Inconvenient People (23 page)

‘Who’s there?’

‘Police.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I am come up to interfere respecting your servant who is going to kill you. Will you give the servant in charge?’

‘Oh yes, take her away.’

‘I must see you personally before I take the charge.’

‘I cannot, I am undressed, and you can tell from my voice that I am in bed.’

PC Richards asked Mrs Cumming to dress and open the door, but she refused. When her coachman, Charles Crane, and the officers failed to break the door in, PC Richards climbed out of the landing window and edged round on top of the conservatory roof to the bedroom window. Once he had reached it, he smashed a pane, raised the sash and tumbled headfirst into the room, making Mrs Cumming scream again. When she rushed to throw herself
from the same window, she spotted PC Arthur Parsons on the villa’s driveway.

‘Who is that?’ she shouted down.

‘I’m a policeman.’

‘You are an infernal liar, you are not a policeman but a keeper from the madhouse in disguise, come to take me away.’

PC Richards noted a short, stout, evidently physically infirm lady, who still bore traces of having been extremely handsome in her youth; she was wearing a nightcap but a day dress. A large fire blazed in the grate, and the room smelt awful. Mrs Cumming told the officers that her servant had attempted to tie her to her chair with a white shawl and intended, when she had thus straitjacketed her mistress, to have her conveyed to a lunatic asylum. Gradually, the officers and the coachman calmed the seventy-two-year-old, who said that she wouldn’t be pressing charges against Mary Rainey. Charles Crane agreed to spend the night at the villa to protect Mrs Cumming, and the officers left the bizarre scene. As they were on their way out, Rainey explained that Mrs Cumming had threatened to cut her own throat – committing suicide in order to ‘put an end to “all this”’.

The next day, Mrs Cumming sent a request that her former servants George and Elizabeth Clarke would come and stay with her at Herbert Villa. Because of several painful physical conditions Mrs Cumming did not often leave her room, and she was very frightened of Rainey, who, she said, was of a passionate temper, used foul language on her, and had installed herself as ‘Queen of the Lower House’. Mrs Cumming also believed that after dark her servant admitted others into the ground-floor quarters of Herbert Villa – she claimed she could hear male voices downstairs talking long into the night.

The Clarkes had worked for Mrs Cumming between March 1849 and April 1850, when they had left service to set up a greengrocer’s shop; they had remained on friendly terms with their former employer and would visit her from time to time. They now discovered that Mary Rainey had indeed admitted guests: the Hickey family had frequently stayed the night, and sometimes friends of the Hickeys too. When George Clarke challenged her about using Herbert Villa as a doss-house, Rainey flew into a rage. Mrs Cumming ordered her dismissal and made up her final pay packet. Rainey screamed to Clarke
that Mrs Cumming’s children were coming for her, to take her to a madhouse. Then she flounced out of the house, for good.

The Clarkes had been instructed by Mrs Cumming to screen all visitors to Herbert Villa, demanding their names and taking a physical description. A number of gentlemen and ladies asking for admittance were refused – none of them gave names that Mrs Cumming recognised. Clarke warned off one man attempting to clamber over the garden wall, who was later seen conferring on the pavement with two well-dressed women. Carriages would lurk outside Herbert Villa, with the passengers peering out at the house. On 9 February, Mrs Cumming fled, and two days later sent for her furniture to follow her.

This flight from Maida Vale was in keeping with the course of her life for the past four years. Since December 1846 she had had to be taken in by friends and well-wishers each time she believed that her family were close to seizing her and confining her in a madhouse. This peripatetic life – in search of ‘quietude’, as she put it – was all the more remarkable since she was often in great pain. Mrs Cumming suffered from paralysis of the bladder and bowel problems, conditions that rendered her doubly incontinent and about which she was very embarrassed and apologetic to the servants who looked after her; in addition, she had recurrent ophthalmia, rheumatism and had endured a bout of pleurisy, an epileptic fit and bronchitis. Her physical suffering was more than matched by the intense pain of the hatred that had grown up between herself and her two daughters, Thomasine and Catherine. And the catastrophic breakdown of her family life had, to her horror, become national tittle-tattle.

Mrs Cumming was born Catherine Pritchard, the only child of a landlord of estates in Monmouthshire. Her parents intended to bequeath her everything. In 1808 she married – against her parents’ wishes – Captain Charles Cumming, quartermaster of His Majesty’s West Gloucester Regiment of Local Militia. Captain Cumming had represented himself as a man of property, but after the wedding it became clear he was no such thing; in fact, he had come to the altar burdened with gambling debts. Catherine’s father immediately changed the nature of his bequest to her to a ‘life interest’, which meant that Catherine had to pass the properties on to any children she might have; she became, in effect, a trustee for her descendants.
Mr Pritchard was keen to keep as much of the inheritance out of the hands of the captain as possible.

The Cummings’ marriage was a very unhappy one. The captain fathered at least two illegitimate children, and some of Mrs Cumming’s income was used to contribute to their upkeep. He repeatedly ran up gambling debts and worked his way through a good deal of his wife’s money to pay them off. Some of Mrs Cumming’s furniture was seized by bailiffs, including heirlooms and items of sentimental value, and the Cummings had to move home three times and live under assumed names to dodge the captain’s creditors. Throughout all, Mrs Cumming remained an astute businesswoman who appeared to enjoy the running of the Welsh estates, control of which had passed to her upon her father’s death in 1811. Some of her Welsh properties would eventually fall into disrepair, however, for she was unable to look after them without making the Cummings’ whereabouts known to the creditors.

Captain Cumming was declared bankrupt in 1839, when he was eighty-two years old; he subsequently spent two and a half years in the Queen’s Bench prison. Her lawyer advised Mrs Cumming to seek a judicial separation from her husband, as this would offer some protection against his wasting of her money, but she refused, stating, ‘I have hitherto done my duty to him and I will still continue to do so.’ She often visited him in the debtors’ prison, taking him spending money and his favourite delicacies: mock-turtle soup, beef tea and jellies.

Mrs Cumming had maintained a cheerful facade throughout the 1820s and most of the 1830s. She was highly sociable, with a lively but astringent wit. Even those who liked her would describe her as ‘irritable’, ‘imperfectly educated’ (i.e. badly brought up), ‘of rather a violent temper’ and ‘obstinate and self-willed’. She had found great solace in her daughters, Thomasine and Catherine; she doted on the latter, her youngest. But then in 1836, Thomasine, at the age of twenty-two, became engaged to a man of whom Mrs Cumming violently disapproved. Perhaps he was too strong a reminder of the captain when he had wooed her. Benjamin Bailey Hooper, aged thirty, had played the French horn in various London theatres before joining the army as a bandsman, and later worked as a clerk for the Excise Office at Custom House. When Thomasine announced her engagement, Mrs Cumming forbade
her to marry ‘the trumpeter’, or ‘the bandsman’ (as she habitually referred to Hooper). However, with the connivance of her sister Catherine (who had become the wife of surgeon-apothecary John Ince in 1833), Thomasine did marry Hooper. Mrs Cumming’s relationship with both her daughters now cooled considerably, since she viewed Catherine and John Ince’s behaviour as treacherous; but in 1839, after the birth of the Hoopers’ second child, a tepid reconciliation took place. Hooper used the thaw to ask his mother-in-law for a loan, to which she agreed. She also assisted him in obtaining credit, and gave in to his request to be allowed to collect in the rents from the Welsh properties, but three months later she ended this agreement.

Then, in about 1840, so her daughters would claim, their mother’s conduct and habits changed dramatically: from being ladylike and civil, she became ‘strange’. Once gregarious and vain about her appearance and her dresses, she began to shun her friends and grew dishevelled. Always a very strong-minded individual (‘When I am angry, I generally make people aware of it,’ as she put it), she now habitually expressed herself in the strongest language, thought the worst of anyone, and would become enraged at the smallest provocation. When at a family dinner one evening Thomasine noticed her pocket handkerchief was missing, Mrs Cumming blurted out that she would always take the word of a servant over her daughter’s if she were to claim that the handkerchief had been stolen by a servant. The Hoopers left the house immediately and did not communicate with Mrs Cumming for some time. On another occasion, when Catherine turned up ten minutes late for a dinner at her mother’s house, she was refused entry. Mrs Cumming would complain bitterly about each daughter to the other; and when one of the Inces’ young children died, Mrs Cumming made some extraordinarily insensitive remarks at the deathbed. Much would later be made of this incident.

By the early 1840s, Mrs Cumming’s furniture and belongings had become widely travelled as a result of the efforts to prevent them being seized by her husband’s creditors. She also had to sell off a Pritchard heirloom – a small basket made of silver – to raise cash. She had immediately regretted this and had given her son-in-law John Ince a large sum of money so that he could buy it back and return it to her. For many years Mrs Cumming claimed that Ince had given her neither the basket nor the money back. She also believed that Benjamin Bailey Hooper had taken and pawned the captain’s gold
watch, as ‘the trumpeter’ was proving unable to control his own spending.

After the captain’s release from prison in 1842, the aged couple’s life together at 1 Belgrave Terrace, Pimlico, was distressing and pitiful. Captain Cumming, in his mid-eighties, had disease of the prostate gland and suffered leg ulcers and poor hearing. Despite this, according to some of Mrs Cumming’s servants and her solicitor, the captain ‘endeavoured to take improper liberties’ with many female servants and hired nurses, putting his hands down their dresses and making indecent suggestions. In addition, Mrs Cumming (using one of those euphemisms that can make aspects of nineteenth-century life seem so opaque) spoke of ‘certain indelicacies that he was addicted to that she did not like to specify’. He could be violent too, and once seized a stick to beat a servant, missed, and split a wooden table instead. Mrs Cumming told her solicitor that the captain had pawned her watch and seized her rings from her fingers, drawing blood. In March 1846, a police constable was called in from the street when the captain locked his wife and her servant out of the parlour, barricading himself in with furniture stacked against the door. Mrs Cumming was crying and she pleaded with PC John Green not to harm her husband. When the constable broke into the room he was faced by the captain wielding a hot poker and a knife. PC Green was chased around the room by the octogenarian, who stabbed the constable in the hand (resulting in four days’ sick leave) before the officer could overcome him. PC Green later stated, ‘He had been using the poker about Mrs Cumming, by all accounts.’ When asked why he hadn’t fought back, Green said, ‘The police authorities do not allow us to do that . . . He was considered as a madman. I believe the police had had interference since then and before.’

Rows at Belgrave Terrace were usually less violent, but raised voices and foul language were often heard by most of the servants and intimate friends; theirs was a ‘cat-and-dog life’, according to servant Martha Bowen. Both were drinking heavily, brandy and water being their drink of choice.

On the night of 11 May 1846, so John Ince later claimed, Captain Cumming fled the house in fear of his life because of one of his wife’s rages. Mrs Cumming would state that the captain had been persuaded by the Inces to take with him in a hackney coach his entire writing bureau and all the paperwork it contained. It is
possible that reading through the documents within the bureau, the Inces may have discovered something that set in train the following events. Or perhaps the events had been planned for quite some time.

Although Mrs Cumming had become cantankerous in the extreme, she nevertheless remained very fond of children and animals. She had become particularly attached to fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Buck, the daughter of one of her servants. On 12 May, the day after the captain had headed for the Inces’ house,
Mrs Cumming was teaching Elizabeth to write. They were seated in the parlour, poring over the girl’s copybook, when two female strangers and two policemen entered the room, threw a straitjacket over Mrs Cumming, who began screaming ‘Murder!’, and bundled her out of the house, into a waiting carriage. A shawl was wrapped around her head to stifle her screams and she was forced down into the footwell of the vehicle. Elizabeth Buck also saw Mrs Cumming’s servants attempting to keep out of the house two more policemen and John Ince himself; Ince forced open the parlour window to gain entry and, as the girl noted, rummaged throughout the house before leaving with several items.