In the 1860s the editor of the British Medical Journal, a young doctor named Ernest Hart, together with a group of physicians known as the Harverian Society, launched an investigation into infanticide in Britain. Their findings were published and passed on to the Home Secretary, Sir Spencer Walpole, in January 1867. But Walpole’s sights were firmly fixed on franchise reform and the report elicited no response. Undeterred, Hart kept up the pressure for legislation. In January 1868, he placed an advertisement in a national newspaper offering a child for adoption. He received more than three hundred replies, and the series of articles he subsequently published gained him the support of several leading members of the government.
The tide was beginning to turn. Infanticide in the metropolis had become such a problem that in the late 1860s Scotland Yard assigned a team of specialist officers to investigate the problem, led by Detective Sergeant Relph.
On 5 June 1870, Relph answered an advertisement in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper and entered into a correspondence that was to result in the country’s first high-profile baby farming trial, focusing on two sisters from Brixton named Margaret Waters and Sarah Ellis. Relph’s investigation would also unwittingly uncover Amelia Thomas’s connection with the Brixton Baby Farm.
Adoption – A good home, with a mother’s love and care, is offered to a respectable person wishing her child to be entirely adopted. Premium 5l., which sum includes everything. Apply by letter only, to Mrs Oliver, post-office, Goar Place, Brixton.
The advertisement was typical of its kind. Ostensibly it offered a comfortable, maternal solution to an unwanted pregnancy; but some of its phraseology would nevertheless have been clearly understood by a young woman wishing to rid herself of a problem forever. Firstly, the stipulation that the child be “entirely adopted”: no further visits from the mother would be entertained. The moment of exchange was to mark the end of all contact. Then, the “premium 5l”: £5 cash payment for an infant’s life. This was a woman interested in cash, not in filling her home with the sound of a child’s laughter. “Which sum includes everything”: an assurance of a one-off payment and a guaranteed end to any parental responsibility.
Sergeant Relph – still pretending to have a baby he wished to put up for adoption – met “Mrs Oliver” five days later. After their meeting he trailed her to an address in Brixton, where “Oliver” (Sarah Ellis) was discovered to be aiding her sister, Margaret Waters, in running a baby farm.
Number 4 Frederick Terrace in Brixton extended over four floors, from basement to attic. Relph’s first impressions gave little reassurance of the “mother’s love and care” Ellis had advertised: he found the house sparsely furnished and was assaulted by an overpowering smell. In a back kitchen, Relph discovered five three- and four-week-old infants lying in filth, three under a shawl on an old sofa and two stuffed into a small crib on a chair. The children were barely clothed; the few rags which clung to their bodies were saturated and stank of urine and faeces. The babies were huddled in so small a space that none of them would have been able to move even had they wanted to; though they appeared to have no such inclination. They were ashen-faced and emaciated, their bones visible through transparent skin. They lay open-mouthed, in such a state of torpor that movement seemed impossible to imagine. They lay with eyes fixed, pupils unnaturally contracted, scarcely human.
Relph later told a crowded courtroom that what most affected him was the noise: a cavernous silence, so abnormal for a room full of infants. The life was ebbing fast from these five: “…instead of the noises to be expected from children of tender age, they were lying without a moan from their wretched lips, and apparently dying in that condition” (The Times, 22 September 1870).
On a nearby table was an empty, uncorked phial which reeked of laudanum – an opiate strong enough to suppress the appetite and induce in a child a stupefied, docile state. These children were those ill-fated adoptees of Waters’. The one-off premium paid by their birth mothers had been reserved entirely for her own gain, not a penny of it having been spent on the children where she could avoid it. Their deaths were being hastened by a miserable and absolute neglect.
In another room lay five more infants. Older, cleaner and somewhat better fed, these individuals were clearly favoured, their lives deemed worthy of being sustained a little longer. They were Waters’ nurse children, lodging with her for a weekly fee. The longer she could keep them going, the more income she would receive. But these too were dying: one after another they would succumb to a death which was more drawn out but just as inevitable.
Relph returned to the house later that same day, having first sent for Dr George Puckle to examine a three-week-old baby named John Walter Cowen. Puckle immediately had the baby removed to a trustworthy wet nurse to be suckled, but little John’s skeletal body had been too much abused by neglect and laudanum, and two weeks later, on 24 June 1870, he died. Dr Puckle was convinced that starvation and opiates had caused the death of John Walter.
Waters and Ellis were arrested and taken into custody. The nurse children were taken to the workhouse where three of the older infants were reclaimed by their mothers. Two remaining older children rallied well. But, like little John Cowen, the four young babies who had been permanently adopted by Ellis and Waters were in an unnatural, torpid state. With a peculiar, glazed gaze which did not respond to light, these four were emaciated and inanimate and ravaged with thrush. None of the children weighed any more than 6 or 7lb, though the oldest of them was four months. All four died within a few weeks of being received into the workhouse.
On Thursday 22 September 1870, the two women were brought to trial at the Central Criminal Court. Margaret Waters, aged thirty-five, and her sister Sarah Ellis, twenty-eight, were charged with the wilful murder of the infant John Walter Cowen. Waters admitted to having adopted forty babies over four years. Ellis insisted the figure was higher.
Another Scotland Yard detective assigned to the case, Sergeant Ballantine, acted for the Crown in court, and he began by instructing the jury that the death of this infant was to be regarded as something more than a peculiarity of the constitution of the infant itself. This death was the result “of a system pursued by the prisoners”.
Dr Puckle told the court:
The body [of John Walter Cowen] was extremely emaciated, the bones almost protruding through the skin. It was miserably wasted, and nothing but skin and bone. It had been a fine child. It was in a thoroughly insensible state. The eyes were closed, the limbs hung down, and the child appeared to be in a profound stupor. I raised the eyelids and found the pupils very much contracted, and not in a natural state. I tried very much to rouse it but to little purpose. It was under my observation for 20 minutes. Diarrhoea or thrush would not account for the state in which it was. My opinion is that the child was in a state of narcotism from some drug … The children on the sofa were all very quiet, and that struck me afterward as a remarkable thing. I was in the house nearly half-an-hour and there was no crying or motion from any of them.
At the trial, Margaret Waters’ fourteen-year-old servant also gave evidence. She told the court there were eleven infants in all; the five youngest infants would be left all day to lie on the sofa, and were only fed on the rare occasion they gave out a feeble cry. She said that she was used to keeping watch over the children at night, as Waters and Ellis would frequently leave the house under the cover of darkness, not returning until one in the morning. Often, she said, they would leave with one baby and come home with an entirely new one; or with none at all. Meanwhile, the bodies of five infants had been found wrapped in rags and tossed over garden walls or left lying under railway bridges all over Brixton.
Sarah Ellis was acquitted of the charge of murder, the judge instructing the jury to find that there was insufficient evidence to convict her. Instead, she was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment with hard labour for conspiring to obtain money (from adoption) under false pretences. But in the case of Margaret Waters, the jury were faced with contemplating a crucial point of law: did the evidence prove conclusively that Waters was conscious that her improper feeding of the infants, and the administering of narcotics, would hasten their deaths in order that she might profit financially? The judge told the jury that he was in no doubt that, “From the moment the child Cowen was received into the establishment, the hand of death was upon it”, but he posed the question: “Did she intend by that course of treatment and line of conduct to shorten its life?”
The jury took just three-quarters of an hour to return a verdict of guilty of murder and, after a verbose objection by Waters herself, the judge donned the black cap.
Margaret Waters was hanged at Horsemonger Lane Gaol, Southwark, on 11 October 1870:
But that women could perpetuate the slow murder of infants, could watch them from day to day sinking with glazed eyes from stupor into death, and all in the pursuit of some precarious gain, is the most ghastly instance afforded in our time of the wickedness of which human nature is capable … The depravity displayed by these two women is horrible and inhuman but it will not be forgotten that their infamous livelihood was rendered possible by a depravity scarcely less shocking in other persons. It is impossible to doubt that the majority of those who gave up their children to be adopted by Mrs Waters were cognizant of their probable fate, and were content to abandon them to it …
The Times, 24 September 1870
It was the brief mention in the national press of one of the children in the Margaret Waters trial, a fourteen-month-old referred to by Waters’ servant girl as “Little Emily”, that would cause the heart of one particular Bristol nurse to miss a beat. Margaret Waters was paid a £5 premium for the permanent adoption of Emily three months before her trial. She had never had to meet the child’s mother face-to-face: the adoption was arranged via an intermediary, Amelia Thomas, operating under the name of Mrs Harding.
Emily had been born to a twenty-nine-year-old widow named Elizabeth Gilbert, in April 1869. Mrs Gilbert was already struggling to raise two children on her own, scraping a living running a small general store in Holborn. She had been attended to during her pregnancy by a fifty-eight-year-old apothecary named Dr William Harding.
Dr Harding lived a life of modest privilege in a four-storey redbrick Georgian terrace in Fitzrovia – at 4 Percy Street, just off the Tottenham Court Road. In the late 1860s, Percy Street had an air of quiet, residential grandeur about it, which it is still possible to detect even today in the neat railings, the window boxes, the fanlights of polished glass above panelled front doors and the brightly tiled entrances. The Harding family’s census returns for 1861 and 1871 encapsulate everything that Victorian English society found most estimable.
William Harding was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and the Hall of Apothecaries. He remained married to Catherine all his life, and they had four children (by 1871 the eldest son, Percy, was a professor of mathematics and another, Alfred, a student of medicine). They kept two domestic servants and one young male assistant to Dr Harding’s private apothecary practice.
But Sergeant Relph knew of the murky truth behind Harding’s respectable veneer, and his investigations had also uncovered the connection between this Fitzrovia apothecary and Amelia Thomas.
In August 1870, with Margaret Waters and Sarah Ellis already in custody, Dr William Harding had also appeared before the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. Despite his professional association with the Mother of little Emily, and therefore his connection with the Waters’ case, his was an unrelated charge: that he had procured an abortion upon a young actress named Isabella Tewson, which had resulted in her death.
Abortion, practised either with the use of drugs or surgical instruments, had been illegal in England, under the Offences Against the Person Act, since 1861. If the abortion could be proven to have resulted in the death of the pregnant woman, the individual could be tried for manslaughter, a capital offence. Only a dying actress’s swan-song stood between the apothecary and the gallows (on her deathbed Tewson had gripped Harding’s hand in an effort to identify him as her abortionist). But there had been no corroborating evidence, and so Harding had been acquitted.
Four months later, Sergeant Relph revealed in an internal Scotland Yard report that he had kept up a close surveillance of Dr Harding since the acquittal. Relph reported that Dr Harding kept rooms in Windsor Terrace, just off the City Road in Islington, a couple of miles from his Fitzrovia home. Police surveillance of Windsor Terrace, and discreet questioning of the neighbours, confirmed that very few people were to be seen coming and going from the apartments. In fact, Relph ascertained that Harding had little need to practise at the time as he was able to live comfortably off an allowance from his elder brother, from the family’s estate in Ludlow, Shropshire.
Nevertheless, Elizabeth Gilbert, the young widow from Holborn, had clearly sought the intervention of Dr Harding in her pregnancy in 1869. Dr Harding’s attempt to give her an abortion had failed, and, upon the birth of Little Emily, Dr Harding told Relph that the baby had immediately been put out to a nurse. Intriguingly, Relph’s report on Dr Harding and Little Emily states: “… shortly after its birth it was received as a nurse child by Mrs Harding at a weekly payment of five shillings. It remained in her care until the month of June following.”
The surname Harding, shared by the nurse and the apothecary in the case of little Emily, is difficult to ignore. He can hardly have been referring to his own wife, who was most probably unaware of her husband’s covert and disreputable practice from the cover of a separate address. Furthermore, no gentlewoman would have taken in babies to nurse for a few shillings a week. Clearly, the Mrs Harding in question must have been someone other than his lawful wife. Whether Amelia Thomas’s choice of pseudonym was simply a coincidence or the result of an illicit relationship with the Fitzrovia apothecary and abortionist in 1869 is now impossible to determine. But in June 1869, little Emily was handed over by “Nurse Harding” to Margaret Waters for permanent adoption for the usual £5 premium.
Relph reluctantly concluded his report by saying that the police would be unlikely to gather any evidence sufficient to secure a prosecution against Dr Harding:
I have no doubt this man occasionally lends his professional assistance in cases of abortion, but the operation would take place at the residence of the person undergoing it – no third person would be present and this being so the evidence of the woman being uncorroborated would not be admissible to support a prosecution, both persons being equally guilty. Thus rendering it extremely difficult to bring to justice persons guilty of this class of offence.
Harding was in fact careful to use Windsor Terrace for correspondence only, hence the absence of human traffic noted by the neighbours. Any women he attended to were treated at their own addresses, and he insisted upon no witness being present. Within the limitations of nineteenth-century law, he was untouchable.
One other curious detail emerged during the trial of Waters and Ellis. A series of letters were found in Waters’ house, suggesting that she had been involved with a nationwide trade in infants. Twenty of the letters were of particular interest. Since 1869, a midwife had regularly supplied Waters with unwanted newborns from a house of confinement she was operating in Totterdown, Bristol. The Tottterdown midwife went by two names in these letters: Mrs Smith and Mrs Harding.
It was a tangible thread linking Amelia Thomas to Margaret Waters. Amelia Thomas was farming babies under the alias “Harding”. Neither Scotland Yard nor the Somerset Constabulary (which policed Totterdown) picked up the thread: no visit was made to the Totterdown address. No enquiries were made to establish Mrs Harding’s true identity. But throughout 1869 and 1870, Amelia Thomas was evidently running a substantial baby farm of her own, earning a handsome income supplying Margaret Waters with babies to kill.
If polite London society hoped Waters’ execution would bring an end to the abhorrent trade in infant lives in the metropolis, their hopes were soon dashed. The press continued to report clear evidence that her legacy lived on. Scotland Yard offered rewards for information leading to the arrest of anyone guilty of infanticide, and even offered pardons to any accomplices who came forward. But the scale of the problem was vast.
DISCOVERY OF ANOTHER BABY
On Wednesday Mr Carter held an inquest at the “Malborough Arms” tavern, South Street, Camberwell, on the body of a male child which was found on Monday last … John James Boulton, a gentleman’s gardener, stated that on Monday last he was passing the garden of a lady’s residence at Dulwich when his attention was directed to a parcel which was lying on the ground therein. He immediately went in and opened it and found it contained the body of a deceased child … This makes the third body which has been found since the execution of Margaret Waters, the baby-farmer.
Morning Advertiser, 28 October 1870
In fact, it soon became apparent to the whole country that Waters was not the only one plying such a trade. In the years following the execution of Margaret Waters, further arrests were made for baby farming. Mary Ann Hall and her accomplice Mrs Cumming were arrested at the end of 1870. In 1880 Elizabeth Thompson was charged with baby farming in Liverpool. In the late 1880s, Millie and Joseph Roadhouse were apprehended in London for baby farming. Finally, in 1889 another Camberwell woman, a Mrs Bogle, who had been adopting infants on a prolific scale for twenty years, was given a fifteen-year sentence with hard labour. In every case, their baby farms had been regularly supplied with infants from a house of confinement run by a midwife in Totterdown, Bristol, known variously as Mrs Smith or Mrs Harding. The midwife was never pursued.
The horrors perpetrated by the Margaret Waters case caused such public outcry that Ernest Hart of the British Medical Journal was able to establish the Infant Life Protection Society, which proved to be the final push needed to goad the government into action. In 1871, Sergeant Relph was called upon to discuss his experiences of illegitimacy and baby farming in the capital in front of a Parliamentary Committee. The Infant Life Protection Act was subsequently passed in 1872, calling for the registration of all nurses caring for more than one infant under the age of twelve months.