Jane Coram's pics

[Natalie Severn]

Hi Jane,
I didn"t know that about Mary sitting with her crochet hook----it is not quite how I have ever envisaged her-but then so very little is known about her by comparison with Catherine Eddowes or Mary Nichols or Liz Stride or Annie Chapman.
I do agree that her young life was a tragic one though, and the knowledge that she had only the clothes she stood up in and that she had placed these,her only worldly goods, so carefully and neatly on the chair beside her bed before being murdered and mutilated with such savagery by the ripper ,is certainly an image that carries much pathos.
Best
Norma

[John Casey]

I havent been online for a while, due to being in hospital and some other drearly stuff like that, but just wanted to thank Celesta and Jane especially for their kind words regarding my Abberline pic. I really wouldnt invite me to PM though Jane, you might get sick of trying to teach me where I'm going wrong!! LOL! The offer is very much appreciated, and next time I have a go at something like that I may take you up on it, if you're sure you dont mind!
Best,
John

[Carol]

Walter Dew - he commented on how filthy the floor was too

Hi Norma,
Before I reply fully to your mail can you let me know your source that Walter Dew 'commented on how filthy the floor was too'. The only book I've got that mentions Mary Kelly is 'The London of Jack the Ripper then and now' by Clack and Hutchinson and there is no mention of this. I've looked in Casebook archives with no luck either! I know there are lots of books out there that no doubt mention Walter Dew's comment. (I've got all the Maybrick books and I joined Casebook purely because of that case. It's only recently I've started to find out more about the JTR case in general).
Many thanks in advance!
Love
Carol

[Stephen Thomas]

Here are Dew's relevant statements and I don't believe he made any comments on the cleanliness or otherwise of the room.

http://www.casebook.org/ripper_media/rps.walterdew.html

[Archaic]

Hi John, welcome back! I hope you're feeling much better now. I think you did a good job with the Abberline pic.

Janie, I was looking back over the thread and your picture in post #110 with the death photo of Frances superimposed over your painting of her is very eerie. She really seems to be making eye contact with the viewer.

Thanks for that link Stephen.

Best regards,
Archaic

PS: See Carol, I told you!

[Natalie Severn]

Hi Carol,

Here are some quotes from that reference:



The exception was Marie Kelly, aged between 20 and 25 and quite attractive. I knew Marie quite well by sight. Often I had seen her parading along Commercial Street, between Flower-and-Dean Street and Aldgate, or along Whitechapel Road. She was usually in the company of two or three of her kind, fairly neatly dressed and invariably wearing a clean white apron, but no hat.

Marie Kelly was the most horribly mutilated of all Jack the Ripper's victims. I know because I was the first police officer on the scene of that ghastly crime in Miller's Court, a cul-de-sac off Dorset Street.

What I saw when I pushed back an old coat and peeped through a broken pane of glass into the sordid little room which Kelly called her home, was too harrowing to be described. It remains with me - and always will remain - as the most gruesome memory of the whole of my police career.

------

However,the only specific reference to the state of the floor was :
"All these things I saw after I had slipped and fallen on the awfulness of that floor"---well maybe he just meant it was awful because it was covered with blood -reading the passage again that is what he appears to have meant .


I did notice too, that where he could, Dew spoke well of Mary Kelly,suggesting further on in his account for example that Mrs Maxwell"s account of having seen Mary vomiting at 8 am matched other accounts of her having been drinking heavily the previous night and ,says Dew,"since Mary was not accustomed to drink it probably would have made her ill."
On the other hand, the broken window---broken twice in recent weeks during "heated arguments" with Joe ---it was reported-and other accounts of Mary, often arm in arm with sailors carrying bottles of rum ,suggest Mary may have liked her liquor rather more often than Dew thought!
Best Wishes Carol,
Norma
ps
-another snippet from Dew:
"There was very little furniture, a bed, a table, a chair or two, all in a bad state of repair."

[Carol]

-another snippet from Dew:
"There was very little furniture, a bed, a table, a chair or two, all in a bad state of repair."[/QUOTE]

Hi Norma!
Thank you very much for your post. Your little p.s. regarding the furniture reminded me that I had forgotten to ask you if you knew whether the furniture was Mary Kelly's or else belonged to the landlord.
Thanks.
Love
Carol

[Carol]

Hi Janie!
Thanks for your post and your views on Mary Kelly and her room. Norma is helping me at the moment with some questions I have and I will be posting a 'proper reply' (not a naughty one!) to you both as soon as I have sorted my own thoughts out.
Love
Carol

[Carol]

Best regards,
Archaic

PS: See Carol, I told you!

Hi Archaic!
I must have missed that one. Sorry. I'll try to be more alert in the future but at my age I don't hold much hope.
Fantastic pictures, aren't they!
Love
Carol

[Natalie Severn]

[QUOT[B]E=Carol;170923]-another snippet from Dew:
"There was very little furniture, a bed, a table, a chair or two, all in a bad state of repair."[/QUOTE]

Hi Norma!
Thank you very much for your post. Your little p.s. regarding the furniture reminded me that I had forgotten to ask you if you knew whether the furniture was Mary Kelly's or else belonged to the landlord.
Thanks.
Love
Carol [/QUOTE]

Hi Carol,
It probably belonged to John McCarthy.McCarthy btw, was a big charity donor at the London Hospital---keeping the law sweet etc.He had let rooms to numbers of vulnerable ,unemployed women ,most of whom were part time prostitutes and desperately poor.
Its possible McCarthy was using Mary Kelly sexually, and that may have been the reason he had allowed her to become very far behind with the rent as a lot later on,in 1901 a certain John McCarthy ,who appears to be the same John McCarthy who rented out 13 Millers Ct to Mary Kelly ,still owned 37 Dorset Street and was rumoured to have been sexually abusing another young prostitute who rented accomodation from him named Mary Ann Austin.Mary Ann was murdered soon after being evicted by John McCarthy"s wife and forced to take accomodation in 35 Dorset Street [-the same house where Annie Chapman had been lodging belonging to the Crossinghams ] in fact by 1901 some of the McCarthy and Crossingham children had married. Mary Ann Austin lodged very briefly at 37 Dorset Street which Crossingham owned after McCarthy"s wife had evicted Mary Ann from number 37.
The Mary Ann Austin case, the inhuman treatment by Crossingham employees of the dying Mary Ann-presumably Crossignham gave it the nod as Baxter ,the coroner, managed to highlight,was followed by their framing of an innocent man,[Mary Ann"s husband ]who fortunately for him had alibis in Battersea on the fatal night ,is frankly one of the most ghastly cases its possible to read up on,and was brilliantly researched by Robert Clack for Ripper Notes,Issue 24,October 2005.It reveals the Crossinghams as thugs ,villains and liars of the worst type and John McCarthy and his wife appear to have been little better--despite their charity donations[!],either turning a blind eye to such thuggery or possibly being complicit in it-or even engaging in it, whenever the **** hit the fan .
Women such as Mary Kelly,Annie Chapman and Mary Ann Austin were treated like dirt by these slum landlords.
Best Wishes,
Norma

PS---sorry to have strayed so far from Jane"s superb thread.I guess I should move it.......

[Natalie Severn]

errata: John McCarthy owned 37 Dorset Street where Mary Ann Austin lodged first.Crossingham owned 35 Dorset Street where Mary Ann was murdered.Annie Chapman also lodged at 35 Dorset Street and had been turned away from there on the night of her murder 13 years previously.
Norma

[Carol]

Hi Norma,
Many thanks for your two posts explaining so much about John McCarthy, etc. I was wondering why Mary Kelly had been allowed to stay at 13 Miller's Court having owed so much money to her landlord. Your post has given a really good, and most likely true, explanation.
Love
Carol

[Jane Coram]

Hi,

I was just going through my image files and found this colour up I did of my Grandmother's cousin and her family. (I think I've got that right - the older woman in the picture was my Nan's aunt. ) I thought I'd post it before I lost it again.

As far as I know they were quite a wealthy family. The father was a sea captain and it looks as if they were quite affluent. The girl is called Winifred (she was my Nan's cousin) and apparently she won some sort of beauty competition. My Nan didn't give me any more details than that.

I'm thoroughly enjoying the discussion about Mary and I didn't want to cut in, but I know I'd lose it again if I didn't post it right away! Nothing to do with Jack the Ripper of course, but we were discussing colour ups on another thread and this is just a sample of the technique. It's not a great one, because the photo wasn't too good, but better than nothing I suppose.

By the way, a lot of furniture in the slum dwellings came from the smallpox hospital that was being pulled down. Now that's what you really call scraping the bottom of the barrell!

Much love

Janie

xxxx

[Jane Coram]

Hi Natalie,

I didn't know half of that about McCarthy! I always knew he was up to no good, and was definitely dropping back-handers to the police so they turned a blind eye to a lot of his dealings, but he really was a git!

I did find this bit about slum dwellings which I thought was quite enlightening.

The Daily Mail of July 16th, 1901 reported:

The lodging-houses are bad, but they are the best side of a bad street. They at least have certain official inspection, and a certain minimum amount of sanitation and decency is there secured. But the furnished rooms so-called are infinitely worse. Farming furnished rooms is exceedingly profitable business. You take seven or eight-roomed houses at a rent of 10s. Or 11s. A week, you place on each door a padlock, and in each room you put a minimum amount of the oldest furniture to be found in the worst second-hand dealers’ in the slums. The fittings of the average furnished room are not worth more than a few shillings. Then you let the rooms out to any comers for 10d. Or 1s. A night. No questions asked. They pay the rent, you hand them the key. If by the next night they have not their 10d. or 1s. Again ready you go round and chuck them out and let a new-comer in.

They really were in it to make a fast buck.

Much love

Janie

xxxx

[Natalie Severn]

Hi Jane and Carol,
Thankyou both for your replies.
Jane,thanks for posting the lovely pictures of your family---don"t you think the girl looks a bit like someone in your immediate family?

Regarding John McCarthy its difficult to know what sort of man he was from this distance in time.I know he and his wife drank with Marie Lloyd at the Sugar Loaf in Hanbury Street and that Marie Lloyd helped to get his children on the stage.One of these was Steven McCarthy who married Marie Lloyd"s young friend,Marie Kendall.Together they were the grandparents of the famous 1950"s film star Kay Kendall-who married Rex Harrison.Charlie Chaplin"s mother also performed in Vaudeville with Steven McCarthy [his stage name was different but I can"t remember it right now].Chaplin refers to McCarthy"s son very fondly in his autobiography and the families appear to have stayed in touch because Kay Kendall was strongly linked romantically to Charlie Chaplin"s son, Sydney Chaplin and had a long affair with him before marrying Harrison [circa 1950].
Returning to McCarthy"s daughter in law,the Music Hall comedienne,Marie Kendall,not only was she a great friend of Marie Lloyd but she was a very committed trade unionist---as was Marie Lloyd.They were also both,
hugely loved by the British public.
So if they were fond of John McCarthy and his family he couldn"t have been all bad.
However,the business with Mary Ann Austin being chucked out of Mr and Mrs McCarthy"s lodging house,followed by gossip about McCarthy is a bit odd.Aparently,26 year old Mary Ann Austin was very pretty,so its just possible this "overthrew" him and he acted out of character.But it seems like he may have been a bit of a ladies man since Mary Kelly was also said to have been very attractive too and it is rather strange he allowed her to get so behind with the rent-----
Best
Norma