Welcome back to the Friday Murder club, I hope you had a nice Easter. I’ve got a bit of news before we crack on. I am a doctoral researcher at the Open University and I am thrilled to be doing a free, online lecture on 19th century inquests next month. Unfortunately (and slightly terrifyingly), it’s already fully booked, but I’ll link you to the recording when it’s live.
Now to the task in hand. When Harriet Baker was brutally slain, much was made of her illegitimacy. Illegitimacy was incredibly common in the nineteenth century. Blended families were also incredibly common, whether through illegitimacy or through remarriage after widowhood.
Harriet Baker was raised by her stepfather from the age of around two, and theirs seems to have been a caring relationship. But not everyone was so lucky.
Today’s murder takes us back to the Potteries in the 1870s, and it is not an easy read.
Ann Shaw was born in Cheshire in approximately 1842. She married Charles Newton in the 1860s. He was at least ten years her senior, a carter from Madeley (now part of Telford). They probably married in Cheshire, but they settled in Tunstall soon afterwards. They lived on Hall Street (now part of Scotia Road), at number 19. At number 12 lived the Smith family, a widow named Hannah and her six children.
In the summer of 1874, a double tragedy struck the Newton family. Charles died, at around the same time as their second son, Joseph. Ann was well into her fifth pregnancy at the time. Her daughter, Eliza Frances Newton, was born in October 1874.
Ann now had three small children - William (1867), Samuel (1872) and newborn Eliza. She may have had a fourth in late 1875, but I cannot confirm this. If so, however, this is likely to have led to her outrelief being withdrawn - the Board of Guardians would support widows, but they would not fund what they saw as amoral behaviour.
Hannah Smith, at number 12, may have befriended Ann at this time. Both widows, around a decade apart in age, they were close neighbours. Perhaps Hannah engineered Ann's relationship with her eldest son, a widower named William. Perhaps Ann and William's relationship began in spite of Hannah. On Christmas day 1876, they married in Burslem. Ann was probably thirty-five when they married. William was twenty-four. William moved into 19 Hall Street.
William was a collier, but he did not enjoy the work. When it became apparent that Ann was once again pregnant, he decided to give the army a go. He went to militia training, and returned to the family home in mid-1877.
Things immediately turned sour. He refused to work, refused to give Ann any money, and threatened her if she asked for any. In August 1877, matters came to a critical point. Ann was seven months pregnant, and William was fearfully drunk. When the police attended a disturbance on Hall Street, they claimed they had to fight through a crowd of nearly five hundred people to get in. When they did, they found William had smashed every item of furniture in the house except a table. He was trying to rape Ann over the table, while punching her repeatedly. In court, Ann tried to play down the assault, saying it was not as bad as the police depicted, but the magistrates fined him twenty shillings plus costs. He went to prison for six weeks, in default.
It did nothing to improve his temper. He behaved for two weeks after release.
William turned his ire on the children, ten year old William, eight year old Samuel and tiny toddler Eliza. Eliza, in particular, infuriated him with her mere existence. William continued to refuse to work, so Ann was forced to go to work to feed her family. While she was out, William beat the hell out of all of the children, but was abhorrently vicious to Eliza. He would beat the child if she asked for food or water, with his fists, slippers or clogs. When Ann tried to defend her, he would threaten to beat her too.Ann would take the child to her neighbour, Mrs Holland, and sob at the helplessness of it all. She had nowhere else to go. William's assault of the child was noted by neighbours, who had seen him hit her repeatedly. One testified that she'd seen him pick the child up by the hands and hurl her through a door to make her go to bed.
The baby, Fanny, was born in October 1877, and Ann continued to go out to work. It's not clear who looked after the baby, but she doesn’t appear to have been left with her father. If Ann had hoped fatherhood would soften William's violence, she was mistaken. In late November, Ann came home from work to find Eliza bleeding from a nasty cut to the ear. Eliza, who had just turned three, told her:
"Bill done it"
On the 6th January 1878, William beat Eliza so severely that Ann picked the girl up and ran. They stayed out until after midnight, terrified to go home.
On Wednesday 9th January 1878, Ann came home from work to find Eliza extremely unwell. William told her that the girl had fallen from a step. She fetched Mrs Holland, and - with William - made her a warm bath. When they undressed Eliza, her stomach was black with bruises, her arms as well. Her lower back had two fearsome marks along it. The whole time that Mrs Holland was there, William was swearing at Ann and Eliza. Mrs Holland also noticed that there was no furniture in the house: it had not been replaced after William trashed it all the previous summer.
The doctor was called. He'd been attending the house for several weeks, as Eliza had bronchitis. He saw the bruises on her back, and was told the same story - Eliza fell from a step - but he was not shown her abdomen. By 5pm, it was clear Eliza was not going to survive. She laid on her side, blood trickling from her mouth, and Ann borrowed a blind from Mrs Holland to cover the windows, and begin mourning.
Eliza died at 6:45pm.
This sorry tale was related at the inquest, held at the Sneyd Arms hotel on 14th and 17th January. Eliza's older brother, also named William, was present when Eliza fell off the step. At first, he was very reluctant to say anything else about what had happened that day, terrified of his stepfather. However, after some chiding, he told the coroner that William had kicked Eliza twice, hard in the stomach as she lay on the floor. He was wearing wooden clogs at the time.
A postmortem showed extensive bruising across her body, a broken rib and evidence of infection in her brain and lungs. Her stomach was empty.
The jury came to a verdict of manslaughter, as the doctor maintained that she had died of bronchitis, not a savage beating. William was arrested, almost mobbed by a crowd outside the hotel, and indicted at the magistrate's court the next day. He did not have to wait long for his trial: the next assize at Stafford was scheduled to begin on 23rd January.
His trial took place on Monday 28th January 1878, nineteen days after Eliza's death. The trial’s verdict was reported nationally, but none of the newspapers recounted the proceedings. He appears to have pleaded not guilty. He was found guilty of manslaughter, and for once, actually recieved a punishment that fit the crime: twenty years penal servitude. The judge commented that, if the child had not shown signs of disease, he would have been found guilty of murder and executed.
William served his sentence at Chatham and Dartmoor. He was released five years early, on 1st July 1893, and returned to Tunstall. I believe he died in 1900.
William Smith had never been a good, kind or conscientious man. His violence was not unprecedented. He had married his first wife in early 1873 - she was only eighteen. Four months after their marriage - when she was pregnant - he was sent to prison for three months after beating her half to death, and assaulting her sister. Eleven months after their marriage, he was sent to prison for abandoning her and their newborn daughter. Sarah Ann Smith died at the end of 1874. There was no inquest, but William's mistreatment may have contributed. Their daughter, Mary Ellen, died around the same as Fanny was born but doesn't appear to have lived with her father: I suspect her mother’s family took her in.
His alcohol abuse was also well-known: he'd almost burned himself alive after setting fire to a his bed in a house in Tunstall, seven months before he married Ann.
Ann would have heard about William's treatment of his first wife, but she was still married to Charles when all that happened, and perhaps decided that it didn't concern her. There is evidence that he 'love-bombed' her in the early months of their marriage, only letting his true colours show after she was visibly pregnant. And then it was too late: she couldn't divorce him, and all the support she had was there on Hall Street, among her neighbours and her husband's family. Instead, she tried to work hard, tried to maintain the house around them even without furniture, tried to feed her children on nothing, and tried to hope things would improve.
Eliza was a posthumous child, so William was the only father she'd ever known. He came into her home when she was barely two years old and tortured her until she died, less than thirteen months later. She had a painful, miserable little life; a silent, terrified child, flinching at every sound.
Ann continued to live on Hall Street after William went to prison, although she moved to number 22. She took in lodgers, and carried on working as a cleaner. She died in 1890. Her son William died in 1899, but Samuel survived to the 1950s. Her daughter Fanny, thankfully relieved of her father's presence from a very young age, married and died in 1939.
Eliza Frances Newton
(1874-1878)