Inconvenient People (44 page)

Working himself up to his finale, James made a crude appeal to domesticity and paternalism, which failed to express much of the reality of the Turner case: English womanhood must be liberated from the dungeon (or attic) of such a brute as Metcalfe. He called upon the ‘fathers, husbands and brothers’ of the jury to give their verdict in favour of the lady, ‘and then they would go to their homes with satisfied conscience, and in quietness and peace would lay their heads upon their pillows’.

Commissioner Barlow sent the jury out, telling them that he would need the agreement of at least twelve of the twenty jurymen. He told them that it could be accepted that Mary Jane had been of unsound mind last December, and so the question for them to consider was whether she had ‘recovered her intellect’. Whatever they decided, ‘considerable caution’ would be required with regard to any future treatment – they would not be condemning her to Acomb House if they were to find her insane.

Half an hour later, the jury returned the majority verdict of thirteen to seven that Mary Jane was of sound mind. John Clough, the foreman
(who had not been among the thirteen), also handed in a note expressing their disgust with Metcalfe’s behaviour, and praying that the Commissioners in Lunacy would see fit to punish him.

This looks a rather perverse verdict – Mary Jane had still not stopped talking about widespread attempts to poison her, as late as six weeks before the opening of the inquisition – and is likely to have been a protest vote against inhumane treatment. It appears on the face of it similar to the actions of juries at many criminal trials of the early decades of the century, who had increasingly refused to bring in a guilty verdict when a property crime with no accompanying violence carried the death sentence. This behaviour by juries on capital cases had significantly contributed to the erosion of the Bloody Code. The Turner verdict may well show a jury refusing to condemn an unsound individual to the type of incarceration that Acomb House exemplified.

Mary Jane became a national heroine, and for the next month or so, her experiences at Acomb House filled newspapers and periodicals. By downplaying, or overlooking, her use of the poker to break her husband’s skull in 1850, the press was able to fashion her into a more sympathetic victim of the lunacy laws than Lady Lytton. Her jealousy had been caused, they believed, by her being too loving a wife; the knotted-sheet escapade and the long walk to Leeds showed pluck, spirit, a love of liberty; and at the York Castle hearing, reporters had admired her dignified stoicism. What gave the story an extra frisson was the fact that Mary Jane’s sufferings had come to light by chance: if Pemberton had not had the good fortune to have come across Lord Shaftesbury himself that day at the Commissioners’ offices, and Charles Turner hadn’t chosen to challenge how the asylum fees were paid, then Metcalfe’s cruelties would not have emerged. So how typical of English asylums was Metcalfe’s cruel regime at Acomb House? Was it a one-off, or representative of asylum life? The nation pondered these questions throughout late July and August 1858.

Could a Metcalfe simply break into English homes and steal away our English wives and declare them madwomen?
The Standard
wondered. The
Derby Mercury
pointed out that Mary Jane’s mind must, in fact, have been uncommonly sound for her not to have disintegrated under six months of appalling treatment. To avoid the recurrence of such an error, the newspaper argued, a jury ought to see an alleged lunatic before incarceration and not after – the very procedure that
the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society had been demanding for twenty years.

The
Morning Chronicle
savaged the bureaucrats, stating that the Lunacy Commission’s annual reports ‘show that everything is
couleur
de rose
’ in the nation’s madhouses. The Commissioners, the newspaper pointed out, restricted themselves to highlighting the occasional case of mechanical restraint or the problematic legal wording of a certificate. These instances elicited minor punishments and were only publicised ‘for the purpose of disarming suspicion’, the
Chronicle
sneered. What the Commission reports dealt in were ‘easy platitudes . . . soothing generalisations . . . [and] . . . gratifying averages’. If Acomb House were not immediately shut and Metcalfe prosecuted, the Commissioners must be considered to be nothing more than ‘an ambulatory sham’, one provincial newspaper argued. The mass-market
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper
, on the other hand, could not get one particular image out of its mind: ‘Madwomen to lie nude upon straw!’ (Straw had never come into the story.)

One week after the verdict, Lunacy Commissioners James Wilkes and Robert Skeffington Lutwidge opened an inquiry into Metcalfe’s behaviour, at the Royal Station Hotel in York. There was uproar when Lutwidge announced that the hearing was to take place behind closed doors, as any evidence given could prove to be prejudicial to a future criminal trial. The
York Herald
was just one of many newspapers angered that a veil was being drawn across a matter of supreme public concern: ‘No act could be more indifferent to, or defiant of, public opinion. The case is the subject of conversation in all circles and classes, and every man amongst us, when reflecting upon the inviolability of his personal liberty, regards it as one of tremendous social importance.’ Yet somebody inside the room leaked details to the
Herald
, which were swiftly repeated in other newspapers. It transpired that Mary Jane had spoken for over four hours to Lutwidge and Wilkes about Metcalfe and his attendants committing ‘bodily torture’ upon her, of beatings, persistent verbal abuse and being kept alone in darkness. Mrs Sargison, her York landlady, confirmed to the two Commissioners the violence of Mary Jane’s recapture at Little Blake Street on 2 April. Metcalfe’s wife Harriet and attendant Merindah Hall denied all the allegations, with the exception of one incident, when Metcalfe pushed Mary Jane to the floor.

The Commissioners decided to prosecute Metcalfe at the winter assizes at York. But the asylum keeper and his wife fled to the Continent, and so it was in his absence that on 9 December a verdict was returned against him for assault, but only as a ‘misdemeanour’. The most serious part of the charge – beating and wounding – was ‘not found’ by the grand jury. It had been a sloppily put together case, and the judge, Mr Baron Watson, when asked for a bench warrant to apprehend Metcalfe, said that he had neither depositions nor an affidavit, and was not willing to proceed on the reports of newspapers alone. He was eventually persuaded to issue the warrant but Metcalfe never did return to England to stand trial; the Census of 1881 lists him living in Jersey, aged sixty-two, describing himself as ‘in the medical profession, not practising’.

The huge press furore of 1858 led to a backlash from the alienist profession. In an eight-page article, ‘The Newspaper Attack on Private Lunatic Asylums’ in the
Journal of Mental Science
, its editor, Dr John Charles Bucknill, accused ‘the mob of newspaper writers’ of outrageous libels. Bucknill believed the Turner jury’s verdict had flown in the face of all the available evidence. And rather than being pleased at how swiftly Metcalfe had been dealt with, the press claimed that the Turner case was typical of private care, rather than exceptional. From around 140 individuals in England and Wales who were licensed to receive insane people into their private institutions, just one ‘unhappy person has been found unworthy of the trust reposed in him’, Bucknill wrote. ‘Ought they not rather to have dwelt upon the fact that the keepers of asylums are exposed to more intense provocation, to loss of self-control, than perhaps any other men, and yet that this has been the solitary instance in which foul language and harsh conduct has been brought home to any one of them.’

Bucknill conceded that far too many general medical practitioners were ‘lamentably ignorant’ of mental illness, and that consequently many of the certificates of insanity they signed had little diagnostic meaning and did nothing more than legally permit institutionalisation to take place. But it was not the fault of the asylum proprietor if the lunacy law was faulty and could be taken advantage of by malicious relatives or associates. ‘It is a wonderful thing this newspaper press of ours,’ Bucknill concluded, ‘the fifth estate as it is called, the bulwark of right, the palladium of liberty, the great engine
of education, the universal instructor of the people in all that is right, and, we must add, in all that is wrong, the fountain of the pure waters of truth but alas, sometimes also the sewer of calumnious falsehood.’

Mary Jane Turner died seventeen years later, in Isleworth in Middlesex, at the age of fifty-six; she does not appear to have been under any certificate of lunacy in her remaining years. The hope of those who had followed the case – that the Turners’ passion could be rekindled – came to nothing. Charles remarried immediately upon her death, and when his second wife died, he married yet again, at the age of seventy-six. His standing had not been damaged by the lunacy inquisition, and he continued to work as the Bankruptcy Court official assignee until his retirement in 1871.

Mrs Turner had fascinated the nation as one of its favourite archetypes: a female victim of violence, imprisonment and humiliation, whose only fault was that she had loved her husband too powerfully (the assaults she had made upon him had had to be rewritten as ‘passion’ for this narrative to work). But the two further lunacy dramas of 1858 featured males whose behaviour had strained hard at the conventions of mid-century manliness.

Laurence Ruck was a gentleman farmer in Montgomeryshire, with an annual income of £1,500. He had married Mary Ann Matthews of Aberdovey in 1841, and by 1857 the couple had six children. Mr Ruck had always enjoyed a convivial drink, but in the spring of 1856 friends and locals noticed a swift deterioration in his behaviour. One night, after a dinner party at the home of his friend, Mr Thurston, the two men had retired from the other guests to smoke in the drawing room, where Mr Ruck downed a large brandy, yowled like a beast and kicked Mr Thurston hard in the stomach. He rushed out on to the lawn, where – with all the dining-room guests looking on – he committed ‘an act of indecency’, before disappearing into the night.

Thurston later stated that his friend had previously been of a shy and eccentric nature but that of late, he and others had noticed Mr Ruck walking in the country lanes with a strange pigeon-toed gait, looking wild, dishevelled and vacant. ‘There is poor Ruck, gone mad,’ Thurston remarked to his wife one day when, out driving in their
carriage, they passed him in a lane. On another occasion, Ruck rode his horse straight at Thurston, who was on foot, shouting that he intended to kill him.

The Rucks’ home, Pantlludw, was a cosy house set on a plateau on a thickly wooded hillside. Mr Ruck was busy remodelling it and creating intricate, rhododendron-lined paths, croquet grounds, a lily garden and a waterfall. It was ‘a little fairy-story house in the middle of a wood’, one family member later recalled. ‘There was something wonderfully secret and peaceful about it.’ Mrs Ruck and the children had removed themselves to her family home, eight miles away in Aberdovey, as the renovations got under way, though her husband would sometimes stay at Aberdovey, too. There would later be conflicting evidence about the state of the marriage, with Mary Ann and others saying that it was always close and affectionate, and that they never quarrelled; and Mr Ruck alleging that from two years after their marriage, Mary Ann had refused to have intercourse with him, and spent as much time as she could away from Pantlludw. With a number of Ruck children being conceived up until 1856, it is clear that they did still have sexual relations; affection – and consent – cannot be demonstrated, of course.

Mr Ruck would often stay at the Wynnstay Arms in Machynlleth, where his ‘excitability’ was noted by staff and guests. He once took all his clothes off and told the staff he wished ‘all the girls to see him so’. He also offered the landlady £500 if she would procure him a nursemaid he could have intercourse with, and offered £300 to the postman to be able to sleep with his wife. He would shout out in the public rooms, ‘Mary Jones [his wife’s cousin] has had two children by me. She has murdered them both. Here is a lock of their hair, and I shall be swung [hanged] for it.’

At Pantlludw one day, he locked himself into the drawing room and on the carpet constructed a bonfire of his clothing, and set it alight. He employed workmen to sink a shaft on his land to prospect for copper and iron ore. In a large trunk he kept a huge collection of corkscrews, string, candle stubs, chisels, bits of bread, stones, walnuts and pieces of old paper, and he would repeatedly unpack these, throw them at his wife, then repack them carefully. Servants were hard to keep. Mr Ruck would walk around the house at night with a candle, wandering in and out of everyone’s rooms though not saying or doing anything; servants would often wake up screaming at the sight of him in his nightshirt. One day, when the rest of the staff were out of the house, he locked Mary Jones (who helped to look after the Ruck children) in her room and shouted through the door that he was going to shoot her (he owned at least four firearms). She wasn’t rescued for a day and a half.