Today’s guest blog is by Caro Peacock (aka
Gillian Linscott) a former journalist. Her novel Absent Friends won the Ellis Peters Historical
Dagger and The Herodotus Award for the Best
International Historical Mystery Novel in 2000.
You finish writing a book and, for better or
worse, that’s it. I finished my latest
Liberty Lane book, The Path of the Wicked,
last year and it’s out now. (Published on
31 January.) Only there’s something in
it that won’t let me go. Somebody, that
is. Or rather, she’s in it only she
isn’t. She has an existence outside the
book and her real story, as far as I’ve managed to follow it, is as strange as
any fiction I’ve written.
It started for me in Cheltenham local history
library in the winter of 2011. I had the
general idea for the next Liberty Lane case and knew that it would be set in
and around Cheltenham in 1840. The next
step for me was to read the local papers of the time to build up the picture
and, with luck, collect some ideas. In
the Cheltenham Examiner, 15 April 1840, I came across this:
CELIA
TIPPINS. – The situation of this unhappy
female, now under sentence of death, is creating a painful interest in the
public mind.
I read on and followed the story through some
other regional newspapers. At the recent
Gloucester Assizes, Celia Tippins, 34 years old, had been carried fainting from
the dock.
She’d just heard the judge sentencing her to be
hanged for the murder of her five-week-old baby, adding that she was “a
melancholy instance of the consequences of the first deviation from virtue.”
The case of Celia Tippins was a Victorian
melodrama in real life. She’d gone to
the house of the father of her illegitimate child in Hereford to ask for money
to maintain the baby. The father – “the
wicked author of her Sin” – as the jurymen who convicted Celia described him –
said he didn’t know her and pushed her out into the rain. Even the workhouse wouldn’t take her and the
baby because she had a husband who should support her.
However, her husband was sixty miles away in
Bristol and he’d only take Celia back if she got money from the biological father
for the baby’s upkeep. She’d walked with
the baby all the way from Bristol to Hereford.
She was hungry and penniless. She’d
even had to part with her apron to pay for a night’s lodging. Now she had no alternative but to start
walking back to Bristol with the baby in her arms. At some point on a lonely road in the wet
November night, the child died. Within
days, Celia was in prison charged with his murder.
The prosecution case was that she’d drowned the
baby. There was always considerable
doubt about that. At the trial, the
barrister who’d taken on her case from public spiritedness argued strongly that
he’d died from natural causes; a victim of his mother’s suffering. “The fatigue she had undergone and the
exposure and distress which she had suffered must have had such an effect upon
her health as to impair the quality of her milk and be likely to produce
illness in her child.” The jury found
her guilty with obvious reluctance and added a strong recommendation for mercy,
which the judge ignored. So all twelve
of the jurors signed a petition to the Home Secretary asking for her life to be
spared on the grounds of “the very
distressing and peculiarly lamentable conditions of the unhappy prisoner”. (The petition is still there in the government
archives – an imposing document on stiff parchment.) More petitions came in expressing, as one of
them put it, the “general sympathy of a discerning and intelligent public.” The Home Secretary relented – up to a point. The death sentence was commuted to
transportation for life.
Authors are greedy things, browsing sharks for
other people’s dramas. I fictionalised
some aspects of Celia’s case in The Path
of the Wicked. I gave her a
different name and background, made her younger. In the book, the sentence of transportation
has been carried out on the fictional Joanna Picton and my plot centres on
attempts to have her brought home from Van Diemens land. That should have been that – but as I was to
find out – the real Celia Tippins was a determined woman. Even 172 years on, her story wouldn’t let go
of me. What had happened to her after
that sentence of transportation?
Answering that question should have been easy. If you’re researching your ancestors and have the luck to own one who was
transported you’ll be grateful for the meticulous records kept by the State
Library of New South Wales (www.sl.nsw.gov.au
Go to the research guides page, enter convicts). Even better if the ancestor was female as
there’s a volunteer-run site specialising in women who were transported (www.femaleconvicts.org.au) The
only problem was that neither of these excellent resources had anything on
Celia, either as Tippins or under her maiden name of Corbett. No record either that she’d died on the
voyage.
So, to Gloucester Archives. (Has anybody else noticed that archivists
seem to be secular saints – constantly patient, encouraging, and seemingly
happy in their work?) But all we could
turn up there was that soon after she’d been sentenced Celia Tippins was transferred from Gloucester
Gaol with no hint of where she’d been sent.
Months later – because yes I did have a life to lead and Celia had to
fit in where she could – I found myself sitting at a desk in the National
Archives at Kew with an alphabetical register of convicts in front of me. There was Celia Tippins with three words against
her name in tiny handwriting in the right hand column: Gloucester Lun. Asy. Later
I found a fuller version in a newspaper in her home city of Hereford: This
wretched woman … has become quite insane and on Wednesday last Capt. Mason, the
governor of the county gaol, received an order to remove her at once to
Gloucester Lunatic Asylum …She will of course receive all the attention her
pitiable condition requires.
End of story, then. Celia, driven mad, ends her days in Gloucester
lunatic asylum. Only it wasn’t the end
of the story. Another day, another
reading desk at Kew, another bundle of documents. These included letters from Gloucester
lunatic asylum to the Home Office ten years after her committal, arguing
strongly that Celia Tippins was now entirely sane, had been so for some years
and should be released. Reading between
the lines, it seems clear that she’d never been insane at all – though probably
and not surprisingly severely depressed.
In what seems to have been the relatively humane regime of Gloucester asylum
she recovered and obviously impressed the authorities enough for them to take
some trouble in making a case for her freedom.
Eventually a civil servant noted on the back of one of the letters: I should think that she may be discharged
without danger. Then two weeks
later, 6 January 1851 – eleven years and two months after the night when her child
died – another note in small handwriting records that Celia Tippins has been given
a free pardon.
She would have been 44 or 45 by then. Where did she go? What did she do? I don’t know.
Celia Tippins has done one of her disappearing acts again. I’m trying to follow her, and it’s not easy. Perhaps I should just let her go and move on
to something else, but her story touches on so many aspects of early Victorian
life that I think it’s one that needs telling.
So if your name happens to be Tippins (or Corbett, her maiden name) and
if there’s anything in your family, history that you think gives a clue to any
of this, please get in touch via my website www.caropeacock.co.uk. or Caropeacock@aol.com.
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Caro
Peacock’s latest Liberty Lane novel, The
Path of the Wicked, is published by Severn House. Caro also writes as Gillian Linscott. Her series of books about the suffragette
detective Nell Bray are about to come out as eBooks.
This
book is unusual in that I have used a murder plot that is probably real. I won’t give it all away, but a historian
mentions a weird series of killings, where people didn’t even know they had
been attacked. It may not be true,
because he wants to illustrate public fear and hysteria during the paranoid
Domitian years – a nicely grim period when the new series is set. I did not
want a teenaged protagonist; I have always addressed adults, been satirical
about sex and politics, felt free to make dark events feature heavily. I think
an investigator needs to have experience, or how can they be any good? And trust
me, Albia is good. As a woman in a man’s
world, she needs to be.
