"I want to make no bother at all"

And other lies

Twitter is dead, long live Bluesky.

Any historian of interpersonal violence has to come to terms with the staggering numbers of infanticides tucked among the records. Infanticide is typically classified as the murder of a newborn by its mother, these women usually gave birth alone, away from their support systems and their babies died with a question mark over their heads over whether they’d ever lived at all. These deaths have been treated in different ways legally over the years, re-classifying the crime of child murder to suit the changing culture of England Wales.

But it’s not just newborns; people killed their children at any age, for all manner of reasons. Poverty, shame, inability to provide, mental illness… abuse, jealousy, to clear the way for a fresh relationship…

It’s usually the deadly mothers who get the attention, but this week’s story is about a father. Ipswich, 1883.

Caroline Mary Meek was born in Ipswich in the summer of 1853. Her faher, Jacob, was Scottish and her mother was Irish. Jacob worked as an ostler at a hotel in the city centre, and Caroline - Carrie - went into domestic service at fourteen. Jacob died in 1874.

By 1878, Carrie was working in service in London. While travelling on the underground, she sat near Thomas Lyons Day, who she called Tom. Tom’s origins are opaque. He was born in Staffordshire, probably in 1852, and his parents were based somewhere in Birmingham. His name suggests he was either a first son, or an illegitimate son. When they met, he was in the Coldstream Guards. He was tall, handsome, a bit rough, and they hit it off immediately. In due course, Carrie found herself pregnant and they intended to marry.

But they didn’t. Tom left the army and got a job at a foundry in Hammersmith, but wasn’t making enough money to set up a home. Carrie asked him to marry her anyway, to legitimise their baby, but he wouldn’t. Lilian Alice Lyons Meek was born illegitimately on 18th July 1879. She was baptised a few months later at Addlestone and known as Lily. Tom and Carrie remained in touch for a couple more years, but did not talk of marriage.

In 1880, Carrie took her baby home to Ipswich. Tom offered no support: he knew about the baby but he sent just five and a half shillings in stamps to support Lily over four years.

Carrie got a job in the Station Hotel at Ipswich, as the cook. She met Sarah Woodgate there, and through her, William Woodgate. William was three years younger than Sarah, a steady man with a job. She fell in love, and wrote to Tom to break things off in early 1881. He was living in Barrow in Furness at the time, miles from Ipswich.

In due course, she got pregnant and married William in February 1882. They lived on Station Street. None of the original houses appear to still stand, only those at the junction with Webb Street. William worked as a general labourer for the Great Eastern Railway company. He accepted Lily as his own, and she was joined by a sister - Ethel - in August 1882.

They should have remained a happy family, but Tom wrote to Carrie regularly. He was furious that she’d got married and sent a letter in November 1882, calling her deceitful, telling her she was decieving Lily, and saying she should have waited for him. The letter was full of veiled threats, full of hate and invoking God’s wrath. It was not a comforting letter to recieve. A few weeks later, she recieved another, begging for a photo of Lily, but it was another letter filled with hate and threats.

Tom sent the letters to Carrie’s mother because all he knew about the Woodgates was that they lived in Ipswich. He came to Ipswich on 11th August 1883. staying at a pub on Fore Street while he found out where Carrie lived. He claimed to be looking for work (at Ransome and Rapier’s), and appeared to have no money on him whatsoever. A couple of days into his visit, he went to Carrie’s house under false pretences, probably to get a good look at William. Carrie didn’t tell her husband who he was. The following day - Monday 13th - he contacted Carrie, with a terse note:

Carrie. I want to see Lily. Have been in the town four days and I shall come tomorrow, Tuesday. I want to make no bother at all. I am at the bottom of the street. Tom.

Carrie didn’t want Tom to visit the house. On the pretence of going to her mother’s house with Lily, she left to meet him. He accused her of “selling his child”, apparently furious that Lily was being raised by another man. He told Lily her name was Day, not Woodgate, and told Carrie that he would have married her if he could have got enough money. He asked to take the child out for a while. Carrie said no… she told him she didn’t want him to see Lily alone, or for him to come to the house, but eventually agreed that he could come over that evening when William would be home.

Carrie was frightened. She showed her husband the letter, told William that he was coming. She sent baby Ethel to the neighbour’s so she wasn’t in the house. Tom turned up at 8:30pm, smoking a pipe. Lily was in her nightie, ready for bed. Tom sat on the sofa, took Lily on to his knee to kiss her, and asked her name.

“Lilian Meek”

Tom commented that she’d been ‘taught that lately’, but took her onto his knee and kissed her relentlessly.

Carrie was utterly miserable. She was frightened, anxious and distracted at having Tom in her house, perhaps knowing more about his violent nature than William did. Tom asked Lily who her father was, and she pointed to William. Tom told her she should not say such a thing. Tom said something about Carrie being a deceitful bitch, and William told him he’d have to leave if he used such language in his house. The two men had some threatening words. Lily complained about the pipe smoke and the kissing and Tom said to her:

“You will have to like it my dear. You will have a lot to put up with yet.”

Carrie replied “Not from me and my husband”

Tom made some remark about having the child and being able to do what he wanted.

And then he cut Lily’s throat.

He did it so smoothly and so easily that Carrie and William didn’t initially notice. Carrie saw his hand at the little girl’s throat, thought he was choking her and flew at him to take her away. Then she ran out to fetch a neighbour for help, while William continued to struggle. This probably saved her life. The neighbour, Mr Barber, came in to find the two men fighting on the sofa, Tom on top of William, Lily standing by, bleeding copiously. He grabbed Tom and pulled him out of the house. Tom had cut William’s throat too. Mrs Barber went to the house and picked Lily up, taking her next door to her mother.

A doctor came, and stitched Lily’s wound. Then he sent her by cab to the infirmary, along with her stepfather. She died en route. William survived. Tom was indicted for murder. He told the court he had done it by accident cutting tobacco, and was remanded to wait for trial.

His trial opened at Norwich on 25th October 1883. He told the court he was not guilty. His only defence was that he was cutting tobacco, but as he only had shag (soft) tobacco on him, this was an easily demonstrated lie. And when the jury found him guilty after fifteen minutes, he protested.

Gentlemen, you have murdered me!

He maintained his lie about the tobacco: Lily had slipped, and somehow he’d cut her, and in the same moment, William had gone to strangle him and he’d accidentally cut him in the affray. It was all Carrie’s fault, she had sworn his life away.

The judge sentenced him to death.

---

Carrie’s situation was not uncommon. We like to imagine that the Victorians were incredibly strait-laced and obsessed with respectability, and they were…up to a point. Thousands of women got married when they were pregnant, and thousands found themselves unable to get married when they were pregnant. Thousands married elsewhere. Sometimes, their new husband did not want a cuckoo in the nest, and again, this is the prevailing stereotype. But I’ve seen plenty of evidence of men like William, men who didn’t mind, who loved their stepchildren. William almost died for Lily.

So William loved Lily. Did Tom? Or did he just see her as a possession? Tom made no real effort to connect with his daughter in any meaningful way during her four short years of life. He did not visit her, he did not pay for her. Her only knowledge of him appears to have been a photo of him. Naturally, Lily treated William as her father - he was the only father she’d known since she was around eighteen months old. Tom had no knowledge of William and Lily’s relationship until he visited the Woodgate house, but just the idea of another man raising his child - a child he didn’t care enough about to actually see - was enough to make him homicidal.

The letters Tom had written to Carrie in late 1882 were genuinely discomforting. Tom’s defence tried to prevent them being read out loud, and they succeeded in the inquest, but not at the assize. The first, recieved in November, said:

“Carrie, I am seriously afraid that the worst has not come yet. But in what way I will keep my counsel.”

Weeks later, he wrote:

“Should there be no answer to this, the day will come when I shall see the due that is mine in spite of all, and the Creator of this earth alone shall preclude me.”

Carrie was terrifed, and not without reason. Who could blame Carrie for preferring to settle down rather than spend the rest of her life waiting about for Tom to sort himself out?

Well… Tom could. He took it as a great personal betrayal, one that denied him his child as well as the woman he had hoped would just wait for him. And then, he spitefully did the most destructive thing he could think of. I suspect Tom originally intended to kill Lily AND Carrie, and also himself. What’s more, the letters show that he had planned this crime for almost a year by the time he reached Ipswich. And once he saw that Lily - barely four years old and baffled by this stranger - didn’t know him, he killed her.

Thomas Lyons Day waited for death in Ipswich gaol on St Helen’s Street. He was executed privately at 8am on 13th November 1883: William Marwood had just died, so he was executed by Bartholomew Binns. Thomas did not confess, and sobbed bitterly on the scaffold. His death attracted a few hundred people to the prison - compare to the crowds at Nottingham forty years earlier - and the whole town seemed keen to move on, keen not to dwell too much on this inhuman response to a common family dynamic, keen to leave Carrie in her great grief.

Carrie and William had six more children after Lily died, who all survived childhood. They stayed in Ipswich, where William died in 1925 and Carrie died in 1934.

Lilian Alice Lyons Meek
(1879-1883)