Eliza Ruddom was born in Boston, on the edge of the Wash, in approximately 1831. She married John Bratley, a police officer, in 1856, and had three children in Boston before they moved to Plumstead in London. One of her children died in 1867.
Soon after her daughter’s death, she became an alcoholic. She left her husband and children in London, and moved back to Boston. Her husband left the police force, but quickly replaced Eliza, and was making coffins in Battersea by 1871.
Back in Boston, Eliza met John Fendyke. John was fifteen years older than Eliza. He lived in Skirbeck, on the edge of Boston, and worked as a gardener at the rather grand West Skirbeck House. He was recently widowed – his first wife had died in the street in September 1871 – and seems to have moved in with Eliza fairly promptly. They lived in a cottage near the brickyards along the London Road.
Their relationship was not a happy one. John was violent towards Eliza, as he had been to his first wife. They both drank heavily – John at his club, Eliza wherever she could get served – and Eliza was prone to become hysterical when drunk, sobbing for her children and screaming in the streets. John couldn’t tolerate the yelling, and would beat her, a neverending cycle of abuse. Nevertheless, the relationship continued, although John delicately referred to Eliza as his ‘housekeeper’.
Monday 5th March 1877, a frosty evening. John and Eliza walked into Boston, separating at Liquorpond Street – John went to his club, Eliza went to the pub. John left the club around 11pm, and walked past Heslam Alley – the alley is no longer there, but was along the side of the Baptist Church on the High Street. He heard a woman lamenting, and there was Eliza, drunk and in tears over her children, with her friend Mrs Revell. Mrs Revell lived on Heslam Alley, and had offered Eliza a bed for the night, to keep her out of the lockup. John went to her, and rather than comforting her, slapped her round the face. He told her she should have brought her children to Boston, instead of leaving them behind. He told her he’d rather have her cut his throat than come home with him that night, and he’d pay any money for someone else to look after her. Then, presuming she would stay with her friend, Ann Revell in Heslam Alley, John stomped off home to get the fires lit. It was a cold night.
However, he’d forgotten his key, and went back to get it. A policeman witnessed his return around half past midnight. Eliza did not want to give him the key. The house was in her name, he’d pissed her off, she didn’t want him to go home. He took the key, wrapped in a handkerchief, and stomped back off towards his house on London Road.
John passed another policeman around 1:45am that morning, when crossing the bridge on London Road across the Haven, with a furious (but sobered up) Eliza running after him. John passed the policeman, and Eliza came a few minutes later, slowing to bid the officer a good evening. The policeman had seen them walking home in this manner before, with John walking well ahead of Eliza, and thought little of it. He thought Eliza would catch John up in around 600 yards.
Nobody heard anything more of them that night.
A few hours later, Eliza’s body was fished out of the drain that ran down the side of London Road, roughly 600 yards south of the bridge. Her body was initially mistaken for a child’s, which suggests she was a small woman. Heavy boot prints were seen in the mud of the bank. The handkerchief John had taken from her the night before was found in her hand.
Meanwhile, John had gone about his usual business. When collecting his morning milk, a neighbour jokily asked him why he’d drowned his missus. The neighbour had helped John pull Eliza out of the drain when she’d drunkenly fallen in twice before, so this was a joke with a sting. John told the neighbour he’d left her at Heslam’s Alley, and went home to his breakfast, apparently not worried that the woman they’d pulled out was Eliza.
At 9:20am, the police arrived at John’s house. They asked him when he’d got home – midnight, he said. He mentioned her life insurance police, but he didn’t mention smacking Eliza, he didn’t mention seeing her twice. He showed them his boots. They matched the prints in the drain bank. John was arrested.
The inquest was a disorganised affair, adjourned twice. Eliza was buried between adjournments, on 8th March. One of the medical witnesses forgot to bring his notes following the post mortem, and had to borrow the coroner’s copy. Eliza was holding a hank of hair when her body was found, and an expert witness was sought to match this hair to John’s head. Only, the police in their wisdom did not see fit to also send him a sample of Eliza’s hair. The hair was not John’s. Eliza was in the ground and nobody wanted to exhume her to check the hair was hers, although the expert witness thought it probably WAS hers.
The inquest, uncertain about how Eliza had come to be in the water in the face of John’s stout denial that it had anything to do with him, and knowing she had a habit of falling in the drain when drunk, returned a verdict of found drowned. The magistrates, however, committed John to a full trial for murder. He was held in Lincoln prison for the next four months. Meanwhile, the local population of Boston funded him a proper defence lawyer – most men of John’s class were minimally represented in court.
The trial was held at Lincoln Castle on 18th July 1877. The Grand Jury found a true bill of murder, and John pleaded not guilty. He was represented by John Henry Etherington Smith. A great amount of attention was given to Eliza’s many threats of suicide when drunk, and John’s lack of motive. The boot print could have been anyone’s. The subtext that Eliza, an alcoholic slattern living in sin with a man when her husband and children were elsewhere, was not worthy of being hanged for was unspoken. It wasn’t necessary. After two minutes of deliberation, the jury declared John not guilty.
John went back to Skirbeck, and was remarried to Catherine Mitchell within weeks. His new bride was the daughter of the magistrate’ court messenger. If John beat her, it didn’t make the news. John died in 1898.
So, how did Eliza come to drown in a drain three foot deep?
First, do not imagine that you can’t accidentally drown in a shallow drain. You can. Drains, especially fen drains, are silty and soft on the bottom. Lost in a swirl of skirts, it’s very difficult to get your feet down to push up. Suffocation in the mud is as likely as drowning in the water. Around Boston, they called such deaths ‘slockening’.
I don’t think Eliza slipped in and drowned accidentally. Why? Two reasons. One, she made no sound. Eliza was a noisy woman, yelling and hollering and shrieking in the streets, especially when in drink. She was reknowned for it in Skirbeck. Nobody heard Eliza splashing or yelling for help.
Second, although Eliza had been drunk, she had sobered up by 2am, when she was charging down London Road after John Fendyke, and her house key. She knew where the drain was, and would have had to go off the path considerably to fall in.
Eliza went into the water silently. John was not so far ahead of her that he would not have heard the splash. He had rescued her before. He did not this time.
I suspect that Eliza caught up with John, and went to snatch her key back. Perhaps she surprised him. Perhaps she slipped backwards. Perhaps he pushed her. Whatever the mechanism, she ended up in the water. The drain had steep sides, too steep to climb out without help. Maybe John just watched her drown, tired of her weeping for her children, for her husband. Maybe John already had an eye on the widowed Catherine. Maybe John was thinking about the insurance money. Or maybe he couldn’t stand the cycle of the drinking, the shrieking, the screaming.
But noisy Eliza did not make a sound: no screams for help, no splashes carried across that crisp and silent night. John was a violent man, with a history of beating his partners. In death, Eliza held handfuls of her own hair. Did he hold her down in the water? Had she been trying to pull his hands from her head?
Then John went home, hung the key up in the shed, and went to bed. And he told the police that he’d been in bed since midnight, which cannot possibly have been true, and took the real story to his grave.
SOURCES: Boston Guardian: 10th, 17th, 26th March 1877; 21st, 28th July 1877.
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