The Nightingale Shore Murder

Rosemary Cook

Copyright © 2015 Rosemary Cook

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For my son-in-law Mike Blackburn, who writes today's crime stories

For this second edition, I am especially grateful to Jeremy Stone for his continuing pursuit of information on this story about his distant relative, Florence Shore. Many thanks also to Raymond Davies, who solved the mystery of Annie Shore, Florence's step-mother, and shared the information with Jeremy and I. I am also grateful to the Dringhouses Local History Group, and the Bishopthorpe Local History Group, for additional information about Middlethorpe Hall and the Wilkinson family.

Even more archivists and researchers helped with this edition, and I would like to thank the following:

Special thanks go to descendants of the Hobkirk family for generously sharing their information, pictures and family letters, which contributed so richly to this book.

In particular I am very grateful to Jeremy Stone, great-grandson of Clarence Hobkirk, who sought me out to offer assistance, and who has used his expertise as a former Detective Chief Inspector in the Royal Hong Kong police to comment on the investigation into Florence Shore's murder. Also many thanks to Julia Lisle, who scanned family pictures and letters for me, and sent them through from Australia.

I must also thank Reid Paskiewicz and Erika Nelson from the United States, for sharing a copy of Patrick Paskiewicz's unpublished book about Florence Shore with me, following Patrick's death.

Thank you to my partner Alison and my daughter Kate for reading the early draft, proof-reading, re-organising and improving. Any remaining blips are my own.

The research for this book was greatly assisted by a Monica Baly Bursary granted by the Royal College of Nursing in 2010, for which I am very grateful.

I have received very valuable help and assistance from numerous archivists, researchers and others at record offices and archives around the country. I would to thank the following for their efforts and their interest in my research:

I would also like to thank the Hastings and St Leonards Observer for permission to reproduce the photographs of the train guards and the train compartment that was the scene of the attack, in publicity for this book.

Two things have inspired me to publish a second edition of this book.

The first was the discovery of new information on the story, including the solution to the mystery of Annie Shore, Florence Shore's young stepmother; and the discovery of a cache of Florence's medals, amazingly reunited many years after her death.

The second was the growing realisation of how important Florence and other Queen's Nurses were to the nursing effort of the First World War. In these anniversary years of the Great War, I have been uncovering more and more evidence of the breathtaking heroism and dedication of these nurses. They trained to care for the poor in ordinary British homes, then willingly transferred their skills to makeshift front-line military hospitals, and the ravaged villages of occupied Europe. In tribute to them, I have included more of their stories in the chapters about the War.

This expanded and updated edition also includes more on Florence's connections to two other famous nurses, Ethel Bedford Fenwick, who fought for thirty years to have nurse training standardised and nurses formally regulated; and Edith Cavell, who was executed for helping soldiers escape from Belgium, and who also had a connection with the Queen's Nursing Institute.

And in trying to solve the mystery at the heart of this story – who murdered Florence Nightingale Shore – I include the latest information on my search for the elusive murder file which would tell us so much about what the police suspected, even if they could not make a case in court.

Rosemary Cook

York, July 2014

It was the first stage in a murder so unlikely and audacious that the first three witnesses on the scene did not even realise it had happened.

The London to Hastings express train had stopped at Polegate Junction, near Bexhill in Sussex, just after five o'clock in the afternoon. It was Monday 12th January, 1920, a dark, rainy evening, and the three railway workmen who climbed into the third class compartment were thinking only of getting home. One had a bad cold. One was on his way back from a funeral. None of them was initially alarmed at what they saw in the carriage.

There was a woman sitting upright in the corner seat on the far side of the carriage, facing the engine. She was warmly dressed in a fur coat, with her luggage at her feet and on the seat beside her. She was leaning back against the cushioned seat, with an open book resting on a newspaper in her lap. The quiet normality of her posture hid the fact that she had horrific head wounds, her clothing was saturated with blood and she was barely conscious. Somewhere between London Victoria and Polegate Junction, someone had hit her with sufficient violence to fracture her skull in three places through her fur hat.

The woman was fifty five years old – it was two days after her birthday – and her name was Florence Nightingale Shore.

It was unusual to name a child Florence in the early 19th century, according to Cecil Woodham Smith's biography of the nursing icon Florence Nightingale. Fifty years later, when Florence Nightingale was famous for her work in the field hospitals of the Crimean War, this was no longer the case. Birth records show that hundreds of girls were called Florence in the latter half of the century, and some were given both of the famous names as forenames. Florence Nightingale Shore was one of them.

But this Florence was not just named in tribute to the most famous nurse of them all. She was related to her, being both a relative and god-daughter of Florence Nightingale. And she was also a nurse, with a distinguished career of her own. In fact, Florence Shore's life, before the savage attack on the Hastings train, was full of adventure. Her childhood was marked by family crises and scandals. The travels that brought her to Bexhill had previously taken her to Scotland, Ireland, South Africa, France, Germany and even China. She had nursed in the South African War and in the First World War, where the French African soldiers she cared for called her the ‘White Queen'.

This true story of Florence's life and death is both a tragedy and a mystery. A tragedy because she did not need to be on that train, or in that carriage, at that time. A mystery because, although the police knew who must have killed her, they could not find him, or put a name to him. It is an unsolved murder that involved Scotland Yard detectives, Dr Bernard Spilsbury, the famous Home Office pathologist, and a bizarre link to Percy Topliss, the ‘Monocled Mutineer'. Now, ninety years after the event, a shocking new theory about the killing has been proposed. And an entirely new suspect has emerged from the research for this book, as a candidate for the mysterious ‘man in the brown suit' that the police were desperate to find.

This is also the story of Florence Shore's enduring friendship with another nurse, Mabel Rogers, which lasted more than 25 years, from their meeting during nurse training to Florence's death. The two were perhaps part of the luckiest generation of women. They were born in the middle of the Victorian era, into a time of long dresses, stifling manners and total subservience to the men in their families and in society. By the end of their lives, they could make their own living in a respectable profession, and join the men in the war zones of Europe and beyond. The emancipation of women made the development of professional nursing possible; and nursing provided emancipated women with the most extreme test of their desire to be and do something meaningful and challenging.

For Florence and Mabel , of course, it was not history in the making. It was personal adventure, excitement and ultimately tragedy. The beginning of the end came after the assault on Florence, when Mabel Rogers was summoned from London to a hospital in Hastings, late in the evening of 12th January, to sit at her friend's hospital bedside.