the master bedroom at the front of the house.
A few steps later he faltered, stopping so abruptly that Alice almost walked into the back of him. The groan that escaped him should have offered some warning of the scene awaiting her, but when Alice stepped forwards she gasped in horror. Inside the room on a bloodstained mattress, Molly was stretched out on her back, her eyes and mouth gaping. The sinews in her neck were taut, her powdered cheeks etched with the chalky deposits of dried-up tears.
It was Alice who reached the bed first. The emergency drills she had learned as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse assessing casualties during the war years came back to her instantly. She ran her eyes over Molly, methodically checking for vital signs. Half a second later, she turned to the constable, gave a grim shake of her head then hurried past him into the hall.
The door to the small bedroom at the back of the house stood open. Alice hesitated in the doorway for a brief moment, then ran over to the cot by the window, where Molly’s infant son lay. Bracing herself, she leaned over to feel the skin at the back of his neck. Her legs buckled then – it was warm to the touch. Had she been half an hour earlier in rousing the alarm, the deputy coroner for east London later reported to the inquest held in Stepney, the baby boy might have been saved.
The death of Molly and her son was the first in a series of shocking cases that Alice Hudson became involved in, one that marked a turning point in her career, redefining the way she viewed herself and the world around her. When Alice returned to the Royal Free Hospital on Gray’s Inn Road and wrote up her report of the incident, she was unaware of the tangled threads that tied Molly to a case that rocked her above all others: the web of deception that began to unravel months later, on New Year’s Eve, 1921.
The question of the abuse of voluntary hospitals is one of wide knowledge. It has led to the creation of the hospital almoner, and there is a great future in front of her … Students should be between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, and the more knowledge of the world and of general interests that they can bring to their training, which lasts at least eighteen months, the better.
(Pall Mall Gazette, 1915)
By the middle of the afternoon on 31 December 1921, Alice Hudson had ticked off almost all of the duties on her weekend list.
It was three degrees Celsius, the sort of weather that prescribed hot drinks and thick blankets, and the almoner might have spent the day huddled in front of the log fire in the nurses’ home instead of trudging across the icy streets of east London, had it not been for the pile of urgent home visits weighing down the desk of her basement office.
Although December 1921 had been generally mild, Londoners shouldered frequent high winds and gales towards the end of the month. Today, Saturday, there was a cloud of sulphur in the air, the sky stretching over the Thames as grey as the sediment lurking at its depths. Conditions were likely to worsen over the next few hours but, all being well, Alice would be back in her room before dark.
The signs were promising. It was 2.30 p.m. and she was already three calls down, with only one to go.
The almoner took hurried, lopsided steps along the pavement overlooking the river, a briefcase full of patient files bumping against her ankle-length cape. In the distance, the faint blue glow from the lamplighter’s pole twinkled reflectively over the surface of the Thames as he worked his way, much earlier than usual, along Tower Bridge. Several children had walked unwittingly through the vapours into the frozen waters during the last terrible smog. The flickering lights glinting over the water offered at least some degree of reassurance for pedestrians.
Fifty-seven years old and possessed of an unruly beard, portly physique and a loud but undeniable charm, Frank Worthington strode ahead, smoking his ever-present pipe. A newly appointed board member of the Charity Organisation Society, or COS, Frank had shadowed Alice in the last fortnight, apparently to report back to the board on the benefits of the almoners’ work.
Besides arranging financial assistance and practical support for patients in times of crisis, or improving their living conditions so that they were able to benefit from their hospital treatment, Alice was expected to identify those families with the means to make a small contribution, thereby increasing the hospital’s income and justifying the cost of her own salary.
Peering beneath the veneer of the family and making judgements about their financial situation while at the same time maintaining a friendly, trusting relationship was a tricky balancing act for the almoners, however, one that could easily swing out of kilter.
Some families fiercely resented the intrusion of home visits, particularly those that were unannounced. Alice quickly learned to brace herself against the inevitable shock on the faces of her subjects, the rising unpredictability that could beset any unannounced visit, the ever-present possibility of violence.
Not that it always helped to be mentally prepared. On one surprise home visit, Alice was pelted from an upstairs window with some foul-smelling, ominously yellow soggy rags. Another time, she lost her thumbnail in a ferociously slammed door.
According to the almoner’s file on the last family they planned to visit, the Redbournes persistently claimed poverty, but were known to frequent several of the newly opened jazz clubs in the West End. While the question mark over their earnings was a matter that required further investigation, however, it wasn’t the almoner’s biggest concern.
The Redbourne family file was marked with an asterisk; a code to indicate to the team that theirs might be a case that warranted closer inspection.
When Alice’s boss, Bess Campbell, had first visited the family in their small house in Dock Street, she later documented that she had found the children home alone. Mrs Redbourne had staggered back arm-in-arm with one of her neighbours singing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ at the top of her voice while the Lady Almoner conducted a conversation with one of her youngest through the letterbox.
There were five children in the family, three of whom had received treatment in the outpatients department for dysentery. It was a condition feared by parents across the city: the summer diarrhoea of 1911 claimed the lives of 32,000 babies under the age of one, the plethora of flies attracted by horse manure on the streets speeding up the transmission of disease. The Redbournes’ youngest, a boy of around a year old named Henry, had fallen sick with pneumonia soon after recovering from his bout of dysentery. According to the physician who treated him, he had been lucky to survive.
As a porter on the railways, Mr George Redbourne earned a reasonable wage, one that, according to Miss Campbell, should have been sufficient to allow the family to contribute sixpence a week towards the cost of their medical treatment. A typical wage for someone like Mr Redbourne in the early 1920s was around thirty to forty shillings a week (in old money, there were twelve pennies in a shilling, and twenty shillings to a pound).
The Redbournes insisted that the rest of their income, after the eight shillings and sixpence a week they paid out in rent, was swallowed up by tram fares to and from work, payments to elderly parents and other essentials. So far, not a penny of the costs of the family’s treatment had been recouped.
Trouble with nerves prevented Mrs Redbourne from working, or so she claimed, but she was a reluctant interviewee, and her word was not entirely trusted. The margin of the Redbournes’ file was marked with the letters ‘NF’: the almoners’ code for ‘Not Friendly’. It was a practice taught in training, one that forewarned visiting staff to be on their guard.
Across
