The Girk Who Lived On Air

by Stephen Wade

  This point was to be a challenge to legal thinking, as was the position of the doctors involved in the second watch. Hannah and the medical men had in a sense been in a supervisory role as a child had been allowed to die through neglect, but there was no doubt that Evan had exerted power and had had the most relevant status and authority. Prosecuting, Mr Coleridge summed up the situation: ‘If in this instance the father and mother have not compelled their child to take food, as I shall make out by the facts, then they are guilty of such negligence as in the eye of the law amounts to manslaughter.’ He also added that Jacob was a prosperous man, with a large farm and seven children.

  In court, Coleridge (who would become Lord Chief Justice Coleridge), was a very powerful and impressive lawyer and speaker. He had celebrated his forty-nineth birthday a few weeks before Sarah died, and was considered by his first biographer to be a very adept thinker in court: ‘Coleridge relied always upon a particularly disarming suavity of manner that invited and usually obtained the confidence of prisoners and witnesses where blunter methods failed.’ He was to be involved most famously with the Tichborne case and with that of Constance Kent.

  Charles Kingston, who knew him, wrote that ‘when Coleridge became a fully-fledged barrister he was one of the tallest and handsomest men of his time. Standing six feet three, with clear-cut features and a dignified carriage, he attracted attention at once, and his eloquence was compelling.’

  Of course, Evan was primarily a Welsh speaker, as were most of the jury, and that was to be a factor. It is hard to imagine someone like Coleridge interacting with a simple farmer whose command of English was limited.

  The doctors were all questioned, and there was much heated debate. Mr Fitzwilliams, on the bench, focussed on one of the main contentious topics – that none of the doctors was actually employed to treat or advise on Sarah’s illness. But Coleridge persisted, saying: ‘They were there as medical practitioners to pronounce upon the condition of the girl. We say they combined together and are responsible for the consequences of that combination. Fitzwilliams would not allow that line of thought to be developed. There was obviously a strong local feeling that the doctors were not directly to blame at all.

  Doctors Fowler and Hughes, who had examined and girl (both alive and dead) had plenty to contribute. Naturally, they were both defensive, and keen to show that they had been wise to the fraud from the start. Their words stress the irrational and suspicious behaviour of the parents, as in Hughes’ account of the urine-soaked bed and Fowler’s direct and confident opinion: ‘Children that don’t take food in the presence of their parents are generally called night feeders and the disease characterised by want of hunger is called asitia. My opinion of the girl is that she was a night-feeder. I said the loss of the power of motion was attributable to hysteria.’

  There was something of a developing confrontation between Fitzwilliams and Coleridge, and the latter desperately wanted the medical men to be committed; but Fitzwilliams was blunt and heavily reliant on the letter of the law as he saw it: ‘We have considered this case very carefully and by a majority of the bench we think that no case can be made against the doctors. Our opinion rests upon that of Mr Baron Alderson, who says that there must be some personal act committed…. The doctors were, if I may use the phrase, retained to advise the nurses if their advice was called for. The doctors came for that purpose and the nurses never asked for it.’

  The Jacobs were admitted to bail, for £100 and two sureties of £50. What had also been on trial in the lengthy hearing before the magistrates was the probity and moral responsibility of the new medical profession. The British Medical Association had only existed for a decade, and the official register was new. The mix of medical men, ranging from those with wider (and metropolitan) experience down to local doctors whose knowledge would be more limited and more conservatively oriented, had been in focus, and reported on, with a local impact. Once again, as Richard Ireland has investigated, there was present the influence of a polarised community: the Welsh identity and sense of pride was also at stake: after all, the second, professional watch had been arranged by two Welsh-men, one at Guy’s and one in Carmarthen.

  Evan and hannah Jacob were to appear at the Carmarthen assizes, charged with manslaughter. Everything was about to move up on a larger scale, and the nature of juries at regional assizes was to be a prominent feature here. Richard Ireland’s research on Carmarthen-shire juries has cast light on these problems:

  …evidence brought before the Select Committee on the Administration of Justice in Wales 1817-1821, spoke of jurymen determining their verdicts before hearing the evidence…. Half a century later the same sentiments are still current. In 1877 an article in the Cornhill Magazine makes the first reference I have come across to the story of the eminent Welsh judge remarking as his hounds overtook a hare, ‘By God, a Cardiganshire jury can’t save her now!’

  The language issue was always there too. Ireland cites the instance of a man called Evan Jones, who in 1866, addressed the jury in Welsh in a bigamy case, ‘assuring them that the charge had been contrived against him by his brother.’

  The office of High Sheriff in Carmarthen goes as far back as the early sixteenth century, and there have therefore been assizes there since around that time; the Guildhall has been the location for the assize court over the centuries, still a dominant presence in the heart of the town. Twenty years before the Jacob case it had been in the very centre of the Rebecca Riots when toll gates were destroyed by bands of men in large numbers who roamed the shires of West Wales in disguise. Many attending the trial of Evan and Hannah would recall the events of 1843, when over 300 Rebecca rioters had fallen upon the town, the placards which had the word for ‘justice’ on them – ‘Cyfiawnder’. Expressed in Welsh, this was to carry a powerful irony in the minds of the locals. After all, also in the 1840s, many Carmarthen men had been sentenced to transportation after trial in the guildhall assizes, at the time of the Rebecca Riots.

  Nicholson’s Cambrian Travellers’ Guide for 1840 describes Carmarthen vividly, and in complimentary terms: ‘The town is a mile in length, and half that extent in breadth, containing several streets well paved and lighted with gas, of which the two principal meet near the butter market which forms the central point. The old buildings have of late been modernised and new ones afford more comfort and displaying more taste have succeeded them.’

  In the 1860s Carmarthen was a prosperous place, with strong literary associations, and a reputation as a centre of printing. That fairly comfortable world, with its many artisans, farmers and tradesmen was to be a place where everyone was looking the same way for a while – towards the fortunes of the tenant farmer and his wife from Llanfihangel-ar-Arth.

  On 12 July, 1870, the presiding judge at the Carmarthen assizes was Sir James Hannen, born in 1821, the eldest son of the very wealthy London businessman, also a James Hannen. He was educated at the St Paul’s School and later at the University of Heidelberg. He was admitted to the bar in 1848 and came to specialise in commercial law. Just a year before hearing the Jacob case, he had been knighted and appointed a Judge of the Queen’s Bench. He was later to be involved in the famous Parnell inquiry, for which he was president.

  The true bill charging the Jacobs with having ‘killed and slain one Sarah Jacob’ brought them to the dock, and against them, for the prosecution, were Coleridge again, this time joined by Hardinge Giffard. For the defence were Mr Bowen and Mr W. Michael. Giffard was to become the first Earl of Halsbury; he had begun his professional life as a journalist, but then took up law and became a junior prosecuting counsel at the Old Bailey, taking silk four years before he appeared at Carmarthen. More recently, he had failed to be elected at M.P. for Cardiff in 1868, but before the 1870s were out, he was destined to be Solicitor General and to be knighted. In 1885 he reached the office of Lord Chancellor.

  ‘Cyfiawnder’ was to resonate through the trial, and was ironically doing so even before the assize was commenced. As my pr
evious comments about the established views at the time that Welsh and Irish juries did not want to convict and often went their own ways, there was also the issue of the place of Welsh in the courts. Shortly before the Jacob case became news, there had been a Times editorial (September, 1866) giving this opinion:

  The Welsh language is the curse of Wales. Its prevalence and the ignorance of English have excluded and even now exclude the Welsh people from the civilization, the improvement and the material prosperity of their English neighbours. Their antiquated and semi-barbarous language, in short, shrouds Them in darkness. If Wales and the Welsh are ever thoroughly to share in the material prosperity… the culture and the morality of England, they must forget their isolated language and learn to speak English and nothing else…

  This would be now considered more than a bit rich by the reading public of Carmarthen, Llandysul and Pencader, people all keenly aware that it was the English who had sent nurses from their fancy hospital in London, and young Sarah had died after the nurses’ intervention. English medical men had appeared to dominate the opinions on the medical aspects of the girl’s case, or so it must have seemed to many, as Fowler’s reports made it to The Times as well as to the British Medical Journal.

  In addition to the problem of Welsh being used in the courts – something which had been contentious ever since the watershed of the Act of Union of 1536 when English was decreed to be the official language of the courts in Wales – there was the issue of the composition of the assize jury: the petty jury, in proper terminology. The Grand Jury had found a true bill, so an indictment was made, but now, as Hannen’s court was assembled, a jury of locals had to be signed up to be the ‘twelve good men and true’. The ‘Grand’ jury would be landowners, squires and men of wealth and status, but the petty jury in the 1860s, as we know from the qualifications for jurors, would be such types as farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, publicans, merchants and the like. The list for the area was composed of men who had a £10 annual freehold tenure or who lived in premises assessed by the poor rate at £20.

  One of the central problems for trials in Wales (and also in other areas of Britain, depending on local conditions and attitudes) was that the jurymen knew that they were to be directed towards a verdict by the judge. When Hannen had arrived in Carmarthen, his presence bruited about and reported on, the middle classes would have been well aware that one of their own, Evan Jacob, a tenant farmer with a large acreage and who employed a servant, was up against it – faced with the vigour of the law as backed up by the Treasury: the government was prompting the prosecution, so it was very different from a normal police action or a personal action against someone.

  A useful way to understand the attitudes of the local Welsh is to reflect on Richard Ireland’s conclusion after his study of Carmarthenshire juries. He wrote that ‘For the people of Wales the criminal law was part of a process of dispute settlement, not as yet the monopoly force of social control. The ‘independence of rural Welsh jurors should be viewed in this broader context, as should the reservations which were expressed in respect of it.’

  But why did the government take the action of prosecuting? Judge Hannen, in his summing up, gave one reason: ‘If ever the Crown is to take a special part in criminal proceedings, it must be in cases of this peculiar and exceptional character. I make these allusions to the fact that this is what is called a Government prosecution, because that has been made use of as a topic in the speeches of the counsel who have addressed you.’ This very schoolmasterish explanation will not do. Richard Ireland has pointed out that a Treasury prosecution was a rare event in 1870, especially in homicide cases. This needs more enquiry. Why would the Crown take such an interest in a rural case at the far end of Wales when it was obvious that, the facts being clear at least in terms of what the doctors had explained, this was a case of manslaughter. It was not something on the scale of Chartism, or, as in 1812, the machine-wrecking Luddites, or a case of serious rioting on a wide scale as in the Rebecca disorders.

  There had been Treasury solicitors since early times, and their role was to work for the Crown, Secretaries of State and the Attorney general. In the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 they had been notably active, given the brief of controlling prosecutions of the rebels (which extended across the country and were intended to lead to barbarous repressive punishments). In 1842, the Treasury office took care of prosecutions for 13 out of 23 government departments. Not long after the Jacob case, in 1876, the Treasury Solicitor Act made the Treasury solicitor in effect the forerunner of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and in 1885 he was officially given that title. But there seems always to have been confrontations and difficulties in the business undertaken by this branch of prosecutions. Even as late as 1906 there was a heated interchange in the House of Commons when several members confronted the Attorney General, Sir John Walton, over the case of Rex v Fowler. The Treasury had employed a man called William Richardson in court, and a member asked, ‘I beg to ask whether the Public prosecutor was aware when William Richardson became one of the prosecutors on behalf of the Crown… that he was convicted on 30th September, 1901 at Oxted petty sessions, of disorderly conduct, and was convicted on 12th January, 1903 at the same place, for disorderly conduct?’

  This dominance and centrality had developed by the end of the century because, as Ireland argues, law and order became recognised as ‘a national rather than as simply a local matter’ because there was so much settling of potential charges out of court, and by not always moral or legitimate means.

  The fact remains that the Crown made a special point of prosecuting a case which appeared to represent the success and remarkable impact of the forces of superstition and unreason in a situation of great emotive power, disseminated by the press in all areas of the land. Mr Michaels, for the defence, although speaking sarcastically for effect, was close to the truth when he said that they were dealing with ‘A case in which it is said we are sitting here in order to free the ignorant Welsh mind from the trammels of superstition and darkness’.

  One rather less visible reason might have been the growing problem of child cruelty and a seemingly universal ill-treatment of children. Notions of neglect and deprivation, so much emphasised all the way through the trial, were ‘hot news’ across Britain at the time. During the 1860s there had been an increase in baby-farming, the crime in which babies were taken into lying-in houses for sums of money, as a remedy for the problem of illegitimacy. The trial of Charlotte Winsor in 1865 had alerted the public to the horrors attached to varieties of infanticide. The corpse of a baby had been found by the road near Torquay. A girl called Mary Harris was the mother and what emerged from the case was that Winsor ‘put away’ unwanted children for clients like Mary; she had choked, drowned and starved babies. Winsor was imprisoned for twenty years, and died behind the prison walls.

  Crimes against children were very common indeed and the government were well aware of the huge scale and of the need to clarify the areas of homicide covered by infanticide and by manslaughter, and to make known their efforts towards suppression and reform to the general public. The jacob case of what was apparently starvation provided a perfect vehicle they could use to intensify their crusade to show that the problem was being faced and dealt with. As there was an epidemic of malnutrition and starvation in the streets, to contemplate a case of parents wilfully starving a child would have appeared as some kind of challenge to the government. The long-standing abuse of children in child labour, and the outrageous facts of pauperism in and out of the workhouses, could not be ignored by many who read of Sarah’s case. The word ‘starvation’ attracts attention in any context, but in this case, the irony could not be missed – that a child within the bosom of a loving family could still starve to death.

  In the late 1860s the papers were crammed with tales of starvation, mostly linked to the failure of the poor law system, fear of the workhouse, and economic depression. With no welfare state, a labouring man out of work had to contend wit
h imminent extreme want and the real threat of his children dying through starvation. There was a particular crisis in this respect in the years as Sarah lay in her bed: between 1867-1869 there were countless cases of children starving, as shown in the report by a Dr Lankester in March, 1868 to The Times, in which three small children died of starvation after their parents became too ill to work. The autopsy report pro to that of Sarah Jacob: ‘The elder was very puny for a child of seven years of age, and was rickety and very much emaciated. The intestines were completely empty. Death had been caused by convulsions brought on by starvation.’ A long letter describing the state of the poor in Poplar, included this statement: ‘This alien population – not easy to move and impossible to employ – now shares the starvation of the natives, and adds formidably to the legitimate burden of the parish.’ One of the worst reports was from Dublin, referring to a place called Bird’s Nest, a home for destitute children. ‘One of the Committee’ wrote to the press, saying, ‘Some of our little applicants would make the hearts of parents bleed in recounting the history of their short lives. Some have come to us of late with their bodies scarcely covered with rags, and their faces show that starvation had almost ended it work with death…’

  In the 1860s this problem had another off-shoot, in juvenile crime. The penny dreadfuls at the time were full of tales about feral children around London, such as The Wild Boys of London – or the Children of the Night. John Springhall has pointed out that at the census of 1861 there were 4,038,000 people in Britain between the ages of 10 and 19. Wild children, street urchins and associated robberies were related to this general issue of children abused, neglected and pushed into criminality, and the garrotting panic of 1864-66 added to the problem, with gangs of men working with ‘wild boys’ robbed the wealthy and vulnerable on the streets at night.