Millers Court - the demolition picture

[Stephen Thomas]

I have read Praters statement about hearing mary moving about and read it aloud several times (in various voices, cant quite decide on my Prater voice!! lol) and can only interpret her 'hearing' in the context of the stairwell. The languauge used and the flow seem to make this completely clear.

am i mrs prater? ooh wants to know ooh a reporter from a noospaper eh? a word merchant eh? i can't even read (cackle) let alone write anything but i'm not saying nofffink to nobody unless they grease my palm with silver as them gypsies say wot 'alf a crown? you're a gent and no mistake a toff if ever i saw one yes i'm your girl not like them uvvers what don't know noffink cos i live just over where that 'orrible murder 'appened right above you could say and when i used to go upstairs to my room i used to see see all sorts of fings if i looked through that big crack in the partition i seen mens bums going up and down like fiddlers elbows i dont suppose you can put that in your noospaper (cackle) i told them coppers i was waiting for my young man that night and they all believed me shows 'ow stupid they are anyway i was fast akip and this stupid kitten trod on me face so i picked it up and threw it at the wall see 'ow it likes that and i 'eard this voice wot said oh murder it seemed to come as from the court

[Sara]

I've just read this whole thread through and hope I can remember the points which occoured to me

Firstly, re numbering: There only seems to have been one room up and down in some of the houses in the immediate vicinity, at least two of which belonged to McCarthy - maybe all of them did? It seems to me the numbering covered a block of houses, possibly all - then or certainly at one time - in the same ownership, inc those in Millers Court and fronting Dover St

Noise: I don't think we have any idea how noisy the East End of Lodnon would have been at that time. It seems to have been a '24 hour' city, certainly in Whitechapel - the comings and going of so many characters we follow are notable for the strange hours they keep! People worked and kept open shops and public houses til all hours, sometimes all night; and carts etc would be in the streets. In the area of so many Lodging Houses there would be noise all night (as mentioned in some of the reports). As in all rough areas, people were no doubt calling out and cursing at all hours, many of them much the worse for drink. A cry in the night or an brief altercation would easily go unnoticed.

(Personally, I think JtR put his hand over Mary's mouth as he forced her head back to slit the throat - and her hands show evidence of how brief the struggle was)

Noise 2/3: The building of which we speak would not have double floors/ceilings, and cavity walls, such as we are used to. Floors owudl be planking. All the partitions between floors and rooms would be flimsy in the extreme, and it would imo be easy to hear from the top floor what was going on in the courtyard not far away - see next:

Prater's Room: Did I not read very early in the thread that there was a couple in the room above Mary's who had slept undisturbed through the whole thing? It seems to me on balance that Prater occupied the room over the 'shed' ie she had the upstairs (first floor) room of the house,
BUT THAT DID HAVE A WINDOW OVERLOOKING THE COURT above Room 12 - see purple pane here:

http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=1755

Date of demolition photos: The main photo taken, the panorama at the start of the thread, is from a Hulton neg. This will now be held by the Getty Collection which is on the Kilburn/N Kensington borders. There will be an exact date on the slip on the reverse of the prints. It's just possible there will be more glass negs from the set, which have never yet been printed - it's worth asking, though hard to believe some bloodhound has not get there already! - you'll need to cite some book you're working on or something to get access ;^)

Finally, for now: There is probably no photo of the back of 13 Millers Court because the yard was so cramped a photographer would not have been able to get his camera tripod set up far enough back to take one. Though of course there may be images taken by some enterprising snapper sometime before it was demolished, though even in the late 1920s it would be hard to get far enough back with, the available equipment imo

I've posted in another thread about poss sources of historic images esp photos of London - I forgot to mention a couple; I'll copy that and add on, into the main Photos thread

[Celesta]

Hi Celesta

Kitty Ronan's room was upstairs in the first house on the right of the six small houses in Millers Court, the south facing wall of which faced Mary Kelly's windows. There was another murder almost 10 years to the day after Kelly's in the room above her (the supposed Prater room) that is described here in the recently released Old Bailey proceedings.....

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18990109-124-offence-1&div=t18990109-124#highlight

Astonishingly we have here three young women (Mary, Eliza and Kitty) all murdered within yards of each other in 20 years.

Hi Stephen,

Thank you for answering my question and for posting this link. What a place 26 Dorset and environs was! This murder had slipped my mind. One of the witnesses, Barnett Lipman, gave his address as Room 19 at 26 Dorset Street. Did they really cram that many, or more, rentals rooms into that house? If there's a number 19 in the house was there a Room 20?

The house you describe is where I thought # 20 would have been, if it wasn't above #13. Below that was apparently a shed and that could have been what Prater was talking about.

Could there have been a # 20 Millers Ct and a Room 20 in # 26 Dorset?

I looked back at the 1881 and 1891 Census report posted by Chris Scott, but I didn't see # 20 Miller's Ct. so I don't know if that post listed all the addresses in that little cul-de-sac.

I'm not arguing that Liz's room was in any particular place, but it's interesting because it seems that at times even the residents seem confused about where it was!

Best,

Cel

[Mike Covell]

We often use the term "Over" to describe a place overlooking another place, for example, my daughters room is over the rear yard. It is not actually over the rear yard, but from her window you can see the yard below.

In the same way, our master bedroom is over the street, which it isn't, it just looks over the street.

Many of the small victorian premises still standing in Hull have a front and side entry, from the front you can reach the front room, then by an internal passage you can reach the rear room and side entry.
The side entry is usually near the stairs, which usually lead to the rear of the property.

My house is late victorian, but has been remodelled, the front and rear rooms have been knocked through and the doors in the passage way have been bricked up! Leaving us with one way into both the front and back rooms.

An extension has also been added and onto that another extension and shed, thus removing the charector of the initial design.

[claire]

I'd imagine that any sounds from MJK's room that Prater routinely heard would likely be undifferentiated from any other noises she heard...unless she had reason to listen in (and who'd bother listening to yet another bout of yelling from yet another neighbour), I don't know that she'd be able to differentiate a) whether the noises really came from Kelly's room (unless, as noted, she was actually on her way up the stairs at the time), or, b) whether the voice was Kelly's (cf. the 'oh murder' shout). I don't believe 'oh murder' related to murder--I think it may have been Kelly, but I imagine it to be a reaction to being disturbed after she'd gone to bed by, she'd think, a punter. But, dead drunk, asleep and disinterested until after the event, I doubt that Prater would have been able to identify whether the cry was Kelly's or Queen Victoria's.*

*note to conspiracy theorists: there is little evidence to believe that Her Majesty was ever in Miller's Court, except in two dimensions on a commemorative tin.

[Archbug]

Changing view

I always stay very quite on these boards and prefer to sit back and read

I have quite a busy all-consuming job which means i couldn't contribute much and i'd feel bad posting and not getting back for days!!!

....saying that...I had always held the notion that praters room was indeed above mary's. I could envisige her lying there whilst the gruesome activities were carried out below! However all PerryMason's (sorry think its micheal ) post has done is convince mw of the opposite!!

I have read Praters statement about hearing mary moving about and read it aloud several times (in various voices, cant quite decide on my Prateer voice!! lol) and can only interpret her 'hearing' in the context of the stairwell. The languauge used and the flow seem to make this completely clear.

Now i think the confusion comes from the last piece of evidence Perrymason provides. Now correct me if i'm wrong but this does not seem a first person qoute and very much seems like paraphrasing. It reads as though paraphrasing Prater and making the same mistake, perpetuated for years that she meant she could hear her from in her room instead of from within the stairwell.

Anyway, just thought i'd stick my oar in instead of talking to the computer anonamously from afar, anyway am at work so really should go!!! ............................

Julie

[White-Knight]

Prater

Another top read, Stephen. thanks. Prater seems to show she's pretty upset-understandably.How upset exactly, I wonder? mmmm.......

[Stephen Thomas]

You say that she had no windows looking into the court, yet she says at the back of the house the windows looked into the court.

Its clear to me that you are denying what the witness herself said was the case in terms of the rooms and their position to each other, so this is a good time for me to slip out of this thread, I cant really argue with illogical positions.

Hi Michael

No, she said windows from the lodging house up the road looked into the court. She never mentions a window of hers overlooking the court.

Now here's a thing. A reporter from the big selling Star newspaper tracks her down and what does she tell him? She tells him that her room is ALMOST over
the murder room before going into her just over/right over mantra.

And the paper uses the 'almost over' quote as a sub-heading......

http://www.casebook.org/press_reports/star/s881110.html

[White-Knight]

I seem to remember reading about these murders some years ago on these message boards though the Old Bailey proceedings were new to me and a right riveting read.(I have visited this site over many years though only started posting the other day!) It is indeed 'astonishing',even given the notoriety of the area,Stephen.Perhaps the sight was cursed or some such nonsense!? makes looking at the demolition photo even more eerie though, what a creepy place..I'm glad they pulled it all down, even if all the clues went with it!

[Stephen Thomas]

I'm looking at an old article by Andy Aliffe called Kit, Kitty, Kitten (Ripperologist, No. 21,. Feb. 1999). He cites the Illustrated Police News from July 1909 about the murder of Kitty Ronan. Kitty was murdered in Elizabeth Prater's old room, as we all know. The room number is given as # 12 Miller's Court.

"The room of the tragedy was the top apartment of a two-roomed house. There were about half a dozen white-walled houses in the court and the opposite houses are only a few feet apart. Two doors away on the right hand side near the entrance, is the house in which one of the "Jack the Ripper" murders was committed."

So there's at least one other reference to it. From this, my impression was that Mary's room is two doors away if you count from the bedroom door of Kitty's room. You then have the first entrance door and then Mary's. That makes it sound like #12 is above #13, however it may be situated on an x-y axis.

Hi Celesta

Kitty Ronan's room was upstairs in the first house on the right of the six small houses in Millers Court, the south facing wall of which faced Mary Kelly's windows. There was another murder almost 10 years to the day after Kelly's in the room above her (the supposed Prater room) that is described here in the recently released Old Bailey proceedings.....

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18990109-124-offence-1&div=t18990109-124#highlight

Astonishingly we have here three young women (Mary, Eliza and Kitty) all murdered within yards of each other in 20 years.

[White-Knight]

DVV-Indeed! clearly more of a dancer than a singer. I'm not so worried about the timing of any singing, though doubtless I should be.As Chava will tell you she WAS, more than likely P*****D! I'm not that convinced she did hear any singing that night anyway. But its a funny little addition, quite personal, well after the event. Did she really prattle ,this Prater woman,do we know? Was this a lively little embellishment or could it have been the start of a more personal memory? part of the more real stuff she DIDN'T like to talk about? What do we know about this woman..really? Happy to be de-bunked..Invitations open....

[White-Knight]

Chava...yes I share some of these doubts over her testimony...the cat, the singing told of a couple of years later, even the 'oh murder' in respose to the inconsequential..maybe CAT **** rather than dog!!
I know she drank,(Prater), like many, but whereas you have her down as something of an alcoholic fantasist latching onto whatever other rumour began to circulate I am just exploring another possibilty. This was the most horrific murder in a chain of such. The claim that MJK was singing, and I am very tentative in offering this, just might have been something else, something post traumatic, something just marking the beginning of a memory denied, forgotten and forcing itself to the surface, mightn't it? I don't think its about prudence. I think being anywhere near those crimes is just abhorrent.That's my reason as to 'why she wouldn't'.Perhaps she just couldn't handle it.Perhaps saying little or nothing WAS her best form of self preservation,psychologically if not physically. Basically, maybe she was more than just a little 'freaked out'.Its total speculation of course, and probably complete rubbish, but its possible isn't it?Are drinkers insensitive as well as insensible.I have often found the opposite to be the case. Can it be shown NOT to be so, do you think? Was she really just another rough old east end hag?

[Chava]

But we come back again to the issue of whether the cry came from Kelly. 'Oh murder!' was not an uncommon thing to hear back then. The word 'murder' was used as an expletive for a long time. I recall hearing our housekeeper say that in the 1950s when she was upset and didn't want to swear. And no one ever said they heard a scream. Just a 'cry'. Which could be a scream. And could just be a slightly raised voice coming from a woman who had just stepped in some dog-mess.

As to the noise issue: the real question is how solidly that court was built. How much of a gap was there between the floorboards of the first floor and the ceilings of the ground floor? I'll bet they were in close proximity. I will also bet that sound leaked all over the place. If Mary Ann Cox heard Kelly singing from her room up the court, then I think it's possible that Prater could have heard stuff in Kelly's room from her room upstairs and slightly to one side. Sound vibrations travel along joists etc.

I think Prater did hear the odd noise from Kelly's room from time to time. I would be surprised if Kelly didn't raise her voice occasionally. We know she had fights with Barnett. Prater couldn't have been out every time Kelly sang/yelled/fought with someone/came home drunk and knocking into the furniture and swearing. Prater would probably have heard a fair bit of that and would be familiar with the sound and language Kelly used. So I believe she would have been able to distinguish Kelly's voice, muffled though it may be, from an anonymous woman shouting in the court. Not just by the timbre of the voice, but by the direction of the sound. Even if she woke up from a drunken stupor just before this, I suspect she would recognize her neighbour's voice.

We'll never know if she told everything to the police, but I can't come up with a good reason why she wouldn't. The Ripper was a threat to every woman in the LVP, and that would include Prater herself. There comes a point where self-preservation would take over from a prudent dislike of getting too involved. The account of Diddles walking over her is a bit unlikely however. I wonder if she slept right through the night, heard from someone in the court that the cry of 'oh murder!' was heard at 3.00 am, and told everyone that she had heard it as well. She told Kit Watkins a couple of years later that she had heard Kelly singing on the night she died. But at the inquest she said she hadn't heard anything like that. So I'm not sure whether I am prepared to believe too much of Eliza Prater's testimony.

[DVV]

Hi White-Knight,
...difficult questions here. She woke up, heard the cry, then slept again.
IMHO, if the murder occured just after the cry, no other noises were to be heard. I can't imagine Jack singing an Irish song around 4:00.

Amitiés,
David

[White-Knight]

ok guys, thanks for those replies. duly noted. whilst you were writing and sending I edited and added to that post. raining eh? yes I'd heard that it would have to be voluable noise and I know we've no solid reason to believe the crimes were noisy..so swift... kind of cuts down the possibility but what do you all make of Prater psychologically speaking?...appreciate any thoughts to the additions...if she had heard more, would she tell us?