Kate Eddowes: The Fourth Victim Of Jack The Ripper
Catherine or Kate Eddowes
You can click play and listen, or you can read the text. It’s your choice!
Catherine Eddowes, who was known as Kate Eddowes, was the 4th victim of Jack the Ripper. Her body was discovered at 1:45 in the morning in Mitre Square in the City of London.
PC Watkins had walked through the square at 1:30 and said it was clear there was nobody there. 15 minutes later he walked back into the square and he found Catharine’s body.
He said, “She was cut up like a pig in a market”.
Not only was Catherine the 4th victim of Jack the Ripper, but she was the second victim murdered in the space of less than an hour in the early hours of September 30th.
Liz Stride’s body had been discovered at 1:00 o'clock, and just 45 minutes later, Catherine was discovered murdered in Mitre Square.
Catherine Eddowes was born in Wolverhampton on April 14, 1842. She was christened with her mother’s name, Catherine.
Catherine Evans was one of seven children who lacked any formal education but found work as a cook at the Peacock Inn in Wolverhampton. Little Catherine became known as Kate.
Kate’s father, George Eddowes, was a skilled tin plate worker, having served a seven-year apprenticeship learning how to turn tin plate into pots, pans, kettles, and other useful items.
The year after Kate’s birth, George became involved in an industrial dispute between some of the employers and the tin plate workers union.
George ended up serving two months of hard labour for his part in the strike. With little opportunity for work in Wolverhampton after that he moved the family to London.
In June of 1843, George, his wife, Catherine, and their six young children took the least expensive transport available. They boarded a canal boat for a two-day journey along the Grand Union Canal.
George Eddowes was a skilled worker, and so earned around three times the £1 a week that Charles Booth considered the dividing line between abject poverty and simply being poor.
£3 a week would have provided well for a small family, but it meant a struggle for a family of eight.
Kate’s four older sisters helped with the housework and, when the time was right, would be expected to find employment and contribute to the family budget. Kate escaped this.
Close to where George was working was the Dowgate School and he managed to enrol Kate.
Her studies included needlework, arithmetic, reading, and writing. She learned full-time seven days a week, including attending services in St Paul’s Cathedral, which was near the Dowgate School.
In June 1851, Kate, then 9, joined the other pupils for a visit to the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park.
It would have been an extraordinary day in the lives of these children whose existence would have lacked anything to match the entertainment value offered by the 15,000 exhibitors in the massive glass pavilion.
Life in the Eddowes family changed when Kate was 13. Her mother died at the age of 42 of tuberculosis.
Two years later, her father died. Her youngest siblings became orphans at the Bermondsey Union Workhouse, and 15-year-old Kate took a train to Wolverhampton to live with her aunt and uncle.
They found her work in a tin factory. This was not the kind of work her schooling would have prepared her for; she would be working long hours in very poor conditions.
She began to enjoy the conviviality of the pub on her way home from work.
The recklessness extended to stealing from her place of work, which caused a major rift between her and her relatives.
At 19, Kate walked 14 miles to Birmingham and moved in with another aunt and uncle. But she didn’t escape the need to work, and Birmingham was not short of tin plate works.
Then Kate met a handsome young Irishman called Thomas Conway.
After serving in India Conway had been invalided out of the Royal Irish Regiment with a pension of sixpence day.
Unable to cope with heavy labouring work, he supplemented his pension, plodding the highways and byways between villages, selling scissors, ribbon, toys and the like and entertaining the villagers with gossip and tales.
For 20-year-old Kate, maybe this life appeared a more romantic option to the life of a tin plate worker. She would soon discover that the life of the travelling pedlar frequently meant missing meals and sleeping rough.
Just days after Kate’s 21st birthday on the 18th of April 1863 Kate’s first child, Catherine Annie Conway was born in a workhouse in Great Yarmouth where, as Halle Rubenhold says in her book The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, “the gas jets were regularly left on to deter the rats”.
After years of wandering the length and breadth of the country, Thomas decided to try his luck in London. And it was in London that Kate’s second child,
Thomas Lawrence Conway was born and, two years later, in March 1869, Kate gave birth to a second daughter, Harriet.
Thomas, despite his poor health, worked as a bricklayer’s labourer, but it was poorly paid work
Like many families in their situation, they starved. Their baby, Harriet, died of malnutrition
Drastic measures were required, and Thomas left London to find work while Kate, together with 7-year-old Annie and 2-year-old Thomas, entered the Greenwich Union Workhouse.
Over the next few years, life got no better, and in August 1873, Kate was again entering a workhouse.
Kate gave birth to a second son, George Alfred Conway, in the Southwark Workhouse. And three years later, in November 1876, she gave birth to her third son, Frederick, in the Greenwich Union Workhouse.
These would be bleak experiences entering the workhouse. Passing through ‘the archway of tears’ meant being stripped of clothing and personal belongings and entering a communal bath.
While Kate and her children were in and out of workhouses, her husband, Thomas, was in and out of London in search of work.
Kate frequently turned to alcohol, and she would receive a beating from Thomas, who did not drink alcohol and would resort to beating his wife black and blue.
As things got worse, Kate would often turn to her older sister, Emma, for help. But as Kate wouldn’t give up alcohol, Emma and the oldest sister, Harriet, broke with her completely.
Finally, at the end of 1881, Kate left her family, and when she had fourpence for bed, she stayed at 55 Flower and Dean Street. Here, she met John Kelly.
He was a less violent man than Thomas Conway and, from Kate’s standpoint, a more congenial partner because he enjoyed alcohol as much as she did.
John Kelly worked in the market, and Kate did char work among the many Jewish families around the Brick Lane area.
Income was never reliable, and they would sometimes sleep in the casual ward of a workhouse or, like many others, sleep rough. Something that Kate had grown quite used to.
Hop Picking
Like thousands in the East End, the end of summer meant a brief holiday away from the foul air and squalid slums for Kate and John, and 1888 was no exception.
They walked out of London and into the fields of Kent for the hop picking. The farmers paid pennies but provided barrels of beer and cider and a dry barn for the pickers to sleep in.
1888, though, was not a good year for them. The harvest was poor, and many returned to London poorer and hungrier than when they left. Kate and John were back in London on the evening of the 27th of September.
Penniless, they spent the night in the casual ward at Thavies Inn on Shoe Lane. The next day John managed to earn sixpence for work he found at Spitalfields Market. The sixpence probably bought them alcohol.
In the evening, Kate handed over John’s boots, and the pawn shop handed her two shillings and sixpence, which bought them food and more alcohol.
There was enough left to pay for a bed in a doss house for John. It’s not clear where Kate slept. Maybe some casual ward, but there is no record, so it’s likely that she slept rough that night.
The next day, Saturday, they met up but again separated in the afternoon and John said that Kate walked down Houndsditch toward Aldgate.
At 8:30 that night, she was helplessly drunk in a heap outside 29 Aldgate High Street. PC Louis Robinson and PC George Simmons managed to get her to Bishopsgate Police Station, where she gave her name as ‘Nothing’.
She was put in a cell where she fell asleep. A little after midnight, she woke up and started singing to herself.
She asked when she would be released. She was told that would be when she was capable of looking after herself. She answered that she was capable. She was released at 1 am.
Helplessly drunk at 8:30, it hardly seems likely she would be in any fit state to look after herself at one in the morning.
It is also odd that the police would release this woman onto the streets in the early hours when, just three weeks earlier, the fourth homeless woman that year had been brutally murdered within a twenty-minute walk of where they were releasing her. This was a time when the police were urging doss house residents to stay off the streets at night.
Before leaving, she gave her name as Mary Ann Kelly and her address 6 Fashion Street.
Mitre Square in the City of London
Three quarters of an hour later she was discovered by PC Watkins in Mitre Square ‘cut up like a pig in a market’.
Thank you for checking out this post.