Millers Court - the demolition picture

[Stephen Thomas]

Many thanks, Sam, I'd forgotten that. I believe that Dew was early at the scene but maybe not quite as early as he said he was. If there was a nailed up door behind the bed ie. opening on to the foot of Prater's stairs then that introduces the possibility that the partition and back staircase were part of the original building and not a later 'add-on' as there wouldn't be any point in having a door there otherwise.

[perrymason]

Many thanks, Sam, I'd forgotten that. I believe that Dew was early at the scene but maybe not quite as early as he said he was. If there was a nailed up door behind the bed ie. opening on to the foot of Prater's stairs then that introduces the possibility that the partition and back staircase were part of the original building and not a later 'add-on' as there wouldn't be any point in having a door there otherwise.

Agreed. There was a doorway to the stairs and the archway entrance that became the "partitioned" wall, the door "nailed shut",....so its likely that the parlour was accessed by this sealed entrance and one could gain access to it via the archway door.

If you look at how close Marys courtyard door is to the corner, you will agree that its likely that doorway was created after the room was built....and allowed for the other entrance, the one reached via the archway, to be sealed for the rooms privacy. This also allows the room which is part of 26 Dorset to become part of Millers Court, as it no longer had direct access to the house.

Cheers Stephen.

[Chava]

OK, but hang on, Kelly lived in the back-parlour/kitchen of #27 Dorset St. Her 'address' may have been 13 Millers Court but that's not where she lived. Millers Court was 6 one-up/one-down cottages, and she didn't live in any of 'em.

Prater says clearly that she could, either on the night of the murder or as a general rule, see light around the edges of a door in Kelly's room as she went up the stairs to her room. That must be the original door into what was then, I'm pretty certain, the kitchen. If any of you have been to Dennis Severs house in Folgate St, I believe the kitchen there is in the back of the house and roughly in the same position that Kelly's room occupies. If 27 Dorset St follows the standard Heugenot silk-weavers construction, then you go in through the front door. There is a morning room on the front of the house and a dining room to the rear. You go upstairs to the main drawing room, or stay on the ground floor and go to the back of the house, past the staircase, to get to the kitchen. The kitchen has a door you must go through to get in there. The kitchen would have egress to the back garden--which was probably a kitchen garden growing vegetables and herbs etc--through a door. And I suggest it's that door that provides the entrance to Kelly's room.

The door through to the main house has been boarded-up. And the 'shed' probably occupied the morning-room area and the dining room area behind it. The dividing wall would have been removed at some point. But that still leaves the staircase, which Prater used to go up to her room. And once she was in the front door of #27, she would have had a clear view down the hallway to the kitchen as she approached the staircase.

[perrymason]

Hi Chava,

Although I see the reasoning behind the kitchen theorizing, it seems clear that this house, #26, wasnt designed or built to be specifically a Lodging or Doss House,...that is just the way it has been configured, so I doubt very much if a communal kitchen existed at all.

Marys room was said to have originally been a parlour of #26, but when the doorway to the house was sealed with an old door, and a new entrance was made in the courtyard, her address effectively changed due to the manner of access to her digs. She no longer had to set foot in what was the house on Dorset Street, she could only enter her room via the courtyard door.

The light Prater refers to "not seeing" is likely shone through cracks in the body of the door that seals the original entrance, which is approx in the area where the blood spray can be seen...opposite the sitting room fireplace, or from around that old door due to a poor seal.

I believe the "partition wall" actually is only the segment that has a "partition" inserted into the space, that being an old door with the faded marks of the numbers 2 and 6 on it, facing inward, sealed shut.

Best regards

[Chava]

Michael, I didn't mean a doss-house communal kitchen. I meant the kitchen original to the house when it was first built for family occupation. She's living in what had been a proper house, not in one of the junky 'cottages' in the Court. Given that, she is living in a house that was originally built for single family+servants. The next time you're in London, if you go to the restored Folgate St house nearby, you'll see what was probably the original layout of #26. So, yes, the door with the blood-spatter would be the boarded-up old door on the wall where her bed was. And it would have led into the house from the kitchen.

I am assuming that all the interior walls that could be taken down were taken down to support the house's use as a storage facility. But it wouldn't have made sense to turn Kelly's room into storage, because it would have lain beyond the stairs and down a very narrow passageway. So barrows etc wouldn't have gone there, and it would have been a chore to shove other stuff down there as well. Better make it into a rental, and that's what I think they did.

[perrymason]

Hi Chava,

Im not saying her room wasnt a kitchen at one time, just that it was never referred to as such, only as a "sitting room" or "parlour"....and the fireplace in the room seems to be scaled in size for the room itself...it is not a cooking hearth, as seen in pictures of contemporary kitchens and communal ones.

Your guess is the same one I made a few years ago here, that there must have been kitchen space on the ground floor somewhere...although I thought that it would be accessed via the "sitting room", not be the room itself.

Im pretty sure that any diagrams and floor plans that we might see of that house reflect only the configuration it was in when the drawings were made, not what the original layout might look like, and of course not what the layout was after the date of the drawings. I believe any plans I have seen precede the period in question but are also after it was built....so I really cant say with any authority what the original layout was..we've never seen builders plans.

Cheers Chava.

[Chava]

No we haven't got any plans. However it does sound as if the house was built on the standard silk-weavers' model and there are a lot of houses still standing that were built around the same time. The houses on Dorset St were originally built as fairly nice middle-class houses with silk-weavers' lofts on the top floor, bedrooms on the next floor down, drawing room on the first floor and morning room, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor. I don't think they had basements as later Georgian row houses would have had. If they had, the basements would house the kitchen.

However, if the fireplace had been replaced, that makes me think that the amount of light coming from it wouldn't have been huge. And brings me back to my original point which is, if Lizzie Prater did see light leaking out around that boarded-up door, then it might have been because Kelly's bed was moved away from the wall by her attacker so that he could get better access to her body. People have commented on the existence of a Kelly photo that was clearly taken from the other side of the bed, and assumed it was because the photographer or the police moved the bed. I wonder if the killer moved the bed, and that photo was taken first and then the bed moved back against the wall to take further photos.

[perrymason]

However, if the fireplace had been replaced, that makes me think that the amount of light coming from it wouldn't have been huge. And brings me back to my original point which is, if Lizzie Prater did see light leaking out around that boarded-up door, then it might have been because Kelly's bed was moved away from the wall by her attacker so that he could get better access to her body. People have commented on the existence of a Kelly photo that was clearly taken from the other side of the bed, and assumed it was because the photographer or the police moved the bed. I wonder if the killer moved the bed, and that photo was taken first and then the bed moved back against the wall to take further photos.

Let me just take on the above....the angle of MJK3, the shot from the partition wall side of the bed across her empty midsection, is consistent with what would likely be the result of placing a camera on the bedding that is wedged down between the wall and bed, and focusing it from above, across Marys body and framing within it the nightable. Whether the photographer came up with the notion and placed the bedding there himself is unclear, but it would explain the angle shot without requiring that the bed was moved at all.

Heres my thought on whether the killer moved any furniture...the answer is no. I dont think he would take the risk of someone waking above by the noise...even if Mary is not directly below Liz, Liz said she could hear furniture moved in room 13. The main reason to suggest this is to allow for a right handed killer to work from a less awkward position, so he moves the bed out. Otherwise, why would he move it at all? He moves her into the center of the bed after the attack, if he is left handed, everything that happens from that point he can then do standing on the nighttable side....pivoting to place the breast under the head, and to place flesh on the night table. These things would be awkward for a right handed man standing on the left side of the bed, and difficult if her were kneeling between her legs. The only sure way that he can control blood staining is to keep the corpse at arms length when he is cutting it up. Kneeling in that bloody mess on the mattress wouldnt be prudent.

Cheers Chava.

[Stephen Thomas]

Michael and Chava,

Guys,

Where does Prater mention a doorway in the partition?

[Sam Flynn]

If the fireplace wall is not the wall that separates this house from the one next to it, the opposite side of 26 , which I wouldnt think it would be...

...it was, though. The chimney-breast that served Kelly's room was flush against next-door's wall, Mike - in other words, Kelly's easternmost wall was joined to the wall of the premises next door. There was no space behind the fireplace for a room on the first floor to spill over into, or for the "shed" to encroach onto.

Check out the demolition picture, and the contemporary newspaper sketches of Miller's Court (such as that colour-coded by Chris Scott on the very first page of this thread), for confirmation.

[perrymason]

Sam,

If you look at the sketches there is some room to doubt the actual scale represented, look at the size of the windows on that wall, the second from the court looks like a garage size opening rather than a window. Im not going to defend the extension of the shed idea, I was just exploring how two mutually exclusive locations might be referred to as being roughly the same place. I never really expected to find that they could be. Its just part of a process I like to refer to as being respectful of others contentions.

Stephen, the "partition" IS the old door that seals the entrance to that room from the house, via the landing inside the door from the archway, to the stairs. If Elizabeth looks to her left as she makes the first step, she is looking at the "partition". Thats why the "partition" is referred to as being made of old doors, and why the new doorway from the room to the courtyard...new being a relative term, appears to be in a location that is not where a builder would put it, but does open into the court rather than the alcove, which would have meant losing a window. For the rooms privacy though, an alcove door would have been better, but not practical to build a new window into the wall that borders the courtyard, privacy issues there for sure. So the doorway went where it now is, being the best wall to place it on overall, preserving the natural light and the privacy.

This was an enclosed room of 26 Dorset, with an entranceway in and out the house, to the stairs and the door out under the archway. That doorway has been sealed, perhaps with some cracks in the plastering, and that is the space that Elizabeth Prater sees when first entering the archway entrance and starting up the stairs...to her immediate left.

Best regards

[Sam Flynn]

If you look at the sketches there is some room to doubt the actual scale represented

The demolition photographs are the key to this, Mike - and leave little room for doubt. Mary's chimney runs right up next-door's wall and, as we know, the camera never lies. (The notable exception, of course, being the camera actually inside #13 Miller's Court )

[Chava]

I"ve been doing a little bit of research. I can't find a floor plan for any of the Dorset St houses, but I have found some information about the builders of those houses. I thought they had been built by silk weavers for themselves and their families but I was wrong. They probably were built with silk weavers in mind, but the houses in Dorset St and White's Row seem to have been thrown up by speculative builders--ie cowboys--and were badly-built from the start. A number of builders were done for using bad morter etc. Also, these were small houses with 16' frontages. I can't find any mention of basements, although some of the nicer houses in the area did have 'semi-basements' which I guess were used for storage. So the place where Kelly lived must at some point have been used to cook food. I'm pretty sure that the door she used as her front door would have been the houses egress into the garden originally.

[Roy Corduroy]

When were the houses built?

[Sam Flynn]

They probably were built with silk weavers in mind, but the houses in Dorset St and White's Row seem to have been thrown up by speculative builders--ie cowboys--and were badly-built from the start.

Miller's Court itself (i.e. the "apartments" built behind #26/27 Dorset Street, rather than #26/27 themselves) certainly appear to have been. Fiona Rule's book, The Worst Street in London, records that John Miller built the court that later bore his name (known first as "Miller's Rents"), by demolishing the gardens that once backed onto #26/27 and replacing them with hastily-constructed "cottages", which he rented out from the late 1840s.

These jerry-built dwellings were those occupied by the likes of Mrs Cox, the Keylers and the Picketts, although I believe that the back parlour of #26 Dorset Street (later 13 Miller's Court) may well have pre-dated John Miller's arrival on the scene. Precisely when #26 and #27 were built, I'm not sure - although I'd guess that they'd been there for well over a hundred years by the time John Miller "revamped" their back gardens.