By 13 January, Amelia Dyer had convinced medical staff at the Wotton Asylum that she was sufficiently recovered to warrant a trial return into the community. Where she headed for that cold, bleak January fortnight following her release is not known, but, significantly, her trial coincided with the start of the Palmers’ new venture as independent baby farmers. By the start of February she was back at the asylum, her case file recording five days later that she was “again to all intents and purposes recovered, though not so much as previously”. She was clearly not entirely buoyed up by a visit to her daughter and son-in-law, if indeed that is where she had been.
However, she was now a compliant lunatic, and one whose recovery, if not yet complete, was considered entirely imminent. She was duly removed from the County Asylum, where costly patient care weighed so heavily upon the local ratepayers, and transferred to the more economical wards of the Barton Regis Workhouse infirmary in Bristol.
If her weeks at the Wotton Asylum had been grim, the workhouse was grimmer still. Though a shift toward the employment of more female and working-class Guardians had effected a gradual softening of some of the worst excesses of the regime, it was still widely regarded as a place of dread. The days were monotonous, the routine harsh and the infirmary staffed by unqualified “pauper attendants”, who could be notoriously brutal. The infirmary struggled to accommodate the sick, the mentally ill and the incapacitated side by side. Added to that was the pressure of housing the violently insane. Written into the workhouse regulations at Barton regis was a stipulation that no one deemed dangerous, of an unsound mind, or who “may require habitual or frequent restraint” should be admitted into the workhouse for longer than fourteen days. But even two weeks is a long time for those living in an open ward alongside a dangerous and restrained individual. In such an environment, those with depression or psychosis would quickly deteriorate, and were often sent back to the County Asylum.
The day the Palmers took Queenie by train out of Bristol, Queenie recalled being “waved off” at the platform by a “very big tall lady” who she had been told was her grandmother. Alongside her “parents”, she climbed aboard a train bound for Plymouth. The city then, as now, was a major naval base, which must have rekindled Arthur’s boyhood love of the sea. He was frequently reported to have passed himself off as a ship’s steward home on leave, and had even been offered a position as such, on New Year’s Day that year, working alongside his wife as steward and stewardess on board a private yacht. It would have taken them away to sea for three years and Mother couldn’t tolerate that thought: she had forbidden them to accept the post, despite what she described as “a good wage” of eight shillings a month. Her word, it seems, had been enough to stop Arthur taking the job he had dreamed of since boyhood. But the pull of the sea was clearly strong, and so Arthur, Polly and little Queenie Baker sat in their compartment and waited for the whistle.
After a brief consultation between the medical superintendent of the Wotton Asylum and the medical officer of the Barton Regis Workhouse Infirmary, Dyer was officially discharged from Wotton on 11 March, considered by both parties to be fully recovered. But still she was not ready or able to risk life on the outside: she pleaded poverty, saying her home had been broken up since her incarceration, and became an able-bodied pauper at the Barton Regis Workhouse.
It was a grim choice for her to have to make. There can have been little that distinguished her life as a pauper from her memories of prison. In both institutions she was labelled an “inmate”. In both, her days were regimented by a series of bells. In both, her diet, her personal hygiene, her clothing and the manner in which she passed each day were entirely removed from her control. It was a system that, though reformed in 1880, bore the traces of its original conception as a punishing system for the eradication of the “idle poor”; a regime designed to reprimand and to castigate those who failed to support themselves.
Dyer was bound by daily roll calls, enforced periods of silence and rigid controls against smoking, drinking, use of “obscene or profane language” or card games. Permission had to be sought for the most basic human rights: the right to sleep when exhausted (forbidden outside set bedtimes, “except by permission of the master or matron”); the right of a parent to be with her child (restricted to one set period in each day, and only then in a room specially set aside for the purpose); the right to leave (without giving “reasonable notice”). Even her choice of reading matter was scrutinized: an enduring mistrust of the educated working classes meant that it was left to the discretion of the master or matron to decide upon anything deemed “improper … which may be likely to produce insubordination”.
What gave the house its raison d’être, as well as its name, was work. Picking oakum was a standard and soul-destroying occupation, but there were other tasks, too. Able-bodied women could be asked to nurse the sick and lunatic on the wards of the infirmary; or to tend to the infants in the nursery. Amelia Dyer had four of her own adopted children at the workhouse in May 1895: Annie, Alfred and Lily and a baby girl who had been one of the infants Dyer had adopted at Grove House. Ironically, in the workhouse in May 1895, Dyer may have been set to tend her own abandoned children. (The baby girl remained in the workhouse for another four months, until September 1895, when she was selected by the Guardians “to be emigrated” to Canada. She was later said to be doing “thoroughly well”.)
Life for the elderly inmates in particular was nothing but a bleak and hopeless monotony. Elderly paupers were typically proud, dignified souls. They had worked hard all their lives, and would only enter the workhouse when their bodies were worn out so that they could no longer earn their own keep; although such was their dread of life in the workhouse that many chose begging and vagrancy as preferable alternatives. Those inside spent comfortless, regimented days on hard wooden benches, with nothing but a bland and inadequate diet to break up their day. Most elderly paupers went into the workhouse knowing they would almost certainly die there.
On the morning of Wednesday 24 April 1895, Mother obtained a temporary pass out of the workhouse to visit her daughter.
It was a day fraught with emotion. Mother didn’t bear isolation well; she had not waited long before returning to live with Polly after the wedding. She had even gone so far as to forbid the newlyweds to take up the position on board a yacht because she could not accept the ensuing three-year separation. Polly herself was later to reflect, “For as long as I was there, [Mother] was well.” In spite of all that had gone between them, it seemed Amelia Dyer craved the company of her daughter. That April, after three years on the run from the Bristol police, considerable financial pressures, three torturous months as a certified lunatic and several weeks toiling under merciless hardship of the workhouse, Amelia was reeling. And now she found herself standing on a crowded railway platform, waving her daughter off to a life in a new city.
When she headed back into the workhouse two days later, she had resolved that her stay there was almost at an end.
Dyer could have avoided the monotony and crushing loss of liberty of the workhouse. It was a dehumanizing system: an assault upon an individual’s humanity and one which none would opt for, except those in desperate need. It is difficult to regard Dyer’s need as desperate. For as long as she was prepared to continue to accept cash for infant life, as she had done for twenty-five years, there was no need for her to tolerate poverty.
Had she at last had a change of heart? it seems unlikely: she would return soon enough to her “nefarious practice”. Her stay at the asylum may well have reflected her genuinely fragile mental health, but upon her discharge she made a choice to remain a pauper. Perhaps the hardship of the workhouse represented a lesser evil; a welcome refuge; a protection from a greater foe? Certainly she feared capture and arrest by the Bristol Constabulary, who had already proved unrelenting in their pursuit; but that had never stopped her from living at large in and around the city before. She had taken refuge in the asylum and the workhouse for the first six months of 1895, as if she were in hiding. Furthermore, she had pleaded for a considerable sum of money from Arthur and then suffered apparent destitution, despite a staggering income. Dyer was clearly fleeing some greater menace, its identification now sadly beyond our reach.
Jane Smith was a lonely soul, suffering the workhouse as her only option, the spark all but gone from her eyes. Fast approaching seventy, she had once had a home, a husband, a family. She had been born in Swansea and had moved to Bristol when she had married her husband, William, since which time she had never left the city. She took pride in her long service to a Bristol law firm as a cleaner. But now all that had gone: her three children buried many years since; her husband dead for over two years; her home lost with him.
Jane Smith, Weekly Dispatch, 19 April 1896
Most of the old girls in with Jane passed their days in quiet introspection, and she had struggled to find solace in their company. There was one exception: a Bristol nurse, fallen on hard times; she had entered the house in the spring of 1895 and began to spend time with Jane. The nurse listened to her story, and confided in Jane her dearest wish: to live on the outside once more, making a quiet life tending to the unwanted babies cast aside by their unmarried mothers. Jane was encouraged to feel some small hope for her own future.