At twenty-six, John Ottley’s youth belied his experience. Throughout may and June of 1895 alone, he had given testimony at Police Courts and Coroners’ inquests on an almost weekly basis, and had been witness to such maltreatment, exploitation and abuse of children that he was able to recognize instantly the hallmarks of the baby farmer. He would have been familiar, too, with the young, single women who declared themselves too scared, too poor, or else too reluctant to raise their infants. The women who gave up their babies, abandoning them either to the streets or to the whim of individuals like “Annie Smith”. The best of them were gullible and helpless; the worst guilty of murder. Many in between consoled themselves that their actions were laudable: they were angel makers.
So when Ottley returned after a few days to discover that the house at Channings Hill had been vacated, it confirmed his suspicions about the standard of care being offered by “Annie Smith”. He alerted the Bristol police and began to make quiet enquiries as to Smith’s whereabouts.
Inspector Robertson of the Bristol police had frequently worked alongside John Ottley. Robertson was also in possession of quite a sizeable file on a Bristol baby farmer named Amelia Dyer, one which stretched back sixteen years and took in many of her aliases. “Smith” had been favoured by Dyer back in 1879, in the “Totterdown Baby Farmer” case. Since then, the plight of the governess whose infant Dyer had adopted had been carefully tracked, until December 1894, when Dyer had once more slipped through the net. This latest alert by Ottley bore all the signs of a Dyer operation; the neighbours’ descriptions of a tall, heavy woman in her fifties only added to robertson’s conviction that “Amelia Dyer” and “Annie Smith” were one and the same.
Robertson questioned the neighbours in Channings Hill, and learned that they had seen as many as six infants a day coming into the house over a three-week period, prompting them to raise the alarm with the NSPCC. Inside the house, Robertson found more than thirty telegrams relating to the adoption of unwanted infants from women all over the country, as well as numerous letters. Despite sustained efforts, however, none of the babies referred to in the correspondence could be traced.
Robertson, like Ottley, was a Scotsman; an Orcadian in his mid-forties and a father of four. He harboured grave concerns for the welfare of the two-year-old child reported by the neighbours to be in the care of this woman, said to be headed for Eastville. He concentrated his force’s efforts upon tracing “Annie Smith”.
INQUESTS IN BRISTOL
MONDAY – Before the City Coroner
DISCOVERY OF AN ERRAND BOY – At the Hope and Anchor, Jacob’s Wells, on the discovery of a newly-born child. George glue, of 2, Chapel Hill, stated that he was going on an errand for his employer when he saw a parcel lying in Codrington Place. He opened it and found it contained the body of a child. PC Parkhouse … said that on receiving a communication from the previous witness, he went to the spot named and found a child’s body, which he conveyed to the police station.
Western Daily Press, 30 July 1895
The Smiths’ Eastville neighbours turned out to be just as inquisitive as those in Channings Hill; one in particular took great interest in the two elderly Mrs Smiths and the little child in their care, Bertie. Mother wasn’t at all happy with the attention the woman next door lavished on the child whenever she saw him. In a matter of days, she announced to granny she was not to make herself comfortable in Eastville: they would be moving once more, this time to join her daughter Polly in Cardiff. She instructed her to begin to make her preparations to leave, and went out, taking Bertie with her.
Dyer returned to the house in Eastville some hours later, and the same neighbour reported that upon seeing the woman return she had been curious, peering inquisitively at the nine-month-old infant Annie Smith was suddenly cradling, and enquiring as to Bertie’s whereabouts. She knew the midwife was not one for idle chatter, but even so had been taken aback at the curt rebuttal: “That’s my business”, she had been told, Annie Smith conceding only that the baby was her daughter’s child, and that they were on their way to Cardiff to visit her in the morning.
The following day, 13 July 1895, with granny and mother already on board a train to Cardiff, two-year-old Bertie Palmer was found abandoned, wandering alone on Durdham Downs in Bristol.
Mr Ottley of the NSPCC arrived a day too late to catch the woman Annie Smith in Eastville. A neighbour told him everything she knew: that the woman “Smith” left the house with young Bertie, but had returned without him, carrying instead an infant in her arms, who she had claimed to be her nine-month-old grandchild. She had said that she was on her way to Cardiff to return it to her daughter there.
Robertson issued a warrant for the arrest of the woman going by the name of “Annie Smith”, for abandoning Bertie Palmer on Durdham Downs. Meanwhile, Ottely worked hard to establish the true parentage of the nine-month-child Smith had claimed to be her own grandchild, and traced it to a young girl from Clarence Road in St Philip’s who had given it over to Smith for adoption, along with a £10 premium. Little Bertie Palmer was sent to the workhouse at Barton Regis.
Several years later, during renovation work, the skeletons of four infants were uncovered in the garden of a house in Fishponds formerly occupied by Amelia Dyer.