Victoria’s serial killer wet nurse
Six children with their throats slashed. A house drenched in blood. And a mother clinging to life. That was the gory sight at the heart of a drama TV's Victoria DIDN’T touch on...
AT A quarter to six in the morning on Saturday, June 10, 1854, Henry Woolgar, a labourer from Esher, near London, was on his way to work when he passed a cottage and noticed something curious hanging from an upstairs window.
As he drew closer he saw, to his consternation, that it was a pillow saturated with blood. He rang the doorbell. No one answered. Other neighbours began to gather. Then, a woman was glimpsed inside, apparently trying to attract their attention. Woolgar fetched a ladder, climbed up and peered in.
At first he could not see anyone. Then a terrible apparition emerged at the top of the stairs. It was Mary Ann Brough. Her hair was hanging down and her body was covered in blood. As she turned towards him, Woolgar saw that her throat had been slashed. From the wound a curious whistling sound emanated.
Woolgar hastily descended the ladder and ran to fetch a doctor. By the time he returned with the local constable, another neighbour had entered and found a scene of unimaginable horror.
Mary Ann lay on a bed. On the floor nearby was her son William, his throat cut. In the other rooms he found five more children, all with their throats slashed, lying dead. The house was ‘deluged with blood’.
Who, wondered the horrified witnesses, could have slaughtered six children – 11-year-old Georgy (Georgiana), William, aged eight, Carry, seven, four-year-old twins Harriet and Henry and one-year-old baby George – and attempted to kill their devoted mother, Mary Ann, who lay grievously wounded?
The answer came after a doctor miraculously managed to sew Mary Ann’s throat back up, enabling her to speak. She had, she confessed, killed the children one by one with a razor, before trying to kill herself.
The case of the Esher Murderess gripped Victorian Britain and made headlines worldwide. Not only was Mary Ann a serial killer but, shockingly, she had once been entrusted with the care of the most important baby in Britain: Bertie, the Prince of Wales, Queen Victoria’s eldest son and heir to the throne. Mary Ann had been his wet nurse.
The second series of the ITV drama Victoria dramatises the young queen’s struggles to combine motherhood with monarchy. With its final episode about to air, it does not, however, feature Mary Ann, to whom Victoria delegated one of the most cherished aspects of motherhood.
Unlike other Victorian massmurderesses, such as the poisoner Mary Ann Cotton or serial baby-killer Amelia Dyer, Mary Ann Brough has all but disappeared from the pages of history. No biographies or TV series have been written about her. Yet she was once the most notorious killer in the land.
Mary Ann’s career as a royal wet nurse began when Victoria summoned her to her bedside on November 9, 1841. The queen was in labour and was adamant that the baby must immediately be handed to the wet nurse as she had no intention of breastfeeding.
Victoria, in common with many wellborn ladies in the 1840s, viewed breastfeeding with ‘a totally insurmountable disgust’. The post of royal wet nurse had been advertised and attracted a large number of applicants, not least for the attractive rate of pay. For her eight months of employment, Mary Ann received £1,000 – the equivalent of about €55,000 in today’s money.
It is likely that Mary Ann got the job because her husband, George, worked as a groundsman at Claremont House, one of Victoria’s favourite royal properties, near Esher. His father had also worked there.
Who could be better than the wife of a trusted servant?
Mary Ann had given birth to her eldest daughter, Mary, eight years earlier. After that she lost a number of babies. It’s believed she miscarried… but it is possible that Mary Ann’s children
dren died as a result of being deprived of their mother’s milk, since she was being paid to give it instead to the babies of wealthy mothers.
The psychological cost of nursing another woman’s healthy baby with milk produced for her own, dead children can only be guessed at.
THE QUEEN was, initially, delighted by Mary Ann, believing her to be a simple, decent country-woman. And she performed her job well: Bertie soon developed into a fat, healthy baby, although Victoria, suffering acutely from post-natal-depression, thought him ugly and too frightful’.
'She couldn’t bear babies,’ says Professor Jane Ridley, Bertie’s biographer. ‘They came too soon, interfering with her and Albert’s marital relations.’
Having failed to bond with Bertie, Victoria largely ignored him. In his early months, Mary Ann probably spent more time with Bertie than his mother did.
Yet for reasons that were never declared (one newspaper later claimed she was a drinker, another that she had disobeyed orders), Mary Ann was sacked after eight months. Victoria had no doubt largely forgotten about her when, more than a decade later, she opened her morning paper and received a shock.
‘A most awful & horrid tragedy has taken place at Esher,’ she wrote in her diary on June 13. ‘Mrs Brough, for 8 months, Bertie’s wet nurse, has murdered her 6 Children! The news quite haunts one. She was, it seems, a most depraved woman. Morose, ill tempered & stupid she always used to be, when in our house!’
After Mary Ann had been dismissed, she settled down in the cottage in West Esher with George. Her second daughter, Georgiana, was born in 1843 and five more children followed in rapid succession. Neighbours remarked on what a kind and attentive mother she was, doting on her brood.
But after the birth of her seventh child, George, in September 1852, Mary Ann suffered what seems to have been a stroke.
According to the surgeon Mr Izod, who gave evidence in court, she had become paralysed down her left side, and her speech was slurred and her face distorted.
She recovered to some degree but Izod, who saw her regularly, observed ‘symptoms of a disordered brain’. She complained of ferocious headaches, a ‘tumbling’ and ‘swimming’ sensation in her head, and frequent nosebleeds. He gave her medicine, but the symptoms persisted.
What appears to have precipitated the tragedy was that her husband, George, a ‘hard-working, sober man’, began to suspect his wife of infidelity. According to an amateur detective he employed to follow her, she took the train to London for a tryst with another, married man.
It was evidence enough for George Brough. He walked out on his wife on Tuesday, June 6, 1854, and sent word that he would apply for custody of the children. For Mary, it was a terrible blow. He planned to bring her a legal agreement that Saturday to sign.
To compound her anxiety, her children caught measles, potentially a fatal disease. For several nights she got little sleep as she nursed them. On Wednesday she asked Mr Izod for medicine to ease her headaches but he refused to give her any, since the symptoms were not new, and told her not to overexcite herself.
On Friday, June 9, tormented by the searing pain in her head, she went back to beg him again, but he was unavailable. In despair, she returned home to her sick, fretful children, and collapsed into a chair to sleep.
At 9pm Georgy, still recovering from measles, began calling for her to come up to bed. Then her other children began crying out. They carried on calling out and crying until midnight.
They fell quiet, but Mary Ann could not sleep. Demented with exhaustion, despairing at the thought of her children being taken away, she snapped. She later told Superintendent Biddlecombe, who took her statement at the scene: ‘There was something like a cloud over my eyes. I thought I would go down, get a knife, and cut my own throat.’
But in the darkness she could not find her way downstairs to the kitchen. Instead, groping in her husband’s room, she found his razor. Then, driven by a deranged compulsion, she slit her children’s throats, one after the other.
‘I went to Georgy and cut her first. I did not look at her. I then came to Carry and cut her, then to Henry. He said, “Don’t, mother.”
‘I said I must, and did cut him. Then I went to Bill. He was fast asleep. I turned him over. He never woke. I served him the same.’
She stumbled into the next bedroom. ‘Harriet and George were awake. Harriet struggled very much after I cut her, and gargled for some time. I then lay down and did myself. I can’t tell you what occurred for some time after that, till I seemed weak, and found myself on the floor. That nasty great black cloud was gone then.’
A little while later, she got up, saw the children drenched in blood, and realised what she had done.
Unable to cry out because her windpipe was partially severed, she hung a bloody pillow out of the window to attract attention.
Mary Ann’s trial was held in August 1854. The case rested on the question of her sanity: did she kill her children in a fit of madness, or was her crime premeditated and deliberate?
Was she mad or bad? The defence called an ‘alienist’, as psychiatrists were then known, the eminent Dr Forbes Winslow. He diagnosed ‘temporary insanity’ brought about by brain disease and exacerbated by the stress of caring for her sick children. It was this, he contended, that had caused a normally sane, loving mother to kill. The prosecution disagreed, arguing that in fact the crimes were premeditated. A will had been found, written only hours before the killings, in which Mary Ann bequeathed her jewellery and other precious items to her eldest daughter, Mary, including a silver teapot and two brooches, one from Queen Victoria and one from the Queen of the Belgians, to keep them out of the hands of her husband. While in custody she had even told Mary that ‘her reasons for committing the foul deeds were that she was afraid she would be separated from her children by the agreement she was to sign on the Saturday’. Her motives seemed clear: jealousy and revenge. Furthermore, the evidence of her adultery showed that she was immoral and depraved. The judge agreed with this view, telling the jury they should find the prisoner guilty. But, swayed by the evidence of Forbes Winslow and other ‘lunacy experts’ who agreed that Mary Ann had been gripped by madness caused by her ‘congested brain’, the jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity.
Newspapers largely agreed with the verdict. ‘Is it credible,’ asked one, ‘that, except in a frenzy, a mother would destroy her children?’
For some time afterwards Mary Ann’s house of horror became a macabre tourist attraction, feeding the Victorian fascination with murder, with a royal connection too.
Mary Ann spent the rest of her days in Bethlehem mental hospital in London – known as Bedlam – where she was said to be a non-violent, quiet inmate. She suffered a series of fits or strokes which resulted in paralysis, and she eventually died in 1861.
A Bedlam doctor told the inquest that brain disease caused her paralysis, eventual death and her insanity. And he had no doubt that it was responsible for the tragedy that had unfolded seven years earlier.
Mary Ann had claimed that if Izod had seen her that Friday and given her the medicine that relieved her headaches and the terrible ‘cloud’ in her brain, she would never have committed the murders.
Nearly 20 years after the killings, however, the Esher Tragedy continued to fascinate.
The murder scene was recreated in gruesome detail at the Birmingham Wax Works where visitors could gaze upon the figures of the six children, each with its throat cut and ‘gore on the little waxen faces, gore on the sheets…’, while a figure of the bloodstained murderess bore a label round her neck – reminding visitors of her intimate royal connection.