The Murder of Harriet Monckton

by Elizabeth Haynes

  He placed his trembling hand upon the desk for support, and said,

  ‘What have you done?’

  18th June, 1880

  Here I sit, an old man, waiting under a rat-coloured sky for Death to claim me.

  I have long since given up the hope that I shall meet Jesus in Heaven; rather, I think it is oblivion that awaits, and I believe I shall be glad of it. I have spent my life praying for forgiveness, and the words have grown cold on my lips, and meaningless; my life has been spent on others, and it was all to try and make amends.

  Oh, we all make mistakes, I know that. Small ones, great ones; little white lies, dangerous untruths: I am not the only one guilty of it. But I have borne the weight of my own sin, and that of another, for nearly forty years, and it has made me stoop, and cry with the pain, and wish for it all to be done with. A lifetime spent on good works is not enough to redeem a man. Confession, and repentance, and absolution, and whatever else it is that the High Church tells you will lead you to God, washed clean in the Blood of the Lamb, and none of it is worth anything – anything at all – without a simple apology.

  I am nearing the end. My eldest son has taken my place, preaching God’s Holy Word and Divine Love to the world. I am proud of him, for he is truly the godly man I always wished to be, and now see that I never was.

  Every day I wonder if I should tell him – tell all three of my boys, fine men that they are now – what really happened on that night in November, 1843, so many years ago. How it was that young Tom Churcher and I suspected each other, and because of my foolishness how we entered into a grand scheme of deception, to throw the blame away from God’s house and place it at Harriet’s own hand; and how, later that evening, I discovered that the truth was far darker.

  It has been nine years since Sarah died, taken by a fever as the old year gave way to the new. My wife: voiceless, unheard, unasked. In all that time, her opinion was never sought. She was never called to the inquest, never asked about my whereabouts on the night in question, much less hers. How would she have responded, if the coroner had thought to call her to give evidence? We should all have been undone, perhaps.

  What would they say, my boys, if I were to tell them that their mother was a murderess? That she had become so very exhausted by her husband’s filthy sin that she took it upon herself to end the latest threat to her reputation, her father’s money, and her life as a minister’s wife? For it was Harriet, asking for help, that had caused her to act. She had seen so many women taken by her husband, and she had known of them all – but not until Harriet came, brazen, desperate, to the door of her own home did her final thread of forbearance snap. She balked, finally, at the continued price of my dalliances, or at the cost, rather, of keeping at bay their consequences. For it was not my money that had bought us the fine house, that paid off the debt on the building of the Bromley chapel; it was hers. I was a man of very modest means until I met Sarah. Her father’s money had bought us everything; and charity was one thing and freely given to those good souls who deserved our pity, but her husband’s whore was not going to take a penny of it.

  What would they say? Would they blame her, for losing her patience? No! They would blame me, for I was the sinner.

  I have paid for those sins every day of the last thirty-seven years, in Sarah’s silences and in the look of cold disgust upon her face every time she beheld me. I have paid for it in her hatred and her scorn, in her bitterness and in the beating of her miserable heart, and I deserved it all. I have paid for it in the nine years without her, when I had nobody left to hate but myself.

  That night, as I moved Harriet’s body out of the chapel, believing her to have taken her own life, or perhaps that Churcher had harmed her in some inexplicable fit of anger, I swear I had no knowledge of my wife’s part in it. I had left the house, thinking her upstairs, to visit Harriet in the chapel, and all the while Sarah had been there already, hidden in the shadows, waiting to see what might pass between me and the girl who had come to her in desperation, four days earlier. And she had seen the very worst of me. The cruelty and the meanness; the cajoling, the wheedling, the asking for favours, the offering of money. The girl, crying, despairing, but quietly accepting. My fingers, gripping her throat. The act of lust itself, filthy to behold. And after it, I had left.

  What had she done, then? Come out of the shadows, or pretended that she had just chanced to pass, and seen that Harriet was within? Offered her a solution, a tincture to rid herself of the problem? And had Harriet taken it willingly, or was the liquid forced upon her? I like to think, at least, that it must have been quick.

  The act is done; it cannot be undone. All I can do now is something I should have done many years ago.

  Harriet, dear, brave girl: I am sorry. I sit here in my final days of life, weeping for you, and for the life that was so cruelly taken from you. For the life of your child, entirely innocent of any sin, taken and discarded as if worth nothing at all. I treated you so very badly, and you deserved none of it. Forgive me, Harriet, for I have nothing left now but sorrow, and shame, and despair.

  And all I have to hope for, now, is that I might see you translated into Glory, and, if not that, then at least that you sleep in peace.

  Afterword

  I stumbled across the first two (of the three) documents that tell Harriet’s story when I was researching another novel at the National Archives in Kew, London. These documents (which can be read at the National Archives, reference TS 25/218 and TS 25/208) consist of correspondence between the coroner, Charles Carttar, and the Home Secretary, via the Attorney General and the Solicitor General, dating from December 1844 and January 1846. One of the jurymen, Richard Hodges (also known as Barbarossa, apparently because of his impressive red beard) had written to the Home Secretary to ask for him to prompt the coroner to resume the inquest, and reach a verdict, as it had been, by then, nearly three years since the murder. One of the jurymen had died, one had gone abroad, and the rest of them were certainly very frustrated at the lack of a conclusion to their efforts. The Home Secretary requested the circumstances of the case from the coroner, and a comprehensive account of the 1843 inquest was forwarded, along with the explanation for the delay, namely that, owing to his suspicions of a particular person (George Verrall), he had decided to adjourn in order to allow the police to investigate thoroughly. The Attorney General and Solicitor General were consulted as to whether the coroner had been criminally negligent, and eventually after much correspondence back and forth the decision was reached that the Home Secretary should just tell him to bring the matter to a rapid conclusion.

  Fascinated, I googled ‘Harriet Monckton’. To my surprise, having read so much about Victorian crime, nobody else appeared to have written about Harriet and the circumstances of her death; the only relevant hits (despite trying different spellings) were the two documents I had already seen plus, intriguingly, a third, also in the National Archives, entitled ‘Murder of Harriet Monckton at Bromley Thomas Churcher suspected’ (document reference MEPO 3/48).

  My reaction to those documents was almost a physical one. I felt breathless with excitement. A cursory online search suggested that none of the people mentioned in the documents I’d read had been arrested or tried for Harriet’s murder. Verrall and Churcher, in particular, went on to live relatively long lives and so had clearly not died at the end of a hangman’s rope. I felt a desperate sense of injustice for Harriet, and for her unborn child. Such a terrible thing had happened, an act of violence whether by accident or design. But why was Harriet the victim of that violence? Why was her murder never solved? I was determined to find out, hoping that the documents were going to help me achieve some sort of justice for Harriet.

  In his reply to the Home Secretary, the coroner, Charles Carttar, listed nine reasons why he suspected George Verrall of the crime (see p.497). Whilst these reasons certainly raise questions, there is little in the way of the sort of evidence that a modern investigation would require to establish a case a
gainst him.

  Whilst the coroner was fixated on Verrall being the guilty party, the two Metropolitan police detectives who arrived in Bromley to investigate quickly decided that Thomas Churcher was a far more likely suspect. The police notes in the archives suggest that their suspicion was based on Churcher’s own reluctance to speak to them; and that in an early interview he had claimed that he knew Harriet only vaguely from her attendance at the chapel, but then several residents of Bromley came forward to report that he had been seen on numerous occasions walking with Harriet, including late in the evening, and on the night she died. The police concluded that whilst Verrall had undoubtedly acted suspiciously in the time following Harriet’s death, this might have been due to his efforts in protecting some other member of his congregation, i.e. Churcher.

  Intriguingly, there was a third named suspect: one Thomas Cranfield. The case against him seems to consist of the fact that he was in Bromley on that night, and that he committed suicide shortly after Harriet’s death. From the newspaper reports at the time of the second inquest, I discovered that Cranfield ‘dined’ (probably meaning luncheon) with the Verralls on Monday, 6th November – along with several others. The police ruled him out of further investigation, for there was no other evidence to connect him to Harriet.

  What struck me about the case was that, in addition to these three, there was an abundance of other suspects: the Fields, Thomas Churcher’s betrothed, Frances Williams – even Harriet’s own family seemed hostile. There seemed to be many people who could have had a reason to want her out of the way.

  The hardest thing was trying to work out the best way of telling the story. I spent a long time trying to decide if I was going to write a ‘true crime’ book, or to embellish the details of the case with historical details I had acquired through my research; or whether to fictionalise it, either completely, by changing all the names and the location, or by retaining as many of the facts as I could. I tried to write all of these versions, and struggled. My goal was always to try and find some justice for Harriet and her son; to reveal the crime and then leave it unsolved, or to give her a made-up name and disguise the town, would fail in this aim. In the end I decided to stick to the facts, and to write in the spaces between; this does, at least, allow for Verrall to apologise for what he did, or failed to do.

  I have tried my best to keep to as many of the facts of Harriet’s case as I could, as far as they are provided by the coroner’s documents and by the contemporary press reports. The details of the inquests are as close to the facts as I can get them; as far as possible, I have used the words the witnesses actually said before the coroner and the jury.

  The details for the first inquest come from the documents in the National Archives, and the contemporaneous newspaper reports; the details for the second inquest come only from the many newspaper reports at the time, which are available to read online thanks to the British Newspaper Archive. Everything that takes place after the second inquest finishes is, therefore, entirely imagined. Harriet’s diary is entirely fictional, as is, of course, Verrall’s confession.

  It was a challenge to differentiate the voices of the narrators. As these were real people, it felt wrong of me to imagine their voices. It’s very different from making up characters and getting them to speak. But, after inhabiting the documents and the newspaper reports for some time, I did get a feel for them; from his interactions with the coroner, Verrall came across as very self-assured; Thomas Churcher did not want to speak to anyone without his father present. Miss Williams clearly had the measure of the townspeople in the way only an outsider would. Richard Field, who shared his house with young women and married one who was thirty years his junior, seemed to me to be at once charming, and predatory. I felt that his behaviour towards Harriet amounted to what would be described now as grooming.

  George Verrall remained in Bromley for the rest of his life, dying at the age of 83 in July 1880. His wife, Sarah, predeceased him and died in 1871 at the age of 79. They had been married 46 years. The Bromley Congregational Chapel was rebuilt in the 1880s and remained as a landmark in the town until it was destroyed during the Blitz, on 16th April, 1941. After the Second World War, a new building designed by Raymond Wilkins became the town’s United Reformed Church, consecrated in 1957. The current church has several meeting rooms, one of which is called Verrall Hall in honour of their first minister.

  Verrall’s sister, Ruth, married James Churcher (Thomas’s brother) in June 1852, when she was 37 and he was 32. The first of their two sons was born nine months later.

  Thomas Churcher married Mary Ann Milstead (see ‘A note on the names’, below) on 25th July, 1844. They had six children, and in 1851 moved the relatively short distance to Sydenham. Thomas died there in 1876, at the age of 58. Mary Ann died in Lewisham in 1902, at the age of 83.

  Clara Churcher married Richard Humphrey in 1854, when she was 41. They do not appear to have had any children, and Clara died in 1902 at the age of 93.

  Richard and Maria Field had six children, including Richard, who was born before Harriet’s death, and Ebenezer, who was actually born in 1847, although for the sake of the story I have moved his birth date forward to 1846. Richard appears on the 1851 census as a collector to a charitable institution, and in 1861 as a clerk at a wholesale grocer’s.

  According to the newspaper reporting on the second inquest in 1844, Frances Williams moved to Shifnal, in Shropshire, at some point after the first inquest. A record in the 1851 census shows a governess called Fanny Williams as a visitor at the house of unmarried brother and sister Edward and Ann Williams, in Wellington, near Telford. No other trace of her has yet been found.

  When you’re dealing with real people, it’s very easy to get distracted by the details of their lives. I loved finding out about all of them. One of the ways in which I tried to investigate from this distance was by researching all the suspects for Harriet’s murder, not just to see if any of them had been prosecuted for this offence, but to see if any had gone on to be convicted or suspected of any offences in the years afterwards. As a result of this, I found that one of the suspects was also involved in something that, whilst perhaps not criminal, was certainly morally dubious. I am not going to say too much about that because I am slipping down that particular rabbit hole as we speak, and potentially it might turn into another book.

  From the moment I read the documents I got a thrill of excite ment at finding something unique and important, I knew I would have to tell Harriet’s story. The impact on my life has been profound, to the extent that I feel as if I have inhabited Bromley in 1843 myself. This was helped in some degree by acquiring a suitcase full of family history material a couple of years ago. I discovered quite recently that my own great-great-great grandparents lived at 6 Fieldgate Street, in Whitechapel, in 1841 – at the same time as Harriet was living there with Richard Field, at No.33. Researching my own family tree helped me a great deal, as it gave me a connection to that time in a way that meant something to me personally.

  As it turned out, I knew Bromley fairly well, having worked there as a medical rep in the early 1990s. These were streets I recognised, even though, of course, much had changed. I took a research visit back to the town and identified many of the locations that would have been familiar to Harriet, and of course this is something that the reader can also do. The United Reformed Church now stands where the Congregational Chapel formerly was, and a very lovely and welcoming place it is too. Widmore Lane is now Widmore Road, and is a busy thoroughfare. The place where the Verralls’ house once stood is now the junction with Homefield Road. The Three Compasses public house is currently a pizza restaurant at which I had the best pizza I think I have ever had, although the building is recognisable from the three compasses in the plasterwork above the door. The Market Place still exists, although is considerably changed. But at least four buildings are still the same as they were in Harriet’s day: the Archbishop’s Palace, now the Bromley Register Office; historic Bromley College,
opposite where the Workhouse stood before it was demolished; the Swan Inn, used for the second inquest, which is still on the corner of the High Street and Beckenham Lane; and of course the parish church, where Harriet is buried with her father and her mother, which is still largely as it was, albeit somewhat extended over the years. Alas, there is no way of telling exactly where Harriet is buried, but, as I walked through the churchyard with my friend Sarah, a whole load of receipts inexplicably fell from the purse I was carrying tightly in my left hand. They scattered behind me and, as I picked everything up, I wondered if Harriet had taken that opportunity to tell me where it was she lay.

  A note on the names

  The newspapers vary considerably in their reporting, not least in the spelling of the name of the surgeon who performed the post-mortem. I have seen his name reported variously as Stott, Scott, Hott and Ilott. The 1841 census is corroborated by books on the history of the town, and I have thus established that, although there was an eminent surgeon in Bromley by the name of Scott, the young man who performed the post-mortem and appeared accordingly at the inquest was James William Ilott.

  For the purposes of avoiding confusion, I have taken some liberties with names.

  Emily Graham, who is living with Frances in Shifnal in 1846, is a character entirely of my own invention.

  Thomas Churcher’s sweetheart, who later became his wife, was in fact Mary Ann Milstead. I changed her to Emma (her younger sister’s name) to avoid confusion with Harriet’s sister Mary Ann.

  The two police detectives who came to Bromley to investigate the case at the instigation of the Home Secretary were Superintendent Nicholas Pearce and Inspector Charles Frederick Field. Both of these men are well known as being among the earliest members of Scotland Yard’s detective branch, set up in August 1842, and they were contemporaries of the now famous Jonathan Whicher. Field in particular may have been the inspiration for Dickens’s Inspector Bucket. To avoid any confusion with Richard and Maria Field, I have given him the alias of Meadows in Harriet’s story.