Murder, Scandal and Insanity in Victorian Bloomsbury
SINCLAIR McKAY
Contents
Preface – The Dislocation of the Dead
1 The Day Before
2 ‘There Is Something in the Cellar’
3 The Man from X Division
4 A City of Disappearances
5 ‘I Am Not a Judge of Human Bones’
6 Superior Apartments in a Quiet Home
7 ‘A Mass of Light-Coloured Ringlets’
8 The Canterbury Dolls
9 The Book of Dreams
10 ‘No, Not Me’
11 The Brothers Bastendorff
12 The New Age of Light
13 He Kept Company with Her
14 The Boiling Bones
15 ‘Everything Was Sweet’
16 ‘It Was Not My Place’
17 ‘Working Women Like Herself’
18 Avowed Admirers
19 ‘The Expected Child’
20 ‘Oh God! What a Sight Met My Gaze!’
21 She Had No Character
22 ‘I Have Disgraced You Before all the Country’
23 ‘I Depend Upon My Character’
24 ‘Such a Strange Brotherly Part’
25 Disintegration
26 A Length of Washing Line
27 The Stain That Would Not Go
Notes
Picture Credits
Afterword: A Bloomsbury and Somers Town Walk
Afterword Two: Illustrated Murder and Mayhem! – The Victorian Press
Selected Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Preface – The Dislocation of the Dead
Before its notoriety, the house presented an impeccable and genteel face to the city.
It stood four storeys tall, in the middle of a long, elegant Georgian terrace. The cream stucco frontage, the large French windows overlooking the leafy garden square, the covered, tiled porch before the front door and the first-floor balcony with decorative canopy above for shelter, spoke of some refinement. There were handsomely wrought, black ironwork railings, in front of steps that led down to a basement.
In that basement area, there was a door to the scullery and kitchen, and also a door to cellars that ran beneath the pavement above. These cellars were expressly intended – as stated in the leases for the houses in this terrace – for both coal and wine.1 The house changed in different lights; if the spring evening burned with a crimson sunset, for instance, the stucco would glow a reflected pink, then a mesmerising lavender, against the darkening eastern sky.
So any prospective tenant approaching the smart black-painted front door of 4, Euston Square, in 1879, might – without any difficulty – have imagined themselves a person of some distinction. And any servant coming to work here might lose themselves in daydreams of ownership. Within these walls were people who – both knowingly and otherwise – took on new identities.
Yet this prosperous-looking home stood just on the border of quite another kind of world. At the back of the house, at the very northern tip of Bloomsbury, and in the mews and the dusty streets and alleys of Somers Town beyond, the refined air gave way sharply to the heavy iron percussion of the railways. There was the grand classical terminus of Euston, its passenger locomotives pointing to the northern night; the goods trains feeding the sooty coal depots; towering cylindrical gas holders standing by the slick, thick oily canal; terraces of more ramshackle properties stained a permanent charcoal by the smoke. This district was a portal: into the great terminals – including nearby St Pancras and King’s Cross – came countless newcomers to the city, from around the country, and from lands beyond.
London was seething with reinvention; and in order that its new, modern identity become fixed, the past was being exhumed.
Quite close by to the house in Euston Square, the ancient churchyard of St Pancras Old Church had, just a few years previously, been dug up to make way for train platforms and marshalling yards; centuries-old gravestones were extracted like old teeth, carried to the other end of the remaining graveyard and then rammed back into the earth, clustered tightly against each other around an old ash tree in an extraordinary circular pattern of pagan supplication. In charge of this melancholic operation was the poet and novelist-to-be Thomas Hardy. There were many bones pulled from the soil too, which had suddenly protruded, yellow, under the digging works; bodies that had lain at peace in that earth for decades were now obliged to find a new home: a pit was shovelled out for their new communal resting place. There had been terrific public disquiet about disturbing the remains for such nakedly material reasons. Even in an age of enterprise and velocity, there were still strong superstitions concerning the disposition and the displeasure of the dead.
The horse-drawn traffic to Euston station was continuous. The hansom cabs would turn off the Euston Road – which had been widened to allow cattle-driving from the Caledonian Market a mile away, and which also had embedded rails for horse-drawn trams – and drive along the thoroughfare that divided the square. In 1879, one tram company was trying an experiment: some vehicles were drawn by mules especially imported from Spain. Large wheels whirred and crunched on the frequently moist, gravelly road. Yet the ceaseless movement did not affect the charm of Euston Square.
It had been built in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, some time before the first railways had been laid. At that time, the square formed part of a nexus with other Bloomsbury streets; the building of these houses had been a speculative venture and it had paid off. Here were to be found wealthy residents: distinguished gentlemen; ladies with titles from old families.
By 1879, the social composition had altered a little. Ladies and gentlemen of quality still abided there, among them doctors and retired military men and clerics; but now there were also what the newspapers were beginning to refer to as the ‘bourgeoisie’: writers, artists, skilled craftsmen. The brother of Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti had recently settled on the south side of the Square. Euston Square had its reputation, and there was a distinct community that kept a watchful eye on its newer neighbours.
Unlike nearby Torrington Square – which was gated and bordered with rails to discourage non-residents – Euston Square was open to all. But its smarter residents were continually vigilant for any tokens of transgression. Young, unaccompanied ladies who seemed to linger too long in the shades of night were scrutinised carefully from windows.
The district had a youthful feel and, on warm spring evenings, there were young promenaders, some returning from nearby Regent’s Park: women dressed in the brightest of the colours that chemists were now able to manufacture – mauves, hypnotically deep blues, startling yellows. Their young gentlemen companions, sporting smart brocade waistcoats and silk ties, might have had in mind a popular music hall song from the comic artiste William ‘Billy Beau’ Bint:
‘I tell them my father’s a Marquis
But wouldn’t society frown
If they knew that he shaved for a penny a time
In a little shop down Somers-Town.’
Yet this was also the intellectual centre of London. Euston Square lay just a few streets to the north of London’s university, plus the Reading Room of the British Museum. In 1879, Karl Marx was in there almost every day. He travelled down from his house in the northern suburb of Haverstock Hill, but he was always more associated with Bloomsbury. Continental socialists, who had yet to use his name to define their beliefs. were to be found in the pubs in the streets around Euston Square. In the 1870s, one policeman was asked by a young French man the directions to a particular pub. The constable told the young man exactly where it was, adding drily that all the anarchists went there. Among these young Europeans
were those who went beyond fiery rhetoric: the German exile Johann Most was preaching in nearby Charrington Street pub back rooms, about the use of dynamite and bullets. ‘No great movement has ever been inaugurated without bloodshed,’ Karl Marx told the editor of the Chicago Tribune in 1879.2 Yet many of Marx’s fellow immigrants to London felt uncomfortable about such sentiments; they had left tumult on the continent and had come to this city precisely to find peace.
Euston Square, and others like it nearby, had for some time proved particularly attractive to recent immigrants. London was rich in opportunity and offered the stability in which skilled businessmen and tradesmen and artisans could flourish and build their fortunes.
Their domestic point of entry was most frequently the boarding house. Boarding or lodging houses had been a feature of London life for a long time, satirised by Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackery; but now their popularity was spreading and, indeed, as the capital grew richer, so the number of upmarket establishments proliferated. The better sort of house would provide certain services: maids, laundry, food cooked on the premises.
This was a new way of life for so many Londoners too. Previously lodging houses had been associated with more precarious incomes; now, establishments such as number 4, Euston Square offered a much smarter proposition.
Such living arrangements, although used by all sorts of people and families, generally tended to be more favoured by women and men who were single; those who were quite young and embarking upon their lives. They were also the province of the more eccentric; men and women of a certain age who had never married or who stood at a noticeable angle to conventional society in other ways.
The boarding houses in the centre of the town answered other needs, both economic and sometimes emotional too. If one was new to the city, this was the sort of establishment in which one might make new and valuable acquaintances.
Yet there was another side to these homes that would become apparent deep into the night – and that was the wakeful sense of living among strangers. Once doors were closed and lights extinguished, houses could sometimes still be filled with their own curious noises: unfamiliar footsteps on landings, restless movement from rooms above. Even with a locked door, there might not always be a sense of perfect security.
Number 4, Euston Square, seemingly so prosperous, well-run and attractive, was a boarding house filled with unease; a house that was restless at night; a house with secrets.
Soon it would seem like some gigantic doll’s house, open to examination by the entire nation.
And the mystery of what happened within would persist for many decades afterwards; a byword for the darkest subterranean impulses of a violent city, and the cruel anonymity that could sometimes be forced on its victims.
1
The Day Before
On 8 May 1879, there was welcome news for Mary Bastendorff. A new lodger, a businessman, had confirmed that he was preparing to move his effects into 4, Euston Square. He would be taking the rooms on the first floor: an elegant apartment with high ceilings and two large windows, with a balcony, that faced out on to the garden square. This was the apartment that generated the most income and went a long way towards the upkeep of her house.
There had been, of late, a dearth of paying guests. This was not wholly surprising in a city which, by 1879, had 14,000 houses licensed to take in lodgers. The population of the city was expanding dizzyingly and was now close to four million; and, while in some districts, notably to the east, this was resulting in overcrowding and squalor, in many others there were vast improvements in terms of comfort and hygiene.
A rising middle class was developing ever more refined tastes; and in boarding houses such as 4, Euston Square, it was possible to give an appearance, or simulacrum, of gracious living. In addition to this, there was the tremendous – and modern – convenience of the nearby Metropolitan Railway underground station at Gower Street. Steam trains, adapted to minimise the smoke vented into stations, ran every five minutes into the heart of the City, terminating at Moorgate Street. The difficulty for the Bastendorffs was that so many other establishments around the immediate area offered similarly fine accommodation.
Mary Bastendorff, dark-haired, 32-years old, generally tried to keep herself aloof from the day-to-day running of the house. She wanted to concentrate on her four young children. But on 8 May, she would have roamed from room to room, shadowing her young maidservant, checking that the establishment was in a suitable state to receive Mr Brooks the following day.
On the ground floor, apart from the high-ceilinged entrance hall, light angling through the fanlight above the door, the floor muffled with linoleum, oilcloth and with rugs and carpets, there was a fine drawing room. Here was a table at which meals might be taken; tightly upholstered sofas and chairs were gathered around the large marble mantelpiece, the fireplace and the piano.
Mrs Bastendorff was strongly fixated with her children; but she also appeared to some to be an abstracted figure, the reason most likely grief. Mary and her husband had lost three young babies; and the house surely contained many sharp reminders of their short lives.
But Mary was not unsociable. In the evenings, the ground floor drawing room was generally her domain; any particularly valued tenants would be invited to take some brandy and lemonade with her.
Up the stairs, on the first floor, were the rooms that the new guest would be taking, moving his own furniture in. There was a water closet on this floor too, although it was not for the sole use of the first-floor tenants. Climbing further, on the second floor, were two principle bedrooms – the larger facing out on to Euston Square, and a smaller bedroom at the back, which faced out over the yard and the mews beyond. All were lit with gas: the lady of the house had procured ornamental glass globes to frame the wall-mounted gas jets. The carpets were thick and green; they had been a relatively expensive purchase, and she was alert to any stains or danger of mess.
The windows of the first- and second-floor bedrooms had blinds in addition to curtains. So even though the horses and cabs below were constantly churning up dust, their noise was muffled and the rooms were broadly insulated against the irritating particles that would infiltrate in the summer. And at the top of the house, there were three more bedrooms, one used by Mary and her husband, and the others for their children.
Her husband, Severin, aged 32, had been born in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. He was one of sixteen children and had been brought up in an intensely rural world. His transformation from a boy of the deep European forests into an urbane Londoner – not merely acquiring the language, but also the tastes and habits of the English middle classes – seemed complete. The previous year, he had been naturalised as a British subject, a move that none of his brothers – who had also immigrated to London – seemed to be tempted by.1
However, Bastendorff continued to identify very strongly with German culture; and indeed in the district of St Pancras, there was much to be enjoyed, especially at an institution, recently founded, called the German Gymnasium. This hall, near the railway marshalling yards of Battle Bridge Road, not only provided facilities for gymnastics – suspended ropes, vaulting horses – but also lively concerts of German classical and popular music, and German-themed banquets; with an estimated 30,000 Germans in London, there was great variety there and elsewhere of continental art and culture. Added to this, a few streets away, was the Bavarian Church, at which German Catholics attended Mass.
Severin Bastendorff, who was a little on the short side, had thick, dark red hair; and whiskers which he had cut into the most fashionable style. He was always proud of his facial hair. He had deep-set eyes of pale blue; and his manner could tend towards swaggering. Yet in one sense this was justified. He had achieved a very great deal in the space of eight years.
His business – and his skill – was furniture making. He employed ten people. At the back of the house, across its yard, reached via the basement kitchen, and in the shadow of the houses that stood on the nex
t street, was a large workshop. This had once been an artist’s studio, where young women had posed for life portraits. Now there was the constant rasp and buzz of intricate woodworking; Bastendorff’s bamboo furniture was becoming ever more popular. This studio, in turn, backed on to a stabling mews; this enabled Bastendorff to keep a horse and cart, for the purposes of deliveries, and also for the occasional family treat.
A couple of years earlier, Bastendorff had gone into business with several of his brothers; they shared and acquired the necessary skills. Joseph and Anton, like Severin, had found themselves London-born wives.
Unusually for a self-employed man, Bastendorff was not especially particular or urgent about making an early start to the working day. This might have been because he frequently spent evenings out with business associates at public houses such as The Euston Tavern, the Sol’s Arms and The Orange Tree. It is reasonable to assume that on the morning of 8 May, he had had the newspaper taken up to his bedroom so that he might contemplate the world as he waited for his own to come into full focus.
He would have been most interested that day in news of a European conference called by German manufacturers. This was a time of intense industrial expansion and businessmen in Westphalia were calling for a widening of free trade and an end to all tariffs. Since the 1830s, the pre- and post-unified states of Germany had belonged to a customs union which allowed free trade within that region; some wondered if there was a way to expand that principle throughout continental Europe, perhaps even including Britain?
That day, there were also bulletins from ongoing wars: the curious, unwanted British conflict with the Zulus in southern Africa, and the seemingly endless instability in Afghanistan. To a man born in Luxembourg – which had been the subject of constant predations from neighbouring France and Germany – there might have been a blend of admiration and discomfort about Britain’s colonial affairs. Bastendorff’s family had known what it was like to be pulled back and forth by different administrators from different countries; the requirement to speak this language or that, the demands for taxes or preferential exports. Equally, though, Bastendorff would have been wholly at ease as a foreign national in this ever-brightening and ever-accommodating city; there was a growing appetite in London for Germanic culture. Publishing houses such as Chatto & Windus were that year issuing volumes of German Stories, translated into English.
The Lady in the Cellar Page 1
