I’ve been working my way through the local paper in 1861 this week. It is intensely, gloriously parochial. Nothing happens, except in the village of Eye which seems to have a feast, festival or village tea every other week. However, the man who printed the Peterborough Advertiser was an enterprising fellow. He ran a stationery shop and every day, obtained and rented The Times out to local readers. Sometimes, national news from The Times made it into the pages of the Advertiser. That’s where I found today’s murder, nestled among arguments over piles of manure in the Angel Hotel yard.
Today’s murder took place in Small Heath in Birmingham, and is a story of jealousy.
John Grayson Farquhar was born in 1823, and you can tell from his name alone that he was born into money. He was the only son of Alexander Copeland Farquhar, a builder, and his first wife, Sophia. His mother died when he was a baby. His father remarried, but died in 1846. John initially also worked in the building trade - as a contractor, not a brickie - and later worked as an inspector of house. He had sufficient income to retire by the 1850s.
John married in 1847, but his wife died in May 1859. They had two children, but one died in 1857. His surviving daughter, Emily, was born in early 1852. They lived on Grange Road in Small Heath, a small detached house, with an enclosed garden.
Elizabeth Brookes was born in Birmingham on 20th May 1841. Her father, James, was a publican on Garrison Lane. He emigrated to Australia in the 1850s, leaving Elizabeth to live with an aunt. In 1859, following the death of Mrs Farquhar, Elizabeth was employed by John as his housekeeper.
A sexual relationship developed, and within a year, Elizabeth was pregnant. Usually when this happened, the servant was sent home, sometimes in disgrace, sometimes discreetly paid off. But John did not do that. He was in love, so he kept Elizabeth with him. Their son was born in February 1861, but died two weeks later.
In August, a new servant was engaged and Elizabeth occupied a rather strange position, neither servant nor mistress. Their relationship was not a secret - John’s friends knew about it, and in August, he’d invited Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle for dinner. It seems he planned to propose.
On Thursday 29th August, John and Elizabeth went into Birmingham and John bought her a beautiful silk dress. He left her in the draper’s to buy it, but was angry that she took more than five minutes, and even more angry when he thought she was flirting with the shop assistant. The shop assistant, a young man, told John to “show the lady a little consideration”.
John was not happy. John was not happy at all.
They went home by cab, and John discreetly asked Emily - nine year old Emily - to fetch a pistol. This was a horse pistol, an old-fashioned cavalry pistol. There was another gun on the wall of the parlour. God knows why they had so many guns.
The couple, with the cabman went to the parlour to have a cup of tea. While in the parlour, John fired the horse pistol out of the wndow and asked the cabman if he thought it was loud. The cabman said no. The cabman watched John reload the gun, and then left. John saw him out, and told the cabman that he would never him again.
Their servant, Mary, thought John seemed drunk: he was unsteady, excited. Elizabeth told John that she intended to go and see her family at Saltley, and that she wanted to walk there. John, apparently, wanted her to go in the comfort of a cab. At ten to six, John asked Mary to go and call another cab. At the time, John and Elizabeth were sitting together.
Mary left. John closed the door, and shot Elizabeth - still seated - just under her left breast at point blank range. The powder burned her dress and skin. The bullet, a single ball, pinged around in her torso ripping through her aorta and liver, before going through a kidney and lodging in her spine.
John left her dying, went into the street and found his daughter, kissed her and said
“Emmy, I have shot Bessy”
A friend, Mr Penny, overheard this and John asked him to come back to the house. Mr Penny followed him and found Elizabeth, on the brink of death with her breast exposed by the burned dress.
“It was I who shot her! I did the deed!”
John held Elizabeth, dead by this time, and kissed her all over. Mr Penny asked Emily to fetch a doctor, but John told her to fetch Mr Horsfall, a local solicitor. Mr Penny went and fetched a doctor. Another neighbour, Mr Degge, took the pistol away and also took a knife from John. There seems to have been no haste to fetch the police, but they turned up at 6:35pm. John was arrested, rambling and hysterical by this time. He told the police inspector at the station
“I shot her with a horse pistol. I am guilty of murder. I took her into town this day - it was through jealousy I did it. Please bring the case on as soon as you can for I wish to be hung and follow her.”
The inquest was held the following afternoon at the White Lion pub at the top of Muntz Street, close to the house. The jury returned a verdict of wilful murder, and John moaned and groaned and was eventually excused from proceedings. On the 2nd of September, with John still labouring under his misery, he was formally committed for murder. His defence was that Elizabeth had been helping him to remove the pistol lock when the gun went off.
Yeah, I know.
The tone was set for his defence by his representative:
“All I can say is that I hope that when the case comes before the jury they will believe that a man in the position the prisoner occupies cannot be guilty of deliberate murder towards this woman with whom he had lived on the terms of affection and who was evidently deeply beloved by him”
Elizabeth was buried on the same day, and a great crowd of working-class women attended her funeral.
John had to wait for three months to be tried. His trial was just before Christmas, at Warwick assize. His defence, as anticipated, claimed that it was all a terrible accident. Elizabeth and John had been playfully fighting over the loaded pistol, and it had gone off by accident. All John’s words in the aftermath were simply shock and grief. Several men were called to say how lovely John was, and how kind he was to the poor.
The judge told the jury that if they believed John had shot her knowingly, the offence was murder. If they thought he had been negligently playing with a loaded weapon that went off, it was manslaughter.
The jury retired for ten minutes, before returning a verdict of manslaughter.
The judge, however, passed a life sentence upon him. John left the dock in a state of ‘intense agitation’.
Elizabeth Brookes, as is common in murder cases, vanishes once she’s been shot. She becomes a dead dress, a dead dress with a hole burned at the breast, a dead dress with a nipple. Nobody mentions her personality, nobody speaks for her. The dress that she bought on that fateful day gets more column inches than she does.
She was only twenty when she died. She had been with John for less than two years. He was almost certainly her first relationship, and in that time she had borne a shortlived son and been promised marriage. Her life had been a whirlwind, a fairytale for a domestic servant.
However, on this day, it seems that she saw something in John she did not like. His ferocious jealousy was compounded when this man that she had dared speak to for five minutes, told John off. And perhaps when she told John that she wanted to go and see her family in Saltley, she sensed danger and wanted out, as Charlotte Hilton had done six months earlier.
John, enraged by jealousy and possessiveness, appears to have planned to kill Elizabeth as soon as they left town. He was unbalanced with fury, unable to walk straight. He got the gun, checked it worked, and reloaded it in plain sight. He told the cabman he wouldn’t see him again. He then shot Elizabeth. The bullet entered her abdomen at a strange angle, which suggests she was trying to push the gun away from her. Her terror when her beloved, who doted upon her, who bought her a silk dress and planned to marry her despite their difference in class, approached with the gun can only be imagined.
John Grayson Farquhar and Augustus Hilton are not so different. Both killed their domestic partner in the same year, apparently because both women wanted to leave the house without them. John was jealous because Elizabeth had spoken to another man, Augustus was livid that his wife cut him out of her business dealings. Both men declared that they wanted to be hanged afterwards, but only Augustus had the courage of his convinctions. John genuinely seemed to think he’d be acquitted, perhaps having convinced himself that it really had been an accident.
John was tranferred to Dartmoor prison in early 1862. In April 1866, he was released on a ticket of leave due to poor health. He lived in Handsworth, and died there in December 1866. His daughter Emily was raised by John’s half-brother, and married off as soon as she was eighteen.
Elizabeth Brookes
(1841-1861)