Two for Sorrow

Notes

Two for Sorrow is a work of fiction, inspired by real lives and events.

Amelia Sach and Annie Walters were hanged at Holloway Gaol in London on 3 February, 1903, having been sentenced to death by Mr Justice Darling at the Old Bailey, despite a recommendation of mercy from the jury. Theirs was the first execution at Holloway since its conversion to a women’s prison the year before, and the last double female hanging in Britain. The bodies of both women were removed from the prison grounds in 1971 and taken to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, where they are buried together.

Most of the material included in Josephine’s untitled novel is reported in or suggested by the various newspaper accounts of the arrest and trial. When she died, Amelia Sach left behind a husband and young daughter, but their names were not Jacob and Lizzie, and their fates as depicted in Two for Sorrow are entirely fictional.

In 1927, Mary Size became the first female deputy governor of Holloway Prison. Although her improvements fell short of her own ideals, the reforms she introduced—mirrors and photographs in cells, a system for prisoners to earn their own money and a prison shop, financial aid to help with debt and the provision of clothing on release—brought a new humanity to the incarceration of women and did much to bring the standard of women’s prisons more in line with those for men. Her story is told in an autobiography, Prisons I Have Known. Cicely McCall’s book on Holloway, They Always Come Back, was published in 1938, and I am indebted to her for providing the details of Josephine’s guided tour.

Josephine Tey was one of two pseudonyms created by Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896–1952) in a successful career as playwright and novelist; it first appeared in 1936, paying tribute to her late mother and her Suffolk great-great-grandmother, and it is the name by which we know her best today. As Josephine Tey, although her output was small, Mackintosh wrote some of the most original and modern crime novels of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, including The Franchise Affair, The Daughter of Time (both re-workings of historical crimes) and Brat Farrar. One of her finest books, Miss Pym Disposes, takes its setting and some of its characters from Anstey Physical Training College near Birmingham, where Mackintosh studied during the First World War. The other alias, Gordon Daviot, was reserved mainly for plays and historical fiction, and was the name most widely used by her friends.

For most of her life, Elizabeth Mackintosh lived in her hometown, Inverness, where she kept house for her father, but she loved England and spent a good part of each year south of the border or, occasionally, in Europe. Her time in London was usually spent at the Cowdray Club, a club for nurses and professional women where she was a member from 1925 until her death in 1952. As well as providing a convenient and comfortable base in town, the club gave Tey the names of many of her characters; look through the membership lists for those years, and you will find a Grant, an Ashby, a Blair, a Farrar and a Marion Sharpe. The club no longer exists (not because of murder or scandal, which are all my invention), but the building in Cavendish Square is still the headquarters of The Royal College of Nursing.

Mackintosh is widely believed to have lost a lover at the Somme in 1916; although her early work supports this, her lifelong friend from Inverness, who was with her at Anstey during the war, knew of no such relationship, and Mackintosh shied away from close emotional entanglements. The most significant attachments of her later life were almost exclusively with women, many of whom she had met during the West End run of her phenomenally successful play, Richard of Bordeaux. From April 1935 to March 1936, one of those women—the actress, Marda Vanne—kept a diary, a year-long love letter written to Gordon Daviot. The words which Marta asks Josephine to read here are Marda’s, an eloquent expression of a real and lasting love.