Israel Barratt was a Gainsborough outfitter, doing his business in Church Street. He was prosperous, and a believer in the very strong Victorian work ethic. He could even afford to pay domestic servants, and in the case of one of these, a young girl called Ellen Taylor, something happened to turn his life around and virtually ruin him. Whether he committed a crime is still open to doubt.
Ellen was only fifteen when she came into his home to work as a domestic servant. She had had posts in service before, but did not seem to stay long at particular places. On the day that trouble began brewing for Israel, in early September 1890, Ellen was making the beds upstairs, rather strangely, as the children slept. As she walked out onto the second-floor landing, she alleged that she met Israel and that he first asked her to go and fetch some meat for him, but then he grabbed her, according to her statement made later, and did ‘improper things to her person.’ Was it a case of indecent assault? It certainly looked that way for some time.
Ellen claimed that she shouted loudly as he molested her, and that she yelled that she would tell his wife. No-one responded to her cries. The man then seems to have cooled down, and retreated to the very top garret, while the girl went down to the ground floor – and here she, rather amazingly for future medical and legal debate, continued with her work.
The girl said that her employer then came down, obviously after doing some soul-searching about the supposed assault, and apologised to her, insisting that if she said nothing, the action would never be repeated. But if anything had happened, he had chosen the wrong victim. Ellen went to take the children for a walk and paid a visit to her mother, to whom she told the tale. It was the beginning of the end for the tradesman’s reputation, guilty or not. Both her parents went to visit Barratt that very night, and it appears that there were negotiations and certain monetary suggestions that would avoid any further fuss.
But the case went to court. Mr Barratt was insistent that he had done nothing, and did not offer cash. When Ellen was cross–examined she told a garbled tale. The account now referred to being ‘thrown onto the stairs’ and that she was fighting for her breath in the struggle. She also said now that she did not scream. What happened next is very familiar in modern cases of a similar nature. The lawyers tried to ‘dish the dirt’ – searching for any implication of a laxness of character on her part. It was noted that the girl had had ‘improper relations’ with a young man a few months before her work with Barratt.
She had been employed by a Mr Walton, a pawnbroker, and there had been no complaints made there. The defence were looking for a clear narrative of the girl and her family looking for easy profits from alleged assaults, hoping nothing would ever reach a court. When employed by Walton, she had never said that she was over sixteen, so the notion that she might be playing another sort of game was dismissed.
This is an important point, as, at this time, the issue of child seduction and sexuality was very much a hot topic. Only fifteen years before this, the journalist W T Stead had set out to ‘buy’ a child to highlight child prostitution. His phrase, ‘maiden tribute’ would have been lodged in the middle class respectable mind with regard to Ellen’s father’s behaviour.
Barratt had made things much worse for himself by going to visit the girl and her family on the next evening after their visit to him. He said that he had meant no harm, and that he had been misunderstood. The girl’s father’s response had been put plainly: ‘Now can you square this?’ The father had also produced the daughter’s birth certificate as well, showing that she had been born on 9 August, 1875. So she was indeed under sixteen and was a minor. He went on to say all the things that the defence would have pressed: that the girl had never been in a reformatory school, and that indeed was a ‘good and proper behaving daughter.’
Barratt could only repeat that he had not taken any liberties with the girl, and the medical expert called; Dr Henry Wright, could really say no more than that the girl’s condition at the time was no more than that she was ‘red-eyed’ and ‘very badly shaken’.
The first hearing had ended dramatically, with Barratt saying to the police, ‘I expected some bother – I wired for my father this morning.’ Then he was locked up. The whole farrago led to a trial in which nothing was resolved, but he avoided a prison sentence. What did fade away for good was his good name. Reading the story today, everything balances uneasily on the cusp between being a sly attempt at extortion and the possibility that the man perhaps fondled the girl and realised very quickly the error he had made. It seems doubtful that he attacked her or was rough with her at all. The father comes across as a somewhat Dickensian character, full of dodges and ruses; he may well have been using the child as a means of squeezing cash from the middle class men of the area. But we will never know the truth.