The Lady in the Cellar

by Sinclair McKay

  Bastendorff related how the following day, the Monday, he had particularly directed Hannah Dobbs to go upstairs and collect the old lady’s rent – and that if she did not do so, he would do it himself. The reason, he said, ‘for speaking thus sharply was that (she) had shown a disinclination to collect rents from the lodgers’. But when spoken to, Hannah Dobbs said: ‘Then I will go.’ And as his wife had stated, Dobbs came back down the stairs with a £5 note.

  Added to all this, Bastendorff told the court that he ‘afterwards found a cash-box lying about the house’; he asked where it had come from. Dobbs had told him that it belonged to her, but ‘having been compelled to break it open, as she had lost the key, it was no use’.

  Like his wife, Bastendorff said that he had no inkling of what might be lying beneath those coals in the cellar; he did remember ‘one occasion’ when he ‘smelt something rather strong’ and spoke to Hannah Dobbs about it. He thought that ‘it was some bad eggs on the shelf’ and he admonished Dobbs ‘to keep the place more sweet’. Indeed, she seemed to have attended to the problem, for he remembered that a little later, around Christmas 1877, that he ventured into the cellar when there were coals there and ‘everything was sweet’. His holiday to Germany – and the wild boar he shot there – was a little later. The salted boar was stored not in the coal cellar, but in the adjacent cellar.

  There was just one last thing the prosecution wanted to know: did Mr Bastendorff have any memories of the lodger called Findlay? Yes, he said; that he ‘left in August 1877’ and ‘had a small American revolver’.4

  Once again, the defence counsel Mr Mead decided to ‘reserve’ his cross-examination. And with this, the court was adjourned until the following day. Hannah Dobbs had apparently lost none of her composure. This in itself was quite remarkable.

  16

  ‘It Was Not My Place’

  Whatever the source of her outward strength, Hannah Dobbs would surely also have been helped by the dizzying pace of the proceedings. The following day in the New Court of the Old Bailey, the defence was ready to begin cross-examinations. And Mary Bastendorff was the first to be recalled to the witness box. She was first asked once again about the gold watch and chain that Hannah Dobbs had started to affect around the house.

  Mrs Bastendorff recalled that just before Dobbs left her service, she found two pledge tickets in Dobbs’ box; these were for a pawnshop run by a Mr Thompson. And while Dobbs worked at 4, Euston Square, how much latitude did the servant have in terms of taking time off? She was, said Mrs Bastendorff, ‘in the habit of frequently going out. Sometimes she went out on Sunday – whenever she chose to ask, she went out’. And if the lodgers needed anything in these absences, a ‘little girl’ would step help. This ‘girl’ was a ‘nurse’ or nanny but she was not there in October 1877 – or indeed, at any point when Matilda Hacker was in the house. And Mrs Bastendorff added that she could not recall Hannah Dobbs ‘going out at all’ during the time ‘that Miss Hacker was lodging’.

  The defence counsel was interested in this. Could Mrs Bastendorff be quite sure on this point? It seemed not; she could not ‘swear to it’. What were the more precise terms of Hannah Dobbs’ duties when it came to the lodgers? ‘She provided for all the requirements of the lodgers before she went out,’ said Mrs Bastendorff. Occasionally, she herself would send Dobbs on errands. But yes, she conceded that lodgers might occasionally come into her own room if there were any requests.

  Mr Mead continued, could Mrs Bastendorff swear that Matilda Hacker never spent an afternoon with the landlady? ‘I do not recollect it,’ said Mrs Bastendorff. ‘It is very improbable that she did.’ However, she conceded, ‘on one occasion, she might have taken my children into the square’.

  Could Mrs Bastendorff also be quite certain about the stained carpet in Matilda Hacker’s room? ‘The stain was not on the carpet when Miss Hacker came,’ she said, adding that she only saw it ‘after she left’. She did not, she told the court, go into the room when Matilda Hacker was staying there.

  And yet, the defence asked, ‘managing this lodging house, will you swear that you never went into their rooms?’ Mrs Bastendorff became quite vehement, telling him: ‘No. I never went into Miss Hacker’s room. I was too much engaged with other things. It was not my place to look after lodgers.’

  This received a startlingly aggressive response from Mr Mead: ‘I should rather think that it was your place to look after the comfort of your lodgers.’ The cross-examination went on.

  Did Mrs Bastendorff see Matilda Hacker’s luggage being taken away in a cab? No, she did not. Was it normal for Hannah Dobbs to look after the children? She ‘was in the habit of taking (the) children’. And so could it have been the case that Hannah Dobbs had the children on that fateful Sunday when ‘Miss Hacker went away?’ Mrs Bastendorff ‘could not say that she did not do this’.

  So what were Matilda Hacker’s daily habits? As a rule, said Mrs Bastendorff, she ‘dressed in the morning and went out’. Mr Mead returned to the children; and Mary Bastendorff was forced to concede that it was a possibility that on that Sunday, Hannah Dobbs had taken them up to Hampstead.

  And so when precisely did Hannah Dobbs relay the news that ‘Miss Uish’ had gone? It was on the Monday, at around lunchtime. But how could Mrs Bastendorff not have noticed the inevitable disturbance – the noise of belongings being taken downstairs, the footsteps above moving back and forth, checking that all had been packed, the summoning of the cab outside – that comes with departure? ‘Anyone,’ she said, ‘could come downstairs and leave without (her) hearing.’

  Indeed, when pushed on this, she added that she ‘should not have seen the cab unless she had watched for it’.

  From the business point of view, was it not the case that her lodgers would have to give her notice of at least a few days if they were planning to leave? No, said Mrs Bastendorff. It was ‘not at all usual for the lodgers to give notice’. The judge leaned in, interested, and asked: ‘Not usual?’

  ‘Not in furnished apartments,’ said Mary Bastendorff. ‘At least,’ she added, she ‘did not make it a rule.’ The judge asked if all her tenants had departed similarly. Mrs Bastendorff ‘could not remember whether the next lodger who came gave notice or not’. But on that occasion, she had seen the lady – Miss Willoughby – depart.

  Something by this stage had started to visibly irk the judge, Justice Hawkins. Perhaps he thought Mary Bastendorff was being wilfully evasive, or hostile – perhaps he simply thought that she was a neglectful landlady – but his own questions stepped up. He wanted to hear more from her about the nature of the coal cellar. ‘The cellar would hold a large quantity of coals,’ she said. ‘They had had four tons in it.’ And ‘it was a light cellar’ (meaning that with the door open, it got the light).

  And what of the day that Matilda Hacker arrived and moved into number 4, Euston Square? Mary Bastendorff was once more blank. She ‘did not see her arrive, but understood that she brought luggage’. No, she did not ‘hear the luggage being taken upstairs’. Someone might more fairly have pointed out that as the mother of four young children, she might have been elsewhere attending to other matters as the old lady was let into the house by Hannah Dobbs. But Justice Hawkins now volubly lost his temper, as though he felt that Mary Bastendorff was being deliberately obstructive.

  He turned to the jury. And he asked them: ‘Is there any other question I can try to get answered? I never saw such a witness. We cannot get answers to questions which ought to be answered.’1

  Mrs Bastendorff was asked then whether she noticed the comings and goings of the tenants in the unfurnished rooms, for which they supplied all their own needs. And yes, this was the distinction that she had wanted to make: she remembered the departure of Mr Riggenbach, for instance, ‘as he had his own furniture’.

  This had clearly been an ordeal for Mrs Bastendorff; but perhaps where the judge thought he saw sullen silence, there could have been a range of other emotions, one of which might have been an in
ward terror. Each of these encounters was scraping layers of respectability and security off the life of her home and family. She might also have known that there was worse to come.

  Now Severin Bastendorff was re-called, and he swore his oaths. Without any kind of preamble, Mr Mead – who had now clearly been briefed very much more comprehensively by his client – began his questioning aggressively.

  The inquest had heard about Hannah Dobbs’ relationship with Peter Bastendorff. Mr Mead was now about to allege that there was quite another relationship going on at the same time.

  Was it the case, Mead asked Severin Bastendorff, that he had been ‘keeping company’ with Hannah Dobbs?

  The denial was instant and hot. Bastendorff declared that all the time Hannah Dobbs was in the family’s service, he ‘was never out with her’.

  Was Mr Bastendorff perhaps familiar, Mr Mead now asked, with the Princes Hotel in Argyle Street?

  Bastendorff replied that he ‘knew Argyle Street, not the Prince’s Hotel’.

  Was he ever there with Hannah Dobbs?

  No, he said. He ‘was never in Argyle Street with her’.

  Now Mr Mead mentioned an inn in the Surrey town of Redhill, some 30 miles south of London. Had he ever been there with Hannah Dobbs? Or after she left his service, did he perhaps go and see her at her lodgings just off the Edgware Road? Again, the denial was most insistent. He ‘did not go to Redhill to see her, nor to her lodgings in the Edgware Road’.

  But, it was put to him, she had also been observed in the vicinity of Euston Square after she had left service there. Yes, Bastendorff said, he had on occasion seen her outside his house but he ‘never walked one inch with her’.

  Mr Mead suggested that there was a local publican who thought otherwise. Bastendorff ‘knew a publican named Johnson and his brother’, but he ‘did not tell the latter’ that he ‘had been out’ with Hannah Dobbs.

  The defence counsel would not leave the subject. Was Severin Bastendorff ‘not attached’ to Hannah Dobbs? ‘No,’ said Bastendorff simply. ‘I liked her very well because my brother was keeping company with her.’

  Wasn’t younger brother Peter uneasy about Severin’s affection for Hannah?

  ‘My brother never complained that I was too fond of her,’ said Bastendorff. ‘If he says so, it is untrue.’

  All of this must have been profoundly shifting the views of the jury. At the start, and through newspaper speculation, Hannah Dobbs had been presented as a defiant, shameless young woman; her sexual relationship with Peter Bastendorff shockingly free and casual. But into this portrait of modern amorality was thrown a further element of seaminess; sexual betrayal.

  Mr Mead wanted to know still yet more. Did Severin Bastendorff ever give Hannah Dobbs any presents? His answer had an unintentional element of Pooterish humour about it. ‘Never of more value than two shillings and sixpence,’ he said. ‘That was the value of a cabinet I gave her.’

  And, continued Mr Mead silkily, did Hannah Dobbs ever lend Severin any money? ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Three pounds in the year 1877.’

  That was a startlingly large sum – almost a quarter of her annual salary. And now Mr Mead was ploughing into murkier territory; what else, Mead asked, did Hannah Dobbs give him? Bastendorff told him that she lent him ‘her watch for half a day’. She also ‘gave him a pencil case’.

  And did he ever give her a gold watch? He said no.

  Did he not give her the gold watch and chain, persisted the defence counsel, ‘and tell her to say that her uncle had given them to her, and that because you did not wish your wife to know the circumstance?’

  ‘No,’ said Bastendorff, ‘I did not.’

  ‘Nor the gold eyeglass?’

  ‘No.’

  The sequence of questions had the appearance of trying to move the shadow of guilt away from Hannah Dobbs and on to Severin Bastendorff.

  When, Mr Mead wanted to know, did Bastendorff first see Matilda Hacker’s basket trunk? ‘Last autumn,’ he said (which would have been the autumn of 1878). ‘It was then in the scullery. It might have been in the house a long time,’ and, he said, he would not have seen it.

  And what of the cash-box? Bastendorff said he ‘used it for Christmas 1877’. It was Hannah Dobbs who had given him the box. Why, asked Mead. Bastendorff had ‘asked her for it,’ he said. ‘It was standing on the dresser.’ And Dobbs gave it to him.

  Mead abruptly turned to rumours concerning the moral nature of 4, Euston Square. Was he right to state that on the sabbath, there was frequently drinking and gambling taking place there? ‘On Sunday, card-playing sometimes went on,’ in his house, Bastendorff said, ‘and drinking.’ But then he had got into a routine of going away for the weekend, and so such activities stopped. Indeed, he told the court, he absented himself precisely because he wanted to ‘turn-up’ the card-playing, meaning give it up. He ‘did not like it on Sundays’.

  This had the effect once more of shifting impressions; not merely an apparently respectable man using his house for gambling, but also a man for whom the card-playing was becoming a problem. Mead had astutely established the unusual fact of the servant lending money to her employer; and he had also fixed in those minds the image of the cashbox, also being handed by the servant to the employer. And the thread of this narrative was becoming more and more pronounced; if perhaps the old lady had been murdered opportunistically for money, might there not have been a likelier suspect?

  And these weekend sojourns in the country, continued Mr Mead. Did Mrs Bastendorff ever join him in these jaunts? ‘On one occasion,’ he said. And yet could he not recall having said at the police court that Hannah Dobbs had joined him on a Sunday, bringing one or two of the children? He said he had not ‘had time to think over the matter’.

  There were yet more curious mysteries to be considered. Why, asked Mr Mead, had pages been torn from the general rent book of 4, Euston Square? Bastendorff declared that he could not say. Then there were the guns in the house: the lodger Mr Findlay apparently had a revolver – but he was not the only one, was he, said Mr Mead. Bastendorff replied that in 1876, he had had a revolver ‘which he sold in that year’. He conceded though that he ‘borrowed a revolver from his brother’.

  The prosecution returned to the subject of Hannah Dobbs; he was interested in the amount of latitude that she had within the house. Mr Bastendorff testified that she was ‘in the habit of going out’; and that if the lodgers ever required anything while she was out, sometimes the childrens’ young nursemaid would help. Though Bastendorff also recalled one occasion when Hannah went out and a lodger started ringing for her attention. The lodger was ignored by everyone else and indeed carried on ringing for hours until the maid returned.

  This gift of a cabinet to the maid; the prosecution was interested in hearing more about it. Bastendorff told him that it was a ‘Japanese cabinet’; he had ‘allowed her to choose’. And for what reason had Hannah Dobbs lent her employer the sum of £3? ‘It was to pay the carriage of a cask of claret,’ said Bastendorff. He had the wine imported specially from France; the reason for the loan was that he ‘happened to be very busy at the time’ (thus not being able to get to the bank) and he ‘paid the money back the same week’.2 But where had Hannah Dobbs obtained the money from?

  He was also asked about the layout of 4, Euston Square in terms of sleeping arrangements; this presumably was to help narrow down the hours in which Matilda Hacker was fatally attacked. Bastendorff told the court that ‘the children slept on the floor above that which Miss Hacker had her room’. He added that they ‘were usually put to bed at 7 o’clock’.

  This seemed to suggest that the murder had certainly taken place earlier; surely the young children would have been awoken by any disturbance from downstairs? Equally though, it might have pointed in the other direction: the tired little children soundly asleep, and the house otherwise empty save for Matilda Hacker and whomever her assailant might have been.

  Bastendorff was now relieved from the stand. He
would have known that the suggestion of a sexual relationship with the woman accused of murder would be featuring in all of the newspapers the next day; that it would be there in the eyes of all his neighbours in Euston Square. It cannot be known how much, after the hearing, he protested innocence to Mary.

  His friends were next to be called as witnesses, to prove that on the day of the murder, he had indeed been out in the country. Taking the stand was John Richards of Brook Street, Erith, to tell how Bastendorff had been visiting at the weekend for the last two years, and how he would accompany him ‘on Saturday and Sunday morning shooting small birds’. Mr Richards remembered the ‘one occasion’ when Mary Bastendorff came down for the weekend to join them. And he also testified that on that crucial October weekend, Bastendorff was there as usual, leaving late on the Sunday evening; Mr Richards remembered that particularly as ‘he had to go after him with a string of birds’ that Bastendorff had presumably forgotten.

  Mr Whiffling, Severin’s friend from nearby Gower Street, gave corroborating evidence, adding in his recollection of Bastendorff being fined by the officious Erith policeman.

  Then came the turn of Mary Bastendorff’s mother, ‘Mrs Pearce, Charrington Street’. She was there to testify about the gold watch; how Hannah Dobbs had handed her the watch to get it cleaned in October 1877. It was the watch that had been produced in court; the property of Matilda Hacker. The reason Dobbs had sent it her way was that Mrs Pearce had a lodger in Charrington Street called David Rhodes who knew a specialist in jewellery cleaning. He in turn passed the watch to Mr Julius Jeuchner, ‘watchmaker, Soho’; and the watch was duly returned to Hannah Dobbs.

  But Mrs Pearce recalled rebuking Hannah Dobbs, telling her that ‘it was very out of place to wear jewellery in the presence of lodgers’. She remembered also that Dobbs appeared to have acquired an eyeglass.