Annie Millwood, Emma Elizabeth Smith and Martha Tabram
Emma Elizabeth Smith and Martha Tabram
Annie Millwood, Emma Elizabeth Smith and Martha Tabram were three homeless women who died as a result of brutal attacks in 1888 in what became known as ‘The Whitechapel Murders’.
All three women were attacked within five minutes walk of each other. Annie Millwood was attacked on February the 25th, 1888. Emma Elizabeth Smith was attacked on April the 3rd 1888 and Martha Tabram was attacked on August the 7th 1888.
It’s worth stating that contrary to what we might believe about the brutal existence of those who occupied the slums of Whitechapel murder was not nearly so common as we might imagine.
Bruce Paley in his book Jack the Ripper: The Simple Truth refers to the ‘Annual Report on the Sanitary Conditions of Whitechapel’ by Joseph Loane, the Medical Officer for Health. 1602 deaths were registered in 1887. Disease and accidents were the big killers. Joseph Loane reported no deaths as a result of murder in 1887.
Bruce Paley writes:
“Nor were that year’s statistics a fluke. There hadn’t been any murders in Whitechapel in 1886 either, out of sixty-eight committed in London, while the reports for 1889 and 1890 each show one murder per year in the district, out of seventy-nine and seventy-four respectively for all London.”
Those figures for the four and a half million who lived in London at the time are in line with London in 2019 when 150 murders were reported among the nine million residents.
The City of Chicago Police Department said there were 617 murders in Chicago in 2023, down from 709 in 2022. And Chicago has a population of around three and half million or a million less than the population of the London of 1887.
This means that the brutal attacks on Annie Millwood, Emma Elizabeth Smith and Martha Tabram would not have been lightly dismissed.
The huddled masses of ‘The Abyss’ would have been exchanging information, and the press would have stoked the flames so that by the time Polly Nichols was reported as murdered in Buck’s Row on August the 31st, 1888, a frenzy of mass hysteria had been whipped up.
Did all of this impact the way the Whitechapel Murders and then the Jack the Ripper Murders were investigated?
Little is written about the attack on Annie Millwood, but the attacks on Emma Elizabeth Smith and Martha Tabram are covered.
I decided to take a look at The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook to see what it can tell us about them.
Stewart Evans, who together with Keith Skinner created The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook, first became involved with the Jack the Ripper story when he was a child in the 1950s when he saw the ‘Dear Boss’ letter and the ‘Saucy Jacky’ postcard at Madame Tussaud’s waxworks. But what really hooked him was reading Tom Cullen’s book Autumn of Terror and Robin Odell’s Jack the Ripper in Fact and Fiction and then visiting the murder sites in the mid 1960s. After that he bought every new Jack the Ripper book that came out.
Perhaps this early fascination with one of the most notorious crimes in history is what led him to choose a career in the police. His fascination with the murders of 1888 has never waned and he is certainly one of the most respected authorities on the subject.
His co-author, Keith Skinner, also developed an early fascination with the world of Jack the Ripper and has gone on to become a respected crime historian. He has been a consultant on documentaries and films including the film From Hell.
Like his fellow author his fascination with these murders has continued and he has co-authored more than a dozen books about them.
For both men assembling the enormous amount of material has been no easy task. As they say in the introduction to the book “Transcribing all the handwritten documents has taken many years and has been a difficult task.” Given the amount of material they were dealing with calling it “a difficult task” must be an understatement.
Their determination was no doubt driven, as they themselves write, by “the very human desire to find the answers to an unsolved series of murders that was, even then, of international interest”.
It was to help change an unsolved series of murders into a solved series of murders that made them produce their book. As they say: “This work presents the full factual history of the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 -91, chronologically presented, and powerfully told by the people who lived in the shadow of Jack the Ripper. We hope that it will prove a useful and user-friendly companion.”
Chapter 1 looks at the material relating to the murder of Emma Smith which was the first of eleven murders in the police files that ended with the murder of Frances Coles on the 13th of February 1891. Sadly, they explain that the police file on Emma Smith’s murder is now missing however notes taken for a 1973 BBC presentation do exist and there are press reports.
The address given for Emma Elizabeth Smith was 18 George Street. This was what was known as a common lodging house, or ‘doss house’, There were about 200 of these doss houses in Whitechapel nearly all in the Spitalfields area around Commercial Street and Brick Lane and about 8000 people a night would rent a bed there on any one night.
On nights when they didn’t have the fourpence ‘doss money’ they would find a doorway, yard or stairway and sleep rough. There were thousands every night at that time sleeping rough.
Jack London describes spending a night in one of these places from his description of conditions rough sleeping might not have seemed much worse for many providing you found somewhere that was dry and not too cold.
On Tuesday the 3rd of April she turned up badly injured at 18 George Street somewhere between 4 and 5am. The deputy and a lodger helped her get to the London Hospital where she died the next day from her injuries.
The inquest was held on Saturday the 7th and apparently the police had only learned of the attack the day before.
Dr G.H. Hillier who attended her at the hospital said at the inquest that her right ear had been torn and there was a rupture of the peritoneum and other internal organs, caused by some blunt instrument.
Dr Hillier said that Emma had drunk alcohol, but she was not intoxicated. He said according to Emma she had been attacked at about 1:30 on Tuesday morning near to Whitechapel Church.
Nobody appears to have asked what this woman was doing for the three hours or so before she made her way to her lodging house which was only 300 yards from where the attack took place.
She said she was attacked by three men. None of the beat policemen in the area reported any disturbance nor did any mention passing her and her helpmates during their half mile journey along Whitechapel Road to the hospital. The women certainly would have passed more than one policeman.
Members of a street gang
The police considered the possibility that the attack on Emma Elizabeth Smith was carried out by one of London’s street gangs.
In the late 19th century, there was a massive increase in gangs in many of Britain’s cities. In Birmingham, there were the Peaky Blinders. In Liverpool, there were the Cornermen and the High Rip. These gangs revelled in carrying out random acts of violence.
Just a 15-minute walk north up Brick Lane from Osborn Street where Emma Elizabeth Smith was attacked is Old Nichol Street. In the 19th century this was the centre of one of London’s blackest slums known as ‘the Old Nichol’ and the notorious gang of young cut throats who lived in that area gloried in the same name. They were known as the ‘Old Nichol’.
The brutal and mindless attack on this 45-year-old homeless woman could well have been carried out by the ‘Old Nichol”. A savage game that ended as a murder thus ensuring newspaper headlines that they could quietly enjoy.
The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook then moves on to the second Whitechapel murder recorded in the police files and that was the murder Martha Tabram on Tuesday the 7th of August. The inquest into her death was carried out in the Working Lads Institute which is right where I start my tour of the Jack the Ripper murder sites.
Martha was found on the first-floor landing of George Yard Buildings at 4:50 she’d been stabbed 39 times.
The Times reported that the inquest opened 2 days after the murder, on Thursday the 9th of August, and quoted Dr Killeen as saying that he “did not think all the wounds were inflicted with the same instrument.
The wounds generally might have been inflicted by a knife, but such an instrument could not have inflicted one of the wounds, which went through the chest bone.”
Alfred Crow, a cab driver, passed the body at 3-30 on his way home. He didn’t take any notice because “he was accustomed to seeing people lying about there. He did not then know whether the person was alive or dead.”
An hour and a quarter later, at 4:45, John Reeves “found the deceased lying on her back in a pool of blood”.
The Times went on to explain that the body had not been identified. Three women identified it under three different names.
A Metropolitan Police Report dated Friday, the 10th of August, said a description and photograph had been circulated, but the body had still not been identified.
The authors say that the next relevant report is dated 16 August. The report says Henry Tabram identified the body as his wife, who left him some years earlier.
The report says she was also identified by Mrs Luckhurst of 4 Star Place. She said the woman called herself Mrs Turner, and she and Mr Turner had lodged with her until a month earlier.
A police report 2 weeks later, on the 24th of September, says that Henry Tabram had lived with her until she left 13 years earlier.
She then went to live with Henry Turner for 12 years until 3 weeks before she was murdered when “it is found that the deceased resided at 19 George Street, (a Common Lodging House) and passing there in the name of “Emma” and was looked upon as a common prostitute, and a friend of Mary Ann Connelly, alias “Pearly Poll”, also a prostitute”.
Mary Ann Connelly (“Pearly Poll”) claimed that she and the victim had been drinking with two soldiers, a private and a corporal, from 10 pm until 11:45 pm on Monday the 6th.
The report goes on to say that she would be able to identify both men again. The corporals and privates who were on leave on that night were paraded the next morning, but she failed to turn up.
A search was made, and when she was found, she promised to report to the Tower the next morning. She did turn up but failed to identify anybody.
A police constable who was on duty in George Yard claimed he spoke to a private of the Guards at 2 am on the 7th. This PC picked out two men.
“They were both questioned and beyond all doubt the first was not the man, and the second gave an account of himself, and his time, which on inquiry was found to be correct.”
Then, in a report made by Inspector Edmund Reid, which goes over the events relating to the evidence of both Mary Ann Connelly (“Pearly Poll”) and the police officer who said he talked to a soldier at 2 o’clock on the morning of the murder.
He concludes his report with this:
“Inquiries were made to find some other person who saw the deceased and Pearly Poll with the privates on the night of the 6th but without success, and Pearly Poll and the P.C. having both picked out the wrong men they could not be trusted again as their evidence would be worthless.”
And reading and rereading the police reports and newspaper accounts of the events surrounding the murder of Martha Tabram, I think Inspector Reid has a point; their evidence is worthless.
Today, eyewitness evidence is subjected to much greater scrutiny than was the case in 1888, so I’m surprised it is still their evidence that mostly shapes the story. Perhaps because it is such a colourful story.
A story that says Martha Tabram sold sex and, as a result, picked up a client, possibly a private of the Guards, possibly somebody else who she found later.
They then go to the first-floor landing of George Yard Building, where the client goes berserk, stabbing her 38 times before calmly sheathing that knife so he can pull out his heavy-duty dagger, which he uses to smash through her chest bone.
This vivid tale, combined with the colourful “Pearly Poll”, all makes for a very good story.
But could there be an alternative story based on what is known?
After 12 years together, Henry Turner and Martha Tabram separated.
For the next three weeks, Martha struggles to survive alone in the Whitechapel of the 1880s.
For those three weeks, she hopes that she will end each day with fourpence to pay for a bed in a doss house. On those nights when she doesn’t have her doss money she finds shelter, like thousands of others, sleeping rough; George Yard Buildings being a popular and well-known option.
At 3:30, Alfred Crow, a cab driver, passes the body on his way home. He didn’t take any notice because “he was accustomed to seeing people lying about there”.
I think even with a casual glance, Alfred would have spotted the difference between your average rough sleeper and the sprawled-out body of a woman stabbed 39 times, with her chest bone smashed through.
Alfred passes her by, and the crew who used Emma Elizabeth Smith as entertainment a few months earlier, or another crew inspired by the sensational publicity they had created, decide to see if the first-floor landing is occupied.
Perhaps seeing a middle-aged woman lying asleep was just too tempting, and maybe, like Hannibal Chollop, one of them possessed a great knife just made for smashing through chest bones.
And this inspired a more lightly armed companion to show the superiority of speed over brute power. Then, 39 stab wounds later, they walked away gleefully anticipating the headlines that would inevitably appear.
But no matter how I dress that story up, it is simply a story about another rough sleeper being abused, and that could never compete with a story of prostitutes, uniformed guardsmen, and a leading character called “Pearly Poll”.
It is obvious which story is more interesting, It is not obvious which story is true.
The only evidence we have to go on is, as Inspector Edmund Reid said, worthless.
It is quite possible that neither story is true, so you are most definitely allowed your own opinion about how Martha Tabram met her end.
*Charles Dickens created a character in his book Martin Chuzzlewit called Hannibal Chollop, “much esteemed for his devotion to rational Liberty; for the better propagation whereof he usually carried a brace of revolving pistols in his coat pocket, with seven barrels apiece. He also carried, amongst other trinkets, a swordstick, which he called his ‘Tickler’ and a great knife, which (for he was a man of a pleasant turn of humour) he called ‘Ripper’ in its allusion to its usefulness as a means of ventilating the stomach of any adversary in a close contest.”
Around the time Martin Chuzzlewit was published, the newspapers created a headline grabber called ‘Spring-heeled Jack’.
At the end of September 1888, a letter was delivered to the Central News Agency. The letter possibly took inspiration from Hannibal Chollop’s ‘Ripper’ and Spring Heeled ‘Jack’ because it was signed, ‘Yours truly Jack the Ripper’.
And one of the greatest headline grabbers of all time was born.
Thank you for checking out this post.