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Camden Town Murder or What Shall We Do for Rent? Walter Sickert added the male figure as details of the killing emerged |
Emily: framed for murder
The murder of a prostitute a century ago inspired Walter Sickert to paint her demise – but the artist’s obsession led to rumours about his involvement in the killing, writes Dan Carrier
WHAT happened to Emily Dimmock when she closed the door of her seedy Camden Town bedsit for the last time will never be known.
Her violent death 100 years ago next week has entered the area’s folklore and is NW1’s very own unsolved Jack the Ripper-style case.
The anniversary of the death of Emily is due to be marked by an exhibition by artist Walter Sickert, whose four paintings inspired by her grisly demise are being shown together for the first time.
Emily’s death captured his imagination. King’s Cross glassware designer Robert Wood was tried and acquitted of her murder, and Sickert followed the trial avidly. It inspired him to create the four paintings that express his vision of one of the darkest episodes of Edwardian London.
Sickert had been working in Paris under the tutelage of Edgar Degas. He returned to London in 1905 and based himself in Camden Town, using the its numerous cheap lodging houses as studios.
It was his knowledge of such homes that would have drawn him to the murder of Emily. His series of paintings depicted nudes reclining on the iron bedsteads of lice-infested rooms, the sorts of place where the unfortunate young woman met her end.
According to the exhibition’s curator, Barnaby Wright, Sickert’s art played on the fears of the area’s reputation as a haunt of criminals, pimps and prostitutes, all exploited in turn by the slum landlords who cared little for what went on in their lodging houses.
Sickert followed the trial of Robert Wood and in 1908 created the four paintings that underlined the popular conception of Camden Town as a place where morals were corrupted and danger lurked.
Sickert’s imagination also fired the public fascination with the murders. In one painting, Sickert has placed a clothed male figure on the end of a bed – he told friends he used the chief suspect Robert Wood as his model.
Mr Wright says: “He [Sickert] had been painting nudes in Camden Town since 1905. He had returned from Paris and was interested in the way that nudes had been seen as high art. He felt the depiction of nudes had no basis in reality and he wanted to create paintings where the nude became real again.”
The seedy environs of where he was working provided perfect copy.
“The poverty, the prostitution of the area was a real subject for him,” says Mr Wright.
“He began a series of nudes and then suddenly there was the murder of Emily Dimmock. It was as if real life had caught up with his subject matter.”
And the Wood trial inspired him to change one of his paintings and add the male figure.
Mr Wright says: “He put this second figure in the composition to create a psychological tension.”
And Sickert felt personally involved in the murder.
“He moved around a lot and stayed in many lodging houses – he would have known the type of place Emily met her death. Although he was moving in circles of high society, he loved the area and he loved its seediness.
“At one point, he even claimed to his friends he had met the suspect. This prompted his claim that Robert Wood was the model for the man in his piece What Shall We do For The Rent? However, that is likely to be a myth.”
Emily Dimmock’s slaying was front-page news in every national paper and when Sickert’s paintings were displayed they fuelled interest in the unsolved crime.
Her own story is tragic: she left home as a young girl to work as a servant for a family in East Finchley, but the position did not work out and she re-emerged in King’s Cross.
In 1905 she was living in Bidborough Street, in a dwelling house owned by a notorious King’s Cross crook John Crabtree.
Crabtree had convictions for theft and horse rustling, and the police were regular visitors to Emily’s chosen digs.
From there she met and married railway worker Bertram Shaw. They moved to Royal College Street and then on to St Paul’s Road – now Agar Grove. It was here that Emily’s body, covered in blood and her throat slashed, was found in the morning of September 12.
The chief suspect, Robert Wood, had been seen drinking with Emily in the days before her death and was arrested.
Shaw’s job meant he travelled between Sheffield and St Pancras over 24 hours – meaning he spent periods away from home, which allowed Emily to work as a prostitute.
His job working on trains gave him a cast-iron alibi for the time of her death.
It is known that she met Wood in a pub in Euston two days before her body was found. It is also believed that Emily had returned to her St Paul’s Road home with another man, a ship’s cook called Robert Percival Roberts, who stayed for three nights and then arranged to meet her again on Wednesday, September 11 at the Eagle pub in Royal College Street. The police later said Robert Wood has also been in the pub that night. It was the last time Emily was seen alive.
Wood’s subsequent trial, which Sickert attended, made legal history. He was the first suspect in a murder case to be able to give evidence, but the jury were instructed by the judge to acquit him because he believed there was a lack of evidence.
It fascinated Sickert, says Mr Wright – and this fascination has meant Sickert has been linked not just the Camden Town murder, but also the Jack the Ripper cases some 20 years earlier.
There were even rumours that he was somehow responsible for both Emily’s slaying and the Ripper murders.
It was the sort of publicity Sickert enjoyed.
“He claimed at one point that his landlady had told him the identity of the real Jack the Ripper,” says Mr Wright.
“He was fascinated by unsolved crime in Camden. But being fascinated by it and involved in it
are two very different things.”
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