A Proper Person to be Detained

Welcome to our regular feature showcasing the talents of the nation’s best writers.

On Christmas Night in 1881, my great-great-uncle, John Manley, whose parents had migrated from Ireland some 30 years earlier, was stabbed in a Leeds street, after a foolish quarrel. The single wound was fatal and he died within minutes. He was just twenty-two years old, and the murderer, John Ross, was only three years older.

John’s sister, Elizabeth, was already some paces away at the bottom of the street. She later said in court that she heard a scream and a woman raise a cry of ‘Murder!’ She turned back in time to see Ross running past and her brother lying on the ground, bleeding, although she saw no knife.

‘You’ve killed my brother!’ she cried as Ross passed her.

Seventeen-year-old Elizabeth gave evidence at the trial that Ross and Manley ‘had been good friends, as far as I know,’ an assertion that was repeated by other witnesses.

Some time in 1884, three years after the murder, Elizabeth travelled all the way to Glasgow. She may have gone there to work as a servant, but there are no details of who might have employed her. The simplest explanation is that she was taken there by somebody, on the promise of something. A good job. A better life. A new beginning.

I can find nothing about her during the two years or thereabouts between the time when she left Leeds and the shocking events of the late afternoon of 4 August 1886, when she was picked up by the police on Castle Street in Glasgow and declared to be insane, a danger to herself and others. The poor law officer reports that she ‘had a brother stabbed four years ago’, the only time in which the circumstance of this young woman having witnessed the violent death of a close relative is seen as being in any way relevant to her condition. ■