15

‘Grandfather’s clock, stop clock, never to go again’

Clerkenwell, London, 1879

Having given birth to fourteen children, eight of whom survived, forty-one-year-old Eliza Pace was said to be constitutionally weakened and rather delicate – as the contemporary newspapers claimed somewhat melodramatically, ‘She would have pined and died in the crowded courts of London.’ Fortunately, Eliza’s husband of twenty-two years was an unselfish man who, for the benefit of his family, took a cottage in Southgate in the borough of Enfield, which was then in the countryside. Eliza and the children flourished in the fresh country air but the distance from his work place meant that every day, come rain or shine, Henry William Pace had to leave home at 4 a.m. and walk two miles to the nearest station, where he caught a workman’s train. Yet, for Henry, the daily inconvenience of his tiresome journey from home to work and back again was outweighed by the chance to enjoy pottering about in his garden and going for long rambles with his children on Sundays.

Henry had spent all of his working life at the Seckford Glass Works in Clerkenwell and, after twenty-six years had risen to the position of foreman metal worker. He took an almost paternal interest in the younger men he supervised and was quick to befriend thirty-four-year-old Maurice Thomas William Cole when he came to work at the factory as a glass driller. Cole was handsome, intelligent, charming, widely travelled and well-educated, speaking several foreign languages. Yet he seemed lonely and when Henry realised that Cole had no friends in London, he invited his colleague to spend a Sunday in the country, where he was welcomed with open arms by the entire Pace family.

The Paces’ eldest daughter Elizabeth, known to all as Lizzie, was twenty years old in 1878 and was engaged to be married to a neighbour. However, as the weeks passed, Cole repeatedly turned up uninvited at the Paces’ home on Sundays and it seemed that the more often Cole visited, the less often Lizzie’s fiancé took his accustomed place at the family tea table. Even so, none of the family realised the extent of the burgeoning relationship between Cole and Lizzie until somebody happened to mention to Henry that they had seen them walking out together arm in arm in London.

Henry immediately challenged Cole, who admitted that he had fallen in love with Lizzie and wanted to marry her. Henry protested that his daughter already had a fiancé and was told that Lizzie had long since thrown over her suitor in favour of Cole, who had then taken it upon himself to visit the young man personally and threaten him with a thrashing if he ever tried to see Lizzie again.

Such was Henry’s devotion to his daughter that he could not bear to deny her anything and so reluctantly agreed to her engagement. However, once he was accepted into the family, Cole began to treat the Paces’ home as if it were his own. He persisted in turning up and outstaying his welcome, lingering until he had missed the last train home, leaving the well-mannered and hospitable family little choice but to offer him a bed for the night. Eventually, he managed to convince Henry and Eliza that it would be best for all concerned if he moved in as their lodger.

With Cole living in her house, Eliza Pace grew to dislike him intensely, although she and her husband put up with him for the sake of their daughter, whose infatuation showed no signs of diminishing. Cole seemed to cultivate an air of mystery and revealed very little about his life before his arrival in Clerkenwell. Several times, strange women called at the Glass Works asking for a man named ‘Anderson’, although nobody of that name worked there. Cole invariably made himself scarce on such occasions, yet when the women were asked what ‘Anderson’ looked like, their descriptions seemed to fit him. Meanwhile, Lizzie’s attitude towards her father subtly changed – she no longer ran to greet him with a kiss when he came home from work but avoided contact with any of her family, preferring to spend her time with Cole.

Eventually matters came to a head when, suspecting that their daughter’s new fiancé might already be married, Eliza and Henry Pace demanded to know the identities of the women visitors to the factory. Cole flew into a temper and left the Paces’ home in a huff, leaving Lizzie broken-hearted but, at the same time, adamant that her engagement was over. She promised her father that she would never see or even write to Cole again.

Cole was not happy to be rebuffed and, unbeknown to her family, he took to visiting Lizzie, whose resolve to break off all contact with him quickly weakened. The couple began meeting in secret, either at a neighbour’s house or in the nearby countryside, an arrangement that continued until June 1878, when Lizzie’s mother found a letter that her daughter was in the process of writing to Cole. When Eliza threatened to tell Lizzie’s father that she and Cole were still associating, Lizzie fled to her lover and the couple set up home together in Clerkenwell.

Until she left home, Lizzie had been the apple of her father’s eye and once she had gone, he fell into a state of deep depression. He took little notice of any of his other children, apart from shouting at them for making even the slightest noise. He stopped eating and was unable to sleep at nights for worrying and, to make matters worse, whenever he asked Cole about his daughter, he was sneered at. Henry and Eliza Pace went to the extent of contacting the Society for the Protection of Women and Children with their concerns about their daughter and although a representative went with Henry to see Lizzie, he was unable to persuade her to return home. ‘I will marry her in a month’s time,’ Cole promised in July 1878 but the marriage never took place. Henry told his wife that if Cole were to make an honest woman of Lizzie he would feel better but the thought that the couple were living together in sin, without being legally married, was driving him almost insane.

It became obvious to everyone that Henry’s physical health and mental state were deteriorating rapidly and he seemed unable to think of little else but Lizzie. Eventually, his eighteen-year-old daughter Lucy decided that she couldn’t bear to watch him die and made up her mind that she was going to go and see Lizzie and somehow persuade her to heal the rift with their father. Without her father’s knowledge, Lucy visited Cole at his work and demanded to see her sister. Although Cole was reluctant to reveal Lizzie’s address, Lucy would not be dissuaded and eventually Cole told her where she might find her sister. Lucy hastened to the address she had been given and to her horror, found that her sister now had a three-month-old baby. Returning home, Lucy told her mother what she had found out but didn’t dare make any mention of her sister’s situation to her father, for fear it would kill him.

Henry Pace was by now desperately ill, unable to eat or sleep and constantly suffering pains in his head. Although he insisted on going to the factory as normal, his spirit seemed broken and he came home every night looking pale and downcast. He spent long, sleepless nights alternatively tossing and turning in bed or pacing restlessly from room to room and by the end of March 1879, was so ill that he was forced to take two days off work. He spent the entire time huddled by the fire, an overcoat wrapped around his shoulders, complaining that his head was so bad that he didn’t know what to do with himself and saying that he desperately wanted to sleep but couldn’t. Then, in the middle of the night of 3 April, he suddenly asked his wife if she thought Lizzie was likely to have a family of her own.

Eliza Pace was unable to conceal the truth from her husband any longer and blurted out that Lizzie had already been a mother for some months. On hearing that, Henry gave an animalistic scream. ‘The fault was mine. The fault was mine,’ he sobbed repeatedly, berating himself for ever bringing Cole home. ‘To think I should take a man home as a friend to make a whore of my child! And I loved her so,’ he moaned to Eliza, who tried her best to comfort her distraught husband, to no avail.

Over the next few nights, it dawned on Henry that Cole must have impregnated Lizzie while she was still living under his roof. As a loving father, the knowledge that he had failed to protect his daughter’s honour drove Henry to the brink of madness. He wandered the house at nights searching for his razors, which Eliza had taken the precaution of hiding to prevent him from killing himself, while anxiety and lack of sleep caused him to hallucinate wildly. He once woke Eliza in a panic to tell her that their youngest child was dead and insisted that he was being watched and people were coming to search the house. Yet Henry still went to work every morning, dreading spending all day in the company of the man he believed had replaced him in his daughter’s affections – a man who jeered and gloated endlessly and who Henry had come to despise. On 7 April, Henry was so distracted that he didn’t arrive home from work until nearly 2 a.m. the next morning. He explained that he had no idea where he had been or how he had got home, claiming to have missed his stop on the train and ended up in High Barnet.

On 9 April 1879, Henry was leaving home for work after yet another wakeful night when Eliza happened to notice that he was only half dressed. She called him back and he quickly put on the rest of his clothes before hurrying from the bedroom without kissing Eliza goodbye. She called him back yet again as he was walking downstairs and pointed out that he had not even kissed the baby and Henry obediently returned to the bedroom and picked the child up from his cradle, kissing him and saying, ‘Goodbye, my boy and God bless you. May you never be so unhappy as your wretched father.’

There was a terrifying finality about his words that led Eliza to believe that Henry intended to commit suicide and she begged him to stay at home. However, he ignored her and hurried off to work, leaving the front door of the cottage wide open behind him in his haste. Exhausted from lack of sleep and too physically weak to run after her husband, Eliza spent the rest of the morning ‘all of a twitter’, convinced that something dreadful was about to happen. When one of the children rushed in from the garden to tell her that Henry’s father and mother were coming towards the cottage, she ran outside to greet them.

‘Don’t tell me Henry has killed himself,’ she begged her parents-in-law.

‘Much worse than that,’ replied William Pace, revealing that Henry had been arrested for attacking Cole.

William was employed at the same place as his son and told Eliza that Henry and Cole had been working alone together in a workshop. William and labourers William Bates and John Ware heard a heavy thud and, on going to investigate, they found Cole sitting on the floor with his back resting against a bench, while Henry stood over him, a heavy spanner held above his head. As William Pace rushed forward and clasped his son in a bear hug, Henry struggled, shouting, ‘Let me go, let me go!’ The two men fought for possession of the spanner until William finally managed to snatch it from Henry’s hands and threw it into a corner of the room, out of his son’s reach. While William restrained Henry, Ware and Bates turned their attention to Maurice Cole, who was bleeding badly from wounds to his head.

Dr J. Hunter was called to the factory and he organised Cole’s immediate transfer to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, where house surgeon Dr Stacy Sutherland Byrne found a four-inch-long cut running across the top of his head, with a second smaller wound on his left temple and a third behind his left ear. The police were also called and Henry was arrested by PC ;Alfred Barnes and brought up before magistrates later that day at Clerkenwell Police Court, charged with feloniously cutting and wounding Cole by striking him on the head with an iron spanner. He was remanded in custody for one week but Cole’s skull was extensively fractured and he died in hospital shortly after midnight.

The charge against forty-three-year-old Henry was elevated to one of wilful murder and after an inquest held by coroner Mr Payne, he was committed for trial both by the magistrates and on the coroner’s warrant. The proceedings opened at the Central Criminal Court before Lord Chief Justice Coleridge on 28 April 1879.

The prosecution was conducted by Mr Poland and Mr Horace Avory, while Edward Clarke acted in Henry’s defence. Without exception, all the witnesses testified to the fact that Henry was normally a reliable, sober, steady man, who had been visibly distressed and anxious in the days immediately before 9 April, complaining that his head was bad and frequently stating that he feared he was going mad. Nobody had heard him make any threats towards Cole and although no one had actually witnessed what went on before the fatal blow was struck, it was supposed that Henry had tried once again to persuade Cole to marry his daughter and legitimise her child. When Cole refused, Henry’s passion was so aroused that, in hot blood, he snatched up the nearest thing to hand and hit him over the head.

William Pace outlined the sequence of events for the court, beginning when Cole first came to work at the Glass Works. ‘My son was very kind to him and invited him to go down to Southgate on the Sunday to spend the afternoon there,’ William recalled, saying that as time went on he was told that Cole and his granddaughter Lizzie were engaged to be married. Henry became upset and anxious after Lizzie left home in June 1878 but his distress increased out of all proportion when he learned that she had a baby.

William Bates and John Ware corroborated William Pace’s account of the events of 9 April, all agreeing that Henry Pace was ‘wild’ and ‘frantic’ during his frenzied attack on Cole, although he was perfectly sober. At the time of the murder, a song named ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’ was very popular and once he was restrained, Henry repeated an approximation of a phrase from the chorus, saying incoherently over and over again, ‘Grandfather’s clock, stop clock, never to go again.’

As the trial progressed, Edward Clarke seemed to be leaning towards an insanity defence and asked William Pace if there was any history in the family but William could only recall one instance, revealing that his own uncle had been ‘afflicted with insanity’. The defence counsel then called George Mison and Lucy Pace.

Mison was a clerk who commuted by train with Henry and had done so for the previous four years. The men had become friends on their shared journey and Mison told the court that Henry had recently become very dejected. Henry had explained to Mison that he had ‘family misfortunes’ but Mison was so concerned by what he described as ‘The alteration of Pace’s mind and the breaking down of his health’ that he took to escorting him to his door on occasions, for fear that Pace would commit suicide. Lucy also described the great change in her father’s manner and behaviour over the months since her sister left home, relating that the family had been forced to hide his razors in case he took his own life.

Yet although everyone who came into contact with Henry believed him to be suicidal, not one person had expressed any concerns for the safety of his victim, Maurice Cole. Thus, with no immediate family history of mental aberration, Clarke seemed to abandon any pretence of an insanity defence, relying instead on convincing the jury to find Henry Pace guilty of the lesser offence of manslaughter, on the grounds of the provocation he had received from Cole. In the event, Clarke’s gamble paid off and the jury found Henry guilty of manslaughter rather than wilful murder, adding that they unanimously recommended mercy in his sentencing.

Lord Coleridge delayed actually passing sentence, saying that he wished to give the decision some consideration and when the court reconvened on 1 May, the judge told Henry that he was in full agreement with the jury’s verdict. Coleridge continued to say that there was no doubt in his mind that Pace had received very serious provocation from the deceased but, although some might regard that as moral justification for his conduct, in he eyes of the law, it was no excuse. A human life had been forfeited in a most brutal and savage manner and although the jury had recommended mercy, it was still necessary for life to be protected and for the law to be vindicated. The law did not allow a man to have revenge by inflicting bodily injury or taking a life and Coleridge maintained that such an act as this could not be passed over without adequate punishment. After due consideration, he pronounced that Pace should be sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment, with hard labour.

Over the next few days, many of the contemporary newspapers published editorials on the case, most arguing that Coleridge had been far too harsh in his sentencing. Describing Cole as ‘a scoundrel’ who had ‘blighted his [Pace’s] daughter’s hopes, shamed his household and been guilty of the basest ingratitude’, the newspapers largely seemed to applaud the fact that, having come face to face with ‘The wrongdoer’, Pace had seized his opportunity to right the wrongs against him. ‘The extenuating circumstances are such as elicit the deepest commiseration for the avenger in this domestic tragedy,’ opined the newspapers, adding that eighteen months’ imprisonment would not rob Pace of his right to be called a respectable man. The Daily Telegraph went even further, announcing the opening of a fund of public donations, intended to support Eliza Pace and her family while her husband was incarcerated, with some money going towards the upkeep of Lizzie and her child. Within a very short period of time, the newspaper reported that money was flooding in and informed its readers that £1,000 had already been received, from which a weekly allowance equivalent to her husband’s wage of £2 10s would be paid to Eliza Pace, with £1 being paid to Lizzie each week ‘until the family or relations of Cole have been able to provide some permanent occupation for her.’ At the end of Pace’s sentence, it was intended that the family would receive a lump sum of at least £300.

Maurice Cole was largely ignored until his younger sister contacted the press to give her family’s side of the story. Kate Garnish revealed that Lizzie had initially run away from home after alleging that she had been ill-treated by her family and that her father was violent towards her. Mrs Garnish said that Cole and his family had done everything they could to persuade the girl to return home but she had refused point blank to even consider the idea, saying that she would rather starve.

When Lizzie first arrived at Cole’s lodgings, she had only the clothes on her back to her name. Cole engaged a separate apartment for her, paying the rent for her lodgings and his own from his weekly wage of 22s. Lizzie obtained a job to help pay for her accommodation but was unable to take up her new position, since her parents would not allow her to have her clothes from home and neither she nor Cole could afford to buy more.

According to his sister, Cole was desperately keen to marry Lizzie and had contacted a Registrar to try and arrange a marriage between them. However, since Lizzie was only twenty years old, Cole was required to produce written permission from her parents and Mrs Garnish swore that, rather than trying to persuade her brother to make an honest woman of their daughter, Henry and Eliza Cole had deliberately withheld their consent, without which the wedding could not take place.

Lizzie herself was quite content, insisting that no form of ceremony could bind her nearer or dearer to Cole, who she already regarded as her husband. As Cole struggled to find the necessary money to pay for separate accommodation, it was at her suggestion that they eventually moved in together.

Kate Garnish produced letters written by her brother showing that he genuinely intended to marry Lizzie and had made wedding arrangements for 3 May, almost immediately after his fiancée came of age, when her parents’ consent was no longer required for their union. ‘However, passion overcame Pace and in a moment the fatal blow was given,’ concluded the newspaper report.

Meanwhile, Henry Pace was confined in Clerkenwell House of Correction, where he continued to complain of feeling cold, being unable to sleep and suffering from terrible pains in his head, although Dr Smiles the prison surgeon could find absolutely nothing wrong with him, either mentally or physically.

Henry was considered a model prisoner, so much so that he was eventually assigned a cleaning job rather than the tedious oakum picking that he was given to do at the start of his incarceration. It was usual for prisoners to be allowed visitors only every three months but Henry’s good behaviour was rewarded with extra visiting privileges and on 24 or 25 July, Eliza and William Pace went to see him. During the visit, Henry made some remarks that did not quite make sense, leading Eliza to suspect that her husband was still not quite sound in his mind. However, she firmly believed that his mind had been affected for the past eight or nine months and thus his strange comments were not out of the ordinary. Before leaving, Eliza told Henry about the public fund and he appeared pleased and touched, asking her to be sure to thank everyone involved. He specifically asked Eliza and his father if they had seen Lizzie and although Eliza said she hadn’t, William Pace had and confirmed that she was very well. Henry also wished to know if his son, who was away at sea, was aware of his situation and was told that he was. ‘For God’s sake don’t let him come here to this dreadful place to see me,’ Henry told his wife.

During the night of 3 August 1879, a terrific thunderstorm raged outside the prison and early the following morning the prisoners were counted before being allowed to leave their cells. When warder Joseph Lucy came to Henry Pace’s cell, the door would not open. Lucy put his shoulder to it and pushed it open sufficiently to see Henry slumped against the wall on the far side of his cell. A closer examination revealed that he had looped his braces around his neck, attached them to an air hole grating and hung himself.

The prison authorities advised Eliza Pace of her husband’s death by letter. However, before the letter arrived, a newspaper reported unexpectedly appeared on her doorstep and broke the news that she was now a widow.

An inquest was held by Dr Hardwicke, the coroner for Central Middlesex, at which Eliza was the first witness. She was convinced that her husband’s mind was far from sound when he committed suicide, although the prison staff disagreed. Warders William Gallop and Stephen Turner both stated that they had noticed ‘nothing peculiar’ about Pace and neither had Joseph Lucy, who told the inquest that he had routinely asked Pace how he was every morning and had always received the response, ‘Quite well, thank you, sir.’

Dr Smiles was equally certain that Henry was in excellent health, categorically stating for the record that he never had the slightest suspicion that Henry’s mind was disturbed. Smiles theorised that the thunderstorm might have unbalanced Henry or alternatively something that his family said during their last visit might have adversely affected his mind. Smiles or his colleague Dr Philip Francis Gilbert had seen Henry at least once a week and had prescribed no medicine for him, apart from occasional treatment for short-lived bouts of diarrhoea or constipation. The prisoner was always well conducted, concluded Smiles, adding that if he had entertained even the slightest inkling that there was anything wrong with Henry’s mind, he would have placed him under constant watch. Gilbert concurred, saying that the only complaints he had heard from Pace were that he was cold, at which he was given a hammock and an extra blanket. Apart from minor ailments of his bowels, which had routinely been treated with calomel and jalap, he was in the best of health.

Coroner Mr Hardwicke was faced with an impasse, as Eliza and William Pace and some of Henry’s former colleagues insisted that Henry was not right in his head, a diagnosis disputed by all of the prison staff. Eventually, the coroner advised the jury that the cause of death was undoubtedly strangulation by his braces, which Henry had obviously deliberately attached to the ventilation grill. The coroner placed great store on the evidence of James Brewer, a former colleague of the deceased, who was quite certain that Henry was of unsound mind. At the inquest, Brewer revealed that such was Henry’s unhappiness that he had confided in him that he thought constantly of suicide but lacked the courage to go through with it. According to Brewer, Henry once told him that he prayed every night that he would meet with a fatal accident the next day and so end his suffering. It was suggested that, when Henry found out that his wife and family were being cared for, he no longer felt responsible for their welfare and finally felt able to gain the release he so craved.

The inquest jury returned a verdict that Henry Pace committed suicide while of unsound mind. The newspaper paid out the balance of its trust fund to Eliza, who used the money to open a small shop in order to provide for her four remaining dependent children. Eliza died aged seventy-eight in 1916. It has been impossible to establish Lizzie’s fate with any degree of certainty but it is believed that her child died later in 1879, after which Lizzie apparently went into service.