The Real Mary Kelly by Wynne Weston-Davies Read Free Book Online Page A

the mapmaking enterprise or the ventilation business – because it was apparently he who bought the house to which the family moved, 2 Redmore Road, not far from the Broadway, the new commercial centre of Hammersmith. It is perhaps more likely that his parents, realising that their life expectancy was limited, bought the house and settled it on Francis to provide a secure future for him after they had gone. Francis is shown as the owner in 1878 but by 1880 E.T. is also resident and shown as paying his son five shillings a week to rent two unfurnished rooms on the first floor. Such an arrangement was not unusual at the time because the Representation of the People Act of 1867 had given the vote to any man over the age of 21 who either owned or rented and occupied property worth more than £10 a year. By paying his son five shillings a week E.T. was effectively also buying his right to vote.
    The Craigs stayed at 2 Redmore Road for the next seven years. Even though it was a substantial house on three floors, it must have been crowded for the 1881 census showed that they shared it with two other families, a total of nine people. Curiously, although Francis apparently owned the house, his father is shown as head of the household and a journalist in the 1881 census whilst Francis is merely a reporter. It is probably indicative of the subservient role that Francis played to his father throughout their lives but it also shows that he had been unable to find work as an editor in the six years since his sacking by the
Bucks Advertiser
.
    In 1884 the family moved to a smaller house a couple of streets away in Andover Road (since re-named Perrers Road). Despite his advancing years, E.T. threw himself once more into left-wing politics. In 1878 his old friend William Morris had bought a house on the Thames in Hammersmith which he re-named Kelmscott House. There he established a branch of the Socialist Democratic Federation, which met in the coach house every Sunday evening, and E.T. is known to have attended these
soirées
, almost certainly assisted on the mile walk to and from Andover Road by Francis.
    And there Francis might have remained – living the life of a low profile reporter on the local newspapers, helping his father to pack and dispatch the health salts, massage rollers and barbells which they now sold by mail order and avoiding the human contact that he found so difficult – until, suddenly and mysteriously, Elizabeth came into his life.
    He loved Paris and Elizabeth was naturally keen to hear more about the city of which she could only pretend to be a citizen. Quite how it came about is impossible to say but soon after their first meeting Elizabeth found herself agreeing not only to visit the French capital in the company of this strange, reticent individual but also to becoming the wife of a man old enough to be her father.
    Elizabeth had just passed her 28th birthday but could pass for a woman five years’ younger and indeed she habitually deducted several years from her real age in official documents such as the census and her marriage certificate. For a woman in Victorian England it was an advanced age at which to still be unmarried and it is likely that she eagerly grasped at the unexpected opportunity. Francis no doubt told her that he was a journalist with high expectationsof soon becoming the editor of a newspaper. He probably did not tell her that he had been sacked in disgrace from his first appointment as editor nine years previously.
    However their meeting came about, it was a union doomed to failure. Francis probably saw it as a chance to live independently, free from what he felt was the overbearing influence of his parents, although in reality he was barely able to function without them. For Elizabeth it was an opportunity to marry and have children before it was too late and, perhaps, to travel to some of the exotic places that Francis told her about during their encounters in William Morris’s garden.