The Real Mary Kelly (3 page)

The residents of the doss houses were mainly casual male labourers in the docks and the various markets, and women who were collectively known as unfortunates. An unfortunate was a woman, usually in her 40s or 50s who, generally through alcoholism, had lost whatever position in society that she had ever occupied and had descended to eking out an existence through a mixture of prostitution, hawking or taking in washing.

Many unfortunates had once been respectably married women before drink took its toll and they were thrown out by their families. Once on the streets of Spitalfields and Whitechapel they became part of a huge drifting population of many thousands, largely unknown or forgotten by the rest of Victorian society. They operated at the very edge of human existence, their only possessions being what they carried beneath their layers of grubby clothes and consisting mostly of broken fragments of comb, shards of mirror, pawn tickets and a little tea or sugar in screws of blue paper. Apart from needing her doss money, an unfortunate’s main requirement was the few pence needed to purchase a tot of rum to go into a glass of hot water. A woman who was prepared to go with a man into one of the dark, stinking back alleys or a dimly lit court and stand braced against a wall, back to the customer, ragged skirts hitched up above her waist, could make enough in a day to secure a bed of sorts for the night and, if she was lucky, keep herself mercifully drunk for the rest of the time.

It was a wretched, painful existence and in winter many unfortunates literally starved or froze to death in the gutter. Despite, or maybe because of, their shared privations they were a surprisingly cheerful lot, sticking together through thick and thin, sharing what little they had and gathering, when they could afford it, to sing and make merry in the many public houses which surrounded
the markets. There were occasional disagreements to be sure, and short-lived fights over trifles such as a piece of soap were not uncommon, but mostly the unfortunates and their feckless male companions rubbed along in cheerful shared poverty.

To most of those that knew her in the East End it was apparent that Mary Jane sprang from a different, more privileged background. A number of newspapers, particularly those aimed at the popular end of the market, were fascinated by the possibility that her antecedents were socially above those amongst whom she found herself at the end of her life. The
Western Mail
quoted Joe Barnett as saying that her parents were well off and on 17th November the
Graphic
said, ‘Lastly, we would remark … that the woman Kelly did not belong to the “gutter class”. She was a woman of respectable parentage and superior breeding, who had gradually sunk into the state of degradation in which she was existing when she met her terrible death.’

Despite this, Mary Jane identified with her fellow unfortunates and made friends with a few, although none claimed to know her well. As long as Joe was in work she did not need to earn her living on the streets and he was fiercely opposed to her doing so. But prostitution was a way of life for her, whether it was in a grand house in Knightsbridge or the back alleys of Whitechapel, and when money was tight, which was most of the time, she willingly resorted to it. It seemed to give her what she most valued in life: independence from being reliant on others. Her relative youth and good looks ensured that when she went out on the streets she had no shortage of customers.

Number 13 was a small ground floor room with a door that opened directly into the arched passageway that connected the court with Dorset Street. Two irregularly sized windows looked out onto the yard and the room itself contained only a wooden-framed bed, two small tables and two chairs. The only concession to luxury was a framed print of a popular sentimental picture,
The Fisherman’s Widow
, hanging above the small fireplace
¹⁵
. The door closed with a spring lock but the only key had been lost and Joe and Mary Jane were in the habit of putting a hand through a window pane – that had been broken in one of their periodic fights – and opening the catch that way
¹⁶
. Usually a man’s coat hung over the broken window to act as a curtain and keep out the draught.

Almost everything that is known about Mary Jane Kelly comes from Joe Barnett’s testimony at the inquest and from interviews that a few of her close companions gave to newspaper reporters in the days following it. The problem is that much of it is contradictory even when the same person is being quoted. For instance, according to the court transcript, at the inquest Joe said that she had six brothers and a sister who all lived at home and another brother serving with the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards. The next day’s
Telegraph
reported him as saying that she had six brothers in London and
TheTimes
reported him as saying that she had six brothers and sisters in Wales. With this amount of confusion it is no wonder that attempts to pin down the family of Mary Jane Kelly have proved so elusive.

There are clever details, however, sufficiently interesting and yet slightly unlikely – why seven siblings rather than, say, three? – as to be compelling to subsequent researchers. What was a son of an allegedly Irish family resident in Wales doing in the Scots Guards? The Guards regiments have always been fiercely proud of recruiting in their own territories, the Grenadiers in Nottinghamshire, the Coldstream in Northumberland and Durham, and the Scots north of the border. The Welsh Guards did not yet exist, not being founded until 1915, but there were several Irish infantry regiments and surely a man by the name of Kelly would have found himself more at home in a predominantly Catholic unit than a Presbyterian one?

Then there is the question of his nickname. Mary Jane told Joe that he was known to his army comrades as ‘Johnto’
¹⁷
. Johnto however is a well-known Welsh diminutive of ‘John’. More properly it is ‘Ianto’ since the letter J does not exist in Welsh, but it is often rendered as Johnto in families that speak both Welsh and English. It seems an odd choice for Scottish soldiers to bestow upon a man called Henry.

Joe and Marie Jeanette, as he always called her, moved into 13 Miller’s Court in about March or April of 1888. At first it seems they were able to pay the four shillings and sixpence a week that the room cost but then work began to dry up for Joe who, having lost his Billingsgate fish porter’s licence, was doing casual labouring jobs around the other markets and hawking fruit around the streets when all else failed. Soon they began to fall behind with the rent and by early November they were thirty shillings in arrears.

If Joe had been in a secure job no doubt they would have been able to muddle through, but as the nights began to draw in and the already wet summer gave way to a chilly autumn Mary Jane’s soft heart got the better of her. Twice Joe came home in the early hours to find that she had allowed another unfortunate to doss down in the small room overnight. It led to a number of explosive rows and when Mary Jane started to talk of going back on the streets in order to obtain money to pay off the rent arrears it became almost too much for Joe. The final straw came when his headstrong partner decided to offer a home to Mrs. Maria Harvey, another unfortunate who had finally been thrown out by her husband.

Joe did the decent thing; instead of throwing Mary Jane out as Mrs. Harvey’s husband had done, on 1st November he moved out himself, leaving the room to Mary Jane and arranging to call round from time to time to give her whatever money he had to spare. It must have been heart-breaking for him; he was obviously very fond of the strange Welsh-Irish girl with her stories of Paris and life as a high-class courtesan in the West End, places that were as foreign to Joe as the headwaters of the Amazon.

A few snippets that she told to her other acquaintances also came out at the inquest and many more were reported in the profusion of newspaper accounts after the event. In particular
The Daily Telegraph
reported that she ‘was believed to be the wife of a man from whom she is separated’ and her friend Julia Venturney, who lived opposite her in Miller’s Court, also said that she had confided that her husband was still alive. If indeed she did have a living husband, one can see why she might have chosen to tell the man she was actually living with a different story.

With the present-day advantage of computers and digitised records, a family of the alleged size and composition of Mary Jane’s living in Wales between the 1860s and 1880s should be easily identifiable – particularly given that the first names of at least three of them were known – but despite the most intensive search at the time and for more than 120 years since, no family remotely resembling it has ever shown up. Following the Miller’s Court murder the police also made extensive enquiries with their colleagues in Ireland, which was then still part of Great Britain, with similarly negative results. Despite saturation press
coverage at the time, no member of Mary Jane Kelly’s family ever came forward and none were present at her funeral. Nor can any trace of a likely marriage of a Mary Kelly to a man called Davies be found, or of the death in a mining accident of someone of that name and age at around the right time. In fact, surprising as it may seem, there are no plausible Mary Jane Kellys of the right age or of the background she gave recorded in the England and Wales censuses throughout the relevant part of the 19th century. The only possible conclusion is that Mary Jane Kelly never existed and that whoever the mysterious woman was, she was going under a false name and that, of course, throws considerable doubt on the rest of her story.

The only thing that Mary Jane never made a secret about was her profession. She was evidently proud of her past life as a prostitute and boasted of having worked in an upper-class brothel run by a French woman. At the inquest Joe Barnett said, ‘She was in a gay house in the West End, but in what part she did not say. A gentleman came there to her and asked her if she would like to go to France
¹⁸
.’ The coroner then asked if she had gone, to which Joe replied, ‘Yes; but she did not remain long. She said she did not like the part, but whether it was the part or purpose I cannot say. She was not there more than a fortnight, and she returned to England, and went to the Ratcliffe-highway.’

It is a slightly curious way of putting it but Joe was an uneducated man who was recounting some half-remembered detail from a conversation about events that took place anything up to two years before. By ‘part’ he could have meant the place or, possibly, the party, meaning the person she went with. What he meant by ‘the purpose’ is harder to explain. On the face of it, whoever she went with, the purpose would presumably have been to visit an exciting foreign city and have a good time. If, on the other hand, she meant that the purpose was to cement a relationship that she mistakenly thought was casual or temporary into a more permanent arrangement, it is easier to understand. Joe is known to have had a speech impediment and this may account for the lack of clarity in this and other parts of his testimony
¹⁹
.

The coroner specifically asked Joe if he had heard Mary Jane saying that she was afraid of anyone, clearly attempting to discover if she could have known her killer. His answer was reported in slightly different ways in various papers over
the next few days but
The Star
for one reported him as saying, ‘Yes, she used to get me to bring her the evening papers and see if there was another murder but beyond that she was not afraid of anyone that I know of.’ Some people have taken that to mean that Mary Jane was illiterate and that Joe had to read the papers to her but that doesn’t tally with Mrs. McCarthy’s opinion of her being well-educated or with her landlord’s assertion that she received letters from Ireland on one or more occasions.

How he would have known that they were from Ireland is dubious since, at that time, Ireland was still part of Britain, postage stamps were identical throughout the kingdom and postmarks were often blurred and illegible. Julia Venturney said that she had often heard her friend singing Irish songs but that would not necessarily signify anything since sentimental Irish ballads were immensely popular in the music halls of the time and there was also the possibility that Julia would not have been able to distinguish between Welsh and Irish songs. The song that she was heard singing on the night of her death has since been reported by many as being an Irish song but ‘A Violet Plucked from Mother’s Grave’ was in fact an English music hall song written by Will H. Fox for the Mohawk Minstrels.

There is also some doubt about her age. Joe Barnett said that she had told him that she was 25 but whether that was when they first met or at the time of her death is unknown. Her death certificate says ‘about 25 years’ but her body was so badly mutilated that in pre-X-ray days it would have been impossible to tell her age to within five or more years either side of this and it is probable that they took this estimate from Joe. Almost all prostitutes habitually deducted as many years from their ages as they thought they could get away with because youth brought with it a premium in the flesh trade. The reporter of a New York newspaper, the
Syracuse Herald
, who appears to have done a particularly thorough job of interviewing the inhabitants of Dorset Street on the day after the murder, quoted her landlord, John McCarthy, as saying that Mary Jane ‘looked about 30’.

While many of the British newspapers took their copy from the press agencies, from police statements which were frequently contradictory or from jobbing reporters who seem to have plagiarised each other’s work unblushingly,
their brothers from America appear on the whole to have done a much more professional job. With the exception of
The Star
’s reporter and the one from the Press Association, few of the British reporters seem to have actually interviewed the people who knew Mary Jane personally. As a result there are many glaring differences between the reports on either side of the Atlantic in the days following the events in Miller’s Court.