She added of Miss Uish that ‘if I had seen her before she left, I should have made her pay for the carpet.’
Mr Poland asked her: ‘Do you remember the prisoner showing you a book?’ ‘Yes, she brought me a book. I cannot say how long it was afterwards.’
With this, The Book of Dreams was flourished before the court. ‘The first two or three pages are missing,’ said Mr Poland, ‘but is this the book?’
‘Yes, that is the book she brought to me,’ said Mrs Bastendorff. ‘She said that Miss Uish had left her Dream Book behind. I said, ‘I should think that she will come back for it.’
The book had been in the kitchen of 4, Euston Square until it was acquired as evidence by Inspector Hagen on 19 May. ‘It was in better order when I first saw it,’ said Mrs Bastendorff, ‘for my little girl has since had it to play with, and leaves would very likely come out.’
What of the movements of the accused, Hannah Dobbs? Did Mrs Bastendorff remember her leaving her house at around the time of the disappearance? ‘No, I do not,’ she said. ‘She went away for a few days, around the Christmas of the same year – from a Saturday morning to a Monday night, I think.’ And where was it that Hannah Dobbs went? ‘She said she went to her home at Bideford in Devonshire.’
And when she returned, had she in her possession any item that particularly attracted Mrs Bastendorff’s attention? ‘No, sir.’ Had Hannah Dobbs mentioned anything about her relations – about ‘their position and circumstances’? ‘I always thought they were well-to-do people,’ said Mrs Bastendorff, ‘for she said her uncle had left her some money, and I thought that she had gone home to fetch it.’
And had she said anything else on the matter? ‘Only about the gold watch and the chain, which she said were her uncle’s.’
When, asked Mr Poland, did Hannah Dobbs say that? ‘I could not say when it was,’ said Mrs Bastendorff. ‘I only know I had seen her wear it.’ Was it before she went home at Christmas? ‘I could not say.’ Was it before or after that last rental bill had been paid? ‘I could not say.’
Mr Poland was trying to convey to Mrs Bastendorff the urgent importance of these timings. He said: ‘Have you tried to think this matter over?’ As if in frustration, Mrs Bastendorff replied: ‘I am very irregular over dates and can’t remember.’
Now the magistrate, Mr Vaughan, interceded. ‘When did (Hannah Dobbs) tell you her uncle had left her some money?’ he asked her. ‘I can’t say,’ said Mrs Bastendorff.
Yet, the magistrate said, she had stated ‘just now’ that she thought that Hannah Dobbs had gone down to the country to ‘fetch the money’. Had Hannah Dobbs told her that? ‘I don’t know.’ Then why should she have thought that? ‘I had heard some time before that she expected him to leave her money.’
And afterwards she learned that he had? ‘Yes, sir.’
It was at this stage in the proceedings that this chief witness was starting to seem at best vague about many of the facts that she was being asked to recall. One generous explanation might simply have been that Mary Bastendorff would have understood very clearly that Hannah Dobbs, when put on full trial, would be facing the possibility of the death penalty. An extraordinary weight of responsibility rested on flitting memories of seemingly trifling events that had happened eighteen months beforehand.
But the court had curiously limited patience. Accordingly, the questioning from both Mr Poland and Mr Vaughan became increasingly terse; nothing is recorded concerning the reactions of Hannah Dobbs, who was looking on. Mr Poland, with what sounded like a note of exasperation, tried another angle on Mrs Bastendorff. ‘Just look,’ he said. ‘I think you saw a basket trunk?’
‘Yes, in the cellar,’ said Mrs Bastendorff. ‘I can’t say when, but I have seen it in there.’
‘Just try and think when you first saw it,’ said Mr Poland. ‘Have you seen it since the discovery?’ By this, he meant the disclosure of the corpse.
‘No, I have not.’
‘When did you first see it?’ he asked.
‘I can form no idea,’ said Mrs Bastendorff. ‘At Christmas last, we had it moved into the scullery.’
At this, the basket itself was wheeled into the Bow Street courtroom. It was described in the reports as a ‘large basket trunk of a very ordinary kind, used for travelling, covered with American cloth.’
‘Was that,’ Mr Poland asked Mrs Bastendorff, ‘the basket you saw?’
‘It may be the same,’ Mrs Bastendorff said, ‘but it looked different, and I don’t think it had a cover on when I saw it.’
‘That basket does not belong to you?’
‘No.’
‘Was the one you saw about that size?’
‘It was a different shaped one.’
‘Are you able to say,’ said Mr Poland, once again trying to pin down some certainty, ‘that this was the one or not?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Bastendorff. ‘I have seen one similar to that, but the one I saw looked higher.’
Once again, the magistrate pressed for greater clarity. ‘Is the cellar where you saw it dark?’ he asked her. ‘No,’ she said.
Mr Poland tried again, with what now sounded like angry impatience. ‘Was (the basket) similar to that?’ he said. ‘Yes, it was.’ ‘And it did not belong to you?’ ‘Not that I know of. I did not examine it. I thought it was a wine case.’
‘Now, pray consider,’ said Mr Poland. ‘Have you ever had a basket like that?’
‘We have many cases sent to us.’
‘Like that?’
At this, the magistrate lent in and said to her: ‘Just consider.’ Mr Poland added: ‘Like a clothes basket, you know.’ Mrs Bastendorff then said: ‘No, I have not.’
‘When did you first see that?’ said the magistrate. ‘I could not possibly form any idea,’ said Mrs Bastendorff. ‘Last year?’ pressed Mr Poland. ‘Yes, last year,’ she replied.
‘What time?’
‘I could not tell at all,’ she said. ‘It is twelve months since I went into the cellar. I go there very seldom.’
‘Was the prisoner in your service,’ said Mr Poland, ‘at the time you first saw it?’
‘I believe so.’
‘Did you speak to her on the subject?’
‘I did not.’
And where was this basket-trunk then moved to within the house? ‘It was moved into the scullery,’ said Mrs Bastendorff, ‘and filled with empty bottles.’ Who moved it? ‘I don’t know.’ Was Hannah Dobbs still working at the house when it was moved? ‘I think not.’ So this was after September of the previous year, 1878? ‘It was brought in at Christmas last year,’ said Mrs Bastendorff.
What became of this trunk afterwards? ‘I never knew until the detectives asked for it,’ said Mrs Bastendorff, ‘and then it was found that it had been taken away from the house and that my husband’s brother had it.’
Could she ‘fix the day’ that Hannah Dobbs had left her employment? ‘No, I can’t, but it was some time in September.’
The resident Mr Riggenbach had lodged some complaint? ‘Yes.’ He had ‘lost some things’? ‘Yes.’
When Hannah Dobbs left her employ, said Mr Poland, he understood that Mary Bastendorff was ‘some time without a servant.’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘And then Louise Barker came?
‘Yes sir.’ And could Mrs Bastendorff remember ‘one evening her bringing you some towels and drawers – three or four towels and a pair of gentleman’s drawers?’ ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Bastendorff, ‘she said she had found them in the cellar. I looked at them, and saw the drawers belonged to Mr Riggenbach.’
The implication was that these were among the items that had been stolen by Hannah Dobbs from this most respectable of tenants. And the fact of male underwear in this context once more threw a light on the novel intimacy of this sort of living: items that would be normally bundled off to the St Pancras laundress were among those effects that could be purloined from supposedly private rooms. When were these drawers found, asked Mr Poland. ‘Barker was only with us seven week
s,’ said Mrs Bastendorff, ‘so they were found during that time.’
And what servant was engaged for 4, Euston Square after that? ‘A girl named Sarah Carpenter,’ said Mrs Bastendorff.
And did ‘that woman’ afterwards show her ‘a bone’? ‘She brought me a bone,’ said Mrs Bastendorff. ‘I looked at it and I said I believed it belonged to a wild boar my husband had, which he had shot in Germany.’
And thence to the day of the discovery in May 1879: she herself did not go into the cellar? ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I heard afterwards that a human body was found. I went up to tell my husband and during that time, a policeman had been called in.’
There was one last matter that Mr Poland wanted to find out about: the matter of Miss Uish’s eyeglass, which had now been retrieved by Inspector Hagen from a local pawnbroker and which seemed to correspond to an eyeglass sported for a time by Hannah Dobbs.
‘I remember Hannah used to have an eyeglass by a peculiar incident,’ said Mrs Bastendorff. ‘My mother wears glasses … and she compared the sight of hers and Hannah’s on one occasion when she came to visit me.’
And was the eyeglass ‘one of that description’? ‘It was a single glass and it had a gilt frame,’ said Mrs Bastendorff firmly.
Did Mrs Bastendorff ever hear from Hannah Dobbs where ‘Miss Uish came from, or where she had gone to?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Very little reference was made to her at all.’8
There is no record of how the accused Hannah Dobbs was responding to any of this in the dock. But as this pre-trial examination was adjourned, the magistrate, Mr Vaughan, caught her eye. He said to her: ‘Have you any questions to ask?’
Hannah Dobbs’ answer was shocking – and as a result, greatly relished by all the court reporters.
‘I have no questions to ask of Mrs Bastendorff,’ Hannah Dobbs said, drawing out the ‘Mrs’ with startling contempt, adding: ‘When Mr Bastendorff is present, I shall have some questions to put.’
This elicited no comment from either prosecutor or magistrate; nor is there any record of how Mary Bastendorff responded. A date was set a week hence for one more pre-trial examination. Since Hannah Dobbs was already serving a sentence in Tothill Fields, there was no difficulty about remanding her.
‘Shortly after leaving the dock,’ ran one report, ‘the prisoner, who still preserved her nonchalant demeanour, was placed in a cab, and, accompanied by the warder, driven back to the prison.’ There was also a wry afternote concerning the attractions of such cases to the general public: there were few crowds outside to witness her departure from the Bow Street court that afternoon – the reason being that ‘all those who took an interest in the case … apparently found means to enter the court which was very full indeed while the examination lasted.’
The pre-trial resumed a few weeks later – it appeared that Mary Bastendorff had fallen ill and was in no state to attend until she had recovered. Now back to health, she was present as a new gobbet of evidence was given by Hannah Dobbs’ guards at Tothill Fields; she had been telling them of a previous resident of 4, Euston Square called Mr Findlay. The chief warder of the prison, Robert Vermeulen, said that Hannah Dobbs told him of how Findlay had ‘a seven-chamber loaded revolver’. Dobbs also told him that Findlay ‘had committed a murder and that he wanted to confide his secret to her … he wanted her to go away with him to America and offered her £50 to do so but she refused the offer.’ Mr Vermeulen had not taken a note of this conversation but it was lodged in his memory.
Having heard this – with some interest – the court moved to examination of the movements of Severin Bastendorff; of his visit, that weekend in October 1877 to see a friend in Erith, on the Kent marshes. He and another friend, a ‘Mr Whiffling’, were there for some shooting.
Severin Bastendorff had got his shooting license some two months beforehand; despite that, he had had a minor dispute with a local policeman who accused him of ‘shooting in the roadway’ rather than clearly into the country. Despite this minor vexation, he and his friends continued their marsh shoot that weekend; he arrived back in Euston Square late on the evening of Sunday, 14 October 1877; he remembered seeing his wife Mary in the kitchen in her ‘walking hat’ and dress; she and the children has just returned from a trip to Hampstead. Then, he recalled, all retired to bed.
Following this evidence, there were further witness statements concerning boar bones, rent receipts, the gold chain that Hannah Dobbs had been seen with. The prosecutor Mr Poland now asked for the official ‘committal’ of the prisoner for full trial: and at this point the magistrate Mr Vaughan repeated the charge to her.
‘I am not guilty of it,’ Hannah Dobbs said.9
There was, according to reports, the first sign of some agitation from her; but she very quickly recovered; when she was presented with a declaration to sign, she did it with a firm hand.
Though Hannah Dobbs was the one standing accused of the murder of a perfectly harmless and eccentric lady, there seemed much unspoken about the arrangements within number 4, Euston Square. There had been the first suggestion of lodgers like Mr Findlay who could seem rather disconcerting.
Those had not been the only nocturnal footsteps on the stairs in number 4, Euston Square. Journalists picking up gossip were starting to hear of some intriguing and unexpected sexual relationships in that house. There were rumours involving another of the Bastendorff brothers.
And as a result – as Inspector Hagen and his colleagues were still piecing together as much as they could of the earlier life and career of Hannah Dobbs – there were other legal figures who were now anxious to swiftly learn more about the lives and experiences of a family who had emigrated from continental Europe to London and who had, with some dazzling success, reinvented themselves as English middle-class gentlemen.
11
The Brothers Bastendorff
The Bastendorff children – all sixteen of them – had grown up on a farm amid the rich forests and rocky hills and castles of the Ardennes; in the mid-nineteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, under the wing of Belgium, was still largely untouched by the Industrial Revolution. It was only in later years that new forms of steel production suddenly made the country a viable prospect for manufactories. Indeed, Luxembourg only got its first railway line in 1859, some distance behind its neighbours in Belgium and France.
The Bastendorff family lived in a village called Berdorf, near the bustling town of Echternach, which stands very close to today’s German border. The area had its own, close dialect, and held tenaciously to its Catholicism; and the children who were later to emigrate to London – Joseph, Severin, Elizabeth, Anton and Peter – would have been brought up on local folktales1 that blended religion and the lush wooded landscape with the faerie realm; there were the little people that dwelled under the hills, who aided virtuous farmers; a satanic fiddler who could possess people with his music; the chilling nocturnal chants of long-dead monks in the ruin of an abbey despoiled by invaders. There was nothing in this childhood that could have prepared them for life dwelling among millions in the fog of a vast city.
Perhaps it was the belated coming of the railway to the city of Luxembourg which opened up the possibilities of that new world. sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Bastendorff, was the first to leave her home; she was married to a young German called Wilhelm Hoerr. Their horizons were ambitious; rather than heading in the direction of Belgium, they were set on Paris. And they arrived there in the late 1860s. They were joined shortly afterwards by Elizabeth’s brother, Severin, released from his rural labour.
‘At the age of fifteen, I was hired to a farmer for one year,’ Severin later wrote, ‘… I remained with him the whole year, looking after the horses, and he maintained me. After that I went to Paris and learned the cabinet-making trade.’2
Of all the times to hope to make a new life in Paris, this was hardly ideal. Napoleon III was confident that France’s military skill and strength would act as deterrent to a newly unified Germany and its leader Bismarck.
It did not. By 1870, there was war.
Elizabeth and Wilhelm Hoerr and Severin Bastendorff left just before the disaster overwhelmed Paris; the thunder of war made them think not of returning to Luxembourg, but venturing further. There had been a few instances of their young Berdorf neighbours sailing out to America. But they decided upon London.
And it was Severin, then 22-years old, who moved first. He set sail on a steam packet across the grey Channel and came into port at Southampton. ‘I knew no-one, and could not speak a word of English, only French and German,’ he later wrote.3
When Bastendorff arrived, there was no oppressive police presence at the docks to follow him; no officials to tell him that his time in the country was limited; no overbearing government departments insistent on monitoring his employment or housing. There was just a quick note on a register. (Indeed, it was only in the 1880s that official passenger disembarkation lists started to be kept; and the first serious efforts at controlling immigration came later yet at the turn of the century.)
On the other side of that, Bastendorff was left to make his own way in this alien realm. It must have been a tremendous adventure for the young man with no English; but the docks were very cosmopolitan. ‘A man at Southampton gave me the address of a hotel in Nassau Street,’ he wrote. ‘I went there and had some refreshment and he (the proprietor) sent a waiter with me to take a room at the tobacconist’s shop in Ryder’s Court, which I took for two shillings and six pence. The shopkeeper was a Pole.’ It seemed also that he was connected to a wider network of émigrés. ‘Next day, this Pole gave me addresses to look for work.’
One of those addresses was in the East End of London; using what remained of his money, Bastendorff caught the train from Southampton; here, in this swaying carriage amid fellow passengers, he will have had that exhilarating butterfly sensation of being a new arrival in a foreign land. He would have glanced around and wondered if the others could tell he was a foreigner.
His approach into London from the south took him past plump green hills dense with suburban villas, and thence more close-built yellow-brick terraces, and on from there towards the dense smoky clusters of tall chimneys and low roofs denoting riverside industry. The air of this new world – coal, chemicals, gusts from breweries, the close, fusty reek of others’ clothes – must have tasted extraordinary to him. His train arrived at Victoria station. And from here, there was what must have been the stomach-swooping prospect of the underground Metropolitan District Railway: the recently constructed ingenuity of which was described by some as ‘a descent into Hades’: again, we must imagine a young man from a rural land standing looking into the black mouth of the tunnel, cacophonous with the approach of the deep green steam engine; then, the yellow gaslight in the swaying brown-painted wooden carriages, the rich darkness out of the windows, punctuated with gas-lit stations, until reaching the terminus at Mansion House. However he did it, Bastendorff eventually made his way east to Union Street in Whitechapel.
The Lady in the Cellar Page 9