GEORGE HUTCHINSON

Death in the Colliery
By PAUL WILLIAMS
In 1887 a woman calling herself Marie Kelly told her boyfriend that she grew up in Wales and
married a collier at the age of 16, then became a widow two or three years later when her husband
died in an explosion. She was believed to be 25 years-old in 1888, dating the explosion to c.1882.
In that year a woman called Maria Kelly became a widow when her husband died in an explosion
at a Welsh colliery. This essay explores the possibility of a connection between these two events.
Marie Kelly, better known as Mary Jane and a victim of Jack
the Ripper, has never been identified. Our knowledge of her
background comes almost entirely from her ex-partner Joseph
Barnett, who provided a witness statement and testified at the
inquest. 1 Allowing for minor differences between the two pieces
of evidence, the gist of the story is as follows. He knew the
victim as Marie Kelly and had lived with her for about eighteen
months. She told him she was 25-years-old and born in Limerick.
She moved to Wales when very young and her father, John Kelly,
worked as a foreman or gauger at an ironworks in Carmarthenshire
or Caernarvonshire. Marie left home about four years earlier.
Joe Barnett at Mary Kelly's inquest
She married a collier, whom Barnett thought was called Davies
or Davis, at the age of sixteen. He died in an explosion two or
three years later. Marie went to a cousin in Cardiff and followed
a bad life, spending eight to nine months in an infirmary. Next
she moved to a West End brothel where a gentleman took her to
France but she did not stay more than two weeks. Then she went
to Ratcliffe Highway and to Stepney where she lived near the
gasworks with a man named Morganstone. This was in Pennington
Street where she met a mason’s plasterer called Joseph Fleming,
whom she was very fond of.
Her family included six brothers at home and one in the army, plus a sister who travelled between marketplaces,
selling materials. Barnett never met any of the brothers. One, Henry, was serving in the 2nd Battalion, Scots
Guards and was known to his colleagues as Johnto. His regiment was in Ireland.
Parts of this tale are supported by other sources. Kelly was known to others in the neighbourhood by that
surname, but first name 'Mary'. The day after the murder Mrs Elizabeth Phoenix went to the police and said that
a woman matching Kelly’s description used to live in her brother-in-law’s house at Breezer’s Hill, off Pennington
Street. Mrs Phoenix said that Kelly claimed to be Welsh and that her parents who lived in Cardiff had discarded
her, but sometimes she claimed to be Irish. 2 The press investigated further and reported that Kelly made the
1 Witness statement of Joseph Barnett, S P Evans and K Skinner, The Ultimate Jack the Ripper Sourcebook, Constable and Robinson,
2001, p.404. Inquest Papers, Ibid., p.409-10.
2 Morning Advertiser, 12 November 1888, Casebook, accessed 8 August 2015.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 46