Polly Nichols Was The First Victim of Jack the Ripper
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Polly Nichols is remembered today because she is believed by many experts to be the first victim of the killer known as Jack the Ripper.
At around 3:40 in the morning of August 31st, 1888, her body was found lying in a dark and narrow lane behind Whitechapel station. She was identified as Mary Ann Nichols. Mary Ann was what she was christened but from childhood she was mostly known by her nickname, ‘Polly’. When Polly Walker married William Nichols, she became Polly Nichols.
Police Constable John Neill discovers the body of Polly Nichols in Buck’s Row at 3:45 in the morning of August 31st 1888
She was murdered just 5 days after her 43rd birthday.
The first official summary of her death was dated the same day that her body was found, 31 August 1888.
In his report, Inspector John Spratling said that at 3:45 on the 31st of August, P.C. John Neil found the dead body of a woman lying on her back with her clothes a little above her knees, with her throat cut from ear to ear in Bucks Row, Whitechapel.
Inspector Spratling goes on to say that the doctor discovered that her throat had been cut from left to right, two distinct cuts being on the left side.
The windpipe, gullet and spinal cord being cut through, a bruise apparently of a thumb being on right lower jaw and also one on the left cheek. The report went on to say that the stomach had also been ripped open.
A week later, a police report dated the 7th of September opened with: “Deceased identified as Mary Ann Nichols, a prostitute, who separated from her husband nine years ago.”
The question I want to answer is how did this 43-year-old woman end up alone in the early hours of August 31st, 1888, on the mean streets of Whitechapel.
For some, of course, it is enough to say that she ended up that way simply because she was a prostitute, as the police and newspapers at the time explained.
The Crimes Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper by Martin Fido
Martin Fido, in his book, The Crimes Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper, describes her as “A drab little woman” who “drank her husband’s wages.” He says, “It was established that she was practising prostitution”.
The Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sugden
In Philip Sugden’s book, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, he explains that “Polly Nichols and the other victims, prostitutes all, accustomed to accosting men and taking them to dark and unfrequented byways and yards for sex greatly facilitated his crimes.”
So, the explanation for the murders is that a killer, for his own reasons, was targeting prostitutes, and the line of enquiry followed by the police at the time was that they were looking for a prostitute killer.
And most of the more than one hundred suspects have one thing in common they were killing prostitutes: each of them with their own particular reasons.
So, how did Mary Ann Nichols become a prostitute?
She was born on the 26th of August 1845 and christened Mary Ann Walker, but known from her early years as Polly. She was the second child of Edward and Caroline Walker. Edward was a skilled worker, a blacksmith who was working in the print industry around Fleet Street.
Social reformer Charles Booth described abject poverty as being a family with an income below a pound a week. There were tens of thousands in London’s East End who had to survive on a tiny fraction of a pound a week. In the final years of her life, Polly was one of them.
But thousands of children were born into abject poverty, sharing tiny vermin-infested rooms with older brothers and sisters who slept together on the floor while the younger children might share a makeshift bed with a mother and father who might be making more children.
Morality, as the campaigner Andrew Mearns pointed out, would be difficult to maintain in these conditions. So, it wasn’t surprising that some parents launched their children into careers of petty theft or child prostitution.
Child prostitution was rife.
The editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, William Thomas Stead, said that “there was one district with 43 brothels with 428 women and children, many of them not 12 years of age working there as prostitutes.”
In his campaign against child prostitution, he bought the 13-year-old Eliza Armstrong from her mother for £5 just to show how easy it was.
This didn’t happen to Polly. She very definitely didn’t become a child prostitute.
Edward Walker had an income that would have been more than double what Charles Booth said was the cut-off point between living in abject poverty and simply being poor.
And Edward didn’t have a big family to take care of because his wife, Caroline, died of tuberculosis before Polly was seven years old, and two years later, his youngest son died of the same disease.
Edward was able to afford to send Polly to school. Education didn’t become compulsory until 1876, but during her childhood in the 1850s, Polly received an education right up to the age of 15.
That was far from common. And especially not common for girls. Those girls who were lucky enough to receive an education would usually be taught to read but not to write. Polly was taught both skills.
Then as a teenage girl, Polly didn’t follow the usual path into domestic service, where she might become a tempting young thing for any male member of the household to seduce or rape.
For household servants who found themselves pregnant and alone, respectable work was no longer available, and so prostitution became an option.
But when Polly's schooling finished, rather than finding employment, she continued keeping the house for her father and older brother, who were earning the housekeeping money.
At 19, she married a Fleet Street printer, William Nichols, and Polly Walker became Polly Nichols. She then kept house for her husband, father, older brother and eventually her three children.
It wasn’t until she was 30 that the Nichols family had a place of their own.
They were among those lucky enough to convince the custodians of the Peabody Trust that they had the right moral character and income to enable them to become tenants in the newly built Peabody flats in Southwark.
In July 1876, they moved into the flats in Stamford Street, and for the first time in her 30 years of life Polly was not sharing a house with her father.
Here, she had her fourth child and then her fifth and then she and William began to argue.
He claimed it was because she had started drinking. She said it was because he had started an affair with the next-door neighbour, Rosetta Walls. Rosetta was a younger woman whose husband had gone off to sea.
Whatever the truth, on March 29, 1880, 34-year-old Polly walked out of the Peabody Trust flats, never to return.
A 19th Century Workhouse such as Polly Nichols entered in 1880
Polly must have been desperate because she went to the Lambeth Union Workhouse.
Workhouses were an absolute last resort. It was as though Victorian society had designed these places specifically to humiliate anybody who sought help there.
In his book The People of the Abyss, Jack London describes his night spent in one of these places. He had to strip off his clothes and belongings and enter a communal bath that had washed the bodies of all those who had entered that day.
The Lambeth Union decided that William Nichols should pay five shillings a week for Polly’s maintenance.
Five shillings that he felt would be better spent on the home he set up with Rosetta Walls and his growing family. Life for William Nichols changed, but it was nothing compared to the change that faced Polly.
She was about to discover just how tough life could be for a woman at the bottom of Victorian society trying to survive without a man.
When the 34-year-old Polly left her home and family on the 29th of March 1880, she must have been in a desperate state
Was it jealousy of Rosetta Woolls? Was her mental state changed after the birth of her fifth child? Had her husband William turned nasty, as Polly’s father said?
Possibly, as William Nichols said, she’d started drinking. Although the records of the Peabody Buildings do not show that Polly had such a problem and Peabody superintendents would note down any problem with drink by any resident.
Whatever the reason, the woman was desperate because she went to the Lambeth Union Workhouse.
Having lived her life first in the hard-working family of her father and then her husband, she would have grown up with a fear of the workhouse. She would have known that she would be treated with disdain, clothed like a prisoner, expected to do hard physical work, poorly fed and certainly no access to alcohol.
On top of that, she would have known how big a step she had taken when she left her husband.
She had failed. Her duty was to her husband, whatever she had to endure. And as a mother, she must never forsake her children. It was a big step she took, and we can never know what finally pushed her to take that step.
It seems that Thomas Taverner, the Relieving Officer at the Lambeth Union, was not wholly persuaded by William Nichols's version of events because he decided that William should pay his wife a maintenance of 5 shillings a week.
A year or so later, William decided that the 5 shillings would be better spent on Rosetta Wools and his growing family.
He hired a detective and evidence was presented to the Lambeth Union that Polly was sharing a room in Holloway with a George Crawshaw.
Whatever evidence there was - and Polly denied that she was living with a man - when the maintenance stopped, she had no choice but to move back into the Lambeth Union Workhouse, where she stayed for almost a year, after which she could take it no more.
She found a home with her father and her brother’s family, but it wasn’t an easy relationship, not helped when Polly would return home the worse for drink.
In 1884, she moved in with a blacksmith, Thomas Stewart Drew. He was widowed and had three daughters to take care of, and it seems he offered Polly a settled home.
Then, in June 1886, Polly’s only sibling, her older brother, received third-degree burns from a paraffin lamp, which had burst into flames when he went to extinguish it.
Polly was deeply affected by the terrible death of her brother, and it may well have affected her relationship because, by November 1886, she and Thomas Drew were no longer together.
Polly was once again a woman alone and with nowhere to go but the Lambeth Union Workhouse.
The Golden Jubilee
The following year, 1887, saw the celebration of 50 years of Queen Victoria’s reign. Her Golden Jubilee was celebrated on June 20th and 21st.
Princes and potentates from all around the world arrived in London. The streets were decorated, and the people lined to cheer the grand procession, with Queen Victoria riding in her magnificent coach escorted by her elite troops.
But 1887 was 14 years into the Long Depression. The Long Depression began with the Panic of 1873. A financial crash that began in Vienna but spread throughout Europe and across the Atlantic.
In Britain, it led to 20 years of economic stagnation, during which those at the bottom of society suffered the most.
Five months after the pomp and ceremony of the Golden Jubilee, the first ‘Bloody Sunday’ took place in Trafalgar Square.
2000 Metropolitan Police officers armed with truncheons and supported by 400 troops from the Household Cavalry charged into the thousands of demonstrators who were demanding change.
The name ‘Bloody Sunday’ would later be applied to tragedies that occurred in Dublin in 1920 and then in the Bogside of Derry in 1972.
The month before, during the chilly nights of October, as Halle Rubenhold writes in her excellent book, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper,
“Weary old men and women in ragged, battered bonnets propped themselves up against the wall below the National Gallery. Shoeless children rolled themselves into balls in the corners and slept like small dogs. W.T. Stead, the editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, walked through the scene of bodies in the square one night shaking his head and scribbling on his pad: ‘Four hundred sleepers, men and women, promiscuously side by side, I count in the shadows of the finest hotels in the world.’ Slumped at the base of one of the lions, or lying with her head against a bench, was Polly Nichols, cold and anonymous. When morning came, the rough sleepers were joined by the steady trickle of the unemployed and ‘friends of socialism’.”
And they kept coming through the poisonous autumn fogs and the rain. Speakers were cheered, and the police went on high alert. Skirmishes broke out as attempts were made to clear the square.
On the 24th of October, Polly, along with 5 other women and 2 girls, was arrested. They had been begging beside the National Gallery.
This was followed by months where Polly alternated between days of tramping and nights of sleeping rough in doorways or stairways.
On April 16, 1888, she ended up at the Renfrew Road Workhouse. The absence of alcohol in the workhouse probably helped Polly because, by May 12, she was deemed to be of suitable character to become a servant in the middle-class home of Mr and Mrs Cowdry.
And during the first week in their home, for the first time in 2 years, she communicated with her father, who had Polly’s eldest son living with him:
“I just write to say you will be glad to know that I am settled in my new place and going alright up to now. My people went out yesterday and have not returned so I am left in charge. It is a grand place with trees and gardens back and front. All has been newly done up. They are teetotallers and very religious, so I ought to get on. They are very nice people and I have not much to do. I do hope you are all right and the boy has work. So goodbye for the present.
Yours Truly,
Polly
Answer soon please and let me know how you are.’
A secure place to sleep, three meals a day, and a comfortable home had to feel good for Polly after the desperate life she had been living.
But the sole companionship of the devout middle-class couple and their niece may have been a mixed blessing.
Long summer days thinking of the family she had lost and missing the temporary escape that alcohol effortlessly provided must have taken its toll.
On July 12th, two months after she had arrived, Sarah Cowdry wrote to the Renfrew Road Workhouse that Polly had absconded with £3 10s worth of clothing.
At the beginning of August, Polly was at Wilmott's Lodging House at 18 Thrawl Street, a lodging house that only catered to women.
During her three-week stay, Polly seems to have made one friend, Ellen Holland. Ellen was an older woman who described Polly as melancholic and said she kept herself to herself as if some trouble was weighing upon her mind.
By the 24th of August, Polly’s money had run out, and she had to leave Wilmott’s. Once again, Polly was homeless, hoping each day that she could get some money for a bed and also for alcohol. The last week of August would be the last week that Polly spent alive.
Polly’s body was found lying in Buck’s Row. Buck’s Row, right behind Whitechapel Station, was lit only by a dim gaslight at the far end. So, right where she was found would have been pitch dark.
After the murder, people began referring to Buck’s Row as Murder Row, so the residents demanded a name change. In 1888, it became Durward Street, which is what it is still called.
Back then, Buck’s Row was patrolled by a beat policeman every half hour.
About 150 yards to the east of the murder site, another beat policeman passed the east end of Buck’s Row every half hour as he made his way down Brady Street.
About 150 yards west of the murder site, another beat policeman passed the west end of Buck’s Row every half hour as he made his way down Baker’s Row.
Whoever the killer was, he had to avoid being noticed by 3 different police officers.
At about half an hour after midnight on August 31st, 1888, Polly left the Frying Pan Pub on the corner of Brick Lane and Thrawl Street and walked to Wilmott’s Lodging House, but lacking the money to pay for a bed, she was kicked out at around 1:30 in the morning.
At 2:30, she was half a mile west of Buck’s Row at the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel High Street.
She met Ellen Holland, who had been out watching a fire blazing at the docks. Ellen said that Polly had left her and started walking east. Ellen said that when Polly left her, it was 2:30 by the Whitechapel Church clock.
45 minutes later, at 3:15, she was still making her way east because Police Constable John Neil walked from west to east down Buck’s Row, and he said there was nobody around.
Just 25 minutes later, at 3:40, Robert Paul was walking from east to west along Buck’s Row on his way to work. He said that ahead of him, there was a man standing looking at something. As he got closer, the man crossed to meet him and said, “Look, there’s a woman lying here.”
Polly Nichols's body was laid out in front of a pair of gates. The two men weren’t sure if she was alive or dead, but not wanting to be late for work, they left her intending to tell the first policeman that they saw.
A minute or so west from where Polly lay, they passed the end of Thomas Street, which connects Bucks Row with Whitechapel Road, and minutes after they passed it, PC John Neil walked up it from Whitechapel Road and turned right to once again walk east along Buck’s Row, and he found the body. He turned on his light and saw that her throat had been cut right across.
He attracted the attention of the policeman patrolling down Brady Street at the east end of Buck’s Row and sent him off to get a police surgeon who lived locally.
The police surgeon, Dr Rhys Llewellyn, discovered a short cut just below the left ear and, below that, a much deeper cut. It went right across the throat right back to the spinal column. He said it was as though whoever did this they were trying to remove the woman’s head completely.
Despite the throat being cut, blood had not run down the front of Polly’s clothes. All the blood was gathered beneath her.
He said she had to have been killed when she was lying down, and death occurred when the left carotid artery was severed.
He added that there was no sign of a struggle. The only bruising was a bruise the shape of a man’s thumb on Polly’s right jaw and a longer bruise on the left cheek.
This is important because this is how the murders of the other 4 women took place. It is this that has led to the belief by many that the 5 women were murdered by the same killer. It is also part of what built the killer’s reputation.
Consider also that right next to where the murder took place; there was a woman who was a very light sleeper. And in the building right opposite there was a woman who was awake at the time. They heard nothing. And each of the other murders occurred close to people who were sleeping, and they heard nothing.
So, the standard explanation is, as Philip Sugden explains in his book The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, Polly Nichols and the other victims, “prostitutes all, accustomed to accosting men and taking them to dark and unfrequented byways and yards for sex greatly facilitated his crimes.”
So, if we accept that theory - sometime after 2:30 in the morning when she left Ellen Holland, half a mile to the west, Polly accosted a man and persuaded him to give her fourpence in exchange for sex in a dark and unfrequented byway.
She then waited at the end of Buck’s Row until 3:15, when PC John Neil made his way east.
Then she and her client crept in the darkness down Buck’s Row in complete silence. And then, also in complete silence and without a struggle, he got her onto the ground.
It’s worth mentioning that when working outdoors, prostitutes provided their service by standing against a wall. They did not leave themselves at the total mercy of the client by lying down. And indeed, the client would not have wanted to lie down on the average East End street.
But the killer managed to get her on the ground without a struggle, after which he severed the left carotid artery. All of this, and the victim didn’t make a sound.
It’s easy to see why Jack the Ripper gained such a reputation. Why people suggested a vampire, werewolf, or ghost.
But suppose we change part of the story. That part of the story that takes place after Polly leaves Ellen Holland at 2:30.
We can change it because there is no evidence that can confirm the theory that Polly accosted anybody.
Even accepting the assumption that Polly was accustomed to accosting men and taking them to dark and unfrequented byways and yards for sex, there had to have been nights when she was unsuccessful in her quest.
In this new story, sometime after 3:15, she arrives in Buck’s Row alone. She’s exhausted and simply looking for somewhere to rest. She tries the gates, but as the police confirm, they are locked.
She hopes that in her dark clothes, in the pitch darkness, huddled against the gates; she might be unseen and get some sleep before dawn.
But maybe somebody sees her. Watches her settle down.
He waits until she drifts off to sleep and then silently creeps toward her, drops down beside her, clamps his left hand over her mouth, squeezing the nostrils closed between thumb and forefinger, and at the same time, his right-hand grips her jaw to stop her head from jerking around and throwing his left hand off.
His right thumb leaves a bruise on the right side of her jaw, and his fingers leave a longer bruise on her left cheek.
All in complete silence because she’s asleep. No sign of a struggle because she’s already lying on the ground.
But whichever scenario you favour, whether you believe she led her killer to Buck’s Row or her killer found an easy target as Polly slept, you have to admit this man was a cool customer.
A beat policeman patrolled from west to east along this “dark and unfrequented byway” every half hour.
And, at the time Jack commits his murder, it’s not an “unfrequented byway” - as we know - men are making their way from east to west to get to work.
Interesting. These men going to work.
In 2000, Derek Osborne said the man who was standing looking at Polly’s body when Robert Paul arrived could well have been her killer.
And in 2014 journalist Christer Holmgren and criminologist Gareth Norris explored the case against him in the 2014 Channel Five documentary Jack the Ripper: The Missing Evidence.
In the documentary, they suggest that he lied about the time that he discovered Polly’s body. Silently dropped down beside her. Strangled her and cut her.
Then he heard Robert Paul making his way along Buck’s Row and rather than making a run for it and attracting the attention of the three beat policemen close by, he calmly said, “Look, there’s a woman lying here.”
Holmgren and Norris say that this man gave his name as Charles Allen Cross, but evidence has recently come to light that suggests that was a name he had used only briefly as a child. Cross being the surname of one of his stepfathers.
At Pickford’s, where he worked as a meat delivery man, he went by the name Charles Allen Letchmere, the same name that was listed at the address that he gave to the police: 22 Doveton Street, Bethnal Green.
They also say that he told the police he left 22 Doveton Street at 3:30 and arrived at the murder site ten minutes later at 3:40.
They say it is only a seven-minute walk, and they are right; in fact, it only took me six minutes.
What can be said in favour of the suspect, Charles Allen Letchmere is that he was very definitely in Buck’s Row very close to the time that the murder took place. That cannot be said of any of the scores of other suspects.
Of course, Robert Paul and PC John Neil were also in Buck’s Row at around the right time.
Certainly, the police should have shown more interest in Letchmere, but of course, they were working on the assumption that the killer was targeting prostitutes.
Polly Nichols was walking from the west while Charles Allen Letchmere was walking from the east, and he was an unexceptional man on his way to work, so Polly couldn’t have accosted him.
The Jack the Ripper mystery is, of course, inextricably linked to prostitution. He was, after all, a prostitute killer.
Wasn’t he?
Back in the 1880s, women had it tough, particularly in the East End.
In The People of the Abyss, Jack London wrote:
“The men are dependent on their masters, and the women are dependent on the men, so the woman gets the beating that the man should give his master, and she can do nothing because there are the kiddies, and he is the breadwinner and she dare not send him to jail and risk leaving herself and her children to starve.”
And the first four murder victims were especially vulnerable. They were particularly susceptible to the effects of alcohol. And their upbringing also increased their vulnerability.
Remarkably none of the four women grew up in that bleak, abject poverty. All four had fathers who had skilled work and so could afford to send their daughters to school until they were 15. Education didn’t become compulsory until 1876 so sending children to school especially daughters was not common.
The four went on to have husbands or partners until those relationships disintegrated when the women were approaching middle age.
Having had no experience of surviving on the mean streets of Whitechapel these women struggled.
Children who grew up in abject poverty and managed to survive the first 5 years learned some basic skills, like if you are going to sleep rough, don’t go to dark and unfrequented byways and yards where any drunken thug can use you as his plaything. Go to places where others are gathered, like the Embankment or Trafalgar Square.
Having grown up in relatively secure households these women had skills that helped them eke out a living in Whitechapel.
Housework, laundry work or needlework. It would have been tough for these middle-aged women to begin a career selling sex.
Competing with women, some of whom had learned from childhood how to survive the brutal and dangerous world that was the 19th-century sex trade.
It was the police who first said they were prostitutes.
Until 1887, as many as 6000 women a year were arrested by police officers who claimed the women were prostitutes.
PC Endacott would haul in 2 or 3 to the Old Bailey every day. This all changed after June 28, 1887, when Endacott arrested Elizabeth Cass.
Unlike many other women, she was not intimidated by the police or magistrates. Backed by her employer they brought a case against Endacott.
A Member of Parliament who happened to be a barrister got involved and took it to the High Court.
It made the headlines, and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Charles Warren, was forced to send a memo out instructing his officers not to say a woman was a prostitute unless she self-described herself as one or there was irrefutable evidence.
Of course, Polly Nichols and the other women were dead when the label was applied and certainly had nobody capable of employing a lawyer to challenge what may well have been a description that had more to do with police bias than solid evidence.
As the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police wrote in a letter to his boss, the Home Secretary, during the investigation into the Whitechapel murders in 1888: He said:
“We have no means of ascertaining what women are prostitutes and who are not.”
However, the overwhelming opinion of modern writers on the subject is that these women were prostitutes.
Martin Fido, in his book The Crimes Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper, says, “Polly Nichols took to a life of prostitution”.
As we know, Philip Sugden, in his book The Complete History of Jack the Ripper clearly states that Polly Nichols and the other victims, “prostitutes all, accustomed to accosting men and taking them to dark and unfrequented byways and yards for sex greatly facilitated his crimes.”
And Donald Rumbelow in his excellent book The Complete Jack the Ripper, says:
“In 1882, William Nichols discovered that Polly was living the life of a prostitute and so he discontinued the maintenance payment to her.”
Possibly it all comes down to your definition of a prostitute. Because what William Nichols discovered wasn’t how I define prostitution.
At the inquest into Polly’s death, he was questioned by a juryman:
“It’s said that you were summoned by the Lambeth Union for her maintenance, but you claimed she was living with another man. Was he the blacksmith whom she had lived with?”
William Nichols replied:
“No, it was not the same man; it was another. I had her followed.”
William Nichols had employed a detective to gather evidence against Polly so that he could stop paying the maintenance.
The detective didn’t discover that she was accosting men and taking them to dark and unfrequented byways and yards for sex. He discovered that she was living with a man.
In the eyes of many in Victorian England and possibly some today, a woman who leaves her husband and five children and then moves in with another man is no different to a prostitute.
But of course, it very definitely is not solid evidence that supports the theory that she brought about her own death because she was accustomed to accosting men for sex.
On the 6th of September 1888, Polly was buried in an unmarked grave in the City of London Cemetery
In 1996 the unmarked grave was given a commemorative plaque by the cemetery authorities.
Thank you for checking out this post.