Mrs Amelia Dyer was charged with the murder of baby Doris Marmon and tried at the Old Bailey on 21 and 22 March 1896 before Mr Justice Hawkins. The trial began on the afternoon of the day on which Mr Justice Hawkins had sentenced to death Albert Milsom and Henry Fowler.
The Crown’s case at Mrs Dyer’s trial was put by Mr AT Lawrence and Mr Horace Avory. Mr Kapadia, who defended her, accepted that she was guilty but tried to prove that she was insane. Dr Logan of Gloucester Asylum said that in 1894 she had been violent and had suffered from delusions: she heard voices and said birds talked to her. Dr Forbes Winslow, who saw her twice in Holloway Prison, said she was suffering from delusional insanity, depression and melancholia. He did not believe she was shamming insanity. Two other doctors appearing for the prosecution said that her insanity was feigned. One of them, Dr Scott, the medical officer of Holloway, who had seen her daily, said he had discovered nothing in her that was inconsistent with her being a sane person, beyond her own statements. The jury agreed, taking a mere five minutes to find her guilty, and not insane.
Mrs Dyer, aged fifty-seven, a short, squat woman with thin white hair scraped into a bun behind her head, was hanged by James Billington at Newgate Prison on 10 June 1896. Before she died she made a long statement or confession, written in five exercise books, explaining some of her actions and thoroughly exonerating her daughter and son-in-law. When urged by the chaplain to confess, she indicated the exercise books and asked: ‘Isn’t this enough?’ Her statement ended: ‘What was done I did do myself. My only wonder is I did not murder all in the house when I have had these awful temptations on me. Poor girl [Polly], it seems such a dreadful thing to think she should suffer all this through me. I hope and trust you will believe what I say, for it is perfectly correct, and I know she herself will speak the truth, and what she says I feel sure you can believe.’
The Reading baby farmer evidently had some feelings for her own and only surviving child.
THE MURDER OF WILLIAM TERRISS, 1897
Murderers often tend to play a part, to assume other names, achievements and emotions, to invent autobiographical details, to pose, pretend and lie. They would make, one imagines, good actors. On the other hand, only one actor in the UK is believed to have committed a murder. He was Richard Prince, whose ambitions were scorned, his affections spurned, and his whole existence mocked. He was more than neurotic and just a little mad, and his victim was an actor like, but much better than, himself.
His real name was Richard Millar Archer, though he also called himself William Archer and William Archer Flint. Short, dark, with a thin black moustache waxed at both ends, he was Scottish, having been born in 1858 on a farm on the Baldoran Estate just outside Dundee. His father was a ploughman. His mother, Margaret Archer, later attributed the fact that Richard was ‘soft in the head’ to the summer day when she left him as a baby out in a harvest field in the sun. He was educated in Dundee, and as a lad was employed in a minor capacity at the Dundee Theatre for two years. In 1875, when Richard was seventeen, the Archers came temporarily to London, and the fantasies of the stage-struck youth must have been set alight by the glamorous world of the gas-lit West End theatres, in which the idols of the stage – before films and television eclipsed their glory – declaimed and emoted to much effect and immense adulation. But before long, the Archers were back in bleak Dundee.
Little is known of Prince’s movements over the next twelve years. Presumably, like many young aspiring actors, he was more out of work than in, finding employment where and however he could. His native accent may have limited his chances on the London stage, although he probably modified and disguised it as best he could. What he was unable to alter was an increasingly theatrical manner, a slight squint and a villainous appearance that meant he was invariably cast as a ‘heavy’. However, in 1887 he was in London, employed as a ‘super’ or extra at the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand, appearing in The Union Jack. He stayed with the play on its provincial tour, and is also said to have toured in Alone in London and The Harbour Lights (in 1889). This was a revival of the play written by George R Sims and Henry Pettit that in December 1885 had established the Adelphi as the home of popular melodrama. It had also established the romantic association of its two stars, Jessie Millward and William Terriss, which was also played out in private: she was his mistress.
William Terriss (real name William Charles James Lewin) was one of the most popular actors at that time on the English stage. Popularly known as Breezy Bill, he was born in London on 20 February 1847, educated privately and also at Christ’s Hospital, and took up various occupations before he became a full-time actor. As a youth he joined the merchant navy for a few weeks (he liked the uniform), embarking as a cadet on a sailing ship at Gravesend and disembarking at Plymouth, having discovered a sailor’s life was not for him. He also tried his hand at silver-mining and horse-breeding in America and at sheep-farming in Australia and the Falkland Islands, where his daughter, Ellaline Terriss, a future Gaiety Girl and wife of Seymour Hicks, was born. Her mother was Isabel Lewis, who on holiday in Margate had been captivated by the athletic figure of young William Lewin sporting in the sea. They were married in 1868 when he was twenty-one. Before long the family left the Falklands and returned to England, and Terriss, who had dabbled in amateur theatricals, obtained his first notable professional engagement. In 1871, he was cast as Robin Hood in a Drury Lane extravaganza and appeared in Rebecca, which was based on Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. The Observer critic, Clement Scott, noted of his performance: ‘It is really pleasant to find anyone determined to speak as ordinary people speak on the boards of the theatre, whereon strange tones and emphases prevail.’
Terriss’s face, figure and voice being his fortune, he soon became successful, establishing his reputation as an actor with Henry Irving’s company at the Lyceum Theatre. Aged thirty-one when he joined the company, Terriss gave several acclaimed performances: as a brother in The Corsican Brothers; as Squire Thornhill in Olivia, with Ellen Terry as Olivia and Irving as Dr Primrose; as Nemours in Louis XI; as the King in Henry VIII; and as Henry II, with Irving in the title role of Tennyson’s play, Becket, which was given a royal command performance in Windsor Castle in 1893 before Queen Victoria. In 1895, Irving was knighted, the first actor to be so honoured.
Several years before this, in October 1882, Jessie Millward, then aged twenty-one, had appeared as Hero in the Lyceum’s production of Much Ado about Nothing; Terriss was Claudio. It was three years after this, in December 1885, that they made a name for themselves as a romantic team in The Harbour Lights, in which Terriss played Lieutenant David Kingsley and Jessie Millward the lovely Lina. One critic said of Terriss’s performance: ‘He does not act, he is the frank, handsome sailor whose joyous laugh, bright eye and sturdy ringing voice bring life and hope to the darkest hour. The fine presence, boyish, handsome face and free, fearless gestures suit the role to perfection.’
From then on, Terriss and Jessie Millward often appeared in the same productions, touring Britain and America. In London in the 1890s he used to dally with her in her flat off Oxford Circus, while his wife (they were both Catholics) kept up appearances and the family home in Bedford Park, West London.
It was in September 1894 that Terriss and Jessie Millward – he called her ‘Sis’ and she referred to him as ‘my comrade’ – embarked on the series of popular successes at the Adelphi that affirmed their national reputation, appearing