1

The Day Before

On 8 May 1879, there was welcome news for Mary Bastendorff. A new lodger, a businessman, had confirmed that he was preparing to move his effects into 4, Euston Square. He would be taking the rooms on the first floor: an elegant apartment with high ceilings and two large windows, with a balcony, that faced out on to the garden square. This was the apartment that generated the most income and went a long way towards the upkeep of her house.

There had been, of late, a dearth of paying guests. This was not wholly surprising in a city which, by 1879, had 14,000 houses licensed to take in lodgers. The population of the city was expanding dizzyingly and was now close to four million; and, while in some districts, notably to the east, this was resulting in overcrowding and squalor, in many others there were vast improvements in terms of comfort and hygiene.

A rising middle class was developing ever more refined tastes; and in boarding houses such as 4, Euston Square, it was possible to give an appearance, or simulacrum, of gracious living. In addition to this, there was the tremendous – and modern – convenience of the nearby Metropolitan Railway underground station at Gower Street. Steam trains, adapted to minimise the smoke vented into stations, ran every five minutes into the heart of the City, terminating at Moorgate Street. The difficulty for the Bastendorffs was that so many other establishments around the immediate area offered similarly fine accommodation.

Mary Bastendorff, dark-haired, 32-years old, generally tried to keep herself aloof from the day-to-day running of the house. She wanted to concentrate on her four young children. But on 8 May, she would have roamed from room to room, shadowing her young maidservant, checking that the establishment was in a suitable state to receive Mr Brooks the following day.

On the ground floor, apart from the high-ceilinged entrance hall, light angling through the fanlight above the door, the floor muffled with linoleum, oilcloth and with rugs and carpets, there was a fine drawing room. Here was a table at which meals might be taken; tightly upholstered sofas and chairs were gathered around the large marble mantelpiece, the fireplace and the piano.

Mrs Bastendorff was strongly fixated with her children; but she also appeared to some to be an abstracted figure, the reason most likely grief. Mary and her husband had lost three young babies; and the house surely contained many sharp reminders of their short lives.

But Mary was not unsociable. In the evenings, the ground floor drawing room was generally her domain; any particularly valued tenants would be invited to take some brandy and lemonade with her.

Up the stairs, on the first floor, were the rooms that the new guest would be taking, moving his own furniture in. There was a water closet on this floor too, although it was not for the sole use of the first-floor tenants. Climbing further, on the second floor, were two principle bedrooms – the larger facing out on to Euston Square, and a smaller bedroom at the back, which faced out over the yard and the mews beyond. All were lit with gas: the lady of the house had procured ornamental glass globes to frame the wall-mounted gas jets. The carpets were thick and green; they had been a relatively expensive purchase, and she was alert to any stains or danger of mess.

The windows of the first- and second-floor bedrooms had blinds in addition to curtains. So even though the horses and cabs below were constantly churning up dust, their noise was muffled and the rooms were broadly insulated against the irritating particles that would infiltrate in the summer. And at the top of the house, there were three more bedrooms, one used by Mary and her husband, and the others for their children.

Her husband, Severin, aged 32, had been born in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. He was one of sixteen children and had been brought up in an intensely rural world. His transformation from a boy of the deep European forests into an urbane Londoner – not merely acquiring the language, but also the tastes and habits of the English middle classes – seemed complete. The previous year, he had been naturalised as a British subject, a move that none of his brothers – who had also immigrated to London – seemed to be tempted by.¹

However, Bastendorff continued to identify very strongly with German culture; and indeed in the district of St Pancras, there was much to be enjoyed, especially at an institution, recently founded, called the German Gymnasium. This hall, near the railway marshalling yards of Battle Bridge Road, not only provided facilities for gymnastics – suspended ropes, vaulting horses – but also lively concerts of German classical and popular music, and German-themed banquets; with an estimated 30,000 Germans in London, there was great variety there and elsewhere of continental art and culture. Added to this, a few streets away, was the Bavarian Church, at which German Catholics attended Mass.

Severin Bastendorff, who was a little on the short side, had thick, dark red hair; and whiskers which he had cut into the most fashionable style. He was always proud of his facial hair. He had deep-set eyes of pale blue; and his manner could tend towards swaggering. Yet in one sense this was justified. He had achieved a very great deal in the space of eight years.

His business – and his skill – was furniture making. He employed ten people. At the back of the house, across its yard, reached via the basement kitchen, and in the shadow of the houses that stood on the next street, was a large workshop. This had once been an artist’s studio, where young women had posed for life portraits. Now there was the constant rasp and buzz of intricate woodworking; Bastendorff’s bamboo furniture was becoming ever more popular. This studio, in turn, backed on to a stabling mews; this enabled Bastendorff to keep a horse and cart, for the purposes of deliveries, and also for the occasional family treat.

A couple of years earlier, Bastendorff had gone into business with several of his brothers; they shared and acquired the necessary skills. Joseph and Anton, like Severin, had found themselves London-born wives.

Unusually for a self-employed man, Bastendorff was not especially particular or urgent about making an early start to the working day. This might have been because he frequently spent evenings out with business associates at public houses such as The Euston Tavern, the Sol’s Arms and The Orange Tree. It is reasonable to assume that on the morning of 8 May, he had had the newspaper taken up to his bedroom so that he might contemplate the world as he waited for his own to come into full focus.

He would have been most interested that day in news of a European conference called by German manufacturers. This was a time of intense industrial expansion and businessmen in Westphalia were calling for a widening of free trade and an end to all tariffs. Since the 1830s, the pre- and post-unified states of Germany had belonged to a customs union which allowed free trade within that region; some wondered if there was a way to expand that principle throughout continental Europe, perhaps even including Britain?

That day, there were also bulletins from ongoing wars: the curious, unwanted British conflict with the Zulus in southern Africa, and the seemingly endless instability in Afghanistan. To a man born in Luxembourg – which had been the subject of constant predations from neighbouring France and Germany – there might have been a blend of admiration and discomfort about Britain’s colonial affairs. Bastendorff’s family had known what it was like to be pulled back and forth by different administrators from different countries; the requirement to speak this language or that, the demands for taxes or preferential exports. Equally, though, Bastendorff would have been wholly at ease as a foreign national in this ever-brightening and ever-accommodating city; there was a growing appetite in London for Germanic culture. Publishing houses such as Chatto & Windus were that year issuing volumes of German Stories, translated into English.

Throughout the day, there was constant movement in the yard workshop at the back of the house in Euston Square, and high-spirited noise and joking. Severin’s brothers, Joseph and Anton, went in and out of the main house, through the back door which led to the kitchen and through to the scullery, which in turn looked out to the front of the house, light spilling down from the street above. Immediately outside this downstairs scullery was a small paved area, with some steps leading up to the pavement; and then, in the area beneath the pavement itself, was a door leading to two large cellars. In the main, these were used for coal; the delivery men would open a manhole in the paving stones and throw the order down into the sooty darkness. The Bastendorffs kept timber and bamboo there, as well as imported wine.

The kitchen and the scullery were largely the domain of the Bastendorff’s young maidservant, Sarah Carpenter, who was 13-years old. At that point, she would have been responsible for all the cleaning and the cooking; she would also have been required at certain times to help with the young Bastendorff children. But in some ways, Sarah’s Euston Square situation might have been more congenial than many of her peers; at present, without lodgers, the workload of the house was not heavy, and the pay, while not lavish, was also far from miserly. Added to this, Sarah was the only servant, which actually gave her a certain amount of flexibility that would not have been allowed in grander Belgravia establishments. There was no hierarchy of servants for her to fit into at 4, Euston Square; just the instructions she received from Mary Bastendorff. And Mary’s diffidence meant that Sarah Carpenter was able to use her initiative more than many young servants in her position.

In the three years since Severin and Mary had taken on the lease of the house, they had had a wide variety of paying guests and servants; some regular lodgers who came and went, men and women alike. Perhaps when they had first arrived in 1876, their noticeably smart neighbours on the Square might have been a little alarmed at the prospect of a house filled with transient people. There may have been a fear that such tenants might give the Square a louring appearance. Yet the Bastendorffs had never received complaints from other residents. The house was always known as respectable.

For all the difficulties that Mary and Severin had faced – the aching sadness from the loss of their children – there was more family support than simply from Bastendorff’s jocular brothers. Mary’s mother, Elizabeth Pearce, lived around the corner in her own lodging house in Charrington Street, a rather dowdier area, which lay close to the busy canal abutting the good yards and the old graveyard and was an easy ten-minute walk for her daughter. Elizabeth was a frequent and welcome visitor to number 4, Euston Square as well. Severin Bastendorff seemed rather fond of his mother-in-law, and she was certainly rather fond of him. The warmth, from her point of view, might have been partly generated by contemplation of his secure prospects. Added to this, perhaps as a foreign national, he was difficult to pinpoint in terms of class; and that might have been a terrific advantage in a city where anyone English-born was instantly betrayed by speech and manners. If Severin Bastendorff chose to dress as a swell gentleman, who was to say that he had no claim to such a station?

There was only one sense in which 4, Euston Square might have been seen as a less than proper house; and that was on those Sunday evenings when Severin Bastendorff would gather friends together for card games, played for money. Throughout those contests, alcohol was drunk; Severin, in particular, had a lively appetite for it, especially the imported wine which he kept in his cellar. But even in such instances, when the Bastendorff’s immediate neighbours might have been able to hear through the walls any unusual high-spiritedness, they would have seen nothing that would have brought disgrace to the square.

In all, Mr and Mrs Bastendorff, their children and the respectable men and women who formed their ever-changing roster of paying guests, were a testament to the city’s atmosphere of social mobility and unselfconscious diversity: from wildly differing and modest backgrounds, this young couple had made an enviable home, only a little apart from London’s more fashionable streets.

By the following morning, however, that secure home – and the lives of all within it – would be under the most macabre and terrible of shadows.