London's Unfortunates, as prostitutes were called by the press, police, and the public, did not drift along the cold, dirty, dark streets in search of the "thrill," despite the belief of many Victorians that prostitutes wanted to be prostitutes because of their insatiable sexual appetites. If they would give up their evil ways and turn to God, they would be blessed with bread and shelter. God took care of His own, so the Salvation Army said when its women volunteers braved the East End slums and handed out little cakes and promises from the Lord. Unfortunates such as Martha Tabran would gratefully take the cake and then take to the streets.
Without a man to support her, a woman had scant means of keeping herself or her children alive. Employment - if a woman could find it - meant working six twelve-hour days making coats in sweatshops for the equivalent of twenty-five cents a week. If she was lucky, it meant earning seventy-five cents a week for seven fourteen-hour days gluing together match boxes. Most of the wages went to greedy slumlords, and sometimes the only food came from mother and children searching the streets or picking through garbage for festering fruit and vegetables.
Sailors from foreign ships anchored at the nearby docks, military men, and the upper-class male clandestinely on the prowl made it all too easy for a desperate woman to rent out her body for a few coins until it became as dilapidated as the vermin-infested ruins where the people of the East End dwelled. Malnutrition, alcoholism, and physical abuse reduced a woman to shambles quickly, and the Unfortunate slid lower in the pecking order. She sought out the darkest, most remote streets, stairwells, and courtyards, both she and her client usually falling-down drunk.
Alcohol was the easiest way to not be present, and a disproportionate number of people of "The Abyss," as writer Jack London called the East End, were alcoholics. Probably all Unfortunates were. They were diseased and old beyond their years, cast out by husbands and children, and unable to accept Christian charity because it did not include drink. These pitiful women frequented public houses - pubs - and asked men to treat them to drinks. Business usually followed.
No matter the weather, Unfortunates haunted the night like nocturnal animals, in wait for any man, no matter how rough or disgusting, who might be enticed into parting with pennies for pleasure. Preferably, sex was performed standing up, with the prostitute gathering her many layers of clothing and lifting them out of the way, her back to her client. If she was lucky, he was too drunk to know that his penis was being inserted between her thighs and not into any orifice.
Martha Tabran fell behind in her rent after Henry Turner walked out on her. Her whereabouts since aren't clear, but one might guess she was in and out of common lodging houses, or if she had a choice between a bed and a drink, she most likely took the drink and dozed in doorways, in parks, and on the street, continually chased off by the police. Martha spent the nights of August 4th and 5th in a common lodging house on Dorset Street, just south of a music hall on Commercial Street.
At eleven o'clock this bank holiday night of August 6th, Martha met up with Mary Ann Connolly, who went by the alias of Pearly Poll. The weather had been unpleasant all day, overcast and unsettled as the temperature continued to drop to an unseasonable fifty-two degrees. Afternoon fog was followed by a thick mist that obscured the new moon and was forecast to last until seven o'clock the next morning. But the two women were used to unpleasant conditions and might have been miserably uncomfortable but rarely vulnerable to hypothermia. It was the habit of Unfortunates to walk about in everything they owned. If one did not have a permanent residence, to leave belongings in a lodging house was to lose them to a thief.
The late hour was lively and alcohol flowed freely as Londoners stretched out what was left of their day off from labor. Most plays and musicals had begun at 8:15 and would have let out by now, and many theatergoers and other adventurers in horse-drawn taxis and on foot braved the mist-shrouded streets in search of refreshment and other entertainment. Visibility in the East End was poor under the best conditions. Gaslights were few and spaced far apart. They gave out smudges of illumination, and shadows were impenetrable. It was the world of the Unfortunate, a continuum of sleeping away days and getting up to drink before venturing out into another numbing night of sordid and dangerous employment.
Fog made no difference unless the pollution was especially high and the acrid air stung the eyes and lungs. At least when it was foggy, one didn't have to notice whether a client was pleasant in appearance or even see his face. Nothing about the client mattered anyway, unless he was inclined to take a personal interest in an Unfortunate and supply her with room and food. Then he was of consequence, but virtually no client was of consequence when one was past her prime, dirty, dressed like a pauper, and scarred or missing teeth. Martha Tabran preferred to dissolve into the mist and get it over with for a farthing, another drink, and maybe another farthing and a bed.
The events leading to her murder are well documented and considered reliable unless one is inclined to feel, as I do, that the recollections of a hard-drinking prostitute named Pearly Poll might lack a certain clarity and veracity. If she didn't outright lie when she was interviewed by the police and later when she testified at the coroner's inquest on August 23rd, she was probably confused and suffering from alcohol-induced amnesia. Pearly Poll was frightened. She told police she was so upset that she might just drown herself in the Thames.
During the inquest, Pearly Poll was reminded several times that she was under oath as she testified that on August 6th, at 10:00 P.M., she and Martha Tabran began drinking with two soldiers in Whitechapel. The couples went their separate ways at 11:45. Pearly Poll told the coroner and jurors that she went up Angel Court with the "corporal," while Martha headed toward George Yard with the "private," and that both soldiers wore white bands around their caps. The last time Pearly Poll saw Martha and the private, they were walking toward the dilapidated tenement housing of George Yard Buildings on Commercial Street, in the dark heart of East End slums. Pearly Poll claimed nothing out of the ordinary happened while she had been with Martha that night. Their encounter with the soldiers had been pleasant enough. There had been no fighting or arguments, nothing at all that might have set off even the faintest alarm in either Pearly Poll or Martha, who certainly had seen it all and had survived the streets a long time for good reason.
Pearly Poll claimed to know nothing about what happened to Martha after 11:45 P.M., nor is there any record of what Pearly Poll herself was up to after she slipped away with her corporal for "immoral purposes."
When she learned that Martha had been murdered, Pearly Poll might have had cause to worry about her own welfare and to think twice about giving too much information to the coppers. She wouldn't put it past those boys in blue to listen to her story and then send her to prison as "a scapegoat for five thousand of her class." Pearly Poll was to stick to her story: She had ended up in Angel Court, a good mile's walk from where she left Martha, and inside the City of London. The City was not under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police.
For a wily, street-smart prostitute to place herself outside the legal reach of the Metropolitan Police was to encourage the constables and investigators to avoid turning the case into a complicated, competitive multijurisdictional investigation. The City of London - better known as "the Square Mile" - is an ornery oddity that can be traced back to 1 A.D. when the Romans founded the city on the banks of the Thames. The City remains a city unto itself with its own municipal services and government, including its own police force, which today serves a resident population of 6,000 - a number that swells to more than a quarter of a million during business hours.