The Real Mary Kelly (5 page)

Elizabeth was faced with a stark choice: remain with her mistress and be condemned to a life of quiet service looking after an ageing and reclusive woman in a house that would never again echo to the sounds of parties and laughter or – what? She could have returned to London and no doubt have obtained another post as a lady’s maid, although whether her employer would have assisted her in light of what she may have viewed as disloyalty is debateable. But then another opportunity presented itself.

Within days, it seems, of the Marquess’s death Elizabeth was installed in the Maundrells’ upper-class French brothel in Kensington and enjoying a life such as she personally had never experienced. In order to appeal to the rich clientele the girls were dressed in the latest French fashions and encouraged to adopt French names and manners. Whether any of the customers, which included many well-travelled and sophisticated men from Mayfair and Belgravia, were actually fooled is questionable but it added to the mystique and allure of the sisters’ establishment. It is not known what name Elizabeth adopted but Marie Jeanette is as likely as any other. In the few weeks that she remained in the ‘gay house’, as such places were euphemistically known, Elizabeth revelled in wearing the expensive gowns that her employers provided and riding out in Hyde Park in their carriage, provided no doubt as an effective way of showing off the merchandise.

It ended, abruptly, sometime in December of 1884 when a man, some 20 years older than she was, came into her life. Francis Spurzheim Craig may have been a client of the Maundrells’ French brothel but in light of what was to follow it seems more likely that Elizabeth met him elsewhere, most probably at one of William Morris’s Sunday soirées at his riverside house in Hammer-smith. Morris was a giant of Victorian society. A highly successful artist, writer, designer and a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he was also a left-leaning politician who became the focus of what would eventually become the Socialist movement. Whilst himself living in opulence – in his country house, Kelmscott Manor in Gloucestershire, and his London residence, Kelmscott House in Hammersmith – Morris railed against poverty and inequality. He frequently travelled to the East End, the most squalid part of the capital, and addressed left-wing meetings at places like the International Working Men’s Educational Club in Berner Street, Whitechapel.

He also surrounded himself with a bohemian mixture of writers, artists, poets and political activists for whom he held regular Sunday evening meetings at Kelmscott House. Amongst the Morris set were writers such as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells; artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Aubrey Beardsley; musicians such as Gustav Holst and political figures like Friedrich Engels, Sidney Webb and Eleanor Marx, daughter of the
more famous Karl. The Maundrells may well have been part of the group for they were certainly friendly with others that were, including the artist Walter Sickert and the journalist and playwright George Robert Sims
³¹
. Another regular attendee was a serious-minded political thinker called E.T. Craig.

Edward Thomas Craig lived near to Morris in Hammersmith, although in a much more humble dwelling. At over 80 he was nearing the end of his political life but in his youth he had been one of the founders of the Co-operative movement and a considerable force in left-wing politics. ‘E.T.’ – as he was always known – and his wife Mary had an only child, a son who like his father earned his living by the pen. Unlike his father, who was a journalist of note and in his time the editor of at least eight newspapers, Francis was merely a humble penny-a-line reporter on local newspapers
³²
. At 47 he should already have achieved his life’s ambitions and been the editor of a newspaper or an author of some standing with a house and servants, but instead he was still living in genteel poverty with his elderly parents in a two-up, two-down artisan’s cottage in the backstreets of Hammersmith.

The Craigs were in no position to afford carriages even if E.T.’s socialist principles had allowed it, so they walked the mile to and from their house at 3 Andover Road to Morris’s mansion on the Thames. For his age E.T. was remarkably fit and a lifelong exponent of healthy living. Teetotal, vegetarian and non-smoking, he believed strongly in the virtues of fresh air and body
building
³³
. He and Francis sold fitness aids such as barbells, massage rollers and bath salts by mail order and the younger man had been trained from his youth to build up his upper body strength. Although no definitely identified pictures of him exist, Francis was probably of medium height but broad-chested and with well-muscled arms. His later writing revealed that he was a keen follower of rowing and it is likely that he had been an enthusiastic oarsman in his youth.

Francis owed both his forenames to his father’s lifelong passion for phrenology, a pseudo-science that was pioneered by a German doctor, Franz Gall, and his protégé Johann Spurzheim in the late 18th century. By the first decades of the 19th century it was an established movement held in high regard by scientists, doctors and philosophers and E.T. had been a devotee ever since hearing Spurzheim lecture on the subject in Manchester in 1831. It was much beloved of the early socialists and co-operators because it offered the common man the possibility of gaining insight into his own character and, thereby, the capacity for self-improvement.

E.T. became adept at the art and described himself as a ‘Professor of Phrenology’ for much of his life, but by the middle of the 19th century most doctors and scientists had realised that it was based on false premises
³⁴
. Feeling the outside of the skull was of no more use than running one’s hands over the cover of a book and attempting to interpret its contents. The stubborn E.T., however, characteristically refused to accept the obvious and never lost faith in it. He was belatedly rewarded when he was elected President of the British Phrenological Society in 1888, the year of the Whitechapel murders, at a time when almost all educated people had long since abandoned it.

E.T.’s other two passions were public health and anatomy. In his teens he had been admitted to Manchester Infirmary following an injury
³⁵
. He later gave an account of creeping into the operating theatre after the day’s work was done to examine the amputated limbs before they were removed by the hospital porters. In his memoirs he wrote that it, ‘awakened a deep interest in the structure and anatomy of the body’. He is known to have taken part in dissections of the human body. In his
Lectures on Phrenology
the doyen of British phrenologists, George Combe, described Craig assisting Dr. John Abercrombie, the foremost neuropathologist of the day, to dissect the brain of a ‘Mr. N’, an aged diplomat
who had suffered a personality change shortly before his death
³⁶
. It is likely that E.T. took Francis to observe dissections and encouraged him to study the subject from popular books such as Sir Charles Bell’s
A System of Dissection Explaining the Anatomy of the Human Body
, a detailed practical account of how to cut up the human cadaver and gain access to its innermost secrets.

Although E.T.’s assertive and obdurate personality was well known and frequently commented on by his few friends and many enemies, shadowy is the best description of his only son, Francis Spurzheim Craig. Almost everything that is known about him comes from other people’s insubstantial descriptions of him and from the fleeting penumbra he cast on his surroundings. A great deal is known about his parents but Francis, who had no brothers or sisters and no known descendants, left little of himself behind except in such of his journalistic output that can definitely be attributed to him – and that is little enough. It is probable that this absence of a written legacy is largely due to his parents’ deliberate sheltering of their awkward son from the normalities of the outside world. For Francis himself was far from being a normal man.

From surviving descriptions of Francis by the few people who knew him at all well and with the benefit of modern psychiatric knowledge it is evident that he suffered from what today would be known as a severe personality disorder. He may possibly have had high-performing Asperger syndrome but, if so, it was certainly overlaid with psychotic features. At his inquest in 1903 he was described as ‘most eccentric’ and ‘very nervous’, although his ex-employer, Arthur Lane, also saw another, darker side to him. He was a man, said Lane, who ‘took antipathies to people for no apparent cause’. He was given to erratic and unpredictable behaviour, jumping up in the middle of a meal and rushing out into the street shouting, ‘I’m off!’ In later life he also had what his acquaintances recognised as delusions, fancying that all the world was against him and even – ominously – that the police were after him for murder.

Today his behaviour would be recognised as falling somewhere in the hinterland between ‘psychopathy’ and a true ‘psychosis’ on the schizophrenia spectrum. He was a highly intelligent man and with adequate support which, during their lifetimes, he received from his parents, he was capable of functioning almost normally. The problems came when he tried to exist independently.
For most of his life he lived under his parents’ roof and they appear to have handled his financial affairs and his day-to-day needs whilst he earned a living as a reporter and, later, an editor. Surprisingly, he seems to have been a good journalist and surviving pieces that he wrote show an intelligent, witty mind that was completely at odds with his face-to-face persona.

At such a distance it is difficult today to put a single label on Francis’s specific psychosis. The most likely diagnosis by current standards is probably ‘schizotypal personality disorder’ (STPD). The main diagnostic features of STPD are behaviour or appearance that others find odd, eccentric or peculiar; suspiciousness or paranoid ideas; poor rapport with others; a tendency to withdraw socially; and obsessive ruminations, often with sexual or aggressive content. All of these are characteristics that can easily be discerned in what little is known about Francis Spurzheim Craig.

This was the man that Elizabeth encountered late in 1884. Possibly they met and talked as they strolled the gardens of Kelmscott House before the start of a meeting. Despite his age Francis was unmarried and had probably never had a normal relationship with a woman other than his strong-minded mother. He found conversation difficult and his few friends and acquaintances described his curious habit of breaking off in mid-sentence and fleeing the scene when the pressure of making small talk became too much for him
³⁷
. Only when he was talking about a topic that interested him did he become less tongue-tied and capable of sustaining a proper exchange. One such subject was travel, especially to foreign countries
³⁸
.

In 1864 Francis had left the sanctuary of his family home for what may have been the first of the only three occasions that he did so in his adult life. It is tempting to think that he might finally have had enough of living under his parents’ roof and decided to strike out on his own, but it is more likely that he was urged to do so by his father in the hope that it might prove the making of him. The incentive was probably the American Civil War, the first great conflict of modern warfare, where new technologies like machine guns, anaesthesia and photography were deployed on the battlefield for the first time. The war was attracting reporters and journalists from all over the world and when, on 4th April that year, the
City of London
docked in New York from Liverpool via
Queenstown, Ireland, Francis was amongst the passengers
³⁹
. Where he went and what he did while he was there is not known but he seems to have had a fair degree of exposure to the American newspaper industry because after his return he adopted the less formal, more free-flowing style of his American fellow reporters and for the rest of his journalistic life, intentionally or otherwise, American expressions and forms of spelling crop up in his writing.

Between his return to England in 1866 and 1870 Francis was employed by the
Oxford Journal
and once again he lived with his parents who were resident in the city at the time
⁴⁰
. Sporadic examples of journalism published under his own name begin to appear from this time although, since they were usually signed only with his initials, F.C., they are difficult to track down. In 1884 he wrote a series of three articles for the
Tricycling Journal
about a journey that he undertook on such a machine from London to Oxford in which he described the landscape and notable sights along the way. He evidently loved the English countryside and in later life he published polemics about the protection of public open spaces and rights of way. He also wrote other accounts of meandering through the rural landscape by canal boat. In all of these there is evidence of the keen eye for geographical detail that must have stood him in such good stead during the three years that he later spent mapping Cambridge and its surroundings.

The census of 1871 is the only one during the entire life of his parents in which Francis was not living at home. They had left Oxford to settle in Cambridge and Francis journeyed to London in an apparent attempt to break into the world of mainstream national journalism. It does not appear to have been met with success. On the night of Sunday 2nd April he was living alone in a private hotel in Essex Street. The street, which is just off the Strand, is close to Fleet Street, then the heartland of the British newspaper industry. It is an obvious place to live for someone trying to make their way in the profession of journalism but in the case of Francis there is a surprising entry under ‘Rank, profession or occupation.’ It reads: ‘No occupation.’ Most people who were temporarily out of work would have entered ‘Reporter, unemployed’ or similar. If they were fortunate enough not to have to work they entered ‘Living on own means’ or ‘Annuitant’. The words ‘No occupation’ usually indicated someone who was permanently unable to work through mental or physical incapacity.