14

The Boiling Bones

One of the effects of the 1870 Education Act was a dazzlingly fast rise in rates of literacy; but this improvement had, in turn, been fuelled by the increasingly salty and sensational nature of popular newspapers, periodicals and literature. Reading as a mass pursuit had become a terrific source of escapist entertainment: as young boys became addicted to the bloodthirsty adventure stories to be found in weekly ‘penny dreadfuls’, so it was noted that those young women in service were gripped by romances and in particular, scandal. And there was no question that for readers around the country, lurid real-life stories of murder were particularly satisfying.

As well as the thrilling element of Grand Guignol,¹ and the attractive notion that these were baffling mysteries that could be penetrated by the exceptional minds of Scotland Yard – with readers following each fresh development on a daily or episodic basis – there was also a sense of these stories speaking to deeper, more general, fears and prejudices.

By some dark coincidence, as the Euston Square mystery was deepening, the public was immersed in another sensational domestic murder. And for many middle-class readers, the story of the 1879 atrocity that occurred in the pretty Surrey town of Richmond upon Thames would perhaps have had them glancing in the dark at their bedroom doors at any suggestion of a creak outside. Indeed, there was a ghastly necromantic luridness about this particular story that seemed to have some echoes with the Euston Square coal cellar.

In the early frozen weeks of 1879, with the riverbanks crusted white with frost, a woman called Kate Webster made her way through the leafy lanes of Richmond to a pleasing cottage; this was the home of an elderly lady called Julia Thomas who was had been seeking domestic help. She required no references from her new maid. If she had sought them, she might have found that Webster, born Kate Lawler, had lived an unusually turbulent life and had been in prison frequently for prostitution and theft.

But Julia Thomas was hardly the ideal employer either; she was excessively contrary and demanding. She would follow her new maid from room to room, offering venomous criticism of her work and demanding that tasks be repeated endlessly. Kate Webster, who was an avid drinker, started finding the local public house an increasingly congenial sanctuary.

The relationship deteriorated fast; the old woman becoming more vituperative, Kate Webster becoming more drunk. Finally, one Sunday, as they argued in an upstairs room, there was an explosion of violence. First, Webster pushed the old lady hard, sending her crashing down the stairs. Then – in an apparent panic about Mrs Thomas screaming and alerting the neighbours – she ran down the stairs after her, grabbed the prone woman by the throat, and strangled her.

Out of this apparently spontaneous homicide came subsequent actions that were, to say the least, remarkable. Webster decided that she was going to dispose of Mrs Thomas’s remains in such a way that no-one would ever find her. Using a hacksaw, she set about dismembering the corpse. Then, the next day, she filled the laundry copper – in essence, a large metal cauldron that clothes were washed in – with water, heated it over the fire, and then started boiling the removed body parts. Flesh softened in the molten water, tissue melted, fat ran into the mixture. Webster spent the day reducing the corpse of the old lady to a form of obscene soup.

Her next steps in the subsequent days had the suggestion of a fugue state about them; visits by omnibus to upriver Hammersmith, with boxes filled with boiled bones, that she dropped in the water; and then her extraordinary decision to remain living in her murdered employer’s house and wear Julia Thomas’s clothes quite openly in the street.

One of the boxes was washed ashore at Barnes; the unlucky man who poked at it curiously on the riverbank found it filled with unidentifiable melted flesh.

The fact that the head was missing (and was to remain missing for many decades) made the crime seem insoluble; until Kate Webster’s strutting behaviour in Richmond – combined with the absence of the old lady – at last alerted neighbours and solidified the lines of suspicion.

She faced trial in London in the late spring of 1879 – concurrent with the Euston Square drama.

Journalists made careful note of the fact that Webster wore gold earrings for the hearing; perhaps to suggest that her desire to rise above her servile station was intertwined with the horrific crime.

And with the guilty verdict came sentence of death. In July 1879, Kate Webster was executed at Wandsworth Prison. Her wax effigy was placed on show in Madame Tussauds almost instantly. All of this was happening as public and potential jurors alike were reading of Hannah Dobbs, another maid-of-all-work.

(As a curious and macabre footnote, a few years ago Sir David Attenborough, long a resident of Richmond, acquired a little extra land upon which had once stood a pub near some cottages; when work began, builders unearthed a skull. Tests were carried out; and confirmation was given. This was the long concealed skull of Julia Thomas.)

The real fascination of the story among the reading public – and this meant not only middle-class householders, but also those whom they employed as servants – was the nature of the relationship and the balance of power between the mistress of the house and her maid.

For countless young women who worked long and physically demanding hours in the grander houses of Kensington and Belgravia, subject to the whims of masters and mistresses whose behaviour might be oppressive and overbearing, how many derived a vicarious thrill from the story of a servant who turned upon her malicious mistress? Equally, for wealthy householders, was there an echoing chime of recognition in terms of the difficulty of dealing with wayward and ungovernable staff?

The weekly journal The Spectator picked up on this seam of fascination and the apparent parallels with the Euston Square mystery and a still unsolved murder from a few months beforehand in another Bloomsbury street, Burton Crescent. ‘The conviction will, we trust, relieve that portion of the public which appears to have felt so very strongly the danger of old ladies living alone in houses with only one servant,’ declared its editorial in June 1879. ‘An alarm of this kind always arises after every great murder, and sometimes rises to singular proportions…

‘As a matter of fact, however,’ the journal continued, with a note of near-joviality, ‘servants very rarely commit murder, their comfortable lives not developing either the desire or the nerve for such crimes; and thousands of old ladies are attended for years by single servants whose peccadilloes are, at the worst, limited to petty thefts, minute impositions, and very numerous small tyrannies and exhibitions of jealousy.’²

The other murder mentioned by The Spectator had occurred six-months previously in the December of 1878. The Burton Crescent killing had also centred on a landlady, Mrs Burton, and a maid called Mary Ann Donovan. In this particular story, one of Mrs Burton’s lodgers returned home on a dark afternoon and found, to his horror, her body with her throat cut wide.

The only suspect in the case appeared to be Miss Donovan, who was noted by the newspapers as being of an unusually ‘heavy build’. There was a pre-trial hearing in which the accusation was put that the killing had been spurred by acquisitiveness and rage. Yet the pre-trial hearing was as far as the case got; the judge decided there and then that there was simply not enough – or indeed, any – evidence with which to mount an effective prosecution.

Donovan was released. The Spectator, using this and the case of 4, Euston Square as examples of why their readers were not likely to be murdered in their beds, had this to say of the Euston Square enigma: ‘As to Miss Hacker, she lived in a house which a policeman would have declared as little likely to be the scene of a murder as any in London, in one of the noisiest and most frequented of squares, and a house where one would have supposed solitude impossible.

‘No sensational novelist would dream of fixing on Euston Square as the scene of a violent murder, with a body hidden away for months; nor could anyone, however timid, have dreamt that in her own bedroom, in a frequented lodging-house in the heart of London life, and within sight of policemen, she was in greater danger than in any lonely farm-house in a remote county.’³

That might well have been so; but within all these stories was a thread of modern middle-class unease with the question of servants, and how to retain one’s authority within one’s own household. Just several decades beforehand, the subject would not have arisen with such frequency. There were aristocratic families who had always employed servants; men and women who had been attended to from birth who knew (or thought they knew) how best to deal with those who did this work. For the rising Victorian middle classes – especially those in London taking on just one or perhaps two servant women – there were lessons to be learned. Equally, those going to work with them – even those with no apparent traction or agency to improve their circumstances – still had to find a way of negotiating awkward questions of power and hierarchy.

An example: a lady of the house who entertains many guests decides that they should all dine late. What thought is there for the servant girl who has to rise before six in the morning, yet cannot hope to complete her duties of washing the china and the glass and cleaning the kitchen until the early hours of the morning? Many Victorians were not wholly insensitive to such questions. In a popular mid-century journal called The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, there was an essay entitled ‘The Cry of the Maidservant’. It stated that ‘in the homes and kitchens of the middle classes in England, “white slavery” is rampant. How many of these (servants) labour and slave in their vocations sixteen, eighteen and even more hours a day … continuing on foot “upstairs and downstairs” with only “slight interregnums” and “comfortless meals … past midnight?”’³

There were no employment rights as they are understood now; simply the understanding between the employer and the servant. And certainly for many young women in service at that time, there must have been a great many secret tyrants who, because they gave them the roof over their head, felt able to make the most outrageous demands.

Yet at a time of rising prosperity – and in London in the 1870s at least, the fast-expanding middle classes meant a whole new range of employment prospects – it was also quite a simple matter to leave an unsatisfactory master or mistress. This was a ballooning labour market with increasing demand; and as is clear from the classified advertisements in the newspapers of the time, households were continually seeking new staff. The ease of finding such work meant that the responsibility lay with these middle-class householders to try and make the position seem as agreeable as possible.

In houses such as 4, Euston Square, run by ladies such as Mary Bastendorff who might once have been servants themselves, such equilibrium could not be taken for granted; no-one had taught these new employers either how to keep full control or indeed how to do so without behaving monstrously. And it was these delicate questions of household management that the women’s magazines of the day addressed continually. According to The Lady’s Own Paper in 1870, even the most well-meaning lady of the house might find difficulty getting the best out of her domestic staff; for these young maids themselves would be quite new to the very idea of being in service.

‘Unfortunately, most of that class upon whom many of us have to depend have had no opportunity for systematic training,’ the magazine declared. ‘So they pick up a few ideas here and there and use them very inefficiently. For example: notice the manner in which many girls remove the dishes at the dinner table. It makes one uneasy and nervous to sit by and observe the slovenly manner in which this work is often accomplished.’⁵

Could one learn authority? Equally, from the point of view of the put-upon overworked maid, could one acquire a habit of sincere subservience and obedience? By the 1870s, there were countless magazines devoting much feature space to these and associated problems. There were some books too, among them The Lady’s Maid published in 1877, which featured advice both to employers and servants on tricky matters such as privacy and discretion.

It is especially interesting to think that while Karl Marx was studying and writing in the British Museum reading room in Bloomsbury, there were daily outbreaks in the houses all around him of a perfectly invisible and yet important class struggle. It might perhaps have been one thing to be in the service of a bejewelled Duchess; but in so many households in London and the larger cities, the ladies of the house had only just attained their middle-class eminence; to what extent did a certain social insecurity drive their dealings with their staff?

Even as early as 1853, a journal called the North British Review was dispensing tips when it came to the troubling question of servants witnessing domestic disharmony. ‘Everything that you do, and very much that you say, at home is related in your servants’ families,’ ran the article, ‘and by them retailed to other gossips in the neighbourhood, with appropriate exaggerations, until you almost feel that you might well live in a glass house or a whispering gallery.’⁶

Meanwhile, in The Lady’s Maid, the servant in question was advised on how to deal with capricious employers and domestic tension. ‘If your master should be unfortunate in his temper or in any of his habits,’ it read, ‘if you should hear harsh words, or see your mistress in distress, you are bound in honour to be as silent upon the whole matter, whether you are so desired or not, as if it were a secret committed to your keeping.’⁷

The secrets were on both sides, though, and other journals counselled the lady of the house to keenly monitor those who came to visit their servants; to ‘double-check the kitchen accounts’; and also to set strict curfews. Intriguingly, this particular aspect of life for servants was soon to be focused upon as the Euston Square trial got underway.

In the case of Kate Webster, it seemed understood that here was a woman with no sense either of moral boundaries or class boundaries: that she killed and then dismembered her mistress in an apparent frenzy after being scolded for her domestic shortcomings was one thing. But there was also outrage, as expressed in the press coverage after her execution, that she should then have had the impertinence to assume the identity of her dead employer. She appropriated the clothes and jewellery of Mrs Thomas and began to pass herself off as a lady.

And the trial of Hannah Dobbs for the murder of Matilda Hacker at 4, Euston Square was also set to create interest in how a maid and her employers negotiated the working relationship; and it was also set to illustrate just how easily the balance of power in certain households could be swayed this way and that. Inspector Hagen and the newspaper correspondents had been working on the assumption that, like the Webster case, this was a straightforward affair that would be easily settled by the court. They were all perfectly wrong.