The Lady in the Cellar

by Sinclair McKay

This might have seemed the most absurdly trivial point; but given the defence’s line that Hannah’s pamphlet had deliberately misled by naming the wrong Bastendorff brother, and that this was a sinister case of swapped identities, it actually seemed to have become central. Prosecutor Mr Williams lost patience: and he angrily demanded ‘the committal of the defendant’. This would have placed Severin Bastendorff in jail, awaiting a main trial.

  Responding with a fiery tone, Mr Poland in turn took the magistrate back into the twisted roots of the conflict; the original charge of murder – and the opportunism of an amoral press.

  ‘Two gentlemen connected with what is called The Central News Agency invited the cooperation of this abandoned woman,’ he declared, ‘and with Mr Purkess, the plaintiff in this case, induced her to reveal the secrets, real and imaginary, of her polluted life, and paid her money for “revelations” which they should, in the interests of society and even of the woman herself, have done all in their power to discourage.’ These ‘revelations’, he insisted, including being the ‘accomplice of at least three murders’, had not been mentioned at her trial.

  He then pleaded that there was no other evidence and ‘asked the Court to pause before it branded the defendant and his wife with the infamy imputed to them by this abandoned woman, encouraged by men who ought to have known better and ought rather to have advised her to remain in obscurity for the remainder of her tainted life’.2

  After this powerful plea, there then followed some legal bickering with the magistrate Mr Flowers becoming tangled in Severin Bastendorff’s action for libel against the Central News Agency and Hannah Dobbs; before there could be any proceedings for perjury, surely he ought to wait until the result of that libel case was known?

  Yet Mr Williams the prosecutor somehow managed to suggest that ‘the alleged perjury had no relation whatever to the (libel) action.’

  And caught up in these legal thickets, the seemingly ineffectual Mr Flowers made his decision. As there had been ‘four witnesses to the alleged perjury’ he was therefore ‘bound to send the case for trial’.

  The case would be heard at the Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey.

  Mr Flowers asked Severin Bastendorff if he had anything to say. All he could think to reply was that Hannah Dobbs’ story was ‘a pack of lies’.3

  He was required to give the court £5, in the meantime, as a surety that he would appear at the trial, which was set for a few days hence.

  23

  ‘I Depend Upon My Character’

  In her single-minded struggle for survival, Hannah Dobbs was now prepared to put herself, as well as Severin Bastendorff, through every fire of shame. The persona she seemed to be inhabiting was complex: part sophisticated sexual adventuress, part repentant and bewildered country girl. She and the men of the Central News Agency were laboriously steering the narrative towards the suggestion that she had been pulled into Bastendorff’s immoral vortex: that he himself was wearing a mask, that of a civilised London man of property. And that beneath this mask lay unspeakable depravity.

  Added to this was a possibility that the most luridly shocking allegations in the pamphlet – child murder, dog eating – seemed designed to appeal to a rather gothic prejudice against the Germanic people; deep in those forests, the pamphlet seemed to be suggesting, who knew how these people lived?

  Was this the reason why the judge at the Old Bailey seemed perfectly content to have a trial based around the character and morals of Severin Bastendorff? Equally, was there, for the police and the legal system, a frustrated sense that the murderer of Matilda Hacker might be detected under the stress of a largely concocted offence? Could it be that Bastendorff might stand revealed?

  Those gathered in the gaunt space of the Central Criminal Court in that dark December would perhaps have felt their hearts beat faster; the proximity to the feared Newgate jail, which stood next door, would have added a sharpness to the swearing of oaths and the consequences of lying. The first witness to be called to the stand was an ever more poised Hannah Dobbs.

  It is possible she thought this would be her final opportunity to transfer any suspicion of murder from herself; whatever the case, she was now willing to step beyond all boundaries of accepted decorum.

  As well as repeating all the stories of illicit sexual encounters with both Severin and Peter, she was now prepared to go into ever more acute detail on the sordid mechanics of those nights; the language she now used seemed to have an extraordinarily modern quality of unflinching candour. Her words must have been akin to a razor tearing Bastendorff’s skin.

  She now recounted how, on the second night that they met in 1875, he first took her to a coffee house, and then to ‘a room’ in a house in a street that she could not now recall. ‘I think it was on the second floor, I am not certain,’ she told the court. ‘We went to bed and he had connection with me there.

  ‘We remained there for about an hour or an hour and half,’ Dobbs added, ‘it might have been two hours. We then got up and dressed ourselves and went back to Torrington Square.’ This was the night on which Hannah got back at 2a.m. only to find that she had inadvertently held on to the servants’ bedroom key – and Selina Knight and Clara Green had been waiting up furiously for her to return.

  Hannah then told the court of another occasion when Severin paid a visit to Torrington Square on a Sunday afternoon, when the landlords were out. Hannah invited him in; presently, her fellow servants went out too. Hannah and Severin were left in the kitchen but, Hannah told the court, they swiftly made their way to the servants’ bedroom where ‘he had connection with me’.1

  The assignations continued, with the pair generally meeting by St Pancras church, Hannah said. At the time, Bastendorff’s beard was ‘very long’. She recounted the story of how he had engineered for her the job at 4, Euston Square; and how ‘there was intercourse between us from time to time’.

  The defending counsels were interested to learn how such manoeuvrings might be possible within a house of many souls; and following on from this, how murder might be committed in such circumstances. Hannah was asked to take the court through all the lodgers that stayed there in her time – from Mr and Mrs Brookes to Miss Willoughby to the mysterious Mr Findlay to the tragic Matilda Hacker. She detailed how lodgers either used the downstairs drawing room as a common sitting room or else paid for two rooms so that they might lead rather more hermetic lives. Matilda Hacker was unusual in using the one room as a bedroom and a sitting room.

  And it was there, late in 1876, and new to her position, that Hannah first met Severin’s brother, Peter, who, she recalled, ‘had very little beard’ at the time. By her own account, Peter was instantly struck by her; and, indeed, she said, it was not long before he was asking her for a front door key ‘so that he might come in in the night and sleep with me’.

  She provided him the key; and according to her, his nocturnal visits, deep into the small hours, began. ‘I had intercourse with him. It commenced at the end of January 1877,’ she told the court. But just before that, she alleged, there was an intimation of catastrophe.

  ‘I had reason to believe there was something the matter with me,’ said Hannah. ‘I told the defendant [Severin] that I thought I was with child.’ She also told him how his younger brother had been pursuing her, how Peter had expressed his desire to ‘keep company’ with her, and of how she had obliged by passing him a street door key. According to her, it was Severin who came up with a plan to explain her pregnancy. She and Peter should sleep with one another again and she should ‘put the child on him’. Yet ‘Peter had not asked me to marry him’ but only to keep company with her.

  And in all the time in 4, Euston Square, she told the court, ‘the connection between me and the defendant’ continued.

  Hannah Dobbs was also more explicit about the weekend away to Redhill; how she and Severin arrived at the inn on Saturday evening, he ‘took a glass of ale’ and then they retired to bed at around 9p.m. ‘The defendant and I slept together
that night,’ she said. The next day they went for long walks across ‘the commons’ and ‘we went straight up to bed directly we got back’. Under closer questioning, Hannah wanted there to be no doubt. ‘We had intercourse there.’

  There then followed a succession, for Hannah, of temporary rooms, after she briefly left 4, Euston Square; she told the court how Severin came to see her, for instance, at the ‘Railway Hotel, Argyle Street, King’s Cross’; of how ‘the defendant was there with me for about two hours. He went to bed with me and connection took place there.’ He then returned to Euston Square and she spent the night there. The impression given to the jury could not have been more atrocious; but at the centre of this, Hannah Dobbs’ shocking candour clearly sounded to some like the honesty of pure confession.

  In a previous court appearance, it had been put to her that she was not a chaste woman. Hannah was now most insistent that ‘she had not been with any gentleman before’ she met Bastendorff. ‘I said at Bow Street I was not a chaste woman – but I did not know what it meant,’ she told the court. ‘The defendant was the first person with whom I had intercourse.’

  It was put to her that in her pamphlet, she had mentioned how she had become ‘intimate’ with a footman in the service of Lady Buck in Bideford; Hannah brushed this off as another example of linguistic confusion, much as she claimed not to have understood ‘chaste’.

  The defence counsels, who had clearly been investigating every corner of Hannah’s life, were attacking hard; long before Euston Square, what then of a gentleman friend she had briefly acquired when she had first moved to the south London district of Rotherhithe? He was a policeman, but he used to visit her ‘in plain clothes’. She dismissed this impatiently; she simply ‘kept company’ with him but denied intimacy.

  Mr Poland than focused on the short period in 1875 when she left London to work as a maid in Redhill, Surrey. He asked Hannah about the thefts that her employer had noticed, and what happened immediately afterwards. ‘I stole £2 and 3 shillings from a box,’ she told the court. Was she aware that this was a charitable collection? ‘I don’t know that it was a missionary box,’ she said, adding with what must have seemed a certain brazenness, ‘perhaps it would not have made much difference if I had known it.’

  There was also the matter of some stolen silk; Hannah now admitted to the theft. ‘My mother came up from Devonshire,’ she told the court, ‘and paid the money that was required, with reference to the box and the silk.’

  So, in fact, it transpired that Hannah had had to be rescued by her mother before she returned to Bideford in the mid-1870s; ‘I stayed there nearly twelve months, my mother and father maintaining me,’ she now told the court.

  And then she had been pulled once more back to the irresistible attractions of London, and the situation at 42, Torrington Square. Even there it seemed that Hannah’s compulsion to steal was bordering on the kleptomaniac; there was ‘dispute’ over a sovereign that landlady Mrs Pearce had dispensed for the purchase of some butter.

  Then, at 4, Euston Square: what would she say about the lodger Mr Riggenbach accusing her of stealing (and pawning) some of his clothes? Hannah Dobbs at first denied this, but then appeared to stumble over her own account. She told the court that ‘there was a little dispute’; and that Severin Bastendorff had pawned many of his own items in the local pawn shops. But she then admitted that she had ‘pawned the first lot’ of Mr Riggenbach’s apparently extensive wardrobe of jackets and waistcoats at ‘Mr Clarke’s’ on the Hampstead Road. And the reason, she said, was this: Bastendorff was trying to raise a little money so that they might go and spend the weekend together at Redhill.

  So what then of the grave hints she dropped in the pamphlet of the mysterious lodger Mr Findlay being murdered? Some of the pamphlet was read back to her: including the passage about the ‘imbecile’ police and the officers ‘Dogberry and Noodle-dum’ missing startling clues. The defence counsel – realising that she did not know that the officer’s names were a joke, Dogberry being a comically inept constable in Much Ado About Nothing – went in at this point for some sly and underhand teasing.

  First, how could she stay in a house that was filled with such horrors? ‘I did think he had been murdered,’ said Hannah, ‘and yet I remained in the situation.’ And, said the wily Mr Poland, would she care to tell the court who exactly these police officers were? Hannah Dobbs faltered for a moment.

  ‘I do not know who Dogberry is,’ she said. ‘I never heard of him until I read the pamphlet. I don’t know where he lives. I don’t know anything about it. I do not know who Noodle-dum is, or what he is, or where he lives.’ Quite apart from inciting a laugh at Dobbs’ ignorance, the larger point – that key points in this pamphlet were the work of journalists writing quite separately from the young woman – would surely have been made quite strongly.

  She was not finished yet though. Under questioning, Dobbs seemed happy to expiate on the subject of the gold watch and chain and the eyeglass, all of which were the property of Matilda Hacker. In Hannah’s account, she had simply somehow acquired these items a few days after the old woman was supposed to have left the house.

  But now she became entangled in the chronology; and began to speak of when she knew the watch and chain had been Miss Hacker’s when she ‘saw the remains in the cellar’. So when precisely did she know that the remains were there, and that the old lady had been murdered? At this point, the prosecutor Montagu Williams jumped in with some urgency; he turned to Judge Hawkins and declared that even though Hannah Dobbs had been acquitted of murder, she was still ‘liable to be indicted as an accessory after the fact’.

  The judge, puzzlingly, agreed that Hannah Dobbs should decline to answer any questions that might in some way incriminate her.

  Yet Hannah pressed on, at once claiming that she had seen the remains in the winter of 1877 (while remaining ‘in service to Mr Bastendorff’ for a year afterwards) while then finessing which part of the coal cellar the corpse was in and then declaring that ‘I always understood from the defendant that the remains were buried in the square … that is, removed from the cellar.’

  This seemed to be the closest that Hannah Dobbs had come to accusing Severin Bastendorff of the murder.

  She was once more pressed on her claims to have seen a little boy killed; ‘I said in the pamphlet that that was true but I decline to answer any of these questions,’ she said.

  The court heard more about her restless, peripatetic life after 4, Euston Square, which in a curious way, seemed to mirror that of Matilda Hacker; a constant moving about from lodging house to lodging house. And her relationship with Peter Bastendorff continued; she told the court, under questioning, of how she had gone to visit her parents in Bideford, and Peter followed her, staying at the family inn as Hannah’s ‘husband’. ‘He slept with me at my father and mother’s house,’ she told the court.

  The defence counsel wanted to know what the relationship was like now. ‘Peter came to meet me at the prison gates … but I did not speak to him,’ said Dobbs. ‘I took a cab by myself, not with him. I spoke to him about a week after.’ But was she claiming that the relationship was no longer so intense? ‘It is true that since I came out of prison, I have had intercourse with him twice,’ she said. ‘I saw Peter last about three weeks ago, I think.’

  The point that Mr Poland was edging towards was this: the extent to which Peter Bastendorff colluded with the preparation of the pamphlet. Was it still the case that there was enmity between Peter and his brother, Severin? ‘He has not been on good terms with the defendant,’ said Dobbs, ‘but he is now, I suppose, because he told me he had made friends with his brother the last time I saw him when he came to see me [at her lodgings] in Southwark Bridge Road.’

  And yet the pamphlet stated repeatedly that ‘Peter Bastendorff corroborates this’. To what extent did he have a hand in the writing of it? Hannah conceded that Peter Bastendorff had been at the offices of the Central News Agency, and the text was ‘read over in
his presence or he read it over and said it was true’.

  So to what extent had all of this been sparked by ferocious sibling rivalry? Prompted by questioning, Hannah Dobbs recalled how she made her home in 4, Euston Square; and she told the court that when it came to Peter entering her life, she had her own definition of the term ‘engaged’; ‘he never said anything about marriage’ but ‘people get engaged in hopes to get married some times’ and she considered herself to be ‘engaged to be married at some time’.

  But then there was the darkness of the alleged sexual deceit: ‘I was engaged to be married to Peter at the time I was in the family way by his brother,’ she told the court. ‘It was with the defendant’s permission that I gave Peter the [front door] key … that he might come in in the night and have intercourse with me.’

  Now she was preparing to go further than ever in imputing not one but several murders to Severin Bastendorff. During the period after she had first left 4, Euston Square for a time, moving from house to house, Hannah told the court that he gave her presents. First, there was a gift of a large watch and chain; she said she told Severin: ‘It is like Mr Findlay’s’. He reportedly said to her: ‘How do you know it is like Mr Findlay’s?’ According to Hannah, he then said: ‘It is not Mr Findlay’s. I bought it at a sale … there are many watches alike.’

  Hannah then told the court that she remarked that it was too big for her – it was a gentleman’s watch. ‘You can wear that,’ Severin allegedly told her, ‘until I get you a smaller one.’

  Then, a few weeks later, Hannah said, Severin asked her to give back the large watch as he had a present for her. Inside a box was a smaller gold watch and chain, and an eyeglass. These, Hannah said, were the property of Matilda Hacker, though she did not know it. She told the court that Severin had said to her: ‘You will say you had it given to you by your uncle, the same as you said you had the first one from.’