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These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators?
Women accused of violent murders have often faced assumptions about their motives and disbelief that the ‘gentle sex’ could commit such bloody crimes. Rosalind Crone investigates four cases from the 19th century
1. A female bodysnatcher? At a time when selling human bodies to anatomy schools reaped hefty payouts, some desperate criminals killed to get their hands on fresh corpses. Was Elizabeth Ross one such grasping murderer? In the early 19th century, ‘resurrection men’ dug up recently buried corpses to meet the huge demand for cadavers to use in teaching and surgical practice. Others were too impatient to wait for someone to die before snatching a body – and took matters into their own hands. Between 1828 and 1831, William Burke (operating with accomplice William Hare) in Edinburgh, and John Bishop and Thomas Williams in London, were convicted and hanged for murdering numerous people in order to sell their bodies to anatomy schools. Indeed, all of the infamous bodysnatchers of 19th-century Britain were male. It’s certainly conceivable that women were involved in the trade as helpmates – but could they ever have been the instigators, or even killers? Meet Elizabeth Ross (alias Cook), a 38-year-old Irish immigrant in London with a reputation for drunkenness, violence and petty crime. She had once been accused of skinning alive six of her neighbours’ cats, and it was rumoured that she had murdered a 14-year-old girl who went missing while in her care. Elizabeth’s common-law husband, Edward Cook, who worked as a nightwatchman for the parish of Aldgate, associated with resurrection men. Little wonder, then, that fellow parishioner Ann Buton was very concerned when her grandmother, Caroline Walsh – at that time an 84-year-old pedlar – accepted Elizabeth’s offer of cheap lodgings. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/Credit-Wellcome-CollectionEliza-Rosswebready-6e9dca8-e1766488850584.jpg" width="613" height="420" alt="A black and white sketch of an elderly woman wearing a frilly bonnet and a high necked coat" title="An illustration of “the atrocious Eliza Ross” from an 1832 book about London ‘Burkers’ – bodysnatchers – including an account of her murder of elderly Caroline Walsh (Image by the Wellcome Collection)" /> On 19 August 1831, Caroline moved into the small attic room occupied by the Cook family – Elizabeth, Edward and their 12-year-old son Ned – at 7 Goodman’s Yard. With only one bed and a small table, Caroline was expected to sleep on the floor in the corner of the room. The next morning, when Ann came to check on her grandmother, Caroline was nowhere to be seen. Missing, presumed dead After searching the streets, poorhouses, hospitals and prisons for her grandmother, Ann Buton became worried, and told the police about her suspicions. But it wasn’t until October that an officer launched an investigation and arrested all three members of the Cook family. Elizabeth appeared unfazed. “With all your trouble,” she remarked, “you have not found the old woman’s body.” Elizabeth’s son, Ned, soon explained why. He told the court that on 19 August, soon after Caroline Walsh had gone to bed, his mother had suffocated the old lady. His father had been leaning out of the window at the time. Elizabeth then “lifted [the body] off the bed herself” and carried it downstairs. The next morning, Ned saw a sack in the cellar, with “partly black and partly grey” hair poking out of the top. That evening, between 11pm and midnight, Ned watched his mother carrying the sack down Goodman’s Yard. “She told me,” he continued, “that she took the body to the London Hospital.” Read more | From murder bottles to arsenic wallpaper: 5 hidden killers in Victorian Britain Perhaps unsurprisingly, the surgeons at the hospital denied ever having received a body from Elizabeth Ross, but the rag sellers in the market testified that she had sold them distinctive items of clothing that belonged to Caroline Walsh. Elizabeth was convicted of murder (Edward was acquitted) and was hanged on 9 January 1832. But how reliable was the evidence of a 12-year-old boy? Could Elizabeth have carried a body by herself all the way from Goodman’s Yard in Aldgate to the London Hospital in Whitechapel? In the moral panic about bodysnatching that had erupted in the early 1830s, was Elizabeth – already a woman with a bad reputation – accused and convicted of a crime she did not commit? Or does her case suggest that we need to look more closely at female involvement in body snatching? 2. Matricide – or a terrible mishap? Kitty Newton, who grew up in a troubled family, was accused of murdering her mother – but it may have been a tragic accident At 2am on 5 December 1848, in a grand house on the banks of the river Severn in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, servant Mary Corfield woke to the smell of smoke and the sound of her disabled master, Mr Dyer, crying out. Mary rushed downstairs and out of the house to call for help. Neighbours quickly came to the aid of Mr Dyer, while Mary found evidence of a fire in the kitchen – a half-burned sofa and pillows, wet sheets, and oil on the floor. The previous evening, Ann Newton – mother of the housekeeper, Kitty Newton – had decided to stay the night and sleep in the kitchen. Her burned body was found lying face down in an outbuilding on the property. The police were called, and Kitty was arrested, accused of murdering her mother. An inquest was quickly convened and witnesses called. Mary Corfield claimed that Kitty and Ann had had a turbulent relationship. When Ann visited Kitty, mother and daughter would drink and quarrel, sometimes violently. On one occasion, Mary said, Kitty had beaten Ann with a hand-whip so severely that pieces of flesh were torn from Ann’s arms and a doctor had to be called. Kitty’s uncle, Ann’s brother, suggested that his niece might have killed his sister to get her hands on an inheritance. He reported that on one occasion, when he spoke to Kitty about ill-treating her mother, she replied: “I should like to see the d*** old bitch dead and cut in quarters! She has lived too long, and has kept me out of my money till the hairs of my head are got grey!” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-2227135159-e8bcfff-e1766488988940.jpg" width="1500" height="995" alt="A sketch of a woman in a long black dress and top hat leaning against the rail of a box in court, with a large crowd behind her" title="A Victorian illustration of a woman in a courtroom dock. When Kitty Newton was accused of murdering her mother, a botched post-mortem helped secure a not guilty verdict (Image by Getty Images)" /> Shamed and condemned Was Kitty’s uncle telling the truth? As the newspapers revealed, hers was a troubled family. Another uncle had been convicted and hanged for beating his pregnant wife to death. Kitty’s parents had had an unhappy and violent marriage. And as a teenager, Kitty had been sent to work as a housekeeper for a third uncle, and became pregnant with his child. While the child was accepted by the family, Kitty was shamed and condemned – by her own mother, too. However, other witnesses at the inquest testified that Kitty showed great care towards her mother. The local curate suggested that Ann “was in a troubled and unhappy condition, and wished to die”. Two medical men criticised the post-mortem examination, which failed to examine Ann’s larynx or trachea, making it impossible to determine the true cause of death. The inquest jury failed to reach a consensus and, after enduring three criminal trials and spending 15 months in prison, Kitty was found not guilty and set free. She moved into a small cottage in Bridgnorth, left to her by Mr Dyer who had died while she was awaiting trial, and lived off the inheritance from her mother. Was Kitty a greedy, murderous daughter? Or had Ann accidentally (or deliberately) set fire to herself on that fateful night? After all, Victorian kitchens, which combined naked flames with flammable liquids, could be dangerous places. We may never know. 3. Pathological lies or a cry for help? Accused of murder, Jessie McLachlan issued a string of contradictory statements – but proof of her guilt remained elusive On 7 July 1862, John Fleming and his son arrived home at 17 Sandyford Place, Glasgow, after spending the weekend at the family’s summer house on the Firth of Clyde. The two men were greeted at the door by John’s father, James, an old man in his eighties who had decided to forgo the family holiday. But opening the door was the job of the servant, Jessie McPherson. Where was she? James said that he had not seen Jessie since Friday night, and that her door was locked. The three men went to investigate. John found a key and opened the door to Jessie’s bedroom, where they found her dead body. Her head had been smashed in, she was naked from the waist down, and there were defensive wounds on her hands. Clothes and sheets were soaked in blood, and someone had attempted to wash the kitchen floor. A post-mortem concluded that Jessie’s injuries pointed “to a female or a weak man as having inflicted them”. Further investigation revealed that Jessie’s best clothes and some of the Flemings’ silverware were missing. Evidence on a plate The police arrested James Fleming on suspicion of murder, but their attention was soon drawn in a different direction. A pawnbroker claimed that a woman had sold him some plate that matched the description of the silverware taken from the Flemings’ house. That woman was 28-year-old Jessie McLachlan, a former servant of the Flemings and a friend of Jessie McPherson, who had married a seaman and had a child. McLachlan was arrested and brought in for questioning. Over the course of a week or so, she gave three statements in response to the discovery of new evidence linking her to the crime. Each contained lies and contradictions. James Fleming was released, and McLachlan was indicted for murder. At her trial between 17 and 20 September, McLachlan’s legal counsel argued that the prosecution could not prove that McLachlan had been at Sandyford Place on the fateful weekend. But, despite further compelling evidence – including some from friends of McPherson who claimed that James Fleming was sexually harassing his servant – it was a losing battle. The judge encouraged the jury to return a guilty verdict – which they did, after deliberating for just 15 minutes. Read more | Who were the real Forty Elephants? The true story of Mary Carr and the all-woman crime gang McLachlan responded by delivering yet another statement, which she had written while awaiting trial – though her lawyers had refused to use it in her defence. McLachlan admitted that she had been at Sandyford Place on the night when McPherson was killed – but she claimed that James had murdered McPherson after the latter rejected his sexual advances. James then secured McLachlan’s silence with a thinly veiled threat: “Don’t be feart, only if you tell you know about her death, you will be taken in for it as well as I… My life is in your power, and yours is in my power.” McLachlan’s statement was enough to cast doubt over her conviction, trigger an inquiry and save her from the gallows. Her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and she served 15 years behind bars. James Fleming , meanwhile, lived out his days as a free man. There is a further twist in this tale. McLachlan gave a fifth statement to her lawyer, in which she confessed to the murder. It was quickly retracted, but the question remains: was this an admission of guilt? Or a cry from a woman desperate to be heard, knowing that she would likely never see her young child again, and that her voice would be suppressed throughout a long prison sentence for a crime she did not commit? 4. Could a woman commit brutal murder? After a mother and baby were slaughtered, ample evidence pointed to a love rival, Mary Pearcey, as the culprit – but many couldn’t believe that a woman might be capable of such a vicious crime On the evening of 24 October 1890, the body of a brutally murdered woman was discovered behind a row of newly built houses in Belsize Park, London. Her head was “almost entirely severed from the body” and her skull, pierced in several places, had suffered “terrible blows from some penetrating instrument”. Newspapers declared that the victim must be a prostitute, the killer must be a man, and the murder could be the work of Jack the Ripper, who had not long ago terrorised the streets of the capital. They were wrong on all three counts. The body was identified next morning as Phoebe Hogg, a 31-year-old mother. She had last been seen on the afternoon of the discovery leaving the home she shared with her husband, Frank, with her 18-month-old baby, Tiggy. Her pram, covered with blood, had been found a mile and a half from Phoebe’s body. On 26 October, Tiggy’s body was found in some nettles near Finchley Road. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/BAL11978716webready-cabdf28-e1766489231180.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A sketch of a crime scene, with a woman killing another woman and a baby, with an upturned pram" title="The murder of Phoebe Hogg and her baby Tiggy by Mary Pearcey, as imagined in The Illustrated Police News. Tiggy’s pram (right) remains on display in Madame Tussauds wax museum, London (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> A search of the Hoggs’ home revealed in Frank’s coat pocket a key to the lodgings of a family friend, 24-year-old Mary Pearcey. The police decided to visit the property. Opening the door, they discovered a horrific scene: blood was splattered on the walls, ceiling and floor, and two kitchen windowpanes had been smashed. They found lace curtains, clothing, a poker and a big knife all covered in blood, and a button from Phoebe’s jacket. Mary claimed that she had been killing mice. The police arrested her for murder. Read more | Reading, writing and retribution: inside Victorian prison schools Suspicious minds The public could not believe that a woman had committed such a brutal crime, or even possessed the physical strength to dispose of the bodies. Suspicion continued to swirl around Frank, especially when it was discovered that he and Mary were lovers. Did he want to get rid of his wife to be with Mary? Yet Frank had an alibi for the time of the murder, and there was no evidence that he had encouraged or helped Mary to kill his wife. A neighbour claimed that she had seen Mary, alone, pushing a heavily loaded pram along the street an hour before Phoebe’s body was found. Mary admitted that she had invited Phoebe and Tiggy to tea that afternoon, but denied that she had killed them. “I would not do such a dreadful thing,” she declared, adding: “I would not hurt anyone.” On 3 December 1890, Mary was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. A plea for clemency on the grounds of insanity failed, and she was hanged at Newgate Prison on 23 December. She begged Frank to visit her before her execution. He had already left London – but not before he had sold Tiggy’s pram to Madame Tussauds wax museum in Marylebone Road. There it remains on display in the infamous Chamber of Horrors – a reminder that perhaps women have the potential to be killers just as brutal as men. This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Victorian Britain's fearless female felons
Drugging, fraud, even murder – women couldn’t really commit such heinous crimes, could they? Rosalind Crone explores five audacious female-led felonies from the 18th and 19th centuries
1. The Victorian spiking crisis Female thieves took to drugging men’s drinks with opiates before cleaning out their victims’ pockets On 2 January 1865, Elizabeth Bagwell (alias Elizabeth Manning) was convicted at the Middlesex Sessions of “larceny from the person”, and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. It was a harsh punishment, reflecting the fact that she already had three previous convictions – but also that she was no ordinary pickpocket. Bagwell had spiked the drink of James Rintoul, a London cab driver, at her lodgings off Edgware Road, according to press reports of her committal hearing at the Marylebone Police Court. The drugged glass of gin she gave James was, he claimed, “so hot that it burnt my mouth”. He fell unconscious, and later woke to find himself “alone in the room, and in darkness. My gold watch and chain were gone… my ring also [and] 25 shillings from my pocket.” He had fallen victim to a crime commonly called ‘hocussing’, derived from ‘hocus pocus’ – the term used since the 17th century for conjuring, trickery or sleight of hand. By the late 19th century, ‘hocus’ had become shorthand for drugged liquor. Hocussing had become more prevalent by that time, likely because of the ready availability of cheap drugs including opium (in the form of laudanum), morphine and chloroform. Particularly in convivial social settings such as Victorian public houses, it was easy for thieves to slip drugs into drinks undetected. With their victims bewildered or unconscious, hocussers had time to search pockets thoroughly, remove any valuable jewellery and escape the scene of the crime, making pursuit and prosecution difficult. Poisoners in prison Hocussing was deployed by women and men against victims of both sexes. As a weapon of the weak, poison enabled female thieves to overcome stronger male victims. Men who had been lured by the promise of sex with women hocussers may have been reluctant to prosecute, for fear of reputational damage. Certainly, by 1865 Bagwell had already hocussed at least two other men – a medical student and a midshipman – both of whom declined to press charges. Following her release from prison on parole in 1869, she was convicted of theft from the person two more times. Her story suggests that there were probably many more victims of this technique – and many more female hocussers at work. 2. The counterfeit coin con Instead of stealing money from the pockets of others, some women had a go at literally making it themselves – and gambled with their lives On 3 September 1788, Elizabeth Alford went to a neighbour’s room in the lodging house she inhabited in Aldgate, London, to buy some thread. The neighbour, Christian Bowman (alias Catherine Murphy), was a single mother of three who worked as a servant in a public house and lived with a man named Hugh Murphy. On entering the room, Alford noticed “some bad money on the table”, and that Bowman and Murphy looked a bit shifty. “They wanted to shut me in,” Alford later told the court. Yet when she informed the couple that she had left her own door open, they let her go – and she went straight to her landlord, asking him to fetch an officer of the parish. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Credit-Element-Pictrures-BBC-430378-CMYK-37d46f5.jpg" width="4285" height="2855" alt="The BBC series The Gallows Pole tells the story of a gang of 18th-century coin clippers in Yorkshire (Image by Element Pictures – BBC)" title="The BBC series The Gallows Pole tells the story of a gang of 18th-century coin clippers in Yorkshire" /> Fatal consequences Later that day, officers caught Bowman and Murphy in the act of colouring pieces of base metal in the hope of passing them off as silver shillings. Bowman begged the officer for mercy, explaining that she had got involved in making counterfeit coins only after her husband had left her, and “never [passed] any bad money in the neighbourhood”. Her pleas fell on deaf ears. The pair were both convicted of coining at the Old Bailey court, and sentenced to death. Murphy was hanged, while Bowman was strangled and her body burned at the stake outside Newgate Gaol. Read more | Tudor angels of death: the 16th-century obsession with female killers Christian Bowman was one of 13 women burned for coining offences in England during the 18th century. It was a terrible punishment and used sparingly, but lawmakers believed it reflected the gravity of the crime, as coining was considered a form of treason. Between 1700 and 1789, 166 women were tried at the Old Bailey for coining offences. These included making, colouring or rubbing counterfeit coins; clipping or filing precious metal from legitimate coins; possessing tools to make counterfeit coins; and ‘uttering’ (trying to use) counterfeit coins. Only 65 of these women were found guilty, and about half of those were sentenced to death. Women represented around one third of those tried for coining offences in England in the 18th century, a surprisingly high proportion. Though some women, such as Bowman, made counterfeit coins with male accomplices, others worked in single-sex groups. Coining was an activity that could be done at home, and with the help of family members. Making fake coins required skill. Advances in the manufacture of legitimate coins, such as milled edges and gilding, made it harder for counterfeiters to produce convincing copies. Some women used the skills gained from other types of delicate finishing work to make coins; most almost certainly resorted to coining to supplement meagre wages. The levels of evidence required for prosecution were demanding. In addition, most ordinary people did not regard coining as a heinous offence. So there were likely many female coiners who never came to court – and simply got away with their crimes. 3. Maladies, magic and murder Fraudulent ‘wise women’ and ‘cunning folk’ scammed desperate people hoping for cures – and some resorted to poisoning their victims In March 1809, Mary Bateman was hanged at York for the murder of her client, Rebecca Perigo. Over the previous decade, Bateman, the wife of a wheelwright and the mother of four children, had been supplementing the family income by selling fortunes, charms and alternative medicines, and claimed to act as an intermediary for other ‘wise women’, including a Miss Blythe in Scarborough. Bateman’s name was often recommended to those in need of help, including Perigo, who was suffering from a “fluttering in her breast”, believed to be an “evil wish” that required the “arts of sorcery” to resolve. In May 1806 Bateman suggested that, with the help of Miss Blythe, Perigo could be cured – in time, and at some expense. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-463913393-CMYK-b6be386.jpg" width="4299" height="2864" alt="Three women sit around a burning cauldron. One is a fortune teller, who is older and bent over, with a blue headscarf. The two women visiting her are dressed in fancier clothes, with furs and hats" title="A scene such as this, showing two young women having their cards read by a fortune-teller, was a familiar one in the early 19th century" /> Over the following 12 months, Miss Blythe sent letters via Bateman to Rebecca and her husband, William, requesting money and various items – shoes, hat boxes, a tea caddy, eggs and bacon – in exchange for charms and spells to relieve Rebecca’s symptoms. Then in April 1807, Miss Blythe warned Rebecca and William that they would soon succumb to a terrible illness. To escape death, she told them, they must “eat pudding for six days and… put into it one of my powders everyday”. The powders contained poison, and Rebecca died. William continued to correspond with the ‘wise woman’ in Scarborough until October 1808, when he discovered that the charms were fake, that ‘Miss Blythe’ did not exist – and that Bateman had killed his wife. Repeat offender The unfortunate couple were the latest in a long list of ordinary and often desperate people duped by Bateman. Some lost only money and possessions; others also lost their lives. Bateman had earlier been publicly exposed as a fraud when she was caught pushing eggs, which contained the message “Christ is coming”, back up the oviduct of her supposedly prophetic hen. Yet her perfidious activities continued. The 1735 Witchcraft Act had made it a crime to pretend to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration, to tell fortunes, or to use “crafty science” to locate lost or stolen goods. Offenders were to be sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment. This legislation did not stop Bateman nor, in all likelihood, others like her. Read more | Victorian murder scandals: what six killings tell us about women's lives in the 19th century We must not assume that all ‘cunning folk’ at the turn of the 19th century were knowingly fraudulent; some sincerely believed in their magic powers. The case of Bateman, though, exposes an unscrupulous side to this business – frauds who took advantage of ordinary people living in uncertain times, who sought explanations and remedies for misfortune and illness, and who continued to believe in the supernatural and the utility of magic. This type of criminal activity might have been far more prevalent than previously imagined. 4. Light-fingered lodgers People who rented rooms in furnished lodgings pilfered items to pawn or sell – and many probably got away with their crimes Criminal justice historians suspect that women perpetrated far more theft from private spaces than was ever prosecuted. Many domestic servants casually or even systematically appropriated or stole things from their employers. Larceny by a servant was even a specific category of offence. When the items were of relatively low (or sometimes even high) value, many masters and mistresses did not think taking such thieves to court was worthwhile. Instead, a pilfering servant was typically dismissed without a reference – a tough punishment. The case of Amelie Decuypere and her husband, Paul, sheds light on a different type of theft from the domestic space: taking goods from furnished lodgings. In July 1859, the Decuyperes were arrested in London, following a complaint made by their former landlord, David Berri. Just six days after moving into a furnished room in Berri’s house, the couple disappeared – along with a coffee pot, a clock and several paintings. To divert attention from their absence, or to indicate their intention to return, the couple left in the room a large chest that, on inspection, “turned out to be filled with straw”. The police found in the couple’s possession a pile of receipts issued by pawnbrokers for items exchanged for cash – property that “no doubt had been stolen from other lodgings”. Three landlords pressed charges, but the magistrate believed that there could have been “at least a dozen” victims in total. Amelie and Paul Decuypere got caught largely because of the impressive scale of their theft, and were sentenced to six and eight years’ penal servitude, respectively. Although Amelie remained silent during her trial, the judge and jury decided that she and her husband were equal partners in the crime. As historians have shown, women made good thieves in private spaces because they often best understood the value of domestic items. Read more | Who were the real Forty Elephants? The true story of Mary Carr and the all-woman crime gang 5. Criminal credit crunch As retail opportunities opened up to wider society, female fraudsters abused ease of credit to take goods with no intention of paying for them For centuries, wealthy people in England purchased goods and services on credit, promising to pay at a later date. In the 19th century, as real wages were rising and the ‘retail revolution’ was under way, personal credit was extended to more people across society, including the upper working classes and women. This system relied on reputation and trust – and was increasingly open to abuse in densely populated urban environments. To gain credit, a woman needed simply to look respectable and to provide a plausible address. It was often difficult for those demanding payment to prove that unpaid debts were not bad debts but were criminal frauds. The difference hinged on whether there was ever an intention to pay: bad debt was dealt with by civil courts, while fraud ended up in the criminal courts. The popular depiction of the faux-aristocratic male swindler likely enabled many fraudulent women to escape detection simply because they didn’t fit that stereotype. One woman who did get caught was serial swindler Annie Gordon Baillie – not her real name, but one of some 40 aliases she used across her lifetime. The illegitimate daughter of a farm servant from Peterhead, Scotland, Annie harboured ambitions of wealth and fame. Her career included collecting money for fake charities and the ruthless exploitation of an aged baronet, but began and ended with the fraudulent acquisition of goods and services on credit. Annie ran up debts in cities across Britain and much farther afield: in Dundee, London and Broadstairs, but also in Rome, New York and Melbourne, Australia. In 1884, the London Association for the Protection of Trade warned about a woman using several aliases who had run up bills with piano manufacturers, chemists and other businesses. By 1888, the police in London and Edinburgh were on the case, and published a full expose in the Edinburgh Evening News. Despite this publicity, it wasn’t until four months later, on 23 June 1888, that the culprit was finally arrested. At Annie’s committal hearing, Detective Inspector Marshall said that the police had uncovered “hundreds, and probably to the extent of thousands” of frauds. “The prisoner is an extraordinary woman,” Marshall declared, “one of the greatest swindlers in the country.” Greed, and a love of attention, had led to Annie’s downfall. Had she been less flamboyant, by living more modestly and eschewing interviews about her outlandish charitable schemes, she might well have got away with it. This article was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Lady swindlers: 6 women who turned to lives of crime and became queens of the underworld
The BBC series, Lady Swindlers with Lucy Worsley, tells the stories of female criminals from the 18th to 20th centuries. Their chicanery often earned them great riches, yet, as series consultant Rosalind Crone reveals through six case studies, their schemes didn’t always go to plan
Alice Diamond: the “queen of the forty thieves” who amassed a fortune While the Peaky Blinders, Brigton Billy Boys and Charles Sabini’s mob terrorised the streets of Britain’s major cities, there was another, equally notorious all-female gang whose shoplifting sprees brought havoc to London’s West End. Read more | The real Peaky Blinders The Forty Elephants, named after the thieves in the legend of Ali Baba and their geographical home (Elephant and Castle), were active from about the 1880s. By the mid-1910s, the gang had a new leader, Alice Diamond (alias Diana Black), described in newspapers of the time as “Queen of the Forty Thieves”. Alice was born in 1896 in the Lambeth workhouse infirmary, and grew up alongside seven siblings in the grim tenements of Southwark, south London. According to the 1911 census, Alice had begun working as a servant when she was just 14 years old. While this was an age of growing opportunities for some working-class women to move into better-paid employment in factories and offices, others – domestic servants, dressmakers and laundresses – found themselves stuck in low-paid work, unable to participate (legally) in new forms of leisure and consumerism. Read more | What was life like for women in Edwardian Britain? The new West End department stores, with their accessible displays of ready-to-wear clothes, proved an irresistible temptation to many. Some shoplifters worked alone, others formed groups, and for Alice and her gang shoplifting became a career. New members were inducted and trained. All had to abide by a ‘hoisters’ code’, which bound them to support each other, share proceeds equally and abstain from “drinking before a raid”. A Metropolitan Police detective explained that the women would dress up and “descend upon a West End store like a plague of locusts… practically clean[ing] the place out inside an hour”. Stolen clothes, fabrics and furs were rolled up and stuffed inside their grafter’s bloomers (pants with giant pockets). Getaway cars transported the ladies back to Southwark where they would sell the clothes on as quickly as possible. Alice didn’t always get away with it. She appeared regularly before the London magistrates and served numerous short prison sentences between 1915 and 1936. Still, at the peak of her career, Alice was making about £30 a week, a small fortune in those days. She spent the money on glamorous clothes, expensive jewellery and entertainment, leaving almost nothing behind when she died in 1952. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-1053521524web-b9ec6dc-e1731338240983.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Shoppers head towards the Swan & Edgar department store at Piccadilly Circus, c1908. The upmarket shops in London’s West End often attracted ‘professional’ shoplifters (Photo by Reinhold Thiele/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Shoppers head towards the Swan & Edgar department store at Piccadilly Circus, c1908. The upmarket shops in London’s West End often attracted ‘professional’ shoplifters (Photo by Reinhold Thiele/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> Fanny Davies: the cross-dressing con artist with quick fingers, but a loose tongue On 2 September 1785, cattle dealer John Wigglesworth secured a room at the Sign of the Three Rabbits, an inn in Little Ilford, Essex. Wigglesworth was on his way from his home in Gosfield to Smithfield Market in London to purchase some new stock. While drinking in the bar, Wigglesworth began a conversation with a young and amiable horse dealer whom Wigglesworth assumed was a man. They shared a pipe of tobacco, and Wigglesworth unwisely disclosed that he had with him a large sum of money to conduct his business. After supper, both retired to their respective rooms. Wigglesworth put his canvas bag containing his money in his breeches and tucked them under his pillow. Read more | ‘She didn’t cry’: how this Tudor woman’s lack of emotion condemned her to death Then, “about the hour of one in the night”, his new friend broke into his room, stole his breeches and his bag containing around £1,200, and crept out of the inn. It was an audacious act of thievery – even more so because the young horse dealer was a 21-year-old woman called Fanny Davies. Born in Southwark c1762, Fanny’s early life was marked by great hardship. According to her biographer, by the time Fanny was just five years old, her father had died and her mother had been transported to America. Fanny was apprenticed to a milliner, but supplemented her wages through petty theft and casual prostitution. By the 1780s, she had allegedly become the mistress of a nobleman, the girlfriend of a highwayman, and a cross-dressing thief. The theft at the Three Rabbits brought Fanny’s exploits in London to an end. Feeling flush, on 4 September Fanny visited a female friend imprisoned in Newgate Gaol and “gave her a guinea and a pair of silver buckles – and boasted of the exploit”. The friend, “being a favourite of the executioner”, informed the authorities. Fanny was arrested. Read more | Were there any real highwaywomen, and did they dress up as men? At her trial on 6 March 1786, she was convicted of robbery and sentenced to death, the judge warning her that she could not “anticipate a pardon or expect that your sex will protect you from the hand of justice”. Despite this, Fanny’s sentence was commuted to 14 years’ transportation to Australia. On 31 January 1787, she boarded the Lady Penrhyn at Gravesend with around 100 other convict women, to travel as part of the First Fleet. They remained on the ship for more than a year, disembarking at Sydney Cove on 6 February 1788. Fanny settled in New South Wales, unusually returning to England three times before she died, in her mid-60s, on 11 November 1828. Sarah Rachel Russell, aka Madame Rachel: the beauty expert with an ugly secret In the 1860s, the beauty industry was expanding. At the centre of it was a shop at 47a New Bond Street, Mayfair, run by Madame Rachel. Described as a ‘Temple of Renovation’, Madame Rachel’s shop lured in customers with its attractive displays of bottles and soaps, exotic products such as ‘Pearl Powder’, ‘Circassian Beauty Wash’ and ‘Magnetic Rock Dew Water of the Sahara’, and exclusive treatments, including enamelling and Arabian baths. A sign above the door claimed Madame Rachel was “Purveyor of Arabian Perfumery to the Queen”. In her prolific advertisements, Madame Rachel promised to make customers “beautiful for ever”. Read more | A bodice-ripping revolution: how Victorian women cast off deadly fashion trends Madame Rachel was a middle-aged and illiterate woman called Sarah Rachel Russell. She was a former fried-fish seller and a (mostly) single mother of seven children, some of whom worked alongside her in the shop. At a time when youthful looks were highly prized, well-to-do women flocked to see her. In the pursuit of beauty, some became hooked on Madame Rachel’s expensive treatments and ran up large debts. When they couldn’t pay (married women had limited access to money), Madame Rachel demanded their jewellery in lieu of suing their husbands. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-3107334web-cabe3b3-e1731338415328.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="New Bond Street beauty store proprietor ‘Madame Rachel’ (pictured c1868), who sold fake products and treatments to her gullible customers, some of whom ran up huge debts with her (Photo by Southwell Bros/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="New Bond Street beauty store proprietor ‘Madame Rachel’ (pictured c1868), who sold fake products and treatments to her gullible customers, some of whom ran up huge debts with her (Photo by Southwell Bros/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> In 1868, Madame Rachel tricked one of her customers, 50-year-old widow Mary Tucker Borradaile, into believing that an aristocrat called Lord Ranelagh had fallen for her. (The subterfuge followed a chance meeting between Borradaile and Ranelagh, and was sustained by forged love letters.) He had also, according to Madame Rachel, proposed marriage, but only if Mrs Borradaile underwent a series of expensive beauty treatments. The widow was soon broke, and Madame Rachel even had her imprisoned for the debt she owed the beautician. Friends and relatives convinced Mrs Borradaile to prosecute Madame Rachel for obtaining money by false pretences. At the Old Bailey trial, both women were censured by the court, press and public. Mrs Borradaile was accused of being vain and gullible, and ridiculed for her use of cosmetics, which were still associated with sex workers and other unrespectable women. Madame Rachel was condemned, not just for her crime, but as a retailer in the beauty industry, which was regarded as a devious trade that encouraged women to hide their true appearance, to the detriment of men. Read more | Challenging gender in the Victorian Age: the 'masculine' New Woman and 'effeminate' New Man Madame Rachel was found guilty and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. On her release, she resumed her thriving business. But in 1878, she was back in court, and this time the true ingredients in her expensive products were exposed. According to her maid, Madame Rachel’s famous Magnetic Rock Dew of the Sahara combined with water from the river Jordan contained “starch and Fuller’s earth and something out of a paper” put in bottles and mixed with “water from the ordinary water-tap of the house”. Madame Rachel was sentenced to another five years’ penal servitude and died in prison two years later. Mary Willcocks: the imposter masquerading as the enigmatic Princess Caraboo On 3 April 1817, a young woman arrived in the quiet village of Almondsbury near Bristol, dressed in “a black stuff gown” with “a black cotton shawl on her head, and a red and black shawl round her shoulders… in imitation of the Asiatic costume”. She knocked on the door of a cottage. When the inhabitants answered, she began to make signs that suggested she wanted a place to sleep. When she spoke, the “cottagers, not comprehending her language, reported the case to Mrs Worrall”, mistress at the local country estate, Knole Park, and wife of a banker and local magistrate. Mrs Worrall paid for the woman to stay at the village pub. The next day, Mrs Worrall returned to find the young woman in a state of distress. She took her back to Knole Park, and through perseverance discovered the woman’s name was Caraboo. Read more | 8 scandals that shocked Georgian Britain Next, Mrs Worrall found a Portuguese sailor in Bristol who was familiar with Asian languages and willing to interpret. He revealed that the woman was a princess from the island of ‘Javasu’ who had been kidnapped by pirates and escaped when sailing up the Bristol Channel. Princess Caraboo became an honoured guest at Knole Park. Visitors from all over the country came to see her, bringing exotic items, books with pictures of foreign lands, and dictionaries of languages they hoped she might recognise. Everyone was enchanted with her behaviour. According to one account, “She oftentimes carried a gong on her back… and a tambourine in her hand… and a bow and arrow slung as usual, her head dressed with flowers and feathers.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/BAL63289web-38aba29-e1731338528409.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A portrait from 1817 shows ‘Princess Caraboo’ as an Asian royal. In fact, she was Mary Willcocks, a cobbler’s daughter from north Devon (Photo by Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives/Civic painting, transferred 1972/Bridgeman Images)" title="A portrait from 1817 shows ‘Princess Caraboo’ as an Asian royal. In fact, she was Mary Willcocks, a cobbler’s daughter from north Devon (Photo by Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives/Civic painting, transferred 1972/Bridgeman Images)" /> But in early June 1817, a Mrs Neale came forward in response to a description in the newspapers and declared that Princess Caraboo was, in fact, her former lodger, an English woman called Mary Willcocks. When it was clear that her game was up, Caraboo, or Mary, told Mrs Worrall the truth. She was a cobbler’s daughter from Devon, who had worked as a domestic servant in London, suffered the loss of a child, and become a vagrant in Bristol where she learned she could earn more from begging if she wore a turban and pretended to be foreign. Read more | Imposters in history: 16 famous con-artists and pretenders On hearing her story, Mrs Worrall took pity on Mary, and gave her money for a passage to America. Delighted, Mary left Bristol with ambitions to exhibit herself, with the help of an agent, as Princess Caraboo. The show was a flop. By 1825, Mary had returned to Bristol. In September 1828, she married Richard Baker, a local man, who was a supplier of leeches for the local hospital. Mary joined the business until her death in 1864. Tilly Devine: The brothel-owning, razor-blade-wielding gangster with more diamonds than Queen Mary “I’ve been hounded out of Australia. They’ve chased me all over the place. I’m sick of it!” Reading Matilda (Tilly) Devine’s words, uttered to a reporter in 1930, you’d be forgiven for thinking that she was the innocent victim of a cruel system that had never given her a fair crack of the whip. The truth, however, was rather different. Recent research by historians has demonstrated that female gang members could be every bit as ruthless and violent as their male counterparts – and that they sometimes played a central role in organising criminal activities. That was certainly true of Tilly Devine. In fact, she was so ruthless, so ambitious and so at ease with violence that she became one of the ‘Queens of the Underworld’ in Sydney during the 1920s and 1930s. Tilly was born thousands of miles from the Antipodes – in Camberwell, south London, in 1900 – and in her teens began making a living as a sex worker on The Strand. It is here that she likely met her future husband, Jim Devine, an Australian serviceman sent to fight in the trenches during the First World War. They married in August 1917, and Tilly followed Jim back to Sydney on the Matatua, a war bride ship, in 1920. In Sydney, Jim became Tilly’s pimp and she was described by police as “a prostitute of the worst type”. She was also ambitious, and had dreams of becoming wealthy. Jim and Tilly soon became involved in drug-dealing and sly-grog (unlicensed liquor stores). After a spell in prison in the mid-1920s, Tilly took advantage of a loophole in the law that made it illegal for men – but not women – to profit from prostitution. She bought a property at 191 Palmer Street in the Darlinghurst suburb of Sydney and set up a brothel. By the late 1920s, she had built an empire of 18 brothels frequented by politicians and businessmen as well as working-class men. With their increasing wealth, Jim and Tilly bought a house by the sea. Tilly declared that she had more diamond rings than Queen Mary “and better ones too”. To maintain their ascendancy, Jim and Tilly frequently resorted to violence. While Jim was charged (but acquitted) with the murder of several gangland figures, Tilly took part in the razor wars of the late 1920s (in which the shaving instrument became Sydney gangsters’ weapon of choice). At one point, she was overheard screaming at a police officer: “I will slash your face to pieces on Monday with a razor!” Read more | Gangs and knife-crime fears: how has Britain responded through history? In 1930, Tilly was arrested for consorting with known criminals, thanks to new legislation passed to help the police suppress the gangs. To escape conviction, Tilly agreed to return to England, which is when she lamented that she’d been hounded out of Australia. Within a year, she had returned to Australia – and to her criminal business. In 1955, however, she suffered a huge blow when she was ordered to pay $20,000 in unpaid income tax and she was brought to the edge of bankruptcy. Tilly sold her last brothel in 1968 and died two years later. Violet Charlesworth: the fake heiress who faked her own death... then found fame on the stage On 2 January 1909, a motor car crashed through a safety wall on the coast road near the village of Penmaenmawr, north Wales, coming to a stop a mere 18 inches from the edge of the cliff. The two passengers emerged from the vehicle unharmed, but the driver, Violet Charlesworth, a well-known heiress in the local area, had vanished. Her notebook and tam-o-shanter hat were found on the rocks, but there was no body and little chance that the sea could have swallowed her. The police soon became suspicious. Superintendent Rees was puzzled that Violet’s family had offered a reward of £20 for the recovery of the body, “but they have not worried me for details of the search. I have had to send to them for details and particulars.” The crash also took place just before Violet’s 25th birthday on 13 January, the day she was meant to receive a substantial inheritance from a Mr Alexander MacDonald, an Australian of Scottish descent whom she supposedly met at a party when she was 17. On the promise of this windfall, Violet, with her mother’s encouragement, had borrowed significant sums from a neighbour called Mrs Smith, and a fiancé, Dr Edward Hughes Jones. Her family had moved from their modest house in Derby to a grand residence in north Wales. Violet had also acquired motor cars and St Bernard dogs, rented further properties in Scotland and Wiltshire, and begun to speculate on the stock market. In January 1909, it soon became apparent that there was no inheritance and that Violet was a fake heiress. She was found, three days after her 25th birthday, at a hotel in Oban, Scotland, pretending to be a Miss Margaret McLeod. Once discovered, Violet tried to capitalise on her situation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-541793765eb-2f529af-e1731338786769.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Violet Charlesworth (pictured by her car) apparently disappeared after a motoring accident near Llandudno, but in reality she had fled to Scotland (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)" title="Violet Charlesworth (pictured by her car) apparently disappeared after a motoring accident near Llandudno, but in reality she had fled to Scotland (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)" /> She sold her story to the Weekly Dispatch, and offered readers the chance to buy a song she had composed, entitled ‘Good-bye Girlie, I Must Go’. She starred in a silent film called The Welsh Cliff Mystery. And she hired an agent who secured for her a major music hall tour to perform a sketch called ‘A Clever Woman’ for £300 per week. But the music hall tour was a flop and on 12 October 1909 Violet was declared bankrupt. Four months later, Violet and her mother were convicted of fraud against Mrs Smith and Dr Jones and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude (later reduced to three). In his summing up, the judge described Violet as “an exceedingly clever and ingenious woman… who might have had an honourable, and possibly distinguished career [if] half her ingenuity had been properly directed”. He could probably have said the same about most of the women on this list. Rosalind Crone is the historical consultant on the BBC Radio 4 series Lady Swindlers with Lucy Worsley, available on BBC Sounds This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Reading, writing and retribution: inside Victorian prison schools
Many Victorian gaols provided schooling for their inmates, decades before it was mandated in wider society. So what, asks Rosalind Crone, drove this great educational crusade?
On 26 February 1848, 19-year-old Thomas Sumpter appeared in the dock at Berkshire Assizes, accused – and quickly convicted – of stealing a sheep. Nothing unusual in that, given the times: livestock theft was hardly uncommon in the first half of the 19th century. What was more curious was the apparent motive behind Sumpter’s offence. Having been recently released from Reading Gaol, he committed the crime with the express intent of ensuring his prompt return to the prison where he had been memorising sections of the Bible. He’d been receiving lessons in reading, and he didn’t want to stop. Sumpter was one of three convicts who had been given early release from Reading Gaol in autumn 1845, following an unprecedented decision by the local authorities. Having been sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment, each had served six to eight months – and in that time had become poster boys for the success of a new regime at the prison. To aid rehabilitation, education was prioritised over labour: prisoners spent large amounts of time learning to read and write, as well as memorising passages from the Bible. Having each committed to memory the whole of the New Testament up to Ephesians, at the time of their release the three men were lauded as star pupils whose characters had been transformed. That ‘transformation’, though, proved short-lived. All three soon re-offended, including Sumpter. Word spread about both the system and the unfortunate relapses, and the prison became known as the Read-Read-Reading Gaol. This account is somewhat at odds with our idea of the Victorian prison as a place of ‘hard labour, hard board and hard fare’. Yet in the 1840s, when there was no universal elementary education and many working-class children were denied the opportunity to attend school, many prisons in England and Wales had schools in which inmates learned reading, writing and sometimes more besides. And despite the scandals sparked by those three ‘transformed’ inmates, prison schools were here to stay. Smelly vessels The first recognisable prison schools appeared in the unlikeliest of places: on board prison hulks. These decommissioned naval ships were used to hold men (and sometimes boys) who had been convicted of serious offences but whose transportation to the penal colonies had been delayed or prevented. Moored in rivers and harbours, these damp and often smelly vessels were routinely described as “schools of vice”. Drinking, gambling and fighting were rife. It is extraordinary, then, that on 1 January 1812, Thomas Price, chaplain for the Zealand hulk at Sheerness, reported that a school had been established in the ship and, as a result, that “some of the ignorant are beginning to read”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-90775486web-e23d815.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An etching of a prison hulk, resting on a mud or sand bank during low tide." title="The 19th-century penal system had various categories, including harshly regimented first-stage prisons such as Pentonville (visitors’ order book, shown right), slightly more relaxed second-stage prisons and, for serious offenders, the dreaded prison hulks. (Etching by Edward William Cooke via Getty Images)" /> Soon after, schools began to appear in land-based prisons, too. In 1814–15, the keeper of Warwick County Gaol set up a monitorial school for juvenile prisoners. From 1816, convicts at Millbank Penitentiary would gather in groups of 16 in the corridors between their cells, where they were taught reading, writing and arithmetic by the most educated among their number. By 1821, there were schools teaching basic literacy in at least 24 prisons and hulks in England and Wales, with more in Scotland and Ireland. Their appearance was a consequence of perceived rising crime rates and the increasing use of prisons as places of punishment, not just secure custody, where convicted criminals would serve sentences of incarceration. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/BAL386205web-97217e5.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white engraving, showing a churchman lecturing to a group of inmates inside a ship." title="A churchman lectures inmates on a prison hulk at Woolwich in a 19th-century engraving. During the day, desks and blackboards were brought into the chapel to turn it into a school. (Image from The Stapleton Collection via Bridgeman Images)" /> This was accompanied by a greater emphasis on reformation, or what we would now call rehabilitation: the idea that prisoners should be returned to society as law-abiding, productive subjects. Instruction in reading and writing, reformers hoped, would civilise and discipline a prisoner, support his or her evangelisation and, in some cases, help to secure employment. Listen | British prisons: everything you wanted to know A religious core These developments reflected those of the wider movement for mass education. In early 19th-century England and Wales, there was no national system of elementary schooling, and attempts to legislate for one routinely failed. Though MPs agreed that any state-funded education should have a moral (ie religious) core, they could not agree on who – effectively, which church – should provide it. That failure, combined with the strength of penal reformers’ commitment to rehabilitation and the growing number of prison schools, led to a remarkable event. In summer 1823, MPs passed new legislation: a Gaols Act, which aimed to improve conditions and impose some uniformity on regimes in local prisons for inmates on remand and serving short sentences. Among other directives, it decreed that “provision shall be made in all prisons for the instruction of prisoners of both sexes in reading and writing”. The legislation heralded the birth of state-funded education in England and Wales, pre-dating the establishment of universal elementary education for children by almost 50 years. From 1823, the number of prison schools continued to increase. By the late 1840s, every convict prison and hulk, as well as the majority of local prisons, had some sort of education scheme for prisoners. In the late 1860s, the proportion of local prisons with schools reached 90 per cent. Most early prison schools were ad hoc initiatives. Prisoners were supplied with books, and sometimes pens and paper, then told to get on with it themselves. The authorities often relied on prisoners, philanthropic visitors or family members to teach for free or a small fee. In 1836, the chaplain at Devon County Gaol explained that he selected schoolmasters from among those convicted of smuggling because they “conduct themselves better than other classes of prisoners”. At Ely Gaol, the governor’s 11-year-old daughter taught the female prisoners. Efforts were made to fill learning spaces with suitable fixtures. On the Defence prison hulk, slanting black desks with inkstand holes were arranged in the body of the chapel each morning. Blackboards were common, and lessons were often supported by textbooks published by school societies. At London’s Holloway Prison, journalist and reformer Henry Mayhew watched a class of female prisoners cluster “around a map of England... [they] appeared to take great interest in their geography lesson”. Read more | Timeline: a history of prisons in Britain Soon, however, new systems of prison discipline ushered in more formal approaches. Prisoners’ lives were increasingly managed via timetables dictating hours for sleep, meals, labour and lessons. After the 1839 Prison Act, the adoption of the so-called ‘silent’ and ‘separate’ systems – which prohibited contact between prisoners – put an end to peer learning. Many classrooms became silent, and in some separate prisons, such as Pentonville and Lewes County Gaol, partitions were placed between pupils. These were soon covered in graffiti as the increasingly literate prisoners found new ways to communicate with each other. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/WandsworthwebHoCadultschoolchapelcmyk-9dd5651.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white engraving showing a man standing before a theatre-style seating, filled with men with partitions between them." title="In the ‘separate’ system, prisoners were isolated from each other, even during lessons – as shown here at the Surrey House of Correction (known today as Wandsworth Prison) in the late 1850s. (Engraving from Heritage Image Partnership Ltd via Alamy)" /> When visiting the school at Coldbath Fields, London, Henry Mayhew found that “all was silent as in a dumb asylum, the only sound being the rustling of copy books”. One pupil, “a lad with ruddy skin... [and] a defect in his speech”, was instructed to read aloud from his book. “‘Whatsoever is wight that shall ye weceive’, [he said]. “‘Do try to pronounce your ‘r’s’ better,’ said the master, kindly; and thereupon there was a shuffling of feet from the other pupils, as if the only method of laughing under the silent system was with the shoes.” At the same time, volunteers were replaced with paid teachers under the direct control of the prison chaplain and governor. In convict prisons and large local prisons, qualified schoolmasters and schoolmistresses were recruited, but in smaller institutions the roles of teacher and warder were combined to save money, often retrospectively. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/AE5J55web-94e28c7.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white engraving showing three rows of girls with dresses and white caps, sitting and working at desks, looked over by some women." title="The school for girls imprisoned at Tothill Fields in the late 1850s. A dedicated schoolmistress was employed to teach that institution’s large female population; in other prisons, the matron took lessons. (Engraving from Chronicle, via Alamy)" /> In 1858, Samuel Parker, former schoolmaster at Newgate Gaol, won an action against his employers for unreasonable dismissal after he complained about the new duties imposed on him. “A schoolmaster would be degraded in the eyes of his pupils,” the judge explained, “if, in addition... he officiated as turnkey and was compelled to clean out [water] closets.” Embracing opportunities Qualified teachers and, from 1835, prison inspections encouraged the expansion of the curriculum, with rote learning exposed as a futile exercise. “I have learned all the Galatians through by heart, and am now upon the Ephesians,” Prisoner 4429, a seven-time veteran of Reading Gaol, told the inspector, “[but] I cannot say I understand it.” While instruction in writing and arithmetic became increasingly common, in some prisons lessons in history and geography were offered to vary and deepen learning. “The school is our strength,” declared the chaplain at Shepton Mallet Gaol. “When prisoners begin to read, they begin to think.” Many prisoners embraced the opportunity to learn. Attending school excused them from labour, while mastering the skill of reading provided relief from boredom, and writing offered the chance to communicate with others outside (and sometimes inside) the prison. But progress was dependent on time, and the majority of prisoners spent no more than three months behind bars. Often the learning acquired in prisons was lost amid the hard reality of the outside world. During the 1850s and 1860s the penal aspects of incarceration intensified, fuelled by growing disillusionment with efforts to rehabilitate prisoners, the replacement of transportation by imprisonment, and the perception that prisons were too comfortable. Prison schools persisted, but provision was reshaped by a new emphasis on punishment and deterrence, and curricula were streamlined to focus only on basic competence in reading, writing and arithmetic. “High teaching is wholly eschewed,” explained the chaplain at Millbank, “not only because there would not be time for it, but as inconsistent with the proprieties of a prison, and not at all necessary with reference to the well-doing of the prisoners [on release].” Stages of learning From 1853, convicts at Pentonville and Millbank serving long sentences spent their first nine months in separate confinement. Keen to increase the pain of isolation, in 1863–64 prison administrators introduced a system of cellular instruction. In each ward, one hour each week was set aside for education, during which prisoners would study alone in their cells. Those who were eligible would receive 10 to 15 minutes’ instruction from the schoolmaster or mistress. At second-stage convict prisons, where some association was permitted, classes continued but lessons were limited to just one evening each week. “The mere attempt to read cannot interest a man fatigued by labour and bowed down with shame,” complained the chaplain at Portsmouth. According to a former prisoner at Dartmoor, “by the time a dozen words of one syllable have been spelt, and often before a single line in the copybook has been filled, the bell rings... and the prisoners return to their cells about as wise as they left them”. The nationalisation of local prisons in 1877 provided an opportunity to review education for short-sentence prisoners. Although the work of the commissioners ensured that a school existed in every prison, provision was reduced to the bare minimum: 15 minutes of individual tuition in cells twice a week for prisoners aged under 40 with sentences exceeding four months. “It is an inherent difficulty,” wrote a senior civil servant. “A place of short-term imprisonment cannot be made a place of education.” Read more | Charles Dickens: prison reformer, scourge of capitalists, champion of the poor The advent of universal (1870) and compulsory (1880) elementary education for children in England and Wales gave prison administrators hope that prison schools could be abolished within a generation. But the reasons for illiteracy and innumeracy within the prison population were, and still are, varied and complex. At the same time, the idea of education as a panacea – a cure-all for society’s problems and an antidote to criminality – remains seductive. Educational and penal policy combined in the 19th century to embed education deep within the penal regime and, as a result, prison schools continued through the 20th century and into the 21st. However, the difficulties of accommodating education within an environment in which punishment and deterrence routinely take priority persist. As a result, 200 years after they first appeared, there are still serious limits on what prison schools can achieve. This article was first published in the December 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Sex, sadism and sugared death: 8 scandals that rocked Victorian Britain
A killer-sweet scare, a criminal trial that threatened to bring down a prominent politician, cruelty in the workhouses, and a horrific murder spree: life in Victorian Britain was not without its scandals. Rosalind Crone investigates eight headline-grabbing events that caused the Victorians to rise up in outrage
The mother of sex scandals: Caroline Norton, a future prime minister and a change in custody laws In 1827, 19-year-old Caroline Sheridan, granddaughter of the famous playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan – himself the subject of a scandal – married George Norton, heir to his family’s fortune. It was a disastrous match. George turned down work while waiting for his inheritance, so the family became dependent on Caroline’s earnings as a poet and novelist. George drank and was often violent towards his wife. All the while, Caroline’s flamboyance and literary flair was attracting some powerful admirers, including a future prime minister, Lord Melbourne. In April 1836, after yet another heated argument, George barred Caroline from the family home and prevented her from seeing their three sons, all aged less than seven. In the early 19th century, the law decreed that a wife’s property – and any children – belonged to her husband, so there was little Caroline could do about it. Naturally, she was distraught, especially as she knew the pain George was inflicting on her children by “cursing me thro them”, as she wrote to Lord Melbourne. If that wasn’t bad enough, in June 1836 George sued Lord Melbourne for adultery with his wife. A successful prosecution was the necessary first step in divorce proceedings. For George, it was also a money-making venture as he demanded that Lord Melbourne pay him £10,000 in damages. The trial was a sensation. The court was “crowded to excess”, and newspaper readers awaited eagerly the potentially salacious testimony. One maid claimed she “saw Lord Melbourne kiss Mrs Norton”, and another that, after a visit from Lord Melbourne, Caroline’s “collar and hair were generally tumbled… She would also wash her hands [and] put fresh rouge on her face.” A coachman’s testimony that he saw Caroline lying on the hearthrug with her clothes “up”, showing “the thick part of her thigh”, promised to prove decisive – until he admitted being sacked for drinking on the job. The jury was unimpressed by these explosive allegations and promptly dismissed the case. Vindicated, Lord Melbourne went on to become Queen Victoria’s first prime minister and beloved ‘Lord M’. Caroline, still married to George but separated from her sons, picked up her pen and successfully campaigned for legal change. In 1839, legislation granted women custody of children aged under seven, provided they were not guilty of adultery. Revelations in the dark: shining a light on the brutality of women's work in the coal mines – sometimes done topless! Coal was the lifeblood of Victorian Britain. But it was extracted at a terrible cost. In 1842, a scandal erupted over the “horrible and degrading labours” that miners were forced to endure – and those miners were often women and children. Read more | From family to factory: women's lives during the Industrial Revolution The scandal was triggered by the release of a report into mining practices authored by the Children’s Employment Commission. Although established to investigate the use of child labour, its remit was expanded when it was discovered that women were also working underground. Mining placed extraordinary physical demands on women and children alike. But what particularly obsessed the commissioners was its perceived immoral and corrupting effects. The commission’s report described how women and older children, who moved coal from the coalface to the shaft head, were forced to go “down on all-fours” and were “harnessed” to carts “like animals”. At the Hopwood pit in Barnsley, a commissioner found girls, some of pubescent age, “stark naked down to the waist, their hair bound up with a tight cap, and [wearing] trousers”. In some pits, the male ‘hewers’, who cut the coal from the seam, removed all their clothes, exposing themselves to the women they worked with. These accounts were accompanied by woodcut illustrations that were suggestive of further improprieties. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/04/GettyImages-188002823-638be7f.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A drawing of a woman working in a Halifax pit. An 1842 report found evidence of women working “stark naked down to the waist” (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty)" title="A drawing of a woman working in a Halifax pit. An 1842 report found evidence of women working “stark naked down to the waist” (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty)" /> Reformers argued that girls were brutalised by their work in the mines. They lost their innocence and grew up to become bad wives and mothers. As for the working women, it was suggested (sometimes contrary to the evidence) that they neglected their domestic duties and were therefore responsible for the poor living conditions endured by their families. The report whipped up a tidal wave of public opposition that helped push the 1842 Mines Act through parliament, prohibiting boys under the age of 10, and women of any age, from working underground in coalmines. Yet not everyone welcomed the legislation. Many women struggled to find alternative employment, creating hardship for families. Meanwhile, men and teenage boys continued to perform backbreaking work over long hours in often perilous conditions. Read more | The ‘Pit Brow Lasses’ of 19th-century coal mines Crushing hunger: the horrific conditions and near starvation in Britain’s workhouses On 1 August 1845, Thomas Wakley stood up in parliament and told his fellow MPs a terrible story of the abuse of the paupers employed to crush bones at Andover workhouse. The inmates were so hungry, Wakley revealed, that they “were in the habit of extracting the marrow and gnawing the meat” that they found on the bones. The home secretary, James Graham, immediately launched an enquiry and a Poor Law assistant commissioner was dispatched to the Hampshire town to investigate. His interviews with staff and inmates confirmed the allegations and revealed yet further abuses. The workhouse master and matron, previously praised by Poor Law administrators for their parsimony and disciplinary regime, had been siphoning food off the prescribed diet. In doing so, they had driven desperate inmates to scavenge for scraps left on putrid bones, while also subjecting them to physical and psychological abuse. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/04/GettyImages-645161372-f0b890d.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration shows men fighting over food in a workhouse. One journalist claimed that hunger had propelled the denizens of Andover workhouse into unwitting cannibalism (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty)" title="An illustration shows men fighting over food in a workhouse. One journalist claimed that hunger had propelled the denizens of Andover workhouse into unwitting cannibalism (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty)" /> The newspapers seized upon the story, adding yet more fuel to the fire. One journalist claimed that bones sent to the workhouse for crushing were “collected from various sources, including… occasionally some from churchyards”, a veiled suggestion that the inmates had become unwitting cannibals. Read more | How gruelling was the Victorian workhouse? The home secretary ordered the abolition of bone crushing in workhouses. But it was too late – the scandal had shone a spotlight on the failings and incompetence of the Poor Law Commission, the body responsible for the implementation of the 1834 New Poor Law. In 1847, it was replaced with a new, more accountable authority: the Poor Law Board. However, as the ideology of poverty that underpinned the workhouse system went unchallenged, the workhouse continued to be an object of dread and often a place of unnecessary cruelty. The Bradford sweets poisoning: how ‘sugared death’ sparked a change in attitudes to the adulterated food trade On 25 October 1858, Bradford sweet-maker John Neal sent an employee on an errand to a chemist. Neal ordered the employee to buy 12 pounds of plaster of Paris – nicknamed ‘daft’ – which he planned to use in his confectionery in place of expensive sugar. In the early 19th century, rogue and sometimes nefarious substances were often added to food and drink in order to extend shelf life, for visual appeal, or to keep prices low. Most of the time, no one noticed, as the public had become so used to it. Yet in this instance, the consequences were catastrophic. The chemist was ill and bedridden, and so he instructed his apprentice to fetch the ‘daft’ from the storeroom to sell to Neal’s employee. Unfortunately, there were two unlabelled casks of white powder “placed near each other”, and so the apprentice accidentally supplied Neal with 12 pounds of arsenic. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/04/2H47M4X-790f9d4.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Death is depicted as a confectioner in an engraving produced following the 1858 arsenic scandal. Knowingly selling adulterated food was proscribed two years late (Photo by Well/BOT/Alamy)" title="Death is depicted as a confectioner in an engraving produced following the 1858 arsenic scandal. Knowingly selling adulterated food was proscribed two years late (Photo by Well/BOT/Alamy)" /> The arsenic was used to make peppermint drops, or, as The Times described them, “little pills of sugared death”. Neal observed that the sweets “were unusually long in drying, and… darker in colour than usual”. However, he wasn’t unduly worried, and sold them at a discount to market trader William Hardaker. Read more | Living in fear: the dangers of Victorian London On Saturday 30 October, around a thousand of the sweets were sold to customers at Hardaker’s stall. The next day – Halloween – hundreds of people, including Hardaker himself, became “dangerously ill”, suffering from symptoms of arsenic poisoning. The source was quickly located and unconsumed sweets were seized. Billmen and night police were instructed “to give warnings in all public-houses and… thickly populated streets”. Their intervention came too late to prevent at least 21 people from dying, including several children. “Three of four persons” were found “lying dead in one house”. Events in Bradford prompted a sea change in attitudes towards food adulteration. In 1860, long-awaited legislation was passed which made it an offence to knowingly sell adulterated food. However, it was another 10 years before the legislation could be properly enforced. Cruelty in the home: the plight of domestic servants, who lacked protection from their tyrannical masters The case of Sarah and Robert Bird shone light into a dark corner of domestic life. In March 1850, the couple, north Devon farmers, were put on trial for the murder of their servant, Mary Ann Parsons, a 15-year-old girl they had acquired from the workhouse. The Birds claimed Mary Ann had stumbled and hit her head on the fireplace, but her body was covered in injuries from regular beatings, and neighbours testified that they had seen signs of abuse. “I heard Sarah Bird scolding the girl… after which I heard blows and the girl crying,” said stonemason William Topas. “Soon after she came out… her face was bloody.” The workhouse master admitted that he had advised Sarah Bird to “chastise her!” when Sarah complained that Mary Ann was an idle thief. Local anger turned to national outrage when the Birds were acquitted. “This is not justice,” declared the highly influential commentators John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor in The Morning Chronicle. “Those to whom power over others is given, and who brutally misuse that power, should be thus far held responsible for the safety of those over whom they tyrannise.” Public pressure forced the authorities to re-arrest the Birds for assault. They were convicted in August 1850, and later sentenced to 16 months’ imprisonment. The case also led to a change in the law. The domestic service industry had expanded dramatically in the first half of the 19th century as the employment of a ‘maid-of-all work’ became common in middle-class households. It was a backbreaking job, and some employers, like the Birds, could be cruel tyrants. New legislation required parish relieving officers to visit workhouse children who had been sent into service to check they were not being mistreated. Most servants, however, remained vulnerable and it was another 60 years before domestic workers began to unionise and assert their rights. Stella and Fanny: the media storm around the trial of two cross-dressers for “corrupting public morals” The arrest of a group of rowdy patrons at the Strand Theatre in London in April 1870 produced a scandal that challenged Victorian assumptions about gender, sexuality and respectability. At the centre of the storm were Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, both from respectable middle-class families. By the late 1860s the friends were better known as their alter egos, Stella and Fanny. As female impersonators on stage, they barely raised an eyebrow. Increasingly, however, Ernest and Frederick took their characters off stage, parading through the streets and frequenting West End theatres and clubs in flamboyant dresses and elaborate make up. Soon, their unconventional behaviour was drawing significant attention. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/04/P7GJBN-6f55024.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park pictured in c1869. In 1871, the pair were acquitted following a trial that gripped the nation (Photo by History and Art Collection / Alamy)" title="Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park pictured in c1869. In 1871, the pair were acquitted following a trial that gripped the nation (Photo by History and Art Collection / Alamy)" /> Given their celebrity, the arrest of Ernest and Frederick came as a surprise to many. However, it was later revealed that the pair had been under police surveillance for a year. They were “greeted with shouts of laughter and hisses” as they were conveyed the next morning from the cells to the Bow Street Police Court. When placed in the dock, still in evening dresses from the night before, “great surprise was manifested at the admirable manner” in which Ernest and Frederick “had ‘made up”. The friends were charged with committing sodomy, conspiring to induce others to commit sodomy, and, by wearing women’s clothes, “openly and scandalously outrag[ing] public decency and corrupt[ing] public morals”. By the time of their trial, in May 1871, two of the three charges had been dropped. Ernest and Frederick both appeared in suits, but each “with a bouquet of flowers in a buttonhole of his coat”. They were acquitted, after the prosecution failed to prove that the defendants had done anything other than dress as women for fun. Despite the pair’s exoneration, the trial served to link cross-dressing with homosexuality in the public mind. And the verdict prompted the addition of a clause in the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which enabled gay men to be charged with gross indecency where sodomy could not be proven. Among those subsequently prosecuted were playwright Oscar Wilde and codebreaker Alan Turing. Sex trafficking of young girls: a newspaper exposé revealed an unspeakable trade – and landed its editor in prison In July 1885, the Pall Mall Gazette ran a series of articles on a scandal that was so explosive that they were preceded with a content warning. “Squeamish” and “prudish” readers who preferred to live in “selfish” ignorance were advised not to read the paper. Those who dared were promised “an authentic record of unimpeachable facts, abominable, unutterable, and worse than fables yet have feigned or fear conceived”. The articles, collectively entitled ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, was the product of a ‘Special and Secret Commission’ led by the magazine’s editor, William T Stead, on the trafficking of young girls into prostitution in London. Stead took readers on a tour of the capital’s brothels typically frequented by wealthy men in search of ‘maidenheads’ to deflower. Through interviews with procurers and brothel-keepers, Stead reported how girls aged 11–15 were groomed, or purchased from parents, sent to collusive doctors or midwives to have their virginity certified, drugged with chloroform, and then raped in locked rooms. “In my house,” boasted one brothel-keeper, “you can enjoy the screams of the girl with the certainty that no one hears them but yourself.” Stead even went so far as to purchase a child for himself. Thirteen-year-old Lily (later revealed to be Eliza Armstrong) was allegedly sold by her alcoholic mother for £5. Stead described the girl’s panic when she woke to find herself locked in a room with Stead, emitting “a wild and piteous cry… a helpless startled scream like the bleat of a frightened lamb”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/04/2DT328F-afa262a.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A cartoon shows a man propositioning a woman in the 19th century. An 1885 grooming scandal resulted in the raising of the age of consent for girls (Photo by Walker Art Library/Alamy)" title="A cartoon shows a man propositioning a woman in the 19th century. An 1885 grooming scandal resulted in the raising of the age of consent for girls (Photo by Walker Art Library/Alamy)" /> The public response to the articles was overwhelming. As the newsagent WH Smith refused to sell it, large crowds gathered at the magazine’s office to obtain copies. The reports were reprinted in European and American newspapers. On 14 August, parliament passed a Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16 and gave the police greater powers to prosecute streetwalkers and brothel-keepers. Days later, 250,000 people gathered for a demonstration in Hyde Park to demand its enforcement. Stead had succeeded in his aim: to use human-interest stories, sensation and scandal to galvanise support for social change. He had also overstepped the mark. For his role in the procurement of ‘Lily’, the editor was convicted of child abduction and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment with hard labour. The serial killer ‘baby-farmer’: the discovery of an infant’s body alerted police to a murderous money-making scheme On 30 March 1896, a bargeman discovered the body of a baby girl, wrapped in brown paper, floating in the Thames near Caversham Weir just outside Reading. The bargeman called the police, who took the parcel back to the station for examination. The police surgeon, on finding “a piece of string… tied tightly around its neck”, concluded that the baby had been strangled. That might have been the end of the story, had the police not noticed a faded address written on the brown paper. This information led the authorities to the home of 58-year-old Amelia Dyer, who was arrested on suspicion of murder. A search of the premises produced “incriminating letters, telegrams, pawn tickets [for baby clothes] and receipts for advertisements in London and other papers”. Dyer, one reporter noted, “evidently carried on to a considerable extent” an “awful traffic in human life”. Read more | Victorian murder scandals: what six killings tell us about women's lives in the 19th century Dyer was a ‘baby-farmer’, a woman who was given money to look after children on a residential basis who were not her own. This was an industry that had emerged in the Victorian period to deal with children – born in and out of wedlock – whose mothers could not afford to support them. The baby farmer was given a lump sum to ‘adopt’ the child. Some, like Dyer, would then kill the child and pocket the money. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/04/KCP5P9-c22faf9.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Amelia Dyer ruthlessly exploited the fact that many parents could not afford to support their children (Photo by Historic Collection/Alamy)" title="Amelia Dyer ruthlessly exploited the fact that many parents could not afford to support their children (Photo by Historic Collection/Alamy)" /> Dyer was not the first murderous baby-farmer to come before the courts, but the scale of her enterprise transformed this case into one of the most prominent scandals of the age. During the month of April, while Dyer was held on remand in Reading Gaol, the bodies of another six babies linked to her were discovered near Caversham Weir. Evidence suggests that in the two months before her arrest, she had acquired around 20 children, none of whom were still living with her. Over the course of Dyer’s 30-year career, it is estimated that she killed more than 300 children. Dyer was convicted of murder, and hanged on 10 June. While the public were outraged by her crimes, some commentators were more ambivalent. One journalist pointed to the “cruel and callous heartedness of parents, who fling away their offspring, to endure any fate that may await them at a mercenary stranger’s hands”. Long-awaited infant protection legislation tightened and added to existing regulations around childcare, but lawmakers failed to provide any new solutions for women who found themselves unexpectedly pregnant with a child they could not support. Rosalind Crone is professor of history at the Open University, and author of Violent Victorians (Manchester University Press, 2012) and Illiterate Inmates (Oxford University Press, 2022) This article first appeared in the May 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine