The Nightingale Shore Murder

by Rosemary Cook

  If this Annie Shore was in fact Offley Shore’s wife, and Florence’s young stepmother, her life ended tragically. She died in Camberwell House Asylum in London, at the age of 39, of ‘exhaustion due to general paralysis of the insane’ – the third and final stage of syphilis.

  This is where the formal record appears to end. But a contact from a family history website, Dr Raymond Davis, takes up the story, passed on to him from family members:

  ‘Annie later became the mistress of my grandfather, Edwin Archibald Harris (1864-1928) and when she died on 13 August 1906 at Camberwell House Asylum aged 39, he buried her, on 18 August, in his family grave at Manor Park Cemetery, Forest Gate Essex … The tombstone describes her as his wife, but the burial register has Annie Shore, as does the death registration. In 1901 they were living as man and wife at 71 Tankerville Road, Streatham (both knocked about 10 years off their ages) [this is confirmed by the 1901 Census, and explains why Annie Shore could not be found: not only has her age changed but she gives her name as Annie Harris] at a house my mother remembered well. It was Annie’s death in 1906 that left my grandfather free to marry my grandmother in 1907 – he described himself as a widower, which was not strictly true… My grandfather’s elder daughter was named Annie after Annie Wakefield/Shore – my grandmother didn’t seem to mind. And apparently he kept a painting of her over the marriage bed, which my grandmother tried to pass off to a visitor as a portrait of her own mother.’

  This is an extraordinary and touching turn of events. Annie had captivated not just Offley Shore, but in a short space of time, another man, much closer to her own age, who lived with her in common law marriage for at least five years, and probably longer. A man who stood by her through the horrors of syphilis in its worst form until she died in a lunatic asylum, then not only buried her in his family grave, but kept her portrait in his house and named his daughter after her. So how had this new liaison come about?

  ‘My mother’s reminiscences, from her father, were that Annie had blue eyes, that he met my grandfather at The Oaks Club (can’t identify that), that Offley Shore told my grandfather “If you like her, take her” …’

  This raises a new possibility to account for the amendment to Offley and Annie’s marriage certificate, made in 1891. Perhaps Offley had already tired of Annie, after four years of marriage – or maybe he was aware that she had contracted syphilis – and wanted a way out. By informing the Registrar of her real age at the time of the wedding (in person or anonymously), perhaps he hoped to open the way for an annulment of the marriage. It is unlikely that he would have wanted to shoulder the expenses of another divorce, as an alternative route to freedom; or to be held liable for the costs of obtaining treatment for her disease. Clearly no annulment was granted, and the marriage remained intact until Annie’s death. Her life until then, although ravaged by syphilis, at least seems to have contained much love and affection from her new ‘husband’, Edwin Harris. The stone he erected over her body in the family grave reads: ‘In loving memory of my devoted wife Annie who passed away 13th August 1906 aged 39 years.’ In later years, both his brother and Edwin himself would be buried in the same grave.

  A year after Annie’s death, Edwin Harris made a more formal marriage. The Gloucester Citizen reported on 8 August 1907:

  ‘Cirencester. MARRIAGE OF MISS PACK. At Kensington was solemnised the marriage of Miss Eleanor (Nellie) Pack, only daughter of the late Mr. George Pack and Mrs. Jack Gillman, of the Post Office, Gloucester-street, Cirencester, to Mr. Edwin Archibald Harris, of 10, Colville Houses, Bayswater, London, Nl, son of the late Thomas James Sandys Harris. There was a numerous family gathering, the bridegroom being well-known in the city as managing expert to one of the leading firms of jewellers. The presents were many and costly. After the ceremony, the bride and bridegroom held a reception at their residence in Colville-square. Part of the honeymoon is being spent at Ilfracombe and the remainder will be at the bride’s house’.

  It would be interesting to know whether the mother of the bride knew of the bridegroom’s recent common law marriage, and the dreadful circumstances of his ‘wife’s’ death, before he married her only daughter. However, neither Edwin Harris nor Offley Shore succumbed to syphilis; and the question remains of how the unfortunate Annie was exposed to the infection at a very young age.

  In spite of his own second marriage in 1887, Offley Shore had not quite finished with his ex-wife, Anna Maria. In June 1889, his solicitor filed an affidavit to the divorce court, seeking permission to ask for a variation to the divorce settlement. He received it, and submitted his sworn statement in July:

  ‘I, Offley Bohun Shore, of The Junior Travellers Club, St James Square in the County of Middlesex, Gentleman, the above named Defendant make oath and say as follows:

  By the settlement dated the 16th day of October 1861 made in contemplation of my marriage with the Petitioner, the Petitioner takes a life interest after my decease in the sum of £4000 – 5 per cent stock of the Government of Canada equivalent to an income of £200 per annum which capital sum was brought into settlement by me.

  I became Bankrupt in 1878 and my life interest in the last mentioned trust funds was sold. Since the date of my Bankruptcy I have had little or no means. My sole means of support at the present time are as Honorary Secretary of a newly founded London Club from which I receive at present no income.

  The children of the said marriage are all of full age and are supporting themselves.’

  In short, in spite of evidently funding his remarriage and new household, Shore wanted to avoid any further financial obligation to his ex-wife and children: his children were wise to have entered into careers that made them self-sufficient.

  The London Club to which Shore acted as Honorary Secretary had re-opened in January of that year with an eminent committee headed by the Duke of Portland. Advertising in The Guardian, it proclaimed itself ‘non-political’, and assured potential members that ‘the proprietary is entirely a fresh one, the late proprietors having nothing whatever to do with the Club; and the arrangements made between the Committee and the present proprietor are such as to justify the Committee in assuring members that the legal position of the Club may now be considered as perfectly satisfactory in all respects.’ With this ominous disclaimer, it is perhaps not surprising that, six months later, the club was still not able to provide any income to its Hon Secretary.

  A Registrar of the Court was appointed to investigate the petition and the claims of the Respondent (Offley) and Petitioner (Anna Maria). The Court reconvened in front of Justice Sir Charles Parker Butt on 6th August to hear the Registrar’s report, and to listen to Counsel for both parties. At the end of the hearing, the Court reached its decision:

  ‘… that the interest of the Respondent in the sum of £1976.4s7d referred to in the said Report be wholly extinguished and that the said Settlement so far as regards the said sum be read as if the Respondent were now dead. And the Court further condemned the Respondent in the costs of and incidental to this application.’

  Offley Shore had lost. In seeking to protect the money he had, he lost it down to the last seven pence, and incurred court costs as well. As far as his first marriage was concerned, he was dead.

  One month later, in September 1889, Florence’s mother finally put her first unhappy experience of marriage behind her. She remarried, in a much more conventional fashion than Offley, a military man seven years her junior: Joseph Henry Laye. At the time a Lieutenant Colonel, he would go on to command the First Battalion Scottish Rifles. Their wedding, in St Mary’s Church in Harrogate, was much more of a family affair: one of the witnesses was the younger Offley Shore, Florence’s brother, by then an army officer himself with the 18th Bengal Lancers. How Anna Maria obtained a licence to be remarried in church is another of the many Shore mysteries, however: at the time, and for more than another 100 years, the Church of England forbade remarriage of divorced people in church while their spouse was still living.

  Perhaps th
is turbulent family life gave Florence an unusual sense of self-sufficiency and resourcefulness. Maybe she would always have had a strong sense of adventure and curiosity. Or perhaps she just needed to get away. One way or another, after completing her education in Belgium, she set out on an extraordinary adventure for a young, unmarried Victorian woman – leaving England to work as a governess in China.

  Chapter 9

  ‘Western Dirt’

  God and opium explained most of the Western interest in China in the 19th century. The desire to convert the Chinese to Christianity led to a massive influx of missionaries as soon as the borders were opened, under coercion, to foreigners. The desire to encourage, exploit and profit from the Chinese addiction to opium sent traders and merchants into the country, following in the footsteps of the massive East India Company. Other merchants traded in China’s most popular commodities: tea, silk and porcelain. At the time that Florence went to China, there was also a community of British and other foreign diplomats and civil servants, as well as numerous individual Victorian travellers, exploring, collecting and writing about the ‘Mysterious Continent’ (or the ‘Middle Kingdom’, or the ‘Flowery Kingdom’) for the benefit of the fascinated community at home.

  This freedom to travel in China was still a relatively new state of affairs. In earlier centuries, the Romans had traded in Southern China, as had Moslem and Arab traders, Venetians and the Portuguese. The Jesuits were credited with having ‘opened’ China in the 16th century. But in the middle of the 18th century, the Emperor had restricted foreign access to China to one port only – Canton – and trade and access were highly regulated. Access to the mainland of China was very limited; use of land for factories, offices and residences was confined to an area beside the Pearl River, outside the Canton city walls; no foreign women were allowed into the country; and an overseer kept tight control on all trade. This long period of exclusion allowed the Western world to build an idealised, romantic picture of China, based on the quality of its exported goods, and the tales of those merchants who managed to visit the very restricted areas open to them. Writing in 1935, E.V.G. Kiernan, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, described how the country was viewed prior to the turmoil that was to follow in the 19th century:

  ‘The charm of the Flowery Kingdom lies in its dreaming, through thirty centuries, in one mood, or one landscape of moods melting into one another with an incomparable harmony, as perfect as that of a Chinese painting on silk, or of the image called up in half a dozen phrases of a Chinese poem – clouds floating over the Gorges, the wild geese flying towards the South. Wherever the thick volumes of China’s poetry are opened it is the same world, haunted always by the same voices, the same sentiments and familiarities, too poignant, too perfect, ever to be relinquished; a broad moon is climbing the autumn sky, peach-blossoms hang over antique gateways, cups of wine are warmed and books stand on the table to shorten solitary days; there are blue mountains and silken women, slow rivers with stone-arched bridges, the tears and dreams of separated friends, and in the distance the vaguer recesses of feeling that language cannot be forced to express.’

  This idyllic view of the country was not to last in the face of Western commercial imperatives, backed up by military muscle. By the end of the 18th century, there was a huge trade imbalance, with the West importing far more of China’s silk, tea and porcelain goods than it exported its own goods to China. Lord McCartney was sent to the country at the end of the 18th century to try to arrange a trade agreement, and an exchange of ambassadors, but his mission failed. So did Lord Amherst in 1816, and Lord Napier in 1839 – he died before an agreement could be concluded. In that same year, the issue of the sale of opium to the Chinese finally came to a head.

  The East India Company had had a monopoly on the trade from the 1770s. Indian farmers grew the opium, which the company sold to China. In spite of the Emperor’s edicts against it, opium smoking increased relentlessly in China, fuelling demand for the product. The Emperor ordered opium smokers to be punished by the pillory and bamboo, later increasing the penalty to imprisonment, transportation and death. But still the demand for the addictive opium grew, and the trade was simply driven underground to become smuggling. The Chinese continued to oppose the trade and punish their people for using opium; the British continued to pursue the profits available from the huge Chinese market. A report published in England in 1880 described this period:

  ‘Between the eagerness of the Chinese for our Opium, and our greediness for their silver, the wicked traffic soon grew to great proportions. The East India Company continued to develop the trade until in 1838-9, we smuggled into China more than 35,000 chests of Opium.

  This illicit trade was not carried on without frequent protests from the Chinese Government, which, in 1835, issued an edict, expressly mentioning by name nine of the principal Opium merchants, and insisting upon their expulsion from the country. As this was not done, a proclamation was issued in 1839 requiring that the Opium-receiving ships should be sent away, under penalty of hostile measures if the demand was not complied with. Commissioner Lin [Lin Tse-hsu, appointed to suppress the trade] was sent to Canton with authority to deal summarily with the matter. He demanded that the Opium on board the ships should be delivered to the Government to be destroyed, and a promise given never to bring any to Canton again on pain of death. “I, the Commissioner”, said Lin, “am sworn to remove utterly this root of misery, nor will I let the foreign vessels have any offshoot left for the root to bud forth again.” Finding his orders disregarded, he surrounded the foreign factory by sea and land, thus imprisoning two or three hundred British subjects, with the alternative before them of submission or death. Capt. Elliott, then Trade Superintendent, dared no longer hesitate, but handed over to the Chinese Commissioner more than 20,000 chests of Opium, valued at two millions sterling, which was publicly destroyed by mixing it with salt and lime. But still the Opium ships came and sought to land their cargoes, and in this state of things some outrages committed on both sides brought an open war.’

  This was the first Opium War, started in 1839 and ending in 1842, by which time 15,000 British troops had overwhelmed the inferior and under-prepared Chinese forces. The Nanking Treaty, which ended the war, exacted a very heavy price from the Chinese, designed to humiliate the country as well as to facilitate trade with it. The Treaty forced the Chinese to open five ports, afterwards known as ‘treaty ports’, to Western ships: Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai. China was also forced to cede Hong Kong to the British, and to pay 21 million dollars in silver for the expenses of the war, the debts due to merchants for destroyed property, and the value of the opium which had been destroyed. Foreign traders and missionaries were to be exempt from punishment by Chinese law; and a limit was set on the taxation that could be imposed on imported goods. The 1880 account notes that:

  ‘It was of this war that Mr. Gladstone said, “A war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and have not read of.”’

  So relations between the British in China and its indigenous population were constantly under strain. In 1856, the Chinese seized a British-registered ship, the Arrow, owned by a Chinese resident of Hong Kong. The subsequent riots in Canton, attacks on missionaries and the murder of a British official, sparked more military and diplomatic action against China, which became known as the Second Opium War:

  ‘In 1858, another unjust war broke out, and the English, aided by the French, bombarded the million-peopled city of Canton. Field pieces, loaded with grape [shot] were planted at the end of long narrow streets crowded with innocent men, women and children, to mow them down like grass, til the gutters flowed with their blood. In one scene of carnage, the Times correspondent recorded that half an army of 10,000 men were in ten minutes destroyed by the sword, or forced into the broad river. The Morning Herald asserted that “a more horrible or revolting crime than this bombardment of Canton has never been committed in the
worst ages of barbarian darkness”. 30,000 people were burnt out of house and home. And all this for an imaginary insult to our flag, for which ample satisfaction had been offered.’

  The 1858 Treaty of Tientsin legalised the importation of opium, protected Christian missionaries, and opened new treaty ports, but did not end the conflict. Finally, with the city of Peking surrounded by the allied armies, in October 1860, the Chinese yielded. However, the Emperor escaped the siege, and some British prisoners were found to have been murdered, so the British burnt down the Emperor’s Summer Palace in addition to demanding compensation. The 1860 Convention of Peking forced China to cede the Kowloon peninsula to Britain, and formally opened the whole of China to traders, travellers and missionaries.

  The tragic impact of the opium trade on ordinary Chinese people was described by a Mrs Adams, who was in Nankin in the 1880s. She wrote in ‘Word and Work’ about visiting a woman whose husband’s opium addiction had destroyed the family:

  ‘The poor woman was in a death-like stupor, and, roused, complained of a great pain at the heart and a weary desire for sleep. My husband gave her a strong emetic, which soon produced the desired effect.

  While watching the result of the treatment, the following story was told: “The husband of this poor woman had formerly held a lucrative and responsible position in a Mandarin Yamen, or court. While there he first tasted what the natives call ‘western dirt’. As long as he kept his situation his wife and family did not suffer, but he lost it as the Opium obtained more complete mastery over him. He could get no employment, though the taste grew daily. His poor wife did all she could to keep up appearances and provide for her family, by winding silk and weaving the satin, for which Naking is noted; portions of their house were let off till they had but one room left for themselves. At last the bitter cold winter set in, and the poor creature found herself without money, without food, and without clothes, for those which should have protected from the cold had long since been sold to buy the fatal drug, and yet the infatuated husband must have money to satisfy the cravings of appetite. At last, the poor wife, in a fit of desperation, determined to put an end to the struggle by taking her life; and thus, ignorant of God, ignorant of the future, she was very near the unseen world, when it pleased God to restore her, as the remedies used were blessed to her recovery. The husband came afterwards to hear the Gospel preached, and seemed very grateful.” This is but a picture of what is occurring in thousands of families in this city, and in myriads of families in this empire.’