Jack the Ripper Tour

Happy Days Fish and Chip Shop

Property rented out to movie companies

Last weekend my husband took me away to London for a Jack the Ripper Tour arranged by Edwards Coaches. It was an anniversary present and a great one at that! Other women get flowers and chocolates but I got a slasher tour. Just kidding I got the flowers and chocs too. It was honestly the best present he could have given to me as going on that tour brought the area to life for me. The tour lasted for two hours and was well worth it as the guide took us around the streets and alleyways that the victims and Jack the Ripper himself would have used. I actually asked if some of the cobbles were the very ones they had walked on and I was assured that they were!
One place we were shown was the Happy Days Fish and Chip shop at Goulston Street, which was the site where Catherine Eddows bloodied apron was found. Apparently the police had hold of it for six weeks and then it conveniently disappeared! Although there was no DNA back then, imagine if they'd kept it, later on it could have been analysed! But apparently lots of evidence went missing back then as our guide told us they were just left lying around and not always labelled.

A nearby street

Another building we passed was this eerie building on the left that was light up inside and full of old furniture. Apparently, it's used by movie companies for programmes like Ripper Street and would be very expensive to purchase even though it looks run down! No one lives there, it's just rented out.

The street intersecting with that one was extremely spooky I found, it looked very olde worlde, yet properties there would cost a fortune!

The Ten Bells pub next door to Spitalfield's Church was of interest to me as it was said that some of the Ripper's victims would have drank there, maybe even the Ripper himself!

The Ten Bells pub

Wikipedia says: "The Ten Bells is a public house at the corner of Commercial Street and Fournier Street in Spitalfieds in the East End of  London. It is sometimes cited as being notable for its association with two victims of Jack the Ripper; Annie Chapman and Mary Kelly." I was most interested in seeing Miller's Court where Mary once lived but it's no longer there, now it's a building site with a huge crane stuck in the middle!

The pub is just a short walk from that area so I could well imagine Mary having a few gins at the Ten Bells, maybe picking up a client and staggering back to her humble abode, which is most probably how she met her grizzly demise!

Of all the victims I find Mary Jane Kelly, the most intriguing of all!

A crane now stands on the site of Miller's Court

I suppose I imagined the walk would meander along deathly quiet streets, swirling with fog, but of course it wasn't like that at all. It's a very busy area indeed and especially as it was a Saturday night as people passed us dressed up for a night out and on some parts of the tour you could hear the 'Boom Boom' of music vibrating from pubs and clubs out onto pavements beneath our feet, though some parts like near the expensive houses, the streets were quieter which added to the ambiance. A good imagination is needed for this tour to get the full effect!

Also I imagined there would be just the one tour going on, quite naively! There were several going on at the same time with various guides and we were almost bumping in to one another as we criss-crossed the streets, not to mention almost colliding with several other members of the public.

Spitalfields Church is very close to the Ten Bells pub. According to this website:

Spitafields Church

http://ccspits.org/history/ "Christ Church was built between the years 1714 and 1729 as part of the church building programme initiated by the Fifty New Churches act of 1711, backed by Queen Anne, which was implemented by four different parliamentary commissions. At the time, there were fears that ‘godless thousands’ outside the City of London had no adequate church provision, and that non-conformists – including large numbers of French Huguenot silk weavers – were moving into Spitalfields and bringing their non-conformist worshipping ways with them."

Another Ripper Tour near ours

It seemed strange to think that the 'unfortunates' as they were known back then, i.e. prostitutes, were frequenting a pub so near to that the church where the moralists of that time would have attended. Would the prostitutes have gone there to worship too? Although the guide told us that it was St Botolph’s Church near Mitre Street that they encircled to ply their trade.      

I would say all in all, the Jack the Ripper tour we attended was very good and we got our money's worth from it. The guide told me something I hadn't heard before and that was [he got it from good authority] that the 'intestines over the left shoulder' thing that the Ripper did was connected to the Masons. It seemed to be a symbolic thing. He also showed us various photographs of the victims which were quite gruesome. Some of the women appeared to be middle-aged with Mary Kelly being the youngest at around 25 years of age.

So, I suppose it begs the questions did any of the women know their murderer? Had they encountered him beforehand, maybe say at the Ten Bells pub? Why was Mary Kelly's murder far more brutal than the others? It was almost as though 'Jack' wanted to hack off their identity and make them less of a woman by removing their uteruses. And strangely enough, why did Doctor John Rees Gabe [a qualified gynaecologist], attend Mary Kelly's murder scene along with an obstetrician?

The questions swirl around and around in my mind...

Who's the real Mary Kelly?

Mary Jane Kelly, who was believed to have been the Ripper's final victim, was known under a variety of names. Sometimes she's referred to as Marie Jeanette Kelly, this is thought to be because she turned up in London and became friendly with a French lady who introduced her into the world of high class prostitution in the West End, where she became a courtesan, granting favours for wealthy men. There are passages of writing that refer to her as 'riding around in her own carriage' and 'being escorted to Paris', where no doubt, she did business. Although she was said to dislike it out there and returned to London.

Although Mary was thought to be Irish, she was apparently Welsh by birth and was fluent in the Welsh language. Some Ripperologists believe Mary once lived in Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, which would tie in with her being married young to a collier with the surname, Davies. There were plenty of coal pits in Merthyr at that time, so that could fit. He was said to have been killed in a pit accident, so, Mary was widowed at the tender age of sixteen. Her father was said to work in an ironworks and there were three of those in Merthyr: Cyfarthfa, Dowlais and Plymouth.

Bob Hinton who wrote the book 'From Hell', found evidence of a sixteen-year-old Mary Jane Davies living at the Brunswick Hotel, Merthyr Tydfil. She's listed on the 1881 Census as 'Widowed', which would seem to fit too.

See here: https://kpoulin1.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/mary-jane-davies-widow/

The Brunswick as it is today

There was talk of Mary going into the 'infirmary' after her husband's death and moving to Cardiff to be with a cousin. It seems to be that people assume it's the infirmary at Cardiff that she was interned into for some time, but I wonder if she was living in Merthyr as Bob Hinton suggests, was it the St. Tydfil's Infirmary Merthyr Tydfil she was interned at? Particularly as that infirmary was just up the road from the Brunswick Inn and there's evidence of a Doctor J. Gabe working there during that time period as a Medical Officer. That was information I discovered myself whilst studying online Welsh newspapers.

13 Miller's Court

Doctor Gabe was one of the first doctors on the scene at 13 Miller's Court [where Mary was later found brutally murdered after a particularly savage attack on November the 9^th, 1888.] Could Gabe and Kelly have known one another whilst both lived in Merthyr Tydfil? After all, they seemed to have arrived in London around the same time. Is it too much of a coincidence that Gabe was present at the murder scene when he was a registered gynaecologist who also worked for the N.S.P.C.C.? Why was an obstetrician present too? Was Mary pregnant and it was hushed up for some reason? In fact there were 6 doctors present at the scene, which is more than all the other cases had present.

Other names Mary was known as were 'Fair Emma', 'Ginger' and 'Black Mary'. She was around twenty-five-years-old and said to be living in poverty at the time of her death. This ties in with her leaving her job at the West End and moving to the East End of London to work the streets. Reports from the time estimated that she was around 5 ft 7 inches tall [1.70 m] which would seem quite tall for a lady back then. Her hair colour seems uncertain as sometimes she's said to have had blonde hair or red hair, though 'Black Mary' seems to suggest she was a brunette. Her eye colour was said to be blue. The Daily Telegraph of 10 November 1888 described her as 'tall, slim, fair, of fresh complexion, and of attractive appearance'.

I've also read reports that John Langan, a suspect in the Ripper murders, was mentioned in the Home Office files of 12 October 1888. A letter had been received from E. W. Bon-ham, the British consul in Boulogne, expressing the belief that the Ripper might be Langan. There is no record of why Bonham thought so, and Langan was interviewed and cleared of suspicion. Langan was reported as staying with a 'Mary Davies' and there's mention of him staying at The Brunswick Hotel in Merthyr. Could Mary and Langan have known one another in Merthyr? Coincidentally, both had spent time in France.

Is it more than coincidence that Langan and Gabe might have crossed paths with Mary in Merthyr?

Part 2 Coming soon!