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  The Mystery of Sarah Jacob,

  The Welsh Fasting Girl

  Stephen Wade

  Seren is the book imprint of

  Poetry Wales Press Ltd

  Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales

  www.serenbooks.com

  facebook.com/SerenBooks

  Twitter: @SerenBooks

  © Stephen Wade, 2014

  The right of Stephen Wade to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  ISBN 978-1-78172-068-4

  Mobi 978-1-78172-069-1

  Epub 978-1-85411-070-7

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holders.

  The publisher works with the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council

  Printed by the Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

  CONTENTS

  The Problems Love Can Bring

  Introduction

  1. Before the ‘Sensation’

  2. Knowledge Torn Apart: Science and Popular Belief

  3. The Main Attraction

  4. Invasion of the Nurses

  5. A ‘Good’ Celebrity Death

  6. From Court to Prison

  7. So what was wrong with Sarah? The Physician’s View

  8. So what was wrong with Sarah? Hysteria and Collusion

  9. Anorexia, Sarah and Sir William Gull

  10. Her Life After Death: Fasting Girls and Hunger Artists

  11. The Problems Being an 1860s Girl Can Bring…

  12. Conclusions and Theories Abound

  Bibliography and Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  List of Illsutrations

  1. Sarah in her Room

  2. Florence Black, an example of Victorian child starvation

  3. Sunday at Home – ‘A Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading’

  4. Advertisements for the growing number of home remedies

  5. John Griffith – ‘Gohebydd’

  6. Harding Giffard

  7. Giovanni Succi, Hunger Artist

  8. The Jacob family grave at Llanfihangel-ar-Arth

  The Problems Love Can Bring…

  Think of a story that can pull at the heart and at the head: a story with the power to torment with the ambiguities and oppositions of emotions as they make the nets around and between us.

  You can spin such a story like this:

  In February, 2011, a couple in their seventies were arrested and charged with manslaughter. Their daughter, Samantha, aged 40, had died as a result of her very severe form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. For almost eighteen years, Samantha had remained at home, for fear of coming into contact with germs. She had earlier been a law student, but everything she had planned gradually ebbed away as the illness took hold of her whole being, invading every living moment of her days.

  Samantha’s father was 76, and had bone cancer; his wife was a year older and disabled, unable to walk at all. She told the press that everything in the house had to be covered, wrapped, and her husband had to change clothes before going back into the house after going outside. The couple had tried to obtain professional help, as their daughter’s behaviour was obviously a puzzle. The mother plaintively lamented, with a rhetorical question that resonates with the voice of the desperate individual before the law, ‘How could they arrest us? We didn’t kill her – it was the OCD. She was our daughter and we loved her.’

  Medical personnel had called and inspected, then gone away. There was no psychotherapy on offer. All that could really be offered was love. That vague but fortunately ubiquitous commodity has been there in many similar cases, but has often not been enough to reclaim the sufferer back into life. By the time of her death, the young woman was ‘skin and bone’. What was left for her parents was something horrendous added to their grief: the fear of the massive impersonal edifice called the Law.

  These sad tales have been related again and again through history, and for the subject of this book we move back in imagination to 1869, and to rural Carmarthenshire, when there was also love, expressed in the face of profound fear, and inevitably, the apprehension, the pity and the agony of a dying child led to the courtroom and the prison, as well as to the churchyard.

  Or you can spin the story like this:

  In February 2011 the authorities were stunned and perplexed by the ignorance and ineptness of an old couple who allowed their daughter to die. Some might say that, like Shakespeare’s Othello, they loved ‘not wisely but too well’ when they neglected their daughter’s OCD condition to such an extent that they were arrested, facing a charge of manslaughter.

  Their daughter was so obsessed by the thought of infections entering the house that she manically showered for several hours a day, and would not let her aged father, sick with cancer, back into the house without a change of clothes.

  Where were the proper medical carers in her life? How could such family concern and pain lead to such absurd neglect? But this happened today, in Britain.

  Then there was the girl in Carmarthenshire, at a time of great social prosperity, who died in her home, watched by professional nurses, and whose parents were also accused of manslaughter.

  These stories are at the heart of how we read Sarah’s story, known in the reference books as ‘The Welsh Fasting Girl. .But there is one further complication. Her life on earth was at a time in the past, which as we all know, is a foreign country and they ‘do things differently there’. But perhaps the bonds of family love are made and secured differently, and even more powerful, maybe some of them are made in silence, in the dark, unknown, and only seen when they go wrong.

  Introduction

  In the mid 1860s it seemed that there was a weight of troubles and anxieties over Britain; Prince Albert’s death in 1861 had, to some minds, been a harbinger of crises to come, and much of this was related to the lives of individuals in the society that had seen the results of the first wild rush of technology and innovation we think of as the Industrial Revolution. This, in turn, had created and fuelled an empire, generating new urban centres to house the new industries and their influx of immigrant workers. Consequently, these developments spawned multiple problems for the individuals caught up in the relentless progress of history.

  Industrial society gave rise to a number of health issues, both in personal lives and in public health. By 1863, it was estimated that almost 6,000 women were known to the police in London as prostitutes; the Contagious Diseases Act of the following year made physical inspections of the ‘ladies of the night’ working in garrison towns compulsory. This was just one small aspect of what became a growing debate about the lives of women in this decade, in which Victorian prosperity and confidence was really beginning to show its casualties. John Stuart Mill’s speech in 1867 on the need for women to be given the vote highlighted exactly how much the mothers of the land were left out of the rewards of enterprise and power.

  Women were not included in this brave new world of business. Yet there was one profession of these middle years of the Victorian period in which they were to be prominent: that of nursing. That factor figures in the following story; by the mid 1860s nursing had been taken seriously, and training for the job was beginning to be developed and regulated. It rose in profile, one might say with a tinge of realism, because it was still mediated as a woman’s business, but nevertheless, it gathered esteem and respect. It was not only working women who were subject t
o the causes of severe ill-health at the time. There were plenty of more wealthy women needing attention and help: as Richard Altick noted in his survey of Victorian people in 1974, ‘An unnaturally sheltered and restricted existence the middle class girl and woman led… little wonder that neurasthenia was as prevalent as the personal records of the period reveal it to have been.’

  The society that had accelerated change and improvement in all quarters had taken some notice of the impact on public health in the 1850s, notably after the Crimean War and with Florence Nightingale’s dissemination of the frightful shortcomings of medicine as applied en masse. Between 1855 and 1867 there were seven large-scale new hospitals built, including the Royal Hospital for Incurables of 1854 and the National Hospital for Diseases of the Heart in 1857. In terms of the problems of public health generally, emphasis was at first very much on urban locations. In 1848 the Public Health Act made provision for local boards of health to be created and medical officers of health were appointed. The infamous ‘Great Stink’ on the Thames in 1858, created by the vast quantities of human waste in the city’s effluence, made the authorities aware of the need to create modern sewage systems: the ever-present fear of cholera was one strong factor behind these measures.

  Therefore, if we survey the land around 1860 across Victoria’s domain, we find that the new towns and cities were where the problems created by the surging population and its ensuing dilemmas were most clearly seen. But what about the rural areas? Britain was still very much an agricultural country. Not until the 1870s did the acreage of tillage begin to decline, falling from 9.6 million acres in 1872 to 6.5 million acres by 1913. In human terms, the people in the more remote rural areas of the country were left out of major elements of ‘progress’ – many regions still very much embedded in conservative beliefs, untouched by modernity, as Thomas Hardy shows in Tess of the D’Urbervilles in which the coming of the machines and the new breed of entrepreneurs come head to head with a rural network of communities which had been essentially unchanged in moral and spiritual belief for centuries. Even such an impact as non-conformity had hardly touched fundamental beliefs and traditions around farming families.

  But the 1860s was to bring all kinds of oppositions into conflict. One of the fundamental ones was the confrontation of science with the beliefs which had sustained and comforted common people for centuries. At the very heart of this was the medical profession, because the medical man of the community – in whatever capacity – had always been a valued and familiar personage; newcomers may have been well qualified but they were not endowed with that necessary esteem, acting as a general practitioner in all but name. The essential commodity the medical men provided was trust, and outsiders were poorly regarded, as Wilkie Collins illustrates in The Moonstone (1868) referring to a Mr Ezra Jennings: ‘Nobody knew much about him in our parts. He had been engaged by Mr Candy, under rather peculiar circumstances and… we none of us liked or trusted him. There were other doctors at Frizinghall but they were strangers to our house…’ The local medical man could be, until the regulation of the profession by the 1858 Medical Registration Act, a general practitioner whatever their expertise. At that time it was discovered that only one in three of practitioners had any proper formal qualifications.

  Across the land, then, in the 1860s, it was common for people with any ailment to consult anyone and everyone – often to save costs – and to stick to traditional cures and locally trusted ‘wise’ or ‘cunning’ folk with their herbs, potions and rituals. The understanding of illness was still so basic, and medical theory still so muddled and contradictory, that in this decade, when the government was streamlining administration of a great empire and regulating life in cities, the story of an illness attained the level of a ‘mystery’ and in a sense perplexed many of the doctors who passed comment.

  The focus of the story shifts from the big picture to a hamlet in Wales, not far from Pencader, where the new railway line was about to bring travellers and tourists to South Wales; in fact, by 1869 it would carry them in droves to see a literally ‘wonderful’ sight in a Welsh long house. Wonder means ‘awe’ – something inexplicable and astounding. In 1771, Dr Johnson’s fourth edition of his great dictionary had defined it as ‘to be pleased or surprised so as to be astonished’. The Victorians in this story revelled in astonishment.

  For several months in 1869, Sarah Jacob, a little girl from rural Carmarthenshire, gave the world a story that filled the front pages. Britain and its empire were like a machine at full throttle: the Widow of Windsor communicated a heady mix of gravitas and power, and her captains of industry were as zealous as her military leaders in their pursuit of success and wealth. At the very core of this was the total commitment to the dominance of knowledge. A decade earlier, Charles Darwin had shown what applied scientific method and curiosity could achieve, and the medical men were doing the same. Knowledge of the human body, the microcosm reflecting the vast macrocosm in the heavens, was becoming a subject that generated medical expertise. It had become clear just how important knowledge of biology and hygiene were; the British Medical Council had been created. The familiar world of ‘wise men’ and astrologers, quacks and ‘cunning folk’ must have seemed, to the literate and well educated classes opening their copy of The Times over breakfast, virtually medieval, far removed from their certainty that eventually science would conquer all man’s ills.

  But then came the story of a twelve-year-old girl in the far reaches of Wales whose condition apparently demolished the comfortable realms of medical confidence daily demonstrated in the professional publications. Knowledge in general, and science in particular, appeared to have an answer to all problems, but here was a peasant girl, apparently living ‘on air’. But then, older folk could recall that there had been ‘fasting girls’ before and the seeds of doubt were sown. Those attitudes of common sense and a natural scepticism were set within the particular context of life and belief in rural Wales at the time. Research into the work and status of the ‘wise man’ or dyn hysbys of the time, such as the Harries family of Cwrt-y-Cadno has shown that it was quite normal for men with legitimate medical qualifications to practice as spiritualists, astrologers and herbalists within the spectrum of fringe medicine and folk cures of the mid Victorian years.

  The mystery of fasting is largely a medical one, with its roots in hysteria as it had been understood and treated since the late eighteenth century, mixed with the complex sources of self-starvation. The word ‘anorexy’ had been used in English since Tudor times, and there had long been the notion of anorexia as practised by saintly women in the fasting regimes of Medieval religious life. This adds confusion to the subject, because it was ‘anorexia mirabilis’ and in the ranks of the historians and men of the church, it would be a familiar feature of their reading and studies. It would also be familiar to general readers in an age of massive expansion of popular production of religious tracts and sermons for the young on the lives of saints. The fact that Sir William Gull, physician to the Queen, became an acknowledged expert on cases we would now confidently call anorexia, studying and treating the illness at the very same time that Sarah Jacob was attracting national attention, has to be considered because the contrast is very significant: the famous doctor’s patients received personal attention and a holistic approach to treatment as was possible. Sarah, on the other hand, was totally isolated until the nurses arrived in her last days. But there is also a narrative that has to focus on the lines of medical thought which existed to counteract the view of hysteria as the sole cause of the illness of wilful emaciation.

  Then there is the legal element. My account of the story will include an assessment of the reasons why, in the context of manslaughter and the contemporary debate on the reform of homicide law, the case of Reg. v Jacob and Jacob never became a leading case in common law. The reasons have recently been examined by Richard Ireland, in his research into the process of legal action taken at the time of the Jacobs’ prosecution.

  Beneath a
ll the legal and medical arguments and theories there remains the fact that the story of Sarah Jacob is, and always will be, one of a Welsh girl in a farming family at Lletherneuadd who attained a position of power within the family dynamic to such an extent that her parents appear, in all records and sources, to have left her alone, separated her from the daily round of work after she first became ill in 1867. She became a focus for ritual, colour, celebration; she was bedecked like a Bride of Christ and allowed to read in both Welsh and English. She wrote poems in Welsh, obviously an aspect of her general high regard for literacy and her love of literature which appears to have given her some consolation. With this in mind, my narrative will always include an awareness that the ‘people story’ will dominate the ‘paper story’ beloved of historians, with their fine respect for archival sources. In other words, it has always been so easy to lose sight of the family life beneath all the media hype of the time. The fact that we know this family life only in fragments, in hints and moments of insight, only adds to the mystery.

  Finally, this book develops and suggests a theory: that ostensibly explains the wasting illness Sarah had: I have gathered material which will urge readers to look again, and if I achieve that, then I have succeeded. A theory in an historical work is there to supply a process of reasoning that could solve a riddle – even one of so long ago. The trajectory of Sarah’s illness and the observed manifestations of her physiological symptoms and behaviour relate to the line of thought I suggest: I can say no more than that. I believe that my reasoning is grounded in common sense, with no sensational headlines to compare with the ‘Napoleon died of arsenic in the wallpaper’ kind. Yet, in a strange way, the story tempts one to speculate on reasons and causes, and it is hard to resist some of this discussion.

  1

  Before the ‘Sensation’

  From his brimstone bed at break of day