The reason I research historical death and crime is not because I particularly enjoy death and crime: this week’s story made me sick to my stomach with rage. No, I research this horrid subject because of what it tells us about life, and relationships, and attitudes, and society.
This week’s story is about a man and his mother-in-law; about grinding poverty and miserably cramped surroundings; about the things children see and say. This week’s story finds us in Crewe, in 1875.
Some towns are millennia old, still found along the same plan that would have been familiar to the Romans. Not Crewe. Crewe emerged around the railway, borne of necessity rather than tradition. Most of its citizens moved there from elsewhere. It did not have a pedigree, no long-established families, no well-known names.
But the railway was not the sole employer. People needed houses, pubs and shops, cupboards, and wheels, and plumbers. And so it grew.
Robert Mountfield was a publican, from Minshull. He married Jane Lufkin in the 1820s, and they moved around Cheshire running various pubs. Jane was born in 1803, in Crewe-as-was; a small village of about seventy souls near Monks Coppenhall.
Robert died at some point in the early 1860s, although I cannot trace his death registration - he apparently killed himself. In widowhood, Mrs Mountfield moved to Crewe with her daughter, also named Jane, and took up the lease of 16 Station Street, a terraced house which is now the site of a Lidl. In 1868, Jane the younger married a bricklayer named George Henry Goosey. George was born in Wellingborough, but had come to Crewe to build the rapidly expanding town.
When the census was taken in 1871, the household consisted of Mrs Mountfield, George and Jane Goosey, and their toddler daughter: they occupied one bedroom. Another older woman named Jane Rigby occupied the other bedroom, and they shared the kitchen, parlour and toilet. Jane Goosey was pregnant for the third time in three years: one daughter had died. In due course, two more daughters arrived in 1871 and 1874, and Jane Rigby either left or died. On Christmas Eve 1874, an older couple, Henry and Sarah Jane Palmer moved in to Jane Rigby’s old room.
It was not a happy home, especially with three adults and three small children sleeping together in one room. George was lazy, and rarely went to work, so the family relied on lodger income and whatever else they could scrape together. He was also a violent man, and although he was never charged with any crime, the arguments and fights at number sixteen were well known throughout the immediate neighbourhood. He particularly loathed his mother-in-law, and hit her frequently. He did not give her much to eat, and often expressed his wish that she’d die. In the first days of 1875, Mrs Mountfield ran into a Sarah’s room and asked for shelter: George had thrown a large piece of wood at her, hitting her back, and told her he would knock her brains out.
On 1st June 1875 in the evening, Mrs Mountfield, George and the three little girls were in the kitchen. Jane Goosey was outside, chopping sticks. Sarah Jane Palmer heard Mrs Mountfield knock a pan in her kitchen. She heard George swear at her for knocking things about - “what the bloody hell are you always banging the things for?”- and Mrs Mountfield reply “You are always cursing me!” George replied “Hold your row or I will knock your bloody jaw in”.
Sarah then heard a thud.
She ran in to help, and found Mrs Mountfield unconscious and bleeding. Jane arrived at the same time, and screamed:
“Oh George, George! You have murdered my mother! You have killed her at last!”
To which George replied
“Serve the old bitch right; she ought to have been dead years ago.”
The women moved Mrs Mountfield into a chair, while George watched on impassive. He told the crying children, “Hold your noise, I did not touch your grandmother”, and Mary Jane, the eldest, aged six, replied:
“Yes you did! You knocked her down with a stick!”
For the next hour or so, George went in and out of the house, restlessly pacing around the area. When Mrs Mountfield became worse, Sarah Palmer went to fetch him back and found him petting a horse outside the pub. He returned and helped his wife carry her upstairs to bed.
Sarah asked George to go and get a doctor. He refused, saying Mrs Mountfield was shamming. Sarah pointed out that there would be trouble if she died, and he replied:
“We shall get into no bother. I don’t care if the old bitch dies tonight and I am hung tomorrow… But I am sorry I have done it.”
As the women tended Mrs Mountfield, George said:
“I didnt strike her with my fist, I pushed her with my arm across her chest.”
At around 7pm, Mrs Mountfield’s breathing changed. Sarah again asked him to fetch a doctor, and perhaps finally realising the gravity of the situation, George went to Dr Bailey and asked him to come, telling him that she’d fallen down the stairs. George visited Dr Bailey three times before he attended. When he finally arrived, he found Mrs Mountfield on the brink of death, and prescribed some medicine. Sarah went to fetch the medicine, but Jane Mountfield died before she returned.
George picked up his youngest daughter, 15 month old Louisa, and went to the police station. He told the officer that his mother-in-law had slipped when putting a pan on the fire and banged her head. At midnight, he was arrested.
The inquest was held on 3rd June, at the Commercial Hotel. On post-mortem, Mrs Mountfield’s lungs were diseased, and her digestive system empty and friable. She was emaciated, and covered in bruises. She had two wounds to the head, one above the other near her right ear, fracturing her temporal bone and orbit. The fractures exposed her brain. There was a blood clot on the left side of her brain. They were long wounds, most likely inflicted with the poker found in the kitchen. Jane Mountfield died from haemorrhage and swelling: these wounds were absolutely unsurvivable.
The policeman who attended the scene laid bare George’s lies about how Mrs Mountfield’s injuries occurred. George’s description was of cosy domesticity: he was sitting in the kitchen among his daughters, dandling the baby on his knee as Jane prepared the dinner. She turned to put the pan on the stove, slipped and banged her head on the dresser. He had carried the poor woman to bed himself. A pity, a tragedy, an accident.
Except the fire wasn’t lit, and the pan was on the wrong side of the fender, and there was no blood on the dresser, and Jane had extensive wounds to both sides of her head. George couldn’t hold the baby AND carry his mother-in-law to bed. His lies were a mess.
The coroner summed up, regretting that he could not called Mary Jane Goosey to give evidence on account of her age, and pointing out the many versions of events George had told. The coroner’s jury brought a verdict of manslaughter, and this was repeated two days later in the magistrate’s court. George awaited his trial in Chester castle.
It took place on Wednesday 14th July. George’s defence was that Jane Mountfield was a most aggravating woman, who had driven her husband to suicide, and therefore deserved to be brained with a poker. And George swore at everyone, so his abuse of this elderly woman was just…expected.
There was no blood on the poker in the kitchen, but no other potential weapons in the house. The wounds appeared to have been inflicted with a downward strike, from above. They could not have been caused by a fall, or by being kicked, nor by a thin stick which would surely break before causing such damage. Who cleaned the poker? And when?
The defence’s closing speech encouraged the jury to be cognisant of the Goosey family’s poverty, and to consider whether George had meant to kill Jane. He depicted George’s hideously abusive language to and about his mother-in-law as a normal part of working-class society. He was simply a DEGRADED ANGRY MAN and therefore…not entirely responsible for his actions.
(As you may have guessed, nothing pisses me off like the closing remarks of the defence. I know they have to try, but good grief.)
The judge instructed the jury that, if they thought George had deliberately hit Jane with a weapon, intending to cause her death, then he was guilty of murder. However, if they thought he’d merely intended to assault her with a weapon, or pushed her over, then he was guilty of manslaughter.
Fifteen minutes elapsed, and the jury returned a verdict of guilty…
…of manslaughter.
The judge agreed with the jury, and said
“I do not think that you intended to take this woman’s life or to do her any grievous bodily harm such as might possibly end in death.”
Because hitting an elderly woman hard enough to expose her brain is just an accident.
However, if George thought the judge’s comments would lead to a lenient sentence, he was very much mistaken. He was sentenced to penal servitude for life.
He cried as he was removed from court.
George Goosey was dependent on his elderly mother-in-law and wife for support. The house was in Jane Mountfield’s name, George never went to work, and it was down to the two Janes to make sure the children were fed. George ran a reign of terror, swearing and beating his family, as they cowered in their tiny house. But this was the only place he had any power.
If George’s abuse of his mother-in-law had not been so well-witnessed, and if he’d told a coherent lie to the authorities, then I have no doubt that George would have recieved a lighter sentence, or got away with it entirely. In 1878, a letter was published in the local papers asking for mercy for George, who had not meant to kill the old lady, and whose incarceration was a stain on the family. The writer praised George for housing his elderly mother-in-law, ignoring the fact that Jane had been housing HIM.
No mercy was forthcoming: George initially went to Pentonville, before being transferred to Dartmoor.
Jane Goosey became pregnant again in 1879. She died two months after giving birth to her fifth daughter in January 1880. The Goosey daughters went to the workhouse, and either died young, or vanished into the records.
George had the happiest ending in this deeply unhappy tale. He was released on 9th July 1895, after serving twenty years of hard labour. He went back to Wellingborough, and remarried in 1897. He died in Roade in 1930, apparently never getting in trouble again.
Jane Mountfield
(1803-1875)