The Hopeless World of Hilda Blake
Written by Reinhold Kramer & Tom Mitchell
Emily Hilda Blake was convicted and hanged for the death of her employer, Mary Lane. Her story is fascinating and one that deserves telling--as it was in the book "Walk Towards the Gallows," by Reinhold & Mitchel:
Cottage tenants on the Beauchamp estate were religious and 'most respectable people' -- 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. 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. 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'.
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 -- 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.
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. 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, 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 . 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.
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. 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. 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 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.' 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, but it would have been odd indeed if such thoughts did not cross the minds of the Beauchamps and the Guardians.
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 SS 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.
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. 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.' 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.
Soon thereafter, Hilda had run away, and it was amid several bouts of litigation she was made to return. Then she finally ran off again. She was hired at the farm of Robert and Mary Lane of Brandon, Manitoba, Canada.
Her sad story continues as follows:
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'. 4There 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.
Cottage tenants on the Beauchamp estate were religious and 'most respectable people' -- 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. 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. 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'.
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 -- 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.
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. 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, 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 . 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.
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. 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. 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 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.' 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, but it would have been odd indeed if such thoughts did not cross the minds of the Beauchamps and the Guardians.
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 SS 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.
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. 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.' 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.
Soon thereafter, Hilda had run away, and it was amid several bouts of litigation she was made to return. Then she finally ran off again. She was hired at the farm of Robert and Mary Lane of Brandon, Manitoba, Canada.
Her sad story continues as follows:
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'. 4There 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.
