Looking into Preston Prison from the old main gate.
Photo courtesy of Lancashire County Council.
hold. But nothing would have been as bad as the mess they were in now. Why hadn’t Grace known that he loved her enough to forgive even this, and to help her find some place for Tom?
Once the Magistrate’s Court in Bolton-by-Bowland had committed Grace and Isabella to trial, the Clitheroe barrister, Mr. Baldwin, told him frankly that the sisters’ situation was dire, and that for the trial in Leeds they would need the best lawyer John could possibly find.
But how? In his desperation, John turned again to the family of the local squire, King-Wilkinson, for advice.
The King-Wilkinson family had long been involved in the practice of law, and knew well the reputations of many in the region’s legal community. And so it was that John travelled to Leeds to plead for the help of a rising star of the North-Eastern Circuit, Edward Tindal Atkinson.
A Lawyer Well-Chosen for a Difficult Task
In 1885 Edward Tindal Atkinson was thirty-eight years old and already well-established as a successful barrister. His practice was focused on the Leeds County Court and what was known as the Quarter Sessions, where he sometimes even argued cases before his father, Judge Serjeant Tindal Atkinson, with the apparent acquiescence of all involved.
The Tindal Atkinson family were prominent in British legal circles. While Edward’s father was a long-serving county court judge in the circuit that included Leeds, his brother, H. Tindal Atkinson, was a judge of the Essex County Court.
At his public school, Felstead School in Essex, which is best known as the alma mater of the sons of Oliver Cromwell, Edward earned a first-class certificate. Following his call to the bar (Middle Temple) in 1870, he took chambers in Leeds, and was already a lawyer of some reputation and experience when he was approached by John Isherwood, diffident but desperate, to defend his wife and sister-in-law.
In addition to his reputation and experience, Edward Tindal Atkinson had some other very important attributes. As the Yorkshire Evening News (15/12/1919) put it:
Although he is physically well set up, and has a commanding presence, his method of conducting a case was of the quietest. His voice has a soft, lulling sound, and he was always persuasive rather than dictatorial toward witnesses.
The initial meeting between Edward the lawyer, and John the farmer, was a touching one. Edward soft-spoken and polite, John frightened and anxious. The fact that hiring such a well-regarded lawyer was way beyond the Isherwood’s means was something that neither party dwelt on. Edward could tell immediately that John was a man who paid his debts. If Edward could lead his family out of this present horror, John felt willing to pay everything he had.
A Thoughtful Assessment
Whether through luck, or, more likely, through wise advice and direction, John Isherwood had chosen well in selecting the defender of his wife and sister-in-law. Edward Tindal Atkinson was young, but not too young, and his demeanour did seem to match that of his two young female clients.
The strategy for handling the case was not easy to develop. On the evidence presented so far, Grace and Isabella looked guilty. There was motive: the need to hide the existence of yet another illegitimate child from Grace’s new husband. There was the frustrated plan to leave poor little Thomas in the workhouse in Clitheroe, and then there was the opportunity for an expedient death: that long and lonely journey through the fells from Clitheroe to Meanley Farm with only each other and the two children for company.
Discussing the case over tea in his chambers, Atkinson and his junior decided that they needed to understand the state of mind of the accused and to gauge the kind of impression the two young women would make in court. Grace had managed to become a respectable farmer’s wife, and Isabella sounded like a hard-working young woman, but would they seem so to a jury of twelve men? In particular, Edward was worried that Grace might seem a cold and cruel woman who had just abandoned her first child. There was also the impression of her moral character that having had two illegitimate children would create with the jury. And Isabella’s wild stories about the child and the swarthy man who threatened their lives made her sound quite unreliable if not outright dishonest.
So the junior lawyer, Mr. Charles Morley, was dispatched to Preston Gaol to see what he could learn. When he arrived he found Grace too ill and too frightened to be much use. But he did get the sense that with her timid demeanour and slight figure she would strike a jury as more sinned against than sinning.
Slowly Mr. Morley began to piece together the details of the tragic life of little Thomas Gardner. The second illegitimate grandchild of the senior Gardners, whose small house was already overflowing, little Tom was given the Gardner last name at birth, and was left soon after with Agnes Creary while his mother sought work to support the two of them.
Grace had found a job at Crosshills, not far from where Isabella was in service, and began to work hard to make money to send back for the care of little Thomas. She sent funds back to Mrs. Creary for Tom’s care whenever she could, and she wrote frequent letters asking after his health. But as the months passed, the letters became fewer and the funds less adequate.
Soon, Mrs. Creary was grumbling that she was not in the charity business, and gradually baby Thomas was passed from hand to hand. There was little room for sentimentality about the needs of small children in the crowded lives of the Gardners or their neighbours.
With the arrival of Grace’s second fatherless child, there was little time left in her thoughts for the distant first one. Even the news that little Thomas had been placed in the Ulverston workhouse could not stir her to action on his behalf. She felt so sad about his plight but there was nothing she could do.
Mr. Morley thought the story, as he had heard it so far, offered him the beginnings of a possible defence. A meek and weak young woman, separated by circumstance from her child, sending money when she could, writing letters of loving concern, and then, as she is struggling all alone to support herself and her child, another man comes along and she is lost again.
Grace’s inarticulate misery, combined with her history of care for the child, gave the defence a chance to make her the victim, rather than little Tom. Even the prosecutor would have a hard time giving Tom a voice in the courtroom, with only his salvaged clothes to mutely remind the jury that his only crime was that of being “inconvenient.”
Eighteen-year-old Isabella was the perfect contrast for Grace’s apathetic, head-hanging sadness. Though the younger sister by many years, she had been in service since she was thirteen, and was much more worldly than her meek sister. Isabella had to learn early how to handle dangerous masculine attention, and her position as middle child in a large struggling family had made her quick and watchful.
She also proved to be more capable of helping Morley with the defence. Prison life had already given her a hacking cough and a dreadful pallor, but she answered the questions put to her carefully and thoughtfully. She had observed a lot about different types of people and their ways. With the benefit of the experience of the other prisoners, she was dreadfully aware that if she and Grace were found guilty they could be sentenced to death. She paid close attention to the lawyer’s questions.
For Isabella, Grace had at times been a stand-in mother, a loving older sister who somehow found the occasional moment to focus on her alone, in a home where people were crowded together and mostly paid each other scant attention. So sure was she of Grace’s maternal instincts that she had felt certain that Grace would be glad that Tom had come to join her.
When Isabella learned that Grace’s husband knew nothing about young Tom, she realized her terrible mistake. In the confusion that ensued she had only made things worse. In trying to make it up to Grace for her mistake in bringing Tom to Meanley, she went so far as to tell a ridiculous story to the police about his whereabouts. Of course that had just made their situation worse. Instead of admitting the terrible accident that had befallen the
m, her tale had made it look as if they were guilty of inept murder.
Carefully, the young lawyer extracted the details of Tom’s last day from the sisters. While he had been encouraged to learn of Grace’s many letters asking after Tom’s well-being and the money she had sent for his care, there was still the problem of the drive home from Clitheroe and the dead body placed by the brook. How were they going to explain what happened on the trap ride through the fells?
Similar Problem, Apparently Different Solution
Penny and I have a third sister, Terree, whose official name, Theresa, makes her the bearer of our mother’s name for our generation.
Despite the good fortune to be named after our mother, Terree has faced a number of disadvantages in life. To begin with, she was born when our mother was already seriously ill with the disease that killed her, although none of us knew, least of all Terree. And even though she was fourteen when Tessie, our mom, finally died, I doubt Terree has any real recollection of her. Even I, with my four-year age advantage, can’t remember our mother as more than the gentle invalid with a dangerous addiction to cigarettes.
I imagine Terree’s memories of our mother are probably like mine, only vaguer: a pleasant, sparkly-eyed woman with salt-and-pepper hair wearing earrings and a pearl choker, who lay in bed all the time in our parent’s bedroom.
Unconsciously echoing two of the Gardner sisters, Terree and I went on to have our share of children out of wedlock. Naturally, I thought that in my case the decision to do so was modern and feminist, while, with an older sibling’s innate right to disparage, I thought Terree was just irresponsible.
That wasn’t true, of course — at least the part about Terree being irresponsible. Terree graduated from university and got a teaching job. She travelled around in Europe with our stepsister Lesley. She had a proper, although youthful, marriage, and I believe a proper divorce. But, in the background, while she was doing all those things, the schizophrenia that would come to define her was taking hold. She became increasingly whimsical, if not downright erratic. She heard voices, and sometimes she spun right out.
Although she spent some of her time in hospitals with locked doors, our family bought Terree a condominium to live in, and the state has helped keep the wolf from the door.
Well, sort of. I mean, Terree hasn’t starved or anything, and she has the essential minimum of furnishings and of clothes in which to face Canadian winters. But a wolf in man’s clothing did manage to find his way into her apartment and her life.
Terree had her first child out of wedlock when she was twenty-eight, I was thirty-two at the time, and Penny was forty-one. Dean, our dad, was still alive and he and Doreen cared about and worried over Terree’s baby, little Joseph, from the moment he was born. Terree loved him ferociously, but her disease made it very difficult for her to give Joe the stable environment and consistent care that every child needs.
In those days, Terree was still in and out of institutions with some regularity, and Joe was sometimes cared for by foster parents and sometimes by Penny. In retrospect, none of us exactly knew what was happening with Terree and Joe all the time, and by the time we began to figure things out, Joe was already four years old.
At that point, on one of his and Terree’s regular visits to Penny’s house, Joe simply refused to leave. With the agreement of all concerned, Penny and her husband Dale adopted Joe.
That was our family solution for Terree’s illegitimate baby boy number one.
Some years passed, five to be precise, and the same old wolf made Terree pregnant again. She knew by then that he had a perfectly good wife and several children, with whom he lived just across town. But I guess it is difficult to find a good steady male friend when you are mentally ill, so the wolf must have seemed better than nothing. From his point of view, Terree must have seemed a little strange, but she had a low-key sweetness, an apartment of her own, and boundless availability to recommend her.
So then our family had Terree’s illegitimate baby number two to deal with, just like with Grace Gardner, except Grace didn’t have rapidly changing moral standards in society and a middle-class family who thought they were modern to help her out.
By this point, our family understood the drill a little better. Actually, Terree made the decision herself when Daniel was twenty months old. She brought him over to Penny’s house and left him there, saying she was concerned about her state of mind and thought she would go stay in an institution for a while. By then, sadly, Dean was dead, Penny was forty-eight years old, and John had a family of nine children to preoccupy him. As John so eloquently said at the time, “Sheelagh, this one’s for you.”
We felt very fortunate to be able to adopt Daniel. We had love to spare and then some, we had enough money, and we had a perfect space in the family, just after Matthew, in which to tuck him. Terree had given us a priceless gift.
But what would have happened to Terree and Joseph and Daniel one hundred years earlier? Terree and Joe would probably have lived with Penny and Dale, and Penny would have added the burden of care for Terree to the enormous burden the oldest daughter in a motherless family already has to carry. The wolf might have had a harder time getting at Terree a second time, especially if she was living with Penny. If he managed to find a way, the arrival of the second child would have been even more infuriating and demoralizing.
Or maybe Terree and however many children she had would have ended up in the workhouse. The rough work, thin rations, and segregated ages and genders would likely have made Terree rely more and more on the voices that are always there, waiting to talk to her.
Contemplating a Defence
Back in Leeds, Charles Morley gave Edward Tindal Atkinson a concise version of what he had learned from his visit to Preston gaol. He had taken the time on the journey back to list what he thought of as the positives and negatives of the case.
“First of all,” he told Edward, “both women are in a dreadful state. Grace is swollen with child and mute from misery, and Isabella coughs so hard she can barely breathe. Neither looks like a murderess, but they don’t appear perfectly innocent either. It is going to be a tough case to make.”
Edward looked thoughtfully at the young man. He liked a challenge, and this case certainly presented him with one. Infanticide was a common enough crime, but the two accused being comely, if distressed and ill, sisters who claimed they had no part at all in the child’s death was unusual.
“How,” he wondered aloud, “can we get a jury to believe it was all an accident?”
Steepling his fingers, he stared at the law books on his shelf as he listened for what else his junior had learned while in Preston. He was pleased to hear of the provisions for care that Grace had made for young Thomas, including her efforts to send money even after her marriage, but he furrowed his brow when he heard that Thomas’s release from the Ulverston workhouse was at the instigation of Grace’s parents, not of Grace herself.
He was surprised, but pleased, that the sisters could read and write, especially because it seemed likely that letters from Grace enquiring after Tom’s well-being could be available as evidence of her motherly concern, however intermittent that concern seemed to have been.
The whole week of deceit after Isabella and Tom arrived at Meanley was quite problematic. He could certainly present Grace as sweet and meek and unlikely to intend harm to anyone, especially a child. But her sustained deceit of her new husband would make a jury uncomfortable. A way had to be found to ensure that she would be seen as loving and fearful, rather than dishonest and manipulative.
Isabella was a different problem. Her maturity and intelligence could work against her with a jury. He would have to be careful to keep the court from concluding that she, at least, was calculating enough to decide that Grace would be better off without the problem of Thomas.
He needed to present Isabella as a young woman who was devoted to her older sister. While she clearly wanted Grace to find happiness in her marriage, circumstance had
saddled her with a terrible dilemma. She had been sent by her parents to deliver Tom to his mother, so she could scarcely come home again with him still in her custody. What was she to do with poor little Tom?
If Isabella was a murderess, her motive had to be love for her sister.
Could he convince a jury that it would be perverse to believe that sisterly love would extend to child murder?
Edward Tindal Atkinson, a barrister well-known in Leeds for his compelling arguments, did not feel at all confident that he had yet hit upon a defence that would save both the sisters.
In Hopeless Circumstances, Sometimes the Absurd seems Logical
Would I murder for Penny? Of course not — at least, not a child. A spouse, maybe …
I have been in fraught situations, usually caused by romantic entanglement, when the world seemed reduced to a very small set of choices. I have, temporarily at least, lost sight of the greater world and the extraordinary number of options available when choosing how to live one’s life. You don’t need to be a fallen woman in late Victorian times to feel trapped and confused by the circumstances in which you find yourself. It can happen to any of us, any time.
In stressful situations all sorts of unthinkable notions can be entertained. For example, I remember once, for one night only, seriously contemplating a communal marriage, as described in the book The Harrad Experiment. In retrospect, it is hard to believe that I wasn’t high on something that night. Certainly it was the sixties. But I know that I was just completely emotionally overwrought, if stone-cold sober.
The Slaidburn Angel Page 10