#canonical five

The masses all love a bloody spectacular

And the Whitechapel harlots were but meat in an abattoir

Five women departed this life at the end of a knife

Now they rise once again to rock you tonight

Ladies and gents

Introducing, in the order of being murdered:

Mary Ann Nichols

Annie Chapman

Elizabeth Stride

Catherine Eddowes

Mary Jane Kelly

I give you:

The canonical five

Now you all know our names

We’re happy to meet ya

We’ve learned some knew tricks

The devil our teacher

We’ve driven men wild

In the dark of the alleys

Too many nights

With sticky finales

All born to be rotten

And scorned and forgotten

Now we’ll take to the streets

Done all prim and proper

In life after death

It’s all silk and cotton

When a woman’s done wrong

Nothing can stop her

Canonical five

Canonical five

Kelly, Chapman, Eddowes, Nichols, and Stride (x3)

A lady in waiting, a whore on her back

Same goddamn thing, as a matter of fact

One takes a ring, the other takes money

But a lady in waiting takes all of the honey

Discovered some powers down here in hell

And the devil himself is casting a spell

We’re headed back up to the east end of town

We’re grabbing this bastard and bringing him down

Canonical five

Canonical five

Kelly, Chapman, Eddowes, Nichols, and Stride (x2)

Baptized in crimson

From hell we bring fury

Revenge is our mission

We’re judge and we’re jury

Vengeance

Canonical five

Canonical five

Kelly, Chapman, Eddowes, Nichols, and Stride

The sword kills five in the bloodiest autumn

He’s still most wanted but we’ve been forgotten

If it’s eye for an eye then we’re all going blind

This Jack of all whores will get his in kind

We lace ourselves up our corsets of scorn

In the footlights of hell vengeance is born

Poor Juliet, hunter, Romeo’s hag (?)

Got baptized in hell now we’re coming back

Canonical five

Canonical five

Kelly, Chapman, Eddowes, Nichols, and Stride (x2)

Baptized in crimson

From hell we bring fury

Revenge is our mission

We’re judge and we’re jury

Agony in red

Vengeance

Canonical five (x2)

Canonical five

Canonical five

Kelly, Chapman, Eddowes, Nichols, and Stride (x2)

Baptized in crimson

From hell we bring fury

Revenge is our mission

We’re judge and we’re jury

Agony in red

Vengeance

Canonical five (x2)

Canonical five

Canonical five

The Five. 

The Untold Lives of the Women killed by Jack the Ripper/The Lives of Jack The Ripper's Women

By Hallie Rubenhold (2019)

Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London—the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper. Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women. For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time—but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman.

(Spoken):

That melody you play. I’ve heard it before.

The beauty of music is that it anchors to time.

Just follow the notes as they drift through your mind

I followed the tune from the corner to here

got lost in the music

and the night disappeared

Looks like you’ve got some blood on your collar, old chap.

Agh. Red.

It’s the color that always leaves stains. From what became of the night, this is all that remains.

Can memories ever really be erased?

They live inside you. And at some point, they wake.

In time you shall find that most everything breaks.

Sing me another song, then.

Don’t you just love when you relate to a song.

(Sung):

You hear this

And the chorus

And know you belong

Annie Eliza Smith was her name

A daddy’s girl by default

a mother to blame.

He Pinned her hair back

flowers in strands.

She always felt loved in the movement of hands (?)

She came to London with stars in her eyes

How quickly stars fall when poverty strikes

She sold some flowers

and sold some crochet

But sooner than later had skin in the game

Her name was dark Annie

And everyone loved her

A real hallway darling

She smiled when she left ya

Lost in the moment

She’ll never know grace

So, three cheers for Annie

Forever erased

In a public house drinking

You don’t feel you’re losin

The spirits and music

She’s yours for the choosin

An alley her bedroom

She is your lover

Farewell, my darlin

Your spit in the gutter

No one to live up to

She let no one down

So I’m raising a glass

To a night on the town

No bed to go back to

She’d just blown the rent

More than the money

It’s the life that she spent

Her name was dark Annie

And everyone loved her

A real hallway darlin

She smiled as she left ya

Lost in the moment

She’ll never know grace

So three cheers for Annie

Forever erased

She took him out back

Let down her defenses

First came the scream

And rattling fences

In the blackest of oceans

She’s swimmin downward

In the weight of the water

Her own life would drown her

What little she had

Was three rings on her finger

Each ring for a child

And the bitterness lingered

Innocence lost

You can never replay

She cried for her daughters

As she died in the rain

Her name was dark Annie

And everyone loved her

A real hallway darlin

She smiled as she left ya

Lost in the moment

She’ll never know grace

So three cheers for Annie

Forever erased

Three cheers for Annie

Forever erased

Three cheers for Annie

Forever erased

A Hidden History of Women in the East End: The Alternative Jack the Ripper Tour.

Join us to hear the untold story of Jack the Ripper’s victims. In this hidden history tour  we celebrate the strength of women led to sell sex for survival, not a serial killer. Visiting the streets where the women lived, we will explore what we know about their lives and commemorate their deaths. Alongside the historic, you’ll hear the stories of women still affected by sexual exploitation in the area today and how you can take action on these issues.

BOOK TODAY TO HEAR HER STORY.

2019 tour dates:

28th March

25th April

30th May

27th June

25th July

29th August

26th September

31st October

7th November

28th November

Tours take place on the last Thursday of each month.

Tours depart from St Botolph without Aldgate at 6.30pm.

Tour tickets cost £8 for adults, £5 for students, 65+ and those receiving income support. Advanced booking essential.

The Real Mary Kelly

By Wynne Weston-Davies (2016)

Many researchers have tried over the decades to discover Mary Jane Kelly’s true identity. She was the final and most brutally murdered victim of Jack the Ripper, but almost nothing is known about her family or her earlier life. 

In this thrilling book,  author, qualified surgeon and Mary’s great-nephew Wynne Weston-Davies explores the inscrutable circumstances behind the Ripper’s fifth and final victim and how the elusive life of Mary Jane Kelly is wholly intertwined with the mystery of her legendary killer.

Wynne, an anatomical surgeon based in London, presents his theory that the luckless Mary was his great-aunt, that her real name was Elizabeth Weston-Davies and that she was a former lady’s maid to the Marchioness of Londonderry. Her murderer could have been her estranged husband Francis Spurzheim Craig. 

Born in 1857, Elizabeth was the sixth child and fourth daughter of Edward Davies, a slate quarry owner from Montgomeryshire, Wales. Her mother Anne had once been lady’s maid to Mary Cornelia Edwards, the daughter of a prosperous Montgomeryshire landowner. In 1846 Miss Edwards married George Vane-Tempest, heir to the Marquess of Londonderry.

Following Edward Davies’ premature death, Anne called upon Mary Cornelia – now Marchioness of Londonderry – who agreed to take on her young daughter Elizabeth as a lady’s maid. This was sometime in the mid to late 1870s.

As such, Elizabeth bore close witness to the antics of the elite who came to the lavish Bohemian parties held at Londonderry House in London’s Mayfair during the early 1880s. Among those who came, says Weston-Davies, were Héleine and Frederica Maundrell, two sisters who ran a series of upmarket French brothels in London that catered to the British passion for Gallic prostitutes.

In 1884 Lord Londonderry unexpectedly died of bronchitis aged 63 and his heartbroken widow declared her intention of leaving London, never to return. Faced with a dilemma as to whether to accompany her mistress to the country or start anew in London, Elizabeth broke rank and offered her services to the Maundrells who duly accepted her into their brothel at Collingham Place in Kensington at which point, proposes Dr. Weston-Davies, she began wearing expensive French gowns and adopted a French name, à la Marie Jeanette.

In December 1884 her sojourn as a high class prostitute ended when she met Francis Spurzheim Craig, a 47-year-old journalist and draughtsman who had put together the Cambridge version of the A–Z gazette. His father was ET Craig, a high profile public health engineer of leftist political persuasion. More relevantly to Dr. Weston-Davies, the elder Craig also had a penchant for dissecting human bodies in order to ‘gain access to its innermost secrets’, apparently with his only son watching on.

The younger Craig’s career had fallen apart in 1875 amid accusations of plagiarism and Dr. Weston-Davies believes the man was showing strong signs of schizophrenia by the time he met and fell in love with Elizabeth. Nonetheless, Elizabeth impulsively agreed to marry him on Christmas Eve, 1884, and he took her on a trip to Paris.

Within three months the couple had parted. In the wake of their separation, Craig hired a private investigator who discovered that his heavy drinking wife was back working as a high class hooker for a lady called Ellen Macleod. Craig’s obsession, says Dr. Weston-Davies, rapidly metamorphosed from love to hatred as he tried to track her down with a divorce petition.

And then one day Elizabeth vanished. When Craig was tipped off that she had moved to the East End, he too moved there and renewed his hunt. He also began filing reports on the goings on of East End police courts for the newspapers. All this coincided with a spate of three brutal murders of East End prostitutes by a group known as the ‘High Rip’ gang.

Dr. Weston-Davies postulates that reporting on the ‘Whitechapel Murders’ fuelled Craig’s psychopathic mind and gave him the perfect contrivance to murder his wife. Armed with the knowledge of human dissection he had learned from his father, and a long, sharp knife, he would murder several women, including Elizabeth, and make it look like the work of a deranged serial killer.

~*~

On August 10th 2015, Dr. Weston-Davies’s proposition was taken seriously by the UK Ministry of Justice, which indicated it granted him an exhumation license for Mary’s grave on the basis that he was her nearest living relative. It was his hope that a DNA test proved Mary was his grandfather’s sister. The license was conditional on him producing a letter from a laboratory willing to do the DNA testing. He had also to post a notice of the exhumation on the grave for three months.

However, on March 13th 2017, archeologists from the University of Leicester concluded the project would take too long and cost too much. The team was commissioned by crime writer Patricia Cornwell, but after visiting St Patrick's Catholic Cemetery in Leytonstone, where Ms Kelly is thought to have been buried, the scientists decided that searching for the murder victim's remains was impractical. In a new report entitled the The Mary Jane Kelly Project they pointed out that it was likely to involve excavating an area containing hundreds of graves, and each exhumation would legally require the consent of next of kin. Lead researcher geneticist Dr Turi King said: 'To complete any exhumation application to the Ministry of Justice, a compelling case for the exhumation as well as detailed information on the location and state of the grave would be required. Not only for the exhumation of Kelly's remains, but also to determine if any other remains might be disturbed in the process. However, the precise location of her grave is unknown and, not only that, it rapidly became clear that as such, the remains of a number of other individuals would have to be disturbed. Her remains are highly likely to have been dug through when the communal grave site she was buried in was reused in the 1940s, making accurate identification of any of her remains highly problematic if not impossible. As information presently stands, a successful search for Kelly's remains would require a Herculean effort that would likely take years of research. It would be prohibitively costly and would cause unwarranted disturbance to an unknown number of individuals buried in a cemetery that is still in daily use, with no guarantee of success.'

None of Jack the Ripper’s victims have ever been exhumed.

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Jack the Ripper. Blood Lines

By Anthony J. Randall (2013)

Anthony J Randall looks at the canonical victims of Jack the Ripper (Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly) and investigates the family background of their paternal and maternal lines. Perhaps their histories reveal the origins of their destiny. Perhaps their family backgrounds hold the seeds to the paths they trod. In this searching investigation many birth, marriage and death certificates, and over two hundred census returns, have been transcribed and presented. 

Will the Real Mary Kelly...?

By Chris Scott (2005)

The last generally acknowledged victim of Jack the Ripper was twenty five year old Irishwoman named Mary Jane Kelly. Or was she? So little is known of this young woman, so thoroughly has she evaded all attempts at researching her life that, in all truth, there is very little we can actually say we know about her. Whilst research has led to significant advances in other areas of the Whitechapel crimes, she remains an enigma. 

This book pulls together what we can learn and reasonably infer about this most elusive victim of the most elusive killer in criminal history.