The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (4 page)

In the days immediately following the birth, Mary Hilton and her daughter Edith Emily Hilton were the only visitors to the Skinner household. Whether it was because of a desire to protect their daughter or their shame at what she had produced, the Skinners tried to keep their neighbors from knowing that Kate had brought forth Siamese twins. When the fish wives living around the Skinner row house hadn’t seen anything of Kate for a week or so, however, they started asking questions. Soon it was known everywhere on Bear Hill that there were freak babies under the Skinners’ roof.

Who had fathered the twins? In the streets and local pubs, people whispered that the babies had been the result of an incestuous relationship between Kate and her father or perhaps between Kate and Ernest Skinner, the fifty-eight-year-old unmarried uncle who worked as a carpenter and boarded with the family. Such suspicions were understandable in the British Isles at a time when intermarriages within the royal families had produced their share of physically and mentally challenged children. While the possibility that Daisy and Violet were born of an incestuous relationship cannot be ruled out absolutely, such an explanation for their anomaly is improbable. Nowhere in the medical literature is there a single documented case of conjoined twins who were born to biologically related parents. As
historically rare as conjoined twins are, they are not caused by hereditary factors. Such children can result only because a single fertilized egg has divided imperfectly.

Daisy and Violet, years later, would make the claim that their father had been a military officer, a “Captain Hilton.” In the slim autobiography they produced,
The Intimate Lives and Loves of the Hilton Sisters, World Famous Siamese Twins
, they summed up their father in just four sentences: “He married our mother in Texas. She ran away from him after we were born. We were unable even to learn our father’s first name. Our father … died in action during World War I.”
⁴

Like much else in the twins’ memoir, the sketch of their father appears to be entirely fabricated. As a lowly green grocer’s assistant, Kate Skinner never had the means to travel outside Sussex County, much less a quarter of the way around the world to Texas. As for the twins’ assertion that their father’s surname was Hilton, this was clearly a concoction. The name Hilton came not from the man from whose seed Daisy and Violet sprang, but rather from Mary Hilton, the midwife who attended their birth.

The only known document providing a clue to the identity of the twins’ father is a handwritten note from 1921 by Mary Ann Skinner, their grandmother. The note names a Frederick Andress as the father of Daisy and Violet and is now in the hands of Jill Grove of Eastborn, Sussex, England, a niece of Daisy and Violet, who has maintained a small collection of mementos relating to them, including photographs, newspaper clippings, genealogical charts, and some legal documents.

According to the city’s census records, only one Frederick Andress resided in Brighton in the year of the twins’ birth.
⁵
He was a hairdresser who maintained a salon at 5 Brighton Place. Frederick Andress was thirty, nine years older than Kate, the son of Edward and Sarah Andress. Edward Andress was a man of wealth and prominence in
Brighton. He was the publisher of a weekly newspaper, the
Brighton Times
, and also operated a printing company.
⁶

The postulation that Kate became pregnant by a scion of one of Brighton’s wealthiest and more powerful community leaders was given even more support by Jim Moore, a close and nearly life-long confidant of the twins. Moore seemed not to know or remember the name of their father, but the details he provided about their conception sounded perfectly credible. “Their mother [Kate] was a serving girl of some capacity in one of the great homes of Brighton.… The father was one of … the younger children of the family … [Kate] was in disgrace. [The father] wouldn’t have anything to do with her after she became pregnant, so [Daisy and Violet] were born out of wedlock.”
⁷

While the birth certificates identified their mother as a “greengrocer’s assistant,” it is known that Kate had been employed by a Brighton family as a maidservant before taking work as a vegetable vender. It’s reasonable to believe that Edward and Sarah Andress would have fired Kate had they learned she had become pregnant by their son. As one of Brighton’s social pillars, Edward Andress surely would have gone to great lengths to prevent a scandal.

Whomever the father was, it is almost certain the twins’ progenitor was already married when he impregnated Kate, or so it is believed by Joseph Haestier, a nephew of Daisy and Violet. Haestier’s mother was Kate Skinner’s younger sister Maggie who was present in the birthing chamber when the twins were born. “My mum had always been devoted to her sister Kate,” said Haestier of Kent, England. “Maybe her devotion had something to do with the fact that Kate was six years older than her. It was probably a kind of hero worship or something.… I used to ask my mum why Kate never married the father of Daisy and Violet. She always answered that Kate couldn’t marry the twins’ father because he
already was married. As I understood it, Kate had a long-term affair with this man.”
⁸

Kate never married, but according to Haestier, she would have two more illegitimate children after the birth of the twins, both by the same man who fathered Daisy and Violet.
⁹

Whether she was listening to a pub patron pouring out his woes or coaching a young unwed mother through her first labor, Mary Hilton could affect an empathetic, motherly manner. But Kate knew from the months she worked for Mary at the Queen’s Arms that her outward appearance of benignity masked a woman with a cold and judgmental temperament. Even in the late stages of Kate’s pregnancy, Mary insisted that Kate work long nights scrubbing kettles and waiting tables. When Kate protested, Mary told her she was free to go home, but if she did so, she would have to arrange to find another midwife.

Mary Hilton was no less reproving of Kate after the twins were born. Over and over, she told Kate that her monster babies were the result of loose morals.

As scolding as she could be to Kate, Mary doted on the newborns. She reported to the Skinner row house almost daily, usually accompanied by Edith Emily. Sometimes, in fact, she showed up two or three times a day to help feed and bathe the twins as Kate refused to suckle, bathe, or even take them in her arms.

The diet of diluted cow’s milk that Dr. Rooth prescribed seemed to present no problem for the infants. Daisy and Violet weighed about twelve pounds at birth and, within just a few days, pushed the scale at thirteen pounds. But soon after coming into the world, the twins broke out with eczema. As Dr. Rooth would later write, the skin condition was a result of the fleshy and cartilaginous bond at the twins’ backs. The sisters were so tightly joined at their buttocks, he
observed, that Mary Hilton was presented with “an extreme difficulty in keeping them both dry and clean.”
¹⁰

Kate spent her days and nights shut inside her bedroom. Each morning, she hoped her mother would appear at her bedside and tell her that the twins had taken a bad turn and had died or were dying. But all she ever heard from her mother was that the babies were showing healthy appetites, that they had slept through the night without fussing, and that they appeared to be growing ever more robust. Mary Ann Skinner was a gentle woman. She sometimes thought that maybe her daughter would begin having maternal feeling for the babies if she placed them in a crib and left them with Kate in the bedroom. At the same time, she worried that if Kate were left alone with the newborns, she might try to smother them.

There is no way of knowing whether Kate might have tried to kill her daughters, but she herself seemed to have lost the will to go on living. She refused to eat the food her mother brought to her bedside on a tray. Growing weaker each day, all Kate could think about was the bleakness that lay ahead if the twins were to survive. Because of the rope of flesh knotting Daisy and Violet together, they would never be able to appear in public without attracting attention. And Kate was sure that if she kept the children, she would never be able to go anywhere without being mocked and pointed at as an example of how God had punished the most sinful of his flock.

Even before she gave birth to her extraordinary daughters, Kate had wondered how, as a single mother, she was going to support even one child. Attitudes toward illegitimate children were anything but enlightened in England in the early twentieth century. Unlawfully begotten children of the poor were an affront to public morality. Under British law, in fact, such a child was regarded as
filius nullius
: a child with no name, no parents, no kin, and no right to inherit.

There were orphanages for foundlings and the children of the destitute, but Kate was not assured that any of them would take her offspring. Many kept their doors closed to illegitimate children in the belief that such children inherited the moral weaknesses of their parents and would contaminate the minds and morals of their lawfully begotten wards. Another option for an unmarried mother was to send her offspring to a so-called baby farm. Under such an arrangement, the mother would pay a lump sum to the baby “farmer” for the child’s long-term maintenance. Only the most desperate mothers gave up their children to baby farms. The newspapers regularly ran exposés of baby farmers who practiced infanticide outright or let their charges die of starvation and neglect. In 1896, for example, a Mrs. Dyer of Reading was hanged after being found guilty of strangling the babies that had been entrusted to her and throwing their bodies into the Thames. She became the subject of a sardonic ballad,
Mrs. Dyer, the Baby Farmer
, which had this refrain:

Unaccountably to Kate, Mary Hilton’s attitude toward her began to change four or five days after the twins’ birth. Mary no longer reproached her for refusing to feed and care for the twins. Instead, she seemed solicitous and unusually sympathetic. Her feelings toward the twins, Mary told Kate, were special. She took great joy in bottle-feeding and bathing the babies and in holding them in her arms until they drifted off to sleep. Always before she left the Skinner home, Mary visited with Kate in her bedroom. Sometimes for hours at a time, she held Kate’s hand and listened as the new mother talked
through her sobs about the fears she had for her daughters and herself. Kate was always soothed by Mary’s visits.

As she had done almost daily since the twins were born, Mary Hilton called at the Skinner household when the twins were three weeks old. As sympathetic toward her as Mary had gradually become, Kate found the saloon matron and midwife to be even more tender on this occasion. After seating herself on the bed, Mary took Kate’s hand and reassured the frightened young mother that there was no need to worry about what might become of her and the babies. Mary explained that after long discussions about the twins with her husband, Henry, and her daughter, Edith Emily, they were united in their desire to adopt Daisy and Violet. They were eager to give the girls a good and loving home.

Kate was silent for several seconds, at first not comprehending what she had heard. Then her lips began to quiver. In a moment, all the pain and terror welled up inside her and broke through. She threw her arms around Mary and, sobbing and shaking convulsively, held on tightly. Between gasps she blurted out her gratefulness. “Take my babies and care for them as a mother,” she begged. “Tell them you are their aunt and never let them know who their real mother is.”
¹¹

Adoptions were common enough in England in 1908, but they were usually carried out privately, with no filing of records. Britain had no laws governing the adoption of children, which meant that if a mother gave up her baby for one year and then wanted to reclaim it, the adoptive parents would have no legal right to the child.

For all her seeming guilelessness, Mary was cunning. Before telling Kate that she was prepared to adopt the twins, she had visited a lawyer to see if some legal instrument could be drawn up that would discourage, if not prevent, Kate from ever trying to get the twins back. The lawyer, J. G. Bramhall of Brighton, brilliantly devised
such a document. Under the terms of the agreement he drafted, if Kate ever tried to regain custody of the children, she would be legally obligated to pay Mary and Henry Hilton ten shillings a week for every week the twins had been in their care. The document read as follows: