17

‘Working Women Like Herself’

The mother of Hannah Dobbs was reported to have said, prior to her main trial, that she always knew her daughter would be the one to bring disgrace on the family. Yet on the morning of 8 August 1879, as she completed her jail sentence for fraud, it was clear that Hannah had moved beyond disgrace to a subtly different form of notoriety; she was now in a curious way a celebrated figure. That morning, outside the Tothill Fields House of Correction, not far from Westminster Abbey, a crowd had gathered, having heard advance intelligence of the young woman’s release. It was possible they were there to jeer; it is equally possible that many of them were simply agog with curiosity having followed the twists of this intriguing case in the Illustrated Police News.

Also standing close to the gates of the prison was Peter Bastendorff. He, like all the others, was not allowed too close to the entrance.

No risks were being taken. When Hannah emerged from the main door of the jail, a pre-arranged hansom cab immediately drew up. There was no time for Peter Bastendorff to step forward in greeting; his lover was hustled fast into the vehicle. And before any of the ‘mob’ as the crowd was described in the press could so much as glimpse her, Hannah was being driven off in the direction of Paddington Station from where, it was assumed, she would be catching a train to Bideford.

And yet how curious it must have been for Hannah, and her family and, indeed, the people of that small harbour town, to have her return. There would have been many in the area who would have recalled the young woman’s childhood years; now, declared innocent of murder, yet daubed in the gaudy colours of sexual scandal, many must have wondered how Hannah had progressed from a bucolic childhood to the sophisticated amorality of London.

Hannah was born in January 1855, in Barnstaple, on the rushing River Taw, a town with a thriving harbour and quays, and a handsome square. Although some distance from any large city, Barnstaple was in some ways a mercantile hub; imports such as tobacco and wine sailed in from the ocean up the river into the calm harbour; and the fertility of the plump countryside around brought the wool trade, and many dairy farms. A few miles west lay a dramatic coastline that even by 1855 was drawing wealthy and fashionable visitors from London and other cities; there were headlands such as Hartland Point, where the roaring Atlantic winds would disperse any lingering sense of pervasive city smog. But inland, the countryside was soft; vivid deep green under the clouds after rainfall, dips and hollows plunging to secret river valleys and rich woods.

The visitors were being inspired by the recently published novel Westward Ho! written by Charles Kingsley. This was an historical romance set in the Elizabethan era concerning the high sea adventures of a young man from Bideford. The fame of the novel – combined with the completion of a railway line running to Barnstaple in 1855 – brought a new class of tourist.

This was an age where, under the dark skies of intense industry, urban romanticism concerning untouched landscapes was reaching a new intensity. Well-to-do travellers from London might have gazed from the railway window as they passed through the tiny villages, thatched houses in the midst of lavishly wooded hills, and imagined that they were looking at a perfect vision of what rural life could be. Such visitors would not see just how hard that life actually was.

Soon after Hannah Dobbs was born – one of three sisters – her parents moved the family to live and work on a farm just outside Barnstaple. At that stage, her father, William, was a shepherd, her mother Susan worked as a dairy hand, as well as attending to other tasks ‘about the farm-house’.¹ Neither of these roles were easy: relentless hours, brutal winter weather, the oppressive fly-humming torpor of the summer; for Hannah’s mother, it must have been extraordinarily difficult, combining all the physical labour of the dairy with bringing up young children. There were no complex items of farming machinery to ease the work; the business of caring for cattle continued much as it had done for centuries – though by the mid-nineteenth century, and with the advent of rail travel, the scale was slightly larger. Even without any wholly effective form of refrigeration, the arrival of trains meant that it was now possible to transport milk and butter to large towns such as Exeter.

In 1856, the railway line that wound through the valleys from Exeter to Barnstaple was now extended further to Bideford and a few miles south to the market town of Great Torrington. For a generation of children growing up amid these green valleys, this would have re-shaped their entire view of the world in a way that their parents could not have imagined: bringing cities such as Bristol and even London within easy reach. For children such as Hannah Dobbs, who were educated in Bideford at what was termed the ‘British School’, the piercing cry of the locomotive whistle, the distant thunder of the departing train, will have sparked many new dimensions of daydreaming.

William and Susan Dobbs, with their children on that farm at Gameston Moor, had clearly been thinking that there must be less physically arduous means of getting a living. This was a difficult life for those of advancing years to maintain. As tenants, the Dobbs’ would have had few entitlements or rights.

Yet equally for their children – when they were not labouring at chores – this was a life filled with strong colour, long hilly paths upon which the wind would bring scent of the sea. Hannah herself would certainly describe it later as a ‘happy’ childhood; if there were privations, then there were seemingly none that had lingered in her memory or indeed had sparked any aversion to this rural life.

But this landscape could be paradoxically claustrophobic. As they grew older, Hannah and her sisters, who would have attended the summer dances at the agricultural fairs, would have seen that the trajectory of their lives was either marriage and homemaking, combined with further varieties of farm work; or entering into service with the local gentry. As she grew up, it is possible to envisage how Hannah might have become dissatisfied with the limits of north Devon life. She and her family had little money but the fashionable tourists from the cities had brought more than glimpses of material wealth; they had brought ideas. Added to this, in the 1860s and 1870s, there was an ever greater number of colourfully written journals and magazines. And literate girls like Hannah read voraciously.

This was a booming period for such literature; a serendipitous conjoining of a widely spreading railway network, opening up new markets, and a new generation avid to absorb news and amusement and scandal of all varieties.

In 1870, The Ladies’ Own Paper carried an amusing A–Z feature concerning that perennial preoccupation now widely termed ‘The Servant Problem’; how were middle-class people, inexperienced in such matters, to deal with truculent staff? In this case, ‘E’ stood for the ‘elegant person’ who has been hired as the new maid-of-all-work to the Browns in London; she wears ‘a lady-like bonnet’ and ‘a trimly fitting dress’. And that evening, she prepares an excellent dinner. No-one can find fault ‘with the fish or the roast’. However, after a few days, the mask of perfection slowly slides away; and the girl becomes sulky, disobedient, angry. It comes to the point when the family try to sack her.

And then the feature moves to ‘F’ for ‘fracas’ as the maid steadfastly refuses to budge upon being fired, while also unleashing ‘the torrent of her eloquence’ upon the lady of the house and the lady’s daughters. As the magazine reports the servant saying, ‘They might send for as many constables as they liked. 500 men couldn’t stir her till she chose to go, and that would be soon enough when she got her wages. Call them ladies! They was working women like herself – common working women. She had been deceived.’²

A hugely popular magazine of the 1870s called London Society turned the servant problem the other way around; it told the wry story of a maid in London’s Mayfair called Jane Bell, and how she was lured away from her household to work for ‘Lady Mary Fauxanfier’ of Belgravia. Jane Bell’s previous mistress was highly sceptical of this arrangement; why, Jane had no experience in arranging hair or supervising the extensive wardrobe of an important society lady. She would surely be hopelessly out of her depth in a grand Belgravia house.

And some days later, Jane Bell indeed returns to Mayfair, and asks her former mistress if she still has a situation for her. But the tale she has to tell is not quite what the lady is expecting: the fact was that Lady May Fauxanfier’s extensive retinue of servants were non-existent. Jane Bell was required to fill every role herself, from answering the door to supervising her ladyship’s hansom cab. This was Belgravia household economics: every appearance of aristocratic grandeur but acute shortage of cash. Jane Bell wanted to return to a nice middle-class house where the family might not have had any sort of aristocratic lineage but it did at least know how to live comfortably and how to treat its servants.

By her own admission, Hannah Dobbs became entranced by fashion early in her life; and magazines such as ‘London Society’ were filled with beautifully textured illustrations showing ladies on ‘fashionable promenades’ or in resorts such as Brighton. The slang term ‘fashion plate’ derives from these illustrative plates in the journals; the images accompanied by extensively detailed descriptions of cashmere with velvet, ‘all in shades of blue’; of ‘striped, plaited skirts’ matched with ‘striped waistcoats’, ‘fastened with cordelieries’ and ‘velvet buttons’.³ The illustrations conveyed a life of elegant leisure; ladies in the Regent’s Park, at flower shows, taking tea. Hannah Dobbs had a voracious interest in the fine clothes of the models; and surely also for the elegant world that they represented.

When Hannah Dobbs left school, she immediately joined her mother in dairy work on the family farm. Such work – from the cajoling of reluctant cattle with ‘teats as hard as carrots’,⁴ the milker’s face resting against the beast’s hot flank, to the carrying of great pails to the repetitive churning of the butter pail – would have left most so physically tired that at the end of the day, sleep would have been yearned for.

Hannah Dobbs had a fecund imagination (as she would abundantly prove later when the Euston Square mystery darkened further); it is possible to imagine how in the soft glimmering darkness of summer’s nights, as she lay in bed, she might have heard the last train puffing through from Great Torrington, through Bideford, towards Exeter. It is possible to imagine how she might have yearned to be on that train.

She did not stay long on that farm; as a sixteen-year old in 1871, Hannah Dobbs decided to find work of her own. Her first domestic situation was at the rectory in Parkham, a few miles south of Bideford; but her next move took her closer to the realm depicted in magazines. She went into service – albeit initially at the level of dairymaid – for the Stucley family at Moreton House just outside Bideford.

The Stucleys – or Bucks – were the most prominent local aristocrats, and Morton House was beautiful (they also had possession of the picturesque Affeton Castle and the more imposing Hartland Abbey). Moreton House, built in the eighteenth century, was a whitewashed mansion, looking out over carefully tended gardens and parkland. The lives of those within must have seemed, to a creative and intelligent young woman such as Hannah, extraordinarily desirable: the mistress of the house would have been attired in the finest new modes, and the house itself played host to a range of society figures drawn not only from the immediate county but invited from London.

The Stucley family enjoyed a particularly fast social ascension in the previous century; their wealth had been produced by the harbour at Bideford, and the extensive importation of ever-more popular tobacco from America. Wealth brought a seat in Parliament; and in the mid-nineteenth century, Sir George Stucley was made a baronet.

Hannah’s time came to be divided between the farm house and the big house; she had many dealings with all the other staff. She was on a salary of £10 10 shillings a year; enough for the necessaries, but not enough to plan, and nowhere near enough to be able to edge closer to the finery that she craved: ‘I could never resist the desire to dress well,’ she later stated.⁵

As might be expected in such an establishment, there were flares of passion between the younger staff; and by her later admission, Hannah became ‘intimate’ with one of the footmen.⁶ The affair did not last; for not long after this, Hannah became involved with a young butcher from the nearby village of Holsworthy. It was also around this point, working in various capacities in and around the big house, that her apparently troubled relationship with money – specifically, money belonging to others – began. Hannah’s own account of the trouble was ambiguous and patchy; the lady of the house had intended to give another servant girl a cheque for £3 for some unspecified reason. But then, in a twist of complexity, Hannah somehow had this cheque pressed upon her so that she might get it cashed in town, or indeed use it as security to lend against. What was clear in the admission was that at the time, Hannah was fixated by a particularly desirable bonnet that she had seen in the window of a Bideford milliner.

The cheque was somehow used as security for Hannah to have the bonnet; it was left with the milliner. And it was then, as she put it, that the ‘trouble’ began.⁷ Hannah said that she failed ‘to return’ for the cheque in time and it was then that it was discovered that it had not gone to the intended recipient. In her own account, Hannah declared that this happened at exactly the point that she was leaving the service of the Stucley family, in order to marry that young butcher from Holsworthy. But as a result of this garbled affair – what would appear to be a fairly straightforward case of theft – she left without any favourable references. And her engagement to the young butcher was terminated. At the age of 18, in 1873, Hannah found herself forced to return to her parents.

As she had fallen, so their circumstances had seemingly improved; for by this time, William and Susan Dobbs had left the dairy farm. William had taken a lease on a public house in Bideford called The Blacksmith’s Arms.

This was (and is) a handsome Georgian building, with a fanlight over the door, a whitewashed front elevation, and a view over the river of sailing masts and the rich sunsets beyond. The upper storey had rooms for family and guests alike. The arrival of the railway in the 1850s had been a boost to the business.

Crucially, this was also to become something of a haven for Hannah Dobbs; but it was impossible for her to find a new domestic situation in Bideford or Barnstaple. Word carried.

So Hannah now had an obligation to think beyond the local hills. The impatient sighs of the locomotives on the railway behind the tavern might just have been the spur. It might have been expected for her to look towards Exeter, or Bristol. But her imagination had already taken her a great deal further than that.

And as her luggage was loaded on to the railway carriage that day, and as she bade farewell to her parents, it must also have taken quite a great deal of courage. Hannah Dobbs was fixed on London. She clearly felt that this was where she would find the life that she yearned for. But even in the mid-1870s, even armed with all the knowledge gleaned from magazines and journals, it must still have seemed as if she was travelling to a new and unknown world.