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Amelia
SACH
A Baby-Farming Case. Two Women Sentenced To
Death
Otago Witness (New Zealand)
Jan. 21, 1903
UnknownMisandry.blogspot.com
Finchley Baby Farm
The Islington Murder Charge - Trial of Sach And
Walters - Witnesses for the Defence
The Echo (London, England)
Jan. 16, 1903
Medical Evidence
The baby killer in my family: Researching your
background has never been so popular... but the past can hide horrific
secret
By Penninah Asher - DailyMail.co.uk
June 5, 2011
Digging into your family past has never been as
easy or so popular.
Millions of us spend weekends trawling the internet
and poring over ancestry sites and magazines.
We are glued to television programmes such as the
BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?.
We all want to know where we come from, to build up
a picture of our family's past and to discover how our forebears used
to live.
My interest in genealogy started ten years ago when
I was inspired by my mother Judith's attempts to complete her family
tree.
She told me stories of a grandfather who fought in
Sudan and an ancestor who ran away to sea aged 14. I was intrigued.
So, pregnant with the first of my two children and
home all day with very little to do, I did some research, starting
with friends' families.
Then I turned to my own father and his roots, a
subject of great curiosity to me. I come from a fractured family on
his side.
In fact, I'm estranged from my dad, I haven't seen
him since I was 16 and I didn't even know the names of his parents. I
knew nothing about my father's family, other than what my mother had
told me.
I've always enjoyed piecing a story together, so
day after day I sat at my kitchen table in front of the computer, next
to a growing box of certificates and other documents.
I found the website www.freebmd.org.uk, my first
and most valuable source.
It gives free access to the index of birth,
marriage and deaths in England and Wales, and I managed to trace my
grandparents through it.
Then I joined the website www.rootschat.com, a free
messaging forum where members give helpful advice and I started
building a family tree on www.ancestry.co.uk.
It is a well-trodden path. But, while I suspected
some members of my father's side of the family were pretty colourful,
nothing prepared me for what I discovered when, out of the blue, I
received an email from a man through the website ancestry.co.uk, who
asked if I was aware I was related to 'a notorious lady' called Amelia
Sach.
Sach, explained my correspondent, was a murderess
better known as the Finchley 'baby farmer'.
On a bitter winter's morning in 1903, she became
one of the first two women to be executed at Holloway Prison - along
with her colleague Annie Walters.
And Amelia Sach, convicted as an infamous killer of
babies, was the sister of my great-grandmother, so she was my
great-great-aunt.
My first reaction was confusion, then shock and
then disbelief. Did I really have a murderess in the family? And if I
did, then why did I know nothing about it?
The answers were not hard to find. I went back to
my family tree and found Amelia Sach had been baptised Frances Amelia
Thorne in Hampreston, Dorset, on May 5, 1867, the fourth child of ten.
She had three sisters, the youngest being Eunice
Priscilla May Thorne, my great-grandmother.
I tracked Amelia through the censuses, and
discovered her marriage to Jeffrey Sach in 1896.
I checked and double-checked, and the emailer - who
I understand was a lawyer researching the fate of children born to
murderesses - was right.
I'd heard the term 'baby farming' before (it was
first used by the British Medical Journal as long ago as 1867) but now
I needed to find out more.
I began reading everything I could, including a
transcript of Amelia's Old Bailey trial and, as I did so, I started to
uncover a story so astonishing and sad it is now the basis of a new
novel, The Ghost Of Lily Painter, by Caitlin Davies.
Legitimate baby farmers provided a much-needed
service for pregnant unmarried women in Victorian and Edwardian times.
These women were often servant girls who were
forced to 'farm' out their illegitimate child to avoid scandal or to
keep their jobs.
Such women had few choices at a time when even
orphanages might refuse to take a child born out of wedlock.
Advertising their services in the local Press, baby
farmers charged a weekly sum - five shillings a week in 1890s London -
or a oneoff 'premium' ranging from £5 to £50 to have the baby adopted
or fostered.
Most were honest and caring. Some, though, starved,
abandoned or even murdered the babies to maximise their profits.
Sach and Walters were two of seven baby farmers
executed between 1871 and 1908, often following sensational trials.
Some figures suggest that half of all babies born
in Edwardian London died before they were one.
Burials were expensive and barely a week went by
without police finding a little dead body abandoned in a railway
carriage, or left on the banks of a canal.
Two weeks after Sach and Walters were arrested,
nine starving children were found in a house not far away in Wood
Green, including two babies lying in the lid of an old rush basket.
The elderly woman in charge had received £30 to
care for each child.
Amelia Sach was a midwife who arrived in London
where her father, an odd-job man, had found work.
Shortly after her father died, she married Jeffrey,
a builder, and they had a daughter, Lillian.
Perhaps he provided the money she needed to get her
business off the ground because, in her early 30s, Amelia decided to
open a 'lying in' home, where unmarried pregnant women could stay
before giving birth.
By 1902 she was working from Claymore House, a
semi-detached, red-brick villa in East Finchley, North London.
She put an advertisement in the local papers under
the name Nurse Thorne: 'Accouchement, before and during. Skilled
nursing. Home comforts. Baby can remain.'
The phrase 'baby can remain' meant that an
unmarried pregnant woman could go to the lying-in home, give birth,
and leave without the child.
Once the child was born, Amelia would offer to
arrange an adoption; assuring her clients that for £25, their
offspring would start a new life with a 'well-to-do lady'.
But according to newspaper reports and evidence at
their subsequent trial, her colleague Annie Walters - a highly
disturbed 54-year-old midwife - removed the babies from the lying-in
home, drugged them with a lethal narcotic and then wandered the
streets looking for somewhere to dump them.
In the winter of 1902, Walters took lodgings at
Danbury Street, Islington, where she asked the landlady if she could
bring a baby back for one night before it was adopted.
On November 12, she received a telegram from
Claymore House - 'To-night, at five o'clock' - and Walters set off for
the lying-in home.
She brought a baby back to Danbury Street. Two days
later the boy had gone.
Walters told her landlady that the adoptive parent,
a widowed lady in Piccadilly, was delighted and the baby was now
finely dressed in 'muslin and lace'.
On November 15 she received another telegram, and
brought home another baby, telling a fellow lodger: 'This one is going
to a coastguard's wife at South Kensington.'
Her actions had already aroused suspicion and this
time the police placed a watch on Danbury Street.
On November 18, Walters was followed to Kensington
Station where she was discovered in the ladies' lavatory with a dead
infant in her arms, his hands clenched, his tongue swollen and lips
purple and black.
The victim was the four-day-old son of Ada
Charlotte Galley, a servant who had recently given birth at Claymore
House.
The cause of death was said to be asphyxia and Sach
and Walters were arrested for murder.
Walters admitted having given the child chlorodyne,
a lethal but widely available mixture of chloroform, cannabis and
opium, originally used as a treatment for cholera.
Walters was probably addicted to it herself,
telling the arresting officer: 'I never killed the baby, I only gave
it two little drops in its bottle, the same as I take myself.'
Sach was charged as an accessory and, in the eyes
of the police, the existence of the telegrams was enough to prove her
role in the crime.
In January 1903 the women stood trial at the Old
Bailey. Both pleaded innocent, although neither took the stand.
An all-male jury quickly convicted them and the
Press denounced the 'horrible and extensive traffic in babies' and
their 'unwomanly callousness'.
The case was reported as far away as Australia.
When police searched Claymore House they found 300 items of baby
clothing in Amelia Sach's bedroom.
When the police arrested her, she denied knowing
any Annie Walters, although there's no doubt she had sent the
telegrams.
It is far from absolute proof that she was a
willing accomplice, although I suspect she was not entirely innocent.
It was enough, certainly, to convince the jury, and
on February 3, 1903, Sach and Walters were executed together on a
newly built scaffold in the yard of Holloway Prison.
It was the last double hanging in Britain and with
them - or at least soon after - went the trade in babies.
Five years later the Children And Young Persons Act
required all foster parents to be registered, and the industry
dwindled.
For me the story won't be over until I find out
more about my greatgrandmother Eunice.
It seems she never told a soul about her sister.
When she married three years after the execution, she changed her
first name to Mabel and changed her father's name on the marriage
certificate, as well as his occupation.
Only in 1930, 14 years after the death of her
husband, did she revert to her real name. The crime has lost none of
its power to inspire revulsion, by the way.
When I told my family what I'd found, one relative,
worried what people would think, advised me to keep things to myself.
It is no wonder the story was so well hidden.
How do I feel about having a murderess in the
family? We might not like the truth when we find it, but we can't
ignore it.
It's human nature to want to know our roots. I come
from a poor family, so there have been no documents or photographs to
help me during my search; their lives were not chronicled.
In this story at least, there has been no happy
ending, only a terrible family secret and more than a century of
denial. But even that is better than nothing at all.