Yorkshire Almanac The Leeds authorities try to make Eliza Thurkill calmly admit she is dying so that, under English law, her hearsay statement may later hang her abortionist

20 December 1868: The Leeds authorities try to make Eliza Thurkill calmly admit she is dying so that, under English law, her hearsay statement may later hang her abortionist

T. Clifford Allbutt. 1869. Dying Depositions. Medical Times and Gazette, Vol. 1 (1869). London: John Churchill and Sons. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

DYING DEPOSITIONS.
LETTER FROM DR. T. CLIFFORD ALLBUTT.
[To the Editor of the Medical Times and Gazette.]
SIR, I am very glad to see you have taken in hand the matter of dying depositions, and have drawn attention to the case of Regina v. Barrett. I have now seen several such depositions made, and I was present during the deposition of Eliza Thurkill when she accused Sarah Barrett of procuring abortion upon her. I was called in by Mr. Joseph Teale and Mr. Heyward to see Thurkill during her fatal illness, and my first visit was at the time of the deposition. Nothing could have seemed to me more unreasonable and more painful than the whole business. The clerk to the magistrates took down the story, which the dying woman told with surprising distinctness and coherency. She was then in a state of collapse, her face was pinched and deadly pale, her wrists were pulseless, and her extremities cold. In the intervals of her story she tossed restlessly upon her bed and snatched convulsively at the coverings. Her voice was remarkably clear, and her sentences coherent, or we should certainly have looked for instant death; as it was, we feared it from minute to minute. Every now and then she buried her face in the pillow and groaned to herself, “Oh, I am dying, dying!” or again, “Save me, save me, Doctor, if you can, but I know you cannot.” Such sentences she frequently repeated, and was not only conscious of imminent death, but hysterically dreaded its approach. Yet, under such dreadful circumstances as these, the law could not take the deposition unless the young woman would calmly announce her own end! In spite of her frequently repeated interjections it was neccessary to have a catechism after this fashion:-“Now, young woman, do you know you are going to die?” “Oh no, I don’t know, I must not, cannot die. Oh, no, no! You must save me;” clutching my hand until she forced her fingernails into the flesh. “Now, young woman, pray don’t excite yourself; that does no good, you know. I want to know whether you are aware you are going to die.” More passionate dread and entreaty follow from the poor girl, while the lawyer impassively arranges his papers and renews the inquiry. At the end of each outburst the girl turns her head aside and gasps-“But I know it must be so;” only, this not being a direct reply, the catechism recommences, and so on until the lawyer is wearied and gives it up. How sincerely she believed death to have been at hand was clear enough from her agony next day, when she had rallied somewhat, and had recovered a little hope; she then cursed herself for telling the story which covered her with shame. “Never would she have breathed a word to any one had she not felt certain she was going to die and be forgotten.” And so these important depositions, accusing a notorious midwife who has but too often escaped her deserts, were waste paper, because a young woman abounding in life and beauty, but not abounding in virtue, is suddenly brought face to face with the grim spectre, and cannot calmly point to his approach! Can anything show more ignorance of human nature, and a blinder adherence to routine? I am, &c.
T. CLIFFORD ALLBUTT.
Leeds, April 12.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Wikipedia:

In the law of evidence, a dying declaration is testimony that would normally be barred as hearsay but may in common law nonetheless be admitted as evidence in criminal law trials because it constituted the last words of a dying person. The rationale is that someone who is dying or believes death to be imminent would have less incentive to fabricate testimony, and as such, the hearsay statement carries with it some reliability.

Laura Eliza(beth) Thurkill/Thirkill died aged 21 and was interred on 30 December in Beckett Street Cemetery.

Sarah Barrett, the midwife, was acquitted by the jury at the spring assizes (Bradford Observer 1869/03/30). The date I’ve taken – 20 December – is based on that article and Allbutt’s testimony.

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Comment

Wikipedia:

In the law of evidence, a dying declaration is testimony that would normally be barred as hearsay but may in common law nonetheless be admitted as evidence in criminal law trials because it constituted the last words of a dying person. The rationale is that someone who is dying or believes death to be imminent would have less incentive to fabricate testimony, and as such, the hearsay statement carries with it some reliability.

Laura Eliza(beth) Thurkill/Thirkill died aged 21 and was interred on 30 December in Beckett Street Cemetery.

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25 February 1879: 500 await the black flag signalling the hanging at Armley Gaol (Leeds) of Charles Peace – steelworker, violinist, picture-framer, burglar, stalker, murderer

23 January 1888: Dr Henry Arthur Allbutt of Leeds launches a crowdfunder after being struck off for publishing a cheap obstetrics and gynaecology manual for women

8 January 1925: Writing to Berkeley Moynihan, Clifford Allbutt recalls surgery at Leeds Infirmary in the 1860s

14 April 1792: The ballad of Spence Broughton, hung this day at the York Tyburn for robbing the Sheffield and Rotherham mail

25 March 1938: With her life at stake, Kathleen Mumford of Middleton tells a Leeds court that she gassed her severely handicapped son to spare him

19 October 1909: Opening a nurses’ home in Dewsbury, Clifford Allbutt describes their predecessors in the Leeds fever hospital in the 1860s

29 June 1876: Uplifted, Harrogate parish church awaits the monstrous £1,800 Schulze organ from Thomas Stuart Kennedy’s Meanwood Towers, Leeds

2 June 1867: Dr Clifford Allbutt tells the Epidemiological Society that the market will not provide decent housing for Leeds’s poorest

3 June 1917: A mob wrecks and loots Jewish shops and houses in east-central Leeds

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Comment

James Appell:

The wartime discord prompted some soul-searching within the community, which began questioning whether the economic and social bonds between Jew and non-Jew, forged in Leeds by the conditions of the tailoring trade, were really as strong as the trade unions and socialist movements might have portrayed. The Jewish Chronicle offered its own analysis just a few weeks after the Leeds riot concluded:

There has been a very large and sudden increase in the Jewish population of Leeds during the last few years, and that there has in consequence been considerable inconvenience in many directions to the indigenous inhabitants … Towns, like countries, can assimilate only a certain Jewish element in a certain time, and the Jewish addition to the population of Leeds has been too much and too fast.

The rapid entry of nearly 20,000 Jews into Leeds within the space of two generations clearly exerted pressures on the local population. In this respect Leeds may have differed from London and other provincial cities, where Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe was of a longer duration, where an Anglo-Jewish community already existed and where tensions were less marked than in Leeds. Poverty and mode of employment may have united the two groups, but ultimately religious difference divided them. In such circumstances, therefore, Leeds Jews’ identity as Yorkshiremen was only ever going to be fragile (Appell 2019).

Via Lola Fraser, who thinks the perception that Leeds’s (eastern European) Jews were evading military service would have been exacerbated by the Leeds socialist-pacifist convention on 3 June 1917 in support of revolutionary Russia’s withdrawal from World War I (Fraser N.d.).

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