The Lady in the Cellar

by Sinclair McKay

  ‘Unfortunately, most of that class upon whom many of us have to depend have had no opportunity for systematic training,’ the magazine declared. ‘So they pick up a few ideas here and there and use them very inefficiently. For example: notice the manner in which many girls remove the dishes at the dinner table. It makes one uneasy and nervous to sit by and observe the slovenly manner in which this work is often accomplished.’5

  Could one learn authority? Equally, from the point of view of the put-upon overworked maid, could one acquire a habit of sincere subservience and obedience? By the 1870s, there were countless magazines devoting much feature space to these and associated problems. There were some books too, among them The Lady’s Maid published in 1877, which featured advice both to employers and servants on tricky matters such as privacy and discretion.

  It is especially interesting to think that while Karl Marx was studying and writing in the British Museum reading room in Bloomsbury, there were daily outbreaks in the houses all around him of a perfectly invisible and yet important class struggle. It might perhaps have been one thing to be in the service of a bejewelled Duchess; but in so many households in London and the larger cities, the ladies of the house had only just attained their middle-class eminence; to what extent did a certain social insecurity drive their dealings with their staff?

  Even as early as 1853, a journal called the North British Review was dispensing tips when it came to the troubling question of servants witnessing domestic disharmony. ‘Everything that you do, and very much that you say, at home is related in your servants’ families,’ ran the article, ‘and by them retailed to other gossips in the neighbourhood, with appropriate exaggerations, until you almost feel that you might well live in a glass house or a whispering gallery.’6

  Meanwhile, in The Lady’s Maid, the servant in question was advised on how to deal with capricious employers and domestic tension. ‘If your master should be unfortunate in his temper or in any of his habits,’ it read, ‘if you should hear harsh words, or see your mistress in distress, you are bound in honour to be as silent upon the whole matter, whether you are so desired or not, as if it were a secret committed to your keeping.’7

  The secrets were on both sides, though, and other journals counselled the lady of the house to keenly monitor those who came to visit their servants; to ‘double-check the kitchen accounts’; and also to set strict curfews. Intriguingly, this particular aspect of life for servants was soon to be focused upon as the Euston Square trial got underway.

  In the case of Kate Webster, it seemed understood that here was a woman with no sense either of moral boundaries or class boundaries: that she killed and then dismembered her mistress in an apparent frenzy after being scolded for her domestic shortcomings was one thing. But there was also outrage, as expressed in the press coverage after her execution, that she should then have had the impertinence to assume the identity of her dead employer. She appropriated the clothes and jewellery of Mrs Thomas and began to pass herself off as a lady.

  And the trial of Hannah Dobbs for the murder of Matilda Hacker at 4, Euston Square was also set to create interest in how a maid and her employers negotiated the working relationship; and it was also set to illustrate just how easily the balance of power in certain households could be swayed this way and that. Inspector Hagen and the newspaper correspondents had been working on the assumption that, like the Webster case, this was a straightforward affair that would be easily settled by the court. They were all perfectly wrong.

  15

  ‘Everything Was Sweet’

  In her white-washed cell – and out of it – Hannah Dobbs was unusually garrulous; and whether talking to fellow prisoners, or the guards watching over her, she was discussing the Matilda Hacker case as if she herself was distanced from it and might be able to reach some valuable deductions. All this would emerge in later testimony. It is difficult to know whether this was some reflex caused by a growing dread of the trial; or an extraordinarily strong self-assurance that her own innocence would be taken for granted.

  Her talkativeness was not light-hearted though; Hannah spoke very seriously to those around her. Indeed, she was often conspiratorial. She seemed to have a taste for suggesting that all was not as it seemed with certain Euston Square tenants … and then she would stop herself, as though somehow forbidden to say more.

  The streets outside the prison were glistening with rain that never seemed to stop over those first weeks of summer; and the bruised sky brought with it dampening cold. But outside pubs around Westminster and Hyde Park, there were brilliant splashes of scarlet: the uniform of soldiers from barracks celebrating the news of British victory in the Anglo-Zulu War after the Battle of Ulundi.

  Here was a city effervescent with confidence, a dazzling spectacle to visitors; a city that was now fully conscious of its own splendour. The view to Ludgate Hill, and thence to the dome of St Paul’s, was bisected by a railway line; a perspective that placed Christopher Wren’s seventeenth-century ideal of a reborn London next to the exuberant vigour of nineteenth-century industry. Under this railway bridge was driven the police cab taking Hannah Dobbs to the nearby Old Bailey. The case was heard in the New Court in June 1879. Even in that drab summer, the light would have flooded through the three large windows of the court; and there would have been ample opportunity for all present to study the most minute of Hannah Dobbs’ reactions as the proceedings unfolded.

  The prosecution was to be led by the Attorney General, on behalf of the Treasury; he opened by outlining the nature of the case against Hannah Dobbs; this was weighted with additional information concerning the stained carpet in Matilda Hacker’s room; a ‘piece had been cut out’ and tests confirmed not only that the stain was blood but that also ‘there must have been a considerable quantity of it’. The case was that Matilda had been most probably killed by a blow to the back of the neck (differing from the inquest’s supposition that strangulation had been the chief method of dispatch). There was also mention of the old woman’s watch and other items of jewellery, which ended up being pawned by Hannah.

  It was the intention of the prosecution to prove that on an autumn Sunday in October 1877, ‘Hannah Dobbs and Miss Hacker were the only grown-ups in the house’; Severin Bastendorff was out shooting on the Erith marshes, Mary Bastendorff was visiting her sisters and her mother, respectively in Holloway and in St Pancras. The other lodger, sugar merchant Francis Riggenbach had been out in the morning, ‘returned for a short time in the afternoon to get something, and went away with a friend, and he would be able to fix the date by the character of the conversation he and his friend had’.

  The prosecutor was quite firm about what might seem to some circumstantial evidence. He told the jury that many ‘cases of this description – cases of murder – depended on circumstantial evidence but such evidence might happen to be stronger and even more trustworthy than direct evidence’.

  He did not explain exactly how this might be so; he added that what the jury ‘had to do was satisfy themselves as to the facts which it was alleged could be proved and from which they were asked to draw their inferences’.1

  Yet this was certainly not going to prove either straightforward or easy for the jurors; the very first witness on the stand instead seemed to weave further layers of ambiguity into the case. This was Dr H. Davis of number 1, Euston Square, who had been called almost immediately after the hideous discovery in the cellar was made. Now, some weeks later, he had his notes: and he was pleased to take the gentlemen of the jury through the charnel house details.

  The ‘separation of limbs from the body was no doubt due to decomposition’, he said. ‘The whole of the flesh had gone from the face and front of the leg, and also from the scalp except the back part.’ There was the indentation caused by the cord around the neck and the ‘flesh was in a very decomposed state’.

  All that said, there ‘was no indication by which he could judge of the death’. He ‘should have expected that there would have been a
flow of blood – probably not a copious flow – from a body which had been strangled. This would have been from the eyes, mouth and nose.’ He added that if the jugular vein had been severed, ‘the body would have been emptied of blood directly’.

  Mr Mead, the defence counsel, was intrigued by this. ‘So as far as you saw,’ he said to Dr Davis, ‘there was nothing inconsistent with a natural death?’

  ‘No,’ said the doctor.

  ‘There would have been a flow of blood,’ continued Mr Mead, ‘had a blood vessel been broken?’ The doctor agreed, and withdrew from the stand. In his place came ‘Mr A.J. Pepper, pathologist’ at St Mary’s Hospital. Again, confusingly, he threw doubt upon the very idea of murder. He told the court he had made ‘two examinations of the body at St Pancras mortuary’. And that he ‘agreed generally with the evidence of Dr Davis’.

  In his view, ‘strangulation would make a considerable indentation’. In the case of this corpse, the mark ‘was higher than if the person had been strangled’.

  The Attorney General cut in to ask Mr Pepper if he could clarify that. ‘The marks were consistent with hanging,’ said Pepper, ‘or of the body’s being dragged by the cord.’

  There was a sliver of further medical evidence from Mr W. Luck, analytical chemist, who told the court that he had made ‘an analysis of the internal organs of the stomach and found no trace of poison’.2

  The question was left hanging in the air: was there the chance that this was a murder trial for a murder that had not actually been committed? But there was also an impatient velocity to the proceedings; such cases rarely ran beyond one-and-a-half or two days. There were many more witnesses to be heard.

  Matilda Hacker’s brother, Edward, took the stand. He confirmed that he ‘never saw her alive after October 1877’ and that before then, their communications had been sparse. ‘She usually called every four months,’ he said, ‘and generally at Christmas.’ He said that ‘last Christmas, she did not call.’ He thought this ‘very strange and made inquiries, and found that she had not applied for her rents as usual’. The prosecutor was apparently too sensitive to make the awkward point that this would in fact have been the second Christmas he had not seen his sister, the first being that of 1877; this meant that over a year-and-a-half had passed before he began to find his sister’s absence strikingly odd.

  And what of the residents of 4, Euston Square? The German sugar merchant Francis Riggenbach – who now lived in Brixton Road, south of the river – told the court that in August 1877, he took an apartment in the Bastendorff home, ‘occupying the whole first floor’. He lived there, he said, until September 1878. Hannah Dobbs, he said, was the servant there and she ‘waited upon him the whole of the time he was there, excepting when she went for a holiday’.

  Mr Riggenbach said that he ‘did not recollect the lady who occupied the room over him’ (this was Matilda Hacker) ‘but on one occasion – a Sunday – in October 1877’, he met ‘a lady in the passage’. Mr Riggenbach explained that he ‘usually left about nine o’clock in the morning and returned about the same time in the evening’ and that on Sundays, he would go out at about lunchtime and return at about nine or ten o’clock in the evening. The implication was that even if he had wanted to, he would never have spent enough time in the house to get to know his fellow lodgers to any great degree.

  So what then did he recall of that autumn Sunday when it was being assumed that Matilda Hacker had been murdered? Mr Riggenbach said he remembered 14 October 1877 because ‘it was the day of the French elections’. He went out that day ‘to see a friend who resided at Torrington Square (just two or three streets away), leaving at about 12 o’clock (noon)’. He told the court that he returned to Euston Square with his father and a friend ‘for a few minutes about 4 o’clock’ and then went out again, remaining out until about eleven o’clock that night.

  This evidence if anything made the puzzle more unsettling. If the contention of the prosecution was that this was a vicious killing carried out when the murderer knew that the house was empty, then when did the murderer strike? Before or after Mr Riggenbach had returned at 4 o’clock for that few minutes? When he went back to his first-floor apartment, was there already a corpse lying on the floor above his head? Or had the body already been taken down to the coal cellar? There was clearly no sense of disturbance, or of violence, or none at least that Mr Riggenbach noted. Had it happened after he left, as the house swiftly darkened in the autumn night? Such questions must also have caused the jurors to look at Hannah Dobbs in the dock and wonder about motivation and, indeed, opportunity. In a house where people generally were coming and going without warning, how had she timed this shocking slaughter?

  Mary Bastendorff was now called to the stand; if the inquest had been an ordeal, this must have been doubly so. She told the court that it was in the summer of 1876 when Hannah Dobbs came to work for them. The servant’s salary was £14 a year. Mrs Bastendorff remembered that in August 1877, Hannah ‘went away for about a month’. She did not elaborate on why the maid-of-all-work had been granted such an unusually long leave, but again, the question must surely have struck many of the jurors.

  Mrs Bastendorff remembered ‘Miss Uish’ coming ‘to lodge with them’. Her rent was 12 shillings a week and it had particularly stuck in the landlady’s memory because they day the old lady arrived, she had gone out specially to buy a new glass lamp, which would go in ‘Miss Uish’s’ room.

  She maintained that she ‘only saw Miss Uish twice while she was at 4, Euston Square’. It was, she said, ‘on Sunday morning on each occasion’. Indeed, Hannah Dobbs had borrowed ‘a church service’ for her. Three weeks after ‘Miss Uish had been in the apartments – viz, on Monday, October 15, 1877’, her husband, Severin, asked Hannah Dobbs for Miss Uish’s rent. Mary Bastendorff told the court of Hannah Dobbs taking the bill upstairs and returning with the £5 note. Mrs Bastendorff was certain that she never saw ‘Miss Uish’ again.

  It was ‘a day or two’ afterwards that Mary Bastendorff went into the old woman’s former room on the second floor and immediately noticed ‘a large stain on the carpet’.

  There were now questions directly about Hannah Dobbs and her movements. Mrs Bastendorff testified how, at the latter end of October 1877, just after ‘Miss Uish’ was thought to have left, that Hannah Dobbs went ‘away for three days’. She had told her employers that she was ‘going to her home in Bideford’ and that ‘her uncle had died leaving her a watch and a chain and some money’. And, indeed, Mrs Bastendorff noted that her servant was wearing a watch and chain, although she could not swear to them being the same as those produced in court.

  And what then of the coal cellar, where this body had lain hidden for over 18 months? Mary Bastendorff told the court that while Hannah Dobbs was in her employ, she herself never went into that cellar.

  Hannah Dobbs, she said in response to another question, left her situation in 4, Euston Square eleven months later in September 1878. She had told her employer that ‘she was going into apartments’ in nearby Gower Street. After she left, Mary Bastendorff spent a few weeks ‘without a servant’. And on the very rare occasions she did go into the cellar, all she saw was ‘rubbish’. She recounted the story of the bone, and of the wild boar, and then of the discovery of the body. Mrs Bastendorff told the court that up until that time, she ‘had not the slightest idea that there was any body in the cellar’.

  She was asked to think back to the presumed date of the murder, that dark October Sunday, and to think hard about the whereabouts of all who lived in 4, Euston Square. Severin Bastendorff went off to the Kent marshes on the Saturday and did not return until late upon the Sunday evening. Mrs Bastendorff went to visit her sister in north London. And she was aware that Hannah Dobbs took the children ‘to be photographed at Hampstead’ but she ‘could not say’ that this was in October.3

  None the less, this left open another intriguing element; if the Bastendorffs’ children were in the care of Hannah Dobbs that day then wher
e exactly were they in the Euston Square house when the murder was supposed to have been carried out? And how could Hannah Dobbs have wrought such an act of violence without the children having detected any disturbance? This was a loose thread: but for some reason, the defence counsel Mr Mead ‘reserved his cross-examination’ by the ‘permission of the court’.

  The proceedings moved at speed and next to be called to the witness box was Severin Bastendorff. The first thing that he recalled about the lodger ‘Miss Uish’ was The Book of Dreams, which, he said, she ‘was very fond of reading’. It is difficult to know how he formed this impression because, as he subsequently said, he ‘never saw her’. It was not his habit, he said, ‘to see the lodgers’.

  Bastendorff was happy to recount his shooting outing that key weekend; how he was accompanied by his friend Mr Whiffling, and the minor disagreement with the local Erith constable about his ‘shooting near the high road’. He was required to pay a hefty fine of £2. That aside, the weekend had clearly been enjoyable; the sportsmen entrained back from Erith to London Bridge on the Sunday evening; and Bastendorff’s friend accompanied him ‘to the corner of Euston Square’. This was about 11p.m. When Bastendorff let himself in, and went down to the kitchen, he found his wife there – she herself had only just returned from her sister at Holloway.

  It could only be assumed that their children had been tucked up in bed for some time; and given that neither husband or wife mentioned seeing Hannah Dobbs, that the maid must have retired too. This again must have struck some of the jurors as curious; surely it would take blood of the coldest sort to murder, to hide the body, and then to remain in the house and go to bed as though nothing had happened?