The Runaway Soldier 
The 1880s saw impressive developments in child welfare. Education was now compulsory between the ages of five and ten, and the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was campaigning for a new law to protect victims of neglect and abuse. In 1889, the ‘Children’s Charter’ was passed, giving the state power to intervene when a child was thought to be in danger. The same year the newly formed NSPCC and its network of inspectors dealt with 3,947 cases across the country.144
Murders of children by their parents, on the other hand, were often sudden and unpredictable. None of the 1888 cases appear to have involved systematic, long-term abuse and most of the accused were said to be loving and affectionate. Their terrible acts were often rooted in mental illness or stress of circumstance, rather than deliberate cruelty.
The Runaway Soldier On 11 October 1889, a young private in the 29th Steel Battery of the Royal Artillery at Newbridge Barracks in Ireland made a sudden confession.
‘I wish to give myself up,’ Edwin Shuttleworth told his sergeant-major.
‘What for?’ came the reply. Shuttleworth was already in trouble for leaving his post early and going off to get drunk, but it was hardly a major offence.
‘For child murder,’ he said. Shuttleworth explained that there was a warrant out against him over the death of his three-month-old son. ‘I did not do it,’ he hastily added, before revealing that his real name was Clarence Henry Longman. He was only nineteen years old.
Exactly two years earlier, Longman had married a young woman called Elizabeth Carmichael, the respectable daughter of a clerk in the bankruptcy court. She was then seven months pregnant and their son, Clarence Junior, was born on 18 December 1887. From the beginning, the relationship was troubled thanks to Longman’s short temper and failure to find work. He was clearly not cut out for family life at the age of seventeen and did not appear to have any affection for his son. He referred to the baby as a ‘little sod’ and repeatedly suggested that it should be given to somebody else to look after. On several occasions he told his wife, ‘If you want to live you will have to go on the streets and work for me as I shall not work for you.’ They lived only on the money they got from Longman’s father, an advertising agent based in Ludgate Hill.
The situation only got worse when they moved into a single room, costing 2s 6d a week, at No.12 Clayton Road, Peckham, south London, on Tuesday 20 March 1888. The following night, Longman and his wife were in bed with the baby when he again brought up his suggestion that she work the streets. ‘If you don’t do that you will have to go home to your mother and ask her advice about you going to service.’ He said he would keep the baby while she was away, adding, ‘Are you afraid of me hitting him? You must think I’m a coward, go on, make haste and go.’ She left on the understanding that he would bring the baby round to her mother’s house in Brixton the following day. When he finally turned up, he no longer had the child.
Longman first claimed that his sister had it, but Elizabeth was adamant that he take her to see her son. At first, he refused, and then said the boy was at Arlington Street, Westminster. There was no Arlington Street in Westminster. Next he claimed that he had given the baby to three young women he knew. Finally, after Elizabeth’s mother, Catherine, confronted him at his father’s house in Peckham, he agreed to take his wife to see the child. This time he pointed out a door at No.26 Monk Gardens, Westminster Bridge Road, but when Catherine Carmichael went round to check, the occupants knew nothing about any baby.
Longman continued to be evasive despite his wife’s increasingly despairing pleas to tell her where he had taken her child. On 31 March, as they took a tram from New Cross to Camberwell, she was so upset that a fellow passenger alerted a police officer and the couple were taken down to the station at Camberwell Green. ‘I want my baby, my baby,’ she sobbed. Longman told the sergeant in charge that it was ‘out at nurse’, but claimed he did not know the address. After waiting some time while officers tried to locate his father, Longman announced that he would take his wife to the child.
Once they were back on the tram, he turned to his wife and said, ‘Well look here, I’ll tell you the truth of it, the baby is not out at nurse, it’s dead … I gave it some peppermint and laid it on its face thinking it would break the wind. I have not killed him. I suppose I have given it too much peppermint … I ought to have called a doctor in at once, I was so excited and I knew how it would upset you that I was afraid to tell you.’
‘What have you done with the baby?’ Elizabeth again demanded.
Longman said, ‘I’ve wrapped it up nice and warm and put it in a little box and buried it at some place beginning with B.’ He then asked her not to say anything and made her write a letter.
‘My dear mother,’ it read. ‘I have seen the baby, Harry and I went together this afternoon. I shall be home tomorrow morning. I remain your affectionate daughter.’
He then had the cheek to go and see Elizabeth’s father, Charles Carmichael, to ask for some money to keep him and his wife going while he looked for a job. Mr Carmichael recalled:
I said if he would bring my grandson back then I would talk to him. I think I said I should be the happiest man in the world if he would only bring the child back. He said it was somewhere not very far off – Whitechapel, I think he said, and he should want some little time to write for it.
Longman promised to bring the baby back the following day. Again he failed to keep his word.
The truth finally emerged when the Carmichael family learnt that the body of a child had been recovered in Battersea. A waterman had spotted a bundle of sacking on the south foreshore of the Thames underneath the Albert Bridge and opened it to reveal a parcel tied with string. He undid the package and saw a child dressed in a white shirt and white flannel petticoat.
When the Carmichaels got to the police station, Elizabeth was too distressed to identify the body, but her mother was instantly able to recognise the clothing and confirmed the boy was her grandson Clarence Junior. He had died of suffocation rather than drowning. Although the find had been made on 28 March, and the information circulated to all police stations, the link was not made until 5 April. By then Clarence Longman had vanished.
He failed to attend a single hearing of the inquest and his parents said they had no idea where he had gone. The coroner issued a warrant for his arrest and a description:
Seventeen, 5ft 2in; complexion, swarthy; hair, dark brown (worn on forehead, and when oiled appears to be black); high forehead, eyes, full, very dark hazel; very thick black eyebrows; nose well formed; two large scars back of head, one extending to left; small feet; swinging gait; carried hands in pockets. Dress: short blue serge jacket, green or black cloth vest; grey mixture trousers; black hard felt hat, worn on one side of head; spotted silk tie; patent high-heeled boots.
The police also circulated a woodcut portrait of the murder suspect.
Longman had travelled to Dover and enlisted in the Royal Artillery under a false name on 1 May 1888. He kept his secret for fifteen months before finally coming clean on his second wedding anniversary while stationed at Newbridge. He was handed over to the Royal Irish Constabulary and returned to London to stand trial at the Old Bailey for murder. During the hearing, Elizabeth’s mother recalled a conversation she had had with Longman while her daughter was in hospital a few days before giving birth. She had said to him: ‘It is a pity the baby is coming so soon. It would be well if the poor little thing would die, as it would then give you a chance to get on.’
Longman replied, ‘Yes, I wish it would die.’
Faced with all the evidence, the defence case was that the child had been accidently smothered while in bed. Longman had panicked and tried to cover up the death, and had no motive for killing his son. The argument was only partially successful. Longman was cleared of murder but convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to twenty years’ penal servitude.145
One Night in Judd Street In 1888, the twenty-one-year-old Herbert George Wells was still finding his way in life. He had finished his studies in biology at the Norman School of Science in London, spent four months teaching at a school in Wrexham and had given up on his first attempt to write the novel which would become his breakthrough 1895 work The Time Machine. It was June and he was back in London, ‘lean and unkempt’ with £5 in his pocket to live on until he found some work. ‘I arrived, with that old small portmanteau of mine, at St Pancras and found a lodging that night in Judd Street, which I considered to be just within my means; a rather disconcerting lodging,’ he wrote in his autobiography. He continued:
The room had three beds and one of my fellow occupants, the lodging house keeper told me, was ‘a most respectable young man who worked at a butcher’s’. The next morning I breakfasted in a coffee house – one could get a big cup of coffee, a thick slice of bread and butter and a boiled or fried egg for fourpence or fivepence – and then set out to find a room of my own.
The room in Judd Street may have been chosen because his geology professor had the surname Judd, but it was hardly suitable lodgings. He quickly moved into a more respectable place in Theobald’s Road and spent the next six months gradually using up his savings, visiting the British Museum reading room, loitering in the streets and watching the crowds. Eventually the loneliness of his wanderings got to him and he went to stay with his aunt, Mary, and cousin, Isabel, whom he would marry in 1891.146
A few months after Wells’ brief stay in Judd Street, the neighbourhood was shocked by the murder of a five-month-old boy at No.125. Mary Ann Reynolds and her husband, William, had moved into the house with their four children in April 1888. The youngest, Frank, had been born about a month earlier, but they had been forced to move from their last place because of difficulties with their landlord. They were also suffering financially because William had lost his job. The pressure was starting to tell on Mary Ann, and something didn’t seem to be quite right. Every so often she would knock on the top of her head and announce, ‘It is here’, without further explanation. She told her sister that she had a burning pain at the top of her head, but did not seem to want to get medical help. Despite all her problems, she remained an affectionate mother and doted on her youngest. Then in the early hours of 9 August, the landlord Robert Hough heard a loud knocking upstairs and ran up to investigate. Mrs Reynolds told him that her baby was dead.
The doctor arrived to see Mary Ann sitting on the bed with her hands clasped, swaying backwards and forwards with her eyes shut. ‘I clutched the baby round the neck and found it dead,’ she suddenly answered, before continuing with her strange rocking movements. She had scratches and a wound to her throat and two large bruises to the back of the head. A hammer and a pair of scissors lay next to her. Beside the bed, the baby boy was lying on the floor with obvious bruising to the throat. He had been suffocated.
Mary Ann was taken to the Royal Free Hospital and two days later tried to cut her throat in the middle of the night using a knife left in another patient’s locker. When a police officer came on duty to watch over her during the day she told him, ‘I killed my baby, I put a handkerchief round its neck and squeezed it, I was loving it, I don’t know what I did it for. My husband was asleep and I took the hammer, striking my head with it, and that woke him up.’ She then exclaimed, ‘Oh, look, the ceiling is falling’ and asked if the officer would catch one of the butterflies fluttering about the ward. She saw dogs on her bed and claimed to hear children crying. The same day she was moved to Holloway Prison to be put under constant observation. It was no surprise when in September 1888 an Old Bailey jury found her ‘guilty but insane’ and she was taken to Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum.147
At the Workhouse On 5 November 1888, PC Herbert Lee was on duty in Marylebone Lane when he saw a woman lying on a doorstep. In her arms was a baby. Approaching them, PC Lee noticed that the child was dressed only in a nightshirt. He told the woman that she should wrap her baby up warm because the cold winter air would do it no good at all. ‘Mind your own business,’ replied the woman, slurring drunkenly. The officer decided it was best for everyone if he arrested her and took her down to the station.
Ellen Mulchay was a thirty-year-old widow and variously described as a charwoman or an ironer, who had been deserted by her partner. She had already been charged twice before with drunkenness. But it wasn’t her condition that concerned the police. The child, a seven-month-old girl named Jane, was in dire need of food and a wash. Her weight, 5lb 14oz, was lower than that of a newborn. The officer put the girl in a blanket and took her to the nearest doctor, the medical officer at Marylebone Workhouse.
In 1888, the workhouse could hold 1,600 people, having added a new block for 240 women to its site between Marylebone Road and Paddington Street. It took in vagrants, the poor, ‘idiots’, the insane and the elderly, whether men, women or children, and gave them food, a bed and a wash. But it was not a place you would choose to live, even if conditions had improved since the early Victorian era popularised by Charles Dickens’ famous workhouse child Oliver Twist. Dickens had served as a juror on an inquest held at the site in 1840, and considered the case of a young maid suspected of killing her newborn son. He seems to have almost single-handedly ensured that the woman stood trial at the Old Bailey only for concealing the birth rather than murder. Ten years later, he revisited the workhouse for an article for Household Words magazine. One scene he described involved a nurse in the ‘Itch Ward’ wringing her hands and sobbing in great distress. ‘Oh, the child that was found in the street, and she had brought up ever since, had died an hour ago, and see where the little creature lay, beneath this cloth! The dear, the pretty dear!’
Dickens saw the ‘dropped child’ she was referring to, and noted how it ‘seemed too small and poor a thing for Death to be in earnest with, but Death had taken it; and already its diminutive form was neatly washed, composed, and stretched as if in sleep upon a box’.
Sadly little Jane Mulchay would share the same fate. The staff had tried to feed her without much success, for most of it came back up as vomit. They even gave her the traditional sip of brandy in an attempt to revive her spirits. Her mother made several visits, but always seemed to be drunk and in no fit state to have her child returned. As the days went by, the girl’s condition seemed only to worsen, and on 17 November she died.
Three days later the inquest was held, at the Ossington Coffee Tavern rather than Marylebone Workhouse. The doctor told the hearing that the girl had died of exhaustion ‘following mal-assimilation of food’ and the coroner remarked that he had ‘no doubt this was a case where the mother had neglected the child, owing to her drunken habits’. The jury returned a verdict of manslaughter against Ellen Mulchay and she was taken into custody. The following week, however, the magistrate, considering the charge, refused to commit her for trial at the Old Bailey because the doctor was unable to say why the child had starved at the workhouse. ‘That the prisoner had behaved in a disgraceful manner was quite clear and if it had been proved that the death was the result of that disgraceful conduct, he should have committed her for trial. But it had not and she must be discharged.’ The Grand Jury at the Old Bailey appeared to agree and dismissed the case.148
A Telegram for Mr Spickernell Just as the late twentieth century was revolutionised by the emergence of the internet, the Victorian era also saw the benefits of long-distance communication using telegraphy. At the forefront of this technology was the Submarine Telegraph Co., who in 1850 had laid the first copper cable across the English Channel. Over the next three decades, they laid more cables to France, Belgium, Germany and Denmark. It was a period during which British companies operated two-thirds of the world’s telegraph cables, another demonstration of the power of the Empire.
On 29 December 1888, the Submarine Telegraph Co.’s army of ‘telegraphists’ tapping out Morse code messages across the world included a certain Frederick Spickernell. That morning, he had gone through his usual routine before kissing his wife and four children goodbye and setting off for work. Later that day, he was at his desk when he received a telegram asking him to return home. Immediately he feared that something had happened to his thirty-seven-year-old wife Julia. She had been ill for some time and often complained of headaches. That Christmas Eve he had urged her to rest instead of washing one of the children’s nightclothes and she had thrown herself at him screaming, ‘Oh Fred, I will murder you. I will murder you and then I shall be a murderess.’ He put it down to overexcitement, because she was stressed about her mother’s visit for Christmas. When he got home to No.93 Milton Road in Stoke Newington he learned the horrible truth. She had killed their nine-month-old daughter Mabel.
Earlier that morning at around 11 a.m. Julia Spickernell had knocked on the lodger’s door in the basement. ‘Mrs Goldring!’ she pleaded.
‘Tea, dear,’ replied Mary Ann Goldring, expecting to be asked for a drink.
‘I wish to speak to you a minute,’ Julia said. ‘Come now.’
Mrs Goldring opened the door and immediately sensed something odd about Mrs Spickernell’s behaviour.
‘I have something to show you,’ Julia said, insisting that she come right that minute and bring her servant Ada too. She then led them to the kitchen door before announcing, ‘I have done it.’
‘Done what?’ asked Mrs Goldring.
Julia appeared excited. ‘Give me Mr Goldring’s razors,’ she said, and then started screaming.
Mrs Goldring ran out of the house and fetched the next-door neighbour Lucy Cavalier before calling for a doctor. Then the two women returned to No.93 and went up to Julia’s bedroom. They knocked, and after a few moments Julia opened the door.
‘I have done it,’ she repeated. ‘The devil made me do it. He has been following me about up and down stairs the last five weeks.’
Eventually Mrs Goldring managed to calm her down and went into the bedroom. There she found the baby drowned in a bucket of water.
When Dr Edward Spencer arrived at the house, Julia Spickernell was in such an excited state that he had to throw her to the ground and pin her down until she blacked out. When she came round a few minutes later she asked him to give her a rope. ‘Let me hang myself, let me hang myself,’ she cried. It seemed clear to both the doctor and the police surgeon that she was suffering from some kind of homicidal mania and it was arranged for her to be taken to Holloway Prison for further assessment.
It took two months for her to recover enough to be put on trial at the Old Bailey for the murder of her child. The key evidence came from Dr Philip Gilbert, the medical officer at the prison. ‘I formed the opinion that she was insane when I first saw her,’ he told the court.
She was intensely dejected. She took no notice of her surroundings, she was moaning and rocking herself to and fro, it was with difficulty I could make her speak. When she did she sobbed and said she had been an extremely wicked woman, that she had gone through hell, that she had been a wicked wretch all her life and was unfit to live. Besides this she was under the delusion that she heard a voice that came from the devil, continually accusing her of doing nothing but taking care of herself. It kept her awake at night.
In his opinion, the madness had been brought on by ‘excessive lactation’ – that her health had been damaged by breastfeeding her child too much. Dr Gilbert told the court that it was a temporary form of insanity and that she had now recovered. The jury found her ‘guilty but insane’ and she was sent to Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum.149
Want and Murder Emma Aston could hardly be said to look like a double murderer. Yet somehow this frail, sobbing thirty-nine-year-old mother and factory worker had killed her two young sons. She had suffocated them both, first twelve-month-old Frank and then two-year-old Bertie. It took a long time for the eldest to die, for he was old enough to put up a struggle. Now she was under arrest. ‘Why did you do it?’ she was asked. ‘Want,’ she sobbed, and began to tell her tragic story.
At the bottom of it was a man. John M. Morris was the foreman of the clothing factory where she had worked for more than a decade, in Old Change near St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London. He was also married, but that did not stop him embarking on a relationship with Emma Aston and fathering both of her children. She had given up her job as forewoman to look after them in 1886, and at first Morris was attentive in sending her letters and money once a week to pay for her food and lodging at No.36 Whitfield Road, Upton Park, east London. Emma – who was using the false name Mrs Styles – told her landlady that the letters came from her husband who was often away from home because of his work as a commercial traveller. But shortly before Christmas, the money started arriving through the letterbox less and less regularly. The bills were starting to mount up and she hadn’t received any reply to the three messages she had sent. When a letter finally came on Saturday 18 February 1888, she had received no money for three weeks and the £1 postal order inside wasn’t enough to cover what she owed to her landlady, the baker and the doctor who had come round to check on her two boys. She read the letter over and over again, trying to find a glimmer of hope for her situation. ‘Just a line to hope you are all well. I am so sorry I could not send it before, I have not had it in my possession ten minutes. Will write on Monday. Hoping you are getting on pretty well, ever your loving Jack.’
Her landlady’s daughter, Alice Jones, was sympathetic to her plight and suggested that she go and see her husband on Monday. As Miss Jones recalled:
She was very much disappointed and distressed at the letter. She had been complaining for some days of acute neuralgia in the head, and of a weight on the top of her head. Her face had been very much swollen and she had to wrap something round it. She also complained of a sore mouth and of a constant pain in the back. I know she had been up with the children for a fortnight, and that her rest had been disturbed. From what I could judge of her she was very ill – she had nursed the children day and night, giving them the most tender care, and never leaving the house all that time. She was completely worn out. She was a most devoted mother to the children.
On the Sunday, seeing Emma was still ill, Miss Jones kindly gave her and the children their dinner at midday. For the rest of the day they remained in their room.
The next morning, 20 February, Miss Jones got up at around 7 a.m. to light the kitchen fire and was startled to see Emma Aston sitting fully dressed on the sofa with a shawl over her head. She seemed to be reading the letter again.
‘Oh, Mrs Styles, how you did frighten me!’ Miss Jones exclaimed.
‘Oh, Miss Jones, I have killed my two dear little children,’ Emma said, and sobbed uncontrollably. ‘Oh my pretty little dears, my pretty little dears.’
They both went upstairs to the bedroom and Emma Aston pulled back the sheet on the bed to reveal both boys lying on the bed, dead. The youngest had some blood around his mouth. Then Emma broke down in tears and made a full confession:
I am not married, and I knew if I went to that man this morning he would not give me any money … I was mad, I was mad. I felt such a weight on the top of my head, something impelled me to do it … I tried to cut Frank’s throat with a knife, the knife was blunt, and seeing the blood I put my hand over his mouth and kept it there till he died. He was not long in dying. I used the bedclothes to Bertie, he took a long time to kill, he struggled so.
She would have killed herself too but, perversely, she felt that would be wrong. ‘She did not seem to think she had done anything criminal in killing the children,’ recalled Miss Jones.
The following month, Emma Aston was found ‘guilty but insane’ at the Old Bailey and was sent to Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum. The witnesses at the trial did not include the man who shared some responsibility for events, John Morris. The police had tried to track him down, but it appeared that he had left his £300-a-year job the day after the murder. Perhaps he had eloped with yet another woman, for there was a rumour that he was also cheating on his wife with a second lover who he was keeping at a hotel somewhere in London. As the Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper reported: ‘There was no doubt that the prisoner had been treated scandalously.’150
Ten Shillings It was Saturday, 26 May 1888, and William Pierrepoint had not paid his rent for six weeks. His landlady Sophia Moon had been sympathetic at first – he had lost his job as a wheelwright and had a wife and two children to look after – but he now owed a total of 19s 6d. Mrs Moon had given him two weeks’ notice, but when the deadline came his pockets were still empty. After three years at No.158 Neate Street in Camberwell it was time for them to leave their single room and find somewhere else to live.
At 10 p.m. Pierrepoint and one of his friends were still loading a barrow with their bed and other belongings when Mrs Moon asked him if he had the 10s he had promised. They had agreed that if he could not find the money he would leave the bedstead behind.
‘No, I have not,’ he replied gruffly. He told his friend, ‘Take the bloody things back.’
‘We don’t want them Mr Pierrepoint,’ Mrs Moon replied, trying to avoid trouble.
‘You can have the bloody bed. You can have the bloody lot. I won’t touch a bloody thing.’ He seemed to have been drinking. He picked up his twenty-two-month-old son Sidney in his arms and went downstairs to his wife. By now a few neighbours had come out into the street to see what all the fuss was about. Pierrepoint was crying into a handkerchief and seemed inconsolable. Suddenly he kissed little Sidney on the head and sobbed, ‘They said I starved you.’ He put the handkerchief back in his pocket and added, ‘You shall be the victim.’ Pierrepoint then took up the boy and swung him down on to the pavement, smashing his skull on the asphalt.
‘He was holding it on his arm, he lifted it up with both hands and threw it on to the ground,’ recalled Eliza Howell, a mother of ten who lived at No.172. ‘I believe its head fell on the ground first. I screamed “Murder”.’
Another witness, Kate McCormack, saw it slightly differently: ‘I saw a man with the child by its two legs and dash it on the ground. He had it by its heels. I saw the child strike the ground and as it struck the ground I ran away.’
The screams quickly brought a crowd out on to the street to surround Pierrepoint who was standing in a daze, perhaps unable to comprehend what he had just done. For a moment it looked like he might be given a thorough beating, but after a few punches were thrown, a neighbour, Sarah Store, shielded him behind her and shouted, ‘Don’t knock the man about, let him alone he will have enough to suffer.’
When PC George Lunn arrived a few minutes later, Pierrepoint was nursing a black eye and drowning his sorrows in the nearby Little Wonder beerhouse. The officer walked into the pub to arrest him and was told that he had run out the back and over the wall. PC Lunn took up the chase but the suspect didn’t make it far before being stopped by some men in the street.
‘I shall take you to the station for assaulting your child,’ Lunn told him.
‘All right mister,’ replied Pierrepoint. As they walked back he added, ‘We had notice on Tuesday to leave. I have been out of work and have had a lot of trouble. We had our bed stopped by the landlord for the rent. I had no intention of doing such a thing.’ But by the time they got back to the station in Rodney Street his story had changed slightly. ‘I dropped him off my arm,’ he said. ‘No one saw it.’
Half an hour later they learned that Sidney had died at Guy’s Hospital from a severe skull fracture and brain damage. William Pierrepoint was remanded in custody until his trial for murder at the Old Bailey.
The jury really only had one issue to consider. Did the child fall or was he thrown? The defence did its best to persuade the witnesses that it might have been accidental. Perhaps the boy had slipped and Pierrepoint had grabbed him by the ankles to try and stop him hitting the ground? Sarah Store did not accept the suggestion, but Eliza Howell wavered. ‘He threw it down … it might have fallen as you say … I have described what I saw.’
Miss McCormack, however, was adamant. ‘I am quite sure that the child did not slip out of his arms. He held it by its two legs, close down to the ankles.’
On 5 July 1888, Pierrepoint, aged thirty-one, was found guilty and sentenced to death. He would escape the noose, partly thanks to the jury’s strong recommendation of mercy.151