10

‘I would rather die than live with you’

Birmingham, Warwickshire, 1866

By 1866, William and Elizabeth Smith had been married for fifteen years and had four children, the youngest two of whom still lived at home with their parents. The family and their lodger, Catherine Bradsworth, lived at Black Lion Yard, off Hurst Street in Birmingham, an area which, according to a contemporary local newspaper, was clean and respectable and ‘tenanted by working men of the better rank’.

Thirty-four-year-old William was a quiet, inoffensive man who was known as a loving husband and father and a good provider for his family. Employed as a labourer for the Birmingham Gas Company, he had previously worked as a scene shifter at various theatres and concert halls in Birmingham and it was through his former employment that Elizabeth was introduced to one of her husband’s colleagues, stage machinist George Langley. The couple began an adulterous affair and when Langley left his job for a new position at The Prince of Wales Theatre in Liverpool, Elizabeth followed him, although she subsequently returned to her husband and he graciously took her back.

However, on 18 August 1866, Elizabeth received a letter informing her that Langley was ill. She pawned some household goods and with the money she obtained, as well as her husband’s wages, she purchased a ticket on the mail train to Liverpool. Without telling William that she was going, she went back to Langley, taking her youngest daughter with her. The contemporary newspapers differ in their accounts of what happened next – some state that Langley had already died when Elizabeth got back to Liverpool, others that he died a couple of days after her arrival, the cause of his death variously given as cholera and the effects of excessive drinking. Langley was said to have been a married man and, when his wife found out about his terminal illness, she rushed to his side and was none too pleased to find Elizabeth there in her place. Some newspapers report that Mrs Langley forced Elizabeth to hand over a gold watch and chain and other valuable gifts that Langley had given her but, regardless of precisely what happened in Liverpool, in the early hours of the morning of 22 August, Elizabeth Smith arrived back at her marital home in Birmingham with her daughter.

When she knocked on the door, she was let in by Catherine Bradsworth, to whom she explained that she had come home because Langley was dead. At that point, William came downstairs and seemed surprised to see his wife.

‘What, you couldn’t rest without going after that fellow again?’ he asked her.

‘I own I have been a bad woman,’ Elizabeth admitted before begging her husband for forgiveness, promising him, ‘If you will forgive me I will be as good a wife to you as I ever was and you know what I was to you before I saw Langley.’

William considered her words carefully for a few moments, before lifting his daughter onto his lap. ‘You see what I have got here. I will forgive you for the sake of the children,’ he replied and he and his wife shook hands, before going upstairs to bed together.

The following morning, William left home for work at 8 a.m., returning at 1 p.m. for his lunch. The Smiths, their two children and their lodger enjoyed beef steaks and potatoes, with which they shared a single pint of beer. At 2 p.m., Smith left to go back to work and a little later, Elizabeth went out, without saying where she was going. She returned an hour later but only stayed for a few minutes before leaving again and Catherine Bradsworth saw nothing more of her until she and William returned home together at 11.40 p.m., along with neighbours Elizabeth Jones and Rosanna Simpson.

By that time, Elizabeth Smith appeared very drunk and seemed intent on picking a quarrel with her husband, who had also been drinking but was nowhere near as intoxicated as his wife. She wanted to send out for yet more beer and, when William refused on the grounds that she had already drunk enough, she began needling him about her lover. William asked her more than once to stop talking about Langley, but Elizabeth would not let the matter drop. She flew into a rage, kicking the furniture and taunting her husband relentlessly. ‘If Langley had lived I should never have come back to you Bill Smith. I didn’t intend to live with you. Before another bloody hour I will be away from your roof, you bloody animal.’

‘Don’t mention his name. It makes me sweat to hear it,’ her husband beseeched her but Elizabeth Smith cared nothing for her husband’s feelings. She rose from the settle on which she had been sitting and walked across the room to William, deliberately spitting in his face. ‘The man I love is dead,’ she raged at him, ‘and I hate the breath of you, you bugger.’

‘Lizzie, hold your noise,’ William pleaded but that seemed to enrage his wife all the more and she persisted in goading him until he turned to Rosanna Simpson and appealed to her to make his wife be quiet. Mrs Simpson tried her hardest to pacify Elizabeth, who kept bemoaning the death of the only man she had ever loved.

‘Be quiet or you will drive me mad,’ William warned her but when Elizabeth told him, ‘I would rather die than live with you,’ he suddenly stepped forward and struck her once in the throat. Catherine tried to defend her landlady by stepping between her and her husband and was wounded by the same blow, receiving a two-inch cut on her left temple. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Smith walked quickly out of the house and into the yard, where she eventually crumpled to the ground.

Catherine rushed out into the street, where a passer-by noticed her bleeding face and led her towards Queen’s Hospital. On their way, they met Inspector William Spear, who hailed a cab for Catherine, before hurrying to Black Lion Yard, where Elizabeth Smith lay lifeless in a pool of blood. Spear asked the assembled neighbours, ‘Who did it?’

William Smith immediately stepped forward from the crowd. ‘I did it. I hope she is not dead,’ he responded and Spear quickly arrested and cautioned him. ‘If I did it, I don’t know how I did it,’ Smith told the inspector, before being marched off to Moor Street police station. Spear arranged for another cab to take Elizabeth to hospital, where she was seen by house surgeon Dr Thomas Arthur Wood, who could do little apart from confirm death. With William in custody, a search was made of his house and yard and a clasp knife was recovered from a gutter, its blade still glistening with wet blood.

A later post-mortem examination revealed that Elizabeth had a single incised wound, extending in a slightly upwards direction from just above her left collar bone to just below the angle of her lower jaw on the right. The jagged cut was around seven inches long and had severed both the jugular vein and the vertebral artery, causing death from ‘fatal fainting’, due to loss of blood.

An inquest was opened by borough coroner Dr Birt Davies and adjourned in the hope that Catherine Bradsworth would recover sufficiently to be able to attend. When the inquest resumed on 5 September, she looked weak and ill as she gave her evidence.

Having related what happened on the night of 22/23 August, Catherine told the inquest that she did not really know whether she had been hit or stabbed, since she had not seen a knife or any other weapon in William Smith’s hand. However, she believed that Smith had run his knife across his wife’s throat once only and that the single knife stroke had accidentally cut her own temple.

Apart from Catherine, the main witnesses were Rosanna Simpson and Elizabeth Jones, both of whom had apparently seen different things. Mrs Jones told the coroner that she had not even noticed Mrs Simpson in the house when Elizabeth Smith was fatally wounded, although Mrs Simpson swore that she was there. Mrs Jones also denied seeing the victim spit at her husband, although she confirmed that the couple were quarrelling about Langley for some time prior to the moment when, according to Mrs Jones, William struck his wife a single, downward blow to the throat with his right hand.

Mrs Jones’s account differed from that of Catherine Bradsworth, who stated that William had swept his knife across his wife’s throat, from one side to the other. The medical evidence supported a combination of both actions, suggesting that the fatal wound was caused by Smith initially plunging his knife into his wife’s throat and then slicing sideways. Rosanna Simpson confirmed that the Smiths had been arguing and that Elizabeth spat at her husband. However, Mrs Simpson had her back turned at the time of the fatal blow and did not actually see William either hitting or stabbing his wife.

Once the police officers involved had testified, the coroner summed up the evidence. Davies told the jury that the first thing that they should consider was how Elizabeth Smith met her death. This was a very straightforward matter, since Dr Wood had already testified that she died from the effects of a wound in her throat, which caused blood loss, leading to syncope or fatal fainting.

Next, the jury must consider how the deceased came by that wound, which was slightly more complicated. The two main witnesses both disagreed as to the manner in which it was inflicted, one witness stating that it was a single, downward blow and the other adamant that the instrument that caused the wound was drawn across the victim’s throat from side to side. Neither of these witnesses had seen William Smith with any weapon in his hand and a third person present at the time had seen nothing at all, her back being turned at the crucial moment.

If the jury were of the opinion that the wound was inflicted by William Smith, they must then consider the character of that wound. The coroner explained the difference between murder and manslaughter, instructing his jury to consider whether the killing was done in sudden strife, in sudden heat or neither and if there was expressed or implied malice. If the mortal wound were inflicted in the wake of a trifling or trumpery assault committed by the person killed this was murder and neither being spat at nor any words of provocation given by the deceased would be sufficient to reduce the offence to manslaughter. However, when persons were engaged in violent strife and the blood grew hot and one person struck the other a blow that resulted in death that would clearly be a case of manslaughter.

Smith and his wife were said to have been on friendly terms at lunch, only hours before her death and there was no evidence to show that Smith had formed any prior intention to kill her, yet whenever a person used a weapon, there was always an implied element of malice. Those persons who used any weapon – be it a gun, a knife or poison – were normally judged to be guilty of murder, unless it could be proved that they acted in hot blood or after considerable provocation and here there was no evidence of any sudden heat. With regard to provocation, there was indisputable evidence of what the coroner called ‘moral provocation’ and it was true that if a man took his wife’s life on catching her committing adultery, that was deemed sufficient provocation to reduce his offence to manslaughter. However, in this case the supposed adulterer was dead and thus there could be no suggestion that he and the victim had been caught in the act of sexual connection.

After only a few minutes of deliberation, the jury informed the coroner that they were unable to agree on a verdict. The coroner asked if the majority had reached a conclusion and when the jury told him that fourteen of their number had voted for a manslaughter verdict and the other two jurors were of the opinion that murder was more appropriate, the coroner agreed to accept the majority vote and recorded a verdict of guilty of manslaughter against William Smith, who was committed for trial at the next assizes. However, the magistrates disagreed with the coroner’s court and committed him for trial for the more serious offence of murder. Thus he appeared before Mr Justice Byles at the Warwick Assizes on 14 December 1866 charged with wilful murder, to which charge he pleaded not guilty.

Prosecution counsels Edwin Bennett and Mr Dugdale did little more than outline the circumstances of the case, stressing the violence of Smith’s act and relying largely on the common sense of the jury to return a verdict of guilty of murder. It was left to defence counsels Mr Fitzjames Stephen and Mr Buzzard to make an impassioned plea for their client’s life.

It was the contention of the defence team that, since there was no malice aforethought, Smith was guilty of manslaughter rather than murder. Whereas there had been no provocation in the form of blows from Elizabeth Smith, the taunts and spitting had invoked in her husband a ‘short madness’, causing him to suffer such unimaginable personal indignity that it induced him to kill.

It was left to the judge to try and advise the jury on the options open to them and, in his summary of the evidence Mr Justice Byles seemed to be gently guiding them towards a verdict of guilty of the lesser offence. The judge first stressed that, in law, all killing is classed as murder, unless any grounds for reducing the charge to manslaughter could be reliably demonstrated, without any question of reasonable doubt. Malice aforethought was indeed a necessary ingredient of murder but that did not necessarily mean that death was intended or that such malice was present before the deed was done – it was sufficient to assume that mischief was intended simply because a deadly instrument was used. The defence had already pointed out that William Smith used a knife all the while in the course of his work, arguing that, rather than viewing it as a weapon, it was just something that was readily to hand when Smith was provoked into retaliation by his wife. However, the judge reminded the jury that, whereas Smith might reasonably carry a knife for use in his job, he was unlikely to carry it in his pocket opened. With regard to the use of the knife as a weapon, if it was used in an instant of passion and under sufficient provocation then the offence committed may only amount to manslaughter. However, mere words were not sufficient provocation, although a serious assault might be and spitting was an assault that may be either serious or slight, according to the circumstances of the case. Byles concluded his summing up by telling the jury that it was for them to decide whether the spitting, accompanied with the other indignities, amounted to a sufficiently serious assault to reduce the prisoner’s crime from murder to manslaughter.

When the jury found William Smith guilty of the lesser offence of manslaughter, Mr Justice Byles sentenced him to ten years’ penal servitude although unusually, he concluded the sentencing by saying that if a remission of part of the sentence was wished, it must be made in another quarter. The Birmingham Gas Company obviously rated William Smith very highly as an employee, since they supposedly engaged and paid for his defence counsel. Now, in the aftermath of the trial, they quickly set about raising a petition to appeal to the Home Secretary Spencer Horatio Walpole for a reduction in Smith’s sentence.

The petition informed Walpole that Smith was a ‘singularly humane, affectionate and well-disposed man’ before stating ‘The prisoner killed his wife without any premeditation but under the influence of uncontrollable anger caused by the following circumstances: – His wife had carried on an adulterous intercourse with a man named Langley, who died at Liverpool prior to the murder or manslaughter and she taunted her husband in the bitterest manner with her preference for Langley and declared that if he had lived she would never have returned to her husband. She made use of extremely foul as well as irritating language to her husband and spat in his face, on which he immediately stabbed her.’ In February 1867, after due consideration of the petition, Walpole recommended a reduction of Smith’s sentence to Queen Victoria, halving his term of imprisonment from ten to five years.