own plans involving the Ten Bells, but I don’t want to jinx them by talking about them here…

The Ten Bells, 84 Commercial Street, Whitechapel, E1 6LY. One of the finest and most iconic pubs in London.

The 9th November 1888

9 Nov

Several weeks had passed since the dreadful events of the 30th September when both Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes had met their dismal deaths at the hands of either two separate killers or the same deranged madman. Their murders had not been forgotten but after the first few weeks of fevered terror and speculation, a calm had fallen upon the streets of Whitechapel and people were beginning to go about their lives as normal again.

Since embarking on this series of posts marking the victims of Jack the Ripper, I’ve become more conscious of the passing of time as it must have seemed to the people of 1888 Spitalfields as the days lengthened into weeks and then into a whole month. They must have felt just about able to heave a collective sigh of relief that the ordeal was all over when the morning of the 9th November broke and everything fell apart again.

It was a clear, cold morning and I can imagine Thomas Bowyer, a lackey sent by the well known local landlord McCarthy to collect a rent arrears from a mean lodging in Miller’s Court breathing into his cupped hands to warm them and shielding his eyes against the low winter sun as he hurried along, the wet leaves slipping beneath his boots. It was 10.45 in the morning and the streets would have been buzzing with activity and excitement as the people of the East End, always up for a party, prepared for the Lord Mayor’s Show, which was due to take place later that day.

The young woman who lived in the room owed over six weeks rent, around 27 shillings, and McCarthy, who had been uncharacteristically lenient until now, was determined to collect. It’s not known why McCarthy was willing to let her go for so long without paying rent – the girl, who was known variously as Mary Anne, Mary Jane, Marie Jeanette, Emma or Lizzie depending, presumably, on who asked, was said to be of an attractive appearance with a fresh, clear complexion, thick auburn hair and with a friendly, good natured manner so it may be that her landlord had something of a soft spot for her.

Until quite recently she had not been living alone but her boyfriend, Joe, who had taken the room with her in the first place, had moved out after she had returned to prostitution against his wishes and had started allowing her friends to stay in their home. Joe had not entirely abandoned her though and still continued to visit and probably financially assist her to some degree.

Bowyer would have known all of this as Mary Jane was well known in the Dorset Street area of Whitechapel and was frequently to be seen standing outside the Ten Bells pub beside the ominous, looming Christ Church next door or walking the streets with her friends. The slum landlords of the East End weren’t charities though and the situation couldn’t be left to go on forever, no matter how kindly they felt towards the tenant.

The alleyway that led to Miller’s Court ran off the mean, notorious Dorset Street, which was known to be a local hot bed of crime and iniquity, a place so fearsome that the local police (including my ancestor, PS David Lee!) had to go in pairs when they were forced to go there, so terrifying and volatile were the inhabitants. Bowyer would have been well used to it thanks to his work for McCarthy but it still can’t have been a pleasant vicinity to visit and he would doubtless have hurried along, avoiding eye contact until he reached the archway that led down to Miller’s Court.

Mary Jane Kelly’s residence was number 13: a roughly twelve feet square room, meanly furnished with a pine bed, a couple of tables, some chairs and a wash stand. It wasn’t much but in comparison to many of her peers in Spitalfields, Mary Jane, a woman without proper means of supporting herself, an erratic lifestyle and a liking for gin was living in relative comfort.

Bowyer knocked on the door, then when there was no response, he went around to the windows that overlooked the water pump at the rear of the yard. One of the window panes had been broken for a while and either Mary Jane or Joe had effected a makeshift repair by shoving a piece of cloth into the gap. Bowyer poked this out then pulled aside the thin threadbare curtains, allowing the bright November sunlight to shimmer into the grubby bedsit.

What he saw when the gloom had dissipated enough for him to be able to see inside, must have terrified him and I can imagine him swiftly recoiling then scrubbing his eyes with his fingers before he turned and fled back to McCarthy to tell him that actually, he wouldn’t be getting his rent from Miss Kelly after all, not that day or any other day.

Take a look at this painting, ‘The Ninth of November 1888′ by William Logsdail, which depicts the Lord Mayor’s procession through the streets of London. Despite the glitz and splendour of the procession’s regalia, there is something very gloomy and menacing about this painting with the dark, wet streets, the sombre clothes of the crowd and the foreboding skies above.

It’s almost as though the artist wanted to evoke the fact that at 1.30pm only a few miles away, in a squalid, dank hovel in Whitechapel, the police, who had been loitering fearfully, waiting for both direction and a requested team of bloodhounds in the yard of Miller’s Court since their arrival just after 11am, had just broken into the room of Mary Kelly and were recoiling, their hands over their mouths as they encountered her body, lying splayed in a state of revolting, pitiful mutilation on her bed. While looking at the painting, you can almost sense the panicked, shocked whisper running through the ragged crowd – ‘There’s been another one in Spitalfields. A young Irish girl. She was left in pieces this time…’ while all the while the drums beat out a solemn, funereal rhythm as the Lord Mayor’s procession passes slowly by…

RIP Mary or whoever you were. Since 1988, I have had a vigil of sorts every year on the night of the 8th/9th November in the memory of you and your fellow victims and will never forget any of you.

The Double Event – 30th September 1888

30 Sep

 

On the night of the 29th September 1888, Elisabeth Stride, a slight woman with grey eyes and curling brown hair walked the streets of Whitechapel in search of clients. Unlike the flashy Victorian prostitutes of popular imagining, she was dressed soberly and rather shabbily in a black jacket and skirt and black crepe bonnet, accessorized with a posy of red roses and ferns.

She was far from home, having been born Elisabeth Gustafsdotter in November 1843 near Gothenburg in Sweden. As a teenager she had worked in domestic service before becoming a prostitute in her early twenties. Poor Elisabeth became pregnant as a young woman but delivered a stillborn child, probably as the result of a venereal disease picked up from one of her clients.

In 1866, she moved to London in order to escape her past and start afresh and after a period as a maid Elisabeth married a ship’s carpenter called John Thomas Stride, who was thirteen years her senior. For a while the couple ran a coffee shop in Poplar before separating in 1877, whereupon Elisabeth entered the local workhouse. The couple had an off/on relationship after this but had finally ended their marriage by 1881 and by 1885, she was living with a labourer called Michael Kidney with whom she had a very unstable and occasionally violent relationship, fuelled by her alcoholism which led to several appearances in the dock for drunken and disorderly behaviour.

Her husband died of TB in October 1884, but it seems that Elisabeth had been in the habit of telling people that he and two of their fictitious nine children had been drowned in 1878 in the sinking of the Princess Alice into the Thames. There’s nothing unusual about this – the lives of the fallen women of Whitechapel were so awful and dreary that they often made up stories to make themselves appear more interesting and also in the hopes it might make their clients cough up a few more pennies out of pity.

On the evening of the 29th September, Elisabeth left her mean lodgings on the notoriously dreadful Flower and Dean Street and went in search of clients. A witness later claimed to see her at 11pm near Berner Street with a man in a bowler hat and then she was spotted again forty five minutes later with another man, this time wearing a peaked cap. Then at 12.35, a PC William Smith saw her on Berner’s Street, standing opposite a working men’s club with a man in a felt hard hat.

Where would Ripperology be without the various types of Victorian male headgear?

Less than half an hour after this last sighting, at around 1am,  Elisabeth’s body was discovered by the steward of the men’s club in the next door Dutfield’s Yard when he led his horse and trap inside and almost tripped over her as she lay, her throat cut, on the cobbles.

Later, a witness, Israel Schwartz would come forward to say that he saw Elisabeth being attacked at the yard’s entrance by a man who threw her roughly to the ground. Clearly she had had a busy night but no money was found on her body, which adds to the possibility that the unfortunate Elisabeth was not actually murdered by Jack the Ripper but by someone else, who escaped justice thanks to the hysteria and panic surrounding the Ripper case in 1888.

At 8.30pm on the 29th September 1888, Catherine Eddowes, a short auburn haired woman who was known for her hot temper and loud, ready laughter was discovered lying drunk on Aldgate High Street by PC Louis Robinson, who arrested her and took her to Bishopsgate Police Station where she was held until 1am, when she was considered sober enough to be released onto the streets again, just as not far away, Elisabeth Stride’s body was being discovered.

Like all of the Ripper’s victims, Catherine had had a chequered past having been born in Wolverhampton in April 1842 then moving to London as an infant before going back up north again as a teenager to work as a tin plate stamper. This job doesn’t seem to have lasted long before Eddowes was sacked and moved in with an ex soldier Thomas Conway, with whom she had three children after they moved down to London together.

In what is now becoming a familiar tale, Eddowes became an alcoholic and she and Conway split up in 1880. Catherine left the family home while her ex boyfriend changed his and the children’s surname so that she wouldn’t be able to find them. Within a year she was living with a new man, John Kelly at a lodging house on Flower and Dean Street, just down the road from Elisabeth Stride and here she made a living of sorts from prostitution and whatever she could find.

In the summer of 1888, she and John Kelly left London to spend the hot months hop picking in the Kent countryside but didn’t manage to hang on to their wages for very long so that on the 29th September, they were forced to literally split their last sixpence and go their separate ways until things improved. Catherine had two pence, enough for her lodging for the night but had presumably spent the evening working so that she had enough money to be sufficiently drunk to be drunk and disorderly on Aldgate High Street.

When Eddowes was released from Bishopsgate Police Station in the early hours of the next morning she gave her name as Mary Ann Kelly and disappeared into the night, choosing not to return to Flower and Dean Street but instead return to Aldgate, possibly in search either of more booze or a few more clients for the night.

She was last seen alive at 1.35am by three men who were leaving a club together on Duke Street and saw her standing at the entrance to Church Passage, which led from Duke Street down to Mitre Square. Her horribly mutilated body was discovered ten minutes later at around 1.45am by the beat police officer, PC Edward Watkins who had walked through the square at 1.33am and seen nothing meaning that the unfortunate woman had been killed in the space of just ten minutes before the killer made his escape…

18 Folgate Street, Spitalfields

6 Jul

‘Aut Visum Aut Non!’ – You either see it or you don’t. (The motto of 18 Folgate Street)

As I may have mentioned a few times before, Spitalfields is the place that I feel most comfortable, happy and at home and of course no one who is interested in the area and its richly diverse history can fail to visit the former home of Dennis Severs at 18 Folgate Street, which serves as an echoing monument to the past.

To briefly explain, Californian artist Dennis Severs bought the then dilapidated 18 Folgate Street in 1979 and lived there until his death in December 1999, making it his project to transform the house into a living time capsule of various different periods in the district’s history with each room as you travel from the bowels of the house to the attics above transformed into a multi layered and sensuous set evoking a whole host of memories and stories.

Although I had seen photographs of the Marie Celeste like interior with its unmade beds, abandoned meals, spilled tea and mess of crumbling clay pipes and everyday detritus in the fireplaces, I didn’t really know what to expect as I turned off busy Commercial Street and headed down narrow Folgate Street to number 18.

Just as I was beginning to wonder if I had accidentally walked past the house, I spied some flaming torches outside and a notice asking visitors to ring the bell discreetly stuck to the outside of the door. Embarrassingly, I thought the bell was a push one and it took a few moments of loitering on the doorstep to realise that it was an old fashioned Pull Out Then Let It Go business, which makes sense of course!

We were greeted very warmly by the curator and led inside to begin our tour. Although the website suggests that this is not a place to take children, I decided to take F along with me as he is very keen on history and I thought he would really enjoy the visit. I was really pleased when the lovely curator immediately directed all of his comments to F, shook his hand and even crouched down to his eye level to talk to him. It’s not a place to take boisterous, noisy children but a quiet, thoughtful child who can be trusted to Look But Not Touch would make excellent company while walking around. F was great although he came away with a LOT of questions about tricorn hats, quills, chamber pots, hair feathers, oysters, tea leaves and the lives of little boys like himself in Georgian times.

At 18 Folgate Street, the visitor is told that they have just interrupted the Jervis family, who are well to do Huguenot silk weavers and who are always one step ahead as you walk through the house, so you can hear and smell their shades but never catch a glimpse of them. It’s like stepping into a ghost story or a fairytale as you creep silently through the house like Goldlilocks in search of a family who remain tantalisingly just out of reach, until you finally realise that they are there the whole time with their murmurings and soft laughter…

The tour began down some rickety stairs in the basement of the building, where there is a small dark and untidy Georgian kitchen with windows that look up onto street level so you can see the legs of modern London gamboling by. Visitors to the house are requested to remain silent at all times so as to listen to the sounds of the house – this is a highly sensory experience that needs to be savoured slowly as you walk around each room, taking in and being inspired by the smells, sounds and sights that surround you.

From the kitchen we went back up the stairs to the rooms on the ground floor and then up the rickety staircase to the rooms above. Each of the ten rooms had its own distinct style, with occasionally overpowering smells that effectively evoked the echoes and stories of the past from the heavily and cloyingly perfumed lady’s bedroom at the front of the house, where the dressing table is scattered with jewels, rouge, powders wrapped in pieces of paper and letters to the room on the first floor which evokes the aftermath of a Hogarthian orgy, complete with strewn oyster shells, spilled wine and the heavy smell of tobacco and dirty men.

As you can expect, there is no electric light inside the building so each room is lit only by flickering candle light that gives the house a dimly lit, occasionally eye smartingly sooty ambience that more accurately takes you back to the past than the more sterile reconstructions you may find in museums. It’s like stepping into a painting and finding that what lies behind the canvas is so much more than you could ever have imagined.

I felt extraordinarily sad when we had descended the stairs for the last time and found ourselves back on Folgate Street again, surrounded by the sirens, buzz and chatter of the modern city. I had high expectations of 18 Folgate Street, but actually it was so much better and more magical than I could ever have imagined and I came away extremely inspired by what I had just experienced. In fact I can’t remember the last time I felt so inspired. I’m trying not to give too much away in this post by the way, as I think this is something very, very special that you all deserve to discover properly for yourselves and I really do encourage you to visit if you are in the vicinity when it is open.

Thank you so much to Mick and David for letting me visit and for your amazing hospitality. I’m still in awe of what Dennis Severs achieved and really thankful that he so generously shared his utterly incredible and bewitching vision with us all. From now on I won’t be considering a visit to London complete without a detour to this enchanted corner.

You can find out more about visiting 18 Folgate Street at their website.

All photographs are posted by permission of the Dennis Severs’ House.

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