Frances was born at her family’s home in Southwark on September 17, 1859. Her father was a master bootmaker from Publow, Somerset, and her mother from Armagh, Ireland. The Coles already had two daughters, and their last child and only son would be born on August 30, 1862. Despite living together for eight years and raising a family, the Coles weren’t married.

Eventually the family moved to Bermondsey, where they all shared one room that also served to James’s workshop. Frances may have attended St. John’s Charity School at the nearby corner of Tooley Street and Potters Fields, although this cannot be verified as records have not survived.

The family still lived together at the 1871 census, after which Frances’s mother’s disappears from the records; afterwards James was unable to provide his family with the basic necessities of life and made his way to the nearby St. Mary Magdalen Workhouse. It is not known whether or not his children were with him.

Frances’s sister Selina was unmarried and pregnant in the spring of 1877 when she entered St. Olave’s Union Workhouse in Southwark and there gave birth to a daughter, who only lived for seven weeks. Frances, on the other hand, found a job as a trainee in the packing department of a soap and toiletries manufacturer at 65 Southwark Street, and moved into a nearby lodging house, giving her name as Coleman. Reportedly Frances soon advanced at Sinclair’s, and was promoted to the position of forewoman at a weekly wage of fifteen shillings.

Frances was around 22 when the 1881 census was taken, and still calling herself Coleman. She reported her occupation as “powder packer”. By now she had left her job at Sinclair’s and was working at Winifred Hora & Co., a small wholesale druggist company in the East End, located at 58 Minories Street. The company’s flagship product was Macord’s Transparent Waterproof Isinglass Plaster, but they also produced a variety of medicinal drugs and medicated powders for the wholesale and export market, packaging them in square glass bottles that were sealed with snug-fitting cork stoppers. Paper labels were then affixed to the bottles to identify the contents; Frances took turns between inserting the cork stoppers and applying the paper labels with glue.  She wasn’t a full time employee at Hora’s but a day laborer; some weeks she earned nothing at all. She remained there as an occasional day labourer for at least a few years but may have left the firm as early as 1883.

Frances never held a permanent job again, and no one knows when she first became involved with prostitution. After her murder in 1891, one newspaper reported that Frances had worked as a packer for nine years, and a night watchman at a doss house in Spitalfields – who knew her – suggested that she may not have become a full-time prostitute until as late as 1887. The deputy of the lodging house echoed a similar sentiment.

Frances never earned enough to escape the poverty of her surroundings, and her dingy clothes had become so worn that they kept her from being considered for any type of employment. She was quiet, almost aloof, and tried to avoid clients she considered “rough”. At some point she picked up the street name “Carroty Nell”.

James Thomas Sadler, a merchant seaman, who first met Frances around September 1889, noticed a steep decline in her circumstances when he returned from sea in February 1891. Her fall from grace, however, was a secret she did her best to keep from her family. She still visited her father in the Bermondsey Workhouse regularly, and kept up the pretence that she was living with an elderly woman in Richard Street, Commercial Road, and still working at the chemist’s in the Minories. Her sister Mary Ann sensed something was awry, noticed that she poor and looked dirty, and thought she could detect alcohol on her breath on many occasions.

The landlady at Frances’s lodgings sometimes let her spend the night even though she couldn’t pay for the bed, but by early January 1891 it was happening too often and they had no choice but to turn her away. Now, her only option was to seek shelter in the lowest and meanest doss houses.

The last time Frances saw her father was on Friday, February 6 1891, a week before her murder. She apparently revealed the fact that she had left her position at the chemist’s, but she told him that she was still renting a room in the home of a respectable older woman at 32 Richard Street. 

Sadler was discharged from his ship on February 11 1891, and made his way toward Commercial Street and The Princess Alice pub, where he met up with Frances. They went on to a pub on Old Montague Street, and afterwards to The Swan on Whitechapel Road. They spent the next day barhopping across the area, and at around 4:00pm Frances and Sadler went into The Bell, at Middlesex Street, at the City. They remained there for about an hour, and when they left they went separate ways. Frances walked around the corner to a coffee house on Wentworth Street, where a few minutes later Sadler joined her; according to a witness they were both perfectly sober at this point, but their next stop was a pub called The Marlborough Head on Brick Lane. There is some question as to exactly what the two of them had to drink as the witnesses at the inquest didn’t agree, but Sadler himself testified that he was becoming quite drunk.

About 7:30pm Frances went to a millinery shop at Bethnal Green, and purchased a new black crêpe hat. The man who sold it to her later commented that she was the worse for drink. For the price of the hat, she could have gotten almost 6 nights lodging in a doss house.

At some point between 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m., Sadler told Frances he was going to meet a friend on Spital Street, gave her money to pick some drinks, and told her to go to Spitalfields Chambers and get a double bed. She went with him part on the way, but when he turned into Thrawl Street she tugged on his arm and warned him it was a very dangerous street, to which Sadler replied that he had travelled all over the world and in all kinds of company and had never yet turned back on anything. He should have listened to her; he hadn’t gone fifty yards before a woman in a red shawl came up behind him and hit him over the head with a folded umbrella. He fell on the ground and two men came from the shadows and began to kick him in the ribs, taking his wallet and his watch. This made Sadler extremely angry at Frances and he accused her of not doing anything to help him, but she reasonably pointed out that if she had tried she would have been a very easy target for the men. However Sadler was now penniless, and the two of them parted company again.

Frances was drunk when she returned to their lodgings at Spitalfields Chambers. Sadler came back an hour and a half later, face bloodied and bruised, and in a belligerent mood. He asked Frances if she had the money he gave her for their bed, but she replied she didn’t. Sadler thought they would trust her for one night. Although he had no money, he was still owed his pay for the seven weeks he’d worked since December 24, which he planned on collecting the following morning. The night watchman at the lodging house helped Sadler wash himself in the back yard but was forced to ask him to leave as he hadn’t the money for a room. Frances remained at the table, fast asleep, until about an hour later when she woke up and left since she also lacked her doss money.

At Shuttleworth’s eating house in Wentworth Street, Frances Coles purchased three half-pence worth of mutton and some bread, which she ate alone in the corner. After some fifteen minutes she was asked to leave but refused three times, eventually leaving about 1:45am and heading in the direction of Brick Lane through Commercial Street. She bumped into a fellow prostitute on Commercial Street, who later said that she had seen Frances with a man – not Sadler – who had behaved violently towards them both.

Meanwhile, Sadler had got into yet another fight as he tried to force his way back onboard his ship. Left bleeding from a sizable scalp wound, he tried twice to enter a lodging house but was refused. Soon after this he was seen drunken and bloodied on a nearby pavement by a police officer who reported that he was ‘decidedly drunk’.

At about this time three men walking through Swallow Gardens saw a man and a woman at the corner of Royal Mint Street. One shouted “Good night” to the couple but received no response. The woman was said to be wearing a round bonnet.

At 2:15 a.m. on Friday morning a police constable on his beat along Chamber Street heard the retreating footsteps of a man in the distance, and a few seconds the light from his lantern fell on the body of Frances Coles. He had passed the spot fifteen minutes before and was adamant that she hadn’t been there then. Blood was flowing profusely from her throat, and he saw her open and shut one eye. Since the woman was alive, he was required to remain with the body and was unable to pursue the fleeing man. He blew his whistle to raise the alarm and the neighbouring beat officers came running to the scene, soon joined by another officer who had been on plain clothes duty in Royal Mint Street. They found the woman to be quite warm, with a very faint pulse. One constable went for the local medic, who pronounced life extinct. Another constable headed to the Police Station to fetch a senior officer, who promptly ordered the officers arriving at the scene to search the area and to stop and question anybody suspicious or who might be able to provide any information. More senior officers soon arrived, and meanwhile the body was to ordered to remain in the position in which it was discovered while an in-depth search for clues was carried out.

At 3:00am Sadler returned to the lodging house, bloodstained from being robbed, but the deputy turned him out as he was so drunk he could barely stand or speak. Two hours later Sadler admitted himself into the London Hospital for brief treatment.

Sadler was the immediate suspect in the murder, thanks in no small part to the testimony of witnesses, and a subsequent investigation into his past history and whereabouts at the time of the previous Whitechapel murders indicates that the police suspected him to be the Ripper. On February 16th he was charged with the murder of Frances Coles. Luckily for him, the Seamen’s Union paid for proper legal representation, and – perhaps even luckier – the inquest into Frances’s death was headed by a very thorough coroner. The testimony of witnesses who had seen Sadler hopelessly intoxicated at 2:00 and 3:00 a.m., respectively, made it unlikely that Sadler was capable of committing the murder.

The jury returned a verdict of “Willful Murder against some person or persons unknown” on February 27, and four days later the Magistrates’ Court dropped all charges against Sadler. As he left the court on March 3rd, crowds of people cheered his release.

Frances Coles was buried on Wednesday February 25th in the afternoon at the East London Cemetery, Plaistow. About two thousand people had assembled in the roadway and on the pavement, but they were refused admission to the cemetery where there was already a gathering of several thousand. The grave was situated on rising ground, close to a young poplar tree – and beneath and around, extended for a considerable distance in all directions, was a sea of human faces. She was buried in plot number 21, grave number 19270.

Frances’s father remained living the Bermondsey Workhouse. Her sister, Mary Ann, an unmarried house cleaner, lived in Shoreditch. Frances’s other sister, Selina, who in 1891 was a 32 year old book folder, was listed as a lunatic in the Leavesden Asylum, Watford, where she died aged 37 in the early summer of 1897.

This text was adapted from a very comprehensive article on the subject at https://victorianwhitechapel.tumblr.com/Frances-Coles, retrieved on 4 December 2021.