Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

small village of Ynystawe. Nothing now remains of this once grand house that overlooked the thriving industrial valley below, save for a pair of ornate gate-posts at the start of a long winding drive, and the circular stone base of what might once have been a statue standing on the front lawn. At a time when the average income per head of the population in Britain was less than £1 a week and the welfare state did not yet exist, poverty and starvation were commonplace. At this time, Morriston, a thriving industrial town, was the centre of British tinplate production, and many fortunes were made there. But for a labourer, the work was hard, the days were long and the pay abysmally poor; often as little as two shillings might be paid for an exhausting twelve-hour shift. In these hard times, women and children frequently had to beg or prostitute themselves in order to survive.
    By contrast, Richard Hughes had money to burn. He hadn’t been born into money; he had sought it out deliberately. Opportunity came his way in the shapely form of Anne Thomas, daughter to the owner of The Lan public house near Morriston. It stood at the corner of Clasemont Road and Vicarage Road, where Hughes worked brewing beer from 1839 to 1849. Anne, born in 1827, was ten years his junior. She was the sister of William Thomas of Lan Manor (1816-1909), affectionately known as Thomas O’Lan – Justice of the Peace, entrepreneur and twice Lord Mayor of Swansea (1877/78 and 1878/79). Despite what was a considerable disparity in their ages, Hughes married his employer’s daughter on 1 May 1845.
    Such a well-timed stroke of calculated good fortune brought Richard Hughes into the folds of the Thomas family business. He soon abandoned the beer trade to become a partner and director in the Landore Tinplate Works (established in 1851), situated between Swansea and Morriston in the Lower Swansea Valley. This huge enterprise on the banks of the river Tawe – which, at its peak employed over a thousand men, women and children – was the largest, and most innovative, tinplate works in the world, with the first mills ever to be driven by steam.
    Mary Elizabeth Ann, Lizzie , was born to Richard and Anne Hughes on 7 February 1850, almost five years after their marriage. She was the adorable child they had hoped for, with a perfectly round face, coal-black hair and dark brown eyes. She was named Mary after her father’s sister who had died, unmarried, on 11 February 1842 – almost exactly eight years before Lizzie was born, Elizabeth after her paternal grandmother who died in 1868, and Ann, either after her father’s youngest sister, Anne, born on 30 December 1829, or her own mother (we were unsure which), though the ‘e’ was dropped from her name. But, five years later, on 9 May 1855, Anne Hughes died after a long illness; she was only twenty-eight years old. In her obituary, she was described as “a most affectionate and kind-hearted woman, and is deeply lamented by a large circle of relatives and friends” ( The Cambrian , 11 May 1855). A little over a year later, on 24 June 1856, Hughes married again. This time, his wife, Mary, was sixteen years his junior; only seventeen years older than his little daughter. There were no children by this second marriage.
    By all accounts, Hughes doted on his daughter, and she idolised him. There seems little doubt that she admired in her father the characteristics that had been so instrumental in shaping his forceful personality and, as a direct consequence, the fortune he had made from the tinplate works. Hughes lavished every conceivable expense on her; no request was refused. Perhaps he was trying to make up for the loss of her mother, or perhaps he just didn’t know what else to do with his enormous wealth. Whatever the motive, the result was that Lizzie grew up accustomed to having everything her father’s money could buy. Most importantly, though she would not have realised it at the time, it bought her the security she needed following the loss of her loving mother, and that was a situation she must have anticipated would never change.
    Lizzie, who from the age of five enjoyed the luxury of her live-in governess, was both intelligent and well educated. She studied the Bible, regularly attended chapel on Sundays with both her parents, and spoke the Queen’s English as flawlessly as her native Welsh language. At the age of fifteen she won a competition for singing and acting at the 1865 Eisteddfod,