25
Disintegration
Above all else, Severin Bastendorff would appear to have owed it to his wife, Mary; over the course of the last eighteen months, she had been pulled by the wrist through a nightmare of murder and courts and scandal and prison, while pregnant and also attempting to keep an entire household economy running. She would have been piercingly aware of the swift glances that she was receiving while shopping for food; terrifically sensitive to the prospect of friends falling away, frightened by the darkness that seemed to surround her house and family.
On 26 January 1881, Mary Bastendorff suffered further strain as the Queen’s Bench Division of the courts – together with a special jury, and all under the Lord Chief Justice – met to consider the original libel action against George Purkess for printing and distributing the Hannah Dobbs pamphlet.
Severin Bastendorff was present, and ready to be called as a witness. Perhaps his own state of mind does not require very much imagination to conjure.
He now had new defence counsels; and it was Mr Edward Clarke who opened the case. He explained to the court the circumstances of the discovery of the corpse; of Hannah Dobbs’ trial for murder and her acquittal; and then the publication of the pamphlet. ‘The plaintiff then brought his action for libel,’ Clarke told the court, ‘denying one of her statements imputing to him an intimacy with her.’ This led to an indictment for perjury and Bastendorff’s year in prison ‘which he had suffered’.
Clarke told this new special jury that this libel case ‘raised very grave and serious issues,’ since the libel imputed to his client ‘the guilt not merely of murder but of several murders’.
Just as the counsel began to go into further detail, he was halted by an interjection from the Chief Justice Lord Coleridge who said – with rather extraordinary and ‘expressive’ disdain – ‘must this case go on?’
It took the prosecuting counsel Montagu Williams to tell him that yes, ‘at present’ he ‘thought it must’.
‘Then the mischief be done,’ said Lord Coleridge. ‘No doubt the parties have a right to take up the time of the Court.’1
There was no sense here at all of a judge who might have considered that Bastendorff had been atrociously wronged.
And the moment must have been vertiginous for Bastendorff. Yet he was clearly ferociously determined. ‘Having heard the statements read from the pamphlet,’ ran one report, ‘he said there was no truth in the charges that it contained and the consequence of their publication had been to cause him serious injury.’ Indeed, Bastendorff stated: ‘I have suffered in my business and in my reputation.’2 He did not mention prison; perhaps he had been counselled against doing so.
This time, judgement was swift – and surprising. ‘A conference took place between counsel in the case,’ ran the report, ‘which ended in a settlement’. It was agreed; and in Severin Bastendorff’s favour.
The verdict was ‘for the plaintiff’. There was a ‘withdrawal of the charges against the plaintiff’. And he was awarded £500 (roughly equivalent to £65,000 today, though such a sum would have gone a very great deal further; it was a fortune).
The prosecuting counsel Montagu Williams said that ‘he agreed on the part of the defendant to that verdict’. That defendant, publisher George Purkess, ‘also desired to express his regret that he should have published the statements, and to intimate that he withdrew them’.
Lord Coleridge, who might simply have been relieved to have been spared a lengthy case for which he had little interest, said that he ‘rejoiced at the settlement of such a case, which would spare a great deal of public time that would otherwise have been taken up in the inquiry’.
There was no apology for the prison sentence; no hint that compensation for that judicial wrong might be forthcoming.
Severin Bastendorff was free to return to Euston Square and – somehow – resume his business interests and more importantly reintroduce himself to his young family. His victory was publicised in newspapers across the country.
But there was no sense that that would have been a help to him. The ‘Euston Square Mystery’ was still being regularly referred to in news reports as a case seemingly beyond solution. The odour and the squalor clung to his name.
The money awarded would have helped in the short term; his legal costs were also covered by the judgement, so the aim would have been to begin restoring the fortunes of his furniture business. But even in the initial relief of the win, something was broken within Bastendorff.
By this stage, Hannah Dobbs had relinquished her desire to be widely known; even if this pursuit had been less to do with the rejoicing in celebrity and more to do with a grim fight for survival and a terror of once more being accused of murder, it was clear from the hideous damage wrought by the pamphlet that discretion would now be the wiser course. There were suggestions that she and Peter Bastendorff were still romantically linked, and even that they were common-law husband and wife, in his Somers Town lodgings. But now they were very careful to avoid the press. Peter Bastendorff continued with his own furniture trade in the area. Indeed, in the years to come, this business would see some expansion.
At what point in the coming days and weeks and months did Severin Bastendorff begin exhibiting signs of frightening instability? And what triggered it? The 1881 census provided a list of the inhabitants of 4, Euston Square that summer. Severin was there, ‘head’ of the household, aged 34, with his occupation described as ‘cabinet maker, employing 10 men and one boy’. There was wife Mary, aged 36. The children were listed: Christina, aged 8; Peter, aged 6; Severin, aged 4 (rather quaintly, the youngsters had, as their occupations, the term ‘scholar’). The smallest children were Rosa, aged 3, and Richard, just one.
Interestingly, there were two lodgers: one, 26-year-old William Pierce, was also listed as a ‘cabinet maker’ and might have been working for Bastendorff. But there was also a 66-year-old widow called Elizabeth Powell. Had she heard of the house’s bad name? Or were her circumstances such that she could not allow herself to be bothered?3
Clearly, with ten employees, Severin Bastendorff’s business was thriving against the many bitter odds against it. His brothers, Joseph and Anton, appeared to be thriving too; the style for Chinese lacquer-work cabinets was now at a peak of fashion.
But there was a point at which Severin Bastendorff broke down; a day some time in the early 1880s, when he suddenly and blankly walked out of 4, Euston Square. What is known is that he made his way to the pleasant south London suburb of Camberwell. It had always been popular with the German community, and so it is possible that he had either friends or acquaintances there. But his ultimate destination was rather more desperate. By this stage, his behaviour was erratic enough to be noticed by the police. As would become clearer later, a large part of this involved Bastendorff having aural hallucinations and listening to voices that he said conveyed commands. He was taken off the street and conveyed to the Camberwell workhouse.
This institution, just off the Peckham Road, had been expanded in recent years, and it did not merely cater for the crisis-hit poor, or the elderly.
There was also a separate, special ward for what were termed ‘lunatics’.
Some would have shuddered at the idea; it might have sounded like a recreation of the eighteenth-century ‘Bedlam’. But the Camberwell architects had given some thought to a dedicated space that was – to some psychologically vulnerable inmates – a safe haven of solid brick and tall bright windows.
The ceilings were fourteen feet high, so there was no sense of claustrophobia. The floors were kept scrupulously clean, and there was a carpet in the middle of the ward. The lavatorial facilities were deemed by inspectors to be fine, and there were frequent opportunities for decent bathing too. The beds, quite close to one another, had mattresses of horse-hair but were judged to be reasonably comfortable.
And on top of this, at one end of the ward could be found skittles and games of backgammon; efforts to keep the inmates amused and happy. Like all such institutions of the time, the quality of the staff would have been variable; but for some with severe mental health problems, this special ward of the Camberwell workhouse might just have afforded valuable respite from the unfeeling clamour of the densely populated streets.
At some early stage, the authorities must have established who exactly he was; but the news of her husband’s removal to such a place will have been a further horrific blow to Mary Bastendorff. Apart from anything else, she was now becoming increasingly reliant upon the kindness of Bastendorff’s brothers; her own income, deriving from lodgers’ rents, was minimal. Added to this, it is possible that Mary resented the close meshing of the family; and she may have resented it a great deal more when Anton Bastendorff and his wife, Elizabeth, moved into number 4, Euston Square.
In general terms, a workhouse was not a prison; the inmates were free to leave if they chose. The cruelty lay in whether or not they could afford to. But those who dwelled in the ‘lunatic ward’ were under much closer watch than the other workhouse inmates; granted, the attendants were not medically trained, but the vestrymen of the parish who were responsible for running the institution would have ensured that only the most temperamentally suitable people were selected for the job.
Severin Bastendorff spent some time here; the nature of his illness – listening to voices, whispering to himself – might have been growing more intense. Possibly he showed no sign of wishing to leave the ward. But gradually, after some weeks, he regained some of his old health. Eventually, someone in authority deemed him recovered enough to be discharged. But his marriage by this stage was essentially over.
It is difficult to know when Mary Bastendorff first tried to have her husband committed to the rather larger lunatic asylum at the fringes of north London in Friern Barnet. But it was clear that she no longer felt safe around him.
To have taken such a grave step, Mary Bastendorff would have involved the police; but it also involved a counter-signature on the requisite forms from one of his brothers.
So it was that the dark tragedy of Matilda Hacker’s murder continued to reverberate throughout 4, Euston Square. Attendants from the lunatic asylum presented themselves at the house; Severin Bastendorff found himself being removed from the home that he had worked so hard for.
And from here he was escorted – closely guarded – to the nearby King’s Cross station. A local train pushing northwards; within 15 minutes, Bastendorff’s destination would be seen: a vast and elegant construction on top of a green hill. It had its own special railway sidings. He was being taken to the Colney Hatch asylum. It is possible that he found the first sight of it terrifying. Many Londoners did.
By the mid-1880s (while the records for his later spell in the asylum are complete, those for the first period there are no longer extant), the place had begun to acquire a seriously forbidding reputation. It had not begun that way. Indeed, Colney Hatch was intended as the physical expression of a renaissance in the care of the mentally vulnerable. It really was intended to offer both asylum and sanctuary.
The architecture was Italianate in flavour; there was a grand central tower with a dome. Stretching off from this were immensely long wards and dormitories, two and three storeys tall, rendered in brick. And around these buildings lay expansive gardens and fields. Colney Hatch, built and opened in the 1850s, had been conceived out of compassion; previously, those suffering from mental health problems were consigned to those special wards in workhouses, or if better-off, to the unregulated care of ‘private madhouses’. Colney Hatch and its sister institution in Hanwell, to the west of the city, was the public and civic declaration that treatment and rehabilitation were possible.
Previously, mental illness had been dealt with in a manner that was almost medieval: close confinement, darkness, ignorance. Colney Hatch, by contrast, was staffed by ‘physicians’ and nursing staff who had an interest both in caring for and curing those who had once been regarded as incurable. To begin with, there were problems: the use of restraints, regarded by the supervising authorities as barbaric; sanitation and heating were primitive; and there was no comfort for distressed souls in the forbidding furnishings and décor.
The restraints were soon abandoned; and one of the institution’s early chief movers, Dr Tyerman, brought a distinctive Victorian energy to the role. At Colney Hatch, the patients would not be idle but instead set – if they chose – to invigorating work. This, he insisted, was the opposite of exploitative.
‘The great desideratum is to promote … uninterrupted, interesting, varying employment, which strongly claims the attention, and leaves the morbid idea no time to develop itself,’ he wrote. ‘A glance at the list of trades and occupations of those admitted … as of gas-fitters, plasterers, painters and grainers, engineers, carpenters – the resources of this immense Establishment afford opportunities … for developing latent and nascent intelligence.’4
He added that many inmates, who had previously worked in ‘sedentary’ occupations, greatly appreciated the chance to take up outdoors work. The fields around Colney Hatch were seeded with crops, which were harvested; the institution was self-sufficient in vegetables and corn.
There was also – as the institution evolved – a determination not to completely segregate male and female patients. There were chances to mix at mealtimes. There was cricket. Added to this, it was felt to be important that the inmates of Colney Hatch were not shut away completely from the wider world; both for their benefit, but also to ensure that the local villagers in Southgate, Barnet and Finchley did not regard the institution with fear. In the summer, there were fairs in the grounds: inmates and local people encouraged to mingle. There were concerts too, and dances. Again, these were occasions for inmates and visitors to meet; an opportunity on both sides to eradicate misconceptions and to dissipate dread on both sides.
In addition, given that the great sprawl of London built-up suburbia had not yet quite reached these hills, it was possible to take the patients out for country walks at the weekend, around Pym Brook and Bounds Green.
Yet for all of the idealism, by the 1880s, the institution had also developed, for many Londoners, an aspect of dread. Possibly one reason was that its prominent position on top of that hill, visible from miles around, was to many a constant reminder of the fragility of mental health; equally, for patients, the well-meant architecture proved oppressive in very particular ways.
There were shadowy corridors that stretched to a third of a mile; even in the brightest summer, they were dark. Patients in large dormitories were sometimes terrified of the people around them. The building was filled with echoes, in the halls, on the stairs; the noises of involuntary aggression or indeed fear would be amplified. The only element of effective soundproofing would be found in the cells that had been specially padded for emergency cases; a recent innovation.
There were never enough trained staff to give the many patients the individual care they needed. And of course, for many patients, there would have been the darkest fear: that this was now to be their permanent home. No matter how pleasing the grounds, no matter how engaged and sensitive the attendants, this was still an institution that was guarded, with a high wall. All individual agency was removed; whereas in prison, one might count out the days of one’s sentence, in Colney Hatch, that sentence might be indefinite, and one might never understand why.
Was there the sense among the doctors and attendants and others who cared for Severin Bastendorff that this instability might have been an element in the fate of Matilda Hacker?
At one point, Bastendorff contrived to make an escape. This would not have been immensely difficult; there were plenty of opportunities when taking exercise to scale the wall and leave the grounds. Bastendorff would have faced a five mile walk back across the increasingly built-up hills of Hornsey and Haringey towards Euston Square; in other words, a journey of about an hour-and-a-half. For a man blazing with a sense of multiple injustices having been done to him – plus also the bewilderment of having fallen so far from the heights of successful craftsman to inmate of Colney Hatch – such a walk must have passed as in a dream.
Yet his attendants were not far behind. They caught up with him (it would not have been difficult for them to reason where he was going) and persuaded back to his new home. And indeed, there must have been an essential pacifism about Bastendorff’s manner around his carers. Because a few months after that incident, he was deemed to have made sufficient progress to be discharged altogether from Colney Hatch; he was free to return home.
It might be that Bastendorff was once more lucid, and showing a keen interest in the business that he had laboured over the years to build up.
One of the elements that made Colney Hatch asylum relatively progressive in its outlook was its policy of not incarcerating patients for any longer than was deemed necessary for their own good; a man or woman might, in some cases, be discharged after only a few days. Indeed, there were those who returned to the hospital years later not for re-admittance, but simply to convey their grateful thanks to the staff who had worked so hard to heal them.
In 1885, Bastendorff was again at liberty; and now he had returned to 4, Euston Square, reunited with his children and his wife even if – as it is reasonable to speculate – he and Mary now kept separate beds. This respite was not to last. None the less, he attempted to return to his old furniture-making work; it can only be assumed that in his absence, the other Bastendorff brothers had taken on his previous clients. Added to this, Peter Bastendorff was listing 4, Euston Square among his other business addresses, such as Hampstead Road.
There was a public flash of Severin Bastendorff’s intense paranoia in the autumn of the year. It came in the form of an extraordinary newspaper advertisement that he took out in the London Evening Standard.
‘In accordance with the law,’ this advertisement ran, ‘I hereby give notice that after this date, my wife Mary Snelson Bastendorff, is NOT to receive money as cashier in my business. Anyone paying money to her is liable to be called upon for the same. S. Bastendorff … 4, Euston Square Oct 3, 1885.’5
The marriage disintegrated further over the coming weeks; Bastendorff was forced to move out of Euston Square and take a room in the nearby Midland Hotel. Then there came a further crisis point as Severin returned to the house to confront Mary one morning in mid-November 1885.
He climbed the stairs to Mary’s bedroom; and finding her within, he confronted her angrily ‘about a £5 note’ which he had ‘missed’. With apparent anger, she replied that she had spent it on family ‘maintenance’. He was carrying an umbrella; and at this, he raised it up and ‘thrashed her with it about her shoulders’. ‘She ran downstairs screaming into the kitchen where again he beat her.’ The assault only ended when a young man in Bastendorff’s employ, Walter Vortigan, came down to the kitchen and ‘interposed’. He did so, he told the court, because he was aware of ‘the other affair’ that had occurred in the house and was worried that there may be another fatality.6
Yet Bastendorff considered himself the wronged party following this assault; and indeed waited in the kitchen as a policeman was fetched. As the constable arrived, Bastendorff made his position clear: he wanted his wife arrested. He was clearly convinced that the ‘missing’ £5 constituted theft.
Protesting, Mary went to the length of lowering her dressing gown to show the policeman ‘the marks of violence about her’. Presumably satisfied that the assault was over, the policeman then left: no arrests, no charges. Although the courts at that time were filled with cases involving domestic violence – it is a misconception about that era that such cases were overlooked – the police were not often as assiduous as they might have been in such matters.
None the less, the incident was enough for Mary to take out a further ‘summons’ against her estranged husband. The aim was to have him taken back to the asylum.
Bastendorff was in no doubt that a monstrous injustice was being wrought against him. On a grim winter’s day – just twenty-four hours before the summons was due to be delivered to him – he bided his time around the central garden of Euston Square and then approached his eldest children, Christine, Peter and Severin, as they returned from school. How would they like to come with him to Germany for a short holiday?
His daughter, Christine, and son, Peter, were happy to go. Somehow – extraordinarily – Mary Bastendorff was either content with this too or had felt compelled in some way to agree to this arrangement. The childrens’ things were duly packed, and Bastendorff had his own small portmanteau. Mary even went with them to Liverpool Street station to see them off on the train.
As soon as he was out of the country, a warrant was issued. It seems certain that he stayed with family relatives on the borders of Luxembourg and Germany, with his daughter and son; but then he decided to return, strikingly leaving Christine and Peter behind. Upon his arrival at Euston Square, someone in the house or in the workshop alerted the police. The aim was to have Bastendorff returned to Colney Hatch and the children brought back from Germany.
But it proved a little more difficult to have Bastendorff removed this time. The case had to be heard before a magistrate and there was a delay of a few weeks. The Bastendorffs’ marriage was irretrievable; Severin continued to rent a room in the nearby Midland Hotel. When the case for his assault on Mary with the umbrella was heard, the sadness of it all was once more relayed in newspapers right across the country.
Mary was called to testify against Severin; and she told the magistrate that he had ‘used threats against her’. She also said that ‘her children who were abroad were in a destitute condition’.
She was asked by the prosecutor: ‘Have you put your husband away in an asylum?’ ‘Yes, I have,’ she said. ‘How many times?’ ‘Twice,’ she said. ‘Are you now taking proceedings against him in lunacy?’ ‘Yes,’ she said.
The prosecutor then asked her: ‘Is not your object by this prosecution to assist in the lunacy proceedings?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I applied to the relieving officer yesterday because I don’t consider that he is in a fit state of mind to be around.’7
It emerged at this hearing that ‘the prisoner’s brother’ (it was not stated which) ‘signed the petition in lunacy on the first occasion’. But in this court in January 1886, the magistrate seemed reluctant to consign Bastendorff once more to the wards; and he ruled that he considered it unseemly that a court such as his should be used to make such a judgement upon a man’s sanity. Presumably to the great dismay of Mary Bastendorff, Severin was merely bound over to keep the peace for six months.
Although there are no records, it is reasonable to assume that in the interim, one of the other Bastendorff brothers made their way to the old home in Echterdorf to fetch back Severin and Mary’s children; what is certain is that in that period, Severin’s mental health deteriorated further. He was exhibiting signs of what might have been seen as acute paranoia, or a sense of ceaseless persecution. Bastendorff had an increasingly agitated manner that was seen in public the following year.
He was back in the Bow Street court, eight years after Hannah Dobbs’ pre-trial hearing: on 27 May 1887, Severin Bastendorff, now 45, was ‘charged with being a lunatic not under proper control’. It was reported that when he was placed in the dock, he ‘smiled vacantly’. Detective-Sergeant Brown told the magistrate how Bastendorff had come into the Whitehall Place police station earlier that morning and announced that he wished to make a statement.
Bastendorff had declared: ‘I have been sent by Almighty God to claim £50,000. My brother Peter and his wife murdered Miss Hacker.’
‘There was no doubt,’ ran the report, ‘that the prisoner was insane.’8
The quiet judgement was that he should be returned to the asylum. As Bastendorff was being led through the Bow Street corridors, he glanced up and saw a portrait of the late Mr Flowers – one of the judges who had committed him to face trial for perjury in 1879 – and he shouted: ‘That man has no business there. The Lord told him to discharge me and he would not.’
And it was at this point, back in Colney Hatch, that Bastendorff’s life became a subject of study by a number of interested doctors. ‘Facts specified in Medical Certificate upon which Opinion of Insanity is founded’ was the introductory line in Bastendorff’s medical notes. ‘He has the delusive idea that God speaks to him,’ noted the anonymous doctor, ‘that He speaks in English, French and German – that sometimes God’s voice is audible close to him – sometimes it seems as if at a distance – that when I ask him a question – he listens – hears the voice of God which dictates the answer and then (Bastendorff) answers. He will not wear the Ward dress being as he says directed by God not to do so. He says God’s voice is distinct like music, that God came on a cloud and he saw Him.’ The verdict: ‘mania’.9
Alfred Wilson, an ‘attendant of the Insane’ at the Camberwell workhouse where Bastendorff had previously been, added the observation that while he was there, Bastendorff had refused to wear the regulation trousers saying ‘the Almighty had ordered him not to do so’. It is not difficult to hear the echo of Bastendorff’s entry to prison in December 1879: the stripping away of the clothes that had been part of his identity, and the humiliation of being made to assume the identity of a common convict.
The receiving doctor at Colney Hatch also noted of his returned patient:
A fairly nourished German, with a bushy, reddish beard, moustache and whiskers, a small, piercing, restless grey eye with which he winks and smirks in a silly, coquettish manner; poses and demonstrates his imaginary powers and skill by relating how he cures stones in the bladder, works miracles, coins money … he is egotistical and vain while relating how he has overcome false witnesses, how he has laid a claim against the government for £30,000 and obtained instead a million and a half. All this he proceeds to show is through the influence of voices from God. Pupils contracted, tongue protruded normally, speech unaffected, gait steady but somewhat constrained.
The diagnosis: ‘Mania.’10
How might Bastendorff have been diagnosed today? Was this a breakdown, the result of the intolerable pressures of the past few years? Or was it a deeper underlying condition: manic depression, even paranoid schizophrenia? The brutal trauma of hard labour and the loss of his respectable reputation could have been a trigger; but additionally, it must be remembered that for many in those late Victorian years, having come to the vast city from rural areas, the relentless and cacophonous nature of this new urban life could eventually become overwhelming. On top of this, the records of the hospital from this time feature a striking number of European names: and it might reasonably be argued that any vulnerable immigrant, experiencing prejudice in a hundred quite different ways, might come to form a view of a society that was indeed set on persecution.
In the wards of Colney Hatch, the study of mental health was still a new science; psychology in its most basic terms was in its infancy. But there were some things that they took care to do right: at one point the colour scheme of the wards – until that point, bright whitewash – was changed to a more restful pale blue which the patients preferred. And different therapies were tried; excitable or distressed patients were allowed long hot baths and indeed spells in a specially installed Turkish Bath, which was found to aid sleep.
Added to this, the hospital expanded its facilities for different sorts of workshops, for those patients who were interested in filling their days with productive work. There were rooms for the weaving of baskets and mats; but additionally, given the large number of skilled craftsmen who were admitted as patients, there were also workshops in which furniture could be made and upholstered. In some instances, the furniture made was used in the hospital. There would have been an outlet for Bastendorff’s talent in the construction of beautiful cabinets, although according to the hospital notes, he did not seem to be interested in returning to his craft: much of the time he remained ‘unemployed’.
He would not have suffered any physical privations. Much work had also been done on improving the sanitary conditions and the lighting; by the 1880s, Colney Hatch had proper bathrooms, plentiful hot water and good lighting through gas. In the winter, no-one would be dirty or cold or shivering in the dark. Some patients who came here with temporarily disabling conditions – cases that might seem close nowadays to post-traumatic stress – found the asylum had actually been a terrific boon. Unlike their lives in the precarious London world outside, they had spent a lengthy period being looked after both mentally and physically, with good food and attentive warders seeing to any wounds or otherwise painful conditions.
For those detained there indefinitely, however, the flaws in the institution – which became more apparent in the late nineteenth century as numbers rose and funding became tighter – were all too visible. There were structural faults in the outwardly elegant structure on that north London hill; stonework that was already crumbling, forbidding lighting, missing hand-rails for stairs. And no matter how attentive the doctors and orderlies, no matter how strenuous the efforts to maintain hygiene and calm and to relieve the daily monotony with different activities, nothing could quite rid the place of its uncanny atmosphere; this was the fault of the architecture, which had created those seemingly illimitable echoing corridors.
In Bastendorff’s records, the phrase most frequently used by doctors was ‘no change’. Each year, he got a new, short (sometimes one line) summary on his patient notes. Yet there were changes. For a time, Bastendorff became agitated by the idea of telephones; that everything he said was being monitored by these machines; that there was a telephone ‘perched’ outside on the guttering. When he spoke to doctors, he would sometimes raise a sheet, or a length of fabric to cover his mouth, and he would speak in a half-whisper. He was adamant that he was being monitored by enemies.
Occasionally, he fell prey to the diseases that would sweep through the institution like fire; in the 1890s Bastendorff suffered a bad attack of pneumonia (though he evaded the outbreak of scarlet fever that came a little later). Food became a matter of disquiet for him; he became convinced that his foes were attempting to ‘poison’ him, and he could only be persuaded to eat with difficulty. One doctor noted how he had become ‘much thinner’.11
By 1893 – six years on his ward – Bastendorff had ‘delusions of grandness – that he is a king’. He was ‘so feverish in his talk’. The possibilities of any future discharge were looking increasingly remote.
This was to be Severin Bastendorff’s home for the rest of his life.
There were photographs taken of inmates in the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century: they are immeasurably haunting. Some of the patients – thin, sometimes mottled with the tokens of infectious diseases like scarlet fever – look at the camera directly. Others gaze elsewhere. There is no emotion in the eyes; but there is the sense behind them of the troubles that brought them to this place.
In 1899, a portrait was taken of Severin Bastendorff. He was photographed looking to the left. He was aged 52. His hair was still thick and full of colour – no discernible grey in that reddish thatch – and his whiskers were still long. His cheeks were hollow. The clothes he wore – a suit of plain material, with a high waistcoat and a patterned shirt – were some distance from the style he had been used to in his former life, but nor did he look shabby. As he looked away, what was he thinking?
Another photograph, taken later in the 1920s, showed a group of young male patients, dressed up in suits and smart clothes for a day out: some look down, some look away, some have a distinctive gait, a way of holding the shoulders, that is indicative of their condition. The clothes were intended as a means of showing those on the outside that the inmates of Colney Hatch were not ‘Others’ to be shunned, but all part of the same community.
Yet this was not what was portrayed in the growing popular culture of thriller novels and silent films. Increasingly, institutions like this were rendered as places of gothic menace; so many thrillers, such as The Cat and The Canary (1927), involve the alarms being sounded as an especially dangerous lunatic escapes; and even later, the characters around P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster can be found accusing him and others of insanity, and threatening them with incarceration in Colney Hatch.
This was the only world that Bastendorff knew for the remaining twenty-two years of his life. The hospital notes give no indication of whether – or how often – his wife and now grown-up children managed to visit him. Would he have even received them? Underneath that carapace of delusional behaviour was one strong recurring theme: that of a proud man who had been grievously wronged.
He lived until the spring of 1909 and died aged 62, of a heart complication.
When he was taken for burial, his sons and daughters would have been in early middle age. How much did they tell their own children about the father whose mind had been broken?
In the absence of Severin Bastendorff at Euston Square back in the 1880s, it seemed that the other brothers decided to take it on. They had their own troubles. In 1893, Anton Bastendorff was summoned to Clerkenwell magistrates, charged with ‘neglecting to maintain’ his wife, Caroline. Indeed, it seemed she had ended up in the St Pancras workhouse, and was now ‘the responsibility’ of the Guardians there (as the couple’s five children remained at home). Anton Bastendorff ‘denied that he failed to support his wife’ and the reason for her present state was that she had fallen into ‘intemperate habits’. He made arrangements to have her removed back to his address: 4, Euston Square.
Yet there were suggestions that both Anton and Caroline were heavy drinkers; and it appeared that she died not too long afterwards of what was described as ‘quinsy’ – a septic complication of tonsillitis against which there would have been little defence at that point.
By this stage, the Bastendorffs’ sister Elizabeth was living in London (after some time in Paris) with her husband, Wilhelm Hoerr. And it appeared that also living with them was Peter Bastendorff. There was no official suggestion come the 1880s or 1890s that Hannah Dobbs was by his side; yet would it not have been possible that she had changed her name as she had before? The notoriety she had experienced had not brought any sort of gain; indeed, it would have made her utterly unemployable. Who would even consider having such a maid around their domestic establishment after her barrage of accusations, and her self-confessed kleptomania?
The bamboo furniture business, it seemed, continued to thrive for a time; after all the horrors of the body in the cellar, the family name was once more seen in regular advertisements across the city. Indeed, these featured in upmarket periodicals.
Yet Peter Bastendorff by the 1890s had taken a step to disassociate himself with any other memories of the family name: moving premises in north London, he began using the name ‘James Roberts’ for company business. And as the decade wore on, was Peter afflicted with some form of nostalgia for a city he had fleetingly known years back? Whatever the case, it would appear that he left London, sailed across to France, and made a new home in Paris. By this stage, he would have been about to turn 40 years of age. It is simply impossible to know: was Hannah with him? Would she perhaps have now lived with him under the name ‘Hannah Roberts’?
Paris by this stage, suffused with the new light of electricity, had been reborn in elegance. It would have been a thrilling city in which to begin a new life, especially given the circumscribed possibilities of life back in London.
Yet this might be an assumption too far; Hannah Dobbs’ own disappearance – or the vanishing of her old self at any rate – seems to have been too complete for anything to be stated with iron certainty.
According to one suggestion put forward in a genealogy discussion conducted a few years ago, Peter Bastendorff’s move to Paris was his last: he was said to have died in January 1898. He was also said to have left the sum of £160 (now worth about £11,000) to his sister, Elizabeth. There was no hint of any other bequests; not a suggestion that a more constant companion had inherited more.
But the business notices in the national newspapers in London announced the winding up of his remaining commercial concerns; that the company James N. Roberts, ‘trading as’ Peter Bastendorff, a bamboo furniture maker, was now bankrupt.
And by this stage, 4, Euston Square seemed to have gained, rather than faded, in notoriety. Which each passing year, the dank mystery of Matilda Hacker seemed to become ever more tantalising to an ever-widening reading public. Indeed, the house was about to take on a most unwelcome new life.