Sherlockian Sojourns - Special #13: The Whitechapel Horrors – The Graves of the Victims

Having previously visited sites connected to Jack the Ripper and his victims, I decided to undertake a further visit, this time to the graves of the five canonical victims, who are buried across four London cemeteries. The sites of their graves have long since been re-used, but each cemetery has a memorial to the respective victim.

My first port of call was the City of London Cemetery, Manor Park, a ten minute walk from Manor Park Station on the Elizabeth Line. This is where Mary Nichols and Catherine Eddowes, the first and fourth victims of the Ripper respectively, were buried. Open since 1856, the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium is a Grade I listed two-hundred-acre site.

  

Making my way through the main gate, I headed for the Traditional Crematorium building with its red tiled roof, and on the other side, turned right to walk through the Memorial Gardens. Here a short distance up, flat on the grass on the right, I found the memorial plaque to Mary Ann Nichols.

 

  

Nichols’ funeral took place on the 6th September 1888, and a report about it appeared in the next day’s South Wales Echo:-

“The funeral of Mary Ann Nichols, who was murdered in Buck’s Row, early on Friday morning, took place yesterday. The time at which the cortège was to start was kept secret, and a ruse was resorted to in order to get the body out of the mortuary, where it has lain since the day of the murder. A pair-horsed closed hearse was observed making its way down Hanbury-street, and the crowds, which numbered some thousands, made way for it to go along Old Montague Street; but instead of so doing it passed on into Whitechapel Road, and doubling back it reached the mortuary by the back gate, which is situated in Chapman’s Court. No person was near, other than the undertaker and his men, when the coffin, which bore a plate with the inscription, “Mary Ann Nichols, aged 42. Died August 31, 1888″, was removed to the hearse and driven off to Hanbury Street, there to await the mourners. Meantime the news had spread that the body was in the hearse, and people flocked round to see the coffin.

At length the cortège started towards Ilford. The mourners were Mr Edward Walker, the father of the deceased, and his grandson, together with two of the deceased’s children. The procession proceeded along Baker’s Row, and past the corner of Buck’s Row, into the main road, where policemen were stationed every few yards. The houses in the neighbourhood had the blinds drawn, and much sympathy was expressed for the relatives.”

 

Continuing along the path, after a short distance, flat on the grass on the left side of the path, I found the memorial plaque to Catherine Eddowes.

  

Eddowes’ funeral took place on the afternoon of Monday 8^th October 1888. That evening The Nottingham Evening Post carried a brief report on the events of the day:-

“The funeral of Catherine Eddowes, the victim of the Mitre-square murder, took place this afternoon at Ilford, Essex, where the City of London Cemetery is situated.

The expenses of the funeral were borne entirely by a private citizen. The corpse, decently laid in a plain coffin, with the name and age of deceased engraved thereon, was removed at half-past one from the Golden-lane Mortuary. Thousands of people lined the streets in the vicinity of the cemetery, evincing much sympathy. The remains were borne in an open hearse, followed by two carriages. Several wreaths were on the coffin. The crowds in the streets of the East End were so dense that a force of police had to direct the traffic.”

 

The following weekend, The Warminster and Westbury Journal, and Wilts County Advertiser, carried a report about the funeral in its edition of Saturday 13th of October 1888, which went into more detail about the behaviour of the crowd:-

“The funeral of Catherine Eddowes, the victim of the Mitre Square murder, took place on Monday afternoon. The body was removed from the City mortuary in Golden Lane at a quarter past one o’clock for interment in the City of London cemetery, at Ilford.

There were dense crowds in the vicinity of Golden Lane, and at the junctions of Osborn and Commercial streets the people were so numerous that a large force of police had to direct the traffic. The body was conveyed in an open hearse, a wreath being placed on either side of the coffin. Following the remains were two mourning coaches, and in the rear of these was a large wagon crowded with women, the majority of whom were attired in a style not at all befitting the occasion.”

 

Retracing my steps to Manor Park Station, I went down a side-road just before it, and five minutes later was at Manor Park Cemetery, where Annie Chapman (born Eliza Ann Smith), the second canonical victim of the Ripper, was buried. Manor Park Cemetery and Crematorium was founded in 1874.

 

Entering the Cemetery, noticing an information board highlighting graves of historical interest (including Chapman’s), I immediately turned left down a grass path that started between two trees and, as the modern graves gave way to an older area of graves on the left, I reached the memorial plaque to Annie Chapman.

Chapman was buried shortly after 9am on 14^th September 1888 in a service paid for by her family. She was laid to rest in a communal grave within the Cemetery. At the request of Chapman's family, the funeral was not publicised, with no mourning coaches used throughout the service, and only the undertaker, police, and her relatives knowing of these arrangements. Consequently, relatives were the only people to attend the service.

A hearse supplied by Hanbury Street undertaker Henry Smith travelled to the Whitechapel Mortuary in Montague Street to collect Chapman's body at 7am. Her body was placed in an elm coffin draped in black and was then driven to Spitalfields undertaker Harry Hawes, who arranged the funeral. Chapman's relatives met the hearse outside the cemetery. Her coffin plate bore the words "Annie Chapman, died Sept. 8, 1888, aged 48 years."

 

Returning to Manor Park Station, I caught the Overground to Stratford, then the Central Line to Leyton. A short walk brought me to St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cemetery, Leytonstone, where Mary Kelly, widely believed by scholars to have been the final victim of the Ripper, was buried.. It was opened in 1868 in response to the growing demand arising from population growth for consecrated burial space by the Catholic community in East London, and is one of only two Roman Catholic cemeteries in London (the other being a sister cemetery in West London - St Mary's Catholic Cemetery, Kensal Green).

  

Going through the cemetery gates, a short distance down the path was the grave of the McCarthy family, with a large standing angel on top of it. Amongst those buried here is John McCarthy, who was Mary Kelly’s landlord.

    

Following the main path as it bent right, I was soon at the grave of Mary Kelly.

 

 

Mary Jane Kelly was buried at 2pm on Monday 19^th November 1888, in a service officiated by the Reverend Father Columban. No family members could be located to attend her funeral, and both Joseph Barnett and her landlord, John McCarthy, were insistent her remains were interred in accordance with the rituals of her Church. The eight individuals within the two mourning coaches following Kelly's polished elm and oak coffin from Shoreditch Church to the cemetery where she was buried were Joseph Barnett, an individual representing John McCarthy, and six women who had known Kelly and who had testified at the inquest into her murder: Mary Ann Cox; Elizabeth Prater; Caroline Maxwell; Sarah Lewis; Julia Venturney; and Maria Harvey. Several thousand people gathered outside Shoreditch Church to observe the funeral procession.

Kelly's obituary ran as follows:

“The funeral of the murdered woman Kelly has once more been postponed. Deceased was a Catholic, and the man Barnett, with whom she lived, and her landlord, Mr. M. Carthy, desired to see her remains interred with the ritual of her Church. The funeral will, therefore, take place tomorrow [19 Nov] in the Roman Catholic Cemetery at Leytonstone. The hearse will leave the Shoreditch mortuary at half-past twelve.

The remains of Mary Janet [sic] Kelly, who was murdered on 9 Nov in Miller's Court, Dorset Street, Spitalfields, were brought yesterday morning from Shoreditch mortuary to the cemetery at Leytonstone, where they were interred. No family member could be found to attend the funeral”

 

Making my way back towards Leyton Station, I caught a #69 bus from the bus stop just before the station, alighting at Grove Road, Plaistow, just opposite the gates of the East London Cemetery, where Elizabeth Stride, whom most authors and researchers consider Stride to be the third of the Ripper's canonical five victims, was buried. The cemetery was founded in 1871 and laid out in 1872 to meet the increasing demand from the City and surrounding areas of East London. The cemetery covers approximately 33 acres and has two 19th century chapels.

     

 

Once inside the gates, I walked towards the Celtic cross War Memorial, then turned left down a side path until I reached the grave of Elizabeth Stride.

        

Stride was buried on Saturday 6^th October 1888 in the East London Cemetery, located within the east London district of Plaistow. Her funeral was attended by a small number of mourners, and the costs were provided at the expense of the parish by the undertaker, a Mr Hawkes.

 

Catching a #69 back to Plaistow Station, I caught the District Line to West Ham, then the Jubilee Line to Waterloo, from which I could catch a train home.

 

Sherlockian Sojourns - Special #12: Crimes That Holmes Could Have Investigated

Something a little different for the first Sojourn of 2025, visiting sites of crimes that occurred in London during the time that Holmes was practising as a Consulting Detective. He may have been consulted on all or some of them.

 

Catching a train to Vauxhall, I then rode one stop on the Victoria Line to Pimlico. From here it was a ten minute walk to the first crime scene, 85 Claverton Street, SW1V.

 

‘The Pimlico Mystery’

Adelaide Bartlett

On 1st January 1886, Mr. Doggett, the landlord of this address (since demolished for a block of flats - Whitley House) was woken at 4.10am by his tenant Adelaide Bartlett, to be told that she thought that her husband was dead. Adelaide had married Bartlett, a wealthy owner of six grocery shops (and 11 years her senior) in 1875. Their relationship remained almost entirely platonic, with Edwin instead encouraging his wife’s relationship with George Dyson, a young Methodist minister, who he had retained to teach Adelaide Latin and Mathematics. He even told George that he should marry Adelaide if he died.

On arrival at the scene, the landlord and Edwin’s physician, Dr. Alfred Leach, found Edwin dead, and were both immediately suspicious. A postmortem revealed that Edwin’s stomach contained chloroform and concluded that this had killed him. Adelaide and George were immediately arrested, with Adelaide being accused of the murder, and George being accused of helping her when it was revealed that he had bought chloroform for Adelaide to treat her husband. Edwin had been a hypocondriac, convinced that he had syphilis (which he didn’t), and had been taking mercury poison as a treatment.

 

The charges against George were dropped due to lack of evidence, but Adelaide appeared at the Old Bailey, represented by the leading barrister of the day, Sir Edward Clarke, whose brilliant defence relied on common-sense expert testimony. Various medical men stated that liquid chloroform was not necessarily fatal, and that there was no chloroform in Edwin’s windpipe or lungs, as there would have been had it been poured into his mouth as he slept. The jury concluded that there was ‘not sufficient evidence to show how or by whom the chloroform was administered’, and so Adelaide was acquitted. The mystery of Edwin’s death has never been solved, and after the trial both Adelaide and George vanished from public notice.

The novelist Julian Symons (who also wrote three Sherlockian pastiches, two which were set in the modern-day featuring a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character), wrote a novelisation of the story, ‘Sweet Adelaide’, in which he suggested that Adelaide emigrated to the USA, settling in Connecticut.

WHERE WAS HOLMES ?: Holmes was in Baker Street (with Watson), but not yet well-known due to fact that Watson’s first chronicle ‘A Study in Scarlet’ was not published until the end of the next year   (January 1886)   

 

 

A fifteen minute walk brought me to Vauxhall Bridge, and my second crime scene.

 

‘The Thames Torso Murders’

Finding bodies in the Thames in the 1880’s was not unusual, with 544 corpses being recovered from the river by ferrymen, passers-by and the marine police in 1882. Therefore, when in May 1887, a female torso washed up on the shores of Rainham in Essex, there was little press interest. In the following week, more body parts started to appear on other parts of the Thames shore, until the body was almost complete, although the head was never found. Police surgeon Dr. Thomas Bond stated that whoever had dismembered the woman had a rough anatomical knowledge, but was not a medical man. Due to the level of decomposition, he was unable to conclude that a ‘violent act’ had occurred, so the inquest recorded her simply as being ‘Found Dead’.

A year later on 11th September 1888, as ‘Jack The Ripper’ fever gripped London, a woman’s arm was recovered here, on the shore of Pimlico, barely a mile from the Houses of Parliament. The Times newspaper initially suspected that the arm was placed in the water as a medical students' prank. Then on 28th September, another arm was found on the opposite bank in Lambeth. Dr. Charles Hibbert, who examined one of the arms, stated that although the killer ‘was not necessarily an anatomist, he certainly knew what he was doing’, given his cutting at joints. 

WHERE WAS HOLMES ?: It was a busy month for Holmes – first he investigated the experiences of Mr. Melas, Greek Interpreter [GREE], then helped Watson’s future wife [SIGN], and finally found himself on Dartmoor for his most famous investigation [HOUN]   (September 1888)  

 

Crossing the bridge, another fifteen minute walk brought me to 103 Lambeth Palace Road, SE1.

 

'The Lambeth Poisoner’

 

Thomas Neill Cream

The victims of the Lambeth Poisoner in 1891 included 19-year-old Ellen ‘Nellie’ Donworth, 27-year-old prostitute Matilda Clover (although her death was originally put down to alcoholism), and prostitutes Alice Marsh (21) and Emma Shrivell (18) who both died in agony in the flat they shared. A further woman, Louise Harvey, also a prostitute, was given two pills, by a client who insisted that she swallow them right away. However, Harvey, suspicious of him, pretended to swallow the pills he had given her but secretly threw them from a bridge into the River Thames. Late in 1891, when police received an anonymous letter accusing two respectable and innocent doctors of the poisonings, they quickly realised that it must have been written the murderer, as the letter writer knew too much.

 

Around this time, a London doctor, Thomas Neill Cream, who lived here  met a police officer from New York City, who was visiting London. The officer mentioned that he had heard of the Lambeth Poisoner, and so Cream showed him the victims’ homes. The American then reported this to a British policeman, as he found Cream’s detailed knowledge of the case suspicious. Cream was put under surveillance, and it was soon found that he liked to consort with the prostitutes of Lambeth. The investigation took officers to America where they found that Cream, who had lived in Quebec, Edinburgh and Chicago, had poisoned at least one person to death in each city before being convicted by murder by poison in 1881, receiving life imprisonment, but being released in July 1891 after his brother pleaded for leniency (and bribed the authorities).

Cream was convicted of these new crimes and sentenced to death. Less than a month later, he was hanged on the gallows at Newgate Prison by James Billington, who claimed that Cream’s last words on the scaffold were ‘I am Jack the –‘. However, it was established that Cream was in a US prison at the time of the Whitechapel Murders.

Cream was the main antagonist of the 1990 Radio 4 play, ‘Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Pimlico Poisoner’, which represented the second time that Crawford Logan had played Watson for them (the first being opposite Roger Rees in the 1988 ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ which led to the complete dramatisation of the Canon, starring the recast Clive Merrison and Michael Williams), this time alongside William Chubb (with 1980’s Davros, Terry Molloy, as Lestrade). Also, in the first episode of ‘Murder Rooms: Mysteries of the Real Sherlock Holmes’, the young Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Bell pursue a murder case that involves a Thomas Neill, played by Alec Newman. At the end, a postscript further identifies him as Thomas Neill Cream, who attended medical school alongside Conan Doyle.

WHERE WAS HOLMES ?: Holmes was believed lost at the Reichenbach Falls in May 1891, but was in fact in Tibet visiting Lhassa and spending some days with the head Lama  (October 1891)  

 

 

Fifteen minutes later, I reached the Victoria Embankment, and Norman Shaw North, SW1A.

 

‘The Whitehall Mystery’

The Illustrated Police News, October 1888

This Grade I listed building was the headquarters of Scotland Yard from 1890 to 1967, and was built to the designs of architect Norman Shaw (whose name this building and the one next to it still feature). It took about twenty years to build. New Scotland Yard is now based in a building a short distance down the Embankment.

On 2nd October 1888, a female torso was discovered in a three-month-old vault that made up part of the cellar of the construction site for the building. It was placed there at some point after 29th September when Richard Lawrence, a workman, had last been inside the unlocked vault. The body had been wrapped in cloth, possibly a black petticoat and tied with string. The torso was matched by police surgeon Dr. Thomas Bond to the arms previously found in Pimlico. The press called the discovery ‘The Whitehall Mystery’. The head and remaining limbs were never found, and the identity of the victim was never established.

 

 

In June 1889, parts of another woman were fished out of the Thames, with one of her arms being later found thrown into the riverside grounds of a house that had belonged to Mary Shelley, whose ‘Frankenstein’ involved building a monster out of various body parts. Again the head was never found, but she was identified from other clues as Elizabeth Jackson, a suspected Chelsea prostitute. On 10th September 1889, a constable on his beat found a female torso under a railway arch in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel. The murder was eventually attributed to the Thames Torso Killer, but like the Ripper, the case was never solved.

WHERE WAS HOLMES ?: Newly back from laying Sir Henry Baskerville’s family ghost [HOUN], Holmes would have been available to be consulted on ‘The Whitehall Mystery’. However, when the second woman was found, he was in Herefordshire [BOSC] and Birmingham [STOC].    (October 1888 / June 1889)  

 

Catching a tube from nearby Westminster Station, I made my way to Warren Street Station, where five minutes away was 33 Fitzroy Square W1T.

 

‘Tottenham Court Road Mystery’

On 28th October 1884, a constable passing the address, which was then a military drill hall and armoury, noticed a large brown paper parcel in front of the railings. He pulled it open, revealing a portion of a human torso. Press interest was high, with the Pall Mall Gazette stating that the area was ‘constantly patrolled by police’, following a skull and a chunk of flesh from a human thigh being found in a nearby street on 23rd October.

 

Then a parcel containing a female arm (which due to being tattooed was believed to belong to a prostitute) was found in the gardens of Bedford Square, which I walked to next.

  

An inquest was held at St. Giles Coroner’s Court on 11th November 1884, where doctors stated that the body parts came from the same woman, being ‘divided by someone skilled, but certainly not for the purpose of anatomy’. The proceedings were adjourned, and by the time that they reconvened on 9th December 1884, a parcel containing bones of the right arm, right and left feet and right forearm of a different woman had been found in Mornington Crescent, a fifteen minute walk away. The remains were stored at St. Pancras Mortuary before being buried without the women ever being identified or the mystery solved.

WHERE WAS HOLMES ?:  Holmes was in Baker Street (with Watson), yet to investigate the majority of his celebrated cases.  (October 1884)  

 

Having completed my tour of Victorian crime scenes, it was time to make way to the nearest tube station to start another Sojourn.