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

by Hallie Rubenhold

Polly bemoaned the fact that she had no money and appeared anxious that she had to “make up the amount for her lodgings,” though, as she could barely walk, any such undertaking did not seem likely.

“I have had my lodging money three times today and I have spent it,”

Polly Nichols was obviously out soliciting that night, because she, like every other woman, regardless of her age, who moved between the lodging houses, the casual wards, and the bed she made in a dingy corner of an alley, was a prostitute.

Whichever scenario a person might favor, everyone was certain, without so much as a single shred of actual evidence to reinforce their convictions, that Polly Nichols was a prostitute.

I’ll soon get my doss money, see what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now”—included

At that hour, Polly would know that her hopes of begging money for her doss were slim. With her head spinning from drink and exhaustion, she wandered, stumbling through the network of East End streets. She steadied herself against walls and the sides of buildings, feeling her way through the night, groping for a place that might become a bed. Polly would have learned how to locate such a spot—somewhere with a step or a slightly recessed doorway. The cavities beneath stairs, the landings in communal buildings, the semiprivate yards that lay just beyond unlocked gates, were the better places to attempt slumber.

Slight flickers of light from a window or a distant lamp would have guided her down Buck’s Row.

Polly had been born among printing shops and presses, against the very backdrop where some of the most famous Victorian stories were fabricated. In death she would become as legendary as the Artful Dodger, Fagin, or even Oliver Twist, the truth of her life as entangled with the imaginary as theirs. She had been brought into the world along the Street of Ink, and it is to there, riding on its column inches, its illustrated plates, its rumor and scandal, that she would return: a name in print.

He recognized her small, delicate features and high cheekbones. Her gray eyes, though vacant now, were familiar to him, as was her brown hair, which since they had last met had become streaked with silver.

Ruth Chapman was among them. Little is known about this Sussex-born young woman,

the date of his nuptials was backdated by two years on his military records. Anyone who inquired would learn that George and Ruth’s wedding had taken place in the same month and year as that of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

In some barracks large barrels were used as communal chamber pots; these same receptacles were emptied and then used for bathing.

Many believed that children might acquire habits of “idleness and vice” there; girls in particular were to be shielded from “the more masculine habits of drinking and swearing.”

Considering the instructional standards of the first half of the Victorian era, these children received a fairly rigorous education.

The small ones were taught spelling, reading, and singing, a curriculum that would expand to include lessons in writing, diction, grammar, English history, geography, arithmetic, and algebra. Under such a regimen, Annie would have received an education far superior to that of most of her working-class peers, both male and female. As a girl, she would also benefit from afternoon lessons in “industry”—specifically, in every type of needlework, from embroidery to making clothes, crocheting, and knitting.

Over the course of George’s service with his regiment, from the 1840s through the early 1860s, the family lived at no fewer than twelve addresses between London and Windsor.

Annie’s girlhood was spent between Knightsbridge, with its elegant stucco-fronted villas, and Windsor, in the shadow of the royal family’s residence.

When Ruth and her children stepped out from the door of one of their temporary homes, they walked along clean, broad, well-lit streets, comparatively free from signs of want.

From a young age, Annie would have been taught to take pride in her father’s position and to adopt his love of queen and country as her own.

How Annie stood and spoke and comported herself, while not making her appear privileged, would have demonstrated that she understood the rules of appropriate conduct and was aware of her place within her surroundings. These skills and discernment would remain with her into adulthood, so that she always gave the impression of having come from a good family.

Yet Annie also experienced life as a child of the working class. Despite the privileges of her father’s p...

Over the span of only three weeks, death had claimed four of the Smiths’ six children.

Annie grew into a teenage girl with dark, wavy brown hair and an intense blue-eyed stare.

Annie would have been nearing her fifteenth birthday. Traditionally this was considered the age when a girl’s education was complete and she would be expected to start earning a full-time wage.

Less than an hour later, when George had still not appeared, the landlady went upstairs and, much to her horror, discovered Leyland’s valet “with his throat cut, in a shocking manner, with a razor lying by him covered with blood.” George was dead by the time he was found, on the floor, “with only his shirt and drawers on.”

“suicide by cutting his throat with a razor while labouring under temporary insanity.”12 There was also the suggestion that George had been drinking, a problem to which he had succumbed quite seriously since leaving the army.

The pension to which George had been entitled expired with his death; in the mid-nineteenth century the law did not permit a widow to make a claim on behalf of a deceased husband.

the typical coachman boasted that his position meant that his spouse did not have to work; coachmen could “keep [their] wives too respectable for that.”

It was not until 1890 that he was elected an MP for Windsor, and nine years later was granted a baronetcy by Queen Victoria.

Additionally, it boasted more than “230 acres of old park and forest,” home to “gigantic oaks, stately beech, elm, fir and Californian redwood.”

downstairs service area large enough to accommodate a staff of thirty servants.

Upon assuming his position, John became the master of two grooms, four stablemen, and a second coachman. The handling of the stable’s accounts, the ordering of feed, supplies, and equipment, also fell into his charge. As Barry was one of the wealthiest and most prominent landowners in the area, John’s duty was to represent him from atop his employer’s highly polished carriage, in a tall hat and shining boots, and with a clean-shaven face.

For Annie, accustomed to life in London’s mews, this was a significant improvement. The coachman’s cottage was a house on an entirely different scale. It included a sitting room or formal parlor, and a living room, where the family would dine and spend most of their time, as well as a kitchen, a scullery, a wash house, a larder, and three bedrooms.

Once the Chapmans had settled in, they sought to place nine-year-old Emily Ruth in “a highly respectable” young ladies’ school in Windsor.

Annie and her children (when they were not in school) had the use of Francis Tress Barry’s parkland and forests in which to wander and amuse themselves, and should the coachman’s wife wish to visit the shops in Windsor, she could use one of the estate’s fly carriages to convey her into town.

When John, still at his job in Berkshire, was asked to provide his “rank, profession or occupation,” he did not hesitate to describe himself as a “coachman, domestic servant.” Mrs. Chapman, when the same question was posed to her, stated she was “the wife of a stud groom.” It is possible that John’s responsibilities had been extended to include the purchase and breeding of racing stock for Barry, yet Annie’s way of describing herself may point to more grandiose ambitions. The landed gentry venerated stud grooms, the servants who managed a gentleman’s racehorses.

The courses of all of their lives may have ended quite differently had Annie Chapman not been an alcoholic.

Miriam Smith then went on to provide details of how she and her sisters came to sign the abstinence pledge, promising to forgo the use of “fermented spirits.” All but the eldest sister had committed herself to this path. “We tried to persuade the one given to drink to give it up. She was married and in a good position. Over and over again she signed the pledge and tried to keep it. Over and over again she was tempted and fell.”

Miriam suggested that her sister had inherited “the curse” of alcoholism from their father, and that her problem began “when she was quite young.”

Those among them who aspired to a middle-class identity, as Annie did, would attempt to conceal or deny any growing dependency.

For a time, Annie would have been able to hide her addiction within the confines of her home, but her family would have known of it.

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the appearance of “ladies saloon bars” meant that having a “wee nip” in public might also be veiled with respectability.

Keeping Annie away from drink was but one of the challenges the couple faced.

Miriam Smith’s letter to the newspaper revealed that over the course of her sister’s marriage, she gave birth to eight children, though “six of these have been victims to the curse [of alcohol].”

The realization that her drinking was likely to have been behind the suffering of her children may have pushed Annie deeper into despair at her perceived inability to control her impulses.

In Miriam’s letter she made it clear that Annie desperately did want to give up drink, but found it almost impossible. Her sisters had convinced her to commit several times to the pledge; they had prayed for her and with her in her difficulties, but could not get her to adhere to it permanently.

In the following year, Annie’s battle with addiction came to a head. Toward the end of that November, her eldest daughter, twelve-year-old Emily Ruth, began to sicken. When the child’s high temperature gave way to a spreading red rash, Annie would have recalled the signs and symptoms of scarlet fever,

When Emily died on November 26, her mother was not present at her bedside.

At some point prior to that autumn, Annie had begun to acquire a reputation among the local police and the Windsor magistrate for public drunkenness. She had been found wandering between the villages and along the roads from the St. Leonard’s Hill estate. From all accounts, the coachman’s wife did not make for an ugly drunk, but rather a sad, sullen, quiet one, weighed down by heartache. That final week of November her pain would have been unbearable.

An entry of December 9, 1882, in the Spelthorne Sanatorium logbook reads, “Mrs. Chapman arrived—brought by her sister from Windsor.” As Miriam’s account asserted, Annie agreed to enter this “home for the intemperate . . . of her own accord.”