9

‘And yet I loved her as never a woman was loved before’

Batley, West Yorkshire, 1865

On 10 March 1863, the marriage of His Royal Highness Albert Edward Prince of Wales to Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandra Caroline Maria Charlotte Louisa Julia Christian of Denmark was celebrated throughout the country and, at the festivities in Batley, Yorkshire, a young couple met for the first time and began a love story of their own. For Eli Sykes and mill worker Hannah Brooke, what started as a friendship quickly deepened and by 1865 it was expected that the two would soon be married.

However, at the Dewsbury Feast in July of that year, eighteen-year-old Hannah met James Henry Ashton and instantly realised that James, rather than Eli, was the love of her life. She broke off her relationship with Eli, who took the rejection hard and began determinedly stalking Hannah, turning up unexpectedly when she visited friends and threatening that if he couldn’t have her, no other man would. Unfortunately, Hannah simply laughed in Eli’s face, ignoring him or even singing aloud to drown out his professions of undying love and her friends failed to recognise any real threat to her safety from the man who appeared to worship the ground she walked on. Even Hannah’s brother George did not feel that his sister was in any real danger and when Eli complained to him that he was ‘so grieved by Hannah’s refusal to keep company with him that he did not know what to do’, George simply told him not to be a daft lad, adding that there were plenty of other girls who might be interested in him.

Nineteen-year-old Eli, who was thought of as a steady, respectable young man, worked as a cloth finisher and was also a member of the 29th (Dewsbury) West York Volunteer Corps. On Saturday, 19 August 1865, he paraded with the Corps at 3 p.m., marching to Drighlington where they were drilled. Five hours later, the men were marched to the station to await the arrival of the train back to Batley, in which three carriages had been reserved for their use. While waiting, each man was given his choice of half a pint of ale or a glass of ginger beer.

Drighlington Flower Show had been held that day and, when the train pulled into the station, many more passengers than normal boarded, quickly filling the reserved carriages. So many volunteers were left standing on the platform, that it was arranged that a train would be sent specifically to collect them. Eli was one of the eighty or ninety who managed to get a seat on the first scheduled train, which arrived at Batley Station at about 9.40 p.m. Many of the young men waited for their comrades to arrive on the special train and Eli stayed at the station chatting for some time, before leaving to walk home with two of his friends. However, when Eli and his friends came to part company, he announced his intention of going to see Hannah. ‘You’d better not do any such thing,’ his friends advised him, well aware of the threats that he had made towards her. Nevertheless, instead of heading for his own home, Eli ignored his friends and went to Hulme Street, where Hannah lived with her mother, Sarah, who was usually known as Sally.

Neighbour Robert Jones saw Eli and Hannah standing talking in the street, Eli dressed in his Volunteer Corps uniform, his bayonet fixed to his rifle. The couple were standing a few feet apart and, although Eli’s head was hanging down, Jones was unaware of any tension between them. After exchanging some brief remarks about the Adwalton Flower Show, Jones bid the couple ‘Good night’ and continued on his way.

Precisely what happened next was known only to Eli but at around 11 p.m., neighbours heard Sally screaming, ‘Murder!’ Joseph Pease and William Fawcett ran to see what the matter was and found the sixty-year-old widow standing on her doorstep in her nightdress.

‘He is murdering our Hannah in the house,’ Sally shouted and the two men pushed past her and ran inside, where they found Eli Sykes repeatedly stabbing himself in the throat with his bayonet. Pease grabbed his arm and tried to disarm him, sustaining a minor stab wound in his side as he and Eli grappled for control of the weapon. Fawcett rushed to help and between them the two men managed to take the bayonet from Eli and pinion him on the floor, so that he was unable to move. Meanwhile Hannah was standing quietly at the far end of the room, blood pouring from her mouth. As soon as Eli was safely restrained, she began to walk out of the house but got only as far as the door before collapsing into the arms of a neighbour. At the same time, Sally Brooke came indoors and it was only then that it became apparent that she was also bleeding. As she rushed to help her daughter, she too collapsed.

Someone had sent for a policeman and a doctor and the first to arrive was Sergeant Thomas English, who found Pease and Fawcett still restraining Eli on the floor. English lifted Eli onto a chair but the youth immediately tried to make a bolt for freedom and the Sergeant had to handcuff him so that he could tend the injured women.

Sally Brooke had been lifted onto her bed. She was bleeding heavily from stab wounds in her neck and chest and as English reached her side she gasped and died. Hannah had also been laid on her bed and appeared to be asking for water. She was given a couple of sips and tried to speak but was unable to say anything and by the time surgeon William Bayldon arrived, she too had died. Since he could do nothing for Hannah and her mother apart from pronouncing life extinct, Bayldon concentrated on dressing the wounds in Eli’s throat and ensuring that he was in a fit state to be transported by cart to the Dewsbury lock-up.

Eli said nothing during the journey to the police station and maintained his sullen silence until 2 a.m. the following morning, when he suddenly decided to speak to PC Patrick Murray, who had been left to guard him. Murray immediately cautioned his prisoner, warning him not to say anything that might be used in evidence against him but Sykes insisted on talking. ‘I feel easier in my mind and better satisfied now than before I did it,’ he told Murray, explaining that only five days earlier, he and Hannah had been on good terms, in spite of the fact that Hannah had told him that she wanted to end their relationship.

The young man explained that he had gone to visit Hannah to have one last try at getting her back but Hannah had insisted that she wanted nothing more to do with him, claiming to prefer another man. According to Eli, both Hannah and her mother began to harangue him, telling him that they didn’t want him there and urging him to go away. Eli asked Hannah if she would ever go with him again but her answer was ‘No’. He then asked if she had another boyfriend from Wakefield, to which she replied, ‘Yes’, adding that she would go with any man she liked and if Eli wouldn’t go away she would make him. As Eli tried to reason with Hannah, she sat down on a chair and began to sing and Eli told the police constable, ‘This aggravated me.’

Eli told Murray that he became so angry with Hannah that he hit her over the head with the butt of his rifle. ‘Oh, Eli, let me alone and I will go with you,’ Hannah cried but it was too late. Having broken his rifle, Eli snatched his bayonet and thrust it into Hannah. When her mother tried to protect her, he stabbed her too, plunging the bayonet into the two women again and again before finally turning it on himself in an effort to end his own life. ‘Although I murdered her, I loved her,’ Eli told the policeman.

The full extent of Eli’s violence was only properly revealed when William Bayldon and his colleague Mr Keighley conducted post-mortem examinations on his two victims. Sally had been stabbed nine times on her breast bone, chest, wrists, arm and neck. The fatal wound was between the fifth and sixth rib, where the bayonet had penetrated four inches into Sally’s body and pierced her heart. Hannah had seven wounds, on her left cheek, neck, shoulder, buttock and thigh, with a deep stab into her heart between the sixth and seventh rib judged to be the fatal injury.

An inquest held at The White Hart Hotel in Batley by coroner Mr Jewison returned a verdict of wilful murder against Eli Sykes, who then appeared before magistrates at Dewsbury Court House and was committed for trial at the next Leeds Assizes on 19 December 1865.

The double murder was an open and shut case, since Eli had been caught literally red-handed at the scene. Describing Eli as ‘a quiet, inoffensive, well-behaved, well conducted and industrious young man’, his defence counsel Mr Campbell Foster fought to have the murder charges reduced to manslaughter. He appealed to the jury to find that, at the time of the murders, Sykes had been ‘in a perfect transport of passion’, having momentarily lost his reason and self-control due to jealousy, coupled with a sudden frenzy consequent upon the taunting from Hannah.

Much of Foster’s good work was undone by Mr Justice Shee in his summary of the case for the jury. Murder could not be reduced to manslaughter by a mere sudden transport of passion, Shee clarified, explaining that it must be a sudden transport of passion under adequate provocation and that in this case, given the extent of the victims’ injuries, it would have to be very great provocation indeed. Shee advised the jury to pay no attention to reports of the prisoner’s good character unless they had any reasonable doubts about the evidence before them.

It took the jury just thirty minutes of deliberation to return a guilty verdict, at which Eli Sykes immediately fell to his knees in the dock and appeared to be praying. When the clerk asked him if he had anything to say before sentence of death was passed upon him, Eli rose to his feet and earnestly addressed the judge:

My lord and gentlemen of the jury, what I have done, I never had it in my mind to do in my life before it was done. If these were my dying words, I could say in the presence of God that I never meant to kill Hannah. And, as the only man that knows what happened in the house that night, I say that what she said caused me to do it. She provoked me to do what I have done and began singing ‘You may go to the devil for me’. She also said things which I thought could never have come out of a young woman’s mouth. And yet I loved her as never a woman was loved before. I don’t know whether I shall die on the scaffold but, of course, if it is death, I hope I shall meet her in heaven and her poor mother. But I don’t think I shall be hanged; the Queen will be merciful to me. Many an hour I have cried with her [Hannah] and she told me many and many a time that she was going with another but I still kept trying to gain her affection … When she began singing that I might go to the devil for her I was angry, else I would not have hurt her for my life. I hope I shall meet her in heaven and I pray that God may forgive me, for Jesus Christ’s sake … She has gone – she has gone – and I will die to go to her and, if it be so, I shall die like the Lamb that died before for sinners. I trust my fate will be an example to all young men and that they may see I am dying for doing what I hope they will never do.

Eli’s impassioned speech was described in the contemporary newspapers as ‘altogether one of the most painful and impressive ever witnessed in a court of justice’ and it left many of the court personnel and spectators in tears. Only Mr Justice Shee seemed unmoved as he intoned the death sentence.

Sykes remained confident that Queen Victoria would intervene to spare his life and a petition to her was organised on his behalf, appealing for the commutation of his sentence to one of life imprisonment. The petitioners reiterated the young man’s excellent character, describing him as ‘quiet and inoffensive in his habits and diligent and punctual in his business.’ Stressing that Eli had been Hannah’s ‘accepted lover’ for more than eighteen months, during which time he had always treated her with the greatest kindness and affection, the petition begged to inform Her Majesty that Hannah was encouraging Eli’s addresses, while simultaneously deceiving him with another lover and had greeted his attempts to win back her affections with taunts and jeers. Eli had previously exhibited no angry feelings towards her and appears to have ‘entertained the most honourable but most extravagant affection for her.’ There was nothing to suggest that his crimes were premeditated.

Meanwhile, Sykes awaited his execution in Armley Gaol, Leeds, where he was placed in a cell on the ground floor, one of two specifically assigned to condemned prisoners. The other cell, which was situated on the second floor of the prison, was occupied by Patrick Welch, who was found guilty of murder at the same assizes.

The prison staff began to feel very concerned that Welch was a suicide risk and decided that he and Sykes should exchange cells, thus removing any opportunity for Welch to jump over the railings. However, on 23 December, it was Sykes who took advantage of a moment’s inattention by his warder and escaped from his cell to throw himself from the upper-storey balcony, landing on the flagstones below.

Hearing a tremendous crash, the prison staff rushed to find Sykes convulsing and bleeding heavily from injuries to his forehead, feet and legs. ‘She’s before me, she’s before me. For God’s sake take her away,’ he ranted as he was placed on a hammock and carried back to his cell. At first, it was not thought that Eli’s injuries were life-threatening, however the broken bones in his feet had penetrated blood vessels and gaol surgeon Mr W.N. Price struggled to control the consequent haemorrhaging. He requested assistance from Mr Wheelhouse, a surgeon at the Leeds Infirmary and, together with the gaol’s assistant surgeon Mr Wright they finally managed to stem the gushing of blood from the prisoner’s injured feet.

Sykes made good progress, in spite of his numerous unsuccessful attempts to retard his own recovery by trying to remove the bandages binding his feet or to make his nose bleed, which necessitated his hands being strapped. However, on the afternoon of 3 January 1866, his foot began bleeding again and, although the surgeons managed to halt the flow, Sykes haemorrhaged again later that evening. The surgeons contemplated amputating his foot but feared that he would be too weak to survive such drastic surgery.

Sykes rallied briefly, but haemorrhaged for the final time on 6 January, dying at 7.20 p.m. A post-mortem examination conducted by Dr Price revealed that Sykes had sustained a chipped eye socket in his fall, which had led to a build-up of blood beneath his scalp. He had a large dent in his skull and a cracked bone in his forehead, along with a fracture which ran through the roof of both of his eye sockets, across the bridge of his nose. The outer covering of his brain was torn at the front and there was noticeable softening of the brain tissue at the back of his head. Both of his heel bones were broken, the left shattered into fragments, which had been driven into the arteries of the left foot and, in Price’s opinion, the cause of death was haemorrhage from these damaged arteries.

At the inquest on Sykes’s death, borough coroner Mr Emsley stressed to the jury that it was not their place to determine if there was any neglect on the part of the prison staff, which was a matter for the visiting justices to decide. (One warder was later dismissed and another suspended for failing to ensure that Sykes’s cell door was properly locked after a visit from the prison chaplain.) All that the inquest jury needed to decide was whether the injuries Sykes received in the fall were the cause of his death and, if so, did he inflict those injuries wilfully or unintentionally. If the jury believed that Sykes intended to do himself some mortal injury, they must then consider his state of mind.

Emsley reminded the jury that, although Sykes seemed confused immediately after his fall, testimony from prison staff and surgeons at the inquest suggested that he quickly recovered his senses and, from his conviction to his death, gave no indication that he was not in a sound state of mind. The coroner gave instructions that, if they thought that the deceased was of sound mind and that he wilfully and intentionally inflicted mortal wounds on himself, they must find a verdict of felo de se (an archaic expression for suicide, literally meaning ‘felon of himself’).

After deliberating for a few minutes, the inquest jury found a verdict of felo de se and Sykes was ordered to be buried within the prison walls at midnight.