The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  These first writs were served by a willing if timid clerk named Lever, but there soon appeared someone much more to Georgina’s tastes, the drunken, argumentative, and—as it was to prove—unstoppable Captain William Harcourt. Nothing about him was as it seemed. He was not born Harcourt, but Johnston. He never was captain. Gazetted ensign in 1853 just in time to be sent to the Crimea, he found himself before Sebastopol. Quite as weary of the siege as his generals, he exchanged uniforms with a dead Russian and simply walked into the town, where he had “a jolly good time.” He marched out of one gate with Menshikov’s army as the French and British arrived through another. His later career included a total of twelve years of hard labor and any amount of tall stories. Georgina describes him presenting himself for employment: “a poor thin miserable creature, smelling fearfully strong of beer, stale onions and tobacco, with a suspicion of kipper and bloater.” He was taken on at once.

  In the little firm she set up in Red Lion Court, the elderly and high-minded Chaffers deviled away in one corner, Georgina rehearsed her legal phraseology at an ink-spattered desk, and Captain Harcourt lounged at the door, ready to dart away at a moment’s notice to serve another writ. She found the life entrancing. Chaffers was only there as consultant, for in all the suits she brought forward, she intended to be the plaintiff in person acting in forma pauperis, words she was beginning to relish. F. C. Phillips wrote a biographical sketch of her as she was in these Red Lion days:

  In the first room was a grille, behind which, when not serving writs and other processes at his own personal risk, used to sit Mrs. Weldon’s secretary, Mr. Harcourt. Mrs. Weldon herself used to transact business in the outer room amid a chaos of ink bottles, stumps of pens, papers and memoranda, legal and otherwise. The inner room was her sanctum, and here she made tea and received her visitors.

  Phillips was impressed by her and made note of her short hair, vivacious features, and “eyes strangely brilliant and piercing.” He was conscious of her reputation as an escaped lunatic, a thing he scoffed as quite impossible to believe. All the same:

  That she was strangely unlike most other women was evident at once. Her manner no doubt was feminine; one could understand in a moment the power she claimed to exercise over children and animals; but with all this there was a strange masculine thread in her character. She behaved like a woman, but she thought and expressed herself as a man, and would and could beyond question make herself extremely disagreeable if she chose to do so . . .

  By the end of her first year she had, with Captain Harcourt’s energetic assistance, served notice of her first twenty-five actions, which are worth tabulating. They read:

  Weldon v. Weldon

  Weldon v. de Bathe

  Weldon v. Neal (two cases)

  Weldon v. Lloyd

  Weldon v. Bates

  Weldon v. Semple

  Weldon v. Rudderforth

  Weldon v. Johnson (Figaro)

  Weldon v. Winn

  Weldon v. Misu

  Weldon v. Misu (second case)

  Weldon v. Maddock

  Weldon v. Jaffray (Birmingham Music Festival)

  Weldon v. Sylvester

  Weldon v. Moncrieff

  Weldon v. Winslow

  Weldon v. Winslow (second case)

  Weldon v. Weldon (second case)

  Weldon v. Gounod

  Weldon v. Lloyd (second case)

  Weldon v. Rivière (second case)

  Weldon v. Budd and Brodie

  Weldon v. Stevens

  Weldon v. Wontner

  In all but three of these cases she represented herself. Social Salvation, the Herald of Health, the True Cross, and all the other little publications for which she had written, all the esoteric knowledge she had been offered from cranks and do-gooders, even the unfailing accuracy of predictions from the Other Side she had received, could now go hang. This wasn’t litigation; it was war. It was blitzkrieg.

  3

  Georgina recruited one more assistant, Bernard de Bear, a young shorthand writer. Full transcripts of court proceedings were no more widely studied then than they are now, and most people happily took their view of the law from reports published in newspapers—the greater the crime, the more lurid the reporting. Georgina had no trust in what she called “press gush.” Hadn’t journalists inserted remarks in the Menier trial, attributing words to defense counsel that she was quite sure he never uttered? This would not do for her, always suspicious that some wrong would accure if any record were not complete and entire. De Bear was the answer. In giving him the job of reporting her verbatim and demanding from him scrupulous accuracy, she was unknowingly fostering the future principal of the Pitman School of Shorthand. Chaffers to prepare, Harcourt to serve, de Bear to report; nevertheless, the bulk of the work fell upon her. Her enormous energies, her appetite for the impossible challenge, were at long last given shape and focus. The first flurry of actions was merely the beginning. Altogether, from 1883 until the end of the century, she brought over a hundred cases before the courts, pleas heard by learned judges up to and including the Lord Chief Justice, but also footling affairs brought before magistrates’ and sessions courts—wherever she could attack her enemies. The sheer scale of these labors was enough to make her famous, irrespective of the results.

  The press was not slow to pick up her story. On quiet news days editors would demand in print, “What is Mrs. Weldon up to?,” and often the question was answered within the week. In one sense the press invented her—she was in the public eye, a metaphor she by no means found displeasing. As with music, so with journalism: she remained to the end completely naive. She did not and could not distinguish between being newsworthy because of some exceptional talent and being the construct of the newspaper industry. When she was told by a news clipping bureau that she garnered more column inches than many a cabinet minister, it seemed to her a straightforward demonstration of her own superiority, without realizing she was a victim of news values quite as much as their beneficiary.

  Her old enemy A’Beckett drew her cartoon in Punch, in which she walked a tightrope looking childishly plump and overinnocent, with the minatory caption “Be careful you don’t fall, Mrs. Weldon.” The implied suggestion that she would fall soon enough was not shared by the wider public. This was a unique instance of a woman clearing her name and reputation with a fearlessness and determination that seemed somehow modern. After such a long journey she had come into step with the mood of the age. If the laws of England were at last offering women a modicum of independence, here was one that seized it with both hands. In the period of her greatest activity, 1883–88, the General Post Office had no trouble at all in delivering letters from all over the world addressed simply to Mrs. Weldon, London.

  Mrs. Weldon is a woman of great natural talents, much increased by conscientious and untiring cultivation, and she has specially addressed herself to the art of singing in which she has few equals and very few superiors. But she is also a very energetic lady, entirely unshackled by conventional ideas. Mrs. Weldon is certainly not as other women are for she has a most indomitable courage, a marvellous energy, and an incredible activity and industry . . .

  This description by “Jehu Junior,” a pseudonymous newspaper biographer, was cheap puffing journalism, but it reflected popular opinion. For five years or more, hardly a month passed without her presence in one or another court. If the detail was sometimes hard to follow, the broad-brush concept was simple: this was a woman whose good character was the point at issue. She was determined to reinstate it by using the law as her megaphone and the royal courts of justice as an amplifying chamber. Whatever the lawyers might think about that, the general public was on her side. The first journalist to call her Don Quixote struck a chord. Yet in addition to tilting at windmills she also set her lance at the establishment. Part of her popularity came from the desire newspaper readers had to see the world of frock coats and top hats humbled.

  “We pay for a Government. We have it! We pay for law.
We have it! Fancy paying for substance and receiving—what? Jokes! Chaff! Witticisms on the part of Judges and Magistrates. Bounce! Bluff! Bullying on the part of Barristers.” When she spoke like that, she was touching an exposed nerve.

  For generations the common experience of those unlucky enough to fall foul of the civil law was how laggardly and cripplingly expensive it was. “Pettifogging” sounds like an adjective flung off by Dickens, but has a much longer ancestry than that. For three centuries perception of the law had been colored by stories of delay, chicanery, and expense. At the same time (and partly as a consequence) newspaper law reports about other people’s miseries were a piquant form of theater. For many Victorians they also acted as a kind of social forum. When Weldon v. de Bathe was reported by the Times, on the same page was a much more extensive report of a case in which a widow sued a life assurance company for payment of a policy of £2,000. What made the case so interesting was that it turned on the deceased man’s drinking habits, which it was held he may have falsely represented when taking out the policy and which may have contributed to his death. Much of the evidence was provided by staff and members of the Sunderland Conservative Club, where the policyholder had been a member. The particular point of interest in this case was implied rather than stated. Mr. Lotinga was a Jew.

  Weldon v. de Bathe may have taken second billing in the Times in that day’s law reports, but there was a sequel to it that indicates the general and uneasy interest her suits aroused. Georgina won the case. In doing so she uncovered a piece of law that made the jurors sit up and take notice. It emerged during her questioning of de Bathe that someone who signed an order for committal to an asylum had no power under the law to revoke it. One of the jurors, a Mr. Walter Holcombe, wrote to the Times after the trial had concluded:

  The argument that “the person who had signed an order under the statute for the reception of a supposed lunatic had no power to get the party out again” was the most powerful weapon my fellow-jurors had against me in my almost singlehanded fight for what I considered their extravagant idea of the damages to be awarded; and which, had I not taken a firm stand, would have been largely in excess of the substantial sum agreed upon.

  Holcombe’s letter missed the point. This was not a story about the scale of damages. The jury had heard in evidence a piece of law that seemed to the majority of them completely unjust but that had lain undisturbed since the lunacy laws were first framed. It had taken Georgina Weldon to bring it out into the light.

  All the high-profile cases that followed one another down the decades, in addition to their human interest, had the effect of theatrically relighting the fabric of society. An instance of how the law raised matters of general social interest was the conviction of Colonel Valentine Baker for indecent assault in 1875. Baker was one of the most dashing and intelligent cavalry officers in the army when he came to court. He was a Crimean veteran and assistant adjutant general. On conviction for an indecent assault in a railway carriage upon a woman of good character, he asked to be allowed the honorable way out by resigning his commission. Both the Duke of Cambridge and Prince Edward attempted to intercede on his behalf with the Queen. Victoria refused and he was paraded, stripped of his insignia of rank, and had his sword broken. Much was made of the fact that during the trial, out of courtesy to the young woman who brought the charge, Baker refused to question any part of her evidence. By so doing, he ensured his own destruction. This was gentlemanly and ungentlemanly conduct all in the same story.

  Everybody (especially Georgina) had an opinion about the Tichborne Claimant. Maurice Kenealy, the Claimant’s disgraced and disbarred counsel, went on to publish a scurrilous newspaper about the history of the trial called the Englishman. It was edited from grimy rooms in Fleur de Lys Court, a few steps away from Georgina’s office. The first number sold a staggering 100,000 copies. With a face value of 2d, this first edition changed hands for as much as half a crown a copy. In only a few years’ time, in 1888, the whole country would be convulsed by the Whitechapel murders. It was a story about Jack the Ripper and unsolved crime, but it was also an indictment about the way some people lived. Mrs. Weldon’s adventures in court fed this same curiosity. They were high entertainment—the circus attraction of the tightrope walker—but in the actions she brought against Harry, de Bathe, and the mad doctors she added very significantly to the weight of public concern surrounding the operations of the lunacy laws.

  In the Semple trial, heard before Mr. Justice Hawkins in July 1884, she subpoenaed Lord Shaftesbury, the chief commissioner of lunacy. Shaftesbury’s reputation as a philanthropist and evangelistic social reformer was unimpeachable—he had interested himself in the plight of lunatics since 1828. Now in the last years of his life, almost as old as the century and laden with honor, he came to the Queen’s Bench in aid of the strange Mrs. Weldon, a woman he had little sympathy with socially. It was a brilliant coup on her part. Both he and the trial judge exhibited signs of the greatest unease as the evidence unfolded—it has to be remembered that Shaftesbury was being questioned by the very woman who in only slightly different circumstances would have been confined in an asylum without him, as chief commissioner, ever knowing about it.

  The judge heard evidence from Shaftesbury that licensed madhouses were conducted on principles of profit. When defense counsel stood up to object, he was waved down. “It is obvious, is it not? It is not to be supposed that anybody will keep a lunatic asylum except for profit.”

  “Sir Henry Hawkins then asked Shaftesbury, on a point of clarification, whether it was the practice of asylum keepers to send out their own agents and servants to arrest persons as lunatics. Shaftesbury could see where this was leading. Hawkins asked the key question. “Surely it can’t be contended that a doctor has a right to arrest me, or make an order for my reception into his lunatic asylum just as though he were a policeman arresting me for some offence?”

  Before Shaftesbury could reply, Georgina interrupted him. “Ought the proprietor to get medical men to give the certificates?”

  The chief commissioner for lunacy glanced at Hawkins. Speaking to him rather than to the plaintiff, he replied somberly, “We should look with great suspicion upon such a course.”

  The public interest aspect could not have been clearer to the jury. What had been uncovered here was bad law. They responded accordingly, giving Georgina damages of £1,000.

  As she became better practiced, the knockabout style with which she started out was tempered by a firmer understanding of the law and a shrewd grasp of its personalities. Appearing before the master of the rolls, Lord Esher, she argued a verdict given by Vice-Chancellor Bacon on the grounds that he was too old. (He was in his eighties.) Esher replied, “The last time you were here you complained that your case had been heard by my brother Bowen, and that he could not do justice to you on account of his youth. What age do you require a judge to be?” Plaintiff: “Your age, my lord.” It was the kind of swift and easy retort that endeared her to the bench.

  Her cross-examining of witnesses was often prolix and in some cases spiteful; nor did she always avoid digging holes for herself. In the Winslow case, defense counsel, a Mr. Clarke, tried to savage her.

  Q: You thought the only course of action was to libel people all round?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Did you send to Dr. Winslow all you wrote against him?

  A: Quite everything. (Laughter)

  At the end of Clarke’s cross-examination, Lord Huddleston directed her gently as follows: “Mrs. Weldon, the position is this: the cross-examination is finished and you have the right to re-examine yourself.”

  She replied loftily, “He has not asked me anything.”

  As well as inexperience it was an example of her notorious petulance, and Huddleston was disappointed, because she had just admitted libel and he wished to give her opportunity to defend herself. She had come to the law with more than a little contempt for lawyers and seemed not to understand that judges had once been barristers
. It sometimes made her look stupid. Yet her memory was phenomenal, and she was gradually learning how to score points.

  Three days later in the same trial she managed to extract from an exquisitely embarrassed Dr. Winn, in an examination about the nature of her certifiable delusions, the admission that in his medical opinion one of the worst of them was that if she had charge of the management of the Albert Hall she could make it pay. This was more impressive. Huddleston heard the evidence with extreme patience and courtesy but in the end nonsuited her. However, in his summing-up he expressed surprise at the workings of the lunacy acts as they had been shown in Georgina’s case. Though the actions of the defendants were legal, the law was unsatisfactory. This—and the calling of Lord Shaftesbury as witness in the Semple case—had in the end far more repercussion than who said what to whom.

  Not every judge was so well disposed to Georgina, and not all the actions she brought were worth the effort she put into them. The one thing she did not experience was ridicule. Inside the court and out, she was treated with increasing respect. In two areas she scored major successes. The first of these was in Weldon v. Weldon, where she attempted to make Harry honor in full the restitution of conjugality. This case caused lawyers some anxieties. As the law stood, the only means of restoring Georgina’s rights was by “attachment,” which was granted with great reluctance by the president of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division in 1883. The meaning of this was that if Harry still refused to comply with the order against him and cohabit with his wife, he must now go to jail for contempt. The House of Commons took sufficient note of the legal interest in this case to amend the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1884 by abolishing attachment. It was instantly dubbed the Weldon Relief Act, but had far greater consequences for women than for men. Lord Esher, master of the rolls, commented that “the passing of the Act of Parliament which took away the power of attachment in such cases is the strongest possible evidence to show that the legislature had no idea that a power would remain in the husband to imprison the wife for himself; and this tends to show that it is not and never was the law of England that the husband had such a right.” It did not matter that in the Weldon case the wife had come close to imprisoning the husband. As Lord Esher indicated, she had uncovered bad law. She had also significantly added to women’s rights.