The Twelve Day Death of Eliza Lewis

This one is perhaps one of the darkest stories I have come across in my research and it involved two Charlotte Street women.

First we have to go back to 1863 when a house was found ablaze in the morning:

The arsonist was found to be a girl called Elizabeth Tregall and she was brought before the court on the Saturday:

Elizabeth would spend the next two nights in a cell at the police station on St Mary Street. She was back in court on the Monday:

So they let her off an arson charge but she got three months hard labour for vagrancy, probably in  Cardiff Gaol. 

However the original Police Court records of this case paint a different picture. Elizabeth Tregall only looked 15 years old because she was emaciated and malnourished. She was actually in her early twenties. PC Surcombe states:

"She has no employment, she said her husband was at sea" 

Also Sergeant Glass states:

"I have known prisoner 5 or 6 months. She is married but her husband has left her and she has been on the town . She has no home and nowhere to sleep. I see her wonder round the streets every night."(This description means she was homeless rather than working as a prostitute)

While in Cardiff Gaol Eliza would have met Adeliade Paine, Annie Yarwood and Mary Murphy, all experienced brothel keepers from Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane who were also there at this time. Also there was Sue Walker, in for smashing the windows of her old brothel on Charlotte Street and Catherine Mitchell, a prostitute in for stopping men and using foul language.  

So if Elizabeth wasn't familiar with prostitution in Cardiff before gaol she certainly would have known all about it by the time she left. 

Cut to a year later and an Elizabeth Lewis (bear with me on the name) is up for soliciting on Bute Street:

"Three sailors were coming up. Prisoner caught hold of one between the legs and behaved in a very disorderly way."

Then next year our Elizabeth resurfaces as Eliza on Charlotte Street in April 1865:

It reads:

"At 12:30 on Sat night saw prisoner drunk in Charlotte St. She was hollering and shouting- she is a prostitute. 7 days Hard Labour"

So Eliza was back in gaol. She was picked up again the next month:

"Last night at one o'clock saw defendant in Nelson Street drunk and behaving in a very riotous manner using obscene language. She is a prostitute. Cautioned."

Things then came to a dramatic conclusion in February 1866 and is evidence of the name change:

The other newspaper report gives more information but not the alias:

See my other blog post on the Glamorganshire Canal for more background on how common this was. This lock on the junction canal still exists today.

The body they had pulled from the canal was badly decomposed and so Elizabeth Lewis/Tregall was pronounced dead at the inquest and a death certificate was issued for her. She was hurriedly buried at Cathays Cemetary. 

The thing is the body wasn't Eliza. For twelve days Eliza Lewis was walking dead and buried on the streets of Cardiff.

Ten days later the lock gates on the junction canal were not shutting properly. The workman overseeing the lock used his grappling hooks to remove the blockage. He pulled up the mutilated corpse of a baby girl. The sixth month old was wearing clothes from Cardiff Workhouse:

This led to enquiries being made at the workhouse and soon enough the mistake was realised.

The woman's body wasn't Eliza but Mary Wheelan who had taken her daughter Catherine out of the workhouse on Sunday to go to chapel. Mary had possibly slit her baby's throat before she hugged her daughter and jumped into the canal. I think the doctor is sparing the dead mother here in his sudden change of mind about the cut- is it not doubtful that two huge lock gates could make a clean cut from ear to ear of a six month old baby?

Mary Wheelan herself had probably worked as a prostitute on Charlotte Street as she was assaulted there by a bully in June 1865, two months before she gave birth to Catherine in the workhouse. 

Of course it is possible she fell in by accident, the Junction Canal ran under Bute Street, but it seems probable this was a suicide.

Why she committed suicide and murdered her child we will never know but post-natal depression, desperation and despair must have lain at the root of the cause.

Interestingly it seems that the deaths of Mary and Catherine were not registered officially, even though Eliza's incorrect death was. The Burial Register at Cathays was also not altered so the grave is still named as Elizabeth Lewis, there is no indication her daughters body was buried with her. Surely this is the result of some highly insensitive bureaucratic oversight after the inquest. 

As for Eliza Lewis being dead did not stop her:

That is from the July after she was recorded as dead in February.

In November of the same year Eliza was stripping clothes lines along Bute Street:

Eliza was sentenced to a year in gaol for this offence. 

There the trail goes cold for Eliza. I can't be sure when she died or if she remarried as the name Elizabeth Lewis is so common, she certainly did not carry on as Elizabeth Tregall. 

References
Fire: Cardiff and Merthyr Guardian 29th May 1863 p.8.
Saturday Court and Monday court are the same reference.
Police Court is Glamorgan Record Office PSCBO/1/39 Elizabeth Tregall 23rd May 1863. The other women in Cardiff gaol are also from this record in May and June 1863. I can find no record of any Tregall living in Cardiff in this time, or any marriage between a Tregall and an Elizabeth either, though it is highly likely they are from Cornwall.
Catching hold of sailors is PSCBO/1/42 Elizabeth Lewis 4th June 1864
Prostitution charges PSCBO/1/44 Eliza Lewis 24th April and 17th May 1865.
Inquest on Eliza Lewis MM 10 February 1866 p.8. and Cardiff Times 9 February 1866 p.5. Death Certificate is March quarter 1866 Cardiff 11a 164. Cathays Cemetary plot K929.
Mary Wheelan inquest Cardiff Times 23 February 1866 p.5. Her daughter is Catherine Wheelan see birth Cardiff Sept Quart 11a 259.
Mary Wheelan on Charlotte Street is Cardiff Times 9 June 1865 p.7. and PSCBO/1/45 Thomas Davies 7th June 1865. Strangely Thomas Davies alias Clark was sentenced to a year imprisonment at the New Year Assizes in 1866 for theft of meat from Bute Street- he could be the bully that Eliza Tregall was supposedly bereaving when it was thought she had committed suicide.
Eliza tea can theft: CT 20 July 1866 p.8.
Eliza clothes theft: CT 2 November 1866 p.6. and trial CT 12 January 1867 p.8

Babes of the Pave. Prostitute Babies in Cardiff.

This is Bridget Lancaster, a Newport prostitute from 1871. (Image Gwent Archives.GROQCG 38)

Babes of the Pave: Prostitute Babies in Cardiff

Warning- Themes of sex and child deaths in this article.

This blog is a continuation of a series as I continue to construct a book called 'Notorious: Charlotte Street and the Lane'. See previous blogposts and for art go to www.anthonyrhys.com 

Half of the people in my book are prostitutes. They sometimes end up running brothels themselves or moving away from the occupation but they start off as prostitutes. Considering how one role of the prostitute was to have a lot of sexual intercourse you'd expect to find their babies everywhere in Cardiff. The opposite is true and their children are usually non-existent in the records.

This post is about how very difficult it can be to find their babies. 'Normal' family history is a pretty straightforward task- looking for formal birth, death and marriage records, it's usually C follows B follows A. When looking for prostitute children it's very often G follows X follows 7. It's illusive and sometimes illogical and, as I'm finding out as I research Notorious, it's also incredibly hard.


It is very important for me and my book to find these babies. You cannot tell a life story if you miss out the crucial, primal, often harrowing experiences of childbirth and rearing that these women faced. I also get frustrated reading material about Victorian prostitution that concentrates on the laws and middle class attitudes towards them- I want to find them themselves.

Here I give four case studies of my searches for the 'Babes of the Paves' for four Cardiff girls.

Baby 1: Ruth Fletcher

Ann Anthony was a Cardiff prostitute. She became active in the profession in 1844 and seems to have left it after a long prison sentence from 1855 to 1861. She never officially married and I think she died in Cardiff in 1880 aged 50.

Baby Ruth is an example of using a 'holistic' attitude to the sources. There are no references to Ann being pregnant or with a child in any of the newspaper or census reports. In fact she wasn't in the 1851 or 1861 censuses so to find her alone took some work. eventually I tracked her down.


In 1851 she is living with her bully John Fletcher as Ann Fletcher. In the 1861 census she is simply an A A in the Brixton Prison listings. 1871 she still eludes me.

So, taking the jump to Ann Fletcher I found this: Ruth, daughter of Anne Fletcher from 1847.

All well and good. the Mill Lane address is acceptable as it is just behind Charlotte Street where she worked. The prostitutes lodged everywhere and seldom stayed at any one house, beerhouse or brothel for long.

Then there is this: The death of Ruth Fletcher aged 3 weeks in China Row.

Again, all well and good- China Row is also very close to Charlotte Street and was part of the supporting slum area around it. The problem is the hundreds of single woman and single parent births around this time, it's not unusual at all.

I wanted to confirm this baby Fletcher was linked to Ann Anthony so I got the death certificate.

Yes, there we are- confirmation, Ruth Fletcher, the daughter of John Fletcher, with Ann Anthony present at the death at Mill Lane. Poor Ruth died of convulsions at 3 weeks with no doctor or medical attention. At least Ann was there at the time.

That was easy wasn't it? This adds a lot to Ann's story. It also adds to her narrative things you would never have thought of if you were unaware of little Ruth. One example is when she jumped in front of a violent bully who was about to attack one of her friends. She did that when she was five months pregnant.

Baby 2: Catherine Rees

Example number two is mainly the benefit of randomness and taking a chance. It starts with this, the burial of little Catherine Rees:

There is no corresponding baptism record to find the name of the parents of this Catherine. Now a child death on Whitmore Lane was not uncommon, in these church records there are hundreds. What I was actually doing here for the book was focusing on one cluster of child deaths to show the high rates of mortality among children on Whitmore Lane, Catherine Rees was just one of four young infants who died there from 7th July- August 3rd 1841.

But when the death certificate came it was pointing towards this being a prostitute's child.

Lo and behold there is an Elizabeth Rees working in Thomas Thomas' brothel, in the 1841 census She's one of 7 women working there (The census taker has used the euphemism of 'single woman'). Tommy Thomas ran a notorious beer house and brothel rolled into one. It features heavily in newspaper reports at the time.

The 1841 census was taken on June 6th, the baby was born mid-June. Elizabeth was probably working in the brothel right up until she gave birth. Catherine Rees lived for five weeks before dying of convulsions, a generic term for any child death linked with high fevers or epilepsy.


I think that Elizabeth Rees was arrested for theft in April 1847 and died in Cardiff Gaol on the 26th June while awaiting trial. She was a heavy drinker and 'Died by the visitation of God of chronic disease of the stomach.'

So this was a chance find.

Baby 3: Amelia Clark

Whizz forward a little to 1852 and the prostitute Sarah Clark. Sarah turns up in early 1849 as a prostitute working in China, the notorious area in Merthyr Tydfil. She moved down to Whitmore Lane in late 1849 and appears on the 1851 census running her own brothel, aged 22, at 4 Whitmore Lane with three other prostitutes. I knew that Sarah Clark had a baby because of these two sorrowful newspaper reports:

She had a baby in her arms in October 1852 when she was working and also August 1853 when she was drunk.

I don't think Sarah Clark would win a mother of the year award after these two incidents but it shows she had a baby. The problem was- who was he/she? There was no indication on census returns of a daughter.

It didn't take long to find little Amelia's birth in the GRO indexes and here she is:

Amelia completely disappears after August 6th 1853 when she was dangled by her mother. She doesn't die, get buried, married or appear in any census anywhere, so that is a continuing task. I think she is either dead and unofficially buried or she has been taken away from Sarah, adopted or institutionalised and had her name changed.


Sarah Clark did go on to have more children, but that is another story. She also continued to run brothels until at least 1903, that's fifty years in the business!!! But again, that's another story.

4 Angelina Owens

I've kept the worst until last. Ann Owens, nicknamed 'Little Punch', was a prostitute from the age of 12. First in Swansea at the start of 1850 then in Cardiff from 1851 where she is working at Mrs Prothero's brothel on Whitmore Lane. Ann is 19 years old and heavily pregnant when she gets a seven year transportation sentence for her part in the robbery of a canal woman's house. The court reports her state during the proceedings as 'far advanced in pregnancy':

.

When Little Punch got her seven year sentence she broke down in court in a 'paroxysm of grief', no wonder as she was also four months pregnant.

From this it was a bit of detective work to track down her child with an 'Owen' or 'Owens' surname in Wales. I thought she gave birth before travelling to Lewes prison then Millbank but there was nothing that matched in Cardiff, there was nothing at Millbank or Lewes either. Finally I found this description of Ann Owens' tattoos from five years later- they were recorded when she was imprisoned for a ten year transportation sentence for theft in Merthyr Tydfil.

Ignore the other tattoos for now apart from 'Angelina Owens' below the left elbow. I know she had no relatives with that name so Bingo! A further search of the London records and Angelina Owens was found, well her burial was- in Victoria Park Cemetery on June 16th 1854.

Angelina was born at Millbank prison as her birth is registered in Westminster London 1853. 

Her death certificate states she died of secondary syphilis and diarrhoea. It's hardly surprising that Ann Owens had syphilis as at age 19 she had already been a prostitute for seven years. Ann may have been present at the death, she may not have been, it lists Mary Smith, the Head Nurse at Brixton as being the informant. I doubt she would have been allowed to attend the funeral. Her tattoo was the only way she had to memorialise her one year old daughter, her angel.

So there we are. In retrospect it makes sense finding each of these but when you have very little to go on it is a hard, time consuming part of the research, but it tells the lives of these young girls and tells it well.

References available. 

Article intellectual copyright. Anthony Rhys 2017.


Certificates all GRO copyright, Newspaper articles from the wonderful Welsh Newspapers Online by National Library of Wales.

Notorious: Charlotte Street and 'The Lane'.

 

Whitmore Lane on the left. The Golden Cross circa 1890. National Museums of Wales.

Sex, violence, theft and death in Cardiff.

Anne Awberry, prostitute and drunk, from the Carmarthen 'Notorious' show.

My next project is a book with paintings based on thirty people living in two streets in Cardiff- Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane over a thirty year period. It sounds a but dry but bear with me on this one. The two streets were back to back and connected with a maze of lanes and outbuildings.

Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane 1851, Cardiff Central Station is bottom left. Glamorgan Record Office.

Even if you live in Cardiff chances are you won't have heard of them. They were purposefully destroyed by the Cardiff Corporation- Whitmore Lane was renamed Custom House Street in 1872 and Charlotte Street was demolished soon after and now lies under the Marriott Hotel. Only one building, The Golden Cross, remains in a rebuilt form on the original streets. In their time from the 1830's to the 1870's these two streets were truly notorious and full of brothels, beerhouses and lodging houses. A unique community of prostitutes, gangsters, thieves, pimps, boatmen, sailors and the poor emerged there - streets of vice and pleasure.

Two of my previous shows have used historical sources from Carmarthen and Merthyr Tydfil as a basis for my paintings so this project is a natural progression.

Bute Street, which was round the corner, is still well known in Cardiff as having been an area for pubs and prostitutes. Cardiff Bay/Tiger Bay further towards the coast has a semi-mythical status now as a unique and multicultural community but it came later in the 1870's and 1880's. The story of Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane is unknown. Google searches reveal very little, academic books and articles make brief mention of it. It was a liminal area inhabited by unique subcultures. It was half town half docks, half working class half criminal, half land half water, half Welsh half Irish, half pleasure and half pain. It was a place of sex, violence, money, disease, prison and transportation, drink and drugs, laughter and death.
This is how it was described looking back in 1901:

Cardiff Times 1901 May 4th p.4.

Don't think I am exaggerating just because you may not heard of Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane. The newspapers of the time are riddled with condemnation of these two streets. In 1860:
'The name I see written on a wall in black letters, which seem to be in mourning for lost characters- lost virtue- lost purses- lost everything relating to genuine happiness and respectability, and which letters form 'Whitmore Lane'... dens of infamy, shoeless feet, broken heads, flat noses, beds full of innumerable, diminutive, bona fide lodgers of biting and teasing propensities.' Cardiff Times February 25th, p.7.
The place of women in this community was central, pivotal and strong. They owned and ran brothels and beerhouses, they were prostitutes and thieves, they were drunk and violent and they also made money on their own terms. Disability was not always a hindrance there either and one of Whitmore Lane's most important figures, Mary The Cripple, a woman severely disabled from birth, managed to thrive and support an extended family there through difficult times. She is a character unique in Welsh history. I have unearthed the lives and stories of many other individuals who were not content to live their lives according to the socially acceptable roles of the time.

Mrs Prothero's brothel on the 1851 census, age 73 her house includes her house manager Mary Davies and four prostitutes including 'The Grenadier' from Chester and 'Little Punch' from Swansea. It operated for at least twenty years.

The thirty people I write about in the book are all social outcasts to some extent, more than half of them are female and three of them disabled. All of them are intriguing. For their story I have trawled whatever sources are available- newspaper reports, censuses, gaol and workhouse records, birth, death and marriage certificates, court records and maps. Their stories interweave with each other throughout the thirty years and it is almost possible to recreate the community through their lives. I am turning these historical sources into a ‘creative history’ or ‘narrative history’ format, that I have admired in the work of historians such as Helen Rogers and Lesley Hulonce.

I am primarily a painter though and so this book will cross creative and historical boundaries by containing thirty portraits of the main people within it. I want to illustrate these people, because as far as I am aware there is only one photograph extant of them, a prisoner mugshot from the mid 1870's of one of the bullies of Whitmore Lane. There are also no photographs of the streets either from the time, the one heading this post being the closest I can find. 


Daniel Davies, aka 'Swansea Dan', a boatman and bully from Whitmore Lane. The photograph was taken in Pentonville Prison in June 1876 after a charge of shooting. He has an abscess on his hand. Source: National Archives.

I am intensely passionate about this book as on a personal note my family lived there from the 1830’s until 1865. My grandmother knew her grandfather who was born there so the link is historical and biological. My family were (unfortunately) not notorious enough to be in this book but they do appear in the sidelines. They would have known everyone in it, they would have heard about every event on the street, they lived it and they are a part of me. 

So, utilising (so far) over 4,000 individual sources of information about these people, I’m drafting through the finished work. It’s currently around 90,000 words long with 30 paintings to do alongside it.

I can’t wait to introduce you to Kitty Pig Eyes, Lewis Leyshon, Mary the Cripple, The Notorious Jack Matthews, Swansea Sue, Mrs Prothero, Billy Shortlegs, Harry Kickup and the rest of the formidable cast of Notorious who hung around the Lame Chicken, The Kings Head, The Flying Eagle and the many brothels of Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane.

The text is in a very rough draft form still as I've only recently added all of the core information in order but here's a flavour from 1841.

'Mrs Prothero, at 63 years of age, is the oldest owner of the oldest brothel in Cardiff. It gets the lion share of the business on Whitmore Lane, partly because it's right next to the Custom house where the sailors get paid off, partly because Mrs Prothero knows the game inside out. She’s also a light sleeper, alert to the comings and goings and a door banging nearby in the early hours rouses her. Hearing shouts of ‘Driver!’ from across the road she knows full well that the boatman William Bennett is in trouble again. The copper on duty has heard a grunting in a lane. He’s looked over a fence and seen Driver in the moonlight in a garden, digging up a stashed stolen goose. Mrs Prothero glides downstairs to her door in time to see Driver smashing in the head of the policeman with an iron bar. The copper has hold of Driver’s collar and manages a smash back on the head with his staff but then he faints. Driver runs off but is soon caught. Having no love for the thug, Mrs Prothero testifies in court that she saw him and he gets four months in Swansea Gaol.'

'Hard labour at the house of correction means grabbing a bar and walking up the steps of a giant wheel with a group of other inmates, turning it for no reason. Ten minutes on the wheel, five minutes off and you do that for eight hours straight.  Driver lasts six days then he dares to talk at the wheel. He’s sent to the dark cell for three nights of solitude on bread and water with nothing but a bowl to piss in.'

Driver goes on to beat children and punch sick women, but he gets his dues one dark night near the docks.....

For further reading on academic views on my paintings and their links to history please see:

Neo-Victorian review from BAVS2016 conference. by Emily Turner from Sussex University.  

Resoundingly Neo-Victorian Biofiction in Paint: Review of Anthony Rhys’s Notorious
Marie-Luise Kohlke

In Neo-Victorian Studies 8:2 2016. (Should be online but the link is down!)

Anthony Rhys 28th January 2017