It’s a Thursday Murder today, as the Easter holidays commence shortly. Nobody tell Osman…
I shall be back on April 19th: enjoy your break!
Emily Ann Bignall was born in Elstree in Hertfordshire, in June 1864, the sixth of seventeen children born to Sarah and William Bignall between 1855 and 1884. Twelve survived childhood. Both of Emily’s parents were born on Green Street, and her father worked as a carpenter.
In the 1870s, a family named Cullum, originally from Paston in Suffolk, also moved to Green Street. Edward Cullum, the head of the house, had been married. His first wife had died in an asylum in 1857. He married the much younger Henrietta in 1860, and they had one son: Henry, born in the summer of 1862. Henry was well known and well liked in Shenley, although his difficult relationship with his elderly father was a matter of community gossip.
Henry left home in 1882, aged twenty, to work on the railway. He was based at Normanton, near Wakefield, working as a goods porter. His mother died while he was away, and Henry drank heavily to cope with her loss. At one point, probably in 1886, he developed a ‘brain fever’, which was probably delirium tremens.
Although Henry must have known Emily before he left Shenley, they don’t seem to have been friends. Emily had a daughter - Eva - in the spring of 1884, when she was nineteen, fathered by a man she met when working in London, but stayed in touch. In 1886, she had a second daughter - Nellie -, fathered by a different man. He also left her. She raised her babies in Shenley, and also looked after her little siblings so her mother could go out to work.
Henry wasn’t celibate in Yorkshire. He had a relationship with a woman in Sheffield. In mid-1887, this relationship broke down and Henry became…unsteady. He stopped showing up for work, he purchased a revolved, and then suddenly quit his job and went back to Shenley, claiming illness. His father had moved since he left, and was now a neighbour of the Bignells.
On his return, in September 1887, he immediately struck up a relationship with Emily. It appears to have been love at first sight, eyes meeting across the shared back garden. Emily’s parents approved, and it seemed their slightly wayward daughter was going to be married.
Henry, however, wasn’t looking for work. He wasn’t doing anything much to support himself. Edward also had no money coming in, and they often went hungry (although Henry found money for beer).
At Christmas, he started acting out. He punched a little girl in the face, possibly one of Emily’s daughters, and generally behaved strangely. His father, whose first wife died mad and whose daughter worked as an asylum attendant, asked for him to be admitted to an asylum. Proceedings were started, but the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him, except ‘a disease which would certainly affect the mind, viz masturbation’.
Yes, the Victorians thought wanking was a disease. But as Henry was not eating much, and as masturbation was considered an act of self harm, losing vitality through unnecessary emission… you can kinda see where they were coming from.
Around the same time, Emily found out about the revolver, possibly after he threatened her or himself with it. She took it from the Cullum’s house, telling Henry’s father what she was doing. Edward Cullum, who’d already removed the shot from the gun, asked her not to let Henry have it back.
On 17th January 1888, the father of Emily’s first daughter asked her to meet him at Elstree, sending a letter to Emily’s house. She showed the letter to Henry, who seemed a bit put out, but didn’t do anything to stop her going. Indeed, he met her off the train when she got home.
At the end of February 1888, Henry went to the Bignell’s cottage and demanded his gun back. Emily sobbed, and initially refused, resisted and physically fought with him over it. Her mother came in and as this scuffle was taking place,and asked her to give it back, apparently worried she’d be accused of theft.
On 7th March, Emily was in her garden. Emily’s youngest, Nellie, barely toddling, had followed her mother into the garden. Henry went out of his garden, and leaned over the low palings to talk to her. Suddenly, Henry gave a great cry
“You beast!”
And shot Emily. Then he shot himself. Through the hand.
However, he got Emily through the neck and the bullet passed through from short range. She fell to the ground. The murder was witnessed by another neighbour in her garden, who quickly summoned help. Emily was carried into her house, where she bled out and died in a few minutes. Henry was held by neighbours, but put up no resistance, merely said the shock would kill his father.
The inquest was opened next door at the Green Willows, to a packed crowd on 8th March. Emily’s poor mother, utterly hysterical with grief and shock, arrived late and sobbed throughout. The crowd heard that Emily had been shot from about four feet away, the bullet had destroyed her jugular vein, and that she was visibly pregnant. The inquest began to probe Henry’s mental state, but was adjourned until Monday 12th March, and moved to the larger White Horse pub.
This time, Henry’s sanity was the main subject of inquiry. It was indisputed that he had shot Emily, but although it was not in the coroner’s remit to pronounce on his sanity, the jury still picked over it. They returned a verdict of wilful murder by Henry Cullum, and added a rider; that young people should not be able to buy revolvers, and that the sale of firearms should be licensed.
Henry Cullum was twenty-five though, hardly a child.
He was committed to a murder trial, and seemed entirely unmoved by all the legal proceedings, making no comment.
Emily was buried the next day, in Shenley churchyard. Her funeral was attended by her family… and by Henry’s.
Henry waited in prison for his trial, held on 31st August 1888 at St Albans. He spoke only to plead guilty, and much of the proceedings were concerned with his sanity. Henry had been examined by doctors who still didn’t think he was insane (just…masturbating a lot). Henry himself told the judge there was no reason for the death sentence to not be passed.
So it was.
Henry waited to die in the condemned cell at St Albans. His execution was scheduled for 21st August, but Henry was certified insane on 13th August and his sentence was remitted on 15th August. He went to Broadmoor.
The Herts Advertiser was delightfully lurid in its coverage of this awful crime, claiming all kinds of bizarre and factually inaccurate things, mixing the timeline, muddying the waters. They couldn’t even get the genders of Emily’s children right, mixing her youngest brother up with her daughters. This is why we take the press with a pinch of salt.
However, there was a rumour in the village that Emily was having sex with both Henry and his father, Edward. These rumours passed into mythology in the village. However, at the time, the rumours were fiercely rebutted by a friend of Edward’s ex-landowning-employer. He claimed Edward was a bent-backed man of seventy, and couldn’t possibly have been shagging Emily. However, the rumours were such that the coroner commented on how they had no bearing on the verdict during the inquest summing up.
By the time the case came to trial, the Herts Advertiser had placed the blame squarely with Emily and her family. Not only had she managed to get herself pregnant three times, her family hadn’t got rid of the revolver during the months it was kept in their house. Stupid Bignells. Poor mad Henry.
But was Henry mad? He certainly seems to have been emotionally labile. The story about his girlfriend in Sheffield is strange, and only reported in one newspaper who sent a reporter to interview his ex-boss at Normanton. This episode seems to have been the reason Henry bought the gun in the first place, but to kill himself or her is a mystery. It was never mentioned in court, even though it suggests a violent undertone to Henry’s relationships.
Jealousy was presented as reasonable motive throughout. Emily was no demure, respectable virgin despite her sweet and caring nature. The father of her unborn baby was never named, although at least three candidates were alluded to at the inquest. Maybe it was Henry, or her eldest’s father, or Edward, or someone else. And Henry’s masturbation addiction seemed to suggest that she wasn’t having sex with him. And does jealousy mean insanity?
And, as we’ve seen before in this type of case, Henry lacked the will to kill himself. He hoped the state would do it for him. He was infantilised by the investigation, consistently aged down by two years, and discussed as though he was ruled entirely by his whims, a manchild without agency. The fact he’d spent years living away from home, holding a steady job, was skated over. This narrative of insanity could only work if Henry was a pitiable figure.
But a week after getting it back, he loaded his gun, went into the garden and shot his pregnant beloved in the throat while her little daughter looked on.
His Broadmoor records are elusive, and although he was there in 1891, he seems to have been discharged (or died) by 1901.* Prisoners found insane were not obligated to serve a prison sentence, they just went home when considered cured. But if he went home, he didn’t go to his father’s house in Shenley. I don’t know what happened to him: write in if you do.
His father died in Shenley in 1907, aged eighty-four(ish).
Meanwhile, Sarah Bignell - broken by the sight of her pregnant daughter bleeding to death in the parlour - raised Emily’s two little girls as her own. Her husband died in 1913, and she died in 1915.
*Thanks to Dr Alison Pedley, Broadmoor specialist, who confirms that Henry left the asylum c.1904. It seems that Henry was then admitted to a non-criminal asylum in Suffolk, before being moved to Hertfordshire and then Wakefield asylum, where he died of tuberculosis in 1909. Thanks Alison!!
Emily Ann Bignall
(1864-1888)
And her unborn child