The Lady in the Cellar

by Sinclair McKay

  In 1885, Bastendorff was again at liberty; and now he had returned to 4, Euston Square, reunited with his children and his wife even if – as it is reasonable to speculate – he and Mary now kept separate beds. This respite was not to last. None the less, he attempted to return to his old furniture-making work; it can only be assumed that in his absence, the other Bastendorff brothers had taken on his previous clients. Added to this, Peter Bastendorff was listing 4, Euston Square among his other business addresses, such as Hampstead Road.

  There was a public flash of Severin Bastendorff’s intense paranoia in the autumn of the year. It came in the form of an extraordinary newspaper advertisement that he took out in the London Evening Standard.

  ‘In accordance with the law,’ this advertisement ran, ‘I hereby give notice that after this date, my wife Mary Snelson Bastendorff, is NOT to receive money as cashier in my business. Anyone paying money to her is liable to be called upon for the same. S. Bastendorff … 4, Euston Square Oct 3, 1885.’5

  The marriage disintegrated further over the coming weeks; Bastendorff was forced to move out of Euston Square and take a room in the nearby Midland Hotel. Then there came a further crisis point as Severin returned to the house to confront Mary one morning in mid-November 1885.

  He climbed the stairs to Mary’s bedroom; and finding her within, he confronted her angrily ‘about a £5 note’ which he had ‘missed’. With apparent anger, she replied that she had spent it on family ‘maintenance’. He was carrying an umbrella; and at this, he raised it up and ‘thrashed her with it about her shoulders’. ‘She ran downstairs screaming into the kitchen where again he beat her.’ The assault only ended when a young man in Bastendorff’s employ, Walter Vortigan, came down to the kitchen and ‘interposed’. He did so, he told the court, because he was aware of ‘the other affair’ that had occurred in the house and was worried that there may be another fatality.6

  Yet Bastendorff considered himself the wronged party following this assault; and indeed waited in the kitchen as a policeman was fetched. As the constable arrived, Bastendorff made his position clear: he wanted his wife arrested. He was clearly convinced that the ‘missing’ £5 constituted theft.

  Protesting, Mary went to the length of lowering her dressing gown to show the policeman ‘the marks of violence about her’. Presumably satisfied that the assault was over, the policeman then left: no arrests, no charges. Although the courts at that time were filled with cases involving domestic violence – it is a misconception about that era that such cases were overlooked – the police were not often as assiduous as they might have been in such matters.

  None the less, the incident was enough for Mary to take out a further ‘summons’ against her estranged husband. The aim was to have him taken back to the asylum.

  Bastendorff was in no doubt that a monstrous injustice was being wrought against him. On a grim winter’s day – just twenty-four hours before the summons was due to be delivered to him – he bided his time around the central garden of Euston Square and then approached his eldest children, Christine, Peter and Severin, as they returned from school. How would they like to come with him to Germany for a short holiday?

  His daughter, Christine, and son, Peter, were happy to go. Somehow – extraordinarily – Mary Bastendorff was either content with this too or had felt compelled in some way to agree to this arrangement. The childrens’ things were duly packed, and Bastendorff had his own small portmanteau. Mary even went with them to Liverpool Street station to see them off on the train.

  As soon as he was out of the country, a warrant was issued. It seems certain that he stayed with family relatives on the borders of Luxembourg and Germany, with his daughter and son; but then he decided to return, strikingly leaving Christine and Peter behind. Upon his arrival at Euston Square, someone in the house or in the workshop alerted the police. The aim was to have Bastendorff returned to Colney Hatch and the children brought back from Germany.

  But it proved a little more difficult to have Bastendorff removed this time. The case had to be heard before a magistrate and there was a delay of a few weeks. The Bastendorffs’ marriage was irretrievable; Severin continued to rent a room in the nearby Midland Hotel. When the case for his assault on Mary with the umbrella was heard, the sadness of it all was once more relayed in newspapers right across the country.

  Mary was called to testify against Severin; and she told the magistrate that he had ‘used threats against her’. She also said that ‘her children who were abroad were in a destitute condition’.

  She was asked by the prosecutor: ‘Have you put your husband away in an asylum?’ ‘Yes, I have,’ she said. ‘How many times?’ ‘Twice,’ she said. ‘Are you now taking proceedings against him in lunacy?’ ‘Yes,’ she said.

  The prosecutor then asked her: ‘Is not your object by this prosecution to assist in the lunacy proceedings?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I applied to the relieving officer yesterday because I don’t consider that he is in a fit state of mind to be around.’7

  It emerged at this hearing that ‘the prisoner’s brother’ (it was not stated which) ‘signed the petition in lunacy on the first occasion’. But in this court in January 1886, the magistrate seemed reluctant to consign Bastendorff once more to the wards; and he ruled that he considered it unseemly that a court such as his should be used to make such a judgement upon a man’s sanity. Presumably to the great dismay of Mary Bastendorff, Severin was merely bound over to keep the peace for six months.

  Although there are no records, it is reasonable to assume that in the interim, one of the other Bastendorff brothers made their way to the old home in Echterdorf to fetch back Severin and Mary’s children; what is certain is that in that period, Severin’s mental health deteriorated further. He was exhibiting signs of what might have been seen as acute paranoia, or a sense of ceaseless persecution. Bastendorff had an increasingly agitated manner that was seen in public the following year.

  He was back in the Bow Street court, eight years after Hannah Dobbs’ pre-trial hearing: on 27 May 1887, Severin Bastendorff, now 45, was ‘charged with being a lunatic not under proper control’. It was reported that when he was placed in the dock, he ‘smiled vacantly’. Detective-Sergeant Brown told the magistrate how Bastendorff had come into the Whitehall Place police station earlier that morning and announced that he wished to make a statement.

  Bastendorff had declared: ‘I have been sent by Almighty God to claim £50,000. My brother Peter and his wife murdered Miss Hacker.’

  ‘There was no doubt,’ ran the report, ‘that the prisoner was insane.’8

  The quiet judgement was that he should be returned to the asylum. As Bastendorff was being led through the Bow Street corridors, he glanced up and saw a portrait of the late Mr Flowers – one of the judges who had committed him to face trial for perjury in 1879 – and he shouted: ‘That man has no business there. The Lord told him to discharge me and he would not.’

  And it was at this point, back in Colney Hatch, that Bastendorff’s life became a subject of study by a number of interested doctors. ‘Facts specified in Medical Certificate upon which Opinion of Insanity is founded’ was the introductory line in Bastendorff’s medical notes. ‘He has the delusive idea that God speaks to him,’ noted the anonymous doctor, ‘that He speaks in English, French and German – that sometimes God’s voice is audible close to him – sometimes it seems as if at a distance – that when I ask him a question – he listens – hears the voice of God which dictates the answer and then (Bastendorff) answers. He will not wear the Ward dress being as he says directed by God not to do so. He says God’s voice is distinct like music, that God came on a cloud and he saw Him.’ The verdict: ‘mania’.9

  Alfred Wilson, an ‘attendant of the Insane’ at the Camberwell workhouse where Bastendorff had previously been, added the observation that while he was there, Bastendorff had refused to wear the regulation trousers saying ‘the Almighty had ordered him not to do so’. It is not difficult to hear t
he echo of Bastendorff’s entry to prison in December 1879: the stripping away of the clothes that had been part of his identity, and the humiliation of being made to assume the identity of a common convict.

  The receiving doctor at Colney Hatch also noted of his returned patient:

  A fairly nourished German, with a bushy, reddish beard, moustache and whiskers, a small, piercing, restless grey eye with which he winks and smirks in a silly, coquettish manner; poses and demonstrates his imaginary powers and skill by relating how he cures stones in the bladder, works miracles, coins money … he is egotistical and vain while relating how he has overcome false witnesses, how he has laid a claim against the government for £30,000 and obtained instead a million and a half. All this he proceeds to show is through the influence of voices from God. Pupils contracted, tongue protruded normally, speech unaffected, gait steady but somewhat constrained.

  The diagnosis: ‘Mania.’10

  How might Bastendorff have been diagnosed today? Was this a breakdown, the result of the intolerable pressures of the past few years? Or was it a deeper underlying condition: manic depression, even paranoid schizophrenia? The brutal trauma of hard labour and the loss of his respectable reputation could have been a trigger; but additionally, it must be remembered that for many in those late Victorian years, having come to the vast city from rural areas, the relentless and cacophonous nature of this new urban life could eventually become overwhelming. On top of this, the records of the hospital from this time feature a striking number of European names: and it might reasonably be argued that any vulnerable immigrant, experiencing prejudice in a hundred quite different ways, might come to form a view of a society that was indeed set on persecution.

  In the wards of Colney Hatch, the study of mental health was still a new science; psychology in its most basic terms was in its infancy. But there were some things that they took care to do right: at one point the colour scheme of the wards – until that point, bright whitewash – was changed to a more restful pale blue which the patients preferred. And different therapies were tried; excitable or distressed patients were allowed long hot baths and indeed spells in a specially installed Turkish Bath, which was found to aid sleep.

  Added to this, the hospital expanded its facilities for different sorts of workshops, for those patients who were interested in filling their days with productive work. There were rooms for the weaving of baskets and mats; but additionally, given the large number of skilled craftsmen who were admitted as patients, there were also workshops in which furniture could be made and upholstered. In some instances, the furniture made was used in the hospital. There would have been an outlet for Bastendorff’s talent in the construction of beautiful cabinets, although according to the hospital notes, he did not seem to be interested in returning to his craft: much of the time he remained ‘unemployed’.

  He would not have suffered any physical privations. Much work had also been done on improving the sanitary conditions and the lighting; by the 1880s, Colney Hatch had proper bathrooms, plentiful hot water and good lighting through gas. In the winter, no-one would be dirty or cold or shivering in the dark. Some patients who came here with temporarily disabling conditions – cases that might seem close nowadays to post-traumatic stress – found the asylum had actually been a terrific boon. Unlike their lives in the precarious London world outside, they had spent a lengthy period being looked after both mentally and physically, with good food and attentive warders seeing to any wounds or otherwise painful conditions.

  For those detained there indefinitely, however, the flaws in the institution – which became more apparent in the late nineteenth century as numbers rose and funding became tighter – were all too visible. There were structural faults in the outwardly elegant structure on that north London hill; stonework that was already crumbling, forbidding lighting, missing hand-rails for stairs. And no matter how attentive the doctors and orderlies, no matter how strenuous the efforts to maintain hygiene and calm and to relieve the daily monotony with different activities, nothing could quite rid the place of its uncanny atmosphere; this was the fault of the architecture, which had created those seemingly illimitable echoing corridors.

  In Bastendorff’s records, the phrase most frequently used by doctors was ‘no change’. Each year, he got a new, short (sometimes one line) summary on his patient notes. Yet there were changes. For a time, Bastendorff became agitated by the idea of telephones; that everything he said was being monitored by these machines; that there was a telephone ‘perched’ outside on the guttering. When he spoke to doctors, he would sometimes raise a sheet, or a length of fabric to cover his mouth, and he would speak in a half-whisper. He was adamant that he was being monitored by enemies.

  Occasionally, he fell prey to the diseases that would sweep through the institution like fire; in the 1890s Bastendorff suffered a bad attack of pneumonia (though he evaded the outbreak of scarlet fever that came a little later). Food became a matter of disquiet for him; he became convinced that his foes were attempting to ‘poison’ him, and he could only be persuaded to eat with difficulty. One doctor noted how he had become ‘much thinner’.11

  By 1893 – six years on his ward – Bastendorff had ‘delusions of grandness – that he is a king’. He was ‘so feverish in his talk’. The possibilities of any future discharge were looking increasingly remote.

  This was to be Severin Bastendorff’s home for the rest of his life.

  There were photographs taken of inmates in the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century: they are immeasurably haunting. Some of the patients – thin, sometimes mottled with the tokens of infectious diseases like scarlet fever – look at the camera directly. Others gaze elsewhere. There is no emotion in the eyes; but there is the sense behind them of the troubles that brought them to this place.

  In 1899, a portrait was taken of Severin Bastendorff. He was photographed looking to the left. He was aged 52. His hair was still thick and full of colour – no discernible grey in that reddish thatch – and his whiskers were still long. His cheeks were hollow. The clothes he wore – a suit of plain material, with a high waistcoat and a patterned shirt – were some distance from the style he had been used to in his former life, but nor did he look shabby. As he looked away, what was he thinking?

  Another photograph, taken later in the 1920s, showed a group of young male patients, dressed up in suits and smart clothes for a day out: some look down, some look away, some have a distinctive gait, a way of holding the shoulders, that is indicative of their condition. The clothes were intended as a means of showing those on the outside that the inmates of Colney Hatch were not ‘Others’ to be shunned, but all part of the same community.

  Yet this was not what was portrayed in the growing popular culture of thriller novels and silent films. Increasingly, institutions like this were rendered as places of gothic menace; so many thrillers, such as The Cat and The Canary (1927), involve the alarms being sounded as an especially dangerous lunatic escapes; and even later, the characters around P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster can be found accusing him and others of insanity, and threatening them with incarceration in Colney Hatch.

  This was the only world that Bastendorff knew for the remaining twenty-two years of his life. The hospital notes give no indication of whether – or how often – his wife and now grown-up children managed to visit him. Would he have even received them? Underneath that carapace of delusional behaviour was one strong recurring theme: that of a proud man who had been grievously wronged.

  He lived until the spring of 1909 and died aged 62, of a heart complication.

  When he was taken for burial, his sons and daughters would have been in early middle age. How much did they tell their own children about the father whose mind had been broken?

  In the absence of Severin Bastendorff at Euston Square back in the 1880s, it seemed that the other brothers decided to take it on. They had their own troubles. In 1893, Anton Bastendorff was summoned to Clerkenwell m
agistrates, charged with ‘neglecting to maintain’ his wife, Caroline. Indeed, it seemed she had ended up in the St Pancras workhouse, and was now ‘the responsibility’ of the Guardians there (as the couple’s five children remained at home). Anton Bastendorff ‘denied that he failed to support his wife’ and the reason for her present state was that she had fallen into ‘intemperate habits’. He made arrangements to have her removed back to his address: 4, Euston Square.

  Yet there were suggestions that both Anton and Caroline were heavy drinkers; and it appeared that she died not too long afterwards of what was described as ‘quinsy’ – a septic complication of tonsillitis against which there would have been little defence at that point.

  By this stage, the Bastendorffs’ sister Elizabeth was living in London (after some time in Paris) with her husband, Wilhelm Hoerr. And it appeared that also living with them was Peter Bastendorff. There was no official suggestion come the 1880s or 1890s that Hannah Dobbs was by his side; yet would it not have been possible that she had changed her name as she had before? The notoriety she had experienced had not brought any sort of gain; indeed, it would have made her utterly unemployable. Who would even consider having such a maid around their domestic establishment after her barrage of accusations, and her self-confessed kleptomania?

  The bamboo furniture business, it seemed, continued to thrive for a time; after all the horrors of the body in the cellar, the family name was once more seen in regular advertisements across the city. Indeed, these featured in upmarket periodicals.

  Yet Peter Bastendorff by the 1890s had taken a step to disassociate himself with any other memories of the family name: moving premises in north London, he began using the name ‘James Roberts’ for company business. And as the decade wore on, was Peter afflicted with some form of nostalgia for a city he had fleetingly known years back? Whatever the case, it would appear that he left London, sailed across to France, and made a new home in Paris. By this stage, he would have been about to turn 40 years of age. It is simply impossible to know: was Hannah with him? Would she perhaps have now lived with him under the name ‘Hannah Roberts’?