The woman who inadvertently had decided so many of our destinies was described with a blank on the back of her photograph. But there was more to it than that. What I had initially thought to be damage on the photo caused by the ravages of time, on closer examination looks deliberately inflicted. The older woman in the photo, posed with her two young daughters and her stepdaughter, has a scratch through her figure shaped like an X, as if someone had impotently tried to take out their anger at her on the photograph.
I could imagine that such a feeling might increase, not lessen, as the years went by, and as the alienation from Lancashire in British Columbia took its toll.
Grace. Such a mild looking little woman, such a lot of grief.
Less a Murder Investigation and More a Sentimental Journey
I coaxed Penny into coming to England to help me think about the murder and its impact on our life.
She and I had been sharing insights and feelings, and she was the one who had located the photo of Grace. When I called her to marvel, partly because no one in the house with the newly born Turner Whittaker Scott seemed interested in my ravings about the photo, she said, “I thought it was Grace, but I wanted you to decide for yourself.”
Now I needed her to come with me and look at the terrain of Slaidburn and Easington with fresh eyes, and tell me what she thought.
I also needed a dose of “sister.” Penny has been both mother and sister to me, but the passage of time and shared hurts and triumphs has made us mainly sisters. I love to listen to the details of her life, and to tell her some of mine, although William privately counsels me to be sensitive about seeming competitive rather than informative. Sigh. My good intentions are so often misconstrued.
We set off on from London on Easter Sunday; Nick (our youngest child and Margaret’s last great-grandchild), William, Penny, and I, plus chocolate eggs, with plans to investigate the scenes of the crime.
William constructed a wonderful Murder Route for us to follow, and the Easter holiday resulted in some interesting sleeping arrangements for the four of us.
The first night we slept in the Coach and Horses Inn in Bolton-by-Bowland, just down from the site of the Magistrate’s Hearing. The family seat of the presiding magistrate back in 1885, Lord Ribblesdale, is nearby.
Bolton-by-Bowland is a village, known for its thirteenth-century market cross and a post for putting people in the stocks that stand on the green near the Coach and Horses. The beauty of the place stands in sharp contrast to the horrors that Grace had experienced there: first, the birth of her second illegitimate child, then the magisterial proceedings.
The former courthouse is an attractive stone building, but I feel confident that no one in our family noticed its eighteenth-century features when they attended the Magistrate’s Court there in the summer of 1885. On our walk around the village, Penny and I tried to peer through the windows of the courthouse, which is now someone’s private home, to get a sense of the building (discreetly, of course, as always).
It was a beautiful spring day, almost exactly a hundred and nineteen years after the hearing, but the village seemed much as it likely had been. We didn’t sense any of the angst our forebears must have felt, but it must still have been there, infinitesimal traces in the ether.
We next went over to Slaidburn to show Penny our ancestral village and the scenes of the crime. When I walk in the lanes of Slaidburn I feel the histories of my forebears, and when I sit near the fire in Hark to Bounty I reflect on how many jugs of ale folks with DNA like mine have downed before that fire. I have added a fair few pints of Guinness to the total myself.
Easter is a busy time of year in Slaidburn, with lots of fitness buffs there to walk and cycle on the fells. Our little group had been warned that all that would be available was the “family” accommodation in the Hark to Bounty Inn. On the face of it that sounded all right. We were a family: parents, a child, and his aunt. But our climb up two flights of stairs, the second flight reached through a low door and up increasingly steep stairs, revealed that the family accommodation was one large attic room furnished with four single beds, one over by the bathroom, one against the wall, and two side by side against the wall facing the bathroom door.
A skylight and a small window provide light for the family room. Immediately below is the remarkable, big room that has been used for hundreds of years in Slaidburn as a courtroom, although not on the occasion of the preliminaries of “our murder,” where they used the Black Bull tavern across the street.
Penny was cheerful about the arrangements, especially since she was lucky enough to draw the bed near the bathroom door. As she blithely noted, it was not the first time our family has slept in such a fashion over the thousand years or so we seemed to have dwelt in and around Slaidburn.
Once settled, and well-fed by Hark to Bounty’s excellent kitchen, we were off to visit the scenes of the crime. We walked up the Easington road toward Meanley Farm, which has been gentrified but still proudly reveals its origin as an ancient farmhouse, past Chapel Croft, with its old stone farmhouse and equally old outbuildings.
Then we drove down the lane to the bridge and the stream at Easington Beck. We all piled out of the car to crane our necks over the stone wall, and look down at the paving where the child was found. Having visited the sites previously with Cathryn and David, William and I were able to serve as knowledgeable tour guides.
We tromped around the graveyard at Saint Andrews and sat on the bench beside the River Hodder. Some months earlier, I had sent Penny a postcard of a woman sitting by the Hodder, and if we hadn’t known that she had never been there before, William, Penny, and I would all have sworn it was a photograph of her.
We waved, somewhat ineffectually, in the direction of Ash Knott Farm, where the Bleazards had lived. It is very hard to get to, even today.
Of course, Penny and Cathryn Higham hit it off right away, with David putting in a brief, typically modest appearance.
We talked a lot about the crime and the community, and the emotions of our great-grandfather John. We also talked about Grace and Isabella. Two young women half-mad with fear, running about through the fields and lanes with a dead weight, if not a dead child, in their arms in the middle of a summer’s night.
Walking through the rough fields was very difficult for us. Grace and Isabella would have done so every day, and they would have known where to put their feet, but they were little women and a two-year-old is heavy.
As we tromped around the countryside, it was clear that Penny was finding the “accident” theory of the crime increasingly hard even to consider, while I had to admit I had never given it much credence. Even today, as Mr. Atkinson argued in 1885, the drive from Clitheroe presents many opportunities to dispose of a body without attracting attention, if murder is your objective. But Mr. Gane’s argument, that a healthy two-year-old can’t suffocate at your feet without being noticed as you drive along, is much more compelling, at least to me.
The next stop on our family murder mystery tour was Haslingden, the town to which Grace, John, and the six children had decamped to start a new life. By then we had eaten all the chocolate Easter eggs we had brought with us, so the mood in the car was more sombre.
Haslingden is not terribly far from Slaidburn, but even today it is like a completely different world. Compared to the pleasant, verdant fields, the ancient stone buildings and walls, the trees and the daffodils around Meanley, Haslingden seems densely populated, sad, and bleak.
Slaidburn is a charming agricultural village that is in the Doomsday Book. Haslingden is a mill town that flourished in the mid to late 1800s, a bit later than the heyday of Blake’s “dark Satanic mills,” though the phrase still seems apt.
Using an old map, we drove around Haslingden, locating the homes that the census and marriage records listed as Isherwood residences over the years. And we visited the textile museum to give Penny a sense of the noise and the hardship of life in the mills.
Penny also had a chance to m
eet Rita Hirst at the local library. And we stayed in quite luxurious accommodations: three separate rooms, each with its own bathroom, at an old vicarage in Bacup now converted into a charming B&B.
Despite the fine hospitality, having carefully surveyed Haslingden, Penny and I agreed that if we had been working in a mill there in the 1890s, we too would have taken our chances in Canada. Maybe it’s in the genes.
Questions Just Keep Turning Up
In the years since Penny first directed me to the Slaidburn site, I have read over the legal proceedings reported in the various newspapers several times. Each time that I do so, I notice something new.
Most recently, I noticed a seemingly small discrepancy. After the inquest, the Preston Guardian reported that:
Jane Hayhurst, of Chapel Street, Slaidburn, deposed to washing the deceased and laying it out. She found a black mark on his forehead and a few scratches on his cheek. There were no other wounds. The child was healthy looking.
Some days later, the Guardian reported on the magisterial proceedings:
Jane Hayhurst, of Slaidburn, who laid out the child, and found no marks of violence on the body, repeated her evidence.
The newspaper reports of the actual trial make no mention of any testimony by Jane Hayhurst.
The change in testimony, although small, seems worth noting. In all likelihood, the minor nature of the black mark and the scratches made it natural for all involved to discount them. I doubt that would be the case today.
Modern forensic theory and practice would suggest that scratches on the cheek could be caused by placing something over the mouth and nose to cause suffocation. A black mark or bruise on the forehead could have occurred during a little struggle or the moving of the head from side to side to try to get free to breathe. Or the marks might have been the normal bumps and scrapes of childhood.
The evidence that the child was healthy looking is also significant. For all his being handed from one person to another, Thomas sounds as if he was a resilient little boy, which makes his death all the more mysterious.
My Emerging Theory of the Acquittal
Originally I thought the sisters were found “not guilty” for two main reasons: Grace’s obviously pathetic condition, combined with Isabella’s articulate explanation; and Judge Wills’s disinclination to sentence another trapped and hopeless young woman to death for using a desperate measure to get rid of an unwanted child.
Now I think that while those reasons may have played a role in the acquittal, there were other forces at play.
I took the opportunity at one of our delightful lunches to ask my friend Elaine, one of the smartest lawyers I am not related to, what she thought about the death of the child and the trial. She is from a legal family based in Manchester and I wanted to know if she heard or understood something in the story that was different from the way that I understood it, especially the statement at the trial given by the teenaged Isabella. I also wondered if she could cast some light on the fact that Grace seems to have sat mute throughout the trial.
Elaine’s chief insight was that the sisters were certain to have benefited from the rather rudimentary forensic work that was conducted in 1885. She felt strongly that today there would be no doubt about whether the child had suffocated or drowned, and the evidence on the contents of the stomach would have been quite exact. But in those days the young women would have received the benefit of the doubt.
Rereading the reports of the trial, I notice that while Doctor Bridgman testified that the post-mortem evidence seemed to indicate drowning, on cross-examination Mr. Atkinson got him to concede, as reported in the Times, “that it is often difficult to say in such cases whether death had been caused by drowning or by suffocation previously to immersion.”
The Preston Guardian included the information that Mr. Scattergood, a lecturer in forensic medicine from Yorkshire College, also testified that “while the evidence was consistent with suffocation by covering the mouth, the probabilities were in favour of death by drowning.”
That is where the prosecution went wrong. Mr. Gane, Q.C., and Mr. Manisty focused the prosecution on proving that Isabella’s story about Elizabeth Dockray and John Stables was untrue and that the women had drowned the child in the beck.
As the “Summary” in the Yorkshire Post, August 4, 1985, read:
At the Leeds Assizes yesterday the most important case was a charge of child murder against 2 sisters — Grace Isherwood and Isabella Gardner. The child was the illegitimate son of the young woman, Isherwood, a farmer’s wife, and it was alleged that she had, with the connivance of her sister, drowned the boy in Easington Beck, near Slaidburn. The case was not concluded when the Court rose.
The prosecution either did not know or did not pay sufficient attention to Isabella’s testimony that on their return to Meanley from Clitheroe, she had discovered that the child had suffocated during the journey, and subsequently she and Grace had disposed of the body at Langcliffe Cross Bridge. The women were admitting that the child had died on the return trip from the Clitheroe Union Workhouse to Meanley, but claiming that his suffocation had been accidental.
The prosecution likely was caught off-guard by the fact that no witnesses were called for the defence. As a result, Mr. Gane had to deliver his closing arguments immediately after Isabella’s statement. In closing argument, as reported by the Yorkshire Post, he called the attention of the jury “to the improbability of the suggestion the child was suffocated in the rugs. Considering the size of the child, its healthy condition, and the nature of the journey from Clitheroe, could it be believed that the child could meet its death in this way without the attention of the women being called to it?” However, neither Mr. Gane nor Mr. Manisty seems to have offered any evidence on the type of rug the child was alleged to have suffocated in, how the crowded floor space in the trap was allocated between the child and the day’s purchases, or how Isabella was able to determine so quickly when she lifted him down that the child was dead.
With an all-male jury, it seems reasonable to assume that they would be less likely to know from intimate knowledge how robust a two-year-old can be, and how insistent, even though it is probable that Thomas was an undemanding little boy.
And what about the child’s clothes? Where does the removal of the child’s coat, hat, and shoes fit into the defence? As the Yorkshire Post reported, in closing, Mr. Tindal Atkinson argued “that the defence was, and had been throughout, that the child was dead when it was put into the water, and did not meet its death by drowning.”
A clever argument, narrowly framed. No wonder that within a year, Edward Tindal Atkinson “took silk,” which in the English legal world means becoming a Queen’s Counsel (Q.C.). My great-grandfather certainly got his money’s worth.
The outcome was fortunate, not only for Grace and Isabella but for Margaret and John and the rest of their descendents. If Grace had been convicted, she likely would have been sentenced to death, with the sentence subsequently commuted to life in prison.
John, emotionally and financially spent, would still have had to give up Meanley Farm, although he might have tried to move to somewhere close to where Grace and Isabella were imprisoned so that he could visit. Even a deep love would have been further tested by those circumstances.
Margaret would have had to become the woman of the family, staying home to look after her brothers and her father. With the stain of murder on the family’s reputation, it is hard to guess who might have sought to marry her, and she might have ended her days as a spinster, keeping house for her father and her unmarried brothers. The Canadian branch of the family would never have sprouted.
The Passing of a Decent Man
John Isherwood had been unwell and weary for some time, and finally his heart just gave out. Fanny sat at his bedside at the end and held his hand, as he had done for her mother. She and her husband, Walter, had been living in the South Shore house for some time, caring for father, who had been sinking steadily ever since Grace had di
ed some eighteen months before.
In recent months, John had been lost for much of each day in thoughts of the past. Some days he simply spent remembering things like how he had courted Jane and how they had dreamed of being tenants at Meanley. He would smile to himself when he thought about Meanley, such a fine place for animals to graze.
He still missed Maggie, even after all those years. She had spunk, that girl, and she was his first girl baby. She often wrote to tell him how she and William and their children were faring, but it was hard for him to imagine her life way over there in Canada in the shade of the Rocky Mountains. Hazel, Ross, Dean, and Ivy — funny names for children — but then, Maggie always did try to be different.
Grace had never really liked Maggie, and he guessed he understood why. Grace was afraid he favoured his daughter, and in some ways he did. But surely Grace realized that in standing by her through all their travails he had more than proved his devotion. Even with his fourscore years and three, a biblical age if ever there was one, he still found the minds of women mysterious.
Travails. A good word for the fear and suffering they went through that summer. He had never satisfied himself that he knew what had really happened to that little boy. Long ago, on that late walk home from Slaidburn after the boy had been “delivered,” he had told himself that there would be no profit in inquiring after all the details, and he remained convinced that he had been right.
He felt terribly tired now, just bone weary. In his mind, the faces of the people he remembered shifted and shaped themselves into a tender look with a loving smile, somehow more an enfolding embrace than just a picture.
The Slaidburn Angel Page 22