Was Eleanor Bridge Mrs Hammersmith?

[erobitha]

I have reason to believe that "Mrs Hammersmith" was in fact "Mrs Eleanor Bridge". Hammersmith was a quaint nickname Jim had for her, and most likely George too. This is at theory stage and I have yet to research any direct link to the two families, but have a look at what I have found thus far:

- George Bridge was born Liverpool December 1848 (aged 40 in 1888) Baptised 15/01/1849
- Father Mark Nelson Bridge & mother Elisabeth Bridge
- Address was Windsor Street, Toxteth Park 1851 census (father was a pilot)
- Lived with parents & siblings at 6 Myrtle Street, Liverpool (aged 12 - 1861 census)
- Age 22 still living with parents, this time Richmond Terrace, Everton, West Darby (1871 census)
- Married in 1873 to Eleanor Young (born 1847)
- 1881 census address is Innismore Newsham Park, West Darby. 6 miles north of Battlecrease House with main road linking being Queens Drive. George's Occupation: Cotton Broker
- In 1887 Hammersmith Bridge was re-opened to the public by Prince of Wales on 11/06/1887.


Just sharing a theory for now....

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

Erobitha, I'm glad your getting your money's worth from your Ancestry subscription.

Your implying that Eleanor Young, who married George Bridge in 1873, was Mrs Hammersmith because of a bridge?

Mrs Bridge. Hammersmith bridge has recently opened, let's call her Mrs Hammersmith, affectionately, cause her name's Bridge, see. Get it?

I'll be honest, I'm not seeing that one.

[Iconoclast]

Erobitha, I'm glad your getting your money's worth from your Ancestry subscription.

Your implying that Eleanor Young, who married George Bridge in 1873, was Mrs Hammersmith because of a bridge?

Mrs Bridge. Hammersmith bridge has recently opened, let's call her Mrs Hammersmith, affectionately, cause her name's Bridge, see. Get it?

I'll be honest, I'm not seeing that one.

That's not strictly true, Abe - you are clearly seeing it. Whether you choose to believe it is yours to call. At present, it's a 'could have been' which both sides of the debate make frequent use of.

PS erobitha, 1) Why are you called 'erobitha'? (I finally feel the need to ask), and 2) possibly as hard to prove as my GSG argument, but well done all the same (maybe James had a sense of humour and enjoyed playing around with her name - who else do we know who enjoys doing that???)

Cheers,

Ike

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

I can only see what's shown to me.

[Iconoclast]

I can only see what's shown to me.

Well, Abe, he's showing you that Maybrick could have been referring to a Mrs Bridge as a 'Mrs Hammersmith' because he had Ken Dodd's tickling stick before him and - using the name thus - it tickled his fancy. Dodd (no relation of Paul, I assume) probably got it from an auction at O&L.

I used to call a pal 'Hemel' because she came from Hemel Hempstead. Absolutely no logic to it, but I had borrowed Doddsy's tickling stick and made good use of it.

Carry on.

Ike

[erobitha]

Erobitha, I'm glad your getting your money's worth from your Ancestry subscription.

Your implying that Eleanor Young, who married George Bridge in 1873, was Mrs Hammersmith because of a bridge?

Mrs Bridge. Hammersmith bridge has recently opened, let's call her Mrs Hammersmith, affectionately, cause her name's Bridge, see. Get it?

I'll be honest, I'm not seeing that one.

Whether they are yours or Al Bundy’s eyes - you get to choose what you see. I am simply presenting a theory that in the mind of the author such a silly nickname for someone he has a low opinion of is not beyond the realms of possibility.

I accept you couldn’t move for Cotton Brokers in Liverpool at that time, but using more psychology as a starting point as opposed to census data I feel we might uncover a better quality of candidate. Such as my Mary Thomas example.

I need to be quick as my free trial period on Ancestry runs out soon so does anyone have any requests? missing relatives? Glen Miller?

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

"Hammersmith was a quaint nickname for her, and most likely George too"

You've already arrived at your conclusion. It's not a theory. It's tenuous claims to bolster what you need to be facts. Like the "Manchester Murder" that was in a different town.

Erobitha, I'm not knocking your research, and certainly I'm not knocking you as an individual, that's really not me. But if you have a pre disposed view, your looking for anything that fits it, and that's not objective research.

If there are facts out there, they can be found. But saying that an entirely random Mrs Bridges was Mrs Hammersmith because Jim liked a pun is not conclusive.

Unless the low opinion was because he felt Mrs Bridges spread between two towns? Maybe she spurned him, despite her easy virtues? That'll do, since we're making **** up. Helps to explain Jim's hatred of licencious women.

[erobitha]

PS erobitha, 1) Why are you called 'erobitha'? (I finally feel the need to ask), and 2) possibly as hard to prove as my GSG argument, but well done all the same (maybe James had a sense of humour and enjoyed playing around with her name - who else do we know who enjoys doing that???)

Cheers,

Ike

The name is just a random word I saw online somewhere and thought it would be suitably ambiguous. Means nothing as far as I’m aware, but I like the idea of something being born from nothing.

I think the ‘could have beens’ are interesting because they can fire imaginations and spark people with more skills than I to follow these lines and see if there is more compelling evidence to be found beyond someone’s free trial ancestry account.

If you can’t think different then you can’t solve different.

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

The name is just a random word I saw online somewhere and thought it would be suitably ambiguous. Means nothing as far as I’m aware, but I like the idea of something being born from nothing.

I think the ‘could have beens’ are interesting because they can fire imaginations and spark people with more skills than I to follow these lines and see if there is more compelling evidence to be found beyond someone’s free trial ancestry account.

If you can’t think different then you can’t solve different.

Cracking response. The facts are so few, all we have are the maybes. Explore, by all means. Just be open to criticism.

Best endeavours.

[Iconoclast]

Cracking response. The facts are so few, all we have are the maybes. Explore, by all means. Just be open to criticism.

He's just proposing a theory, Abe, to explain facts about the scrapbook which we to date have not been able to clarify. If one believes in something and something appears to contradict it, it's not unreasonable to look for context which might explain the apparent discrepancy.

Context is absolutely everything in life. The other day I was watching a YouTube documentary on the famous Charlton footballing brothers. Up until that point, I had seen the 1958 FA Cup Final goals hundreds of times. It was the final after the Munich disaster and Man Utd has surprised everyone by making it to the final where they played Bolton. The narrative around the game had always been that Man Utd had in fact been outplayed by Bolton that day, as their two goals suggested.

Here's the rub. The documentary on the Charlton brothers showed a quick clip of Bobby Charlton hitting a long shot after 8 minutes which struck the post and came out again straight into the 'keeper's hands. Immediately, I thought: "Wow - context change". That one clip made me stop and think about the context surrounding the 88 minutes we know nothing about rather than the two minutes we know so much about. Context. If Bobby had scored on 8 minutes, who knows how the game could have ended?

And I've said this a thousand times about James Maybrick's scrapbook: we have to permit him the 88 minutes we know little or nothing about as well as the 2 we do know about. If we allow him to be a real 3D person rather than the one-dimensional caricature we occasionally make him, then he gets to come out of his own shadow to be the man who loved sport, and may have attended Everton's first league games, who smoke and drank, who womanised, who ate and travelled, had hopes, ambitions terrible frailties, and may well have had foolish nicknames for folk he knew. So George at the Exchange gets to be known as 'Hammersmith', therefore his wife gets to be known as 'Mrs Hammersmith', just as I am 'Iconoclast' so my missus is therefore 'Mrs Iconoclast'. If anyone is confused, that's not her actual name.

In my brilliant History vs Maybrick thread, I wrote:

So we should be circumspect and cautious before we dismiss possible context which was unequivocally pertinent - if perhaps prosaic - to him but which may seem of no consequence to us, here now down down the long line looking back with the natural scientific absolutism of our unremitting retrospect; our expecting only the obvious, anticipating only the rational, when dealing with a human being who lived a life – as we all do – free of the constraints which later tether those who remain to the simplistic binaries of the cold light; a man whose moments on the earth were as ours – daily as deep as his all-too human soul could reach into the warm glow of hot blood and the unpredictable eye and mind. So the fact he may have been influenced by the early football results shouldn’t be overlooked nor too easily dismissed.

The denouement was deliberately prosaic - it was intended to jolt the reader out of the reverie and back into the reality of James Maybrick's life in 1888. And - if we want to understand the scrapbook - we need to be able to have the intellectual curiosity which permits of the apparently implausible and positively sanctifies it as a glorious possibility.

People do strange things. I constantly refer to Mike Barrett's affidavit as his 'affy David'. It's a corruption, of course, of Barrett's own original misspelling of a relatively underused word in the language. If in a hundred years someone was trying to work out who this mysterious genius Iconoclast was (the guy whose determination, strength, persistence, and handsomeness eventually solved the puzzle of who Jack the Spratt McVitie was) and they stumbled upon me as a candidate (for - of course - I keep a Victorian scrapbook of my own whenever I am ripping-up sex workers here in Lower Whottlington on the Whottle) they might draw the conclusion that Ike's use of 'affy David' was in homage to his much-respected father-in-law called David who died last year and who his (David's) wife constantly referred to - as fondly as only the ironic Scots truly can - with the expression "He is [now was] an affy man" ('affy' being a Scots corruption of 'awful'). Now, our erstwhile author in a hundred years time might get laughed at for the convoluted nature of this 'link' to me. And yet, they would be perfectly right - that is indeed the reason I write 'affy David'.

Now, that's the power of context for you, dear readers. So when erobitha suggests that George Bridge was nicknamed 'Hammersmith' because of the nascent bridge, and that therefore James Maybrick may have referred to George's wife as 'Mrs Hammersmith', we should be very wary indeed of reaching quickly for the 'cry foul' button on our remote controls. It 'could have been' the case.

It is unlikely that context is ever going to be proven, which brings me back to the power of statistics to make a point (this in response to - was it Harry D's? - confusion over another of my brilliant posts): if a sufficient number of events occur which appear to point towards a certain possibility, then one can argue from statistical probability that such a number of things would not occur in this way by mere chance alone (that is, that something must be causing them all to appear to point towards a certain possibility).

Moral of this story is do not too easily dismiss the possible evidence of context. There is no reason to think those who came before us expended their entire lives in a vacuum.

Ike

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

Ike, me owd mucker, me owd matey skip, I'm not embarking on a crusade against your heir apparent. Just so, as you claim about supposition and context, if David "Lord Orsamgasm" can argue that Godmother and Aunt are incompatible, the same logic applies to Mrs Hammersmith. Maybe Jim was dead against such formalities. Maybe he was so in awe of the countess he never called her anything but "the godmother"

We don't know. We can't know. So it's not a great starting point without outside verifiable details.

Really, Lord Orsamgasms "Bunny's Aunt" didn't finally nail the coffin. Mrs Hammersmith isn't prising the lid off to shouts of "hallelujah".

Just saying....

[Iconoclast]

The name is just a random word I saw online somewhere and thought it would be suitably ambiguous. Means nothing as far as I’m aware, but I like the idea of something being born from nothing.

Perhaps 'Laurenz' would have been an alternative (after Laurence Krauss, author of A Universe from Nothing)? Actually, 'Diego Laurenz' would make a good handle, wouldn't it? I wonder if anyone has used it yet?

Just out of interest, I wonder if it is possible to edit one's username once it is registered? I quite fancy 'The Great Ikemondo'. What does my reader think?

Cheers,

TGI

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

Perhaps 'Laurenz' would have been an alternative (after Laurence Krauss, author of A Universe from Nothing)? Actually, 'Diego Laurenz' would make a good handle, wouldn't it? I wonder if anyone has used it yet?

Just out of interest, I wonder if it is possible to edit one's username once it is registered? I quite fancy 'The Great Ikemondo'. What does my reader think?

Cheers,

TGI

The Great Ikeconundrum

[erobitha]

Thanks Ike for so eloquently explaining why I share these theories - I forget sometimes that to bring people on the journey with you they need to understand not only where you are going, but why. You did a first rate job articulating that for me, thanks.

When the bones have been scraped of all their flesh one must look for nourishment in different ways. The marrow can be extracted and the bones rendered down and used as broth. The man who realised this was possible was the man who didn’t starve.

After 130 years we need fresh thinking and new theories. Those theories could lead to hard evidence that unlocks the secrets which have shrouded this case for many, many years.

If all we keep doing is scraping the same old bones then we will starve.

Mary Jane Kelly is out there somewhere for example - just not as Mary Jane Kelly. Do we give up or do we look at it through the lens of context and psychology? If she changed her name why and from what?

Theories based on context is simply another way to create different strands of investigation. Mine are basic thus far and I have never claimed they are 100% fact but they could be the catalyst to answers.

I don’t take criticism personally but I won’t stop sharing theories just because certain people don’t like them. I’m here for the truth. Despite the irony of my signature

[caz]

Interesting thread, thanks all.

I often wondered if Mrs Hammersmith was a fictional character dreamed up as an oblique reference to 'Emma Smith', the early Whitechapel victim, who had a blunt instrument rammed inside her, which is what 'Sir Jim' fantasised about doing to a victim with his cane.

"Emma Smith!" is in a little book I have somewhere upstairs called something like: 'Cries of Old London Town', and is down as London slang used by porters and such when calling out the name of the train station, "Hammersmith!"

As for making up and using funny nicknames, here at Brown Towers we make an art form of it and I always have. My daughter had a cuddly seal we named Seal Dwitherkiss [get it?] and a cuddly parrot we named Parrot Fenalia [get it?].

A lady I once worked with was called Olive Boyt, so she quickly became "Oi'll 'ave a boit".

A lady who lives near us, who must remain nameless, is always referred to by a few of us as "Brick Top". It's not kind, and it's not big or clever, and there is no connection with her real name, but you'd know what we mean if you saw her.

Love,

Caz
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