Have you seen this?

[Phil Carter]

Ally,

You claim your women friends were devastated by the loss of their children.

I have never mentioned once, throughout this thread, any mention of any lady friends of mine, neither have I mentioned any of my lady friend's personal circumstances. Just where did you get that from?

Your comments are factually incorrect. AGAIN.

Trying to bring in personal things that either don't exist or are made up assumptions won't get me to get annoyed either, which very much seems to be your bent.

I find your comments very childish

best wishes

Phil

PS Patronising me has no effect either (sweetie). Spare yourself the bother.

[Tom_Wescott]

Hi Nats. Depending on who you asked, Liz did have an accent. She tried explaining it away by stating she had a throat defect and had lost the roof of her mouth.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[Ally]

Ally,

Your assumptive comments about her being "delighted" about losing the baby are complete fabrication, THAT isnt in any record. Niether is her "partying ways", neither was she an alcoholic at the time. I find them awful. You have NO basis of fact for them. Try and argue your way out of that, using the records you scream with and find those FACTS to back up YOUR words.

best wishes

Phil

Phil sweetie, I didn't assume anything of the sort and I didn't say that anything I was saying about her alcoholism or her delight was based in fact. I was responding to YOUR assumptions that were not based in fact and countering them with equal assumptions to show you how idiotic your assumptions were. I said "for all we know" meaning one scenario is just as likely as the other. Your hearts and flowers scenario of her grief and horror is not based on any factual information but I never claimed mine was either.

WE do not know whether she was devastated by the loss of her daughter. We do not know if she was grieving. You assume she was. That's an assumption. It's not based on any reality. You claim your women friends were devastated by the loss of their children. Were your women friends destitute whores, most likely suffering from venereal disease at the time they lost their daughter? How valid is what you are basing your assumptions on her reactions?

But one thing is a fact: she was a prostitute BEFORE her daughters death and there was no spiraling downward into prostitution based on grief. She was one before the birth of her daughter and she was a prostitute after the death of her daughter. The daughter was NOT the start of a downward spiral she was in in that spiral before the daughter's death.

[Natalie Severn]

Ally,
Our posts had crossed.I was responding to an earlier post.
What I like to think about anyway is not whether she was a whore or not---she was, ofcourse she was.But she also spoke English without an accent,could apparently speak Yiddish as well and seems to me to have been quite bright and adventurous at one time.
So whore or not,she had one or two other things going for her.

[Phil Carter]

Ally,

Your assumptive comments about her being "delighted" about losing the baby are complete fabrication, THAT isnt in any record. Neither are her "partying ways", neither was she an alcoholic at the time. I find them awful. You have NO basis of fact for them. Try and argue your way out of that, using the records you scream with and find those FACTS to back up YOUR words.

best wishes

Phil

[Ally]

Hi Phil
You can take family stories one hundred years after the fact as proof as much as you want. I'll take the proven police records dating from that time as being slightly more convincing than family stories based on nothing.

Edited to add: I do also love the father of the baby was "apparently" a man of good standing. That makes it an even better story. I mean so much more sad if she's knocked up by the evil house master than the stable boy. I bet mice and doves sewed her clothes too.

[Ally]

I tend to agree with Ally here about Liz Stride, in that I doubt she entered prostitution because of having had a stillborn child.She may have had mixed feelings together with some post natal depression about her stillborn child,but that in itself wouldnt have been likely to have determined whether or not she took up prostitution,I wouldnt think.

It's not a matter of what we think or believe. It's a matter of record. She was a prostitute BEFORE her daughter was stillborn. So it's a proven FACT that she did not take up prostitution because of her daughter's death.

There is no speculation on that point. She was a prostitute prior to her daughter's death and registered as such by the police IMMEDIATELY before her daughter's death meaning she was whoring while pregnant. And treated for venereal disease a few months after, which may well have been a contributing factor.

She was a professional whore, by choice, long before her daughter's death and apparently during her pregnancy as well.

[Phil Carter]

Ally,

She wasn't an alcoholic. She was in Gothenburg, working as a housemaid. , and became pregnant, went on a downward spiral that ENDED in prostitution. Those aren't my words, they are the words of a relative, cited from the article.
So YOU Ally, are wrong.

And I maintain your comments about her are false. The father of the child was apparently a man of good standing. It is NOT unusual from those times that housemaids, kitchen maids and scullery maids were put in the family way by the more well to do in the families they worked for. Sometimes through naivity, sometimes through force.

Not a pretty story either. Just plain hard cold facts of the day.

best wishes

Phil

[Natalie Severn]

I tend to agree with Ally here about Liz Stride, in that I doubt she entered prostitution because of having had a stillborn child.She may have had mixed feelings together with some post natal depression about her stillborn child,but that in itself wouldnt have been likely to have determined whether or not she took up prostitution,I wouldnt think.
Nevertheless,what Joan says above is important,which was that economic hardship had hit many in Sweden at the time,so maybe jobs that paid decently had become hard to get.But despite all this,there were probably many single young women who would have tried to avoid becoming dependent on selling sex for a living,especially travelling to London to do so on the streets of Whitechapel.On the other hand there were apparently many women in Whitechapel at that time,especially mothers with dependant families,who needed to do some part time prostitution to avoid starvation for them and their children.But Liz does not seem to have been one of these hard pressed women.In fact she seems to have chosen to streetwalk rather than work say as a maid ,which I think she did for a while in Sweden.The main reason for her choice may have been that she seems to have had a significant drink problem---often ending up in court for drink related offences.I imagine the quickest way to get the money for her fix was prostitution.Its as simple as that.

[Ally]

So what? I mean really what does ANY of what you have said have to do with the reality? So what the city was poor? So what that the women YOU knew were devastated. What does that have to do with the reality that we do not know how a prostitute in that time would have felt about losing a baby that was a result of whoring seven months into it. You don't even know that she wasn't the cause of the loss of the child. She might well have induced the miscarriage, it's not unheard of.


And you are quite wrong. She was a working prostitute and registered as such by the police ONE MONTH prior to her giving birth to her stillborn daughter and she was treated for venereal disease later in that year as well. So for all you know she miscarried in the act of prostitution.

But again, let's not let the facts get in the way of the pretty, pretty stories we like to tell.

[Phil Carter]

All,

Ally: And for all we know she was delighted to have lost the baby so there would not have been a constant drag on her as she went about her prostitution, or interfered with her drunken partying ways. Maybe she lost the baby because she was already a degenerate alcoholic and couldn't have cared less about its demise.

A 7 month pregnancy????

Good grief!!!

Ally, I would say that just about EVERY woman having got to 7 months in a pregnancy, and losing that child, would be gutted. To use the words "delighted" "interfered with her partying ways" is an awful, degrading, judgemental assumption to make upon Elizabeth Gustavsdatter (her name at the time). We are talking about someone who was in Gothenburg at the time. Not London. And if you knew anything about Gothenburg in the LVP, you would know it was NOT a big city, wasn't reknowned for its "gay life" (old sense of the word) and was, infact, relatively provincial. Also, as a country, Sweden in general was quite poor. Torslanda was extremely poor. Farming yielded very little, fiancially, in those days. Smnallholdings were common, and the larger farms used to piece off and sell land in smaller areas to gain income. This farm was a smallholding. And the area was a poor one.

When Elizabeth Gustavsdatter left Torslanda, it was NOT as a prostitute. She got a job through her sister. A respectable job. Housemaid. It was whilst being a housemaid, she apparently became pregnant, lost her baby, and fell into a downward spiral, which resulted in prostitution.

She was a respectable working woman at the time of pregnancy. And there is NO indication of her being an alcoholic then either.

And you pretend to use reason? Such comments and assumptions are shameful.


best wishes

Phil

[Pippin Joan]

Visiting Elizabeth

I had the great opportunity of visiting Elizabeth Stride's home in Torslanda in December while on a visit to my sister in Sweden. It is such a picturesque place that one must remember what hard times people had in Sweden in those times. Sweden had gone through several catastrophic crop failures, especially in the province of Småland, and as much as 1/5 of the population emigrated to America by the turn of the 20th century. I found that Swedes wax nostalgic over the novels of Vilhelm Moberg (“The Emigrants”, “Unto a New Land”, “The Settlers” and “The Last Letter Home”), and pretty well consider Minnesota a Swedish colony!

I also had the joy of taking a very good Jack the Ripper Walk in London in January, the one Richard Jones does. He wasn't the guide, but a very knowledgeable woman led it, and we were very impressed. I was accompanied by my 86-year old father, and she was very considerate in slowing the walking pace for him. He was quite struck with the whole story and atmosphere, after all the talking I've done about it.

[Stephen Thomas]

Ally, I'd be ashamed; popping up from time to time talking about using reasoning. Get with the program girl..........

And you come around talking about reason.

Oh dear,

Someone's gonna get their a$$ kicked.

[DVV]

Hi Hunter,

This is the twenty first century.

True.
This is February 2010...and with all due respect, most people still disagree with your opinions.
If you doubt it, just start some polls.

Amitiés,
David

[Simon Wood]

Hi Hunter,

I'm not quite certain how you arrived at your interpretation of "the new and improved Jack the Ripper story", but would I be right in assuming that, for whatever reason, you're more comfortable clinging to the tired, outmoded, getting us nowhere fast version of events which for 121 years has defied the basic tenets of reason and logic?

Regards,

Simon