The general title page of the pamphlet dates the two trials to 21 March 1812, at the Bury Assizes. In the section devoted to the Smiths, the counsel for the prosecution, Mr Alderson, opened his case by describing three children whom the inhabitants of Cookley no longer saw. He maintained that the Smith family had withdrawn the children from all public view, and that their condition had subsequently wasted away beneath blows, lack of sustenance, and the cold. The printed report opens with this speech of accusation, rather than with a reconstructed scene: no witness is present here to recount what transpired hour by hour within the walls of the dwelling. The trial’s purpose was to establish what had been seen, what the medical men could deduce, and what each person had heard said.
John Smith was thirty-nine years of age, Elizabeth twenty-seven. Mary Ann, the daughter of John’s first marriage, was eight. Two younger children lived alongside her. The indictment, as summarised in the print, alleged a succession of beatings, deprivation of food, and exposure to the cold between 31 December and 11 February. It specified as consequences bodily injuries, emaciation, and the mortification of the feet; the child died on 11 February. These were, in the first instance, the formal terms of the charge, not an independent finding of fact. The two other children survived.
Alderson bade the jury picture children once robust who had become too feeble even to heed their surroundings. He asserted that prior to John’s second marriage, contracted in November, the three children had been clean and well nourished; thereafter, according to his opening, they were kept apart, and the neighbours only discovered their plight in the opening days of February. He undertook to prove the violence, the starvation, and the cold. His language was that of the prosecution, and his declaration that poverty could serve as no excuse was his own assertion. The trial itself would bring forth more circumscribed voices.
Lucy Smith, John’s sister, placed her first visit on 5 February. On the preceding evening, she said, her brother had come to her house in Halesworth in tears. He had told her that his eldest girl was going to die and that the other two children were declining rapidly. The following day, Lucy found Mary Ann abed, in a chamber the stench of which she found insupportable. She believed the child had but a few hours to live. The two younger ones, on the ground floor, likewise appeared to her almost indifferent to what surrounded them.
Lucy returned on the Friday. Mary Ann recognised her voice and called to her as she ascended the stairs. Lucy stated that she caught sight of dark marks upon the body, arms, and neck when the bedclothes were turned down. Elizabeth attributed them to illness and said they had only appeared the day before. The child’s feet were swathed in cloths; Mary Ann wished them to be undone, but her stepmother objected, according to Lucy’s testimony. This detail did not of itself establish the origin of the lesions. It indicated, however, that the child’s condition could no longer be described solely through the words of a parent.
The sister also heard two differing versions of the same distress. She stated that she had accused the pair of starving the children. John replied that he could not procure sufficient food, and that he believed his wife withheld drink from them. He was said to have committed the two younger ones to her care, whom she subsequently took under her protection. To Lucy, he was reported to have said that it had shocked him to look upon his eldest daughter for the past three weeks, and that he would leave the country to escape his wife. These are words reported by his sister; they were not a deposition taken down by a clerk of the court, and the record provides no other witness to this conversation.
The defence examined Lucy upon her intimacy with the family. She conceded that she had seldom visited the household following the remarriage. Yet she described her brother as a kind husband and a generous father before that union. She knew that his first wife had died of consumption and said that John feared the eldest girl might have suffered from having nursed her. Her testimony thus combined a belated alarm, confidences attributed to the brother, and a favourable recollection of his character. These elements did not resolve into a single, unequivocal account.
Mary Clark, who dwelt about half a mile distant, said she came after hearing that the children were famished and that one of the girls was dying. She had known the family for several years and remembered the children clean, healthy, and lively. In February, she found a filthy, foul-smelling room, and Mary Ann in a state she deemed dreadful. Clark had on several occasions brought oranges, cake, wine, and water; the children, she stated, ate with ravenous greed. She also reported that the female prisoner said she gave them what she could obtain, but that they perhaps lacked for drink. Certain words that Clark attributed to the child were expressly excluded by the judge: they cannot be entertained as admitted evidence.
Ann Cameron, formerly a servant to the Smiths, had kept the house for thirteen months. She quitted her place on the preceding 8 November. She affirmed that at that time the children were in good health and always had sufficient to eat. Cross-examined by the defence, she described John as a good father, while specifying that he worked as a labourer and was frequently in the house only at mealtimes and after his day’s labour. Her testimony marked a prior state of affairs, but shed no light on what had occurred during the weeks in which Mary Ann had wasted away.
John Walker, a surgeon, explained that John Smith had come to him on 1 February regarding the eldest daughter, whom he represented as suffering from a worm fever. Walker at first considered that the description did not warrant his getting out of bed; he sent a vermifuge and visited the children a day or two later. He found them all severely emaciated and dejected, listless in a manner that struck him forcibly. Mary Ann was, he said, more emaciated than any child he had ever seen. He was not then aware of the condition of her feet. After her death, he observed that mortification extended as high as the ankles; he judged that it had accelerated her demise, while adding that the child might have recovered had she been in sound health.
Stebbing Revans the younger, who had opened the body, attributed death to the want of food. He regarded the mortification as a secondary cause that had hastened the end, and did not believe the girl had died of consumption. His father, a surgeon in Halesworth for more than twenty-six years, delivered a similar opinion: the primary cause was, in his judgment, long-continued deprivation of food; the mortification had acted as an accelerator in an already debilitated frame. The three men did not describe a single, isolated cause. They distinguished between privation, the state of debility, and the lesions upon the feet, and then explained how these factors might have combined.
The prosecution added the account of Constable John Wright, who had apprehended John Smith. Wright said he had held out no promise of favour. According to him, Smith admitted having placed the child in the shed on three separate nights, at his wife’s desire, and having suspended her by the middle of her body, with her feet touching the ground, for failing to perform her spinning task. The printed record attributes these words to the prisoner through the mouth of the officer; it does not present them as a signed confession. Wright also touched upon words exchanged between the spouses concerning meat and the future of the children, but the judge ruled that portion inadmissible. A line must be drawn between what the witness related and what the jury was permitted to entertain.
The witnesses for the defence returned to John’s character. George Higham, a farmer who had employed him from 1805 to October 1811, spoke of him as tender towards his children. He sold him two bushels of wheat every three weeks and had heard no complaint that he lacked for food. James Reeve likewise recalled a considerate man, though he knew less of the family after the remarriage. Hayward, of Cookley, also gave him a good character. The judge observed that this reputation had been laid before the court as fully as it possibly could be. It answered to the moral portrait drawn by those witnesses; it did not expunge the medical depositions nor the observations made within the house.
In his summing-up, the judge directed the jury to determine first whether a murder had indeed been committed. He reverted to the three surgeons, who attributed the death to hunger, aggravated by other cruelties, and to the mortification that had accelerated the end. After five minutes’ deliberation, the jury found John and Elizabeth Smith guilty, and the judge passed sentence of death upon them. He condemned them to be hanged on Monday, 23 March, and their bodies to be delivered to the surgeons for dissection. The pamphlet does not record whether the sentence was subsequently carried out.
The printed account closes upon the two testimonies concerning the selfsame hearth without presuming to describe what no third party witnessed there. The sister had received two of the children; the neighbour had carried victuals; the former servant remembered a house once better ordered; the surgeons agreed upon the role of starvation, yet distinguished what had precipitated the death. The verdict established the guilt of the spouses in the eyes of the jury, not every word reported nor every circumstance set forth in the indictment. At Cookley, the door that had closed upon the children was opened in this record only by the partial glimpses of those who were permitted to step within.