SHE was clearly bereft of her senses.

For the second time in two years, Mary Ann Bembridge stood in the dock, charged with the murder of one of her children.

She was so confused that she initially pleaded guilty, but after the sharp intervention of her barrister reversed it.

Hampshire Assizes heard in 1850 how the nearly blind prisoner had trudged to her local police station where in a “state of high excitement” she confessed to killing her five-year-old son James.

An officer accompanied her back to her home where the child lay on a bed, covered up. He had been strangled.

It transpired that two years earlier, in 1847, Bembridge had stood trial on a similar charge but was adjudged insane and detained in jail for 18 months until she was released.

An unnamed surgeon, who had investigated her case, attributed her malaise to milk fever which triggered bouts of insanity.

“An attack of this kind is always likely to recur,” he explained. “The prisoner has always been a kind, good and attentive mother to the child, but two months before she committed this act she had appeared quite wild and exited, and the person who lodged with her and her husband feared she would commit some improper act.”

He said the coroner who had overseen the inquest of the first child considered she was a monomaniac, more particularly with her own family.

“When she was in jail the previous occasion, she was of sound mind on most subjects and was appointed nurse to the children in the jail. Her mind was very sensitive.”

Bembridge was acquitted of murder on the grounds of insanity but was detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.