Shadows of Whitechapel: Elizabeth "Long Liz" Stride, The Mysterious Path That Led to Whitechapel

Elizabeth "Long Liz" Stride © public domain

Everyone knows the terror that ripped through the East End, in 1888, but many forget the victims and who they were: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. Each of these women was a living, breathing person with a unique history and story.

Here I have tried to piece together the lives of the women who would go on to become known as 'The Canonical Five', resulting in a small glimpse into their lives. There is much that I have left out, but what I believe to be the important pieces of their lives are here.

Obviously, with census records, online records, books, newspaper articles, archives and much more, there are discrepancies and contradictory accounts, resulting in confusing timelines.

So, where there has been contradictory information, I have left that out, or bracketed the information, so that I could create the most accurate account of their lives.

If you do spot an error, please do get in contact.

Elizabeth Stride, known as "Long Liz"(née Gustafsdotter; November 27, 1843 – September 30, 1888)

Early Life and the Voyage from Gothenburg

Elisabeth Gustafsdotter was born on Friday, November 27, 1843, on a small, traditional farm in Torslanda, just west of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her parents, Gustaf Ericsson and Beata Carlsdotter, worked the land relentlessly to provide for Elisabeth and her three siblings. Life in rural Sweden was dictated by the seasons, heavily agrarian, and deeply religious.

By the early 1860s, seeking independence and a reprieve from rural poverty, Elisabeth moved to the bustling port city of Gothenburg. Working as a domestic servant, she was exposed to the harsh complexities of urban life. It was during this period that her life took its first difficult turn; by 1865, she was registered by the local authorities as a registered domestic worker who had fallen into sex work to survive, a common safety net for young, ununioned women of the era. Seeking a completely fresh start and a blank slate, Elisabeth used her meager savings to buy passage across the North Sea. On February 7, 1866, she officially registered her relocation to London.

Upon arriving in the capital, she immersed herself in the vibrant immigrant community surrounding the Swedish Church in Prince’s Square, Whitechapel. Clean, blonde, and possessing a quiet dignity, she quickly anglicised her name to Elizabeth. On Sunday, March 7, 1869, she married John Thomas Stride, a ship’s carpenter who was thirteen years her senior.

The Coffee Shop and the Thames Myth

The early years of the Stride marriage represented a period of genuine, hard-won respectability. Together, Elizabeth and John opened a modest coffee room at 68 Chrisp Street in the bustling Docklands district of Poplar. To the local dockworkers and sailors, the Strides were a successful, industrious couple. Elizabeth relished the stability: she had a home, a legitimate business, and a respected position in the community.

However, the tide turned abruptly in the mid-1870s. The business began to fail under the weight of intense local competition and economic decline. Compounding the financial ruin, the marriage fractured under the strain of mutual recriminations. In later years, Elizabeth would frequently tell a tragic tale to anyone who would listen: she claimed that her husband and two of their children had tragically drowned in the horrific 'Princess Alice' paddle steamer disaster on the Thames in 1878. While historically evocative, records show the couple never had children. The story was likely a coping mechanism, a respectable, tragic explanation for a deeply painful and messy marital breakdown. By 1881, the couple had separated permanently, and John Stride died in a workhouse infirmary three years later.

The Whitechapel Rooms and the Final Night

Following the separation, Elizabeth gravitated toward the cheap, transient lodging houses of Flower and Dean Street, the absolute heart of the Whitechapel slums. To survive, she took to sewing, cleaned lodging house rooms, relied on charity from the Swedish Church, and occasionally returned to the streets when her funds ran dry. She entered into a volatile, on-off relationship with a local labourer named Michael Kidney, but his aggressive nature frequently drove her back to the safety of the communal lodging kitchens. Despite her hardships, Elizabeth was remembered by her contemporaries as a quiet, clean woman who was generally pleasant when sober.

On the afternoon of Saturday, September 29, 1888, Elizabeth earned a small amount of money by cleaning the rooms of the lodging house at 32 Flower and Dean Street. Dressed neatly in a dark jacket and skirt, with a fresh flower pinned to her lapel, she went out into the rainy autumn night.

Around 11:00 p.m., she was seen drinking with a man in the Queen’s Head public house on Commercial Street. Despite the damp chill, Elizabeth appeared to be in good spirits. At 12:45 a.m. on Sunday, September 30, a passerby noticed her talking with a man outside Dutfield’s Yard, a dark, narrow alleyway off Berner Street used primarily by Jewish socialist workers.

At exactly 1:00 a.m., Louis Diemschutz, a travelling salesman driving a barrow into the pitch-black yard, discovered the body of Elizabeth Stride. Her throat had been cut just moments prior. 

She was buried in a quiet ceremony at the East London Cemetery on Saturday, October 6, 1888, far from the rural Swedish fields of her youth.