GEORGE HUTCHINSON

Charles Dickens and The Murder House In Chatham
From 1817 until 1821, the youthful Charles Dickens spent some of his formative years with his family at No. 11
Ordnance Terrace, Chatham. In 1855, there was a gruesome murder in Chatham: the 78-year-old Mrs Catherine Bacon
was brutally done to death in her home. Her maidservant, the 17-year-old Elizabeth Laws, stood trial for murdering her,
and the evidence against her seemed solid enough, but the squeamish jurymen were unwilling to send a young woman
to the scaffold, and she was acquitted. The unsolved murder of Mrs Bacon took place at – No. 11 Ordnance Terrace,
Chatham! Clearly it was time to do some murder house detection work, to find out if the Dickens house in Chatham had
really become a murder house.
* * * * *
Mrs Catherine Bacon was the widow of Matthew Bacon, civil engineer at H.M. Dockyards, who had predeceased her
in 1849. They had four adult sons alive. Mrs Bacon was very short and thin, and suffered badly from chronic bronchitis,
but she remained alert of mind and capable of locomotion. She was rather pernickety, and apt to find faults with her
servants. In late November 1854, she had employed the local girl Elizabeth Avis Laws as her live-in maid-of-all-works.
Elizabeth was just 17 years old, and looked even younger, but she was a precocious teenager who liked drinking and
revelling. More than once, Mrs Bacon upbraided her for sneaking out late in the evening, and going to a public house of
low repute for some ‘fun’.
On the morning of 29 January 1855, the girl
Hannah Bagot came to No. 11 Ordnance Terrace
with some milk. Elizabeth Laws opened the door to
her and asked what time it was. It was ten minutes
past eight. Hannah Bagot noticed that the lower
ground floor shutters were up. The two schoolboys
Henry Farmer and Charles Manning then came up
to the premises, hoping to earn some money by
sweeping away the snow from the stairs and the
front of the house. But although the boys stood
knocking and ringing at the door for more than
five minutes, no person answered it. But at length
they heard the bolt being drawn, the door opened
and Elizabeth Laws emerged. The boys saw that
she was bleeding and that her throat seemed to
have been cut! They ran off in a panic, and told the
railway porter Samuel Smith, who was just coming
up Ordnance Terrace to deliver some parcels, what
The body of Mrs Bacon is found, from Famous Crimes Past & Present
they had just seen. Smith helped Elizabeth into the
house, and made sure that a doctor was called. He went upstairs to have a look inside the main bedroom, and shouted
‘There is a dead person up stairs!’ when he saw the mangled body of Mrs Bacon lying on the floor.
Dr Gammie, who lived nearby, made sure that Elizabeth’s throat was bandaged. Her wound was not a deep one, and
the doctor was confident that she would live. When her dress was undone, a small parcel wrapped in blood-stained
newspaper fell from her bosom. It contained a ring and a brooch, both belonging to Mrs Bacon. Elizabeth was removed
to the Fort Pitts military hospital, where she made a statement to the magistrate Major Boys. She had been chopping
wood in the cellar, she said, when there was suddenly a knock on the door. Two men were standing outside, asking if
they could take the dust away. Mrs Bacon had heard them, and come down stairs. All of a sudden, one of the men seized
hold of Elizabeth and forced her into the back kitchen, and the other pursued Mrs Bacon down into the cellar. Mrs Bacon
screamed, and Elizabeth herself also screamed very loud. As one of the dustmen murdered Mrs Bacon, and searched the
house for valuables, the other did his best to keep Elizabeth quiet. When she bit his hand hard, he cut her throat, and
then the two miscreants left the murder house, in a hurry.
Superintendent Thomas Everist took charge of the murder investigation. He found it peculiar that the servants in the
two neighbouring houses had not heard any screaming or uproar the morning of the murder. No person had seen the
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 55