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The death of William
Urquhart, or, Karl Marx loved a good gossip
Every subject has its
apocryphal stories, and the Victorian Turkish bath is no exception. One
of these relates to the death of David Urquhart’s thirteen month old
son William in the Turkish bath at his Rickmansworth home in 1858.
The circumstances of
the baby’s death were quite inaccurately reported at the time causing
the baby’s mother, Harriet, much unnecessary additional unhappiness.
Coming so soon after the reintroduction of the bath into England, the
story received widespread publicity to which gossips, as is their wont,
gave credence by the confident manner in which they retold and
embellished it.
The gossip continues
to this day, most recently in Francis Wheen’s well-received new
biography of Karl Marx. Wheen, in the process of relating the rather
surprising relationship between Urquhart and Marx misses few
opportunities to denigrate the now mostly forgotten Urquhart by
emphasizing his, admittedly sometimes undeniable, eccentricities. As an
instance of this, Wheen quotes Marx’s letter to Engels about baby
William’s death, written on 5 March.
Did
you overlook, in one of the [Manchester] Guardians you sent me, the item
in which David Urquhart figures as an infanticide? The fool treated his
13-month-old baby to a Turkish bath which, as chance would have it,
contributed to congestion of the brain and hence its subsequent death.
The coroner’s inquest on this case lasted for 3 days and it was only
by the skin of his teeth that Urquhart escaped a verdict of
manslaughter.
Now while the use of
the word infanticide can be seen in the light of the following sentence
to have been pure hyperbole, there remains the clear implication that
Urquhart subjected the baby to extreme heat and that this, directly or
indirectly, caused the child’s death.
Not only did Marx not
bother to check his facts-it might be argued that he was, after all,
writing a private letter to a friend-but nearly 150 years later the
story is repeated, without any comment whatsoever, by a respected
biographer who also, perhaps less justifiably, failed to check the
facts. A closer examination of contemporary accounts tells a rather
different story.
The travels of the
newly-wed Urquharts
In 1854 Urquhart
married Harriet Angelina Fortescue, sister of the first Baron
Carlingford (who, as Chichester Fortescue was MP for Louth, and later
became the fourth husband of Lady Frances Waldegrave.) Harriet, like her
husband, was passionately interested in politics, writing under the
pseudonym ‘Caritas’ in The Free Press, as well as contributing to
David’s writings and handling his extensive correspondence.
Two years later,
traveling round Ireland, the Urquharts met Richard Barter, an extremely
successful doctor who owned St Anne’s Hydropathic Establishment near
Blarney in Co. Cork. Barter had read Urquhart’s The Pillars of
Hercules and been impressed by it. He had immediately seen the
therapeutic potential of hot-air baths and invited the Urquharts to stay
as his guests, offering to provide the workers and materials needed if
David would help him to build a ‘Turkish’ bath in the grounds of his
hydro.
Vapour baths had been
available for many years, but Barter realised that only the dry air of
the Turkish bath could be heated to the very high temperatures (up to
220ºF) required for therapeutic purposes. After much experimentation,
for it was still difficult in the mid-1800s to heat air to such
temperatures without contaminating it with impurities, they succeeded in
building the first modern hot-air bath in the British Isles.
(Thereafter, Urquhart would build a Turkish bath, smaller or larger, in
each of his homes, for it was only in the bath that he found some relief
from the pain of his neuralgia.)
Returning to the
mainland, the Urquhart family (for there were, by now, two children)
stayed for a short time in Manchester. While there, David helped the
local Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) to build their own Turkish bath,
the first in England to be opened to the general public since the time
of the Romans.
The move to
Rickmansworth
Then, after a brief
stay in Lytham they moved in November 1857 to Rickmansworth, at that
time in the county of Buckinghamshire. They had found what they hoped
would be a pleasant home, appropriately called Riverside House, at
Moneyhill on the banks of the Colne. But first, while builders were
making a number of alterations, including the by now predictable
addition of a self-contained Turkish bath, they stayed at the Swan
Inn-like Riverside House, now demolished.
By mid-January the
work was completed and the Urquharts moved in with their small retinue
of servants. There was Matilda Ellrington who had been working at the
Albion Hotel in Manchester when the Urquharts were staying there, and
who joined them in Lytham to look after the children. At about the same
time, George Barnes had been appointed as house-steward, while Edward
Rackley and Matilda’s younger sister Emma joined them at the time of
the move.
The death of baby
William
But joy at moving into
their new home was short-lived, for on 4 February their younger son,
thirteen months old William, died in tragic circumstances. In the midst
of teething at the time, he was often in considerable pain. His elder
brother David had been similarly afflicted during the time they had been
at St Anne’s, and the Urquharts had discovered that his pain was eased
whenever he had been placed in the warmth of the Turkish bath.
The same procedure had
been successfully tried with baby William at Lytham, where Urquhart had
first built himself a small Turkish bath, and it was now repeated in
their grand new bath at Riverside.
This was no small
cramped cubbyhole but a spacious facility, capable of holding several
guests at the same time, and divided into a number of areas, each
designed for a specific purpose.
William had been left
alone for five minutes in his cot on the floor, in the coolest part of
the bath, when he suffered a fit. Emma removed him, and Matilda ran with
him to his parents who tried unsuccessfully to revive him. A local
surgeon, George Codd, was called but by the time he arrived, William was
dead.
There was no
self-evident legal requirement to hold an inquest because, as Dr Barter
wrote to a friend on hearing the news, William had earlier, during their
stay at the Swan Inn, been seen by Mr Codd about his gums. Indeed,
according to the Bucks Herald, Urquhart had immediately written to the
local coroner, Mr Lowe, giving him full details of what had happened and
the coroner had initially decided that no inquest would be necessary.
The inquest
But the Urquharts had
reckoned without the local gossips, many from the Swan Inn, who had a
field day spreading rumours about the strange newcomers to the village
who had killed their baby in a hot bath. Because of this, the coroner
felt he had no option but to hold an inquest, and this duly opened at
the ‘Halfway House’ in Moneyhill on 5 February.
Mr Codd testified that
he had conducted a postmortem and concluded that death had been caused
by ‘congestion of the brain’ and that the fits had been a result of
teething troubles. When Matilda Ellrington gave her evidence she said
that the older boy and his parents all ‘used the bath regular’ and
little Willy ‘always seemed in much better health when he took the
bath regular.’
Yet it was the gossip which seemed to set the agenda for
the inquest and so many people wished to attend the second day’s
hearings that it was adjourned to the ‘Fox and Hounds’ in the centre
of Rickmansworth.
It was rumoured that
the child had been seen naked on a cold verandah; that it had two black
eyes and was bruised from the cheek to the shoulder; that boiling water
had been poured onto its head from a kettle; and that the body was said
to have been covered with scars and blood. Above all, Turkish baths-in
which it was said that the baby had been left at 140ºF for up to seven
hours-were dangerous and no fit place for grown adults, let alone
babies.
In such a small
community it would have been impossible for the jurors not to have heard
such mischievous rumours, but it soon became clear that they were
totally without any foundation in fact. For example, when William
Cudworth, landlord of the Swan, was asked on the second day of the
inquest to confirm what he had already told one of the jurors, namely,
that ‘Mr Urquhart had throttled the child,’ he blandly replied, ‘I
was not on my oath then’. Furthermore, some of the servants at the
Swan stated that, in fact, the Urquharts always seemed to treat their
children kindly.
Testifying a second
time, Matilda Ellrington poured scorn on those who tut-tutted at the
temperatures in the bath. ‘I have been in the bath myself when it was
180 degrees,’ she said, adding proudly, ‘and have been there for
half an hour.’So, one by one, over a period of three days, the rumours
were either quashed, or dismissed for lack of any witnesses prepared to
testify. It was admitted that the child had a single scar, but this had
been caused by accidental contact with a hot wet blanket six weeks
previously, and it had been treated by a doctor at the time.
At the end of the
third day, according to the Advertiser, the jury’s verdict was that
‘the evidence is unsatisfactory as to the cause of death.’ But,
gratuitously, it concluded, ‘The jury highly censured the treatment of
deceased.’
The aftermath of the inquest
Harriet Urquhart,
already upset by William’s death, found the inquest itself almost as
hard to bear. Her biographer says that though she rarely spoke of this
double trial, her life ‘was never quite the same again’ and her
health suffered ‘not at once, but later on.'
The behaviour of the
jury throughout the trial, their unusual censure of two bereaved parents
who were actually shown to have cared deeply for their children, and the
manner in which all this was reported, were to have further
repercussions.
For in reporting the
inquest, the Advertiser tended to quote only the responses of the
witnesses. This omission of the jurors’ questions succeeded somehow in
giving credence to actions which the witnesses had, in reality, denied.
On the third day, for instance, answers given by William Rackley (a
servant at the Swan and a brother of Edward) were transcribed as:
Did
not ever see the deceased in a hot bath. Never saw Mr Urquhart pinch the
child in the throat. Never saw any act of cruelty to the child. Saw a
mark on the child, but never saw the child with black eyes. I never told
any person I ever did...
When the Advertiser
summarised the three days’ hearings in its main editorial, it was not
uncritical of the behaviour of the jurymen (who frequently squabbled
amongst themselves), and it concluded that since the Urquharts had been
censured, even though the cause of William’s death had not been fully
determined, the matter could not be allowed to rest there.
But Urquhart by now
knew that the reports in the Bucks Advertiser had been provided by one
of the jurors, a Mr Carter, and had already decided to pursue the matter
further.
During the following
weeks a number of letters were published in the Bucks Advertiser. A
member of the jury wrote of their difficulties in understanding the
conflicting evidence and stated that, after the second day, eleven of
the jurors had sent a note to the coroner asking for specialist legal
advice which they were not granted.
Urquhart wrote that he
had offered the jurors an opportunity to try the bath themselves so as
to better understand it. One of them replied that jurors could not be
expected to submit themselves to treatments which ‘might seriously
injure their health.’The Foreign Affairs Committees express their
concern
This attempt to
disparage Urquhart and spread alarm about the safety of the newly
re-introduced Turkish bath affected others far from Rickmansworth,
especially those involved in the FACs who were thinking of setting up a
Turkish bath in their own locality.
On 20 February, John
Singleton, who was for many years Secretary of the Preston FAC and who
later ran the Turkish bath in Grimshaw Street, Preston, wrote a worried
letter to John Buxton, often used as a troubleshooter by Urquhart when
any of the FACs were in difficulties.
One
of the members of our Committee has received a letter from a friend in
Kendal stating that he has seen a report in ‘The Weekly Dispatch’ of
an inquest over one of Mr Urquhart’s children that had died through
the effects of using cold water in ‘The Turkish Bath’. Pray send us
word if this is true...
These reports were
even more worrying for the Bradford FAC which had opened a Turkish bath
at 58 Leeds Road a couple of months earlier, advertising it as being ‘Under
the advice and direction of Mr Urquhart’. As can well be imagined, a
précis of the Advertiser’s reports of the inquest which appeared in
the Bradford Observer caused much local consternation.
It was not until six
weeks later that the Bradford Advertiser, usually supportive of the
Foreign Affairs Committees, rather belatedly got its act together.
Feeling that it was its duty, as an advocate of the Turkish bath, to
publicize the truth of the matter, it finally answered the damaging
report which had appeared in its contemporary.
A letter from David
Urquhart stated that he had already decided to take proceedings against
the writer of the newspaper reports, and explained in detail why the
bath was not to blame. In addition, he attached letters of support from
the editor of The Free Press, from Dr Barter, and from Sir John Fife, a
surgeon at the Newcastle Infirmary and a past mayor of that city. There
were also copies of certificates from two London doctors, John
Westmacott and (a different) Dr Codd. Both had been at the inquest, had
heard the postmortem results, and stated that it was their opinion that
death was due to convulsions consequent on painful teething.
The Urquharts
vindicated
Finally, on 7 May, in
the Court of the Queen’s Bench, Urquhart’s counsel, Mr Edwin James,
QC, asked that Carter be brought to trial ‘for the publication of a
garbled and untrue report’ of the inquest.
The transcripts and
reports were reviewed in detail, and the omission of the
cross-examinations was criticized. It also transpired that although the
two London doctors had attended the inquest in order to refute the
allegations against Urquhart, the coroner would not allow them to be
examined. The report in the Advertiser made no mention of this, nor of
the fact that the temperature in the Turkish bath was only 95ºF when
William was placed inside.
But the Urquharts were
not successful in their immediate objective for the report, although ‘not
verbally accurate,’ was deemed to be ‘fair and bona fide’ and on
that account the Court ‘ought not to interfere.’Nevertheless the
Bucks Herald wrote in an editorial that,
If
it was [Urquhart’s] aim to establish before the highest criminal
tribunal of the country the falsehood of the cruel suspicions to which
he has been exposed by gossiping servants and prejudiced jurymen, he has
fully succeeded. Having read the affidavits of Mr and Mrs Urquhart, both
Lord Campbell and Mr Justice Earle publicly expressed their opinion that
the parents of the deceased infant had treated it with uniform
attention, kindness, and tenderness, and that there was not the
slightest ground for the excitement which had prevailed against them...
And with that, the
Urquharts had to be content.
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