THE MURDER OF RICHARD GIBSON.
ON the 30th ult. Jane Smith, a lodginghouse-keeper of Yarmouth, was tried in Norwich " for feloniously slay- ing " Martha Turner, a weak-minded girl in her service. It was proved that the poor girl had been treated with atrocious cruelty, beaten repeatedly with a riding-whip, frightened with threats of transportation, and worked to death, but the legal case rested chiefly upon another point in the charge. Mrs. Smith as mistress was bound to provide her servant with food and lodging good enough to sustain life, and she did not do it. Martha Turner was left to sleep on damp bricks thinly covered with a straw mattress, and so deliberately kept without food that on one occasion she had nothing for three days, begged morsels from the butcher, ate offal and fish-gills, swept crumbs from the floor, and at last died of a disease caused by hunger and exposure to the damp. The jury found her mistress guilty, and but for a legal point as to the obligation to maintain a servant after the contract had expired, she would by this time have been sentenced to a long term of penal servitude. There was no want of means, the mistress and another servant being well-fed, while Martha Turner was dying of want ; but the case in itself, horrible as it is, would call for little remark, such cruelty being as exceptional as the weak-minded terror which induced a healthy girl to submit to it even for a week. We have noticed it here because of its singular bearing upon a tragedy of equally recent occurrence and of far greater public importance. On the 9th of July last year a man named Richard Gibson, only forty years of age, but not healthy, was admitted into St. Giles's Workhouse, where he had often been before. It was found in October that he was suffering from scurvy, and he was removed from the regular wards to the infirmary, which it appears is not a hospital with clean beds, attentive nurses, and skilled attendance, but a cellar, with eighteen iron beds in it, so dark that a window had to be taken out before the jury could see the body, and so crowded that when full each patient has only 500 feet of air laden with stench and the exhalations of the sick. There is no convenience of any kind which can be used by a patient unable to move beyond the room, there are two nurses, who, as was proved in evidence, sell dinners to the patients, but never report the starvation which induces those patients to purchase, and there are two doctors, neither of whom have ever protested against the use of the " ward." In a corner of this pesti- ferous hole, utterly unfit for the sick and choked with the miasma of human ordure, the wretched man was laid down on the 27th of October, and there till the 8th of February, three entire months, he lay slowly rotting to death. During the whole time he was never attended by either doctor, the senior stating he never heard of him, and the assistant pass- ing his bed every day without, as the post-mortem showed, ever seeing him so much as cleaned. On that day he managed to give twopence, obtained from a niece who came to dress his sores, to a fellow pauper to attend on him, cut his hair, and make him a little clean. This man, Felix John Magee, had not yet been starved by the workhouse authorities into helpless acquiescence in torture, perhaps because he was Irish, and he used the twopence to buy the means of writing a letter to Sir Thomas Henry, the chief magistrate. That letter we give entire, merely premisin.b that it seems to us, after a careful perusal of six or seven columns of the verbatim report published in The West End News, a moderate and indeed under-toned statement of the bare facts of the case :- " SIR, —I wish to bring under your notice the case of a pauper named Richard Gibson, at present an inmate of St. Giles's Work- honse, 47 Ward. His disease is scurvy, and through weakness he hasJ been unable to wait on himself, and therefore has been in- my neglected. On Sunday morning he asked me to wash his face, and he would give me twopence. I took it, for it enabled m to write. I washed him, and such a sight of suffering may I ne er see again. He was covered from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet with scabs and sores. He had sores on the back, and his legs are iu a shocking state from neglect. I have never seen them dressed since I have been in the ward, and I can say on oath that they have not, and so will others. The bed he has on has not been made for five nights. It is an iron bedstead, with wood laths for the bottom, with no mattress, in a dark corner of this underground ward, and it is only through part of the day that you can discern his features. On Sunday when I washed him 1 ,took out of his head a half-pint of scabs. His hair is unusually long, and was matted from constantly lying in bed, and his hands were as it were enamelled with his own soil. It was an eighth of an inch thick on the palm of his band and fingers, for I see no night-stool and bed-pan in this ward. Sir, I hope you will send an officer as soon as you can, for should he die the ends of justice would be evaded. If the officer keeps the object of his visit a secret I will be able to get the under nurse and helper to own to it themselves. He is now delirious, and cannot last long, and if he dies the proof of guilt will be removed.—I remain, your obedient servant, FELIX JOHN MAGEE."
We are almost ashamed to reprint a document so horrible in its plainness, but there are occasions on which one must re- press one's taste as an inhuman impulse. The magistrate immediately sent a warrant officer to the workhouse who saw Gibson, and testified in the coroner's court with generous vehemence to the accuracy of Magee's description, which in- deed was patent to the jury as they gazed at the body. His- visit created a consternation ; a magistrate with a handle to his name interfering to see that a pauper was kept alive! it. was indecent, but still inquiries were unpleasant things and Gibson was carried away to an upper and better-ventilated ward. Even then he was not cleaned, for he died in the state described by the surgeon deputed to make the post- mortem examination. " The hair," testifies that gentleman,. Mr. J. S. Beale " of the head was matted throughout, and. swarming with vermin, the nostrils closed up with filth, the beard one mass of filth and vermin, also swarming over the face, chest, and neck. The whole surface of the body was dirt-stained, scabby, and covered with vermin." The man in fact, though afflicted with a disease which of all others demands cleanliness for its cure, had been allowed by the workhouse officials—master, nurse, and doctor—to die for three months slowly of rottenness in a corner of a dark cellar on. a mattress which gave him sores. It was attempted at the inquest to prove that Gibson was very dirty, which, as he could not move without help, is exceedingly probable, and that he disliked being cleaned or shaved, but it is certain that he paid money to have it done, that Magee, a fellow- pauper, did it for him, and that it was not done even when on the surgeon's statement he was carried upstairs " too weak to resist." We utterly disbelieve in his reluctance, except so far as it was the peevish expression of the hopeless- ness of a dying man, but granting that it existed, what then? There was not a wish the poor wretch could have formed on earth which these people would not have summarily overruled, but this one to die of dirt it seems they felt themselves obliged to concede, compelled to allow, though every day they fling the casual poor, who would rather be moderately dirty than take trouble, against their will into baths. The defence is simply an afterthought, and the whole evidence proves to a demonstration that in the middle of London, in one of its largest workhouses, there is an under- ground hospital in which a pauper may be left to rot slowly through three long months to death, and no one paid by the establishment will interfere, and every one will on inquiry defend the system and his or her own procedure with a cyni- cism worse even than the neglect itself.
Now we want to know where is the difference between the moral obligation enforced so rigidly and so justly against Mrs. Smith and the one which ought to press upon these workhouse officials, and more especially upon the master ? That person stands practically in the exact relation to sickly paupers which Mrs. Smith held towards the weak-minded girl she starved, and why should not the duties of the position be equally recognized by law ? Martha Turner begged scraps of food about to be given to the dogs to supply her ravenous hunger, and Gibson gave the nurse pennies to get enough to eat. Martha Turner was kept on one occasion three days without food. Gibson, though dying of an exhausting disease, was so kept for sixteen hours every day for the three months he lingered. Nothing was ever given him from four in the evening to eight next day, there was no night nurse, and his niece brought him rags because those supplied by the work- house were "like canvass." His wounds were never dressed, there were not in the house specially set apart and organized to relieve the suffering of the poor even dogs to lick the sores of an English Lazarus. And when the man is dead, killed by a neglect which we do not know how to distinguish from wilfulness, a jury meets, forces out a window to see the spot where he lay, returns a verdict of death " accelerated by parochial neglect "—accelerated ! the man was forty, and had only scurvy—and—that is all; Nothing further will be done in the matter, the master, on whom, say the official witnesses, " rests the whole responsi- bility," will not even be tried, the beds in the cellar will be filled again with other poor wretches in need of good ventilas ton the witnesses who told the truth will be harassed, the witnesses who 'testified to the perfection of all workhouse errangemenfis will be petted, and everybody will be happy till some other pauper chooses with the spitefulness natural to paupers to die of neglect and vermin. And then we are told with pitying surprise that poor men are unreasonable, that they will rather starve than enter a workhouse where everything is provided, and members of Parliament talk with horror of the sufferings of Irish peasants who, if they starve, at least starve in a but which is not a latrine, and with sympathizing faces round them.
We are tired of suggesting preventives against crimes like this, but we have one question to ask. There are at least thirty members of Parliament who can be trusted to talk by the hour on any question of foreign policy, or injury done to the country by a relaxation of the game laws, or Irish grievances, or the state of Hamilton Place. Is there not one who will make it his business to keep his eye on such cases as these, to state them to the House, to make Mr. Villiers feel that a murder of this kind is a bore to him, to coerce the -department into severity towards its underlings by sheer weariness of the Parliamentary consequences which will follow indifference ? It is the business, we know, of a metropolitan member, but who expects a metropolitan member to do any business except conciliate vestries, and make imbecile speeches about the virtues and rights of the " people " who pay rates, and are consequently not put to rot in cellars 2 The field is perfectly open, the member who takes up the cause can obtain information just as readily as we can, and if he is once known to have taken it up, such masses of facts will flow in on him as will, if they do not first break his heart, make him master of the department. And when he is, let it be his first task to see that the obligation we enforce so carefully against the employers of the poor shall also be enforced against the men whom we in mockery call their " guardians."
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