52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, Halloween Edition: Catherine Eddowes

Trigger Warning: Descriptions of violence and murder. I have avoided explicit details, but there are still some disturbing details. 

    Welcome to the final installment in the Halloween edition of 52 in 52. The tale of "Jack the Ripper" is a well known story and the focus of countless horror movies, including From Hell, The Lodger, and even a recent animated Batman film, Batman: Gotham by Gaslight. The story is one of the classic horror tales, but the story of the victims is somewhat less known to horror and true crime aficionados. Today, I would like to not probe the mystery of the identity of Jack, but rather tell the tale of one of the victims, Catherine Eddowes. Catherine's story is one of desperate poverty and grief, and the stark horror of her death still resonates with us today. Her story is a good example of what genealogy can do; it paints a picture of a woman whose life and death reflects the socio-economic situation she found herself in, and how the moral and ethical issues surrounding her life story reflect the contradictory Victorian society she lived in.

    Catherine was born on 14 Apr 1842, in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, England, to George and Catherine (Evans) Eddows or Eddowes. George was 33, and Catherine was 26. George was born in Wolverhampton on 1 Aug 1808, to Thomas and Mary (Banks) Eddowes, a tinplate stamper and his wife. George followed his father into the tinplate industry, working at the Old Hall Works in Wolverhampton. The tin industry was a major part of the local economy, so Thomas and George, along with many of their neighbors, were employed in the production of tin goods, in this case specifically inexpensive plates, although many other types of tin goods were manufactured in Wolverhampton. Young Catherine's mother was also employed, as a cook for the Peacock Hotel in the same city. Tin workers were very poorly paid, so almost all lower-class women in Wolverhampton worked; the 1851 UK Census shows Thomas Eddowes as a tin worker, and his wife Mary as a candlestick maker:

Thomas and Mary (Banks) Eddowes in the 1851 UK Census for Wolverhampton

Generational poverty was a reality for the majority of working-class families in Victorian England, and the Eddowes family was no exception. Entire families worked in the iron mills, cotton mills, mines, potteries, and tin factories in Staffordshire. Children as young as 10 or 11 were sent out to work to help support the family; in the family listed above Thomas and Mary in the census, the 11 year-old son is listed as an "errand boy." This was simply the only way that families could make ends meet, because hanging over their heads was the specter of the workhouse.

    Victorian workhouses were intended to provide shelter and work for poverty stricken families and individuals, but the reality was actually much different. The regimen of the workhouse was designed to deter all but the most desperate of souls from applying for help. Victorian society saw poverty as a moral character failing; you were poor because of some character flaw or moral deficiency, therefore you deserved to suffer. Working-class families were often scorned and taken advantage of by middle and upper-class employers. People seeking help at the Poor Unions for poverty relief were compelled to be admitted to the workhouse, where they would labor at tasks for no pay in exchange for room and board. Inmates would not be released from the workhouse until the masters and overseers were satisfied that the inmate had completed enough work to be dismissed. Men, women, and children were separated from each other at admission; only children younger than four were allowed to remain with their mothers. After the age of four, the children were taken to a children's wing, attended to by a "nurse" who in most cases was a pauper inmate of the workhouse herself, and the children were only permitted to see their parents rarely. Work for inmates ranged from breaking rocks for road gravel, splitting and stacking wood, picking oakum (picking apart pieces of old rope used on ships, coated with salt and tar), breaking up bones and smashing them to powder for use in fertilizer, for men; women's tasks were usually picking oakum, laundry, knitting, sewing, cooking in the workhouse kitchen, and nursing sick inmates. The inmates were housed in a "ward" of hard, narrow beds, often without adequate bedding, heat, or sanitary facilities, the doors of which were usually locked at night to prevent inmates from leaving to visit friends and family members, or absconding out of the workhouse entirely. Food was barely adequate and frequently tainted by rodent droppings and insects. Disease spread like wildfire through the overcrowded wards, and although workhouses had a doctor by law, inmates were generally at their mercy and many people died due to incompetent medical care and lack of medicines. Workhouses were essentially prisons for the destitute, and almost all Victorian working-class families had a horror of the workhouse and would do everything that they could to avoid asking for help from one. 

    Considering this, large families were both a curse and an inevitability in a time of no birth control, or even a basic understanding of how conception worked. Young Catherine was the 6th of what would eventually be 12 children born to George and Catherine:

1. Harriet, b. 1833
2. Alfred, b. 1833 (Harriet and Alfred were not twins)
3. Emma, b. 1835
4. Eliza, b. 1837
5. Elizabeth, b. 1839 (some family trees conflate Eliza and Elizabeth, but they are both listed in the 1841 and 1851 census records, making it clear that they were two separate people)
6. Catherine, b. 1842
7. Thomas, b. 1843
8. George, b. 1845
9. John, b. and d. 1849
10. Sarah Ann, b. 1850
11. Mary, b. 1852
12. William, b, and d. 1855

                  

1851 UK Census showing the Eddowes family in London.

    That the family was poor and scraping a living was a given. In hopes of bettering his family's situation during a strike at the Old Hall Works, George moved the family in 1843 to a suburb of London called Bermondsey, and obtained a job with a tin-making firm called Perkins and Sharpus in the City of London. Catherine was the last of the family's children to be born in Wolverhampton; the next six children were all born in Bermondsey. The area was a slum, surrounded by docks and cheap housing for immigrants. The infamous St. Saviours Dock and Jacob's Island were located here. Crime was common, and families struggled to keep body and soul together any way they could in their filthy surroundings. Charles Dickens set his famous novel, Oliver Twist in this area and his description of Bermondsey resonates even today:

"... crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem to be too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud and threatening to fall into it—as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage: all these ornament the banks of Jacob's Island."

    By the 1851 UK Census, 17 year-old Alfred was working and living at home. Emma, Eliza, and probably Harriet were all working as domestic servants, and Emma and Harriet were no longer living with the family. The remainder of the children were listed as "scholars" which indicates that they did receive some education, although the children were probably sent out to work sometime around 13 or 14. The family situation was only complicated with the arrival of Sarah Ann in 1850, who seems to have had some sort of intellectual disability; she would later be admitted as an "imbecile" to an asylum, where she lived until her death in 1928. In 1854, tragedy struck: the birth and death of the last Eddowes child, William, who died 9 Dec 1854 at the age of 4 months. Less than a year later, Catherine Evans Eddowes died of what was probably tuberculosis, on 17 Nov 1855. Her youngest living child, Mary, was 3 years old. George Eddowes only survived his wife by two years, dying in 1857. This threw the family into the middle of their worst nightmares. With no other recourse, the younger siblings were sent to the workhouse at Bermondsey. The youngest, Mary, was only 5. 

A workhouse register for Thomas, George, and Mary Eddowes dated 9 Dec 1857. The notes indicate that George was being apprenticed to a shoemaker, Thomas was to join the band of the 45th Regiment, and five year-old Mary was being sent as a servant (!) to a private home. 

    Catherine, commonly called Kate, was 15 at the death of her father, and she somehow seems to have made it back to Wolverhampton, to live with first an aunt and then an uncle. The most reasonable explanation as to why the remaining Eddowes family in Wolverhampton didn't take in the other children is fairly easily explained: they were poor, and taking on the burden of several more children who wouldn't be able to earn their own living was practically impossible for them. Kate at 15 was old enough to go out to work, and this she did. In the 1861 UK Census, Kate, called "Cette" is listed as living in Wolverhampton with her uncle William Eddowes and his family, working as a scourer in the tin plate industry. Her uncle would describe her later as always keeping late hours, and as a "jolly" girl. Kate seems to have been very pretty, only about 5 feet tall, with rich auburn hair and hazel eyes. She is also listed among the students at a night school for workers in Wolverhampton, so she seems to have been keen on getting an education.

1861 UK Census, listing "Cette" Eddowes living with her uncle William in Wolverhampton

    Eventually, Kate moved on from Wolverhampton and her family to Birmingham, another industrial center which made its fortune producing various metal items, including tinware and cutlery. It was here that Kate became acquainted with Thomas Conway, a veteran of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment, who made a poor living selling "chapbooks," small handmade books about various subjects, usually sensational in nature, similar to the "penny-dreadfuls" sold in the United States. Kate and Thomas quickly took a shine to each other, and she began helping him with selling his chapbooks. In 1863 she gave birth to his daughter Catherine Ann, called Annie by her family, followed by a son Thomas in 1867. It was about this time that Kate began calling herself Kate Conway, although there is no evidence that Kate and Thomas ever married. She had his initials crudely tattooed onto her forearm in blue ink.

    Dissatisfied with life in Birmingham, Kate and Thomas took their children and went to London to try and make their fortunes. the 1871 UK Census lists the small family as living in the Borough of Southwark, in southern London, right next to Bermondsey, the slum where the Eddowes family had lived previously, and much like it in character. At this point, Kate and her children began a series of admissions to London workhouses, under a variety of names: Kate Eddowes, Kate Conway, Catherine Eddowes, and Catherine Conway. Sometimes it was to the workhouse infirmary for medical attention- on one occasion she had been suffering from a burned foot- other times because she had her children with her and they were destitute. Sometimes she was admitted to the workhouse at Stepney, but most of her admissions were at the Newington Workhouse in Southwark. It was during the years in Southwark that Kate developed an addiction to alcohol, something that Thomas Conway strongly objected to. In August 1873, the Conways had another son George Alfred, called Alfred by his family, but the rift between Kate and Thomas had widened. Annie would later testify that her father had beaten her mother over her drinking, so perhaps Kate was looking for refuge in the workhouse from domestic violence. Her profession was listed as "hawker," indicating that perhaps she was still working with Conway, selling the chapbooks and broadsheets. 

An 1875 Stepney Workhouse admission for Kate and her 15 month old son, George Alfred. The register indicates that she was ill and destitute. Note she is also listed as "single"

Although many biographies of Kate state that she only had three children, a fourth child, Fredrick, appears starting in 1877. 

    Newington Workhouse admission for Kate and 6 month-old Fredrick Conway, dated 9 Aug 1877. Kate was listed as having earned her and Fredrick's night stay by picking oakum.

   

 Workhouse discharge, this time at the Greenwich Workhouse in Woolwich Road, showing Kate, under the name Catherine Eddowes, and her four children, dated 6 Sep 1877. It is unclear as to whether the "Pregnant and Destitute" refers to Kate or to a woman on the previous page.

    

    The 1881 UK Census shows Kate living with Thomas Conway, but only Thomas and Albert were with the family, so it may not be a stretch to believe that little Fredrick had died in the interim. Annie was 17 or 18 years-old at the time so she was probably living on her own by then:

    Despite the census record, we know that the estrangement between Kate and Thomas was growing, and at some point that year Kate left Thomas and the two boys, and moved in with a fruit salesman and agricultural laborer named John Kelly in the Spitalfields district in London. Spitalfields had once been a prosperous district where French Huguenot silk weavers fleeing persecution in France settled and produced their wares, but by the Victorian era the silk trade had gone into a decline, and Spitalfields had become a slum. Once prosperous merchant residences had been carved up into multiple cramped apartments, often shared by multiple families, and cheap by-the-night rooming houses. Despite an influx of Jewish refugees who worked in the textile industries, Spitalfields became one of the most dangerous slums in London. Jack the Ripper would claim his last canonical victim, Mary Jane Kelly, in Spitalfields, on Dorset Street. Kate lived with John Kelly (no relation to Mary Kelly) in a cheap rooming house located on Flower and Dean Street, in the center of the Spitalfields area. The first victim of the "double event" murders committed in the early morning of 30 Sept 1888 by Jack the Ripper, Elizabeth "Long Liz" Stride, also lived in a rooming house on Flower and Dean Street; the second victim that night would be Catherine Eddowes. 

    

    Kate's drinking seems to have escalated by the late 1870's; she was arrested for public drunkenness in 1881, and although her landlord later testified that she was rarely drunk, evidence contests this. Acquaintances and her landlord, Fredrick Wilkinson, knew her as Kate Kelly by this time. She was often unemployed, although she did do some sewing and cleaning for local Jewish businesses in Brick Lane. John Kelly and Kate were also earning a sporadic living a few months of the year by traveling south into Kent to pick hops, used in brewing beer. By this time, Kate may have become a casual prostitute, trying to earn money for her nightly lodging. The couple did not have a steady income, and Kate would often visit her sister Elizabeth, who by this time was married and lived in Greenwich, or her daughter Annie who was married in 1885 to Louis Phillips, a gunsmith in Southwark, for money, although Annie frequently turned her away; by the time of Kate's murder, Annie had not seen her for about two years, and was actively hiding her whereabouts from her mother. Elizabeth seems to have given her money frequently, but Kate also made social calls to visit her sister. When she couldn't obtain money from her sister or daughter, Kate often slept rough in front of a lodging house on Dorset Street, the same street where Mary Kelly lived and died. Although they lived in roughly the same area, there is no evidence to suggest that Kate, Liz, and Mary knew one another.

    In September of 1888, Kate and John Kelly had gone to Kent to pick hops during the harvest season. The couple met up with another couple, Emily Birrell and her common-law husband. They parted when the harvest was over, and Emily and her husband went on to Gloucestershire, while John and Kate returned to London some time around the 27th of September. Kate and John spent the night of the 27th in the "casual ward" of the Shoe Lane Workhouse. Kate and John proceeded to spend their money, probably on alcohol, the next night, and in consequence, they split the remainder of their wages, which amounted to sixpence on the night of the 29th of September. John took fourpence, and proceeded to get a room in Flower and Dean Street, and Kate took twopence, intending to stay the night again in the casual ward of the workhouse, and travel to ask her daughter for money the next day. Since the fourpence was not enough to buy lodging for the night, John Kelly pawned his boots, and took the money and bought lodging. According to the lodging house keeper, Kelly arrived barefoot just after 8 pm, and stayed in his lodging all night. Kate had a different idea in mind. 

Catherine "Kate" Eddowes

    At about 8:30 on the night of the 29th of September, Kate was picked up by the police, drunk and almost insensible, after she collapsed on the sidewalk. Kate gave her name as Mary Ann Kelly, and gave a fictitious address. The constable and his partner hauled Kate off to the police station at Bishopsgate, and put her in a cell, where she instantly fell asleep.  At about 12:30 am, Kate woke up and asked the constables when she would be released; the answer was given as "when you can take care of yourself." By 1 am, Kate was sober enough to be released. She left the police station, saying to the constable who escorted her to the door, "Good night, old cock." When she left, instead of going to the Flower and Dean Street lodging where John Kelly was sleeping, Kate instead went in a different direction, heading deeper into Spitalfields. At 1:35 am, Kate was seen by a group of three men, talking to a fair-haired and mustachioed man at Church Passage; she had her hand on his chest, but the men later testified that she did not seem frightened, and the gesture seemed less like she was pushing him away, and more enticing. The three men were the last people to see Catherine "Kate" Eddowes alive.

    I will not describe the murder of Catherine Eddowes; details of her death and subsequent autopsy are widely available in a number of books and websites. Her body was discovered in Mitre Square less than 15 minutes after her last sighting. A piece of Kate's apron had been cut out, and the missing section was found by a police constable in nearby Goulston Street at about 2:55 am on the morning of 30 Sep 1888. On the brick wall above it, was scrawled "The Juwes are the men that Will not be Blamed for nothing." It is unclear whether or not the message was written at the same time as the blood-stained apron was left as anti-Semitic graffiti was common in the East End of London, but fearing an uprising against Jewish residents of the area if the graffiti was connected to the murder, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner ordered it transcribed and then washed off the wall. To this day it is debated as to whether or not the graffiti was written by the murderer. During the autopsy, it was noted that one kidney was missing. When the "From Hell" letter from the Ripper was sent to the authorities, the parcel it was in contained half a human kidney that the Ripper claimed was taken from Eddowes; experts believe that the letter was probably a sick prank, and the kidney could have been taken from a medical school or any number of morgues or cemeteries. 

    Catherine Eddowes was buried in an unmarked grave in the City of London Cemetery, her funeral paid for by an anonymous donor. She was buried in a polished elm coffin with a brass plate engraved with her name, age, and date of death. She was only 43 years old. Her grave would remain unmarked until 1996 when cemetery officials placed a plaque to mark her grave. Kate rests only a few yards away from the first victim of that night, Elizabeth Stride. The inquest jury voted to give Annie Conway Phillips their fees to show their sympathy.

The marker for Catherine Eddowes, placed in 1996. A newer marker was placed in 2003, marking her grave as part of the City of London Heritage Trail.

        

    Catherine's life was one of generational poverty and trauma. She really never stood a chance against the Victorian society she was born into, which saw her as responsible for her own death in many ways. She was not one of the "deserving poor," those who had simply fallen into a time of genteel poverty; Victorian society regarded her poverty and misery as a moral failure in her character, a "fallen" woman. Victorian society was cruel in its moral pronouncements, and for every victim that Jack the Ripper claimed, poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, and an endless cycle of child bearing in sub-optimal conditions claimed a thousand more women. It was only with the Ripper victims that society began to examine the "moral code" that kept people in this vicious cycle of generational poverty and violence, and start making changes towards how the working-class and homeless were treated.