18

Avowed Admirers

There would have been days without number when the sky above was broiling brown; and the air was thick and suffocating with chemicals, with the piercingly caustic smell of burning rubber and ammonia, and the weightier stench of animal dung and urine. Under the shadow of the vast railway viaduct that stretched out from London Bridge station for four miles down to Greenwich was an infernal world of leather tanneries and rubber works; there were distilleries too, although their own distinct aromas were wholly smothered. Hannah Dobbs’ first view of her new city neighbourhood must have been – in the most literal sense – breath-catching and daunting.

Before she left Devon, she had secured herself lodgings in the district of Rotherhithe, on the south side of the river, near the vast timber warehouses of the Surrey Docks. Hannah did not know any better; but did the cheapness of the room on offer cause her any kind of premonitory flutter of disquiet or unease? Hannah’s train, after a change at Exeter, would have arrived at Waterloo; and after a tiring seven-hour journey, she would have stepped off the train into a shattering clamour of noise and smoke. A young woman, quite alone in this vast metropolis; how was she to establish herself? And once she had engaged a horse-drawn cab to Rotherhithe, how was she to adjust to that new realm of narrow, glistening alleys and damp walls and rotting weather-boarding, where the nearest green space was a mile away and where the close-built streets at night were alive with the pervasive menace of male drinkers?

A satisfactory domestic situation seemed elusive. There were employment agencies for servants; but her references were by necessity limited. And Hannah Dobbs was also in precisely the wrong location to walk around looking for work in grander houses; though there were some middle-class households to be found a little further south in Peckham and Camberwell, it would have been an increasingly trying business for the former dairy-maid to trudge from door to door asking if there were any jobs to be had. The real focus of work lay north of the river.

In addition to all this, a young woman living quite alone in a mean rented room close to the noisy pubs that served the hard-drinking dockers, in moist passages that by night were a malign maze, would surely have found this first taste of London deeply unsettling. After a month, when Hannah’s meagre funds had dwindled, she was forced to leave.

But she was not ready to give up altogether; somehow, she got to hear of a position at ‘Mrs Nicholson’s, Woodlands Road, Redhill’¹ – a town in Surrey swaddled in the lee of the North Downs.

The work must have been relatively agreeable; Hannah stayed there for fifteen months and indeed might well have stayed longer. The reason for the termination of this job was once again her compulsion to steal. This time, she purloined ‘a piece of silk, and £1 3 shillings from a box’. Mrs Nicholson not only dismissed Hannah, but also wrote to her parents in Bideford about her ‘conduct’.² Hannah had no choice but to return to Devonshire in disgrace.

Despite the failure of her last attempt, she yearned to return to London. Again, there may have been subliminal encouragement offered by newspapers and magazines; daily gossip items increasingly focused on female stage performers from unprivileged backgrounds, and where they were next appearing. The capital, it seemed, was welcoming women of talent; and newspapers were fascinated by these new celebrities, moving in such a world of glamour and colour. Hannah (who was later to have the term ‘celebrity’ sardonically attached to her own name) and countless others would have been gripped by stories about those who began as humble dancers or chorus members. The rooms of Bloomsbury played host to many women who sought such work.

Journals such as The Era were printing articles about music hall artistes such as Bessie Bellwood (famous for her ditty ‘What Cheer, Ria’), Lizzie Coote (‘Froggy Would A Wooing Go’) and Jenny Hill – ‘The Vital Spark’ (‘Maggie Murphy’s Here’ was a favourite). Bessie Bellwood had risen from great poverty in Bermondsey; but with her newfound stardom, her devoted fans were thrilled to read that out of her tremendous earnings, she regularly paid for Masses for the poor. Jenny Hill, meanwhile, was using her fantastic earning power to invest: in 1879, she bought The Star music hall in south London.

The public fascination for these female performers lay in the fact that they were seen to have agency and traction; an unusual level of control over their lives.

Added to this, the rise of the popularity of photography saw singers and stage actresses now having their images sold in special photograph shops. These shots were known as ‘shilling beauties’. There was an inevitable element of salaciousness involved in a lot of the photographs; as actresses, music hall singers, even dancers in ballet companies, the women portrayed might justifiably pose in scanty clothing. By the 1870s, this trend for slyly shocking photography receded a little when the newspapers and magazines noticed, and signalled disapproval.

‘The photographic shops are now purged of the prurient portraits of half-dressed actresses,’ observed one London gossip column entitled ‘West End Notes’, ‘which used to make it impossible for modest women to study the celebrities of the day.’ But ‘celebrity’ photographic cards of a more decorous nature were still pervasive and popular with women. And despite censoriousness, they still pointed towards a sense that their subjects understood the power of sexuality.

In the mid-1870s, there was a national flurry of fascination over the famous young cockney actress and singer Nelly Power, who had become involved in a most intriguing off-stage scandal. Under her real name, Eileen Maria, she was married to a man called Richard Israel Barnett. As Nelly Power sang on stage: ‘He is something in an office, lah-di-dah/ And he quite the City toff is, lah-di-dah.’ But the marriage had soured. And now there was the prospect of a very public divorce which sensationally would reveal Nelly Power’s affair with another man. For a woman in any other social situation, this would mean blazing humiliation, if not ruin. The case of Nelly Power, who was only twenty-years old, appeared to re-write the conventions.

As the marriage disintegrated, Power moved out of the nuptial home and went back to stay with her mother, Mrs Lingham who lived in Islington, not far from the canal. But Nelly Power’s estranged husband was roiling with fury, jealousy and suspicion; and spent many evenings simply standing positioned across the road from the mother’s dwellings, in the gloom of the gaslight. His behaviour would now be termed stalking.

One evening in the autumn of 1875, Barnett once more took up that unsettling sentinel position on the Southgate Road, looking at the home of Nelly and her mother. He observed Nelly Power going out, and catching a hansom cab; some hours later, as he remained motionless, he watched as another cab drew up Southgate Road. Out of it emerged his wife and the man he had so frequently seen. This was Frederick George Hobson, later described by the excited newspapers as a ‘betting man’ and member of the Raleigh Club. He was also, as the excitable newspapers noted, an ‘avowed admirer’ of Nelly Power.

In the course of the violent scuffle that followed, the husband Barnett came off worse with a bloody nose. The next stage was the courts; and a case that readers devoured eagerly.

Anyone who imagined that Nelly Power might be reluctant to attend for fear of the damage it might do her reputation had misjudged her self-confidence. As Barnett tried to lay the accusation of assault against Hobson, he glared at Nelly Power and told the jury that ‘the lady sitting beside you is my wife and I wish I had never seen her’.³

But Nelly Power had her own statement to make. She took the stand and told the court: ‘Since I married this man, my jewellery and everything have been swept away.’ The court was also informed that Hobson had suggested that ‘£1000 would square him’. The case brought by Barnett was now being turned against him. Nelly Power won a divorce in which her future earnings were ‘protected’. And most importantly, the newspaper coverage was suggestive of a popular sympathy with the young woman in the matter. The fascinated public, in the form of ever-larger theatre audiences for her roles in ‘Jack The Giant Killer’, and ‘The Merchant of Venice’ gave their approval too. There was no suggestion of her own sexual morality being judged.

Nelly Power’s life was tragically short; she died of pleurisy only a few years later at the age of 32. Her funeral was in Abney Park cemetery in the north London suburb of Stoke Newington; thousands of people lined the streets to bid farewell. All through her career, she had been a wildly popular figure.

And most crucially, she and so many other actresses – from Nellie Moon to Lillie Langtry – will have been alluring role models to countless young woman across the land. They held out the inspiring possibility of a world in which a woman could find fulfilment not in domesticity, but the achievement of a hugely successful career – if only one could find the opportunities.

After a few weeks back in Bideford, Hannah Dobbs was ready for a new attempt on London. She had contacted a ‘servants’ advertising agent’; he had written back to tell her that he had several potential vacancies for her. Once again, her she embarked upon that train journey; but this time, instead of taking lodgings in the murk of Rotherhithe, she instead found herself a room in Lamb’s Conduit Street, Holborn.

The street itself, with its creaking architecture, was frowsy. But it lay close to the territory that Hannah wished to be in. She went out looking for situations herself.

Not half-a-mile away from her lodgings were some of the grandest and most elegant squares in Bloomsbury: Russell, Gordon and Torrington. At number 42, Torrington Square lived a landlady, Mrs Pearce, who rented rooms to a number of lodgers, and who needed several maids to deal with the workload. Hannah Dobbs was quickly taken on as a cook, with a salary of £12 a year.

It was this position, in the heart of Bloomsbury, that was going to alter the course of her life, and make another kind of life seem possible. Hannah and her colleagues certainly worked hard but here was also an extraordinary vantage point from which to view the fine ladies, the sumptuousness of fashion; it was also from here that the maids would have been keenly aware of the different sorts of young men – from the soldiers, the bright aggressive scarlet of their tunics blazing outside the public houses, to the men of property, coats dark but waistcoats and neckties silken and shimmering with finely woven patterns.

It was there in Torrington Square – Hannah Dobbs would later lethally claim – that she first met Severin Bastendorff. It was from that point onwards that she would find herself on that trajectory to her own dark form of celebrity.

And so it was, a few weeks after her release from prison in August 1879, following the murder trial, that Hannah Dobbs was to acquire rather greater fame and notoriety. She had a story to tell. And one that a newspaper publisher called George Purkess was extremely eager to pay handsomely for, to publish and send across the world.

Yet this was also a story that – in all its sexual seediness and horror – was going to smash at the foundations of the Bastendorff household.