The Girk Who Lived On Air

by Stephen Wade

  Phillips’ most useful and productive note was about the possibility of hidden food or drink on her body: ‘On looking at the girl’s shoulders and armpits, I found the right shoulder much more prominent than the other, the left armpit being very hollow, sufficiently so to contain a half-pint of water.’ He agreed about the excrement and the time it had been in her body.

  Dr Lewis wrote in his autopsy report: ‘On making the incision through the integuments from the larynx to the pubes, a considerable layer of subcutaneous fat was cut through’. This was an inch thick below the umbilicus. These are important facts with regard to the observed healthy and, in fact, plump features described just before the second watching. Lewis wrote about the digestive tract: ‘The entire length of the colon was distended with air. At different parts of the transverse and descending colon, a large quantity of hardened faeces was found, enough to fill a breakfast cup. We thought it would weigh about eight ounces.’

  All this would have strongly suggested to those present that Sarah had somehow taken sustenance shortly before the nurses arrived, but had not passed a stool. There had been plenty of urine, however, and so the possibility of quantities of liquid food taken from a vessel kept in her armpit was clearly implied by Phillips.

  The business was adjourned and then resumed the next day at the Pencader schoolroom. The main elements of the story were gone through, from the first watching to the end. When Evan Jacob was questioned, in Welsh, he spoke directly, summarising his family situation and going to the very source of the illness: ‘I have my wife and seven children, and a servant man. My eldest child is a daughter, nearly eighteen, and the deceased was my third daughter. At the time of her death she was twelve years and seven months old. In her earlier days she was a very active child, but a change took place in February 1867. She was at school and she was spitting blood… crying out and complaining of a pain in her side.’ He recalled that the first doctor to see her thought she had worms. Then he reminded the jury that he made the vow and told the medical men that only the ‘Great Doctor’ could help.

  He must have seemed to the jury at that point as either a very simple man – or a simpleton. On top of that, their credence was probably stretched when he said, ‘I do not know who gave her the cross, nor can I say who first placed money on her breast. I do not remember that I ever took any money. Persons left sixpence or a shilling behind them after visiting.’

  It must have appeared that he had been advised as to how he would look through the eyes of strangers, and those statements about the money had to be made emphatically, although no reporter recorded how he actually spoke. Hannah was always the quiet figure in the background, but we have a glimpse of her part in things from Ann Jones’ testimony. The Welsh nurse stated that she had heard Hannah say to Evan that he must not give her any food because they had made their vow. Both parents were judged as equally involved at that time, but of course, there was so much more said about Evan – and he was the father, and so had the position of pater familias.

  Evan was quizzed in depth about his involvement with the care of his daughter, tracing his actions all the way back to the onset of the first fast. One exchange in particular is of special interest:

  Coroner: You had two daughters, one 18 and the other 16 had you not?

  Evan: Yes Coroner: They were strong and healthy?

  Evan: Yes Coroner: The mother recovered from her confinement did she not? Evan: Yes Coroner: Yet you made the bed?

  Evan: Yes Coroner: Yet you never saw the stains of urine out of the bed? Evan: Never Coroner: And that from August 1867 to December, 1868 she never made water?

  Evan: Yes Coroner: And then for how long?

  Evan: Three days – consecutive days. I made the bed on alternate days, but counted the spots on the bed. She was unconscious of passing water.

  Coroner: How do you know?

  Evan: She was not willing to talk about it.

  Coroner: What do you mean by spots?

  Evan: Spots of urine. The quantity expected of a child of one year old.

  Evan told the coroner and jury that he began to dress his daughter in the ritualistic way, and it seems likely that this scrutiny of his habits with other, older daughters was to sound out his knowledge of matters relating to infants, with the sub-text of finding out exactly why and how his ploys to control the whole situation with Sarah began. The coroner was searching for confirmation of Evan’s habits of thought and his motives regarding the care and control of his third daughter, with one eye on the incidence of profit and notoriety.

  This aspect of the case was highlighted long before, at the time when Mr Hughes was set to be prosecuted for ‘assault’ by the Jacobs. The Western Mail had reported on that and what happened there relates very closely to the questions asked by the coroner after Sarah’s death. Here is the main section from the report on Pearson Hughes’ appearance at the petty sessions at Llandysul, in which Thomas Jones is speaking in defence of Hughes:

  The defendant said he would pull her tongue out, and she begged Evan Davies, who was with Dr Hughes, to take him [Jones] away. He did not do so, and Dr Hughes stripped the girl, and held the stethoscope to her chest and held her breath. He said to her, “Let your breath run, you wicked creature.” She told him she had a doctor of her own. Defendant asked when she was last on her legs, and plaintiff [Evan] said, “In the name of the Lord from Heaven go out of my house and leave my child alone…

  The reporter then stressed the behaviour of Hannah: ‘Before leaving the house Dr Hughes gave the woman money… the assault was really committed on the 13th March but the information was not laid until the 10th of April… The fact that the woman did not refuse the money was also suggestive, for if an assault had been committed the mother would have thrown the money out through the doorway…’.

  The first thing that strikes the reader here is that Hughes’ approach (if it was actually as described) was surely typical of the kind of forthright and direct attitudes which would have been taken by doctors across the land in every dispensary and hospital for the poorer classes. If we place Evan’s attitudes in that context, then it has to be concluded that he was either playing a mind game and starting to believe it himself, or he was a crook.

  Regarding the taking of the money from Hughes, that may or may not have happened; this reads as a distorted and possibly partly fabricated report (note the verb used – he stripped the girl) to maximize the sensation which was breaking out when a medical man of good reputation stood in the petty sessions before the bench.

  Many at the time of the inquest would recall that, and their opinions would have been formed by the ridiculous alleged assault, yet they would recall that it happened, and that fact alone would lodge in the mind. Consequently, the jury of locals and indeed the public present would have no fixed views, merely a bundle of prejudice and extreme reports of something suspicious and possibly nasty in their own neck of the woods in Wales.

  This was simply an inquest though. Sensationally, the coroner said that Evan Jacob was charged with manslaughter, a complex concept at that time, as we shall see; but the verdict was that the girl had died from starvation and Evan and Hannah had neglected to supply her with food to sustain life. The parents were committed and granted bail. It was just the beginning of a prosecution which opens up to scrutiny the double-edged and often inscrutable workings of the law machine in 1869.

  6

  From Court to Prison

  Fresh from brawling courts

  And dusty purlieus of the law

  Tennyson: In Memoriam

  This was a big occasion. Every assize was one of the compelling stories of the year for the local and regional press. Basil Nield, writing in the 1960s, after a life as a judge, described the trajectory of the event in modern times, and his account (though it includes a Rolls Royce) captures the spirit of the occasion: ‘Setting out from London, if the judge of assize goes by train, he is entitled to a reserved carriage. This is just one way of securing that there shall be n
o danger of the judge coming into contact with any litigant or juryman, or even accused on bail…. Arrived at his destination, the judge is met by the High Sheriff or the Under Sheriff of the county, formally attired. Very often the stationmaster is also there to meet him and escort him to the car…. The judge is conveyed to his lodgings which consist either of a house provided by the local authority or that of a private individual.’ Nield then adds that there would be a ceremonial opening and a service in the parish church ‘in which is said the Bidding Prayer’. This prayer referred to all varieties of persons in authority, to ask for wisdom and guidance. Of course, heads would turn and members of the press would be scribbling in their notebooks.

  In Carmarthen, this kind of ceremonial had been going on for many centuries, and the guildhall on assize days was acknowledged as the formal centre of the community, because justice would be done there, hopefully with wisdom and with human understanding as well as with the guidance of the heavy law books.

  Everyone involved in the process was now open to blame, censure, and potential criminal prosecution. The reason was simple: that the girl had died so soon after the professional watching pointed to a fraud, and the adults appeared to be in control of this, manipulating a child, and to such a degree that she had been starved to death for monetary gain. That all seems clear-cut, but it was not what it seemed. Nothing ever was in the story of Sarah Jacob.

  The medical men found themselves summoned to appear before the magistrates at the Wilke’s Head, Llandysul; one of the doctors, Lewis, was a magistrate himself, such was the bizarre nature of the first stage of the criminal proceedings. There was a moral accusation too, and a professional one, expressed succinctly in The Lancet for Christmas, 1869, in the wake of Sarah’s death: ‘The practical lesson is clear – the medical profession should have nothing to do, directly or indirectly, with the investigation of any of the absurd stories arising, from time to time, out of ignorance and deceit, or superstition. The sacrifice of this child ought to be enough, in all conscience, to make any future attempts at similar impostures penal.’

  The magistrates sat in judgement at the first court hearing, and the case must have stood out in strangeness and complexity to their usual business of dealing with drunks, assaults and petty theft. But before an account of the trial is given, the fact that C.E. Coleridge was acting for the Treasury Solicitors is significant. What had happened was that, as Richard Ireland has discovered through painstaking research, the coroner and his advisors had decided that they did not want to have the case prosecuted, and he wrote to the Secretary to the Treasury to explain: ‘The position of things at present is that no-one has been bound over to prosecute and I learn that the County Justices do not intend taking the matter up with a view to prosecuting by Indictment. It seems to me therefore that unless you are pleased to direct some action to be taken no counsel will be instructed and the prosecution by Coroner’s Inquisition will probably break down…’

  This gap between the centralised English attitudes to prosecution and judgement has been further studied by Richard Ireland, and a neat way to grasp the problem is to glance at a memoir by J.A. Strachan, a barrister writing c.1900 about Ireland, which at this time showed similar traits in this respect:

  Rarely has an English judge to appeal to an English jury for a conviction: not infrequently he has to appeal to them for an acquittal: everywhere else the juries are only too ready to acquit… In Ireland, north and south this is sometimes the case, not merely in agrarian offences, where fellow-feeling may affect the jurors’ minds, but in ordinary crimes where their own well-being and protection are at stake. We have all heard of the tale of highway robbery at Tralee. The evidence for the prosecution showed that highway robbery in Kerry had become a public danger, and the prisoners were the leaders of a robber band, yet the jury acquitted them…

  This was referring to acquittal. In Carmarthen at this time, the issue was with there being no progression towards a Grand Jury deciding on a true bill and an indictment. The Llanfihangel justices went on to explain that some of the reasons for this desire not to take the trial any further were practical matters of convenience: many witnesses lived a very long way off, and they would have to be brought back to Carmarthen for a trial. But clearly this was not acceptable. The Home Office insisted on a prosecution. This was a very unusual event – the prosecution being conducted by central government. In fact, later, in July, 1870, it was reported by The Times that John Jones, a Conservative M.P. in the House of Commons had asked the Secretary of the Treasury ‘on what principle a larger scale of costs was allowed in the Sarah Jacob, Welsh Fasting Girl case, than was paid or allowed to witnesses in other prosecutions, and why it was considered necessary to employ counsel to conduct the preliminary investigations instead of the local agent mentioned in the return.’

  There had also been much thought about the nature of the crime. The issue was about homicide, and the exact definition of manslaughter. Sarah had died through neglect and omission. The great legal historian Sir James Fitzjames Stephen wrote, in 1880: ‘Whether the word “killing” is applied or not to homicides by omission is to a great extent a question of words. For legal purposes a perfectly distinct line on the subject is drawn. By the law of the country killing by omission is in no case criminal unless the thing omitted is one which is a legal duty to do. Hence, in order to ascertain what kinds of killing by omission are criminal, it is necessary in the first place to ascertain the duties by which tend to the preservation of life.’

  There had been debate on this since the reports made before the influential Offences Against the Persons Act of 1861, with a focus on the notion that there might be a difference between killing by manslaughter and killing by negligence, as in this statement in a government report of 1848:

  Killing by negligence is homicide by an act lawful or unlawful… causing death by reason of a want of that degree of knowledge, skill, care, attention, caution or diligence, in the person who did it which he ought to have employed in the position in which he was placed.

  The difference came down to what we today would discuss under the common phrase ‘a duty of care’, as in the case of Regina v Sarah Shepherd just five years before Sarah first took to her bed and fasted. This was a charge of murder against Shepherd, who had failed to procure a midwife for her nineteen-year-old daughter. The judge’s directions to the jury explain the dilemma:

  The learned judge told the jury to consider whether it was established by the evidence that the death of the deceased was attributable to the Prisoner’s neglect to use ordinary diligence in procuring the assistance of a midwife or other proper attendant, and if it was not so established, then to acquit the prisoner. But if it was so established, then to consider by so neglecting the intended to bring about the death of her daughter, and if so, they were to convict her of murder, but if not, of manslaughter…

  The case went to the Court for Crown Cases Reserved, which means that the judge in question had felt he should consult his peers for further advice, after the court had at first found Shepherd guilty of a criminal neglect. At that later court, it was decided that, as the daughter was an adult, and had lived away from home for some time before returning home to have her child, there was no maternal responsibility. The conclusion was: ‘The court were of opinion that the deceased was emancipated, and that the case did not come within any of the authorities which cast a legal liability upon the prisoner’. Shepherd was freed, the conviction quashed.

  Today we would see the issue as being manslaughter by breach of duty. As William Wilson has written, it would follow this reasoning: the defendant owed the victim a duty of care; the defendant breached that duty; the breach of duty caused death, and the breach of duty was gross.

  The Shepherd case shows that, in the 1860s, there were still difficult questions of law attached to the crime of manslaughter, but that by the time of the trial of Evan and the doctors (all were indicted to appear before the magistrates), the age of the child in question was cruc
ially important. Sarah had lived at home, died there, and was a minor. Shepherd’s daughter was nineteen and had lived away. Even later in the century, though, punishments varied considerably in areas child neglect, as the case of Mary Thomas of Llangefni shows: she was fined £2 in 1895 for not caring adequately for her child. Closer to the Jacob case was that of Benjamin Evans of Cardiff, who in 1886 was guilty of starving his daughter to death. He was in extreme poverty, and as David Jones commented, ‘The family were in lodgings, they had no furniture and his wife was ill. He told the court that he had done his best. His state of virtual destitution is in sharp contrast to Evan, who was comfortably off and had lots of land.’

  The Jacob case was a prosecution initiated by the Treasury. Many interested parties wanted the trial to take place in London, rather than in Wales. There was much on this in The Law Times in March, 1870, the most cogent statement being : ‘…we trust that the appeal we had ventured, on the other and higher grounds of the interests of the law and of science, for the trial of the case in London, will be adopted by the Home office.’ Commentators within the law establishment were well aware of the possible consequences of having a local trial, out of the immediate domain of the instigators of the prosecution.

  Apart from the crime itself, there was also the issue of Hannah Jacob and whether or not she should be charged, and this was due to the legal concept of coverture. This stated that Hannah was subject to the governance of her husband, and so had no individual act of intent against her – a married woman was seen as ‘under the rod’ of her husband, the legal concept stemming from the French femme covert, such as a married woman, as distinct from a femme sole. For that reason, she is a shadow in the literature telling of the story, and a careful reading of the entire narrative of the Sarah Jacob story has to conclude that she is barely visible, behind Evan always, appearing to condone, but possibly swaying with the wind when it came to decisions about what to do with the house invalid.