Wendy Percival
SHOCKING FAMILY FINDS
Uncovering cruelty & abuse
As family historians we’re thrilled to find our ancestors mentioned in the press as it adds ‘flesh’ to the bones of names and dates. But sometimes what we stumble across can take our breath away, as I discovered while researching my 3x great-grandfather, Thomas Shelley. I had an inkling of his character after finding a newspaper report of his being fined for selling flour adulterated with alum. Aware of the financial precariousness of these times, I might have forgiven him, until a deeper search revealed something shocking. And this time Thomas couldn’t cite pecuniary pressure as an excuse.
The headline in the Staffordshire Advertiser on 8 November 1856 read, ‘UNNATURAL AND CRUEL TREATMENT OF A FARMER’S WIFE’. Thomas, I discovered, had been charged with ‘assault and cruelty’ to his wife Elizabeth (known as Bessie, née Holland). And, it transpired, he had an accomplice in the form of his housekeeper, Martha Cotterill.
A disturbing picture
Newspaper accounts of the hearing before magistrates in Eccleshall, Staffordshire, on 31 October 1856, paint a disturbing picture. Bessie was described as being ‘feeble minded’ and it seemed Martha bullied her unmercifully. It was alleged that on one occasion, Martha had taken a knife to Bessie and drawn blood, another that she’d dragged Bessie into the house by her hair. Further accusations included kicking, threatening with a stick, pushing excrement from a chamber pot into her mouth and ‘inflicting severe pain on some of the most sensitive parts of the body with a bunch of nettles’.
A former servant at the farm, James Turner, said he’d brought the cruelty to the attention of Mr Shelley who had merely laughed and told him if he didn’t like it, he could leave. Another servant, Thomas Davis, said he’d seen Mrs Shelley locked up several times and that she was never allowed to eat meals with the family. He also said that Mr Shelley had told him Cotterill was to be considered mistress of the house.
It was also alleged that Cotterill taunted Bessie saying, that although she was not yet Mrs Shelley, ‘as soon as she could see the end of her she should be’.