December 24, 1876 --- "You May Not Enter"

An irreligious confrontation for a Christmas Eve, to be sure, takes place in the doorway at St. James's Church in Hatcham.

The Rev. Arthur Tooth refuses to admit a minister sent by the Bishop of Rochester to replace him. Mr. Tooth had been admonished by his Bishop to cease certain "Romish" practices. In 1874, Parliament had passed the Public Worship Regulation Act.  It was "Low Church" versus "High Church."  The former had hoped to drive out the rituals of the Catholic mass which had been creeping onto the altars of the so-called "High" church. Specifically, the Rev. Mr. Tooth was accused of countenancing "immense wax candles, bells and incense" and he dared to perform his duties while dressed in red robes.

Tooth claimed civil law had no jurisdiction in his church. Independently wealthy and Cambridge-educated, Mr. Tooth had nonetheless become a popular figure in his working class parish and standing with him on this Sunday morning are two dozen churchwardens, representing - if you will - "muscular Christianity." The Bishop's minion is allowed to read his statement and then must perforce withdraw.

There was no violence.  Tooth simply told the other chap, "You may not enter."  The matter is handled with the courtesy befitting two gentleman of the cloth. Such defiance of the See, however, could not be tolerated and the matter soon stirred even the secular world. Suddenly, St. James's in a grim section of S.E. London, became a weekly Reformation battleground. Police had to be called out to preserve Sunday morning order; local roughs - eager for a row and ignorant of the issues - chose up sides.

When ordered to surrender the keys to his church, Rev. Tooth again refused. He was finally ruled to be "contumacious" and ordered to jail. There, he languished for 28 days - winning martyrdom status. Released, he rallied his supporters and repeated his defiance, "What you are opposing is the intrusion of secular authority in spiritual matters." One exasperated Bishop prayed for "the extraction of Mr. Tooth." The Times denounced him as well: "He was imprisoned for contempt, he is released with contempt."

After his release, Tooth broke back into his old church one Sunday morning.  He threw open the doors for a sunrise service for 400 of his faithful. The police arrived too late.

In the end, Tooth's original jail sentence was overturned on a technicality and he threatened to sue for false imprisonment. Instead, he resigned from St. James's claiming "My health is broken." He relocated to Croydon where he operated a boys orphanage.

The Rev. Mr. Tooth in Vanity Fair

December 23, 1890 --- The Pram Murders

24-year old Mary Eleanor Wheeler is hanged at Newgate Prison.  Her final, words: "The sentence is just, but the evidence false."

Mary Eleanor Wheeler earned her living "receiving gentleman visitors" in her North London flat. She fell in love with one of them, a furniture removal man named Frank Hogg. Her lover was a married man and his wife was expecting.  Eleanor forgave him. Indeed, a quasi-bigamous relationship developed.  At the trial, a letter Eleanor wrote to Frank was introduced, "I love you with all my heart and I will love her because she will belong to you."  Eleanor nursed Phoebe Hogg back to health after the birth of Frank's daughter.

In October, Eleanor wrote Phoebe, inviting her to visit and bring "our darling child." Mother and daughter were never seen alive again. The baby was found dead from either suffocation or exposure along the Finchley Road. Phoebe was found, her head crushed and her neck cut through to the spine, dumped in woods in South Hampstead. In nearby St. John's Wood, police later found a blood-stained pram. When police found Phoebe's body, Eleanor was taken to the morgue to help identify the remains. There, Eleanor's bizarre behavior, her nervous laughter especially, prompted police to search her flat. They found signs of a "ferocious struggle" and a bloody poker.

Several witnesses testified that they saw Eleanor pushing a pram through the crowded streets of Kentish Town.  The pram seemed to be carrying an unusually heavy load. The man in the case, Frank Hogg, did not escape suspicion.  Had he conspired to do away with his inconvenient wife and child and return to his lover? But Hogg had a very good alibi and a lack of evidence saved him. Still, he was hissed at every appearance and needed a police escort to escape the London rnob. Eleanor's defense was very weak; her lawyers claimed there was only circumstantial evidence.  Why would Eleanor want to murder a women she'd obviously come to accept? The accused was a very slight woman and the defense argued that she would not have been strong enough to push a pram all that distance with two bodies inside.

The jury took less than an hour to find her guilty.  Justice Denman, denouncing her "prurient and indecent lust," donned the black cap and sentenced her to hang.  Appeals for commutation failed.  The Spectator decried any sympathy for this woman: "[There is] a distinct and most evil tendency to make of "love" an excuse for crime in the woman ... that nothing is too bad for the adulterer, and nothing too compassionate for the adultress."

The sketch of Mary Eleanor Wheeler from the National Portrait Gallery.

December 22, 1891 --- The Great Pearl Mystery

In a dramatic conclusion to a sensational trial, the great barrister Sir Charles Russell sobs as he informs the court that he must throw in his brief.  His client, now facing perjury charges, has fled Britain.

In February, Major and Mrs. Hargreaves had invited her young cousin, Ethel Elliot to come stay at their home in Torquay.  Ethel and her fiancee, Capt. Osborne, remained with the Hargreaves for several days.  Soon after the guests had left, Mrs. Hargreaves discovered some of her jewelry was missing, most notably a pair of earrings "with pearls as big as filberts." The jewels had been kept in a secret box in a location known to very few, including Miss Elliot.  Advertizing her loss, Mrs. Hargreaves heard from Spinks, the well-known jewelers of St. James, London. They reported that a young woman had sold them the jewelry for 550 gold sovereigns. The sale took place only a day after Miss Elliot had left Torquay.  The woman had given a name and address that proved false.

Spinks returned the jewels to Mrs. Hargreaves who began to openly talk of "this sad business with Ethel Elliott." She told friends, "Of course, she took the jewels." Miss Elliot, now Mrs. Osborne, sued for slander. Across Britain, all were asking "Did she do it?" Her defenders suspected spiteful old Mrs. Hargreaves of being jealous of the much younger and quite beautiful Ethel and her dashing military husband.  There was also another guest at Torquay who was known to have some rather heavy racetrack debts.

Ethel Elliot Osborne was on the stand for two days and her story was unshaken. The Spectator noted: "With her look of innocence, and her frankness in meeting cross-examination, she had carried the audience by storm." Then, the crash. A moneychanger reported a young woman had exchanged a bag of gold coins for 50-pound notes. At the Bank of England, investigators traced one such note that had been used to purchase linens in Mayfair. It bore a damning endorsement: Ethel Elliot.

The defendant having fled; the verdict was given to the Hargreaves who say they have no wish to prosecute the matter further.  However, Justice Denman agrees to issue a warrant (on Christmas Day no less) for Ethel's arrest for perjury.

She was returned to London for trial in March.  Pregnant and pleading hysteria, she was, nonetheless, given nine months hard labor. She served but one and was released due to poor health. The Great Pearl Mystery was finally over.  The Times spoke for many in wishing Mrs. Osborne "kindly oblivion"

The courtroom sketches in The Penny Illustrated Paper

December 21, 1899 --- Winston Bloody Churchill

The British consul at Lorenco Marques wires London: "Please inform relations that Winston Churchill arrived today."

Since escaping from a Boer P-O-W camp nine days before, the young war correspondent had become something of a national hero. Captured in mid-November in an attack on a British reconnaisance train, Churchill claimed noncombatant status as a correspondent for The Morning Post.  The Boer officers who took him in, however, insisted Churchill took an active part in the affray. Not content to await clarification, Churchill went over the wall of a prison latrine in Pretoria. In his memoir, My Early Life, he recalled the moment:

"Now or never! I stood on the ledge, seized the top of the wall with my hands, and drew myself up. Twice I let myself down in sickly hesitation, and then, with a third resolve, scrambled up and over ... I was free!"

The Boers posted a reward for Churchill, dead or alive: "An Englishman, 25 years old, about 5 ft. 8 in. tall, average build, walks with a slight stoop, pale appearance, red-brown hair, almost invisible small moustache, speaks through his nose, cannot pronounce the letter "S."

Churchill hopped a train heading east to Portuguese territory.  He abandoned the rail before daybreak, still in Boer territory. Perhaps only Churchill could have found a British mine operator willing at great risk to hide him, albeit at the bottom of a rat-infested pit. The object of dramatic headlines at home - CHURCHILL ESCAPES! - and a desperate manhunt, he was finally smuggled out aboard a goods train to the coast. At first, a consulate staffer turns him away only to be greeted with a roar: "I am Winston Bloody Churchill!"

The Boers accuse Churchill of breaking his word not to escape. Worse, political enemies at home accused him of abandoning fellow POW's. (Claiming "My conscience is absolutely clear," he later won two libel actions.) In his first post-escape dispatch to the Morning Post, Churchill used his celebrity status to rally the homefront: "Are the gentlemen of England all fox-hunting? ... For the sake of our manhood, our devoted colonists, and our dead soldiers, we must persevere with this war."

December 20, 1886 --- A Torrent of Filth

At last, the month-long Campbell v. Campbell divorce action comes to an end.  The Times called it "an unsurpassably offensive business."  The beautiful Lady Gertrude Campbell had charged her husband with cruelty and adultery. Lord Colin, eldest son and heir of the Duke of Argyll, countered by claiming that his wife had taken no fewer than four lovers, including the 8th Duke of Marlborough and Captain Shaw, the heroic commander of the London Fire Brigade.

For four weeks, the public had revelled in the sordid details of life at 79 Cadogan Place. Lady Gertrude testified that upon her wedding day she was informed that due to her husband's health, the marriage could not be immediately consummated.  He claimed it was fistula; but she learned that Lord Colin's "specific complaint" was syphillis. Although he professed to have been cured, he soon infected his wife and all physical relations between the two ended.

The charges and countercharges of infidelity seemed unending.  Lady Campbell said her husband had slept with men and had also raped a servant girl. That young lady, however, was found to be virgo intacta and Lady Gertrude's credibility suffered. The lawyers for Lord Colin detailed her Ladyship's numerous gentleman callers.  The most frequent visitor was Marlborough, a notorious philanderer and divorced from his wife.  The jury was informed that Lady Campbell's doctor, Thomas Bird, was found asleep in her bed, though the wags quipped that it would have been worse had he been found awake!  A servant testified to peering through the drawing room keyhole to see Lady Campbell and Capt. Shaw in flagrante delicto on the floor.   The jury was actually taken to Cadogan Place to peer through said keyhole.  Lady Campbell's lawyers pointed out that a key in the lock would have frustrated any peeping toms.  In the end, Lady Gertrude put up the unique defense that she simply did not have the time for adultery, between her social obligations and her charity work in Stepney.

After all this, the jury dismissed both petitions. The Spectator described the trial as a "torrent of filth [with] no result except to vitiate still more the already vitiated atmosphere of society." Lord Colin drifted off to India and an early death. Lady Gertrude never remarried, her beauty captured by Boldini in a painting (left) done ten years after the trial, which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. A portrait of her nude by Whistler was destroyed by the artist's wife. When Marlborough died suddenly in 1892, he left her £20,000 (roughly her court costs) "as proof of my friendship and esteem."

December 19, 1843 --- A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is published to immediate acclaim and frantic sales.

Dickens came up with the idea for his holiday tale while on a visit to the great mill city of Manchester earlier that year.  There, he was struck once again by the poverty amidst the affluence.  It took Dickens but six weeks to pen the tale of the redemption of Mr. Scrooge, "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!" Still, he had not completed the writing until early December, requiring a heroic rush to publish in time for the holiday.

Dickens oversaw all the publishing details; A Christmas Carol appears in an elaborate, illustrated, gilt-edged volume and first day sales - at a modest five shillings - are a remarkable 6,000; 15,000 were sold by Christmas Eve. Exhausted by the effort, Dickens "broke out like a MADMAN." The effort is worth it. Thackeray exulted: "It seems to me a national benefit and to every man or woman who reads it a personal kindness."

For Dickens, however, it brought little happiness or money. The story is promptly plagiarized; "Parley's Illuminated Library" came out with a ten-penny edition, "re-originated from the original." In early January, Dickens sued and quickly won an injunction. "The pirates are beaten flat," he cried. In the end, however, his adversaries would just file bankruptcy leaving the author with nothing but huge legal bills. Presaging the gloom of Bleak House, he wrote: "It is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law."

Dickens soon feuded with the publishers (Chapman & Hall) over the final bills for the fancy printing. Sounding a bit like Scrooge himself, he fussed: "What a wonderful thing it is, that such a great success should occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment."  Dickens was in a bit of a money crisis; his last novel, Martin Chuzzlewit had also failed to meet expectations.  Firing his publisher, Dickens decided it would be cheaper to live abroad and took his pregnant wife and family into Italian exile, remaining there until the spring of 1845: "I am not afraid, if I reduce my expenses; but if I do not, I shall be ruined past all mortal hope of redemption."

Illustration from dickenslit.com

December 18, 1899 --- A Child's Murder

A London jury convicts Louise Masset of the murder of her 3-year-old illegitimate son. She will hang.

Louise was 36, French-born, and earned her living giving lessons in her native tongue to "children in respectable homes." She lived in Stoke Newington with a sister. 

In October, the body of a boy had been found in the ladies room at Dalston Junction on the North London Railway. Police believed he had been first struck with a brick and, while stunned, suffocated. His clothes, bearing any tell-tale laundry marks, were removed and the body had been left naked beneath a shawl.  The horrible discovery received great attention in the press and a woman came forward to identify the child.  Helen Gentle, who lived in Tottenham, said she had been foster-mother to Manfred Masset but only a few days before she had returned the child to his mother.  Louise Masset had told her she was taking the child to his father in France.

Manfred's clothes and some of his toys were found in a dustbin at the Brighton rail station. Police soon learned that Masset had been in Brighton that very weekend, on a holiday with her new young man. Investigators also determined that the brick used to strike the child - while common enough - was the same paver used in the backyard at Stoke Newington. Louise told her sister, "I am being hunted for murder but I have not done it."

At her trial, the Crown argued that Louise, hoping to at last be married, found that Manfred was an embarrassing nuisance. In her defense, Louise offered a tale of two women from Chelsea, who were struck by little Manfred's beauty and offered to raise him for £12 a year.  That was considerably less than the Tottenham charges. Louise suggested that the Chelsea ladies simply took the advance payment and slew the boy. The prosecution scoffed and the jury hardly blinked. At the verdict, Louise cries, "I am quite innocent."

The Times - noting the clumsiness of the crime - concluded, "It is next to impossible to follow the workings of a feminine mind of the criminal type." Queen Victoria received a letter on behalf of dozens of Parisian governesses: "[We] ask a great Queen, who was always a perfect mother, to have pity for the unworthy mother who killed her child."

There was no respite; Louise Masset was hanged on 9 January 1900. Her last words: "What I suffer is just."

Sketch from the Penny Illustrated Paper