In 1890 an attractive and well-educated young governess from Exeter found herself “in trouble” and entered into a correspondence with Amelia Dyer. Dyer’s letters in response were persuasive, with their sweeping script and homespun promises of care and discretion, and she decided to trust that Dyer would help her out, albeit for a fee.
Her faith in Dyer was to prove entirely misplaced.
The governess was never named. Her age, place of birth and address were never given out. But the story of her four-year fight for the child she entrusted to Dyer was taken up by the Bristol police force at the time, and was to be recounted by Polly from the witness stand of the Central Criminal Court six years later, and transcribed by the national press. It was a true-life Victorian melodrama. The governess’s determination to do the right thing might not have ended well for her, and hers is a story that was no doubt played out time and time again in the lives of many young mothers, long since forgotten. But it was to herald the start of a dramatic new chapter in Amelia Dyer’s criminal career.
The governess wrote to Dyer early in 1890, in response to a newspaper advertisement. She was desperate. She had fallen in love with the elder son of the family by whom she was employed. The two had carried on an illicit affair, and she had become pregnant. The son offered to marry the governess, but his father would have none of it: a governess was not a suitable match, not least because she was clearly a woman of loose morals. The son was packed off abroad in an attempt to distract him from the affair.
The young governess found herself out of work and alone.
The governess exchanged several letters with Dyer and agreed the financial terms upon which she would nurse her through the pregnancy and labour. Should the baby live, she had no choice but to arrange that it would thereafter be adopted by Dyer. A final sum of £15 would then be payable two months after the birth.
In the early spring of 1890 the young woman moved in with Dyer, before the pregnancy became too advanced to be disguised. She remained at Dyer’s house in Horfield, near Fishponds, for a considerable time – probably for as long as six months and certainly until after she had delivered her child. In all this time, she clearly came to trust that the nurse was the right woman to raise her baby. Dyer proved adept at sustaining a role day and night for the lengthy duration of the governess’s stay in the house. In due course and with a heavy heart, the governess gave Dyer her baby for permanent adoption.
Two months later, in the late summer of 1890, Dyer and the governess met for what was supposed to have been the final time. It was to be an opportunity for the governess to see that her baby was being well cared for, and for her to hand over the final payment, and thereby relinquish all further responsibility. She was to learn for the first time that her nurse was not as she had at first seemed.
At that meeting the governess realized instantly that something was wrong. Dyer was nursing a child, but she was convinced it was not her child. Dyer was dismissive: infants change considerably in the first six or eight weeks of their life; this was her child as surely as night followed day. But the governess pulled back the child’s clothing to examine the hips for signs of the birthmark with which the child had been born. There was nothing there.
Dyer was apparently entirely “nonplussed”. How could this have happened? She assured the governess that they would meet again, in a few weeks’ time, and that this time she would have the “dear little baby” in her arms. In the meantime, she wondered would she consider parting with a little of the balance of payment; just something for her “to go on with”? The governess refused to hand over another halfpenny until Dyer produced her child, alive and well.
According to later accounts in the press, the governess’s young beau re-entered the story at this point. He had finally persuaded his family to grant them permission to marry and now that the ring on her finger gave respectability to her child, the young woman determined to remove the baby from Dyer’s care and bring it home. With her husband at her side, she went to meet with Dyer for the second time.
The nurse failed to keep the appointment. The young mother was distraught. Her friends and relations had already remarked upon the noticeable physical strain etched on her young face. This was too much to bear. Unable to rest until she found Dyer, and with her, she prayed, her child, she returned to Horfield later that same night.
It was the early hours by the time she reached the house. Rage at the enormous betrayal of trust, and fear of what might have become of her child, had driven her far beyond the point of paying heed to courtesy and decorum. She pounded on the door until Dyer appeared. The governess stood trembling on the doorstep, battling against her distress in order to speak her mind. She demanded that Dyer hand back her baby.
By contrast, Dyer was cold and perfectly poised. That side of her which was so rarely given a public face was unleashed on the governess: a devastating menace. Dyer must have been aware of the threat posed to her by a desperate mother, and yet reportedly nothing about her demeanour that night suggested to the governess that Dyer felt either fear or remorse. With steely control, Dyer demanded further payment before producing the child.
The next forty-eight hours can only be imagined: Dyer, fighting to keep her nerve, plotting her next step; the young mother, unable to find solace even in sleep. Finally, the couple knocked on the door of Dyer’s rented Horfield home for a third time.
Dyer greeted them in the same dispassionate manner. There was no baby in the house and she offered the young couple no reassurance that they would be reunited in the foreseeable future. In fact, Dyer was not prepared to give them any indication of the child’s whereabouts. Even when the couple showed her the £15 they were prepared to hand over in exchange for their baby, Dyer remained resolute and the meeting ended abruptly.
The governess was frantic, but could not leave matters there. She was convinced that Dyer was hiding the child somewhere in the city, and so embarked upon a clandestine three-week surveillance operation. Day and night she watched Dyer’s every movement. She would have got to know what the contemporary newspapers described as Dyer’s “peregrinations” around Bristol very well, had it not been for the fact the Dyer was shrewd enough quickly to realize that she was being shadowed and altered her habits accordingly. In the end, the governess learned nothing.
The husband could sit back no longer and permit his new wife to hasten her own decline. He returned to Dyer’s house and confronted her once more. Finally, Dyer appeared to capitulate: the baby, she revealed, had been so greatly admired by a couple on the platform of Temple meads Station that she had been persuaded to hand it to them for adoption and it had been taken to live in their farmhouse.
It was not a convincing story, coming as it did after weeks of Dyer’s menace and procrastination. But it represented the couple’s only hope, and however unlikely the story, they were compelled to follow the trail. Dyer sent them firstly to several addresses in Bristol; when these addresses produced nothing, she came up with another. Then, after several weeks, she claimed to have received news that the couple who had adopted their baby were currently residing in Cheltenham. With mounting desperation, the pair scoured Cheltenham for word of the elusive couple from the railway platform who had allegedly disappeared and taken their baby with them.
December 1890 was the coldest in Bristol in more than a century. Snow lay on the ground for four weeks, nine inches in all by Christmas Day. Temperatures fell to five degrees below, and rarely climbed above zero day or night. When the rain came, it froze as it fell, covering the city in a sheet of ice.
For the governess and her husband in their joyless search, the chill weather could not have seemed more appropriate. They found no trace of the couple or their baby in Cheltenham. By January the non-tidal “Floating Harbour” in the city centre was still covered with several inches of ice, so that the people of Bristol had been able to enjoy weeks of skating. But there was no New Year cheer for the governess. For many months she danced Dyer’s pitiless pas de deux, cherishing faint hope of recovering her child in Bath, Gloucester, Exeter and London in turn. Each journey fruitless; each preceded by yet another confrontation with Dyer, who offered her further leads which she had no alternative but to follow up before discounting. Dyer’s sustained deception was an act of heartless cowardice, but for now, at least, the governess could do nothing but listen to her.
Finally, the governess and her husband accepted that they could not continue to fight this woman alone. No longer mindful of the risk to their reputations, in January 1891 they took their story to the Bristol police.