The Lady in the Cellar

by Sinclair McKay

  All the while, she told the court, any items of value from anywhere within 4, Euston Square were being pawned; Severin Bastendorff, she was alleging, was in constant and urgent need of money.

  Hannah reported that he finally confessed what it was for (and here was a fresh new scandalous allegation): he had impregnated a young woman ‘and he wanted to pay her off’.

  ‘I don’t remember the girl’s name now,’ Hannah told the court. ‘She was a French girl. I remember seeing her at the house.’2

  After some more questioning about the watch, Hannah was free to step down.

  But the case was about perjury and deceit; and when Hannah Dobbs’ former colleague, Selina Knight, was called, the defence counsels aggressively brought her own closely guarded secrets out before the wider world.

  Knight was there to corroborate the Dobbs story that Severin and Hannah had met in Torrington Square in 1875; but in order to prove her fundamental untrustworthiness, the defence instead fixed her to the spot with questions about her own sexual history. Hideously, having sworn the oath, Knight was compelled to tell the story of the new domestic position she found herself, and how she – like Hannah Dobbs – had had a secret nocturnal visitor at North Audley Street in Mayfair. With extreme reluctance, Knight was forced to confess that these furtive encounters had resulted in pregnancy. Another later romance produced the same result. The babies were adopted by friends. What made these confessions so painful – and indeed they must have been difficult to listen to – was that Knight found herself forced to name the errant father of one of these children; a man called Richard Henry Jones. At one point, she seemed to make a plea to the court not to be pursued further on the matter.

  ‘I have had the misfortune to have had two illegitimate children,’ said Knight. ‘I have tried as far as I could to conceal the fact. I am dependent on my character for getting a place as a servant.’3

  Her ‘fellow servant’, Clara Green, was also called; her story seemed to match that of Selina Knight, suggesting a tutored quality which the defence was swift to pick up on. Central to the doubt was the idea that a man seen not more than three times, and even then not to any proper extent, could be recognised and sworn upon four years later. Green asserted that she ‘should not want to see a man’s face’ more than once for it to become lodged in her memory. But she was repeatedly questioned about how certain she could really be about this.

  She stated that Severin’s beard was very ‘much shorter’ now than it was then. ‘I say he is the man. I say so positively,’ she declared. How then could she account for her unusually acute memory for faces, even though by her own admission she ‘had not taken much notice of him’ when he visited Hannah? Green made mention of his ‘rather peculiar’ face, rendered so by his ‘unusually small eyes’. But like Selina Knight, she had had lengthy meetings beforehand with the team acting for the Central News Agency, which the defence lawyers made certain that the court heard about.

  And so it was that Severin Bastendorff’s friend and erstwhile colleague John Adolphus Dicke found himself in the witness stand being asked not about character or temperament but about his friend’s beard, and the styles in which he had worn it since 1875. ‘I have always known him with a fine beard, what I would call a full beard,’ said Dicke. ‘But I can’t say whether it was before 1875 that he had a long beard. I never put anything of that kind down or take any particular notice – unless there is anything I ought to take particular notice of.

  ‘I know once he had it cut out in the centre,’ he added, ‘what you would call a concave.’

  Also being asked – possibly to his bemusement – about the style of Bastendorff’s whiskers was another of his friends, Albert Kaw Derrell, a ‘wholesale cabinet-maker’ who lived and worked at nearby Argyle Square. He and Severin had, throughout 1875, been business partners. ‘I think I saw him every day during that time, barring Sundays,’ said Derrell. ‘His beard was then very much longer than it is now, it nearly covered his shirt front.’

  After the ‘dissolution’ of their business partnership, Derrell did not see Bastendorff so frequently but when prompted, did recall that in 1877 or 1878, on an occasion when they met, Bastendorff had changed his beard; he had ‘shortened it’ and also by shaving the hair off the chin – leaving the whiskers to run from the upper lip round to the cheeks – he was affecting a facial fashion popularly known as ‘Piccadilly Weepers’. As with Dicke, this seemed to be all that the prosecution lawyers wished to hear from him.

  Returning to court was Anne Carpenter, who had kept the Red Lion Inn in Redhill at which Hannah Dobbs had allegedly spent the weekend with Severin Bastendorff two years before. Even under quite searching questioning, nothing seemed to dim her belief that the defendant and her guest that weekend were the same man; even when it was put to her that he had a brother, and even when it was pointed out that she had, in fact, seen very little of the couple throughout the time that they were under her roof.

  The last several witnesses must have produced some relief in the breast of Severin Bastendorff; for these people were to express scepticism about the claims made, and provide warming portraits of Bastendorff family life. Mrs Ellen Pearce, who had been the landlady of 42 Torrington Square when Hannah Dobbs worked there, was immediately keen to express her bewilderment about one small but crucial detail about the servants’ accounts: they said that Severin had stopped initially as they were cleaning windows. But, the landlady said, ‘a man was engaged to clean the windows’. More than this: ‘Selina Knight distinctly stated when she took the situation that she would not clean windows … it was not the business of the servants to clean the windows, if they did, it was not in my presence.’ The implication was that the window cleaning detail was wholly invented.

  Mrs Pearce also cast puzzled doubt over the idea that a servant such as Hannah Dobbs might be able to let a man into the house surreptitiously at night, or sneak in and out at will in the small hours; the basement door used by the servants was locked after a certain time and the key, she said, was brought upstairs and was kept on the mantelshelf. This was, after all, a lodging house; and she had the security of her tenants to consider.

  This in itself was not conclusive; but it appeared that Mrs Pearce had been one of the few witnesses who had not been tutored by either side before her appearance.

  The really crucial element in this trial – curiously, given the unsolved murder and the allegations of further atrocities – was establishing the truth of that weekend in Redhill. Hannah and the inn landlady swore to it. But now the defence was bringing in several people who recalled seeing Severin in London on the weekend in question. The next lady to take the stand had recently lost her eyesight; but Margaret Hodson was happy to give evidence. She had been a maid servant, and she had been engaged at 4, Euston Square after Hannah had left for the first time. Her memories of the house were in sharp contrast to Dobb’s sinister portrait; and she also distinctly recalled that Severin was present that weekend with his wife.

  ‘He carried on his business there, he had a workshop at the back,’ she said. ‘Mrs Bastendorff was there that Saturday and in the evening, Mrs Bastendorff’s mother came. Mr Bastendorff was there at dinnertime [this meant lunch] on that Saturday … I saw him after dinner.’ Then he might have gone out; but he returned later. ‘The last time I saw him on that Saturday was between 11[p.m.] and 12 when I went to bed. I saw Mr and Mrs Bastendorff and they wished me goodnight. They were in the back parlour, going to bed.’

  There was another reason that particular weekend stuck out in her memory: two of the children, Christina and Peter, had measles, and were poorly. Mrs Hodson told the court that on the next day, the Sunday, ‘Mr Bastendorff was in the house. I don’t remember him going out at all.’ His mother-in-law paid another visit; Mrs Hodson confirmed that Mary’s mother was round at 4, Euston Square very frequently.

  During her time working there, Margaret Hodson never saw any sign of Hannah Dobb’s claim that the servant was being let into th
e house at night to continue her affair with Bastendorff. ‘I never knew of her or anybody being let into the house,’ she said. And she recalled that on the following weekends, Mr Bastendorff resumed his old routine of going shooting in Erith; taking the train down on Saturday evening and returning Monday morning. Occasionally, Mary Bastendorff took the train on Sunday to meet her husband on the Erith Marshes.

  The prosecuting counsels tried to suggest to Mrs Hodson that she was getting her dates muddled; that she went to work for the Bastendorffs a little later on in the year than she thought. Mrs Hodson admitted that with the loss of her sight, it was quite difficult to be sure of much; but then she had spoken with Inspector Hagen earlier on in the Matilda Hacker investigation and the detective had found that her son kept a diary which appeared to confirm her recollection of the dates; and there was also a dated letter to her at Euston Square from a friend at Birchington On Sea.

  And what of the second weekend she was there, when Severin Bastendorff was allegedly in Erith, she was asked? In reply, Mrs Hodson told the court that he ‘brought back a rabbit’; the spoils of his shooting.

  Now Bastendorff’s mother-in-law, Elizabeth Pearce, swore her oath. She was adamant that he was there at Euston Square on the Saturday of that August Bank Holiday weekend, and not at Redhill; though he was not perhaps in the house all day. There was a chance he was absent in the afternoon. But, she told the court, he was certainly there all day on the Sunday, with the children being confined to the house with measles. Mrs Pearce, having been there on the Saturday, returned on the Sunday and was there until the late evening.

  Indeed, she wanted to impress upon the court the regularity of domestic life at 4, Euston Square. ‘I think I can say I have always been there on Saturdays and Sundays since they have been married,’ Mrs Pearce told the court. And that particular weekend was also memorable because several days beforehand, on 2 August, it was ‘the eldest boy’s birthday’.

  In terms of refuting the Redhill allegation, there was still that August Bank Holiday Monday afternoon to be fully accounted for: John Hackford, a ‘gilder’ from Weedington Street, Kentish Town, told the court that he had assembled a fishing party, comprised of Anthony Bastendorff, the defendant, Joseph Bastendorff and (as it turned out most unhelpfully for the defence) young Peter Bastendorff. The men took themselves into the hilly countryside that lay several miles north of Highbury and went fishing in a lake near Wood Green.

  The memory was unhelpful because the defence had been trying to establish that Hannah had in fact spent that weekend with Severin’s younger brother. ‘We did not have any sport at the fishing,’ said Mr Weedington. ‘We only caught one fish.’ This intelligence was of limited interest to the court.

  Rather more cross than all the other witnesses to be standing once again before a judge was John Richards of Northumberland Heath, Erith, who had been the host for Severin Bastendorff’s weekend shoots on the marshes in 1877. From August 11, Mr Richards insisted, the defendant never missed a weekend. On one of them, he was there with a couple of other German friends; on another, Mr Richards recalled, he brought along his eldest daughter Christina; and on another, Christina, his son, Peter, and wife, Mary all came.

  Montagu Williams, for the prosecution, began to question Richards closely about the accuracy of his memory for dates; for at the trial of Hannah Dobbs, had he not stated that Bastendorff had come down to his house a little later in the year? Mr Richards bridled instantly at this.

  ‘I have not been accustomed to be pulled about in a Court of Justice,’ he said. ‘And I don’t like it. But I speak what I know to be correct. The 11th of August is fixed in my mind.’ The reason was that he and his wife had been ‘intending to have a holiday’ but business was too good. In addition, he told the court, he could produce all sorts of bills and receipts – not only money paid to him by Bastendorff but, indeed, payments he had made to the Bastendorff furniture business for various items, which were also from that particular August.

  Last to appear were two gentlemen who between them were suggestive of the strong community networks that were beginning to build in the fast expanding city. Pierre Gersthausen, a tailor then living in Gower Street, recalled that August Bank Holiday, and of how the Saturday evening was spent playing cards with a small party assembled at another friend, Mr Dicke; Severin Bastendorff, he said, joined the party at about 8p.m. and stayed until about midnight. ‘It was a very wet night,’ he said, ‘and it rained very fast.’ He concluded by stating: ‘I have known the defendant four or five years,’ he said, ‘as a respectable, moral, truthful man.’

  These sentiments were echoed by John Hoffman of Gerard Street, Soho, a messenger at the German Embassy. He, too, had joined that card party, since his wife and children had gone to the country. He paid a very similar tribute to Bastendorff: ‘I have known Mr Bastendorff for about three years – he has always borne the character of a respectable, honest, truthful, decent man.’

  Bastendorff might have been confident that these latter testimonies would have established the fact that he had not been in Redhill when Hannah Dobbs had claimed, and also that he was a sociable, popular man, leading a perfectly ordinary – even aspirational – family life. He might also have been impatient to press on with his own libel case in order that he may prove to the world that Hannah Dobbs’ pamphlet was a nightmare of deceit.

  There was an adjournment of a day or so; and it was time for ‘evidence to be adduced for the defence’. The QC Mr J.J. Powell, addressed the court: he wanted the jury not only to consider what ‘had occurred’ at Torrington Square. But he also wanted to contend that by ‘credible witnesses’, he had ‘disproved the statement of Hannah Dobbs’ concerning Bastendorff being with her in that inn in Redhill. There were also ‘discrepancies’ between the evidence she gave in court and her statements in the pamphlet.

  He wanted the jury to think on the accusation that ‘for three weeks, the defendant had been in the habit of letting her into his house privately and after his wife and family had gone to bed, then had intercourse with her while his wife was asleep and finally turned her out before the family were up in the morning’. Such a story, said Powell, was ‘utterly incredible’.

  ‘And if it were false,’ he went on, then what could have ‘influenced her conduct?’ The answer was in her pamphlet, he said: her confession of her inability to say no, and of her own ‘moral cowardice’. Nothing had forced her to accept the ‘blandishments of the gentleman connected with the Central News [Agency], backed by £30’.

  The defendant, Powell continued, was a man ‘against whom no charge had ever before been made, a man respected by many respectable persons … This was the man whom they were asked to convict of perjury, on the evidence of a person who from her own confession seemed to be the most abandoned woman that ever entered a criminal court.’

  More, Severin Bastendorff had been seeking to defend himself against the publisher George Purkess, who had sold so many thousands of copies of the pamphlet. Did the jury think that Purkess cared for one moment about the ‘public interest’? The man ‘who collected into these publications, as into a common sewer, the literary garbage of the police cell, brothel, gaol and gallows and, seasoning it with details of the lives of criminals, poured it forth in streams most dangerous and fatal to the ignorant boys and girls who delighted to wallow in them … and hoped that they themselves some day might be distinguished like Hannah Dobbs by having their portraits exhibited in the shop windows of the Police News’.4

  Montagu Williams rose to answer for the prosecution. It was, he said, equally ‘incredible that any human ingenuity, if the story was based on deceit, could have invented all the details which had come out in Hannah Dobbs’ evidence’. Those details included the comic misunderstandings surrounding Hannah Dobbs and Bastendorff’s first meetings at Torrington Square; the ‘unimpeachable’ evidence given by the Redhill landlady; and the vanishing alibi: for if Severin Bastendorff had been out fishing on the day claimed, then the evidence g
iven said that so too was his brother, Peter. Therefore, Peter could not have been at Redhill with Hannah.

  Worse, the defendant’s lawyers had victimised Selina Knight. She had ‘tried to conceal the fact she had illegitimate children’ but under ferocious questioning, ‘this had come out’ and ‘now she was a ruined woman’.

  There were, he said, many discrepancies over dates from those witnesses who said they had seen Bastendorff across those August weekends. The case, he said, was ‘reduced to two questions’. Did the jury believe, as to Torrington Square, ‘the testimony of the three girls’? If so, he said, defendant was guilty. ‘Did the jury believe the evidence as to Reigate [Redhill]? If so, he was doubly guilty.’

  In his summing up, the judge mused on what seemed to be Bastendorff’s ‘good character’; and he spoke of the ‘sensational’ nature of the pamphlet. But character alone, he told the jury, was not enough in a trial for perjury. Equally, even if the pamphlet had been written by ‘several hands’, as well as those of Hannah Dobbs, and even though she might be said to have an ‘infamous character’, that was no legal reason to presume that she was automatically telling untruths in this particular case. She had already been tried and acquitted for murder. And here the judge seemed to find the awkwardness, for she could not be tried again.

  She had, he said, by her own admission, stayed at 4, Euston Square even after she knew about the body in the cellar; she even went about in the murdered woman’s jewellery. To say the least, this placed her in a most ‘unfavourable light’. None the less, no matter how ‘infamous’, the jury still had to focus on the alleged perjury concerning Bastendorff’s denial of an affair with her. There was the word of the fellow servants at Torrington Square; and the defendant’s friend who confirmed the detail of his beard length at the time.

  The judge had one serious complaint, which to his mind complicated the entire matter: that Peter Bastendorff had ‘not been called by either prosecution or defence’. He ‘could have wished’ that one or the other had done so as it ‘would have possibly thrown some light on the case.’5 This was masterly understatement; the entire relationship between Severin and his younger brother was almost wholly perplexing.