The Spinning House E-Book

Caroline Biggs

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 363

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Biggs deftly blends historical research with creative retelling, bringing prison records to full and chilling life.' - The New Statesman Cambridge University is renowned worldwide for its academic prowess, but below the surface lurks a murky past. During the nineteenth century, the university became infamous for its dogged determination to cling to ancient laws allowing it to arrest and imprison unchaperoned women found walking the streets of Cambridge after dark. Mistakes were made. Violence and legal action followed until finally an Act of Parliament put an end to the university's jurisdiction over the women of Cambridge.

Leseprobe

In memory of Daisy, Elizabeth, Emma and Jane and all thewomen imprisoned in the Spinning House.

Please note that the dialogue in this book is based on fact in that the historical content is taken from court records and secondary sources, but has been paraphrased to recreate the atmosphere and emotions of the events as they would have taken place.

First published 2024

This edition published 2025

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© Caroline Biggs, 2024, 2025

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ABOUTTHE AUTHOR

Growing up in Cambridge, in the shadow of some of the most famous buildings in the world, Caroline Biggs was always curious about the history of a town dwarfed by its internationally famous university.

A former trustee at the Museum of Cambridge and founder of Cambridge History Festival, an event focusing on the unsung history of the ‘town’, rather than ‘gown’, she completed an MA in Creative Non-fiction at UEA in 2019.

Since then, she has been piecing together the untold stories of the women imprisoned inside the building known as ‘the Spinning House’, originally a workhouse founded by Thomas Hobson to teach the poor how to spin flax. Following his death, the university used the former charitable endeavour as a depositary for troublesome women.

The histories of ‘town’ and ‘gown’ will always be inextricably intertwined, but for far too long the former has been overlooked by people interested in the real Cambridge, something Caroline hopes to change.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Bloody Riot

2 The Untimely Death of Elizabeth Howe

3 The Coroner’s Inquest – Day One

4 The Coroner’s Inquest – Day Two

5 The Special Correspondent

6 The Memorial

7 The Bachelors’ Ball

8 Respectability and Ruin

9 The Law of the Land vs the Vice Chancellor

10 The Court of Common Pleas, Westminster Hall

11 Smears and Fears

12 An Unusual Law

13 A Rebellious Daughter

14 The Runaway

15 British Law

16 Saving Jane

17 Under Pressure

18 A Rural Living

19 The Arrest

20 The New Courtroom

21 The Prisoner

22 Habeas Corpus

23 The Revenge

24 Bogus Daisy and the Cause Célèbre

25Hopkins vs Wallis

26 The Final Chapter – An Act of Parliament

Select Bibliography

Praise for The Spinning House

PREFACE

Cambridge University is internationally renowned for its ancient colleges. It is lauded for its educational excellence. But in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, infamy blighted its hallowed name. As an alarming number of courtroom dramas exposed the university’s steadfast resolve to cling to its archaic right to lock up women in its own private prison – the Spinning House – the great institution began to look tarnished. None of those women had broken the law of the land. Yet their removal from the streets of Cambridge was deemed essential to protect the moral character of the gentlemen scholars fresh from the constraints of masters and parents.

This little-known tale of woe came to my attention after I heard the name Daisy Hopkins mentioned at a meeting of local historians. The story went that she was the girl responsible for the abolition of special laws, applicable only in Oxford* and Cambridge, permitting the arrest and imprisonment of women suspected of soliciting. Because of her, the Spinning House prison – Cambridge University’s private prison for women – was torn down in 1901.

I was curious about this story. It seemed unlikely that a prostitute would be the cause of such a seismic shift. I went to the local library in search of evidence. There, I discovered that in the eighteenth century the vice chancellor had paid the town crier 10s to whip ten unruly women. How could this have happened and so few people know about it?

More research led me to a report in the New York Times newspaper about the trial of Daisy Hopkins. Why, I wondered, had a London barrister fought the case of a streetwalker? The titillating story didn’t quite add up. In the years that followed this first discovery, my curiosity about this teenage girl niggled. Who was Daisy Hopkins? What was this prison? And did the internationally famous university really have such a murky, misogynistic past?

In 2016, I decided I couldn’t leave the tale alone. A return to the archives I’d exhausted a decade before rewarded me with a document that changed everything. Someone else had been as curious as me about this untold story. And luckily, that person was like me. Her sense of injustice about what had happened to thousands of young women at the hands of a powerful group of men led her to write her Open University PhD thesis on the topic.

Every page of ‘Girls of the Spinning House: A Social Study of Young Cambridge Streetwalkers, 1823–1894’* filled me with anger and outrage. Sitting in the local studies library, I paused my note-taking. All I could do was greedily devour the facts unfolding before me. Between 1823–94, senior members of the university known as proctors were responsible for over 6,000 arrests of young women. Under the common law of the land, none of those women had committed a crime. I’d uncovered a tale of overwhelming social injustice against young, working-class women.

I found, too, that Daisy Hopkins was the topic of the Law Bar Association’s Annual Lecture in 1999. One of her cases against the university had made legal history. I wondered why this story hadn’t broken free of academic studies. The more I discovered, the more I felt determined to change this.

Although I am Cambridge born and bred, I am not a member of the elite group of people who inhabit the ‘other’ side of Cambridge. I discovered I couldn’t research the story until I’d gained the authority to delve into college and university archives. It wasn’t enough to have a BA from the local university, as opposed to Cambridge University. I needed more before I could get inside the places where the treasure, supporting this story, lay buried.

Following a few courses in creative non-fiction writing at Cambridge University, I was offered a place at the University of East Anglia to take an MA in Biography and Creative Non-Fiction. Doors that had previously been closed to me swung open once I had a UEA email address. Now I wasn’t just an amateur local historian, with a chip on my shoulder, banging on about the mistreatment of women at one the world’s most famous educational establishments. I was – almost – ‘one of them’; no longer a victim of the same class and gender stereotyping as the women dragged into the Spinning House. The more I read, the more furious I became about this dual reality. Women have been edited out of the history of Cambridge for too long.

I decided I wanted to write a story about the Spinning House that everyone would want to read. I wanted to discover, and reveal, as much as I could about the real lives of the young women thrown into a prison repeatedly condemned by prison inspectors. It was a damp, cold place where women would emerge in a much worse condition than when they went in.

Plenty of biographies and histories are written about the people, mainly men, who ‘went to Cambridge’. Daisy Hopkins was not a member of the group of people who ‘tell’ or are ‘told’ about, in the history of Cambridge. The lives of working-class women are hard to trace. Yet, if they were summoned into a courtroom, their characters spring alive. Even then, we only know them in terms of their threat to authority. Fleshing out their back stories takes a huge amount of, often futile, research. But it is worth the effort. For then their characters come alive, and rather than seeing them as troublemakers, we see them as ordinary women searching for a way to live when paid work was hard to find and entailed long hours of drudgery.

It was over 100 years since Daisy’s arrest, but for a modern-day woman, the landscape wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. Rules restricting merrymaking lingered. To ensure a suitably quiet atmosphere, curbs on nightlife limited noisy activity. But those, including me, seeking Saturday night entertainment discovered we could circumvent the ‘quiet’ crackdown. We joined the term-time queues outside the Student Union or Graduate Centre, and sometimes we made our way to the cellars of King’s College for their legendary discos.

All these venues were in the city centre, their disturbance perfectly acceptable to university authorities. And there we danced the night away, an ink splodge on one hand, a drink in the other. Mixing with townies both thrilled and scared undergraduates, a distraction their tutors still warned against. But at least we could no longer be whipped or arrested for it.

My experience of working for Cambridge University at a time when the colleges were nervously opening their ancient doors to women was that the establishment was firmly dominated by men. I worked in university libraries and always there was a moment when a ‘new girl’ was taken to one side by an ‘old girl’: ‘Don’t get left alone with him …’ she would whisper in the junior’s ear. Little had changed since the diarist and Fellow Commoner, Charles Astor Bristed wrote in 1845 that many upper-class men believed working women existed purely for their pleasure.

Armed with a precious reader’s ticket, I booked myself a table in the Manuscripts Room of Cambridge University Library. Here, I took a deep breath as I lightly brushed my fingertips over the stiff velum pages of the three large Spinning House Committal books covering the years 1823–94. It was a thrilling moment. I glimpsed the real lives of the young women who were dragged off the streets of their hometown into a carelessly run prison.

Notes scratched in blotchy black ink in the margins revealed that some of women confessed to their ‘crime’, although no written confessions or statements were taken. In the vice chancellor’s court, unlike a magistrates’ court, no proof of wrongdoing was required. Suspicion was all – true or false. If a girl didn’t ‘come quietly’, her sentence was lengthy. Admitting guilt of streetwalking essentially got the ordeal over as quickly as possible. But any girl finding herself inside the Spinning House, guilty or not, would be tainted by the experience, her employment prospects and those of her family plummeting. The few women who were brave or enraged enough to retaliate with legal suits provide us with fascinating facts about their real lives.

Through such court records, archive material, newspapers and other primary and secondary sources, I began to hear the voices of four girls – Daisy, Elizabeth, Emma and Jane. I heard the anguish of family members pleading for the release of a daughter or sister, and of young women recounting the hours leading up to the death of a loved friend. I heard, too, the voices of men and women up and down the country demanding an end to the cruel regime of proctorial authority. I read the justifications of an elite group of men determined to ‘protect’ the young men in their care by clinging to ancient laws that allowed them to control almost every aspect of the lives of the townspeople of Cambridge.

Victorian society cherished high standards of personal conduct. It gave way to an impetus for social reform, but in doing so, it also placed restrictions on the liberty of certain groups.

In Cambridge, hundreds of charming young men with time and money on their hands arrived each year – although not all were wealthy. We don’t know what promises were made to the young women they flirted with, or how easy it was to win the virtue of a beguiled beauty. What we do know is that the punishment for talking to an undergraduate after dark didn’t fit the crime.

*    The situation in Oxford was less brutal than in Cambridge. There, women were taken before the local magistrate and, if proven guilty, were sent to the local prison.

*    Janet Oswald, ‘Girls of the Spinning House: A Social Study of Young Cambridge Streetwalkers’, Open University thesis (2008).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my fellow students from the MA in Creative Non-Fiction 2018–19 cohort at the University of East Anglia who confirmed I had an important story to tell, and later the Madingley Writing group whose support was of great value. My greatest thanks for moving me from manuscript to publication must go to Nancy Lavelle Mangan, Jacqui Lofthouse of The Writing Coach and Katy Massey. I am also indebted to the staff at The History Press for their amazing editorial assistance. Final thanks go to friends and family who have accepted my reclusive habits over the past few years as I trawled archives and glued myself to my laptop. It has been a such an honour to finally tell the true story of the Spinning House.

While every effort has been made to obtain permission from all copyright holders for materials used in this book, I would welcome any new information that could provide further copyright credit in any future reprint.

INTRODUCTION

On Wednesday, 26 April 1561, Queen Elizabeth I added her regal signature to a charter sanctioning the incarceration of any woman ‘suspected’ of corrupting the morals of the young undergraduates at Cambridge University. It read:

We … grant the Vice Chancellor, Masters and Scholars and their Successors for ever, that it shall be lawful … at all times to make scrutiny, search and inquisition … in the town of Cambridge … for all public women, procuresses, vagabonds and other persons suspected of evil … whom on inquisition … shall found guilty or suspected of evil, they may punish by imprisonment of their bodies, banishment or otherwise.*

This was the cause of centuries of bitter riot and rebellion between town and gown. The charter gave senior members of the university the right to arrest and imprison any unchaperoned woman walking in the town’s streets after dark.

The inky flourish of Elizabeth’s jewelled hand sealed an irksome problem. The vice chancellor pleaded for her to chastise the Mayor of Cambridge and his deputies, who had a habit of liberating the ‘delinquent prisoners’ the vice chancellor brought to the town jail. Back then, the women were accommodated in cells inside the crumbling town jail within the precinct of the old castle. The mayor held the keys – and the power. But an anxious vice chancellor, desperate to protect his fresh young flock of men, free for the first time from the close supervision of parents and tutors, pulled rank to demand a transfer of power.

The young men sent to Cambridge, often second sons going ‘into the church’, were in statu pupillari – under the guardianship of the vice chancellor. It was his duty to suppress the natural urges of his young men with preaching and prayer. Newspapers and history books allude to parents’ fears that precious sons, and their fortunes, might be bewitched by the cunning wiles of country girls. Or worse, they might father children they felt compelled to support. Cambridge University was ruthless in alleviating such parental terrors – all the while turning a judiciously blind eye to the gentlemen scholars ‘stabling’ their mistresses in the town.

The queen’s decree didn’t stop at allowing the round-up of suspicious women. It listed further measures. No longer would the town have rights over weights and measures, the licensing of beer, wine and theatrical performances and more. From then on, the vice chancellors of Cambridge University had power over each person and every aspect of town life. Cambridge was run for the benefit of the university, not its local inhabitants.

Little is known about the Spinning House prison, although its conditions were bad enough to lead to the deaths of some of those incarcerated there. A faded photograph of the hated building shows a squat brick and stone construction, built in the seventeenth century and originally a workhouse where the poor learnt to spin flax. The building morphed into use as a place to lock up vagabonds, petty thieves and disorderly women. During the nineteenth century, the university took control of the building.

It was said that an inhabitant of Cambridge from 1500 would have recognised the same narrow, unpaved, squalid streets and landmarks of the town in 1800. While the townspeople were concerned about their dirty and polluted yards and congested streets, the university authorities, in their open and airy courts, extended their concern to the ‘debris’ parading in the public streets.

In 1825, another monarch, spurred by another vice chancellor, signed another decree. An Act of Parliament was passed allowing the employment of special constables to assist the proctors in their nightly search for ‘lewd’ women. The ‘Bulldogs’, as the townspeople branded these detestable men, were employed to sniff out every idle piece of tittle-tattle about the young women living in the town. These servants of the university knew the dark alleys and troubled families living in them. They watched girls blossom into women. They whispered words into the eager ears of proctors about who to arrest, who to caution, who to turn a blind eye to.

Those women hauled into the Spinning House accused of being ‘procuresses’ were denied legal assistance. They stood in silence during the fifteen minutes it took the vice chancellor, resplendent in his academic garb (‘academicals’), to hear the charges against them. No family or friends stood beside them.

Mistakes were made. Evidence was based on hearsay, not facts. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time could be a crime – according to laws adhered to by the university – but not according to the law of the land, where proof was needed and an appearance before the local magistrate.

As I delved deeper into the archives, I became familiar with the tragic stories of women snatched off the streets of the town they lived in. It wasn’t only Daisy Hopkins who’d suffered in the cold and damp cells condemned by prison inspectors and Liberal reformers. Thousands of young women’s lives had been ruined and I wanted to write about the handful of brave and enraged young women who had had the courage and determination to fight back.

*    Taken from the Elizabethan Charter of 1561 – Winstanley, 1947: 92.

1

BLOODY RIOT

It was February 1846. A Saturday – market day. It was a day when Fenland folk flocked to Cambridge to peddle goods nurtured from the famously fertile soil that bordered the town. Traders travelled far and wide to barter for such goods. But as dusk fell in the narrow streets, lanes and yards wedged against the solid walls and impenetrable gatehouses of the Cambridge colleges, unknown violence was about to bloody the pavements.

Revolution in Paris and the rising unrest of the Chartist movement breathed oxygen onto the smouldering flames of resentment festering in the dark corners of the town. Nervous that parents might be fearful of sending their sons to Cambridge if they heard that unsavoury women walked its darkened streets, the proctors had agreed to a ruthless drive of ‘cleaning’ the town centre of unchaperoned women. Their nerves had been rattled by the opening of a railway station on the edge of the town the previous year. Nerves were also jangling about the swelling numbers of displaced agricultural workers squeezing into the cramped streets and yards of Barnwell, a rural village now sprouting row upon row of closely packed houses. Here resided a growing number of people whose lives were independent of the shackles thrust upon most parts of the town.

Tensions between the proctors and the police had already been mounting that month. The vice chancellor objected to the way the town constables arrested and sent wayward members of the university to the local magistrate. He demanded that the mayor instruct police officers to bring members of the university before him for punishment. The mayor refused. Wasn’t this exactly what the townspeople were asking to be done to the women arrested on suspicion of soliciting? They wanted the women to be judged by a magistrate, as happened in Oxford, not the vice chancellor.

Violence sparked as dusk fell, when a cluster of youths from the town rushed to free a young woman spotted in the clutches of the proctor and his men outside Trinity College. Cries of, ‘Town! Town!’, the well-known call to arms, rang out.

‘No secret tribunals!’ chanted the excited mob gathering outside Trinity. They were joined by ‘pot-valiant’ butchers and bargees who were in town for market day and ready for riot. Ugly skirmishes quickly escalated into one of the bloodiest riots the town had ever witnessed.

As fighting erupted between town and gown, any gownsman spotted on the streets was in dire peril. In King’s Parade, a sturdy local lad named Edward Patman, whose sister had been dragged to the Spinning House for no apparent reason, hurled abuse as he raised his fists against a cap-and-gowned Thomas Hurst and his friends.

‘Come on!’ he baited the scholar before landing a heavy blow.

Having felled Hurst, Patman aimed for his friends’ hatted heads. He laughed as they scraped in the dirt to retrieve their fallen caps. Patman, who the Cambridge Independent newspaper described as a ‘sturdy looking fellow’, received the choice of a £1 fine or one month in prison for his actions. It was not reported which he chose.

Meanwhile, as trouble worsened in other parts of the town, proctors darted onto the pavements, shepherding their flock to the safety of their colleges. One rampaging throng spotted a gowned figure – a proctor from Clare Hall ushering his scholars to safety.

‘Get ’im!’ yelled the angry mauderers, as the crowd rushed at him.

‘Leave me to my business!’ the proctor ordered as he lifted his arms to protect his soon to be hatless head. His blood bathed the pavement so close to the safety of his college.

In Bridge Street, a proctor from Magdalene College was left severely bruised and bloodied after two Swansea butchers struck him repeatedly with a sheep hook.

As word reached the vice chancellor, who feared damage to buildings would follow damage to bodies, he demanded the mayor gather up the police force to quell the unrest. Entreaties for calm from the mayor and the police restored order. But this wasn’t the end of hostilities.

The following week, a shrill cry cut through the dimly lit streets. It was the rallying call for 100 gowned men seeking vengeance. They’d assembled outside Trinity College armed with pokers, staffs and any instrument that would ensure bodily harm. At the cry, they trooped towards Rose Crescent. There, they paused to take in the scene before them. A line of policemen had gathered; behind them, a jeering mob. Three yards of dung-coated dirt divided townsmen fighting for justice for the townswomen and gownsmen fighting to save their honour in the narrow lane connecting Trinity Street with the Market Square.

‘Go home to your colleges,’ came the order from a police constable.

Arthur Walsh of Trinity College, a Fellow Commoner, a man who, in paying twice as much as other students, was entitled to sit on the high table and in the best seats in his college chapel, shouted to his man servant, ‘Go fetch my bat!’ It was clear the situation was about to turn ugly.

‘Down with the Peelers!’ chanted the gownsmen.

‘Protect the police!’ countered the townsmen.

The name calling stuttered as the two sides ran out of new taunts. It was the moment for raw hatred.

The scholars linked arms, forming a tight human chain. The swell of ragged boys and brawny men ripe for riot pushed forward. The police had no choice but to defend themselves as a battery of weaponry and yells merged.

‘Take that! And that!’ the cries went up.

Sticks, pokers, fists and a cricket bat were wielded and injuries mounted. Surgeons rushed to the scene to bandage and stretcher off the injured. Police Constable John Freestone was forced to protect himself from Walsh’s bat. Grabbing a discarded staff, he brought it down heavily on Walsh’s shoulder, knocking him to the ground. As Walsh recovered and made to fight back, a second blow cracked down on his head, rendering him unconscious.

The next day, Walsh, the son of a baronet, wanted revenge for the impertinence of the attack. Despite him joining the fray armed with youthful pride and useful weaponry, he didn’t take kindly to a policeman getting the better of him. A few months later, Constable John Freestone was in court charged with assault. The cold facts of the matter, as reported in the Cambridge Independent, made it clear that Freestone had resorted to self-defence as the violence descended into chaos. Yet Freestone would face two weeks in prison for fighting for his life and lose his job – the price of defending himself against a baronet’s son.

The town boys usually triumphed in a fight, but not that evening. Complete revenge came when the vice chancellor demanded that magistrates impose stringent measures on anyone resorting to riot. This was bad news for a man named Wilson, who couldn’t read. He set about freeing a young woman from the clutches of a proctor the following week. A large crowd gathered to enjoy the spectacle. As things turned nasty, the proctor sought refuge in the Bird Bolt Inn in St Andrew’s Street. Windows and lamps inside the inn were smashed as Wilson vented his anger, although the proctor remained unharmed. Wilson received a fine of £5 but was unable to pay and so was sent to labour on the treadmill for two months.

Riot wasn’t working as a way of ridding the town of the proctor’s patrols and the detested Spinning House.

But this wasn’t the end of hostilities between town and gown. Behind the angry fists were gathering an army of men eager to flex their legal muscles against their adversary. And the following November, Michaelmas term, the untimely death of a teenage girl played into the hands of this group of educated townsmen eager to test the law of the land against the tyrannical law of the university.

2

THE UNTIMELY DEATH OF ELIZABETH HOWE

Elizabeth (Betsy) Howe

Age: 19

Arrested: 6 November 1846

Arresting proctor: The Reverend Mr William Towler Kingsley

Charge: Suspected of being a loose and disorderly person

Sentence: Admonished and sent home with a promise to return to Fulbourn

On a cool November morning in 1846, with the sweet smell of peat in her nostrils, 19-year-old Elizabeth Howe waved farewell to her mother, father, two sisters and the souls of 10-year-old Eliza, 10-month-old Harriet and, at 22 weeks, baby Susan, who lay under the rich fenland soil of the graveyards of St Vigor’s Church and All Saints Church in the village of Fulbourn, 4 miles south-east of Cambridge.

The real lives and struggles of many of the women flung inside the Spinning House remain unknown, but when searching the newspaper archives for clues about the life and death of Elizabeth Howe, the sixth of eight Howe daughters, her name appeared in column after column of closely set jet-black ink. Details of her life covered the pages of official documents. Snippets of news about the brown-haired teenage girl, who found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, had been devoured by eager readers up and down the country.

Elizabeth had spent the summer at home with her parents, harvesting the ripe fruits that would nourish the family when winter set in. Now, as she strode across the ancient byways towards Cambridge, her face and hands still sun-kissed from outdoor labour, she hoped to gain respectable work, despite such opportunities being in short supply.

Many young women migrated to Cambridge in search of unskilled work as servants, shop girls and laundresses, or were apprenticed as dressmakers and milliners. All entailed long repetitive hours of drudgery at the mercy of their mistresses’ moods. Some girls took jobs in the lodging houses accommodating undergraduates, where a romantic encounter might lead to a broken promise and a ruined reputation. Others worked as chambermaids or barmaids in the many public houses and inns in Cambridge, where they might be encouraged to behave pertly towards their customers and suffer the consequences. Already, many young women whispered about emigrating, not to Cambridge, but to the other side of the world. Indeed, five domestic servants from Fulbourn soon sailed to Australia – a land offering a brighter future.

An hour after saying farewell to her family, Elizabeth arrived in Union Row, Barnwell, a place once known as the Garden of Eden where the monks of Barnwell Abbey had tended their crops. But from 1830 onwards, its green fields disappeared as developers, hungry to profit from the great influx of workers desperate for accommodation, built hundreds of poor-quality, uniform houses. The newly named streets and roads, and those who lived there, were feared by the university as their cramped conditions quickly gained a reputation for villainy – and a place where single young women in search of rent money lodged.

It was here that the newly arrived Elizabeth was welcomed by Mary Anne Rose, the landlady of 7 Union Row, a house accommodating several young women. It was 5 November, and a rowdy night lay ahead for the townspeople as undergraduates remembered the exploits of Guy Fawkes.

Removing her muddy boots, Elizabeth and Rose agreed it was best not to venture far beyond the front door that evening. So, it was four o’clock the following afternoon when Elizabeth announced she was off to meet her friend, Harriet King. The pair hadn’t seen each other since Elizabeth’s return to Fulbourn. They had much to talk about.

Happily reunited, the friends strolled arm in arm through the town centre where they perhaps stole a glimpse of the new winter fashions in millinery, ribbon and fabrics so recently purchased by Mrs Asplen’s at No. 8 The Crescent, and Mrs Swan in King’s Parade. The Cambridge Independent had printed an article from the London and Paris Ladies Magazine of Fashion – black velvet bonnets were to be worn for the promenade and plaids in every dimension were in favour for dresses.

Elizabeth and Harriet could only gaze at such delights, but it was fun to dream. And in dreaming, the girls lost track of time despite daylight having long faded. As the church bells began striking eight o’clock, Elizabeth sensed they were being followed. The girls instinctively tightened their shawls, preparing to flee.

Seconds later, plans of escape vanished. A voice boomed from behind. ‘What do we have here?’

Turning around, the pair came face to face with two warmly buttoned-up Bulldogs and a proctor, the Reverend Mr William Towler Kingsley, his long, dark cloak making plain his importance.

‘We know ’em,’ the Bulldogs confidently informed Kingsley.

Indeed, they did know the girls. Harriet King, a particularly tall girl, had ‘emigrated’ to Cambridge from the village of Girton. She was always under the watchful eye of the Bulldogs.

Elizabeth, too, had been warned twice, two years ago, to keep off the streets of Cambridge and get herself back home to Fulbourn. She had disobeyed them, paying the price with a seven-day sentence inside the Spinning House in May 1846, after which she dutifully returned home as ordered.

Now, the timing was bad. The fearful friends were trapped by the proctor and his men in a street housing a reputed brothel at one end and Christ’s College at the other. Their guilt was undeniable to the men about to rob the girls of their freedom.

‘Bring them in,’ Kingsley instructed his men.

‘Excuse me,’ Harriet protested, as she struggled to free herself. ‘You can’t take us. We’ve done nothing wrong. We aren’t with anyone,’ she pleaded, as she felt the cold brass buttons of the Bulldogs’ coats dig into her body as she struggled.

Both girls knew they risked being marched off to the Spinning House if found in the company of a member of the university after dark, but, as Harriet kept saying, that wasn’t the case. Elizabeth remained still, knowing resistance was punished with a harsher sentence and admitting guilt lightened the cold hearts of the men surrounding her, vindicating the necessity for their harsh treatment.

‘Get on with it,’ Kingsley commanded again.

The proctors were extra vigilant in clearing the streets of temptation during Michaelmas term, the first of the three terms of the academic year – this one covering October to December. The arrival of 100 or so freshmen necessitated the increased protection.

A university made up entirely of men – an elite group united by gender, class and age – needed protection, it seemed. Parents soon dashed off letters to prominent newspapers if they suspected leniency or heard reports of working-class women walking the streets at night. Support for proctorial authority came from well-to-do and nervous parents all over the county.

The disgrace of being marched along the street to the Spinning House in the clutches of the proctor and his men was mortifying and ruinous – guilt by association. Elizabeth and Harriet could do nothing but fix their eyes straight ahead during the fifteen minutes it took to reach the large oak doors of the dreaded Spinning House. The Reverend Kingsley delivered a loud knock, rousing Mr Edward Wilson, the keeper, and Eliza Pattern, his servant. The girls’ names were written in the Committal Book, the charge against them inked in, ‘suspected of being a loose and disorderly person’.

That night, nine of the ten cells inside the Spinning House were full, with some already being shared.

‘You’ll need to share,’ an irritated Wilson ordered them. ‘It’s full.’

The trio had had a successful evening. Since the violence earlier that year, fewer men braved punishment for rescuing women in the clutches of the proctor and his men.

The girls were taken to a single unheated cell containing a night commode, candle and an iron bed with two blankets. No warm fire took the edge off the creeping fingers of dampness penetrating the entire building. They huddled together, searching for warmth as they lay on top of a damp mattress, beneath two damp blankets. Realising the relentless draught came from a small open window set just above them in an iron casing, the girls shoved the bed under the window and using the candle to shed some light on the problem, fumbled to pull at the window catch.

‘It’s broken,’ Harriet said. ‘It won’t move.’

Elizabeth tried too, her fingers pulling and pushing at the cold metal bar, which was refusing to budge even a fraction of an inch. However cold they were, and however damp the bedding shrouding their shivering bodies, there was little point calling for Wilson, the keeper. He was a busy man and deaf to the tiresome pleas of inmates. The girls could only pray that when the vice chancellor arrived the next day to hear their cases, they would be sent home. After all, they hadn’t been found in the company of any university men. Surely, he wouldn’t imprison them for weeks on end. They had no idea what to expect.

Daybreak finally filtered through the broken window.

‘Come on.’ Wilson prodded a finger at them after his servant had served the girls an unappetising breakfast of weak tea and stale bread. It was eleven o’clock. ‘The vice chancellor’s here.’

He led them back to the small, whitewashed room they had been taken to the previous night. There sat the great man with the arresting proctor, Mr Towler Kingsley, both dressed in academic gowns.

‘We found them in Hobson Street, close to a house. I suspected them of incontinent behaviour,’ the proctor explained, almost by rote.

The girls remained still and silent, except when Elizabeth raised her handkerchief to stifle a cough. Neither were permitted, nor expected, legal assistance. The fact that the young women were found close to a house of ill repute and a college was enough to condemn them.

‘Did they come quietly?’ asked the vice chancellor.

Kingsley replied, ‘Elizabeth Howe came very quietly; Harriet King did not.’

This was all the evidence produced or required. Both had been apprehended before. The vice chancellor turned to Harriet King, ‘You are to stay here for two weeks.’

Her troublesome behaviour had not paid off. She knew to accept her sentence meekly, but inside she fought hard to suppress her hot fury. They had done nothing wrong according to the charter, or the law of the land, but it wasn’t worth objecting.

The vice chancellor turned to Elizabeth Howe. Her throat tightened, a dizziness washed over her, she battled to stay standing.

‘You may go and promise to return to your parents’ house.’

Relief flooded through her entire aching body, ‘Thank you, Sir.’

The story of Elizabeth Howe makes for fascinating reading. I read it, pencil in hand, sitting at a desk in the Reading Room of Cambridgeshire Archives. The spine of the leather-bound book before me released a musty smell. Few had parted the creaking, parched pages contained inside. An icy thrill washed over me as I began to read. I didn’t pause to make notes. I became totally engrossed.

It was almost twelve noon on Saturday, 7 November, when an exhausted, coughing Elizabeth returned to her lodgings in Union Row. Every single step of the half-mile journey from the Spinning House inflamed her aching limbs. She clutched at her chest several times as she made the slow walk home, willing more air into her constricted lungs.

Rose was shocked at the sight of the pale and wheezing figure returning to her house. Elizabeth complained she felt ‘ill all over’. Rose lit a fire for the ailing girl, but heat worsened the symptoms. There was no improvement the following day, nor the next. This was no ordinary chill. Rose was becoming anxious. A doctor would cost her dear.

‘You must write to ask your mother to come,’ she urged Elizabeth. ‘Ask her to come quickly.’

Each day, Elizabeth’s symptoms grew worse, not better, and each day, Rose expected the arrival of Elizabeth’s mother. But Mrs Howe was illiterate. Unaware of the urgency, she didn’t trouble to find someone who could reveal the contents of the letter.

Increasingly alarmed at Elizabeth’s decline and unsure how to proceed in the absence of her mother, Rose finally called the doctor. Elizabeth had now been ill for eleven days, during which Rose had been agonising over how the doctor’s fees would be paid.

Mr Charles Newby, a local surgeon, arrived to find the patient in a dreadful condition. By then, Elizabeth couldn’t move her legs and arms without it causing her excruciating pain.

Examining her tongue, he found it ‘much coated’. Her pulse was recorded as 120 a minute. She was extremely thirsty, yet her urine was ‘scant’ and ‘highly coloured’.

‘How did you catch such a violent cold?’ he asked.

‘I was put to a damp bed in the Spinning House.’ Her voice confirmed her weakened state. ‘The cell was cold and draughty. The window stuck open.’

Mr Newby was gravely concerned, both by her story and her condition. He decided she needed daily monitoring. Some days, he even visited twice. First, he tried a strong purgative and saline diaphoretics, but those failed to ease her symptoms. The next day, he asked Rose to make up a foot bath containing hot water mixed with a quarter of a pound of mustard and a pint of vinegar. Meanwhile, he had also been drawing urine as he believed its retention was causing problems.

‘Is my mother here?’ she whispered each day as she felt the strength in her body ebb away.

The days went by and nothing soothed Elizabeth’s condition. A second week began, the fourth week since her incarceration in the Spinning House. Elizabeth was no longer certain if the sounds of cartwheels beyond her room were the night-soil men collecting the ‘black cargo’ or the milkman delivering fresh milk.

Her friends called daily to help Rose. They fetched fresh water from the nearby pump to help with the extra burden of laundry. On Monday, 30 November, she slipped into delirium.

When her friend Emma Osbourne visited that evening, a distraught Rose took her to one side.

‘I’m very worried,’ Rose confided. ‘Fetch Newby. Ask him to bring more medicine?’

Emma hurried off into the dark streets wanting to do anything she could to help her friend. But as she neared the doctor’s house, a suspicious proctor spotted her.

‘What are you doing? Where are you going at this hour?’ he demanded to know.

‘My friend, she is seriously ill, Sir. I am sent to fetch Mr Newby,’ she gasped out her explanation.

‘I don’t believe you,’ the proctor said.

‘But please, I need to find him urgently,’ Emma pleaded.

‘Get home now or I will take you to the Spinning House.’

Fearing arrest if she refused, Emma had no choice but to return to Rose empty-handed.

At half-past one on the morning of 1 December, twenty-five days after her arrest, 19-year-old Elizabeth Howe moved from delirium to death.

Back in Fulbourn, Elizabeth’s desperate note summoning her mother lay opened but unread.

3

THE CORONER’S INQUEST – DAY ONE

Daylight had faded from the ill-lit streets close to Union Row as 38-year-old Charles Henry Cooper, the county coroner, made his way towards the Old English Gentleman public house in Blucher Row, Barnwell. Two days before, a sigh had escaped from deep inside Cooper as he placed his signature on the death certificate of Elizabeth Howe. Mr Newby, who’d pronounced the death, had been clear about its cause. The narrow oblong boxes running across the official document stated that the 19-year-old single woman, living in Union Row, Barnwell, had died of rheumatic fever caused by being confined in a cold and draughty cell in Hobson’s Workhouse, as many still called the Spinning House. The circumstances causing the death had been predicted; prison inspectors had repeatedly condemned the ancient building as an unfit place to lock up women. Now it was Cooper’s duty to preside over an inquest that greatly saddened him.