The Lady in the Cellar

by Sinclair McKay

  The jury was sent out. And it was two hours before they returned.

  They declared to Mr Justice Hawkins that their verdict was ‘guilty’. They found that Severin Bastendorff had in fact wilfully lied about his relationship with Hannah Dobbs.

  Justice Hawkins declared that he found himself to be in agreement with the jury. And that Bastendorff’s deceit under oath would merit a severe penalty.

  For the moment, the court was adjourned; sentencing would be handed down the following week. Bastendorff was allowed to leave the court under very heavy bail conditions; two sureties of £500. It is easy to envisage him, and his defence counsels, in a trance of disbelief. There was no question that he would be facing jail; ‘wilful perjury’, he was warned, carried sentences of up to twelve years. But beyond that lay an even more frightening prospect: if he was supposed to have lied about the affair with the maid, then surely the wider public would believe every other allegation in the pamphlet, up to and including child murder?

  24

  ‘Such A Strange, Brotherly Part’

  The furniture maker from Luxembourg was convinced that he had more than one kind of persecutor. This paranoia was soon to envelop many of his waking thoughts. The battle with Hannah Dobbs was one thing; but Severin Bastendorff was by now certain of the malevolence of the British legal establishment.

  He was not alone in feeling that he had not been dealt with straightforwardly. The guilty verdict for perjury was being discussed all over London, and, indeed, throughout the country. The Times published an editorial reflecting this baffled perplexity, and it was re-printed with further comment added, in newspapers from Aberdeen to Kerry.

  The frustration was clear: the trial should somehow have cut through the thickets of mystery surrounding the Euston Square Murder and produced something near to an answer to the enigma. But now, this conviction for perjury – Bastendorff was waiting to hear what punishment awaited – had increased the puzzlement.

  ‘A British jury is not infallible,’ stated The Times. The paper advised its readers to remember ‘the narrow nature of the issue decided by the verdict’.

  What could be made of Hannah Dobbs and her allegations? In the newspaper’s view, ‘if she did not explicitly acknowledge that she was an accessory after the fact to a couple of murders, she used language that admitted of no other interpretation. The truth or untruth of these suggestions was not, however, raised in the trial.’

  The pamphlet ‘purported to explain the whole circumstances of the murder of Miss Hacker and was in addition thereto a story of brutal vice’ and ‘a greedy public devoured it wholesale’. ‘Whether the allegations of the story were true or false,’ the leader continued, ‘Bastendorff could not rest silent under them.’

  The newspaper had no wish to quarrel with the jury; but it raised an interesting legal issue about the fact that ‘Bastendorff himself could not be examined, even if he wished it’. That was the court procedure – defendants were not then permitted to speak for themselves. This in fact was soon to change; something The Times had been campaigning for. ‘We are brought at once to feel how unsatisfactory the whole of this trial has been as an illustration of our jurisprudence.’1

  The newspaper went on to describe Hannah Dobbs and her story as resembling ‘that of Moll Flanders’ in ‘its absence of morality’ and ‘frequent deviations into crime’. And even though her pamphlet admitted that she had been aware of the murder, the law meant that she could not be placed on trial a second time.

  The action for libel brought by Bastendorff would, the newspaper felt, have brought more light into the murk; and something should have been done ‘to prevent the mischief of this trial on a partial issue’ intervening to prevent it.

  Hannah Dobbs’ evidence ‘was tainted with the odium of her own confessions that she was a thief, a strumpet, and an accessory after the fact to murder’. Meanwhile, the defendant’s brother, Peter, ‘who plays such a strange brotherly part in the narrative of Hannah Dobbs’ was not called on either side.

  The newspaper pressed for the judge to postpone his judgement; it is, the leader said, ‘clearly desirable that Severin Bastendorff should prosecute his action without delay’.

  But the desire to see the murder solved was not quite the same thing as sympathy for Severin Bastendorff; and a few days later this was to be made clear at the Central Criminal Court. On 17 December 1879, under the glow of gaslights illuminating the chamber in the thick winter gloom, Judge Hawkins and also Senior Judge Baron Pollock were presiding. Bastendorff was ‘brought up for judgement’. Following the lead of The Times, his defence counsel Mr Poland began outlining a strenuous case for staying the sentencing.

  Most pressing, Mr Poland told the court, ‘judgement should be postponed until the trial of the action for libel brought by him against Mr Purkess had been disposed of.’ The reason? ‘The defendant could be examined and cross-examined and all the facts would be brought to light.’ Added to this, he said, he had in his hand ‘a statement signed by a number of respectable witnesses testifying to the good character of the prisoner’.

  Moreover, the focus of the alleged perjury – Bastendorff’s ‘immoral’ relations with Hannah Dobbs – was very far removed from Bastendorff trying to clear his name of the very much more atrocious allegations within the pamphlet.

  What followed in that Old Bailey court, in the darkness of that cold December, was a stately legal dance. The lawyers and the judges bickered about the timings of appeals, and the proper time to make them.

  Bastendorff was formally called into the dock to hear the sentencing. Justice Hawkins addressed him, saying ‘perjury was a very serious offence, calling for severe punishment under any circumstances’. The reason was that justice ‘could only be administered upon the veracity of an oath, and where wilful perjury was committed, it was calculated certainly to interfere with the administration of justice’.

  Justice Hawkins thus pronounced sentence: ‘that the defendant be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for the space of twelve months.’2

  In the reports, there is no sense of how Severin Bastendorff reacted to this shattering prospect; but there was no pause. He would have been immediately led away from the dock, down some steps and deep into the passages that led to holding cells.

  And the prospect of hard labour must have brought with it a sense of annihilation; not merely because of a sense of physical dread, but also the complete social humiliation.

  Bastendorff’s solicitor had forwarded to the judge a written statement from his client which was a plea for clemency: it began with a short account of Bastendorff’s upbringing in Luxembourg, his emigration to England, the efforts to learn the language and find an economic foothold; his subsequent success, marriage and family.

  ‘Wherever I have been,’ Bastendorff wrote, ‘I have always borne a good character and paid everyone.’ And now this. ‘After the discovery of Miss Hacker’s remains,’ Bastendorff wrote, ‘my business fell off, owing to my being unable to attend to it, at Bow Street, at the trial, and elsewhere, and the general disturbance of the place.

  ‘I have been entirely ruined,’ he continued. ‘The house is valueless and I cannot keep up my payments out of the business. I have had to borrow money to defend myself and they falsely accuse me of three murders and now they want to imprison me so that I shall not be able to defend myself any more. I have a wife and five children entirely depending on me for support.’3

  The letter had made no impression; nor did the judge seem interested in that note of persecution – his enemies crowded under the simple ‘they’. His situation did, indeed, seem desperate.

  And what of his wife, Mary? She was pregnant again. How could his marriage possibly survive all that had been said in court? And as Bastendorff intimated, how was she to manage while he was in jail? There was at least the sense there that her mother and sister were close by; and also that Anton and Joseph Bastendorff – her brothers-in-law – might show a little support. But what sort of income
could she hope to generate from letting out rooms in what was now one of the most notorious houses in the country?

  Darker thoughts yet swarmed through Severin Bastendorff’s mind about the devious nature of the British establishment; as would become clear later, the sense of injustice burnt like the most corrosive acid.

  Some who had been through the Victorian prison system later wrote that the process of entering it could produce a form of disassociation, as if the cataclysm was not quite happening to oneself. For Bastendorff, there was the walk from the court through white-tiled passages to the waiting police cab outside, divided into cellular compartments; the obscured, dim, jigging ride through the streets of the city, crossing the bridge that lay across the underground lines at Farringdon – once the course of the river Fleet – and presently drawing up at a vast institution near the church of St James, Clerkenwell. It is possible Severin Bastendorff was in a daze as the cab reached the gate of the Clerkenwell House of Detention. If this was the case, the procedure for induction would have shocked him back into the present.

  As an anonymous Captain, who had also been sentenced to be incarcerated there, wrote later:

  The reception we received in the Reception Room was far from a cordial; it was indeed as cold as the weather outside. The Reception Room is octagon shape with benches arranged over the entire floor; on these we were directed to sit down, about a yard apart. In front was a large desk and a high stool, on which a turnkey was perched, whose sole duty was to prevent the least intercourse between the prisoners. In fact the entire room and its fittings conveyed the impression of being connected with a charity school for mutes.4

  Bastendorff would then have been required to step forward and surrender his personal property: his watch, handkerchief, any pen he might be carrying. These would be placed on a desk while they were meticulously catalogued in a Property Book.

  Then, he would have been led through to another room where he would have been required to remove all his clothing. What lay ahead was the bath. All who came here were required first to scrub themselves. The same was true for the workhouses. The quality of such baths varied from institution to institution – there were some inmates, quite unused to such facilities, who thought them rather luxurious. Severin Bastendorff, on the other hand, might possibly have shuddered at the prospect. Some prison baths were described as having a coating of ‘a curious slime’; others apparently had water with the consistency of ‘mutton broth’.

  In a broader sense, many prisoners later described this as the moment when they understood that their identities had been transformed. A former MP who had been convicted for fraud in the late nineteenth century observed: ‘Even though I … was prepared for this experience, this breaking with the old life by the casting away of its garments proved a greater trial than I had anticipated.’5

  As Bastendorff was immersed in this dark new world, he did have friends outside in Bloomsbury and Somers Town who were happy to let it be known that they were standing by him, and that they wanted to see the jail sentence greatly reduced, if not cancelled altogether.

  ‘Last evening,’ reported the Daily Telegraph on 20 December, ‘a number of gentlemen interested in the case of Severin Bastendorff and ‘who are desirous of seeing the Euston Square mystery fully investigated’ met together at the Rising Sun tavern, Euston-road. Steps are being taken in respect to petitioning the Home Secretary for Bastendorff’s release, or for a shorter term of imprisonment, as evidence has been obtained since the trial which will, it is alleged, throw discredit on the testimony of material witnesses for the prosecution.

  ‘It was resolved by the meeting,’ the report continued, ‘to communicate with the German Club and other German societies, with the object of obtaining pecuniary assistance so that Bastendorff may be in a position to prosecute his action for libel against Mr George Purkess. In any event, that action will be persisted in. It is expected,’ the newspaper added, ‘that Peter Bastendorff will shortly make an important statement.’6

  Perhaps another instance of the unpredictably strange relationship between the brothers; yet if any such statement were given, it was not publicly heard. Nor was there any sense that any appeal to the Home Office had even produced an official response, let alone a positive one.

  And so for Bastendorff, the passing days would soon become a week, then more. He had a range of sometimes unexpected humiliations to face. The prison uniform was frequently less than uniform in the sense that it could comprise unmatched shirt and trousers, brown, blue, beige or dark red; nor was there any guarantee of underwear, or ‘flannels’. Again, to a man such as Bastendorff, who had always dressed well, walking the London streets proudly, the process must have been lowering.

  There had across the years been some local controversy to do with noise at the prison; the tall, gaunt eighteenth-century architecture, combined with the shape of the enclosed exercise yards, could amplify the shouts and bellows of the prisoners and turn them into a sometimes uncanny cacophony. Upon arrival, this weird echoing roar must have been terrifying. Perhaps the prospect of the cell locked might have seemed like sanctuary.

  In many cases, the cells were of whitewashed brick, with black-painted doors, furnished with a hard bed, a scarcely less rigid mattress and pillow and indifferently laundered bedclothes. Even with a narrow window, the light would have been feeble. Yet here at least was the possibility of rest; one prisoner of another London prison wrote years later that even though the bed was as hard as a wooden barrel, he did, after about six months of his sentence, eventually become used to it. And, indeed, from that point, he declared, he had no difficulty sleeping on that or on any other uncomfortable surface. It was extraordinary, this former prisoner wrote, what one could always adjust to.

  Bastendorff’s sentence was for ‘Hard Labour’; here in Clerkenwell, this had been turned into something of an art. Three immediate prospects awaited Bastendorff: in one part of the institution was a hall in which the prisoners would be gathered to sit and pick oakum. This was the process of taking old tarred and frayed ship’s rope and – using fingernails and fingers – untwining it so that it was transformed into fine thread fibre, which could be used to create fresh lengths. The work was initially brutal on the hands and nails, leaving them bloody and blistered and blackened. ‘The strands of the rope,’ recalled one prisoner, ‘had to be pulled apart until they were as fine as silk.’7

  The rope provided for unpicking often ‘in hardness and firmness, resemble[d] wire pit ropes more than anything of a hempy or flaxen nature’. At this task, the prisoner would be expected to spend anything upwards to twelve hours, and he would also be provided a target weight of unspun rope to reach. The pain and the sense of futility would have been intense at the start.

  But after some time, there were those prisoners who somehow adapted; the work was a little easier on their toughened hands or they had developed the mental strength to go into a form of trance while engaged or indeed they had devised ingenious dodges to make the task a little easier: particularly prized were concealed iron nails which, while the wardens were not paying full attention, could be used to loosen up the most intransigent ropes.

  In another large room, prisoners would be set to work sewing; as well as the large canvas sacks used by the Royal Mail, there were also sacks used for carrying coal; and like picking oakum, there was a physical intensity to this work that many found initially defeated them; the canvas material was too coarse, the needles provided insufficiently sharp. As well as the pain in the fingers, the frustration of continually failing to produce the required daily quota had its own cruelty.

  Yet there were other forms of sewing that some prisoners came to find curiously congenial. An imprisoned Lord, William Nevell, wrote that he was set to sewing stockings, ‘which almost anyone can learn in a few lessons and which after a while becomes rather absorbing’.8 But he confessed that mistakes, such as dropping stitches, or failing to pay enough attention to the heels, could be disproportionately maddening.<
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  And all of these above tasks would certainly have been preferable to the treadwheel; an element of hard labour that the authorities had made a particular science. First introduced to prisons earlier in the century – and occasionally a means of grinding corn – these vast wooden constructions, designed for many men (or sometimes women), standing in a row, inspired a certain species of horror. The prisoner, facing the dark wood of the wheel, would be required to ‘climb’ widely spaced steps as the construction turned beneath his feet. There were handrails above for steadying balance. And so, for many hours each day, with breaks at regulated intervals, the prisoner would move the wheel, his arms above him. Some who were new to it were led off at the end of the day crying.

  It was not merely the utter futility; it was also the hallucinatory boredom. Even if the prison governor set a daily target of ‘steps’ – some suggested climbing the height of Ben Nevis, others the height of the Matterhorn, partly at least to give the prisoner a visual imaginative aid and a sense of challenge – the repetition could be deadening. By the end of a spell of the wheel, sweat would be cascading but the mind would be dulled.

  This remained the case as the prisoner quickly became accustomed to the routine; even if, as in some cases, he now found that the wheel moved easily beneath him, and that he ‘was walking on air’, the Sisyphean element of being condemned to an eternally meaningless task would still have been psychologically harsh.

  It is not known how often Severin’s wife, Mary, or his brothers came to visit him; but it is reasonable to speculate that each separate visit would have constituted fresh agony for Bastendorff; a reminder that the ignominy that stained him had left that stain on them too.