George Arthur Bailey – alias George Arthur Cox, alias Ronald Gilbert Tremayne (or Tremaine), alias Ronald Gilbert Treherne, the last three names having been acquired over 12 years of on-off petty crime before the tumultuous events of 1920 – was born in West Hampstead, north-west London on 13 March 1888, a month before Jack the Ripper began his three-year reign of terror in the East End of the capital.

He was the seventh of eight children born between 1873 and 1892 – his four brothers were Richard, Thomas Jr, William and Charles, and his sisters Mary, Emily and Helen – to Thomas and Betsy Bailey, née Hoyels (or Hoyles, according to George’s marriage certificate).

Born and raised in Devon where he worked on the family farm run by his father Richard, Thomas Sr was 20 when, in 1872, he married Betsy, a fellow Devonian. The couple lived in south Wales before moving to West Hampstead where he worked for the Water Corporation, first as a general labourer, or ‘navvy’, before becoming a foreman. They moved into Lowfield Road, just below the brand-new Metropolitan & St Johns Wood Line, which opened in 1879. It was the third railway to appear in the district following the Hampstead Junction line from 1857 and the Midland in 1868, following the opening of St Pancras that year.

The Baileys lived at 9 Lowfield Road, possibly in one of the 42 new houses built there between 1877 and 1879. However, the next census, in 1891, now finds them on the other side of the tracks, as it were, albeit less than half a mile as the crow flies from Lowfield Road, at 115 Ravenshaw Street, a little terraced house backing on to the Midland Line, the northernmost of the three railways snaking through the area. That’s the address given on George Bailey’s birth certificate. But, just to confuse matters, it’s also one and the same house in which an older brother, Thomas Jr, was living at the time of the trial – more than 30 years later – when it was officially listed as 37 Ravenshaw Street. The confusion is explained when it transpires that the street numbering system was changed in 1892.

George’s principal education took place almost within spitting distance of the family home, just a few hundred yards away on the corner of Mill Lane and Broomsleigh Street; the latter – now known as Beckford School – was also the name of the second of three schools opened in the area by the School Board of London. The SBL, as it was commonly known, came into being after the passing of the Elementary Education Act in 1870 and was charged with providing schooling for London’s poorest children.

Although education wouldn’t be compulsory on a national level until 1880, the Board passed a by-law in 1871 that compelled parents to have their children schooled between the ages of 5 and 13. By the end of the 1880s – Broomsleigh Street opened in 1886 – the Board, responsible in its time for constructing over 400 schools across London, was providing school places for more than 350,000 children. When George first passed through its doors, he found himself in the company of no fewer than 1,381 fellow pupils. In addition to teaching the three ‘Rs’, the school could also boast, by 1895, a cookery and laundry centre as well as facilities for manual training.

By all accounts, George was a very bright lad, attaining the highest level – Standard VII – ahead of most other boys of his age, before eventually leaving Broomsleigh Street in 1901 at 13 shortly after the country had exchanged eras, from Victorian to Edwardian, with the accession, in January of that year, of a new monarch. He was also, you may recall from sister Helen’s evidence on Day Two, ‘musical from quite a boy’, able to play various instruments by ear including the piano, banjo, zither and mandolin.

His first job was as an office boy at Lockhart’s, the coal merchant in nearby Cricklewood, but it seems this employment may have been interrupted, then rather swiftly curtailed, by a severe case of sunstroke affecting his spine (according to the doctor who attended him) which caused George to be bed-ridden for a month. The meteorological records for the July and August of that year indeed indicate temperatures in London soaring on occasion to nearly 31°C. Eventually back on his feet, Bailey next found employment – and, remember, he was still only 14 at the time – as an outdoor-porter for the grocers, Lindsey Brothers, in West End Lane, even closer to home.

He was still working for Lindsey’s three years later when his father died. Thomas Sr contracted a severe bout of ’flu towards the end of 1904 and a six-week illness then turned into what one of his sons, Thomas Jr, said was ‘acute melancholia’ or, in present-day speak, clinical depression.

Towards the end of February 1905, Thomas Jr called in the doctor and the local Relieving Office ‘on account of his [father’s] serious condition’. Before the creation of the welfare state, Relieving Officers were responsible for sorting out cash payments, where applicable, for the elderly, sick or unemployed, as well as issuing orders for admission to the workhouse.

Thomas Sr, who, it seems, had been subject to fits up to the age of 16, was admitted immediately to the Hampstead Workhouse Infirmary. According to Thomas Jr, his father’s ‘degree of insanity grew worse and it was decided to send him to Hanwell Asylum’. But, before he could be transferred to the facility in West London, Thomas Sr died on 26 February. ‘Acute Melancholia’ and ‘Exhaustion’ were certified as the official causes of death.

According to an unpublished account of his brother’s behaviour given years later after the trial, Thomas Jr said that George had been with his father in the garden when the most serious seizure occurred. ‘George was very much upset and had to be medically treated afterwards. My sister tells me that his hair stood on end.’

Three months later, George left his job in West Hampstead and followed his family’s roots, first to Devon, working on farms in Farracombe and Lynton before heading for Leicester. Not for long, though, because, later that same year, he was back with his mother at the house in Ravenshaw Street and ill for three weeks, Betsy would later record, probably with his first nervous breakdown. It was, however, a sort of ‘rupture’, which apparently was the cause of his being rejected for Navy service in 1905.

Soon after this, he left West Hampstead again and wasn’t heard of, by his mother at least, for almost five years, during which time George’s life had begun crumbling with disastrous results.

His first conviction was on 10 June 1908 when, at Northampton, he was sentenced to 20 months’ hard labour for forgery and fraud. By this time, he is also believed to have married, under the name of George Cox, in the same town, one Annie Harman, and it was while on honeymoon in Barnstaple, north Devon, that he was arrested. George was still serving his sentence in Wormwood Scrubs when Thomas Jr and his wife received the following letter from Annie, dated 10 October 1909:

George was released from prison three weeks after this letter was sent but there is no record of any more contact with Annie. Thomas, who would later write that George had committed the crime to help foster the image that he was ‘a fabulously rich man … and almost hoaxed all Northampton’, met him outside the Scrubs and took his brother back to Ravenshaw Street where he stayed for several weeks before disappearing again from immediate family view.

It is also worth noting for future medical reference that a couple of months earlier, David Ford, a cousin of the Bailey family, had been admitted to the notorious Bethlem Royal Hospital – better known as Bedlam – in St George’s Fields, Southwark, suffering from melancholia and delusions. After seven weeks’ treatment, he was transferred to a convalescent home from which he was eventually discharged on 8 December as ‘recovered’.

Thomas’s reunion with his younger brother 15 months later was traumatic, to say the least, after he’d been instructed by his mother to go to an address on the other side of Hampstead. Arriving at 1 Constantine Road on 2 February 1911, he discovered that George had, the day before, attempted suicide by swallowing poison. The attending medic, a Dr Owstry, asked Thomas if he could make a search of the house. Thomas did so and eventually found an empty poison bottle as well as a long, rambling, often incoherent and truly bizarre letter, or statement of so-called explanation:

I, George Arthur Bailey of West Hampstead, whose death you will hear of in the morning, sends you these poems [of which no record], also this rough draft of play [again, nothing more] for you to try and raise a little money for burial expenses etc and incidentally to see if they are worth publishing.

Sir, I rely on your honour.

Fate has given me more brains than enough, and a funny nature. I have lived a life of deception and deceit. I have deliberately lived as I have done through curiosity to see what I could do; people have stood no chance against me; it will pay you to investigate my career if you want sensation and to see how I defraud people and yet, Sir, I am tender-hearted and hate the sight of suffering and have given my last penny away. I have suffered cruelly, my own fault. I have chosen someone to die with me [unexplained].

I am not frightened to die; there is nothing in death. I am sane but have seen enough of the world. The end of the world will be by the instrumentality of education. I can see it. I am an optimistic fatalist. Education will be the downfall of the human race. Why? Just ponder. Laugh at me now, but in 200 years time, I shall be proved right. There is more sin now, more restrictions placed on wrongdoing; education combats it and finds a way out. Is not life a hollow sham and hypocritical existence? The quicker we conquer our emotions and sentiment, the better it will be for us. I will say no more, perhaps the documents will explain themselves. All I will say is that all my life has been imposture, letters, forgeries and fables.

Do not blame my Mother or my Father. I was brought up in the right way but I deliberately transgressed it, and now my curiosity has killed me. Sympathise with my brothers and sisters, my friends and relatives, but not for me. I have enjoyed my life, have built around myself walls which I have had to destroy by the same means as I built them. I was told that my intellectual ability overbalanced my moral stability.

Perhaps so. I only advise other young men not to do as I have done. And please caution young ladies against young men. They are so foolish. Yes, Sir, I have wept over many a boy’s and girl’s downfall. Now analyse my nature. By the time you have read this, West Hampstead will be shocked by a double tragedy. My only regret is that people have no insight with these things or with,

Yours truly

GA Bailey

PS I wish Jackson Clarke [no further information] to examine my knee. It has been horrible.

Thomas handed over the bottle, subsequently discovered to have contained aconite – often described as ‘the queen of poisons’ – and the letter to Dr Owstry who then certified George to be suffering from ‘melancholia’ and thus a suitable patient for confinement in the infirmary at the nearby workhouse. Indeed, this was the same Hampstead workhouse where his father had died six years earlier. He was said to be unemployed and destitute at this time and that his suicide attempt was therefore partly attributed to this condition.

George was ‘removed to’ the Infirmary on 3 February and, the next day, examined by the resident Medical Officer, Dr E Claude Taylor, who concluded that the patient was ‘a person of unsound mind and a proper person to be taken charge of and detained under care and treatment. The facts indicating insanity observed by myself at the time of examination were as follows: Depression – said he had failed to live up to his ideal; said to have taken aconite and other drugs three days previously so as “to end it all”.’

Three days later, he went before a local Justice of the Peace, Frederick Poynton Weaver, who, after hearing Dr Taylor’s diagnosis, made an order for George to be admitted to the London County Mental Asylum at Banstead in Surrey, where he arrived on 7 February. From the hospital records for George, summarised by Dr Percy Spark, who was Medical Superintendent at the time of his arrest in 1920, the new patient was described as a ‘gardener, married, 23 years of age. He was a case of melancholia, and ascribed his acutely depressed condition to loss of employment and family trouble, and admitted having taken aconite with a view to committing suicide. His condition soon cleared up and he was allowed to work in the garden. The patient admitted whilst an inmate of having been in prison for forgery at a post office, and he also claimed to have made an unhappy marriage but no name or address of wife, or record of any visit from her are recorded. The patient is said to have been a total abstainer.’

George was given a trial discharge from Banstead on 22 May and was then finally discharged a month after that on 19 June. At the end of July, he applied to the Hampstead Workhouse Infirmary for admission to the Farm Training Colony at Lingfield. These Colonies first came into being towards the end of the 19th century, mainly sponsored, at the start anyway, by the Salvation Army, whose founder, General William Booth, saw them as places for training ‘the undereducated and underfed’. Every person in a Farm Colony would, said Booth, ‘be taught the elementary lesson of obedience, and will be instructed in the needful arts of husbandry, or some other method of earning his bread’.

The scheme was also enthusiastically espoused by late Victorian Socialists such as George Lansbury and the Fabian Society founders, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, while the Colony at Lingfield, aimed principally at ‘vagrants and paupers’, was actually run under the auspices of the Christian Union of Social Service, a new offshoot of the Christian Student Movement which had sprung up in the UK at the turn of the 20th century.

However, for George, the pleasures or otherwise of Lingfield now suddenly had to wait because, on 11 August, an order was made for him to be admitted again to the Hampstead Workhouse Infirmary. On 5 September, he was discharged at his own request but then, the record states cryptically, ‘re-admitted the same evening’. A clue to this odd turn of events comes in an official statement – again from 1920, by which time the facility had become New End Hospital – in which the Infirmary’s Medical Superintendent, Dr Arthur Reade, noted that, on 5 September, George went to discuss ‘an invention of some kind’ (sadly unspecified) with the House Surgeon, who refused to take the idea up. This, in Dr Reade’s opinion, was ‘evidence of unsound mind’ – George’s, that is, not the House Surgeon’s.

Dr Reade also proffered the information that, on George’s history sheet at the Infirmary, there was a record that in an application for relief he had stated ‘he does not care if he lives or dies, and refuses his food; cannot sleep at night for the last three months; has altered brother’s Post Office Bank Book from a balance of 4/2d to £299 and filled up a form for withdrawal’. There was also the more familiar intelligence about his prison term and an unhappy marriage.

Deluded, temporarily or otherwise, on the matter of his so-called invention, George was, however, found suitably sound of mind by 4 November to secure his requested transfer to Lingfield.

A couple of months after he was settled in Surrey, he may have heard the news that his cousin David Ford had had a recurrence of his own problems and was admitted to Croydon Mental Hospital, Upper Warlingham, suffering from melancholia and delusions. He would remain there until he died in January 1918.

After seven months at Lingfield, George relocated to Liskeard in Cornwall where he worked in a local dairy business for another nine months before his mental health once again took a hand and he had another nervous breakdown. Returning to live with his mother, who now had a house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, George found work as a milk roundsman for the Express Dairy Company, based at College Farm, Finchley.

And it is in Finchley where we hear of George’s next brush with the law. On 13 June 1913, information was received at Finchley Police Station that George, who in the interim had made another suicide attempt using morphia, had embezzled various sums of money, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Simultaneously, it appears that he had also absconded with a Miss Edith Denny, daughter of one of his mother’s neighbours. Mr Denny told police he was fearful, quite reasonably, that George might kill his daughter and then commit suicide.

The couple were very quickly tracked down and George was arrested at the Beech Hill Café on St David’s Hill outside Exeter and held pending the arrival of an officer from London to bring him back. Miss Denny was brought back by her father. The arresting officer reported that George had attempted to take a bottle of prussic acid from his pocket, saying, ‘I was going to take that tonight. I was expecting this.’

The following month he was sentenced at Middlesex Sessions to six months with another six months of hard labour concurrent. At the trial, he handed the Judge a letter, which read, in the Bailey tradition:

The ‘Bessie’ referred to was Miss Bessie Hales, a book-keeper at College Farm with whom George was said to have ‘kept company’.

For the first three weeks of his incarceration, George was kept under close observation by the prison Medical Officer who found him, according to police reports later, ‘unstable and impulsive but saw no reason why he should be treated other than as an ordinary person’.

After his release, George’s history becomes rather sketchy, although punctuated increasingly over the next four years, against the backcloth of the Great War, with minor offences, arrests and brief terms of imprisonment. His legitimate work, in the first part of 1914 at least, seems confined to the odd stint as a hospital attendant which went sour when he had a bad fall while cleaning windows and had to wear a support on his knee.

During 1915, George was twice in Court, firstly at Taunton for giving false information under the Aliens Restriction Act. The Act of 1914 was passed in the context of Britain being at war, and its provisions were principally aimed at controlling foreign ‘enemy’ aliens already settled in London, particularly Germans. It more specifically required foreign nationals to register with the police and allowed for their deportation.

In George’s case, it appears he’d contravened the Act rather differently. On 3 September, he and a lady friend arrived at a restaurant in Station Road, Taunton, and asked if they could stay the night in one of its advertised lodging rooms. He signed in under the name Ronald Gilbert Tremaine, adding in the lady’s name as his wife. Checking the new arrivals that Saturday, a local police officer, Sergeant Hart, spoke to George who gave him a card, which bore the name Tremaine. When Hart returned the next day, George admitted his name was Bailey, explaining that the reason for giving the false name was to protect the identity of his friend.

Three days later, George was up before the Magistrates pleading guilty to the charge of unlawfully giving false information. According to a report in the Somerset County Gazette, the Deputy Chief Constable, Mr Brown, told the Court that ‘it was most essential under present conditions that everyone should give their correct names and addresses’. Chair of the Bench, Taunton’s Mayor, Councillor Hinton, said the prisoner had ‘pleaded guilty to a very serious offence and he had not committed it with his eyes shut. He knew perfectly well that he had done wrong.’ George was sentenced to two months’ hard labour.

A month later, at Devon Quarter Sessions, while still serving time, he got a further 10 months’ hard labour under the alias of Ronald Gilbert Tremayne for having earlier stolen a pony, trap and harness at Paignton.

On release from prison in June 1916, and with conscription having been introduced that year, George, now 28, attested for the Army and was posted to the Devonshire Regiment, known as the ‘Bloody 11th’ after its participation in the Salamanca campaign during the 18th-century Peninsular War. At the trial, you will recall Bailey claimed he made two attempts to enlist in the Army and was eventually accepted, whereupon his knees ‘gave way’ on the training ground.

While he was still in training, halting or otherwise, his Regiment was in action on the Western Front, sustaining, like so many others, terrible losses on 1 July, the infamous first day of the Somme. Later that month, the Regiment distinguished itself at High Wood where Private Veale earned the Devonshire’s second VC. Around this time, or soon after, George Bailey – Private 26991 – deserted.

It is not clear whether this latest shame had transpired by 12 August – the likelihood is that it had – for it is on this Saturday that, from records still available, Kate first and rather suddenly enters the story as George’s 18-year-old bride at Lambeth Register Office in South London. Their marriage certificate, which mistakenly records George’s age as ‘25’ – was he ‘bluffing’ Kate from the start? – lists their residence at the time of marriage jointly as 202 Rommany Road, West Norwood. It was five miles south-east of Lambeth and far enough away from Devon to suggest George, now working as a dairyman – ‘Milk Roundsman’ was actually denoted on the marriage certificate – in nearby Streatham, might have been on the run at the time. There’s also the distinct possibility that the marriage itself was bigamous since there appears to be no record of a divorce from, or dissolution of the union with, Annie Harman eight years earlier.

Many details of Kate’s pre-history have, apart from the very barest facts, been almost impossible to track down. According to her birth certificate, she was born Kate Lilian Lowden on 19 December 1897, to John Henry Charles Lowden an ‘Engine Driver (Stationary)’ and Emma Augusta Lowden née Muff, who lived at 18 Carlton Street, Canning Town. Mrs Lowden made a mark – suggesting illiteracy – as the official ‘informant’ of Kate’s birth when it was properly registered ‘in the County of West Ham’ the following February.

The next we know of Kate is contained on the marriage certificate where her rank or profession is listed as ‘Cleaner, General Omnibus Company’. By this time, her father, now described oddly as a farmer, is also noted as ‘deceased’. Her mother had died seven years earlier, in 1909, aged 50.

There is little else, apart from the record of at least one half-brother, a William Isaac Muff, son from a then 18-year-old Emma’s first marriage to labourer Robert William Muff in the East End.

Prior to her association with George, which would, over the next two years, turn the couple into a kind of minor-league Bonnie and Clyde – albeit with the bride as a distinctly passive Bonnie – before a tragic end to her rather short and unhappy life, Kate had not at any time been, as the record had it, ‘under the notice of the Police’. That was quickly to change.

In 1917, George was working first as a roundsman operating out of Milward’s Farm near Lewes, Sussex, before, more ambitiously, attempting to set up his own milk and general dairy business in Farnborough, Hampshire. The plan was for Kate, in rented accommodation, to manage a tearoom and take in boarders. But, before the latter could come to fruition, George appears to have succumbed to another nervous breakdown.

Then, on 24 August 1917, accompanied by Kate, he stole from their lodgings in Torquay £11 10s in Treasury notes, a quantity of silver and coppers and a Post Office savings book, showing a deposit of £60, then absconded to London, finding lodgings at Brockley, near Lewisham. On 30 August, he stole jewellery and a chequebook belonging to their landlady, a Mrs Wheeler, before decamping this time to Eastleigh, on the south coast outside Southampton.

There, in the next phase of this pathetic crime spree, George, now using the alias Ronald Gilbert Treherne – the surname might have been appropriated from a rather fine neighbourhood house he would have known in his West Hampstead childhood – told local tradesmen that his and Kate’s home in London had been destroyed by bombs in order to try to obtain goods and money by means of the stolen cheques. He claimed the cheques were from the insurance company in settlement for the damage.

He and Kate were quickly tracked down and arrested. On 13 November, at Hampshire Assizes, George was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude for five cases of forgery and larceny; hapless Kate, in the name of Lilian Treherne, was indicted with her husband and given six months in the ‘second division’.

There was, however, an extra complication. Just over a month before she was in Court to receive sentence, and while on remand like George in Winchester Prison, Kate had given birth to a baby daughter, Hollie, on 10 October in the prison infirmary. On her release early the following year, she and Hollie went to live in Swindon at the home of George’s sister Helen and her husband James, and soon after that got a job nearby with The Cellular Clothing Company, pioneers of Aertex undergarments.

George, who had attempted suicide yet again shortly before Hollie was born, was some three months into his sentence at Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight when the Army, still preoccupied with the last terrible months of the Great War, finally caught up with him and he was discharged because of his imprisonment.

Eventually, in February 1920, having served two years and three months of his term, George was discharged from prison on licence and made his way to Swindon where he, Kate and Hollie would begin the final, fateful phase of their lives together that would come to a shocking conclusion in South Bucks less than eight months later.