by Stephen Wade
Hannen’s summing up, if we look at his first words again, illustrates perfectly the nature of this as a ‘test case’ – perhaps a public lesson about the problem of the cruelty and starvation of the children of the nation, as discussed earlier in this chapter. He said, as mentioned earlier, ‘Whenever the Crown is to take a special part in criminal proceedings, it must be in cases of this peculiar and exceptional character.’ The fact is that the Crown made the Jacob case ‘exceptional and peculiar’ by using the events and people as a weapon of safe and secure beliefs of rationality against the ‘ignorance and superstition’ of the more distant parts of the realm. The world of wise men, folk medicine, clairvoyance and all the rest in the perceived alternative society lying in the heart of Victoria’s realm, was under fire.
Hannen made the most of the expert witness testimony to ensure that the jury saw the case as an imposture, and here we arrive at the final argument against the defendants at the time in court: the direction of the jury by the judge. It was Hannen’s powerful summing up that led to his direction, after making clear exactly what constituted manslaughter in the alleged behaviour of the parents: ‘And that is the crime for which they are now charged, and that is the charge of which you have now to determine by your verdict, whether they are guilty or not. And now I leave the case in your hands.’
Directions to the juries in Victorian trials tended to have the persuasive rhetoric of authority, cloaked in seeming open-minded tolerance, as in Judge Wills’ words to the jury in the case of Adelaide Bartlett: ‘If you think it can stand, by all means take a different view. The last thing that would ever occur to my mind would be to feel a sense of embarrassment or annoyance, if you were to take a different view of the facts than that which presents itself to my mind.’ That, of course, was said after twenty minutes of explanation and analysis of alleged facts.
Richard Ireland has argued that the Jacob trial should really have been elevated to the status of being a leading case: ‘a potentially leading case ended in a tawdry prison sentence and was then returned to a community where it still, to an extent, reverberates in households which have never seen a law report.’
Evan and Hannah were found guilty of manslaughter, but the foreman of the jury added: ‘We wish to recommend the female prisoner to the merciful consideration of the court because we believe she was under the control of the husband.’ This meant that she should have a shorter sentence. Hannen agreed: ‘The sentence that I shall inflict on you, Evan Jacob, is that you be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for twelve calendar months; and that upon you, Hannah Jacob, will be more lenient… and it is that you be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for the period of six calendar months.’ Hannah was at the time pregnant with her eighth child, and she was to go on to have ten, although the last one (born in 1878) died when very young. Hannah and Evan carried on their life together, farming at New Inn, and they still had over thirty acres.
What sort of prison experience would they have had when they arrived in Swansea prison? In 1870 the prison system had only quite recently been transformed from a muddle of different local gaols. For convicts such as Evan, ‘hard labour’ was the key concept for punishment. It meant that men were expected to be put to work so that they were breathless and fatigued. There was a mix of various versions of tough work in the prison regime known as ‘hard labour.’ There had always been hard labour in the houses of correction and in many local gaols, but from the 1840s through to the 1877 nation-alisation of the prisons, the demanding work in prisons was mostly a mix of the crank, the treadmill, lifting shot (cannon balls) and picking oakum. Added to that could be any kind of labour. Prisoners had different classifications, and the work they did depended on their status. Diet also related to classification, and of course male and female diets were different. As is often explained in prison histories, the treadmill was the main instrument of hard graft in the prison. In Stafford prison, for instance, there were eight treadmills used in 1883. The cranks were usually in the cells, but some gaols had crank sheds for cripples to use – those not capable of using the treadmill. Oakum picking was for women or for weaker prisoners, or even juveniles, but men, after the treadmill, would also transfer to the oakum picking room. Oakum picking was the chore of unravelling old, tarred ropes to make new fibres which could be used to caulk ships’ fabric.
Basically, in the mid-Victorian years, and through to the system led by Edmund Du Cane from the late 1870s, was founded on hard physical work, moral and religious reflection and severe punishment. The ethic of work was something profoundly embedded in the whole society; Samuel Smiles’s key work, Self-Help (1859) was a typical tract on that theme. Paintings often depicted the dignity of labour, as in Ford Maddox Ford’s picture called ‘Work’ (1865) in which God-like labourers dig the road, observed by men in suits, including Thomas Carlyle, who played his part in writing eulogies to self-help and the work ethic.
The Jacobs were in Swansea prison which had only quite recently been rebuilt after its first incarnation as a bridewell, or house of correction, in which debtors were kept alongside criminals; in 1861 the new prison was up and running, housing both men and women, and continued to do so until 1922. The governor waiting for the Jacobs was William Cox, who had taken the post after his father’s death in 1843, as often happened in the prison service, because families had usually run the old houses of correction. The new prison had a capacity of just over 200 inmates, with male prisoners being around a figure of 170 and females averaging around 50-60 in these years. Hannah would have been in a separate wing from her husband, and they would not have met during their stretch inside.
In her book, A Wonderful Little Girl, Sian Busby, traced the family history of the Jacobs after the return to normal life, and she found that their children had dispersed across the country to build new lives. Evan died in 1895 at Crosmaen of an illness called ‘waxy liver’ – formally known as lardaceous disease, in which the fibrous tissues of the organ degenerate into a white viscous substance. Hannah died in 1907. Margaret, Sarah’s little sister who was put to bed with her for warmth, Busby found to be ‘still alive a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War.’ Perhaps the success story is found in little David Jacob, who became a curate in Glamorgan and qualified in Divinity at Lampeter. The last of all the Jacob children to die was Rachel, who died in 1958 at the age of 85. Clearly, as both Busby and Richard Ireland have discovered, there is still both an oral history and a clutch of memorials in the churchyard relating to the Jacobs at Llanfihangel-ar-Arth. Sian Busby pointed out that ‘All Sarah’s siblings took whatever they knew with them to the grave.’ That sentence has a profound impact, coursing through the whole story, largely because those other children were silent witnesses to the truth – or so we might like to think. Arguably, they were excluded, protected, or in some way simply kept distracted and busy, their questions either never being asked or never being answered.
7
So What Was Wrong with Sarah? The Physician’s View
Cans’t thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?
Shakespeare: Macbeth
Over the century and a half since Sarah Jacob died, writers, many of them qualified medical professionals, have produced theories with reference to actual physiological illness, in addition to a number of psychological interpretations. So, what was wrong with Sarah? Is it possible to find an explanation other than the ‘hysteria’ so confidently asserted by Dr Fowler after his examination of the girl?
My first enquiry is on possible physiological illness. After all there were copious notes on Sarah’s autopsy, and since the publication of these in the British Medical Journal in January, 1870, there have been many more theories and speculations as to her illness.
First, what about her condition in February, 1867 at the beginning of her illness? The family scourge then was scarlet fever, and that provides our first possibility. Here is a recap of the three interpretations of the whole case.
Theory one: Sarah really had an actual definable illness and this segued into a condition dominated by a mental state indicating some kind of hysteria. The point to grasp about this, as explained in a medical manual in the early twentieth century, is that ‘the emotions of the hysteric are for the most part artificial’ and ‘the hysteric feels because he does not act.’ That is, we are to assume that when we read of what she says and does, it is like watching a puppet in a shadow play, nothing we see being trusted as ‘real’.
Theory two: Sarah was ill from the very beginning with symptoms of glandular fever, concurrent with the scarlet fever, or with TB, as John Cule suggested in 1967. The various signs of illness during the trajectory of the fasting period can be made to align with a specified condition.
Theory three: Sarah, after recovering from scarlet fever, was still physically ill but this was secondary to her relishing the special place she had attained in the family, adding the religious and ritualistic elements later. Simply, she lapped up the situation of freedom and ‘prima donna’ specialness that she was given. What child does not like to be the centre of attention?
As an example of how easy it is to assign any one of a dozen conditions to Sarah, look at Bright’s Disease. The duration and trajectory of scarlet fever and its symptoms includes the advent of desquamation – the formation of scales on the epidermis. The risk when this occurs is the chance of the kidneys being inflamed, particularly in the cold. Sarah went back to school at the end of February 1867, with that risk definitely present. One consequence of desquamation is the onset of Bright’s Disease, which had been defined and explained in 1827 by Dr Richard Bright. Was this a possibility in Sarah’s case?
The difficulty when seeing this through modern eyes is that Sarah may have developed chronic Bright’s Disease, or equally any of the other suggested physiological ailments. Along with several other suggestions, this diagnosis fits with the post mortem comments on the digestive tract, and also, enticingly, with the examination by Dr Lewis in early 1869: ‘Occasional flatulent rumbling noises were heard in the abdomen’ but unfortunately it also aligns well with the supposed ‘globus’ of the hysteric. In such a way does the muddled and unsatisfactory theorising develop. This globus was widely accepted, even by the most pre-eminent medical men, and was everywhere in the literature of hysteria.
With this in mind, later in this chapter I will unashamedly exercise the right of the historian and biographer to suggest an explanation, though being well aware of the caveat I have ventured to explain.
For this reason, we need to start with the autopsy and look at the key findings before exploring any possible definable illness. This was done and reported by Thomas Lewis on the 30th December, 1869, and also by Mr J. Phillips (of Guy’s) printed in Medical Times and Gazette.
The more detailed report is by Lewis, who has more to say on the nature of the digestive tract, but with regard to the normal signs of starvation both agree that there was a layer of fat and also fat stored in the omentum, a fatty tissue linked to the stomach. Lewis noted, ‘On making incision from the larynx to the pubes, a considerable layer of subcutaneous fat was cut through; below the umbilicus it was an inch in thickness and above it half an inch.’ The fat in the omentum would be a pointer towards the proportion of fat across the body, as it is a kind of store, much as the spleen is to the blood supply. Phillips reported also that all the organs were healthy, corroborated the notes on fat, and added that all aspects of the brain were healthy, as were the lungs.
The most important detail was that, as Lewis put it, ‘…there was no emaciation, no appearance of bedsores ever having existed.’ Both noted the faeces, and Phillips’ expression of this is interesting: ‘Colon fairly distended with gas, and, with the rectum, contained about eight ounces of hardened faeces, not at one spot but diffused throughout its entire length.’
There was no significant evidence of any serious condition; but the space under one arm, which had been referred to in the trial as a place where a bottle could have been hidden, was noted. This pointed to the fact that her diet, of ‘milk and flummery’ as one doctor put it could have been hidden there. Flummery (Welsh, llymru, is a jelly made from oat husks). With the constituency of a soup, such food would be easily taken, and would provide plenty of good nourishment, without the need for solid food to be somehow accessed and taken surreptitiously. The best way to think of this is that it was ‘baby food’ and would have had the effect of comforting as well as nourishing the girl.
In short, there were no clues as to any serious illness, but there was plenty of detail to back up the decision of the court that Sarah had taken food secretly and that, as she had easy access to the dairy, she could have walked across the adjoining servant’s room (he too would have been working outside for much of the day) to get food from the dairy. This hints at the suspicious silence of her siblings, who were never asked to speak in court. They perhaps would have known about any secret eating, at least some of the time. Hannah and Evan would often have been working outside too, so when Sarah was left alone, she could have filled the small bottle and kept it with her; naturally, when we note that examination by doctors was largely forbidden, suspicion grows.
Yet what actually happened is of less interest than whether or not there really was anything wrong with the girl. There was no indication of any specific disease in her corpse. From that basis, we can only logically proceed on the assumption that if she had some variety of physical complaint, then it was bacterial, and that the supposed deadness in one arm and the ‘fits’ and sensitivity to noise were part of any one of a number of ailments.
If we assume that she did eat and drink, exclusively from the dairy, and there was the flummery or even the soup frequently found in Welsh cuisine, cawl, then she would have had the sustenance required for healthy life, but cawl, a broth usually with vegetables and bacon, was not mentioned. More likely she had the bwyd llwy (spoon food) mentioned earlier, which would have included mashed potatoes. Flummery would have been an everyday food, as the oats used in that were needed to feed the horses. Oats were sometimes mixed with crushed gorse also. What I have said above about the food seems more and more interesting, and all commentators have picked up on the unusual space under Sarah’s arm.
Keeping this speculation in mind, it seems likely that she would have had a predominance of dairy food, and so she would have had fats, protein, carbohydrates and some fibre. But there is clear evidence that she was constipated, and it is highly probable from this that dehydration was a major problem – something that determined her malaise. It is not likely that she had the 15 grams of fibre needed for a child of 10, and perhaps the 24 grams of proteins were also rarely met.
Most of this points to some pathological source of her failure to eat, made even worse by dehydration as time passed. There was no evidence of any intestinal blockage, but more generally, if we survey observed symptoms across the last year of her time in bed, we can list: impaired gastrointestinal function, muscle atrophy, reduced renal function, disturbed sleep patterns and some evidence of poor thermoregulation.
John Cule supports this view, surmising kidney failure in the last days, and he does not rule out the possibility of tetanus, but his conclusion is (and this agrees with most other readings) that, ‘She was, in the end, a victim of her own personality.’ He goes along with this largely because the earlier supposition that there was TB at the heart of some symptoms found, have to be dismissed. Cule is more in favour of ‘a non-tuberculous meningitis or an encephalitis from which she never recovered and which exaggerated her fundamentally hysterical personality.’ It makes as much sense as other ideas, and Cule knew the case very well indeed.
What are we left with? As all the physiological theories relating to diseases that partly fit the known behavioural facts have their limits, we may have to look for something rather more specific to the Jacobs’ lifestyle than has previously been considered: the fact that they shared their long house with calves.
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nbsp; In terms of public health awareness, the great landmark of the time was Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (1842) which had concentrated on the terrible health consequences of urban overcrowding and polluted water. Full attention had been made by authorities to this issue because it was in their interests to attend to the health of their workers. But what about health risks in the countryside? In the mid century Britain was still largely an agricultural economy. The public by the 1860s would have been aware of such matters as the cattle plague of 1866 and in Monmouthshire and Wales there had been over 7,000 reported cases of sick cattle, and 5,000 of these had died. But what about diseases of mankind that may have been transmitted from cows to people?
It was late in the nineteenth century that viruses were first discovered, the first animal virus being defined in 1899 by Loeffler and Frosch. Before that, there had been a gradual realisation that there should be more controls of live animals and of the slaughter of animals in abattoirs and knackeries. One of the few researchers in this area has been Anne Hardy, who has looked in detail at early veterinarians, and has pointed out that ‘most informed Victorians were slow to make a connection between the health and welfare of animals and the welfare of the state.’ The landmark Public Health Act of 1872, aimed at establishing measures that would reduce the incidence of diseases such as diarrhoea, scarlet fever and whooping cough. Six years later some scientists were beginning to understand that animals could transmit diseases to man, and in 1879, when there was the first outbreak of food poisoning at Welbeck, it was shown that imported ham had been the cause.
After 1878 veterinary inspectors were introduced and the first meat inspections in retail locations occurred after vetinarian George Fleming demonstrated that bovine TB was something that would be a threat to people. But all this is a long time after Sarah’s autopsy, and when the doctors performed that task, they had no knowledge of zoonotic infection: diseases passed from animals to humans. Not until 1885, after a few scares, did a medical inspector identify, as Anne Hardy puts it, ‘an infectious fever of cattle which could be transmitted directly to humans through infected milk’. It was shown that cows with an infection of the udder, defined as tubercular, could be a source of infection for people. Doctors Lewis and Phillips, however, did note one or two matters that could indicate some kind of animal-sourced infection. Phillips found ‘half an ounce of a thickened mucous exudation’ and the ‘duodenum contained a little of the same fluid, as well as the ileum, where it became slightly grumous [filmy, like a mist]’. Lewis noted that the stomach had ‘an olive-green mucous fluid, spread over the lining membrane… this fluid was slightly acid’. He added that the ‘grumous fluid’ was ‘supposed to be an exhalation of blood’. It is worth asking the question, in a chapter of theoretical notions, whether this fluid was a symptom observed in a zoonotic disease.