After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Murdering Midwife of Covent Garden

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

‘If only walls could talk’ is a phrase which feels particularly relevant to mysterious murder cases throughout history. And in today’s episode, walls do have a story to tell. To celebrate Maddy’s book about Eighteenth-Century graffiti coming out this week, she’s sharing two intriguing murder cases where graffiti played an integral role. First case is a murderous midwife in London, followed by the mystery of the body discovered floating in a Bristol estuary.To find out more about Maddy’s new book, Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain, click here.Please be aware there is discussion of murder and suicide in this episodeWritten by Maddy Pelling. Edited by Tomos Delargy. Producer is Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet. Hello. Just to let you know that this episode includes discussion of domestic violence and suicide. 1688, and we're in the London of Christopher Wren and Samuel Pepys. The devastation of the Great Fire of London two decades before is still being righted. The new St Paul's Cathedral looms optimistically skyward,

and everywhere the clink of mason's hammers and tradesmen's chatter fills the air. Narrow, gloomy passageways are slowly being transformed to open piazzas. But this is far from a modern city, nor is it safe, particularly for those who find themselves on society's edges. An influx of immigrants from across Europe has brought merchants and artisans, but it has, in some quarters, bred mistrust. Paranoia bubbles under the surface here, and at the court of James II, there are whispers of an unwelcome royal conversion to Catholicism. But we're far from the seat of English power. In fact, we're standing in a dingy set of rooms rented by Mary O'Brie, a French Catholic midwife who serves the expectant and delivered mothers

of Covent Garden and whose husband, a violent man, is about to walk through the door. Mary lives apart from her husband Denis as much as possible. He works ferrying goods for merchants across the channel to France, but he always finds her in the end, and when he does, she can expect to suffer. Nor can she escape him. She speaks little English and has no real friends here. she escape him. She speaks little English and has no real friends here. Her husband has been drinking. She can smell it on him. It's not long before his fist connects with her head. The first of many blows, they rain down upon her. The assault lasts minutes. He throws her onto the bed, bites her, kicks her. She screams but no one comes. Eventually it's all over. He lies down as though nothing has happened and falls asleep. But this time Mary has a plan, the only way out that she can see. Moving silently so as not to wake him, she gently loosens the twine that ties his stockings beneath his knee.

It's thin but strong. She twists it in her hands, experimenting. Then she climbs on top of her husband, legs either side, hardly daring to breathe as she looks down at his face. He doesn't stir. She slips the rope under his neck and loops it together. She pulls. It's over in minutes and he's so drunk he barely resists. Quickly, Mary finds she is alone in the world. Her husband, still beneath her, is dead. her husband still beneath her is dead panic sets in and she begins to shake what now she pours herself a brandy a large one the bottle knocking against the dirty glass as she tries to steady herself and considers her next move Welcome back to After Dark Towers. Now, this episode, we're doing things a little bit differently as I am going to talk to Maddy about her brand new book, Writing on the Wall,

Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of 18th Century Britain, which is out on the 28th of March. Pre-order, order, make sure you're getting your copy because this is a really, really special history book, particularly if you're interested in histories from below, histories of rebels and criminals, of war, riots, women, art, politics. It's all in there. Anything that you find interesting about this turbulent, glittering period, you'll find it in Maddy's book. This is the history book that you need to be buying this year. Maddie, are you excited about the fact that the book is going to be in the world? We have talked about this for a long time and now it's happening. I'm kind of scared. It's, I mean, as you know, you know this

very well from the book that you're currently writing, that it's such an odd process. You spend so much time writing alone, just in your own world, living with the people you're writing about, the history you're writing about, the history you're writing about, really immersing yourself in that world. And it's such a solitary experience. And then the manuscript goes off to editors and the wonderful people that you get to work with. But it still doesn't feel like a tangible, real thing until you get that copy of the physical book. And I do have that now. I have my little box in the corner of my room of author's copies, And I do have that now. I have my little box in the corner of my room of author's copies,

which thankfully is going down steadily as I give them away, which is a good sign that some people are taking them. But no, it's absolutely terrifying that it's going to be out in the world. I really, really hope people like it. I keep telling Maddie to stop. Just stop. Don't put it out. It's too much. It's too scary. Like I'm scared for her, but it is. When she gave me my copy, I literally squealed. We were recording after dark, actually. You did. I think there was some jumping up and down.

I definitely jumped up and down. I'm honest. It is such an achievement. And, you know, I'm probably what, a year behind you in the process in terms of my own book. So I'm looking at you and going, wow, this is it's such an achievement

to get these things out and to have an actual book on the shelves. It's incredible. But one question, which I suppose I know the answer to, but maybe everybody won't. Graffiti specifically, what was it about that art form, I guess, or a form of protest? And you can elaborate a little bit more on these things, but what was it about that specifically in the 18th century that drew you to talk about this in your first book? I think graffiti is an archive that's really untapped. And I should say upfront, it's something that archaeologists have been looking at for decades. They've been looking at ancient graffiti, medieval graffiti, early modern graffiti. And there's a lot of scholarship on that, but cultural historians have been quite slow on the uptake when it comes to graffiti and what it can actually

tell us. And one of the things to say up front about graffiti is that it's unique compared to other archival material that we might look at as historians, because it's everywhere. So lots of it has been lost. For every piece of graffiti that survives, there might be 20, 30 pieces that don't. And there's something to consider there about how those things come down to us and what we have lost. But the graffiti that does exist still is not necessarily subject to the same collecting or curatorial tastes that other materials, artworks, paper archives that they have in institutions. And so it gives us, yes, an untapped, but also a sort of unregulated archive of historical voices and one that anyone and everyone can go and access and explore and research. So that's what I love about it. And I think in terms of what it

can tell us about the past, we think about graffiti today. We think about maybe modern tagging. Before we started recording, Anthony, you were telling me about writing like Anthony was here on your school books. Not even mine, other people's. Oh, wow. Okay. Not mine. I like to keep my books clean. Oh, you were a neat kid,

but defacing other people's property. That says a lot about you. But, you know, historic graffiti can tell us all kinds of things. It can tell us about where someone literally stood in the past in relationship to their built environment, how literate they were, whether they were angry or sad, what they were hoping for, who they fancied, what they desired, what turned them on and what turned them off. You know, all of these things can be read into graffiti. Some of the stories that I found in the book are really remarkable. They're really the stories of people who've slipped out of that traditional historical archive. So for example, I've looked

at graffiti left by previously enslaved black men and women who were prisoners of war, captured in the Caribbean and brought back to Britain and put in prison here. The graffiti of factory workers, the graffiti of sex workers, sailors, soldiers, rioters, all of these different people who haven't necessarily been allowed in their own time and in the centuries since to leave anything more tangible of themselves in a sort of more official way. And so graffiti gives us a way into that, I suppose. It's a way of accessing history, a lens through which to view the past that is so tantalising as far as I'm concerned. And I just can't wait to bring people on that journey.

And when we're talking about graffiti, especially in the last week, we have had a new Banksy that has appeared and Banksy has informed our perception of what graffiti is to a great extent. The popular perception of what graffiti is to a great extent at the moment. But when we're talking about 18th century graffiti, just so that we're all on the same page, what is it exactly that counts as 18th century graffiti? Well, first of all, I should say a big shout out to Banksy for very kindly doing

a new work in the month that my book comes out. So if you're listening, Banksy, thank you very much. And I'm open to collabs. Yes, Banksy absolutely kind of typifies the graffiti we think of today in terms of street art. It's rebellious. It's provocative. It's not always welcome. And there's lots of debate around the value of it. Is it something that should be washed off by the local council? Should it go to the high-end auction houses of the world? Now, the term graffiti doesn't actually come into play until the mid-19th century. It's a term that's applied by 19th century archaeologists, English archaeologists, French, some German, some Italian, during excavations of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. And they use it to describe the writing on the wall that they're finding

in that setting. But before that point, there's not really one word to describe this. And actually, the practice of leaving your mark really depended on how you were doing it, the surface that you did it on, the message behind it sometimes. And it's really difficult to define, which of course makes it deliciously good fun in that it can sort of be anything and everything, whether you're a practitioner of it or a historian of it looking at it now. So some of the terms that people use in the 18th century to describe it are hieroglyphs, wall writing, diary writing sometimes, which is fascinating. Often it's referred to simply

as a manuscript. Other times it can be, you know, a sort of a sketch or a drawing, something like that, that doesn't necessarily have a terminology that would be different from a sketch on a piece of paper. Graffiti itself was done in terms of drawing on surfaces. So thinking about, you know, things that are drawn maybe with paint or pencil, blood, sometimes human excrement, I'm very sorry to say, but other times it was carved into a surface. So we get things like, obviously, if anyone's been to a historic church, they would have seen graffiti carved into stone surfaces, but also things like diamond writing, which is when people would sharpen diamond points,

diamond rings, diamond tips on the end of their styluses and pens and would write into glass. So things like drinking glasses, but also windows. So you get a lot of graffiti in those period in tavern windows. And some of that is some of the most interesting and bawdy and revealing. Yeah, they're fantastic. And they're often poetry as well.

And the way that they come down to us is often through people then transcribing them onto the page. And of course, we have to take that somewhat with a pinch of salt in terms of what that process looks like and how that's being curated and changed and maybe expanded on. But the key takeaway really is that in the 18th century world, every surface that could be written on was teeming with things, clothing, carriages, you name it. People are writing on it and drawing on it. I love that. and it's one of my favorite things about the book that you you really do paint that world it's kind of like you know that meme that you see where somebody can't do maths and all those things are like flying in

front of her face yes it feels very like that when I read that passage in your book I was like oh it feels very like this is like all around them. It's part of the, it's almost part of the air they're breathing. It's just so everywhere in it. So I think that was one of the key takeaways I took from reading your book was just the everywhere-ness of it, which is incredible. Yeah. I've never heard my work described in terms of a meme, but I think, I think actually that is really accurate. You could say that a meme was kind of a representation of me at the beginning of this project, searching for the graffiti I was going to write about. It is everywhere.

It's overwhelming, but it's also, you know, sometimes unless you're familiar with particular historic buildings, you're not necessarily going to find it. And I'm so grateful to the genuinely hundreds of people who've sent me graffiti near them, photographs, just little tips about where to go and visit and stuff. So it's been a really collagic project in that way, where I've kind of brought everything together and made it into hopefully a coherent whole. So let's talk about some of those stories. Now, we heard at the beginning about Mary Obrey and murder, and that's perfect for After Dark as well. So it's not just graffiti, it's now a crossover with After Dark. Who was she exactly? And why did graffiti become part of her story?

So Mary O'Brie is a French Catholic midwife. She's an immigrant to London at a time when immigrants and particularly Catholics are not necessarily welcome. She's married, as we heard at the beginning, to a man called Denis, who as far as I can tell, and it's this story, this early story in the book is taking place in 1688, and it's difficult to uncover much information about the lives of people in the lower classes at this point. And Mary and Denis are very much in the lower echelons of this society. But it seems that he's working as a sort of ferryman for merchants who are trading between London and France. So he's often going back and forward between the two.

And meanwhile, she works as a midwife in Covent Garden in a local area, serving women who are expecting babies, women who've had babies. So she's a key part of that community, but she's also an outsider because she's foreign, because she's a Catholic. So she's marked out and marginalized in that way. Denis, the husband, is regularly violent. And as we heard at the beginning, she takes matters fair enough into her own hands, I think it's fair to say that, and she strangles him in his sleep. And the story that unfolds after this moment, Graffiti plays a really key role in how she's caught and how we know about her story today. And it's really the first time that Graffiti appears in print. So we'll get to that. But to give you a little bit of context about this story,

so as I say, it takes place in 1688, just a few months before the Glorious Revolution, when King James II and VII is removed from power. He's on the throne at the time, and he's removed, replaced by his daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange. And a lot of that trouble and unsettlement that comes in this time is around Catholicism. And it's suspected that the king himself might have converted to Catholicism. He's also seen as something of a tyrant in some circles. And there's a real fear in this moment in England. I'm using the word England. My book has the word Britain in the title, and this is very much the beginning of the story of how Britain is made. So it's not Britain at this

point. That comes in 1707 with the Acts of Union. So we're in England absolute abomination. And she becomes notorious because of what she's done and also because she is different because she's a Catholic. So it's a really fascinating moment in which the story of one very poor, downtrodden woman unsettles the nation. One pamphleteer at the time, he describes the story, and this is in the weeks after she's caught. He says that it put more freaks and crotchets into the heads and minds of the common people than any other story of that size perhaps ever did in this world before, which is a bit of hyperbole perhaps, but you can see the impact that it has. It's interesting as well, because from a modern perspective, it would be very easy for us to say, well, of course she retaliated. She was subject to such terrible abuse within her own house. But actually, what you were hitting at there in terms of that idea of the household structure, domestic power, whatever Denis was doing to Mary, although would have been frowned upon, you know, violence against someone's

wife was not tolerated per se, because you could very much be socially maligned for it. But legally and in terms of ownership and ownership over women, he was perfectly entitled to do that. And what isn't okay is her retaliation, even if it hadn't have been taking his life even whatever way she had retaliated wouldn't really have been acceptable unless she went to the authorities and sought help that way and even then she probably would have been dismissed we know of so many cases particularly more so in the 18th century where those kind of cases are just dismissed yeah absolutely she really is powerless in this situation The other thing to say about her is that we know some of the abuse that Denis enacted on her, because we have her own words, which is really incredible. And this comes with a caveat by saying

that her words are recorded by the royal press censor at the time, Sir Robert Lestrange. So, you know, we have to consider the reliability of that account and how much he's edited it. However, her account appears alongside, I think, around about 30, maybe even 40 witness statements to the crime itself and the days surrounding Denise's murder. For me in the book, I mean, I go into a reasonable amount of detail of what happens to Mary and what she does about it. Because we have her words, and I think it's important when it comes to violence against women in the past, certainly not to make it in any way salacious, but also to not turn away from it. We have her saying what happened. It was important for her to tell her story. And I include that as part of the story of graffiti. So we have her in the early months of 1688, having killed her husband in his sleep. Now she does something a little bit unconventional next.

And Anthony, I want you to tell us this next part of the story, because I've provided you with two images. And these are actually pretty graphic. I think they'll give you a clue of what happens. Just to explain, these are playing cards, illustrated playing cards, which was a very common thing at the time. They're from the British Museum. Anyone can look them up in their online collection. And these were made in the weeks following Denise's murder. So it gives you a sense of how she's being perceived at the time and how

the story was perceived. So tell us what's happening. So the first card I'm looking at on the left hand side is a queen of clubs. It's got the number 13 on top. And in the main part of the card is the picture of a woman with an axe held aloft. She's actually quite well dressed. I don't know why I'm getting suddenly distracted by that, but she's relatively well dressed or appears to be. She's got an axe in her right hand and she's holding it above what is already a partially dismembered body, which I presume is Denis's body. In this depiction, Denis is headless and armless, and it looks like he's about to be legless too. In the background, we see the bed in which she is reported to have killed him, and the curtains are drawn back from the bed, letting us see into the crime scene. She now has him on a table. It's worth noting that the body is on a table,

which is very reminiscent of a butcher's block. And underneath that, it says the midwife cutting her husband to pieces. Then over on the next one, beside that, we have the Jack of Spades. Beside that, we have the Jack of Spades. Is that right? Yes, thank you. The Jack of Spades. And it shows her, it shows Mary, disposing of these now dismembered body parts. It looks like she's putting them into a, it says underneath, the popish midwife put his quarters in the privy. So she is putting them down the loo to dispose of them yes so mary she has her panic and i think that's understandable where she pulls herself this huge

brandy and works out what she's going to do and there are other elements of the story for example she has a son who's a young apprentice nearby, and she brings him to the crime scene for help and pulls back the curtain of the bed to reveal the body of Denis. Possibly this boy's father, possibly not, very unclear. And the boy can't help her. He faints, falls to the floor, and he refuses to help. So she has no option but to get rid of the body. She has to get it out of the rooms she's renting in Covent Garden. So she chops him up. She wraps up all the individual pieces and she doesn't put them in one privy. She actually walks the city and she starts to dispose of each piece in different locations.

And these are public privies. These are privies around the backs of people's houses, in the street, you know, probably most often sort of wooden structures with, you know, sort of pit in the floor. And for her, it's the best way to get rid of them, to hide the evidence. And for a little while, she does get away with it. I would imagine, not drawing any conclusions here, but I would imagine that given the fact that this is depicted on playing cards, she doesn't get away with it forever though right the first sign that a crime had occurred came at the end of january 1688 in parker's lane north of covent garden and near to lincoln's inn fields between nine and ten at night, two men walking the street noticed a bundle wrapped in old coarse cloth and discarded upon a small dunghill. On tentative inspection,

they discovered Denis' torso. Cut at the shoulders and thighs, the head removed and only his privy members remaining. The pair took up the remains and carried them to a tavern, the Cochin Horses, where they were promptly arrested on suspicion of committing the crime themselves before being later released. News of the grisly find travelled fast. One London gentleman, William Westby, recorded in his diary a great buzz and noise in the city and the whole kingdom. Almost immediately, fears of a Catholic plot began to surface as locals speculated on the identity of the man whose remains had been so unceremoniously discarded. The humour of the town, Westby wrote, had darkened and false reports of missing or

brutalised Protestant priests abounded. There was, he wrote, not a noted Protestant divine whose head was not fitted to these shoulders. One news sheet dubbed the whole a bloody prologue to some greater tragedy. But while speculation abounded the real killer was still at large, Mary had no choice but to go about her normal business as a midwife and to pretend that nothing was wrong. And indeed, she might have gotten away with it, but for an ordinary, everyday action by someone she knew that accidentally exposed her secrets and would lead to her downfall. that accidentally exposed her secrets and would lead to her downfall.

Denis's colleague and friend James Lorraine was looking for him. They'd been offered work in France, but they would need to leave soon. When Lorraine came to Mary's rooms in Covent Garden looking for her husband, he found no one at home. And so, without realising the importance of what he was doing, he took a piece of chalk out of his pocket and wrote a note on the door. Today, the contents of the note are lost to us, but we can surmise something of what he wrote, that he was looking for Denis and would meet him the next day at the Catholic chapel nearby. When Mary returned home and saw the note, she knew she had to buy herself time.

Making her first error, she decided to answer Lorraine and go to the chapel to meet him in place of her dead husband. She told Lorraine Denis had gone to the West Indies, that he'd left her and had no plans to return. Lorraine was surprised his friend hadn't mentioned anything about leaving and how had he paid for the passage across the Atlantic? It wasn't long before he began asking questions, trying to trace his friend. Then he heard about the body in the tavern to which hundreds of Londoners were now flocking for a look at the grisly evidence of a murderer in their midst. the grisly evidence of a murderer in their midst. He put two and two together. Mary's arrest came fast. She was taken at night from the house of a pregnant and terrified client and dragged to Newgate Prison. Days later, she would be hanged and set alight in Leicester Fields before a baying

crowd. But for the graffiti that had caught her out, the story had barely begun. It had entered the public conversation and psyche like never before. In the coming decades, writing on Britain's surfaces would shape the nation and its people in remarkable and powerful ways. What's so tantalizing about that is the idea of community that emerges from the way in which she's caught and we have this gathering of so many different diverse people in Covent Garden I mean you talked earlier about how she would have been a slight outsider in Covent Garden which is entirely true based on her nationality and her Catholicism. But equally, people probably would have recognized her because she's circulating in that and she's providing a service that's necessary in that space. But then you also are faced when this has happened with Lorraine receiving that news just because he's in the area.

He's not necessarily hearing it through official systems or official newspapers. He's hearing it because he's where he needs to be to hear that. And it's all happening within very close proximity. And it's happening on Mary's doorstep as well, which is the other thing. That must be very frightening for her. I mean, I understand she has killed a man, but at the same time, she's trying to run from that and she's trying to escape that. And what it does is it builds this idea of network, community, and the relationship that you're having with your neighbours, even if it's in a very dark way, even in the middle of somewhere like Covent Garden, which people will often point to as being, you know, one of the busiest hubs in Europe, I suppose, at this time.

That's all so true. And what it does, what graffiti does, if we start to look for it, because of course, Lorraine's note was written in chalk, it's long lost. It was probably rubbed off the door a day after it was written, maybe by Mary herself. But what looking for it reveals to us is those invisible networks within the community, the ways in which people understand their relationships, express their relationships, the way they communicate. People carrying chalk in their pocket was a regular occurrence. People would use it to mark all kinds of things, to mark, talking of playing cards, the score for games of cards, drinking games in pubs.

If you were down by the docks buying something or selling something, you might use it to tally payment or to tally the goods that you're buying and selling and things like that. So she's caught really by accident in a very everyday way. And that is what becomes so terrifying about this story. And there are government and royal officials at this time who are deployed into the London streets to investigate this because there is fear that there's a huge Catholic plot afoot and that things are going terribly wrong and that the royal structure and hierarchy is about to collapse. And of course, it does at the end of that year, but not because of Mary Albury. However, her case really sets the tone and the landscape for what is to come in a big way. The other thing to say about her, of course, you say that she's part of that community.

When she's arrested, she's actually sleeping in the house of a potential patient, a woman who is about to give birth and her husband. We only have the husband's name now, thanks to the men who wrote this story down at the time. We don't have the name of the pregnant woman. But Mary, on the day she's caught, goes to attend this woman to check her. She's about to go into labour. She thought that she'd begun. They're not sure whether active labour has actually started and they invite her to spend the night. So this is someone who is trusted to sleep in people's homes and attend them in their most vulnerable moments. And it turns out that she has done the ultimate crime of rebelling against the structure of the household and domestic space.

And yet the fact that it's a piece of graffiti and everyday normal occurrence that catches her out. It's so by chance. It's so remarkable. And that's why it's so terrifying to people. Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed

England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. costs. But Mary isn't the only person. She's one of quite a few, actually, that are featured in your book. Can you give us another insight into some people, some stories that people will find in there once they get their copies? Absolutely. So we've started right at the beginning of the book in 1688. And now we're going to go right to the end of it and the end of the 18th century in the 1790s. no one who had ever met james doe would have described him as anything other than affable he was according to several of his friends extremely generous with the time and small amount of money that were his highly respected in his trade as a ceramic painter and generally beloved wherever he went. Despite sharing his name with a common legal term, John Doe, most often applied to corpses whose identities could not be

easily ascertained, he was in fact most memorable to those who knew and loved him. He'd spent upwards of 20 years working in the Staffordshire Potteries, amongst them Josiah Wedgwood's Etruria factory, and was a recognisable figure to those in the trade, although few beyond it would have known his name. its long career decorated countless cups, saucers, plates and jugs made by the nation's leading potters which by the end of the 18th century graced drawing rooms across Britain as well as its furthest overseas colonies. So when in the autumn of 1797 his body was found bloated and bobbing in the Bristol estuary miles from from his familiar Staffordshire. The mystery of just how it got there gripped the attention of the public. Apparently drowned in one of the busiest and richest ports in the world, in the same waters that had previously carried the fruits of his labours out into an expanding empire, Doe's tale was one of ingenuity, art, industrial espionage,

inequality, and betrayal. We've now moved from the end of the 17th century to the end of the 18th century, and it feels like we're in a different world. And it feels like it's a world that has changed and that is more industrialized, as you're hinting at there. And as a result, I'm really intrigued to know, as we get through this story, how graffiti has changed too. But before we get to that point, it's 1790s now. This is where the story is happening. Tell us what's going on in the world in Britain at this time. So you're absolutely right. I mean, there's so much change and the book very much takes people through that in a more orderly way. So we've leapt right to the end here. So the 1790s,

there's a lot going on culturally, globally, in terms of industry, in terms of empire, all of that. So Britain is at war with France and this is a global conflict. It's being fought on the battlefields of Europe, but also across the world. Of course, in 1789, there's been the French Revolution. There's been the rise of Napoleon following that. There's fighting taking place in the Caribbean in particular, where the French actually promise freedom to enslaved men and some enslaved women who agree to fight for them against the French. And part of the book, in fact, the chapter before we get to the story of James Doe deals with some of these individuals who are brought as prisoners of war from the Caribbean to British shores. We've also got the rise of romanticism. So in this period, we've got William and Dorothy

Wordsworth in the Lake District, coincidentally doing their own graffiti. They often carve their names into the landscape. We've got ideas of the Gothic, of the power of imagination, this idea that the Romantics are so interested in of interior worlds, of your spiritual, intellectual relationship with nature, with history, with time itself, with ideas, all taking place within your own mind. And that's something that comes into play with the James Doe story. We've got the Industrial Revolution, which has already very much begun. It's not quite on the scale yet that it is in the 19th century, but we've certainly got this real emptying of rural areas. So people are moving from towns and cities to work in factories. And this is bringing its own problems. It's bringing

a loss of folk practices and those kind of community networks that we see so much actually in Mary Albury's story, but that was certainly present in rural parts of Britain well into the 18th century and indeed into the 19th century but they're being really sort of undermined here and cut up in quite brutal ways there's food shortages happening particularly across the north of England which are coupled at a really unfortunate time with high taxes thanks to the war and it causes a lot of unrest and actually there are food riots that take place across cities like Manchester and into Yorkshire. And alongside that, there's machine breaking. So workers in factories who have been working in really sort of cottage industries in very skilled ways are being increasingly replaced in terms of the skills they have by machines and they're breaking into factories and quite literally destroying this new technology that's replacing them so there's a lot going on culturally in terms of society in terms of

how people view themselves in relation to each other but also in relation to the wider world what people want from their lives from their work the satisfaction they want. All of this stuff is changing. It's hugely, hugely changed, certainly from Mary O'Brie's own time at the end of the 17th century. And this is very much a world going into the 19th century now. This is vast change happening. So that's the context, I suppose, for the story. So we're in Bristol then, and there is a body in the water. What exactly happens next? So this relatively young man is discovered at Seamills, which at the time was a disused harbour. So it was already out of use. It was on the edge of Bristol. Today, it's part of the

sort of urban sprawl of the suburbs. And I've been there actually, and I did lay some flowers for James Doe because I was writing about him at the the time and you can still go and see the 18th century harbour wall and all of that so it's an interesting location now the body is found by two gentlemen who remain unnamed in the sources that survive from the story they call the parish constable and his servant so the four men together lift the body out of the water. And they sort of gather initially any clues they can about who he is, because they don't know at this point that he is the potter James Doe. So there's a list of things that he's wearing, that he has on his person that can give them some sense of who he is in this society of the 1790s. So for example, he has what's described as a coat made of good light cloth. He's got a cotton waistcoat on that has pockets lined with blue silk. So really quite

nice, quite fancy clothing. He's got velvet britches. He's wearing a linen shift underneath that's frilled at the bosom. Again, I mean, they're not incredibly fancy clothes, but there's a certain element of flourish going on here. These are aspiring clothes. This is someone not from the poorest parts of society. Quite amazingly, in the water, he's found still with a wig on his head, which I think is a testament to the skills of 18th century wig makers. And really touchinglyly in his pocket, he has a small miniature portrait of a woman that's painted on ivory and it's wrapped around with silk. But unfortunately, the water damaged it so much that no one could tell who this woman was. And we still don't know who she was in relationship to him. Was she a wife? Was she

a lover? Was she a mother? We don't know. So those are the clues that are available to the men, these four men who initially find him. However, a couple of days later, and this is the really remarkable thing about this story and why we have this story today, the men venture into an abandoned tenement building, which is right next to the harbour. It's completely empty, but in the attic, they discover written all over the walls, some of the ceilings, some of the floor, the doors as well. What is essentially James Doe's suicide note written out in graffiti. And we have it today, or at least a version of it. And again, we're thinking about

the distance between graffiti written on a surface and graffiti that makes it onto paper as a record and how much of that has changed. So take it slightly with a pinch of salt. But we have what appears to be his suicide note because the parish constable is so determined to put a name to this man he's pulled out of the water and he's so moved by his fate and by the portrait miniature in his pocket, he wants to piece together what's happened. So he actually transcribes the whole thing and publishes it as a pamphlet, which today might shock us to a certain extent. I think there's maybe some ethical questions there about publishing someone's suicide note. It was a

regular occurrence in the 18th century. And we can talk about what suicide meant to people in this particular moment in history, because it becomes something of a cultural concern in a way that it maybe hadn't been before. But what happens when he publishes it, even though it's full of tantalizing clues and some mysterious allusions and references to people in Doe's life, he doesn't quite want to name. We get a sense of what's happened to him, who he is. And at the time, people write in to the parish constable from all over the country to say, I know him and here's his story. And so we get the life of someone from a new industrial class, someone who is a skilled artisan in their own right, but who is in an industry that is changing, that's devaluing human talent more and more. I think it's fair to say he's becoming lost in this system. Something happens to him. He has some relationship breakdowns that we can get into,

and he ends his life miles and miles from the Staffordshire that he knew and loved in Bristol. And we find him in the water and it's just the most remarkable and moving story. And I have to say from all the research that I did, this story is the one that stayed with me actually. And my editor said a similar thing that it really affected her as well. And the suicide note itself is available online to read for anyone who is interested. And I would say it's a difficult read, but it's a really remarkable document. It's absolutely incredible. And we can go through a little bit of what it contains, but it's well worth the read in its entirety. It is. There's something really remarkable about the picture that you paint of this particular

history where I see it almost as watercolour. I don't know why, but I think it's the evoking of the clothing and the miniature and then the painting on the wall or the writing on the wall, should I say. It really is quite, and I don't mean to romanticise it because at the end of the day, somebody has taken their lives here. But I think it obviously stuck with the authorities in Bristol at the time, because as you said, they really wanted to get to the bottom of this. But it clearly has the power to affect over generations as well, because there's something so, so, I don't know, it's a really arresting image, I think. It's so interesting to me that you say you envisage it as a watercolour, and that there's something about that line between romanticising and the reality of this situation.

As you say, it's really tragic, and it's really difficult to come to terms with this human being story. But of course, the line between romanticism and reality in this period is being completely blurred. And people, the parish constable who transcribed this, the people who responded to this publication at the time, very much were living in that moment of romanticism, actually. And that is how James Doe's story is dressed up. It's also interesting to me that you see it in terms of watercolour, because I do see him as an artist in various ways. And something that really struck me when I went to see Mills to look at the place that he died was actually, there's very little distinction between the river there that's flowing out into the Bristol estuary and the riverbank.

And it's all kind of clay like brown slop. And of course, he's a potter and he's OK, he's a painter of pottery, not necessarily digging the clay and dealing with the sort of early stages of it. But there's so much that's poetic about the story. And I don't mean that in a way to diminish the tragedy of it. I think it was understood in those terms in the 1790s. And I think we can at least go some way to viewing it in that way. So Maddy, you mentioned earlier when you were describing the note that was found that there were very specific attitudes around the 1790s that related to suicide. Can you tell us a little bit more about what they were and how they impacted people and society more generally? Yeah. So at the end of the 18th century,

there's a real, I think it's fair to say a panic about suicide and particularly suicide of young men. There's a sense that art and life are becoming blurred. We've talked about romanticism being a big issue and there's this feeling that young men swept up with new ideas of art and sentimental feeling are coming a cropper because of this. The consequences of all this new feeling and experimenting with your emotions is leading people to take their own lives. This isn't helped by the popularity of novels like Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, which admittedly is published in the middle of the century. But in 1774, we get Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. And that features a suicide and was so popular at the time that there was a feeling Goethe's novel had actually prompted real life so-called

copycat deaths. So the Morning Chronicle, which was a popular newspaper at the time, publishes a letter just four years after Goethe's book has come out, and it's still incredibly popular. And it claims in that piece, it says, quote, at no period was the crime, and it was viewed as a crime, so deplorably present as it is at the moment. And it also goes on to say, the passage of human life forced by our own hands has now become as fashionable amongst almost all ranks of people. So there's a sense that suicide is not only affecting the lower classes, but also the aristocracy. And there are some really high profile aristocratic suicides

in the 1790s. And there's a sense that Britain, the future of Britain, in terms of the men who are going to govern it, who are going to rule its empire, it's being undermined by this spread of this problem. So that's the context of that. And I think it's just so fascinating, especially thinking about, you know, there are so many conversations today about mental health, in particular about young men and mental health. And, you know, we know that suicide rates are still highest amongst young men today. And it's fascinating that these conversations are happening, albeit in a really quite an insensitive, difficult way in the 18th century. But it is part of the cultural conversation. And James Doe is part of that story, I think.

It's interesting as well to tie this idea of men are having too many feelings, and therefore it's leading to their destruction into the trajectory of manhood over the 18th century, where it was seen that one could express one's emotions a little bit more. You could dress to reflect your personality, reflect your moment in time. And then to skip forward from the 1790s into the 19th century, how that expression becomes dampened and curtailed as the Victorian era really takes and kind of regulated. You spoke about regulation and this is another way in which manhood becomes regulated or the expressions of manhood become regulated into as much of a binary as they possibly can. But in terms of the specific

man we're talking about, in terms of James, do we know what his life was like? We've spoken about his death, but what exactly was his life? Do we know? Yeah. So we know a remarkable amount about him for someone who was really, as I say, a part of this emerging industrial class. Because people read the pamphlet with the graffiti transcribed and they recognize who he is from his own words, his own suicide note, and they write in and explain. And then there's multiple pamphlets that are published afterwards, including in the National Gentleman's Magazine eventually, telling his story. So we know that he was apprenticed as a child. He is born in Lambeth in London, and he works, first of all, in the Delft factories, Delft being the sort of fashionable way of making pottery until Wedgwood's

sort of boom of the Staffordshire Potteries. So inevitably he gets drawn to Staffordshire because he's part of this industry that's growing. He goes to the potteries there. And it's important to say that people working in this context, the competition between individual potteries was so high that you would try and retain all of your workforce. It took years to train people. And we're still in a period where people are working out the chemical processes of glazing ceramics, of making things. There's so much variation between these competitors and you really try and keep your secrets close to hand. However, it seems that Doe, James Doe, is involved in some form of industrial espionage. So this isn't the first scandal of its kind. There's several scandals that affect Wedgwood's factory at Etruria,

which is on the edge of Stoke-on-Trent for anyone who doesn't know. And you can still visit there today, in fact. And what happens is people try and sell to competitors, but also to the French. And of course, in the 1790s, Britain at war, France. And it's really, I think it's impossible to overstate the importance of ceramics to British culture in this period. So Queen Charlotte is herself, so the wife of George III is a patron of Wedgwood. And we get Queensware, which becomes this really fashionable product that Wedgwood's

producing because of her endorsement of it. But pottery is also a way of denoting class. So we see it, for example, on ships across the British Empire, the officers would have bone china cups and saucers, whereas the lower ranks on the ship would have much more sturdy earthenware, big chunky vessels for drinking from, that kind of thing. So it's a way of denoting class, but also so-called civilisation, delicacy, ideas of refinement, polite society. Pottery can also be political. So if you think about it on a tea table, we've got dishes that are holding sugar, sugar that's made by enslaved people in the Caribbean. And actually people in the end of the 18th century, and certainly in the

1790s, were producing and buying anti-slavery protest ceramics. So ceramics that would look like sugar bowls, for example, but that would have an anti-slavery message on them. So ceramics are really at the heart of British identity in this period. And to find someone who has been involved in the betrayal of that, who's undermined that, and who's come to this very romanticised or romanticisable end, and a tragic end, was so tantalising to the reading public at this time. This story has so many elements to it that people get really drawn in. And one of those elements that you're talking about that this story really has is a mystery, and people will always gravitate towards a mystery, and it will mean a story endures.

Can you tell us a little bit about that mystery that surrounds his death? Yeah, so in Doe's suicide note that's, as we've said, written on the walls of this tenement building, he makes several oblique references to what he calls an acquaintance. Sometimes he puts his name and he puts a line through it, which is a very common 18th century trope when you want to name someone who, if you're in the know, it's very obvious who that person is, but if not, it protects them. And you see it in the press, you see it in novels. And it's someone who is involved in the industrial espionage or something around Doe's downfall. And it's also a man who he's been incredibly close to. Now, the nature of their relationship isn't really clear. One thing I was able to find out in the course of my research is that the man in question, Doe's friend, Doe's lover, we don't know, is sent to prison for his involvement in this scandal. And Doe keeps him alive from the outside. He pays all of his bills in prison. He bribes people. He

keeps this man safe. And it seems that when the man comes out, he doesn't want to know Doe. Doe has lost all of his money, his professional standing, his place at the Etruria factory of Wedgwood. And the reason why he's eventually come to Bristol is because he's working in a much lower grade factory as just a sort of unskilled factory hand, sometimes able to do the beautiful painting that he's been used to doing his whole career. And this man has disowned him and is the reason that he's fallen so low and seems to be part of the reason for Doe's suicide. And it's just the most incredible insight into the relationship between two men. And it leaves so many questions unanswered, some of which I get to in the book, but there's so much still to answer there. And it's just a remarkable moment,

a remarkable little chink that we can peer through to see an element of one person's story in the past, but someone who really has disappeared from all other records. And it's because of his graffiti that we know anything about him today. And what we do get is a really, really deep insight into his psyche, who he is as a person and how people perceive those inner worlds, emotional turmoil, mental health at the end of the 18th century. I just think it's so fascinating because the whole world is contained in these histories that you have revealed in this book. It is micro histories of individuals that we can't even really get to the real crux of. And that is so many people's lives. That's how people live

their lives. Even the people we know a lot about, we don't know everything about because they don't share absolutely everything. So it's tantalizing to get these peaks into places that we probably shouldn't be seeing and were never intended to see. And then at the same time, it leads us to conflict with France. It leads us internationally. It talks about the transatlantic slave trade and how that relates to the sugar bowls that are sitting on tables in England. In that sense, Maddy, do you think your book is a history of graffiti,

or do you think it's a history of graffiti in Britain, and therefore a history of Britain, or is it doing all of the above? Hopefully it's doing all of the above. That's a very annoying historian's answer, isn't it? No, I would like to think that it's doing both. I mean, on the one hand, it is a history of how graffiti itself comes into the public consciousness like never before. The written word, whether it's on the page, whether it's in a letter, whether it's on the wall in the 18th century has new potency. It's incredibly powerful in all kinds of ways. This is an era where kings, as we see in 1688, are toppled. In the case of George III, they're running mad. Global war is shaping events in Britain, across the planet. There's industrialization,

there's inequality of gender, of race, economic inequality. All of these things are going on. And what I think hopefully the book does is show graffiti as an incredibly useful lens for finding that way in. It's just one way of entering this world, but it's one that gives us access to people that other routes into this history don't give us. So I really hope that people do buy it and do enjoy it. One thing that I found already is that the people that I've given copies to and that have had access to it early have been noticing graffiti everywhere and they've been sending me their pictures. So if anyone does buy it and then feels inclined to go out and find some historic graffiti for themselves, and you can do that at

heritage sites, you can do that in your own hometown. You can do it in churches, castles. Send me your pictures, tag me in things. I absolutely love to see it. I think it's one of the most tantalizing and wonderful things about studying graffiti is it is for everyone. It's everywhere. It's written by everyone and it's for everyone to access. Every time I'm somewhere now and I see graffiti, the first thing my husband will say to me is, take a picture of that and send it to Maddie. I'm just like,

she has had enough pictures. I mean, don't spam me. Well, listen, I am so excited for this. So thank you for listening to this special episode of After Dark, where we are talking about

writing on the wall, graffiti, rebellion and the making of 18th century Britain, which is published by Profile and by none other than Dr. Maddy Pelling. It is the history book that I'm most excited for this year, but of course I would say that, wouldn't I? Thank you so much for listening. As always, do leave us reviews and like wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to get in touch

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