|
Study of Birth Records in Blisworth, 1550 - 1922
Tony
Marsh
Text Processing: Perl is ideally suited to the manipulation of text. It is
capable of detecting 's' (ie. son) or 'd' (ie. daughter) in a variety of
syntaxes and also detecting any double occurrence of the word 'of ' in a
syntax such as "s of
Charles & Harriet of Wolverton" and so give an opportunity to
exclude visiting parents. Other
phrases such as "base born" and "bastard" allow a
logging of most baptisms of illegitimate children. In the original Excel
file, once filtered for baptisms, there were 4934 valid entries and a
justification for excluding 507 of them for a variety of reasons. A
total of 247 entries were for visiting parents, incl. 3 adults, and so
were ignored. They displayed an SRB ratio of 1.05, as a sub-group,
and the importance of this is discussed later. There were 260 blank or
seriously uninformative entries. The great majority of these (93%) were
created in the interval 1550 to 1650. A closer examination was made of
these, looking for mention of a given name so that entries could be
classified for gender and this was possible for 87 entries. However,
some may have corresponded to adults, possibly already baptised without
their knowledge. For this reason this small group was finally omitted. A
total of 64 illegitimate children were logged from 1550 – 1922 and the
total was later adjusted for a reason that will become clear.
Remarkably,
only 31 family names sported a strong male bias at some stage (and
rarely twice, interestingly). Such situations are highlighted in yellow
while the relatively un-biassed periods for the families are shown with
a white background. At each point the format of the entry is “boys
comma girls”. A grey background is used where there are no births for
a family within a particular 50-year period. This distinction, with grey,
probably shows when a family has departed or just arrived in the
village. A few families, eg. the
Paceys, Gibbs and the Griffins, have occupied the village continuously
from 1550 -1922 (but mysteriously have all now departed).
The Carters began in the early 1700s and are still going strong
today. Families that appear over two separate periods are presumed to be
not closely related branches and have the same surname more-or-less by
coincidence - eg. the Greens and the Watts. Before attempting to give any account of the
results it is sometimes helpful in the massaging of complex data to
extract what, to the scientist and engineer, is known as any dimensionless group. This promotes the suggestion of mathematical
relationships between elements of the data. The SRB is already
dimensionless, being a ratio without units. The data in Tables I
and II could be combined as follows. One could note the count of
male bias incidence with each 50-year period and compare that to the
total number of baptisms for the same period. Thus,
as an example, the number of incidents in the 1750-1800 date range is 4.
We set that as (4 +/- 1) and divide it by the level of birth activity in
that period, which was 514 according to Table I. A "families
per 100 births" index so formed is thus: Fam/100
index for (1750-1800) =
(4 +/- 1) divided by 5.14 =
0.6 to 1.0 The justification for the +/- 1 is that the measure of “actual male bias” is subjective and liable to error. The index is dimensionless because it is the quotient of two plain numbers. In the diagram below, Figure 1, there is plotted against the date ranges both the SRB ratio and the Fam/100 index.
By
inspection, there appears to be a correlation between these two factors
in that between 1550 and 1800 the two trends follow each other. To
confirm this impression just imagine the data for SRB being drawn
lower down on the graph compared to where it is (ie. move by minus 0.1
on the SRB scale). The SRB =
0 point, which is meaningless, is suppressed anyway. We see that,
after 1800, the SRB takes off upwards and "peaks",
compared to an expectation based on the Fam/100 index, at around
the middle of the 1850-1900 date range. Before considering the conditions regarding births in the two date ranges, before 1800 and after 1800, it will be useful to be clear on definitions. These data are about baptisms and not strictly about births. There are at least three distinguishable cases where the difference is very important. (i). A
mother may (a) conceal her pregnancy, (b) have her baby in private and
alone and (c) not tell anyone about its subsequent death. This would
have been common temptation for un-married young girls with all to loose
because of the stigma. Up to about 1700 the law was clear on this issue
and if the woman were found guilty on all three counts the sentence was
a capital one, for what was termed “infanticide”. Some sympathy was
being introduced in the 1600s and by 1800 the situation had become one
of laissez faire from a legal standpoint. (ii). A
situation where a birth is not necessarily reported and the baby dies
very young (at less than 6 years) has always been regarded with sympathy
even though the cause of death might have been unnatural or partly
brought on by the mal-nutrition of a very sickly child. There is no term
for this type of loss in the literature so here it is given the label
“family wasting”. (iii).
Cases as in (ii) where the death is not reported –
“unrecorded family wasting”. It is recommended that one should read Appendix
4 that deals with this topic. Discussion Pre-1800
era:
Blisworth was essentially a small agricultural community. Social
standards were established and maintained by the Lord of the Manor
(being an agent of the King until ~1700), by the Rector and by some of
the parish officials such as the Constable and the Overseer of the Poor.
It seems inconceivable that much distortion of the records occurred due
to infanticide, ie. (i) above. One only needs to inspect the low
level of illegitimacy to feel convinced of this. Possibly there may have
been a fair amount of unrecorded family wasting. The abstract for a
treatise was found in the searches (see the Appendix I) that dealt
with practices common in a German parish where arguments for reducing
the count of girls was justified as the natural loss of young boys was
always a major concern. (The loss of more boys than girls was recorded
also in Blisworth). The high value of the SRB may be partly for
reasons of unrecorded family wasting but probably only partly. A more likely
contributory factor is the light level of inter-breeding within the
community that would persist even though some males were encouraged to
find their wives in the neighbouring villages. It was frequently the
case that two families got on so well together that brothers married
corresponding sisters. Subsequently the offspring would be genetically
very close cousins, all the more confusing if three or four families
were involved. Occasionally these cousins would carelessly marry and
affect the genes. Alternatively, would
the stress from the pre-Civil War years have fired up an extra male
bias? We know little of the society of that time. We know of only one fellow who departed the village for a few
years and joined the Roundheads. He was Richard
Bland, the second eldest
one of four sons (no daughters!) that were born from 1623 to 1632. He
survived all the battles and returned with, eventually, a good pay that
would have exceeded earnings possible in agriculture. Having three
competing brothers perhaps had encouraged him to seek his fortune
elsewhere. Could these conditions have
encouraged a common male bias? The opinion of a geneticist is required.
In the
time interval of 70 years there was no longer a scarcity of new
employment, or so it seemed, but the influx of newcomers to the village
virtually doubled the population and doubled the birth rate. One can
imagine a majority of society that was poor or in poverty looking on at
the good fortune of a few lucky entrepreneurial people. The loss of
a moral compass, hitherto set by a Rector and a few influential people,
one supposes gave the community a sort of “go ahead”. The scale of illegitimacy
took off and there was perhaps an enormous increase in male-male
competition. The illegitimacy rate of 2 in 25 years that had been
maintained for at least 200 years climbed to a level of nearly one per
year. The claimed large
flush of them at the time of the
canal building (1795 - 1810) was not noted in fact. The bar chart below,
Figure 2, condenses the table opposite. Oddly, from 1854,
there were no more illegitimacies recorded in the usual way. This was
because of the move by Rev Barry to follow the CoE
"high-church" fashion causing him to simply ban any use of the
phrase "base born" from 1854. The chart is therefore continued
with a different colour showing babies baptised with just a mother
present. Maybe his ministry improved societal standards after ~1850
because the chart does show a decline. Another factor was the new 1872
law that made the father equally liable for the support of the
illegitimate child and, incidentally called for the compulsory recording
of all births. Rather amusing is
the performance of Miss Mercy Plowman who simply could hardly stop
having children out of wedlock (8 in all, see red highlights, her last
at the age of 51). Some of her babies appear to have been fostered by
the Carter family where she was lodging in 1871. Five other families
besides Plowman achieved multiple illegitimacies. All this expansion
created over-crowding. The railway company in circa 1850 built the
twelve houses near the railway arch for their workers who were enjoying
a fair to good income. There were 11 houses built ~1870 to
a “Grafton design” that were intended for prosperous families. The baker R. Westley,
however, built two blocks of tenements containing 28 poorly
specified units for the poorer families in 1855 and also a few cottages
for higher grade workers at
Pynus in ~1890. The poor had the new tenement and and were crowded into
them and the lower grade cottages, some of which were subdivided into 3
or 4 units. Grafton, the owner of Blisworth till 1919, was
criticised in parliament in
1911 for his derisory record in house
building and it was not until the Towcester Rural District Council began
razing old houses, in the name of public health, in the 1930s, building
over 36 new Council houses, that the village could be said to be
catching up on the population expansion. Crowding was pretty bad. The 1871 census
demonstrates this and shows 952 people resident in 222 dwellings. The
distribution of housing density has been determined from a knowledge of
the size of the dwellings and the houses were divided into “classes”
as HIGH, Good, Medium or Dire (or evidently Empty or "residents not
at home"), see Table IV below. Among the
"Medium class" and those described as "Dire" there
were 25 dwellings with 6 or more occupants, up to a total of 10. The
high apparent occupancy for the houses classed as "HIGH" is
due to the fact that they included servants and a total number of
bedrooms of around 6. Most of the units considered "Medium or
Dire" comprised one bedroom, one shared living room, a shared
kitchen area and maybe a shared "copper" for hot water (no
bathroom, water from a well nearby). With that there would often be an
outside closet toilet, emptied manually twice weekly, shared between 4
to 6 households. Fresh tap-water and flush toilets arrived in the
village in 1953 - 17 years after Northampton. Within a population
sub-group of about 400, this would certainly be an environment capable
of harbouring infant ill health with a prospect of infanticide or
unrecorded family wasting. Indeed,
after nearly 100 years of grossly unhygienic use, it was perfectly
reasonable for the Council to raze such “in-grained” houses and
start again (though villagers with ideas of property development found
the action of “replacing stone with utility brick” lamentable). The SRB ratio
just before 1800 was hovering in a slight female-bias state, ie. SRB
~ 0.95, and this could have been because there was an under-current of
male babies dying before they could be baptised. Quite why this ratio
was overturned into a male-bias in the Victorian years is something of a
mystery. Could there be a similar but diluted effect from male-male
competition (compared to the 1600s) arising in the genetics of the
community? At least comforting is the fact that from 1800 any suspicion
of inter-breeding would be dispelled.
It
is a fact that the SRB ratio for the Victorian period is anomalously
high and demands to be explained. We have discussed crowding and poverty
which were both undeniable factors influencing society in the Victorian era
and alluded to a loss of moral compass (as against the standards at that
time, it must be emphasised). Perhaps a level of unrecorded
family wasting was the reason for a high SRB which basically is pointing
to a moderate shortage of recorded female births. Incidently there is a
study of the effects of poverty in a large Venzuelan population
(catholic, probably mostly healthy 'moral compass') and there the SRB
remained in the range 0.98 to 1.08 while correlations implying
poverty-driven family size control were found. So this is the
justification here of "adjusting" the statistics for Victorian
Blisworth. If an arbitrary
total of 106 infants as unrecorded family wasting (in 50 years)
were to be added to the 71 infants statistic and notionally counted as
births then, with a reasonable excess of girls over boys assumed in the
wasting, the entered points in Figure 1 above, for the 1850 –
1900 period, would occupy the grey outlined positions shown there, with
an SRB of 1.10. The change provides some improved conformity
between the two plots but that is rather modest compared with an
adjustment one would expect, naively, from a simple set of ideas. At
least it is evident that an incidence of wasting may make an adjustment in
the right direction but the level of wasting at 106 seems too high to be
reasonable. Visitor Baptisms: This is a rather strange topic and, at first sight, merely an unimportant side issue. Figure 3 shows the number of such baptisms by decade. There were only three cases before 1780 and so it is only necessary to cover the period from 1780 to 1930 (the records cease in 1922). The high level in the 1790s and the 1800s could be explained by a large number of temporary visitors, as families, to the village for the canal and tunnel construction. The tiny component for the 1920s was due to WWI and only three years being represented.
Conclusions (1).
Whilst life in Blisworth did not equate to city life, it
is important to not have an overly romantic view. There was, for a
while, a context for Blisworth that resembled a city environment and the
new elements of industrialisation, namely transportation and quarrying,
had created such environment exacerbated by a level of social laxity and, for
some of the population, poverty and
over-crowding. (2).
The incidence of unrecorded wasting is not a proven fact for the
Victorian period in Blisworth but the evidence is disconcerting.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Appendices
Various appendices
are attached. Appendix 1 refers to a treatise on the practices in
a German parish. Appendix 2 presents an extract of another book
that discusses infanticide. Appendix 3 covers the Victorian
inclination to use laudanum-containing preparations to quieten children
– this, one can imagine, would be very tempting in order to
successfully use the single bedroom. The danger from it is that too much
laudanum (morphine) might be used and the child looses appetite and
energy and may eventually die addicted. A Pharmacy Act in 1868 demanded
that “Poison” be displayed and directed that pharmacies and not
grocers would sell in future. A survey of the local newspaper, the
Northampton Mercury, was made for the period 1860 to 1863 and the
presentation of adverts on various narcotic syrups or pills was easy to
find. For example, Dicey’s Bateman Pectoral Drops is a morphine
containing cough remedy, as is Lambert’s Asthmatic Balsam.
Interestingly, Dicey, as the owner of the newspaper, was subscribing to
a marketing deal with Bateman and a “quack-doctor” website, see
below, comments that the morphine content varies widely, deal to deal.
Appendix 1: Human sex-ratio manipulation: Historical data from a German parish
Eckart Voland On the basis of demographic data of a parish in Schleswig-Holstein,
characterized by a by this intervention, ie. as a result of less well being taken care
of. This resulted in
(1) inheritance practices favouring male descendants, and (2) the proportion of marriage perspectives for the
sons
as opposed to the daughters being in favour of the boys,
in contrast to other social classes. The classes of the parish without land property revealed a different
pattern of Appendix 2:
Sex Differentials in
Survivorship and the Customary Treatment of Infants and Children Lauris
McKee Infanticide
is a direct and violent means of removing children from a population.
For this reason, it has attracted public concern and occasioned careful
scientific inquiry. Parents
generally are deeply, emotionally invested in their children.
Institutionalised practices prejudicing child survival have the
advantage of interposing time and space between a treatment that
enhances the probability of early death, and a child's actual death.
Hence, the relationship between cause and effect can pass unperceived.
For example, infection of a ritually-inflicted wound appears several
days after the injury is incurred. In societies with no germ theory of
disease, pathogenesis would not be attributed to un-sterile conditions
but to other factors, such as imperfect performance of the ritual act or
the malfeasance of witches or supernatural. Scrimshaw (1982) notes that
seeking psychological distance through temporal and spatial distance
figures even among infanticidal parents who often abandon rather than
directly murder their children. In this chapter, the major goal is to convince
the reader that infanticide exists, and to argue that two of its
potentially numerous functions arc (1) the limitation of population
growth; and (2) the management of demographic structure by control of
the sex ratio. The latter, it is suggested, results in selective female
infanticide to compensate for universally higher male mortality in
infancy and childhood, and may be implicated in the prevalence of
systems of male preference.
Appendix 3:
Endangered
Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.
pp. 34-35 Wohl,
Anthony S. Medical officers were convinced that one of the major causes of
infant mortality was the widespread practice of giving children
narcotics, especially opium, to quieten them. At Id an ounce laudanum
was cheap enough — about the price of a pint of beer — and its sale
was totally unregulated until late in the century. The use of opium was
widespread both in town and country. In Manchester, according to one
account, five out of six working-class families used it habitually. One
Manchester druggist admitted selling a half-gallon of Godfrey's Cordial
(the most popular mixture, it contained opium, treacle, water, and
spices) and between five and six gallons of what was euphemistically
called "quietness" every week. In Nottingham one member of the
Town Council, a druggist, sold four hundred gallons of laudanum
annually. At mid-century there were at least ten proprietary brands,
with Godfrey's Cordial, Steedman’s Powder, and the grandly
named Atkinson's Royal Infants Preservative among the most popular. In
East Anglia opium in pills and penny sticks was widely sold and opium
taking was described as a way of life there. Throughout the Fens it was
used in 'poppy tea,' and doctors there reported how the infants were
wasted from it — 'shrank up into little old men', 'wizened like little
monkeys' is the way they were described. Opium killed far more infants through starvation than directly
through overdose. Dr. Greenhow, investigating for the Privy Council,
noted how children 'kept in a state of continued narcotism will be
thereby disinclined for food, and be but imperfectly nourished. Marasmus,
or inanitition, and death from severe malnutrition would result, but the
coroner was likely to record the death as 'debility from birth,' or
'lack of breast milk,' or simply 'starvation.'
Appendix 4: Background material
Infanticide: a case study by Richard Brown (from
his website blog) In West London, on the evening of 1 September 1856, a grisly
discovery was made. The bodies of newborn twins were found wrapped in a
bloodstained petticoat and chemise in the front garden of a house at
Pentridge Villas, Notting Hill. Mr Guazzaroni, the surgeon who conducted
the post-mortem at the Kensington workhouse, found that the twins had
died because of intentional suffocation and exposure. A verdict of
wilful murder by persons unknown was returned at the coroner’s inquest
but the twin’s mother was never traced. Infanticide was disturbingly
common in Victorian Britain.[1] Lionel Rose estimates that of 113,000
deaths of children under the age of one in 1864, 1,730 were due to
‘violence’ with only 192 of those being classified as homicides.
Contemporaries maintained that Britain was suffering from an epidemic of
child-killing blamed on ‘puerperal insanity’, a form of post-natal
mania that accounted for as much as 15% of female asylum admissions in
some years. [2] From the early 1840s, questions were being openly asked on the floor
of the House of Commons where Thomas Wakley, coroner, surgeon and MP
shocked his audience by claiming that infanticide[3], ‘was going on to
a frightful, to an enormous, a perfectly incredible extent.’[4]By the
1860s, the problem was believed to have reached crisis proportions and
figured as one of the great plagues of society, alongside prostitution,
drunkenness and gambling. According to some experts, it was impossible
to escape from the sight of dead infants’ corpses, especially in the
capital, for they were to be found everywhere from interiors to
exteriors, from bedrooms to train compartments. One observer commented
that bundles are left lying about in the streets... the metropolitan
canal boats are impeded, as they are tracked along by the number of
drowned infants with which they come in contact, and the land is
becoming defiled by the blood of her innocents. We are told by Dr
Lankester that there are 12,000 women in London to whom the crime of
child murder may be attributed. In other words, that one in every thirty
women (I presume between fifteen and forty-five) is a murderess.[5] Even The Times was forced to concede at the end of a long
list of Herod-like statistics on the subject that ‘infancy in London
has to creep into life in the midst of foes’.[6] At every new
‘epidemic’ of dead babies found abandoned on the streets of the
capital, there was a public outcry focussed on society’s responses. In
1870, in London, 276 infants were found dead in the streets and in 1895,
this figure reached 231. For the Ladies’ Sanitary Association,
civilisation itself was under threat: ...an annual slaughter of innocents takes place in this gifted land
of ours... we must grapple with this evil, and that speedily, if we
would not merit the reproach of admitting infanticide as an institution
into our social system.[7] Many of the women involved were from the lower classes and many of
the babies were illegitimate. However, pleading this form of temporary
insanity when taken to court was frequently met with a sympathetic
response from judges, despite the obvious suspicion that some cases were
murders. The problem of infanticide was brought into strong focus by the
case of Mary Newell.[8] Born in south Oxfordshire, Mary had been a
servant since she was 16. Without work in the summer of 1857, aged 21,
she travelled to Reading where she met as old acquaintance, poulterer
William Francis who invited her for a drink at his house. Mary ended up
pregnant and Francis showed no further interest in her. Although she
soon found employment within two months she left and single, pregnant
and unemployed and having failed to persuade Francis to marry her, she
was admitted to Henley workhouse on 11 January 1858. In May she gave
birth to a son, Richard and remained at the workhouse until August when
she walked the eight miles to Reading to seek help from Francis who
refused. Unclear what to do and confused, Mary wandered round all night
and eventually she undressed her baby son, laid him by the bank of the
Thames and let him roll in. At Mary’s trial, there was outrage at Francis’ attitude, as it
was believed that had he shown any willingness to help, the baby would
not have died. Although he admitted his neglect at the trial, this did
little to moderate local feeling and after the verdict he was attacked
by a mob, beaten and left semi-naked, an event repeated when news of the
trial’s outcome reached his new home at Wallingford. Mary was
condemned to death but was in such a state that she was committed to the
local asylum. A petition was launched asking Queen Victoria to commute
her sentence and the local mayor, magistrates and nearly 800 others
signed it. A deputation of people from Reading visited the Home Office
to lobby and this intervention appears to have saved Mary’s life. Infanticide was an act of murder and as such, the guilty parties
could be exposed to the full force of the law. Yet, on this politically
delicate question, sentencing by the courts depended as much on the
facts as on the medical interpretation placed on them. Victorian
leniency towards infanticide was shaken in 1865 when a woman from
London, Esther Lack, killed her three children by slitting their
throats. After the court backed an insanity plea, one newspaper openly
questioned the willingness of courts to find in favour of such
defendants. Evidence from London shows that most women charged with
infanticide between 1837 and 1913 were in their early to mid-20s though
some were as young as 16 and that the younger the woman, the more likely
she was to be acquitted or guilty only of the lesser offence of
concealing a birth. However, it was not until the 1922 Infanticide Act
that the death penalty was abolished for women who murdered their
newborn babies if is could be shown that the woman in question had had
her balance of mind disturbed as a direct result of giving birth. The advent of the life insurance business brought a further motive
for murder but in particular infanticide. Arsenic poisoning was
difficult to identify since its symptoms were similar to those of
dysentary, gastritis and other causes of natural death and magistrates
were generally unwilling to squander public funds while the chances of
detection were so small.[9] Families could enrol their children in a
‘burial club’ for a halfpenny a week and when the child died the
club would pay out as much as £5 towards funeral expenses. Since a
cheap funeral cost around £1, this left a valuable surplus for feeding
the remaining children and some families enrolled each child in several
clubs to increase the payout. There was a saying in Manchester, though
it existed across the country that a burial-club baby was unlikely to
survive for long. The burial-club scandal became so widespread that
legislation was passed in 1850 prohibiting insuring children under 10
for more than £3. However, the lure of life insurance remained a potent
cause of infanticide. Mary Ann Cotton, a former school teacher from
County Durham murdered most of her 15 children and step-children, as
well as her mother, three husbands and her lodger, before she was hanged
in 1873. The harshest decisions were certainly those meted out to the
professional baby farmer found guilty of infanticide. One of the first
and most sensational trials was that of Margaret Waters, the so-called
‘Brixton Baby Farmer’ in 1870, who was found guilty of conspiracy to
obtain money by fraud and the murder of a baby.[10] She was executed
amid extensive popular agitation and press coverage. In a sense the
pattern had been set and when, in 1879, Annie Took was similarly found
guilty of smothering and dismembering an illegitimate physically
handicapped child she had been paid £12 to look after, she too was
executed. Other high-profile baby farmers such as the Edinburgh
murderess Jessie King in 1887[11] and Amelia Dyer[12] suffered a similar
fate. Yet not all of these criminals were sentenced to death and other
cases that received front-page coverage such as those of Catherine
Barnes and Charlotte Winsor resulted in verdicts of life imprisonment. There was a growing body of evidence by the 1870s that infanticide
was a crime committed primarily by women and, more often than not, by
the mothers or the surrogate mothers of the infants themselves.
Undoubtedly, the more ‘acceptable’ of these two explanations was the
latter, that these crimes were the work of depraved, unscrupulous women
who had lost all sense of their maternal instincts and indulged in a
commercial trade with life itself inside a profession known popularly as
‘baby farming’.[13] The term first appeared in The Times in
the late 1860s, and, according to one medical practitioner of the
period, was coined ‘to indicate the occupation of those who receive
infants to nurse or rear by hand for a payment in money, either made
periodically (as weekly or monthly) or in one sum’.[14] It was
regarded with a great deal of suspicion in many quarters, as an
“occupation which shuns the light”[15] and not simply a primitive
form of child-care. However, its popular appeal and social function were
immense at a time when illegitimacy was stigmatised and single mothers
excluded from the most elementary means of supporting their child. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the mechanics of the
system had become well established. The ‘baby farmer’ was usually a
woman of a mature age and poor working-class background who would offer
either to look after the ‘unwanted’ child or ensure that it was
‘passed on’ to suitable adoptive parents. The fee for this
transaction varied according to the specifics of the contract but was
usually situated between £7 and £30.[16] In the majority of cases
there was also a tacit understanding between the two parties that, in
the harsh conditions of life in working-class areas of the nation’s
cities, the child’s chances of survival would be extremely slim. What
particularly outraged public feeling was that this trade had a visible,
almost respectable, side to it for it was practised openly through
advertising, in national, regional and local newspapers. Not
surprisingly under such circumstances, the financial considerations
involved in this extensive traffic in infant life gradually became the
focus of deep suspicion. For the British Medical Journal of 1868,
these ‘baby farmers’ would not have the slightest difficulty in
disposing of any number of children, so that they may give no further
trouble, and never be heard of, at £10 a head.[17] Baby farms were denounced as nothing more than ‘centres of
infanticide’, a convenient way for women to solve the problem of
unwanted and illegitimate births. It was, for instance, widely believed
that these babies were often left to wilt away and die, sometimes helped
along with a little soother known as ‘Kindness’. These rumours found
credence in the fact that at this time it was common practice, not only
among those whose looked after children, but also among mothers
themselves, to use a certain ‘Godfrey’s Cordial’ to quieten the
babies, and that this, if dosed incorrectly, could lead to ‘the sleep
of death’.[18] Little however was known about the role of the mothers in this
trade. The Times had no doubts that the women who sent their
children to baby farmers were ‘complicitous and selfish’ and
not naive and impoverished victims in their own right.[19] Yet a survey
of those implicated in the more spectacular trials of the period
suggests that most were guilty only of the crime of having a child
outside of wedlock. Crime reports invariably refer to the biological
mothers’ occupation as that of bar-maid, prostitute, factory or mill
worker, domestic servant. Much more rarely are there references to
‘outraged’ middle-class girls and unfaithful upper-class women
having recourse to the infamous baby farmers. In the Margaret Waters
case, for instance, the court heard of 17-year-old Jeanette Cowen, who
had been raped by the husband of a friend and, on the birth of her son,
her father arranged ‘adoption’ procedures with Waters without the
mother’s consent. Evelina Marmon, a barmaid from Bristol,
confided her 10-month-old child to the safe keeping of Amelia Dyer
because she was temporarily unable to look after it. She was unaware
that the baby had been strangled and disposed of until the trial, as
Dyer sent her regular reports about its progress. The illegitimate child
of Elizabeth Campbell, who died in childbirth, was ‘adopted’ for a
generous fee by Jessie King to avoid a family scandal but nobody
apparently suspected that any harm would befall the child. The problem of ‘baby farming’ proved intractable, despite the
sustained pressure of such groups as the Infant Life Protection
Society that called for the registration and control of all people
in charge of babies on a professional basis.[20] Not only was this
activity an integral part of the social regulation of the nation’s
sexuality, it also fulfilled a valuable economic role by allowing
working-class women to occupy paid employment. Government interference
in such a private sphere was therefore problematic in the extreme. The
breakthrough only came through a private member’s initiative which
became the Infant Life Protection Act in 1872. This reform made
registration obligatory with the local authority for any person taking
in two or more infants under one year of age for a period greater than
24 hours. Furthermore, deaths of infants in such care had to be
communicated to the Coroner within 24 hours. It was a timid start since
the scope of people exempted from the Act was significant; relatives,
day-nurses, hospitals and even foster women were all excluded and no
‘authentification’ of contracts between parent and baby farmer was
required. Moreover since the registration of all births, live and dead
did not become compulsory until 1874, unless the authorities actually
knew that a baby had been born, it was possible for it to die, be killed
or be disposed of without anyone even noticing its existence. Only after
other sensational ‘epidemics’ of infanticide in the ensuing years
did a further Infant Life Protection Act force its way through
Parliament in 1897. This Act finally empowered local authorities to
control the registration of “nurses” responsible for more than one
infant under the age of five for a period longer than 48 hours.[21] NOTES [1] Rose, Lionel, Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in
Britain 1800-1939, (Routledge), 1986 and more generally Jackson,
Mark, (ed.), Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and
Concealment, (Ashgate), 2002, Thorn, Jennifer, (ed.), Writing
British infanticide: child-murder, gender, and print, 1722-1859,
(University of Delaware Press), 2003 and McDonagh, Josephine, Child
Murder & British Culture, 1720-1900, (Cambridge University
Press), 2003, pp. 97-183. [2] Puerperal psychosis is now a well-recognised event, affecting
perhaps one in every 500 births in the UK. It normally happens in the
first month of the new child’s life and takes the form of a severe
episode of mania similar to that suffered by manic depressives. Patients
may become confused and delusional, and in the most extreme cases try to
harm themselves or their new child. See, Marland, Hilary, ‘Getting
away with murder? Puerperal insanity, infanticide and the defence
plea’, in ibid, Jackson, Mark (ed.), Infanticide: historical
perspectives on child murder and concealment, 1550-2000, pp. 168-192
and ‘Disappointment and desolation: women, doctors and interpretations
of puerperal insanity in the nineteenth century’, History of
Psychiatry, Vol. 14, (2003), pp. 303-320. [3] William Ryan described infanticide as ‘the murder of a
new-born child’ although there is no specific time applied to the term
‘new-born’; it is not restricted to days after the birth. Ryan,
William Burke, Infanticide: Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention and
History, (J. Churchill, New Burlington Street), p. 3 [4]Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd Series,
76, 1844, col. 430-431. [5] Ibid, Ryan, William Burke, Infanticide: Its Law, Prevalence,
Prevention and History, pp. 45-46. [6]The Times, 29 April 1862. [7]
Baines, Mrs M.A., Excessive Infant Mortality: How can it be
stayed?, (J. Churchill and. Sons), 1865. [8] National Archives: PCOM 4/36/37 and the review of Ryan, William
Burke, ‘Infanticide: its Law, Prevalence, Prevention and History’, The
British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review or Quarterly Journal of
Practical Medicine and Surgery, Vol. xxxi, (1863), pp. 1-27. [9] See, Whorton, James C., The Arsenic Century: How Victorian
Britain was Poisoned at Home, Work and Play, (Oxford University
Press), 2010, pp. 27-33. [10] On Margaret Waters’ case, see HO 12 193/92230 [11] One of the children in her care apparently died from an
overdose of whisky. King was executed on 11 March 1889 in Calton Prison,
and had the unenviable distinction of being the last but one woman to be
hanged for murder in Scotland. [12] Dyer’s reputation as a mass-murderess stems from her modus
operandi for after strangling her victim with tape, she placed it in a
carpet bag (nicknamed the ‘travelling coffin’) and threw it into the
Thames. She stated in her confession ‘You’ll know all mine by the
tape around their necks’. Fifty-seven-year-old Dyer was
responsible for at least 17 deaths before her arrest in 1896. For a
detailed police report, her trial and sentencing, forensic detail,
incriminating evidence as well as her written confession, see Thames
Valley Police Archives. See also, Vale, Alison, Amelia Dyer,
angel maker: the woman who murdered babies for money, (Andre
Deutsch), 2007. [13] See, Behlmer, George K., Child abuse and moral reform in
England 1870-1908, (Oxford University Press), 1982, pp. 25-42,
150-156 and 211-221. [14]Curgenven,
J.B., On Baby-farming and the Registration of
Nurses, Read at a meeting of the Health Department of the
National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, March 15,
1869, (National Association for the Promotion of Social Science),
1869, p. 3. See also, Greenwood, James, The Seven Curses of London,
(S. Rivers), 1869, pp. 29-57. [15]North British Daily Mail, 2March 1871. [16] Ibid, Rose, Lionel, Massacre of the Innocents. Infanticide
in Great Britain 1800-1939, p. 94. [17]Cit,
Altick, Richard D., Victorian Studies in Scarlet,
(W.W. Norton & Co.), 1970, p. 285 [18] See, Findlay, Rosie, ‘‘More Deadly Than The Male’...?
Mothers and Infanticide In Nineteenth Century Britain’, Cycnos,
Vol. 23, (2), (2006), URL: http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/document.html?id=763
[19]The Times, 4 July and 24 September 1870. [20]The Infant Life Protection Society, created in 1870 and
the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
established in 1889 campaigned relentlessly for the introduction of
better ‘policing’ of working-class families: Allen, Anne and Morton,
Arthur, This is your child: the story of the National Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children, (Routledge & K. Paul), 1961,
pp. 15-33. They recommended more foundling hospitals to be set up as
well as public nurseries for the children of the poor, as they believed
that working-class mothers’ lack of education and standard of living
both conspired against infant life. See, Arnot, Margaret L., ‘Infant
death, child care and the state: the baby farming scandal and the first
infant life protection legislation of 1872’, Continuity and Change,
Vol. 9, (2), 1994, p. 290 and ‘An English Crèche’, The
Times, 8 April 1868. [21] The Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act was passed in 1889 to
protect children under the age of fourteen from ill-treatment. Although
in 1881 the Midwives Institute was founded, it took almost another
twenty years before the first Midwives Act was passed in 1902; the
Central Midwives Board were to govern training and practice of midwives
in England and Wales, and it was illegal to practise without
qualification (Scotland 1915 and Northern Ireland 1922). Appendix
5: The Excel and Perl process.
MSExcel
Set in date order and filter for baptisms only
MSExcel
Then, alphabetically sort the surnames
MSExcel
Save as a new file in "comma separated variables"
format (ie. plain text)
Perl Run
this routine for each new text line
Perl cont..
Split the fields at the commas.
The rest of the routine works on the “Information field”
Detect and exclude "visitor parents" for separate
listing
“Surname field” - Take surname and either continue
totalling, if the surname is the same as
Detect uninformative entry, exclude and set for separate listing
Detect "s" for boy, "d" for daughter and then
increment count against surname
Detect "bastard" & "base born" and copy
for listing
Perl
On “End of file” close lists of visitors, uninformative,
bastards and surnames |
We should however look closely at the
possibility of either infanticide or unrecorded family wasting being
embedded in the figures. The 1871 census was used to analyse this issue
along with the processed data for the 50-year period, 1850 – 1900. In
that period there were 71 recorded deaths at an age less than 12 months
and a further 74 for children under the age of 6 years. These two
figures amount to a loss of 27% of all births (baptisms) and there were
in fact 38% more recorded boy deaths than girls.
