The Horrors of the East End: The Forgotten ‘Rippings’

When people think of the Whitechapel murders that horrified London during the last quarter of the 19th century, there is a very slight chance that they can remember and actually recall the names of the five ‘canonical victims’ of Jack the Ripper. These five – Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly – are forever immortalized in history due to their direct association with the Ripper, an association established by the primitive techniques of 19th century Scotland Yard. The implication of the title ‘canonical’ is clear: that there were other women who also fell victim to the same crime as the five, yet unlike the canonicals, they were forgotten by history due to the lack of clear association between them and their possible assailant. 

Martha Tabram led a life that in many ways paralleled those of the five. Born in 1849, the youngest of five children, Tabram experienced trauma early on in her life when her parents separated when she was 16, and her father died six months later. These events no doubt placed pressure on Tabram as now she had to replace the income that was lost upon her father's death. So, four years later she got married and eventually started a family of her own. However, this was not to last.

Matching in many ways the circumstances of Annie Chapman, the marriage was problematic and later broken up by Tabram’s drinking problems. Divorce in Victorian Britian was usually a social death sentence for women, and Tabram was no exception. She gradually drifted further and further into poverty, something only exacerbated by her drinking problem, and increasingly frequented the slums of the East End. This place proved be her undoing, as on 6 August 1888, the same month that the first canonical victim was killed, her body was found, stabbed multiple times. Yet, the specific wound on the throat that would come to be shared by the five was missing, and therefore she was relegated to the shadows of history. 

Alice McKenzie, as with many women of lower social status at the time, would have likely used lies to aid her survival in the pitiful circumstances she found herself in. Due to this, very little is known about her past and early life, only that she was supposedly born in Peterborough around 1849. Therefore, we do not know how or why she ended up homeless in the wretched East End, before taking up residence with a certain John McCormack. What is known is that her condition did improve, albeit marginally, as she then cohabited with McCormack and had a job as a washerwoman and a charwoman – a house cleaner. 

Despite this, the East End did not provide her further mercy, and on July 16, 1889, nearly seven months after the last canonical murder, her body was found in Castle Alley, Whitechapel. Unlike Tabram, and like most of the five, her left carotid artery was severed, which sparked the debate whether or not she was the sixth victim of Jack the Ripper. Yet the official conclusion determined that she was not, as the cuts were not as deep as with the ones featured on the five, resulting in her sharing a space in history with Tabram. 

Frances Coles is the last victim mentioned in the Whitechapel files. Born in 1859 to a poverty-stricken family, much of Coles’ early life was spent in the East End, the same place that she met her demise. By 1880 she lived her own and was employed by a wholesale chemist shop in Whitechapel, where she often complained of the working conditions to her sister, Mary Ann. After she eventually quit her job, the absence of an income caused her to take up prostitution, something that she kept a secret out of shame. Her family only learnt of Coles’ circumstances after her death, which came around the early hours of 13th February 1891. P.C. Ernest Thompson noticed the body of Frances Coles lying under a railway arch, simultaneously noticing her probable assailant retreating in the distance.

However, since Coles was still alive when Thompson discovered her, he was obliged by protocol to remain by her side, allowing her probable assailant – and perhaps Jack the Ripper himself – to escape. As with the previous cases, she died to wounds to the throat, however, unlike the previous cases the weapon used was determined to be blunt and there were no further mutilations. Based off these findings, and the fact that her killing took place nearly 3 years after the last canonical murder, the police ruled her a victim, but not a victim of the Ripper. 

These three do not share the same spotlight as the canonical five as they were not ruled to be directly killed by the Ripper, meaning that most of the morbid curiosity that surrounds him (or her) continues to elude them to this day. However, we still do know their names, a rough picture of the lives they lived, and who they were – unlike the many more women who perished in similarly violent circumstances throughout history, and whom are to truly be forgotten by it.  

Bibliography

‘Frances Coles’, casebook.org, https://www.casebook.org/victims/coles.html [Accessed 12th March 2025]  

Rubenhold, Hallie, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (Doubleday, 2019)