The Irish Exhibition at Olympia opened its doors to the pleasure-seekers of London in the summer of 1888. For the price of a shilling, visitors gained entrance to an underground cave of limestone and sandstone with glistening stalactites and stalagmites. On the other side, blinking in the sunlight, they gazed in wonder at a mock village complete with peasants and pigs, a genuine dairy – churning butter from the milk of sixty cows transported from Kerry – and a replica castle hosting mock sieges and military displays. Their stomachs churned at the sight of the roller coaster and a 450ft toboggan slide. For the less adventurous there were displays of textiles, shipbuilding, engineering, mining, brewing, printing, furniture and ‘women’s industries’. And at the centre of the attraction, for those of higher cultural leanings, was the gallery of ancient and modern Irish art, including the Book of Kells – the illuminated Latin manuscript containing the four Gospels of the New Testament. The effect, it was hoped, would be to educate the English about the country lying off their western coast, and the money raised would go towards improving the situation in Ireland.
On Monday 13 August, a married woman by the name of Elizabeth Doyle was making her way home from the exhibition. She decided to take the underground Metropolitan District Railway from Kensington towards the East End and her home just north of Bethnal Green. It was just after 9 p.m. when she took her seat in a third-class carriage. The first thing she noticed was the terrible smell. None of the other passengers seemed to be doing anything about it, so she looked around the compartment. Under the seat she spotted a brown paper parcel. The source of the stench was inside, wrapped in copies of the Morning Advertiser and the Sporting Life newspapers. What she had found was the decomposing body of a newly born baby girl.
The dead child was quickly passed on to a guard at Mansion House station and then to Inspector Simon Hoskins of the City police. He instructed one of his plain-clothes officers to investigate and the following morning William Saunders visited the mortuary in Golden Lane to view the body. What he was looking for was a clue as to who had placed the child on the train. And there, on the brown paper wrapping, he found printed out the details of a Miss Max, of the Falcon Hotel near Fleet Street.
Emmeline Max was a barmaid at the Falcon on Gough Square – an address most famous for its connection to Dr Samuel Johnson, who lived at No.17 while he compiled his dictionary in the mid-eighteenth century. Miss Max told the officer she had received the parcel containing a dress at the end of July, but denied having a child. Saunders then questioned the other staff to see if they knew of anyone there who might have been pregnant. The next day he and Inspector Hoskins returned to the hotel to question Ruth Newman, a twenty-one-year-old housemaid, who had been off work sick for at least a week. Asked about the child found on the train, she replied, ‘I know nothing about it whatever.’
‘Have you been ill?’ queried Inspector Hoskins.
‘Yes, I have been in bed all the past week and have been seen by Dr Ryan of Dean Street, Fetter Lane,’ said Miss Newman.
‘What did the doctor treat you for? What was the matter?’ he pressed.
Miss Newman hesitated for a few moments before replying, ‘I have been suffering from irregularity of the system. The doctor only came once and only sent me one bottle of medicine.’
Inspector Hoskins then revealed his hand. ‘Certain circumstances have come to my knowledge that you are the mother of this child, is that so?’ When she failed to reply, with a nervous, frightened look on her face, he repeated his question. Her resistance broke.
‘Yes, I’ll tell you the truth,’ she sobbed. She then told the inspectors the whole ghastly tale:
What I have previously told you is false. I was delivered last Sunday week in the kitchen and I was alone. My fellow servant the cook had gone out. I hardly knew what I was doing but as soon as I was able I went on the landing, got some paper and wrapped the body of the child in it. It was quite dead. It never moved or breathed, and I placed it in my box where it remained until last Monday when I took it out and went to Kensington and left the body in the carriage. No one knew anything of it but myself.
Inspector Hoskins then told her that she would be charged with concealing the birth and she was taken off to see a doctor. On Thursday 16 August, Ruth Newman was brought before the magistrate and taken into custody until the inquest. At that hearing, the doctor who had carried out the autopsy referred to the blisters all over the body caused by boiling water and the marks on the throat suggesting a ligature had been used. The child’s eyes appeared to be bulging, and the tongue was protruding, suggesting strangulation. In the opinion of the doctor, the appearance of the lungs indicated that the baby had breathed after being born. This satisfied the legal test of a ‘separate existence’ from the mother and Miss Newman now found herself accused of murder.
The young maid was committed for trial by both the coroner Samuel Langham and the magistrate Sir Andrew Lusk. However, Lusk thought it was more a case of concealment of birth, a much less serious charge punishable by a maximum of two years imprisonment. In the end, the Grand Jury at the Old Bailey agreed and ignored the murder bill. Miss Newman was found not guilty of murder, but pleaded guilty to concealing the death of her child after its birth on 6 August 1888. In mitigation, it was said that there was a ‘very pathetic story’ behind the crime. Her father had died fifteen years earlier and she and her sister had left their mother’s home in the country to enter domestic service. Miss Newman had been seduced by a man who abandoned her as soon as he learned of the pregnancy. She fell ill and made no preparation for giving birth, and the child was stillborn. The chaplain of Holloway Prison and the secretary of the St Giles’ Christian Mission asked the court to allow them to place her in the care of her mother and spare her a prison sentence. The judge, Mr Justice Charles, agreed and released her on condition she forfeit £50 if the terms of the order were broken.133
The Newman case was ‘solved’ thanks to good detective work, but there were countless others in 1888 involving babies that were never identified. In May it was reported that a male child had been found in a brown paper parcel lying in a doorway in Wheatsheaf Alley, Thames Street in the City. He had suffered fractures to the head and right arm, as well as a severe brain haemorrhage. The inquest jury returned a verdict of wilful murder, but nobody was ever charged. Later that month another dead baby boy was recovered from the Thames near Tunnel Pier, Wapping. He had a piece of string tied tightly round his neck. The child had also suffered a large cut to the side through which the intestines had protruded.
On 2 July a newborn girl was found in Spring Gardens in Westminster, only yards from the offices of the Metropolitan Board of Works (the London County Council from 1889).
On 23 July, a male child was found wrapped in a brown paper parcel in an alley running off Burdett Road, Limehouse. Finger-sized marks on the neck indicated that it had been suffocated, and the police issued a description of the young woman believed to have left the body – nineteen or twenty years old, 4ft 10in, dressed in a blue serge dress, black hat trimmed with blue ribbon, high-heeled boots and a leather belt. In all three cases the jury returned a verdict of wilful murder ‘against some person or persons unknown’.134
It is estimated that there were 300 suspicious infant deaths in London every year during this period. Some were ruled as accidental suffocations, caused by the parent or sibling rolling over them in bed. Others may genuinely have died during, rather than after, birth, or died suddenly from unexplained reasons. If the mother was identified, they were often given the benefit of the doubt by magistrates and juries at coroners’ and criminal courts. In November the Pall Mall Gazette reported, under the headline ‘Mutilation of a child at Woolwich’, that a twenty-two-year-old domestic servant called Lily Smith had cut off her baby’s head, arms and legs and burnt them, leaving only the torso at her room in Ogilby Street. Her partner, a soldier, had left for India after the birth. She said the child had been born a month previously but had died and that she was ‘very sorry, and that if she had not been half-starved it would not have occurred’. Her tears and moans of distress in the dock may have influenced the magistrate’s decision to commit her for trial only for concealment of birth, rather than murder. The same applied to Eugenie Blanchard, a twenty-two-year-old French nurse who hacked up the body of her illegitimate newborn and stuffed it down the servants’ lavatory at the home of a wealthy couple in Sumner Place, South Kensington. A week later, a local bricklayer was called in to sort out the blocked drains. In front of the lady and gentleman of the house, he dug up the ground and opened the junction pipe to find the remains of an infant, cut in half lengthwise. The doctor was unable to say whether the child had been alive at birth and Eugenie was cleared of concealment by a jury at the Old Bailey. In May 1888, three baby girls were found dead in the room of Elizabeth Robson, said to be a highly respectable servant at a hotel in the Strand. One of them had been tied up in a bundle with a cord twisted around her neck, while the other two were loosely wrapped in a towel. The jury concluded that the first died of suffocation, but stated had there was not enough evidence as to how it was caused. The other two had died through want of attention at birth. Robson was charged with concealment of birth rather than murder, but the case was dismissed by the magistrate at Bow Street. It may have helped that her employer at Osmond’s Hotel testified that Robson had an impeccable eight-year record and was ‘a most invaluable servant and highly respectable’.135
Domestic servants were frequently involved in cases of suspected infanticide because they had so much to lose if they kept their baby. They would have to leave their jobs and their status as ‘respectable’ women would be ruined. In desperation they could resort to a practice known as ‘baby dropping’. Catherine Morgan, a nineteen-year-old Welsh girl employed as a servant at a house in Lordship Road, Stoke Newington, left the dead body of her newborn boy in a cask in the cellar. Her mistress, noticing her condition, asked whether she had given birth but Morgan denied it and walked out. The child was only found later that evening on 1 July 1888. Although there was no indication as to the cause of death, Catherine Morgan was at first charged with manslaughter. By the time the case reached the Old Bailey it had been reduced to an allegation of concealment of birth. She was acquitted by the jury. This might not have attracted much attention in the newspapers had it not been for a stinging attack on the police by the judge Mr Justice Hawkins, popularly known as ’Angin’ ’Awkins because of his tough sentences. It emerged during the trial that officers had arrested Miss Morgan at her uncle’s home in the middle of the night without a warrant, and had taken her back to the station to be examined by a surgeon. ‘I consider that there has been harshness and severity in the treatment this poor girl has received which amounts to positive cruelty, and I trust that this is the last time I shall ever hear of such conduct,’ he said. The judge’s comments were raised in the House of Commons, but the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, replied that the police might have acted differently if she had admitted the truth straight away. In the House of Lords, the Lord Chancellor went further and claimed that Catherine Morgan should have been found guilty of concealment. ‘The police might occasionally be guilty of error of judgement, as everyone else might be, but he believed it would be difficult to find a finer or more respectable body of men.’ This statement was greeted by cheers.136
The case against Annie Burbridge was much more serious. ‘Horrible Child Murder At Battersea’ read the headline in Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper. On the night of 1 July 1888, the twenty-year-old servant girl was found lying ill in bed at her master’s home in Park Road, Battersea. A doctor attended and immediately realised that she was in labour. ‘That can’t be the case because I never had connection with a man,’ Annie replied. She was given a painkiller but refused to be examined. A few hours later it became clear she had given birth. Her mattress was stained with blood but there was no sign of the baby.
‘I asked her where she had placed the body of the child,’ said Dr John Oliver.
She gave me no direct answer at first and hardly seemed to know what she was about but after a while she told me it was in her box. I went to the box but it was locked. She told me she had hid the key under the mattress. I opened the box and I found the body of a child hidden underneath all her clothing. It was wrapped up in a white petticoat and a pair of drawers and three diapers round the child’s neck and all were saturated with blood.
There was a gash just below the baby’s jaw.
‘Where’s the knife you killed your child with?’ asked Dr Oliver.
‘It’s not a knife, it’s a pair of scissors. I have hidden them in some boxes in the drawer.’
Annie seemed to admit that the child had been alive when it was born, but was in such distress that the doctor believed she was suicidal. At the inquest, the jury concluded that she was not responsible for her actions at the time of the death of the child. Nevertheless she was charged with murder and committed for trial at the Old Bailey. Again the charge was dropped and Annie was instead prosecuted for concealment. The jury found her guilty and she was sentenced to one month in prison. She was taken from the dock of the court sobbing.137
It was not just young single servants trying to cover up illegitimate children. Julia Magson, a cook, was married and already had a two-year-old daughter. Her colleagues at the home of Mrs Leon at No.104F Mount Street, Mayfair,138 had noticed the bulge in her stomach but she denied that she was pregnant. ‘I am going under an operation,’ she said. ‘I have a tumour in my inside.’ The following month, at 4.30 a.m. on 3 June 1888, a maid living in the next room heard an infant crying. She knocked on Magson’s door and asked what was the matter. ‘There is nothing the matter, it is all right,’ replied Magson. The maid went to fetch the caretaker and when they returned Magson was washing towels. There was a bath upside down in the room with blood on the floor, on the bed and on her clothes. Magson admitted, ‘I had a baby but it is dead.’ The caretaker, Emma Batty, asked her what she had done with the baby. Magson held out her hand and said, ‘It was only that size … I have put it in the fire.’ Sure enough, the kitchen stove was blazing even though it was the middle of the night. Once it had died down, the caretaker raked out the fire and found the charred thigh bone of an infant child. Julia Magson was charged with murder, but the problem for the prosecution was proving that the baby had been alive when it was born. The other servants had heard what they believed to be a baby’s cry but the medical evidence did not contradict Magson’s claim that it was born six months premature. The case was dropped before being put before a jury at the Old Bailey.139
The large number of discarded babies each year was also a sign of the public perception of the value of infant life. Attitudes were changing, but in November 1884 Revd John Mirehouse still felt able to post a stillborn baby girl in a box to the then Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt in protest at a decision concerning burial grounds in his parish in Lincolnshire. The coroner called it a ‘gross outrage on public decency’ but the reverend escaped punishment. In May 1888, a cook was charged with murder after she posted the dead body of her newborn illegitimate daughter to its absent father in Northampton. Mary Sarah Lambert, who was in service at a house in Queen’s Gate Terrace, Kensington, told the magistrate, ‘I swooned as soon as it was born and when I came to it was dead. I put it in a box and sent it to the father.’ She stood trial only for concealment of birth and was acquitted.140
The same year there was a case of a grandmother accused of murdering her daughter’s two illegitimate children. On 31 January, after a difficult labour, thirty-year-old Dora Hart gave birth to twins – a boy and a girl – at the family home at No.206 Upper Fore Street, Edmonton. The doctor and nurse who attended the delivery called again the next day only to be told that the babies had been sent to Southgate. The day after that, Dora’s mother Jane, aged fifty-four, admitted that they were dead and that under the Jewish religion all children who died within twenty-eight days of their birth were considered as stillborn. ‘I have not laid a finger on the little dears,’ she told police. The girl was later found wrapped up in a parcel in the schoolyard of a Wesleyan chapel in Tottenham and Dora’s brother Harry admitted to police that the boy had been buried in the back garden in a brown paper parcel.
The first doctor to examine the bodies believed that the boy’s death was not natural, while the girl had died from starvation. Both mother and grandmother were arrested and charged with causing their deaths, but only Jane Hart went on to stand trial for murdering the male child at the Old Bailey. The medical evidence was conflicting – a professor believed that the boy had died of asphyxia, which might have arisen from natural causes, while another doctor believed that the boy had died of natural causes due to ‘imperfect expansion of the lungs’ . In his summing up, the judge declared there was no evidence to support the charge and she was acquitted by the jury.141
The murders of newborn children were generally of far less interest to the newspapers than other cases, and tended to be reported in brief. There was no mystery, no salacious detail, only tragic circumstance. Occasionally the press picked up on unusual details. When Florence Lovett, a twenty-five-year-old single woman, was charged with killing her illegitimate newborn daughter, the East End Observer headlined its report: ‘The shocking child murder at Mile End – The career of Mad Florrie.’ Miss Lovett was known in the neighbourhood for her strange behaviour. One witness told the inquest: ‘We used to call her Mad Florrie. She used to tell such stories. She would say she had been to Wales, when she had not. She would say she was engaged to people when she was not.’ She lived with her father Edward, a builder, her stepmother and her two-year-old child at the family home at No.175 Skidmore Street. On Friday 6 January, 1888, her sister Minnie became suspicious after Florence claimed that she was ill with neuralgia. Minnie looked under the bed but the chamber pot was missing.
‘I looked in a cupboard in the bedroom and there I found the chamber with some blood in it,’ said Minnie. A dead infant girl had been wrapped in a bundle of clothing inside a box, and a piece of tape was tied tightly round her neck. A doctor gave the cause of death as strangulation, and Florence was committed for trial for murder by the coroner, despite her father’s claims that she was not responsible for her actions and that there was mental illness running in the family. The jury at Old Bailey appears to have taken pity on her condition and cleared her of both murder and concealment of birth. The outcome was noted in The Times of 29 February with the statement that ‘the case did not present any features of public interest’.142
Another case took place in Spitalfields at the height of the Ripper murders. On the morning of 10 October 1888, a dead newborn baby was found at the home of a twenty-two-year-old tailoress, Dinah Israel, at No.16 Church Street. One of her roommates had heard her moving around and groaning the previous night, but Dinah claimed that she had diarrhoea. The truth only emerged when they saw the state of her bedding. A post-mortem revealed that the infant girl had been born alive but died ‘from want of proper attention at birth’. It was Dinah’s second illegitimate child. The inquest jury returned a verdict of manslaughter, but the Grand Jury at the Old Bailey ignored the bill and she was found not guilty.143