Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

at which event she was given the Bardic name Morfydd Glantawe . She was a remarkably bright and confident young woman, with the blithe self-assurance exuded only by those who are born into money. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Lizzie Hughes was a woman who expected to get what she wanted out of life, and that life would never say ‘No!’.
    Lizzie, always close to Papa and Mama – the names she called her father and stepmother – enjoyed a close relationship with them both for the whole of her life. Her diaries show that, during the early years, it was her father who played a key role in her upbringing , guiding, supporting and financing her when she needed it, while in her declining years, after she became ill, it was her stepmother who provided the constant care Lizzie Williams required.
    In 1870 a curious incident upset the close-knit Hughes family. A little over a decade earlier, in 1859, Daniel Edwards, whom Hughes had employed in a business that he also controlled, the Upper Forest Tinplate Works, had involved himself in what today would be known as industrial espionage. Edwards, as ambitious as he was hard-working, had been busy recording the secret methods and ideas of Hughes’s tin-making processes, with the intention of setting up his own factory which would bring him into direct competition with his one-time employer. When the ‘intellectual property’ theft was discovered, Edwards was instantly dismissed. It was a degradation he would never forget or forgive.
    The matter might have passed off as just another of the disagreeable industrial problems that Richard Hughes was required to deal with in the day-to-day management of his business, except that this affair proved to be the genesis of something that would develop into a crisis of nightmarish proportions . In the meantime, however, it would manifest itself on young Lizzie in a most public and humiliating manner.
    When a new, larger chapel was proposed for the quickly growing population of Morriston, Richard Hughes provided the land for the building at a knock-down price. But the agreement was conditional on his daughter having the honour of laying the foundation stone – which, in accordance with recognised tradition, was to be inscribed with her name.
    Its benefactors intended the new Congregational chapel, Tabernacle, to be the most impressive building in Wales. John Humphreys, a chapel deacon known as ‘God’s Architect’, was appointed to create what would be the most outstanding classical design of the age. At the staggering cost of £18,000, it was a veritable cathedral amongst chapels, with a soaring octagonal clock tower and seating capacity for 1,450 people. “Tabernacle stands out as one great redeeming feature in the whole of that manufacturing district, an oasis in a desert, an object worthy of admiration in the midst of unsightly works and manufactories of every size and description … and all who have seen it speak of it in the highest terms” ( The Cambrian , January 1873).
    However, in what was an unfortunate quirk of fate, Daniel Edwards, now a tinplate magnate, the ‘industrial spy’ whom Hughes had fired years before, was appointed to supervise the building project. At the grand unveiling ceremony, held on a grey winter’s day, 26 November 1870, over 500 religious and civic dignitaries, together with members of the public, tried to crowd inside the iron railings of the small yard fronting the great chapel. But there was insufficient room to accommodate them all, and they spilled out onto Woodfield Street, stopping all traffic, and the horse-drawn trams that ran between Morriston and the terminus on Castle Street in Swansea.
    As the foundation stone was unveiled, the full force of Edwards’s malice was revealed. The inscription, carved in stone, read:
    THE FOUNDATION STONE OF THIS
TABERNACLE
WAS LAID BY
Miss HUGHES, YNYSTAWE
26TH NOVEMBER 1870
     
    It was a cold and calculated insult, the yesteryear equivalent of today’s two-fingered salute. Edwards had omitted Lizzie’s three Christian names. Not even her initials were inscribed on the stone – but Edwards had fulfilled the terms of his contract, and there was nothing that could be done about it.
    However, Daniel Edwards had not yet fully settled his score with Richard Hughes.

CHAPTER 4
     
     
    J ust twenty miles to the west of Swansea, not far from Carmarthen, stands the small whitewashed farmhouse of Blaenllynant, together with a cluster of