The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

In Wolverhampton, Kate worked as a scourer, one of the women who moved tinware through an oxide bath. Scourers worked six days a week “from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the summer and 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the winter” (206). It is possible that Kate began drinking alcohol during this period. She also stole something from the Old Hall Works where she worked, which got her fired but not arrested. Her family was outraged and disgraced. At the age of 19, Kate moved to Birmingham, where she moved in with her uncle Tom Eddowes, a popular bare-knuckle boxer, and his wife Rosannah. While there, she got a job polishing japanware trays.

Kate started a relationship with Thomas Conway (originally Quinn), who was born in Ireland and enlisted in the British army. He was sent to India, which was then part of the British Empire. During his time there, he became sick with chronic bronchitis and a heart condition, which caused him to be discharged from the military with a pension that was not enough to live on alone. Thomas became a chapman, who traveled around selling goods like knives, thimbles, toys, and chapbooks, which were pamphlet-like books. Often, he would try to attract customers by singing, using the lyrics from his chapbooks. It was while Thomas was working as a chapman that he met Kate.

The relationship with Thomas was apparently opposed by Tom Eddowes, and this opposition may have been what forced Kate to return to Wolverhampton. However, William and Elizabeth were no more sympathetic, with Elizabeth refusing to let Kate stay with them unless she ended her relationship with Thomas. Instead, Kate moved into a lodging house with Thomas and became pregnant in 1862. While middle- and upper-class girls were strictly expected to maintain their virginity until marriage, standards were more lax for working-class girls. Since working-class people lived closely together with little or no privacy, “bodily privacy and modesty were luxuries they simply could not afford” (217). Some working-class couples never married and simply lived together while telling their neighbors they were married.

As peddlers, Thomas and Kate were called by the slang of their time “‘flying stationers’ or ‘general paper sellers’” (218). As a couple, they may have performed songs and “theatrical repartee” (219) to attract customers. Since Thomas was illiterate, Kate wrote down and helped compose his own chapbooks for him. Such a life would have seen them sleeping in poor lodging houses and causal wards, having little access to laundry, and receiving little and uncertain pay.

Since such a way of life was bad for a woman about to give birth, by April of 1863, Kate went to give birth at a workhouse infirmary in the town of Great Yarmouth in the county of Norfolk. There were no dedicated maternity wards, and instead Kate would have delivered her child alongside patients suffering from disease. On April 18, 1863, Kate gave birth to a daughter, Catherine “Annie” Conway.

On January 9, 1866, Kate went to Staffordshire where her cousin, Charles Christopher Robinson, was about to be hanged for murder. A document at the Wolverton Archives is the only surviving chapbook believed to have been written by Kate Eddowes and Thomas Conway, titled A Copy of Verses on the Execution of Charles Christopher Robinson for the Murder of his Sweetheart, Harriet Segar of Ablow Street (223-24). The chapbook was apparently profitable for the couple. After this, the two decided to try to grow their business in London.

Kate and Thomas apparently never formally wed, and instead signified their union by a tattoo Kate got on her arm of Thomas’s initials. Tattooing was associated with sailors and soldiers; it was almost unheard of for women to receive them. For Kate, getting a tattoo was “deeply subversive” (228).

When she and Thomas moved to London, they were able to settle in a small house where they had two more children, Thomas Lawrence and Harriet. Thomas’s chapbook business did not succeed in London as he and Kate had hoped, and he had to find work as a bricklayer despite his health problems. Due to the family’s growing poverty, Harriet died in infancy from malnutrition. While Thomas went to Yorkshire to find a new job, Kate and her children stayed with her sister Elizabeth before having to go to the Greenwich Union Workhouse.

Kate’s options for welfare were limited, forcing her to turn to the workhouse. She was considered in the eyes of authorities equivalent to a “fallen woman,” akin to a sex worker even though she “cohabited with [a] monogamous common-law partner” (229). Kate would have been made to work while her children were placed in a workhouse school, and later what were called the Industrial Schools.

In the workhouses, children of both sexes were taught reading and writing. Boys were taught “shoemaking, tailoring, carpentry, and music” while girls learned “needlework and knitting” (231). The facilities at the Industrial Schools were actually “considered state-of-the-art” (231) and included workshops and a farm where students could learn trades and agriculture. Students were even involved in musical performances. Kate’s own younger siblings had been sent to the Industrial School at Sutton, where Thomas Eddowes learned music and joined an army band, George became a shoemaker, and Mary was employed as a domestic servant.

In the meantime, Thomas and Kate’s relationship worsened. They fought violently, and the fights were aggravated by Kate’s growing alcohol dependency. Kate’s family blamed her for the domestic violence she experienced, which fit with the attitudes toward domestic abuse among the working class. A wife’s drunkenness was commonly seen even in trials as a legal defense for charges of domestic abuse by the husband. Still, communities regulated themselves and intervened in some ways, such as offering women a safe place to stay, which is what Kate’s sister Emma did for her. When she was not with Thomas, Kate wound up staying in various workhouses and causal wards. She was once arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct.

Despite the violence, Kate and Thomas continued to stay together. They moved frequently, with Kate working as a laundress, doing charring work, and again helping Thomas with selling chapbooks. While selling chapbooks, Kate twice abandoned her two sons, Thomas and George, requiring police intervention. By 1881, Thomas and Kate had separated for good. Kate was again arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct, and her family broke off contact with her except for her sister Eliza.

After the death of her first husband, Eliza married a dockworker, Charles Frost, and lived in Whitechapel. Kate lived with a man named John Kelly, who also had an alcohol dependency, in a lodging house called Cooney’s. Their income fluctuated, so sometimes they had to sleep on the streets. Kate also continued to work as a peddler, traveling with John between London and Kent. However, her alcohol dependency ruined her relationship with her eldest daughter Anne.

Like many workers in London, in the late summer of 1888, Kate and John Kelly walked to the nearby countryside of Kent to pick hops in exchange for pay and free drinks and lodging. Since the hops harvest was poor that year, they instead worked picking fruits in the orchards. On the way back to London, they stopped at a casual ward called Thavies Inn, which was well-known to be lax when it came to work requirements.

What happened between then and Kate’s murder is unclear, because John Kelly’s testimony was, by his own admission, “muddled” (244). It seems that while John slept in a lodging house after pawning a pair of boots, Kate slept on the street. The coroner and the media of the time believed that Kate was targeted because she was a sex worker, which purportedly explained why she and John were not together. However, Rubenhold argues again that there is no proof that Kate was a sex worker. The closest thing to “proof” is that journalists at the time misinterpreted John’s statement that Kate was “walking the streets” (246), which actually just referred to having to find a place to sleep on the streets for the night.

The night of her death, a police officer, Louis Frederick Robson, found Kate drunk at Aldgate High Street. When asked her name, she replied, “Nothing” (248). That night, when she was released at one o’clock in the morning, she gave a false address and a fake name, “Mary Ann Kelly.” Then she went to find a place to sleep at Mitre Square. The morning of September 30, Eliza Gold learned that her sister Kate had been murdered. Her family intervened financially to make sure she would not be put in a pauper’s grave, and hundreds of Whitechapel residents attended her funeral.