stuff 'n other stuff

While researching something else entirely I came across the story of the Agapemone, a nineteenth century quasi christian cult in England.

I came across the cult due to the misuse of the laws governing lunacy in England in the mid Victorian period – essentially, after marriage a womans’s property became her husband’s, at which point due to rather lax criteria to establish insanity, the husband could get his wife commited to a lunatic asylum, and then spend her money on whatever he liked, for example his mistress.

In this Victorian cult men were encouraged to marry wealthy women and then pass the money to the religious community, possibly in an age of religiosity with the consent of their wives.

In one case, the Nottidge case, there was an attempt made by family members to have a cult member, Louisa Nottidge, declared insane and hence unable to enter into marriage as her judgement was impaired, and of course allow her brothers to reclaim her money and act as trustees.

Concern about wealth and the control of a married woman’s property were of great concern to Victorians and it has been suggested that the Nottidge case partly inspired Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.

Within the cult, marriages were supposed to be purely spiritual, but clearly weren’t, as a number of children were born to cult members.

As with any cult, there were lurid tales, such as new brides for the cult leader being chosen from women sitting on chairs on a giant ‘lazy susan’ rotating table and ritual public copulation on a billiard table pressed into duty as an altar (the Victorians seem to have had a thing about billiard tables, it was an urban myth of the late nineteenth century that Palmerston, who had something of a reputation as a philanderer, had died from apoplexy after attempting to have sex with a housemaid on a billiard table – the rather more prosaic truth is that he died of pneumonia after catching a severe chill.)

Cults often seem to involve a lot of sexual shenanigans, which always enourages lurid and exagerated stories about going on inside the cult, but strangely cult members seem to have lived together quite happily, and strangely, played large anarchic games of hockey together at a time when the game was little known.

Agapomenites playing hockey (Punch 1850)

Cults are peculiar things and are often dependent on the cult leader’s personality to continue, and often break apart after the leader dies.

In this case the Agapemone cult survived the death of its founder and persisted until 1956, when the last member died.

The cult had been relatively wealthy, and this allowed them to build a substantial communal house in Somerset – and after the cult dissolved the house went through various owners and at one time housed the production studios for the BBC children’s animated programmes Trumpington and Camberwick Green.

And there is a sort of Australian connection to this story as well.

Due to the notoriety of the Agapemone cult in England in the light of the Nottidge case, the Fisherite cult which had grown up around Nunawading, which like the English agapomenites, subscribed to a set of millenarian beliefs, and may have practised polygamy, was described as a ‘colonial Agapomone’ when its leader was sued in court by a man named Rintel for abducting and corrupting a woman who had run away from her husband to join the cult.

members of the Fisherite sect c 1890 (Victorian Collections)

In fact there was no connection between the two cult groups, and the parallels drawn in the court case was an attempt to make the Fisherite cult seem more extreme than it was and present a moral danger to the colony of Victoria

Down at Lake View yesterday, one of the items I documented was an 1867 Britannia sewing machine made in Colchester in England

Britannia machines were extensively advertised at the time

and at a cost of GBP 9 – which works out at around $1700 in today’s money – represented a substantial investment.

Yet people bought them, because prior to then all clothes had to be hand made, either at home or by a professional tailor or seamstress.

And a good seamstress was a well paid job for a woman, and she would likely never be wanting for work.

A sewing machine simplified the making of clothes at home, and at the same time made the mass production of clothes possible, and cheaper. (It has also got to be admitted that also opened up the drudgery of mass production – piece work – literally sewing pieces of fabric together to make a shirt or a dress.)

And of course in rural Australia sewing machines meant that people could make and repair their own clothes rather than having to trek to a larger town or city.

Sewing machines were the first mass produced bits of complex hardware – it is telling that Britannia, and some other sewing machine manufacturers also began to produce safety bicycles, and in the case of Remington, typewriters.

And just as the sewing machine freed women from the drudgery of sewing at home, the bicycle allowed women greater freedom to travel to and from work, while typewriters allowed women to have a ‘respectable’ profession …

In Victoria, there are still quite a few  nineteenth century post boxes around. There’s two common types a cylindrical model with a metal crown on on top and a square design which sometimes has a separate slot for posting newspapers.

There’s one in Port Fairy that is still in use, they’re quite common in older suburbs in Melbourne and we even have a couple of decommissioned ones in Beechworth.

The Port Fairy example is obviously an early model as it is the short door type where the postie had to bend down to get the mail out, while the Beechworth examples are the more common and more ergonomic long door type.

Well, when we were stopping off in Echuca on our mad dash to Lake Tyrell, I spotted another nineteenth century short door type mail box near the Star Hotel on the steamship wharf at Echuca

which was still in use, and has had a bit of titivation with the crown being done in gold paint, but unlike the Port Fairy example, Australia Post haven’t picked out the rim in gold.

As post boxes are heavy lumps of cast iron, I’m going to guess that the box is still in its original location.

This example was made by Dangerfield and Son Ironfounders

who were advertising in the Age in the late 1870s – which is about the right date for post boxes of this design

(Dangerfield and Son advert in the Age 27/07/1878 via Trove)

J had come across some pictures of Lake Tyrell, a salt lake out in Mallee in the west of the state, and thought the landscapes might make a suitable subject for a painting or two.

At the same time I’d been thinking we should take some trips out west to look for some nineteenth century architecture and so on.

So, in a moment of idiocy we decided on a dash to Swan Hill (first reached by paddle steamer from the mouth of the Murray in 1852) and then loop home via Lake Tyrrell.

We totally underestimated the time it would take to do this on the less than wonderful back roads, but, on the other hand we had a good time.

We first drove to Echuca for lunch.

Echuca was another nineteenth century paddle steamer port on the Murray allowing the transport of wheat, wool and passengers to the coast. As I’ve written elsewhere, we tend to neglect the history of paddle steamers in favour of that of the railways in the nineteenth century, but until the railways were laid, paddle steamers were an important means of transport, needing very little in the way of infrastructure, and being shallow draft, could navigate many shallow water courses.

In Victoria and South Australia paddle steamers provided a means of transporting wheat and wool from the interior to the coastal ports for export before the railways arrived.

It’s also why in Victoria we have railway lines snaking across the state to former paddle steamer ports like Swan Hill and Echuca – harvests would be taken by paddle steamer down the Murray to the railhead and then taken by train to Melbourne or Geelong, but had few, if any direct links between these towns.

Anyway, Echuca, when we last visited was a little bit cheesy with paddle steamer trips and a pretend stagecoach giving rides along the river wharf.

While, you can still have a trip on a paddle steamer, the town is now a bit less cheesy with some quite nice restaurants.

On our way out we ate at a vegetarian restaurant near the wharf, and damned good it was to.

From Echuca we drove on to Swan Hill, first reached by paddle steamer, the Lady Augusta, in 1852.

A pleasant town, but not a lot of nineteenth century architecture, but to be fair, we didn’t really have time to explore it fully.

Dinner was at Java Spice, a truly wonderful South East Asian restaurant in a tropical style garden, and blending Indonesian, Thai, Malay and other influences. The restaurant is a little bit outside of the town centre, opposite the big Bunnings hardware store but definitely worth the trip.

The next day it was on to Lake Tyrell, which is a few kilometre north of Sea Lake on the main Bendigo Mildura road.

Huge skies and a strange other worldly aspect with purply pink water and crystallising salt, almost like being on a science fiction film set.

Then down to Wycheproof where the railway line runs down the middle of the street

(wikimedia – public domain)

While there’s no longer a passenger service, grain trains still occasionally rumble down the main street.

We stopped for lunch at the rather good bakery before heading cross country via Boort – where we missed the local community museum by being too early –  and Mitiamo and back to Echuca where we had an an ice cream by the wharf.

From there we retraced our route out via Yarrawonga and Rutherglen where we stopped to pick up some fresh fruit and veg, as well as a pizza base and a bottle of wine before heading home.

It was fun, but a totally mad trip, really too far to drive sensibly in a couple of days, and we really didn’t give ourselves time to look around properly, but it did give us a taster of the Murray Valley’s potential as a destination for a longer trip, perhaps staying in some self catering accommodation for a few days to let J do some plein air landscape painting …

(digitised 1880’s map from The National Library of Scotland)

When I went down an internet rabbit hole about crime and nineteenth century railway carriages, I mentioned that I had come across a report of an incident on the Montrose to Bervie line in 1886.

I was interested in the case because of my family connections to the area, and the use they may have made of the line.

Researching the story was a pain. Britain of course has no equivalent of Trove or PapersPast – you have to pay to search newspaper archives, or more accurately the British Newspaper Archive lets you search for free but you have to pay to download the article.

All I had at the start of the exercise was a name and a rough date, but I managed to find a snippet on the BNA that gave me a firm date for the first newspaper report of the incident.

Fortunately the State Library in Melbourne has a subscription to the Gale Newsvault and I was able to find a copy of the report of the incident from the Dundee Courier

The case was obviously taken seriously by the authorities with the accused being held in jail pending a full trial.

Another Newsvault search and I was able to track down a report of the trial from the Aberdeen Journal.

The accused had opted for a jury trial, which at that time in Scotland meant that the victim had to appear in court and be questioned by the accused’s lawyers. It also meant that the victim’s deposition (formal statement of the crime committed) was read out in open court.

I am purposely not going to give the victim’s name or the name of the farm where she was employed because, as I said, my family come from the area and some families have been in the area for generations.

The deposition is quite graphic with the victim describing how the accused put his hand up her skirt and then tried to wrestle her to the ground. There is also a description of how her clothing was torn and how her knees and body and neck were bruised.

Not nice.

Reading the trial transcript in the paper what struck me was how sensitive the trial judge was. After character witnesses confirmed the victim’s good character he shut down any further attempts to malign the victim.

The accused admitted putting his hand up her skirt but claimed he did nothing else, perhaps hoping that a partial admission of guilt would result in a lighter sentence.

It didn’t. The judge sentenced him to six months hard labour with a warning that if he had been older he would have received a sentence of several years …

Train travel revolutionised life for Victorians.

Suddenly it became possible for people on modest incomes to travel more than they could comfortably walk in a day, and in a shorter time, be it for a school teacher to visit friends and family or for a farm worker to travel in search of a better paying job, or even for an office worker to live out of town.

But train travel also brought its own risks, robbery, murder or sexual assault, and partly the reason lies in the design of trains in Victorian times.

If you’ve travelled by train recently, either or a local or intercity service, the chances are that the train carriage you travelled in was open plan.

You might have travelled in what is called a standard corridor coach in Britain and beloved by heritage railways in the UK – in it seats are arranged in groups of six in little compartments with a sliding door that gives access to a narrow corridor giving you access to the lavatories at the end of the coach, or onto other coaches and perhaps a buffet coach if you are lucky.

As well as their British versions I remember travelling in their big bottle green French equivalents as well as one in Slovenia as late as 2015.

But why would you design a train carriage like that – current open plan designs are so much more sensible.

The answer lies in the design of early train carriages, which evolved from the early stage coach design. Early British, and other, trains consisted of a set of wooden compartments with no access to each other, no toilets or any other modern facilities, and sometimes passengers were locked into their compartments between stations.

This led to a quite understandable fear of being trapped in a compartment with a murderer, a robber or a rapist, with no obvious means of escape.

Victorian newspapers are full of accounts of men being robbed and thrown from a moving train, young boys being assaulted by vicars, and young women being assaulted on trains.

While doing some family history research I came across the story of a young woman suffering an attempted rape on the Montrose to Inverbervie line (unfortunately I havn’t found an open access source for the story), which shows it was a constant risk even on quiet country lines.

This was far from am isolated incident – the newspapers of the time report a depressing number of assaults including the more high profile cases of Catherine Scragg, or that of Valentine Baker’s attack on Kate Dickinson.

By the time of these attacks passengers were no longer routinely locked in their compartments, and there was supposed to be a communication cord to attract the attention of the train conductor – as a deterrent they were completely useless as there was no way a train conductor could render assistance until the train stopped at the next station.

One feature of both the Dickinson and Scragg cases was that they opened the door of the compartment while the train was in motion and stepped out – they were able to do this as most coaches had a running board, as in this picture of a preserved Caledonian railway coach, along the length of the coach as an aid to boarding.

Undoubtedly dangerous, but these women were in fear and desperate to escape. It might even have been possible by hanging on to the door to bang on the window of the next compartment to attract attention and gain some help.

So when you read about women in the nineteenth century routinely using hatpins that could double as a stiletto, or a distinctly vicious looking fruit knife, it wasn’t a joke, there was a very serious reason…

A lot of people tend to assume I have some sort of a degree in computing, life sciences, archaeology or archival studies, history even, and while it’s true to say I’ve spent time working in jobs associated with these fields, my actual degree is in psychology.

Might seem strange, but that’s how it is, and while my psychology years are long behind me I’ve retained an interest in the treatment of the brain damaged and mentally ill in the nineteenth century.

And the nineteenth century is an interesting time, because it saw the first large scale attempts to treat the mentally ill and those with brain injuries, even if, in the case of larger public institutions it was usually a case of “lock’em up and shut’em up”.

Of course it wasn’t all sweetness and light – in England, and other British Empire territories, there was the abuse of the Lunacy Acts to lock up inconvenient and difficult women – even Dickens considered having his wife Catherine locked up in an asylum so that he could have a free and open relationship with his mistress.

At the same time there were institutions such as Sunnyside Hospital in Scotland where there appears to have been a genuine desire to treat the patients rather than simply seclude them from society.

Five or six years before the Crimean war, in the US there was the notable case of Phineas Gage, the railroad worker who survived horrific brain injuries and recovered to the extent he was able to support himself despite some personality changes following the injury.

Today, we would use his case as an example of neural plasticity, but at the time the emphasis was more on the changes in behaviour following his injury.

A few years ago, while researching something else, I came across a report from 1856 in the Scotsman – then the newspaper of the Edinburgh establishment and Scottish gentry – which seemed to suggest that not only were there officers being treated in the Royal Edinburgh Asylum for brain injuries sustained during the Crimean war, but that there might even be an early case of what we might characterise as PTSD.

There is also some evidence from Florence Nighingale’s correspondence that she recognised that soldiers in the Crimea suffered from not just physical trauma, but mental distress as well and that affected their recovery.

Now there has been relatively little work on the occurrence of PTSD like symptoms, or the consequences of brain trauma in nineteenth century conflicts – army medical doctors were perhaps not the most caring, and army medical records are not necessarily complete or accurate – in the case of the lower ranks, there’s a suggestion that some army doctors were creative with their diagnosis to ensure that men discharged on medical grounds – which meant some illness or injury, rather than “malingering”, were discharged in a way that guaranteed them an army pension, however small.

In the case of officers, I’m not sure, but certainly the evidence of the report in the Scotsman suggests that some at least were treated in a mental hospital after their return.

This is something that I always meant to follow up on and investigate further, but never did, until a post on Mastodon alerted me to the Florence Nightingale digitisation project.

The idea behind the project was quite simple.

Over her lifetime, Florence Nightingale wrote thousands of letters, certainly upwards of 3000, and because these letters were from Florence Nightingale, people kept them, and then later generations kept and collected them, meaning that a lot of her letters eventually ended up in libraries and archives.

The idea behind the project was to digitise them and reunite them online making the whole of her correspondence available for research.

The project appears to have started with high hopes and to have excited quite a few institutions as in these posts from Leeds University and Derbyshire records office.

There’s only one problem – the links to the digital archive site are dead. The site certainly existed – the wayback machine shows it was certainly up and running at the end of 2019, but it drops out of the record in early 2022.

Which is a bit annoying.

It looks as if the site simply went away. A quick hunt and click seems to show that most of digitised content is still online via the various host institutions, but what is lost is the ability to search across the corpus of her correspondence.

There seems to be an initiative on the part of the Howard Gottleib Archival Research Centre in Boston to bring the archive back together, but so far, nothing.

So, why do I care?

Well, having started on this dilettante project to investigate mental trauma among the survivors of the Crimean war, I thought a good way would be to look at who she wrote to about mental trauma, and possibly brain injury during the Crimean War period and immediately thereafter, and then follow up on her correspondents – even such information which can be gleaned from family history sites that Dr Someone was working at a mental hospital can be useful.

Unfortunately, at the moment that’s clearly not to be – I’ll have to come up with another line of attack …