This Dreadful and Immoral Life

A Complicated Entanglement

Good news: the new series of LadySwindlers with Lucy Worsley drops next week. I worked on a few of the episodes and it was great fun to work on some non-lethal crimes.

This week, as a special treat, the newsletter is free to read. So please share it about and if you like it, consider subscribing.

I told this story at the Curious Histories event in London last week, but I didn’t have the time to give it a full airing. This is the story of a complex set of relationships that resulted in a brutal murder.

But who did it?

---

James Gardner was born first, the son of Robert and Elizabeth Gardner, born in Webb Square in Shoreditch in November 1818. He was joined by a little brother, Samuel - Sam - in 1824, and four others, including sisters named Sarah and Amelia. Webb Square was a dump, a haunt of pickpockets, prostitutes and burglars, and nobody mourned its passing when it was demolished to make way for the railway in 1846.

Robert Gardner was a chimneysweep, a godforsaken job requiring children as young as four to shuffle up a space nine inches square, often naked. Robert, an adult, was too big to get up a chimney breast so he doubtless sent his sons up there as soon as they were old enough to obey instructions. Of course it was made illegal to send kids up chimneys in 1834, and of course people ignored that. Chimney sweeping wasn’t just horrendously risky because of the size of the flue and the dust and the potential to get burned. It also caused testicular cancer, known as soot wart. Young men with this wart were likely to get their testicles removed as there was no other treatment. If they were lucky and early enough, this would stop the cancer spreading.

Elizabeth Read was born in Shoreditch on 3rd March 1823, the daughter of an ivory turner. She met James Gardner and married him on 18th November 1847. She already had a three year old son.

James and Elizabeth’s marriage was childless, and James appears to have been infertile. It was possible that James was infertile because he’d lost his testicles. There was no hormone therapy in the 1840s, so if this was the case, his libido and ability to get an erection would have vanished abruptly.

Meanwhile, James’ little brother Sam was also freshly married. His wife, Elizabeth Dewis, was twelve years older than him, widowed with three children. Sam was eighteen when he married this lady. She died of stomach cancer in December 1850. Their marriage was also childless, although Sam’s libido and fertility were not in doubt. However, Sam took guardianship of her three orphans.

So, in 1851, the Gardner brothers moved in together, living in an alleyway off Bishopsgate. James and Sam were both sweeps, probably working together. Elizabeth took care of her little boy and her three teenage step-niblings. Sam and Elizabeth started sleeping together on the sly, and in February 1853, Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter.

We don’t know how James took this miraculous birth. We don’t know whether he’d realised his wife and brother were having an affair and turned a blind eye, or whether he knew and consented, or whether he was taken by surprise. We don’t know whether this conjecture about his balls is accurate: he may have assumed the baby (Elizabeth Margaret) was his. What we do know is that on 19th March 1855, Sam and Elizabeth sneaked across the river to Southwark and married. Elizabeth used a fake surname and claimed to be a spinster.

It seems that James left the household around this point, although whether he did it in a burst of rage or as a respectful withdrawal is a mystery. By 1861, he was living with another woman as his wife.

Around the time that James left, a new person joined the family. Elizabeth Mary Ann Clark, known as Betsy, was born in Gravesend in 1843. Her parents were very young when they married, and their marriage seems to have been unhappy. Betsy joined the Gardner household as a homehelp when she was eleven or twelve. She occasionally left the house to go and work in service for someone else. In 1858, when she was fifteen, Sam seduced her. Sam was thirty-four. He paid her one shilling a weeek to stay with them.

Sam was still sleeping with his bigamous wife of course: towards the end of 1859, she gave birth to a second daughter, Eliza.

Betsy’s mother got wind of this scandalous arrangement and in 1860, arrived at the house, broke down the door and took Betsy and her things back to Gravesend. After a month, Sam came to fetch her and rented them a room together. However, on 14th October 1861, Betsy left Sam to marry John William Humbler (or Humble) in Gravesend. John was ten years older than Betsy and grew up on Bishopsgate, so it’s likely that Betsy met him via the Gardners. The marriage lasted six weeks.

Betsy couldn’t rely on her parents for support: her father was dead and her mother remarried and horrified by Betsy’s behaviour. So she went back to Sam, and they arranged to have sex in a rented brothel room. In March 1862, Elizabeth became pregnant again, so Sam was evidently having sex with both women. In May 1862, Sam asked Betsy to come and live with him and Elizabeth as a servant.

The Gardners had moved to Northumberland Alley and lived in a narrow three-storey house with one room on each floor. The ground floor was the kitchen, the middle floor was the main bedroom and there was a garrett in the attic. Sam seems to have thoroughly enjoyed living in his little harem. The family’s complicated sexual and emotional ties didn’t seem to bother him too much at all.

But they bothered the women.

Elizabeth was getting sick of Betsy Humbler, turning up and banging Sam whenever she felt like it. And Betsy was jealous of Elizabeth’s (admittedly illegal) wifely status. Their relationship was fractious, veering between friendly conversation, with Elizabeth reading to Betsy, and open bickering. Elizabeth argued with Sam about it, and overhearing one such fight, Betsy offered to leave. Sam told her to mind her own business:

“I am master”

And so, matters came to a head. In early September, Elizabeth was seven months pregnant and unwell: she told a neighbour that she’d fallen down the stairs recently and thought she would have to go into Bow Workhouse. On Sunday 14th September, a letter was pushed under the door. The letter was addressed to Elizabeth and was full of unpleasant things about her character. This wasn’t the first such letter Elizabeth had recieved, she’d had a steady stream of them over the last two years. Sam and Elizabeth were both well educated, able to read the works of Aristotle as well as the newspaper. Betsy was illiterate.

According to Sam, Elizabeth accused Betsy of writing the letter - something Betsy literally could not do - and a fight erupted. Sam threatened to break Betsy’s jaw if she didn’t stop crying. Betsy went to bed and brooded on her misfortune in ever meeting Sam. Sam later claimed that after this fight, he’d decided to kick Betsy out.

But he didn’t tell Betsy.

Later that evening, Sam chalked a mark on his front door, which told the local policeman to knock on his door at 3:30am to wake him. A sweep’s day started early. The policeman was surprised to find Sam up and at the window when he arrived at 3:15am on the 15th, but thought nothing of it, indeed, he was keen to apologise for waking Sam early. At around 4:30am, he saw Sam leave come out of Northumberland Alley and head off to work. Sam was seen on Leadenhall Street at 4:40am. Sam was seen in Northumberland Alley again just before 7am, heading out to Aldgate and beyond.

Betsy slept in the attic of the house. At 7:30, the noise from nearby sawmills woke her up. She dressed and went downstairs to light the fire, but popped up to Sam and Elizabeth’s bedroom to fetch a match. The room was dark, and the toddler, Eliza, was crying. She trod in something wet, and went to get a light.

On her return, she found Elizabeth dead by the bedroom door, squished into the twelve inch gap between the bed and wall, her throat cut, her hands mangled. The sheet from the bed was caught under her, forming a strange tent between body and bed. Eliza was sitting by her mother’s feet.

Betsy grabbed Eliza and ran to Dr Sequiera. She did not stop to put her shoes on. Henry Little Sequiera, a surgeon and apothercary with premises on Aldgate. Betsy told Dr Sequiera that Elizabeth might still be alive. He knew the Gardner family, and came at once. Dr Sequiera thought Elizabeth had been dead for four hours. She was lying flat on her back, with her right hand across her chest. A knife lay loosely against her right hand, pointing towards her left side. He thought she was rather dirty and commented later that her hands had not been washed in some time.

At 8am, Sam came back from work to have his breakfast. Betsy met him at the bedroom door and told him Elizabeth was dead. Rather than ask how or when, he said

“You wretch! You have done this!”

Sam told the police officer who examined the house that he thought Betsy had done it, that Betsy had sharpened knives, kept knives in her room and threatened him.

But Sam told his family that he thought Elizabeth had killed herself.

Sam told Betsy to leave the household, and gave her three shillings to pay for the trip. She went to stay with her mother in Gravesend. Sam’s sister Sarah washed Elizabeth’s body and, with a neighbour, laid her out ready for burial on Wednesday 17th September. When Sam saw her body, he said she must have been killed - one of her fingers was almost cut off. The inquest was convened the same evening, at the Saracen’s Head, a pub on Northumberland Alley, eight doors down from the Gardners. The pub was crowded with people who knew the Gardner family and Betsy.

The Saracen’s Head in the late 18thC.

The inquest jurors did not have enough evidence to decide whether Elizabeth had died by suicide or murder, so a post-mortem was requested and the inquest adjourned for a week. Elizabeth was buried on 21st September.

The post mortem found that Elizabeth had died lying down, that the wound had been inflicted by another and whoever they were, they had used considerable force to hold her down. Sam’s sister Sarah told the inquest that Sam and Elizabeth had always got along well, but that Sam confided that they’d had an argument about Betsy and that he thought Betsy had killed Elizabeth.

“That bitch. I know she has taken her life away because she was going away.”

Sam told his sister Amelia the same story. But he also told the coroner that his brother James was dead.

James turned up at the inquest, alive and ready to tell the coroner what a strange mess the family’s relationships were in. James knew, possibly from his stepson, that Sam had threatened to kick Elizabeth out in favour of Betsy.

The plot thickened. The inquest adjourned again. Sam and Betsy were both taken before the Lord Mayor at Mansion House to begin the process of committal. Betsy was bailed. Sam was not.

On 29th September, two weeks after the murder, the inquest returned a murder verdict against Sam AND Betsy: one couldn’t be too sure.

On 7th October, Sam’s committal was completed at Mansion House. Betsy was not committed, but as the inquest had ruled her a suspect, she was also bound to stand trial. They were taken to Newgate. Their trial commenced at the Old Bailey on 27th October.

Betsy was immediately released. There was no evidence against her aside from her presence in the house at the time of the murder, and her apparent motive. The trial proceeded against Sam. The key evidence was that although Sam left the house at 4:30am, he returned home around 6am and therefore had at least two opportunities to kill Elizabeth. Dr Sequiera thought she had died at 4am, and as he told the inquest:

I have about five thousand patients under me in the course of a twelvemonth—a great many of them unfortunately die..

The handprint in blood found on her thigh was a man’s handprint. The sooty marks on her elbow and wrist indicated that a sooty man had grabbed her. Chimney sweeps did not wash particularly often - no point if you were just going to get filthy again - so it was to be expected that Sam would be sooty first thing in the morning. Elizabeth had cuts across the palms of both of her hands, where she had tried to deflect the knife that killed her. And crucially, because the space where she died was so narrow, there was no way in which she could have inflicted the fatal wound herself.

Sam’s defence took three hours to deliver, but in summary, declared that Betsy Humbler was a woman with an ‘abandoned mind’ who had sex with Sam despite knowing he was married and left her husband to be with him and therefore probably did it. But Betsy was no longer on trial and her sexual behaviour was not up for consideration.

The jury took an hour and a half to return a guilty verdict against Sam, with an appeal for mercy. They said it was possible that Elizabeth had provoked him.

Nevertheless, the sentence was death.

---

Samuel Gardner thought he could get away with murder, cutting the Gordian knot of his complex relationships, freeing him to promote Betsy to senior wife. He thought he could make it look like a suicide. Dr Sequiera was already at the scene when Sam came in from work, and watched Sam go straight to the body and pick the knife up from Betsy’s hand. Dr Sequiera had already noticed how the knife was positioned, so this made no odds to the case. The police initially looked at the house on the 15th, and returned on the 18th. In between that time, Sam planted evidence, including fingermarks of blood inside the window shutters, to make it seem that Betsy had killed Elizabeth while he was out. He splashed blood against the walls, taking it from around Elizabeth’s body after she was moved back to the bed to be laid out. He didn’t realise the police would notice such things. He didn’t figure that this would be used against him.

Sam liked to go to the races with a pretty young girl by his side. He thought nothing of seducing a girl he’d known since she was an actual child, nor of finding ways to continue their sexual relationship after her marriage. But then Sam thought nothing of bigamously marrying his brother’s wife. He liked to boss the women of his house about, and didn’t shy from hurting them. He expected to be obeyed. He expected to be believed. He seems to have had a lethal mix of charm and ego.

Sam’s family were determined to protect him. His sister went to great lengths at the inquest to say how well Sam and Elizabeth got on, how there was never a cross word between them. But Sam’s sister was a liar. She claimed she’d only met Elizabeth when she married Sam, but Elizabeth had been known to the Gardners since the mid-1840s. And Sam knocked Elizabeth about. Everyone knew it. She frequently had a black eye, a bruised face. He seems to have pushed her down the stairs not long before he killed her and anyone who keeps an eye on domestic violence knows it can escalate when women are pregnant. Sam told his family that Betsy knew he was planning to kick her out, and that’s why she killed Elizabeth. But Betsy didn’t know, and was blindsided by this accusation in the inquest. Sam’s stepson, James Read, to tell the court that he’d overheard his mother give Betsy notice to quit. But as Sam himself said, he was master, he decided who lived in his house.

The contents of the poison pen letters were not disclosed in the press. There were plenty of people who had cause to write such letters to Elizabeth, not least her first husband, but perhaps it was Sam. Perhaps he wanted her on edge and worried. Perhaps that made her easier to deal with.

It’s not impossible that Betsy Humbler was involved with Elizabeth’s murder, but on balance, I think not. If so, why did she run to fetch a surgeon without stopping to put on her shoes? But there are strange elements to her story that don’t make sense. Did Sam actually manage to kill Elizabeth silently? She must have fallen out of the bed, although maybe that was a normal noise in this unhappy house. Did she just ignore little Eliza’s crying as she found her mother unresponsive on the floor?

Sam killed Elizabeth at around 4am. The crime scene suggested he tried to kill her in her sleep, in bed, but she woke up and tried to fight him off, cutting her hands to ribbons. He pulled her out of bed on to the floor and viciously cut her throat with a single stroke. The position she was in at the time of death meant the blood flowed down, pooling underneath her, leaving Sam relatively clean. He wiped his hand on her exposed thigh, and then climbed over her and went to work, leaving the baby Eliza asleep in the bed.

He came back briefly around 6am, perhaps to alter the crime scene or just to pick up some equipment for work. He seems to have hoped to have ‘discovered her suicide’ on his third return for breakfast, but Betsy got there first. Sam panicked and blamed her. Dr Sequiera’s initial impression was that Elizabeth had committed suicide, and it’s likely that if Sam had not tried to blame Betsy and then started planting evidence, the inquest would have found her death to be a suicide.

Lord knows, she had reason.

Sam was expected to hang in November 1862 - a ballad was produced in anticipation, blaming Betsy equally for the murder:

It is evident it was done between them,
This dreadful and immoral life,
Caused the wicked maid to kill her mistress,
And the wicked husband to kill his wife.

But the death penalty was commuted to transportation for twenty-one years. He sailed to Perth in January 1864. By 1881, he was released on a ticket of leave and established a chimney sweeping business. He died in Perth in 1898.

Betsy Humbler had a difficult life. She found herself seduced by her boss when she was barely grown up, with no prospect of marrying him. She then found herself effectively his prostitute, unable to maintain an ill-judged marriage, unable to settle with the man who had groomed her since she was eleven. She was only nineteen when she was framed for murder. She had a shortlived child in 1864, born in Gravesend, but is untraceable after this. Did she follow Sam to Australia? Find herself a new paramour? Or die in silent poverty?

Elizabeth’s three surviving children were taken care of within the Gardner family. The youngest, Eliza, died in her twenties but James and Elizabeth Margaret grew old.

Elizabeth’s baby, however, died anonymously within her.

Elizabeth Gardner
(1828-1862)

Her unborn baby
(1862)