Over Her Dead Body: Emma Steels

Died: 22^nd May 1861 near Milton Ferry Bridge

Age: approximately ten weeks

An important part of the nineteenth-century rural calendar were feasts, held in early summer in most parishes. Castor feast, being adjacent to the Milton Estate, was one of the best in the area. It was a place to come together, to drink and eat and dance. It was an excellent destination for a prostitute in need of a bit of money.

Elizabeth Steels grew up in Stanground, and was working as a prostitute by 1860, when she was seventeen or eighteen. She lived on Wellington Lane, notorious at that time as a criminal haven, and associated with a group of known prostitutes. Her baby daughter, Emma, was born in February 1861. She was a small baby, and did not thrive, always seeming ill. Elizabeth doesn’t seem to have had fed the baby herself, or fed her much of anything else.

Baby or not, in order to provide for herself, Elizabeth needed to work.  On the evening of Tuesday 21^st May 1861, she headed to Castor feast, carrying baby Emma. She arrived around 10pm, met her friends, Susannah Frost and Elizabeth Knight, and they got on with the business of attracting men. There was a dance that night at the Fitzwilliam Arms. Elizabeth gave the baby to a woman she didn’t know to look after, and danced until 3:45am.  

Elizabeth, her friends, and several unnamed  men left the pub around 4am to walk back to Peterborough. They stopped off near Milton Ferry Bridge to ‘dance’. Elizabeth Knight took the baby while Elizabeth worked, and realised that she had died.

We cannot know how Elizabeth reacted to discovering her daughter had died, but we know that she then ran into town, stopping only when she met Police Sergeant Jackson in the Market Place at 5:40am. Sergeant Jackson, knowing Elizabeth and her trade, took her and the baby to the police station. A post-mortem was performed by Dr Thomas Walker, and the inquest was held at the Fitzwilliam Arms in the city (on Nelson Street, lost under the Queensgate development) the following day.

The inquest was mostly concerned with whether Elizabeth had deliberately neglected her little daughter, whose cause of death was starvation. They concluded Emma’s death was natural: so many babies died of malnourishment in this period that it was impossible to tell which were starved deliberately and which were starved through want. But they severely reprimanded Elizabeth, for her carelessness and neglect. I believe that what they were really reprimanding her for was her lifestyle.

Elizabeth does not appear in the records again. She seems to have left Peterborough, but her life after this unhappy episode is a mystery (for now, at least).

Join me again next month for the death of Elizabeth Gillis in 1881.

Image of Wellington Street in an OS map of Peterborough from 1888-1913 courtesy of National Library of Scotland at maps.nls.uk