Jack the Ripper (2 page)

The new direction has allowed The Whitechapel Society to develop, whilst faithfully continuing the tradition started by that small group of enthusiasts over ten years earlier. At the six meetings held each year, members are still blessed with superb presentations and talks from the top experts in the field of Ripperology and Victorian/Edwardian social history. Entry into official meetings remains free to our members and new attendees are always made to feel very welcome indeed!
The Whitechapel Society Journal
has continued to attract many contributors, with articles of every description, from well-known authors to amateurs trying their hands (and often very good ones) for the first time. Now edited and produced by the team of Adrian Morris and Frogg Moody, respectively, members receive six Whitechapel Society Journal magazines per year and are actively encouraged to participate with articles, research, letters and reviews.

In recent years, The Whitechapel Society has diversified, broadened its horizons and explored new, exciting ways of bringing the past to life. Members have been encouraged to participate in a whole host of events, including a photographic history of London’s old east end, short story competitions, public exhibitions and ‘Question Time’ debates. The Whitechapel Society is also proud to be on the steering group of the Tower Hamlets Bancroft Library.

The association between The Whitechapel Society and The History Press, in bringing you this new publication of
Jack the Ripper: The Suspects
, is seen by our organisation as a real achievement and one that takes us to a new level of development. All the contributors are current members of The Whitechapel Society and we are delighted that their meticulous research into each of their given suspects has been rewarded in this book.

Interest in Jack the Ripper, world-wide, remains as strong as ever, and the Society’s membership embraces people from all walks of life and from every part of the globe. The Whitechapel Society is open to anyone – all that is required is an interest in Jack the Ripper and his world.

You can become a member of The Whitechapel Society via our website at:

www.whitechapelsociety.com

Our website keeps you up to date with all the latest news involving The Whitechapel Society, Jack the Ripper and historical East End articles.

Go to our official website if you are interested in joining The Whitechapel Society or would like more information.

The Whitechapel Society is the best way to keep in touch with what’s happening in the world of ‘Ripperology’ and the historic East End of London. The Whitechapel Society offers:

Regular Society Meetings

With excellent speakers, conducted in the East End of London, the very heart of the area that we actually study.

The Whitechapel Society: Jack the Ripper London Conference

A two day international conference attracting delegates worldwide.

The Whitechapel Society Journal

The critically acclaimed membership magazine, which features articles, reviews, interviews and much more.

Frogg Moody, 2011

For Monique, who found me; and to my babies, Wolvie and Tiggy

Joseph Barnett holds a rather unique position among Ripper suspects; he’s the only partner of one of the victims to be seriously considered as a suspect. But, unlike John Kelly and Catherine Eddowes, for instance, Joseph Barnett and Mary Kelly, as a couple, are also the closest we come to painting a picture of domestic harmony amid all the horror and hyperbole of Whitechapel,in 1888. In fact, given Barnett’s proximity to the perpetually elusive Kelly, one wonders why he isn’t actually held in higher regard – the privileged person who knew the face that, 120-odd years on, can be reconstructed only from witness statements, given that the photographic evidence is just a forlorn mess. But, when Bruce Paley put Barnett forward as a suspect in his book,
The Simple Truth
, any notions of beatification went by the wayside, as it was suggested that Barnett himself may have been the one responsible for destroying that famous non-face in the first place.

In a nutshell, Paley put forward the hypothesis that Barnett killed the first four canonical victims in order to scare Kelly off the streets, because he disapproved of her lifestyle, and then killed Kelly herself when all these other efforts failed. Her death occurred, according to Paley, after she finally spurned Barnett, a week or so after he’d moved out of the tiny room they shared in Miller’s Court, Dorset Street. On the face of it this is possible; in fact, it’s fairly plausible. We, as human beings, do crazy things when we’re in love, and if the legends of her loveliness live up to the truth about Mary Kelly – no photo other than that of her crime scene is known to exist – maybe we’d understand why Barnett went wild the way he supposedly did. Elevating Barnett to the role of Jack the Ripper may be a touch sensationalist, but there are those willing to settle for his having killed Kelly alone; perhaps in a fit of pique over her return to prostitution. The world of Ripperology remains generous to a tee with the reputations of those it points a finger at.

Joseph Barnett was born and reared within spitting distance of all the murders, at Hairbrain Court, adjacent to the Royal Mint and mere moments from the Tower of London. He was effectively orphaned at an early age, when his father died and his mother seemingly abandoned the family, brought up henceforth by his older brothers. These facts alone are innocuous enough and, indeed, it sometimes seems as if the whole case against him hangs on this loosest of threads. Supposedly, he had a speech impediment – a pronounced stammer or echolalia – that made possible over the years a sort of degeneracy of the personality. For me, the theory falls apart at this first hurdle; which dutifully leads to that dodgy area where innocent men are accused of being the most infamous serial killer in history because of some circumstantial evidence and a soupçon of specially formulated FBI profiling. Whitechapel in 1888 – as the poorest area in London – was full of people who had a lot more to contend with, both physically and mentally, than a stammer. They, as a result, didn’t all turn into knife-wielding maniacs. This isn’t in any way to do down Barnett’s personal experience – of which we know nothing – but Paley’s precisely researched pieces on the hardships of East End life, simply don’t transfer to putting Barnett on the scene as a serious suspect. In fact, they come across as fleshing out areas otherwise rather bereft of facts. It was a hard world for everybody, full stop. In fact, from all the accounts of Barnett and Kelly’s time together, he was anything but the sort of man who went around harbouring a grudge against a cruel and uncaring world. In fact, his whole demeanour and personality positively fly in the face of some of the more fearsome characters and conditions usually conjured up when referring to the Whitechapel of 1888.

Joseph Barnett. (Moody/Morris Collection)

Joseph Barnett met Mary Kelly in Commercial Street on the 8 April – Good Friday – of 1887 and they moved in together the very next day. Whilst this may indeed have been borne of economic necessity for her, for him it certainly seems to have been a case of true love. Barnett was old fashioned by our standards; he worked as a fish porter at Billingsgate market, so she didn’t have to ply her trade as a prostitute. The arrangement was suffused with an extra sense of nobility, by virtue of the fact that he was saving her, both body and soul, from the streets with his rather ample wage. Again, rather than conjuring up images of a nefarious, knife-wielding killer, I, for one, am far more put in mind of a well-meaning and rather mild-mannered young man; kind of like a downtrodden, Dickensian Clark Kent, clutching his billycock hat before him and fighting a valiant battle with his b’s, as he attempts to mollify her concerns over the constant media coverage of the killings. Without doubt, that is how Joe Barnett ought to be seen; a veritable Superman working his fingers to the bone to give the girl he loved the sort of life she deserved, rather than the sordid reality. Unfortunately, the rather random and indiscriminate realm of Ripperology then rears up, citing him as a possible suspect, simply because of his proximity to Kelly, in the hope of solving a series of murders for which there’ll never be any real justice, anyway. It’s a sort of slander, swaddled up in an all too human concern for closure. One wonders how diligent these social detectives would be if some snazzy research were to direct an accusing digit at their beloved grandfather or uncle, simply because he visited Bethnal Green occasionally and may, or may not, have worn callipers when he was a child.

Barnett and Kelly moved a couple of times in the early days of their relationship, including a stint on Brick Lane, before settling down in the midst of ‘the worst street in London’ (Dorset Street), making what home they could in No.13 Miller’s Court, a little cul-de-sac that ran off the main thoroughfare. In a room barely big enough to swing a cat – Elizabeth Prater and her kitten, Diddles, residents of the room upstairs, can surely testify to that – they lived in something like domestic bliss for the early part of 1888. By all accounts, Kelly kept off the streets during this period whilst Barnett worked busily in Billingsgate Market, until he had the misfortune to lose his job around the middle of 1888. Bruce Paley put this disastrous turn of events down to theft, one of the few misdemeanours for which a total dismissal was deemed necessary. This could, indeed, have been the case; maybe Mary Kelly was too demanding, even for Barnett’s big wage packet, and he had resorted to stealing as a means to keep her in the ‘style’ to which she had become accustomed. Number 13 Miller’s Court may not have been much to look at, but the landlord, John McCarthy, charged a jaw-dropping 4
s
6
d
per week for the ‘privilege’. This new set of circumstances put a considerable strain on Barnett and Kelly’s somewhat shaky relationship, forcing them to spend much of the day together in their little room, where Barnett could pontificate to his heart’s desire on the perils of prostitution, whilst Kelly imbibed increasingly-large amounts of gin in an effort to drown him out. Such a turn of events served only to hasten the end of their somewhat ill-suited relationship, for as much as Joe Barnett may have been her Superman, Mary Kelly was by no means his Lois Lane. If anything, she comes across as a little hard-boiled where Barnett is concerned, with testimony to the effect that she couldn’t bear to be in the same room with him. She also saw her former lover, Joe Fleming, from time to time, and summoned a series of female ‘friends’ to their room to share the meagre space, in what seems to have been a deliberate exercise in driving him out for good. The fact that Barnett continued to give Kelly what little money he had after he’d lost his job, only brightens the hue on his halo as far as I’m concerned. The more cynical might see it as a crude example of someone so unutterably clingy that they can’t bear to let go, even when they’ve been given the boot. The fact was, that from the middle of 1888, Barnett sought almost any work he could in order to keep giving Kelly money, from days spent as a market porter to the occasional stint on the orange markets. Paley hypothesised that the loss of his job and the subsequent lack of money made Kelly’s return to the streets imminent, and so Barnett supposedly began his periodic slaughter of prostitutes, in the most ghastly fashion possible, in order to point out to her the perils of such a life.

By all accounts, Kelly was indeed seriously spooked by the spate of killings, begging Barnett to read her the papers after each event. However, even the details of various disembowelments couldn’t stop their relationship crumbling, as Barnett’s lack of money made their formerly comfortable lifestyle a long-distant memory. Barnett’s company seems to have been so intolerable to her that she took in fellow prostitutes – the aforementioned ill-suited ‘friends’ – to share their room. Perhaps this was partly out of the kindness of her heart, but it also seems a genuine attempt at driving him out. Now that he was earning little or no money he was of no use to her. The final, violent row between them occurred on 30 October, during which Kelly broke several of the windows of their room. This was in consequence of Maria Harvey, a laundress friend of Kelly’s, moving into the room Barnett himself moved out, but this didn’t deter him from visiting Kelly, on an almost daily basis, and giving her what little money he had. He visited her on the eve of her death, after she’d spent an afternoon mooching around with Maria Harvey. By all accounts, Barnett still loved Kelly so much that he sent his brother Danny to beg her to take him back later that evening, after his own efforts had obviously failed. That she was killed so soon after their split is, of course, the sort of evidence so compelling that it’s impossible not to consider him a suspect (but why not his brother Danny; one imagines it will be but a matter of time before a case is launched against him, on the basis of his having tried to reason with Kelly, and then perhaps killing her out of shock over her disregard toward his brother?!). On the other hand, it seems to be just as obvious that without Barnett’s protection, Mary Kelly was forced to make her way back onto the streets, where she met her killer. If she’d stayed with him she might have lived, and however meagre Miller’s Court might have been, it was still a considerable step up from the succession of common lodging houses or street corners the other canonical victims called home.