The Slaidburn Angel

by M. Sheelagh Whittaker

  As he rose to go over to the courthouse on another matter, Edward sighed and said, “I think the fate of Grace and Isabella hangs in the balance right now, and I just don’t know what argument will tip it one way or the other.”

  A Straw in the Wind?

  As part of the defence preparation, Charles Morley had been assigned to follow a case that was presently before the court.

  It was a trial for the murder of a child and, while the mother was much younger than Grace, elements of the situation seemed similar. On the morning the trial was about to commence, Charles hurried over to the law chambers to ask permission to attend in person so he could see and hear how the case was tried.

  The facts of the case had many parallels: Sarah Elizabeth Dunn, aged seventeen, had been charged with the wilful murder of her illegitimate child, sixteen months old. It was claimed that she had left her father’s home with her baby, Bertha, on May 8th and the body of the child was subsequently found in a hole filled with stagnant water. She had been committed to trial at the assizes.

  While his junior took careful notes in the courtroom, Edward Atkinson was able to learn much of what he needed to know about the case from reading his morning copy of the Yorkshire Post.

  A GIRL SENTENCED TO DEATH

  At Durham Assizes on Saturday — before Mr. Justice Wills — Sarah Dunn, aged 17, a domestic servant, was charged with the wilful murder of her illegitimate child, Bertha, aged 16 months, by thrusting it into a drain where a semi-liquid stream was flowing. The prisoner was left at the Birdhill Farm, near Shildon, her father’s home with no one in the house but her child, on the morning of May 8th. The parents returned at noon after four hours absence from the house, and found it empty, and the prisoner was found the next day in Richmond, where she told her aunt that her child had been put out to nurse with a respectable widow. Her father, however, told the police he had suspicions, and the prisoner then admitted that the child was dead. The body was found buried in a hole close to the drain, and had been smothered with mud.

  Mr. Milvain defended the prisoner and Mr. Skidmore and Mr. Liddell prosecuted. Mr. Milvain pointed to the prisoner’s affection for the deceased; and the fact that the deceased required constant supervision. The child had fallen accidentally into the beck and was poisoned instantly, and the prisoner, fearing she would be blamed, and horrified at the accident, fled from the place. The jury found the prisoner guilty, but recommended her to mercy.

  Mr. Justice Wills passed sentence of death.

  — Yorkshire Post, Monday, July 20, 1885

  Like many a skilled barrister, Edward Atkinson was a student of the moods and behaviour of judges. Having often appeared before Judge Wills, Edward knew him and felt certain that the obligation to sentence seventeen year old Sarah to death would have weighed heavily on him. It was all very well for the jury to recommend mercy when the judge had no choice on the sentence.

  Edward hoped to be a judge himself someday, like his father and his brother, and he routinely tried to understand the range of alternatives certain arguments presented to a judge and the weight of judicial responsibility one might feel when complying with some of the harsher aspects of the law.

  In the case of Sarah Dunn, Edward surmised that the responsibility to sentence such a young woman so harshly would frustrate the judge. He knew that an upstanding man like Justice Wills was likely to believe privately that the myriad of problems arising from illegitimacy were borne by women and children to a disproportionate extent. Natural justice was being thwarted by the fact that men could simply deny paternity or run away.

  Days after the difficult sentencing of Sarah Dunn, Charles Morley knocked on the door of Edward’s chamber without even having an appointment. He had come to report that Sarah Dunn had been pardoned. The explanation for her pardon was a surprising one. It seems that Sarah had been crying and moping around in the prison, as one who has been condemned to death well might, and that after a week or so she was granted a reprieve from being hanged on the grounds that she had “become despondent” following her conviction and sentencing.

  How unusual. Edward and Charles concluded that Sarah’s father and mother must have petitioned the Crown on their daughter’s behalf, using the fact that her father had done the right thing by turning her in as grounds for leniency. Whatever the real reason, Sarah Dunn’s reprieve was a good sign for Grace and Isabella.

  Edward remarked to Charles: “Even the most ignorant of barristers knows that judges take it ill if their sentence is overturned. Let’s hope for the sister’s case that Judge Wills presides over the trial for the murder of Thomas Gardner.”

  Weighing New Developments

  Edward was thoughtfully stirring his tea when he heard the knock on his door. He had been sitting at his desk for some time, musing on what he had learned about child murder over the last several days.

  The newspaper seemed tragically full of stories of murdered mites and their deranged mothers. There was the case of Isabella Hewson, accused of hanging her two-year-old son, Maurice, by a rope attached to a hook in the ceiling of her house.

  In court she had sobbed and cried, “Oh, Maurice. Oh, Maurice. My son, my son,” then fallen in a faint. Her reason for the deed, subsequently offered during the trial, was that she did not want him to be put in the street.

  There was also the case of Emily Georgina Battersill, eighteen, accused of murdering her illegitimate male child by dismembering him and throwing him down a drain.

  And, of course, there was the murder of baby Bertha by her mother, Sarah Elizabeth Dunn. The details and presentation of that case had become even more relevant to the defence of Grace and Isabella now it had been confirmed that Mr. Justice Wills would be presiding at the trial of the sisters.

  He had also received a brief note from Mr. Morley informing him that Grace had not yet recovered from the stillbirth. Given her quiet disposition and weakened condition, it seemed unlikely that she would be able to offer much in her own defence.

  Having nodded him in, Edward generously offered a cup of tea to Charles, as well as a seat. Almost as a continuation of his musings, he asked: “Do you think the younger sister, Isabella I believe is her name, could stand up in court and offer an explanation of their conduct? We do have her previous false statements to contend with — maybe the best way to deal with those is to have her give the ‘true version’ of events to the jury.”

  Charles looked thoughtful. “Were you thinking to have her read something out in court?”

  “I am thinking to make them both pitiable and to somehow keep Isabella from cross examination. I think Justice Wills may have no appetite for sentencing young women to death at present, and if we can get the sympathy of the jury and give the judge some major points of contention with the prosecution’s evidence that he can direct to the jury, maybe we can escape conviction.”

  The junior nodded. He was a great admirer of Edward’s style, his soft-spoken arguments and elegant constructions. “I’m off to the gaol, then,” he said, “to see what Isabella and I can write down in her own words. Let’s hope she is more believable than with the ‘truth’ that she told to P.C. Sutcliffe back in May.”

  Edward smiled slightly. “I think we need to know more about the meal in Clitheroe. Justice Wills likes scientific arguments, and there is some talk in medical circles that the extent of digestion of food can suggest how soon after a meal a person has died. It looks as if the prosecution are going for drowning, not wilful suffocation. If the baby’s stomach showed signs of an undigested meal, then we might argue that it had died before it was put in the stream.”

  “Perhaps a misdirected prosecution,” he muttered to himself, “but who are we to complain?”

  Mr. Morley, pleased at the prospect of a scientific argument, strode energetically down the street toward the Leeds prison where the sisters, their trial now imminent, had been moved.

  Preparing in Leeds

  The journey from Preston to the prison in Leeds had been long and hot
. Dusty and exhausted, neither sister had travelled well, although Grace’s recent indisposition left her by far the worse off.

  Mr. Tindal Atkinson paid them a very brief visit, but the young lawyer, with whom Isabella had begun to flirt feebly, worked hard with them to properly record what they claimed had really happened on that day in May.

  He made Isabella write it all out, and it was a slow process. She had always been good at letters, but had never had much call to write at any length and her cramped handwriting was slow and sometimes not even legible. When he couldn’t make it out, Mr. Morley made her write it again.

  They had been carefully questioned about their dealings with all the witnesses, and had not a bad word to say about any of them. Isabella had never much liked John Stables, but that was because of his rough ways and reputation as a leaver, not a stayer. She regretted dragging her friend Elizabeth Dockery into things, yet also privately believed that the Dockerys had much to answer for, especially since she was convinced that one of them had ill-used her sister.

  Isabella moved through defiance and into tears as Mr. Morley made her practise reading her written version of events aloud over and over. While he firmly reminded her that their lives might depend on how believable she was, his pressure on her to go slowly and articulate clearly put her under an unaccustomed kind of stress. It was only his entreaties that Grace was depending on her that kept her focused.

  Trying to sleep the night before the trial, the sisters were glad to be together for a change and grateful for each other’s company. They spent their time talking about what they would do when they got out of gaol, what special foods they would eat, and who they might see and where they might go. They agreed that they would prefer never to see Preston again. Grace cried for a while over the death of little Victoria, who would have been the first child of her marriage to John, and they prayed that little Thomas was happy in heaven.

  Grace worried about the money John would have to find to pay Mr. Atkinson. She feared he might lose his tenancy. She also worried about those who had been their friends and neighbours. John was not very forthcoming during his visits about circumstances in Slaidburn, but she sensed that he was being shunned by some of the town folk.

  Isabella shushed her rambling worries about the money. “John would pay anything to see you free,” she said.

  Oh, Grandma, We Hardly Knew You

  Reading the magisterial proceedings had been a sobering experience for Penny and me. Suddenly a great gap had opened up in our knowledge and understanding of our grandmother. With our father long dead, and his brother and sisters now gone too, we had no one to ask about the family past. Nor were we certain that they had been told anywhere near as much about what happened to little Thomas back in Slaidburn as we now knew.

  We began to ask around amongst our cousins for stepmother stories that they might have heard from grandma, but it turned out that while collectively we could remember hearing stories about a stepmother, none of us could remember any details. We had, however, been left with the impression that the relationship had not been a happy one.

  My cousin Margaret, grandma’s first granddaughter and official bearer of her first name, remembers her telling a story about the frustration of having to draw rows of J-shaped things that looked like pothooks on her slate at school. Grandma felt that those drills were for babies. Indeed, they were quite beneath her, because she already knew how to write.

  Penny remembers grandma saying that she went to a Quaker school in York, but thought she meant the town of York, which was many miles east of her family’s farm. Of course, to her Canadian grandchildren, born sixty years later than their grandmother, such distances no longer seemed so great.

  Though Meanley Farm is in Lancashire today, it was in Yorkshire in the 1800s. We now recognize that grandma was most likely referring to the school in Newton, just walking distance from Meanley, which happened to be a centre for nonconformists, or Quakers. There is still a Quaker school there today, less than a mile from the farm, and the school’s charter still allows for students of other faiths to attend as long as the number attending from their particular sect does not exceed that of the Quakers.

  Cousin Margaret also remembers that, in later life, grandma tried to efface the description of her occupation as a mill worker from some official British document. The fact that she had worked as a weaver in a mill, while her husband was a bleacher, must somehow have seemed an embarrassment to her as she tried to find her place in the new world.

  These days my brother, John, and his wife, Nancy, spend their summers in my grandma’s little house in Kaslo, and one of the most prominent wall decorations there is a blow-up of the marriage certificate of our grandparents, William Whittaker and Margaret Isherwood. Sure enough, the enlargement magnifies the fact that someone has tried to scratch out the word weaver on the certificate. A sweet irony — grandmother’s embarrassment now made larger than life and proudly hung on a wall by her grandson.

  But that well-rehearsed piece of family history just seems to add to the confusion and mystery of Grandma Maggie’s early life. How did she end up working in a mill in Haslingden? A settled life on a farm near Slaidburn, in the Forest of Bowland, in the late 1800s does not logically lead to working in a gritty northern mill town. So what series of events took the nine-year-old Margaret to Haslingden, and who went with her?

  Mr. Justice Wills Presiding

  In the Preston Guardian of August 5, 1885, Cathryn Higham finally found the report of the Assizes trial in Leeds. Her husband, David, quickly put it up on the website so that we could all marvel at the outcome. Then she and David sent us an email to let us know that what they called “The Conclusion of the Story” was there for us to read.

  Of course, even before I received their email, Penny Bent, tireless Internet investigator, had again phoned me at about 11:00 p.m. in Wellington, New Zealand, 9:00 p.m. in Canberra, Australia, to say, “Quick, go to the Slaidburn site, the trial outcome is there! Hurry!”

  She had caught the Higham’s posting of the trial result on the site before the electrons were even dry.

  “Give me a hint,” I said, never one for suspense. “Was our step great-grandmother hanged for murder?”

  Penny has had a lot of experience raising children, including me, so she told me to look for myself.

  “Give me a hint,” I whined. “Will I be happy or sad?”

  “You will be amazed,” she replied.

  And, of course, I was.

  I phoned her right back. And there we were, again in the middle of the Antipodean night, although not so cold as previously because it was spring then, marvelling about events in 1885 and the impact those events eventually came to have on our own lives.

  ASSIZE TRIAL REPORT

  Preston Guardian, Wednesday, August 5, 1885

  THE ALLEGED CHILD MURDER AT SLAIDBURN

  At Leeds Assizes, on Monday, before Mr. Justice Wills, Grace Isherwood (28) married, and Isabella Gardner (18) single, servant, was indicted for the wilful murder of Thos. Gardner, on May 16th. Mr. L. Gane, Q.C., and Mr. Manisty, appeared to prosecute, and Mr. E.T. Atkinson defended.

  Mr. Gane pointed out that the prisoners were sisters, whose home was at Dalton-in-Furness. Last September, Grace Isherwood went as housekeeper for a Mr. Isherwood, farmer, near Slaidburn, taking with her an illegitimate child. In January Mr. Isherwood married her. On May 5th, Isabella Gardner went to see Mrs. Isherwood, her sister, taking with her a boy some two years and five months old, stating that she had been nursing the child and that it belonged to one Elizabeth Dackray. On May 17th that child was found dead. In the evening of that day Jno. Barge and his wife were passing under a bridge which crossed Easington Beck, and as they did so they saw a child lying in a pool which was about 18 inches deep in the middle. Seeing that the child was dead, Barge left it and went for the police, and subsequently it was removed. When found, its head was about half way under the kerbstone of the pavement. The charge against the prisoners was that
they

  Meanley Farm (today).

  Photo by Sue Barton.

  had drowned the child, which the prosecutor alleged was the elder illegitimate child of Grace Isherwood, and which had been taken away by her sister on the previous Saturday. Before he married the elder prisoner, Mr. Isherwood was a widower, having one daughter, nine years of age. On the day in question, Grace Isherwood and Isabella Gardner in company with the two children went to Clitheroe in a neighbour’s trap, arriving between 12 and one o’clock. They went to the workhouse there and saw the matron, Mrs. Lofthouse, to whom Mrs. Isherwood represented herself as a widow with two children, the elder of whom she wished to leave in the workhouse, being unable to support it. Having no order she was told that the child could not be left there. The two women then returned to the trap, and started for home with the children. They reached home about six o’clock, Isabella remaining outside the house with apparently the elder child wrapped up in a shawl. The mother entered, but Isabella moved off with the child toward Slaidburn; and Grace Isherwood shortly afterward followed her. About seven o’clock in the evening two women were seen to go on the bridge, beneath which the dead body of the child was found. The two women, however, could not be positively identified. About a quarter to eleven the same night, Mr. Isherwood was seen with two women going in the direction of his home. A Mrs. Tomlinson; about seven o’clock saw Isabella on that road, but she could not say whether she had any child with her. They did not speak, but the next morning — Sunday — Isabella told Mrs. Tomlinson that she had been taking a child to its mother. When the child was found dead a policeman went to Isherwood’s house and asked Grace if she had a little boy. The other prisoner then said that the child they had had with them belonged to Elizabeth Dockray. Enquiries proved that although there were two women named Dockray who lived near, neither answered the description given. One had no child, and the other was in the Workhouse. When the child was alive it had on several articles of clothing; when found it had on two, and the remainder were found in the house of Grace Isherwood. They were given by her to the constable. This, and the fact of the non-existence of the woman described as Elizabeth Dockray, were two of the most important facts upon which the prosecution relied.