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

by Hallie Rubenhold

But on this occasion he “drank it and came to kiss her before departing. In that kiss the fumes of alcohol were transmitted and all the cravings came back.”

“She went out” and “in less than an hour was a drunken mad woman.”

Francis Barry made it known to his coachman that he would not indulge Mrs. Chapman any longer. John had two choices: remove Annie from his home or face dismissal.

Miriam wrote that her sister told them “she would always keep out of our way” but that “she must and would have the drink.”

There was no obvious reason why Annie, who had spent most of her life between Knightsbridge and the West End of London, would have had any cause or inclination to move to a part of town with which she had no familiarity—unless, of course, she knew of or accompanied someone there.

Although her transgressions were not of a sexual nature, Victorian society conflated the “broken woman” with the “fallen woman.” The woman who had lost her marriage and her home through her moral weakness was viewed with no less abhorrence than the woman who had engaged in extramarital sex. A woman who was “drunk and disorderly,” who embarrassed herself in public, who demonstrated no regard for her appearance, was considered as much of a degenerate as a prostitute.

Annie was only ever known as Sievey’s wife; Annie Sievey or Mrs. Sievey, and on occasion, as “Dark Annie,” on account of her wavy brown hair, now streaked with gray.

When asked about her children, Annie gave mocking answers, saying that she had a son who was unwell and “in hospital” and a daughter “who had joined the circus” or “lived abroad in France.”

she had a mother and sisters with whom “she was not on friendly terms.”

Amelia remarked that in spite of this, her friend remained “a very respectable woman” whom she “never heard use bad language.”

Amelia also described Annie as “straightforward” and “a very clever and industrious little...

Annie and Jack Sievey lived in and around Dorset Street. Although Dorset Street would not be crowned “the worst street in London” until the 1890s, its reputation ...

This sum might have paid for a better room elsewhere, as well as for food and coal. Instead it paid for alcohol—at least until December 1886.

John, she was informed, had fallen gravely ill.

The publican distinctly recalled the visit from what he described as “a wretched looking woman having the appearance of a tramp.” Annie told him that she had “walked down from London” because she had “been told that her husband, who had discontinued sending her ten shillings a week, was ill.” She then hardened her expression and claimed “she had come to Windsor to ascertain if the report was true and not merely an excuse for not sending her the money as usual.”6 The publican pointed her in direction of John’s house—1 Richmond Villas, Grove Road—and “did not see her again.”

Annie’s sister Miriam described his appearance shortly before his premature death at age forty-five: “a white-haired, broken hearted man.” Whether Miriam knew it or not, John too had apparently taken to drinking. According to his death certificate, his demise was on account of “cirrhosis of the liver-ascites and dropsy.”*

When she returned to Dorset Street, she cried as she recounted the details of her ordeal to Amelia.8 Annie would never be the same. “After the death of her husband,” her friend recalled, “she seemed to give way altogether.”

Whether it was on account of losing the extra ten shillings or because Annie had grown morose and mournful, Jack Sievey decided he was done with John Chapman’s widow. In early 1887, he left her to return to Notting Hill.

As Amelia described it, Annie was not happy and was increasingly unwell physically; her life had become “a pitiful case” marked by “drink and despondency . . . hunger and sickness.”

Certainly by 1887 she had begun to suffer from what appears to have been tuberculosis, which, according to George Bagster Phillips, the divisional surgeon of police, had been longstanding and had begun to affect the brain tissue.*

Amelia reported that “She used to do crochet work, make antimacassars, and sell matches and flowers.” Saturdays were spent “selling anything she had” at Stratford Market, a hub for small traders who came fro...

Annie, who was able to read and write,

Miriam wrote that, on occasion, “she used to come to us at home . . . we gave her clothes and tried in every way to win her back, for she was a mere beggar.”

That which the newspapers did not report is that, like Annie, her brother was also an alcoholic, though one who had, at least temporarily, held down a job as a manager in a printer’s warehouse.

The five pence that Annie procured from “her relatives” on September 7, 1888, likely came from Fountaine, who lived nearby, in Clerkenwell (directly opposite St. Bartholomew’s Hospital), rather than from her sisters in Knightsbridge.

According to Timothy Donovan, the deputy keeper there, Annie used to wait for Ted at the corner of Brushfield Street on Saturday, when the couple would go to the pub. He usually remained with Annie until Monday morning, during which time he did what was expected of any Victorian man in the company of a woman—he footed their expenses, which included the cost of Annie’s lodging until at least Tuesday morning.

Only Ted confidently stated that they were two in number—“a wedding ring and a keeper” (an engagement ring), which he claimed was “of a fancy pattern.”

Following “enquiries made amongst women in the same class . . . at public houses in the locality,” the police could find not a single witness who could confirm that she had been among the ranks of those who sold sex.

In impoverished areas like Whitechapel, where little stigma was attached to the sale of sex, a woman’s friends, family, and associates were not bashful about openly identifying her as a prostitute when she genuinely was one.

Evidently paying no heed to Charles Warren’s order of July 19, the police of the H Division simply wrote the word “prostitute” in the space designating a victim’s occupation on forms documenting Annie’s murder. Just as they had with Polly Nichols’s case, the authorities began their inquiry from a fixed position: that Annie must have been a prostitute, a stance that from thereon guided the direction of their investigation, as well as the attitudes and interrogations of the coroner’s court.

According to several publications, Donovan was asked about Annie’s associations with men, as was another witness, Eliza Cooper, who was known to have an antagonistic relationship with Annie and had recently come to blows with her over a borrowed bar of soap.

Annie was seriously, if not terminally, ill with tuberculosis. In addition to tablets, two bottles of medicine and what appear to have been letters of prescription given to her during a visit to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital were recovered from among her belongings after her death.

Elizabeth Allen, a fellow lodger at Crossingham’s, commented, “an eight penny bed” carried “with it greater advantages than those accorded by a four penny . . . doss. The lodgers having the cheaper bed . . . were expected to turn out earlier in the morning.”

On that afternoon, Amelia Palmer spotted her friend “looking very pale” and walking slowly by Christ Church, Spitalfields. Annie confessed that she was feeling ill and thought she might go to the infirmary. Completely penniless, she “had not even had a cup of tea that day.”

“I am too ill to do anything,” Annie answered wearily. When Amelia returned to the spot ten minutes later, she was quite alarmed to see that her friend had not moved. Annie hadn’t a penny and was too sick to earn the sum she so urgently needed for a bed. “It’s no use in my giving way,” she said to Amelia, recognizing the gravity of her situation. “I must pull myself together and go and get some money or I shall have no lodgings.”

It is believed that Annie went to the infirmary at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, but as her name does not appear on the in-patients register, it is likely she was examined by a doctor and sent away.

Elizabeth Allen asserted that Annie only ever had money enough to stay “3 or 4 nights a week” at 35 Dorset Street, the period that she spent with Ted Stanley. Logically, this would imply that Annie had no bed at least three nights out of every week.

“You can find money for your beer, and you can’t find money for your bed,” the deputy keeper is said to have spoken in response to her request. Annie, not quite willing to admit defeat, or perhaps in a show of pride, responded with a sigh: “Keep my bed for me. I shan’t be long.”

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.

Emily, Georgina, and Miriam could not bear to tell their elderly mother that the child she had lost to alcohol had been killed in such a gruesome and dehumanizing way. They smothered their grief as they held the hands of Annie’s two children, who would never know the fate that befell their mother. The pain and humiliation Annie’s sisters suffered as story after story appeared in the papers, calling her a prostitute and describing her degraded life, cannot be imagined.

It was Fountaine who went to identify the torn, bedraggled body of his elder sister and later stood before the coroner. His distress on this occasion was so great that he was hardly able to make his voice audible.

Wolverhampton.

However, the sights along the Grand Union Canal would have kept the children occupied as the barge wound through Birmingham and the industrial landscape of the West Midlands.

Leaving behind the familiar slag heaps and furnaces, the Eddoweses traveled through the unfamiliar scenery of southern England toward the capital, bisecting villages, weaving between farms, passing through green and yellow fields bright with wildflowers, spying ancient churches and country estates as they progressed.

The youngest sibling, Catherine (Kate), born the year before, on April 14, was not old enough to later recall any part of the journey, or even the circumstances that forced her family to leave Wolverhampton in the first place.

Kate, or “Chick,” as her family called her, was scarcely nine months old when the shape of her father’s life began to change.

As the writer C. S. Peel describes, in London, a man could “rent a neat little house of six rooms,” one of which he would probably let out to a lodger, who would pay twenty pounds per year. The children would “probably go to an Endowed school or a British Day [school]. There will be occasional jaunts to [the seaside at] Gravesend or Margate: sound boots, Sunday best.”

With a reliable workingman’s income to support them, George’s two or three children could rise in society.

While a young man lived with his parents and had employment, he might enjoy “comparative prosperity,” a situation that would “continue after marriage until he has two or three children, when poverty will again overtake him.” Most workingmen then entered “a period of poverty that will last perhaps for ten years, ie; until the first child is fourteen and can earn wages.” But Rowntree also noted that “if there are more than three children, it may last longer.”

Although Dowgate was not a boarding school, its pupils undertook a full day of structured learning, seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. in the spring and summer months, and from 9 a.m. during the autumn and winter months. On Sundays they were required to attend no fewer than two church services, usually at St. Paul’s Cathedral, in whose shadow the school stood.