The Feather Dresser: The Feather Fraud of 1896

I stumbled across a page of the London prison calendar for September 1896 which offers a brief, unexpected observation.

Defendant number 60 is William Royland Sear, a feather dresser, aged thirty-six. He was charged with obtaining, by false pretences, from George Benjamin Ashmead “a quantity of feathers,” and from a woman called Ellen Harper two lots of bird skins, nine in one case and twenty-four in the other, each time with intent to defraud.

The entry is revealing. We see that after many years of business experience fraud is not always easy to defend against and the firm extended goods on trust to another tradesman but was deceived.

Sear’s frauds spanned at least two suppliers of skins and feathers, so Ashmead was just one of several dealers he approached.

During the court case the naturalist James Gardner of nearby Oxford Street was called as a witness and revealed that Sear had also tried to defraud him, claiming to others that he was working for James Gardner which, said James, was entirely untrue.

Sear was tried on 12 September 1896, found guilty of fraud, and sentenced to eight calendar months at Pentonville prison.

Ashmead is working in the height of the millinery trade

We also see that at age sixty-seven, Ashmead Junior was still supplying feathers in quantity to a feather dresser, suggesting his trade reached millinery workshops as well as collectors. That fits the period, since the 1890s were the years when feather fashion for hats was at its height, and it suggests his business rested on more than cased birds alone.

John Baker 1902. A Naturalist’s Suicide.

The most poignant document in the uncovered files is an inquest report headed “A Naturalist’s Suicide.” It concerns John Baker, aged forty-seven, of 10 Copenhagen Street, Islington, and I want to give it the care that a record of this kind deserves.

His widow, Emma Baker, told the coroner that her husband worked as a naturalist. He had been quiet and depressed, but not through shortage of work: she thought he had far too much to do, and it worried him. He complained of pains in his head and was restless at night. One morning, at about four o’clock, he went out, and some of his clothes were later found in a building by the Regent’s Canal. A tunnel keeper at Colebrooke Row, named in the report as Isaac Ruckingham, found a body on the Wednesday evening. A constable found only two keys and a pocket-knife. An engine-driver found the coat, undercoat and hat in a shed, with a pocketbook bearing the name and address.

Then George Benjamin Ashmead of Bishopsgate Street spoke. He had employed the deceased for twenty-eight years (this would place John Baker starting with Ashmead’s firm in about 1874 – during the time of the partnership with Argent). A few months earlier Baker had been struck by blood poisoning, Ashmead said, but had apparently recovered. Lately he had seemed somewhat upset in mind, “but there was no cause for this beyond his own hallucination. Up to the last he had done his work all right.” The jury returned a verdict of suicide while in a state of unsound mind.

Read closely, the two witnesses disagree.

Emma Baker believed her husband was oppressed by overwork. His employer, who testified that the business exerted no pressure, said there was no cause at all. The reader is entitled to notice that the only witness with an interest in the answer was the one who said there was none.

The arsenic question

Arsenical soap, the preservative devised in the eighteenth century by Jean-Baptiste Bécoeur, was the trade standard throughout the Victorian period, and the corrosive sublimate, mercuric chloride, was also used. The profession knew the dangers of both. A man who prepared skins for twenty-eight years had been exposed daily.

Walter Burton’s own death in 1913, from bichloride of mercury swallowed accidentally while he was preserving butterflies, shows that the trade’s materials were always close to the men who used them.

But the documented event of John Baker’s death cannot be taken as proof. Headaches, broken sleep and low spirits are among the most common symptoms in the whole of medicine, and none of them is specific to arsenic. The “blood poisoning” of a few months earlier could just as readily have been a septic wound as the cutaneous effect of a toxin. No medical witness appears in the account, and no post-mortem findings are quoted.

The responsible way to put the matter in print is as a question that the record raises and cannot settle. Baker’s workplace was hazardous in ways the profession already knew, and nothing in what survives proves or excludes a connection with his state of mind.