Found In Castle Street - An Unexpected Discovery.

 

Castle Street, in Glasgow.

Earlier this week, I gave one of the 'Highlight Talks' in the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway. 46 people came along, which was an excellent audience, but then the museum is welcoming (great restaurant as well) and the organisers of the series work very hard. I promised that I would post a shortened version of the talk on my blog - so here it is. When I was researching my non-fiction book, A Proper Person to be Detained, (this is the eBook link but you'll find a link to the paperback version here) I soon realised that there was another, equally tragic story buried in there, and that sooner or later, I would have to do some more research, and write about it. Among other things, it involves the treatment of those considered to be insane in 19th century Scotland and England. But mostly, it's Elizabeth's story.

It all began with a murder.

My great, great uncle, my grandmother’s 22 year old uncle John Manley, was stabbed in the neck on the evening of Christmas Day 1881. It happened outside a so-called ‘beer house’ in the heavily polluted centre of industrial Leeds.mI soon found out that John wasn’t the only victim. His younger sister, 17 year old Elizabeth, had walked ahead of her brother, but hearing a commotion, turned back to witness him bleeding to death on the cobbles. She knew the murderer quite well.

Some years ago, I researched this murder, because all I knew was the small amount of information that had been passed down through the family. I found out a whole lot more with the help of a friend who is well versed in genealogy and I wrote a non-fiction book about it. Tragic though this young man’s death was, it resulted – eventually – in another terrible death, another wasted life. I researched what I could of that story, and some of it is in this book. But not all, and I plan to write a novel about Elizabeth over the next year, because she has been living in my head ever since.

The murderer – a poor soul by any standards - fled, was arrested, tried, sentenced to death and eventually, with the death penalty commuted, sent to Portland Prison where he served 12 years hard labour. He behaved well, and was released. He never committed another crime. By the time I came to write the book, I thought that he should probably have been tried for manslaughter.

Oddly, opinion in that part of Leeds was divided and the Manley family came in for some flak. I suspect it was mostly down to disapproval of the death penalty although the fact that Elizabeth had testified at the trial upset the murderer's friends and family. After the trial, she suffered from abuse in the street and was physically assaulted.  

Her elder sister, my great grandmother Mary was married to Charles Terran, but in January of 1884, he died of heart disease brought on by his work in an iron foundry, leaving her with three young children, and with very little means of support. Her only way of making a living of sorts was ‘hawking’ – selling whatever she could acquire: brushes, matches, that sort of thing. Possibly herself. Some time much later that year, she discovers that she is pregnant, and the child born in March of the following year, can’t possibly be her dead husband’s.

Elizabeth was twenty years old, unmarried, illiterate, feisty I think, diminutive and rather pretty if my mother and aunts and cousins are anything to go by – but extremely vulnerable. At some point in 1884, she travelled to Glasgow. As someone who was born in Leeds, but had spent many years living in the West of Scotland, I hadn’t expected this connection at all.

How did she get there? Probably by train, but who paid the fare? She spent two years there, as a ‘servant’ of some kind. In August of 1886, her address is given as 32 Spoutmouth, just off the Gallowgate and not far from the original Saracen’s Head Inn. We know this because she was picked up by the police in Castle Street where Provand’s Lordship still stands. She was said to be in a ‘manic state’ and she was taken to St Rollox police station and thence to the pauper asylum in the centre of Glasgow, (pretty much where the bus station now stands) a proper person to be detained as surely as the murderer of her brother. Gartnavel Hospital was in existence, and provided decent treatment for both upper and lower class patients, but Elizabeth was destined for the poorhouse with asylum provision on the side. 

32 Spoutmouth, where she had been living, is not a dwelling, but a warehouse, owned by Thomson McMullan, who deals in sacks, bags and casks. The McMullan family have a big house on fashionable Monteith Row, near Glasgow Green, but Elizabeth isn't named among the servants there. 30 Spoutmouth, which must have been adjacent or possibly above the warehouse, is tenanted only with working men, many with Irish names. Maps and a few images of this area from around 1900 or earlier show a place that looks uncannily like Brussels Street where Elizabeth had lived in Leeds - pollution, poverty, overcrowding and the railway dominating all. The houses were mostly much older buildings that had been 'made down', partitioned so that they could hold as many tenants as possible, and with flimsy outside stairs giving access to upper floors. 

From the Victorian era onwards there seems to have been a terrible fear of insanity, of ‘escaped lunatics’ rampaging about the countryside. This even persisted into the 20th century, as you’ll have noticed from – for example – Agatha Christie or even Richmal Crompton’s William books in which these lunatics sometimes feature. Earlier in the 19th century, Emily Bronte’s treatment of madness in Wuthering Heights, where the main protagonists are undoubtedly (and gloriously) bonkers, seems anomalous, nay sympathetic, compared with Jane Eyre and Charlotte’s horrific depiction of the madwoman in the attic, who may try to eat you alive – or failing that, burn down the whole house. Victorian society saw itself as that house. The angel in the home turned manic. Madness was equated with moral decay and was dangerous in all kinds of ways. 

Treatments of mental ill health undoubtedly improved as the nineteenth century progressed. People were no longer chained up or exposed for public entertainment. But very few were ever cured. During the industrial revolution, politicians and the press promoted the notion that an epidemic of insanity was sweeping through the nation and – surprise surprise and how familiar this sounds  - they blamed it largely on immigrants.

Few commentators made the connection between the expansion of asylum populations in Britain, the preponderance of women, especially Irish incomers, and the earlier famine that had led them to migrate to Scottish and English centres of population, where they were routinely exploited, living in the worst possible conditions, expected to do the worst possible jobs for very little money. So little money that for many women, prostitution with all its concomitant ills, physical and mental, was the only option.

I didn’t know much about the Glasgow System until I started researching Elizabeth, but by the 1880s, it would have been in force. This was the brainchild of Chief Constable Alexander McCall. His system encouraged working class women to be labelled as prostitutes on the flimsiest evidence, which in turn would class their homes as brothels, so that they could be fined, imprisoned or worse, sent to the Lock Hospital, one of the city’s most shameful secrets. So shameful that the city and its historians chose to forget all about it for a long time. Officially the 'Glasgow Lock Hospital for Unfortunate Females', this was a 19th and 20th century institution dedicated to treating women and girls suffering from venereal diseases. Whether they had them or not. Hard to tell which was worse: the Lock Hospital or the Pauper Asylum. Both were equally difficult to escape from, once you were committed. 

Researching Elizabeth's detention, I managed to see the originals of various record books in Glasgow's Mitchell Library. She sometimes uses the alias Ann Smith, and she is in a ‘state of mental derangement’. Her occupation is entered as ‘servant etc.’ Her late parents’ names are given and their address in Brussels Street in Leeds, so somebody must have been able to give these.

The officials don’t want her to be a drain on the public purse, so they would have been glad to discover that she belonged elsewhere. They note that she ‘had a brother stabbed four years ago and the man was sentenced to penal servitude’ but this is the only time anyone notes that traumatic event.

There is another statement with the damning description ‘supposed of loose character,’ another mark against her. Her Roman Catholic religion is noted, as is the fact that she has only been ‘insane’ for a few days, so there is no known history of mania. She is said to be ‘dangerous to others’ but not supposed to be suicidal. What had she done that was dangerous? Fighting? Screaming and shouting? She was labelled as a pauper lunatic and committed to the Parochial Asylum.

Once there, she is seen by doctors, who issue medical certificates. One notes that ‘she is very excited and cries out for somebody to kill her. Talks incoherently and refuses to answer questions. She is dangerous to herself and others’ he writes, although what that much repeated danger is, is never specified. The second certificate describes her as ‘sullen and morose and would scarcely answer a question’ repeating that ‘she wishes that anyone would only end her existence. She is dangerous’, finally observing that ‘she implores the Blessed Virgin to come and destroy her as she is tired of her existence, cries out at times, maniacally, and threatens to put an end to herself.’

Nobody seems to notice that a young Roman Catholic girl in serious distress, crying out to the Virgin Mary to end her existence because it has become unbearable to her, may have experienced something traumatic enough to trigger a breakdown. But then, I am thinking thoughts they would never have thought. Twenty first century thoughts. And even then, only in some parts of society.

That may have been the end of the matter, but in fact Scotland was a little more enlightened than England. Care in the community was possible and had she had relatives willing to take her in, she might have recovered. A letter was sent to the patient’s sister, Mary Terran, my great grandmother, asking if she could come and collect her. Of course she couldn’t. She couldn’t even write at this point, so somebody – probably the parish priest – had written it for her. She had children to care for and no resources at all. What was she to do? 

The authorities sent Elizabeth back to Yorkshire, firstly to the Wadsley Asylum near Sheffield where she spent four years gradually growing worse. The records of this asylum are all gone, but in 1890, she was transferred to Stanley Royd, in Wakefield, and there we have very full and extremely depressing notes of her treatment. Nobody visits her. Mary has remarried my great grandfather James Flynn and moved over the river to a slightly better house. He is a good man. I've written about him on this blog. But since he came to Leeds as an adult road-builder and paviour I doubt if he even knew about Elizabeth. She was never once mentioned in the family. It struck me recently that they may not have been aware that she had been returned to Yorkshire. 

The handwritten notes on her condition over the next two years make very grim reading. Nobody mentions the murder, although it is obvious that her distress and anger increases at Christmas time. Just occasionally you can see a flash of justified resentment in her replies to the endless questions. She will say ‘you know!’ Once, she says, ‘they call me Sarah Floss’. Had that been the name given to her by whoever was exploiting her in Glasgow? Once, they ask her where she came from, and she says ‘If you knew where you came from, sir!’ and then mentions, in exasperation, ‘what you call your person in bed’ but they don’t get the joke. She remembers travelling on a big locomotive. She says she has been in the asylum for fifty years. She calls it ‘the prison’ which it is. She says – significantly, I think – ‘no man takes the part of the baby, and no man ever did. I had it in the … beautiful.’ And nobody thinks to ask her what she had, and might it have been a baby and where she had it.

By December 1891, still exasperated by their foolish questions, she tells them that she doesn’t know whether she is in a ‘big institution or a small cabbage’. By February, she claims that she hears her parents speaking to her, and by May of 1892 she is dead from tuberculosis.

Much later, after my book was published, I discovered that in May 1885, before the manic episode in Castle Street, one Elizabeth Smith, a common enough alias, gave birth to an illegitimate child in the maternity hospital, at Rottenrow in Glasgow. This was a rather 'beautiful' place at that time among so much that was filthy and uncomfortable. After some respite at the hospital, the mother registers the baby also as Elizabeth and no father is named.

If this was my Elizabeth, she must have gone back to Spoutmouth, to the McMullan sack and bag makers. Thomson, the father, dies later that year. His will contains a cryptic reference to one of his sons, Alexander, a medical student of whom he had high hopes, but who has sinned in some way. Unless he passes his medical exams and becomes a total abstainer, he will be disinherited. 'He knows the cause' says McMullan. There is an emotional bequest to institutions for the prevention of cruelty to children. 'Something should be done for these miserable creatures.' But there is also a stern admonition that if any of his own children should marry a Roman Catholic or 'join the Romish church', they will be disinherited.

What happened to her in that warehouse? In the Gallowgate? In Castle Street? Did it involve the son who was a disappointment to his father. (He didn’t become a doctor, although he had a long and presumably fulfilling life.)  We know that she had been a good girl who went to mass and said her prayers. Was she enticed and exploited against all the constraints of her upbringing? Did it cause a breakdown that was only intensified by her treatment at the hands of the state? 

Josephine Butler, a feminist and social reformer at the time, campaigned for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, the abolition of child prostitution and an end to the human trafficking of women and children. In one of her public letters, she used the words of a prostitute to drive the message home: 'It is men, only men, from the first to the last that we have to do with! To please a man I did wrong at first, then I was flung about from man to man. Men police lay hands on us. By men we are examined, handled, doctored. In the hospital it is a man again who makes prayers and reads the Bible for us. We are had up before magistrates who are men, and we never get out of the hands of men till we die!'

She could have been describing Elizabeth.

 

Tannery in Spoutmouth, from the Burrell Collection.