Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [29]
October wore on with no further atrocities. The increased police presence and heightened public awareness probably kept the Ripper from operating during this period. With more legitimate trades, such as charring and hawking, oversubscribed as always, prostitutes, driven by the need for the basic necessities of food and lodgings, began to venture out after dark once more.
Mary Jane Kelly
One woman who certainly needed money that October was Mary Jane (or Marie Jeanette) Kelly. Like hundreds of others, she was already nervous about the Ripper. Her lover, Joseph Barnett, testified that she asked him to read out the latest newspaper reports on the case. But, Ripper or not, money was tight and she already owed 29 shillings in back rent. Her attempts to earn money on the night of 8 November would result in the most infamous of the Ripper’s crimes, bringing his reign of terror to a horrific climax.
She was born in Limerick around 1863 and had six or seven brothers and one sister. In early childhood her family moved to Wales where John Kelly, her father, worked in an ironworks.Around 1879 she married a collier named Davies but was widowed two or three years later when he was killed in a pit explosion. She moved to London in 1884 and worked at a high-class West End brothel for a time. At the invitation of one of ‘her gentlemen’ she went to live in Paris but returned to London a fortnight later as she didn’t like it. She then lived on Ratcliffe Highway before moving in with a man named Morganstone at Stepney. Later, she lived in Bethnal Green Road with a plasterer, Joseph Fleming. Kelly remained fond of him and he continued to visit her after they separated. Julia Venturney, who lived at 1, Miller’s Court, remembered Fleming and testified that he had ‘often ill-used her because she cohabited with Joe (Barnett)’.
Mary met Joseph Barnett in 1887 when she lived at Cooly’s lodging house in Thrawl Street. Barnett, an Irish cockney, worked as a fish porter at Billingsgate. They first met in Commercial Street and had a drink together. Their friendship was immediate and, after a couple more encounters that same week, they decided to live together. They seem to have been well suited. By Barnett’s testimony they lived together for a year and eight months. During this time they moved around the area taking lodgings in several addresses.
From the start of 1888, they finally settled at 13, Miller’s Court. The couple rented the room, at 4/6 a week, from John McCarthy, who owned the chandler’s shop at 27, Dorset Street. Miller’s Court was one of several courts off Dorset Street and was accessible by a narrow passageway between numbers 26 and 27. The court was a small paved yard, flanked by run-down tenement houses, with a single gas lamp. Number 13 backed onto 26, Dorset Street and had originally been number 26’s back-parlour before being partitioned off when the rest of the building had been let out as furnished rooms. (It now lies under a multi-storey car park in Dorset Street.)
During their time together, there is no account or inference that Barnett was violent and generally they did not drink excessively. Kelly did occasionally get drunk. Towards the end of their relationship she had broken one of the two windows in the room in a drunken temper. Their quarrels seem to have been rooted in Barnett’s dislike of Kelly’s prostitution. He regularly gave her money so that she would not have to walk the streets. Barnett’s reason for their separation on 30 October was that Kelly was allowing another prosti-tute to share their room. At the inquest he admitted that he had been out of work, but denied that this had any bearing on their parting. He had been fired from his job at Billingsgate several months before (possibly for theft) and despite taking labouring jobs where he could, they