by Sly, Nicola;
Flossie had recently moved to Bournemouth from her native Wales to make a new start, having been jilted by the love of her life. Hence, she was still new to the area and rather lonely and, seeing that Fred Young never received any visitors, she made a special effort to be nice to him. Before long, she was visiting him on her days off. To Flossie, there was something reassuringly safe about Young, who was more than twice her age. Soon, she found herself falling in love with him and offering to live with him when he left hospital.
With his crippled hand preventing him from working, Young took her up on her offer without hesitation. To his neighbours, it was a perfectly respectable arrangement – Young had simply employed a nurse to look after his sick wife. To his son, Alfred, the arrangement was not as respectable as it might outwardly seem, since his Dad and his new ‘Auntie Flossie’ were sharing a bedroom. Flossie would not immediately agree to share Fred’s bed, while his wife slept alone in a different room. However, Fred pleaded and cajoled and swore undying love for her in order to persuade her, and eventually she capitulated for fear of losing him. Yet although she and Fred became lovers, Flossie’s strict religious upbringing meant that, even while they shared the most intimate moments, she could not forgive herself for committing what she saw as a terrible sin.
Francis Road, Poole, 2008. (© N. Sly)
Royal Victoria and West Hampshire Hospital, Boscombe, 1930s.
Before too long, the inevitable happened and Flossie fell pregnant. Fred’s reaction to hearing the news was to bury his head in his hands and exclaim, ‘Oh, my God!’
‘God won’t help us. We are sinners’, Flossie told him.
While Fred went out for a walk to contemplate the probable consequences of his sinning, Flossie sat down and wrote a long, dramatic letter to Alfred, the boyfriend who had jilted her. Calling him ‘the only person I ever loved’, she explained to him that she had tried to commit suicide once before, after he had left her, by taking what she thought was a fatal dose of morphine, mixed with a spoonful of jam. Now, she told him that the very thought of the degraded life that she was living at the moment made her feel sick. She was going to end it all and she thought that ‘Uncle Fred’ would probably choose to come with her, since he was fed up with life and in constant pain. Telling Alfred that she wanted him to have her fountain pen to remember her by, she ended the letter ‘Your Flossie XXX’. She then added a postscript telling him that he would only receive the letter after she was dead and asking him to forgive her. ‘It is so much easier to die than to live’, she wrote. ‘Oh, sweetheart of my youth and womanhood, what have I done to deserve all I had to go through?’ she asked, ending, ‘Goodbye, dear. I am almost heartbroken now’.
When Fred returned from his walk, Flossie spurned all physical contact with him. ‘How much do you love me?’ she asked him. ‘Could you live without me? If I died, would you want to go on living?’
‘Of course not’, replied Fred, his mind almost certainly more focused on persuading her to let him back into their shared bed than on the questions she was asking. It was then that Flossie put forward the idea of a suicide pact between them.
Sensing her distress, Fred felt that he had no choice but to agree, thinking that he could probably talk her round later. He obviously gave the right answer because only now was Fred permitted to make love to Flossie again. Before they fell asleep, Flossie had just one more question for him.
‘You wouldn’t cheat me, would you?’
Fred misunderstood the question, thinking that she was referring to physical infidelity, but Flossie quickly corrected him. ‘Our suicide pact – you wouldn’t have me go and then not follow, would you? I’d be so terrified going alone.’
Fred promised and, reassured, Flossie soon fell asleep. Fred, however, lay awake for hours on end, listening to her steady breathing and thinking about what he had to do next.
Early the next morning, 11 August 1925, Young’s son Alfred was awakened by the sound of somebody shouting his name. He got up and went along the landing, seeing his father standing in the doorway of the bedroom he shared with ‘Aunt Flossie’. As Alfred approached, he caught a glimpse of ‘Aunt Flossie’ through the open door. She was sprawled on the bed, her head almost detached from her body and the whole room seemed almost awash with her blood.
‘Your Aunt Flossie is dead’, his father explained. ‘Go to the Bourne Valley police station and bring the police back here.’
Alfred ran to the police station as fast as he could, but it was only 6.30 a.m. and the doors were still locked. Not knowing what to do next, he ran back to the house, finding the bedroom door now closed and his father standing calmly in front of it.
‘Are they coming?’ asked Fred.
Alfred explained that the police station was still closed and he was sent for the doctor instead. However, when he reached Dr Montgomery’s house, he was to learn that the doctor was already out on a call. Leaving a message for the doctor to come as soon as he was able, Alfred turned for home again.
It seemed to Alfred as if his father desperately wanted him to fetch someone and now, for the second time, he had failed. Before going home, he made the decision to call on one of the neighbours for help and so he stopped at the house of Mr and Mrs Allen, who lived a couple of houses away in Francis Road, banging loudly on the door until a sleepy Mr Allen answered.
Mr and Mrs Allen were naturally shaken as young Alfred babbled on about ‘Aunt Flossie’ being dead. They asked him in, and Mrs Allen made him a cup of tea while her husband got dressed. If the truth were told, Mr Allen was none too keen to see what, from Alfred’s garbled description, sounded like a very bloody scene and tried to delay things as long as he could. As a result, it was nearly 8 a.m. before the distressed boy finally managed to persuade Mr Allen to go back home with him.
Reluctantly, Mr Allen allowed the boy to pull him to the house next door but one and push him through the front door and upstairs. The squeamish Mr Allen took just one glance at Fred Young, who was standing in exactly the same place that Alfred had left him, before screaming ‘Bloody Hell!’ and bolting. He left the house as fast as he could, announcing his intention to fetch the police. For Fred Young now had a gaping wound in his throat, that pumped out jets of bright red blood with every beat of his heart.
In the event, it was not the police who were first on the scene, but a doctor, Dr Stanley Rowbottom. After giving Fred Young what first aid he could, he pushed open the door to the bedroom, realising immediately that there was nothing he could do for Flossie, who, he estimated, had been dead for at least two hours.
The police soon arrived and Young was rushed to Poole hospital with a police escort. Although his vocal chords had been severed, leaving him unable to speak, he was well enough to write and sign a statement in which he denied having any part in the death of Flossie Davies, saying that he had woken that morning to find her dead in bed beside him.
The carnage in the bedroom at 12 Francis Road told a very different story. A razor, with several pieces of its blade missing was found embedded in the blood on the bedroom floor. So deep was the wound to her throat, which had almost completely decapitated her, that the missing pieces of steel from the blade were buried in Flossie’s backbone. Almost everything in the bedroom was soaked with blood. However, Flossie’s hands were completely clean, indicating that she hadn’t cut her own throat but that somebody had cut it for her.
Young was promptly charged with the wilful murder of Flossie Davies.
He appeared in court at Dorchester before Judge Rowlatt, looking weak and ill, with his throat heavily bandaged, still maintaining that Flossie Davies had committed suicide as her part of a pact between them. His barrister, Ernest Charles KC, tried to tell the court that Young was so severely disabled as a result of injury that his left hand and arm were completely useless, and a one-armed man would not have been able to hold Flossie and simultaneously cut her throat.
‘It takes but one hand to hold a razor’, suggested the counsel for the prosecut
ion, J.D. Roberts.
‘Quite so’, agreed Charles, ‘if the victim obligingly remains still.’
‘Or is asleep’, countered Roberts, acidly.
Fred Young was called to give evidence, but, since he could only speak in a husky whisper, he could barely make himself heard in the courtroom. Dr Rowbottom, in court to give his own evidence, offered to sit beside him and repeat every word that he said.
Via Rowbottom, Young told the court that he had woken up in the early hours of the morning to find Flossie Davies lighting a candle and putting on her dressing gown, with the intention of going down to the kitchen for an apple and a glass of lemonade. He had offered to fetch them for her and, when he returned to the bedroom, had found Flossie in the act of cutting her own throat.
According to Young, the razor belonged not to him, but to Flossie herself. She regularly used it to shave her own neck. In addition, Flossie was an unstable person whom he had once caught taking morphine, which she stashed in her handbag. Young denied ever having discussed suicide with Flossie Davies, saying that he did not offer to cut her throat and he did not want to get rid of her.
In his summary of the case, Mr Justice Rowlatt was very scathing about what he described as the ‘loose talk and gush’ surrounding the suicide pact between Young and Davies. It was not at all a bad way to commit a murder, he told the jury, to make an agreement of this sort and, while the other person committed suicide, for the murderer not to follow suit. Nevertheless, he accepted that the letter to Flossie’s previous boyfriend indicated that there had been some talk of a pact between the lovers, but it did not indicate that any firm agreement to proceed had been made. It was not his job to disprove, he concluded, but the prosecution’s job to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the girl had her throat cut at the hand of Young. The jury must decide between straight murder and no murder at all in reaching their verdict.
The jury took just over an hour to choose ‘straight murder’ and Young was sentenced to death. Still a very sick man, he was taken from court to the infirmary at Dorchester Prison, where doctors began the difficult task of keeping him alive until his execution.
The day before he was scheduled to die, Young began to complain of severe pain. The prison doctor, Dr Francis Nash-Wortham, was called to his bedside where an examination showed that very little air was getting into his lungs. Nash-Wortham prescribed an ounce of brandy every quarter of an hour, in the hope of easing the spasms in Young’s larynx. He then went off to see other patients, returning three hours later to find that Young’s condition had worsened considerably. Now in a collapsed state, the prisoner was pale and clammy, his pulse weak and feeble.
Nash-Wortham was then called to deal with another crisis. Some time later, prison officer Henry Moore saw that Young was becoming weaker still and summoned Dr Mann, Nash-Wortham’s partner and locum. By the time Mann arrived five minutes later, Young had died.
A post-mortem examination was carried out by Nash-Wortham and an inquest held into his death before Major G.G.H. Symes, the deputy coroner for South Dorset. There, Nash-Wortham revealed that Young’s vocal passages were so obstructed by scar tissue that, instead of being the diameter of a pencil as they would normally be, they would now scarcely allow the passage of a pin head. Young was also suffering from aortic disease of the heart and both of his lungs had partially collapsed, putting the diseased heart under an enormous strain.
The coroner’s jury agreed to waive their fees, asking that the money be forwarded to Young’s son, Alfred. Young’s relatives were given permission to collect his body and held a simple funeral for him, attended by only the presiding vicar and Young’s father, brother, and sister-in-law. Frederick Arthur Young may have cheated the hangman but, in the end, he had not cheated Flossie Davies.
15
‘MY HEAD FEELS AWFUL QUEER’
Bournemouth, 1926
The Wright family came to live in Bournemouth in 1923. Some believed that they had come from Manchester, but head of the family Robert, who was by then in his early sixties, did not indulge in gossip, so very little information could be elicited about his previous life. His wife, Beatrice, a much younger woman, then in her late twenties, was equally tight-lipped.
The couple, together with their infant daughter, Marjory, found lodgings at St Swithun’s Road, Bournemouth, in a house that was divided into two flats. The Wright family lived in the top floor flat, while their landlady occupied the flat below. As the months passed, it became evident to their landlady that Robert was very much a family man, who was devoted to his wife and child. A lifelong teetotaller, he quickly found well-paid work as a carpenter and spent his evenings after work mending boots and shoes to bring in a little extra income. He professed himself proud to be using his hands to work in the same profession as ‘our Lord Jesus Christ’.
One day, while Robert was at work, his landlady got chatting to Beatrice, remarking casually that her husband seemed like a man who had ‘known much better things’. The normally reticent Beatrice found herself opening up to their kind landlady, confiding that Robert was very well educated and had travelled the world while in the Army. She also revealed that he had a brother who held a position of some importance in Argentina.
After twelve months of living happily in St Swithun’s Road, their landlady hesitantly approached Robert with some bad news. She had to move house but, if they wanted, there was plenty of room for the family at her new home, including the baby that Beatrice was expecting. Robert and Beatrice were delighted and began to prepare for the move. However, their hopes of continuing with their happy domestic arrangements were suddenly and unexpectedly dashed when the firm that Robert worked for announced that they were to close.
St Swlthun’s Road, Bournemouth, 2008. (© N. Sly)
Without a job and a regular wage, Robert did not feel comfortable impinging on their landlady’s goodwill and, although she pleaded with them to move, saying that she was happy to wait for the rent until Robert found another job, the proud, independent Robert just could not bring himself to be indebted to her.
When the house at St Swithun’s Road was sold up, he moved his family into another rented home in Bournemouth Road, Parkstone. A second daughter, Amy Violet, arrived shortly afterwards. Robert spent his days walking the streets looking for work and the evenings playing with his children or sitting quietly with Beatrice in their sparsely furnished rooms. He continued to promise Beatrice that, one day, things would get better and that they would have a house of their own, rather than paying rent to other people.
The Wright family was in dire financial straits but, in August 1925, things gradually began to improve. It was then that Beatrice was reunited with Frederick Giles, her long-estranged father, who was finally introduced to the son-in-law and grandchildren he had never met. When father and daughter had a few moments alone together, Fred asked Beatrice if she was happy. ‘Life has been tough of late, Dad’, Beatrice admitted, but was quick to add that she had a really good man who couldn’t do enough for her and her children.
Constitution Hill, Parkstone.
Then, just a short while later, Robert Wright finally found a new job, starting work for local builder Mr Hoare on 17 August.
Wright was a resounding success at his new place of work. According to his foreman, William Howe, he was a working machine, ready to tackle any job given to him, no matter how hard or how unpleasant. When Mr Hoare asked if Wright were worth the money he was being paid, Howe told him that he could pay him ten times his current wage and still be getting a bargain. Yet, no matter how impressed he was with his employee, Hoare could only afford to pay him a basic wage and, after Wright’s period of unemployment, during which the couple had found themselves with outstanding accounts to tradespeople, he found himself gradually slipping further and further into debt.
Matters came to a head when young Amy Violet fell ill. The only food that Beatrice could afford to feed her children was the cheapest possible available and it was far from a healthy, nu
tritious diet. Now, Amy Violet lay in her makeshift cot, feverish and sick, and, having already pawned all but the bare necessities, her parents were too poor to send for a doctor to treat her.
Both parents took it in turns to sit up all night with their poorly daughter, trying their hardest to keep her warm and comfortable, with Robert always putting in a full day’s work despite his lack of sleep. However, the hard work and exhaustion began to tell on him and he went down with a bad attack of influenza. He refused to let his illness prevent him from working, telling Beatrice that it was just a cold and continuing to cycle to his job every day as he had always done.
Beatrice was now unable to obtain even milk to feed her children, since her account with the dairy was long overdue. Her family was kept alive only by the kindness and compassion of Mr Chalkley, the milkman, who continued to allow her to have a little milk every day, even though she had already run up a substantial bill.
Robert’s employer and work colleagues noticed that he was looking pale and worn, even though he refused to let his work rate slip because of his illness. He allowed himself one day off work on Christmas Day – a day like every other in the Wright household, since no money could be found for any form of celebration – then he resumed working, still feeling weak and complaining privately to Beatrice, ‘My head feels awful queer’.
Somehow, Beatrice managed to scrape up enough money to pay off some of the arrears she owed for milk, but that left her short of money to pay Mr Jewlett, the coal merchant, and soon he too was refusing to deliver. Jewlett sympathised with the Wrights but he had a business to run. Eventually, he agreed that, although he wouldn’t allow the family to have any more coal, he would also not pressure them for payment of the outstanding bill for the two hundredweight of coal that they had already received and not yet paid for.
