There Must Be Evil

by Bernard Taylor

  Mrs Berry’s episode of ‘brain fever’ drew another letter to the paper, clearly from one owning some medical expertise and knowledge of Mrs Berry. It is almost certain to have come from Dr Patterson. The anonymous correspondent wrote:

  [Mrs Berry’s] strange conduct…was due to an attack of hysteria which she had some weeks before Christmas. The attack was brought on by a violent quarrel with one of the female officers of the House. The ‘swoon’ into which she falls when wound up to a high pitch of excitement is another hysterical manifestation. When about to be arrested after the inquest at the Workhouse she fell heavily, from the above cause, on the back of her head on the boardroom floor. She had a similar heavy fall on the flags of the police cells at the Town Hall, and, again, it seems, at Liverpool. Her cool and quite brilliant deceptive qualities, such as she exhibits, are always seen to greatest advantage in hysterical women. Females of this type are great liars and dissemblers, almost without apparent motive or effort. In many of them also there is a complete loss of the moral sense. Without any exhibition of feeling they commit cruelties and crimes at which people shudder. It is not quite fair to the female sex to think of Mrs Berry as an ordinary woman, but as a person of low or perverted nervous organisation, possessed certainly of much ability and intelligence, but whose ambition and love of display and finery, associated with too little self-control, led her to the committal of at least two most inhuman and unnatural crimes.

  One piece in the Chronicle followed an interview with Ellen Thompson, the workhouse inmate assigned as a servant to Mrs Berry, who gave evidence at her trial. Published under the title: THE CONDEMNED WOMAN AND HER HUSBAND’S PHOTOGRAPHS, it said:

  It was well known amongst the Workhouse officials that on the mantelpiece of Mrs Berry’s sitting room in the Oldham Union were two photographs. One of them was that of her late husband, Thomas Berry, the other, she said, was that of a gentleman she often spoke of. She was constantly admiring the latter photograph, and often spoke of the ‘chance’ which she had missed. Occasionally she would go on to say that the gentleman lived at Derby, and was exceedingly well to do. She said she would have been his third wife had he not died. The fact of his death she often deplored, as she said it had prevented her from getting into the ‘highest society’ and living in ease and luxury. At the time when Mrs Berry was in the charge of the police at the Workhouse the photos were in their usual place. Ellen Thompson was attending to Mrs Berry, and one night she noticed her carrying something under her gown [and later] noticed something lying on the floor near Berry’s dress. She picked it up, and found it to be the photos of Thomas Berry and the Derby gentleman before referred to, which had been crumpled up. Thompson put them on the mantelpiece, where Mrs Berry found them the next morning. The photos no sooner caught her eye than, with a kind of smile of triumph, she threw them into the fire, and stood by until the last fragment disappeared. Her reason for so acting cannot be divined, but apparently she had no desire of the photos falling into other persons’ hands.

  A further report related to the brief period while Mrs Berry was under house arrest at the workhouse. Said the Chronicle:

  When Mrs Berry was under the charge of the police she attempted to act pretty much as she did when she enjoyed her own liberty. She was particularly hard on the doctor, who, she repeatedly said, would have to suffer for it along with Ellen Thompson and the others who were attending on her at the time. She was just as particular about the tidiness of her room as she was before; and would continually have someone trotting about for the curling tongs or something else. A person more scrupulously clean could not be met with than the misguided woman Berry, for like the rooms of the other lady attendants, hers were the picture of tidiness…

  Another contributor from the Oldham workhouse reported:

  She did not care about any mention being made of her deceased relatives, but seemed to deeply lament the death of the child Harold, whom she frequently said would have been of great assistance to her. She never said anything about the death of the other child, who was younger than poor Edith, and who died when only a few months old. Whenever the conversation at all turned towards her mother, Mrs Berry was always noticed to get rather uneasy and did her utmost to change the subject in another direction. She was known to a great many persons outside the workhouse, and was never more at home than when she was in company.

  One very interesting report resulted from one of the Chronicle’s men managing to track down William Finley, who was staying at the Blue Bell Inn at Royton. On 9 January the journalist interviewed him for a piece published in the paper’s edition of the 12th, some parts of which have already been presented in this book. The reporter speaks of Finley as ‘an old man’, saying of him: ‘He is rather over middle height, not over well dressed, but attired as you would expect a travelling pedlar to be, and wears a beard which has turned grey very early, for he is still in his fifties.’

  Since 1880, Finley told him, he had been travelling about the country eking out a living as a pedlar, adding the remark that ‘he would be better off had he not seen so many empty gill pots’. It was not before three weeks earlier, he said, while he was in Manchester, that he had learned of his wife’s exhumation, at which he ‘was thunder-struck’, and at once came down to Royton, where he intended to stay ‘to see it out’. Asked about his stepdaughter Elizabeth, he said, ‘She was very fond of reading novels of any sort, and she was pretty good at history. …She was always proud [and] wanted to be a bit above the other girls in the mill.’ Of the death of his wife Mary Ann, he said, ‘She had been dead eight months before I heard of it. I was then coming from Rushton to Blackburn, and met a friend, who told me that she was dead.’ The reporter then asked him what he thought of ‘the two crimes’, to which Finley replied that he thought that Mrs Berry was guilty of both, ‘and more than that if it was found out’. And he added, ‘An Oldham doctor who knew her told me the other day that she was one of the cleverest women he ever knew, but she had a very small heart.’ As for Elizabeth’s feelings for him, he said, ‘She never liked me; in fact, I’ll tell you what, if I’d lived in the same house as her much longer I should have been a goner. That’s my opinion, and there’s many a thousand thinks so besides.’

  Going on to canvass the feelings of some of Mrs Berry’s erstwhile neighbours, the Chronicle’s man duly reported:

  The excitement in Albion street, Jackson Street, Saville Street and the numerous other small thoroughfares in that part of Miles Platting continues as great as when Mrs Berry and her suspected poisoning of her own child first became the subject of unpleasant rumour, afterwards to be verified with startling distinction. The feeling against the woman in the localities named is exceedingly strong, and if she was let loose, and her former neighbours could have their sweet will of her, there would be no necessity for the services of her namesake, Berry, the public executioner.

  So much, then, for the opinion of the public. Such as it was, it did not bode well for any public petition for clemency.

  21

  The Earlier Deaths

  As public opinion had shown, there was great support for Elizabeth Berry’s capital sentence. Not only that, but there was increasing gossip regarding the deaths of other members of her family, namely her husband and young son Harold. In spite of the gossip and the speculation, however, no official inquiries were made into their deaths. This is not surprising, of course. The putative suspect was already in prison awaiting execution, so even in the event that more deaths were laid at her door, her sentence could not be made any more severe. Also, the business of post-mortems and inquests was a costly one – added to which the earlier deaths had taken place years before, and the bodies’ advanced decomposition would have greatly reduced any chances of a satisfactory autopsy procedure.

  In the matter of suspicion, however, it is of interest to look a little more closely at the circumstances of the earlier deaths that occurred in Elizabeth Berry’s immediate family. We have already seen that an inquest jury found
her guilty of the wilful murder of her mother, but what of those who had died before?

  At the start of Mrs Berry’s trial the judge made reference to her having had two children, a boy and a girl. As we have seen, however, there had in fact been three, one dying in infancy. With regard to this infant, who was never named, reports in the press simply referred to the child as male – witness Mr Cottingham (see p. 151) in his reference to Edith Annie’s ‘two brothers’. However, I could find no information on this second son, and the lengthiest searches for a record of his birth and death in the General Record Office turned up nothing. How to explain it? And then came the solution to the mystery – showing that Mr Cottingham, in this instance, had not so thoroughly done his homework. There had not been two brothers, there was no second son. There among the papers that make up the Home Office file is a brief statement from Ann Sanderson, where she says: ‘There had been a third child, a girl which died three years before the father of teething.’

  And there was the answer. And so it was that some few facts were gleaned relating to the brief life of the Berrys’ third child, the infant Elizabeth Jane Berry, born 13 June 1877, died 26 October 1877.

  Elizabeth Jane’s death certificate also cleared up another mystery. The statement that the baby died of teething, or dentition, as it was more properly known, appears to have been accepted as fact; it was given as such in the newspapers, and also by Ann Sanderson at Elizabeth Berry’s trial.

  A baby’s teething is, of course, a natural part of its development, and while the resulting discomfort often leads to fretfulness and parents’ sleepless nights, it is hard to believe that it could be accepted as being instrumental in a child’s death. Back in earlier times, however, this appears to have been the case. The very high incidence of infant mortality in early Victorian times so commonly coincided with the occurrence of a baby’s teething that the two phenomena became linked, and became so strongly accepted that in 1842 ‘teething’ was registered as the cause of death in 7.3% of infants up to the age of three who died in London.

  Not surprisingly, then, when ‘teething’ was given out in court as the cause of death of the Berrys’ youngest, it was accepted by all, the death being regarded as just one more infant fatality in the calendar. There was not, though, as it turned out, any truth in it.

  The baby Elizabeth Jane’s death was pronounced and certified by one Dr I.A. Palanque. With no mention at all of teething, he gave the cause as ‘Dysentery and convulsions’.

  It should be noted that ‘convulsions’ as a cause of death is something of a catch-all term commonly used in earlier times. It is used for the phenomenon of rapidly alternating contractions and relaxations of the muscles, often accompanied by unconsciousness. Although ‘convulsions’ was frequently given as a cause of death, it is in fact a symptom of an illness. Many illnesses can bring on convulsions, among them whooping cough, pneumonia, infection, encephalitis and damage to the brain. In the case of Elizabeth Jane, her convulsions and dysentery could well have been symptoms of arsenic poisoning. Indeed, they are classically symptomatic of it.

  Arsenic, the favourite weapon of poison in Georgian and Victorian times, was very easy to come by, as was strychnine, both approved means of dealing with rats and mice. And just how commonly available were such deadly poisons in the eradication of vermin is illustrated in the following small article that appeared in the Chronicle of 2 February 1887 under the heading POISONED BY MOUSE POWDER:

  An inquest has been held by the Egremont Coroner on the body of John Braden, six years old, who died from eating mouse power. The poison was placed underneath the table in the parlour, and when the deceased came home from school he ate some of it with fatal results. The Coroner said the parents had shown gross carelessness in placing poison where five children had access to it. A verdict of ‘Accidental poisoning’ was returned.

  The mouse powder concerned was likely to have contained arsenic or strychnine, or a mixture of both, and the boy’s death would have been agonizing. The jury’s acceptance of the given account of how the boy came to die appears to show that the parents seem not to have been held in any great suspicion. The sad case goes to show once again that murder by means of a commonly-bought mouse powder could, in some circumstances, be relatively easy to get away with – and, as we have seen, perhaps provoke nothing more than a stern ticking off from the coroner.

  In the case of Elizabeth Jane, although her death was officially put down to dysentery and convulsions, Mrs Berry had family and friends believe that it was due to a different cause entirely – to teething. Clearly, she lied.

  It is perhaps significant that in all the many reports relating to Elizabeth Berry’s various statements about her life I have been unable to find any single reference made by her to her daughter Elizabeth Jane – not in any regard whatsoever, be it the baby’s birth, life or death. It is as if the child never existed. Further, it is interesting to note that the informant of the baby’s death to the registrar was Thomas, her father, who was with her when she died.

  As we have seen, the next member of the family to die was Thomas himself. And following Mrs Berry’s conviction it was revealed that his death, at the time it happened, gave rise to comment, some of the erstwhile neighbours concurring that he ‘died with startling suddenness’, and was ‘buried with equal quickness’.

  He was only thirty-four on his death in July 1881. The Manchester Times reported that he ‘died somewhat suddenly, after having been at a social party’. His death certificate gives the cause of death as ‘Aortic Regurgitation. Haemorrhoids 2 years Diarrhoea’. According to his widow, who was present at his death, and who registered it two days later, he had been in poor health for some two years. Ann Sanderson, at Elizabeth Berry’s trial, said that her brother had weak bowels, and that she ‘saw him sometimes confined to bed for a day or so’.

  It must be said that the view of Thomas as having been weak and ill for years was not generally shared. The Sunderland Daily Echo & Shipping Gazette stated that those who knew him well at Miles Platting ‘deny that he was a delicate man whilst employed there as a railway official’, and in support of this statement was the fact that he was passed by an insurance doctor ‘as a thoroughly healthy subject, and accordingly insured without any problem’. Also, at no time, it appears, until the very last, was he much out of work. And it must be acknowledged that if he had been unable to work for any lengthy period there would have been no money coming into the house, and this is not for one moment an imaginable scenario where Elizabeth Berry is concerned. Further against any such notion is the fact that throughout the Berrys’ short marriage they were regularly moving house in favour of betterment. And such moves did not come cheaply.

  The cause of death as given on Thomas’s death certificate is interesting. ‘Aortic regurgitation’ is a term used to indicate a condition in which, as the result of valvular disease, the blood does not entirely pass on from the auricles of the heart to the ventricles, or from the ventricles into the arteries. As a result, a certain amount of blood leaks past it, or ‘regurgitates’ back into the cavity from which it has been driven. It is not a disease which in 1881 would have been easy to diagnose, and as no autopsy was carried out on Thomas’s body there was no way of verifying it. As for his having suffered from diarrhoea and haemorrhoids for two years, this also is remarkable in that it should be regarded as contributing to the death of such a young person. Haemorrhoids are a likely consequence of severe and chronic diarrhoea, and diarrhoea is known to be a consequence of persistent poisoning by certain agents, typically arsenic. To my mind, all the known facts point to the supposition that Thomas was poisoned by his wife.

  And what of the Berrys’ son? There is no doubt in my mind that he was Elizabeth Berry’s third victim.

  Harold Berry died at eight years of age at 68 Albion Street, Miles Platting, on 27 September 1882, a year after the death of his father, and following a visit to Blackpool. In the early part of that September Mrs Berry came from her work at th
e Wellington workhouse and went to Miles Platting where the children were living with the Sandersons. On arrival she packed up some of the children’s belongings and, keeping them away from school, took them off to the coast. A week later, on the 18th, they returned to Miles Platting with the children suffering sickness and vomiting. Mrs Berry blamed their illness on their having slept in damp sheets at the lodging house. The sheets in question, she said, were still drying out on the clothes line when they arrived at the place. A Miles Platting practitioner, Dr Shaw, ‘an old man’, as Mrs Sanderson described him, was called to the children after their return, but Harold’s condition continued to deteriorate.

  He died ten days after his arrival back in Albion Street. His death certificate states that he had been ill for fourteen days, and gives the cause of death as ‘tubercular disease of membrane of brain and glands of bowels’. It is not easy to accept that a seemingly healthy boy who a fortnight earlier had been enjoying the delights of the seaside should succumb with such suddenness to tuberculosis, or to accept Mrs Berry’s claim that his illness was brought on as the result of sleeping in damp sheets at the lodging house. One might ask the question as to why, if he was suffering so severely from tuberculosis, his mother took him away in the first place, and also, if indeed the sheets were damp, then what was a loving mother thinking of in putting her precious children to sleep in them?