2 A terrible secret
Fear of the stigma of an illegitimate child led Jane Boyd to commit a horrific crime
Historians have suggested that infanticide might have been a weekly event in mid19th-century Ireland. In many of these cases, it was a means of dealing with illegitimacy at a time when fatherless babies were stigmatised and brought great financial hardship to mothers.
And so, on 26 October 1861, when Ann Boyd – an unmarried teenager from Ballykeel who had recently returned home from a spell as a domestic servant – went into labour, her mother, Jane, panicked.
Living in a small cottage in a tightly knit community, it was difficult to hide what was happening. Ann’s brother James, who had just come home for his dinner, noticed the commotion. “I sat in the kitchen and heard my sister screaming,” he later testified. “Then, after my sister screamed, I heard the sound of a child… It did not cry very long. It gave three cries.”
Around one o’clock, neighbours James and Mary Hill saw Jane digging a hole. “It’s a strange time to be digging in a garden,” Mary remarked to Jane. Other neighbours and extended family who called on the Boyds that afternoon noticed that Ann was very ill and told Jane to call a doctor.
Dr Dunlop, the parish medical officer, came the next day. After examining Ann, and finding that she had recently given birth, he sent for Constable Waters of the Holywood Barracks. Confronted by the two men, Jane, who had insisted that her daughter had suffered a miscarriage, cracked. “There was a child,” she confessed, “and it was buried in the garden. The child was dead, born dead.”
Maximum penalty
At the foot of an elm tree, Waters and Dunlop recovered the body of a baby girl, in a shallow grave hidden underneath some large cabbages.
Following an inquest, Jane was charged with murder and was sent, with Ann, to Downpatrick Gaol to await trial. At the 11th hour, a deal was struck. Jane and Ann pleaded guilty to concealment of birth and the prosecution dropped the charge of murder. Ann was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour. The judge was entirely convinced that Jane had killed the baby, and so gave her the maximum penalty: two years’ imprisonment with hard labour.
“After my sister screamed, I heard the sound of a child… It did not cry very long. It gave three cries”