There Must Be Evil

by Bernard Taylor

  At this stage the court was adjourned for the day.

  Soon after the trial was resumed at 10.50 next morning Alice Alcroft, kitchen worker and former servant to Elizabeth Berry, was called into the witness box.

  She told the court that just after nine o’clock on the morning of 1 January she had seen Edith and Beatrice coming downstairs. ‘I was coming out of the kitchen for some coal for the room,’ she said. ‘They came across the corridor, and I said to them, “I’ll warm you for being late for breakfast,” and they laughed and said, “And we’ll warm you when we get out.”’ She served them their breakfast in the sitting room, she said, and about ten minutes to ten went in again – ‘but I’m not sure of the time’ – having been called by Mrs Berry to get a bucket and wipe up some vomit from the carpet. At that time Edith was lying on the sofa.

  At this point in the proceedings there came an interruption as a telegram was brought in and handed to Mr Mellor, who read it and passed it to Mr Cottingham. It appeared that at the Oldham workhouse there had occurred an outbreak of scarlet fever, made more critical as the medical officer and many of the nursing staff were absent from the place. ‘My Lord,’ said Mr Cottingham to the judge, ‘we have just received a telegram. Some of the witnesses from the workhouse are wanted at home.’ After reading the telegram, the judge said that he couldn’t allow the request to be granted. ‘We’ll send the witnesses back as soon as we can,’ he said, ‘and hope they’re not required to return.’

  Leaving the scarlet fever sufferers at the workhouse to cope as best they could, it was back to the business of the law, and Mr M’Connell asked Alcroft what Edith and Beatrice had eaten for their supper on the Friday evening. She said they had eaten fish for tea, and for supper cold beef and apple pie. They didn’t eat the pie, she said, and she and other inmates had eaten it and the rest of the leftovers. No one had been in the least ill afterwards.

  Her place was taken in the witness box by Sarah Anderson of the female imbecile ward, who said that on the Saturday afternoon Beatrice Hall had come for her to see Mrs Berry’s daughter. She found the child lying on the sofa in Mrs Berry’s sitting room, and some vomit, streaked with blood, in a chamber pot. She saw the child again on Sunday, and on Monday about eleven in the morning, at which time she noticed blisters on the girl’s mouth. ‘I asked Mrs Berry what was the cause,’ she said, ‘and she said she had given her a lemon and some sugar.’

  Anderson’s place was taken by Lydia Evett, who testified to seeing the deceased in the prisoner’s bedroom at about half past five on the Sunday. ‘She looked very ill,’ she said. ‘She was vomiting every few minutes, and appeared to be in great pain about the stomach and bowels. She was continually straining, at which times she was lifted out of bed.’ Asked about the marks on the child’s mouth, she said, ‘Shortly after I went into the room Mrs Berry said to me, “See what that orange has done to Edith’s mouth,” and it was then I noticed that the skin about Edith’s lips was red and inflamed.’

  After Evett came workhouse inmate Mary Jane Knight who told the court that she saw Edith Annie in Mrs Berry’s bedroom on the Sunday afternoon. At that time, she said, the girl was not vomiting, and she saw no marks about her mouth. She saw her again on Monday afternoon about half-past three, and then noticed that Edith’s lips were blistered. On the Monday, she said, Beatrice Hall came down to the kitchen for an orange. She then added that at the magistrates’ hearing she had testified that Hall had come for the orange on the Sunday. But she had been incorrect; it was on the Monday when Hall came down to the kitchen for it.

  Mrs Knight was followed by inmate Ann Partland, who said that about half past five on Sunday 2 January, she was sent for by Mrs Berry to empty a chamber pot of vomit.

  This concluded the evidence of the workhouse witnesses, and they were given permission to return to Oldham. When this was done, photographer William Thorpe was called. He told the court that on Friday 7 January, instructed by the Chief Constable, he had taken photographs of the body of the dead child. Copies of the photographs were here passed to the judge and jury.

  Detective Inspector Charles Purser, called next, said that on 6 January he had accompanied the Chief Constable when he interviewed the prisoner in her sitting room. Asked if he had taken notes, he said that he had not, ‘but the Chief Constable did so’.

  It was anticipated that the Chief Constable himself would be called next, but it was announced that he was unable to attend due to having met with an accident five weeks earlier. This was confirmed by Dr Patterson, who said that Mr Hodgkinson was suffering from an injury to the spine, ‘caused by a fall during the late frost’, and was not in a fit state to travel to Liverpool. The judge, not pleased to hear this, said that if chief constables would instruct their officers to take notes of everything a prisoner said, and ensure that the notes were brought into court, it would save hours of cross-examination.

  The next witness was James Pickford, of the Rational Sick and Burial Society who said that on 6 January he had paid Mrs Berry £10, which was the payment due on the death of her child, Edith Berry.

  He was followed by Henry Jackson, agent for the Prudential Assurance Company in Rochdale, who offered some most interesting information. He told the court that the prisoner had come to his house in April the previous year, 1886, ‘to take out an insurance’. ‘She proposed to insure her own life and that of her daughter, Edith Annie, for £100,’ he said. ‘The insurance was to be mutual. I said I thought it would be a good thing, and that the premiums would be a little over £4.’ Asked to explain the term ‘mutual’, he said it meant that two persons were insured on one policy, and at the death of either of them the survivor would get the premium. He went on to say that Mrs Berry told him that the insurance was for the benefit of her daughter, as she herself anticipated getting married shortly to a gentleman of means in Derby with whom she was keeping company. He was fifty-five years of age and was a builder and contractor. She said also that she would not be staying long in England, as she planned to go to Australia. He said that Mrs Berry was medically examined at Rochdale, as was her daughter Edith Annie at Miles Platting. ‘I forwarded her application to the chief office,’ he said, ‘but the directors declined it on account of the tender age of the daughter.’ However, he added, Mrs Berry had had no means of ascertaining whether her application had been accepted or declined as he did not have any correspondence with her. The policy, therefore, had never gone into effect, and Mrs Berry had never paid any premiums on it.

  This completed Mr Jackson’s testimony, and with his stepping down the court was adjourned for luncheon.

  Dwelling briefly on the subject of Mr Jackson’s evidence, his statement that the Prudential had declined Mrs Berry’s application prompts a question. Both she and Edith had been medically examined, and what Mrs Berry was asking for was quite within the law, so why, one might ask, was the application refused on account ‘of the tender age of the daughter’. To this writer’s mind, it was refused because the company became suspicious.

  Over preceding decades there had been a great number of cases of infanticide and child murder, and very frequently the motive for the crimes was the small insurance pay-outs – known as ‘burial money’ – that could be realized. There were even a few cases where all the offspring in a family were murdered for what could be gained from life insurance policies.

  In an attempt to counteract this grim situation, laws were passed in the mid-1870s to protect vulnerable children, making life insurance pay-outs less tempting for the more penurious, unscrupulous and murderous. For one thing, the new laws decreed that no child below the age of five could be insured for more than £5. Up to the age of ten the maximum sum for a child’s insurance was £10. Over the age of ten there was no limit; a child or adult could be insured for any amount.

  Mrs Berry, we are told, went to the Prudential applying for a life insurance policy worth £100, which, she told Mr Jackson, was ‘for the benefit of her daughter’. This, though, was clearly not quite th
e truth, for the application was, as we have seen, for a mutual policy, whereby either Mrs Berry or Edith would collect in the event of the other’s death. Had Mrs Berry sought a policy solely for Edith’s benefit, then she could have insured her own life solely, naming Edith as the beneficiary. Had this been the case, her application would have been accepted. That said, there can be no doubt that it was the requested insurance on Edith’s life that led to the application being refused. In 1886, when Mrs Berry – still lodging in Rochdale following her mother’s death – applied for the policy, £100 was a good sum – well over £110,000 in today’s terms. As we have seen, the law set no limit on the insured amount for anyone over the age of ten, and here was an application to insure the life of a child who, at ten years old, had just become insurable for a small fortune. It is hardly surprising, then, that the men from the Pru looked at the application with some reservations. And there can be no doubt also that they would have looked into Mrs Berry’s record with the company, and seen there the life insurance pay-outs that had been made on the death of her mother and others in her family. So it was, after due consideration, and perhaps not so surprisingly, that they declined to do business.

  A question remains: why did the company not inform Mrs Berry of their rejection of her application? Could it have been that they simply could not come up with the right words to cover their suspicions?

  Back to the trial.

  When proceedings resumed in the courtroom at two o’clock that afternoon Dr Patterson was recalled. He had much to tell the court, and he was to remain in the witness box for some time.

  Much of his testimony was as it had been at the previous hearings. In detail he told the court that he had tended the sick girl, initially prescribing for ulceration of the stomach, but later concluding that she was not suffering from any disease with which he was acquainted. Her condition had greatly worsened by Sunday night. He couldn’t feel her pulse and her eyes were sunken. Seeing the child’s lips red and blistered, he asked the prisoner as to the cause, and she told him that she had given the child an orange with some sugar, and that that must have caused it. ‘Later,’ he said, ‘she told me it had been a lemon.’ The child vomited in his presence, he said, and Mrs Berry said that the child was also being purged, that the evacuations contained blood and that the child strained to go on the pot every few minutes.

  ‘I said that the child was dangerously ill,’ he said, and concluded that she was suffering from the ingesting of a poison. He called Dr Robertson to see her, and the doctor agreed with him. He saw the girl twice the next day, Monday, and that night gave her an injection of morphia. On Tuesday morning, he said, ‘I was called to her bedside and found her dead.’

  After some questioning on the matter of the child’s death certificate, he caused some surprise by producing a paper which, he said, bore a statement which the prisoner had made. He had told her, he explained, that he wanted from her a history of the whole time of her daughter’s illness. He then commenced to read out Mrs Berry’s words, but before he had got far the judge stopped him and asked Mr M’Connell whether he had any objection to the statement being read out. Mr M’Connell replied that in his opinion it was immaterial either way. With permission to continue, the doctor resumed the reading of Mrs Berry’s statement.

  In her written account, dated 8 January, Mrs Berry said that she was out ‘on the wards’ when she was sent for with a message that her daughter was sick. With regard to the medicines prescribed for the child, she said she had given her nothing but what was prescribed, and as for the creosote mixture prescribed by Dr Patterson, she said: ‘I did not mix it and did not give her any of it.’ With regard to the blisters about the child’s mouth, she said, ‘At two o’clock [on the Sunday] I came down to dinner having left Beatrice Hall in charge of the patient. I returned to the room in half an hour. I then noticed the redness about the mouth and she (my daughter) said, “I have had some nice medicine, I have had some chocolate.” Later, she said her mouth was sore and I applied some cold cream to it. At her request later in the day I sliced a lemon and gave her a slice with sugar. She complained that this made her mouth smart.’

  So, in her own words, Mrs Berry had said that she had never given the child the creosote mixture, and also tried to introduce the notion that while she was away from her daughter’s side, someone else had given her medicine of some kind: ‘I have had some nice medicine. I have had some chocolate.’ As for her statement that she gave Edith some lemon, this is at odds with the account given later in her letter to Dr Kershaw – in which she said that Edith took some medicine, after which ‘…I gave her an orange with sugar, this was about 2 p.m. on the Sunday. After I went upstairs after tea I gave her another dose and again gave her orange and sugar.’

  In addition to the discrepancies above, Mrs Berry also gave differing accounts of becoming aware of Edith’s falling sick. While she stated to Dr Patterson that she was out ‘on the wards’ when she was sent for with a message that Edith was sick, in her letter to Dr Kershaw she writes: ‘…on coming to my bedroom I looked in to see if the children were up. I saw them leave the room. I went on through the wards then came down, went into sitting room where the children were sat at the table. Edith put her hand on her breast and said I do feel sick, and vomited.’

  When Dr Patterson had completed his reading of Mrs Berry’s statement, Mr Cottingham got up to cross-examine. At the magistrates’ inquiry he had scored considerably in his examination of the doctor, and here he was again, with the doctor once again in the witness box.

  He began by asking the doctor when he had first suspected that the child had been poisoned, and Dr Patterson replied that he began to suspect it on the Saturday, before his second visit to the child. It was not from observation but from reflection, he said.

  ‘And when you found the child better on the Sunday morning were you still of the opinion that she had had poison?’

  ‘I had a suspicion,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Did you,’ Mr Cottingham asked, ‘do anything when you left the child on Sunday at twelve o’clock?’

  ‘No. I said to the mother that the child was so much better and that she must send me a message as to how she was.’

  Mr Cottingham now tried to sow some seeds of doubt as to the doctor’s judgement and procedures. ‘Isn’t it rather an alarming thing,’ he said, ‘when a doctor goes away under those circumstances, to get a message unexpectedly to come back at once?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dr Patterson agreed, ‘it was a strange thing.’

  ‘You say you got the message at seven o’clock?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then how is it that you did not go at once?’

  ‘I had one or two urgent matters to attend to.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘First of all, I had to stay during the surgery hours at my own house. Secondly, all my people had gone to church, and I had no one to leave in the house until they came back.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t go to visit a patient after receiving a request from the mother because you had no one to leave in the house?’

  Here the judge came in. ‘He gave a double reason,’ he said. ‘First he had no one to leave in the house, and then he says he had his patients to attend to.’

  Mr Cottingham then asked the doctor as to the time he eventually got to see the patient. Dr Patterson replied: ‘I got to the workhouse at a quarter to nine, but I didn’t see the child until nine-thirty as I had several urgent cases in other parts of the house to attend to first. I had to go into the lunatic asylum for one thing.’

  ‘Why did you not postpone your visit to that part of the house where the lunatics are, and go to the child?’

  ‘Because I didn’t consider that the case was then a case of urgency.’