Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

that his sole motivation to work in the poverty-stricken East End was for a reason far more fundamental than that.
    Before the Abortion Act of 1967, abortion was illegal, except where the doctor was acting to save the life of the mother, or if continuing the pregnancy would result in physical or mental harm. Consequently, pregnant women who wished to abort a child, and whose lives were not in danger, might resort to back-street abortionists or to other self-induced methods to terminate their pregnancies. This frequently led to injury, infection, infertility and sometimes even death. According to figures supplied by the Metropolitan Police, more than 8,000 prostitutes walked the streets of London plying their trade, more than 1,200 of them in Whitechapel alone. However, newspapers at the time estimated their numbers to be ten times that figure. Whichever is correct, the services of these women could be bought for the same price as a glass of cheap gin or a bed for the night in a lodging house, though clean sheets, if required, cost a halfpenny more.
    Pregnancy, for these desperately poor and unfortunate women, was an inconvenient occupational hazard, and termination of the pregnancy, an unpleasant – but necessary – solution. No doubt cheap abortions were available, but those would involve great risk. It would have been considered that it was far better to play it safe, pay a little more and employ the services of an experienced, willing and discreet gynaecologist, if one could be found at a reasonable price.
    There was one reason, and one alone, why Dr John Williams worked in London’s East End and that was to make money. His hospital salary would not have taken him very far with the Harley Street lifestyle he was obliged to maintain, and we believed that Lizzie Williams would have been what today might be described as ‘high maintenance’. We assume that even the generosity of Richard Hughes had its limits.
    It is simply inconceivable that the women who lived in the slums and overcrowded lodging houses, so many of them selling their bodies as a means of survival, would have required Dr Williams’s services for any reason other than to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Whether it was needed on medical grounds – that the life or health of the mother was at stake – was quite another matter. No one would dare to question the word of an eminent doctor on such an issue.
    What toll might the sight of countless small bundles – the aborted foetuses – have taken on Lizzie Williams’s already devastated emotions? Unable to bear a child herself, but watching or even just knowing that her husband was performing his grisly task in the course of his work, not just once, but time and time and time again.
    How must she have felt when her husband returned home from Windsor Castle on that great day, late in 1886, when he attended the difficult birth of Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Alexander, born on 23 November? A pathetic, but irreconcilable mixture of pride, envy, resentment and anger, because her husband, who could do so much for so many women, could do nothing at all for her.
    Dr John Williams’s research into the causes of infertility in women, and the search for a cure, had become a desperate, personal crusade. Any feelings that he may have felt would have been set aside for his work. Lizzie Williams would have had no such welcome diversion. But despite all his efforts at University College Hospital, he was getting nowhere, and, according to his great-great -nephew, Tony Williams, the marriage had gone sour. So what were the couple to do? The only option available to Lizzie Williams was to carry on with her life as best she could, and learn to live with her emotional nightmares. She still had what remained of her marriage, she had a fine home, she was heir to a fortune, and her father’s money was always readily available.
    But it is highly probable that Lizzie’s husband decided to look elsewhere for sexual gratification; it would not have been the first time Dr John Williams had strayed outside the marriage. London offered many temptations, especially for a professional man with money and a roving eye. If, as Tony Williams has suggested, he happened to meet a woman he had known previously, an eye-catching woman much younger than himself, even younger than Lizzie – who was rather plain, and the young woman made herself available to him, it is possible that he would have seen her as an opportunity to