Ellen Dane hailed from Southport, where George Thomas had family. She came to Bristol in the late 1860s and for a brief period she had stayed with George and Amelia. Dane earned a living taking women into her own home for the duration of their confinement, nursing them through the latter stages of their pregnancy and acting as midwife during their labour. Many of the women she nursed were driven by the need for secrecy; they would arrive when their pregnancy could no longer be disguised and would often remain as long as six months. In exchange, Dane could command a considerable monthly fee.
Dane offered one additional and highly sought-after service. Advertising in the small ads columns of newspapers under a pseudonym, she would take charge of unwanted newborn babies, either as “nurse children”, fostered for a weekly fee, or else undertaking a permanent adoption for a one-off cash payment referred to as a “premium”. Dane had identified a niche market and she was not alone in her trade. Since the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, a father could no longer be held financially accountable for the raising of his illegitimate offspring. This spectacular piece of Victorian wisdom was considered an effective deterrent against pre-marital relations: the intention was that the prospect of financial ruin would encourage more women to maintain their moral integrity. But deterrent it was not: by the 1860s, illegitimacy had reached pandemic proportions, and Dane and her like offered unmarried mothers what seemed to be an easy remedy.
In reality there were few others. Employers and families would turf a woman out as soon as her pregnancy began to show, driven either by a dread of scandal or by economic necessity. The workhouse was an option for some, but only at the discretion of the Guardians; many deemed “immoral” were turned down.
Once a baby was born, a woman’s options were even bleaker. Few orphanages would agree to adopt any but “respectable orphans” – those whose fathers were dead rather than anonymous. The feeling was that immorality bred immorality: the “sins” of the mother would inevitably be revisited upon the infant, in the form of similarly loose morals. The Muller Orphanage in Bristol was typical: though priding itself on its ecumenical welcome to orphans of all religious denominations, it nevertheless stipulated that Muller orphans must be “lawfully begotten”.
On Saturday morning, the body of an infant was discovered, wrapped in an old newspaper, lying in the path from the Observatory to Clifton Down.
Clifton Chronicle, 1856
Day after day, such newspaper reports stood testimony to the scale of the problem: many mothers, cornered and desperate, smothered their babies or abandoned them in public places. Mothers were rarely sentenced for “over-laying”: smothering their babies to death during the night by apparently rolling over them in their sleep. Nonetheless, the term was often cited by coroners as a cause of death. Those abandoned babies who lived were raised in the workhouse.
The weekly fee offered by Dane would have given precious hope to those women genuinely looking to secure a future for their child. But it was a dangerous path to follow:
There was held in the parish of St. Luke’s, last summer, an inquest on the body of a neglected infant, aged seven months. The woman to whose care she was confided had got drunk, and left the poor little thing exposed to the cold, so that it died. The mother paid the drunken nurse four-and-sixpence a week for the child’s keep, and it was proved in evidence that she (the mother) had been earning at her trade of paper-bag making never more than six-and-threepence per week during the previous five months. That was four-and-sixpence for baby and one-and-ninepence for herself.
James Greenwood, The Seven Curses of London, 1869
The weekly fee was only profitable for Dane because she had found a means of keeping down the cost of fostering infants. Neglect was her method of choice, a gradual but persistent underfeeding coupled with regular doses of over-the-counter narcotics. Opiates and alcohol, sold as anticolic cordials, had the added benefit of keeping the infants docile and suppressing their appetite. Over a period of weeks, these methods would result in what Victorian death certificates labelled “marasmus”: wasting away.
Where she thought she could, Dane would suggest that a woman offer her child up for permanent adoption, at a hefty but one-off premium, usually of around £5 or £10; more if she thought the mother could afford it. For many unskilled, working-class women, this amounted to something approaching an annual salary, and was beyond their means. But many adoptions were funded by the father of the child: a one-off payment could often be procured as a means of permanently easing a gentleman’s embarrassment.
This system of fostering and adoption was known as baby farming, and in the 1860s it was still entirely unregulated. In the small ads of national and local newspapers there would occasionally appear an advertisement offering a baby for adoption which stipulated that no premium would be paid. In eliciting a response only from those prepared to adopt a baby without cash exchanging hands, these unhappy individuals were clearly hoping for a genuine and humane answer to their predicament. But such people were rare: many more saw this system for what it was, and understood they would have nothing further to do with their child after the transaction had taken place. Day after day the newspapers advertised infants adopted for a cash premium.
Adoption premiums wouldn’t cover the cost of raising a child for very long, but Ellen Dane worked around this. Like many in her trade, she was not a sole practitioner. She acted as an intermediary, passing the babies she adopted on to baby farmers in other cities, paying a cut-price rate and pocketing a handsome profit. The lesser sum was accepted in return for anonymity; the intermediary would be well known to the infant’s mother and therefore in a more precarious position.
Amelia watched Dane’s occupation with fascination. Amelia was a nurse; she had received training in midwifery. She knew she could see women through their accouchement without difficulty. Whether George Thomas acquiesced in her plan to bring women into their home is not known, but it was not to be an issue for long. On 18 October 1869, George Thomas died. His death certificate gave his age as sixty-two and his cause of death as “Diarrhoea”. His wife Amelia, present at his death, was left a young, widowed, single mother.
There seems little doubt that Amelia could have found a way through widowhood, that she could have chosen a respectable way of life to support herself and her daughter. She was later to claim that George had left her a considerable sum of money. But she also had extended family in the city – a sister, brothers, cousins. She had a trade and an education. She was a trained nurse and a competent midwife. She had options, but none that offered the instant money which Dane enjoyed.
Amelia was determined to earn her living as a baby farmer. Like thousands of other single mothers of her day, she now made the decision to pay for her child to be raised elsewhere. At the age of fifteen, Amelia’s daughter, Ellen Thomas, would explain to a magistrate and jury that when her father died she had been “farmed out”, sent away to live elsewhere. Ellen explained that she had not come to live with her mother until 1872. What became of Ellen during those nine years is uncertain, but in 1871 the census return for a family living on the Sea Mills Road, in the village of Stoke Bishop, just outside Bristol, included one intriguing entry.
Stoke Bishop was just two and a half miles out of the city, to the north-west of Durdham Downs in Clifton. William Hemborough was a forty-year-old mason who lived with his wife, Esther, aged thirty-eight, and a house full of children. The Hemboroughs were not a conventional family. With an eight-year gap between their two elder children, a daughter and a stepson of the same age and two infants very close in age, the heavy copperplate script of the census return all but spells out baby farm. And last on the list of occupants in the household was a six-year-old “orphan” named Ellen Thomas.
Dane’s reputation for neglecting the infants which passed through her hands finally reached the ears of the police, and, fearing arrest, she set sail for the United States at the end of the 1860s. But by this time, Amelia had become intoxicated by the fast money Dane had made and had been exposed to a grim network of women embroiled in the buying and selling of infants for maximum profit and minimum risk.
In 1869, Amelia Thomas began advertising for children in Bristol. Operating under the pseudonyms “Mrs Harding” and “Mrs Smith”, she took in women for the accouchement and began to establish a regular supply of unwanted infants to Dane’s contacts in London and Liverpool.