Free The Real Mary Kelly by Wynne Weston-Davies Page A

attack was attributed to a so-called ‘High Rip’ gang, groups of disaffected, unemployed youths who preyed on prostitutes, knowing that the police and the general public held them in such low regard that they were almost beyond the protection of the law.
    Then, on 7th August another unfortunate was murdered on a public staircase in George Yard Buildings, Spitalfields. This latest in the series of attacks on unfortunates in the district was the first to fully capture national attention but that would not happen until after reports began to appear in the press following the inquest which opened at the Working Lads’ Institute on Thursday 9th August.

CHAPTER SEVEN
The Breakthrough
    The Working Lads’ Institute, 285 Whitechapel Road, had been opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales three years before. The Alexandra Room, named after the Princess, was a large reading room with tall windows overlooking the street and, because Whitechapel had no coroner’s court of its own, it had been selected by Mr. Wynne Baxter, the coroner for the Southern division of East Middlesex, as a suitable place in which to hear inquests. Under normal circumstances the room was easily large enough to accommodate the jury and officers of the court as well as members of the public and the three or four local reporters that might normally be expected to attend an inquest. That was certainly the case on 9th August. The
East London Advertiser
commented that ‘there was scarcely any one present except the authorities and those connected with the case, the public being conspicuous by their absence’.
    Baxter himself was away, taking a summer cruise through the fjords of Scandinavia, so the inquest was conducted by his deputy, Mr. George Collier 57 . Mr. Collier was a very different character from his bluff and forthright senior colleague. During the entire proceedings he was ‘painfully quiet’ according to the
Advertiser
. Although reports of the first day of the inquest appeared in atleast 14 local and national newspapers in the days that followed it is apparent that most of them are syndicated copies of the same second-hand account. Almost all, including the nationals such as
The Times
,
The Manchester Guardian
,
The People
and
The Daily News
, reported the police surgeon’s name as ‘Keleene’ (it was actually ‘Killeen’), indicating that they used the same source for their stories. Only two local papers, the
East London Advertiser
and the
East London Observer
, contain accounts of the inquest that were obviously written by reporters who were actually present. Both of them paint vivid and colourful accounts of the scene, describing the dress and the voices of the witnesses in detail. Of the two, the report in the
Advertiser
bears most resemblance to the later journalistic style of Francis Craig. There is his typical use of quotation marks to indicate that he is making a joke as in his description of the jury as ‘20 good and true men of this county’. When giving the cause of death both the
Advertiser
and the
Observer
used the American spelling ‘hemorrhage’, and in a later account in the
Advertiser
of Polly Nichols’s funeral the reporter spells the word ‘ruse’ as ‘rouse’, which although pronounced to rhyme with ‘blues’, is an American spelling still in use today 58 . It is slender evidence that Francis was the
Advertiser
’s correspondent but he was resident in the district served by both the
Advertiser
and the
Observer
and it is highly likely that he was writing for one or other of them. On balance the
Advertiser
seems the more likely.
    On the first day of the inquest the identity of the victim had not been established although several people had come forward and given conflicting names. The first witnesses were people who lived in George Yard Buildings, on the staircase of which the body had been discovered. The building was one of a series of ‘model dwellings’, community housing put up by public and private