LiveTheirStory

Daisy’s life was nasty and short, according to the press reports in the Chelmsford Chronicle of her inquest, and the subsequent trial of her stepmother for child cruelty and neglect. Yet her case is worth investigating at some length for what it tells us about the harsh realities of rural life in the 19th century.

Daisy was the daughter of William Nash, a traction engine driver from Chatham in Kent who had, after the death of his first wife, remarried and moved to the village of Moreton in Essex with his second wife Jane and their blended family of ten children.

It was reported at the inquest that Daisy had suffered from diphtheria and recently returned home paralysed from hospital. She recovered slightly but was never well. The doctor who attended at her death said he was surprised she had been sent home, as she was covered in sores, barely clothed and cold, and had died of ‘constitutional exhaustion’. He described Jane Nash as a ‘scrofulous subject…of very dirty habits.’ Neighbours reported that the child also suffered beatings by her stepmother and was frequently left outdoors in all weathers. Countering this, William testified that his daughter was able to speak but had never reported any harm, and Jane’s 14-year-old daughter Alice also denied that Daisy had been ill-treated. Faced with these conflicting accounts, the inquest was adjourned, and two weeks later a summons was issued against Jane Nash for child cruelty and neglect.

The case, heard before the Ongar petty sessions, was brought by the NSPCC. Founded in 1884 in London, this organisation became national in 1889, so this case is an early example of its campaigning, and probably quite unusual in dealing with a very rural case. The court heard from three female neighbours, who elaborated on their testimony to the inquest. One said she frequently gave Daisy food as she had seen her eating worms, and all reported hearing the child being beaten and crying out. One noted that Mrs Nash never beat her own children, just Daisy.

In court William again defended his wife, this time adding that Daisy was an ‘imbecile’ and hard to handle (elaborated on in huge detail), and had been in a lunatic asylum with his first wife. The doctor seems to have been influenced by this, saying that the child would not keep her bandages on (to protect her sores), and would not stay in bed even when put there. He repeated that he was surprised Daisy had been discharged from hospital, and it was mentioned that a telegram had been received by the family asking them to take her home. It was agreed that the family could have fed her better, but the local Guardians of the Poor had refused any additional money for the family on account of William being in work. As to Daisy being sent out of doors, William said that this was because she was not toilet trained, and the door was always open for her to go back in.

The accusations of neglect, it was argued, were ‘spite on the part of a few women living in these cottages’, one of whom was on record as not getting along with Jane Nash. The justices agreed – there was little prospect of a jury convicting Jane on the balance of evidence, and so they dismissed the case.

Reading the distressing details, I was struck by how a four-year-old, possibly disabled (‘imbecile’) and certainly very sickly child in these reports changes from vulnerable victim to someone whose own behaviours contributed to her death. How could such a weak child have been ‘wilful’? Did the hospital send her home because she was close to death? Or did the family decide they were not going to spend any more on her hospital stay, given that they apparently did not qualify for poor relief?

The dynamics of village life are also exposed: the concerned neighbours (one of whom was my great-great grandmother) are rewritten as nosy, spiteful gossips, and maybe they were. Left unsaid is the fact that William, Jane and their children were incomers to Moreton, a village in which all but a handful were local-born in the 1891 census. Was their arrival greeted with suspicion? Certainly there had been a falling-out between Jane and one of her accusers. Strikingly, that same census suggests that some of William’s children no longer lived in the household (but Daisy still did), and by 1901 William, Jane, her daughters Emily and Alice and their son Arthur, the last two born in Moreton, had moved on again, to Buckinghamshire.

It is a sad fact that children are often only well-documented when their lives have come to an end unexpectedly, or when they have serious accidents. Their stories are told in press articles whose main goal – we must always remember – is to sensationalise and to sell newspapers. Daisy’s life was short but, it turns out, extraordinarily significant. I plan to explore with the NSPCC whether she is in their archival records too.