Inconvenient People (57 page)

Luckily, Mr Bell, who had just been appointed caretaker of Tavistock House by Harry, took an instant liking to Mrs Weldon, and seeing the rights and wrongs of the situation, suggested calling in Harry’s solicitor, Mr Neal. While waiting for Neal to arrive, Bell helped Mrs Weldon to write an inventory of everything in the boxes that Ménier was intending to make off with. Ménier and his mistress now hurried from the house. ‘Cheer up, Madam,’ Bell told Mrs Weldon, ‘I never saw a party run away from his debtor before.’

When Mr Neal turned up, he warned Mrs Weldon not to oppose Ménier, since any contretemps was likely to ‘stir dirty water’, as he put it. She later recounted the tales the Frenchman had told about her during her absence in France: ‘I had put poison bottles around the house in various corners, which the babies found, died, and were buried in the garden. I got £1,000 for each baby, no questions asked [i.e. an illegal adoption]. Ménier had most compromising letters . . . proposing all sorts of dreadful things.’ She found the last particularly amusing, knowing that what the foolish Frenchman intended to blackmail her with were the tragic outpourings of Cadwalladwr Waddy. She could hardly wait.

The letters in the bureau had furnished her with the address of Olive Nicholls, in Golden Square, Soho, and ignoring Neal’s appeal for her to drop the matter, she took a carriage to Vine Street police station. Accompanied by detective Uriah Cooke, she surprised Ménier and Nicholls in their lodgings, which contained items of Mrs Weldon’s clothing, silver plate, jewellery, paintings and small items of furniture. ‘I give this man in charge for the theft of these items,’ she said to
Inspector Cooke. ‘And I give this woman in charge for the murder of little children! She is mad!’ shouted Ménier. The Frenchman was arrested and charged, the Treasury Solicitor (the nearest England had to a public prosecutor at that time) agreeing to bring the case for Mrs Weldon, even though Harry, in law the legal owner of her stolen belongings, would not come forward to prosecute. At his Old Bailey trial in the following September, Ménier would be found guilty and sentenced to six months’ hard labour, despite the jury asking for clemency on the grounds that he was a foreigner and probably had not understood his written instructions from the Weldons or solicitor Neal.

Ménier’s Bow Street committal proceedings took place on Saturday 13 April 1878 – nine days after Mrs Weldon had returned to Tavistock House. It was the next day, Sunday the 14th, that the mysterious visitors began to arrive, and on Monday the 15th the attempt was made to snatch Mrs Weldon and take her to the Hammersmith madhouse. Mrs Weldon’s unexpected arrival from France had forced her ill-wishers to bring forward rapidly the plans they had hoped to have had more time to finesse. On 13 April Harry had gone to see Dr Lyttleton Stewart Forbes Winslow at his practice and home at 23 Cavendish Square. He told Winslow and the doctor’s father-in law, alienist Dr James Michell Winn, that his wife had arrived back from France having abandoned a number of small children to their fate; meanwhile (he said), Mrs Treherne and Dalrymple had contacted him, concerned about the soundness of his wife’s mind. Harry showed the doctors a number of letters from his mother- and brother-in-law, which included the phrases ‘Things with G are coming to a dreadful pass and danger’ and ‘Her mental state resembles that of her poor father’. Harry also gave the following reasons for his concern about his wife’s mental stability (the wife he had not seen for two years): the filth and dilapidation of Tavistock House; her neglect of her appearance and her wearing of tattered or outlandish clothing; allowing a chamber pot to stand beneath the sideboard in the dining room, in case any of the orphans should be caught short; allowing a white rabbit to run about and defecate on the dining-room table during mealtimes. Harry also mentioned ‘the little gutter children, who had been picked up in the street and got the run of the whole house, so that he [Harry]
was driven from room to room’. Would Winslow attempt an informal interview with his wife to give his professional opinion on her state of mind? Winslow and Weldon would later deny that at this time there had been any intention of committing Mrs Weldon to an asylum.

There is a whiff of Garrick Club intrigue here. Winslow may have been recommended to Harry by fellow Club member Arthur à Beckett, who was married to the doctor’s sister; à Beckett’s father and Winslow’s father had been close friends, too. Perhaps word got round the Club that Harry was in search of an alienist, and à Beckett mentioned Winslow because he was an energetic opponent of spiritualism. In 1877, Winslow published
Spiritualistic Madness
, a slender book in which he blamed the table-rappers for a rise in female insanity (even though there had been no rise in female lunacy admissions over male). The case studies in the book comprised four males and two females but Winslow nevertheless concluded: ‘The community of believers contains a large proportion of weak-minded hysterical women, in whom the seeds of mental disorder, though for a time latent, are only waiting for a new excitement to ripen into maturity.’

It was decided that father-in-law Dr Winn and Winslow would pose as Messrs Shell and Stewart respectively (adapting each man’s middle name), pretending to be two spiritualists who were curious about the Weldon Orphanage, in order to gauge Mrs Weldon’s sanity. Winslow told Harry that since he had not seen his wife for two years, a third party would need to co-sign the lunacy order. Could Harry suggest anyone to do so? Yes, he said, their old friend Sir Henry de Bathe, of whom Mrs Weldon was fond (overlooking the fact that the general had seen Mrs Weldon only once in the past three years). All Sir Henry would need to do in order to meet the requirements of the Lunacy Act, Winslow advised, would be to conduct a few minutes of conversation with her alone. And as De Bathe was a governor of St Luke’s, he would be presumed to be able to spot a lunatic when he saw one.

So on Sunday the 14th, ‘Shell and Stewart’ paid their visit to Mrs Weldon. Winslow then walked home and wrote out the lunacy order for Sir Henry de Bathe and Harry to sign. The paperwork contravened the Act: the evidence on the document was supposed to have
been the eyewitness testimony of its signatory, and although Harry had not seen his wife for two years, the statement he had signed claimed that her unsoundness had endured for the past twelve months. For good measure, and going on hearsay from Harry and the Trehernes, Winslow added ‘hereditary insanity’ to the lunacy order, attempting to bolster the case by dragging in poor raving Papa.

Those who would later damn Winslow for his role in this story have not, on the whole, understood that he almost certainly believed Mrs Weldon to be insane. All her talk of showers of stars, animals with souls, and voices issuing commands confirmed for him that spiritualism had devastating effects on the brain (particularly the female one). He believed that these effects were pathological and infectious: ‘It is not unreasonable to conjecture that the morbid change in the nervous centres, which we see in individual cases producing such visionary results, may also become epidemic, and produce these aggregate delusions.’ But in fact the Lunacy Commissioners had found not one case of spiritualism-related insanity in any asylum in the country.

Had he gone on to become a Jungian or Freudian, Winslow might have diagnosed within himself an unconscious desire to add to his family’s revenues. While he may well have believed Mrs Weldon to be clinically batty, he was also in the professional habit of assisting people into his rather expensive custodial care. Perhaps there was something Oedipal too: his father had left a rather complicated will, in which Winslow Jnr was only allocated the role of manager, not sole owner, of the asylums – and so he was answerable to his mother and a family trust. His co-opting of his father’s name (‘Forbes’) into his own birth name (‘Lyttleton Stewart’) is fodder for Freudians, though a more mundane explanation is that it helped the family firm by harking back to the famous Winslow
père
brand name.

Winslow Jnr was a classic over-diagnoser, considering to be mad almost everyone on whom he was asked to give a professional opinion. He would later claim that he had told Harry on the Sunday night that although Mrs Weldon’s was an urgent case, she could be ‘managed’ at home with a lady companion. Winslow was adamant that it was Harry who had insisted on asylum care and had asked Winslow to recommend a good institution. At this point, said Winslow, he revealed to Harry that he ran Brandenburgh House. Mrs Weldon never believed this account, and nor would anyone else who heard it.

Winslow had proposed charging Harry Weldon £10 10
s
a week for custody of Mrs Weldon, which puts his madhouses at the dearer end of private care. But the high fee nevertheless was lower than the £1,000 a year that Harry would have to pay to keep his wife at Tavistock House, so incarceration represented both a saving for Harry and the removal of an embarrassment.

Winslow composed the following report:

When, two weeks later, the plot was all going haywire, Harry wrote to Winslow that ‘the business has been woefully mismanaged’ and Winslow replied, ‘I do not think you are prudent in giving up for the present the idea of putting your wife in a lunatic asylum.’

Winslow would later claim, ‘I always prefer the patient’s friends to select their own medical men . . . and the information he may obtain will be acquired from the patient or his relatives, not from me.’ In fact, Winslow selected his own alienist investigators from a fairly narrow range. Over a twenty-two-year period, Dr Armand Semple had signed 45 of the 440 admissions into Brandenburgh and Sussex Houses; although he was not attached to the asylums in any formal way, Semple had a cosy professional relationship with Winslow. The two men, both thirty-three years old, had known each other since adolescence and dined together most Sundays at Cavendish Square. He certified patients for only two other asylums. Semple and Dr John Rudderforth (who seems to have been hired in a less pally way) were the second set of ‘Shell and Stewart’ – Semple the ‘mesmeric’ starer on the sofa, Rudderforth the uncertain taker of dictation at the library table. Each man received £5 5
s
from the 30 guineas Winslow had been paid by Harry; Winn received 8 guineas. These were generous payments: the usual fee for certification in these years was £2 2
s
.

When Harry had asked for his wife to be taken away to a madhouse,
Winslow had telegraphed to his Hammersmith asylums from Cavendish Square, requesting a carriage, two nurses and keeper Wallace A. Jones. When the first attempt at capture failed at Tavistock House, the carriage made its way to Cavendish Square and waited for Harry, Winslow and his brother-in-law à Beckett to make the second attempt. The next day, Mrs Weldon fled.

From what had Mrs Weldon escaped? An eyewitness account of the Winslow family’s madhouses appeared in the
Pall Mall Gazette
. The reporter noted a ‘not very brilliant performance on the piano by one of the patients’ when he entered Brandenburgh House, where there were fifteen women at the time. Most were out in the garden and ‘all wore a horrible air of settled depression’, the reporter wrote. Looking vacant and never smiling, they marched around the lawn in twos and threes. The journalist believed that anyone of reasonably sound intellect would soon lose her wits if she had to keep such fiercely melancholic company. This was a view frequently expressed in nineteenth-century madhouse discourse – that the sane would become mad if they had to mix with the chronically ill.

Winslow claimed that of the average of nineteen patients admitted annually to both of his asylums, 80 per cent were discharged within a year. In the past fifteen years, there had been twelve escapes from Brandenburgh House but no suicides. There was also a high ratio of attendants to patients. Yet Dr Lockhart Robertson had told the 1877 Select Committee that he, for one, was very unhappy with the admission and detention procedures at Sussex House. As we saw in
Chapter Eight
, Robertson had become something of a bogeyman for Winslow Snr, who accused him of persecution, so diligent were his visits to the Sussex House Chancery inmates. Robertson continued his surveillance of the Winslow empire and would discover that two male Chancery patients were being detained by Winslow Jnr on faulty, hearsay-filled paperwork.