Hello, my darling, he sighed, I’ve been watching out for you.
Kaslo Pioneer Visits England
In August 1951, seventy-five-year-old Margaret Isherwood Whittaker took a lengthy journey by airplane from British Columbia to the north of England. She landed in Scotland, and then made her way by train to her brother’s house in Haslingden. I think the brother must have been Tom.
She wrote of her travels for the newspaper back home, the Kootenaian (named for the Kootenay Mountains in which she lived), and her first letter, which ran to a full column, is filled with lists of things she had to eat. I suspect she had heard stories of rationing and post-war shortages, but as she commented in her letter: “Doesn’t look like starvation in England.”
While in Haslingden, she visited three brother’s widows and their families. James Edward and William, her stepbrothers, had both married and predeceased her, and a passing reference to “my brother Dick’s wife who has a television-radio-gramophone,” suggests that Richard, too, was now dead.
Her letter closed with the news that she would be leaving on Saturday to go to Slaidburn, her home village, and she signed off as “Margaret Whittaker, the Wanderer.”
Margaret lived in Haslingden from 1885 until 1900, almost fifteen years, while she left Slaidburn before she turned ten. But when she was in her seventies she still described Slaidburn as her home village.
It was October before the Kootenaian published “Another Letter from England” and Margaret had written this time from Clitheroe. She had been up to the Lake District, through Barrow-in-Furness and Dalton-in-Furness, which suggests that she was visiting Gardner connections up there.
Her letter is full of comparisons of the cost of food and the availability of appliances, and she seems impressed by the standard of living of those she had visited. When we leave a place for a long time, we do tend to imagine that it has stood still, unable to progress without our presence, and when we return we are surprised and perhaps even a little miffed at what they have been able to accomplish in our absence.
Margaret seems to have been treated a bit like visiting royalty, as her report about Slaidburn includes the information: “A few people own their houses, but King Wilkinsons own most of the houses in Slaidburn, also all surrounding fields and farm houses. They are what are called landed gentry. I was there for tea. Mr. King Wilkinson has an aunt in Creston and once lived on Creston Flats. He is a photographer.”
In closing her letter, grandma wrote: “I wish all people could see my old home. They’d wonder why I left it. But I guess I wanted to see the world, like the little duckling in the story. Hope I get safe home like him and be content to stay. Ever a Canadian MARGARET WHITTAKER.”
No mention is made in her letters of the court case that was the real cause of the family’s departure from Slaidburn, or her work in the mills of Haslingden. Ever the tough little optimist, grandma was quite happy to forget all of that.
Various Verdicts
The defence that little Thomas suffocated accidentally in the trap on the road home from Clitheroe seems just too serendipitous. An otherwise healthy toddler conveniently smothers as his mother is on the way to confess his existence to her new husband, possibly at the expense of his love and protection? I think not.
Cathryn, like me, is unable to swallow the “tragic coincidence” argument.
David, as we know, became convinced that Isabella “did it,” and I think that I have joined him in that opinion. I have hypothesized that females prefer to approach the harming of others from a bit of distance, and that Isabella may have found a way to tighten the rug over Thomas’s face with her feet. It makes me feel ill even to write that, but the fact is that the baby was dead when they got to the farm, and Isabella knew, without making any effort to wake him or hit his back to fill his lungs with air, that Thomas was dead when they arrived at the farm. Not to mention that black mark and the scratches.
Penny, the lawyer, believes that the women behaved hysterically once they had returned to Slaidburn, running about the countryside with the child’s dead body, but that the source of their hysteria was their fear of being found out, not their fear that they would be blamed for Thomas’s accidental death.
Discussing the case after Rita Hirst’s presentation, one woman commented that, sadly, things are still much the same. Girls still get pregnant with the boy next door and children are raised with more than one father. As Rita wrote to me:
When we go to Slaidburn we often cross Langcliffe Cross Bridge. I always remember poor little Thomas, so unloved and unwanted, passed from woman to woman to be cared for. I think nowadays the verdict would have been manslaughter.
My husband, William, who is almost as deeply steeped in the evidence as I am, is convinced that the death of little Thomas was an accident. On the one hand, I wonder how he could think that in the face of all the evidence. On the other hand, I wonder if I am biased against stepmothers, even though I am one. But William is most representative of the jury of peers that found Grace and Isabella not guilty, so he is not the first hard-working, thoughtful man to believe the accident story.
To get on with his life, John Isherwood had to embrace the notion of the innocence of the sisters. Or did he? Maybe he just had to believe that Grace was innocent, and that Isabella, as young people sometimes do, just went too far.
Being Isabella
Isabella sits sadly in the back of my mind.
My feelings for her are contradictory, and certainly not guided by a simple moral principle. I think she probably was a murderess, but I also have a great sympathy, verging on empathy, for her.
For me, Isabella is somehow more real than Grace, more present in my mind, even though I now realize that I did hear stories about Grace — stepmother stories — when I was a child. Isabella’s voice is the voice of the crime and the cover-up, and the ultimate plea to the jury for acquittal. Hers is the voice that speaks through the carefully inscribed notes of the police officer who was first on the scene, clumsily peopling their alibi with the names of her neighbours in Dalton-on-Furness.
Hers was the life that never got a real chance to tell a different story.
When I think about my life and my formative influences, I always come back to Penny. Penny showed me what a mother should be like. Penny defined my experience in so many ways. She taught me the importance of lullabies, no matter how tunelessly rendered.
When I have tried to imagine the relationship between Grace and Isabella — Penny gets to play the role of Grace, Pillar of the Mother’s Union and tea-maker extraordinaire, while I get to be Isabella.
Isabella was the adoring younger sister, who thought Grace could manage to look after everybody; John, baby James, John’s five children, Thomas Gardner, and perhaps even Isabella herself. When she realized, too late, that it was all too much for Grace, perhaps she just panicked and tried to help her older sister out of the mess she was in. In her confusion, Isabella probably thought that without young Thomas her sister could go on to have a good life with John Isherwood. And, in fact, Grace did.
I am an adoring younger sister, and I would go a long way to help Penny out of a tough spot. I don’t think that I would murder anyone, but these are different times. It would be almost unendurable for me to see Penny deeply unhappy, especially if I could do anything to save her from it. In my own protective way, I worry about her relations with her children and her husband, and whether or not she has enough money to do all the things I think that her remarkable generosity and sacrifice have earned her a right to do.
Isabella was in service at fourteen and dead at twenty-five, with a few months spent in gaol, indicted for murder, in between. Weakened by consumption, she would have known for months, if not years, that she was dying.
Isabella was very brave to stand up at the trial and read her statement, and she must have been quite compelling. Or maybe the combination of her little speech and her sister’s wan presence made the difference.
But her sister went on t
o have at least five more children and live to be a respectable member of the community, while Isabella just wasted away.
I’m touched that Grace was there at Isabella’s deathbed, leaving behind her large family to look after her dying sister. No question there was a deep bond there.
And what if Isabella didn’t do it? Here she is, in the brief immortality of a story, condemned as a murderess even though she was acquitted. The saying goes that you cannot libel the dead, but that implies that they are past caring. Prospectively, I doubt that I would ever be past caring about my reputation, even when I am dead.
While I write, I have been thinking of this book as a kind of a memorial for Thomas Gardner, the little boy whose death, accidental or not, was scarcely mourned. But I have felt Isabella reaching out to me, trying to get me to understand how she got caught up in a circumstance where she had little or nothing to gain and where everything was lost.
So, even though they make a strange pairing, this is a requiem for the toddler Thomas Gardner and for his youthful Aunt Isabella too.
A Meditation on Thomas Gardner (December 15, 1882, to May 16, 1885)
Twenty-nine months of life. Not enough to really get started being.
A child approaching two-and-a-half years old is a child on the brink of speaking, of complaining about being hungry or cold in ways that can be readily understood. Little Thomas could have been getting ready to become a little person, with a personality and, maybe, a sense of humour or a capability to accurately observe the world around him.
We adopted our son Daniel when he was twenty-two months old. He had not been abused, or knowingly neglected. In fact, he had been loved. His problem, or perhaps misfortune, was that he had been cared for by someone with a mental illness who often wasn’t capable of understanding his needs.
Nevertheless, or maybe as a result, Daniel was unnaturally quiet and acquiescent. He behaved as if he was unaccustomed to being fed when he was hungry. Instead, he waited patiently until someone was ready to feed him. And he didn’t seem to expect to be comforted if he fussed or cried. He was quiet and seemingly thoughtful, but he didn’t begin to speak until he was almost three.
Little Thomas might have been like that. He had been passed from his mother to a wet nurse, to another, to a workhouse, to his grandparents, and back to his mother, all in a span of twenty-nine months. He probably had no idea who, if anyone, to love or trust. Each time he was cared for, or even settled, he had been cast off or moved. Near the end, he had suffered a long journey with a woman he couldn’t know was his aunt, arriving at a house full of children and noise.
Little Thomas would not have understood that Grace and Isabella wanted to leave him at the workhouse in Clitheroe, only that he had been on another long journey, this time in a trap, where he had to sit on the floor on a bed of scratchy rushes.
He would also not have understood that he was not merely inconvenient, but that his mother believed that his very existence threatened her own well-being and that of his little brother, and of the baby she was carrying. And his Aunt Isabella was tired of hauling him about the countryside.
I am sure that Thomas was a passive child, life had not encouraged him to be anything else, but he was “well nourished” and not likely to have given up life without a struggle.
I hope he didn’t struggle for long.
Paradise Lost
In June 1963, as Maggie approached ninety years of age, she wrote a letter to her son Dean. In it she reminisced:
We were on a large farm in Yorkshire when I was a little girl. I had a Horse called Bonny and did a lot of riding around the Farm looking to the fences. Herding up the Ducks. They would stay all night a quarter of a mile in the Pond and the Foxes would eat them up. So I drove them home and shut them up safe. I also liked looking and watching where our hens stole their nest in the Hedges to lay their eggs. My Brothers did all the hard work. Milking cleaning stables etc. For Father would keep the Stables Barns and Farm yard so very clean they had scuts shoes or clogs to wear while doing the Work.
School clothes and shoes changed for School. I was the only girl in the family until I was 17 years old. Then I had a step sister arrive. She is still alive in England. I saw her the last time I was in England.
I guess you saw her Dean or did you while you were in the Army. She looks like stepmother.
I get around using a stick for walking. I am well and hope I will be able to come to Edmonton to see Tessie. How is she.
I hope you come and bring the girls.
Love Gram
Glad John did so well. Gram
A Kind of Immortality
One chance at immortality is to live on in the thoughts of others. Even if one is neither wealthy nor accomplished, your life can have meaning to someone who comes later.
You can find the village of Slaidburn in the Doomsday Book, and Saint Andrew’s Church can be traced back to the eleventh century at least. There is a cheeky pagan sculpture looking down at worshippers from the church wall that speaks of even earlier times.
Nothing much has changed in Slaidburn in the last century or two. When I walk in the cemetery, between the gravestones, I somehow expect it to communicate with me, to tell me something through the engravings on the stones or through the grass under my feet.
Many of my Isherwood forebears were stonemasons, so I expect to be related at least in this way to more of the tombstones than I can identify. One of the few I can claim with certainty is the flat stone on the ground over behind the grave of Henry Bond. When you push the grass back you can read: “Thomas, son of J and M Isherwood, inter Nov 26, 1806 also Christiane their daughter inter May 19, 1808, infant.”
More dead children. My great-great-great-uncle Thomas and aunt Christiane.
The parents J and M Isherwood described on that stone are John and Mary, the grandparents of John Green Isherwood, who was in turn my great-grandfather. Married in 1803, this John was a stonemason and farmer and they lived at Chapel Croft Farm. But I can find no stone in St. Andrews Cemetery that commemorates either John or Mary.
Penny and I have a plan to memorialize someone at the church who was not related to us, but who changed the direction of our lives. We have plans for a memorial plaque to be fastened to the wall of Saint Andrews, acknowledging the presence in that cemetery of the tiny remains of Thomas Gardner, aged two-and-a-half years, died May 16, 1885.
To us it seems only right that on the plaque there be an engraving of the Slaidburn Angel, a little figure in petticoats found lost by the riverside, accompanied by the inscription:
After all, tears have been shed for you
Appendix 1
Excerpt from the Yorkshire Post, Tuesday August 4, 1885:
Leeds Summer Assizes
--------------
Crown Court — Monday
(Before Mr. Justice Wills)
His lordship resumed the business of the court shortly after eleven o’clock.
ALLEGED CHILD MURDER BY TWO SISTERS
Grace Isherwood (25), married, and Isabella Gardner (18), single, servant, were indicted for the murder of a child named Thomas Gardner, alleged to be the illegitimate son of the older prisoner, at Slaidburn, on 16 May. Mr. Lawrence Gane, Q.C. and Mr. Manisty prosecuted, and the prisoners were defended by Mr. E. Tindal Atkinson.
Mr. Gane remarked in opening his case that the evidence was mainly circumstantial. It was not a case in which the prosecution could lay before the jury the positive testimony of eye witnesses to the acts of the prisoners, who were sisters, coming from Dalton-in-Furness. In September last year the elder, then unmarried, went as housekeeper for a respectable farmer named Isherwood, at Slaidburn, taking with her an illegitimate baby. For some time she stayed with Mr. Isherwood in the capacity of housekeeper, exchanging that position for that of wife in January. On May 9 Gardner visited her sister, being accompanied by a boy, some two years and two months years old, stated by her to belong to a woman named Elizabeth Dockray, who had entrusted it to her for nurse.
That child was on May 16 found dead in Easington Brook, near Slaidburn, by a farmer named John Barge. The body was lying in a pool about eighteen inches deep in the middle. Perceiving that the child was dead, Barge went to Slaidburn for a policeman. He afterward returned with a constable, and the body was then in the same position as it was before. Near the spot there went over the brook a Bridge, to protect which a sort of pavement extending about thirty yards along the edge of the brook had been laid down. The child lay with half its head under the kerbstone of the pavement. Now the prisoners were charged with having by drowning caused the death of this child, which was alleged by the prosecution to be the offspring of Grace Isherwood. Before he married the elder prisoner Mr. Isherwood was a widower, having one daughter nine years of age. The daughter would state that on the day in question the prisoners left her father’s house with the two children with the intention of going to Clitheroe. They borrowed a neighbour’s trap and arrived between twelve and one o’clock at Clitheroe, where they made some purchases and afterward visited the workhouse. There they saw the matron, Mrs Lofthouse, to whom Isherwood stated that she was a widow with two children, one of whom she wished to leave at the workhouse, not being able to support them. The matron refused to accept the child without an order, and the prisoners then returned to Slaidburn. Mr. Isherwood’s daughter would say that on their return at about six o’clock, Isabella remained outside the house, having apparently the older of the children wrapped in a shawl. She did not see the face of the child nor hear it speak. Gardner went away with the child in the direction of Slaidburn as was shortly afterward followed by Grace Isherwood. Barge, who found the body, would prove that at a quarter past seven o’clock the same evening he saw two women proceed to the bridge referred to but these two persons could not be positively identified. Later, Mr. Isherwood was seen accompanied by two women going in the direction of his house. A Mrs. Tomlinson, would prove that at about seven o’clock that evening she saw Isabella on the road leading to the bridge but could not say whether she had a child with her. The next day (Sunday) Isabella told her she had been taking the child to its mother. A constable who went to Isherwood’s house after the child was found was told by the younger prisoner that the child they had had with them belonged to Elizabeth Dockray. Enquiries resulted in it being proved that although there were living in the neighbourhood two women named Dockray neither was the mother of the child referred to.
The Slaidburn Angel Page 23