There Must Be Evil

by Bernard Taylor

  As we have seen, Mary Ann and William Finley had separated soon after their marriage. The break, however, didn’t mark the end of their relationship. Following his spell in prison for deserting his children, Finley didn’t see his wife and stepdaughter for some time, but eventually he and Mary Ann got in contact again and made up. Two years following their separation they were back together. The reunion didn’t last. Only six weeks later, following quarrels and disagreements, he was gone again.

  Mary Ann Finley.

  Later, after Elizabeth had married and moved out with her husband, Mrs Finley left Manchester also, going alone to Rochdale. And there, some three years later, she got in touch with her wandering husband once more and they decided to make yet another new start together. This proved to be no more successful than the previous attempts, and in April 1880 they separated for the third and last time. Following William’s final departure, Mrs Finley moved outside the town to Castleton where she rented a small house, at the same time supporting herself as a cotton weaver at a nearby mill. It was there, on Wednesday 3 February, that she received an unexpected visit from her daughter.

  Arriving in Castleton, Mrs Berry made her way at once to Back Albion Street, the row of humble terrace houses where her mother had made her home. As it happened, Mrs Finley had that morning left to go to Manchester to visit relatives, so when her daughter came knocking on the door of number 6 she got no answer. Knowing that her mother must return before long, Mrs Berry knocked on the door of a neighbour at number 11. The door was opened by Mrs Sarah Wolfenden, to whom Mrs Berry introduced herself, saying that she was Mrs Finley’s daughter Lizzie, and that she had come to call on her mother but had found her not at home. Mrs Wolfenden, impressed by her caller’s appearance and manner – later describing her as ‘quite a lady’ – invited her to come in and have some tea.

  Mrs Berry gladly accepted the invitation, and over their teacups she told her hostess that she was an infirmary nurse, and had just obtained a new situation in that capacity at the Birmingham Union Workhouse. She had been to Birmingham that morning, she said, to take up her new appointment, but on arriving there had found that the nurse whose place she was to take would not be vacating her position until a week later, the result being that she, Mrs Berry, would not be required to start in the position until the nurse alluded to had gone away. It was for this reason, she said, that she had decided to visit her mother. All lies, of course, and Mrs Wolfenden might have wondered why it was necessary for Mrs Berry to travel all the way to Birmingham to discover that she couldn’t start work there for another week. Britain’s postal service was second to none at that time, and Mrs Wolfenden might have questioned the fact that the guardians of the Birmingham workhouse did not think to save her a journey by writing and informing her of the changed situation.

  Be that as it may, Mrs Berry continued to impress her kind hostess, speaking ‘in good style’ and giving the impression that she was a lady who ‘knew Latin and foreign languages’. At one point in their discourse Mrs Berry spoke of wanting to find a pharmaceutical chemist, upon which Mrs Wolfenden told her that there was none in Castleton, but that she would find one in Rochdale, and gave her the name of the street on which he could be found.

  As their conversation moved on, Mrs Berry said something that Mrs Wolfenden would not easily forget. The night before, she said, she had had a remarkable dream, and that whenever she had had such a dream in the past a member of her family had died. Mrs Wolfenden would later have good cause to remember Mrs Berry’s words.

  At some point in the evening Mrs Berry must have gone back to number 6 to see whether her mother had returned, for shortly after nine o’clock the two of them were reunited.

  There is no doubt that Mrs Finley was pleased to see her daughter. Matters between them had not always been as Mrs Finley would have liked, and there had been a prolonged period when Elizabeth would have nothing to do with her mother. Mrs Berry would later claim that they had fallen out over ‘a religious matter’, but whatever the reason for the rift, it was well known among Mrs Finley’s relatives and friends that there was an estrangement between the pair, and among her Castleton neighbours Mrs Finley had made no secret of the fact that Lizzie had not ‘owned’ her for some considerable time. It was known also that Elizabeth had declined to help her mother financially, even when she knew her to be in very poor circumstances.

  Happily for Mrs Finley, however, the estrangement between them appeared to have been mended, for in December had come the invitation from the Sandersons to spend Christmas at Miles Platting along with Elizabeth and granddaughter Edith. She had gladly accepted the invitation and on returning to Castleton two or three days afterwards had happily told a neighbour that she had seen her daughter and ‘made it all right with her at last’.

  Back Albion Street. The modest street in Castleton, where Mary Ann Finley was renting a house when Elizabeth visited her in February 1886. Photograph: Jack Ireland, c. 1986.

  It was shortly after her return from Miles Platting that Mrs Finley began to suffer bleeding from the nose. She recovered from it, however, and was in good health when her daughter made her surprise visit on 3 February. Certainly any observer would have noted that, contrary to what Elizabeth had told Mr Shaw at the Chesterfield workhouse, her mother was not in the grave state of health that she had reported to him. She had given him to understand that her mother was at death’s door, but this was clearly far from the case.

  This was not to be the last that Mr Shaw heard from his briefly-employed nurse. On 5 February, three days after her hurried departure, he received a letter from her telling him that she could not return to her post as her mother was ‘sinking fast’. Included with her letter was a formal letter of resignation.

  Although Mrs Berry’s statement that her mother was ‘sinking fast’ could not have been further from the truth, her words turned out to be sadly ominous. All too soon Mrs Finley’s health would be giving cause for grave concern.

  None of Mrs Finley’s neighbours had met Mrs Berry before that February, for she had never before visited Back Albion Street. However, they knew that she was a qualified nurse, so on learning of her arrival they would have been glad to know that their neighbour would be in the best possible hands. To their shock and sadness, however, they saw Mrs Finley’s health begin to fail in the swiftest and most alarming way. Over the space of a few days those friends and neighbours watched as her condition deteriorated. Come the Saturday morning, she was dead.

  The day after her mother’s death, Elizabeth wasted no time in making arrangements for the funeral, and Mrs Finley was buried a week later at the Moston Catholic Cemetery, after which Elizabeth set about selling her mother’s possessions. The dead woman’s clothes were the first things to go, followed by her other effects. Elizabeth also set about collecting the payments on the various insurance policies that came due on her mother’s death.

  When the small rooms of 6 Back Albion Street had been stripped of anything of value and the keys returned to the landlord, Elizabeth Berry must have felt some sense of relief. Another chapter was closed; it was over, and she could look again to the future.

  If these were her thoughts, however, then she was wrong. It was not over. Those neighbours who had come to call on the ailing Mrs Finley had remained disturbed by the dramatic happening, and whispered among themselves. And though they might also have thought that the unhappy business was over and done with, they too were to be mistaken. Mrs Finley was dead, her remains lying in a cheap coffin in the cemetery, but they were not to lie undisturbed for long. In a year there would be gravediggers hacking at the earth to bring her coffin back up into the light. Much then would be revealed, and some of the dark questions would be answered.

  *

  By coincidence, some years later one of the ward attendants at the Burton-upon-Trent Workhouse would be one Dorothea Waddingham. A petty criminal with convictions for theft and fraud, she would later run a small nursing home in Nottingham, and, notwithstanding
her lack of formal nurse’s training, would nevertheless style herself ‘Nurse’ Waddingham. In 1936 she was hanged for poisoning one of the paying guests at the home. Waddingham was one of the last women in Britain to suffer the death penalty.

  8

  The Oldham Union Workhouse

  After leaving her late mother’s house in Back Albion Street, Elizabeth Berry went to lodge in nearby Whitworth Road. While staying there she saw advertised in the local papers the vacant post of nurse at the Rochdale Union Workhouse, and she wrote applying for the position, stating in her letter of application that she had considerable experience in a nursing capacity, adding, ‘If given the situation it is my earnest desire, under the Divine blessing, to do my duty truly and well.’ Her application, however, proved unsuccessful.

  Some weeks passed, and then in May, still from her lodgings, she answered an advertisement for a situation in Oxfordshire at the workhouse at Henley-on-Thames, the small, pleasant town known for its annual rowing festival. The position, offering a complete change of scene, far away from the grim, grey mills of the north, promised much, and she was delighted to learn that her application had succeeded.

  Sadly, however, her happiness was soon to be dashed, for she arrived at the workhouse and departed on the very same day. With echoes of earlier incidents, she somehow managed to outrage her would-be employer almost immediately upon her arrival. We cannot know exactly what passed, but the Chronicle later reported: ‘Her conduct there was so insolent to the Master of the workhouse…that she was told to pack up and be off, not having been on the premises more than an hour.’ It has to be surmised that this information came from the Master himself, as it is inconceivable that Mrs Berry would have chosen to let it be known.

  So she remained out of work, but not for much longer. The next month, June, she saw advertised a nursing position at the Union Workhouse in Oldham. The post, that of senior resident nurse in the female wing of the infirmary, offered an annual salary of £25, plus free board and lodging. She wasted no time in making her application and, following submission of references from the Burton-upon-Trent workhouse, she was invited for an interview on 7 July. It was to be a seminal event in her life.

  One of six candidates for the post, she was interviewed by the governing body of the workhouse and, most notably, by Dr Thomas Patterson, a thirty-six-year-old Irish bachelor who had been the workhouse’s medical officer for eleven years. With the doctor having a prominent voice in the choice for the post, Mrs Berry was selected. She would later claim that when offered the post she initially declined it – we are given no reason – and was only persuaded to accept it by Dr Patterson, who followed her out of the boardroom and asked her to reconsider. He very much wished her to take up the appointment, she said, and assured her that if she accepted it he would see that she had ‘efficient help and every comfort’. So, she said, ‘I consented to accept the office, and went again into the Board room and was re-elected.’

  Elizabeth Berry. A newspaper illustration taken from a photograph, c. 1886.

  Had she been able to see into her future she would have learned that in meeting the good doctor that day she was meeting her nemesis. Later she would make the most dynamic and infamous charges against him. Guilty of them or not, the doctor was to have the most profound effect on her life and prove a vital instrument in her dark fate.

  If the Board of Guardians imagined that after Dr Patterson’s intervention all would be well with Mrs Berry’s appointment, they were swiftly disabused of their expectations. The capricious element in her nature would soon again come to the fore.

  It was agreed that she would begin her duties a week later on Wednesday 14 July, but when that day came she failed to turn up to begin her duties. Then, at 8.15 that evening, the workhouse master, Mr William Lawson, received a telegram. Addressed to ‘Workhouse Master’, it stated:

  Mrs Berry cannot come tonight daughter met with a serious accident this afternoon will be there in the morning.

  So Mr Lawson waited. But come next morning there was still no sign of her, and no further word came all day. And then, about 7.45 the next morning, Friday, Mr Lawson received a letter. Giving the sender’s address as ‘99 Wilmott Street, Stretford Road, Manchester’, with a message even briefer than that of the telegram, it said:

  Mrs Berry can’t undertake the duties of nurse to your hospital owing to her daughter’s illness.

  [signed] E. Berry

  This very surprising news placed Mr Lawson in a most awkward position, and he decided that he must at once acquaint Mr Mellor, the Clerk to the Guardians, with the state of affairs, and with this in mind he set off for Mellor’s office. On the way, however, as he reached the corner of King Street and Manchester Street, whom should he meet but Mrs Berry herself. Greatly surprised, he asked her what she was doing in Oldham, and she replied that she was of course on her way to the workhouse to begin her duties. Not a little puzzled, he told her that he had received a telegram and then a letter from her saying that she would not accept the situation, and he was now on his way to Mr Mellor’s office to see what he must do to get someone to fill the place.

  To his further surprise, she said, ‘What do you mean? I never sent any letter. Let me look at it.’

  He handed her both the letter and the telegram. Looking first at the letter, she said, ‘I know nothing at all about it,’ to which Mr Lawson remarked, ‘It’s strange – there’s your name and all there.’ She did, however, confirm that she had sent the telegram, and told him that her child had indeed fallen downstairs at a hotel in Scarborough where they were staying, and sustained concussion. She had called out a doctor to her, she said. She herself, she added, had been travelling all night, reaching York at two o’clock that morning. There, after sleeping the rest of the night in the waiting room, she had caught the first available train to Oldham, where she had then gone straight to Mr Mellor’s office.

  After this strange meeting, the two together, Nurse Berry and a very bewildered Mr Lawson, made their way to the Oldham workhouse, where, at 10.15, Mrs Berry commenced her duties.

  Mr Lawson had no further discussions with her about the puzzling matter, but over the coming months he would come to know her distinctive handwriting very well, and he would be in no doubt whatever that the letter had been written by her – his conviction firmly endorsed by other persons in the workhouse. This being so, it indicates that Mrs Berry did indeed have second and third thoughts about accepting the position, and then, for some reason, had changed her mind again. As for her tale of Edith Annie having fallen downstairs while staying in Scarborough, there was no truth in it. Ann Sanderson would later state that the child had never fallen downstairs, had never been to Scarborough, and at the time cited was safe in Miles Platting.

  Altogether it was a most astonishing incident, and one wonders how Mrs Berry could have thought for one moment that her extraordinary story would be accepted. After freely admitting sending the telegram, she had denied having written the letter. But it is surely not within the bounds of possibility that the letter could have come from some other party. Furthermore, although she said that her daughter had suffered an accident at a hotel in Scarborough, the telegram had not come from that north Yorkshire town, nor from anywhere near it. Like the letter that followed, it had been sent from Hulme, an inner city ward of Manchester, only about twelve miles from the Oldham workhouse. This is borne out by the telegram itself, on which was clearly written: ‘Handed in at the Manchester York St office at 7.47 p.m.’

  Another question arises concerning the very odd business, and the strange scenario that it suggests – a question that Mr Lawson might have been tempted to put to his new nurse – and that is with regard to her claim that her daughter had fallen downstairs. What then did she, Mrs Berry, do about the child afterwards? She claimed that Edith’s accident was ‘serious’, that she had been concussed, and that a doctor had been called out to her. And yet here was the child’s mother in Oldham – with no sign of the child. If Edith had be
en injured in Scarborough, then what had become of her? Where was she? Had Mrs Berry simply abandoned her, leaving her at the Scarborough hotel? As far as is known, there is no record of such a question being posed.

  As was later established, there was no Scarborough hotel, there was no holiday with daughter Edith, there was no serious accident. In all likelihood, during the intervening week between her interview for the post, and the day of her proposed commencement in it, Mrs Berry was all the time staying close by in Hulme, near Manchester’s city centre, there chopping and changing in her mind as to whether or not she should commit herself to her new engagement at the workhouse.

  As for the bewildered Mr Lawson that morning, one thing that must have become disappointingly clear to him from the bizarre business was that his newly engaged nurse was the most unconscionable, unsubtle and outrageous liar. And such a realization could not have boded well for the future.

  The Lancashire town of Oldham, where Elizabeth Berry was to spend her final period of employment, was one of the most important centres of the textiles industry until the decline of the cotton trade in the last century. The workhouse, where she came to live and work in that summer of 1886, was situated on the Rochdale Road (now known also as the A671), leading north to Rochdale and Burnley. As we have seen, the shocking report from the Poor Law Board officer of 1866 (see pp. 32–4) was made on this very institution, though in the twenty years since Mr Cane had made his investigation the place had seen many changes.

  Photographs of the building show a wide-fronted, red-brick building with numerous additions, and it was much like this in its layout and appearance when Elizabeth Berry began work there. The main building’s construction had been completed in 1851, after which time were added wards for the sick, for ‘male and female imbeciles’, accommodation ‘for lunatics’, a school to hold 350 children, plus a chapel, dormitories, wash-houses and dining hall and, later, workshops, kitchens and a boiler house. In the degree of its self-sufficiency it appears an extraordinary place – it not only had its own gardens, wherein inmate gardeners worked to provide vegetables for the kitchens, but boasted also what was rather generously called a farm – a plot housing pigs, chickens, etc.