Inconvenient People (60 page)

Next on the stand was Lord Shaftesbury himself. While the rest of the nation had been thrilled by the Weldon shenanigans, Lord Shaftesbury told the court (and the House of Lords, when he was asked a question there about the case) that he had never even heard of it. He said he believed the asylum system had very much improved since 1859. When Mrs Weldon probed him on whether an asylum keeper had the legal right to arrest a person, he ducked the question, stating that her case had never come before the Lunacy Commissioners. But Hawkins would not let him get away with this, and repeated the question, ‘Is it legal for a keeper to send out agents and servants to arrest someone as a lunatic?’ Shaftesbury fumbled that it was a moot point, and it was an issue that had never been raised before. Hawkins would not let go: ‘Surely it cannot be contended that a doctor has a right to arrest me, on an order for my reception into his lunatic asylum, just as though he were a policeman arresting me for some offence.’ The defence barrister interjected that the Acts did so authorise, and that Baron Huddleston’s judgment upon Winslow so held. Yet Mrs Weldon claimed that the Acts only allowed a proprietor to ‘arrest’ an escapee: he had no right to seize someone who was to be received into his establishment.

Shaftesbury confirmed that the certifying doctors must be entirely independent of the proprietor, and that if the latter filled out the order, and/or put a signature to it, he believed that rendered it invalid.

Mrs Weldon now called the two doctors she had consulted one week after the attempted capture. Dr James Edmunds said that he had spoken to Mrs Weldon for one hour and had formed the opinion that she was of sound mind, despite her ‘peculiar notions as to the
simplification of women’s dress’. He told the court, ‘All persons are, in a sense, of unsound mind,’ causing riotous laughter.

‘That was the very question I was going to ask!’ chuckled Justice Hawkins.

‘All persons except Your Lordship are, in a sense, or to some extent, unsound in mind.’ More laughter.

Edmunds went on to explain that harmless unsoundness could turn into the dangerous kind and that it was the test of a physician’s skill to discover if that change had taken place. Under cross-examination, Edmunds said that hearing voices could be a sign of insanity but that in his view it was not necessarily so, unless the voice compelled the hearer to obey. Mrs Weldon had spoken to him about spirits but that had not concerned him, as ‘religious people often believe in strange things’. Indeed, Mrs Weldon brought up the fact that St Paul, John Wesley and Emanuel Swedenborg had all heard voices. More hilarity ensued when Edmunds declared he had always assumed that St Paul had been suffering either an epileptic fit or sunstroke on the road to Damascus.

Dr George Wylde was the second doctor who had declared Mrs Weldon sane, having known her for two years and being a spiritualist himself. ‘Mrs Weldon is a very clever and humorous woman,’ he told the court, ‘with a little excitability, such as was very often observable in interesting women.’ Spiritualist views needed to be seen in context, he said: there were 400 million Hindus and Buddhists who believed in the transmigration of souls, and no one would suggest they were all insane. And in any case, many accounts of the lives of the Christian saints reported that they were enveloped in light. Mrs Weldon had repeated in court the story of the shower of stars, explaining that it had happened as she lay in bed on the morning of 6 April 1878: ‘It gave me great comfort as I believe spirits come in stars, and they seemed to come over me. I have experienced it since but have found out that it was the result of rubbing my eyes.’ (Much laughter in court.) Mrs Weldon had written two years earlier, in 1882, that her spirit experiences mostly took place when ‘alone in my own room, and not from courting spiritualistic seances’. She believed that spiritualism was a method of making closer contact with her God, the Christian Lord.

When Dr Winslow was in the witness box and blurted out that he believed all spiritualists belonged in an asylum, Justice Hawkins said, ‘Then you have no right to the position you hold!’ Mrs Weldon argued
that Drs Winslow, Winn, Rudderforth and Semple had only heard what they had wanted to hear and had written down twisted versions of views that many spiritualists considered to be perfectly ordinary. Rudderforth had written ‘three months’ instead of ‘three years’ for the amount of time Mrs Weldon had said it would take for her to train a child. She recalled that when she had told Rudderforth of her pet white rabbit, describing it as ‘a perfect daredevil’, the doctor had replied, ‘I dare say you thought it was the devil,’ and he began to write something down. This had infuriated her, and she had cried out, ‘Certainly not!’ – and that she didn’t believe in the Devil, ‘only in human devils’. (The court chortled.) ‘Yes, they rely very strongly on the rabbit,’ she continued, noting how weak the mad-doctors’ case was looking. For his part, Semple testified that he had been alone with her for fifteen minutes. ‘She talked incessantly,’ he said, with one subject running into another in a disconnected way. Yet he denied entertaining any malice towards her that night – ‘It was rather the other way,’ he told the court feelingly, clearly smitten. Semple, physician to the Royal College of Music, and author of
The Voice, Musically and Medically Considered
, admired her as a musician and as a woman.

Semple crumpled in the witness box and lost his case. ‘He signed [the certificate] for a sinister motive,’ declared Justice Hawkins. ‘His negligence was gross and culpable.’ The verdict was cheered outside in the street by a large crowd. Mrs Weldon was awarded £1,000 and Winslow was ordered to pay her £500 when he lost his case in the November. Neither man could find that sort of money with their ruined private practices. Nor could Gounod, who in 1885 was ordered to pay Mrs Weldon the colossal sum of £12,000 for a (non-lunacy-related) libel he had published about her. Henry de Bathe’s treachery cost him £1,000.

Mrs Weldon, however, would never pursue her vanquished opponents for this money, even though her own circumstances were much reduced after Harry had disposed of Tavistock House. She and Angèle Ménier (and a menagerie that included a chimp, Titileehee) were dividing their time between 58 Gower Street in Bloomsbury, lodging rooms in Brixton and visits to the orphans who were being brought up at the convent in Normandy, where they had remained following the disastrous trip of 1878. Mrs Weldon was still singing for her supper, earning £70 a week from the London Palladium for performing two songs each night, and appearing at various music halls in an act based on Mr Sergeant Buzfuz (the loquacious lawyer in
The Pickwick Papers
). She scarcely ever put a foot wrong in her public life, but adapting and appearing in George Lander’s play about wrongful incarceration,
Not Alone
, was a rare mismanagement of her persona. She played the rather unimaginatively named Hester Stanhope (unless a reference to the great Regency female traveller was intended), whose dastardly husband gets two medical men, Drs Feese and Fubbs, to certify her insane and place her in an asylum owned by Dr Pounceby, in order that he can marry a younger woman. Mrs Stanhope escapes from the madhouse and mounts a campaign to have the lunacy laws changed.

‘Of the play, it is difficult to speak seriously,’ the critic of the
Morning Post
wrote, unimpressed by Mrs Weldon’s venture on to the boards. ‘A friendly reception was accorded to the play, but dissentient voices were not unheard upon the appearance of the authors at its conclusion.’
The Era
was even less persuaded, stating, ‘It would be idle to say that there is not a feeling of relief felt when the piece is over.’ While demonstrating ‘real histrionic ability’, Mrs Weldon lacked the ‘finish’ that only acting experience can bring. Mrs Weldon’s increasing stoutness (despite her having taken up tricycling to keep trim) was noted as adding unintentional humour to the scene in which she was required to squeeze through the bars of Dr Pounceby’s asylum. Her public simply preferred the non-fiction version of herself, and the dramas of her real life were deemed more powerful and moving than a fictional rendition. Then as now, it was noted that poor-quality imagined works failed to capture the weirdness, intensity and improbable plot twists of actuality.

And one of the biggest twists was that Winslow and Semple, a year after their defeat at her hands, formed the Mrs Weldon Release Committee, to protest at her gaoling for six months for her repeated libel against the trigamist music impresario Jules Rivière. When Mrs Weldon was released from Holloway, the doctors helped to organise a procession for her across London to Hyde Park, where she addressed a crowd that may have numbered as many as 17,000. Perhaps this is
the tribute she demanded from them in lieu of the unpayable fines; their devotion to her cause was certainly more satisfying than dull old cash. Dr Semple remained as besotted with Mrs Weldon as the night he certified her, and in 1885 he moved in with her at Gower Street for a time – and brought with him his family, plus one of his own resident lunatics, kept within the Semple household for a fee. When his next child was born, he named her Georgina Angèle.

Dr Winslow, meanwhile, remained as egotistical a self-publicist as she, and the pair probably recognised each other as such. His reputation had taken a terrible blow, and his brother-in-law had grabbed the family asylums, but he could at least keep his name (and practice) prominent by joining her cause. In 1910 he was still chasing after the wrongful incarceration bandwagon by writing the introduction to Marcia Hamilcar’s autobiographical account,
Legally Dead
, of her seventeen weeks’ incarceration in an asylum, where she had been placed by her malevolent older sisters.

In later letters to Mrs Weldon, Winslow joshingly addresses her as ‘Dear Loonie’, which apparently she did not mind. In these, he admitted to being prematurely aged and thoroughly exhausted by all the battles; he also revealed that he was expecting more litigation from former patients, inspired by Mrs Weldon. (These cases don’t appear to have materialised.) The only person to have seen the entire correspondence between Winslow and Mrs Weldon could detect no anger or resentment on either side.

Dr Winslow did a wicked thing in so casually attempting to carry out Harry Weldon’s wishes. The doctor had indeed believed Georgina Weldon to be mad, but he hadn’t troubled to look into her case carefully. He was not popular with fellow alienists, and the medical press actively disliked him. His vulgarity, ebullience, love of the limelight and failure to live up to his father’s early and mid-career reputation made him unattractive to many. His biographer writes of his ‘reckless kite-flying’ of theories and notions, and, given the harsh lesson Mrs Weldon taught him, it is extraordinary that as late as March 1908, when he was in his mid-sixties, he became the first medical man to be charged with contravening the 1890 Lunacy Act. He had placed Ethel M. Davies with Mrs Edith Mary Lascelles at the latter’s house in Burlington Gardens, Chiswick, West London;
but Mrs Lascelles was not licensed to board a certificated lunatic, and Winslow had known this. He had been seeking a safe, quiet, private place for Mrs Davies, with a discreet woman whom he trusted. The police had had to be called to the house when Ethel became loud and violent. Winslow pleaded guilty and was fined £50, Mrs Lascelles £10.

However, there is much in his later, post-Weldon career that redeems him. Because he saw insanity everywhere, he saved a number of people from the gallows. His father had been instrumental in winning the acceptance of the plea of insanity (and therefore diminished responsibility) in the criminal courts, and Winslow Jnr carried on this battle, involving himself in the investigations of such lesser-known late-Victorian/Edwardian studies in scarlet as the Old Kent Road Murder, the Devereux Trunk Mystery and the Girl in the Belfry. Chivalrous and patronising, he particularly could not bear it that a woman should swing for her villainy, women (in his view) being so less capable of controlling their emotions than men; but his pleading failed to save two particularly revolting murderesses of the day, Mrs Pearcey and Amelia Dyer. He was, however, a vocal member of the campaign to save the killers of Harriet Staunton (mentioned
here
); and the reprieved Alice Rhodes came to his home upon her release to thank him for helping to save her life.