The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

by Hallie Rubenhold

While the wealthy enjoyed the fine weather from beneath their parasols and from under the trees of their suburban villas, the homeless and poor made use of it by creating an open-air encampment in Trafalgar Square.

A demonstration was planned for the 13th of the month. Its pretext was to demand the release of Irish MP William O’Brien from prison, but the grievances expressed by the protestors extended far beyond this particular cause célèbre. Over forty thousand men and women gathered to make their point. They were greeted by two thousand police, as well as the Queen’s Life Guard and the Grenadier Guards. The clashes began almost immediately and the police fell on the protestors with their truncheons. Despite pleas for a peaceful demonstration, many of the participants had come equipped with lead pipes, knives, hammers and brick bats; forty of the protestors were arrested, more than two hundred were injured in the riot and at least two were killed. Unfortunately, Bloody Sunday, as it came to be known, did not signal the end of the conflicts.

The Whitechapel-based H-Division of the Metropolitan Police did the best they could with their resources, but having never before faced a murder case of this scale and magnitude, they quickly found themselves overwhelmed.

The inevitable insertion of the press between the ongoing police investigation and an East End population living in a state of heightened alert proved explosive. In the absence of any conclusive

The throbbing dark heart at the centre of the district was Spitalfields. Here, near to the fruit and vegetable market and the soaring white spire of Christ Church, were situated some of the worst streets and accommodation in the area, if not in all of London. Dorset Street, Thrawl Street, Flower and Dean Street, and the smaller thoroughfares contiguous to them, were feared even by the police. Lined primarily with cheap, vice-riddled lodging houses (or ‘doss houses’), and decrepit dwellings whose damp, crumbling interiors had been divided into individual ‘furnished rooms’ for let, these streets and their desperate inhabitants became the embodiment of all that was rotten in England.

Vermin-infested rooms, eight by eight feet in size with broken windows, were inhabited by entire families.

Health inspectors had found five children sharing a bed alongside a dead sibling awaiting burial.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the common lodging houses, which offered shelter to those too poor to even afford a ‘furnished room’.

In Whitechapel alone there were 233 common lodging houses, which accommodated an estimated 8,530 people without homes.

Whitechapel was 1.44km squared. that's insane

importantly, he qualified this statement by

Much like the inhabitants of Whitechapel’s common lodging houses, the victims of Jack the Ripper and their lives have become entangled in a web of assumptions, rumour and unfounded speculation. The spinning of these strands began over 130 years ago and, remarkably, has been left virtually undisturbed and unchallenged for all of this time.

Jack the Ripper killed prostitutes, or so it has always been believed, but there is no hard evidence to suggest that three of his five victims were prostitutes at all. As soon as the bodies were discovered in dark yards or streets, the police assumed that they were prostitutes and that they had been killed by a maniac who had lured them to these places for sex. There is and never was any proof of this either. On the contrary, it was ascertained in the course of the coroners’ inquests that Jack the Ripper never had sex with his victims.

there were no signs of struggle and the killings appear to have taken place in complete silence. No one in the vicinity heard any screams. The autopsies concluded that all of the women were killed while in reclining positions. In at least three of the cases, the victims were known to sleep on the street and on the nights they were killed did not have money for a lodging house.

However, the police were so committed to their theories about the killer’s choice of victims that they failed to conclude the obvious: that the...

Although a handful of police records exist, the coroners’ inquests provide most of what is known about the actual crimes and the victims. Unfortunately, in three of the five cases, the official documentation from these inquests is missing.

Parents, children, siblings and extended family dressed, washed, engaged in sex and, if there were no ‘adjacent conveniences’, defecated in front of one another. As one family member prepared a meal, a sick child with a raging fever might be vomiting into a chamber pot beside them, while a parent or sibling stood by half-naked, changing their clothes. Husbands and wives made future children while lying beside present ones. Little about the human condition in its most basic form could be concealed.

As many of these buildings did not have cesspools, the contents of emptied chamber pots ‘ran into the courts or streets where they remained until a shower of rain washed them into the gutters’.7 Unsurprisingly, deadly outbreaks of cholera, typhus and what medical inspectors described broadly as ‘fever’ were rife, especially in the warmer months.

At a time when working men were not expected to undertake the sole care of small children, it is a testament to Edward Walker’s affection for his family that he persisted in doing so. Rather than leaving his sons and daughter with relations or even committing them to the care of the local workhouse, Walker was determined to give them a home.

Ultimately, George Peabody’s gift of £150,000 grew to £500,000, a sum worth roughly £45.5 million today. His generosity humbled the British public, helped to heal a rift in Anglo-American relations, and prompted a personal letter of gratitude from Queen Victoria. It also came to assist over thirty thousand Londoners out of the slums.

One of the workhouse’s primary functions was to humiliate those who were forced to rely upon it.

Upon entering, families were divided up by gender and made to live in separate wings. Very young children were allowed to remain with their mothers, but those over seven were placed into the workhouse school and isolated from their parents.

All new inmates were stripped of their clothing and whatever personal belongings they possessed. They were then required to enter a communal bath and scrub themselves in water that had been used by every other person who had been admitted that day.

Within labouring communities, the social stigma of having spent time at the workhouse was so great that many would rather beg, sleep rough or enter into prostitution than place themselves at the mercy of the local parish union.

While a man could divorce his wife for a sexual liaison outside the marital bed, a woman had to prove her husband was guilty of adultery in addition to another crime, such as incest, rape or cruelty.

The reality was that most working-class women who wished to end their marriages had no choice other than to attempt to secure a type of unofficial separation with the assistance of the workhouse

The consequences of separation in the nineteenth century were judged by many to be ‘a living death’, for while the law sanctioned a split between a married couple, it never permitted them to move their lives beyond that. Any future relationships would always be considered adulterous, while any children of those unions would be regarded as illegitimate.

become a permanent one. Servants and masters were not always compatible

By the end of the century, anyone who entered a casual ward was made to spend two nights on the grubby beds for a full day’s labour in between, picking oakum, undertaking cleaning jobs or breaking stones. If the superintendent believed an inmate wasn’t working hard enough for their keep, they could be detained.

Rough sleepers may have felt invisible to ‘respectable society’, but they filled London in their numbers. In 1887 the estimate of those sleeping in Trafalgar Square varied between ‘more than two hundred’ and ‘six hundred’ each night.

As women who lived without male protection or a roof over their heads were considered outcasts, and outcasts were regarded as defective women, so it followed that outcasts were also morally corrupt and sexually impure. It was generally accepted without question by all levels of society that such women would do anything for food and a bed. Because they were desperate they were there to be used. In some cases, their permission needn’t even be solicited.

Higgs was travelling with a female companion, but she found herself being warned by other women that if she tramped for any length of time it was necessary ‘to take up with a fellow’.14 Many women did, and therefore accepted the sexual advances of other vagrants in order to seal a relationship. Their ‘free’ behaviour was then used as further proof to reinforce the belief held by the police and the press that ‘all vagrant women were prostitutes’.

Misinformation took root in the public consciousness as readily as it does today.

‘I have had my lodging money three times today and I have spent it,’ she said to Holland with drunken remorse, but for Polly, this predicament would hardly have been a new one.

two possibilities were forwarded: the first was that the murder was committed by a ‘high-rip gang’, or group who extorted money from prostitutes; the second, which later gained more traction, was that a lone ‘prostitute killer’ was behind the crime. In both cases everyone was certain, without so much as a single shred of actual evidence to reinforce their convictions, that Polly Nichols was a prostitute.

In the span of only three weeks, death had carried away four of the Smiths’ six children. The enormity of such a tragedy is almost inconceivable to modern, Western sensibilities, particularly as their lives might have been spared had they lived in an era of antibiotics.

Ultimately, Annie, like so many addicts, chose a life without those she loved, rather than a life without the substance she craved.

The true tragedy of Annie’s situation is that, unlike the majority of women by whom she was surrounded, she needn’t have lived in such reduced circumstances on ‘the worst street in London’. Jack Sievey would have brought in an income, and failing that, they could always rely on her 10 shillings a week, which would have paid for a better room elsewhere, as well as for food and coal. Instead it paid for alcohol – at least until December 1886.

Contrary to the romanticized images of the Ripper’s victims, she never ‘walked the streets’ in a low bodice and rouged cheeks casting provocative glances from beneath the gas lamps. She never belonged to a brothel or had a pimp. Nor is there any evidence she was arrested or even cautioned for her behaviour.

Just as they had with Polly Nichols’s case, the authorities began their inquiry from a fixed position: that Annie must be a prostitute, a stance which from thereon guided the direction of their investigation, as well as the attitudes and interrogations of the coroner’s court.

Even Charles Warren in his police order had recognized the difficulties in distinguishing a prostitute and her behaviour from that of other poor, working-class women. This was and remains especially the case when the context of a woman’s actions, as well as her own voice, are completely absent from the story.

As the Daily Mail pointed out, ‘No criminal centre is wholly criminal, and to represent even the lodging houses of Dorset Street as wholly inhabited by the utterly depraved would be wrong.’

Twenty-nine Hanbury Street

Of the many tragedies which befell Annie Chapman in the final years of her life, perhaps one of the most poignant was that she needn’t have been on the streets on that night, or on any other. Instead, she might have lain in a bed in her mother’s house, or rested in her sisters’ care, on the other side of London. She might have been treated for tuberculosis; she might have been comforted by the embraces of her children. At every turn there had been a hand reaching to pull her from the abyss, but the counter-tug of addiction was more forceful, and the grip of shame just as strong. It was this that pulled her under, that had extinguished her hope and then her life many years earlier. What her murderer claimed on that night was simply all that remained of what the drink had left behind.

At the end of March, when the wind was still sharp with ice, Elisabeth was ordered to appear at the first of what would become regular examinations of her genitalia by a surgeon at the police inspection house.

The rules that would govern her daily life would have been explained to her. She must attend the inspection house twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, or face arrest and a fine or three nights in prison on rations of bread and water. She would not be permitted outdoors after eleven at night. She was required to ‘conduct a quiet and silent life’, which assumed she was a prostitute and solicited openly. Regulations prohibited her from loitering in the windows or doorway of where she lived and from ‘calling out to passers-by’. She was required to ‘dress in a decent way when appearing in public’ and ‘not to call attention to herself’. The humiliation that women must have experienced at being lectured in such a way, especially if they did not associate themselves with the sex trade, or if their crimes were not public ones, but a rape or a private indiscretion with a lover, must have been overwhelming.

So as to avoid giving offence to the sensibilities of Gothenburg’s respectable citizens passing along Östra Hamngatan, all suspected and known ‘public women’ were asked to enter the police building through a concealed passage at the back. Once inside, they were required to strip naked and form a queue. Sometimes, if the wait was a long one, they were ordered to stand in the outdoor courtyard, shivering in the cold, as the uniformed officers stood over them. For a young woman who had been raised in a religious community and drilled in her catechism, the indignity of this experience would have been shocking.

The first and most traditional involved the ingestion of mercury, as well as its topical application to chancres and lesions. The second and more modern theory favoured the use of other metals – gold, silver, copper – as well as bromine, iodine and nitric acid to be taken internally or applied in ointments. Both were hazardous to the health of the patient.

On 21 April she gave birth to a stillborn girl at seven months while under lock and key at the Kurhuset.

To have been publicly denounced as a whore, to have suffered the indignity of police examinations, to have discovered that she carried a potentially deadly and disfiguring disease, to have been incarcerated and subjected to excruciating medical procedures, to have suffered a miscarriage in a hostile environment and then to have been released onto the street with no relations to whom she could turn must surely have scarred her.

It was widely held that circumstance did not induce women into prostitution but, rather, it was a personal choice.