Force and Fraud

BLURB

Outback Australia in the mid-1800s.

When rich, domineering squatter Angus McAlpin is murdered, the obvious suspect is the penniless artist, Herbert Lindsey - who wants to marry his daughter, Flora.

McAlpin may have proclaimed that Flora would marry Herbert ‘only over his dead body' - and Herbert's bloodstained knife and handkerchief were found near the murder scene - but the artist denies any wrongdoing.

So begins a compelling murder mystery and trial, as the heiress seeks to prove her lover's innocence, and a country town takes sides.

Force may have killed Angus McAlpin, but fraud follows murder in a cunning plan to see Herbert Lindsey hanged - by any means necessary.

For someone else is determined to marry Flora, to obtain her property and her person; and he will stop at nothing.

BY

DR LUCY SUSSEX

 

Ellen Davitt's 1865
Force and Fraud
was the first murder mystery novel published in Australia. It appeared in a popular fiction magazine, the
Australian Journal
, but its significance was not realised for over a century. Ellen and her husband Arthur were remembered as pioneer educationalists, the couple having been in charge of the Model School in Melbourne during the 1850s. They gained an entry in the
Australian Dictionary of Biography
, though with three major omissions: that Ellen was a writer, an exhibited artist, and sister-in-law of the famous Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope.
¹

Trollope has attracted various biographers; but his connection with Ellen Davitt was only discovered in the 1990s by education historian Marjorie Theobald. An earlier historian, J. Alex Allan, in his
The Old Model School
, described Ellen as having ‘overbearing self-esteem'.

Victor Crittenden – whose Mulini Press reprinted
Force and Fraud
in paperback in 1993 – commented: “Just imagine a woman in the 1850s daring to have a high opinion of herself and her capabilities”.
²

Ellen Davitt was an unusual woman indeed. She was the eldest of five daughters, born to Edward and Martha Heseltine, a couple who were first cousins. The Heseltines married in London, in June 1810, when Edward was a bank clerk in Hull, Yorkshire. Ellen's exact birthdate is unknown but she was baptised at Holy Trinity, Hull, on 4 March 1812.
³

The family were then Anglicans; although by 1821, when their fourth daughter Rose (afterwards Trollope) was baptised, they had joined the dissenting Unitarian sect. Rose – as befitted the wife of a novelist whose Barchester series epitomises nineteenth-century Anglicanism – conformed to the Church of England upon marriage. Ellen went further, becoming a Roman Catholic; something which may explain her near disappearance from the family records.

Edward Heseltine was the son of a clerk, but got promoted to bank manager in Rotherham, then a market town near Sheffield. In character he could be hair-raising; as a young clerk he protested being kept late at work with exploding candles, something that could have got him sacked. His obituary notes other pranks:

During the panic of 1825 an old woman in the crowd of applicants for gold at the bank counter became very noisy. Mr Heseltine looked pleasantly at her, and said, “Hold your tongue, my good woman, we are preparing sovereigns as quickly as possible.” He had ordered a quantity to be made extremely hot. These he shot from a shovel in the old woman's hands: down they fell on the floor. He then desired others to step forward for change; but the fever was abated by this application of heat, on the principle of homeopathy, “Like cures like”. A little time was gained by this expedient, and more substantial aid was procured.
⁴

Martha Heseltine's obituary listed little more than her virtues, and that her death (in late 1841) was due to injuries received in a railway accident the year before. The early years of the railway industry were hazardous. Various press accounts of this particular accident appeared, with the
Sheffield and Rotherham Independent
reporting the carriage in which Martha travelled derailed and turned nearly upside down. One passenger was thrown out the window and killed instantly; the others clung desperately to their seats. All were injured, including the Heseltine parents, and Miss Heseltine. Two and possibly three of the daughters had wed by this time; so if Ellen was still single she might have been present.
⁵

Edward Heseltine remarried a year later, to Charlotte Platts. She was a daughter of the Unitarian divine and author John Platts, and younger than Ellen. This May and December marriage produced two sons.

In 1852, when Heseltine retired, aged 72, it emerged that he had helped himself to the bank's funds. He had expensive tastes, being a dandy, and collector of art and armour. Trollope biographer Victoria Glendinning surmises he speculated on the railroads. Heseltine
was
a director of a small railway company, launched in 1836, the year he became bank manager. He subscribed for 20 shares at £25 each; a total expenditure of £500. Nobody seems to have enquired how he found the money; and he went on to embezzle at least £5,000, then a huge sum. For some time Heseltine played cat and mouse with the bank investigators, flitting around England whilst pleading ill-health and mental incapacity. Finally he fled to France, where he died at Le Havre in 1855. Fraud, if not force, was thus something Ellen knew from family experience.
⁶

Ellen grew up in a family without sons, which belonged to a sect with a high regard for the intellect. She might have received a better education than most girls of her era; certainly the family valued reading, and Edward was on the committee of the Rotherham Book Society.

In an 1874 letter Ellen described herself as ‘a lady both by birth and education' – a dubious claim, since a bank manager's daughter was respectable rather than genteel. Additionally a lady was not expected to work for her living – as Ellen did. She wrote, on an application form of the same year, that she had:

Studied under Masters in England, spent some time in fashionable schools in Paris. The Sacre Coeur was one of them. Might have taken out a Diploma but for circumstances that prevented a longer stay in Paris [...], have [illegible] honours in History, Modern Languages, Composition and Elocution.
⁷

Some degree of reinvention, common when people emigrated to the colonies, leaving a lowly or scandalous past behind, can be surmised here. The letter implies a French education; unlikely for a Yorkshire girl whose father, during her schooldays, was only a bank clerk.

Rotherham, where the Heseltines lived above the bank, was where most of the daughters married, including Rose, to the young Anthony Trollope. Here also Ellen may have wed. On 8 February 1836, an Ellen Heseltine married William Ashmoor. That a market town of 20,000 people could have contained two marriageable girls of that name is not impossible, but it seems unlikely.

Ashmoor, with the alternate spelling of Ashmore, was a name not uncommon in Yorkshire. Three separate William Ashmores appear in contemporary coverage in the
Sheffield and Rotherham Independent
. One was an old man, another a working-class villain; so the most likely candidate is an Optician, who went bankrupt in 1838.

Intriguingly, a Mrs Ellen Ashmore appeared in a Rotherham court case of September 1842. She was witness to a burglary, in which three women confronted an intruder who was armed with a poker. He struck at Ellen Ashmore, but missed. If this woman later became Ellen Davitt, then she was feisty even when young; and the realistic court scenes of
Force and Fraud
had a basis in experience.
⁸

The British Census of 1841 (taken in June) provides a vignette of the Heseltine family in Rotherham: the dying Martha surrounded by her three youngest daughters, Rose, Isabella, and Mary Jane, who was married to Heseltine's clerk Robert Edgar, with a baby. Another married daughter lived in Manchester.

Ellen is nowhere to be found; so was either out of the country, or for some reason not included in the census. William Ashmore the Optician does not appear in the census either. He would die, in May 1849, at the age of 57. If he left a young widow, she was free to marry again.
⁹

Arthur Davitt's death certificate states he and Ellen married c. 1847, in Jersey. That may not be accurate, as she was not the informant; and the certificate contains mistakes, giving Ellen Frenchified Christian names (Marie Hélène), and a Dublin birthplace. It was Arthur who was Irish, b. 1808, and an educationalist. It is possible he met Ellen in Kingston, outside Dublin, where the Heseltines holidayed; and where Rose met Anthony Trollope, then a post office clerk.

Arthur Davitt was a Professor of Modern Languages at the Sorbonne in Paris. If he took Ellen back to France with him, that is when she gained her school experience, but as a teacher rather than pupil. After returning to Ireland in the late 1840s, Arthur Davitt became an Inspector of Schools. Ellen taught drawing in the Irish National Board's Model School for Girls in Dublin from 1851-4. During an 1853 visit by Albert and Queen Victoria, her ‘fine' copy of Winterhalter's portrait of the monarch in coronation robes, hung prominently in the school.
¹⁰

The couple were childless; a factor in their next career move, to Australia. In 1853 the Commissioners of National Education in Melbourne wrote to the Irish National Schools Board, requesting they recommend a Principal and Superintendent for the new Model School in East Melbourne; preferably a married couple without family. In effect, thus were two positions filled for the price of one; for the joint salary offered was £1,000 – £600 for the Principal and £400 for his wife. The Irish authorities recommended the Davitts.

At around this time Edward Heseltine's frauds were discovered; prompting another good reason for a trip to the Antipodes, lest the Davitts be tainted by scandal. Another factor was that Arthur Davitt had tuberculosis, for which a standard treatment was sea air and a warmer climate.

The journey proved eventful. The Davitts had to change vessels, since the steamship
Great Britain
soon developed engine trouble. They took the clipper
Lightning
instead, whose captain was James Nicoll Forbes, a man intent on breaking sailing speed records. During the Davitts' voyage he nearly wrecked the
Lightning
on the desolate Kerguelen Isles. The incident is recorded in the surviving journals of the passengers; and also in
Force and Fraud
, Davitt's account being so detailed that it suggests she kept a travel diary.
¹¹

If she had, it would have been interesting to read her version of a dispute on the ship, noted by passenger John Warren Whitings:

This evening we had by way of amusement to some of the passengers as they must have something to pass a way the time, a fight between two men cabin [first-class] passengers, I call them men because I cannot call them Gentlemen with any truth and justice to that title, Mr. Davitt and a Mr. Robinson. Mr. D. called Mr. R. a liar and pulled his ears also promised him a good kicking. A Mr. Swift wanted very much Mr. R. to fight Mr. D. at 12 paces with pistols. I offered the loan of a case but Mr. R. said he could not think of risking his valuable person in a fight with such a man as Mr. D. it lasted about an hour and caused great fun to some of us.
¹²

The Model School would have seemed a plum position, but it proved fraught. During the 1850s education in Victoria comprised two systems: religious schools controlled by the Denominational Board; and the secular National Board of Education, which hired the Davitts. The two boards were bitter rivals, with the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches in particular opposed to non-denominational schooling. The churches, in turn, were supported by powerful Parliamentarians.

In order to prove its superiority, the National Board determined to build a Model School. The building, in East Melbourne, was to be as impressive as the new system of schooling; instead, it proved vainglorious and costly. The Model School may have looked imposing, but it was jerrybuilt, with leaks and faults evident even before completion.

In addition, the place was an administrative nightmare. Arthur Davitt was expected to run an Infant school, separate schools for boys and girls and a Teacher's training college in the one building. In order to conform to Victorian notions of propriety, the male and female students, whether teenage or adult, as in the case of the teacher trainees, had to be kept strictly segregated. Moreover, the National Board of Education was under the same roof, and the real power in the School.

In the Victorian world-view, the male dominated the public sphere, the woman the private and domestic. Ellen Davitt transgressed these boundaries. She was a woman prominent in public life; as Superintendent she was in control of all the female pupils in the school. The position was subordinate to her husband the Principal, but the Davitts were a team. Arthur's letters to the Board frequently included the phrase:
Mrs Davitt and myself
. Thus, while Ellen was a loyal wife, she was not in the background. She had opinions and was ready to express them, for instance suggesting changes to the School's architectural plans.
¹³