The Real Mary Kelly (2 page)

He reported that the woman, who had previously been employed at an upmarket house of ill-repute near Knightsbridge, had ‘suddenly drifted into the East-end’. Although the words ‘suddenly’ and ‘drifted’ don’t belong naturally together, it was clear that most people who knew her believed that Mary Jane had left her previous haunts in something of a hurry – taking refuge in the anonymity of the poorest and most crowded part of the capital – but from who or what she was fleeing remained, like the girl herself, a mystery.

The Star
reporter went on to say that Mrs. Buki resided somewhere off St. George’s Street, the polite name for the westernmost end of the notorious thoroughfare otherwise known as the Ratcliffe Highway. The Highway, as most locals knew it, was a long road running parallel to the River Thames, skirting the complex of docks that started just downstream of the Tower of London.
³
It ran to the north of the high dockyard walls, many of which are still standing although the docks they once protected have almost all passed into history. In 1886, when Mary Jane arrived on the scene, the Highway consisted largely of chandlers’ shops, public houses, opium dens and brothels, all catering to the
constantly changing population of seamen whilst their ships were berthed in what was then the largest port in the world. Mrs. Buki apparently ran an enterprise of the last kind and the newcomer, who was, by all accounts, younger and prettier than most of the women who plied their trade around the streets of Wapping, soon became part of her household.

She did not, it seems, stay long with Mrs. Buki and within a matter of weeks moved to a nearby establishment run by a Mrs. Mary McCarthy
⁴
. Her house was on the corner of Breezer’s Hill and Pennington Street, facing the 14ft wall which formed the boundary of the huge and malodorous Western Basin of the London Docks. Even by the standards of the docks it was an unattractive place but no doubt, being close to the dockyard gates, it had the advantage of being one of the first premises of its kind that sailors came across on their first run ashore after a long voyage.

It is from the time of her arrival with Mrs. McCarthy that a clearer picture of the mysterious newcomer emerges. Many of the details are based on the investigations conducted by
The Star
reporter and published on 12th November. They are recollections of events that happened up to three years earlier drawn from a number of different sources and, not surprisingly, the particulars vary according to whom the reporter was talking to. The most voluble was Mrs. Elizabeth Phoenix, who claimed to be Mrs. McCarthy’s sister. She had presented herself at Leman Street police station on the evening of the previous day, two days after the hideously mutilated body of a young woman had been discovered in Miller’s Court, Spitalfields and the day before the inquest was due to open at Shoreditch town hall
⁵
. She told the police that she believed that the victim might have been the same young woman who had lodged with her sister in Pennington Street between two and three years previously. Very soon it was established that she was correct and it was probably a policeman from Leman Street who tipped off
The Star
’s reporter in return, no doubt, for a small consideration.

It was by the time she had moved from Mrs. Buki’s that the mystery woman had begun using the name Mary Jane Kelly, despite the fact that she had initially told Mrs. McCarthy that she was Welsh
⁶
. There is nothing surprising in her choice of name. It has been estimated that in 1880 between 70 and 80 percent of the prostitutes in London were Irish, the result like so much other
Irish emigration, of the successive famines that had swept the country since the potato blight had first appeared in 1845
⁷
. Because of this the word Kelly was frequently used as a synonym for a prostitute and many ‘unfortunates’, as lower class prostitutes were known, used it whenever they needed an alias.

The stranger soon changed her story to one that sat better with her adopted name, saying that she was in fact Irish, having been born in Limerick, and taken to Wales as a baby when her father sought employment in the iron industry
⁸
. Few people appear to have been taken in by this however. An unnamed woman who knew her later, when she was lodging at a doss house in Thrawl Street, stated categorically that she was Welsh and that she spoke the language fluently. It is yet another of the enduring riddles that surround the girl who called herself Mary Jane Kelly; if she was actually Welsh why would she have wanted to appear to be Irish? Welsh or Irish however, most people agreed that she was better educated than other girls of her sort and, according to Mrs. McCarthy, she was ‘no mean artist’.

Mrs. McCarthy and her sister were puzzled and fascinated by the new arrival. She was a different class of girl from the raddled dockyard prostitutes they were used to. She claimed to have worked in an upmarket brothel run by a Frenchwoman in the West End before coming to Wapping and, shortly before she arrived, to have been taken to France by a gentleman who they assumed was one of her clients
⁹
. It was incomprehensible to them why a woman who boasted of having lived the life of a lady and of riding around Knightsbridge in a carriage should have exchanged that life for the noisome, dangerous streets of the East End.

The identity of Mrs. McCarthy is well established (although, at the time and until recent research established her true name, she has usually been referred to as Mrs. Carthy or Carty), but that of Mrs. Buki remained a mystery for more than a century. Through a recent brilliant piece of Internet detective work by husband and wife team, Neal and Jenni Sheldon, it is now known that she was in fact a Dutch widow by the name of Boekü, a word for which the nearest English pronunciation is Buki or Bookie
¹⁰
. At the time that Mary Jane knew her, she lived with a man called Johannes Morganstern, a skinner in the fur trade, who occupied 79 Pennington Street, next door to Mrs. McCarthy’s.

The cause of her leaving Mrs Boekü’s was most likely to have been arrears of rent, although drink may also have played a part for Mary Jane, who according to Mrs. Phoenix was, ‘one of the most decent and nicest girls you could meet’ when sober, became a veritable fury on the occasions when she had one too many. Moving next door did not, apparently, enable her to escape her debts and Mary Jane travelled one day to visit the French lady in the company of Mrs. Boekü, to collect a box containing expensive gowns that she had left there. The fact that her former landlady bothered to accompany her troublesome exlodger all the way across town strongly suggests that she didn’t trust her out of her sight, and since no-one in the East End ever subsequently saw Mary Jane attired in such finery, it may reasonably be assumed that no sooner had she retrieved the gowns than she was made to hand them over in lieu of the missing rent. It is this report and a similar one by a Press Association reporter quoted in the
Echo
on the same day that are the only independent corroborations of the story that she later told her lover Joe Barnett, of having once worked in a ‘gay house’
*
in the West End.

Breezer’s Hill is little changed in appearance today from when Mary Jane knew it. It is a narrow cobbled alleyway which slopes down from the Highway to Pennington Street, overshadowed by tall, red-brick warehouses. Although today the warehouses have been gutted and converted into offices and smart loft conversions it is easy enough to imagine what it might have looked like on a winter’s night in 1886 when the few gaslights barely penetrated the swirling fog rolling in from the river. If Mary Jane really had been used to the stuccoed mansions of Knightsbridge – and her visit with Mrs. Boekü suggests that she was – then the greasy cobblestones and soot-stained brickwork of Breezer’s Hill must have made a dismal contrast.

Mary Jane stayed at Breezer’s Hill during most of 1886, leaving, according to Mrs. Phoenix, towards the end of that year. Exactly what prompted her to move from the comparative comfort of Mrs. McCarthy’s is not known but Joe later spoke of an older man, who he assumed to be her father, coming looking for her at about that time
¹¹
. When she got wind of it Mary Jane laid low for a few days and later took her leave of Breezer’s Hill. There then followed a
gap of about four or five months during which her whereabouts are unknown. Both Mrs. McCarthy and, later, Joe Barnett said that it was during this period that she lived with one of her regular clients, a builder’s plasterer called Joseph Flemming, in Bethnal Green. Joe also said that she told him that after she returned from France she had lived for a time with a man called ‘Morganstone’ near the Stepney gasworks
¹²
. Mrs. Phoenix herself has recently been identified as Elizabeth Felix, who in 1888 was living with a man calling himself Adrianus Felix, but who, it is now known, was actually Adrianus Morganstern, the brother of Mrs. Boekü’s consort Johannes. In the East End of London in those days people frequently went under a variety of names, usually to avoid creditors, a fact that makes teasing out the details of their lives a difficult task for later historians. To complicate matters still further a third brother, Maran Morganstern, also lived near the Stepney gasworks so it might have been either brother with whom Mary Jane lodged before or after her time in Breezer’s Hill. What seems certain is that Mrs. McCarthy, Mrs. Phoenix, Mrs. Boekü and the Morganstern brothers all knew each other and helped the young woman who called herself Mary Jane during the period after she first came to the East End, before she disappeared again and the last, dark chapter of her life began.

_____________

*
A heterosexual brothel in the 19
^th
century.

No known pictures of Mary Jane in life survive. A few fanciful artists’ impressions of her were later published in the illustrated newspapers but these differ so wildly that it is clear that their originators had no first hand idea of what she actually looked like. Those that did know her, such as Mrs. Phoenix and Chief Inspector Walter Dew – who encountered her when he was a young policeman on the beat in Whitechapel – described her as attractive and about 5ft 7in in height, quite tall for a woman in those days. Inspector Dew used the word ‘buxom’ to describe her, although Mrs. Phoenix preferred ‘stout’
¹³
. She had blue eyes and thick hair which, when let down, reached to her waist. It was probably dark in colour although the fact that she was later known by a variety of nicknames including ‘Fair Emma’ and ‘Ginger’ suggests that she may have been in the habit of changing it from time to time. She took pride in her appearance and Dew said that she never appeared in public except in a spotlessly laundered apron although, unlike most of the unfortunates, she rarely wore a hat.

If she did live with Joseph Flemming it appears to have been a short-lived relationship because on Good Friday, 8th April 1887, she was in a public house in Spitalfields and there she encountered Joe Barnett. They were immediately
attracted to each other and on their second meeting the following day they decided to live together. She told him much the same story that she had told Mrs. McCarthy and her sister, although she said to Joe that she preferred to be called Marie Jeanette in the French fashion rather than plain Mary Jane. She was proud of having worked in a French establishment and she made no secret of that part of her life. She also boasted to Joe about having travelled to France with a gentleman shortly before her arrival in the East End.

Joe was an amiable but feckless man in his early 30s. He had been a fish porter in Billingsgate market until around the time he met Mary Jane, but had lost his licence for some unspecified misdemeanour and now did casual labouring jobs around the various markets when he could get them. They were a well-suited pair, both warm-hearted and generous although not above occasional violent spats when one of them, usually Mary Jane, had had too much to drink.

She told Joe a story that she had not, it seems, imparted to her companions during the Breezer’s Hill days or to anyone other than Joe since that time. Her real name, she told him, was Davies on account of her having once been married to a young Welsh miner of that name who had been killed in an explosion two or three years after their wedding. It would turn out later that it was not the first time she had used the story of being a widow. In due course her death certificate would carry both the names Kelly and Davies.

The couple drifted like most of their kind from one common lodging house to another, always within the ‘wicked half mile’ of Spitalfields, moving on when their arrears of rent led to eviction. Eventually, in the early spring of 1888, they moved into 13 Miller’s Court at a rent of four shillings and sixpence a week.

Miller’s Court was a foetid cul-de-sac opening off Dorset Street which, like its companions Thrawl Street and the oddly misnamed Flower and Dean Street, was the heart of the most wretched part of the area. Clustered around Spitalfields market they were densely packed with common lodging houses, invariably known to their inhabitants as doss houses, where rooms were let out by the night for a few pennies
¹⁴
. At the bottom end of the scale three or four pence would buy a night in a bed shared with a stranger where the sheets were changed, at most, once a week and the ticking on the pillows was greasy and filthy because pillowcases were an unknown luxury. Boots were generally not
taken off before getting in to bed for to do so risked having an eminently pawnable commodity stolen in the night.

Unless paid for in advance, rooms had to be vacated by 8am in the morning. There was little temptation to linger after that time as the additional facilities consisted only of an outside privy shared with 50 or more others and a so-called kitchen with a bare table and a few chairs where residents could make themselves a mug of tea, in the unlikely event that they possessed any. It was better than actually sleeping on the pavement but only marginally so.