Have you seen this?

[ianincleveland]

Hello Jukka,

Indeed, and I suspect that she may well have lost another child at some time in London, the same way as sadly happened in Gothenburg. This MAY explain he reference to two children "having died" when she used the sinking of the ship on the Thames.
I think that mentally, she carried around the loss of that first child around with her all her life.

I would be interested to know if she ever travelled back to Gothenburg/Torslanda for a visit, during the 20 years she was away though.
Also, I would be very surprised if she didn't keep contact by letter with her family, especially her sister.

best wishes

Phil

I agree there the loss of at least one stillborn child must have made poor woman seek refuge in alcohol and unfortunately she went on a long downward spiral.

Just an afterthought ive never seen a Ripper film where Liz has a Swedish accent

[j.r-ahde]

Hello ian!

Well, the script-writers can always appeal to the thing told by her friends; she had no accent in her speech!

She had lost the Swedish touch somewhere, but who knows: maybe, while getting angry she used such Swedish expressions, that we don't want to repeat...

All the best
Jukka

[Ally]

I love how when people speculate wildly about the Ripper women it is always to grace them with attributes of compassion and sadness and tragedy that we have no way of knowing they experienced.

Saying her parents turned away from her when she became pregnant is to deny that she was a prostitute before she became pregnant and they may well have turned against her long before the pregnancy for being a whore.

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.

Pretending you know how she reacted or what the circumstances were is pure folly and the opposite of reason.

[Hunter]

Ally, I'd be ashamed; poping up from time to time talking about using reasoning. Get with the progaram girl. This is the twenty first century. The era of the new and improved Jack the Ripper story. Everyone's a victim; not just of the obvious crimes, but of life in general. And, only 2 women at the most were victims of the so called JTR anyway. Stride was a one off; probably killed by someone in the club. Eddowes and Kelly were done in by copycats and the killer of the first two liked their work so much that he decided to let them take over the business.

Besides that, these women weren't soliciting anyway. Nichols was begging. What better place than a deserted street. Chapman was hawking. She had her stand set up in the back of 29 Hanbury St. Stride had turned her life around and was waiting on a date at 1 a.m. in the morning- maybe to take in a late run of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . Eddowes was working for the police and poor Kelly was killed by an intruder while trying to sleep it off. Heck, whoever the killer/ killers was/were didn't even take the organs anyway; that was done by the mortuary attendants. The police were covering it all up for... for... well, you pick your reason; whatever will stick will do.

And you come around talking about reason.

[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

[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

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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