S1 E5: Dark Annie and the Demon Drink

shares with Annie and their two children. He takes a nip of hot whiskey to fortify himself and then kisses Annie goodbye. That kiss is Annie Chapman's undoing. It sets in motion a sequence of events that ends in her vicious murder on the streets of Whitechapel. I'm Hallie, Rubin hold you're listening to Bad Women. The Ripper retold, a series about the real lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper and how we got their stories so wrong. One side, money plenty and friends too by the score.

Then fortune smilder upon me, No one pass my almy, and not we sees to lie. Annie Eliza Smith was born in September eighteen forty one, the one which day we don't know. She was illegitimate, and so perhaps her mother Ruth, attempted to hide the facts of her birth. Once Ruth's pregnancy became known, she likely lost her position as a servant. After all, no employer could keep such a woman. She was now dependent on the baby's father,

George Smith, for meager and irregular handouts. George was a trooper in the Lifeguards, one of the most prestigious cavalry regiments in the land. They were bodyguards to the royal household and were never far from Queen Victoria herself. Still, his wages were poor. The Army encouraged its soldiers to pursue monogamous relationships with good working class girls, but oddly it discouraged actual marriage, permitting only six and every hundred

men to wed. The army therefore consigned a raft of women to the status of dollymop, a soldier's girl who could never hope to be a soldier's wife. Annie's mother was now in a most precarious position. If George were transferred abroad, she would be left with no money, children to support, and a sullied reputation. Fortunately, even miraculously George received permission to marry Ruth. Their nuptials were even helpfully backdated in the military records should anyone inquire, They were

wed before the birth of their first child. At first, the young family lived in the army barracks, but this was neither healthy nor pleasant for them. Annie spent the first part of her childhood living in a corner of a communal room that was screened off with hanging sheets and blankets. Women here were afforded little dignity. She was as common as a barber's chair, in which how parish

seek to be trained. Regimental wives dressed and undressed, lay in bed, washed, gave birth and breastfed, surrounded by single men who strode about half naked, swearing, jeering, and singing glued songs. Sanitation was not much better. Many barracks dormitories were damp, poorly lit, and unhygienic. In some large barrels were used as communal chamber plots. These were then emptied and reused for bathing. Over the years, Annie was joined

by five more siblings. The Smith children were able to make use of the regimental school, a luxury for working class children. The cost of being a trooper was a life full of disruption. Regiments were rotated between barracks, often at short notice. The Smith family lived at no fewer than twelve addresses in London and in the town of Windsor, in the shadow of the royal family's residence, a huge castle just west of the city. In each of these

dozen homes, Annie snatched glimpses of another world. She witnessed from afar, an existence of status, privilege, and extraordinary wealth. The sight of carriages filled with ladies in expensive silk bonnets and titled gentlemen, their uniforms clanking with medals were an ordinary occurrence. Occasionally she might even have caught a glimpse of Queen Victoria or a royal prince trotting by

an horseback. Though she orbited the outermost edges of this world, any actual privilege was tempered by the meagerness of her father's salary. Annie's daily realities were that of a working class child in London. The Smith's living quarters were dismal on down at Hill Raphael Street. They lived in a cramped house that had been carved up and portioned out to accommodate two other families. A child down the street

the palm. The child got sick first. He was not quite eighteen months old when scarlet fever claimed his life. Easily treated today, this bacterial infection was deadly to young Victorians. The disease crept through the poorous plaster walls and crowded rooms of Raphael Street and soon came to settle in the Smith family home. Miriam Smith sickened first. The two year olds giggling and prattling gave way to fever and crying,

and then silence. The baby, William succumbed next. Scarlet fever then claimed the life of Ely, just five years old. And then a new epidemic arrived, Typhus bread among young and old without distinction. It was transmitted through the bites of the fleas and light that infested the clothes, blankets, and bedding shared by people living in close quarters. What George and Root thought when their eldest son began to

sicken cannot even be imagined. The Smiths summoned a doctor whose fees they could not afford, and the boy was diagnosed with typhus and died. In the span of just three weeks. Disease had carried away four of the six children. This calamity cast deep shadows over the lives of the remaining Smiths. The death of children was an unavoidable aspect of Victorian working class life, but this did not render the experience any easier. Somehow, though, the family managed to

move forward. Annie grew into an adult with wavy, dark brown hair and an intense blue eyed gaze. In eighteen sixty one, she gained a position as a housemaid for a successful architect in the affluent London district of Westminster, the political heart of the vast British Empire. This was grueling labor. She cleaned, dishes, made the beds, hauled buckets of coal up flights of stairs, lit fires, dusted, scrubbed, drew water for baths, polished boots, mended clothing for her

owls are toiling. Annie was poorly paid, and as a living domestic, she was also isolated. She had few opportunities to see her family. Meanwhile, George Smith's fortunes took a turn. He became a valet to one of his officers. In this role, he maintained the clothes that Captain Thomas nayler leyland. The position placed him in the top rank of the servant hierarchy alongside the butler and the cook. Much like Annie, working in domestic service meant that George saw little of

his emily. This estrangement from his wife and children, as well as all that he had known in the cavalry, began to bear down on him. For roughly twenty one years, the army had beaten out the march to which the Smith family moved. The regiment had formed a unique, closed clan like community. But now that George was a valet, he was adrift. He also had more time to himself than ever when not tending to his master. He could read and think without the immediate distractions of his family

or other soldiers. And there were surely many subjects he did not wish to ponder. Undoubtedly the deaths of his four children were among them. He started drinking. In June eighteen sixty three, matters came to a head. Leyland was attending the cavalry races in Wales, and George was accompanying him. George was said to be quite cheerful when he retired to his room at their lodgings. The next morning. When George did not appear at breakfast, the landlady of the inn,

went upstairs and knocked on his door. He did not answer. She pushed it open and found George's body on the floor, covered in blood. Following the discovery of George Smith's body, an official investigation into his death was swiftly launched, swift so as not to interrupt the horse races George's master had come to enjoy. The inquiry found that Annie's father had cut his own throat while laboring under temporary insanity.

Drink was also thought to be a contributing factor. Captain Leyland paid the funeral expenses and headed back to the race track overnight. The Smith family lost George's income. His army pension also expired with his death, and yet the situation did not end in ruin for Ruther her children. Perhaps Captain Dayland made a donation to Ruth because by the following year she had taken the lease on an adequately sized home in a nice part of London and

was letting out rooms to lodgers. One day, a coach driver named John Chapman arrived at the door and inquired about lodgings. Perhaps Annie met John in the kitchen of her mother's home and something blossomed between them. When John proposed to Annie, it was her great moment, a chance to make a success of her own life, to become all that society had intended for her, a wife and

a mother who just hold still now. Like many Victorian newlyweds, the Chapman's arranged to have a photograph taken dressed in their Sunday best. In the photograph, John leans with casual authority against a wood and plaster plymph. Annie wears a checkered gown. Her dark hair is fashionably braided, and her large blue eyes staring intently at the camera. Both wear

stern expressions. The Chapmans had two daughters who were photographed too, clad in tart and dresses and striped stockings, their hair and ribbons. John and Annie's desire to own such an expensive photograph speaks to their hopes for a more prosperous life. Annie had done well to marry a gentleman's coachman, and his salary enabled the couple to set aside money that, in turn fan the flames of their aspirations. Annie likely

enjoyed certain middle class pleasures and privileges. Daily walks passed the twinkling gas lit shop windows with their colorful displays of the latest hats, shoes and jewelry. She strolled busy London thoroughfares that rattled with the carriages of statesmen and society beauties. She may even have bought herself an occasional trinket. John now accepted a position as the coachman to Francis Tressberry, a gentleman of considerable wealth with a grand country estate

called Saint Leonard's Hill. The Chapman's could not have hoped for a more promising opportunity, aspiration was not limited to those on the cusp of the middle class industrialist. Berry had made his fortune in mining, and now he sought society's recognition too. His move to Saint Leonard's Hill, which was adjacent to the royal residence of Windsor Castle, was an obvious strategy to place himself under the Queen's nose.

Chapman had been hired not only to drive Berry's coach, but also to supervise the running of his stable block, which was home to no fewer than thirty horses. The position came with a house, too. Annie had been accustomed to cramped dwellings the Coachman's three bedroomed cottage was a home of an entirely different scale. Annie even hired a day servant to help with some of the more laborious homemaking tasks. The Chapman's elder daughter was placed in a

high respectable school for young ladies. They had officially entered the middle class. When the census was recorded in spring eighteen eighty one, Annie was visiting her mother in London. John was still at Saint Leonard's Hill, and he listed his profession as coachman or domestic servant. Annie Chapman, on the other hand, described herself as the wife of a

stud groom, a significant step up from coachman. Possibly John's responsibilities now included the purchase of breeding and racing stock for Barry, but Annie's grand self identification also speaks volumes. The landed gentry venerated the stud groom who had his master's ear in respect, and with this might breach the class divide. At the same time, Barry was making leaps

and bounds in his own social assent. In eighteen eighty one he entertained a royal party dukes, earls and the Prince of Wales, the future King descended on Saint Leonard's Hill. Annie would have watched this magnificent spectacle unfold, the ladies in their frilled, feathered bonnets and veils, the rotund Prince of Wales beneath his hat and triangular beard. Barry was firmly in the Prince's circle now, and the sounds of merrymaking, music and laughter would have blown down from the grand

house to the Chapman's little home. Were Annie's children slumbered in their own bedrooms. This might have been Annie's story in its entirety. It might have ended in quiet, middle class comfort on a gentleman's estate. Her daughters may have grown up and married middle class men. Constancy and contentment might have defined the courses of all of their lives. Had Annie Chapman not been an alcoholic, the ripper be told we'll be back in just a moment, Just like today,

Alcoholism addiction is universalizing, right. It's not just lower class people. It wasn't just the poor. It isn't just the poor and the working class now, people of all classes suffer from addiction. Julia Skelly teaches art history at McGill University in Montreal and studies addiction in Victorian culture. I came

to the topic as a recovering alcoholic. I got sober in two thousand and six, when I was twenty three, just before I started my PhD. We can't say for sure, but it's likely that Annie's discovery of the pacifying effects of the bottle began with the devastating loss of her siblings to scarlet fever and typhus, and her placement in domestic service shortly afterwards. For a time, Annie was successful in hiding her alcoholism within the confines of her own home,

but she couldn't hide it from her family. Again and again, they tried to persuade Annie to give up drinking. Again and again, she returned to alcohol. In Annie Chapman's day, alcohol was almost impossible to avoid a household like Annie's stopped wines and spirits as a treatment for headaches, colds, fevers, toothaches,

or to rub on the gums of teething children. Most shot bought curatives were principally based in alcohol, and medicines also tended to contain addictive substances like laudanum, a solution of opium, or even cocaine. Their frequent usage ended in dependency. One of the challenges of recovering from addiction at this time was, of course, the mixed messages that in order to cure alcoholism you could take a little cocaine, or to cure addiction to cocaine, you could take a little

something else. One addictive substance was bad, another addictive substance could help you with your other addiction. Often, the tendency for Victorian wives to drink was precipitated by a sense of loneliness. This was the paradox of upwards social mobility. With the children away at school and a maid to do the housework, Annie spent a lot of time alone at home unoccupied. She was also far from her mother and sisters, which only increased her isolation and boredom, and

in turn her itch to self medicate with alcohol. In the nineteenth century, various physicians began to argue that addiction alcoholism was a disease, and one of the reasons physicians were attempting to do that was too empty addiction of the shame associated with sin and moral failing. At the same time, though alcoholism and drunkenness was being criminalized, despite attempts to categorize it as a disease. In the eighteen

seventies and eighties, addiction had sinister implications. Drunkenness was seen as a reflection of a person's degenerate character, their poor judgment, their moral weakness, their idleness. Women were held in particular contempt for their alcoholism. This is apparent and how they were depicted in the era's artwork. Audiences at the time would have recognized all these tropes, the haggard physiognomy, the messy hair, the dirty skin as indicators that this is

a female subject addicted to alcohol. This idea that a woman who is an alcoholic or addict is so out of it is so unfeminine that she doesn't even wash her face, that she doesn't even do her hair. She's unnatural.

Female alcoholics, female drinkers, female addicts have long been, if not have always been perceived as a much greater threat than male addicts and alcoholics because of those gender discourses around what is expected of a good woman, and that is of course being obedient, being quiet, being well behaved, and being a good wife and mother. Annie would have experienced devastating shame as a woman deemed unnatural. That story was so sad reading about Anny Chapman, because that life

trajectory still happens, right. A woman who wants to stop, who has many reasons to stop, and who cannot stop and stay stopped in terms of alcohol consumption, experiences shame that isolates her. And then there's that affective emotional suffering on top of the suffering induced by alcoholism. Mister and missus Chapman faced other tragedies. Two. Annie gave birth to eight children. According to Annie's sister, six of these were

victims to the curse of alcohol. Annie's eldest daughter initially appeared healthy, but by the time she was eight she was suffering from epileptic teasures. A second daughter lived no more than a day, was born with what is now known as fetal alcohol syndrome. Its hallmarks are apparent in that childhood photograph. Two other children died young. The Chapman's

last child, John Alfred, suffered from paralysis. It was obvious to Annie's family, and perhaps also to Annie, that her drinking was at the heart of this series of tragedies. This realization surely pushed Annie deeper into despair and furthered her inability to control her impulses. For their part, Annie's sisters repeatedly tried to get her to embrace teetotalism. They

were proponents of the temperance movement. So the temperance movement began around eighteen thirty, so it's already sixty odd years old when Jack the Ripper was killing women again, very much a religious model right where in temperance was a sin, was a moral failing. So one had to sign a temper prince pledge or an abstinence pledge saying I will not drink. Annie's sisters convinced her several times to sign this pledge, but they could not get her to adhere

to it. There was this expectation that once you signed the pledge, that should be enough, that should be enough to keep you from drinking again. And as we saw with Eddie Chapman, that is not the case. Alcoholism addiction does not just go away if you sign a piece of paper. If only it were so simple. In some ways, the movement just served to exacerbate the humiliation of alcoholics. It went hand in hand with the popular philosophy of self help, which blame poverty on an individual's own behavior

and lack of responsibility for their choices in life. A solemn promised to adhere to restriction of one's impulses was supposed to equate to conscious effort at moral improvement. The temperance movement did kind of function along the lines of shaming alcoholics and addicts, and again, this idea of what a woman should be doing right morally upright duly bound women attending to gendered expectations. It got worse when Annie's

elder daughter, Emily, began to sicken with meningitis. She turned to her usual source of comfort, the bottle, and she was not present at her daughter's bedside when she died. Annie's pain at this time was surely unbearable. By this point, she also had a reputation among the local police. Several times she was found drunk wandering between the surrounding villages. By all accounts, she was not an angry drunk, but rather sad, sullen and quiet, weighed down by her heartache.

We don't know where Annie was eventually found when Emily died, whether she was ensconced in a pub or perhaps swaying down the street, but her behavior was enough to raise serious alarm. Her family gained her admission to spell Town Sanatorium, an alcoholism treatment facility for middle class women. Those sanatoria were very much designed as homes, so they were decorated as domestic spaces, and the idea was these women were expected to do feminine activities to get fresh air, exercise,

to embroider. That was the treatment developed for women of this class, with the idea that they would return to again this kind of natural femininity. There wasn't kind of a dealing with the actual problem of addiction or indeed what may have been causing the consumption of alcohol. Chapman clearly suffered trauma. Right now a day's there's much more attention to the root problem, whereas in the nineteenth century, middle of upper class women who were identified as alcoholics

just needed to be reminded of their duties. Annie spent a year at Spelthorne. Her name is not recorded in the log books. Among the occasional troublemakers, the women who found giving up alcohol nearly impossible, who tore up their clothing, destroyed furniture, or lashed out in violence, it seemed that Annie's time at the sanatorium was relatively quiet. She was released in December eighteen eighty three and able to return home. According to Annie's sister, she was at this point a

changed woman, a sober wife and mother. Life rolled along for a few months, but what happened next sounds almost apocryphal, like a cautionary tale from a teetotalless handbook. One bit a day, Annie's husband, John, who was stricken with a cold, was getting ready for work. Duty compelled him to go out, so he took a fortifying glass of hot whiskey. When he kissed Annie goodbye, his lips carried the taste of

the alcohol, and all her cravings returned. Perhaps she turned over every room in the house looking for that bottle. In the end, she went out within an hour. She was drunk. Later, in words, redolent with the profound suffering of the chronic alcoholic, she told her sister, it is of no use. No one knows the fearful struggle. Unless I can keep out of sight and smell, I could never be free. Spelthorne had been intended to cure Annie, and this was the last straw John's employer could indulge.

Missus Chapman no longer. The berries now moved in the highest circles, and they could not afford the embarrassment of harboring a notorious and unpredictable inebriate on their grounds. Either Annie had to leave or John would be fired, and it was unlikely that he would find another job nearly as well paid. When John and Annie decided to part ways,

the decision was apparently an amicable one, though not without heartbreak. John, who was devoted to his wife, made arrangements to pay her ten shillings a week, a sum higher than a female factory worker might expect. He almost certainly intended for her to return to her mother's home. That sum would not only assist Annie's mother with the upkeep of the house, it would afford his wife a few of the middle class luxuries to which she was accustomed perfumed soaps and

inexpensive jewelry. Perhaps John believed that with the support of her mother and her devoted sisters, Annie might just be all right. But John's well intentioned scheme did not last long. The ripper retold were returned shortly. It was almost impossible for Annie to live in her mother's home. Her family didn't tolerate her drinking, and her shame made a relationship with them almost impossible to bear. Ultimately, Annie chose a life without those she loved rather than one without the

substance she craved. Shame is an incredibly powerful affect right. It controls people, It isolates people, It is incredibly destructive as an emotion, and it is contagious. It wouldn't have just been Annie Chapman who felt ashamed of her alcoholism. Her sisters, her mother felt ashamed by proxy, because the society culture told all of them that they should be ashamed of Annie, that Annie should be ashamed of herself.

The shame discourse, which is absolutely still circulating today around addiction, keeps people from saying to someone I struggle with addiction and I need help. For historian Julia Skelly, this stigma sealed Annie's fate. In isolating her, it all but delivered her into the hands of the ripper. If the shaming discourse had not existed at the time, she would have been able to stay with her husband, right. She wouldn't

have been told you have to leave. The employers found her offensive, and so she was exiled right and thus became incredibly, incredibly vulnerable to violence. It's difficult to fathom the emotional despair that Annie must now have felt she had proven her inability to mother her children, to maintain a home for her husband, even to care for herself. Eventually Annie left her mother's home. She was now a lone woman, a precarious position that demanded that she find

a male partner. Because she was still legally married to John. This meant adultery, but it hardly mattered. She was already considered to be morally ruined. Annie probably met Jack Siveey in a pub, his name reflecting his occupation as a sid maker. They became a pair, bonding over their shared love of drink, and moved to Whitechapel together in search of work. All that remained of Annie's former identity, the wife of a gentleman's coachman, the mother of two children,

was left behind in Whitechapel. She was only ever known as Annie Sivvey, Missus Sivee, or occasionally Dark Annie. On account of her wavy brown hair now streaked with gray, she spoke little of her past. Mister and Missus Sivee found lodgings at number thirty Dorset Street, where Amelia Palmer and her husband also lived. Amelia remarked that in spite of her circumstances. Annie remained a very spectable woman. She

was straightforward, clever and industrious when she was sober. When she could, she sold her embroidery and crochet work at a local market. She never used bad language. Jack Sivie brought in an income, and failing that, Annie had her allowance from John to fall back on. This might have paid for a better room elsewhere, as well as for food and coal. Instead, it paid for alcohol, at least until December eighteen eighty six. That month, without warning, Annie's

weekly payments stopped. She was alarmed. John, she soon learned, was gravely unwell. This news shook Annie and she was determined to see her husband again. In the midst of winter, she set off on a thirty mile journey on foot, trekking across London and into the frozen countryside. She didn't know John's precise new address, and so she called in at a pub, the Mary Wives of Windsor. The manager later described her as a wretched looking woman, having the

appearance of a tramp. But he knew where John lived and he pointed Annie in the right direction. Their reunion was surely a bitter one. Annie's addiction and the collapse of their marriage had felled John completely shortly before his death at just forty five. He was white haired and brokenhearted. He seems to have taken to drinking two. Annie did not linger long enough to witness John's death. Upon her return to Whitechapel, Annie said Amelia was never the same again.

Jack Sivey soon left her. She was also increasing the unwell and becoming a pitiful case. Her life was marked by drink and despondency, by hunger and sickness, and she appeared to be suffering from tuberculosis, which eventually began to ravage her brain tissue. Annie's mother and siblings gave her small amounts of money. She also began a relationship with a new man who paid for her to spend a few nights a week at a lodging house. She likely

spent the other nights sleeping on the street. On September seventh, eighteen eighty eight, Amelia Palmer encountered Annie Lingering on Dorset Street and asked if she would be selling her crochet work at a local market that weekend. Annie answered, wearily, I am too ill to do anything. She recognized the gravity of her own situation, though and told Amelia that she had to pull herself together and get some money for a bed in a lodging house, But by nightfall

she was still short. At one forty five a m. She pleaded with the deputy manager of her usual lodging house for a bed. He declined to extend her any credit. Annie was not quite willing to admit defeat. Keep my bed for me A shan't be long. Perhaps this was simply a show of pride. Ill and drunk, She lingered in the lodging house doorway, considering her options. Before stepping out into the night. She wove her way through the black whitechapel streets and found that the gate to twenty

nine Hanbury Street was unlocked. She would have been familiar with this yard and known that the gap between the steps and the fence was an ideal spot in which to curl up. She would have been relieved to find it vacant. It offered solitude and some semblance of shelter. Annie Chapman needn't have been on the street that night. This is part of the tragedy of her story. She might have stayed at her mother's house or rested in her sister's care on the other side of London. She

might have lain in hospital receiving treatment for tuberculosis. She might have even been comforted by the embrace of her children. At every turn a hand had reached to pull her from the abyss, but the counter tug of addiction had been more forceful, and the isolating grip of shame just as strong. It was this that had severed her ties with her family and pulled her under. Annie Chapman, curled up in that yard, had led a miserable and blighted life.

That life was about to be snuffed out. Bad Women, The Ripper Were Told is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me Hallie Rubbinhold, and is based on my book The Five. It was produced and co written by Ryan Dilley and Alice Fines, with help from Pete Norton. Pascal Wise Sound designed and mixed the show and composed all the original music. You also heard the voice talents of Soul Boyer, Melanie Gutridge, Gemma Saunders and rufus Wright.

The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of mil La Belle, Jacob Weisberg, Jen Guerra, Heather Fane, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, and Daniella Lacane were special thanks to my agents Sarah Ballard and Ellie Karn