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The Review - FEATURE
Published: 12 November 2009
 
Pen drawing of Amelia Sach and   Annie Walters from the News   of The World on January 18, 1903
Pen drawing of Amelia Sach and
Annie Walters from the News
of The World on January 18, 1903
Macabre baby
farmers’ tale

A new exhibition revisits the ‘adoption’ practice that led to the first female hanging at Holloway Prison, writes Caitlin Davies

ON a bleak winter’s night in 1902, an elderly looking woman stood loitering outside the Archway Tavern.
Her name was Annie Walters. She was a midwife who worked at a lying-in home in East Finchley, where unmarried women went to give birth. Her employer, Amelia Sach, had sent her to the public house to see a lady about a baby.
The lady, a Mrs Rogers, arrived in a hansom cab. She gave instructions that a baby be fetched from the lying-in home and brought to Kensington Station the following week. She would then take the baby to a coastguard’s wife in Eastbourne.
Annie would receive 10 shillings for her part in this clandestine adoption. But a few days later she was arrested, a dead baby in her arms. And so began a sensational baby-farming trial, that ended in the double execution of the first women to be hung at Holloway Prison.
The story of Annie Walters and Amelia Sach forms part of a new exhibition at the Islington Museum, which traces crime and punishment from the 18th century to the 1950s.
Baby farmers were women who looked after children in Victorian and Edwardian times. The children often belonged to servant girls who were forced to farm out their “illegitimate” children to keep their job.
Women paid a few shillings a week to have their child cared for, or a one-off sum for an adoption. Some baby farmers looked after the babies well, but others took the money and then abandoned the babies on the streets, or even murdered them.
Amelia Sach was apparently just such a baby farmer. In the summer of 1902 the 29-year-old was running a lying-in home called Claymore House, in East Finchley.
Like other baby farmers, she found her customers by placing adverts in the miscellaneous columns of local newspapers. Sach’s advert ran as follows: “Accouchement, before and during. Skilled nursing. Home comforts. Baby can remain. Nurse, 4 Stanley Road, East Finchley.”
It was the phrase “baby can remain” that would have alerted possible clients. It meant they would be able to give birth, and then have the child adopted. This is what drew the eye of a servant girl named Ada Charlotte Galley.
Galley moved into Sach’s lying-in home and, on November 15 1902, gave birth to a healthy boy. Sachs persuaded Galley to give her baby up for adoption, for the sum of £25. The baby would be well cared for, she said, he would want for nothing and would be brought up by a titled lady.
But four days later the dead boy was found in the arms of Annie Walters.
The arrest of the baby farmers was thanks in part to Annie Walters’ landlady, who was married to a police constable. A few months earlier, Walters had moved into lodgings in Danbury Street, Islington. She told her landlady she was a midwife and that she was expecting a baby, which would then be adopted.
On November 12 1902 she received a telegram from Claymore House. Later that day she brought a baby back to Danbury Street. Two days later the baby had disappeared.
On November 15, Walters received another telegram. This time her landlady’s suspicions were alerted and she told her son to follow Walters. He tracked her to the Archway Tavern where she met a stylishly dressed lady. That night she again brought home a baby.
Three days later, when Walters left Danbury Street carrying a bundle, the police were on the case. A detective followed her to South Kensington Station where he found her with Galley’s four-day-old son.
Walters admitted she’d given the child a narcotic called Chlorodyne, which she may have been addicted to herself.
Both Walters and Sach were arrested for murder, with Sach charged as an accessory. Although the women were convicted of murdering one child, they were suspected of killing many more.
On February 3 1903, they became the first women to be hanged at Holloway Prison and the last double female hanging in Britain.
The execution led in part to the 1908 Children’s Act and by the 1920s baby farming had almost disappeared.
But although baby farming as an industry doesn’t exist today, there are the same anxieties – and sensational trials – surrounding childcare as there were a hundred years ago when Annie Walters first met a lady at the Archway Tavern.
Novelist Caitlin Davies has received a grant from the Arts Council and the Society of Authors to research and write a fictionalised account of the baby farmers.


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