In Victorian times ratepayers had to pay for maintaining the inmates in the local union workhouse. They had every incentive to save money by avoiding this, so magistrates, invariably ratepayers themselves, would “remove” those in need of assistance, and not entitled to live in the parish, to their home parish, whether they were already in the workhouse or not.
An additional reason for taking someone out of the workhouse would be overruling husbands who denied that the wife’s child was their own. The following detailed account, taken from newspapers and a few records, is such a case, although much is hard to follow.
The 12 March 1850 issue of The Sussex Advertiser presents much of the evidence before the three magistrates by witnesses verbatim, in Hannah Player v Henry John Player. She deposed:
I am the wife of the defendant. I was married to him at Brenchley [Kent], on the 3rd Dec., 1843. I lived with him from that time till about two years ago last September. I was then forced to go home again. I went back to Brenchley. In consequence of a communication I received from my husband, I came back to St Leonards and found all the household goods sold. He admitted having sold the things. I lodged one night at the Horse and Groom. He next morning hurried me off again. I afterwards went to Tonbridge Wells to keep my sister’s house during her temporary absence. I had 7s a week from the defendant, at which time I kept my child. He took my child away from me in August last. At his desire I left Tonbridge Wells for Brenchley. I saw him at St Leonards in December, 1848, or January 1849. On the 19th February 1849 I received a letter from my husband’s master, in which he promised to remit me my monthly allowance by post, as Player was determined that we should live apart. He promised this on condition that I should not return to St Leonards. I never saw my husband afterwards until this case was brought forward. I gave birth to a child when living with my brother-in-law at Tonbridge Wells.
Mr Langham, on behalf of Player, cross-examined her. She said, I believe my husband received £1 a week from his master, Mr Adams, then living at 16, Marina. I do not know that he only received 14s a week after his master’s death. She was asked, is the defendant the father of the child which was born at Tonbridge Wells ? She answered, Yes, he is. Langham than asked if it was not true that she had stated to Mr Sopworth, registrar of births and deaths at Tunbridge Wells, “that my husband was not the father of the child, but that it belonged to a gardener named Clout ?” She denied this, and also that she had told her brother in law that Clout was the father. She said that Clout was the bailiff at a farm adjoining her father’s house. “I never told my husband anything about my condition, because I had been forbidden to hold any correspondence with him whatever.”
Langham then addressed the magistrates on the Bench. He pointed out contradictions. The defendant was groom to Mrs Adams, living at the Marina, and had been in service there for four years, and was respectable. A court case from 1830 showed that if a married woman committed adultery while separated then the husband did not have to support his wife.
The Tunbridge Wells Registrar, Henry Lintsele Sopworth, deposed that “Mrs Player told me, when she came to register her child’s birth, that the father of the child lived at Matfield, that his name was Clout, and that she had been living away from her husband for twelve months. I told her she had placed herself in a very awkward position, and that she had better go to the real father of the child, and do the best she could with him. I registered the child as illegitimate, and according to the usual custom, left the father’s name out entirely.” He then produced the registry volume, whereupon there was a touch of farce. Mr Baker, the prosecuting attorney, asked to look at the book. Sopworth replied, I can show you it, but it must not pass from my hands. Baker replied, “Do you take me for a thief ?’ Sopworth pointed out, “It is according to the order of the Registrar General.” He was persuaded to hand it over to the Mayor as they were in a law court.
Player had been employed as a groom for four years by Mrs Adams of 16 Marina. He claimed that the child was not his. The magistrates proposed to imprison him for not maintaining his wife and child. Baker said it was very unlikely a woman would admit to what Sopworth had claimed.
Robert Powell, gardener, of Tunbridge Wells, her brother in law, deposed that she had told him that Clout was the father.
Despite this, Player was sentenced to 14 days’ imprisonment. He immediately appealed, and was released on bail.
The appeal was reported in The Sussex Advertiser, 23 April 1850. The child was born on the 24 September 1849. She alleged that her husband was the father, and that she had never said that the child was not his. Evidence was presented by her sister, Elizabeth Mercer, who said that she had claimed to her that the father was Clout. Neither she nor Powell had ever seen the wife and Clout together. Oddly, at no point was Clout himself asked to give evidence.
She had been receiving £1 8s a month from Player and at present was, with her child, in the Hastings Union Workhouse, having applied for relief on the 1 February 1850, when she was 27 and the child 4 months old. The relieving officer, Henry Coussens, first wrote and then verbally applied to Player to take his wife and her child out of the workhouse.
Several witnesses gave evidence about seeing them both in St Leonards: “Maria Starnes saw her in St Leonards some months after the summer of 1848. Geo. Beaney saw both parties in his house (where the woman was lodging) in October 1848. Charles Terry saw Mrs Player pass Mr Waghorne’s cottage at St Leonards on the 16th December, 1848, and William Turner saw both parties together in the Saxon Mews, about the end of December and the beginning of January.” George Beaney the landlord would have been the married painter with a small child who, in the 1851 census, was in one of three households at 14 Lavatory [Lavatoria].
It was unclear if Sopworth’s evidence about what the wife had said when registering the birth was admissible, and “the evidence of the woman in such a case was inadmissible in a court of justice.” The hearing took six hours, and the Town Hall was stated to be “crowded to excess.” At a time when anything “improper” was suppressed as a means of entertainment, attending divorce hearings or similar cases to this one were legal ways of hearing about spicy matters.
The case then went to the Quarter Sessions, as reported in the Sussex Advertiser, 16 July 1850. The charge against Player was that he was “an idle and disorderly person for not maintaining his wife and child, whereby they became chargable to the Hastings Union.” There was the question of whether or not the Recorder was right in rejecting as evidence certain statements of the wife. It was unclear to me what the conclusion was !
I then went to records to try to find more information about the parties involved, omitting, though, the expense of paying for Louisa’s birth certificate.
I found the 1843 marriage certificate online, which does not give a father for either party. This is a pity, as the court proceedings never mentioned her father’s name, presumably Harmer, the surname by which she married.
About three weeks before the child was born, the husband disavowed any responsibility for her debts in a advert placed in the Maidstone and South Eastern Gazette, 4 September 1849:
NOTICE.
I HEREBY GIVE NOTICE, That my WIFE, HANNAH PLAYER, having left me without my consent or approval, and being now living in Tunbridge Wells, I will NOT be ANSWERABLE for any DEBTS she may contract.
Signed this second day of September, 1849.
HENRY PLAYER
Witness — Wm. Masters
The child in question, Louisa Eliza Player, was baptised 5 January 1851 to Hannah Player at Pembury, near Matfield.
The 30 March 1851 census shows that 16 Marina, Player’s workplace in 1850, was inhabited by Sophia Adams, a 56-year-old widow, and three female servants. She was the widow of Thomas Adams, who was buried at St Leonards church on the 2 February 1850, of St Mary Magdalen, aged 66. That man left a Canterbury will in which he said he was late of the Strand, Middlesex, but now of St Leonards on the Sea, with wife Sophia Stevens, dated 16 July 1849, and proven 23 February 1850.
I could not find Player in the 1851 census. Hannah and her child were in the union workhouse at Bishop Stortford, Hertfordshire. She was 29, born Little Hadham, Hertfordshire, with Louisa, aged 18 months, born Tunbridge Wells. Little Hadham was one of the parishes in that poor law union, so presumably she was there as it was her legal place of settlement.
On the 7 August 1853, Tonbridge, Henry John Player was baptised, son to Henry John, servant, and Mary Ann Player, of Tonbridge. It seems that her husband had a new partner.
In the 1861 census, at Tunbridge Wells, Hannah Player was a 37-year-old married laundress, born Brenchley. She had a son, Henry Player, aged 15 months, born Tunbridge Wells. Who was his father ? Then she vanishes. In the same census, at Brenchley, her daughter Louisa Player was 11 years old, born Tunbridge Wells, living with her uncle and aunt Adam Mercer, fruiterer, and Elizabeth Mercer, the woman who had given evidence in 1850.
In the 1871 census Louisa was in Tonbridge, a dressmaker and lodger. A week later she married, at Brenchley, a wheelwright named Aaron Avards. She died in about 1932 in the same district.
As for Clout, I could not trace him.