The Nightingale Shore Murder (6 page)

While infectious disease was no respecter of class or status, in other places, the Dringhouses school log book points to the differences between the children of the two schools. In January 1870, ‘
Mr Ackeroyd, Lady Meek's Steward, called to pay for Agnes Armison and three of Mr Forth's children'
. And while the girls at Middlethorpe were learning French from Mademoiselle Laurency, the Dringhouses school children were learning about The Pronoun in their grammar lesson, the Shape of the Earth in Geography, and the names of 36 vegetables in Spelling.

In the very comfortable surroundings of Middlethorpe Hall, Florence may have been at least partly insulated from her father's financial embarrassment in London. Her 14 year old sister Urith was also not at home with their parents in early 1881: she was boarding with Miss Katherine Walker, and another boarder, 16 year old Letitia Beasley, in Ecclesall, Sheffield. Their older brother Offley, now 18, was a gentleman cadet at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, preparing for his military career. Ten years later, he would be followed there by his cousin, Clarence Hobkirk, the younger son of Margaret Hobkirk, Florence's maternal aunt. In 1876, Clarence and his older brother Stuart had been left fatherless when John Hobkirk died at the age of just 51, when the boys were aged eight and seven. They may have been particularly close to their Shore cousins, as, many years later, Florence would make provision for both of them in her Will.

Meanwhile, Florence's father was still trying to make money. Following his bankruptcy, he had set off on a new venture, going to Iceland to invest in borax – a naturally-occurring mineral used in detergents, cosmetics and enamel glazes, which was greatly in demand at the end of the 19
^th
century. Unfortunately, like Offley's other ventures, this one did not succeed. The children were beginning to think about ways to earn their own livings. In 1882, Offley junior had passed out from Sandhurst and was set on a military career. He wrote to his father about his younger sisters' ideas:

Florence, now aged 17, also wrote rather wistfully to her father in Iceland:

Urith, the youngest daughter, who seems to have spent little time at home with her family, wrote simply:

Offley Shore's financial difficulties were to continue for years; but in spite of his ‘banishment' from the family, his son in particular continued to write affectionately to him. In 1883, he wrote;

After the family's financial troubles and separation in the latter part of the 1870s, while the children were growing up, they might have hoped that the next few years would pass more quietly. But a series of seismic shocks to their family life were still to come: starting in 1886, when Florence's mother divorced her husband after twenty five years of marriage.

Anna Maria Shore's petition came before the High Court of the Justice, Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division, on 11
^th
January 1886. Changes to the marriage laws had come just in time for Anna's generation. Prior to the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, divorce was only possible by an ecclesiastical annulment of the marriage, or through a private (and very expensive) Act of Parliament, which had to be debated in the House of Commons.

The Act recognised that marriage was a contract that came under the jurisdiction of the courts, rather than a religious sacrament, and removed divorce from the ecclesiastical courts. It established the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes in London, to deal with petitions for divorce: still an expensive business, but more readily achievable for women with some means. The Act also, for the first time, allowed for men to be required to pay maintenance to their ex-wives, and allowed divorced women to control and inherit property in their own right. However, it was not even-handed in its treatment of the marriage partners. A man filing for divorce had to prove only that his wife had committed adultery: the sole grounds on which a divorce could be granted. But a woman seeking a divorce had to prove not only her husband's adultery, but also that he was guilty of bigamy, desertion, cruelty, sodomy, bestiality or incest. Or, as Emily Pankhurst reportedly put it:

Anna Maria's petition set out the history of the 25-year old marriage, and her case against her husband:

This was the last year in which the family holidayed in Southsea together, and just before Offley Shore was declared bankrupt. Florence was 13 years old. But desertion of the young family would not have been sufficient grounds for a divorce: Anna needed also to prove adultery. Her Petition continues:

The Petition is signed in a bold hand ‘Anna Maria Shore', and the signature underlined decisively in black ink.

Offley Shore's response to his wife's petition was presented to the Court by his solicitors on 2
^nd
February, and must have come as something of a surprise to Anna. Nearly eight years after their separation, and in spite of her conviction that he was having an affair with another woman, Offley was not going to make it easy for her to divorce him.

In the face of what must have been fairly incontrovertible evidence – as it would surely be obvious to any observer whether or not he had been living with his wife for the last eight years – Offley Shore was denying everything. Anna would have to fight him in court if she wanted to pursue her freedom. And clearly she did: with her solicitors, Goodhart and Medcalf, she set about finding further grounds to convince the Court that her marriage had irretrievably broken down, whatever her husband might say. At a hearing on 11
^th
March, her solicitors were granted permission to amend the original Petition for dissolution of the marriage, by inserting a new paragraph, 3a, which added:

What searches, accusations and investigations took place between mid-January and early March to arrive at this new accusation can only be imagined. Had Anna known all along that Offley had had more than one affair, but originally planned to cite only the most recent? Or was this a new and painful discovery for her? Perhaps it was actually a relief: she needed to prove his adultery definitively, if she wanted to be free of Offley, since his long desertion of the family was not enough in the eyes of the law.

The amended Petition with the new accusation was sent to Offley Shore's solicitors, and a hearing date was fixed for 27
^th
March. It must have been an intimidating occasion. The Right Honourable Sir James Hannen, the President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court, heard oral evidence from Anna and from witnesses on her behalf – and his decision was to adjourn the hearing for further evidence. The details of the Shore marriage were to be examined in pitiless detail.

The final hearing was on 13
^th
April. Further evidence was taken in support of Anna's Petition, and the two solicitors spoke for their clients. Probably to Anna's enormous relief – and fury, given what he had put her through – Offley did not attend the Court this time to defend his cause. The Court decided that she had sufficiently proved her Petition, and that the Respondent had been guilty of ‘
adultery coupled with the desertion of the Petitioner without reasonable excuse for upwards of two years
.' A decree nisi was granted, with the decree absolute to follow in six months. It might have given a further measure of satisfaction to Anna that costs were awarded against her husband.

Divorce was still an uncommon occurrence at this time – there were only around 300 divorces a year in England in the 1880s – and divorces initiated by women were even more unusual. Anna Maria, whose paternal grandfather was a churchman, and whose father was an important and respectable solicitor in Edinburgh, must have found it difficult to take her marital troubles to the courts. But she does at least seem to have been spared the additional burden of prurient publicity, since the divorce trial occupying the newspapers at the time was that of Lord and Lady Colin Campbell.

Married in July 1881, the couple honeymooned in the Isle of Wight accompanied by a hospital nurse, as Lord Campbell was already suffering from venereal disease. The marriage was only consummated later that year, infecting Lady Campbell – formerly Gertrude Blood – with the condition. After a miscarriage and an operation, in 1884 she applied for and was granted a judicial separation, on the grounds of cruelty: the only way to avoid the obligation of ‘enforced cohabitation'. Later that year, both husband and wife petitioned for divorce, each accusing the other of adultery. In Lady Campbell's case, she was accused of adultery with four men: a Duke, a fire chief, a noted solider, and the couple's doctor. So the case, with the two petitions consolidated into one trial by the Court, was officially known as ‘Campbell v. Campbell and Campbell v. Campbell, the Duke of Marlborough, Captain Shaw, Colonel Butler and Dr Bird.'

The jury cleared Lady Campbell of the accusations of adultery; but no divorce was granted, and the couple remained married until Lord Campbell's death 11 years later.

For Florence, even after bankruptcy, desertion, adultery and divorce, the family's upheavals were not over. Just eight months after his divorce was finalised, her father Offley Shore re-married, to a woman young enough to be his daughter.

Offley Shore's second marriage took place in Westminster Register Office on 2
^nd
July 1887. The couple was married by licence by the Registrar: a licence being an alternative to having the marriage banns publicly read in the bride's and groom's home parishes on three separate occasions. Licences had to be paid for, but were a quicker – and more discreet – way of obtaining permission to marry than having the banns read. Three public readings of the banns would, of course, offer the opportunity for someone to come forward to object to the marriage.

The marriage certificate described the groom's profession as ‘gentleman', and his condition as ‘the divorced husband of Anna Maria Shore formerly Leishman.' His residence at the time of the marriage was 113 Haymarket, London – the same street in which he was said to have conducted his adulterous affair at number 23. His bride was Annie Wakefield, from Spalding in Lincolnshire, a spinster, and daughter of John Wakefield, deceased. The column for the ages of the parties records that Offley was 48 years old, and Annie was 23. The witnesses do not appear to be close family members of either party to the marriage: they were a Fred and Frank Lampard.

Pictures of Offley Shore in mid-life show him even more balding, with huge Victorian mutton-chop whiskers but no moustache and a bare chin. Young Annie Wakefield might once have dreamed of something more than this quiet wedding in a London Register Office, with no family members to be her witnesses. But she was obviously determined – or persuaded – to become Offley's wife, for better or worse: for there is a curious post-script to this marriage. A hand-written correction on the marriage certificate was added four years after the event, in 1891, by the Registrar, in the presence of the Superintendent Registrar, and two witnesses by the name of Milford and Boyce.

It is not unusual for corrections to be needed, according to a current Registrar at the Westminster Register Office, if a mistake was made at the time of the marriage, and neither the bride, the groom nor the witnesses spotted it when they signed the register entry. Normally, such corrections should be witnessed by either the bride or groom, or the original witnesses to the marriage – someone who knows the couple well enough to be able to testify to the changes required. But that did not happen in this case.

It also seems unlikely in this case that the parties to the marriage overlooked the mistake accidentally. The correction is to an entry in the ‘ages' column, where the bride's age is recorded. ‘In column 3', the correction reads, ‘for 23 years, read 20 years.'

In the 19
^th
century, the age at which a woman could marry without her parents' consent was 21. It seems that Annie and Offley were not willing to wait another year to marry with her parents' consent: perhaps they did not expect to get it. Or maybe Offley did not know when he married Annie that she was under the age of majority. In either case, how the ‘mistake' came to light, who reported it to the Registrar, why neither the bride nor the groom were available to witness the correction, and what impact the deception had on the marriage, are all unknown. What is clear is that Offley's second marriage provided Florence, at the age of 22, with a stepmother two years younger than she was.

Annie Wakefield Shore was not what she seemed in other ways too. She gave her father's name as John Wakefield, deceased, and the family residence as Spalding in Lincolnshire: but no John Wakefield is recorded as living in Spalding, or dying prior to 1887, in UK census records. There is no birth certificate on record for Anne or Annie Wakefield, daughter of John from Spalding in Lincolnshire, for the years 1866 or 1867. Family historians often point out that marriage is one of the very few official occasions (the ten-yearly census being another) when the information required is supplied by the parties involved, and is not subject to any external checking. So people sometimes found it convenient to have a ‘deceased' father to put on the marriage certificate, if the truth was more troublesome. In Annie's case, there is an obvious explanation for the deception: what she was hiding was the stigma of illegitimacy. Her birth certificate shows that she was born on 7
^th
April, 1867, in Spalding. Her mother was Elizabeth Wakefield, but the columns for name and occupation of the father are blank.

The 1871 census shows that, at the age of three, Anne Wakefield was living in Gosberton, near Spalding, Lincolnshire with her mother, Elizabeth, who was then twenty four; and her grandparents, William and Louisa Wakefield. Louisa had had her daughter Elizabeth at the relatively late age of thirty five. Elizabeth had given birth to Anne when she was just twenty one, and the three generations were living together in Seadike Lane, Gosberton.

The next census shows the first signs of the fluidity of Anne Wakefield's age. In early April 1881, when she was still 13, Anne Wakefield was a live-in general servant for a farmer, John Huntsman, and his housekeeper, Sarah Squires, in Fengate, Moulton, still close to Spalding. She – or they – reported to the census that she was aged fifteen. Whether the fiction originated with this household, or whether the Wakefields had added a couple of years to her age to make her seem more suitable to go out to work, is impossible to deduce.

How the gentleman Dr Offley Shore met the barely literate (she took two attempts to sign her surname on her marriage certificate), illegitimate and under-age servant girl from Spalding is also impossible to guess. He did have links with the area, having worked for a time at the Stamford hospital, but he had not lived there for more than twenty years by the time of his second marriage. He had, apparently, been conducting adulterous affairs in London for the previous four years. Perhaps he met Annie on a visit to friends in Lincolnshire; or perhaps she was taken to London by her employers, or her family, and met Offley by chance there. Most intriguingly, what was it about this young woman that made the philandering, financially embarrassed and now divorced doctor so determined to marry her, rather than make her his mistress? She had no money, status, influential family or obvious hold over him – was Offley, quite simply, besotted; and did Annie see her chance for a much better life?

Marriage did not end the mysteries of Annie Shore: her later life and her death initially present further puzzles. She was living with Offley in Southampton Buildings in Holborn, London, at the time of the 1891 census. There were no children in the household, and one servant, Mary Chadwick: at 23, she was the same age as her mistress. Strangely, Annie Shore is described on the census list as head of the household, rather than wife of the head; and her occupation is ‘living on own means' although she is also noted as married, and most wives' entries do not list an occupation. (What ‘means' she could have had beyond her husband's is another mystery.) Perhaps the rather unlikely marriage was over in all but name, and they were effectively living separate lives in the same house. In the 1901 census, Offley was still describing himself as married, though he was alone in a house in Oxford Street in London on that particular night. Annie could simply have been away overnight; or they could have separated in a more permanent way. But Annie Shore nee Wakefield, born in Lincolnshire in 1867, does not appear anywhere else on the UK census in 1901.

There is also only one record of the death of an Annie Shore of the right age between 1901 and 1911, when Offley was described as a widow[er]. This Annie Shore died on 13
^th
August, 1906. Her occupation was recorded as ‘housekeeper' and ‘wife of —————- Shore': no first name was inserted for her husband, whose own occupation was ‘unknown.' His address was in Westcliff on Sea: a suburb of Southend on Sea. Offley and his family had spent many summers holidaying on the south coast during the 1870s. Could this have been Offley Shore living by the sea in retirement? He had lived most of his life since the 1880s in London, and he ended his days in a nursing home in London. This might have only been because his daughter Urith was living in London at the time, so it was more convenient for visiting him; but equally it may be that he never lived in Southend. Electoral records for the area do not show a Shore living at the relevant address.

If this Annie Shore was in fact Offley Shore's wife, and Florence's young stepmother, her life ended tragically. She died in Camberwell House Asylum in London, at the age of 39, of ‘exhaustion due to general paralysis of the insane' – the third and final stage of syphilis.

This is where the formal record appears to end. But a contact from a family history website, Dr Raymond Davis, takes up the story, passed on to him from family members:

This is an extraordinary and touching turn of events. Annie had captivated not just Offley Shore, but in a short space of time, another man, much closer to her own age, who lived with her in common law marriage for at least five years, and probably longer. A man who stood by her through the horrors of syphilis in its worst form until she died in a lunatic asylum, then not only buried her in his family grave, but kept her portrait in his house and named his daughter after her. So how had this new liaison come about?

This raises a new possibility to account for the amendment to Offley and Annie's marriage certificate, made in 1891. Perhaps Offley had already tired of Annie, after four years of marriage – or maybe he was aware that she had contracted syphilis – and wanted a way out. By informing the Registrar of her real age at the time of the wedding (in person or anonymously), perhaps he hoped to open the way for an annulment of the marriage. It is unlikely that he would have wanted to shoulder the expenses of another divorce, as an alternative route to freedom; or to be held liable for the costs of obtaining treatment for her disease. Clearly no annulment was granted, and the marriage remained intact until Annie's death. Her life until then, although ravaged by syphilis, at least seems to have contained much love and affection from her new ‘husband', Edwin Harris. The stone he erected over her body in the family grave reads: ‘In loving memory of my devoted wife Annie who passed away 13
^th
August 1906 aged 39 years.' In later years, both his brother and Edwin himself would be buried in the same grave.

A year after Annie's death, Edwin Harris made a more formal marriage. The Gloucester Citizen reported on 8 August 1907:

It would be interesting to know whether the mother of the bride knew of the bridegroom's recent common law marriage, and the dreadful circumstances of his ‘wife's' death, before he married her only daughter. However, neither Edwin Harris nor Offley Shore succumbed to syphilis; and the question remains of how the unfortunate Annie was exposed to the infection at a very young age.

In spite of his own second marriage in 1887, Offley Shore had not quite finished with his ex-wife, Anna Maria. In June 1889, his solicitor filed an affidavit to the divorce court, seeking permission to ask for a variation to the divorce settlement. He received it, and submitted his sworn statement in July:

In short, in spite of evidently funding his remarriage and new household, Shore wanted to avoid any further financial obligation to his ex-wife and children: his children were wise to have entered into careers that made them self-sufficient.