Quite why Hannah Dobbs’ personal effects should have been in a house owned by someone she had never before mentioned was puzzling; yet it was still Euston Square, and here was mention of Mr Bastendorff. Perhaps Mr and Mrs Dobbs assumed that there had been some mix-up; that upon emigrating to Germany, Hannah had been required to leave some surplus effects behind.
Her mother had written back swiftly, as suggested, asking that ‘the boxes had better not be removed, as her daughter might call for them’ upon her return.
But now came these news reports of the discovery of an unidentifiable corpse. The Dobbs contacted the police, who tried to sound reassuring; then the couple engaged a solicitor and sent the following panicked communication – in the name of Mr Dobbs – to Inspector Hagen at the CID:
‘From reports published of the Euston Square mystery, I am led to believe it is my daughter Hannah Dobbs, alias Hassard. I have telegraphed Scotland Yard, and the answer received is not at all satisfactory, as everything corresponds so minutely.’5
In this period of hideous suspense, the Devon police communicated as much as they could, via telegraph, with Scotland Yard; and the local press darkly averred that in the midst of the uncertainty, it could be said that ‘one thing was clear, that the man accompanying the woman to Bideford was not her husband at all’.
Indeed, journalists were sent to north Devon to discover more particulars about the background of the missing maid. ‘The quiet town of Bideford … has been in a great state of excitement,’ ran one report.6 Local inquiries yielded old local scandals from when Hannah had started working with one of the grander families in the area: tales of theft and sexual promiscuity. That assumed name of hers was noted, ‘Hannah Hassard’ – comparisons were made with Daniel Defoe’s extraordinary heroine Moll Flanders.
The agonised grief and anxiety of Hannah’s parents was clearly acute; the reply they soon received from the CID was extraordinary and wholly unexpected.
The news was conveyed to the Dobbs by a Bideford policeman, who had received the telegram from Scotland Yard.
Hannah Dobbs, they were told, was actually very much alive.
Clearly it had taken the police a few days of checking.
The reason nothing had been heard from Hannah for so long was that she was in prison in London. Hannah had been convicted for petty theft; continuing the theme that had begun in her youth in Bideford. She had not wished her parents to know anything of her disgrace.
This development provided Inspector Hagen with new problems to unravel. There was so much in Hannah Dobbs’ return visits to Bideford that seemed irregular: a maid-of-all-work for the Bastendorff household, who returned home, dressed notably finely, claiming marriage to a man she called Mr Bastendorff. What were these domestic arrangements in number 4, Euston Square?
Meanwhile, in the mortuary of the St Pancras coroner lay the pitiful remains of a woman whose identity seemed ever more elusive. Someone in that household surely knew who this woman was?
As was the legal custom then, the inquest on the body was convened long before any suggestion of arrests; the aim simply was to try and ascertain the cause of death.
And so, just several days after the discovery, Dr Hardwicke gathered jurists – local businessmen, in the main – and witnesses at the St Pancras Coroners Court. ‘The proceedings excited great interest and the court was densely crowded,’ reported The Times.7 Severin Bastendorff’s solicitor, Mr F. Jones of Freston and Co., was there watching the proceedings carefully. The coroner opened by explaining to the court that the jurists had already visited number 4, Euston Square. They had, one by one, ducked their heads to enter the coal cellar, but they had also examined the rest of the property, the positions of all the rooms and the stairs and the passages.
The errand boy, William Strohman, was the first witness to be called; he told the court how he had found ‘a large bone and foot’ and had run ‘into the shop’ (the workshop) to tell Albert Savage. In turn, Joseph Savage relayed how he ‘at first did not believe’ the boy.8
Joseph informed the court that he was a japanner. Jappaning was the art of lacquering wooden cabinets in the Eastern style: layers of elaborate varnish inlaid with gold paint or other decorative materials, forming elaborate and delicate patterns on the jet-black surface. It was a skill much in demand in 1879; and it also conveyed to the jury something of the flavour of Bastendorff’s business concerns.
The coal delivery man, George Fulcher, swiftly confused the court with his testimony; he said that as soon as he went down to the cellar, and picked up a shovel to help move the coals, ‘a man came in and sprinkled a lot of white stuff over the cellar’. The next witness, Thomas Holman, PC178 of S Division, deepened that confusion by telling the jurists that ‘he did not see any white powder about’ when he at last reached the scene.9
This disputed scattering of powder suggested a deliberate effort to mask or alter the remains by means of quicklime; and Joseph had to be recalled. He told the court that he had gone to Mrs Bastendorff who had given him the chloride of lime; that he ‘fancied there was a bad smell’.10
Now, for the first time, Severin Bastendorff’s own account of that morning was to be heard. He took the stand and described his occupation as ‘fancy cabinet and bamboo worker’. He told the court he had ‘eight or ten men in his employ’. He explained how somewhere between 9 and 10 o’clock that Thursday morning, his wife had come up to their bedroom and told him there was ‘something in the cellar’.11 Bastendorff explained how he had then gone downstairs to find the police in attendance.
The coroner wanted to know a little of the house’s recent history. How long had Mr Bastendorff been there as landlord? ‘I have been in the house about three years, and let the upper part of the house furnished and the drawing rooms unfurnished,’ said Bastendorff. He described how there had been numerous lodgers. ‘I think I could tell who they were,’ he said. ‘They were a genteel lot of people.’
What were the terms on which they stayed? ‘I had eighteen shillings for the second-floor front and seven shillings for the second-floor back per week,’ said Bastendorff. ‘The attics I have let, the front for eight shillings, and two little rooms at five shillings a week. I may have had about twenty different lodgers. I have let the drawing room floor, but until lately it has been vacant seven months.’
Could Mr Bastendorff put a name to some of these previous tenants? ‘A Mr Hickinbotham had (the drawing room floor) rooms for eighteen months,’ recalled Mr Bastendorff, ‘and a Mr Brooks before him.’ This was a different Mr Brooks to the man who had lately sought accommodation elsewhere. ‘I have also let the parlours occasionally furnished,’ he continued. ‘My wife mostly took the money.’
The coroner was anxious to know more about the cellars and about the frequency of their use. Mr Bastendorff explained that the former lodger Mr Brooks ‘had a coal cellar next to this one’, and that it is ‘approached through the scullery, and I have used that myself for coals’.
And who else had the use of these cellars? Were they kept locked? ‘There was a place for a padlock,’ said Mr Bastendorff, ‘but there has never been one on it. It was always open.’ And did these cellars see frequent use? ‘I had coals in about six weeks or two months ago,’ said Bastendorff. But, he added, ‘no lodger in the house had a cellar except Brooks. He left about two and a half years ago.’
As the court absorbed this, the coroner was still clearly puzzled as to how a dead body could remain undiscovered for so long; especially in a house that was continually busy and thriving.
‘I do not recollect the cellar being cleared out before this,’ said Bastendorff. ‘It was (being) cleared out for the newcomers also of the name of Brooks, who required a coal cellar, and I gave up my own cellar, as I had some wood in the other cellar.’12
Was it really possible, given all that was kept in his cellar, that Mr Bastendorff had noticed nothing at all in the last few months? The coroner pushed this a little further; and now the iron certainties began to
melt a little.
Bastendorff was now at last seemingly moved to recall a most singular occasion some six months previously. Indeed, his story was to elicit an involuntary shocked laugh from among the onlookers.
‘I went into the cellar about Christmas,’ he told the court, ‘and picked up a bone, which I thought was a sheep’s bone, and it had some flesh on it.
‘I took it into the kitchen and showed it to my wife, saying “what a wasteful girl that servant must be, throwing away half legs of mutton”. That is what I took it for.’
This drew a further laugh from the spectators; the pitch-blackest of comedy. The court officials brought hush. Bastendorff continued: ‘I went and threw this particular bone back again into the cellar. I am not a judge of human bones.’
Nor, he added, did he ‘detect at that time any unpleasant smell in the cellar’.13
One jury member, having absorbed this, had a question of his own about the running of the house, and how the Bastendorffs selected their lodgers. ‘My wife has usually gone after references when lodgers have come in,’ said Bastendorff, ‘but sometimes we had no references. When lodgers went away, I did not know where they went to.’
Bastendorff explained further about having had the house for three years. ‘I took the house from Mr Kemp, the house agent,’ he said. He explained further about his first sight of the property, and added one faint possibility about the identity of the body: ‘There was a woman in the house as housekeeper when I went there. I do not know when she went away or where she went to. So (as) soon as I got the keys from Mr Kemp, I gave orders to take in my furniture. But five or six days elapsed before my furniture was taken into the house.’
Who else would have had access to the house (and by extension, its residents)? ‘One of the workmen, Harry, and my brother used to come through the area (downstairs) door to go and open the back shop, which opens into the mews,’ Bastendorff said.14 In conclusion, he was asked about how secure the house was, and what possibility there might be of people effecting entry? He insisted that usually, the downstairs ‘area’ gate was kept locked, and that there were horizontal bars over this area. This precluded his own initial theory about the identity of the body: that this was a passing woman, perhaps drunk, who had crept down to that ‘area’, got into the coal cellar and somehow met her death down there.
Bastendorff’s next-door neighbour, Dr Davis, was called to take the stand. Having led the coroner and the jury through the gruesome details of decomposition, and confirmed the presence of some kind of clothes line around the neck of the corpse, he allowed himself to speculate on the amount of time the body might have been there. ‘It was almost impossible to say how long the body had been where it was found,’ Dr Davis said. ‘It might have been three years or more than three years, or it might have been but one year.
‘It depended mainly on the action with the atmosphere,’ he explained, ‘or what the remains were brought into contact with. There were,’ he confirmed, ‘plainly the indentations made in the neck by the cord.’ That said, it was ‘impossible to say what was the cause of death. She might have been poisoned and the rope put round her neck afterwards.’15
If it was poison, might there still be traces? ‘If arsenic existed, it would be found there now,’ the doctor told the coroner, who nodded towards another present, one Professor Pepper: he was intending to make a ‘chemical analysis of the viscera’.
The next witness – the Bastendorffs’ young current maidservant – was called. Sarah Carpenter told the court that she had been working for Mrs Bastendorff for nearly five months. She testified that she ‘lived in the back kitchen’.
Just a fortnight previously in the cellar, she said, she ‘picked up a bone and took it out into the scullery and looked at it’. Then she ‘took it to her mistress’, and declared to Mrs Bastendorff that it was ‘part of a foot’. Mrs Bastendorff had replied, ‘Oh nonsense!’, and told the girl that it was ‘a wild boar bone of one they once had’.
The jurists – once beyond the gruesome implications of her discovery – might have been a little astonished at the idea of a family dining on wild boar; but it would later be established that the Bastendorffs, as a family, did, indeed, sometimes favour game that had been shot in the Black Forest.
According to Sarah Carpenter, Mrs Bastendorff took the bone and ‘threw it in the sink’. Then, having looked more closely at it, she picked it up and quite simply cast it out in the basement area in front of the coal cellar. This was not quite an end to the matter. A couple of days later, Sarah, again poking about in the cellar, found and picked up ‘a little bone’ about the length ‘of her finger’. Rather than troubling her mistress with it, she threw it into the dust hole, which was where all the household rubbish was consigned.
And had the servant ever found anything else in that dark cellar? Yes, she said. She had ‘picked up rags and things in the cellar and had burnt them’.
Prompted by the coroner, Sarah concluded by declaring: ‘When I took the bone to show my mistress, I said I was sure it was the bone of a person’s leg.’16
The last witness for the day was Inspector Charles Hagen, who gave the coroner and the jury an exact description of the dimensions of the cellar, plus a minutely detailed account of the clothes that the corpse had been wearing: the black silk, the ribands, the ‘quilted silk petticoat’, the ‘steel busk of a pair of stays’ and ‘a large quantity of black lace’. The lady’s linen was gone. The brooch, with its red and white stones, was common, and most probably ‘of Birmingham manufacture’. He also produced what remained of the rope that had been tied around the neck. They were too fragile to touch. But they appeared like ‘fragments of sash line’.
Indeed, despite the prompting from some in the jury, who had heard local gossip of a serving girl from Devon who had once been the Bastendorffs’ maid-of-all-work, Inspector Hagen was not free to say any more for the moment. But he was, at least intuitively, a little ahead of both his colleagues and the press.
There was one more examination of the remains later that day at St Pancras mortuary, conducted by request of the coroner; the inquest’s Dr Hardwicke called upon the services of Bastendorff’s near neighbour, Dr Davis of 1, Euston Square. He, in turn, called upon his two sons – also doctors – to assist at the mortuary. They were joined by a police surgeon called Dr Jakins who belonged to S Division.
The subsequent report in The Times relayed their findings: ‘The greyness of the hair, the state of the teeth, and other evidence showed that the deceased must have been a woman between 50 and 60 years of age,’ the doctors declared. ‘This entirely disposes of the statements in reference to a young woman who is said to have been long missing, and who was in the habit of sitting as a model for the sculptor who had occupied the house before its present tenant.
‘Having placed the remains in proper position and taken the circumstance of the curvature of the spine into consideration, the medical men came to the conclusion that the deceased must have been 5ft 7 inches or 5ft 8 inches in height.’17
Here was a new medical confidence in the studying of cadavers; no matter how ghastly the details, there was also a curious fascination with the way that the state of a corpse might be read or interpreted to offer deductions or wider theories; a scientific séance, in which the doctors sought answers from dead matter.
‘The flesh of the face was entirely gone,’ the newspaper report continued, ‘but the hair adhered to the scalp in patches. The limbs were dissevered from the trunk, no doubt through the action of the quicklime which had been used; but in the former there was still a considerable portion of the internal viscera still remaining.
‘Both hands and one of the feet were entirely gone, except a few fragments of the bones. That quicklime had been extensively used was beyond a doubt, as the sockets of the eyes were found to contain a large quantity. The body was placed where it was found fully dressed as, although in the first place the textile fabrics of what were her stays had been destroyed, there were th
e whalebones by which it was supported in their proper places.’
The reporter – relaying what he had been told by the doctors – was in macabrely intimate territory, further underlining not merely the horror of the crime but also the queasy incursion into domestic rectitude. ‘The underclothing all fell to pieces as it was touched,’ the reporter wrote of the body, ‘as did the outer clothing, although sufficient remained to show that her dress was of black silk, with a jacket of corresponding material, over which were a black lace shawl and an outside wrapper with hood.’
Then there was the matter of the cause of death. There had been a length of what had been described as ‘washing line’ wrapped around the woman’s throat. ‘As the remains were lifted up from the cellar, not only was the rope discovered to have been twisted twice around the neck, but a brooch of extremely common metal dropped from the shawl.’
There was also a ring; and the ‘remains of a bonnet’. This, according to the report, ‘answers to the fashion of some three or four years since’.18 Dr Davis was of the view that that was roughly how long the corpse had been in the cellar. The police surgeon Dr Jakins disagreed; he thought the remains were very much more recent.
There was more information gathered about the house’s previous tenant. Mr Milnes was ‘a very old inhabitant of the Euston Road, and was well-known as a sculptor’, reported Reynolds News.
‘In the rear of the house, he built a studio backing on to Seymour Mews, now occupied as a workshop by the present tenant Mr Bastendorff, who is a manufacturer of light cabinet work.
‘Between the tenancies of Mr Milnes and Mr Bastendorff, the house was empty for half a year.’19
Was this then the key period for the police to examine? Dr Davis and his sons believed so. ‘It is during that interval,’ the report stated, ‘should the medical theory that the body has been there so long prove correct, that it is believed the murder must have been committed.’20
The Lady in the Cellar Page 4
