Look back: Mother, grandmother and maid on trial for dead baby

Sarah Andrews, 20, told kitchen maid Louisa Painter she was not feeling well. Both went to bed but in the middle of the night Painter woke up and lighting a candle, saw stunned to see Andrews sitting on the edge of the bed with a dead baby beside her. Andrews then put the corpse into a clothes box, which she locked, and got back into bed.

“But what are you going to do with the child?” Painter asked.

“I don’t know.”

Within a few days her mother, Fanny, 38, came to Broadlands to collect her washing. The three had tea together but nothing was said about the child. Andrews fetched the dirty linen and gave the bundle to her mother who left.

But the secret came out when police as a ruse told her mother a child’s body had been fished out of water and her daughter was rumoured to have given birth to it.

“What sex was it?” she asked Supt Kellaway.

“Female.”

“Then it was not my daughter’s for hers was a male.”

The superintendent wasn’t fooled. “I am told you buried it in the back garden.”

Andrews answered: “I shall tell no stories about it, for I have not had a minute’s peace of mind since. I have not buried it in the garden.”

She then took the officer to a wood she called ‘grandmother’s’ and indicated the spot. Kellaway then dug up the body, two feet down, wrapped in linen and covered with brown paper.

“Who brought the child from Broadlands?”

“I did, but I have never seen it.”

Kellaway went to the estate, owned by Baron William Cowper-Temple (pictured above), Liberal heavyweight politician only to discover her daughter had gone.

But in time she was traced to Essex where she was in service at the home of a clergyman.

“I am sorry for it,” she said in interview. “I am sorry for mother, and I hope you can do all you can to keep her out of it.”

However, that was refused and mother and daughter appeared at Hampshire Assizes in 1879, charged with concealment, which they denied.

Dr Buckell told jurors the child had died from strangulation.

There was a mark around the neck and other discolouration that might have been the result of natural causes.

“I applied the usual tests but decomposition had set in and I could not say for certain the child had been alive.

“It is possible the strangulation took place before birth.”

Mr Bullen, defending, submitted there had been no secret disposition by either accused.

However, the judge, Baron Huddleston, countered that if she had given the body to her mother so she could secretly dispose of it that it was a furtherance of the other’s intention.

Summing up, the judge told the jury there was no reason to suppose the child’s death had been anticipated by any action of the maid and chiefly directed their attention to the word ‘intent’.

Jurors then found them guilty of secretly disposing of the body.

“With the intention to conceal birth?” the judge asked.

The jury then held a further discussion before saying they were not satisfied on that point.

“Then you must say the prisoners are not guilty.”

The panel conferred again and followed his direction.

The judge then turned to the maid, saying he had received a letter from Baron Cowper-Temple.

“It speaks very favourably of your character and states the unhappy circumstances of the position in which you were placed in, is the consequences of the villainy of a person in my employment whose conduct I did not discover until sometime afterwards.”

The judge said the jury had given her the benefit of the doubt, and advised her: “You should be very careful how you place yourself in a similar position.”

In his high profile political career, Baron Cowper-Temple served as an MP for Hampshire South and acted as a lord of the Treasury, Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department and President of the Board of Trade. He was elected as a member of the Privy Council.

His first wife, Harriet, died unexpectedly early. His second was to admiral’s daughter Georgina Tollmache but neither produced an heir.

He died in October, 1888, aged 76 at his Broadlands home and is buried in Romsey.