The Real Mary Kelly (6 page)

Even stranger is the entry under ‘Where born’. The convention was that a person entered first the county and then the town of their birth and everyone else on the page has done just that. Francis entered ‘Cambridge, Ealing Grove’. He had been born in Acton so the entry should have read ‘Middlesex, Acton.’ Ealing Grove was the name of Lady Noel Byron’s boarding school where his parents had taught until 1835, two years before Francis was born and to which they may later have sent their son. It is nowhere near Cambridge. It is almost as if he was deliberately interpreting the question to mean ‘Where educated’. Even then there is an anomaly. He may well have attended the school at Ealing Grove but there is no evidence of his having enrolled in, let alone graduated from, Cambridge University.

The whole entry has an air of failure and despair about it. He may have been drunk or even under the influence of drugs when he filled in the census form, or suffering a mental crisis associated with his disordered personality, but what was he doing there? Ten years before, in the census of 1861 when living in Warwick, he had confidently declared himself to be a newspaper reporter and, moreover, the head of the household. It looks as if Francis had suffered some sort of breakdown. The attempted move from provincial reporter on the
Oxford Journal
to journalist in the national press seems to have ended in disaster. Within a few weeks he was back living once again with his parents.

At this time the Craigs were living in modest comfort in New Square, Cambridge. They had a resident, 12-year-old housemaid and one wonders how employing such a child squared with E.T.’s socialist conscience. E.T. was in an inventive phase at this stage of his life. In the Cambridge Working Classes’ Industrial Exhibition of 1873 he won the silver medal for the greatest number of new inventions on display, 27 in all, none of which he troubled to patent although several of them were later plagiarised by other people who made considerable amounts of money from them, sending E.T. into periodic frenzies of complaint and litigation.

During this period he earned a large part of his living as a ventilation engineer, environmental health being for him a lifetime obsession and inextricably linked to the welfare of the working man and his socialist instincts. His restless urge to travel took him all over Britain lecturing on sanitation and ventilation.
He became a fierce opponent of the move to install mains drainage and sewage systems, attacking Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the pioneering sanitary engineer, in print and in public speeches on every possible occasion. For E.T. human sewage was much too valuable a commodity to dump at sea and instead the ‘guano’, as he called it, should be collected and used to fertilise the land. ‘Dirt’, as he wrote in a letter to the
Oxford Journal
, ‘is simply manure in the wrong place.’ It was yet another example of E.T.’s misguided and ultimately doomed obsessions, although, as his ideas have recently been adopted by the Green movement, maybe he was just ahead of his time.

The impression that Francis suffered a psychological breakdown in 1871 is reinforced by the fact that when he returned to live under the parental roof he did not resume work as a reporter for some considerable time. Perhaps the failed attempt at breaking in to mainstream journalism had sapped his confidence to such an extent that he could no longer face the prospect of spending days in the company of his fellow men, jostling with other reporters as they competed for the best copy in the local courts. He may initially have spent some time living quietly with his parents, perhaps receiving discreet treatment from a local doctor, for there is no record of his ever having entered any of the county lunatic asylums, either in Cambridge or Middlesex.

Eventually – and no doubt once again through the influence of his father – he was commissioned by William Spalding, a local printer, to undertake a detailed survey of Cambridge and the surrounding countryside. It was to take Francis nearly four years and must have involved a huge amount of pacing the lanes and byways of the medieval city, measuring and surveying the streetscape. Until the end of his life he retained a passion for maps and topography and, apparently, an almost photographic memory for streets and the people who inhabited them.

The map was a success and became the forerunner of similar city plans such as the famous A–Z gazetteer of London. Other than newspapers it is the sole document that the British Library holds that bears his name in contrast to the 17 or so that are listed for his father. ‘
Spalding’s Plan of Cambridge and its Environs Surveyed and Compiled Expressly for W P Spalding by Francis S Craig
’ was printed in 1875 and as a result of his endeavours his name is listed in
Tooley’s Dictionary of Map Makers
. He was later involved in new editions in 1881 and 1885.

Although it was a long way from the type of work he was used to, it apparently enabled him to regain his self-confidence and eventually to return to the world of journalism. By early 1875 Francis had been appointed editor of the
Bucks Advertiser and Aylesbury News
and it is likely that yet again his father’s influence had secured the post for him. His parents appear to have moved from Cambridge to Aylesbury with him, probably realising that it could only work successfully if they continued to provide him with a home and the day-to-day support that he needed. They settled in Ripon Street in the Buckinghamshire county town and E.T. lost no time in re-establishing his ventilation business locally, assisted by Francis.

On 25th January 1875 an article entitled ‘The Tring Centenarian’ appeared in
The Times
. It started: ‘Mr Francis Craig writes from Aylesbury’ and concerned a local character, Betsy Leatherland, who had recently died at the improbable age of 112. Francis took the side of Sir Duncan Gibb, an eminent London physician who had both examined Betsy in life and conducted her post-mortem examination, and who was apparently certain that the old gypsy woman was indeed the age she claimed even though he said that she ‘had the heart and lungs of a young girl of 15’. It was later convincingly shown that she could not have been anywhere near that age and Sir Duncan’s reputation suffered accordingly but by that time Francis had not only sold the story to
The Times
but had managed to have it syndicated by at least 15 other newspapers the length and breadth of Britain. It is clear that, despite his social shortcomings, he was a man who knew very well how to use the newspaper world to his own advantage.

But it was not to last. The
Bucks Advertiser
, which was owned and published by a local printer and insurance agent, Robert Gibbs, had a rival Aylesbury publication – the
Bucks Herald –
also published weekly on Saturdays. On Saturday 29th May 1875, the hammer blow fell. The
Herald
published a long letter on its correspondence page above the signature ‘Honesty’. It has all the hallmarks of being a put-up job by the
Herald
’s own editorial staff rather than being a genuine letter from one of its readers but was no less effective for that. Below the title ‘Coincidence of Great Minds’, it started:

The editor had then done as requested and placed the two pieces side by side so that, although the
Telegraph
piece made references to Yeovil and Somerset, it was immediately obvious that Francis had indeed lifted it almost verbatim and substituted Buckinghamshire for Somerset and Wingrave, near Aylesbury, for Yeovil.

Even worse was to come. Below the two columns the correspondent continued:

The twin columns continued showing that, as well as
The Daily Telegraph
plagiarism, Francis had also stolen large chunks of copy from both
The Morning Post
and
The Times
over the course of the preceding two weeks. It did not need to go further back than that, the point had been made and the damage done.

The letter concluded:

Francis was no doubt summoned to Mr. Gibbs’s office within minutes of the
Herald
hitting the streets on that Saturday in May. The following week the
Herald
carried a terse announcement which stated:

Francis had been caught red-handed committing one of the worst crimes in the cut-throat world of journalism. That he thought he could have got away with such obvious and prolific theft of his fellow hacks’ work without being quickly caught out shows a remarkable lack of judgement, consistent with his unworldly personality. It almost put paid to his career in the world of newspapers and must have made him a figure of derision in the streets of the small market town.

This event would have had an even more serious effect on Francis than it might on most other men. A major present day long-term study known as the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study has found that stressful life events have a seriously deleterious effect on people with STPD, pushing them further towards the criminality and violent behaviour that are associated with the schizophrenia spectrum. In Francis’s case it seems that it lay bottled up, festering away until 13 years later when another, even more stressful, event caused it to erupt with disastrous consequences.

Exactly what happened to Francis and his parents during the next few years is unclear, although there is evidence that he worked with his father in his ventilation business for at least a couple of years. They placed advertisements for the Craig system of ventilation in many local newspapers across Britain and managed to get laudatory articles on the benefits of their ventilators published in some of them, such as one in the
Luton Times and Advertiser
on 3rd June 1876. By that time it appears that they had moved to London and their address is given as 19 Seymour Street, Euston Square
⁴¹
.

It seems that by 1876 their ventilation business was starting to slow down, due probably to the many rival systems that were beginning to appear in the newspaper advertisements. In that year the family moved from Marylebone to Hammersmith, transformed in the 40 years since the Craigs had lived in nearby Acton from a village in open countryside to the west of London to a suburb in a continuous sea of red brick houses that stretched from Paddington to Ealing. The population of London had more than doubled to nearly 4 million in that time and its land area had grown in proportion. To serve the burgeoning suburban population, a large number of new local newspapers had sprung up, and it was probably the new opportunities that these offered that drew Francis along with his by now ageing parents. E.T. was now 74 and, although still very active in writing dozens of pamphlets and his memoirs, he had largely given up his ventilation and sanitary engineering activities.

Francis may have done well – either out of the mapmaking enterprise or the ventilation business – because it was apparently he who bought the house to which the family moved, 2 Redmore Road, not far from the Broadway, the new commercial centre of Hammersmith. It is perhaps more likely that his parents, realising that their life expectancy was limited, bought the house and settled it on Francis to provide a secure future for him after they had gone. Francis is shown as the owner in 1878 but by 1880 E.T. is also resident and shown as paying his son five shillings a week to rent two unfurnished rooms on the first floor. Such an arrangement was not unusual at the time because the Representation of the People Act of 1867 had given the vote to any man over the age of 21 who either owned or rented and occupied property worth more than £10 a year. By paying his son five shillings a week E.T. was effectively also buying his right to vote.

The Craigs stayed at 2 Redmore Road for the next seven years. Even though it was a substantial house on three floors, it must have been crowded for the 1881 census showed that they shared it with two other families, a total of nine people. Curiously, although Francis apparently owned the house, his father is shown as head of the household and a journalist in the 1881 census whilst Francis is merely a reporter. It is probably indicative of the subservient role that Francis played to his father throughout their lives but it also shows that he had been unable to find work as an editor in the six years since his sacking by the
Bucks Advertiser
.