The Real Mary Kelly (4 page)

Although it may now seem surprising, readers of newspapers in the United States were often able to read about the unfolding events in Whitechapel some hours in advance of their cousins in Britain. Whereas the American reporters sent their copy directly to their offices in New York, Chicago or Philadelphia by means of the electric telegraph, the readers in Birmingham, Exeter or Norwich had to rely on the physical delivery of newspapers by rail from London which meant that they were often 12 to 24 hours behind Americans in reading the latest sensational news from the East End.

Amongst the differences in the first hours after the murder in Miller’s Court was that of the victim’s name. Most of the American papers reported it as Lizzie Fisher, although they added that she was known to her friends as Mary Jane
²⁰
. Many of them, including the
New York World
on 10th November, said that she was, ‘tall, not bad looking, with a dark complexion and generally wearing an old black velvet jacket…’
The Boston Globe
, amongst others, reported that she had been in service and that she was a married woman who had been deserted by her husband on account of her dissolute ways
²¹
. The
Washington Evening Star
agreed with the reporter from the
Syracuse Herald
in quoting people that knew her who said that she looked about 30 when she had arrived in Dorset Street about eight months previously in marked contrast to Joe Barnett’s assertion that she was 25. As the late Philip Sugden, one of the most authoritative and painstaking of Ripper historians pointed out in his book,
The Complete History of Jack the Ripper
, most of the early police estimates of the ages of the victims were markedly less than they turned out to be once they had been identified.

A poignant little piece which gives a glimpse of the day-to-day life of Mary Jane and her fellow unfortunates is the interview with her neighbour Elizabeth Prater – who lived in the room above hers – which was published in
The Star
on 10th November, the day following the murder. The interview makes it very
clear that Elizabeth Prater was also an unfortunate who earned her living in the same way as Mary Jane.

She told the reporter, whose own comments were added in parentheses:

It is a moving little passage that resonates with sincerity. Elizabeth Prater was 45 and had struggled to bring up a family of her own children and her stepchildren before she was widowed for the second time and sank into the abyss of alcohol and destitution. The heart-rending little detail of her not possessing a hat or jacket in which to face the cold, wet November night and the nice touch of her addressing a woman 15 years her junior as ‘Old dear’ and in turn being called ‘My pretty’ by Mary Jane who, one imagines, had all the advantages of youth over the other woman brings their voices echoing back through the years.

The enigma of Mary Jane lingers on. Was she Welsh or was she Irish? Was she 25 or older? Was her name Kelly or Davies? Both names are on her death certificate and the only thing that can be said with any degree of certainty is that her name was not Mary Jane Kelly or even Marie Jeanette Kelly. But if she was not who she said she was, who was she? And why was she so keen to keep her real identity hidden?

_____________

*
A temporary open coffin used to transport bodies to the mortuary.

Shortly before Mary Jane arrived to ply her trade around the streets of Wapping, a girl of similar age disappeared from the streets of Bloomsbury. She usually went by the name she had been christened, Elizabeth Weston Davies, although she should more properly have used her husband’s name as she had been married eight months before on Christmas Eve, 1884. Her marriage had been an abrupt event, hardly an affair of the heart as she had scarcely known the man before he blurted out a sudden invitation to join him on a trip to Paris and then, almost as an afterthought, the suggestion that they might as well get married first.

It suited Elizabeth; she was an impulsive girl whose world had been thrown into turmoil little more than two months previously when her employer’s husband had died unexpectedly, and she had horrified her respectable Welsh family by embarking on a life totally at odds with that which her mother had planned for her. She was the sixth child and fourth daughter of Edward and Anne Davies. Her father had been a slate quarry agent until his premature death in 1875 when Elizabeth was 18. The family lived comfortably enough in Aberangell, a hamlet in the upper Dovey Valley in Montgomeryshire, and
Elizabeth grew up close to her younger brother John, attending the village school with him and not leaving until after her 16th birthday, a remarkably late age for a girl in rural 19th century Britain. At home the family spoke both English and Welsh and she was equally fluent in both.

At the age of 19 Elizabeth’s mother had become lady’s maid to the 16-year-old daughter of a Montgomeryshire landowner, John Edwards. The building boom of the 1830s and 1840s had propelled John Edwards from being a comfortably off local squire to one of the richest men in Britain by dint of the acres of slate-bearing hillside that he owned. With no sons and only two daughters Sir John, as he had become, was determined to marry them off to suitable young men. As he prepared his younger daughter, Mary Cornelia, for her first London Season in 1846, he engaged an English woman, Elizabeth’s mother Anne, to become her personal maid in the hope that it would improve her English and help rid her of her Welsh accent.

Due in large measure to Anne’s influence, Mary Cornelia’s entry into London society was a triumph and less than three months after her Coming Out ball she married George Vane-Tempest, a dashing young Life Guards officer, at St. George’s Hanover Square. The two women remained lifelong friends and in due course Anne and her own husband Edward were to name two of their elder children George and Mary in honour of their employers. At the time of his marriage George bore the courtesy title of Earl Vane but in 1872 he inherited the title and vast estates of his half-brother, the fourth Marquess of Londonderry
²²
. With the amalgamation of the Edwards’ slate quarries and lead mines, and the Londonderry lands and coal mines, one of the greatest and most prosperous dynasties of Victorian Britain was established.

In due course Anne’s friendship with Mary Cornelia was rewarded when her fourth daughter Elizabeth was given the same post that her mother had held nearly 40 years before, lady’s maid to the Marchioness of Londonderry. In Victorian Britain ladies’ maids were in a specially privileged position compared to other household servants. They were appointed and employed directly by the lady herself and were not answerable to the butler and the housekeeper like the other staff. Like Elizabeth, they often occupied separate and superior quarters to the other servants and sometimes even had servants of their own. It was to
this favoured world that Elizabeth travelled when she took up her position at Londonderry House sometime before 1881.

During her time in London Elizabeth was introduced to a new and exciting world. As well as witnessing the glittering social life of her employers, during her free time she also became part of a bohemian, literary and artistic clique that flourished in part of London that is now known as Fitzrovia. Lying between respectable Bloomsbury and the heart of London’s burgeoning shopping and theatre-land, it was at various times home to writers like Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde, artists like James McNeill Whistler and William Powell Frith, and political figures including Karl Marx and, much later, George Orwell. It supported a colourful and constantly changing population of writers, actors, prostitutes, charlatans and eccentrics. Elizabeth was clearly fascinated by it and, having artistic leanings herself, it became a second home to her during her occasional free time.

Amongst this population were two families, the Gilders and the Maundrells, who for most of the 19th century shared houses and relationships, sometimes formalised by marriage and sometimes not. Elizabeth’s connection was probably through the Gilders who, like her own family, came from the Dovey Valley in what is now Powys but was then Montgomeryshire
²³
. William Gilder had been the Captain and Adjutant of the Royal Montgomeryshire Militia of which John Edwards was the colonel, but in 1838, when bankruptcy struck, he fled with his family to Brittany and took up with an Anglo-French family, the Maundrells
²⁴
.

Sexual relationships in Victorian Britain were much more ambiguous than is often assumed today. Far from being the bigoted prudes that history has painted them, upper- and middle-class people, particularly in the capital, frequently engaged in extramarital sex. Businessmen kept mistresses in neat villas in St. John’s Wood; aristocratic women like Lady Cardigan were visited discreetly by their lovers in Mayfair mansions; and prostitution, at all levels of society, was at least ten times as common as it is today
²⁵
.

The Maundrells were part of this world. They numbered amongst their close friends Thornton Leigh Hunt, eldest son of the poet James, and himself the fiery founding editor of
The Daily Telegraph
. Hunt subscribed to the
Phalanstère
movement, one of the many utopian cults that flourished in the
mid-19th century. At its most extreme, it believed that institutions such as marriage and the family should be abolished and replaced by huge communal buildings in which free love – both heterosexual and homosexual – could be practiced in rooms specially set aside for the purpose. Hunt practiced his beliefs at least to the extent of fathering four children by his own wife and three by the wife of his best friend, apparently with the full approval of all concerned. Two of his daughters almost certainly became prostitutes in brothels run by two of the Maundrell sisters.

Ellen, or Héleine as she preferred to call herself, was the eldest child of Robert John Maundrell and Charlotte, daughter of old Captain William Gilder
²⁶
. Born in Brittany in 1846, she considered herself more French than English and eventually, in old age, returned to die in her beloved France. In 1877 she married William Macleod, son of another expatriate, but his life as a Purser in the Royal Navy kept him in the Far East for most of his life and, apart from an only child – Helen Kathleen, born the year after their wedding – they had little in common and the marriage eventually ended in separation
²⁷
.

Ellen and her unmarried sister Frederica were highly successful businesswomen
²⁸
. They needed to be since their father, although calling himself a gentleman, never aspired to being anything more than a clerk in the Post Office Savings Bank, and their grandfather William spent his entire life paying off the debts occasioned by his bankruptcy in 1838. The sisters’ entrepreneurial drive led them into one of the most profitable business ventures in Victorian London. They ran French brothels.

Like most things French, Gallic prostitution was highly fashionable in the second half of the 19th century. The Prince of Wales had almost made Paris his second home and
Le Chabanais
, the most exclusive of the Parisian brothels, was his invariable choice when in the city. Founded by an Irishwoman by the name, real or assumed, of Madame Kelly,
Le Chabanais
served its clientele the choicest French food and wines as well as the most attractive young women available
²⁹
.

The Maundrell sisters could easily pass themselves off as French; there is evidence that Ellen, certainly, was bilingual. In her early life she had been an actress, a term that was more or less synonymous with prostitute in the 19th century, and by the 1880s she was operating a string of middle-class
brothels in St. Pancras, Camden and Islington. Usually masquerading as private hotels or coffee houses, they catered discreetly for middle-class men and, although they were known to the police, they were largely left alone. The attitude of Victorian society was that prostitution was inevitable and as long as it was kept off the streets it was tolerated.

At some time in the early 1880s the sisters had accumulated so much wealth that they took the lease of a huge house in the area south of the site of the Great Exhibition of 1851 that had subsequently been developed into what became the fashionable districts of Knightsbridge and Kensington. Number 28 Collingham Place is little changed to this day
³⁰
. It is a stucco-fronted mansion on six floors which today, like many of its neighbours, has been divided into expensive flats. Then it was occupied solely by the Maundrell sisters, their servants and their girls. In the census of 1891 it appeared to front as a school, although with apparently only one pupil – a girl of 18 – and three so-called teachers it appears a little light on customers. The local newspapers including the
Kensington Chronicle
contained dozens of advertisements for the local private schools and educational establishments, many of which appeared week after week, but absolutely none were for 28 Collingham Place.

Elizabeth was settled into her life as lady’s maid in one of the most socially important houses in London and, it seems, enjoying the company of her colourful, bohemian friends when on 6th November 1884 her life was turned upside down. George Vane-Tempest, Fifth Marquess of Londonderry, died whilst he and his wife, Mary Cornelia, were staying at their house in Wales. His widow, the Dowager Marchioness, was heartbroken. She announced her intention of never returning to London again and settled down to spend the rest of her days in widow’s weeds in her childhood home.