As you’re here, you’ll probably enjoy Judith Flanders’ new book which came out yesterday. Judith’s work is at least partly to blame for my history career, and this book is beautiful.
This week’s story is a bit different, mainly because I have stepped out of my safe Victorian comfort zone and into the twentieth century. I came to this week’s story via the bizarre inquest verdict, and it highlights how one-sided a homicide investigation could be when the community turned against the victim. Our victim this week never got a chance to tell her story, explain her actions or explain the deviancy that appeared to be present in her marriage. Nobody was willing to speak up for her, as nobody was willing to speak up for Bess Knox.
We’re in Bradford, 1909.
Elizabeth Summersgill was born in Little Horton in Bradford in late 1865 or early 1866, the daughter of a gasworks stoker. William Fallon, or Fallen, was also born in Bradford, in the summer of 1864. William’s family was large, and when his father - an Irish plasterer - died in the street in 1880, poor. William was probably already working in an ironworks at this time, and became a moulder. His sisters went into the cotton mills.
William married Elizabeth in Bradford Cathedral on Christmas Day 1886. If you ever wonder why everyone used to marry on Christmas day, there were two reasons. First, you were guaranteed the day off. Second, most vicars did the service for free. He was twenty-two, she appears to have either just had her twenty-first birthday or lied about having done so. She was pregnant.
The couple settled on Mapperton Road, now Pollard Park, and they seem to have been happy for a time. Several sons were born in quick succession: Herbert in 1887, Alonza in 1889, and Edgar in 1890. A daughter, Nellie, was born in 1894 and a final son, John, in 1896. This was not a large family for the time, perhaps because money was short, but perhaps because they simply weren’t very sexually active. Elizabeth went back to work as soon as she could after the children were born, working as a mender in a factory.
The family moved to Hannah Gate in the 1900s. This was part of a network of streets in the very centre of Bradford. Hannah Gate is gone now, but was near Burrow Street, as shown on this map.
The remains of a millpond that fed a worsted mill in the 1850s was on the corner of the street.
In the mid-1890s, Elizabeth had an affair. We don’t know who the other man was, but it ended, and Elizabeth begged forgiveness, and promised to mend her ways. Divorce was unavailable to the poor at this time, even though it was far easier for men to divorce wives than vice versa, so they reconciled. But Elizabeth started to drink.
In July 1900, Herbert died, aged twelve. According to his father, he drowned although I cannot find any report of his death. Elizabeth stopped drinking for a full year after his death, but started again around the anniversary. In 1904, William and Alonzo gave her about £2 7/- between them a week for housekeeping, but it was said she spent most of it on booze. She neglected the house and neglected the children, so it was said. She was often in the company of other men, apparently in exchange for money. William tried to leave her on six occasions, so he said, but each time she begged for forgiveness, and they reconciled.
William also drank, but that was normal and expected and standard.
In September or October 1908, William lost his job. He was forty-three and had been working as an iron moulder since he was fourteen. This placed the burden of keeping the family on the children. Alonzo was nineteen and working for a draper, but had left home because of the… atmosphere. Edgar was a year younger and in the foundry. Nellie was working as a spinner, and John also worked at the mill, and was a half-timer at school. The family were not destitute. But belts were undoubtedly tightened.
On New Year’s Day 1909, which fell on a Friday, there were various social events in the locality. William’s sister was holding a party on Ebor Street, and William went there after making tea for the children. His brother-in-law helped. Nellie also went to a party. Nellie’s party was at Sarah Holmes’ house - Sarah was a woman separated from her husband and she lived around the corner from the Fallons. Nellie was friends with her daughter, Louie.
Elizabeth was not at home: she was in the Queen’s Arms, at the junction of Manchester Road and Caledonia Street, where she’d been all day, with Sarah Holmes. They stayed until the pub closed. Sarah got home at 11:15pm, Elizabeth a little after. And Elizabeth was with a man.
This man was never identified, never gave evidence, might have been a figment of the imagination had John Fallon not been there to confirm his father’s versions of events.
John was twelve, although to read the newspapers you would think he was a toddler. We can perhaps surmise he was a little small for his age. John was asleep in a chair when his mother and this man came in from the pub. Elizabeth sent John out for a penny’s worth of fish, and when he came back, sent him again for a penny of potatoes. John then left the house of his own accord.
He bumped into his father in the street at around midnight. Neither seemed surprised to see the other at such an hour. John told his father there was a man in the house, and William went in, upset but not angry, to confront them.
“This is not good enough for me”
he said to the pair. The other man stood up, and said
“We are not going to fall out about it?”
And the two men shook hands, and William told him to go, and perhaps if the strange man had just left, that would have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. The man stopped to fill his pipe, and William asked him to fill it outside. He refused. William pushed him out, and punched him in the face. A neighbour heard this man threaten to summon William and William tell him to fight, but William went back in the house and closed the door.
Elizabeth was livid. She began to bang on the table
“You don’t bring a wage in to keep us!”
William went to throw a pot at her, but John told him he’d fetch a policeman. William stopped, steadied himself, and John left the house, afraid of the row.
We don’t know what, exactly, happened next. We can’t trust what William said.
William and Elizabeth argued for a short time after the door closed; a neighbour overheard them. Elizabeth was heard saying:
“I am not going to get out of bed to work for you, I have kept the children and I can earn my own living.”
Then all went silent.
William went first to Mrs Gorman, who lived opposite, and asked her to come. Then he fetched a policeman.
“I think I have finished my wife… I flung the kettle at her and hit her with a brush. I think you can save her if you try.”
They could not. Elizabeth died in the infirmary the next day. She had two black eyes, bruises around both ears, and two deep cuts to the forehead. On the back of her left ear, she was cut to the bone, with a compound skull fracture underneath: this was the wound that killed her. She had defensive injuries to her right hand, wrist and elbow. The doctor was of the opinion that she had been killed by a being hit with a broom handle in the ear.
And at the inquest, after this sorry tale of drunkeness, sexual debauchery and misery was told, the jury returned a verdict that I have never previously come across in real life:
Excusable homicide.
There are myriad ways of constructing homicide, and excusable homicide was one of four types of homicide verdict available to the inquest jury, but extremely uncommon.* Manslaughter was the usual verdict in these circumstances. I have checked the contemporary guidance for an excusable homicide verdict, and this ain’t it. Excusable homicide is supposed to encompass deaths caused in self-defence. Excusable homicide covers incidents like eating your cabin boy following a shipwreck. Excusable homicide is for situations of dire necessity.
Luckily, the police took a different view and he went before the magistrates. He conducted his own defence, and told the court about how he had tried to reform Elizabeth’s character and tried to make her a good wife, but she waas incorrigible and had come at him. The magistrates committed him to a murder trial regardless.
He did not have to wait long. The inquest was on 12th January, the magistrates committed him on 15th January and his trial was held in Leeds on 16th February. Again, it was Elizabeth on trial and her character was ripped to shreds, but the judge summed up fairly. He pointed out that no provocation justified such violence.
The jury found William guilty of manslaughter without leaving the dock, but asked for mercy on account of extreme provocation.
William was sentenced to six months in prison, in the second division. A soft imprisonment.
*Wilful murder, manslaughter, excusable homicide, justifiable homicide. Execution comes under the last category.
As is so often the case, it’s what is not said that is most interesting. Nellie Fallon told the inquest that her mother regularly had men back to the house when her father was absent, that her father knew, that they did not fight about it. John also told the inquest that usually, if there was a man in the house, William simply left the house, left them to it. William knew what Elizabeth was doing, and either approved or simply couldn’t face acknowledging it.
It’s also incredibly odd that ‘the strange man’ was never identified, and never came forward to give evidence. There is no way nobody knew who he was, but perhaps his story was not welcome in the narrative of Elizabeth getting what she deserved.
Elizabeth called William a ‘bloody lazy bully’ when he arrived home. The entire defence was that William was a mild-mannered man, lovely to his kids and utterly steamrollered by his drunk, cuckolding wife, but I suspect William had a bullying side, a peevish side, a side that nobody saw in public. God knows he was strong to kill Elizabeth with a wooden broomhandle.
Considering what Elizabeth said to William about money when he sent the man away, it seems likely that she was aiming to make a few bob while William was out for the evening. And it seems William knew full well this was a means for Elizabeth to keep the family coffers filled, that this was something that happened often. So why, after all this time, did he react the way he did?
We’ll never know. His fatal assault on Elizabeth was unwitnessed.
Alonzo moved back home after his mother’s death. In 1911, William and his four surviving children lived off Listerhills Street, now part of the uni campus. In 1913, William remarried and had two more children, although one died in infancy. His son Edgar was killed in the First World War, but the other children married.
William died in 1925.
Elizabeth Fallon
(1866-1909)
“Excusable homicide”!