That a man should kill a child is
appalling; that a woman should kill a child is unthinkable; but a woman who
killed an estimated eighty-three children and perhaps a great many more . . .
***
The advertisement in the
"Miscellaneous" column of the Bristol Times & Mirror newspaper
was poignant.
"Wanted," it read,
"respectable woman to take young child."
It was a sadly common request in
Victorian Britain, where life was particularly hard for unmarried mothers.
25-year-old Evelina Marmon, who two months earlier, in January 1896, had given
birth in a boarding house in Cheltenham to a little girl she, had placed the ad
named Doris. Evelina was a God-fearing farmer's daughter who had gone astray,
left the farm for city life and resorted to work as a barmaid in the saloon of
the Plough Hotel, an old coaching inn.
With her blonde hair, busty figure and
quick wit, she was popular with its male customers - though which one of them
made her pregnant has gone unrecorded. And now she was deserted, with a baby
she loved but knew she could not bring up on her own. She would have to find a
foster home for little Doris - to have her "adopted out", in the
language of the time - go back to work and hope in time to be able to reclaim
her child. Quite by chance, next to her own ad, was another: "Married
couple with no family would adopt healthy child, nice country home. Terms,
£10."
It seemed the answer to her prayers, and
she quickly contacted the name at the bottom, a Mrs. Harding. From Oxford Road
in Reading, Mrs. Harding replied in ecstatic terms. "I should be glad to
have a dear little baby girl, one I could bring up and call my own." She
described her situation. "We are plain, homely people, in fairly good
circumstances. I do not want a child for money's sake, but for company and home
comfort. "Myself and my husband are dearly fond of children. I have no
child of my own. A child with me will have a good home and a mother's
love."
Mrs. Harding sounded every bit the respectable,
caring woman that Evelina hoped to find for Doris and she wrote at once begging
her not to consider anyone else until they had met. The reply came back:
"Rest assured I will do my duty by that dear child. I will be a mother, as
far as lies in my power. "It is just lovely here, healthy and pleasant.
There is an orchard opposite our front door." Evelina could visit whenever
she wished. The only issue between them was that Evelina really wanted to pay a
weekly fee for her daughter to be looked after whereas Mrs. Harding preferred -
indeed, insisted on - a full adoption and a one-off payment in advance of £10,
for which "I will take her entirely, and she shall be of no further
expense to you".
Reluctantly, the desperate mother
agreed, and a week later Mrs. Harding, clutching "a good warm shawl to
wrap round baby in the train for it is bitter cold", arrived in
Cheltenham. Evelina was surprised to discover that the woman she had been
corresponding with was more elderly than she had expected and thickset beneath
her long cape. But she seemed affectionate as she swaddled little Doris in the
shawl. Evelina handed over a cardboard box of clothes she had packed - nappies,
chemises, petticoats, frocks, nightgowns and a powder box - and the £10, and
received in return a signed receipt. She accompanied Mrs. Harding to Cheltenham
station and then on to Gloucester, where she stood weeping amid the choking
steam on the platform as the 5.20pm train took her little girl away. She
returned to her lodgings a broken woman. A few days later, she had a letter
from Mrs. Harding saying all was well. Evelina wrote back straight away. She
never received a reply. Evelina and little Doris Marmon had fallen victim to
one of the murkiest of all the many social evils in Britain just over a century
ago - the "baby farmers".
Infant mortality was high and children's
lives were cheap. Many families in straitened circumstances were happy to
dispose of an infant to a new home and not ask too many questions about where
and to whom it was going. Some, like Evelina, intended to retrieve their
youngsters. Others were just glad to see the back of them - one less mouth to
feed, one less burden in the struggle to survive. They were prey to the
unscrupulous, the immoral and the murderous, and none was quite as chillingly
evil as the "caring woman" to whom Doris had just been entrusted.
"Mrs. Harding" was one of the many aliases of Amelia Dyer, a
hard-faced brute of a woman, whose crimes are recalled in a new book. In our
child-centered society today, it is hard to comprehend a time when there were
dead babies by the thousands, droves of missing Madeleines, and scores of Myra
Hindsley’s, and hardly anyone batted an eyelid. It was in such an environment
that Amelia Dyer plied her gruesome trade for more than a quarter of a century.
She was "the angel-maker", as
she once explained to her own little daughter, Polly, curious about the babies
that kept appearing in the household and then disappearing. She was sending
little children to Jesus, she said, because He wanted them far more than their
mothers did. At 9pm, the train from Gloucester pulled into Paddington station
in London - not Reading, as she had told Doris's mother - and Dyer struggled
off, carrying a carpet bag, the box of baby clothes and the baby herself,
whimpering in the shawl. She took a bus to Willesden, and got off at Mayo Road.
At the door of No 76, she was greeted by her daughter Polly, now aged 23, a
grown-up, married woman. Once inside their rented rooms, Dyer lifted the lid of
a workbasket and rifled through the tangle of threads and thimbles for some
white edging tape, enough to wrap twice around the soft folds of Doris's neck.
Next, the tape was pulled tight, held for a second, and then tied in a knot.
Doris would have struggled until her limbs went limp, her mouth opening and
closing in a last, silent bid for life. Then she joined the scores - no one
ever knew exactly how many - Dyer had already sent to their maker.
The two women bound the body in a
napkin, and then picked over the clothes in the cardboard box, keeping the good
items, earmarking the rest for the pawnbroker. From Evelina's £10, Dyer paid
the rent she owed to her unwitting landlady, and even gave her a pair of
child's boots as a present for her little girl. The next day - Wednesday April
1, 1896 - another infant, 13-month-old Harry Simmons, was brought to Mayo Road
in return for a £10 payment. This time there was no spare tape to be found in
the workbasket, so the knot was unpicked around Doris's neck and the same white
length used to strangle him. The following evening, the two corpses were
stuffed, one on top of the other, into Dyer's carpetbag and weighted down with
bricks. Then she took the bus to Paddington and the train to Reading.
There she lugged her heavy load though
the streets down to the river and a lonely spot she knew well, by a footbridge
over a weir at Caversham Lock. In the darkness, she pushed the bag through the
railings until it fell and she heard it smack into the waters beneath. As she
turned to leave, a man hurried passed on his way home and called out
"Goodnight". Later, his evidence at the Old Bailey would help send
58-year-old Dyer to the gallows. Unlike many of her generation, Amelia Dyer was
not the product of grinding poverty. She was born in a small village near
Bristol in 1838, daughter of a master shoemaker, and learned to read and write
and had a love of literature and poetry. She trained as a nurse, a grueling job
but a skilled and respectable one.
From a midwife, she learned of a less
arduous way of earning a living - providing lodgings in her own home for young
women who, in an unforgiving age, were pregnant outside of wedlock. From the
moment, their bump began to show they were shunned by polite society or sacked
if they were in work. So for a fee, unscrupulous businesses offered to take in
these young women and see them through to the birth. After the mothers left,
their unwanted babies would be looked after as "nurse children". The
money differed. If the girl was from a well-off background with parents anxious
to keep her plight secret, it might be as much as £80. Or, say, £50 if the
father of the child was prepared to contribute in order to hush up his
involvement. But more often these were impoverished girls, whose "immorality"
meant even the workhouse wouldn't take them, and for them the deal might be
done for a fiver.
To cut costs, the farmed-out babies were
starved, and to reduce the aggravation of looking after them they were sedated
with easily available alcohol and opiates. Godfrey's Cordial, a syrup laced
with laudanum and known colloquially as "The Quietness", was a
favorite to put a child fast asleep. And if the child died, so be it. Most did,
eventually. One such establishment was described with horror by a police
officer who uncovered it in Brixton, London. In one room, five three and
four-week-old infants were lying in filth, three under a shawl on a sofa and
two stuffed into a small crib. They were ashen-faced and emaciated like
miniature crones, their bones visible through transparent skin. They lay
open-mouthed, in a state of torpor, eyes glazed, scarcely human. What chilled
the policeman was the silence: "Instead of the noises to be expected from
children of tender age, they were lying without a moan from their wretched
lips, and apparently dying." Five infants were in another room, in
slightly better condition because a weekly fee was still being exacted for them
instead of the single "premium" that had been paid for the ones encouraged
to die quickly. However immoral this business - and the immorality usually
stretched to those who deposited children there, in full realization of their
fate - it was one much in demand, and lucrative. There was a pile of cash to be
made here, as Amelia Dyer realized.
Her own particular refinement was not to
bother with letting the children die through neglect and starvation, but to
murder them straight away and pocket all the money. Year on year, Dyer dodged
the police and the inspectors of the newly formed NSPCC. She was caught once
after a doctor was called to certify the death of one child too many and raised
the alarm. But instead of manslaughter, she was convicted of causing a child to
die by neglect and served six months' hard labor in prison, an experience that
nearly destroyed her.
After that, she tried going back to
nursing. She had spells in mental hospitals after suicide attempts. But always
she returned to baby farming, eventually drawing her own family into the
business. She stopped calling doctors to issue death certificates and disposed
of the bodies secretly. They moved homes frequently - Bristol, Reading,
Cardiff, London - as often as they scented the police closing in or mothers and
fathers on their trail trying to reclaim their children.
The killing stopped only after a
bargeman piloting a cargo up the Thames at Reading saw a brown paper parcel
lying in in shallow water near the bank. He fished it out with a boat hook,
pulled at one end and a leg and a tiny human foot appeared. A police inspection
revealed the body of a little girl, aged six to 12 months. White tape was
knotted round her neck. One piece of the brown paper had a railway label on it
from Temple Meads Station, Bristol and the faint outline of handwriting.
A name - "Mrs. Thomas" - and
an address in Reading could just be made out. Four days later, on April 3, Good
Friday, police raided that address and were immediately struck by the stench of
human decomposition, though no body was found. But white tape was, in a sewing
basket, and in cupboards were bundles of telegrams arranging adoptions, pawn
tickets for children's clothing, receipts for advertisements and letters from
mothers inquiring after their little ones. In the past few months alone, they
worked out, 20 children at least had been placed in the care of "Mrs.
Thomas", now revealed as Amelia Dyer. The police had arrived just in time.
She was about to do a moonlight flit again, this time to Somerset. The body
found by the barge turned out to be that of Helena Fry, illegitimate offspring
of Mary Fry, a servant girl from Bristol, and a well-to-do local merchant.
The child had been handed over to Dyer
at Bristol Temple Meads station on March 5. But when Dyer got home to Reading
that evening, all she had with her was a brown paper parcel two feet long. She
hid it in the house, until, after three weeks, the smell became unbearable.
Then she was seen leaving the house with the parcel, saying she was going to
the pawnshop. In fact, she threw in the bundle in the river. But it did not sink,
as the barge discovered. The river was now dragged. Three tiny bodies were
found, then the carpetbag with Doris and Harry inside, her last victims. The
next day, Evelina Marmon, whose name had cropped up in Dyer's correspondence,
was brought to Reading and identified her daughter on the mortuary slab. It had
been a mere 11 days since she had entrusted her child to "Mrs.
Harding". "She was in perfect health when I sent her away," was
all the distraught woman could mutter.
Dyer was hanged at Negate Prison after a
trial in which her plea of insanity was rejected. Her daughter gave graphic
evidence that ensured her conviction (while going unpunished herself for
reasons still not clear). The jury was out for just four-and-a-half minutes
before condemning her. The details of what she had done caused a scandal.
Stricter adoption laws gave local authorities the power to police baby farms
and stamp out abuse. Personal ads of newspapers were to be scrutinized. But
baby trafficking did not stop. Two years after Dyer's execution, railway
workers inspecting carriages shunted into a siding at Newton Abbot from the
Plymouth express found a parcel tied up with string.
Inside was a three-week-old girl, cold
and wet but just alive. She was the daughter of a widow, Jane Hill, and had
been given to a woman named Mrs. Stewart for £12. "The little one would
have a good home and a parent's love and care," Mrs. Stewart had written.
Then she had picked up the baby at Plymouth - and dumped her on the next train.
Who was "Mrs. Stewart"? None other, it was thought, than Polly,
Amelia Dyer's daughter. The evil lived on.
***
We look into our past to find hints to
our future, but the past is alight with folly and maltreatment, is what we are looking for, and is our future? Should
we try to understand the intentions of man, and then apply our knowledge thus gained, to situations in the future so that the past shall not repeat nor rise
again? You decide – bird.
