The Lady in the Cellar

by Sinclair McKay

  Certainly, throughout the course of that year, Severin Bastendorff brooded heavily upon Hannah Dobbs and that pamphlet; and the need – as he saw it – to see justice properly done. He was at last released in the darkness of December 1880; Bastendorff was reunited with his suit, his watch, his tie, his shoes.

  There is no record of whether anyone was there to meet him outside the prison gate. But it is possible he made the walk from there through the tight Clerkenwell alleys filled with watchmakers and barometer-makers to Farringdon, and thence north through Coram’s Fields about a mile or so back to Euston Square; a chance to gaze in winter twilight on richly lit shops and busy streets. He might have needed some time to adjust and prepare. He was returning home to meet a new son, a baby just a few months old.

  And remarkably, it was only a matter of several weeks before he was once more presenting his case to the courts, regardless of how such a course of action had resulted the last time. Severin Bastendorff burned to clear his name.

  25

  Disintegration

  Above all else, Severin Bastendorff would appear to have owed it to his wife, Mary; over the course of the last eighteen months, she had been pulled by the wrist through a nightmare of murder and courts and scandal and prison, while pregnant and also attempting to keep an entire household economy running. She would have been piercingly aware of the swift glances that she was receiving while shopping for food; terrifically sensitive to the prospect of friends falling away, frightened by the darkness that seemed to surround her house and family.

  On 26 January 1881, Mary Bastendorff suffered further strain as the Queen’s Bench Division of the courts – together with a special jury, and all under the Lord Chief Justice – met to consider the original libel action against George Purkess for printing and distributing the Hannah Dobbs pamphlet.

  Severin Bastendorff was present, and ready to be called as a witness. Perhaps his own state of mind does not require very much imagination to conjure.

  He now had new defence counsels; and it was Mr Edward Clarke who opened the case. He explained to the court the circumstances of the discovery of the corpse; of Hannah Dobbs’ trial for murder and her acquittal; and then the publication of the pamphlet. ‘The plaintiff then brought his action for libel,’ Clarke told the court, ‘denying one of her statements imputing to him an intimacy with her.’ This led to an indictment for perjury and Bastendorff’s year in prison ‘which he had suffered’.

  Clarke told this new special jury that this libel case ‘raised very grave and serious issues,’ since the libel imputed to his client ‘the guilt not merely of murder but of several murders’.

  Just as the counsel began to go into further detail, he was halted by an interjection from the Chief Justice Lord Coleridge who said – with rather extraordinary and ‘expressive’ disdain – ‘must this case go on?’

  It took the prosecuting counsel Montagu Williams to tell him that yes, ‘at present’ he ‘thought it must’.

  ‘Then the mischief be done,’ said Lord Coleridge. ‘No doubt the parties have a right to take up the time of the Court.’1

  There was no sense here at all of a judge who might have considered that Bastendorff had been atrociously wronged.

  And the moment must have been vertiginous for Bastendorff. Yet he was clearly ferociously determined. ‘Having heard the statements read from the pamphlet,’ ran one report, ‘he said there was no truth in the charges that it contained and the consequence of their publication had been to cause him serious injury.’ Indeed, Bastendorff stated: ‘I have suffered in my business and in my reputation.’2 He did not mention prison; perhaps he had been counselled against doing so.

  This time, judgement was swift – and surprising. ‘A conference took place between counsel in the case,’ ran the report, ‘which ended in a settlement’. It was agreed; and in Severin Bastendorff’s favour.

  The verdict was ‘for the plaintiff’. There was a ‘withdrawal of the charges against the plaintiff’. And he was awarded £500 (roughly equivalent to £65,000 today, though such a sum would have gone a very great deal further; it was a fortune).

  The prosecuting counsel Montagu Williams said that ‘he agreed on the part of the defendant to that verdict’. That defendant, publisher George Purkess, ‘also desired to express his regret that he should have published the statements, and to intimate that he withdrew them’.

  Lord Coleridge, who might simply have been relieved to have been spared a lengthy case for which he had little interest, said that he ‘rejoiced at the settlement of such a case, which would spare a great deal of public time that would otherwise have been taken up in the inquiry’.

  There was no apology for the prison sentence; no hint that compensation for that judicial wrong might be forthcoming.

  Severin Bastendorff was free to return to Euston Square and – somehow – resume his business interests and more importantly reintroduce himself to his young family. His victory was publicised in newspapers across the country.

  But there was no sense that that would have been a help to him. The ‘Euston Square Mystery’ was still being regularly referred to in news reports as a case seemingly beyond solution. The odour and the squalor clung to his name.

  The money awarded would have helped in the short term; his legal costs were also covered by the judgement, so the aim would have been to begin restoring the fortunes of his furniture business. But even in the initial relief of the win, something was broken within Bastendorff.

  By this stage, Hannah Dobbs had relinquished her desire to be widely known; even if this pursuit had been less to do with the rejoicing in celebrity and more to do with a grim fight for survival and a terror of once more being accused of murder, it was clear from the hideous damage wrought by the pamphlet that discretion would now be the wiser course. There were suggestions that she and Peter Bastendorff were still romantically linked, and even that they were common-law husband and wife, in his Somers Town lodgings. But now they were very careful to avoid the press. Peter Bastendorff continued with his own furniture trade in the area. Indeed, in the years to come, this business would see some expansion.

  At what point in the coming days and weeks and months did Severin Bastendorff begin exhibiting signs of frightening instability? And what triggered it? The 1881 census provided a list of the inhabitants of 4, Euston Square that summer. Severin was there, ‘head’ of the household, aged 34, with his occupation described as ‘cabinet maker, employing 10 men and one boy’. There was wife Mary, aged 36. The children were listed: Christina, aged 8; Peter, aged 6; Severin, aged 4 (rather quaintly, the youngsters had, as their occupations, the term ‘scholar’). The smallest children were Rosa, aged 3, and Richard, just one.

  Interestingly, there were two lodgers: one, 26-year-old William Pierce, was also listed as a ‘cabinet maker’ and might have been working for Bastendorff. But there was also a 66-year-old widow called Elizabeth Powell. Had she heard of the house’s bad name? Or were her circumstances such that she could not allow herself to be bothered?3

  Clearly, with ten employees, Severin Bastendorff’s business was thriving against the many bitter odds against it. His brothers, Joseph and Anton, appeared to be thriving too; the style for Chinese lacquer-work cabinets was now at a peak of fashion.

  But there was a point at which Severin Bastendorff broke down; a day some time in the early 1880s, when he suddenly and blankly walked out of 4, Euston Square. What is known is that he made his way to the pleasant south London suburb of Camberwell. It had always been popular with the German community, and so it is possible that he had either friends or acquaintances there. But his ultimate destination was rather more desperate. By this stage, his behaviour was erratic enough to be noticed by the police. As would become clearer later, a large part of this involved Bastendorff having aural hallucinations and listening to voices that he said conveyed commands. He was taken off the street and conveyed to the Camberwell workhouse.

  This institution, just off the Pe
ckham Road, had been expanded in recent years, and it did not merely cater for the crisis-hit poor, or the elderly.

  There was also a separate, special ward for what were termed ‘lunatics’.

  Some would have shuddered at the idea; it might have sounded like a recreation of the eighteenth-century ‘Bedlam’. But the Camberwell architects had given some thought to a dedicated space that was – to some psychologically vulnerable inmates – a safe haven of solid brick and tall bright windows.

  The ceilings were fourteen feet high, so there was no sense of claustrophobia. The floors were kept scrupulously clean, and there was a carpet in the middle of the ward. The lavatorial facilities were deemed by inspectors to be fine, and there were frequent opportunities for decent bathing too. The beds, quite close to one another, had mattresses of horse-hair but were judged to be reasonably comfortable.

  And on top of this, at one end of the ward could be found skittles and games of backgammon; efforts to keep the inmates amused and happy. Like all such institutions of the time, the quality of the staff would have been variable; but for some with severe mental health problems, this special ward of the Camberwell workhouse might just have afforded valuable respite from the unfeeling clamour of the densely populated streets.

  At some early stage, the authorities must have established who exactly he was; but the news of her husband’s removal to such a place will have been a further horrific blow to Mary Bastendorff. Apart from anything else, she was now becoming increasingly reliant upon the kindness of Bastendorff’s brothers; her own income, deriving from lodgers’ rents, was minimal. Added to this, it is possible that Mary resented the close meshing of the family; and she may have resented it a great deal more when Anton Bastendorff and his wife, Elizabeth, moved into number 4, Euston Square.

  In general terms, a workhouse was not a prison; the inmates were free to leave if they chose. The cruelty lay in whether or not they could afford to. But those who dwelled in the ‘lunatic ward’ were under much closer watch than the other workhouse inmates; granted, the attendants were not medically trained, but the vestrymen of the parish who were responsible for running the institution would have ensured that only the most temperamentally suitable people were selected for the job.

  Severin Bastendorff spent some time here; the nature of his illness – listening to voices, whispering to himself – might have been growing more intense. Possibly he showed no sign of wishing to leave the ward. But gradually, after some weeks, he regained some of his old health. Eventually, someone in authority deemed him recovered enough to be discharged. But his marriage by this stage was essentially over.

  It is difficult to know when Mary Bastendorff first tried to have her husband committed to the rather larger lunatic asylum at the fringes of north London in Friern Barnet. But it was clear that she no longer felt safe around him.

  To have taken such a grave step, Mary Bastendorff would have involved the police; but it also involved a counter-signature on the requisite forms from one of his brothers.

  So it was that the dark tragedy of Matilda Hacker’s murder continued to reverberate throughout 4, Euston Square. Attendants from the lunatic asylum presented themselves at the house; Severin Bastendorff found himself being removed from the home that he had worked so hard for.

  And from here he was escorted – closely guarded – to the nearby King’s Cross station. A local train pushing northwards; within 15 minutes, Bastendorff’s destination would be seen: a vast and elegant construction on top of a green hill. It had its own special railway sidings. He was being taken to the Colney Hatch asylum. It is possible that he found the first sight of it terrifying. Many Londoners did.

  By the mid-1880s (while the records for his later spell in the asylum are complete, those for the first period there are no longer extant), the place had begun to acquire a seriously forbidding reputation. It had not begun that way. Indeed, Colney Hatch was intended as the physical expression of a renaissance in the care of the mentally vulnerable. It really was intended to offer both asylum and sanctuary.

  The architecture was Italianate in flavour; there was a grand central tower with a dome. Stretching off from this were immensely long wards and dormitories, two and three storeys tall, rendered in brick. And around these buildings lay expansive gardens and fields. Colney Hatch, built and opened in the 1850s, had been conceived out of compassion; previously, those suffering from mental health problems were consigned to those special wards in workhouses, or if better-off, to the unregulated care of ‘private madhouses’. Colney Hatch and its sister institution in Hanwell, to the west of the city, was the public and civic declaration that treatment and rehabilitation were possible.

  Previously, mental illness had been dealt with in a manner that was almost medieval: close confinement, darkness, ignorance. Colney Hatch, by contrast, was staffed by ‘physicians’ and nursing staff who had an interest both in caring for and curing those who had once been regarded as incurable. To begin with, there were problems: the use of restraints, regarded by the supervising authorities as barbaric; sanitation and heating were primitive; and there was no comfort for distressed souls in the forbidding furnishings and décor.

  The restraints were soon abandoned; and one of the institution’s early chief movers, Dr Tyerman, brought a distinctive Victorian energy to the role. At Colney Hatch, the patients would not be idle but instead set – if they chose – to invigorating work. This, he insisted, was the opposite of exploitative.

  ‘The great desideratum is to promote … uninterrupted, interesting, varying employment, which strongly claims the attention, and leaves the morbid idea no time to develop itself,’ he wrote. ‘A glance at the list of trades and occupations of those admitted … as of gas-fitters, plasterers, painters and grainers, engineers, carpenters – the resources of this immense Establishment afford opportunities … for developing latent and nascent intelligence.’4

  He added that many inmates, who had previously worked in ‘sedentary’ occupations, greatly appreciated the chance to take up outdoors work. The fields around Colney Hatch were seeded with crops, which were harvested; the institution was self-sufficient in vegetables and corn.

  There was also – as the institution evolved – a determination not to completely segregate male and female patients. There were chances to mix at mealtimes. There was cricket. Added to this, it was felt to be important that the inmates of Colney Hatch were not shut away completely from the wider world; both for their benefit, but also to ensure that the local villagers in Southgate, Barnet and Finchley did not regard the institution with fear. In the summer, there were fairs in the grounds: inmates and local people encouraged to mingle. There were concerts too, and dances. Again, these were occasions for inmates and visitors to meet; an opportunity on both sides to eradicate misconceptions and to dissipate dread on both sides.

  In addition, given that the great sprawl of London built-up suburbia had not yet quite reached these hills, it was possible to take the patients out for country walks at the weekend, around Pym Brook and Bounds Green.

  Yet for all of the idealism, by the 1880s, the institution had also developed, for many Londoners, an aspect of dread. Possibly one reason was that its prominent position on top of that hill, visible from miles around, was to many a constant reminder of the fragility of mental health; equally, for patients, the well-meant architecture proved oppressive in very particular ways.

  There were shadowy corridors that stretched to a third of a mile; even in the brightest summer, they were dark. Patients in large dormitories were sometimes terrified of the people around them. The building was filled with echoes, in the halls, on the stairs; the noises of involuntary aggression or indeed fear would be amplified. The only element of effective soundproofing would be found in the cells that had been specially padded for emergency cases; a recent innovation.

  There were never enough trained staff to give the many patients the individual care they needed. And of course, for many patients, there would have
been the darkest fear: that this was now to be their permanent home. No matter how pleasing the grounds, no matter how engaged and sensitive the attendants, this was still an institution that was guarded, with a high wall. All individual agency was removed; whereas in prison, one might count out the days of one’s sentence, in Colney Hatch, that sentence might be indefinite, and one might never understand why.

  Was there the sense among the doctors and attendants and others who cared for Severin Bastendorff that this instability might have been an element in the fate of Matilda Hacker?

  At one point, Bastendorff contrived to make an escape. This would not have been immensely difficult; there were plenty of opportunities when taking exercise to scale the wall and leave the grounds. Bastendorff would have faced a five mile walk back across the increasingly built-up hills of Hornsey and Haringey towards Euston Square; in other words, a journey of about an hour-and-a-half. For a man blazing with a sense of multiple injustices having been done to him – plus also the bewilderment of having fallen so far from the heights of successful craftsman to inmate of Colney Hatch – such a walk must have passed as in a dream.

  Yet his attendants were not far behind. They caught up with him (it would not have been difficult for them to reason where he was going) and persuaded back to his new home. And indeed, there must have been an essential pacifism about Bastendorff’s manner around his carers. Because a few months after that incident, he was deemed to have made sufficient progress to be discharged altogether from Colney Hatch; he was free to return home.

  It might be that Bastendorff was once more lucid, and showing a keen interest in the business that he had laboured over the years to build up.

  One of the elements that made Colney Hatch asylum relatively progressive in its outlook was its policy of not incarcerating patients for any longer than was deemed necessary for their own good; a man or woman might, in some cases, be discharged after only a few days. Indeed, there were those who returned to the hospital years later not for re-admittance, but simply to convey their grateful thanks to the staff who had worked so hard to heal them.