MARY ANN NICHOLS, JACK THE RIPPER'S FIRST VICTIM

Today, The Fosters and The Grandma have remembered Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols, who was the first victim of Jack The Ripper.

 

Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols (26 August 1845-31 August 1888) was one of the Whitechapel murder victims. Her death has been attributed to the notorious unidentified serial killer Jack The Ripper, who is believed to have killed and mutilated at least five women in the Whitechapel area of London from late August to early November 1888.

Mary Ann was born to locksmith Edward Walker and his wife Caroline on 26 August 1845, in Dean Street in London. On 16 January 1864 she married William Nichols, a printer's machinist, and between 1866 and 1879, the couple had five children: Edward John, Percy George, Alice Esther, Eliza Sarah, and Henry Alfred. Their marriage broke up in 1880 or 1881 because of disputed causes. Her father accused William of leaving her after he had an affair with the nurse who had attended the birth of their final child, though Nichols claimed to have proof that their marriage had continued for at least three years after the date alleged for the affair. He maintained that his wife had deserted him and was practising prostitution. Police reports say they separated because of her drunken habits.

More information: Casebook: Jack the Ripper

Legally required to support his estranged wife, William Nichols paid her an allowance of five shillings a week until 1882, when he heard that she was working as a prostitute; he was not required to support her if she was earning money through illicit means. Nichols spent most of her remaining years in workhouses and boarding houses, living off charitable handouts and her meagre earnings as a prostitute. She lived with her father for a year or more but left after a quarrel; her father stated he had heard she had subsequently lived with a blacksmith named Drew in Walworth. 

In early 1888, the year of her death, she was placed in the Lambeth workhouse after being discovered sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square, and in May left the workhouse to take a job as a domestic servant in Wandsworth.

Unhappy in that position, she was an alcoholic and her employer, Mr Cowdry, and his wife, were teetotallers, she left two months later, stealing clothing worth three pounds ten shillings.  At the time of her death, Nichols was living in a Whitechapel common lodging house in Spitalfields, where she shared a room with a woman named Emily "Nelly" Holland.

At about 23:00 on 30 August, Nichols was seen walking the Whitechapel Road; at 00:30 on 31 August she was seen to leave a pub in Brick Lane, Spitalfields.

More information: Historical Events

An hour later, she was turned out of 18 Thrawl Street as she was lacking the fourpence required for a bed, implying by her last recorded words that she would soon earn the money on the street with the help of a new bonnet she had acquired.

She was last seen alive standing at the corner of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road at approximately 02:30, one hour before her death, by her roommate, Emily Holland. To Holland, Nichols claimed she had earned enough money to pay for her bed three times that evening, but had repeatedly spent the money on alcohol.

A meat cart driver named Charles Allen Lechmere, who also used the name Charles Cross, claimed to have discovered Mary Ann Nichols lying on the ground in front of a gated stable entrance in Buck's Row, since renamed Durward Street, Whitechapel at 3:40 AM, about 150 yards from the London Hospital and 100 yards from Blackwall Buildings. Her skirt was raised.
 

Another passing cart driver on his way to work, Robert Paul, approached and saw Lechmere kneeling over the body. Lechmere called him over. He expressed his opinion that she was dead, but Paul was uncertain and thought she might simply be unconscious.

They pulled her skirt down to cover her lower body, and went in search of a policeman. Upon encountering PC Jonas Mizen, Lechmere informed the constable: She looks to me to be either dead or drunk, but for my part, I believe she's dead. The two men then continued on their way to work, leaving Mizen to inspect Nichols' body.

As Mizen approached the body, PC John Neale came from the opposite direction on his beat and by flashing his lantern, called a third policeman, PC John Thain, to the scene.

More information: Huffington Post

As news of the murder spread, three horse slaughterers from a neighbouring knacker's yard in Winthrop Street, who had been working overnight, came to look at the body. None of the slaughterers, the police officers patrolling nearby streets, or the residents of houses alongside Buck's Row reported hearing or seeing anything suspicious before the discovery of the body.

PC Thain fetched surgeon Dr Henry Llewellyn, who arrived at 04:00 and decided she had been dead for about 30 minutes. Her throat had been slit twice from left to right and her abdomen mutilated with one deep jagged wound, several incisions across the abdomen, and three or four similar cuts on the right side caused by the same knife, estimated to be at least 15–20 cm long, used violently and downwards.  

Llewellyn expressed surprise at the small amount of blood at the crime scene, about enough to fill two large wine glasses, or half a pint at the most. His comment led to the supposition that Nichols was not killed where her body was found, but the blood from her wounds had soaked into her clothes and hair, and there was little doubt that she had been killed at the crime scene by a swift slash to the throat. Death would have been instantaneous, and the abdominal injuries, which would have taken less than five minutes to perform, were made by the murderer after she was dead. 

When a person is killed, further wounds to their body do not always result in a large amount of blood loss. When the body was lifted a mass of congealed blood, in PC Thain's words, lay beneath the body.

As the murder had occurred in the territory of the Bethnal Green Division of the Metropolitan Police, it was initially investigated by the local detectives, inspectors John Spratling and Joseph Helson, who had little success. 

More information: All That's Interesting

Elements of the press linked the attack on Nichols to two previous murders, those of Emma Elizabeth Smith and Martha Tabram, and suggested the killing might have been perpetrated by a gang, as in the case of Smith. The Star newspaper instead suggested a single killer was the culprit and other newspapers took up their storyline. Suspicions of a serial killer at large in London led to the secondment of Detective Inspectors Frederick Abberline, Henry Moore and Walter Andrews from the Central Office at Scotland Yard.

Although Llewellyn had speculated that the attacker could have been left-handed, he later expressed doubt over this initial thought, but the belief that the killer was left-handed endured.

Rumours that a local character called Leather Apron could have been responsible for the murder were investigated by the police, even though they noted there is no evidence against him. 

Imaginative descriptions of Leather Apron, using crude Jewish stereotypes, appeared in the press, but rival journalists dismissed these as a mythical outgrowth of the reporter's fancy. John Pizer, a Polish Jew who made footwear from leather, was known by the name Leather Apron and was arrested despite a lack of evidence. He was soon released after the confirmation of his alibis. Pizer successfully obtained monetary compensation from at least one newspaper that had named him as the murderer.

After several adjournments, to allow the police to gather further evidence, the inquest concluded on 24 September. On the available evidence, Coroner Baxter found that Nichols was murdered at just after 3 a.m. where she was found.

More information: PRI

In his summing up, he dismissed the possibility that her murder was connected with those of Smith and Tabram since the lethal weapons were different in those cases, and neither of the earlier cases involved a slash to the throat. However, by the time the inquest into Nichols' death had concluded, another woman, Annie Chapman, had been murdered, and Baxter noted The similarity of the injuries in the two cases is considerable. The police investigations into the murders of Chapman and Nichols were merged.

The subsequent murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes the week after the inquest had closed, and that of Mary Jane Kelly on 9 November, were also linked by a similar modus operandi, and the murders were blamed by the press and public on a single serial killer, called Jack The Ripper.

More information: History

 

All English people have a fascination 

with Jack The Ripper. 

I don't know why, 

because it's so dreadful, 

but such a strange, 

endearing part of our culture. 

Morbid fascination sums it up.

Jane Goldman

NOLITA, A 'CALÇOTADA' WITH THE GRANGERS IN NYC

Today, The Grangers & The Grandma have been enjoying a calçotada in one of the most important Catalan restaurants in Nolita, New York City. Before eating, they have practised some English grammar with Have got, Countable & Uncountable and Some & Any.

 

More information: Have got

 

More information: Countable / Uncountable

 

More information: Some / Any

 

Nolita, sometimes written as NoLIta or NoLita, and deriving from North of Little Italy is a neighbourhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City.

 

Nolita is situated in Lower Manhattan, bounded on the north by Houston Street, on the east by the Bowery, on the south roughly by Broome Street, and on the west by Lafayette Street.

It lies east of SoHo, south of NoHo, west of the Lower East Side, and north of Little Italy and Chinatown.

The neighbourhood was long regarded as part of Little Italy, but has lost its recognizable Italian character in recent decades because of rapidly rising rents. The Feast of San Gennaro, dedicated to Saint Januarius Pope of Naples, is held in the neighbourhood every year following Labor Day, on Mulberry Street between Houston and Grand Streets.

The feast, as recreated on Elizabeth Street between Prince and Houston Streets, was featured in the film The Godfather Part II.

In the second half of the 1990s, the neighbourhood saw an influx of yuppies and an explosion of expensive retail boutiques and restaurants and bars. After unsuccessful tries to pitch it as part of SoHo, real estate promoters and others came up with several different names for consideration for this newly upscale neighborhood. 

The name that stuck, as documented in an article on May 5, 1996, in the New York Times city section debating various monikers for the newly trendy area, was Nolita, an abbreviation for North of Little Italy. This name follows the pattern started by SoHo (South of Houston Street) and TriBeCa (Triangle Below Canal Street).

The neighbourhood includes St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, at the intersection of Mulberry, Mott, and Prince Streets, which opened in 1815 and was rebuilt in 1868 after a fire. The cornerstone was laid on June 8, 1809. This building served as New York City's Roman Catholic cathedral until the new St. Patrick's Cathedral was opened on Fifth Avenue in Midtown in 1879.

St. Patrick's Old Cathedral is now a parish church. In 2010, St. Patrick's Old Cathedral was honoured and became The Basilica at St. Patrick's Old Cathedral.

The Puck Building, a nine-story-high ornate structure built in 1885 on the corner of Houston and Lafayette Streets, originally housed the headquarters of the now-defunct Puck Magazine.

Since 2010, a Little Australia has emerged and is growing in Nolita on Mulberry Street and Mott Street.

More information: Compass

In the middle of Little Italy little
did we know that we riddled
some middleman who didn't do diddily.

Big Pun

THE STONES HAVE TO PREPARE THEIR CAMBRIDGE EXAM

Today, The Stones and The Grandma have talked with MJ by Google Meet. They are in Honolulu and MJ is in Sant Boi de Llobregat preparing their A2 Cambridge Exam documentation.

The family is preparing this important exam in Hawaii without interferences and surrounded by a wonderful an amazing environment that helps them to study and understand all the English grammar that they are discovering.

They have reviewed Modal Verbs (Have to/Don't have to); Countable and Uncountable (Some/Any) and they have started to prepare their own stories to pass their Cambridge speaking.

The University of Cambridge, legal name The Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Cambridge, is a collegiate research university in Cambridge, England.

Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by King Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's fourth-oldest surviving university.

The university grew out of an association of scholars who left the University of Oxford after a dispute with the townspeople. The two English ancient universities share many common features and are often referred to jointly as Oxbridge.

Cambridge is formed from a variety of institutions which include 31 semi-autonomous constituent colleges and over 150 academic departments, faculties and other institutions organised into six schools.

All the colleges are self-governing institutions within the university, each controlling its own membership and with its own internal structure and activities.

More information: Have to/Don't have to

All students are members of a college. Cambridge does not have a main campus, and its colleges and central facilities are scattered throughout the city. Undergraduate teaching at Cambridge is organised around weekly small-group supervisions in the colleges –a feature unique to the Oxbridge system. These are supported by classes, lectures, seminars, laboratory work and occasionally further supervisions provided by the central university faculties and departments. Postgraduate teaching is provided predominantly centrally.

Cambridge University Press, a department of the university, is the oldest university press in the world and currently the second largest university press in the world.

Cambridge Assessment, also a department of the university, is one of the world's leading examining bodies and provides assessment to over eight million learners globally every year.

The university also operates eight cultural and scientific museums, including the Fitzwilliam Museum, as well as a botanic garden. Cambridge's libraries, of which there are 116, hold a total of around 16 million books, around nine million of which are in Cambridge University Library, a legal deposit library.

The university is home to, but independent of, the Cambridge Union -the world's oldest debating society. The university is closely linked to the development of the high-tech business cluster known as Silicon Fen. It is the central member of Cambridge University Health Partners, an academic health science centre based around the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.

Cambridge has educated many notable alumni, including eminent mathematicians, scientists, politicians, lawyers, philosophers, writers, actors, monarchs and other heads of state.

More information: Some/Any

As of October 2020, 121 Nobel laureates, 11 Fields Medalists, 7 Turing Award winners and 14 British prime ministers have been affiliated with Cambridge as students, alumni, faculty or research staff. University alumni have won 194 Olympic medals.

By the late 12th century, the Cambridge area already had a scholarly and ecclesiastical reputation, due to monks from the nearby bishopric church of Ely. However, it was an incident at Oxford which is most likely to have led to the establishment of the university: three Oxford scholars were hanged by the town authorities for the death of a woman, without consulting the ecclesiastical authorities, who would normally take precedence and pardon the scholars in such a case, but were at that time in conflict with King John.

Fearing more violence from the townsfolk, scholars from the University of Oxford started to move away to cities such as Paris, Reading, and Cambridge. Subsequently, enough scholars remained in Cambridge to form the nucleus of a new university when it had become safe enough for academia to resume at Oxford.

In order to claim precedence, it is common for Cambridge to trace its founding to the 1231 charter from King Henry III granting it the right to discipline its own members (ius non-trahi extra) and an exemption from some taxes; Oxford was not granted similar rights until 1248.

A bull in 1233 from Pope Gregory IX gave graduates from Cambridge the right to teach everywhere in Christendom. After Cambridge was described as a studium generale in a letter from Pope Nicholas IV in 1290, and confirmed as such in a bull by Pope John XXII in 1318, it became common for researchers from other European medieval universities to visit Cambridge to study or to give lecture courses.

More information: University of Cambridge

Cambridge is one of the best universities in the world,
especially in my field.

Stephen Hawking