The Nightingale Shore Murder (23 page)

This description adds a different dimension to the account of the formal opening of the Home, once the flowers and pictures and dainty bedrooms were in place. There was another side to Mabel that was capable of managing the architects and planners, builders and decorators, and accountants and bankers necessary to deliver the project. Perhaps she was helped by her many years' experience of working with the factories and employers of Sunderland.

The nurse's appreciation goes on:

An editor's note in the same issue of Queen's Nurses adds that Mabel Rogers had also agreed to remain on the Committee of the magazine.

So ended the formal part of Mabel's long career as a nurse, six years after Florence's death. Together they had trained as hospital nurses and district nurses, worked in the Imperial Yeomanry Hospital in South African War, and spent twelve years building up a thriving district nursing association in Sunderland. They had returned to London together, and both served with the French Red Cross and the QAs during the War. After Florence's death, Mabel had led a huge relocation project, as well as organising the memorial for her friend. In retirement, she continued to contribute to the profession through her work with the College and the Queen's Nurses' magazine. Mabel died in 1944, in her cottage in Devon, at the age of eighty.

The Nightingale Shore Home was extended in 1936, with the new section opened by Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone. But less than five years later, on 17 April 1941, it was badly damaged by bombing. ‘
Owing to enemy action'
, the Hammersmith District Nursing Association annual report says, ‘
the Nurses' Home was so badly damaged as to be uninhabitable, and although the whole of the staff was in the Home at the time of the raid, providentially no loss of life was sustained.'
Florence's personal mementoes, including those of her medals and photographs which had been displayed in the special memorial bedroom, were now lost in the rubble.

The staff was transferred to a clinic at 103 Shepherds Bush Road, while an application was made to rebuild the Home at 10 Mall Road. The application was refused – that part of the road was later covered by the Great West Road and the Hammersmith Flyover – and the Hammersmith DNA remained at Shepherd's Bush Road until 1958, when they moved to 141 Uxbridge Road in Shepherd's Bush. The building there was named Nightingale Shore House, preserving Florence's memory, and officially opened on 24 September 1958. This remained the centre for home nursing services in the Borough until it was demolished in the late 1960s, to enable the building of a telephone exchange. With the loss of this building, the tangible memorial to Florence Shore was gone forever.

Florence's brother Offley did not survive his sister by long. In 1922, he and Caroline came to England again, arriving as first class passengers on the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company's ship the
Orbita
. They disembarked in Southampton on 23
^rd
May, but were not present at the opening of the Nightingale Shore Home in London in July. After visiting ‘Shore country' near Sheffield, and seeing the old Norton Hall that had been the family's home for so long, they stayed in Harrogate for a while before moving up to Scotland. It was there in October that Offley was taken ill. He died of pneumonia and heart failure, at the age of just 59. The Courier newspaper, under the headline ‘Noted General dies at Pitlochry – Brilliant career in many campaigns', reported that his health had been severely damaged by his army service, and had broken down completely after the first World War, at which time he went to live in the warmer climate of California.

His widow, Caroline, continued to travel between England and the United States throughout the 1920s and 1930s. She died in 1957, in England, where she had been living in a ‘grace and favour' apartment in the Clock Tower at Hampton Court Palace.

Neither Offley and Caroline, nor Florence or Urith, had children, so the Shore family line continued through Florence's cousin, the Reverend Harrington Shore. On her mother's side were her cousin Clarence Hobkirk's children, Elspeth and Ian. These two lines continue the family that descended from Samuel Shore and his acquisition by marriage of the lordship of the Manor of Norton.

It should have been a straightforward matter for the police to answer the question ‘Who Killed Nurse Shore?' They knew who had done it – but not who he was.

It was obvious (or so it was thought at the time) that the killer was the man who joined Florence in her compartment in the train at Victoria, and left it hastily at Lewes an hour and a quarter later, leaving a dying woman behind. That much was simple. The difficulty was that, once the man had successfully slipped away from the train, the police had only two rather general descriptions to help them find him again and name him.

Although the Coroner had drawn attention to the differences in Mabel Rogers' and Henry Duck's descriptions, they are not incompatible. The ages overlap, and a slight build could look more ‘athletic' if an overcoat formerly carried over the arm was then put on, possibly with a cap from the pocket. And both witnesses were at pains to stress that they had only had very brief glimpses of the man.

The vague descriptions of the suspect, reported in the papers, naturally led to many supposed sightings of the wanted man. The police themselves questioned hundreds of people, and brought at least one person in front of the guard, Henry Duck, in a fruitless attempt to get a positive identification. But did they ever have their hands on the right man? A review of the minimal evidence and doubtful witnesses they had to deal with shows just how difficult their task really was.

The man in the hairdressers in Station Road, Lewes on the afternoon of the murder does not quite measure up to either description of the suspect. He was smart, slim and athletic looking, with a pale, thin face and pointed chin. He was wearing the requisite brown jacket and a cap, but no overcoat. And it seems improbable that a murderer would draw attention to himself minutes after making his escape from the scene of the crime by getting his already-short hair cut just a few hundred yards away. This man was most likely the innocent victim of the wave of ‘brown suit spotting' that went on in the town that afternoon.

The man in the bar of the Royal Oak was another. He had the brown overcoat, if not the brown suit, with the addition of a white cashmere muffler and a light grey cap. ‘
He seemed to answer the description of the wanted man
' was the landlady's rather hopeful opinion. Since his bloodstained pound note turned out to have been used at a butcher's, he is also unlikely to have been the murderer passing the time with a pint of beer close to the scene of the crime.

Was the murderer also the young Eastbourne burglar, arrested a few days later after brandishing a blood-stained revolver at a group of women servants? He is a much more serious suspect. He was carrying a gun with no live bullets, but with bloodstains on it that proved to be human blood. Such a weapon could have been used to inflict the injuries that Florence had received, according to Dr Spilsbury; and without bullets, using the butt end as a club would be the obvious way to subdue a victim for a robbery. The man was wearing a new shirt, and claimed to have destroyed his former clothing. It would make sense for a man to dispose of clothes that might have had blood on them: and according to the witnesses to the scene in the train carriage, Florence's hat was beside her on the seat, presumably dislodged by the blows to her head, so blood spatter must have been likely. The man's refusal to explain any of this behaviour must have reinforced the police's suspicions. The fact that the pathologist was unable to take his tests on the bloodstains further and prove the blood type, for comparison with Florence's, must have been hugely frustrating. No witness could pick out the burglar as being the man who left the train at Lewes. He did not confess, or offer implausible explanations that could be used against him. He said just enough to convince at least the Scotland Yard police of his innocence. And there was no forensic evidence to connect him to the crime. It was not possible to prove that he was anything other than a random burglar who happened to be operating in the same area around the same time, and happened to have with him the type of weapon that had ultimately killed Florence Shore. William Clements, the Eastbourne burglar, could not be charged with murder.

There was one other interesting character apparently present at the scene of the assault who does not appear to have come to the attention of the police. John Smith, from Brighton, spoke to the Daily Mail's reporter on either Saturday 17
^th
or Sunday 18
^th
January, the weekend after Florence had died on the Friday evening, and five or six days after the attack. He claimed that he had found Florence when he entered her compartment at Bexhill looking for a seat. He said that he spoke to her, though she didn't reply, and described how she was half-lying in her seat, with blood running down her face; and that she was moving her left hand, and blinking her eyes. He mentioned her rifled attaché case beside her on the seat. None of these details had yet been made public through reporting on the inquest, which did not start until the Monday, and did not hear such details for another fortnight. Nor were they in the initial reports in the newspapers, which said that she had been found ‘unconscious' and mentioned only that jewellery and money was missing. Yet no-one who was at the scene of the incident, from the time the platelayers opened the carriage door to call attention to Florence at Bexhill station to her removal into an ambulance at Hastings, mentioned any other passenger being present on the platform, much less in the carriage. In fact, George Cloutt had testified at the inquest that he had stood guard over the door of the compartment, so that no-one could enter. So how had this man known so much about the scene in the carriage? And if he was a witness – and especially if he was the first to enter the compartment and find the victim – why was he not called to give evidence at the inquest?

There is the possibility that he was in the shadows of the platform and observed the scene through the open door, without being noticed himself – though it would have been very difficult to do so past the figures of the guard and platelayers inside the cramped compartment. Or he may have talked to one of the real witnesses – the platelayers or the guard – later, and heard all the details from them, before passing them off as his own experience for the benefit of the Daily Mail reporter. This assumes that those witnesses would be willing to describe the whole tragic scene in graphic detail to an inquisitive stranger; and that Smith himself, who lived in Brighton, would find a way to link up with the reporter in Hastings, nearly a week later.

There is another possible explanation. If he didn't get into the carriage at Bexhill unseen, or watch unnoticed from the platform, or winkle the details out of the guards – could John Smith have been the man who got off the train at Lewes after attacking Florence? Did he then return to Hastings and talk to reporters, as criminals sometimes do in order to feature in their own crime story? The Hastings and St Leonards Observer, and the West London Observer, reported initially that Florence was found by a passenger rather than by the workmen who joined her in the compartment at Polegate Junction, as the inquest heard later. Smith may have talked to them both with his story of discovering the victim at Bexhill, or one paper may simply have taken the details from the other. Not until he spoke to the Daily Mail's reporter, though, did he add the details about Florence's position in the seat, her state of consciousness, and the state of her belongings. By doing so, he was taking a risk that the reporter would ask later why no-one else remembered him being there, and why he never subsequently appeared at the inquest.

However odd Smith's account may be, he was telling the truth about some things: his name was not an alibi. Electoral records show that John Davey Smith did live at 15 Lauriston Road, Brighton, in January 1920, as he told the reporter. He was 43 years of age, and lived with his wife Martha and three children. He worked as an inspector of shops for a dairy company. But whether he was really there on the platform, how he knew so much about the scene in the carriage, and why he did not feature as a key witness at the inquest, remains a mystery. No-one asked these questions at the time.

Both the Eastbourne burglar and John Smith of Brighton are tantalising unfinished business in the investigation into Florence's death. For the police at the time, the trail had gone cold very rapidly after the inquest concluded in March. But there was no shortage of sensational crime and murder to occupy both the police and the public in 1920, and in April the newspapers were following the story of another fugitive murderer, who would eventually be named as a possible suspect in Florence's death.