Last week, I wrote up a case from my MA research about the perils of unassisted childbirth and the thin line between a tragedy and infanticide. You can read it here.
I don’t write much about infanticide in this newsletter, for two reasons. One: it’s usually a crime done by women and I’m keeping my powder dry on that front. But, secondly and more importantly: there’s no opportunity to know the victim when the victim has never had a life. This week’s victim had a relatively long and terrible life, one that we can only glimpse through the prism of endless appearances in the magistrate’s court.
With thanks to Claire Richardson, who is a fount of knowledge on Victorian prostitution, we move to Berwick upon Tweed, in the mid-19th century. This is a story you really need to read to the end.
Elizabeth Knox was born in Berwick in 1817, the daughter of Ralph and Mary Knox of Wallace Green. Her father was a soldier turned chimney sweep, and died in 1838. Elizabeth, known as Bess, was the tenth of eleven children.
Bess was already married when her father died. She’d married Archibald White in 1836 or 1837, and immediately started having babies. Archibald was a mariner, and often away from home, and Bess usually lived with her mother, brother Robert and sister Jane on Wallace Green. Even with lodgers, the house was crowded and money was tight.
By 1842, Bess was having her babies in the workhouse because she had no money. Jane was born in 1838, Mary in 1839, Archibald jr in 1842 and Margaret in 1844. Archibald abandoned her and their children in 1843, probably returning to Scotland. Margaret died in 1846, but with three children, Bess had to make her own way.
Wallace Green is half a mile from the old fishing quays. It’s hard against the ditches that encircle Berwick, a border town that historically needed strong defences. Nearby, on Parade, stands the barracks. A fishing port, a whole barracks of men without wives and a quiet place nearby: this was the Victorian sex work jackpot.
It’s not entirely clear when Bess began working as a prostitute, but her first appearance in the magistrate’s book was in 1834, aged seventeen. In April 1848, she was placed in the stocks for two hours, an archaic humiliation reserved for those who offended morality. Prostitution, you see, was not a crime.
By 1851, her children were in the workhouse. Bess and her sister Jane both worked the streets. Bess had her fifth child in August 1854, a boy named Robert, of unknown paternity. The sixth, another Mary, was born in 1855 and appears to have died young: it’s likely that she was premature.
Bess was a drunk, violent with it, and notorious in Berwick. In early March 1856, she went to prison for public drunkeness. A few days later, she threatened to kill her mother, with whom she lived, and her mother was so alarmed that she had Bess arrested. Bess stood in the dock and wept, wringing her hands and promising never to drink again, promising to go to the workhouse and look after her child (baby Robert, who was still small enough to be looked after by his mother). The magistrates asked Mary Knox whether she wanted her daughter locked up, and Mary said no. So, Bess went home.
Her sobriety lasted about two weeks. She left the workhouse with baby Robert and immediately went drinking Scotch with the baby on her knee. Children gathered around, singing:
“Oh Bess Knox, you should be put i'the stocks”
The police arrested Bess. She went to prison, for a few days, but her baby died before his second birthday. Bess reacted by getting drunk and threatening to kill her mother again, and went to prison again. And so a pattern was set. In September, she took a man to court for assaulting her, but was so drunk in court that the case was dismissed. A month later, she went to prison for drinking.
At the end of the year, the Board of Guardians took her to court for refusing to work and therefore becoming chargeable to the parish. In eighteen months, she had been admitted to the workhouse twenty-one times - people were usually allowed to use the casual ward one night per month - and she had been convicted of drunkeness and vagracy twenty-three times since her husband left. Bess told the court she didn’t want stay in the workhouse because they only gave her one meal a day. A doctor said that Bess had the constitution of a horse, or her lifestyle would have killed her years ago.
The jail was full, so the magistrates “sent her about her business”.
There was a lull in reporting in the late 1850s, perhaps because she was in a settled relationship, or perhaps because the papers tired of reporting (or the keyword search isn’t working…all things are possible). Another daughter, again called Jane, was born in 1857 but appears to have died soon after. She became pregnant again in mid-1859, and by October, Bess was drunk in public once more, refusing to leave the police station.
Her final baby, another Robert, was born in February 1860. They were living in the workhouse when the census was taken in March 1861. Three months later, Bess had abandoned her baby to the Guardians, and was sent to prison for vagrancy: Bess’ crime was almost certainly sleeping in the streets. Robert was dead by the end of the year.
In October 1862, she appeared in court for the 57th time. The magistrate calculated that she had spent nine of the previous thirteen years in prison or the workhouse. Bess told him she didn’t give a fig for prison, and would willingly go there or the workhouse. The magistrate dismissed her.
Bess’ mother died in 1863, aged 87. This did nothing to ground Bess. She continued to cause trouble, drink, offer sex, and try her best to get shelter. When she needed a bed, she turned up at the police station and refused to leave until they arrested her. Her children were dead or gone. She had nothing except a remarkably robust constitution.
On 7th February 1871, she was once against before the magistrates for being drunk. She told them she was proud of herself for only going to prison twice in the last six months, and promised to check herself into the workhouse. They dismissed her.
On Sunday 12th February 1871, her body was discovered covered in snow on the Cumberland Bastion, within sight of her childhood home. She was found by her nephew, fourteen-year-old Robert Knox, and his friend. She was partly dressed, and one stocking, pulled off and inside out, was found nearby.
The inquest opened the next afternoon, at the workhouse. This building stands on the corner of High Greens and Brucegate. Robert did not mention that the deceased was his aunt. Bess had last been seen alive, but dead drunk, lying in the street on 11th February, surrounded by eight men. One of them, Robert Hattle, made a remark about her being used to lying in the street. A passer-by said he would fetch the police, but the men had other ideas. One of them, a man named Patrick Murray, lifted her onto to Robert Hattle’s back. Murray had recently been in court charged with bestiality; he was an unsavoury fellow. Murray and Hattle went towards the walls with Bess, who was barely conscious. Another man named Wate followed a little later. The other men, tried to find them, but could not. All three men were seen near the spot Bess’ body was found that night. Murray had since absconded. Robert Hattle was nineteen. He lived on Walkergate and had probably known Bess all his life. He had commented going into the inquest that it looked bad for him, Murray and Wate.
At this point, the inquest was adjourned as it was almost midnight. The inquest reconvened on Friday 17th February. The doctor had performed a post-mortem and told the court there were no marks of violence on Bess’ body, but her lungs and brain were highly congested and her heart full of blood. Her organs were still warm, she had not been dead long when found. He thought her death was caused by exposure.
The jury retired for fifteen minutes. Initially, they told the coroner that they thought that Hattle, Murray and Wate had dumped Bess in the snow and left her there to die, but did not want to return a verdict of manslaughter. The coroner refused to accept this verdict and sent them away. They came back with a verdict of manslaughter against Hattle and Murray. Murray was nowhere to be found, but Hattle was immediately moved to Newcastle.
On 21st February, he went before the assize and the grand jury threw the manslaughter indictment out. They were obliged, as the indictment came from the coroner, to hear Hattle’s plea. He pleaded not guilty and was dismissed without trial. Murray was never tried.
And that was that.
God knows what those men did to Bess. The kindest, the most naive interpretation is that they carried her off to the walls of the town (where prostitutes typically worked) for a laugh and just left her there.
It’s more likely that they decided to rape her. Who cares? Who cares if eight men decide to have a bit of fun with an unconscious woman? Especially an old sot like Bess, who’s had the whole town?
The police didn’t care. Eight men hallooing around a woman in the middle of a Saturday night and not a single officer was to be found. Why would they care? Bess was in their custody every other week, who cares?
The coroner’s jury? They didn’t really care either. It was only the intervention of the coroner that stopped this case being underlined by an open verdict instead of a failed manslaughter prosecution. It’s a miracle it didn’t happen to her before. Who cares that it’s happened now?
And Northumberland’s Grand Jury, the cream of the crop, certainly didn’t give a fuck.
Bess Knox was absolutely notorious in Berwick. A week, two weeks, three weeks in prison for vagrancy, for drinking, almost every month. Sometimes three months, sometimes hard labour, and sometimes… the streets and the booze and the welcome embrace of anyone with a shilling.
For years.
She wasn’t a thief; her morality was skewed but strong. In prison, she was a tidy and hard working woman. She simply had nowhere else to go. She came from a huge, poor family, and appears to have worked as a prostitute from a young age (she may have been following in her mother’s footsteps). She had a temper, but she lost so much - five dead children, three lost to her, her husband gone and with him her chance at a ‘normal’ life. She bounced from street to workhouse to street to prison to workhouse to street to prison for approximately twenty-eight years. She died in the snow, like rubbish, thrown away after use.
There was a final indignity in the death of Bess Knox. The vicar who conducted her funeral refused to read the burial service at her grave. Denied Christian burial, but who cares?
Elizabeth White
(1817-1871)
The saddest story of a woman and somewhere in the world her story is repeating right now. Nothing much changes.