Most of these cities also had major racecourses, and several Ripper letters mention horse racing and give the police a few lucky betting tips. Sickert painted pictures of horse racing and was quite knowledgeable about the sport. In the March 19, 1914, New Age literary journal, he published an article he titled "A Stone Ginger," which was racing slang for "an absolute certainty," and he tossed in a few other bits of racing slang for good measure: "welsher" and "racecourse thief" and "sporting touts." Racecourses would have been a venue where Sickert could disappear into the crowd, especially if he was wearing one of his disguises and the race was in a city where he wasn't likely to encounter anybody he knew. At the races, prostitutes were plentiful.
Horse racing, gambling in casinos, and boxing were interests of Sickert's, although very little has been written about them in the books and articles I have seen. When the Ripper uses the term "Give up the sponge" in a letter that art experts believe Sickert wrote, is this a peek into Sickert's personality or simply his thoughtless use of a cliche? Is there any meaning to be found in the murky self-portrait that Sickert painted in 1908 that features him in a studio standing behind what is supposed to be a plaster torso of a boxer but looks more like a female who is decapitated, her limbs raggedly severed? Is there any significance in the reference in another Ripper letter to "Bangor Street," an address that doesn't exist in London, but Bangor is the home of a racecourse in Wales?
While I have no evidence that Sickert bet on horse races, I don't have any fact to say he didn't. Gambling may have been a secret addiction. Certainly that would help explain how he managed to go through money so quickly. By the time he and the parsimonious Ellen divorced, she was financially crippled and would never recover. Sickert's organized brain seemed to fail him when it came to finances. He thought nothing of hiring a cab and leaving it sitting all day. He gave away armfuls of paintings - sometimes to strangers - or let the canvases rot in his studios. He never earned much, but he had access to Ellen's money - even after their divorce - and then to the money of other women who took care of him, including his next two wives.
Sickert was generous to his brother Bernhard, who was a failed artist. He rented numerous rooms at a time, bought painting supplies, read multiple newspapers daily, must have had quite a wardrobe for his many disguises, was a devotee of the theaters and music halls, and traveled. But most of what he bought and rented was shabby and cheap, and he wasn't likely to go for the best seats in the house or travel first class. I don't know how much he gave away, but after their divorce, Ellen wrote, "To give him money is like giving it to a child to light a fire with."
She believed him to be so financially irresponsible - for reasons she never cited - that after their divorce she conspired with Jacques-Emile Blanche to buy Sickert's paintings. Blanche began purchasing them and she secretly reimbursed him. Sickert "must never never suspect that it comes from me," Ellen wrote Blanche. "I shall tell no one" - not even her sister Janie, in whom she had always confided. Ellen knew what Janie thought of Sickert and his exploitative ways. She also knew that helping her former husband was not really helping him. No matter what he got, it would never be enough. But she could not seem to help herself when it came to helping him.
"He is never out of my mind day or night," Ellen wrote Blanche in 1899. "You know what he is like - a child where money is concerned. Will you again be as kind as you were before amp; buy one of Walter's pictures at the right moment to be of most use to him? And will you not forget that this will be of no good unless you insist on arranging how the money is to be spent. He borrowed?600 from his brother in law (who is a poor man) amp; he ought to pay him interest on the sum. But I cannot."
Addiction to drugs and alcohol ran in Sickert's family. He probably had an addictive predisposition, which would help explain why he avoided alcohol in his younger years and then abused it later on. It would be risky to say that Sickert had a gambling problem. But money seemed to vanish when he touched it, and while the mention of horse racing and the cities where courses were located in the Ripper letters does not constitute "proof," these details pique our curiosity.
Sickert could have done pretty much whatever he pleased. His career did not require him to keep regular hours. He did not have to account to anyone, especially now that his apprenticeship with Whistler had ended and Sickert was no longer bound to do as the Master demanded. In the fall of 1888, the Master was on his honeymoon and neither knew nor cared what Sickert did with his days. Ellen and Janie were in Ireland - not that Ellen had to be away when Sickert decided to vanish for a night or a week. Disappearing in Great Britain was relatively easy, as long as the trains were running. It was no great matter to cross the English Channel in the morning and have dinner in France that evening.
Whatever caused Sickert's chronic "financial muddle," to borrow Ellen's words, it was serious enough to push her to the extraordinary lengths of secretly funneling money his way after she divorced him for adultery and desertion. It was so serious that Sickert died in 1942 with only?135 to his name.
Chapter Sixteen. Stygian Blackness
Five hours after Annie Chapman's body was carried inside the Whitechapel mortuary, Dr. George Phillips arrived and found she had been stripped and washed. Furious, he demanded an explanation.
Robert Mann, the mortuary supervisor who had caused so much trouble in Mary Ann Nichols's case, replied that workhouse authorities had instructed two nurses to undress and clean the body. No police or doctors had witnessed this, and as the angry Dr. Phillips looked around the mortuary, he noticed Annie's clothing piled on the floor in a corner. His earlier admonition that the body was not to be touched by inmates, nurses, or anyone else unless the police instructed otherwise had had little effect on Mann. The inmate had heard all this before.
The mortuary was nothing more than a cramped, filthy, stinking shed with a scarred wooden table darkened by old blood. In the summer it was stuffy and warm, and in the winter it was so cold Mann could barely bend his fingers. What a job his was, Mann must have thought, and maybe the doctor should have been grateful that two nurses had saved him some trouble. Besides, it didn't take a doctor to see what had killed the poor woman. Her head was barely attached to her neck and she had been gutted like a hog hanging in a butcher's shop. Mann didn't pay much attention as Dr. Phillips continued to vent his disgust, complaining that his working conditions were not only unsuitable but also dangerous to his health.
The doctor's point would be made more fully during the inquest. Coroner Wynne Baxter announced to jurors and the press that it was a travesty that there was no proper mortuary in the East End. If any place in the Great Metropolis needed an adequate facility for handling the dead, it was certainly the impoverished East End, where in nearby Wapping, bodies recovered from the Thames had "to be put in boxes" for lack of anywhere else to take them, said Baxter.
There had once been a mortuary in Whitechapel, but it had been destroyed when a new road was put in. For one reason or another, London officials hadn't gotten around to building a new facility to take care of the dead, and the problem wasn't one that would soon be addressed. As we used to say when I worked in the medical examiner's office, "Dead people don't vote or pay taxes." Dead paupers don't lobby politicians for funding. Even though death is the great equalizer, it doesn't make all dead people equal.
Dr. Phillips settled down and began his examination of Annie Chapman's body. By now, it was in full rigor mortis, which would have been slower to form because of the cool temperature. Dr. Phillips's estimation that Annie had been dead two or three hours when her body was found may have been relatively within bounds. He was out of bounds, however, when he concluded that the small amount of food in her stomach and the absence of liquid meant she was sober when she died.