The Real Mary Kelly (8 page)

Harry McBain was in fact Henry McBlain and his name is given correctly on the outside of the petition but misspelled throughout the actual document
⁴⁹
. He was a retired 58-year-old ship owner and timber merchant, an Ulsterman who had made a modest fortune in Canada before retiring to London. Why he is described as a baker in the petition is a mystery although there was a large bakery within a few hundred yards of his house in St. Augustine’s Avenue, Camden Town and possibly he owned or had a financial interest in it. He may have known the Maundrells through his daughter Annie, who was a clerk in the Post Office Savings Bank for which Ellen’s father Robert had also worked.

The persistent attention of Francis or his agents eventually proved too much for Elizabeth. It must have been a nerve-shredding experience to be stalked night and day, never knowing when Francis would step out of an alleyway and
beseech her to return to him. There may have been tearful rows in the open streets, a constant barrage of notes and letters, maybe even attempts to drag her back to their home by force. It may also eventually have proved too much for Mrs. Macleod. It could not have been good for business to have that sort of caper going on anywhere near her discreet establishments and involving one of her girls. It may have been she who finally told Elizabeth to pack her bags and leave the neighbourhood.

Whoever made the decision, the sightings in August are the last recorded ones of Elizabeth in North London and in fact the last ever of her under that name; after that she disappeared, not just from the scene but from history as far as most of her family and those that knew her are concerned. How long Francis went on looking for her in that area or paying others to do so is not known but at some time in the next few months the focus of his search moved further east.

On 6th March of the following year Francis visited Mr. R.H. Owens, a commissioner for oaths, at his chambers in Serle Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, to swear an affidavit to a petition for divorce against his wife Elizabeth. His solicitor, Arthur Ivens, whose own chambers were at 107 Great Russell Street, opposite the British Museum, had drawn up the petition based on the evidence that Francis had supplied him with which terminated abruptly after the sightings of 17th and 18th August the previous year. The document bears a momentous piece of information, although one which is easily overlooked on a first reading. It starts with the words: ‘I Francis Spurzheim Craig of 306 Mile End Road in the County of Middlesex …’ At some point in the previous months he had moved from the home he had shared with Elizabeth in Argyle Square back to the East End.

It is improbable that he would have done so as long as he thought that Elizabeth was still in the Bloomsbury area, so it seems that he had received some information which revealed that she had moved east. When and how this had occurred is impossible to say. Maybe he or someone acting for him had talked to other girls who knew her and had been told that that was where she had gone. Even if she had sworn her fellow prostitutes to secrecy, a few shillings or a glass of gin may have been all that was needed to loosen their lips.

The informant, whoever she was, very probably worked from the same brothel as Elizabeth. The divorce petition states that ‘… on the 10th January 1885
the said Elizabeth Weston Craig wrote a letter from the Monmouth Hotel and Coffee House, 161 Drummond Street, Euston Square in which she stated that she had been staying there since leaving the East End…’ It is a tantalising but odd snippet. On 10th January 1885 the pair had only been married for 17 days. It hardly seems long enough for them to have lived and cohabited at three different addresses and then to have separated, let alone to have also spent some time in Paris
⁵⁰
.

There may be two explanations. It is conceivable that there is a mistake about the date. It may be that the letter was written in January 1886; early in the New Year, people frequently continue mistakenly to use the old year when writing cheques or letters. More likely is the possibility that Elizabeth had resumed her old trade during the day whilst Francis was at work and was using the Mon-mouth Hotel as her base. The intended recipient of the letter is not known. Almost certainly it was not Francis or that would have been stated in the petition. Possibly she had written it to a friend or family member so that they could safely write to her at that address and Francis had intercepted it or it had somehow come into his possession
⁵¹
. In that case, ‘since leaving the East End’ would indicate that they had only lived at Lemon’s Terrace, Stepney, for a matter of days.

Why had Elizabeth reverted to prostitution so soon after their marriage? Had life with Francis proved so intolerable that she had quickly realised that there was no future in it? Did she need the money? Francis was paranoid about his finances, frequently believing that he was facing ruin when there were no grounds for such an idea. A doggerel poem that he wrote in December 1889 called
An Editor’s Christmas
which was published in the
Indicator
, of which he was then the editor, talks of a table being strewed with ‘The bills and the notes for which he was sued’. Creditors, real or imagined, seem to have haunted Francis throughout his life. Elizabeth, who had until her marriage been financially independent and apparently well-off, at least for the few weeks whilst she was working in the West End gay house, suddenly found herself reliant on a man who could have been the model for Ebenezer Scrooge. If so, it was a situation that a girl of as independent a nature as Elizabeth would have quickly found intolerable.

The combination of living with such an odd man and the loss of her independence no doubt led to the first of many rows. Elizabeth may have resorted to drink which would have worsened an already precarious situation. Francis’s deepening paranoia may have caused him to employ the services of private detectives to keep his wife under observation until, unable to stand it any longer, she walked out on him.

When the trail finally went cold in August 1885 it apparently did not take Francis long to discover that Elizabeth had moved to the East End, whether the information was imparted by one of her former friends or not. As with all port cities, the area around the docks was a magnet for prostitutes. Sailors on their first run ashore after a long voyage, their pockets bulging with several months’ accumulated pay, were easy prey and the Ratcliffe Highway which ran parallel to the north bank of the Thames teemed with brothels. Moreover the East End, which had the highest population density in Britain, was an ideal place in which to disappear if that was your wish. It seems that Elizabeth had had enough of being stalked and accosted by Francis or his lackeys. Probably she only intended to make it a temporary exile; the upmarket West End was her more natural environment. She no doubt hoped that after a few weeks or months it would be safe for her to move back to old haunts by which time Francis might have lost interest or found it impossible to pick up the trail again. At any event, if that was her intention, she badly underestimated the extent of his obsession. Nor could she have known that his craving to have his wife back had gradually changed into a bitter, festering resentment. It was the classic case of love turned to hatred.

When Francis pursued Elizabeth to the East End in late 1885 or early 1886 he took lodgings at 306 Mile End Road. The house no longer exists because the south side of the road suffered extensively in the Blitz of 1940 and the area was rebuilt as a huge estate of council owned flats in the 1950s
⁵²
. The north side survives however and it is easy to see that the buildings opposite would have consisted of a mixture of 18th and 19th century terraced houses mostly with commercial premises at street level and two or three floors of family accommodation above. In the census of 1891 the house is occupied by William Hasted and his family. Hasted was a printer and may have had his shop on the ground floor. As a reporter Francis would have needed to come and go at all hours and no doubt he had his own key to the street door so that he could let himself in whenever he wanted without disturbing the family.

The Mile End Road is an eastwards extension of Whitechapel Road and both were part of the old Roman road that left the city via the Aldgate and travelled in an almost straight line to the garrison town of Colchester some 65 miles distant. It was a wide thoroughfare which served as a major artery to London, and night and day a stream of wagons brought produce in from the
farmlands of East Anglia, and fish from Ipswich and Lowestoft to the markets of the capital. Since the three great city markets of Billingsgate, Spitalfields and Leadenhall were re-stocked overnight ready to open in the early hours of the morning it was a place of constant bustle and noise, never free of human or animal traffic at any hour. Just as they still do today, market traders set up their stalls along the pavements of the Whitechapel Road selling fruit and vegetables, coffee and all manner of wares from cut-price portmanteaux to tin baths. At night the road was lit by occasional gas street lamps and the hissing naphtha flares of the stall holders.

Soon after Francis’s arrival, a few hundred yards to the east and on the opposite side of the road from his lodgings, a remarkable building project began to take shape. Known as ‘the People’s Palace of Delights’, it was the result of a collaboration between the novelist and historian Walter Besant and the philanthropist Edmund Currie. It was intended as an alternative to the public houses, music halls and gin shops which were seen by enlightened Victorian society as the root causes of the poverty and wretched condition of the working classes of the East End. It was to provide a place where both men and women could have free access to libraries, exhibitions, lectures, concerts, dances, a swimming pool and a winter garden and be refreshed with nothing more intoxicating than tea. After it was opened by Queen Victoria in 1887 it proved to be a great success and the hordes of people who flocked to it throughout the day and much of the night would have added to the constant comings and goings past Number 306. The ornate building, rebuilt after a fire in 1931, still stands and today is now part of Queen Mary University of London.

No doubt Francis chose his lodgings carefully. They were within easy walking distance of the Thames Magistrates Court at Arbour Street, the busiest police court in the country, which served the area east of the City of London and north of the Thames which took in the London docks, Wapping, Whitechapel and Spitalfields. They were also little more than a mile from the Ratcliffe Highway which, Francis probably guessed, was where he might find his errant wife; not so close that there was a danger that she might spot him first and do a bolt before he pinpointed her but sufficiently near for him to keep the area under discreet surveillance.

Apart from the possible near miss in 1886 his search for Elizabeth does not seem to have met with success for the better part of two years. It was likely that she was altering her appearance during this time; Mary Jane acquired several nicknames during her sojourn in the East End – including ‘Ginger’, ‘Black Mary’ and ‘Fair Emma’ – which suggests that she was changing her hair colour as well as her name. There does not seem to be a consensus about the natural colour of her hair. Several people described her as fair although that may have referred to her complexion rather than her hair. In the pictures of Mrs. Barrett that Walter Sickert painted and which some people believe to have been his later recollection of Mary Jane, she is always depicted with dark hair and blue eyes. After her death some newspapers stated categorically that she had fair skin and ginger hair while others, including the
New York World
, said just as emphatically that she was dark complexioned. The only existing photograph of her, a macabre death bed scene showing her terribly mutilated corpse on the bed in Miller’s Court, appears to show dark hair but it is possible that it was so saturated with her blood that it is impossible to tell.

As 1886 and 1887 dragged on, the notes in the divorce papers make no reference to her having been spotted and in May 1887 Francis appears finally to have run out of money. He dismissed his solicitor, Arthur Ivens, and thereafter is recorded as acting for himself, although there are no notes of anything new happening in relation to the petition until August of the following year
⁵³
.

While working in the area and hunting for Elizabeth, Francis had ample time to become familiar with the streets of Whitechapel, Wapping and Spitalfields. His mapmaker’s training gave him an eye for the urban landscape and an ability to see the warren of streets, courts and back alleys laid out in plan form almost as if he was swooping above them like a London pigeon. He in turn would have become a familiar sight to the policemen of H Division at their stations in Commercial Street, Leman Street and Commercial Road. Policemen and reporters have always had an affinity, each providing the other with scraps of information and rubbing shoulders in the police and coroners’ courts and, off duty, in the pubs and watering holes of the district they serve. Despite his natural aversion to face-to-face conversation and small talk Francis would inevitably have got to know the local Bobbies on the beat
and become familiar with the set patterns of their daily lives and the rhythms of policing the Metropolis.

What they made of him is difficult to say. He was an educated man with a quirky sense of humour and maybe he was able to entertain them with stories of his time in America, but with one possible exception he probably made few real friendships during his time in Whitechapel. The poem he wrote and published in the
Indicator
after he left the East End gives some clues as to his existence during this period. It is a maudlin piece called
An Editor’s Christmas
which has been mentioned already and is quoted in full in a later chapter. In it he describes, in cod rhyming couplets, making his way back to a lonely fifth-storey room after a day’s work, his shoes, full of holes, letting in moisture from the slush-covered pavements. He sat trying to read and darn his socks by the light of a solitary candle until he fell asleep and ‘dreamed him of fame’ and ‘the success for which he had prayed’. In his sleep he sees a Christmas tree and a table piled with bank notes and ‘presents and gifts as in good days of old’.