Today’s Age-Old Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Today I’ll start a brief series on the victims of Jack the Ripper. First unfortunate up, poor Polly Nichols:
“Sorry, Polly,” said the landlord of the lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street, “but you know the score. If you ain’t got the doss money, you don’t got no bed.”
Thrawl Street, 1902
She’d been sleeping there for weeks at a time—”dossing” was the word for it—but in the past few days she’d wound up spending her doss money on gin, mostly at the Frying Pan public house in Brick Lane. “I’ll soon get it,” answered Polly, lurching away from the door. An explanation wasn’t needed. The landlord knew exactly what Polly Nichols meant. She’d raise the doss money by plying an age-old trade. Touching her new black straw hat with its black velvet trim, she gave the landlord a wink. “See?” she said. “See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.”
On that Friday morning, August 31, 1888, Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols was forty-two years old and five-feet-two-inches in height. Her brown hair was streaked with gray. Five front teeth were missing. Her dress was threadbare and her shoes were cut-down old boots with steel-tipped toes. Her breath reeked of all the gins she’d downed all day long and through the night, paid for with more than enough doss money shoved into her hand by the men she’d sold herself to that day. Confident that she’d find a patron, she began walking.
Shortly before four o’clock on a street called Buck’s Row, George Cross, a market porter on his way to work, pushed open a stable gate and found her body. He first thought that she’d been raped and was unconscious, but on closer examination he saw that she’d been slashed twice in the throat. The murder had to have taken place quite recently, Cross figured, because her legs were still warm. In fact, she’d been killed within the past half-hour. This was proved by Police Constable John Neil. Buck’s Row was on his beat and he’d passed by that very spot barely thirty minutes before Cross discovered her.
The body of Mary Ann Nichols was discovered at this gated stable entrance in Buck’s Row.
In all likelihood, speculated residents of the Whitechapel section of the East End, she’d been the victim of a gang that had been robbing prostitutes, two of whom had been murdered not far from the place where Polly met her death. But what really puzzled everyone in the close confines of Buck’s Row was that no one had heard her scream nor any sound that might have been her killer fleeing.
The investigation was begun by Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline. A soft-spoken, portly man nearing fifty years of age, he’d joined the Metropolitan Police in 1863 and was appointed one of the first divisional inspectors of the CID in 1878.
Frederick Abberline
His responsibility had been the Whitechapel and Bethnal Green area of the East End, exactly where Polly Nichols plied her trade and ran into a killer. Although he’d been transferred to headquarters at Scotland Yard in 1887, he was sent back to the old stomping grounds of Whitechapel because of his familiarity with the area.
First, he had to identify the victim Polly’s clothing turned up the mark of Lambeth Workhouse. Inquiries there produced positive identification and an account of her activities that night. “About 1:40 a.m. that morning,” Abberline reported,” she was seen in the kitchen at 18 Thrawl Street when she informed the deputy of the lodging house that she had no money to pay her lodgings. She requested that her bed might be kept for her and left stating that she would soon get the money. At this time she was drunk. She was next seen at 2:30 a.m. at the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road by Ellen Holland, a lodger of the same house, who seeing she was very drunk requested her to return with her to the lodging house. She refused, remarking that she would soon be back and walked away down the Whitechapel Road in the direction of the place where the body was found.” There was no doubt with regard to the hour, noted Abberline, because the Whitechapel church clock chimed at 2:30 and Holland called Polly’s attention to the time. “We have been unable to find any person,” said Abberline, “who saw her alive after Holland left her.”
Mortuary photo of Polly Nichols
Culled from: Bloody Business: An Anecdotal History of Scotland Yard by H. Paul Jeffers
Asylum Inmate Deaths Du Jour!
The book Angels in the Architecture contains Accounts of the First Twenty Patient Deaths of the Northern Michigan Asylum at Traverse City between November 30, 1885 and September 30, 1886. Here are a couple of the deaths:
Female, age 71, married, native of Massachusetts
Occupation: minister’s wife
“[She] was admitted to the asylum suffering from chronic dementia. She had extensive lung disease. She gradually failed, and died from pulmonary consumption.”
Died: September 15, 1886
Cause of Death: pulmonary consumption
Male, age 46, married, native of Germany
Occupation: gardener
“[He] was admitted to the asylum well advanced in general paralysis. His death was due to exhaustion incident to a paretic seizure.”
Died: September 19, 1886
Cause of death: general paralysis
Culled from: Angels in the Architecture
Garretdom!
POISONED AT A WEDDING.
Fifty People Made Violently Ill by Eating Chicken Salad.
DECATUR, Ill., Sept. 10.—About fifty people were mysteriously poisoned at a country wedding about five miles west of here Wednesday night, and yesterday all the available physicians were hard at work attending the afflicted person who are retching and vomiting violently. Thomas W. Jacobs and Miss Alice Glasgow were married at the house of the bride’s father. Supper was served at nine o’clock, and included chicken salad, fried and boiled chicken, and all ate heartily. An hour later the bride and groom were taken sick, manifesting symptoms of having been poisoned. Part of the company had left, but those remaining were also taken sick, nearly all doubling up and vomiting. Great fright ensued. The mother of the groom and others were brought to Decatur, and the parties were so much exhausted that they had to be carried into houses before reaching the physicians.
It has been learned that the chicken for the salad were cooked and salted in a big copper kettle. It is supposed the salt caused the metal to corrode and mix with the chickens. These people are quite sick yet, but the doctors do not apprehend the fatal termination of any of the cases.
Culled from the collection of The Comtesse DeSpair
1886 Morbid Scrapbook