The Invention of Murder (31 page)

In the following year, two more cases emphasized the precariousness of a servant’s life rather than her employer’s. Mary Anne Parsons was, said
The Times
straightforwardly in March 1850, ‘tortured to death’ by her master and mistress, Robert and Sarah Bird, a farmer and his wife in north Devon. They had hired Mary Anne, a robust and healthy fourteen-year-old, from the Bideford Union workhouse at the end of September 1849.
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On 4 January 1850 her corpse was discovered at the farmhouse, and a surgeon itemized bruises on her legs, arms and chest, abscesses on one arm, the nails on one hand ‘gone’, the bone of one finger protruding through the skin, wounds on ‘the posterior part of the hips’, a bruise on the back of her head, and a head wound which was the direct cause of death.

At the trial, Mrs Parsons explained that she had placed her daughter in the workhouse after her husband had sailed for the West Indies four years previously, and had never been heard from again. After her child’s death, she said, Mrs Bird had knelt, begging, ‘Think. on me and my poor children, what will become of them [if there is an inquest]?’ The local constable said he had heard Mr Bird tell Mrs Parsons that ‘he would be a friend to the deceased’s mother as long as she lived’ if she said that her child should be buried without further investigation. The master of the workhouse, who had examined Mary Anne’s body after death, said that he had been in the army, and recognized a flogging when he saw one. The rod with which she was beaten was described: it consisted of eighteen leather thongs tied to a stick, and was three feet long. Three witnesses testified to seeing the Birds inflict cruelties on the child; one saw her wiping away blood after she was ‘corrected’. The defence case was that Mary Anne had been subject to ‘giddy spells’ and had fallen and hit her head on the fender. The Birds’ solicitor argued that there was no evidence that any beating they had administered had caused her death, and if Bird ‘had exceeded in a slight degree the limits. for the correction of his servant, there was no proof of … ill-will’.

The problem was the judge.
Bell’s Life
said bluntly that the trial under his direction was a farce, and ‘no man in his senses’ thought the Birds innocent. The judge however told the jury that legally, ‘as there was no means of knowing which of the two actually consummated the crime, they must both be exonerated’. This was recognizably wrong in law only four months after the Mannings were executed, each having claimed the other had killed O’Connor. But the jury, apparently reluctantly, felt obliged to acquit the Birds. The magistrates attempted to appease local outrage by committing them on another charge, ‘felonious assault’, but their solicitor successfully argued that this was double jeopardy. In August they were indicted again, charged with ‘intent to wound … with the intent by such wounding to do her some grievous bodily harm’. They were, on an eight-six decision, found guilty, and while they were not given a custodial sentence, their solicitor asked if they might stay in gaol nonetheless: he was afraid they would be lynched as they left the court.

The case of Mary Anne Parsons caused national outrage, if only briefly. She was, however, immortalized by Dickens in
Bleak House
as Guster (Augusta), the workhouse child employed by Mr and Mrs Snagsby. They are not violent towards her, but Guster has fits, as Mary Anne had ‘giddy spells’. Similarly Charley, the child laundress in the same novel, might perhaps have been drawn from the story of another oppressed child. In
Bleak House
the Smallweeds, a family of moneylenders and usurers, spend much care and time ensuring that Charley is fed as little as possible, putting together the dregs of teacups and scraps of mouldy bread for her meals. There is some resemblance here, in the lack of food, to Jane Wilbred, who like Charley happily did not die, but was rescued by the kindness of strangers.
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Jane Wilbred, also a workhouse child, had lived for two years in the household of George Sloane, a special pleader (a type of solicitor), a man of unimpeachably good family, and his wife, an ex-dancer at the Italian Opera. One day in December 1850 a barrister with chambers in the same house as the Sloanes was told by his clerk of a girl there who looked as if she were starving; this good man questioned the porter, then followed up by consulting another lawyer. The two called on Sloane, and were admirably firm given that they were dealing with a professional colleague: he ‘must deliver up the girl in[to their] care, or take the consequences’. Sloane tried to bluster, but eventually handed Jane over. They called in a doctor, who reported that she was ‘a mere skeleton covered only with skin’, that she was too weak to speak, and that she would inevitably have died within a few days had she not been rescued. The magistrates were notified, and evidence of a sadism even more extreme than the Birds’ unfolded: Jane had been surviving on a basin of broth daily; neither her single dress nor her bedding had been washed in two years, nor had she been paid; she had sometimes been forced to eat mustard, or pepper; she was not permitted to drink anything, including water, and as a consequence had once been beaten for drinking the water used to boil the cat’s meat; Mr Sloane had ‘often’ watched when she was beaten; she had been forced to work naked from the waist up, while Mr Sloane watched; she had been refused permission to use the chamberpot more than once a day; when she had been unable to control her bowels to schedule, Mrs Sloane had made her ‘eat [her] own dirt’, Mr Sloane holding her while Mrs Sloane forced it down her throat.

The workhouse officials made a poor showing: at the first magistrates’ hearing, the clerk to the West London Union (the workhouse) refused to appoint legal counsel on behalf of Jane Wilbred, ‘as the expense would in all probability fall upon myself’. One of the aldermen indignantly pointed out that the Union had placed Jane in the Sloanes’ house, and thus bore a moral responsibility for her well-being. ‘The [parish] guardians are unwilling to move in the matter,’ was the sole response. As Jane Wilbred was not dead, the Sloanes could be charged only with a misdemeanour. They pleaded guilty, and therefore no details emerged in court. They were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment (without hard labour), and
Punch
gave vent to most people’s feelings: ‘What a pity that [Jane Wilbred’s] box. had not been as roughly handled as JANE WILBRED’S suffering body! Had. a riband valued twopence. been taken therefrom by either of the SLOANES; then would the law have arrayed itself in tremendous terrors; then would it have pronounced imprisonment – transportation it might be … But it was only human flesh that was striped; only human feelings that were outraged. How lucky for the SLOANES that they ill-used only JANE WILBRED, and spared JANE WILBRED’S box!’

Jane Wilbred briefly became a national heroine. Three hundred pounds was collected for her, together with the offer of a ‘respectable’ situation. A racehorse was named for her – the only racehorse that I am aware of named for a victim, rather than for a murderer.
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One broadside-seller at least reported that the Sloanes were a paying proposition, and worth producing an elaborate illustration board for, although ‘Sloane was too disgusting for the gentry’. Some broadsides found even the extraordinary facts not extraordinary enough, and suddenly ‘We discovered, because we must be in advance of the papers … Jane Wilbred was Mrs. Sloane’s daughter by a former husband, and was entitled to 1,000l. by rights.’ Shortly after the Sloanes were sentenced,
Reynolds’s Miscellany
published the story of ‘Bertha Grey, The Parish Apprentice-Girl; or, Six Illustrations of Cruelty’. In July the Bower Saloon in the East End staged
Bertha Grey, the Pauper Child, or, The Death Fetch
(a fetch was a ghostly apparition of someone still living). This framed the story of an evil woman maltreating her parish servants – ‘We have whips, chains, and cellars for the refractory’ – in a standard melodrama, so that now Bertha becomes the missing daughter of a baronet.

The parish’s cool response to Jane Wilbred’s torture was not unexpected. While that case was being heard, another was vividly demonstrating the lack of legal obligation to ensure that those under parish oversight were protected. As we saw with the Mannings, 1849 was a cholera year. Yet Tooting, in the south-west corner of London, was a relatively healthful spot. No one in the neighbourhood showed any symptoms of cholera. No one, that is, except the children who were lodged at Drouet’s asylum. ‘Asylum’ was the formal name for what were colloquially known as baby-farms – places where unwanted babies were farmed out. Sometimes a baby-farm was a woman looking after a handful of children in her own lodgings; at others, as with Drouet, the farm operated on an industrial scale. In general, the smaller farms looked after the children of parents who worked long hours, and thus could not care for them, or the illegitimate children of unmarried women, or the children of women with second husbands who did not want to spend money on the offspring of a previous husband. The larger farms were stocked by parish workhouses. Under the Poor Laws, pauper children were trained to go out to work as swiftly as possible, and for large workhouses in big cities, farming the children out for a subsidy was often cheaper than raising them until they were old enough for full-time employment, the asylums acting as middlemen, finding work that the small children would do in the name of ‘training’, and keeping the cash.

Bartholomew Peter Drouet had first come to the attention of Holborn Union in 1847, when he offered to take as many children as the workhouse wanted to farm out. He had, he said, ‘five schools conducted by competent teachers, and the Chaplain; various trades are taught by well-conducted masters … the girls being carefully instructed in needlework, laundry, washing, and the general household work’. The parish clerk responded positively, offering 4s. per child per week: ‘they are earning us, and will be earning you, very considerably’, he reminded Drouet. The Holborn Union decanted eighty-one children aged between six and fourteen onto Drouet that month; another thirty the following week. At the end of the month the clerk, six Poor Law guardians and the chairman visited Tooting to inspect ‘every part’ of Drouet’s ‘school’, and reported their ‘entire satisfaction at the whole of the arrangements’. More and more children flowed from Holborn to Tooting.

In May 1848 the board visited once more, and this time noticed that some of the children looked sickly, which ‘induced us to question them as to whether they had any cause of complaint as to supply of food or otherwise’. Forty clearly very brave boys held up their hands – the parish overseers had asked this question in Drouet’s presence, and so confident was he of his position that despite the presence of the board members, he ‘became violent’ and threatened to flog the children then and there. When the guardians protested he told them he would be only too happy to return the children to their workhouse. The guardians crumpled, or, in the clerk’s more face-saving words, ‘To avoid further altercation, we left’ – leaving, he neglected to mention, the children to their fate. Different officials appeared a few days later, and without apparent qualm signed a report saying that they had inspected everything, and all was in order. It was only the cholera outbreak that summoned the Holborn guardians back. They removed 155 of the children, leaving behind thirty who were too ill to be moved. One of the 155 died almost immediately, and more followed. A post-mortem on the first child showed signs of emaciation ‘produced doubtless by being improperly. fed, clothed and lodged; the appearances were consistent with that’.

Luckily the child had died in Middlesex, where Thomas Wakley was the coroner. Another eighty children had died in Tooting, but the Surrey coroner had seen no need for inquests. When Wakley began to investigate, the scale of the horror, and its confinement to Drouet’s children, became clear. There was no cholera in Tooting itself, and the disease infected only one of the fifty adults at the asylum: something had made the children terrifyingly prone to infection, and unable to fight off the disease once it struck. Furthermore, the children who had been removed from Tooting for the most part recovered, while a quarter of those left behind died. Inspectors arrived to examine not only the dead and dying, but also their food and water, and their living quarters. There was, they noted grimly, a stagnant ditch at the back of the asylum, measuring three feet by twenty and full of ‘filth and refuse’ (human waste and rubbish) despatched routinely from the County of Surrey Lunatic Asylum, a quarter of a mile away, and collected by Drouet to be resold as manure.

On 8 January 1849, a surgeon reported that 160 children were lying ill four or five to a bed at the asylum; he did not blame Drouet directly, but did indicate that ‘inadequate’ medical treatment ‘at the outset’, and children being weakened by being ‘too much exposed to the cold’, were responsible. By 9 January the finger of blame began to find its target. Drouet attributed the outbreak to a fog that had been hanging over the district (at this stage medical wisdom attributed cholera to atmospheric causes). The Chairman of the Board of Directors of the parish of St Luke’s (which had also farmed children out to Drouet) replied tartly that if fog were responsible, why was no one else in Tooting stricken? It was, he said, ‘principally, if not entirely from overcrowding on the one hand, and poor living on the other’. He added that they were paying Drouet 4s.6d. a week per child, and that with the income of the children’s labour, Drouet ought to be making 1s. a week per child, after feeding and clothing them. (If this was true, Drouet’s income would have been in the region of £3,000 a year, a fabulous sum.)

On 10 January, the surgeon employed by Drouet announced that the cholera was decreasing. The
Daily News
revealed the breathtaking cynicism behind this statement: the absolute number of cholera cases in the asylum
had
dropped sharply – because a thousand children had been removed by their parishes. By the thirteenth, the newspapers were referring to the ‘Massacre of the Innocents’: that day the inquest opened on the first Holborn Union child, and Thomas Wakley went on the attack. The Medical Inspector of the General Board of Health read a report on conditions at the asylum: Drouet employed one doctor, aged twenty-five, for 1,370 children. There were thirty-five ill boys in twenty-five beds, in a room ventilated by one window and lit by a single candle. The girls were even worse off, lying four or five to a bed, in a room awash with vomit and faecal matter (cholera causes both diarrhoea and vomiting). After the parish doctor made strong representations (the report implies he had repeatedly to ask for this), two nurses were brought in to look after 178 patients; the four female wards had one nurse between them. The Medical Inspector had told Drouet that each ward of more than twelve needed four nurses; Drouet took this to mean four nurses for the 1,370 children. The inspector finished up by accusing Drouet of ‘great neglect’, indifference to the orders of the Poor Law commissions, and obstructing the inquiry. The inquest now heard of systematized neglect, cruelty, and of intimidation of the children. The jury quickly found a verdict of manslaughter, and added a rider that the guardians of the Union were negligent. Wakley approved of both the verdict and the additional comment. The spectators applauded.