locals of the ten bells and other bars...

[chrismasonic]

i'm sure this has been brought up before but i've searched for a thread to no avail...so my aplogogies if this is flogging a dead horse

every district has a route...a chain of bars that people use...some people might stay in one bar for the night and some have a drink in one then move to the bar around the corner and so forth along the route...and most people use the same route to link these bars together based on proximity

i'm curious to debate if indeed the victims frequented the ten bells pub amongst others they would most certainly know each other or at the very,very least know each others names...locals know each other...locals in the same line of work are more likely to know each other...if you move in the same circles in the same area surely they would have come across each other...

[Sam Flynn]

There were many, many more pubs in Spitalfields than one might believe from popular accounts of the Ripper story, Chris - there were three in or near Dorset Street alone: the Horn of Plenty, the Blue Coat Boy and the Britannia (or "Ringer's"). To get an idea of what we're up against, you might like to read Adrian Phypers' splendid dissertation "The House Where Jack Swilled" here. There's a faint possibility that Mary Kelly might have known Annie Chapman, as they both lived in Dorset Street at the same time, but even there the odds aren't as good as one might imagine - Dorset Street alone was home to some 800 people, and Mary and Annie lived at either end of the street. They were also separated by some two decades in age.

Add to that the fact that most Victorian pubs weren't exactly large, and it becomes readily apparent that the chances of even those who lived in the same street being anything more than nodding acquaintances, still less drinking buddies, are rather remote.

Nothing could be further removed from the image of a cosy village "local" than the gin-joints of the overcrowded East End.

[anna]

I disagree with Sam on this point....


There is no reason at all,why these women wouldn't have known each other.(Doesn't matter how many people lived in a certain road..or area).

I have always felt that way about them,and always will do.

I was just thinking of Tabram and Pearly Poll on a pub crawl....and they were all in the same profession aswell....

As I say...no reason at all....even if just on nodding terms...but I think they knew each other better than this.

[Sam Flynn]

There you go, Chris.

It's your choice between my point about the huge population figures, the non-proximity of the victims' living quarters, the age gap between at least two of them, and the multiplicity of pubs in the area... versus Anna's "always feeling" that the victims knew each other.

Give me inferences based on hard statistics over conclusions based on faith any day, but I could well be wrong

[anna]

Yep...as Sam says......we stand on opposite sides of this one...


But I still think he's great!

[miss marple]

The ten bells

Tom Cullen who apparently interviewed an elderly retired marker porter called Dennis Barret in the 1960s when researching his book The autumn of Terror, has this story from Barrett, who apparently knew Dorset St and' Black Mary' when he was a boy.
I don't know if anyone has checked the veracity of Barrett's stories. Or is it just part of the mythology?
He says'' She was a handsome woman, tall and rather stout. She had her pitch outside the Ten Bells pub in Commercial St, and woe to any woman who tried to poach her territory- such a woman was likely to have he hair pulled out in fistfuls'
Barrett also mentioned other notorious characters,
''Mad Jack O 'Brien, an irishman with shoulders like a boxer. He never wore a shirt and would fight anyone. He would go from pub to pub and the owners would stand him free drinks just to get rid of him' Then there was Tommy no Legs and Mrs Flower of the Flock, Tommy who had two wooden stumps for legs, sold matches outside the Bank of England and when he got roaring drunk, as he frequently did, he would unstrap one of his wooden extremites and use it to smash up a pub '.
These are such great stories i would love it if they were true.
Miss MARPLE

[chrismasonic]

i know theres lots of bars around the area and lots of people too but i come from a pretty busy place too and it doesn't confuse me...

i havn't been in my local estate bar for well over 8 years now...but if i walk in right now i'll recognise people from my street and the locality...along with the lifetime users...i know peoples names that i've never spoken to in my life...and i know them because they drank in the same bar as me at some time

i use a bar across town...same again...the same old faces will be there old and young....most nights of the week

my friends used to live near the ten bells,that was one of there locals...it's very small...i've used most of the pubs around that area when i've travelled down to see friends...if you go there a few nights in a week you start to recognise the locals same as anywhere else

it has been said the mary used to stand outside the ten bells...i can't help but think that after passing a few times you'd get to know who she was...through sight or gossip...

i'm of the school that all of these women knew one another to a degree and most certainly had mutual friends,customers,lovers...which makes it even more likely

[Sam Flynn]

i'm of the school that all of these women... had mutual friends,customers,lovers

Chris,

Please check out the "timelines" (actually, quite useful mini-biographies) for each of them under the "Victims" link in the panel on the left. There you'll see that, not only did these women live in different parts of an exceptionally overcrowded part of London, but some of them (Kelly, Nichols, Stride) were relative newcomers to the immediate area. There were also differences in terms of age-group, "ethnicity" (if I can put it like that) and varying degrees of commitment to relationships among the victims. A number of the victims frequented different doss-houses, which in themselves were located in mean streets containing hundreds and hundreds of people.

Now, in order to cater for the huge, dissolute population of Spitalfields, many of them alcoholics, a large number of pubs would have been necessary - and so, it transpires, was the case. However, some still labour under the misapprehension that the Ten Bells was the only pub in town, presumably because it's become the romantic "victim's rendezvous" beloved of conspiracy theorists and film-makers.

[anna]

Well said,Chrismasonic!!....

[chrismasonic]

we're not just summising they may have encountered each other at the ten bells...or any of the other bars in the area...i know people don't just use one bar...they use many...but along with that you meet people in each one

if people hang out on your street corner...you'll see them...and if they hang out there regularly you'll get to know who they are...maybe become friends or enemies...but you'll remember faces at the very least

if you buy your veg from a stall on the high street you may recognise other customers from previous visits

these people have got all day and all night to come across each other

these are the nightime people...for all these hundreds of people that live in whitechapel mentioned...theres less about at night,it goes without saying and if you hang out in bars and streets in any town at night...you'll start seeing familiar faces and you'll meet others doing the same as you...

the landlord of the ten bells is gonna know the landlord of the next bar down the road...he's gonna know his customers be they gangsters,hardmen,working girls,policemen...all publicans have that knowledge

streetgirls would have a similar knowledge of the bars customers...and the people of the night...where you go and where you don't go and why and because of who...

these girls all have been reported to hang around the streets at night,i'm sure they're lives crisscrossed...

[Sam Flynn]

Even there, Chris, we're not dealing with a handful of professional prostitutes, but with thousands of casual streetwalkers - not to mention tens of thousands of casual customers, not all of them "regular". It's not as if they would necessarily have worked the same "beats", and one only has to look at a map showing the murder sites to see that the victims had evidently been "picked up" in different parts of town.

In addition, most of the victims had passed their prime long before Mary Kelly arrived in the East End. To suggest that the likes of Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes would have been in competition with, or "colleagues" of, Mary Kelly - or that they regularly worked the same "red light district" - is stretching definitions a little too far.

[chrismasonic]

i'm not suggesting that the women were rivals...merely that they knew each other to some degree...

i think the painting of tens of thousands of people hanging out on the streets of whitechapel in the small hours is wrong...
i live in newcastle and each weekend thousands upon thousands of people flood the city centre bars each weekend and i've walked through my city centre many times at 4 in the morning and you don't bump into many people at all...same goes for london...you see people at all hours but not that many

i know my comparison is modern day versus 1888 but times havn't changed that much.in regard to when people go to sleep..they'd be hundreds of people out of them streets that late at night at the very most

you got your daytime people and your nightime people...the guy riding a cart at 5am each morning isn't still in the pub at 1am...he went to bed long before

[Sam Flynn]

Chris,

I think you may have underestimated what "overcrowding" and "casual prostitution" meant in the East End of 1888.

i think the painting of tens of thousands of people hanging out on the streets of whitechapel in the small hours is wrong.

Nobody's trying to paint that picture. The point is that, at any one time, for every few women who were compelled to go out on the streets, there would have been tens of thousands who didn't. The next night, a different few women might have had to go out... and so forth.

In other words - the odds of a casual prostitute happening to be on the streets at the same time as another was quite low, given their unpredictable work patterns and the enormous number of women who might have resorted to prostitution when the need arose.

The same would have been true of the pubs, and for similar reasons.

The odds of a particular Dorset Street resident happening to be in the Ten Bells at the same time as another particular Dorset Street resident would have been quite low for starters, given that the pub would only have held - what? - 50 people, and nearly 900 people lived in Dorset Street.

The odds of a given Dorset Street resident (like Chapman) being in the Ten Bells at the same time as a particular Flower & Dean Street resident (like Nichols) would have been lower still.

The odds of a particular Dorset Street resident (like Kelly) actually striking up a friendship with a Devonshire Street, St George's East, resident (like Stride) would have been practically nil.

The same applies to just about any combination of victim you care to mention, in varying degrees of diminishing probability. When you combine those probabilities, the odds of ALL the victims - or even three or four of them - knowing one another is extremely small.

[chrismasonic]

i'm sure i know about as much about overcrowding as you...i'm not underestimating overcrowding factors...but i'm not calculating random facts

the odds against me and a guy who lives 8 miles away from me being in a bar 10 miles from both our homes who be very high indeed...but we both hung out there most nights the odds wouldn't be very high at all...

the landlords of these bars knew these women well...if there was tens of thousands of people out there each night they wouldn't know individuals as well...just faces in the crowd...plus these thousands wouldn't fit into these tiny bars...is that why mary was always stood outside the ten bells because it was too full?

[Sam Flynn]

the odds against me and a guy who lives 8 miles away from me being in a bar 10 miles from both our homes who be very high indeed...but we both hung out there most nights the odds wouldn't be very high at all...

What if there were several tens of thousands of people crammed into a space of only 2 square miles? What if there were dozens and dozens of pubs dotted around the district? What if those pubs were quite small, and barely big enough to contain even one twentieth of the population of a single street at any one time? What if you could only afford one or two beers whenever you could scrape enough money together to buy them? What if you had to spend ages hanging around the streets hoping to find someone desperate enough to pay you for a grope, before you had enough money to buy another? What if the other guy was operating under similar constraints?

Sorry, Chris, but you really ought to understand the enormity of the overcrowding and poverty problems in the East End during the Late Victorian Period, as well as understanding what "casual prostitution" back then would have entailed. Our 21st Century experiences just do not compare.