Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

father his child. This would have fulfilled his desire, and his mother’s wish. Or perhaps such a woman just satisfied the doctor’s sexual appetites.
    If Lizzie had discovered about his affair, she would have been incensed. Already pushed to the edge of insanity as a consequence of her infertility, it is almost possible to imagine the scene that would have followed: the tears, the arguments, the recriminations, the insults thrown from both sides. John Williams might have displayed his customary indifference and arrogance, while his wife would have been furious, but frustrated by her sheer helplessness.
    The discovery would have been Lizzie Williams’s worst nightmare , the culmination of her secret fears. Being unable to bear her husband a child, when that was what they so desperately wanted, was bad enough; it was the one element missing from their lives that might have saved their relationship. But the thought that he might be physically involved with another woman, one who was capable of bearing his child while Lizzie could not, and who might destroy what was left of their marriage, would have been almost unbearable. So what could she do?
    Probably nothing at all.
    There was little that a sad and lonely Victorian housewife could do in such a situation. While the love might have disappeared from their marriage, it was most unlikely that her husband would leave her. Even if he did, she was not entirely dependent on him. Thanks to her wealthy father, Lizzie Williams was financially secure in her own right. There was nothing she could do about her childlessness, the stresses it brought, or her loveless marriage; she just had to bear the pain and make the best of things.
    Then the unexpected happened and it came like a bolt from the blue. Something from the past caught up with the Hughes family and brought with it terrifying consequences that turned Lizzie Williams’s world upside down, changing everything.
    In the spring of 1888, the Landore Tinplate Works, of which Lizzie’s father was now managing partner, ran into financial difficulties . The company had enjoyed a good run but was too successful an enterprise to go unchallenged indefinitely. The secret methods of production which Daniel Edwards had learnt, and taken from Richard Hughes, enabled him to set up his own company in competition with Hughes’s company. The Dyffryn Works Ltd, established in 1874, was a huge operation, with three mills driven by steam. Located in the lower Swansea Valley, and also on the banks of the river Tawe, it was considered to be a model tinplate works, and Edwards employed an even greater number of workers than the Landore Tinplate Works.
    The death knell sounded for Hughes when Edwards’s lower production costs won over Hughes’s customers. In the course of just a few months, Hughes lost his investment and a third of his workforce. By 17 December 1888, everything he owned was charged to the Glamorgan Banking Company Ltd. The Voters Roll 1888-1889, show that Hughes was forced to move into the much smaller ‘Rock House’ in Church Street, Morriston, only a few hundred yards away from the public house where his career had begun. It was all the more humiliating because he now lived – literally – within the shadow of Dunbar House, a vast rambling mansion on the same street, though on the upper slope, built by Daniel Edwards for his family, which still stands (it is now a grade II listed building, although much dilapidated). Edwards, his wife Ann and their eight children never moved in to it, perhaps because Ann Edwards was more sympathetic to Hughes’s wounded feelings than her husband.
    In July 1891, the United States introduced the McKinley tariff and a levy was imposed on all tinplate imported into the country. The effect of this was to increase the price by up to 10 per cent, which devastated the Welsh tinplate industry and accelerated Richard Hughes’s financial decline. On 22 December 1892, Judge Gwilym Williams in the Swansea County Court declared Hughes bankrupt. He was a ruined man. Daniel Edwards’s revenge was complete.
     
    By mid-1888, her family fortune gone, Lizzie no longer had the financial security she had relied on all her life. The money her father had provided for her up until now, and which she expected one day to inherit, was nothing but a distant memory. Even the beautiful family mansion in Ynystawe, in which she had lived until the day she married, had been sold. From this time on, she would