Amelia Dyer, Weekly Dispatch, 3 may 1896
If Mother was disturbed by the sight of a police officer at her door, she did not immediately seem so. With her usual imperturbability, she insisted she had been telling the truth: that a couple on the railway platform had fallen for the child and had taken it from her for adoption. Naturally, she was not able to provide them with any further details as to the family’s current address.
Amelia Dyer, Weekly Dispatch, 3 may 1896
Dyer’s sangfroid was not long-lived: it soon became apparent that the psychological impact of the incident was considerable. Dyer had been through the dark, grim regime of prison and hard labour once before: she was capable of doing anything to avoid arrest again.
When young Willie returned home from work on the afternoon following the policeman’s visit, he found Mother in the back garden, “half-fainting”. She had slashed at her throat five or six times with a sharp-pointed knife Polly used to peel potatoes. By the time Father came home, Mother was raging and incoherent. She talked of hearing voices; destructive voices. They urged her to kill herself, she said. Worse, they warned her that Polly was trying to murder her.
Whether Mother’s suicidal and delusional paranoia was feigned or laudanum-induced is now impossible to tell, but for two weeks her terrifying frenzy continued. With her father and brother out of the house all day, Polly became the focus of Mother’s fury. She claimed she had long been accustomed to hearing Mother’s threats against her life should she dare to cross her – “she threatened my life on several occasions” – and she already had a scar on the side of her head from the glass Mother had thrown at her in 1888. But Mother’s vehemence now became far more sinister. Polly later described to a journalist how one fracas resulted in Mother throwing a knife at her head. Polly ducked behind the open door to the room, but the knife embedded itself in the hand with which she gripped the door, leaving another scar.
Finally, on 13 November 1891, William Dyer called for the local relieving officer to send in a physician, a Dr Bernard, whose assessment would determine whether or not his wife’s mental state warranted confinement in the asylum.
General practitioner and surgeon David Bernard lived only a fifteen-minute walk from the Dyers, in a sizeable household made up of his wife, their two adult sons and a staff of four. But however privileged he appeared to be, forty-nine-year-old Bernard was no stranger to the lives of the less fortunate of the city: he was the medical officer for the Barton Regis Workhouse.
The fifty-three-year-old woman Dr Bernard found in Glenworth House appeared to be at the point of mental collapse. She was, as he later wrote on the medical certificate, “… highly excitable and very voluble”. He found her to be “a stout, fat and flabby woman”. Her skin was coarse and thick and she was “of florid complexion”, broken-veined and weathered; like a drunk. She was unkempt: her skin filthy; her hair feral; her teeth decaying, blackened or entirely missing; her tongue dirty and thickly coated. She ranted incessantly, spitting in fury, fuelled by terror; and repeating over and over that the voices in her head wouldn’t rest until she had brought about her own annihilation. She must die! She must do it!
The woman’s husband and daughter reported that she had made three attempts on her own life in the past two weeks. The nature of one such attempt at least was evident: the marks from a knife which her daughter described as having made a “nasty wound” in her neck. Dr Bernard interpreted this a little less dramatically, describing simply “five or six slight scratches or cuts, of a recent date” below her left ear. Nevertheless, he was in no doubt that the daughter was telling the truth about her mother’s violent episodes and concluded that Amelia Dyer was a danger to herself and to others. He referred her to the County Asylum in Gloucester.