by Barbara Vine
The coroner said that this was the most dreadful and shocking case that had come to his attention for many years. There could be no question of accident or felo de se for it was as impossible for Miss Henderson to have inflicted such injuries upon herself as it was that she was somehow strangled by chance while falling from the train. At some point in the short journey from Newton Abbot to within a few miles of Exeter an individual entered the compartment, where no doubt she was alone, bent on carrying out his nefarious work. The jury must draw their own conclusions as to what happened at this encounter.
The jury was out for no more than five minutes before returning a verdict of murder.
It’s not possible to know for sure what were the reactions of the Hendersons and Henry to Eleanor’s death. Imagination will have to do what knowledge can’t.
That Samuel was a devoted father is shown by his insistence on meeting the train his daughter was due to return on, in spite of Eleanor’s telling him not to do so. The sisters were close. We know virtually nothing about Samuel’s wife Louisa except that she was pious and fond of referring to ‘Providence’, but there’s no reason to think she was a less than loving mother. They must all have been, to use the current popular word, devastated. But it’s a word that sometimes means exactly what the dictionary defines it as: ‘laid waste’. These parents, this brother and sister, would have been laid waste, ruined, broken. But even in extreme grief, people retain their prideful feelings, their snobbery, their vanity. For the Hendersons Eleanor wasn’t just a beloved daughter and sister, she was the promised bride of a distinguished physician and professor, a royal doctor, a knight and (to them) a wealthy man. With her death all that hope went too. Samuel would never now hear his daughter called ‘Your Ladyship’. There would be no visits to the grand house in St John’s Wood and no visits to Bloomsbury by Eleanor in her own carriage. Her chances of finding a husband for her sister Edith and promotion for her brother were lost. Edith herself would probably have cared least about that aspect of things. For her it would have been a matter of simple grief at the loss of a beloved sister.
What, then, of Henry? How did he react to the death of the girl he was engaged to? His diary ought to give us something to go on but it doesn’t, or not much. By Sunday 21 October everyone was seriously worried at Eleanor’s disappearance, Dorothea Vincent’s telegram having arrived with the news that Eleanor had boarded the 11.14 train. Later that day a body was found. But it wasn’t till Monday the twenty-second that the body had been positively identified by Samuel. Henry’s diary entry for 21 October reads: ‘I was at home in Wimpole Street at seven in the evening when Mr Lionel Henderson brought me the alarming news [of the discovery of a body]. I, of course, accompanied him back to Keppel Street.’ One wonders why Henry didn’t accompany the man who was to have been his father-in-law to Exeter. Perhaps he had pressing business at Buckingham Palace or at University College Hospital, but what audience or lecture could more profoundly affect his life than the murder of his fiancée?
However, from this day forward, as they say in the marriage service, Henry’s character seems to have undergone another change. Hamilton’s death in the Tay Bridge disaster had made him colder and harder than he was before. Now the diary entries changed to being chill and laconic. He became relentless, single-minded, ambitious, a man apparently without much family feeling, having a large acquaintance that included Huxley, Darwin and the painter Lawrence Alma Tadema as well as Canon Duckworth and Sir Joseph Bazalgette, but if not friendless, numbering only Barnabus Couch, Lewis Fetter and perhaps the Henderson family among his friends. He had courted and danced attendance on Sir John Batho and his family but dropped them cold for no apparent reason. The woman who had been his mistress for nine years he rid himself of once she became pregnant with his child. A general practitioner in Stamford, Wilfrid Thorpe, one of his students at University College Hospital in the eighties, wrote in a letter to his future wife of Henry as ‘alarmingly cold, repellently austere, and without a vestige of that wit and humour which can so enliven instruction and make learning less a labour than a delight’. Unpleasant Henry, then. Chilly Henry. On the other hand, Lady Bazalgette wrote to her daughter that she and Sir Joseph had dined with Henry and found him, ‘Such a charming man with so much conversation and a model of courtesy to us ladies.’ Many-sided Henry.
Still, it could have confidently been expected of him that once Eleanor was dead and he’d correctly attended the funeral he’d turn his back on the Hendersons and never see any of them again. The reverse was true. Two or three times a week from 21 October onwards Henry’s diary entries read, ‘Called in the evening upon Mrs Henderson’ and ‘To Keppel Street where I sat for two hours with Mr and Mrs Henderson.’ Plainly, he went there to comfort them, to show perhaps that in losing their daughter they hadn’t lost what their daughter had brought them, his friendship. It’s out of character, it isn’t Henry. Good conversationalist he may have been, but he wasn’t the sort of man who cared about other people’s feelings, especially when those other people were a shabby solicitor making ends meet in an overcrowded house near the British Museum. But it is Henry, it happened. The diary entries alone mightn’t constitute sound evidence but future developments in his emotional life do, and so does a letter Louisa Henderson wrote to her sister-in-law Dorothea Vincent in December 1883. Only the second page of it has survived. Mrs Henderson has evidently been saying that Christmas will be a sad season for the family this year.
... only to dread. There can be no festivities in this house of mourning. If we have any comfort – for I cannot regard the arrest and appearance in the police court of Bightford as comfort – it is in the continued kindness and attention of Dr Nanther. Henry, as I have learned to call him and as he insists I continue to do, is a constant visitor to our house and never appears without some little gift. We are so spoilt by him that we have almost come to take flowers and sweetmeats for granted but yesterday he appeared with books, new novels I am glad to say, not his own learned volumes, though it is ungrateful in me to say so. If anyone could have persuaded me that we must not question the works of Providence but accept what He sends with a humble heart, it is Henry, who has talked so beautifully and eloquently to us of God’s mysterious ways and the working out of His purpose to a final glorious end. Samuel has sometimes said to me that he would not have summoned the strength to go about his daily work without constantly reminding himself of the words of comfort and true religion from Henry the evening before. It is true that we cannot see the end in the means, Henry says, but must only have faith and in the inner…
Henry had been brought up as a Wesleyan Methodist. In his letters to Couch and in his homilies to the Hendersons he presented himself as a religious man. He makes references to God in the notebook and occasionally in the diaries. Strange then, that in a letter to T. H. Huxley, written within a few months of Eleanor’s death, he expresses his own position as ‘agnostic’, the term Huxley himself coined a few years earlier. Two men again, I suppose, or several.
My great-great-grandmother Henderson mentions someone called Bightford as having been arrested and awaiting trial. This was Albert George Bightford, an unemployed railway porter, whom the police had discovered a few days after the inquest living rough on Dartmoor. He’d gone home to his parents where he’d confessed to strangling Eleanor Henderson and throwing her body out of the train. His father was resolved against protecting him and told the police. By that time Bightford was missing but was found when he attacked and threatened a shepherd who refused him food.
At his trial in Exeter, the test was applied to Bightford that if he knew what he was doing when he killed Eleanor, did he know it was wrong? The prosecution successfully contended that the answer was yes to both. Bightford himself was not permitted to give evidence. His counsel said that his dismissal from his post with the Great Western Railway, for insolence to a superior, preyed heavily on his mind. He’d boarded the train at Plymouth and gone into several carriages, speaking to passengers
and trying to enlist their sympathy, contending that a great injustice had been done him. Several witnesses told how they’d been alarmed by his wild looks and aggressive manner. Counsel said Bightford entered Miss Henderson’s compartment, sat down opposite her and began on his tale of woe. Miss Henderson was seriously alarmed and threatened to pull the communication cord. To silence her Bightford, by this time no doubt in a panic, strangled her with her own scarf. Somewhere between Alphington and Exeter, when the train slowed a little, he opened the door and threw her body out on to the embankment.
The jury found Bightford guilty. There was really no other choice about it. He was hanged for the murder of Eleanor Henderson in January 1884.
Meanwhile, Henry was in attendance at Windsor and at Osborne. In April the Queen went to Darmstadt for the marriage of Princess Victoria of Hesse to Prince Louis of Battenberg. At that wedding Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, was to meet the bridegroom’s brother, Prince Henry, and fall in love with him. If my great-grandfather foresaw that the Queen’s favourite child and companion was to do the unthinkable and marry, he must have looked forward with great interest to Princess Beatrice’s future offspring. The Queen was a haemophilia carrier, her daughter Alice had been a carrier, one of her sons and two of her grandsons had been ‘bleeders’. Was Princess Beatrice also a carrier and, if she had sons, would they too inherit the haemorrhagic disease?
Henry wrote a paper entitled ‘Inherited Epistaxis’. He was regularly contributing to medical journals, he gave a lecture to the Royal Society that was attended by Herbert Spencer and Charles Bradlaugh, and another to the Royal Society of Physicians. He was attentive to the Hendersons. Once the period of mourning was past, he organized a picnic on Hampstead Heath to which they, along with Dorothea Vincent who was in London for the ‘Season’ with her daughter Isobel (she who married the American and may have given Edith a Kodak camera), were transported in carriages. He notes in his diary that he gave a dinner party in July at which the guests were, ‘Mr and Mrs Henderson, Miss Henderson and Mr Lionel Henderson, Dr and Mrs Fetter and Miss Fetter’. Far from abandoning his house-hunting on Eleanor’s death, he had been busily continuing with it. At the end of July he notes in the diary: ‘Took possession of a house in Hamilton Terrace, St John’s Wood today. Mrs Henderson has undertaken to engage a cook and two maids for me, who, with my manservant and coachman, will constitute my little household.’
Hardly ‘little’ today. Considering the ‘establishment’ she kept up, I’d be surprised if my great-great-grandmother knew much about choosing suitable servants, but Henry seems besotted with the Henderson. They can do no wrong. He records dining alone with Lionel Henderson in a hotel, escorting Mrs Henderson and Edith to a dance given by Dorothea Vincent, and, more significantly, transferring all his legal business to Samuel’s firm. One of them he obviously valued above the others. In August he proposed to Edith and was accepted; this almost exactly one year after proposing to Eleanor, probably in the same room.
Did he place that ring on her finger, the one taken from her dead sister’s hand? He must have done. Did she ask if she was second-best, if it was only that she reminded him of the woman who was gone? I don’t know. No one knows. There seems to have been general rejoicing in the family. Louisa Henderson wrote to her sister-in-law, now returned home to Manaton, that ‘Providence’ – my great-great-grandmother was devoted to Providence – sent Henry to them in their trial and has now ‘set the seal on our satisfaction’ by wishing to ‘ally himself more closely with our family’. Eleanor doesn’t go unmentioned. She would have ‘rejoiced to see her beloved Henry comforted and destined for a happy future with our dear Edith. Don’t think me foolish, dear, if I say she knows.’
Why did Henry propose? There are a number of possible reasons. He liked the Hendersons. No doubt he’d sat many evenings alone or almost alone with Edith, talking about the dead girl. The two young women were quite a lot alike to look at, both fair and well-built, but Edith was prettier and had the large, if not the dark eyes, of Olivia Batho and Jimmy Ashworth. She may, too, have been ‘gentle, quiet and charming’. Henry had a house, he needed a wife, and here was a compliant, trouble-free woman, who would cause him no more problems than her sister would have done. It was time he married, more than time. In two years he’d be fifty.
‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ says Jude. Her dislike of Henry seems to grow every time we discuss him. ‘He was up to something. He’d probably found out in some underhand way that she was likely to inherit her aunt Dorothea’s money. And there’d be more of it now her sister was dead.’
11
I am alone in Alma Villa, looking at a bunch of letters sent to me by David Croft-Jones. The address on his covering letter, thanking me for dinner at the House, isn’t far from here, a garden flat in Maida Vale. For some reason I thought he lived in Westminster. Jude wasn’t surprised, she’d found out while I was off to the division lobby, and is over in Lauderdale Road now, having coffee with Georgie. She’s gone on foot. Someone or some newspaper has told her walking is the best form of exercise and it’s all part of her new health regimen.
We’re very happy. We haven’t been as honeymoon-happy as this for at least four years. I ought to be thankful and not bother with analysing it. And I am thankful, but… All the unhappiness we’ve had, all the rifts between us and all the silences, have been due to Jude’s passion for a child. There, I’ve put it into words. It’s true but not entirely true. I’ll rephrase it. All our unhappiness is due to my not being able to cope with Jude’s passion for a child. I suppose I feel that if two people love each other and live together and marry they ought to go on loving each other through adversity. Adversity ought to strengthen their feelings, it’s the old marriage service stuff about better and worse and richer and poorer. It doesn’t work for us. Am I really saying we can only be happy when things are going well? Or we can only be happy when things are going well for her? The truth, and I’m ashamed to confess it even to myself, is that I think I ought to be enough for Jude, just as she’s enough for me.
*
Today is the fifth day of the Committee Stage of the House of Lords Bill and we’ll probably be late, later than we were on Tuesday, but I’ll not go in until Jude’s come back from Georgie’s and we’ve had lunch together. Meanwhile I read the not apparently very interesting letters David has sent me. They were sent to Veronica from her first cousins, the Craddock women, Patricia and Diana, the daughters of Henry’s second daughter Mary. I’m now in possession of a great many letters Veronica received from her mother Elizabeth Kirkford, her aunt Mary Craddock and these first cousins. That makes me wonder why there don’t appear to be any from Veronica’s sister Vanessa. Did the two women live so near each other letters weren’t necessary or was Vanessa like her grandmother and never wrote letters? That Veronica didn’t keep them isn’t the answer. It looks as if she hoarded everything that came to her through the post. Of course the existence or non-existence of these letters is irrelevant to Henry’s life, I’m sure. It’s just that when you’re researching for a biography all kinds of odd little questions keep coming up and, if you’re like me, you want to solve them even if they’re only distractions.
David has also enclosed the latest version of the family tree and two photographs. These have the relevant details written on the backs of them in his neat civil servant’s hand. One is of Patricia Agnew and her daughter Caroline and the other of her sister Diana Bell with her husband and their two little girls, Lucy and Jennifer, born in the sixties. It may be a bad photograph but Patricia looks heavy-faced and with an outsize chin while the child is plain, more like a boy than a girl. The Bell family are all handsome, their good looks not of the Nanther type, and the little girls are very fair. These people, my cousins, are rather too far removed not only from me but from Henry to be of much interest – not a question that must be solved. Not one of his grandchildren was born in his lifetime, the result of marrying so late. All there is to be sa
id of the people in the photographs is that they are healthy looking and apparently prosperous. There’s nothing astonishing in the letters, but in one from Patricia Agnew a small query arises. I must ask David about it.
Dear Veronica,
I didn’t write to you when your baby was born. Frankly, I was just so afraid that all might not be well and I might put my foot in it. Now Diana tells me David Roger is quite all right and I am so happy for you. I know that things aren’t what they were and all sorts of things can be done to help these people lead normal lives but it would still be a grave handicap.
Tony and I couldn’t be happier for you now that things have turned out all right. I’m sorry if I’ve said too much but perhaps that’s not important in a private letter. You’ll burn it, I’m sure.
I do hope to have the chance to see young David one day. How sad it is we live so far apart. Give my best to Roger and my fondest
love to yourself,
Pat
I check on the tree and find that Veronica was forty-three when she gave birth to David in 1960. Patricia Agnew had presumably been afraid of Down’s Syndrome, knowing that older women are many times more likely than younger ones to give birth to affected children. Did they know that in 1960? Did they have amniocentesis by then to discover it in the foetus? Patricia Agnew sounds like a pessimist to me or maybe just a very nervous woman if she was so confident her cousin would have a Down’s Syndrome child without any evidence for it. But wait a minute, there was evidence for it, or evidence perhaps in Patricia’s eyes. There was Billy, Henry’s young brother, the little boy who spat blood on to his pillow. If he didn’t have Down’s he had something Patricia must have believed – her mother must have told her – David could have inherited. Anyway, it’s probably quite unimportant.