Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

the position of assistant obstetric physician at University College Hospital in London, which enabled him to give up his Swansea practice and move back to London. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that he married Lizzie Hughes for her money – and for the child he expected her to provide. It was certainly not for her looks because, in truth, Lizzie Hughes was quite plain. When a child was not forthcoming, that left only money as the primary reason for their relationship. Lizzie Williams, being the astute woman she was, would have realised this, and the discovery would have devastated her and added to her fears.
    By 1888, Dr John Williams and his wife had been married for sixteen years. There is no doubt that he was hugely disappointed to discover that Lizzie was infertile. We know he devoted much of his life to a search for the cure for infertility, and this quest now became personal as well as professional. As Ruth Evans writes, “the one great sadness of his life is that he was unable to father a child”. This bald statement was undoubtedly the tip of a very large emotional iceberg for the couple.
    Even from what we learned in the first few pages of Tony Williams’s Uncle Jack , where the author mentions talk within the family of an affair with “a girl he shouldn’t have” (called Mary – Tony Williams’s suggestion is that she was the Mary Kelly of Miller’s Court), it is clear that this was an unhappy marriage.
    In September 1885, Dr John Williams established the ‘Eleanor Williams Exhibition’, a scholarship which he named after his mother. It was an award intended to help deserving boys in the parishes surrounding the area where he had lived in Carmarthenshire to continue their education at a higher grade school. This instance gives but a small insight into how the marriage had deteriorated: Dr Williams named the scholarship after his mother, not his wife. Another indication was the large portrait of Dr Williams’s mother which hung over the mantelpiece in his study, as a permanent reminder of where his real affections lay.
    What took place behind the closed doors of the Williams household during those sixteen years between 1872 and 1888 is difficult to know, though Lizzie’s infertility, and the enormous emotional upset it inevitably brought into their lives, must have played upon the minds of them both. It was a vitally important factor which contributed greatly to the difficulties in the marriage.
    For a man, age is no obstacle when it comes to the physical side of fathering a child. Charlie Chaplin, the comedian, famously fathered two children when in his seventies. But in 1888, Lizzie Williams knew that it would soon be too late for her to conceive, if it was not already well past the time when giving birth would be unsafe for her and her baby’s health. Time was running out for her. Dr Williams, on the other hand, was only two years short of fifty. He had long since lost interest in his infertile wife and was finding his physical pleasures elsewhere. Tony Williams says he chanced upon Mary Kelly and embarked on a relationship with her which could only have been essentially sexual.
    It is Tony Williams’s proposition that when Mary Kelly was aged sixteen, she married a miner named Jonathan Davies, who was killed in a colliery accident. Kelly, who was nineteen at the time of his death, became ill and spent eight or nine months recovering in Cardiff Infirmary, later to become Cardiff Hospital. Dr Andrew Davies, a friend and work colleague of Dr John Williams, lived close to the Infirmary, and it was he who may have introduced Williams to the pretty Mary Kelly. Alternatively, Dr Williams may have met Kelly when she was working as a prostitute in Cardiff, after she had left the Infirmary and moved in to live with a female cousin. When, in 1884, Kelly moved up to London, she took a room in Cleveland Street, located midway between Dr Williams’s home in Queen Anne Street, and University College Hospital where he worked. (There were therefore, at least three possible separate occasions when Dr John Williams could have come across Mary Kelly.) They became lovers and he took her to Paris for a fortnight, though when, and for what reason is unclear. Mary Kelly is said not too have liked it in the French capital, but nevertheless she assumed the name Marie Jeannette, perhaps to protect their adulterous relationship. After they returned to England, Mary Kelly left Cleveland Street and, for