The Lady’s Maid 
In twenty-first-century London, the majority of homicide victims are male. The ratio is usually between 2:1 and 4:1. But while 1888 was perhaps a freak year for murder in comparison to surrounding years, the late nineteenth century does reveal a different pattern. The returns of the Registrar General reveal that usually more than half of homicide victims in London were female (see Appendix). Why were women more at risk? Was it because violence against women, particularly in the home, was more acceptable at this time? In the Victorian era, eight out of ten murdered women were killed by a husband, lover or suitor; and while 26 per cent of convicted murderers were men who killed their wives, only 1 per cent were women who killed their husbands.92
Two female murder victims in 1888 stand out from the rest. They were both middle class and living in comfort. They took no obvious risks – in fact both their lives centred round their homes and nothing within those houses suggested that they might meet violent ends. Yet it was their very wealth and comfort that would attract the attention of their killers. Burglaries, break-ins and robberies were not that common according to the police returns – there were 499 burglaries, 1,408 cases of housebreaking, 590 cases of business break-ins, 107 robberies and twenty-six assaults with intent to rob (at present there are 60,000 reported cases of residential burglary every year in a city which has almost doubled in population). However, these two victims were in all likelihood not chosen at random.
The Lady’s Maid The home of Lucy Clark was decorated with all the trappings of an illustrious career – Dresden china, antiques, fine clothing and jewellery. Pride of place on the mantelpiece was a signed portrait of Lady Lonsdale, Gladys Lowther, the daughter of Sidney Herbert, the late Conservative MP and supporter of Florence Nightingale. Lucy Clark had once been her maid and the picture was just one of the many presents she had been given during her employment. That was some time ago now – Lady Lonsdale was now Marchioness of Ripon, the husband of Earl de Grey (who was himself the grandson of a prime minister) – and Lucy Clark had set up her own dressmaking business in the West End catering for the tastes of the aristocracy. She took premises in Marylebone and advertised her trade with a brass plate on the front door reading ‘Modes et Robes’. Lucy Clark was very much a ‘respectable’ woman. ‘She was described as a tall and remarkably fine person, of pleasing manners, but very reserved in disposition,’ reported the Penny Illustrated Paper. ‘She was in the habit of wearing several rings, and her watch chain and pendants were generally to be found conspicuously displayed on the outside of her dress.’
At the beginning of 1888, Miss Clark was forty-nine years old and living alone, except for her cat, on the first floor above a shop at No.86 George Street, Portman Square. She was a religious woman and was last seen by her neighbours attending the evening service at Portman Chapel before visiting a nearby coffee house on Sunday 15 January. A week went by, and neither the milkman next door, nor the owner of the general store could remember seeing her. It was on Monday 23 January that an estate agent visited the house to show two ladies the unoccupied floors above Miss Clark’s residence. William J. Betts left the prospective clients in the shop while he picked up the post and quickly checked everything was suitable for a viewing. In the gloom he could just make out the form of a woman slumped at the bottom of the staircase. Lighting a match and peering closer, he noticed that she was lying in a large pool of blood. He immediately fetched the police and a local doctor.
Lucy Clark was cold and stiff, and appeared to have been dead several days. But this was no accidental tumble down the stairs – her skull had been fractured into five pieces by heavy blows from a blunt object. Turning the body, Dr Henry Timms saw the throat had been cut from ear to ear, the blade slicing through the blood vessels and windpipe to the spine. So severely, in fact, that it had left a notch upon the bone. There was blood on the floor of the passage between the body and the front door, and blood going up to Miss Clark’s rooms. Detective Inspector George Robson followed the trail upstairs and found the place ransacked. The bedroom was in total disorder; drawers had been pulled out and rifled through and their contents scattered across the floor. There was some food in the kitchen and three empty bottles of stout. In the front room he found an empty jewel case and an empty watch case and two gold rings lying on the carpet. If the murder had been carried out by burglars or robbers, they were not experts. The next day detectives discovered gold, silver and banknotes amounting to more than £11, and a bank book indicating £97 in savings and £250 in stocks and shares.
Inspector Robson also found a letter in Miss Clark’s handwriting dated ‘Saturday, January 13’ [Saturday was actually the 14th]:
Harry, I am waiting an answer from you to know what is your intention – to pay for the damage you did to my gold chain, and make good the other things you have stolen from me. I have taken my chain to a jeweller. But you have broken and twisted it so badly, and one piece you have broken off, he cannot mend it for less than 7s 6d, and the double ring, of the same quality, would be 10s I think the action you did was that of a villain. You know I had it in my power to make you pay one way or another, so you had better let me know if you wish to do so of your own free will.
The letter was addressed to ‘Mr Henry Chadwick, 78, Gloucester Street, South Belgravia’.
Inspector Robson took the clue to Miss Clark’s brother Francis, a stonemason living in Walworth Road, south London. Francis had last seen her alive in early January and knew she kept various items of jewellery, including a gold watch and chain, at the house. There had been some family disagreement after her nephews, Harry and Walter Chadwick, checked on the cat while their aunt was ill at their mother’s house over the New Year. When she returned home to Marylebone on 4 January she had found some of her jewellery missing. It was a possible motive and the detective’s next visit was to twenty-one-year-old Henry Chadwick at his family home in Gloucester Street.
Henry, who worked as a surveyor at an architect’s office, denied any quarrel. What about the jewellery? ‘Surely she had not told you anything about that?’ he replied, before finally admitting that he and his brother had opened a jewel case using some keys they had found in a tin box under the table. They were drunk and had taken two gold stoppers and broken a chain. His brother Walter had pawned the gold stoppers for 10s. Henry had visited his aunt again on Monday 16 January to ask for her forgiveness and to promise to repair a neck-chain which he had broken. Inspector Robson also questioned nineteen-year-old Walter, who was unemployed and had no allowance to speak of. He had not been to his aunt’s house since the theft, and on Tuesday 17 January he had travelled to Stratford by train to see the manager of the radical club on the high street and had spent the evening at a pub. How did he pay the return fare? He must have had money off his brother or from a friend, he said.
There was suspicion but no real evidence. Could the nephews really be responsible for such a brutal murder? The medical evidence was that Miss Clark had been beaten about the head with a blunt object such as a mallet, and the bruises to her arms suggested that she had tried to fend off the attack. She was still alive when the knife was drawn across her throat. The police surgeon believed this fatal wound was inflicted by someone standing in front of Miss Clark. Two different types of attack – did this suggest two killers? Yet Inspector Robson found neither murder weapon at the house. It was still unclear exactly when the murder took place. Inspector Robson favoured the night of Tuesday the 17th, although a business letter found at the victim’s home appeared to have been opened on the 18th. The detective had also established that Walter Chadwick had gone to Stratford on Wednesday the 18th, rather than the previous night. There were other intriguing but unconfirmed newspaper reports. A coachman came forward to say that he had seen two men leave the house and drive off in a Hansom cab at 11 p.m. on Friday the 20th. The driver was tracked down and he told police that he had taken two men to Cannon Street station. It was also said that Miss Clark’s gold watch had been pawned in Fleet Street for £3 under the name of Gill and a fictitious address, St George’s Road, on the 18th. This watch was identified by the victim’s relatives, but the manager of the shop failed to identify the man who attended his premises. He was said to be under thirty years of age, pale, wearing a dark overcoat and a tall silk hat, and spoke with ‘a little bit of bombast’.
The Chadwicks were arrested, detained at Marylebone police station while their rooms were searched, and then released. For the next few days, until the inquest on 27 January, the brothers were kept under surveillance. Their movements were read out to the court but revealed little more than a few meetings with the other members of Lucy Clark’s family. Henry Chadwick told the court that he had gone round to apologise to his aunt after work on the evening of Monday 16 January and had spoken to her on the front step.
She said she had written me a letter, but finding the language a little stronger than she intended she had not posted it. She asked after my mother, and then kissed me and bid me goodnight. She asked me up but I felt ashamed and declined to go.
Henry said that he then went home, calling in at the local Warwick pub to have a drink with his brother until around 10 p.m. The following day he was at home all evening, apart from spending a half hour at the Warwick. He also spent Wednesday and Thursday evening at the same pub, whereas Friday evening he had played chess with his brother at home.
Walter Chadwick thought he had gone to Stratford on Tuesday 17 January, but if that was Wednesday then he must have stayed at home. The coroner was later to remark that the younger Chadwick ‘had not given a satisfactory account of himself’, and that the suspicion resting upon them resulted from their own behaviour. Suspicion, however, was not enough to bring charges and the inquest jury returned a verdict of ‘wilful murder against some person or persons at present unknown’.
The police investigation continued as Lucy Clark was laid to rest at Brompton cemetery on Monday 30 January. Officers were still attempting to trace items of jewellery believed to have been stolen: a gold watch, a gold chain, a gold necklace, three gold rings, three pairs of gold earrings, a gold brooch and two pairs of bracelets. They pulled up the flooring and flushed the drains looking for a weapon. They examined the brothers’ clothing under a microscope and questioned the laundrywomen, but nothing of interest was found.
Journalists also made their own enquiries and interviewed the mother of the Chadwick brothers. Mrs Chadwick ‘was very lady-like and courteous in her demeanour, but showed traces of deep mental anguish’, reported Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper. The family had clearly been torn apart by events, and one relative had openly accused the brothers of the murder. ‘I felt in all my heart that they were innocent and that all would come right,’ said Mrs Chadwick.
The young men I knew did wrong in taking some of her valuables, but they had too much affection for their aunt ever to think of murdering her. No! The murderer or murderers must be sought for somewhere else. But this untimely end, I am sorry to say, is no more than what all of us have feared and expected, and I can prove it.
Mrs Chadwick claimed that her sister had been worried about her home being broken into and that her family had repeatedly tried to persuade Miss Clark not to live alone in George Street. ‘Whether you believe in presentiment or not, she at all times was depressed, and sometimes said she had had such an unpleasant dream that she thought something was going to happen to her.’
The investigation was gradually wound down before becoming overshadowed by other, blacker crimes. As the Penny Illustrated Paper reported:
Sedulously active and vigilant though the Metropolitan Police are under the leadership of Sir Charles Warren, it is mournful to recall the number of criminals who have not been found out, and who may be yet in our midst. Where are the perpetrators of the fiendish murder of poor Mrs Samuels, the wife of the milk-shop keeper in Bartholomew Road, Kentish Town? Where lurk the Great Coram Street, Burton Crescent, and Euston Square murderers? It is earnestly to be hoped that to the black list of murderers at large will not be added the men – or women – concerned in THE BRUTAL ASSASSINATION OF MISS LUCY CLARKE. [sic]
The ‘Marylebone Murder’ was indeed added to the list. Four months later another woman was killed during a suspected robbery at her home in another respectable area of London.93
The Banker’s Wife Canonbury, north of Islington, seemed an ideal place for a sixty-nine-year-old bank clerk like Charles Cole Wright to live. It was close to the city, but green enough to satisfy any yearnings for the clean air of the countryside. Once a land of open fields, grazing cows, a fourteenth-century manor house and a tranquil pond, it attracted visitors to the historic Canonbury Tower and the tea gardens of the Canonbury Tavern opposite. By the nineteenth century, it was a well-to-do suburb of London comprising villas, terraces and cottage-style houses. Mr Wright’s home at No.19 Canonbury Terrace, on the west side of the road now known as Alwyne Villas, boasted a healthy six rooms, including two kitchens. It was a comfortable life, although not without troubles – his Irish-born wife Frances, then seventy-one, was suffering from bronchitis and they had been having trouble finding a decent servant girl who would stick at the job. By Wednesday 16 May 1888, they had not had a regular maid for nine months.
That day Mr Wright left the house at just before 2 p.m. as usual, having said goodbye to his wife who was sitting in the front room. ‘I returned according to custom at half past five in the evening, and noticed a crowd about the house. I was then informed my wife was dead,’ he recalled. He went upstairs to the bedroom and was allowed in to see the body. The only injury that he could see was a slight mark over her left eye, which had not been there earlier in the afternoon. Had she fallen? The gossip of the crowd was that it was a robbery. Mr Wright remembered that his wife had complained that morning about a man visiting the house to ask about the water supply. He had advised her to keep the chain on the door and had ensured the door was closed when he was out. Mr Wright quickly made a tour of the house but there didn’t appear to be anything missing. Most of their valuables had been stolen some five years earlier whilst they were on holiday at the seaside.
The alarm had been raised by two French ladies living opposite. Madame Bertha Prevotal had been observing the street from her first-floor window at around 2.30 p.m. when she saw two men climb the steps of No.19 and knock on the front door. One of them was carrying a bag on his left shoulder. The door was opened and moments later she heard three cries as the men pushed inside. She shouted out to her friend, Selina Chefdeville, and told her what had happened. Madame Chefdeville put on her hat and shawl and went to investigate:
I crossed the road and knocked at the door, but no one opened it. I could hear them moving about inside. I went to the door three times, but could get no reply. There was no policeman or any person to be seen anywhere. The neighbour suggested a policeman should be sent for, and he went to fetch one. While he was gone the men came out of the house. I cried ‘Burglars’ but they dashed past.
Madame Chefdeville valiantly gave chase as the men split up and ran in different directions. Setting her sights on the man carrying the bag – described as being in his early twenties and dressed in a long overcoat and a round hat – she pursued him for several hundred yards across Canonbury Road and down Astey’s Road along the New River, shouting and hollering in half-French and half-English. Along the way she passed a delivery driver and a milkman, who might have gone to her aid if only they could have understood what she was saying. Slowly the word got out and by the time the suspect made it to River Street, Madame Chefdeville had recruited a small crowd of young men and boys, all crying ‘Stop thief’. Unfortunately the man had built up too much of a lead and was last seen dumping his bag between two Pickford’s furniture vans before crossing Essex Road into Norfolk Street.
Back at No.19 Canonbury Terrace, a police officer had arrived and had entered the house via the back kitchen. Inside he found Mrs Wright in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, slumped against the wall in a half-sitting position with her arms stretched out. She was dead although her body was still warm to the touch, indicating that she had passed away only a few minutes earlier. Under her dress, a police inspector found two pockets tied round the waist with a piece of tape. In one was £17 10s in gold, cleverly concealed from view by the use of several pins. The second contained a little over 12s and some keys. If it was a robbery it had likely been interrupted by Mrs Wright’s collapse. This theory was borne out by the post-mortem findings that she had died of shock. The stress of the robbery had overwhelmed her diseased heart and she had collapsed before the intruders had the chance to ransack the house. The inquest jury agreed and returned a verdict of wilful murder. It was now up to the police to catch the two men responsible.
Three days after Mrs Wright’s death, The Times ran an editorial offering up its theories on the case. Was it a ‘commonplace story of household robbery’ tainted by the sudden death of the elderly resident?
In that case the only lesson to be drawn is that London dwellings, especially in lonely and out of the way districts, are singularly insecure, even when they seem to offer little attraction to the burglar or the criminal idler … a man who lives alone with his wife without even a single servant would seem to offer as little temptation to the robber as the vacuus viator who sings along the highway … nevertheless it must be acknowledged that if a novelist of the type of Gaboriau or Du Boisgobey were in search of materials for a story of mystery, crime and detection, he could find no more effective opening than this plain narrative of the crime of Canonbury Terrace. In fiction of this character the reader knows very well that the more commonplace the original circumstances and the more obvious the prima facie explanation, the more certain it is that a deep and terrible mystery will be found to be involved in them before the tale is ended.
The Times called for ‘the most attentive and searching investigation’, adding:
It is not enough to search at large among the criminal classes of London for two men who would be likely to rob an ill-guarded and poverty-stricken house in a lonely neighbourhood. It is necessary to discover an intelligible and adequate motive for the crime, and to prosecute an inquiry concerning those persons on whom such a motive would be likely to operate.
The police issued descriptions of the wanted men based on the witness accounts. The first was 5ft 6in tall and dressed in black trousers, a vest and a dark cutaway coat. The second was shorter, at 5ft 1in, and ‘of military appearance’ with tweed trousers and vest. The round-up of known criminals began immediately with seven arrests in Westminster, Hackney, Holloway and the City. None of the witnesses could make a firm identification, although Madame Chefdeville indicated that one of the twenty-five men in the line-up was of similar height and build to the suspects. A further ten were arrested as enquiries continued over the following days, but they were all released.
Then another lead emerged. Shortly before the murder, three men and a woman had been drinking at a pub not far from Canonbury Terrace. They looked as though they were planning something and one man had a bag. The landlord overheard snatches of their conversation – ‘We must have more than that’, ‘Well I wish I was down in Spitalfields again’ and ‘Great Eastern’. The group then drank up and walked off in the direction of Mrs Wright’s house.
Yet all the police had were descriptions, and no hard suspects. Perhaps the strongest evidence they did have was the carpetbag dumped by the robber during his escape, which suggested a skilled labourer or engineer of some kind. According to reports, detectives first concentrated their attention on the East End, in the neighbourhood of Spitalfields, before turning to scour Clerkenwell with an equal lack of success.
One elderly resident of Islington saw the case as proof of the inadequacy of the police in that area, despite the police rates paid by its respectable inhabitants. In his opinion, the estates of the Marquis of Northampton surrounding Canonbury Tower had ‘always formed the happy hunting ground of burglars, though neglected by the higher class of their profession, the murderers’. The police appeared to believe that quiet areas required less protection and as a result ruffians were free to ‘assail ladies in broad daylight in Canonbury Lane’, and homes were left at the mercy of vandals and housebreakers.
A week went by and the police were no nearer to tracking down the killers. On 22 May an estimated crowd of 2,000 people gathered in Canonbury to see Mrs Wright’s funeral cortege set off on the long journey to Nunhead cemetery. In a way they were returning to a place that held happier memories – the Wrights had married in Newington in 1843 and had set up home in Maze Pond, Southwark. It had seen the birth of their daughter Frances, who had died tragically at the age of seventeen following their move to Islington. Now the mother was dead too, her body enclosed in an elm coffin inside a polished oak case with a brass plate reading: ‘Frances Maria Wright, died 16th May 1888, age 71.’ The procession southwards was a grand one – a newspaper report described how:
… a closed hearse, two funeral coaches and a private carriage, left No.19 Canonbury Terrace at ten minutes past one and was followed by the crowd, whose expression of sympathy with the relatives of the deceased was general. An escort was formed of officers of the Metropolitan Police force, who walked on either side of the cortege to the boundary of their division, Islington Green.
Slowly the investigation stagnated and resources were moved elsewhere. The newspapers turned their focus to other London crimes. If the Canonbury murder was going to be solved it would require a flicker of detective genius, or more likely a stroke of luck.
The breakthrough came on 27 August. At 3 a.m. Sergeant Michael Walsh was patrolling the neighbourhood of Old Street when a drunken woman, aged about eighteen or nineteen, approached him to complain that she had been assaulted. Once they had reached the station, Phoebe Field explained that her partner had hit her because he thought she was still seeing a man by the name of Henry Glennie. This man Glennie had committed the Canonbury murder, she claimed. Sergeant Walsh, ears pricked, pressed her for more details.
They had met several weeks earlier at her neighbour’s house in King’s Cross Road. Glennie had been away from London, he said, and was starving. Virtually all he’d had for the previous seven weeks was hop tea. They liked the look of each other and went back to her place for the night. He promised that he would look after her and asked her to go and live with him in a room off the Caledonian Road. The next day her partner, a diamond fitter called Alfred Edwards, found out and came round to confront them in the street outside.
‘I’m not going to have her going with men who are stealing and burgling and breaking into houses,’ Edwards said.
‘I’ve not got her for that at all,’ Glennie replied. ‘You meet me tonight and I will have it out with you. I might as well be killed for six or seven as for one.’
A few nights later she was in bed with Glennie when he started tossing and turning and calling out for his mother. He moaned something about a murder and then, ‘Never mind, mother, it will soon be all right.’ Phoebe asked him about it but he wouldn’t say anything until the next night when he told her, ‘It was me that done the Canonbury murder.’
‘No, never,’ Phoebe replied.
‘Yes I did, me and Long Bob and the eldest Parsons.’
‘How did you know how to go there?’
‘A girl that worked there told me. I won’t tell you which one of them it was.’
Glennie said that he had gone up to the door and asked the lady to let them in by saying he was there about the gas fittings. When she opened the door he told her, ‘Mother, don’t scream and I won’t hurt you.’ When she cried out he hit her on the side of the head and she fell down. Long Bob was searching her pockets when Glennie exclaimed, ‘I think I have killed her.’
Long Bob said, ‘Now you have killed her I can’t touch it’, and they both ran off without the money.
After the confession came a warning, ‘Whoever tells of it will be sure to be killed.’ If Glennie couldn’t kill the snitch, then his parents and his friends would. A few days later Phoebe Field left him and went back to Alfred Edwards.
The details of this alleged confession did not match perfectly but it was clear that the police had to track down this new suspect. Henry Glennie was twenty-four years old, and up until February 1888 he had worked for the Eagle Range Co. making coal and gas stoves. Former colleagues confirmed that he used a bag for the tools and two of them identified the red carpetbag dumped in Canonbury. When Glennie was finally traced, he was not arrested immediately but instead placed under surveillance. They hoped that he might lead them to the man known only as ‘Long Bob’ or give some clue as to who had tipped him off about the Wright house. The ‘eldest Parsons’ he referred to was said to be Charles Parsons, who had been tried for a watch robbery in March. Phoebe Field heard that he had been sentenced to five years in prison, but the records show that he was actually acquitted.
Finally, on the night of 19 September, the police arrested Glennie in the Caledonian Road. ‘I shan’t say anything,’ he replied. ‘I can prove what I am and what I do.’ At the station in Upper Street, he claimed that he had been with his sister at her confectionary shop in Neasden on the day of the Canonbury murder. Then Sergeant Stephen Maroney produced the key piece of evidence, the red carpetbag. ‘I have obtained information that this bag belongs to you.’
As Glennie took hold of the bag and began examining it nervously, his face grew pale. After a pause, he gathered himself together and said, ‘Well, I admit it is my bag, or rather, it was mine. I sold it with some tools to a man in the Star and Garter public house in Caledonian Road.’ Glennie couldn’t say who the man was, or how much he had received, but he claimed that the transaction took place the week after he left the employ of the Eagle Range Co. No matter, the police charged him with murder and asked the magistrate for more time to prepare their case.
Four days later the police found another witness. Mary ‘Polly’ Dominey was a twenty-one-year-old charlady who had worked at the Wright house on and off for the previous two or three years. She had left about six weeks before the murder took place to look after her baby. On the night of her arrest, 23 September, she was held in the library at Upper Street police station but refused to say a word. Eventually, she was persuaded to admit that she knew Henry Glennie and that she suspected his involvement in the crime. A few weeks earlier she had found out the police were looking for her and she had gone to speak to Glennie. As she recalled:
I said I did not know what they wanted me for; I did not know nothing about it. He said ‘They can’t touch you’. He told me that he went to Mrs Wright’s house, and he said he struck her, and when he felt her a few minutes after she was cold. I told him I had seen the news. He said, ‘Did you see the Frenchwoman running behind me?’ I said yes, that was in the picture. He said he was very sorry for what he had done, he had no intention of doing it.
Dominey also suggested that Glennie might have got the idea for the robbery from her friend Amy White, who had also visited the house in Canonbury.
The police were now armed with two alleged confessions, Glennie’s carpetbag, an identification of Glennie as the man running from the scene and an indirect link between him and the Wrights’ house. They had also recovered a black coat which Phoebe Field claimed she pawned after Glennie told her that it was the one he was wearing at the time of the murder. It was enough to commit him for trial at the Old Bailey.
The case began on 29 October 1888. One by one the witnesses were called: Charles Cole Wright the husband, the two French ladies living opposite, the members of the public who saw the chase, the doctor, the investigating officers, and the former colleagues at Eagle Range Co. Glennie’s barrister, Austin Metcalfe, reserved most of his fire for Mary Dominey and Phoebe Field. It was suggested to Dominey that her baby’s father was in prison for highway robbery, that she had once been charged with stealing boots, that she had been jailed for three weeks for shoplifting, and that she was a prostitute. She denied it all, but admitted that she was receiving a guinea a week from the police while waiting to give evidence. Phoebe Field was also receiving money from the police – in fact she had been living with one of the sergeants for about a month. Was she his servant, joked Mr Metcalfe. ‘I have been taken there because I am frightened for my life,’ she told the court.
The defence also claimed she had changed her story. She had allegedly told Sergeant Michael Walsh that Glennie’s accomplice was called Long Jack, not Long Bob, and that Long Jack had been the one who hit Mrs Wright. Miss Field was also forced to admit that she had worked on the street when she could not get a job at the laundry. That was one of the reasons she left her partner of three years to go with Glennie – ‘I went to live with him on the understanding that he would keep me.’
Then Mr Metcalfe turned to Inspector Thomas Glass. ‘Who had authorised the payments to Dominey? Was a guinea not an excessive amount?’
Glass replied, ‘I advance it out of my own pocket, but I send my bill to the Treasury. I have got leave of the Treasury to give her that. I do not think a guinea a week is too much to give to a witness of that kind.’ It was also suggested he had tried to trick Glennie into a false confession while holding him in custody, but he adamantly denied everything. ‘I did not say to him “I have got your pal”, I swear that. I did not say “he is going to split, I will give you half an hour”, nothing of the kind.’
But the defence’s real weapon was an alibi for the time of the murder. Glennie’s sister Mary Ann Swallow testified that he came to see her in Neasden on 15 May and did not go out at all the following day. She was backed up by a dressmaker who was at the house on Wednesday 16 May. As for the black coat, Glennie’s brother-in-law said that he was wearing it in May, and had only given it to Glennie a month later. Mr Metcalfe told the jury that there was no evidence to prove that Glennie went to the Wright house, and that the alleged confessions were unreliable. Mr Justice Cave summed up the case as one of ‘grave suspicion’, according to one news report, but added that he ‘could not advise them to place much reliance upon the statements of the two principal witnesses [two loose girls named Phoebe Field and Polly Dominey] considering their conduct and the different allegations they had made at various times.’ The jury took just five minutes to reach a verdict – not guilty.
It was yet another defeat for the detectives of Scotland Yard, and questions were raised about the case in Parliament on 12 November. In particular the Liberal MP Edward Pickersgill wanted to know why Glennie was repeatedly questioned by police, despite the practice being condemned by the courts. In 1888 there was no such thing as a recorded police interview and it was not until the 1950s that it became standard practice to interrogate a suspect. The Home Secretary assured the House of Commons that the questions were of the usual sort intended to allow a suspect to clear himself of involvement in a crime. With that, the case faded from public view.
For Charles Cole Wright, life went on. In December 1888, at the age of sixty-nine, he married a woman twenty-seven years his younger, Jane Collett, and moved to her boarding house in Highbury. His happiness was to be short-lived. Two years later he died at the address in Calabria Road, leaving an estate valued at £125.94
Trouble and Strife Three days after the murder of Frances Wright, Islington was shaken by another ‘outrage’ reported by the newspapers. Robert Bright, a twenty-nine-year-old blacksmith, got out of bed as usual at 6.30 a.m., got dressed and arranged to meet his wife Maria later that day. Moments later, as he was leaving for work, he suddenly took up a hammer and battered her repeatedly over the head. Mrs Bright was fortunate to survive the attack and went on to give evidence against her husband, who was sentenced to nine months’ hard labour. Yet while it was not a case of murder, it illustrates that all too often women were at risk from those living with them at home, rather than thieves or psychopaths. In earlier ages, domestic violence might have been shrugged off as an everyday occurrence, or at least a private matter between husband and wife. The Victorians however, purveyors of a different kind of sexism, believed that women should be protected and were more prepared to use the justice system to punish such behaviour. Domestic violence was now seen as a habit of the lower classes, along with overindulgence of alcohol. In many cases, both went together. Husbands returned home drunk at 10 p.m. to treat the neighbourhood to shouts, heavy blows and cries of murder until midnight when it was time to sleep. The social commentator Thomas Wright tried to intervene in one neighbourhood dispute, only to be battered over the head with a chair leg by the lady he had just rescued. ‘He can hammer me if he likes without a meddling bugger like you a coming breaking people’s doors open.’ Wright returned home to the jeers of the crowd outside while the beating continued. Writing in the 1860s, he recalled:
Wife beating, so far from exciting the feeling of abhorrence with which it is regarded in decent society, is in our court looked upon, even by the beaten women, if not exactly as a proper and commendable practice, at least as a very commonplace one, and one which no person of a well-regulated mind would be guilty of interfering with.
Perhaps by the 1880s the situation had improved slightly. The charity worker and social campaigner Margaret Nevinson told how one husband in Whitechapel complained that he could never give his wife a beating in peace, ‘All the neighbours come a-knocking and a-fussing at the door and a-carrying their tales to you ladies, so I’m now to a little house where we shan’t be interfered with.’ On the other hand, Nevinson also noted that, ‘Saturday night is the time for fights and wife-beating of all kinds – any weapon handy – pokers, flat-irons, three-legged stools and one old soldier wounded in the Crimean War used to unstrap his wooden leg for the purpose.’95
Then, as now, domestic murders received much less attention in the press than the more sensational cases. And while the Year of the Ripper had more than its fair share of sensation, it also played host to the sadly familiar tales of women being beaten or stabbed to death by the men they loved and trusted.
In 1888 the novel Vermont Hall was published. It opened with a young girl reliving the nightmare of seeing her mother being murdered by her father. At the root of it, suggested the book, lay the vice of alcohol. The accused gives a speech in court warning of the dangers of drink: ‘If there is here any young man who has begun to like the drink and who thinks he can keep that appetite and keep also home, and love, and friends, and honour and god, let him beware!’ With that, he fell down dead in the dock.
That same year, two girls saw their mothers killed in separate incidents, both inflamed by drink. The first, thirteen-year-old Jane Newman, witnessed her father Charles Latham take a knife to the throat of fifty-year-old Mary Newman in the squalid single room they were renting at No.53 Drummond Crescent in Somerstown, north London. Latham had a history of drunken violence and had only just got out of the workhouse. As Jane recalled:
He was standing with his back against the fire. My mother was sitting in a chair. They were not talking at all, nothing was said by either of them. Then father got hold of a knife, and did that to mother. He put the knife across mother’s throat while she was sitting on the chair. Mother halloaed out ‘Don’t do it’.
Jane ran upstairs to fetch the landlady. By the time help arrived Mary Newman had suffered nine wounds to the neck and face, one of which sliced open the jugular vein. She died ten minutes after being taken to hospital, on the evening of Saturday 19 May. Latham was charged and convicted of murder, but was spared the death penalty on the grounds that he was suffering from delirium tremens, a condition brought on by withdrawal from alcohol (see Chapter 15).96
Five months later, on Saturday 6 October, twelve year-old Emily Roberts saw her mother and father quarrelling in the street outside No.4 Essex Place in Hackney Road. They were both drunk. Her mother knocked her father to the ground with her hand, and then her father returned the favour by knocking her mother to the ground. Her mother – who was forty-three years old and also called Emily – then went indoors and lay down feeling ill. The next day Mrs Roberts went to her niece’s home in the same street with two black eyes and told her, ‘He knocked me down and knelt on my stomach and hit me in the face. The quarrel was all over the cat.’ The husband, Joseph Roberts, a forty-one-year-old boot finisher, could not afford to pay for a doctor to visit immediately and so had to wait for the parish doctor to come round a week later. By that time Mrs Roberts’s stomach was swollen and painful. She claimed that her husband had knelt on her stomach and punched her face and head. The doctor told Mrs Roberts that she was dying and asked if she had anything to add to her statement before she passed away. ‘No, nothing, it is all true,’ she replied. She died the next day, on Thursday 18 October, from inflammation of the bowels, which could have been caused by the kneeling on her stomach. Joseph Roberts was taken into custody after the jury at the inquest returned a verdict of manslaughter. His defence was that he had been drunk and had not meant to hurt her. A few days later, however, the case was dismissed by the magistrate and the prosecution offered no evidence at the Old Bailey.97
There was a similar conclusion to the case of Thomas Healey, a forty-six-year-old labourer charged with murdering his forty-two-year-old wife. This time the setting was in the working-class area of Rotherhithe, south London, described by Dickens as a place where the ‘accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher grounds, like so much moral sewage’. It was a community based around the docks and shipyards, warehouses and factories. On Paradise Street, a few hundred yards west from Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, there were two schools, a police station, a fire station, a depot for Pickford’s removal firm, and a series of alleyways crowded with dirty children and ramshackle housing. Thomas and Jane Healey lived at No.8 Donne Place, Paradise Street. On 25 October 1888, the neighbours were treated to a typical Saturday night of drunken ‘wrangling’ between the couple. Joseph Andrews decided to intervene after seeing Mrs Healey being beaten outside his door. He too received a blow for his trouble and retreated back into his home. Later, he heard Thomas Healey give his wife a shilling to fetch a pot of beer and on her return he began shouting once more, ‘If you don’t find the change, I’ll have your life. I’ll tear the skirt off you. It belongs to my daughter. You shan’t live to wear it any longer.’ Shortly afterwards there were more bangs and thumps and Mrs Healey flew past the Andrews’ door and tumbled head over heels down the stairs. She trudged back up again for more punishment until it all went quiet. The next morning Jane Healey was found dead in bed with her skirt torn off, her face and body discoloured by bruises. ‘It’s a bad job,’ Mr Healey told his neighbour, ‘Do the best you can for me.’
The cause of death was given as internal bleeding on the brain, but the doctor was unable to say whether it was due to an assault or the fall. Although the coroner’s jury returned an open verdict, unable to decide on the evidence, the police took up the case and hauled the husband before the magistrates charged with manslaughter. The neighbour’s wife, Emily Andrews, told the court that the row next door had gone on until 1.30 a.m., at which point she heard Mr Healey say ‘get up or I’ll kick you up’, followed by a thud. The next day Mr Healey had turned up at their door and said, ‘I can’t beat any sense into my wife, and I think she is in a fit or dead.’ Rather implausibly, Thomas Healey denied that he had attacked his wife at all. The case was sent to the Old Bailey, but again the prosecution lacked confidence in getting a conviction and offered no evidence ‘at the suggestion of the Court’.98
Both of these cases might have been expected to have at least gone before a trial jury. Even if the evidence was not strong enough for a charge of murder, it was still arguable that their actions had caused death. Neither husband sought to rely on the old ‘right of chastisement’ which was fading out by the end of the eighteenth century. The worst that could be said for Emily Roberts was that she had struck the first blow and appeared to be drunk, and perhaps this image of a ‘bad wife’ influenced the decision. It also seems odd that Thomas Healey should escape punishment for what was obvious domestic abuse, even if the defence were to suggest that she fell down the stairs of her own accord. Perhaps the old approach to domestic violence still lingered when circumstances were less clear cut. But generally husbands who killed their wives were more likely to be convicted than other murder defendants. This was particularly the case if they used a weapon – in November 1888, Levi Bartlett went to the gallows after murdering his wife by battering her with a hammer and stabbing her in the neck. He was the only person to be executed for a murder committed in 1888. Others were sentenced to death but were reprieved.99
‘Warnings for “nagging wives” and brutal husbands!’ was how one newspaper summed up the case of shoemaker James White. Yet that was hardly an explanation of how Mr White came to batter his sixty-seven-year-old wife Margaret to death with a poker. What had really driven him to commit such a terrible crime? It appeared they had been happily married for forty-one years. They had raised a son and a daughter, and were now grandparents. Even though he was sixty-five years old, James still earned a living as a shoemaker from their home in No.1 Eden Place, off Pond Place in Chelsea. Essentially it was a single room, the front parlour on the ground floor of a house, furnished with a bed, chair, fireplace, chest of drawers and a workbench under the window. They lived in squalor in ‘one of the poorest slums of the parish’, but they got by with what they had. ‘There could not be a more kind or affectionate husband on earth than the prisoner,’ recalled neighbour Johannah Healey. ‘There could not be a happier couple – she had a serious illness, bronchitis, some years ago – he nursed her always as well as he could, always got up in the morning and got her a cup of tea.’ Another neighbour who had known Mr White for twelve years said he was a ‘very quiet and peaceable man’.
There was also a darker side to James White, most noticeably when he had a drink. As his son David explained, ‘When my father gets half a pint of beer his mind is not right. I have seen him take a knife and run it across his throat, as if to cut it.’ The White family believed it was hereditary, as the men all tended to get shooting pains in the head, even the grandchildren aged eight and five.
‘He sometimes broke out into violent fits of passion, with very little reason, if his tea was not ready,’ said David’s wife Catherine. ‘He then said he would cut his throat and have done with it. His general demeanour was that of a kind, affectionate husband and father … he was unusually angry that afternoon – he was apt to get passionate after drink.’ It was also clear that the couple were struggling for money. Business had been slow and Mrs White was careful with the little money that came in – it particularly upset her when James spent their precious pennies on alcohol.
On the morning of Saturday 3 March she travelled from Chelsea to Balham to drop off some mended boots with customers. Having collected 12s in payment, she returned home with her daughter-in-law Catherine, stopping off at the local pub for some bread and cheese for dinner and an eighth of gin. When they got back to Eden Place at about 12.30 p.m., James White was sitting at his workbench staring into space. After a minute or two he declared that he would like a pint of beer. It sounded from his voice like he’d had a few already. ‘James, I think you have had enough, where did you get it?’ asked his wife.
‘I have taken a little job home, and I spent the money.’ At this Mrs White began to cry, reluctantly handing over tuppence for his pint. When he returned a few minutes later with the beer, she gestured at the eighteen pairs of boots that needed his attention. ‘Never mind those, I will see to those afterwards,’ he said. Mr White then retired to bed, complaining that he felt ill.
This only increased his wife’s tears – they had bills to pay and this was the first week in a long time that they had had any work. Catherine told her, ‘Don’t fret, Mother, let him sleep a little while, and when he wakes up he will go to work, don’t disturb him.’ Catherine then left, promising to come back once she had given her husband his tea at 5 p.m.
An hour later the couple’s eight-year-old grandson Thomas Spinks arrived for his regular Saturday visit, and to give Margaret a bit of money from his mother to tide them over. The boy’s grandfather soon had him at work making a cup of tea. Meanwhile, Mr White was demanding his wife give him the money from the boot mending. ‘I have paid my way with it,’ she replied.
James White was enraged: ‘You had a right to come to me first.’ Thomas then watched in horror as his grandfather suddenly turned violent.
‘He threw grandmother off the chair. She fell on the floor against the table. I got frightened then and ran out.’ As the shouting and quarrelling continued, the boy went and fetched a police officer who was walking the beat in the Fulham Road.
‘When I got in I saw the deceased lying on the floor in front of the fireplace on her right side,’ recalled PC William Swinden. He continued:
I considered her to be asleep. Mr White was lying on the bed. I asked him what the disturbance was about. He said there was no row. ‘She is drunk and she will lie on the floor to sleep.’ I did not wake her or disturb her. I told the prisoner not to make any disturbance, to keep himself quiet and I left the room.
Mrs White was still lying on the floor, with nothing on but a black dress bodice on her top half, when a customer called at 3.15 p.m. that afternoon. Rebecca Robson heard Mr White mutter from his bed, ‘I suppose there will be no more work done today. They must come and fetch their things … I will see if I don’t make you get up.’ He then leapt from the bed, grabbed the poker from the fireplace and beat his wife three times with the round end, apparently unconcerned that Miss Robson was watching from the doorway.
‘Oh, have mercy, and don’t hit the poor creature with the poker,’ Miss Robson cried.
‘I don’t care if I kill her,’ he replied.
Miss Robson then left, but only after establishing that her boots were not yet ready for collection.
It was 4.30 p.m. when Mr White called on a near neighbour, Louisa Mayhew, for help. ‘I want you to come over the way to help my old woman on the bed. I have very nigh settled her.’ Mrs Mayhew found Mrs White lying on the floor on her left side, her bodice ripped open to expose her breasts. Her hip was swollen and bruised and there was blood on the left side of her head.
‘Mr White, what have you been doing?’
‘I don’t care. She should have done what I wanted, and got me a cup of tea ready,’ he said. ‘She can get up if she likes. She is only shamming it.’ Mr White then went and fetched a pint of beer in a can, sat on his work seat and smoked his pipe while Mrs Mayhew tried to get a response from his wife. They were joined first by Thomas Spinks and his mother Fanny, then Catherine White and finally at 7 p.m. the local doctor Daniel Lehane. By that time Mrs White was dead.
‘A bloody good job too,’ said Mr White. ‘Fetch me my coat and I will go to the police station.’ He then went out for another can of beer. When police constable William Davey arrived Mr White was happy to give a statement. ‘My God, I settled her. She would not do as I wanted her, so I hit her three times on the head with the soft end of the poker.’ On the way back to the station he added, ‘We have lived happily together for forty-one years, but if she had done as I told her I should not have killed her. I suppose the Old Bailey will be my lot.’
James White was right, because on 2 May he stood trial at the Central Criminal Court. The blows he had dealt to his wife had fractured her left hip and her skull, but he claimed it was done ‘in the height of passion’. His barrister claimed he was not responsible for his actions because of his history of a ‘flow of blood to the head’, but the jury rejected the insanity defence and convicted him of murder. Asked whether he would like to say anything before being sentenced to death, Mr White rambled – he never intended to kill her, and if she had let him have twenty minutes’ sleep he would not have hurt her. His words were futile. The only thing in his favour was that the jury had recommended him to mercy because of his age and the lack of premeditation. As a result, the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. It mattered little in the end. James White died in prison two years later on 21 October 1890.100
One way of escaping trial after committing murder was to kill yourself before the arrival of the police. These ‘murder-suicide cases’ were and still are almost always committed by men – perhaps a reflection of the desire to be a ‘dominant’ figure even when the impulse is towards self-destruction. The perpetrators tend to be deeply depressed, whether because of financial or relationship problems. This was true of both Abraham Potzdamer in Whitechapel and Gordon Hare in Surbiton, and it was true of the third such tragedy in 1888.
Robert and Susannah Barrell had been happily married for twenty-two years. They ran the Bancroft Arms Tavern together in Moody Street, Mile End, and lived there with their four children. On Sunday 1 July, they went to bed in good spirits. The next morning at 8.45 a.m. their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, went to check why they had not yet risen. There was no answer when she knocked at their bedroom door and when she shook the doorknob the key dropped on to the floor on the inside. Elizabeth squeezed her hand underneath to retrieve the key and unlocked the door. When she got inside, she saw her mother lying on the bed with blood all over her face. There was a gaping wound to her right eye. Then Elizabeth saw her father on the floor with a gun lying next to his right hand. He too had been shot in the right eye. Both had been dead for several hours.
None of the children had heard anything, even though they were sleeping in a room next door. Neither had the police constable who passed the building every half an hour. A neighbour heard a gunshot sometime after midnight, but saw nothing suspicious in the street and went to bed. But whenever it happened, it was clear that Robert Barrell had killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself. He had been a chronic alcoholic for many years, and two or three months earlier his wife had confided in her mother about her husband’s ‘strange’ behaviour and her fears that he was suicidal. The public house had also been robbed twice in the previous eighteen months, and they had lost more than £68. Robert Barrell confessed to his mother-in-law, ‘I am in great trouble, I’ve lost all Susie’s money. I am entirely ruined.’ In mid-June he had given up drinking and become teetotal, perhaps in an attempt to improve his health. The withdrawal may have contributed to the attack and the doctor believed he was suffering from delirium tremens, which may have brought on hallucinations, great anxiety and a terrifying sense of impending doom from which death was the only escape.101
The Neglected Wife Not all domestic homicides are violent. Forty-five-year-old Mary Sandford was not the victim of a sudden or brutal attack. She had instead suffered a long, slow death from starvation and neglect. When the doctor was finally called to her bedside on the evening of 11 June 1888, her body was little more than skin and bone. Her clothes were filthy and her hair swarmed with lice. She had sores on her right hip and an ulcer on the left leg. Her internal organs had withered and it seemed as if her blood vessels were almost empty. All that remained in her stomach was a small amount of undigested lettuce. The police surgeon, Dr William Kempster, took the view that she had been lying on the bed for several weeks and had not eaten for three or four days at least. Gradually her body had shut down everything except breathing and blood circulation, until finally even they failed. If a doctor had been called earlier, they might have nursed her with a few ounces of brandy a day, barley water, arrowroot, milk, gruel or broth. ‘Her condition indicated very slow death,’ said Dr Kempster. ‘I believe life would have been prolonged if she had had proper food and attendance or care.’
Mary had not lived alone in that room at No.9 Alfred Street in Battersea, south London. Her partner was William Jeffery, a fifty-one-year-old architect, described by the press as being ‘well-connected’. The couple, who passed themselves off as husband and wife, had been together eight years and seemed to be loving and affectionate. But in 1886, Jeffery had been sent to a workhouse infirmary after being found wandering aimlessly in the street. After his release, Jeffery found it hard to get work, even as a lowly clerk. In early 1888 they moved from a house in Rollo Court to the room at Alfred Street, which had a cheaper rent of 2s a week and was furnished with two chairs, a bed and a table. Mary’s health was also deteriorating and by May she had taken to bed complaining of her swollen ankles. Neighbours had urged Jeffery to apply for relief from the local authorities, but he never did.
On 11 June he asked his friend Mary Wyatt for a few half pennies and told her that his wife was very poorly.
‘Why don’t you get a doctor’s order? Then she will have nourishment,’ Mrs Wyatt said.
‘I will,’ he replied.
Two hours later he saw her again in the street and said, ‘Will you come round with me? I think she is dead.’
Jeffery took her into the bedroom, picked up a lamp and held it near her head so Mrs Wyatt could see the lice in his wife’s hair.
‘Oh Mr Jeffery, you will get into trouble,’ exclaimed Mary Wyatt.
‘I think I shall,’ he replied.102
Jeffery found out exactly how much trouble he was in at the inquest on 19 June when the jury returned a verdict of manslaughter. He was taken into custody and committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court by the Surrey coroner Athelston Braxton Hicks. The case, which began on Friday 3 August, rested almost entirely on the opinion of Dr Kempster. He believed that Mary Sandford’s death had been brought about and accelerated by the lack of care. ‘The prisoner could have procured medicine and nourishment immediately by going to the relieving officer,’ he told the court. However, he accepted that she would probably have died within three months anyway due to the long-standing condition of her lungs. Jeffery was not allowed to address the court in his own defence, but the jury heard evidence that he had told witnesses that his wife was an independent woman who refused his help or a visit from the doctor. In addition, he did not sleep in the same bed as her but on the floor. The Times rather harshly summed up the evidence as showing that ‘the deceased woman was not only of an indolent and untidy disposition but had been at some stage of her life of unsound mind’.
The judge told the jury that it was their task to decide whether death had been caused or accelerated by ‘gross and criminal neglect’, but according to reports ‘expressed the opinion that the charge against the prisoner could not be supported’. The jury accordingly found Jeffery not guilty. Mr Justice Hawkins ended the case by remarking that while Jeffery was under legal responsibility to provide proper nourishment and care to the woman he lived with, he was ‘undoubtedly in a condition of great poverty, and he appeared to have done all that he could to provide for the woman, and to have treated her kindly, and he could in no way be said to have caused her death by wilful and criminal neglect’.103
The Triple Event One night did more than any other to establish the legend of Jack the Ripper. In the space of three-quarters of an hour in the early hours of 30 September 1888, two women were found lying on the ground with their throats cut from ear to ear. The first, Elizabeth Stride, in Whitechapel, and the second, Catherine Eddowes, just under a mile away in Mitre Square in the City of London. Immediately the two murders were linked by the newspapers as being the work of the same man who was responsible for at least two other killings in the East End. An editorial in the usually reserved Times the next day asked:
Have these been the freaks of a madman or the deliberate acts of a sane man who takes delight in murder on its own account, and who selects his victims by preference from the weaker sex, either as the safer and easier to deal with or as giving him the means of gratifying some horrid instinct of cruelty and perverted lust?
It was said that the killer had been interrupted during his attack on Ms Stride and had been driven to a second murder in which he indulged his bloodlust by cutting out Catherine Eddowes’ left kidney and part of her womb. Together the crimes were known as the ‘double event’ and spread a ripple of fear across the capital. It was impossible to go anywhere without hearing about the Ripper, as he had apparently named himself in a letter to the Central News Agency a few days earlier. ‘On my way back from Plumstead all the talk in the train was upon the two murders – the last exploits of the Whitechapel murderer,’ wrote the playwright George Bernard Shaw in his diaries on 1 October.
Of course, there was other news to report in the papers that day – The Times contents listed a scientific report on the volcanic eruption at Krakatoa in 1883 and a ‘fatal boiler explosion’. There was also a report on another murder that took place on the same night as the ‘double event’. Like Stride and Eddowes the victim was a woman in her forties. Like Stride and Eddowes, Sarah Brown was found lying dead in a pool of blood with her throat cut. But there the similarities ended. Sarah Brown was not killed on the streets of east London but in her own home in Westminster. Her killer was not a stranger or a serial killer; he was her husband, John Brown. The police did not have to work hard to solve her murder either, for the first they heard of the crime was when Mr Brown walked into the police station and told the officer on duty, ‘I have stabbed my wife.’ It was 11 p.m. on 29 September 1888, just two hours before Elizabeth Stride’s body was discovered on the other side of the city.
John and Sarah Brown had been married for four years and lived together in a small three-roomed house in the working-class district around Regency Street. Their neighbours were hawkers, labourers, shopkeepers, beggars and prostitutes, although there were more modern buildings nearby which housed those with more respectable occupations like policemen, clerks and mechanics. John Brown had once worked as a porter on the London & South Western Railway between the capital and Plymouth, but he was sacked after repeatedly making false complaints against his colleagues. He then found a job as a labourer at St James’ Park, but in June 1888 was admitted to Westminster Hospital with pneumonia. The doctor treating him noticed what he called ‘peculiarities of his mind’, depression or ‘melancholia’. John brown returned home in July, but his mental state continued to deteriorate. His stepson Robert Young, aged twelve, recalled that:
He seemed to have something the matter with him – he used to say to my mother that she let men into the house. She denied it, but he went on repeating it. He used to strike matches by day and night to look for the men. Before he came from the hospital they lived happily, but afterwards unhappily, by always making these accusations that led to disagreements between them.
By 14 August his behaviour had alarmed Sarah Brown so much that she tried to get help. In the late nineteenth century this meant applying to the local magistrate for a warrant to have her husband seen by the parish medical officer. During the examination she explained that following his return from hospital he constantly wanted to have sex with her, even though she was six months pregnant already. ‘She said otherwise he was a kind and affectionate husband, always sober and very regular at his work,’ reported Dr John Hunt. He continued:
I spoke to him and remonstrated with him, and suggested his discontinuing living with his wife. Under those conditions I reported to the magistrate that I thought this would answer the necessities of the case – especially at the earnest request of his wife that I would not have him locked up.
Dr Hunt reported there was nothing wrong with him other than ‘a little wildness about his eyes’ and a morose manner.
John Brown argued against moving out for a time before finally agreeing, ‘Well, I will go away, and that will settle it.’
The separation did not last long, most likely because Sarah could not afford to get by without his wages. By 15 September the couple were back together. Two days later Sarah attempted to get round the problem by applying for a summons against her husband for maintenance. It was dismissed because he had not actually deserted her and her two sons, and had only left on the order of the magistrate. She was caught in a catch-22 situation – it was impossible to live without him, but when he was at home she feared for her life. Sarah asked her daughter Mary Young, who was living elsewhere as a domestic servant, to come back home. ‘He is always threatening me and I know he will kill me,’ she confessed.
On Saturday 29 September, John Brown’s delusions returned and he started pacing about, apparently searching the house for other men. After being threatened with a knife, Sarah went back to Dr Hunt to ask for protection, but he told her he could not do anything for her that night. She then went to a friend’s house for help, begging her, ‘What am I to do? Am I to go home and get murdered?’ They decided to go to the police, but the local inspector said they could only act if her husband molested her. There was nothing she could do that night but hope for the best. She agreed to have an officer escort her part of the way home, but said she should return alone as she did not want her husband to know she had been to the police.
Minutes after her return at about 10.50 p.m. John Brown cut his wife’s throat while her two sons slept upstairs. Neighbour Charles Redding recalled, ‘I heard someone walk downstairs – immediately after I heard a scuffle in the front room and heard a woman call out “Oh, don’t!”. I went with my wife to the front door and heard a thud, as from somebody falling on the floor. Then all was quiet.’ He knocked on the door, rousing twelve-year-old Robert Young from his bed. As the boy came downstairs he looked into the sitting room and saw his mother lying on the floor.
‘I called to her and she did not answer,’ Robert later told the Old Bailey. ‘I saw a lot of blood round her head. She was dead.’
John Brown seemed unfazed by what he had done. As he sat in Rochester Row police station he told the officers, ‘I hope she is dead; she has led me a pretty dance.’ He then handed over a bloodstained knife. The next day, after being charged with murder, he was taken to Holloway Gaol for examination. The surgeon Philip Gilbert came to the conclusion that he was insane, reporting that:
He is under the delusion that he heard many voices speaking to him, neighbours and friends to his wife, saying that she ought to be ashamed of herself, that she ought to be killed, that men had been running in and out of his house all day, and that they had given her a good doing while he was away at the hospital, that seven or eight different men used to have connection with her of a night.
Brown also believed his wife drugged his beer to send him to sleep, so that she could let her men in and have them right next to him on the bed. But his paranoid fantasies were not just sexual – he believed that his wife put flammable liquid, ‘naptha’, in his boots which caused his feet to burn. The medical evidence was enough for the jury to find him guilty of murder while insane, which meant he would not face a death sentence.104
Although there was still a long way to go, protection for battered wives was improving. The police were still reluctant to become involved in domestic disputes and women were just as reluctant to take their husbands to court but these are issues that are still with us today, 125 years later. Change was taking place gradually, not just in public attitudes but also in the law. Sarah Brown had been able to apply for her husband to pay weekly maintenance as a result of the 1878 Matrimonial Clauses Act, but it applied only to husbands who had deserted their family. Magistrates could order that men convicted of assaulting their partners should seperate, although it was not until 1891 that a legal ruling finally ‘settled the law’ that it was illegal for a husband to beat or imprison his wife (R. v. Jackson). It was only in 1895 that the Married Women Act allowed women to separate from their husbands without an order from the magistrate. Neither drunkenness nor the infidelity of wives, real or imagined, was seen as much of a defence to a murder charge. Nevertheless, William Douglas Morrison, the chaplain to Wandsworth Prison, suggested in 1891 that crime was brought about by increased pressure on the husband to maintain his wife in a respectable fashion. ‘Household extravagance, extravagance in dress, the mad ambition of many English women to live in what they call a “better style” than their neighbours sends not a few men to penal servitude.’ Poverty and financial pressures were a major factor – all the 1888 cases of domestic violence took place within poor or struggling households. This in turn may have exacerbated the tendency of the men, and sometimes the women, to drink heavily as a means of escape. Alcoholism and stress also contributed to deteriorating mental health. In a small number of cases the final result was the tragic death of one or both partners. Domestic violence would only decrease as living standards increased towards the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The consumption of alcohol would also decline from its height in the 1870s, with only a small rise during the First World War. The homicide rate would not increase to present levels until the period between the Second World War and the 1960s, a time of great social upheaval. This latter trend only really began to reverse in the early years of the twenty-first century.105