Black aprons and Goulston Street

I reread Walter Dew's memoirs - the link? North London and hair curlers! Anyway, Walter Dew stated that Catherine Eddowes wore a black apron. I’d always imagined Victorian working-class women wore white aprons, so I checked. There are photographs of women in dark-hued aprons with and without patterns. It takes little thought to understand a dark apron is more practical than white. If Eddowes apron was black or dark, how would Alfred Long see it in a dark entry? In the gloom, white cloth would have been difficult enough to see on that overcast, drizzly, night, but black? A mere shadow at the foot of the jamb that’s how it would have appeared and, at that stage, PC Long wasn’t yet aware a murder had occurred, or so he said. Peculiar he found the cloth so interesting – strange that he saw it at all.