Warning: contains references to child murder
Detective Caminada didn’t investigate many murders during his thirty-year-long career in the Manchester City Police. He wrote about two desperately sad cases in his memoirs, to which he gave rather unemotional titles. The first was ‘Serious Charge with a Strange Ending’ followed by another ‘Serious Charge, with a Different Ending.’ There are, however, some similarities between these two cases and I’ve been investigating the tragic history of the victims, as well as looking into how Caminada managed to track down their alleged killers.
On the August Bank Holiday weekend in 1893, three young brothers were picking blackberries in the woods at Dark Hole Clough – not to be confused with Boggart Hole Clough – in Blackley, north Manchester, when they made a horrific discovery. It had started raining and the boys took shelter under some trees when the eldest, aged twelve, spotted what he thought was a red flower. He took a closer look and found that it was a parcel wrapped in brown paper. When he poked it with a stick, the paper tore to reveal a child’s cap. Inside the package was the body of a baby boy.
The post-mortem examination revealed that the child had been dead between four to six days. He was generally healthy and death was due to asphyxia, probably due to convulsions. As it was almost impossible to identify babies in these circumstances due to the absence of any forensic science, the coroner ruled a verdict of death by natural causes and the unnamed child was buried.
The matter would have ended there, but for the keen eye of a hotel landlady who read the short report in the local press. The incident reminded her of a lodger, known as Mrs Allen, who had stayed with her during the birth of her child the previous month. Her suspicions aroused, the landlady contacted the police, and Detective Caminada set out to find the child’s mother.
Caminada’s first action was to verify the identity of the child. He brought the landlady to the police station and showed her the baby’s clothing. She confirmed that it had belonged to the mysterious Mrs Allen’s baby. As luck would have it, at the same time, a woman had filed a report on a missing person – her stepdaughter Elizabeth Ann Remington, aged twenty-five. She had been in domestic service but had disappeared in May 1893. Elizabeth had told her family and her fiancé that she was visiting a cousin in Morecambe, but she had never turned up. The family couldn’t trace her and so went to the police. While Detective Caminada and his colleagues were trying to find Elizabeth Remington, she turned up at her stepmother’s house in Burnley. The police then took the hotel landlady to Burnley to identify Elizabeth as the missing Mrs Allen, after which Caminada arrested her and took her back to Manchester. In custody, she gave a full statement as to what had happened.
Elizabeth Remington explained that she had had an affair with her employer Ashworth Read and had fallen pregnant. When it became obvious, he moved her away from the house in Burnley to Manchester where she lodged in the hotel. After the birth of the child, whom she referred to as ‘Mick’, the couple met secretly on a regular basis. One day, they took a tram to Cheetham Hill with the baby and walked to the woods at Blackley. Elizabeth described how Ashworth soaked a handkerchief in water and put it over the child’s mouth. Then he wrapped the body in brown paper and left it. Ashworth Read told Elizabeth that she should never mention what had happened as he would never be able to hold up his head in town again. I wanted to find out more about Elizabeth and Ashworth to discover the reasons for his taking such drastic actions which led to the child’s death.
I began with Elizabeth and soon found some information about her early life through family history records. She was born in 1868 in Kirkby Lonsdale, Lancashire. Her father was a joiner and she had at least one older sibling, a brother. In 1884, when Elizabeth was sixteen, her mother died and, three years later, her father married Frances Maria Riches. At the trial, Frances described how her stepdaughter had joined the Read family in 1889 as a general servant. Her father had died the following year. I checked the 1891 census and there was Elizabeth, living with Ashworth Read, his wife and children in Burnley. So, Ashworth was married and this was the first reason why he wanted to keep his illegitimate baby quiet.
Ashworth Read was quite different to Elizabeth. Firstly, he was much older at the age of forty-seven. His father was a grocer, and throughout Ashworth’s childhood, the family’s prospects had grown. By the early 1860s, his father had become a cotton manufacturer employing 156 workers. In 1878, Ashworth, who was a cotton waste dealer, married Sarah Sutcliffe. They had four children who, by the time of the 1891 census, were aged between two and ten years old. Not only was Ashworth compromised by baby Mick, due to his being married, but he was also a well-respected businessman in Manchester and had many connections through the Exchange.
After Elizabeth made her statement to Detective Caminada, he arrested Read, who had nothing to say to the charge of murder. Caminada then set about to collect the evidence and he soon found some witnesses who had seen the couple meeting in Angel Meadow, in central Manchester, as well as a tram guard who recognised them from having travelled together to Blackley. The guard identified both the prisoners and stated that they had caught his tram back to the city later that day, but this time without the baby. Caminada also managed to procure some paper from Read’s mill which looked the same as that used to wrap the child’s body in. They even exhumed the infant so that they could check whether it was a match.
The trial took place in November 1893, and it seemed as if the police had enough evidence to seal the case. However, the medical evidence was not strong enough to convince the jury that the child had died at one of his parents’ hands rather than of natural causes, and both defendants were acquitted. Obviously, Elizabeth’s rather damning statement was not enough. I can’t imagine how she must have felt after losing her child in this devastating way, and then being hauled up before the judge. I was interested to know what happened to her after the trial, but so far I haven’t been able to discover any trace of her. As for Ashworth Read, he went back to work, although he received a rather hostile reception back at the Exchange when he tried to carry on his business practices. Ashworth’s wife, Sarah, stuck by him and they eventually moved to Suffolk, where he opened a greengrocer’s. He died in 1932 at the age of eighty-six. Three years after this heartrending case, Detective Caminada faced the other similar crime, but with a rather different outcome.
You can read about the second infanticide case investigated by Detective Caminada in The Confidential Files later this week. His own recollections of both cases are also included in The Adventures of Detective Caminada.
