I questioned John Lessore about his uncle's Gladstone bag, and he told me he wasn't aware of anyone in the family knowing about a Gladstone bag that might have belonged to Walter Sickert. I tried very hard to fir.: that bag. If it had been used to carry bloody knives, DNA could very well have come up with some interesting findings. Since I am speculating. r may as well add that for Sickert to paint "The Shrubbery" on his bag seems crazy, but then it may not be. During the Ripper murders, the police found a bloody knife in shrubbery close to where Sickert's mother lived. In fact, bloody knives began to turn up in several places, as if left deliberately to excite police and neighbors.
The Monday night after Elizabeth Stride's murder, Thomas Coram. 2. coconut dealer, was leaving a friend's house in Whitechapel and noticed a knife at the bottom of steps leading into a laundry. The blade was a foot long with a blunted tip, and the black handle was six inches long and was wrapped in a bloody white handkerchief that had been tied in place with string. Coram did not touch the knife but immediately showed it to a local constable, who later testified that the knife was in the exact spot where he had stood not an hour earlier. He described the knife as "smothered" with dried blood and the sort a baker or chef might use. Sickert was an excellent cook and often dressed as a chef to entertain his friends.
While police were interrogating the members of the socialists' club who were singing inside the building when Elizabeth Stride was murdered, Jack the Ripper was making his way toward Mitre Square, where another prostitute named Catherine Eddows had headed after being released from jail. If the Ripper took the direct route of Commercial Road, followed it west, and turned left on Aldgate High Street to enter the City of London, his next crime scene was but a fifteen-minute walk from his last one.
Chapter Nineteen. These Characters About
Catherine Eddows spent Friday night in a casual ward north of Whitechapel Road because she did not have fourpence to pay for her half of John Kelly's bed.
It had been seven or eight years now that she had been living with him in the lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean Street in Spitalfields. Before Kelly, she was with Thomas Conway, the father of her children - two boys, fifteen and twenty, and a daughter named Annie Phillips, twenty-three, who was married to a lampblack packer.
The sons lived with Conway, who had left Catherine because of her drinking habits. She had not seen him or her children in years, and this was by design. In the past when she would come around, she was always in need of money. Although she and Conway had never been married, he had bought and paid for her, she used to say, and his initials were tattooed in blue ink on her left forearm.
Catherine Eddows was forty-three years old and very thin. Hardship and drink had given her a pinched look, but she may have been attractive once, with her high cheekbones, dark eyes, and black hair. She and Kelly took one day at a time, holding themselves together mostly by hawking cheap items on the streets, and now and then she cleaned houses. They usually left London in the fall because September was harvest season. They had only just gotten back on Thursday from weeks of "hopping" with thousands of other people who had fled the city for migrant work. Catherine and Kelly had spirited themselves away from the East End to roam the farming districts of Kent, gathering hops used in the brewing of beer. The work was grueling, and the couple earned no more than a shilling per bushel, but at least they were far away from smog and filth and could feel the sun on their bodies and breathe fresh air. They ate and drank like royalty and slept in barns. When they returned to London, they had not a cent.
Friday, September 28th, Kelly returned to the lodging house at 55 Flower and Dean Street in Spitalfields, and Catherine stayed without him in a free bed at a casual ward. It is not known what she did that night. Kelly later stated at her inquest that she was not a woman of the streets, nor was he the sort to tolerate her being with another man. Catherine never brought him money in the morning, he added, perhaps to forestall any intimations that she might have picked up a pittance here and there through prostitution. He was adamant that she did not have an addiction to alcohol and was only occasionally "in the habit of slightly drinking to excess."
Catherine and Kelly considered themselves man and wife and were fairly regular in paying the nightly rate of eightpence for their double bed at Flower and Dean Street. It was true they might have a word or two now and then. Some months earlier she had left him for "a few hours," but Kelly swore under oath that he and Catherine had been getting along just fine of late. He said that on Saturday morning she offered to pawn some of her clothing so they could buy food, but he insisted that she pawn his boots instead. She did, for half a crown. That pawn ticket and
another one they had bought from a woman while hopping were safely tucked inside one of Catherine's pockets, in hopes she might be able to reclaim Kelly's boots and other valuables someday soon.
Saturday morning, September 29th, Catherine met up with Kelly between ten and eleven in the old clothing market at Houndsditch, a healed gash in the earth that in Roman days had been a moat protecting the city wall. Houndsditch ran between Aldgate High Street and Bishopsgate Within, and bordered the northeast side of the City of London. As Catherine and Kelly spent most of his boot money on food and enjoyed what for them was a hearty breakfast, she moved into the outer limits of her life. Within less than fifteen hours, Catherine Eddows would be bloodless and cold.
By early afternoon, she was dressed in what must have been everything she owned: a black jacket with imitation fur around the collar and the sleeves, two outer jackets brimmed in black silk braid and imitation fur, a chintz shirt with a Michaelmas daisy pattern and three flounces, a brown linsey dress bodice with a black velvet collar and brown metal buttons down the front, a gray petticoat, a very old green Alpaca skirt, a very old ragged blue skirt with a red flounce and light twill lining, a white calico chemise, a man's white vest with buttons down the front and two outer pockets, brown ribbed stockings mended at the feet with white thread, a pair of men's lace-up boots (the right boot repaired with red thread), a black straw bonnet trimmed with black beads and green and black velvet, a white apron, and "red gauze silk" and a large white handkerchief tied around her neck.
In her many layers and pockets were another handkerchief, bits and pieces of soap, string, white rag, white coarse linen, blue and white skirting, blue ticking and flannel, two black clay pipes, a red leather cigarette case, a comb, pins and needles, a ball of hemp, a thimble, a table knife, a teaspoon, and two old mustard tins safely securing a precious stash of sugar and tea she had bought with Kelly's boot money. He did not have money for their bed that night, and at 2:00 P.M., Catherine told him she was going to Bermondsey in the southeast part of the city. Maybe she could find her daughter, Annie.
Annie used to have a house on King Street, and apparently Catherine didn't know that her daughter had not lived in that house or in Bermondsey for years. Kelly said he wished Catherine wouldn't go anywhere. "Stay here," he said to her. She was insistent, and when Kelly called out to her to be careful of the "Knife" - the street name for the East End murderer - Catherine laughed. Of course she would be careful. She was always careful. She promised to be back in two hours.
Mother and daughter never saw each other that day, and no one seems to know where Catherine went. Perhaps she walked to Bermondsey and was dismayed to find that Annie had moved. Perhaps the neighbors told Catherine that Annie and her husband had left the neighborhood at least two years ago. Perhaps no one knew who Catherine was talking about when she said she was looking for her daughter. It's possible Catherine didn't intend to go to Bermondsey at all and just wanted an excuse to earn pennies for gin. She may have been all too aware that no one in her family wanted anything to do with her. Catherine was a drunken, immoral woman who belonged in the dustbin. She was an Unfortunate and a disgrace to her children. She did not return to Kelly by four o'clock, as she had said she would, but got herself locked up at Bishopsgate Police Station for being drunk.