At around this time, she wrote, Severin Bastendorff was planning a business trip to Paris; and rather than go all alone, he wanted Hannah to go with him too. By her account, Hannah pertly demurred, claiming instead that she had plans to go and visit her family in Bideford.
She also told Peter that she was going home; but he was angry and apparently jealous. He told her directly that he had heard about the proposed Paris trip; and that he believed she was lying and that she was going with his brother. It was not until the following night – after he had spent some time with Severin ‘at the public house’ – that Peter found that Severin had cancelled his journey. Hannah pushed on to Bideford, taking the child Peter with her.
After several days, they returned and she was told that Mr Riggenbach’s room had not been cleaned as he had recently acquired ‘a black dog’ and everyone else in the house was too afraid to go in.
She was also asked by Severin, she claimed, for a loan of some money; Hannah told him she did not have the amount that he wanted. He suggested pawning the gold watch and chain, with the promise that he would soon buy her a new one, which was less ‘old-fashioned’. Thus it was that Hannah Dobbs sought to move the focus on the old lady’s pawned possessions on to a landlord who seemed always to be in some kind of cash-flow difficulty.
But it was the following Sunday that – Hannah wrote – she made the most horrifying discovery. ‘I went out into the back yard to get some shavings (kindling) to make my fire burn up,’ she wrote. ‘In the yard there is a flight of steps leading up to the work-room.’ And under this was a cramped storage area filled with timber and wood shavings. ‘I put my hand in to get these,’ wrote Hannah, ‘when I felt something move.’
In fright, she wrote, she ran back to the house and announced what had happened. ‘They all ran out,’ wrote Hannah, avoiding saying precisely who ‘they’ were. ‘They’ peered into the wood-store darkness and ‘we saw a small boy – very ragged’. The frightened boy tried to wriggle deeper into the wood and had to be poked out ‘with a long bamboo’. ‘The child cried a little,’ wrote Hannah, ‘but at last ran out and endeavoured to make his escape.’ And this is when – by her account – the horror descended.
‘One of the party (how I shudder as I write it!) struck the little fellow on the head two or three crushing blows with a poker. I screamed and was going to run for the doctor but I was stopped and told to wait awhile. I helped undress the little fellow and put him in a bath and then he was wrapped in a blanket and laid under the bench in the workshop. Then, in a little while, they told me he was dead. Would to God they had laid me there too.’
What could be more horrible than the murder of a small and defenceless street child? ‘He was very pale and slim,’ wrote Hannah, ‘his hair was light and his clothes though ragged had evidently been patched at times. I don’t think he could have been more than ten years old. All his clothes were gathered together and burned at the workshop fire.’1
Again, she was remarkably discreet when it came to naming those in on the conspiracy. Presumably Severin, yes, but Peter? Toon? Mary Bastendorff? And what of any inquisitive neighbours who would surely have been drawn to their back windows to see what all the noise was about in the yard below? But Hannah’s catalogue of horrors was by no means finished. Eliding the question of why she chose to stay in such a nightmarish house, rather than running straight to the police, and then seeking sanctuary at home, she and ‘they’ apparently carried on as though nothing had happened.
There is in fact some wholly unintentional black humour in the continued account, as well as further horrors. ‘On Saturday afternoon, about three weeks after the little child was killed, I was sent to Meeking’s to buy some brown Holland for childrens’ pinafores,’ Hannah wrote, as if it were perfectly natural for her to assent to life carrying on as normal. ‘When I returned, both staircase windows were thrown open; but notwithstanding all this, a fearful smell pervaded the whole house. I asked what was the matter, and was told it was some rubbish in the (furniture work) shop. I tried the workshop doors and found them both fastened.’
At this stage in her account, Hannah became a form of gothic heroine. ‘I rattled one, and said I wanted to come in,’ she wrote. ‘They told me I could not, and upon my asking what they were doing, I was told they were boiling some grease. Then I went up on the leads and opened one of the wooden slides and looked down into the workroom. I saw a bundle wrapped round with a blue counterpane. The boiler was standing on the stove. I called down and asked what was being done, when the reply was ‘nothing in particular’ and at this moment I was called away by Mrs Bastendorff.
‘Two days after I had seen the bundle in the workroom, I went into the (front) area, and found the outer coal cellar door locked with a padlock,’ Hannah continued. ‘With a woman’s curiosity, I determined to know what was inside, and I tried all the keys about the place until I found one to fit the padlock.
‘I went into the cellar and found there a large bundle wrapped in a blue counterpane and tied round with new rope. I opened the bundle and there found some straw and on removing this – oh God! What a sight met my gaze! There were all that remained of our late lodger, Miss Hacker!
‘How I got upstairs, I don’t know; but I sat on my bed and cried until I thought my heart would break.’
And so what precisely stopped Hannah from running out into the street and summoning the police into this house of slaughter? Her explanation was that ‘they’ – she could only have meant the Bastendorffs – had entrapped her. ‘They said if I spoke about it, I should be implicated too, as I had pawned the old lady’s things,’ she wrote. ‘I was horrified and knew not what to do. I wanted to leave. I wanted to speak, but threats and persuasion overcame me, and I became a partner in the dreadful secret. Other feelings weighed with me. I had been a bad woman, but I had some of a woman’s feelings. Scores of times I thought I would go and drown myself and now I am possessed with the same feeling.’
And so now, according to her account, Hannah was in some senses a prisoner in Euston Square. ‘I grew nervous and frightened after this,’ she wrote. ‘I dared not go into the cellar without a light. I kept candle and matches beside me when in bed and night after night I have lain awake, thinking over all the dreadful things that had come into my knowledge. Once or twice I made up my mind to run away to my home and actually made preparations to do so but then the knowledge of that fearful crime paralysed my actions and I stayed on in the house, enduring the torments of hell.’
We have to imagine Severin Bastendorff reading all this that morning in September 1879, and in a giddy daze, taking it back to Euston Square and to wife Mary. We also have to imagine the many thousands of Londoners who were reading this at the same time; and the increasing murmur, heard from the back kitchen of 4, Euston Square, of people gathering outside the front of the house, discussing these sensational revelations. The Bastendorffs must have been in terror of a mob.
‘One day,’ Hannah’s account continued, ‘it must have been in February 1878, as it was after Mrs Bastendorff’s confinement (which means she would have been heavily pregnant at the time of the horrors Hannah described) and while the nurse girl Lydia Barnett was in the house, I went into the cellar to get some coke.
‘At that time, there had been a lot of coal in, and then some coke, and after, some coal again. I wanted to make an ironing fire and shovelled the coals aside to get round to the coke. I saw something sticking out of the coals. I could not make out what it was, but I felt frightened, and ran into the house.’
Given that she had already taken in the sight of the decaying Matilda Hacker, and yet managed to overcome this to shovel coals, what then was this nightmarish new discovery? ‘They told me it was the body of the little boy who was killed by a blow from a poker after being pulled out from under the workshop,’ she wrote. But there was a further hideous twist she had to impart: ‘The remainder of the body was said to have been given to Mr Riggenbach’s dog to eat,’ she wrote. ‘The cup of h
orrors never seemed full and I often wished I had been dead rather than keep such dreadful secrets locked up in my breast.’
She addressed the question of how it was that such dreadful secrets might be kept in a house where lodgers and tradesmen were constantly present. ‘The remains were again carefully covered with coals,’ she wrote, ‘but the workmen were continually coming in to get coal for the workroom fire and it was not many weeks after that that one of the workmen in getting some coal came across the human leg the same way I had done. “Whatever is this Hannah? It looks like the leg of an old man.” At this moment Mrs Bastendorff called me to bring some coals and I took the light from his hand and ran into the kitchen. I never saw anything of the body in the cellar after that time.’
In the meantime, the murky financial business conducted under that roof continued, according to Hannah’s account. ‘In March 1878, I pawned, by request, Mrs Bastendorff’s necklet,’ she wrote, ‘but a few days afterwards I was asked to redeem this pledge, as it was found Mrs Bastendorff would miss it.’ Hannah’s silence over who precisely has asked her to carry out this theft none the less shifted the focus on to Severin Bastendorff. ‘The pawnbroker lent £8 on the necklet,’ she continued, ‘and I was told that I might buy myself a small watch out of the money. This I did at the same place where the necklet was pawned, Mr Gill’s in the Hampstead-Road, giving £2 10 shillings for it. To redeem the necklet I was only given £5 10 shillings and I was asked to pawn my watch to make up the amount required for taking it out of pledge. I was obliged, however, to put my own locket and chain with the watch to raise the requisite sum. I was promised that my things which I had pawned should be taken out soon.’
First murder; now the financial exploitation of the poor maid. The unnamed Severin Bastendorff’s villainy seemed to know no limits. Yet the readers of this sensational work were to discover yet one more dimension of depravity to which he was apparently able to sink.
‘So far as I have spoken in this book, I have been obliged to suppress the name of the principal actors in this awful tragedy,’ wrote Hannah and her amanuensis who must surely have been aware that this omission would scarcely help them in a libel case. ‘But there is one scene that occurred in my presence and which was witnessed by so many people that I can detail all the facts and, if necessary, bring forward witnesses to prove them. Joseph Bastendorff is the foreman in his brother Severin’s workshop, and has been for some considerable time. Joseph had a little dog given to him.
‘He took it home, and after that he brought it to the workshop with him and here it was fed on Mr Riggenbach’s dog’s biscuits. It was a pretty little creature, very affectionate, and always seemed so pleased to be noticed. One day about a fortnight after Joseph had the dog I was standing on the step leading down into the workroom, holding Mrs Bastendorff’s baby in my arms, when I saw them tying the little dog up with cord.’ Again, the ‘them’ went nameless.
‘I asked what they were going to do and they said laughingly they were going to kill the dog,’ she wrote. ‘He was tied to the workman’s bench and then someone fired at the poor little thing. It howled piteously and looked so plaintively up to its murderers that I cried out and begged them to desist, but they only laughed, and again and again the pistol was fired at the poor little creature.’
And one of these ‘murderers’? Hannah named the dog’s owner, Joseph. ‘At last Joseph struck it over the head,’ she wrote, ‘and then carried the carcass into the gilder’s gallery over the shop. They had only been there a few minutes when the most pitiful moaning and then fearful howling filled the whole place. They had commenced skinning the animal before it was dead!
‘The horrible scene,’ she added with wholly unintentional bathos, ‘filled me with a tenfold longing to leave the dreadful place. The thought of the other dreadful secrets completely unnerved me and yielding to solicitations I still remained in the house.’ But the barbarity did not end there. ‘The cruel murder of this little inoffensive animal met with a fitting sequel in the disposal of its remains. Joseph took it home and had it cooked and some of the members of the family ate it! Amongst those who witnessed this horrible cruelty were Anthony Bastendorff, Bullisch, Wm Hanwell, Severin Bastendorff, a boy named Frank and Joseph’s little boy Charlie and three of these I have named ate a portion of the dog. This occurred in July 1878.’
And yet for all of this darkness, Hannah Dobbs did still manage to take trips home, where she somehow managed to maintain her silence. ‘In August 1878, I went to … north Devon for a fortnight, and took Christina Bastendorff with me, and also little Freddy Pearce (a nephew of Mary Bastendorff).’ Yet even on this innocent holiday, she managed to fall foul of malignant fate. ‘I lost my purse and railway tickets on the journey,’ she wrote (doubtless the story given to the station master) ‘and wrote to Peter Bastendorff to lend me £3, which he duly sent. He sent me a letter a few days afterwards stating that Mr Riggenbach had come home and found some of his clothes gone.’ (Riggenbach, as a sugar merchant, would have made frequent trips overseas to the continent.) ‘When I went back to London I spoke to Mrs Bastendorff the first evening about the missing things.
‘She said I was a fool to have taken any notice of (Peter’s) interfering letter and that I could not make things better by returning before the time. I asked her what was lost, but she would not say, and although she endeavoured to dissuade me, I went upstairs and asked Mr Riggenbach about the robbery.
‘He replied, “I don’t know anything about it, no more than when I came home and found my things gone.”’ But clearly he had taken action. ‘The same evening, the police officers came, but Mrs Bastendorff saw them. I asked her again about the things and she replied “what have I to say about them? You ought to know how you left the rooms and his things.” I said, “So I do know. I left everything all right.”
‘There was a deal more said on both sides and it ended by my declaring I would leave, and next day I gave a month’s notice and then she gave me the balance of my wages and said I might go as soon as I liked. I, however, stopped out my month, and then took a lodging at Mr Wright’s, 67 George Street.’
Again, here was unintentional bathos: the idea that after having witnessed murder and depravity, Hannah Dobbs would have her domestic situation ended because of an accusation of pilfering from a man whose dog feasted upon the body of a murdered boy; and none the less saw out her month’s notice. Yet Hannah was steering her story back to sexual scandal. ‘When I left 4, Euston Square, Mr Bastendorff was in Luxembourg,’ she wrote. ‘But after he came back he called in at 67 George Street and asked to see me. Mr Wright allowed me on that occasion to take him into the drawing room.
‘I frequently met Mr Bastendorff after this,’ she continued, ‘but he never called again at 67 George Street while I was there. I was led at this time to believe that I should be set up in a public house and by direction I called at Mr—, house broker, in the Euston-road, to get a list of public houses in the market. The broker told me I could not purchase a house myself, and on giving this message, it was suggested that I should take Peter Bastendorff with me. I did so, also being promised money, but beyond one pound, which I paid Mr Wright for lodgings, and a few shillings at a time, I had no means of living except by pawning my things.’
And it was here perhaps that another sort of story began to emerge with greater clarity: the economic dependence of a young working-class woman on men of property. This was a world where an unmarried woman was forbidden to embark upon any business transactions involving large loans; and Hannah was suggesting that the only remaining options were either finding another domestic situation; or becoming a paid mistress.
‘I was asked if I would like to go to Paris,’ she wrote, not saying which brother – Severin or Peter – had made the offer. ‘But I replied I would not but that I would try for another situation.’
And she was now in financial difficulties. ‘I had no money to pay (landlord) Mr Wright, and I was told to go and live with Mrs Crigger in Melton S
treet. She was a friend of Mr Bastendorff’s. I only stayed there a week when I wrote home, asking my mother to send money, so that I might come to Devonshire.’
Again, if this was the case, then the perpetrators of the atrocities in Euston Square seemed strikingly relaxed about her movements. But in the pamphlet, Hannah was attempting to sketch out motivation. ‘I was fearfully miserable at this time,’ she wrote. ‘The sight of what I had seen in the coal cellar at 4, Euston Square, the threats that if I spoke I should be implicated with the rest quite unnerved me and this, coupled with the desertion of those who should have been so true to me, almost drove me mad.
‘I went home to Bideford, and said my husband was coming down to see me,’ (indeed, keeping track of Hannah Dobbs’ multiple narratives – the stories she told her readers and the stories she told her family – is occasionally dizzying). ‘But I had a letter afterwards which suggested that I should telegraph (Peter), asking him to come down, and he did so, staying two nights.’ So while Peter posed as her husband, had the original intention been to pass Severin off in this role? ‘We then returned to London together and I took a lodging in Hunter Street. A whole week passed and I saw no-one. I was short of money – absolutely in want.
‘I was tempted, and I took a dress and jacket which did not belong to me and carried then to the pawnshop. It was very wrong – that I well know. But at this time, I was fairly beside myself with trouble.’ And here, she vouchsafed an insight that would have struck a nerve with suspicious householders everywhere. ‘My apprenticeship as a lodging house servant,’ she wrote, ‘had not tended to develop any careful distinctions as to what belonged to myself and what was the property of the people.’
Hannah and her ghostwriter were also well aware that for this narrative to be truly satisfactory, justice had to be seen closing in. ‘I had at this time made up my mind to have nothing more to do with the Bastendorffs,’ she wrote. ‘I removed lodgings to Burton Street and then applied for and obtained a situation which I was going to on the Friday evening when I was apprehended by the police for the theft I had committed. I told them the truth, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to eight month’s imprisonment, which I richly deserved.’
The Lady in the Cellar Page 20