The Nightingale Shore Murder (4 page)

Mabel Rogers was engaged in a different kind of tragedy on the evening of Monday 12th January: she was watching
Hamlet
at Covent Garden. There she was told, between acts, that a message had been received at Carnforth Lodge with news of the attack on Florence, and the terrible injuries that had left her in a coma in the East Sussex hospital. Mabel's immediate reaction was to go to her friend, in spite of the hour and the difficulties of travelling alone at night. She caught the 11.20pm train from London, which could take her only as far as Tonbridge in Kent – the same town where Florence had visited her aunt the day before. From here, she drove to Hastings, arriving at the seaside town at three o'clock in the morning. She went straight to the hospital, where she was taken to see Florence, unconscious in bed. Mabel didn't leave the hospital again until after Florence had died, four days later.

In the long hours at the hospital bedside, watching the nurses caring for Florence, Mabel must have been painfully reminded of all the years that she and Florence had worked together doing the same for their patients. They had met in 1894 in Edinburgh, where they had both chosen to do their nurse training. The Scottish capital would have been a bold choice of destination for Mabel, whose family was from Devon and who had gone to school in rural Oxfordshire. It was a more obvious destination for Florence, since it was her mother's home city, and her father had trained there as a doctor.

Offley Bohun Shore, Florence's father, was the fifth child and third son of another Offley Shore and his wife Eliza. He was also cousin to the father of Florence Nightingale, the pioneering nurse for whom Florence Shore would be named. It was Miss Nightingale's father William who had changed the family's name to Nightingale from Shore. As Florence's aunt, Baroness Farina, pithily put it, ‘
The Nightingales were Shores, but changed their name when certain property was bequeathed to them
.' The property in question was a very valuable bequest from Peter Nightingale, William's great-uncle, commonly known as Mad Peter. In a letter to Florence Shore, Florence Nightingale would once comment that she was ‘very fond of the name Shore.'

The Shore family had come into the manor of Norton, four miles south of Sheffield, in the 17
^th
century. In about 1666, the manor had been purchased by Cornelius Clarke of Ashgate. When he died, he bequeathed it to Robert Offley, his nephew, from Norwich. In 1751, Stephen Offley of Norton died without leaving children to inherit, and the manor of Norton became the property of Samuel Shore, who had married one of Stephen Offley's sisters. Samuel had two sons, the eldest of whom, also called Samuel, married a woman called Harriet Foye of Castle Hill, Dorset. Their son Offley Shore inherited the manor: his son, Offley Bohun Shore, was Florence's father.

The Shore family was well-known in the area, and involved in all kinds of local activities. Offley Shore senior – Florence's grandfather – lived in Norton Hall as Lord of the Manor. The Manor was ‘
a handsome stone mansion in a finely-wooded park'
, and Norton itself ‘
a small, well-built village, situated on an eminence ... a scattered parish, undulating and well-wooded, very fertile ground, with many herds of milch cows'
, according to the local Directory. The area was noted for the manufacture of scythes, sickles, files and cutlery. Offley Shore senior was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Derbyshire in 1832. He lived the busy and varied life of a country gentleman, subscribing to sweepstakes at Chesterfield races, attending dinners and presentations with local MPs, and speaking at meetings about the Corn Laws. He gave an annual gift of bread to the poor at Christmas, put up a prize of three guineas for ‘the best stallion of the draught kind' at the local show, and was President of the North Derbyshire Agricultural Society. In 1841, he served on the Grand Jury hearing the case of the murder of the Earl of Chesterfield's gamekeeper.

Offley Shore senior was also a business man, but not ultimately a successful one. His financial dealings would cause the family enormous problems and eventually lose them the manor which had been theirs for nearly 150 years.

In the 1830s, Shore sat on the provisional committee investing in the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Line & Manchester Railway. Proposed capital was £800,000 in 8,000 shares of £100 each. He was also on the provisional committee of the Sheffield & Midland Railway, with even higher capital; and he was an Honorary Director of The Farmers' and General Fire and Life Insurance, Loan and Annuity Institution. With partners Hugh Parker, John Brewin and John Rogers, Shore was also a banker; and it was this, rather than speculation on the railways, that ruined him.

Parker Shore & Co. of Sheffield had been in business for more than 70 years, and two generations. Their bank was so highly-regarded in the area as ‘a legend of trustworthiness' that a local saying grew up: ‘As sure as Shore's bank'. But in 1843, the Sheffield Bank failed, and all the partners were bankrupted. Debts proved at the first meeting of creditors amounted to nearly £120,000, which was said to be around one third of the whole amount: an extraordinary amount of money, equivalent to many millions today. Among the creditors were many members of Offley Shore's own family: Maria Shore, Urith Lydia Shore, Amelia Shore; and the Reverend George Brewin, Offley's brother-in-law. In December 1843, following several stormy meetings with creditors and the appointment of assignees to oversee repayments, Shore appealed against the fiat of bankruptcy, but failed to get it overturned.

In 1845, a family home ‘late in occupation of Offley Shore', was to let in Spondon; it had a coach house, stables and ‘good pleasure and kitchen gardens'. By the end of that decade, Norton Hall was unoccupied. In 1850, the Sheffield Freehold Land Society purchased 31 acres ‘forming a portion of the large domains of Offley Shore which have been brought to the hammer under an order from the Court of Chancery'. Shore was to remain in bankruptcy for at least 17 years, throughout the childhood of his youngest son Offley Bohun Shore. By the time he made his Will, however, in October 1867, he once again had various shares and sums of money to leave to his family.

The Will is a long and very complex handwritten document, containing lengthy explanations of how Offley Shore's father, Samuel Shore, disposed of his property, and settled annuities on Eliza, Offley's wife; perhaps in order to protect her from her husband's financial problems. Offley's Will makes detailed provision for the disposal and distribution of his own assets, principally to his three sons, Harrington Offley, Sydney Foy and Offley Bohun Shore. There is also a sentence informing his daughter, Caroline Stovin (she had married the Reverend Charles Stovin, from Surrey) that ‘
it is not from any want of natural love and affection that I do not make any further provision for her by this my Will but because I consider she is most amply provided for and I am sure she will see the justice of this my Will in favour of her brothers ...
'

In keeping with the complexity and changeable nature of the Shore fortunes, Offley felt the need to add a codicil to his Will, just nine days before he died, after he and his eldest son, Harrington, had sold an estate. This gave Harrington a large advantage in the value of the bequests, which Offley Shore senior sought to remedy by leaving another estate to be shared between the two younger sons. This last minute addition was witnessed by Benjamin Spawton and John Bisbey, respectively butler and coachman in the Shore household.

The final curious twist in this financial maze led to a statement being added to the Will and codicil by Spawton, and witnessed by a Commissioner of Oaths, two months later. This listed individually all the changes made to the Will; and confirmed that, though the two witnesses had not actually seen Offley Shore writing the changes and additions contained in the codicil, they were convinced that he had made them:

Was this just the deceased's solicitor being over-cautious about a late codicil? Or had someone questioned the changes that altered the balance of bequests between the three brothers, and challenged the witnesses about whether these had truly been made by the old man so close to his death? There is no way of knowing. But with the death of Offley Shore, the Shore family's destiny passed into the hands of the three brothers. Perhaps Caroline Stovin had cause eventually to be grateful that she was well provided for without her family's support; because in less than ten years, two of the brothers had bankrupted the family again.

Yet the youngest son, Florence's father Offley Bohun Shore, had entered a solid profession that held out the prospect of ready employment and a reasonable income. He studied at Edinburgh University and graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1860. He was entered onto the Medical Register of England for the first time in 1861; in fact, he was one of the first doctors to be required to register in this way, as a result of the 1858 Medical Registration Act. This was intended to impose some structure on the profession of medicine, which had evolved in several directions over the preceding few centuries.

In the 17
^th
and 18
^th
centuries, ‘physicians' were regarded as members of a learned profession, while surgeons, or ‘barber-surgeons', were considered craftsmen. Each part of the profession had its own professional College, concerned with protecting the good name of its members, and upholding the standards of their practice. The Royal College of Physicians, founded by Henry VIII in 1518, lays claim to being the oldest medical college in England. Henry VIII also had a hand in the surgeons' destiny, bringing together the Fellowship of Surgeons and the Company of Barbers in 1540, to create the College of Barber-Surgeons. In 1745, the surgeons parted company with the barbers to form the College of Surgeons, which received a Royal Charter in 1800 to become the Royal College of Surgeons in London – and later ‘of England'. Surgeons in Edinburgh were recognised as a craft guild as early as 1505, when they were incorporated by a ‘seal of cause' granted by the town council of Edinburgh.

Meanwhile, in England, Apothecary-Surgeons, with their own Society created in 1815, were generalists who undertook care of people in the community: hence GPs' premises and consultations are still referred to as ‘surgeries.' The 1858 Act standardised at least some aspects of these very different parts of the profession, aiming to end what was frankly described as
‘the evils of rampant quackery and illegal practice. The absence of uniformity in training or examination. The jealousies, antipathies and hostilities between members of the profession...'
Whether or not it succeeded in these aims, the Act bequeathed one very familiar aspect of modern medicine: the system of referrals from GPs in the community to consultants in hospitals. This addressed the vexed question of who ‘owns' the patient when many different kinds of doctor are involved in their care. The result has been neatly summarised as: ‘
The physician and surgeon retained the hospital, while the GP retained the patient.'

In October 1861, the newly-qualified Dr Offley Shore married Anna Maria Leishman at St James' Episcopal Church in Edinburgh. She was just twenty, and the eldest of two surviving daughters of John and Hannah Leishman, a long-established Edinburgh family; her father was a ‘Writer to the Signet', a form of solicitor, and her grandfather was a churchman. The Leishmans' younger daughter, Offley's sister-in-law Margaret would later marry the Baron Liugi Farina as her second husband, becoming Baroness Farina – Florence's aunt in Tonbridge.

Offley's home in 1861, once he had left his parents' house at Clifton, was in Stafford Street in Derby. He wrote a letter to the Committee of the Derbyshire General Infirmary, via the classified advertisements of the Derby Mercury newspaper of 27
^th
August 1861, applying for the position of Junior Physician at the hospital. The paper went on to report that Dr Shore was the only candidate for the position; and he was unanimously elected to it. The retiring Dr Heygate agreed to be his supervisor, and Offley Shore thanked the Committee most warmly for the appointment. The following year, Offley's brother Sydney married Dr Heygate's daughter Louisa, cementing the relationship between the two medical men even more closely. At least until around 18 months later, when Offley Shore resigned his position at the Infirmary, ‘in consequence of his removal from Derby having obtained another position.'

So, in August 1863, the Shores' first child was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, where Offley had taken up his new post at the Stamford, Rutland and General Infirmary. The impressively-named Offley Bohun Stovin Fairless Shore (his middle names reflecting the surnames of various branches of the family) was to become a very successful soldier, serving in India, Mesopotania (now Iraq) and Russia. He appears in the Indian Army List in 1912 as a Colonel in the HQ Staff of the Army in India, where his ‘1
^st
class language skills in Russian' are noted. By the time of Florence's death in 1920 he would be a Brigadier General, and holder of the Distinguished Service Order.

Florence Nightingale Shore was also born in Stamford, on 10 January 1865. Her namesake and godmother, Florence Nightingale, had been back from the Crimean War for nearly a decade, and was internationally famous for her work there in improving the organisation of the hospitals and the nursing care of the wounded and sick soldiers. Since her return she had published ‘Notes on Nursing', her hugely popular textbook, and had opened the Nightingale Training School in St Thomas' hospital in London. Although she had been seriously ill, and lived almost completely confined to her London home, Nightingale was still at the height of her influence. She wrote hundreds of letters, and used graphs and statistics to demonstrate her points to politicians and anyone else she thought could bring about change and improvement in the care of the sick. She was held in enormous public esteem and affection for these achievements.