Farewell To The East End

LOST BABIES

How could a baby be born and then disappear? It seems impossible, but in fact it was not so very difficult. It would depend on who knew about the pregnancy in the first place, who knew about the birth, and whether the birth was registered or not.

Family births have always been recorded in parish registers, but this was not obligatory. Since 1837 parents have been required to register a birth with the General Register Office, but it took nearly a century for this law to be enforced. Scarcity of medical care, the high expense of that provision, and vast numbers of births caused thousands of babies to be born and to die unregistered. Still-born babies were not registered until 1929. This made it easy for families to describe babies who had lived for a short time and subsequently died as ‘still-born’.

In the 1870s it was estimated that, out of approximately 1.25 million births annually in the UK, only 10 per cent of women had any medical attention (another survey put the figure as low as 3 per cent). Therefore each year over a million women must have given birth with no medical attention. The death rate was enormous. In the 1870s it was estimated that in some of the poorest areas, maternal deaths were around 25-30 per cent and infant deaths around 50-60 per cent. These figures were estimated and collected by the pioneers calling for the training and registration of midwives.[5]

The first Midwives Act was passed in 1902. Prior to that, midwifery was largely an untrained profession. Any woman could call herself a midwife and go around delivering babies for a fee. She was also called ‘the handy-woman’ in many communities. She had many roles and dwelled in the shadowland of respectability and the law. She was a solo private practitioner, answerable to no one. At the turn of the nineteenth century it was estimated that around 40,000 handy-women were practising in Great Britain, many of them calling themselves ‘midwives’. Some of these women had acquired a knowledge of childbirth handed down through generations, and they were good and conscientious practitioners. However, others were slatternly and often illiterate. Many women could not afford even a handy-woman, and delivered themselves, with just the help of a friend or older relative. No woman had any antenatal care, not even if she was rich, so the fact of pregnancy was not recorded.

With this lack of medical attention it would have been easy for a baby to be born and to die without anyone knowing, apart from the immediate family, who may have had any number of reasons for wanting to conceal the birth.

Illegitimacy was the main reason for hiding a birth. Young people today cannot imagine the disgrace that was once attached to a birth out of wedlock. So great was it that sometimes a young girl would commit suicide rather than reveal she was pregnant. Many a poor woman would conceal the pregnancy beneath her skirts, work until the day she went into labour, deliver the baby herself, and go straight back to work. If she did not register the birth, who would be any the wiser? If the baby died, as many did, who would know? The rich had a more subtle way of dealing with an errant daughter – she could be certified ‘insane’ and confined to a mental asylum for the rest of her life. The baby would then be removed and placed in a private home or orphanage, with no stain attached to the family.

Another reason for concealing a dead baby was the expense of a funeral. A burial cost money, and every respectable working-class mother spent a few pennies each week on insurance to cover family deaths. A pauper’s grave was the ultimate disgrace, and to be thus shamed in front of her neighbours was every self-respecting woman’s dread. But many could ill-afford burial insurance, so it would be better for women caught in this trap to pretend it had never occurred and slip the little body into the river. In the 1950s I nursed a woman who had done just that thirty years earlier.[6]

If the respectable poor were driven to conceal the birth and death of a baby because of the cost of registration and burial, what of the abject poor?

In 1880 nine dead babies were found in a box on the steps of an undertaker in Long Lane, Bermondsey, East London. This was reported in all the newspapers. Would a doctor or midwife have attended the birth of these babies? Would these infants have been registered by parish or state? Could the parents, or at least the mothers, be traced? Not a chance. These nine babies would have been but a few of the nameless children thrown into an unmarked grave, the offspring of the abject poor who were destitute and starving, who were outside any census and beyond enumeration, and whom Charles Booth (1844-1916), the first social statistician, numbered at 255,000 for all London and at 1.95 million for Great Britain as a whole.[7] Later surveys considered this estimate to be conservative, stating that the figure was nearer to 3 million.

Obvious mental or physical disability was another reason for concealing a birth. Fear was the catalyst – fear, amongst the poor, of having to support a sickly child who could contribute nothing to the family income. There was also fear of the stigma attached to having a disabled child. It was widely supposed that congenital defects were due to something vaguely sinister ‘in the blood’, which would mark the family out from its neighbours. The baby could be left to die (probably with the connivance of the mother, or the women who had helped with the birth) and then described as still-born. The father would probably have been unaware of any impairment, because men rarely had anything to do with birth in those days. ‘Women’s matters’ were taboo, a silence enforced as much by women as by men.

The upper classes – aristocracy and royalty – were particularly fearful of the stigma of a disabled child in the family. It could lead to ostracism because of so-called ‘tainted blood’, and the upper classes were not above smothering their own babies at birth.

Poverty led to the abandoning of babies. How much of this really went on I don’t know, but we midwives were always being told about it. The women of Poplar would say ‘Gor! You don’ wanna go dahn Lime’ouse [or Bow or Millwall or wherever]. Dreadful people vey are. Leaves ver babies on doorsteps, vey do.’ And women of Limehouse would say exactly the same about the women of Poplar! We got the impression that babies were being left in droves on the doorsteps of every other parish. However, we never saw it, and no baby was left on the convent steps during the 1950s. I personally know a lady who comes from Manchester, and was born in 1940. She tells me that she was an abandoned baby. She was found on a doorstep one morning along with the milk bottles. The baby was very sickly, but although the couple who found her were poor, they arranged for her to go into hospital and paid for the specialist baby care. Then they fostered her for the rest of her childhood.

There are many reliable records of babies being left on workhouse steps, or at the door of one of the state-run orphanages in earlier years. These babies would be named by the workhouse and registered as ‘parents unknown’.

General Booth, in his volume In Darkest England, records that the Salvation Army ‘lasses’ frequently had newborn babies thrust into their arms by desperate young mothers, with heartbreaking words such as ‘You take him, dearie, he’ll have a better life with you. I can’t give him anything.’ Then the mother would disappear into the crowd, leaving no trace of her identity or address.

Infanticide – that’s an ugly word. Did deliberate infanticide go on before pregnancy and birth had to be attended by a registered midwife? It would have been a hanging matter, so the secret would have been well kept. I doubt if any mother would kill her newborn babe in cold blood, but desperate poverty could well drive a grandmother to do such a thing. History is full of grim realities. I recall reading in the national press some years ago of a Scottish woman in the remote highlands who had died at the age of ninety-three. After her death it was revealed that she had drowned seven babies born to her daughter, who was unmarried and of very limited intelligence. Forensic investigation uncovered the remains buried around the croft. What could go on undetected in the remote highlands of Scotland could well go on in the overcrowded slums of any great city, especially in centuries past. It must have happened times beyond number, and nobody knew.

Did fathers kill babies? Who knows? One of our elderly Sisters certainly thought so. I am not of the school that thinks men are the root of all evil, but it is certainly a possibility that some fathers may have been driven to it. Accident is more likely than murder, in my opinion. A newborn baby is very delicate. In overcrowded conditions someone or something falling on the baby could cause death; suffocation in the family bed could occur – there are many possibilities. It must also be remembered that domestic violence was an accepted part of life in some families. Women and children expected to be beaten up, and in such a scene a misdirected blow could easily kill a baby. If such a thing happened the mother would have done everything possible to conceal the death, and if the baby was unregistered she would probably get away with it. If her husband, the wage earner, was convicted of murder, it would be the gallows for him, or transportation if the judge was lenient. Either way, the family would be deprived of financial support.

Not all missing babies died, however. The more prosperous the family, the more reason for concealing an unwanted birth. A wealthy girl’s mother could keep her confined to the house, conduct the delivery herself, perhaps with the aid of a handy-woman, dispose of the baby, and no one would know. But how? A respectable matron could not go hawking a newborn baby around the workhouses and orphanages because, firstly, the baby would be refused admission, and, secondly, the neighbours would quickly find out. So an arrangement for private fostering, or ‘boarding’ as it was called, had to be found. Many handy-women had an ‘understanding’ with women who boarded babies, acting as intermediary, and taking a fee from both parties.

I knew a woman whose daughter, then aged twenty-four, had an illegitimate baby in 1949, which is not so very long ago. The woman said to me, smugly, ‘I took it away at birth, of course. My daughter was not allowed to see it. The baby went to an orphanage.’ It must have been a private commercial establishment, because the baby was not an orphan. Both parents were known and living.

A decade later, I delivered the baby of a young girl in Poplar. Throughout the delivery her mother shouted repeatedly that she would ‘get rid of the baby and put it in a home or institution’. At one stage she ordered me – the midwife – to ‘clear off’. She could deliver the baby herself and then get rid of it. I don’t know what she had in mind, but obviously she knew of some lawful way of disposing of an unwanted baby.[8]

The standard of care in these private ‘homes’ for babies would depend entirely on the person in charge. One of my friends was an illegitimate child seventy-five years ago. She was sent from one private boarding or foster parent to another, and eventually went to live with a single lady who loved and cared for her and became a lifelong guardian and friend. By way of contrast a woman in Clapham was prosecuted in the 1920s for having eight babies (each of which she was paid to care for) in five cots in the basement of her house. The babies ranged from newborn to three years old. The toddlers could not walk. They had never been out of their cots. They could not talk; they had not heard enough language.

Traffic in children has been going on for as long as mankind has been sinning and suffering. Josephine Butler (1828-1907) writes in her journals, pamphlets and diaries of the second half of the nineteenth century about seeing thousands (yes, thousands) of little girls, some as young as four or five, in the illegal brothels of London, Paris, Brussels and Geneva. It broke her heart to see them. The children had a life expectany of two years, yet the brothel owners, frequently women, seemed to have an unlimited supply of little girls for their rich clients. ‘Clean’ children, who were free from venereal disease, commanded a high price. All this is well documented, but strangely Mrs Butler never mentions little boys, though this branch of the trade must have been going on.[9]

Where did all these children come from? It could certainly not have been from the Salvation Army or the workhouses or state orphanages, nor from the established management orphanages such as Coram, Barnardo or Spurgeon. So from where, then?

A basic law of economics is that supply will meet demand. If brothel keepers wanted ‘clean’ children, unscrupulous women who boarded unwanted babies would supply them, for a price. No questions asked. Many children were not named or registered, and for those who were, a false birth certificate was provided. The parents or relatives probably never knew what had happened to their children. They just vanished as though they had never been born.

Baby selling – the last resort of a starving mother – was rife throughout the population explosion of the nineteeth century. This led to the terrible evil whereby traders, usually women, secured the custody of unwanted little ones, took out an insurance policy on their lives and then by neglect, cold and starvation ensured the death of the child and claimed the insurance. There are many recorded instances of this practice. Dr Barnardo is on record as having thwarted the murderous designs of a ruthless old harridan who had acquired three babies, insured them all, pawned their clothes, covered them in rags and left them without heat or food.

This must make terrible reading for anyone who is seriously studying family history. But life is made of happiness and tragedy in equal proportions, and we will never change that.