Happenstance in research
In February 2019, while revising the manuscript of my book Rummage, I bought a letter from eBay. It attracted my attention because it was listed as:
1816 Two Penny Post unpaid Gerrard Street turned & reused London Letter *W BATTINE
I was looking for documents showing material reuse, so this ‘turned and reused’ letter was an obvious candidate.
As you can see below, the letter starts midway through a sentence which ends (rather intriguingly), ‘which is in fact no more than Prostitution’. There follows a signature, W[illia]m Battine. William Battine was the Chancellor of the Diocese of Lincoln at the time. This partial fragment appears to have been written before the rest of the document. There are two notes on the letter. The first, written in pencil by the Deputy Registrar at Lincoln, John Fardell, on 9 May 1816, requests Battine’s legal opinion on a case:
One of the surrogates has sent me this case and I have to request the favour of your opinion upon it in the course of the early part of next week as I am then going out for the Visitation
Battine’s response, written two days later on 11 May above the pencilled note from Fardell, reads:
I presume this question is from you as Registrar. Therefore I have sent you the law upon the subject. To a Party I could not give an opinion as char-acter
The reverse side of this letter had two addresses, suggesting that it was first used as a wrapper for a letter sent to Fardell, and later sent through the post to Battine (by Fardell).
In the end, I didn’t use the letter for Rummage and instead squirreled it away with all my other paper ephemera. Wheel forward a few months to summer 2019, and I was working on my next book, Penning Poison (Oxford University Press, 2023). Using documents in Worcester Archives, I identified a William Battine as the likely author of an anonymous letter sent to Peggy, the Countess of Coventry, perhaps in 1815. The name Battine rang no bells with me – I had forgotten about this turned and reused letter. It had disappeared quickly into the heaps of original material I worked on for Rummage.
Here is a transcript of the anonymous letter received by Peggy:
Hon[ourable] Madam
Knowing you are acquainted with the gaiety of your husband, & I also knowing his generous liberality and ways—I lament to see him imposed on, as I did the other day when I witnessed that Seafaring Gentleman (who I have often seen with his Lordship) being with her [the Earl’s mistress] an hour before his Lordship came—but this has not been the first time—I will let your ladyship know more for I am sure he is as well with her as your own husband.
A well wisher
Directed to The Countess of Coventry, Piccadilly
April the 22nd
On the reverse, in Countess’s hand, is a filing note describing it as a letter to ‘exact pecuniary sacrifices’. In other words, the Countess regarded it as blackmail or extortion.
The Countess, Peggy, was the wife of George William, the 7th Earl of Coventry, who had been blind since a hunting accident in 1780. The Earl was believed to be the father of an illegitimate child, William. William was the son of Mary Kitching, a servant in the Battine household. For the blind Earl to be able to arrange and conduct the sexual affairs hinted at in the letters he would have needed help, especially to keep it secret. Some of that assistance appears to have been supplied by Dr Battine, a ‘very learned but eccentric man’. Battine was a Fellow of the College of Doctors of Law; a Fellow of the Royal Society; Chancellor of the Diocese of Lincoln; the Advocate-General in the High Court of Admiralty; and other things. Battine had been the lead barrister of the late Lord Ellenborough, who had promoted him to various sinecures. Solicitor’s bills from 1815 reveal that Battine and the Earl of Coventry had been indicted for
a conspiracy to effect and effecting the seduction of Doctor Battine’s servant Mary Ann Kitching and she having in consequence thereof pretended to be with child by my Lord Coventry and having threatened to filiate the same upon his lordship.
The anonymous letter, which I propose was probably written by Battine in 1815. implies that the Earl might not actually be the father of Mary’s child. It hints at a deeper secret – you will have to buy Penning Poison to find out what that was!
Anyway, one day during lockdown in 2020, while rummaging through my jumbled bits and bobs of ephemera, trying to make them fit a rudimentary cataloguing system, I read the eBay letter purchased the year before. With a sudden uncanny jolt, I spotted the name ‘Battine’. Through pure happenstance, I had bought a letter written by the most likely suspect in a case in Penning Poison.
Sadly, the eBay letter does not help with the identification of the anonymous letter, because Peggy appears not to have kept the original. Instead – quite deliciously, given my interest in reused paper – Peggy had rewritten the letter on a scrap of paper. Previously this scrap had been used as the wrapper for a letter addressed to her daughter, Augusta.
Although the 1816 letter is partial and does not add anything to the investigation of Battine as the writer of the subtle blackmail to the Countess from 1815, there was something enjoyable and strange about finding this tangling of the different strands of my research: reused paper; recycled letters; familiar names. It reminds me of the role that happenstance sometimes plays in historical research. It also speaks to me of the importance of regularly returning to the primary sources. Details can emerge which had not seemed prominent first time around, when less of the story was uncovered. It is like opening a curtain in one room, and the day lighting the corner of another.
Godfrey Russell Vick letter, 1939
Written on a prepaid letter card, these words were sent to Godfrey Russell Vick, KC c/o the Old Bailey, where he had recently passed judgement on a man for carrying out a burglary during a blackout. The letter was forwarded to Russell Vick’s chambers. The postal mark furthest left shows that the letter was posted in Chiswick, on the evening of 29 September 1939. Written in inked capitals, the letter opens, ‘your words when sentencing a man to 5 years penal servitude was filthy, stinking, hypocrisy, you welcome crime to live, and make crime by supporting capitalism’. Reports had appeared in the newspapers that day, when Russell Vick sentenced Septimus Mills to five years for breaking into a property.
Mills, under various aliases, had many convictions going back to 1891 when he stole a pair of trousers belonging to a fellow trainee sailor, and he was often described as having no fixed abode. When Septimus was six years old, his mother died giving birth to a younger brother. Prison records flesh out our picture of Mills – we know he had various tattoos, including ‘clasped hands’ and one of a ship, he was just over five foot tall, by 1939 his brown hair was turning grey. His case was covered by newspapers across the country. Russell Vick told Mills ‘There is no doubt that you used the black-out for the purpose of carrying out crime and as far as I am concerned I am determined that it should be widely known by all the criminal classes that the punishment that will be given by courts for offences committed during such a time in this country will be very heavy’.
The letter was either written by someone who held Marxist or socialist views, or by someone pretending to. The letter continued, ‘you are like the late shrivelled ‘avory’ rat who left £163,000’. Here, the author is likening Russell Vick to Sir Horace Avory, a judge who appears in Penning Poison. In his summing up, Avory heavily steered the jury to acquit Edith Swan of writing poison pen letters in Littlehampton in 1923, he could not square such behaviour with the seemingly respectable woman in front of him. The jury thought differently, Swan was found guilty. Avory had previously been involved in the notorious prosecution of Adolf Beck in 1896, a man wrongly convicted of a crime through mistaken identity. The comment about Avory’s legacy suggest that our anonymous letter was especially scornful of judges who became rich from legal cases. Continuing this commentary, the author continued with a vein of antisemitism, ‘you scum make crime to derive a living, may england lose this war and hitler crush the jewish and english capitalism god damn you! you human ‘bug’ heil hitler! up! stalin!! may england get hers … the lower orders are no longer blind’. The final line, written up the left side of the letter, suggests that the writer thinks she or he is writing on behalf of a wider group – or the entire working class.
Mills’s sentence was later reduced on appeal to two years with hard labour, but he committed further crimes, and died in Wandsworth Prison, aged 69 before the end of the war. For me, the most peculiar aspect of this story is the fact that Russell Vick held onto this letter, most letters like this were destroyed.