Mary Jane Kelly, From Whitechapel?

[MrBarnett]

Accents

Can anyone point me in the direction of references to witnesses’ or victims’ accents in the various WM cases? Or more broadly in the late Victorian press?

The Victorian East End was a melting pot of people from across the British Isles and beyond, so there would have been examples of accents from just about everywhere.

Take Henry Tomkins for example. Although he had been born in London, his family had relocated to Manchester when he was a child and he had grown up there. The family were still in Manchester in November, 1887. The first reference to their being in London was in April, 1888, so it’s extremely unlikely that HT had acquired a Cockney accent by August, 1888. His appearance - lack of stature and ‘roughness’ - were described in the press. Why not his accent? And what about the numerous references to people of Eastern European birth or ancestry? Did they all speak like native Cocknies?

Given the enormous variety of accents that must have existed in Victorian London, shouldn’t we be able to find numerous references to them in the press? Maybe there are, or maybe for some reason a person’s accent wasn’t considered noteworthy.

[Varqm]

If Mary Kelly was around 25 in 1888 she was born in 1862-4.Should be too late to be affected by the Irish famine.I think she would have mentioned it if she was or affected by the Irish Welsh hostilities.

[MrBarnett]

If Mary Kelly was around 25 in 1888 she was born in 1862-4.Should be too late to be affected by the Irish famine.I think she would have mentioned it if she was or affected by the Irish Welsh hostilities.

She would have been affected indirectly by the famine. That was very likely the reason her family were in Wales.

So, are you suggesting that nothing of any significance happened in Kelly’s early life other than what Barnett disclosed?

[MrBarnett]

Would an Irish/South Wales accent have stood out as something worthy of mention by MJK’s associates?

Joe Barnett: Joe divulged Mary’s Irish/Welsh background, so it would have been somewhat superfluous for him to have described her accent. Many of the papers described him as an Irishman? How did they come to that conclusion? The name Barnett isn’t obviously Irish, so it’s most likely that as a 2nd generation Irishman brought up in an Irish enclave in the East End (Blue Anchor Yard) he had an identifiably Irish accent.

Mrs ‘Buki’: The English wife of a Dutchman who revealed that Kelly had lived with her Dutch brother-in-law and his Dutch common law wife. Take a look at the places of birth of the 10 people living in 79, Pennington Street in 1891:

Germany
Northumberland
London
Germany
London
Spain
Belgium
Manchester
London
Cornwall


Mrs McCarthy (Pennington Street/Breezer’s Hill):

This witness hasn’t been conclusively identified, but it seems likely that she was the Mary McCarthy who lived at 79, Pennington Street and who married Frank Woodhouse. She had been born in St George E and was presumably an ‘Irish Cockney’. Her husband had been born in Bilston and would probably have had a Black Country accent. She would no doubt have been familiar with a great many of the numerous Irish, Germans, Dutch, Belgians, Scandinavians and other nationalities that inhabited Pennington Street, Breezer’s Hill etc. Why would she have considered an Irish/Welsh accent to have been worthy of mention? MJK’s accent may have been closer to Mrs McCarthy’s own than that of the majority of Mrs McCarthy’s close neighbours.

I’m not convinced that Mrs McCarthy (or MJK for that matter) ever lived at a Breezer’s Hill address, but just for completeness here’s the list of places of birth of the 17 residents of Breezer’s Hill in 1891:

London
London
Glasgow
London
Sunderland
London
Bristol
London
Ireland
London
Hull
Norway
Germany
Kent
Oxfordshire
Poland
London

Someone may want to take a look at Dorset Street to see how many of its residents would have had a vanilla Cockney accent.

[Varqm]

She would have been affected indirectly by the famine. That was very likely the reason her family were in Wales.

So, are you suggesting that nothing of any significance happened in Kelly’s early life other than what Barnett disclosed?

Yes indirectly but too late to have her own experience of it.

Other than what is already known it's blank.Maybe some of it where embellished.

[MrBarnett]

Yes indirectly but too late to have her own experience of it. Other than what Barnett said it's blank.

I’m confused as to what point you’re trying to make.

The societal effects of the Great Famine, an Gorta Mor, were still being felt in Ireland in the 1860s and there were subsequent failures of the potato crop throughout the 19th century. ‘Fenianism’ was rife in Britain in the 1860s, including in industrial South Wales, and the Tredegar riots, which lead to an exodus of Irish workers from thereabouts, occurred in 1882. If MJK’s Irish/Welsh story is true, this was the background to her early years.

[Varqm]

What I'm saying is did Mary Kelly went through a or the Irish famine herself? Was she personally attacked as a result of the Irish Welsh hostilities? Or her family,if she was not an orphan or abandoned.If she had then she would have told about it?

[MrBarnett]

What I'm saying is did Mary Kelly went through a or the Great famine herself? Was she personally attacked as a result of the Irish Welsh hostilities? Or her family,if she was not an orphan or abandoned.

Why are you asking those questions?

The answer to the first question is obviously no, at least not directly. The answer to the second is, we don’t know, but it seems highly likely that her family would have been affected in some way by the anti-Irish/Fenian sentiment that was widespread at the time.

Kate Eddowes’ family are a case in point. Her uncles were involved in a violent fracas in Wolverhampton between English and Irish workers, which I suspect made her choice of Conway as a partner rather unpopular with the Eddowes clan.

The point I was addressing was whether it is plausible that Kelly’s family abandoned the employment opportunities available in South Wales. It is, and one of the reasons could have been the Welsh/Irish tensions that existed there at the time.

[Varqm]

Yes it's all possible,but if she did went through it personally she would have told about it? It maybe that she was detached from all of that, possibly starting from a young age,and was an orphan or abandoned for ex..We do not know.

[MrBarnett]

Yes it's all possible,but if she did went through it personally she would have told about it? It maybe that she was detached from all of that, possibly starting from a young age,and was an orphan or abandoned for ex..We do not know.

Joe B seemed somewhat unsure of some of the details. Was it Carmarthen or Caernarfon? When did she live with ‘Morganstone’/Fleming?

How much did she tell him? How much did he remember? How much did he think it necessary or appropriate to reveal to the police and the coroner?

The reference to the 2nd BnSG intrigues me. He knew where they stationed in November, 1888. How many Eastenders would have known that? And surely it can’t be a coincidence that the 2BSG were based at the Tower, a few minutes walk from Pennington Street at around the time MJK was there.

[Fleetwood Mac]

The Tredegar riot, which resulted in Irish families being burned out of their houses and taking refuge on local hillsides, took place in 1882.

It did but as I say, most of the anti-Irish riots happened around the time of the famine.

Where I come from in County Durham, there were no such anti-Irish riots and there was a heavy influx of Irish workers, and that probably had a lot to do with a large part of the population here being English Catholics. The farther you are away from the seat of government, the more difficult it is to control your thought process and so Catholicism lingered more in Northern England than it did in Southern England.

You're making a play of anti-Irish sentiment, but the reality is you're talking of one anti-Irish riot in that decade across the whole of Wales.

An outlier, 'nowhere near the norm.

And, aye, people did move around for work, and work only. You will always find a few who didn't conform to the norm, but the point remains it would have been highly unusual for six brothers to up sticks from an area that had plenty of work.

[MrBarnett]

I’m not pushing a ‘Fenian’ agenda/theory here, but if, the sake of argument, the Kellies had left Wales because of their political affiliations, and MJK had told Joe about it, do we imagine he would have expounded on that after her death?

[Fleetwood Mac]

I’m not pushing a ‘Fenian’ agenda/theory here, but if, the sake of argument, the Kellies had left Wales because of their political affiliations, and MJK had told Joe about it, do we imagine he would have expounded on that after her death?

You're going with outliers. There's the problem with your theory.

[MrBarnett]

You're going with outliers. There's the problem with your theory.

I don’t have a theory.

When I started researching the Tomkins family, I wondered why they had moved from London to Manchester in the early 1870s and then returned in 1887/8. That the head of the family, William Tomkins, had been caught by his employer (John Harrison Snr) trying to hide stolen horse fat in a dung heap in 1871 and had then been imprisoned, and that the son of his employer (John Harrison Jnr), having created Harrison, Barber in 1886, abandoned the company in 1887 is what you might describe as an ‘outlier’.

Life is full of ‘outliers’.

[Varqm]

Joe B seemed somewhat unsure of some of the details. Was it Carmarthen or Caernarfon? When did she live with ‘Morganstone’/Fleming?

How much did she tell him? How much did he remember? How much did he think it necessary or appropriate to reveal to the police and the coroner?

The reference to the 2nd BnSG intrigues me. He knew where they stationed in November, 1888. How many Eastenders would have known that? And surely it can’t be a coincidence that the 2BSG were based at the Tower, a few minutes walk from Pennington Street at around the time MJK was there.

I agree, Kelly's story about Scot guard johnto maybe false,maybe he was a client.I think this is more likely.The 2nd BT Scot quards would have known if there was a Kelly amongst them with a sister Mary Ann or Jane,Jean,Jeanette.Another possible reason Kelly was embellishing, pulling Joe's leg.