Walk Towards the Gallows:
The Tragedy of Hilda Blake, Hanged 1899

Excerpt from Walk Towards the Gallows: The Tragedy of Hilda Blake, Hanged 1899 by Reinhold Kramer & Tom Mitchell, published by Oxford University Press Canada. Copyright Oxford University Press Canada. Excerpt published by permission of Oxford University Press Canada.

Introduction:
The Murder of Mary Lane

Wednesday, 5 July 1899, was one of those pleasant afternoons that compensates for the plunging cold of the prairie winter. At 21° Celsius, the weather in Brandon, Manitoba, seemed perfect for an outdoor tea party. Not 30 feet from the back entrance to their home, the four children of Robert and Mary Lane-Thomas, Edith, Mary Jr, and possibly Evelyn -- along with several friends -- Kathleen and Helen Johnson, Georgina Hanley, and a girl whose surname was Henderson -- sat on the lawn of a vacant lot, enjoying the party that Mary Lane, the mother, had promised them if they were good. Mary, 32 years old and pregnant, worked inside, hanging curtains on the parlour windows. Just after four o'clock, she ran screaming out the front door and onto the public sidewalk, took a few steps south on Tenth Street, and collapsed. Blood stained her dress. She had been shot in the back at close range -- her skin and blouse singed by flames from the pistol --and the bullet had passed through the top of her lung, lodging finally just above her heart. In some apocryphal accounts a toddler, presumably Evelyn, was playing on the floor at the time of the shooting, and the dying Mary had snatched the child up in order to protect it before running out to the street.¹ Mrs Johnson, the next-door neighbour, was first to answer the screams. Another neighbour, Mr Sampson, ran to call for a doctor and for Mary's husband, Robert, while the Lane servant girl appeared on the scene to bathe Mary's face with water. When Sampson returned, Mary was still alive, but before the doctor or Lane could arrive, blood accumulated in her lungs and she suffocated. She died without saying who had shot her.

Within minutes of the shooting Mary's body was carried into the Lane house and laid on the parlour floor, while a teacher, Miss Bawden, quickly spirited the children away.² Sampson alerted the police, and reports of the shooting sped through the city. The news of a lethal assault on a respectable middle-class woman in the sanctuary of her home in the middle of a July afternoon seemed unbelievable. 'Terrible news of a cruel murder committed in the heart of the city spread like wild-fire. Too horrible to be true seemed the tale which every tongue was telling . . . one of Brandon's women had been ruthlessly taken by an assassin's bullet'. ³ The Western Sun called the murder 'one of the most atrocious crimes in the annals of Manitoba's history and one of the most villainous that ever occurred in the Dominion of Canada'. ⁴

There was one eyewitness. Emily Hilda Blake, the 21-year-old servant girl who had been employed by the Lanes since the summer of 1898, had been carrying out bread and butter to the children and ironing curtains for Mary. Despite the horrific events, Blake gave a precise and lucid account of the murder, complete with motive. She had first sensed the existence of an unknown man when she saw his shadow at the back door, but she didn't attend to him because she assumed that he was someone hired by Robert Lane to work on the lawn. When she eventually turned, she saw a tramp, stooping to place his bundle on the ground next to the door. She wasn't startled; the railway spur being just behind the house, such figures often appeared at the kitchen door. He wore a soiled white shirt and a new suit of blue overalls, his bundle a brown parcel or valise or perhaps a sack. Standing 5' 10" tall, he looked about 30 to 35 years old, with a well-tanned face, a light moustache, and a beard of probably two or three days' growth. 'His eyes were set far back in the head', she said. 'They did not appear very sharp, but had a vacant stare'. She was sure that she would know him if she saw him again; later she would be less sure.⁵

His tone inoffensive, the tramp asked, 'Could you give a fellow something to eat?' Blake did not respond, referring him to Mary, who stood on the parlour sofa hanging the drapes that Blake, a few steps away in the summer kitchen, had been ironing. Without turning, Lane said, 'Make him work for it before you give him anything'. ⁶ This seemed to anger the tramp. He responded under his breath in a foreign language, and, as Blake walked into the kitchen proper from the summer kitchen, he followed, his gait unusual. In the kitchen he stood behind her, facing towards Mary in the front parlour. Mary at that point sharply instructed Blake not to bother with him. Denied, the tramp advanced a few steps to stand in the passage between the kitchen and the parlour, brandished a revolver from under his coat, and shot Mary in the back. He shot twice. Thrusting her arm straight out at the inquest, Blake demonstrated how the man had levelled his gun to kill her mistress.

'Oh Hilda! . . . I'm on fire!' Mary cried, and ran through the front door onto Tenth Street, the tramp at the same time fleeing in the opposite direction out the back door.⁷ He made no attempt on Blake's life, but for her part Blake also screamed. She did not know where the murder weapon was; she thought perhaps that the tramp had taken it with him. She assumed, as well, that he must have picked up his bundle, for it, too, had vanished.

Blake initially followed the dying Mary through the parlour, but she only got as far as the front hallway. There she collapsed, for how long she didn't know, but she never lost consciousness. On regaining her self-possession, she stumbled awkwardly out onto Tenth Street. 'Everything seemed black before my eyes and I felt dizzy when I came to the sidewalk.' She found Mary on the sidewalk in a pool of blood, Mrs Johnson crouching over her, others gathering. Blake went back inside for water and then returned to bathe Mary's face.

Within a few hours, the investigating officer, Police Chief James Kircaldy, doubted Blake's story. During the next days of manhunts and the near-lynching of a tramp, Kircaldy accumulated a number of circumstantial details that didn't fit her account, and he ultimately used those details to get a confession from her. After her arrest she admitted that she had killed Lane with a gun purchased in Winnipeg weeks before, and added that, notwithstanding ample evidence of premeditation, she had committed the murder because of a sudden and overwhelming fit of jealousy. She begged Kircaldy to shoot her on the spot. At the preliminary hearing she pled guilty and requested 'the most severe punishment possible', well knowing that she was requesting the gallows. She refused legal counsel, and despite a movement to have her sentence commuted, she was hanged four days before the end of the nineteenth century, the only woman to be executed in Manitoba, one of only two women executed in Canada between 1873 and 1922.

1. Winnipeg Daily Tribune, 6 July 1899. Winnipeg Morning Telegram, 6 July 1899. Neither Brandon papers nor the Manitoba Free Press (which had a Brandon correspondent) mention this rather significant detail.
2. Manitoba Morning Free Press, 6 July 1899.
3. Brandon Times, 6 July 1899.
4. Western Sun, 6 July 1899.
5. Brandon Times,6 July 1899, 13 July 1899.
6. Brandon Times,6 July 1899.
7. Brandon Times, 6 July 1899.

PART I
A Vulnerable and Isolated Virtue

In great families, when an advantageous place cannot be obtained either in possession, reversion, remainder, or expectancy, for the young man who is growing up, it is a very general custom to send him to sea.

--Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

In 1888, at 10 years of age and accompanied by her 12-year-old brother Tommy, Emily Hilda Blake was sent to sea. Not to work on board ship, but to emigrate to Canada. The two children were orphans -- recent inmates of the Heckingham Workhouse (Loddon and Clavering Union). Hilda had been born to Henry and Sarah Ann Blake in January 1878 at Chedgrave, 10 miles southeast of Norwich on the acres and acres of farmland and low marshes known as the 'Norfolk Broads', a large, rough triangle with the coast as the base and Norwich the apex. Chedgrave and environs belonged to Sir Reginald Proctor-Beauchamp. By 1879, when he was only 26 and Henry Blake 33, Beauchamp had already fought against the Turks at Shipka Pass, had travelled to China and Japan, and had inherited his father's, Sir Thomas Proctor-Beauchamp's, land. The young Beauchamp resided on an 800-acre estate with a large and elegant mansion, Langley Hall, 'a veritable treasure-house of art . . . filled with busts, paintings, and statues'.¹

The Blakes' lives were much more circumscribed. Cottage tenants on the Beauchamp estate, they were religious and 'most respectable people'² -- at least so Beauchamp later claimed -- but poor, near the bottom of a social structure dominated by landowner and parson. Fishing and farming were the region's principal industries, and as a young cottage tenant in the 1860s, Henry Blake worked as an agricultural labourer while Sir Reginald was being educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge. While late nineteenth-century fishing followed more or less traditional patterns, in agriculture the machine had replaced labour-intensive practices of the past. Threshing, winnowing, turnip-hoeing and cutting, sowing, haymaking, corn-cutting and binding, corn- and straw-stacking, and a score of other things were done by machine, to the exclusion of a great deal of manual labour. At 23, married and supporting two children, Blake graduated from tenant farming to become a police constable in the Norfolk Constabulary. His work may have included bailiff duties for Beauchamp vis-à-vis the other tenant farmers. After the oldest daughter, three sons -- Henry Jr, Theodore, and Augustus -- were born respectively in Grimston, Loddon, and Hickling.³ Rev. Henry Alfred Barrett, Beauchamp's uncle and the Chedgrave parson ever since Henry Blake and Sir Reginald Beauchamp were children, would speak, after Henry's death, of him as 'a highly respected officer in the Police Force'.⁴

Barrett exaggerated. Although Blake had risen to constable second-class by 1870 and first-class by 1873, he was dismissed from his job the following year for drunkenness. The dismissal took place in August of 1874 --the same year in which Reginald Beauchamp succeeded his father -- and only one child, Tommy, was born to the Blakes in the next three years, a time during which they must have struggled financially. Unusually, Henry Blake was reappointed to the police at the end of December 1877, ⁵ and eventually rose again to constable first-class. Less than a month after the reappointment Hilda was born. It may be that Sir Reginald had a hand in Blake's reappointment and in his almost immediate promotion to constable second-class, because Henry and Sarah chose a Beauchamp name as a middle name for their new daughter: 'Hilda', after Hilda Beauchamp, Sir Reginald's sister. Whether the name was a thank-you, a hope of some future elevation, or simply an imitation of one's superiors cannot be said. In any case, the young girl went by 'Hilda', not by her first name, 'Emily'.

Another boy, Donald, was born in 1881. By 1883 the family had remained in Chedgrave on the banks of the leisurely Chet River for all of the five years of Hilda's life. But the seeming stability of the Chedgrave years proved illusory, as the 37-year-old Henry Blake became deathly ill in 1883 of 'phthisis pulmonalis, diarrhoea, and exhaustion': probably tuberculosis. His wife, Sarah, wasn't well either. When it was clear that Henry was in the final throes of his illness, Rev. Barrett came to pray with the two parents that 'God would graciously fulfil his promise of being the Father of the fatherless.' Hilda's 'dying father and departing, mother' confirmed the parson's wishes with "deep toned, heartfelt Amens'.⁶ After Henry Blake died, poverty must have descended -- his widow receiving a gratuity of only £25--and the family remained for a short while in Sarah's sickly hands until she followed her husband to the grave a few years later. Hilda was orphaned at the age of nine.

Only working-class children like the Blakes became orphans in Victorian England. Middle- and upper-class children left parentless were usually absorbed into the families of close relatives or placed under the care of a guardian. Working-class children, however, were frequently left dispossessed, stranded, and completely dependent on the state or charitable organizations for their welfare. Few initiatives replaced the social structure of the family; the Adoption of Children Act, which provided for such children, was approved in Britain only in 1926. Although the material conditions confronting orphans were not necessarily more onerous than those facing the typical working-class child, it was nevertheless shattering to be isolated, alienated from the family setting, and placed in a poorhouse or sent as young agricultural labourers and domestics to strange homes in the colonies. Like state wards nowadays, who may be shunted from one foster home to another, working-class Victorian orphans usually knew the irrevocable loss of a permanent home. For a while the eldest sister looked after Tommy, Hilda, and six-year-old Donald, but the sister married, and was then either unwilling, or perhaps unable, to provide for them.⁷ As winter closed in at the end of November 1887, Tommy was sent to live among 600 other paupers in the Heckingham Workhouse, where Rev. Barrett and Sir Reginald were Guardians. A month later, just before Christmas, the eldest sister sent Hilda and Donald to join Tommy. The Workhouse was only a few minutes' walk east from their former home, but in all other ways it was far from their earlier lives. The children's diet category was assigned and a number affixed to their clothes.

Although Donald remained in the Workhouse until at least 1891,⁸ Hilda's stay was relatively short, since Sir Reginald, like Canada's future Governor-General, the Earl of Aberdeen, happened also to be on the board of the Self-Help Emigration Society, contributing £20 yearly to the cause .⁹ On 16 April 1888 a motion was proposed by Sir Reginald, and confirmed by Rev. Barrett and the other Guardians, that the Workhouse master purchase outfits for Hilda and Tommy at a cost not to exceed £2 each, outfits suitable for a sea journey to Canada. ¹⁰

Heckingham Workhouse where Hilda, Tommy and Donald Blake were sent after their parents' deaths. Constructed in 1763 as a House of Industry, it had been set ablaze in 1836 by an anti-Poor Law agitator. (Norfolk Research Centre, C 658844 Hal.)

About 80,000 pauper children arrived in Canada between 1869 and 1925.¹¹ The emigration of young destitutes had been provided for under the amendments made to the British Poor Law in 1850, which allowed for assisted emigration of children at the discretion of the Poor Law Guardians. This power was qualified in two ways: first, the emigration of each child had to be approved by the Poor Law Board; second, the child in question had to agree to the proposed emigration.¹² Their parents dead, Tommy and Hilda did not fight against emigration. Nevertheless, the wordings of the letters and of later court documents make it quite clear that the main consent came from Hilda's eldest sister and brother, who were probably 22 and 18 respectively.¹³ As Joy Parr notes, the Guardians of workhouses and children's homes carefully managed parents or other relatives, suppressed information about emigration, and painted Canada in glowing terms to the children so that there was a minimum of resistance. In the Blakes' case, Beauchamp and the Heckingham Guardians had very little opposition to contend with, but it seems unlikely that Hilda andTommy were capable of making a free and informed decision about their Canadian prospects.

The departure of the Blake children came as a result of correspondence initiated by Mrs Letitia Janet Stewart, the wife of a western Canadian farmer, Alfred Perry Stewart, who had emigrated from England in 1884. The marriage seems to have been Letitia's second, since she was 12 years older than her husband and was once known as Mrs Singer.¹⁴ At 43, she was no longer at the safest child-bearing age, and in the spring of 1887 she had written to ask for 'a couple of poor orphan children to be brought up' on the Stewart farm. ¹⁵ The Honorary Secretary for the Immigration Department of the London-based YWCA, who replied to the Stewarts a year later, chanced to be Constance Beauchamp, sister of Sir Reginald Beauchamp and twin sister of Hilda Beauchamp. Constance wrote that two orphans brought to her attention by Reginald were willing to go to Canada through the Self-Help Emigration Society.

The Society's 1893 Report boasted to British taxpayers and philanthropists about the Canadian Dominion as a solution to British poverty -- 'throughout the vast extent of the Dominion a compulsory poor rate is unknown' -- and the 1892 Report proudly quoted the Nottingham Evening Post: 'The Society has been instrumental in sending large numbers of people to Canada, who, but for its timely assistance, would in all probability have gone to swell the great body of helpless poor in this country.' Despite any incipient helplessness, emigrants were in theory expected to pay some part of their expenses, and the Society claimed to send out a physically, educationally, and financially 'superior class' of emigrant. ¹⁶ The Blakes could not have qualified under such conditions, but with the Beauchamps' personal interest in their cases, that didn't matter. The Beauchamps may have felt that they were obligated (albeit in the least expensive way possible) to see to their bailiff's family before washing their hands of the matter. Arrangements for sending orphans overseas and out of mind must have seemed providential. Merely for the price of postage the Beauchamps at once discharged their family obligations to a deceased employee, did their Christian duty by two young children who might after all rise materially in the colonies, and (felicitously) shortened the list of paupers dependent on their parish. 'Sailors', Constance Beauchamp called her young wards. Complaining of having to run the Self-Help Emigration Society without a manager, Beauchamp wrote, 'through God's goodness we have not had many sailors in but it is rather a trial yet the Lord is doing it so it is well.' ¹⁷ In the din of 'the Lord is doing it,' perhaps the words 'saving of expenditure' and looked well in the accounts' were npt as audible to young Hilda Blake before her sea-journey as they were to Oliver Twist when he left his workhouse,¹⁸  but it would have been odd indeed if such thoughts did not cross the minds of the Beauchamps and the Guardians.

Not everyone rejoiced at such transportations. Back in 1845 the History, and Gazetteer Directory of Norfolk already noted that from June 1835 to July 1836 upwards of 3,000 paupers had emigrated from Norfolk at the expense of their parishes, mostly to Canada. The author of the Directory, favouring the language of economic utility rather than that of social amelioration, questioned the policy of sending away ' the bones and sinews of the nation, which might be beneficially employed at home in agricultural improvements'. ¹⁹ On the Canadian side of the Atlantic, the assisted emigration of orphans smacked a bit too much of the old British practice of transporting criminals to the colonies. In a town near Brandon at the time of Hilda’s murder trial, 'Moralist' complained to the Melita Enterprise that ' It may seem uncharitable to refuse these hungry homeless waifs a seat at our fire-side and table. . . but. . . . with the limitless wealth and intelligence of the British nation it seems incredible that a better solution of the slum question has not been found. . . Why does not the British aristocracy adopt or assimilate or amalgamate this blood with the taint of Cain?'²⁰

In a letter dated 5 May 1888, Constance Beauchamp, speaking as it were on behalf of the British aristocracy, thanked the Stewarts in the colonies for taking the children, and hoped that they would turn out to be nice children '& be the Lord’s servants & so reward you for taking them.' She would have liked to have seen the children as they passed through London, she insisted, but the night they arrived would unfortunately be her 'night at Mrs. George Hollands[sic]', so Beauchamp promised to send her mother as proxy.

Whoever waved good-bye, Hilda and Tommy left Liverpool for Canada on 10 May 1888 aboard the s.s. Lake Superior. For six days by sea to Montreal under the supervision of Alfred Broadhurst, and then five more days alone to Elkhorn, Manitoba, depending upon the kindness of successive CPR conductors, Hilda and Tommy travelled toward the unknown. Broadhurst telegraphed the Stewarts as soon as he had placed the children on the train from Montreal. He later said, 'I knew her as a quiet, well behaved and affectionate child, and she seemed greatly to appreciate the little benefits she was enabled to enjoy while under my immediate care during the voyage.'²¹ The Stewarts would soon find reason to disagree, characterizing her as 'artful' and unco-operative.

The orphan was a figure of great pathos and yet also one of the most problematic social types in late Victorian society. Kimberly Reynolds and Nicola Humble estimate that more than 50 mainstream Victorian novels were constructed around the lives of fictional orphans, reflecting the widespread existence of actual orphans in British society. More importantly, the convention reflected and helped to shape society's emotional response to the problems of orphans. The 'real-life figure of the orphan . . . generated in the public a strong sense of guilt, unease, helplessness and resentment'²² -- a reaction largely rooted in the pathos of innocent and naive children left to struggle through life alone without the guidance or support of parents or kin, all this in an age when the family was increasingly viewed as the heart of the social order. While orphans in real life might suffer through difficult, unattractive, and short lives on the street, in the factory, or in the field, orphans presented in fictional works were constructed to evoke a great deal of sympathy. That sympathy could, on the one hand, inspire social reform; on the other hand, fictive representations could also overshadow real lives to the extent that both orphan and the 'adopting' family might expect an idealized encounter between a grateful, hard-working child and a ready-made, loving family.

John Reed notes that 'to be a female and an orphan as well, was to be doubly disadvantaged. Hence female orphans of all ages came to represent, not surprisingly, a vulnerable and isolated virtue.' The conception of their vulnerability was rooted in the perceived fragility of their gender, their susceptibility to sexual temptation, and their isolation from parental influence. Attractive young girls left without parental protection had to fend off the sexual predations of employers and 'suitors'. Their struggle was first to survive; then, if possible, to regain a life of security and happiness through marriage. Failure could result in the lonely isolation of a single woman eking out a living through domestic service, or in the life of an outcast shamed by sexual disgrace. The fate of the Victorian literary orphan was determined in large part by her capacity to acquire personal discipline in the absence of parental guidance. The orphan must find her own way and shape her own identity in the face of adversity and temptation.²³

Literary conventions help us to approach Hilda Blake on at least two levels. First, she had a reputation for reading novels, so we might anticipate that in her actions and language she might display a certain degree of self-consciousness about her roles. These novels would later influence her melodramatic self-presentation at the murder trial, a presentation forming what one might call the adult version of her childhood 'artfulness.' Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, literary conventions allow us to project models according to which a social phenomenon (such as orphanhood) was understood and spoken about--in other words, the expectations and limits attached to the particular story in which one found oneself. This second and more fundamental sense of the importance of narrative requires no self-consciousness: in fact, a narrative conveyed explicitly through fiction or more subliminally through prevailing social discourses is likely to be uncritically received and repeated by the child.

To Reed’s narrative about a vulnerable and isolated virtue, which gained its most popular representation in Jane Eyre, Hilda’s story adds other narratives, some focused mainly through the orphan’s point of view and some mainly through the point of view of the caregiver: the orphan as an object of Christian charity; the orphan as grateful and inexpensive labour; the orphan as a representative of the ungrateful and scheming lower class (a representative like Becky Sharp, for example, in Vanity Fair). Hilda’s story also hints at Michael McKeon’s categories of progressive and romance narratives--progressive narrative tracing the upward-moving trajectory of a lower-class or non-conformist hero who is characterized by moral and economic industriousness, romance narrative turning upon the discovery of aristocratic birth.²⁴Clearly the various narratives often placed opposing constructions on identical events, but that in no way prevented individuals from simultaneously invoking opposed narratives. As narratives impinge upon the real world of human action, they function variously: to reveal fantasies, to express unmet expectations about how an orphan or a caregiver should act, and, once in a while, to faithfully describe actual experience. Certainly, most fantasies and expectations find some echo in experience, and no faithful description leaves fantasy and expectation behind entirely.

The people who talked about Hilda’s ‘adoption’ used an interesting mixture of orphan narratives. Letitia Stewart, by referring to 'poor orphan children to be brought up' on the Stewart farm, hinted at charity in the most neutral of ways. The Stewarts referred to their 'charitable intent' more directly in a later Surrogate Court document, but, early on, reticence was decorous in the family which stood to gain financially from orphan labour. Yet money did change hands. The Stewarts paid for the children to come to Canada, and evidently had sent a monetary gift to Mr. Holland who, it turned out, 'had no children suitable'.²⁵ Constance Beauchamp, whose economic interest was less clearly at stake (though her Society did receive bonuses for sending out children²⁶) could be much more explicit about the Stewarts’ gain. Her hope for the Stewarts--that the Blakes would turn out to be nice children 'and be the Lord’s servants and so reward you for taking them'--appealed directly (in keeping with her YWCA affiliation) to the narrative of Christian charity, and only slightly less directly to the narrative of inexpensive labour. Speaking of 'servants' and 'reward' to the caregiver was probably a well-understood euphemism for the economic exchange about to take place, quite in keeping with the Victorian tendency to spiritualize economic transactions. The Self-Help Emigration Society literature was more direct: Canada did not want clerks, professional men, or merchants; Canada wanted artisans to a limited degree, farmers, and, above all, domestic servants.²⁷

This is not to accuse Beauchamp of hypocrisy in masking the economic element of the transaction. The dichotomy between 'the Lord’s servants' and ‘domestic’ servants, or between ‘reward you spiritually’ and ‘reward you materially’ was clearly less pronounced for an essentially pre-Marxian society than it is for a post-Marxian society. As Beauchamp conceived of it, the material reward would accrue mainly to the Stewarts, with the Blakes rewarded by becoming nice and industrious children--industriousness a good omen, of course, for the Blakes’ future material prospects, especially if one put faith in a progressive narrative. But for Beauchamp, as presumably for the Stewarts, the progressive narrative (implied in the name of the Self-Help Emigration Society and in the agreement to educate) was probably less significant than the narrative of inexpensive labour. The apportionment of rewards tacitly acknowledged the initial financial outlay on the part of the Stewarts--who agreed to pay passage and to educate the children.²⁸ From the receiving end in the colonies, the Stewarts might have understood the material tropes, though perhaps not the elegiac tone, in the History, and Gazetteer Directory of Norfolk when the author spoke about the disappearing "bones and sinews" of Great Britain.

If the Blake children departed for Canada under the sanction of Christian charity and inexpensive labour, these two conflicting narratives collided head-on shortly after the little sailors found land and began life on the Stewart farm at Kola, near Elkhorn and 80 miles west of Brandon, Manitoba. There the central paradigm of Hilda’s exile in Canada emerged: the recurring motif of the literary orphan’s confinement and escape.

A year and a half after Hilda’s and Tommy’s arrival, Stewart wrote the following letter for the Canadian immigration service:

Burnside Farm, Elkhorn, 21st November, 1889.

Sir,--I think that any man that has a little capital to start can do very well in this country. I came out in the fall of 1883, and my wife and five children in the spring of 1884. What money we have invested in this country we have had a larger interest for than we ever got in the old country from the same amount, besides having a large house, stables, granary, horses, cattle, etc. Of course, this year the crops have been bad about this part, but we have 140 acres ready for wheat next year, when, if we have a good crop, it will put us straight a bit. It is a splendid country for cattle, and they can be kept at low cost. I have a half section here, and I bought a farm in the North-West, and the first year it half paid for itself. We are all contented with the country, and would not care to live in the old country, after living six years in this nice atmosphere. Of course, the winters are cold, but we never suffer from the cold, as we have a good tight house of twelve rooms, which two stoves will keep warm in the winter. I might mention the first ten acres I cropped I got 75 bushels of oats to the acre. This was in 1885. In fact, I got twice as much from 10 acres as I got this year from 120.

A.P. Stewart

P.S. -- I might mention that my garden did better this year than it ever did before, and it was never watered. I had peas, beans, cabbages, broccoli, onions, carrots, corn, tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers, etc.--

That the Stewarts were the ones who named Kola (after the English estate from which they emigrated)³⁰ and that the immigration agent turned to Stewart (among others) to write an encomium for Manitoba, indicates that Stewart was a man of substance. Indeed, with a hint of the British affectation of class contrary to other farmers in the immigration report, A.P. attached his estate’s name--'Burnside Farm'--to his report. In 1886 the Stewarts refused an offer to buy their property. They were clearly wealthier than their neighbour Mary Rex, with a 44 x 24-foot house valued at $2,000 compared to the 22 x 24-foot Rex house valued at $700. ³¹ Although the Stewarts had been on poor terms with the Rexes ever since A.P. had banished Mary from his house in 1886 'on account of unladylike conversation', the Stewart home was a centre of the community’s social and religious life, especially for the area’s bachelors. At Letitia Stewart’s death, it was affirmed that 'many a young fellow remembers today the many kindnesses received at her hand.'³²

But A.P.’s story of unfailing material progress is more interesting--like his wife’s reticent letter to Constance Beauchamp--for what it doesn’t mention: his 'five children' include three step-sons (Archibald Charles Head, Joseph Singer, and Robert Burn Singer) as well as two step-daughters (Evelyn and Fanny Singer), but he does not mention two Norfolk orphans living under his roof and working without pay alongside his family, even though earlier that same year in official court documents he called one of those orphans 'my adopted child'. He does not mention that the orphan had run away, that amid several bouts of litigation she was made to return, and that she finally ran off again, all in the eventful 18 months between Hilda’s arrival and Stewart’s cheery account of farming in the Northwest.

'I hope you say your prayers every night. . . and pray for the people who feed you, and take care of you, like a Christian', a gruff gentleman hectors the orphans in Oliver Twist. ³³ Within a few months of the ten-year-old Hilda’s arrival, high-minded advice of this sort was urgently needed, because her relationship with the Stewarts had deteriorated. The adoption of an older child typically initiates a family crisis, and it is not unusual for children who have not completed the work of mourning to be perceived as 'superficial, manipulative, and narcissistic'.³⁴ Such was the case with Hilda. Responding to complaints from the Stewarts about her 'falsehood and artfulness',  Rev. Barrett wrote a letter in his capacity as one of the Guardians of the parishes in the Loddon and Clavering Union and as the Clergyman of the Parish in which the children had been born. Barrett explained that both children had been trained in the Chedgrave school, had demonstrated good abilities, had been obedient and well behaved. He regretted hearing of the complaints, but hesitated to pass them on to his nephew, Sir Reginald: 'I know it would annoy both him and his uncle Lord Dorchester who are both interested in the Society which seeks to give opportunities of emigration to fitting persons.' The project of exporting children, with its economic and feel-good benefits was more important than two wayward children. (When, in the following year, matters grew worse and Beauchamp did discover what was happening on the Stewart farm, he proved even less inclined than Barrett to worry about the Blakes.) Nevertheless, Barrett advised the Stewarts that 'I shall. . . do whatever may be conducive to their interests and can only regret that any conduct on Hilda’s part should have given trouble.'³⁵ Translated, this meant that Barrett was willing to write the children a letter filled with high-minded advice.

The letter that Barrett sent makes extensive use of the narrative of Christian charity. Referring to letters that Hilda and Tommy had previously written to their sister in Norfolk, Barrett said, 'I am rejoiced to hear that you can write of the great kindness you are receiving from Mrs. Stewart'. In Barrett’s narrative, the Stewarts fulfill the providential intent of divine grace in caring for the fatherless: 'I am amazed at times at the wonderful way in which He has fulfilled His promise and answered the deep toned heartfelt Amens of your dying Father and departing Mother.' Barrett’s distance from the actual situation and his interest in continuing to export workhouse children made it easier for him to idealize the Blakes’ positions in the Stewart home and to speak of amazing answers to prayer. He reminded Hilda and Tommy that they had been baptized, that their parents had set them apart for 'God’s service', and that they were little Jesuses:

You are holy children, in the sense of the word holy, set apart for God, just as the Communion Table is called the Holy Table as a Table set apart for God’s service--remember Jesus Christ died for you. He has taken you up, as it were, in His arms to bless you with the promise of the Holy Ghost that you may be like Jesus--now Jesus was truth--if you are not truthful you are unlike Jesus--all happiness is in being like Jesus.

'Jesus was thoughtful about His mother',' Barrett added, and went on to insist that 'Mr & Mrs Stewart are doing to you a parent’s part.... Study to be obedient--willing to do them service', he urged, using, in echo of Constance Beauchamp, that ambiguous word 'service'. He also admonished the Blakes to obey their teacher Miss Kendell, and hoped to hear good reports about the Blakes which he could pass on to Sir Reginald and the Guardians.³⁶ Beyond simply emphasizing truthfulness, Barrett invoked Pauline theology, in which human beings led by the spirit become God’s children alongside the eldest son Jesus. Barrett hinted that here the Stewarts’ saving action had imitated Christ’s divine grace, and that the Blakes should imitate the proper human response of submission and righteous living, although he wasn’t ready to follow Pauline metaphors so far as to add: 'and if children, then heirs'.³⁷

Barrett’s letter to the children reflected, at least in part, the motivation of British child-savers in sending children like Hilda and Tommy Blake to Canada. Parr explains that 'helping children was an honour akin to sheltering the Christ-child himself. To turn away from a child in distress was to deny the Lord, who too had entered this world in lowly circumstances.' Yet simply placing such children in a Poor House or orphanage was felt to be inadequate. Isolation on the street or in institutional settings tended to cause children to 'dread and hate those who ought to be nearest them', and to 'grow in evil, until the fruits of evil are prized as the best things in the world.' As Barrett’s letter reflected, child savers wanted children to learn obedience and proper conduct through affection and respect, not through simple adherence to authority. The verse in Psalms 68 that follows Barrett’s 'Father to the fatherless' phrase declares that 'God setteth the solitary in families', and most Victorians would have agreed that a family context was required for emotional maturity and the inculcation of moral values. Those responsible for the emigration of orphans hoped that the opportunity to live within a Canadian family would provide such a context. In this way, emigrant paupers would be introduced to the power of 'Christian love at work'.³⁹

The Christian child-saving terms of Barrett’s letter would have struck a responsive chord in the Stewarts. Letitia was called 'a most ardent worker in the cause of Christ’s Church', because between 1884 and 1886 she had allowed her large house to be used for Anglican services and by 1886 she had donated land, raised funds in England, and thus founded the Church of the Advent (now Kola Anglican Church, no longer the site of regular services).⁴⁰ One of her older sons may have gone into the ministry, and when the Blakes joined the family, Letitia was still entertaining visiting clergy. In 1911, 12 years after her death, a brass cross would be unveiled, memorializing her central role in establishing the church.⁴¹ Constance Beauchamp’s frank expression of spiritual concerns to Stewart and the evangelical terms in which those concerns were articulated (low-church terms that would not have been out of place in Methodist holiness circles or among nascent Pentecostals) suggest that the sympathy between the two women was in large part religious: 'We are so thankful & glad to hear the good news of your son--may he be a mighty witness for the Lord. . . . Our brother in China. . . has just been filled with the Holy Ghost after many months of great depression--a real baptism so that he speaks Chinese easier than English & thinks in Chinese & can’t hold back from speaking what the Lord is teaching him.' Evidently the shared religious discourse made it much easier for the sender of the two little exports to trust the receiver, and to feel that the economic aspect of the emigration was an insignificant addendum to what was a charitable, and therefore spiritual, transaction.

However, for many child immigrants--and it seems particularly so in the case of Hilda--the wrenching experience of being removed from kin at an early age proved highly traumatic, and the new family setting unconducive to moral growth. Her case wasn’t unique, because a few years later the Self-Help Emigration Society was taken to task for failing to supervise wards such as Joseph Henry Adams, a sixteen-year-old who, weak-minded and prone to bed-wetting, wandered the country homeless and in semi-starvation after losing his place of service. To the Minister of the Interior, the Self-Help Emigration Society protested that it did not send children to Canada 'unless under the care of their parents or responsible friends with whom they would continue after arrival.'42 The discrepancy between the 'artful' and uncooperative Hilda who called forth Barrett’s letter and Alfred Broadhurst’s description of a 'well-behaved' and 'affectionate' Hilda, suggests that among the Stewarts she did not get whatever love and nurture she needed. She was not really adopted 'in the full sense of the word'     ( to use Rev. Barrett’s phraseology). Summing up a constant theme in the autobiographies of the "home children" (as these orphans were called), Phyllis Harrison suggests that, 'Having started from the premise that poverty-stricken children. . . were being given a much greater opportunity. . . some people accepted that these children were somehow not like other children--with the same needs for affection, love and understanding. . . . Many [farmers] deeply regretted their previous attitude to the children and tried to make up for it in later years.'⁴³ For Hilda and many others, the transportation experience 'clouded the childhood memories. . . with mystery and bitterness', shaping adult tendencies.⁴⁴Both Hilda and the Stewarts carried idealized expectations of the orphan’s position--the Stewarts expecting a tractable and grateful child whose labour would prove valuable, Hilda expecting quite a bit more than room, board, and an education.

1. Ernest R. Suffling, The Land of the Broads (London: L. Upcott Gill, 1887), p. 54. Who’s Who 1902 (London: Adam and Charles  Black, 1902), p. 133.
2. Reginald Beauchamp letter to A.P. Stewart, 17 April 1889, Provincial Archives of Manitoba (PAM) , Surrogate Court of the Western Judicial District, Emily Hilda Blake, GR 5338, File No. 108, 1889.
3.1881 Census, FHL Film 1341473, PRO Ref RG11, Piece 1963, Folio 51, Page 3, Norfolk Studies Library. The eldest daughter’s identity is something of a puzzle, since she does not appear in the 1881 Census. Given the ages of the parents, it could be that Sarah Ann had given birth at 16, and that her daughter was out of the home--either married or working out--by the time she too was 16. It is also possible that the eldest daughter was Hilda’s step-sister, and resided with another parent.
4. The 1881 Census lists his occupation as "police constable."
5. Personal letter from Superintendent Kirkham of the Norfolk Constabulary to Christina Crease, 29 February 2000.
6. Henry Alfred Barrett to Tommy and Hilda Blake, 6 August 1888, Queen vs. Mary Rex (1889), PAM, Court of Queen’s Bench (Brandon) Filings, A 0088, GR 363, L-11-4-14.
7. Constance Beauchamp letter to Mrs. Stewart, 19 March 1888, Queen vs. Mary Rex (1889).
8. Heckingham Workhouse, Loddon and Clavering Union Admission and Discharge Book, 1891, Norfolk Record Office.
9. Self-Help Emigration Society. Report for 1892, Public Archives of Canada, Immigration Branch, RG 76, Volume 72, File 3440, p. 30.
10. Heckingham Workhouse (Loddon and Clavering Union), Guardians’ Minute Book, 1887-89 (C/GP 12/123), 16 April 1888, Norfolk Record Office.
11. Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1987), p. 251.
12. Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, Vol. 2 (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul), p. 555.
13. Reginald Beauchamp letter to A.P. Stewart, 17 April 1889, Surrogate Court of the Western Judicial District, Emily Hilda Blake, 1889.
14. Scrapbook at the Church of the Advent, Kola; article taken from the Virden Empire Advance 1962. Stewart’s age is listed in Margaret Goodman et. al. Index to the 1901 Census of Manitoba for Brandon (South West Branch, Manitoba Genealogical Society, 1998), p. 15, 34. Letitia Stewart’s gravestone shows that she was about 12 years older than Alfred Stewart.
15.. Surrogate Court of the Western Judicial District, PAM, GR 5338, File No. 108, 1889.
16. Self-Help Emigration Society. Report for the Year 1892, p. 2. Report for the Year 1893, 19.
17. Constance Beauchamp letter to Mrs. Stewart, 19 March 1888, Queen vs. Mary Rex (1889).
18. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1837; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 61.
19. William White, White’s Norfolk (David and Charles Reprints), p. 16.
20. Melita Enterprise, 21 July 1899.
21. Western Sun, 14 December 1899.
22. Kimberly Reynolds and Nicola Humble, Victorian Heroines: Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth-century Literature and Art (New York: New York University Press, 1993), p. 24.
23. John Reed, Victorian Conventions (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975), p. 254.
24. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
25. Constance Beauchamp letter to Mrs. Stewart, 19 March 1888, Queen vs. Mary Rex (1889).
26. Letters of 6 November 1894 and 28 August 1895 from Lyndwode Pereira, Assistant Secretary to the London High Commissioner for Canada, speak of a $2 per capita bonus being paid to the Self Help Emigration Society. Self-Help Emigration Society. PAC, Immigration Branch, RG 76, Volume 72, File 3440.
27. Self-Help Emigration Society. Report for 1892, p. 4, 27.
28. Reginald Beauchamp letter to A.P. Stewart, 17 April 1889, Surrogate Court of the Western Judicial District, Emily Hilda Blake, File No. 108, 1889. 29. "No. 12 Annual Report of Winnipeg Immigration Agent," Sessional Papers 5 (1889): 89-90.
30. Elkhorn and District Historical Society, Steel and Grass Roots: History of Elkhorn 1882-1982 (Elkhorn: Elkhorn and District Historical Society, 1982), p. 80.
31. Provincial Archives of Manitoba (PAM), NR 0215 Natural Resources Lands Branch, Homestead Files, Reel 1110 (hereafter Lands Branch, Reel 1110).
32. Virden Advance, 12 October 1899.
33. Dickens, Oliver Twist, p. 54.
34. Paul D. Steinhauer, The Least Detrimental Alternative: A Systematic Guide to Case Planning and Decision Making for Children in Care (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 27, 33, 353.
35. Henry Alfred Barrett letter to Mrs. Stewart, 6 August 1888, Queen vs. Mary Rex (1889).
36. Henry Alfred Barrett letter to Tommy and Hilda Blake, 6 August 1888, Queen vs. Mary Rex (1889).
37. Romans 8:17( King James Version). 
38. Joy Parr, "‘Transplanting from Dens of Iniquity’: Theology and Child Emigration," in Linda Kealey, A Not Unreasonable Claim: Women and Reform in Canada, 1880s-1920s (Toronto: The Women's Press, 1979), p. 176.
39. Ibid.
40. Elkhorn and District Historical Society, p. 68. Elkhorn Mercury, 11 April 1911.
41. Ibid.
42. G.M. Marshall to S. Carsley, President, Society for the Protection of Women and Children,15 February 1896;  Edward Wilson Gates to the Minister of the Interior, 16 January 1896, NAC, Immigration Branch, RG 76, Volume 72, File 3440.
43. Phyllis Harrison ed., The Home Children: Their Personal Stories (Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer, 1979), p. 22.
44. Parr, '"Transplanting from Dens of Iniquity"', 173.