The Nightingale Shore Murder Read online

  The Nightingale Shore Murder

  Death of a World War One Heroine

  Rosemary Cook

  Copyright © 2015 Rosemary Cook

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,

  or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

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  Matador®

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  ISBN 9781 784626 587

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  For my son-in-law Mike Blackburn, who writes today’s crime stories

  Contents

  Cover

  Acknowledgements

  Preface to the Second Book

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  Sources

  Acknowledgements

  For this second edition, I am especially grateful to Jeremy Stone for his continuing pursuit of information on this story about his distant relative, Florence Shore. Many thanks also to Raymond Davies, who solved the mystery of Annie Shore, Florence’s stepmother, and shared the information with Jeremy and I. I am also grateful to the Dringhouses Local History Group, and the Bishopthorpe Local History Group, for additional information about Middlethorpe Hall and the Wilkinson family.

  Even more archivists and researchers helped with this edition, and I would like to thank the following:

  • Jane Bass, Archive Assistant, Essex Local Archives

  • David Capus, Review Manager, Metropolitan Police Service

  • Holly Carter-Chappell, Collections Assistant, Florence Nightingale Museum

  • Lydia Dean, Archives Assistant, the Borthwick Institute, York

  • Dr Tommy Dickinson, Senior Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing, University of Chester

  • Colin Gale, Bethlam Royal Hospital

  • Karim Hussain, The National Archives

  • Helen Ostell, Neighbourhood Delivery Officer, Greater Manchester County Record Office

  • Dr Sue Proctor, Diocesan Secretary, Diocese of Ripon and Leeds

  • Tom Richardson, Archive Assistant, North Yorkshire County Records Office

  • Nigel Taylor, The National Archives

  • Christopher White, Visitor Services Assistant, the National Railway Museum

  Special thanks go to descendants of the Hobkirk family for generously sharing their information, pictures and family letters, which contributed so richly to this book.

  In particular I am very grateful to Jeremy Stone, great-grandson of Clarence Hobkirk, who sought me out to offer assistance, and who has used his expertise as a former Detective Chief Inspector in the Royal Hong Kong police to comment on the investigation into Florence Shore’s murder. Also many thanks to Julia Lisle, who scanned family pictures and letters for me, and sent them through from Australia.

  I must also thank Reid Paskiewicz and Erika Nelson from the United States, for sharing a copy of Patrick Paskiewicz’s unpublished book about Florence Shore with me, following Patrick’s death.

  Thank you to my partner Alison and my daughter Kate for reading the early draft, proof-reading, reorganising and improving. Any remaining blips are my own.

  The research for this book was greatly assisted by a Monica Baly Bursary granted by the Royal College of Nursing in 2010, for which I am very grateful.

  I have received very valuable help and assistance from numerous archivists, researchers and others at record offices and archives around the country. I would to thank the following for their efforts and their interest in my research:

  • Dhimati Acharya, Information Librarian, East Sussex County Council, Bexhill Library

  • Kevin Austen, Editor, Merstham Town website

  • Matthew Bradby, Marketing and Communications Manager, The Queen’s Nursing Institute, who first found the story of the nurse murdered on a train

  • Helen Minocki Brooks, House Manager, and Sue Baxter, Archivist, Claydon House Trust

  • Laura Brouard, Assistant Archivist, Lothian Health Services Archive, Edinburgh University Library

  • Lionel A Chatard, Director & General Manager, Middlethorpe Hall and Spa

  • Daniel Collins, Senior Library Assistant, Local Studies and Information, East Sussex County Council Library and Information Service

  • Dr Sam Coulter-Smith, The Master, The Rotunda Hospital

  • John Crawford, Michael McGrady, Val McLaren, The National Archives, Kew, London

  • Rosalind Hill, Mark Allen Group

  • Meurig Jones, ABWMV Research Services, Casus Belli

  • Sheila Jones and John Wood, Local Studies Department, City Library and Arts Centre, Sunderland

  • Shona Milton, History Centre Officer, Brighton History Centre, Brighton

  • Ursula Mitchel, Digital Asset Management/Archive Officer, Queen’s University, Belfast

  • Dr Jonathan Oates, Archivist, Ealing Council, London

  • Emily Oldfield, Information Assistant, British Red Cross Museum and Archives, London

  • Jack Spencer, Registrar, Westminster Registry Office, London

  • Caroline Stockdale, Reading and Learning Advisor, and Joy Cann, Archivist, York Explore

  • Fiona Watson, Archivist, Northern Health Services Archives

  • Anne Wheeldon, Archivist – Public Service, Heritage Services, London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham

  I would also like to thank the Hastings and St Leonards Observer for permission to reproduce the photographs of the train guards and the train compartment that was the scene of the attack, in publicity for this book.

  Preface to the Second Book

  Two things have inspired me to publish a second edition of this book.

  The first was the discovery of new information on the story, including the solution to the mystery of Annie Shore, Florence Shore’s young stepmother; and the discovery of a cache of Florence’s medals, amazingly reunited many years after her death.

  The second was the growing realisation of how important Florence and other Queen’s Nurses were to the nursing effort of the Firs
t World War. In these anniversary years of the Great War, I have been uncovering more and more evidence of the breathtaking heroism and dedication of these nurses. They trained to care for the poor in ordinary British homes, then willingly transferred their skills to makeshift front-line military hospitals, and the ravaged villages of occupied Europe. In tribute to them, I have included more of their stories in the chapters about the War.

  This expanded and updated edition also includes more on Florence’s connections to two other famous nurses, Ethel Bedford Fenwick, who fought for thirty years to have nurse training standardised and nurses formally regulated; and Edith Cavell, who was executed for helping soldiers escape from Belgium, and who also had a connection with the Queen’s Nursing Institute.

  And in trying to solve the mystery at the heart of this story – who murdered Florence Nightingale Shore – I include the latest information on my search for the elusive murder file which would tell us so much about what the police suspected, even if they could not make a case in court.

  Rosemary Cook

  York, July 2014

  Prologue

  The Woman on the Train

  It was the first stage in a murder so unlikely and audacious that the first three witnesses on the scene did not even realise it had happened.

  The London to Hastings express train had stopped at Polegate Junction, near Bexhill in Sussex, just after five o’clock in the afternoon. It was Monday 12th January, 1920, a dark, rainy evening, and the three railway workmen who climbed into the third class compartment were thinking only of getting home. One had a bad cold. One was on his way back from a funeral. None of them was initially alarmed at what they saw in the carriage.

  There was a woman sitting upright in the corner seat on the far side of the carriage, facing the engine. She was warmly dressed in a fur coat, with her luggage at her feet and on the seat beside her. She was leaning back against the cushioned seat, with an open book resting on a newspaper in her lap. The quiet normality of her posture hid the fact that she had horrific head wounds, her clothing was saturated with blood and she was barely conscious. Somewhere between London Victoria and Polegate Junction, someone had hit her with sufficient violence to fracture her skull in three places through her fur hat.

  The woman was fifty five years old – it was two days after her birthday – and her name was Florence Nightingale Shore.

  It was unusual to name a child Florence in the early 19th century, according to Cecil Woodham Smith’s biography of the nursing icon Florence Nightingale. Fifty years later, when Florence Nightingale was famous for her work in the field hospitals of the Crimean War, this was no longer the case. Birth records show that hundreds of girls were called Florence in the latter half of the century, and some were given both of the famous names as forenames. Florence Nightingale Shore was one of them.

  But this Florence was not just named in tribute to the most famous nurse of them all. She was related to her, being both a relative and god-daughter of Florence Nightingale. And she was also a nurse, with a distinguished career of her own. In fact, Florence Shore’s life, before the savage attack on the Hastings train, was full of adventure. Her childhood was marked by family crises and scandals. The travels that brought her to Bexhill had previously taken her to Scotland, Ireland, South Africa, France, Germany and even China. She had nursed in the South African War and in the First World War, where the French African soldiers she cared for called her the ‘White Queen’.

  This true story of Florence’s life and death is both a tragedy and a mystery. A tragedy because she did not need to be on that train, or in that carriage, at that time. A mystery because, although the police knew who must have killed her, they could not find him, or put a name to him. It is an unsolved murder that involved Scotland Yard detectives, Dr Bernard Spilsbury, the famous Home Office pathologist, and a bizarre link to Percy Topliss, the ‘Monocled Mutineer’. Now, ninety years after the event, a shocking new theory about the killing has been proposed. And an entirely new suspect has emerged from the research for this book, as a candidate for the mysterious ‘man in the brown suit’ that the police were desperate to find.

  This is also the story of Florence Shore’s enduring friendship with another nurse, Mabel Rogers, which lasted more than 25 years, from their meeting during nurse training to Florence’s death. The two were perhaps part of the luckiest generation of women. They were born in the middle of the Victorian era, into a time of long dresses, stifling manners and total subservience to the men in their families and in society. By the end of their lives, they could make their own living in a respectable profession, and join the men in the war zones of Europe and beyond. The emancipation of women made the development of professional nursing possible; and nursing provided emancipated women with the most extreme test of their desire to be and do something meaningful and challenging.

  For Florence and Mabel , of course, it was not history in the making. It was personal adventure, excitement and ultimately tragedy. The beginning of the end came after the assault on Florence, when Mabel Rogers was summoned from London to a hospital in Hastings, late in the evening of 12th January, to sit at her friend’s hospital bedside.

  Chapter 1

  The Train to Hastings

  It was Mabel Rogers who had inadvertently led to Florence to her death. She had accompanied her to Victoria Station in London on the afternoon of Monday 12th January, and chosen her compartment on the train to Hastings.

  Florence had been living at Carnforth Lodge, the Hammersmith nurses’ home of which Mabel was Superintendent, since her return to London from war service in France in November 1919. The Home, in Queen Street, was both the residence and the working base for the local ‘Queen’s Nurses’ – district nurses who had trained under the auspices of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Institute for Nurses. Mabel and Florence were both Queen’s Nurses, though Florence was not working following her return from France. A photograph of the two women shows that they looked strikingly similar. Both had dark hair, worn swept up, a broad brow and a straight nose. Florence’s face is a little more rounded than Mabel’s rather square jaw, and her eyes are slightly hooded under curving eyebrows. Mabel’s eyes are larger, under straight brows. Both women have wide mouths, and Mabel’s chin is more prominent and firmer. Each wears the same high collared style of dress with a pin at the neck, and they are wearing their Queen’s Nurse badges on neck chains: Florence’s is the bronze of a qualified QN, Mabel’s the larger silver badge of a Superintendent. Florence was a small woman, only five feet three inches in height, and she was dressed for the journey, on the cold January afternoon, in a fur coat over her long dress, with hat and gloves.

  Florence had spent the previous day, Sunday, with an aunt and cousin in Tonbridge in Kent, returning to Hammersmith in the evening. Her plan on the Monday was to travel from London to St Leonards Warrior Square Station, via Hastings, to spend a week with friends in the town. Mabel accompanied Florence from Hammersmith to Victoria Station for the start of her journey. They arrived at the station just after three o’clock, and Mabel selected a carriage for her friend – a third class, non-smoking compartment in the last carriage. By unfortunate chance, Florence had been turned away from a different carriage which she would have shared with another female passenger. Florence wanted a corner seat: the woman already in the carriage told her that, although currently unoccupied, the corner seat was taken. So Florence and Mabel moved on, and Mabel found her friend a corner seat in an empty compartment of the next carriage.

  Florence’s third class ticket did not mean that she would travel in poor conditions. The service to Hastings was operated by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, which ran services along three routes, together forming a triangle: from London to Portsmouth and London to Hastings, and along the South Coast in between. In common with most of the other 100 or so train companies, the LB&SCR had abolished second class carriages, leaving only first and third. Competition for passengers between the different railway companies h
ad led to increasing comfort and amenities to attract travellers, in both classes of carriage.

  In the early days of train travel, the cheapest seats were in open trucks or goods wagons with no windows. A terrible accident when a train ran into a landslip in 1841 and eight passengers were killed led to roofs being added to the third class trucks. As passenger numbers increased, some express trains initially had no third class, as these services were aimed at the better off passenger. Then the Midland Railway put third class carriages onto its express trains in 1872, albeit with hard wooden benches. Three years later, the company abolished second class and the third class carriages had upholstered seats and partitions to create compartments. By the 1880s, electric lighting was beginning to replace gas, and lavatories and dining cars were more common in the express trains. Trains were heated by steam pipes running through the carriages, replacing the metal box portable foot warmers that had to be topped up with hot water at stations. Train travel was becoming ever more comfortable, though the traveller’s experience still varied widely depending on the line, class and purpose of the journey. From 1908, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway ran a famous service called the ‘Southern Belle’, with seven luxurious ‘Pullman’ carriages behind its steam locomotives, providing a fast and enjoyable journey to the seaside at Brighton for day trippers and weekenders from London.

  More routine and local services had much more basic carriages, though there was always great pride in the LB&SCR steam locomotives which pulled the coaches. Early versions of the passenger locomotives were painted in a dark green livery, with fine red and gold lines. Towards the turn of the century, this was changed to ‘Improved Engine Green’ – universally described as a mustard colour, rather than green, and the invention of William Stroudley, Locomotive Superintendent of the company. It has been suggested that he was either colour-blind, or cunning: deliberately describing his new yellow as ‘improved green’ to convince his company’s board to make the change.