It is not clear why the police did not arrest Dyer that April. After all, the governess could identify her as the woman who had “adopted” her child; and the child was clearly missing. At the very least, Dyer had entered into a fraudulent contract to raise the baby as her own for life and had therefore obtained the fee under false pretences. She could have been arrested and charged on those grounds – as Sarah Ellis had been before her in the Brixton Baby Farmer case of 1870. Whatever the reason, the police failed to make the arrest, and Dyer was left alone once more.
This time she made the journey to Wells directly, hoping to be re-admitted without the suicide attempt, the medical certificate and the magistrate’s order which had conspired to send her there on Boxing Day. The meticulous case notes kept at the Wells Asylum record the following encounter which took place toward the end of April 1894:
One evening in the spring of 1894 [Amelia Dyer] arrived here late in a very excited state ... She had only a few coins in her pocket and had come all the way from Bristol having had nothing to eat all day. I took her in for the night and telegrammed to her friends next day as they did not come to remove her, I sent her back with an attendant.
Officials during the period often used the word “friends” to describe relations: it was clear that none of Dyer’s were altogether too keen for her to return home.
Pasted beneath the entry in the asylum case notes was the following article from the Wells Journal, with a note to say that it had appeared in the paper a few days after Dyer’s visit:
It was not difficult to try to drown oneself in the city of Bristol. With the awesome height of the Clifton Suspension Bridge spanning the River Avon, the River Frome running through the city as well as the muddy waters of the Cumberland Basin, there were several opportunities. Indeed, Brunel’s iconic bridge has over the years earned itself a reputation as Bristol’s “suicide bridge” (although fate has intervened on more than one occasion in that regard. In 1885, for example, a factory girl named Sarah Ann Henley, jilted by her lover, jumped from the bridge and was saved by the billowing of her skirts, which acted as a parachute, carrying her gently down to the muddy banks of the river. She became quite a local celebrity and lived to the age of eighty.)
Dyer’s “attempted suicide” in Ashton Park (in what was elsewhere described more accurately as a “brook”) did little more than dampen the layers of her skirts. Nevertheless, on 26 April 1894, Amelia Dyer was discovered in an excited state, partially submerged in a foot or two of water in the rivulet. She was taken to the Bristol General Hospital, where, an hour or two after admission, she was seen by house surgeon, Dr Lacey Firth. He recorded seeing no evidence of the woman’s “excited” state, although she was shivering with cold and in very low spirits. She was admitted to a ward, where she remained for thirteen days.
For the duration of her stay, Dyer remained downcast, but Dr Lacey Firth was satisfied that while she was certainly melancholy, and initially refused all food, she was not insane. She repeatedly told the doctor that she was troubled, that there was something on her mind.
Dr Lacey Firth reported that she received one visitor at the hospital. A well-dressed man, whose name the doctor did not record, conversed both with the doctor and the patient. He was searching for a woman, in whose care had been placed a child. To the man Dyer remained unresponsive, but later the visit had such a negative effect on her mood that it prompted the doctor to question her about her visitor. Dyer admitted to having known the woman the man had been searching for, who she said lived on a certain street in Bath, and she also gave some indication that she had been involved in the disappearance of the child. But she would not admit the exact nature of her actions or the whereabouts of the child.
Polly and Arthur were married days after Mother’s release from hospital, at the parish church in Horfield. Arthur spent almost his entire savings making a home for Polly.
Willie had already set off for his new life in the navy, and Father was still resident on the Wells Road. Mother briefly returned to her husband after her discharge from hospital, but the marriage was clearly over, and she soon moved to York Road in Totterdown, a riverside address.
Marriage had added a certain haughty allure to Polly’s tall, neat physique. A wedding ring was still a young woman’s surest way into society, and her husband’s savings had funded a well-furnished and comfortable home. Briefly, Polly must have felt removed from her mother’s influence for the first time in her life. But it hadn’t lasted long: within a few weeks mother appeared at Grove House, Polly’s Fishponds address, begging to be allowed to live with them.
Polly recalled that it “seemed quite a surprise to mother that Arthur had so much money to spend” on making a home for his new wife. Polly seems to have grown in confidence, buoyed by the material trappings of respectability which now surrounded her. Arthur had for a while now been employed as a commissions agent – a travelling salesman – selling corn and flour to Bristol tradesmen for a major London miller. But soon after mother moved in with them at Fishponds he lost his job, “due to slackness of trade”, leaving the couple without an income.
Polly was later to claim that when Arthur sold “almost every stick” of furniture they possessed, it was not because of his change of circumstances, but rather as a result of Mother’s desperate plea for cash. He told Polly that Mother had approached him in a most distressed state, and had insisted that “if she did not have £150 at once she would very likely get into most serious trouble”. Mother had promised to repay him the loan shortly; she expected to come into £500. Arthur had believed her and had raised the money against the sale of the household contents.
Polly recounts, “Here again the same business was repeated, I mean as regards the ladies coming and the babies being born.” Infant life became the household’s sole source of income. Arthur passed indolent days, happy to allow his mother-in-law to work to support him and apparently indifferent to the ebb and flow of women and infants. Polly was induced to enter into what she grimly referred to as “the baby business”. She was soon to prove herself as prolific as her mother.
By the end of 1894, they had also opened their doors as a house of confinement. Alongside the ladies who came for the accouchement, Mother and the Palmers, Alfred, Annie and Lily and four adopted infants were all crammed into Grove House. One of the babies was born in the house; Mother had received £80 for its permanent adoption. Two others were the result of newspaper advertisements and had been born elsewhere, arriving with £30 and £40 premiums respectively. As the money rolled in, so the number of people in the house increased and tensions began to run high.
In December 1894 Mother suffered another fit of melancholia, and Polly awoke one morning to the familiar sound of Mother’s distress. She had tired of this world, she said. It was time she sought peace in heaven; she must do it! She must do it! She threatened to drown herself in the river, and finally Arthur applied to the relieving officer for an order to have her certified.
Dr William Eden arrived at Grove House on 14 December. He reported that he had found her “very excited; when I went in she threatened to pitch me out … I had very little conversation with her, she was in such a bellicose spirit; I heard what she had to say, and let her talk on, and in the end I came to the conclusion she was of unsound mind, and ought to be placed under control.” His words give a sanitized vision of Dyer’s condition: Polly had been under siege. The incessant and semi-coherent talk of suicide (Dr Eden also noted how Dyer “rambled on”) would turn in a moment to raging aggression. Polly told Dr Eden that Mother had “run after her with a knife”.
With Mother exclaiming, “God has forsaken me!”, “The world is against me!” and “I must do it! I will do it”, Dr Eden signed a certificate to the effect that she was “Excited and depressed by times. Says she is lost to God and the world is against her … She is dazed and incoherent.” Under the magistrate’s order she was then transported to Gloucester County Asylum at Wotton.