The Whore and the Mayoress: The Death of Bristol Eliza.

The Golden Cross: Whitmore Lane on the left c.1890. Image National Library of Wales.

The Whore and the Mayoress: The Death of Bristol Eliza

I am currently writing a book on Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane in Cardiff, two streets notorious for prostitution, drink, violence and theft. From 1840-1870 it was a community unique in Cardiff's history and one that is currently quite unknown. See my earlier post on the general background of the book for more information on the growing art and narrative history project.

One of the most interesting events in my research so far has been the case of Eliza Wells. This is the text from my book.

Monday April 15th 1850

Merry Meyrick is woken up at Ann Llewellyn’s brothel. She gets the message that Bristol Eliza wants her because she is dying. Eliza used to be a servant from Bristol and worked on the Lane with Merry when she came to Cardiff. For the last three years she’s been going in and out of the workhouse with her injuries, big open sores on her legs that she got from a bully kicking three years ago. Wounds that just won’t heal. Syphilis has ravaged her body, there are weeping sores on her hands and feet, massive lesions and growths all over. To dull the pain Eliza’s been taking an ounce of laudanum a day for years, Merry often gets the laudanum for her and she takes half an ounce at a time from a small phial and then a drop of water. Recently it's got so bad that if she tries to speak or move too much she’s soon asleep.  

Merry walks down Whitmore Lane to Mrs Prothero’s brothel where Eliza has been lodging for years. Eliza is in a very bad state, weak, haggard and withered. She looks about 50 years old but has only lived 23 short years. She quietly tells Merry that she is dying and that she has seen it coming in her dreams. Merry doesn’t really know what to say so she talks to her of praying to God for solace. They say a prayer together and sit for a while. In the afternoon Eliza says she wants someone to read the bible to her. Merry can read and write a little but she knows her words will be slow and stumbling so Mrs Prothero sends for one of the few well educated people that they have had contact with. 

Mrs Vachell, the mayoress, who knows the girls from the courts and the streets comes within the half hour. She reads to Eliza and prays with her. Eliza asks to be turned from one side to another to ease the pain on her sore body and then she dies. When they try to move her body for the coroner blood gushes out of her mouth and nostrils. The inquest says that she died by the visitation of God.

So why does this sad event interest me so much? It gives an extremely rare behind the scenes insight into the human relationships of the many brothels on Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane. It is also  evidence of the camaraderie and community that I hoped existed in this much maligned community. Here's some background information on the main people:

Mrs Prothero ran a brothel on Whitmore Lane from at least 1839 until her death aged 84 in 1857. It was in a commanding position at number 44 Whitmore Lane, right next door to the Custom House where the sailors were paid their wages. It also operated in conjunction with a pub on Charlotte Street that was called 'The Navigators Arms' 1841-1849, 'The Lame Chicken' up until 1851 and then 'Noah's Ark' until 1855. This notorious beer house was run by Mrs Prothero's daughter and son-in-law and it supplied drunken customers for the brothel and also out of hours beer.

Mrs Prothero's brothel or 'lodging house' at 44 Whitmore Lane, 1851. All five women listed were active prostitutes, 'girls of ill fame' has been written down by the census taker then later crossed out.

Merry Meyrick is Maria Meyrick, a Cardiff born girl who turned to prostitution in the Friar's Fields area of Newport around 1841 at the age of 19.  She returned to Cardiff in 1845 after she was severely beaten by her bully and almost killed. At first Maria worked mainly out of the Gloucester Arms beerhouse at 28 Charlotte Street but like most other girls she moved from pub to pub and brothel to brothel. She could be vicious and was an accessory in the murder of a man in 1847 when she assaulted his landlady Peggy the Sweep for bringing a light out to her own door. She was transported to Van Dieman's Land in 1851 for a brothel theft at the Noah's Ark. (Her nickname Merry comes from a report in a Hobart newspaper- Maria liked to wear pink dresses.)

1841 census record for Eliza Wells, aged 15.

Maria Meyrick showed another side of her character though with Bristol Eliza (place name nicknames were common in these streets, Liverpool Dick, Swansea Dan, Swansea Sue and Gloucester Bill were all living on Charlotte Street and Whitmore Lane). Eliza Wells was indeed from Bristol and was a house servant for a skilled working class family on Lawrence Hill in 1841. When she moved to Cardiff is unknown as she seemed to stay out of trouble with the authorities but by February 1847 she was very unwell. She entered the Cardiff Union Workhouse as a destitute prostitute and with 'wounds on legs'. She seems to have admitted herself voluntarily for medical help for short periods and discharged herself on the 16th February, 15th April and 24th July 1847. 

Cardiff Union Workhouse admissions register 1847 listing Eliza Wells

The inquest says that the wounds on her legs were originally caused by kicks from a bully (pimp). There was endemic violence towards prostitutes from their bullies right through the Victorian era and kicking was as popular as punching. Why the wounds did not heal though is due to the syphilis she had contracted. The inquest does not say this explicitly, preferring to call it 'the disease to which unfortunate women are peculiarly liable' and 'a certain disease'. Eliza was obviously in the latter stages of syphilis and her body would have been a mass of painful sores. She would have also probably suffered from growths around her vagina and anus, hair loss, swollen glands, tiredness, headaches and joint pains. As she worsened further she would have had vision and heart problems, numbness, loss of co-ordination and she died from either a laudanum overdose, meningitis, strokes or dementia like symptoms as her brain rotted.

The inquest also says that laudanum, a flavoured medicine of 10% opium and 90% alcohol, was easily accessible from the chemist and that it was low cost and commonly used by the prostitutes. It was a cheaper way of getting wasted than alcohol and was also an effective pain reliever. Laudanum misuse was a massively under reported problem in Cardiff and I have only come across one other reference to it in this time period when Ann Llewellyn, who Maria Meyrick was lodging with, took an overdose in January 1857. This was probably a suicide attempt as she was about to be given a four year sentence for a robbery.

What interests me with all this information is that Mrs Prothero, Maria Meyrick and others obviously took care of Eliza Wells over a three year period. I think a common assumption with a case like this is that Eliza would have been forced out of the brothel as she was no longer economically viable and would have died in the workhouse. The opposite seems true here however as she died in bed surrounded by friends. There was no way she could have paid any rent or bought laudanum by her own means especially in the latter years or months of her life yet this is what happened. The relevant records for the workhouse do not survive for this period but I doubt if she was a candidate for outdoor relief from the Poor Law authorities so what we have is a brothel owner and a working prostitute looking after one of their own and caring for them.

The mayoresses' involvement is also interesting. Mrs Vachell probably came into contact with Mrs Prothero and her girls either through the police courts and magistrates or through some civic charitable cause, although I have found no charity involvement recorded this early- all of the 'homes for fallen women' and church work seemed to have started in the 1860's. I find it very consoling that a 'lady of the pave' could go out on a Monday morning to the mayors house and ask her to come and read to a dying syphilitic. 

Eliza Wells was buried April 17th 1850 at St Mary the Virgin Cardiff aged 23 and I like to think that her funeral was well attended by her friends. I am glad that she was looked after. 

St Mary the Virgin Church Burial Record for Eliza Wells, 1850.

References available. 

Article in it's current form is copyright Anthony Rhys 2017.

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

Two items from Welsh Asylums.

With a great interest in Victorian institutions I'm always on the look out for artefacts from them.  This post is about three items in my collection.

The first is two boot keys from Denbigh Asylum.  I bought them from Nigel, a nurse who used to work there in the 1970's.  He himself collected old items from the hospital and said this about the items:

"Hi, I am a psychiatric nurse by background, retired 2 years ago after 38 years. One of my hobbies over the years has been to collect mental health ephemera. I originate from North Wales and worked up there as a community psychiatric nurse from 1984-1991. I was given these by a retired ex North Wales Hospital nurse who knew I was collecting things back in the mid 1980's. I have seen similar items in the old West Cheshire Hospital museum when it was open (I trained there in 70s) so have no reason to dispute what he told me they were. He picked them up during his years at the hospital."

There are two metal keys, both slightly different designs to each other.  They both have a 'screw' pattern inside them. The screw pattern would, when twisted, have moved a 'peg' that was in the strap attachment that went through a hole in the boot strap itself to secure it- making it impossible to take off without the keys.  They were used on patients who constantly removed their shoes, I guess under the reasoning that they needed their feet protected against the cold and the floors. Dating is difficult but I'd say  they are from the 1880-1920 period.

They are very similar, but not identical to these on the People's Collection Wales website.  They also have the locks that went on the boots as well.

The second item is a carpentry plane.  It is stamped 'Glamorgan Asylum' on each end. Asylums had workshops used to train patients in a trade- an occupational therapy approach. The plane is a fine bladed type used for fine details.  It was bought from someone who worked at the site during some construction and they found a whole load of them in a skip.

Victorian Photographs of Disability

Bit of background- I teach pupils with profound and multiple learning difficulties in my day job, a job I absolutely love. I also love Victorian history and photographs (which comes out in my art a little) so for me combining the two is twice as interesting.

As people with a disability in general have been institutionalised and marginalised throughout history it has been a pleasure to find old photographs of children and adults with 'special needs' or a physical disability that are from family albums.

This little girl is my favourite, from the photographer H J Taylor of 243 Kentish Town Road.  Date wise I think it's late 1870's or early 1880's- the photographer moved to 335 Kentish Road at some point (possibly 1890's) but I can't tell if that was after or before living at 243.  Medically speaking I think she has nystagmus- hence the sideways gaze at the photographer and her hand position is interesting too but apart from that it is hard to make any specific medical diagnosis from one snapshot.  This is also a 'hidden mother' card as you can just see her hand behind the girls back on the left side supporting her.  Cabinet Card, back is blank.

This baby is from Brynamman and the photo taken by William Rees, Chemist and Photographer, I think it dates to around 1895 and the boy (pretty sure it's a boy despite the dress- babies were often dressed the same in Victorian times weren't they?) has Down Syndrome, which was only identified in 1866 by Dr John Langdon Down, who worked at The Earlswood Asylum.  It's a cute photo with typical ornate chair and furry rug background.  Cabinet Card, back is blank. 

These photographs are rare as there are more of one of the same individual. Here is the girl as a baby, note the mothers hand bottom right supporting her. This is a tiny passport sized photo and technically not Victorian as it probably dates 1900-1910.

Here is the same girl a few years old- about four or five? The photo has been taken around the back of a house, note the coal shovel against the wall on the right. She is also sitting in front of a backdrop of what looks like a painted aerial view of a landscape. Note the cute cat toy she is holding!

Again the same girl a few years later- looking about 8 or 9 I'd guess, taken around the back of a terrace house. The girl has a lovey doll and also a little fob watch on her dress! The chair she is sitting on is the same as the one in the previous photograph.

These two photographs are unfortunately faded. In the first she looks like she has another doll or toy on her lap. The second is clearer and she is again sat on the same chair and is gazing lovingly at her doll next to her- the doll is in a toy pram with a blanket over her. The girl is wearing the fob watch again but it must have been taken at a different time to the other photo with the watch as she is wearing a different dress in this photograph. I love the way she is looking at the doll. 

These two photographs were bought with the others. They date from the same time and probably show the girls brother and her proud and well-dressed mother. 

What I love about these photographs are the fact that they have been kept together. Again they show a little girl with a disability who has been kept in a loving home rather than institutionalised. I only wish there were more of her as she got older. Perhaps she did not survive beyond childhood, I hope she did.  

This bearded gentleman is from Peterborough, date 1880's?  Cerebral palsy?  CDV, Eastmid Studios, back is blank. 

A man showing off his writing skills. The back is blank though the seller said it came from a album of photographs from Scotland. This may be a family photograph but it also could have been sold to raise funds for an institution or the individual. Cerebral palsy again and dating from late 1860's or early 1870's.

I love this family photo in the garden. c1890?  Note the wooden spindles of the wheelchair legs, it seems to be a household chair with two wheels attached either side. Back is blank.

 This studio photograph from the 1860's shows a man with two unusual three legged crutches. I assume he needs them as he has very poor balance. The three stools in the photo and the empty chair to his left are there intentionally. I would say he is a carpenter and they are there as example of the man's livelihood. Photograph is from a Mansfield studio in Nottinghamshire.

Back of photo.

and I don't usually collect American photographs but this girl is from Minneapolis. Fred Palmer, CDV, back is blank, though it has 1885 pencilled on it.

That's it! I own the photographs but wouldn't say there's any copyright on them so feel free to share and I'd be interested to know of any others.