In the autumn of 1872, Amelia married again. Her second husband, William Dyer, had just turned twenty-seven, and (according to subsequent census entries) he believed his new wife to be just twenty-nine (curiously, a year younger than she had claimed to be upon the occasion of her first marriage, eleven years earlier, when she was actually only twenty-four). In fact, in 1872, Amelia Thomas was already thirty-five years old. But her deception did not extend beyond this one detail: Dyer knew Amelia to be a widow and a mother, and he became an instant stepfather to her eight-year-old daughter, Ellen Thomas, who now returned to live with her mother.
Before he married, William Dyer had lived in Bristol with his parents and his younger brother, just outside the Bedminster parish boundary, in Philip Street, which ran between the Redcliffe Hill Bridge at its eastern end and Bedminster railway station at its west. His father, Francis Dyer, was a stays cutter in a firm of corset makers, an intricate and highly specialized craft. His youngest son, Henry, was twenty-one years old in 1871, and the census records that he worked as a cab driver. William was unskilled and illiterate: he marked his marriage certificate with a cross. In common with many of his neighbours in St Mary Redcliffe, William was employed as a labourer at the Conrad Finzel’s sugar refinery, renowned as the city’s best employer, and an easy walk from his home in Philip Street.
In the autumn of 1873, William and Amelia had their first child, Mary Ann, known to the family as Polly. She was followed three years later by a brother, William Samuel. The Dyers fell victim to the high infant mortality rate, burying at least two other children between 1872 and 1879 (and possibly more: Amelia would later claim to have given birth to thirteen children during her lifetime). The Dyers gave up a room so as to take in a lodger, Jane Williams, to help pay the rent. For the first five years or so of their marriage, their lives were unremarkable. But in 1877 Bristol’s best employer was hit by the combined forces of rapid expansion, trade slump and the increasing predominance of the port of Liverpool. The Finzel refinery was forced to make extensive cuts to its workforce and Dyer was among the five hundred workers who lost their jobs. Two years later, however, William was working again, this time as a labourer at the Purnell and Webb vinegar brewery. Though he most probably earned a lower wage than he had at Finzel’s, the family’s financial crisis was essentially over. But by then, a crisis on an altogether bigger scale had been unleashed.
By the time Polly Dyer was old enough to form her earliest memories of her mother, the family was living in Poole’s Crescent, on the steep slopes of Totterdown, a suburb of Bristol which sat just over the river inside the Somerset county boundary. Poole’s Crescent was one of a tangle of streets built in the 1860s and 1870s to accommodate the railway workers for the newly built Temple meads Station.
If Ellen’s early childhood had been unsettling, Polly’s was about to become far more so. Ellen had at least spent her early years largely removed from her mother’s influence. Polly had no way of escaping.
When Father lost his job, it was Mother who took decisive steps to see the family through their financial difficulties, returning once more to the baby business. Polly later recalled that from 1877, when she was just four years old, her home in Poole’s Crescent had been filled with ladies. Some would stay weeks, others months. Some came from far away – from London, Dublin even. But eventually every one of the ladies would succumb to the same end: the “accouchement”. The sound of women in labour was a constant in Polly’s childhood. Mother would disappear behind a locked door and eventually emerge exhausted. Sometimes, a day or two later, Polly would see the new mother, nursing an infant at her breast. But often there was no infant: just a death certificate, pronouncing on another “stillborn”; and an undertaker.
Contemporary Scotland Yard files reveal that many midwives knew how to engineer the appearance of a stillbirth where it was called for: the baby would be smothered at the very moment of delivery when the head emerged, its mouth stuffed with a wet cloth, its nose covered with another. That way, the compression of the chest still inside the birth canal would prevent it from taking breath. It would die silently, and, if the woman was lucky, its skin might not entirely discolour, a telltale sign of asphyxiation, thus throwing any doctor off the scent. Scotland Yard even detailed cases where the madam of a brothel smothered infants during delivery without the consent of the woman giving birth.
There was a grim skill in this. Hesitate, and in a moment the newborn infant would be lying on the bed gasping for air. Even then, so long as its cries went unheard, all was not lost: many infants who died naturally in the birth canal would also die blue. Even modern pathologists cannot easily tell the difference between a natural suffocation during labour and a suspicious one immediately thereafter without an internal post-mortem. A nineteenth-century doctor would be able to pronounce upon this type of infant death as nothing but a natural occurrence.
Polly may have known differently from the doctors who certified the babies “born dead” in Poole’s Crescent. She may sometimes have caught the first spluttering cries of a newborn. With the blind acceptance of a five-year-old, she may not have pursued any further the troublesome question of how a dead baby cries. Instead, it may have sat, stored in a dark recess, to be revisited in her maturity.
Not every birth in the house elicited a doctor and a death certificate. Some babies lived, and remained a while after their mothers had left. Sometimes a different woman would come to collect a baby, handing Mother money. Polly well recalled the glint of sovereigns before Mother secreted them away.
RESPECTABLE Person to Adopt a little Girl three months old. Premium. References exchanged. – “Secrecy”. Daily Press Office.
Western Daily Press, 14 February 1877
Some of Mother’s nurse children were not born in the house at all, but were brought there. Daily the post brought more letters to the door; every week, Polly was sent to post letters from Mother. Letters addressed to ladies in other cities. Letters addressed to newspapers: to the Western Daily Press; the Bristol Times & Mirror; Christian World.
MARRIED LADY wishes to have CARE OF A CHILD. Would adopt one – Address Mrs Dyer, 14 Poole’s Crescent, Bath Road, Bristol.
Christian World, 27 June 1879
It was a perfunctory advertisement, in comparison to the others among which it sat.
J. R. Pearce of Somerton, whose ad appeared just above Mrs Dyer’s, proclaimed herself “A RESPECTABLE WIDOW”, residing “in a healthy village”. More sinisterly, Pearce had added the assurance “A delicate child would have the greatest attention”. She might well welcome the sickly infant: such a child could be neglected to the point of death without too much difficulty, its death later explained as an unavoidable tragedy and put down to its natural frailty. But at least other advertisements offered some assurance of the suitability of those offering their services, such as Mrs Chappell from lower Edmonton, London, who offered the “Highest references” to those who cared to take them up. Mrs Dyer offered no such guarantee.
Polly watched mother and Ellen tend to the nurse children, preparing feeds with boiled bread, and bottles of water, cornflour and a little condensed milk. It was busy work. The babies kept coming: sometimes they were tending to as many as six at a time, as well as Polly’s brother William Samuel, barely walking in 1877.
The babies wouldn’t have seemed like Polly’s own little brother. He was plump and rosy-cheeked; he laughed when he was happy and bawled when he wasn’t and fed heartily. Mother’s nurse children had yelled loud enough in the beginning, and for so long at night that mother couldn’t get any rest. But she had seen to that: she sent Ellen twice a week to fetch “twopenny-worth of Godfrey’s Cordial” from the druggist on the Wells Road. Sometimes she sent her more often, depending on how many babies were in the house, and how fractious they were at night. It was a wonder, that cordial.
The druggist’s wooden counter was so highly polished that Polly could have seen her reflection in it. Behind the counter was the “drug run”: row upon row of tiny square drawers, each with a neat, round, ivory handle and each filled with powdered or caked medicine. Above the drawers was a glass and mahogany cabinet, groaning under rows of bottles, jars and packages, filled with an array of coloured liquids, powders and pills; as enticing as a sweet shop.
Godfrey’s Cordial was usually kept by apothecaries in a great jug on the counter. Ellen would have had to hand the druggist her empty bottle and ask for “twopenny-worth”. The apothecary would pour it through a funnel into her little glass bottle. Get the dregs of the jug at the end of the day and you’d have more of the laudanum and less of the syrup and molasses; that way, you’d get more for your money in terms of the effect it had on the recipient. The Quietness, Ellen and Polly would have heard it called. Five drops of that on the end of a spoon at bedtime, and they’d go off as quiet as anything, sleeping all night without a sound; all day too, often enough.
Soon after mother had taken to quietening the babies with Godfrey’s Cordial at night, they had stopped needing so much food, too. They took to sleeping, mostly. They were wrapped in muslins and left to sleep all day in wooden crates which served as bassinets. Soon they’d got to be so thin and drawn that they hadn’t the strength to take a bottle at all. Polly wouldn’t have cared to look at them much after that: the skin drawn tight; blue and grey and sunken, like miniature crones. The sound of their breathing was different, too: heavy and laboured, as if they’d just run up the Wells Road.
Mother could at least rest at night now that the little ones had been quietened. Life could carry on around them pretty much as if they weren’t there at all. The weekly fee kept rolling in; the babies were kept dosed up by mother. Mother began to suffer terribly with her teeth: pregnancy put neglected teeth at risk and her later medical reports chart her declining dentition. She needed something to ease the toothache: mother knew well enough how to deal with pain; she was fond of saying, “i’m part doctor myself”.
Had Polly seen the little clear glass bottle, its distinctive grooved sides warning the poor-sighted and the illiterate of its deadly contents? it was filled with a sticky brown liquid and clearly labelled “laudanum – POISON”. Mother had no need of pretence; no need to soak off the labels, to disguise the contents. It was purely medicinal; she could right enough have had it prescribed to her by a medical man for the relief of her toothache, had she not been so adept at self-diagnosis. Laudanum; “elixir of Opium”: sherry, opium, saffron and cinnamon. Foul-tasting, bitter liquor, but worth swallowing for the sweet relief it brought. The druggists sold it commonly to those troubled with neuralgia, toothache or persistent rheumatic pain.
Mother knew poison: she had worked in hospitals; she had experienced enough to keep her from its dangers. She had seen its pull often enough, on the lunatics in the asylum. Those who had begun with a few drops to ease pain, and had soon found they needed its comfort daily. Before too long, a few drops would become a spoonful. After a while, a tablespoon a day was swallowed. How easily the feebleminded were ensnared: she would never fall victim. Just a drop or two on the end of a spoon every few hours was enough; she could cope with her days then.