It’s hard not to be intrigued when the place of death recorded in a burial register is ‘The Mortuary, St. Martin’s Lane’ so I had to find out more about what had happened to Charles James Skelton, who is buried in a common grave in the southernmost corner of Brompton Cemetery. When he left home on 8 August 1891, he could not have anticipated that he would be spending the night in a police cell, or the next couple of days dying in a workhouse.

Charles, aged 40, had for many years been a clerk to Mr CJ Elton, QC, MP. Born in Brompton, he lived in Caversham Street, Chelsea, with his wife and five children. On the evening in question he had dinner in the Three Tuns, Chancery Lane and drank small beer (low alcohol). The landlady, deposed at the inquest, said that he was in good health and perfectly sober. Good health was relative, in this situation, as he had recently recovered from typhoid fever and had epilepsy. He had problems walking and talking – this had a critical impact on the way he was treated when he was found later that night in a helpless condition near the Temple Station by a constable, who subsequently charged him with being drunk. His own doctor, who was called at the inquest, thought he had probably fallen down in the street and that his life could have been saved if the fracture to his skull has been discovered and he had had an operation to relieve the pressure of the clot on his brain. At every step during his detention at Bow Street and subsequent treatment in the Strand Union workhouse infirmary at Bear Yard, the assumption that he was drunk prevented him from getting the treatment that he so desperately needed.

This failure started when the police medical officer, Dr Hamerton, certified that ‘The prisoner Skelton is partially insensible from heavy drinking, and is not fit to remain in the police cell’. When Charles arrived at the workhouse he was ‘perfectly helpless, speechless, and unable to walk, and kept murmuring’. Dr Harris, the medical officer of the workhouse, read the police medical certificate and ‘came to the conclusion Skelton had been indulging in drink, and he treated him accordingly’, so he ordered beef tea and wrote a prescription. While the nurse claimed that she visited her patient every hour, one of the pauper inmates who cared for him declared that she was in bed and did not visit the ward. Charles died at 3am on the Monday morning, his family unaware of his whereabouts as the police had not informed them that he had been taken into custody.

The jury at the inquest was unimpressed by his treatment and concluded that the manner in which such patients were treated at the infirmary should be brought to the attention of the Strand guardians, that the police medical officer should have more carefully examined his patient, and that the police at Bow-street were negligent in not giving notice of his detention to his relatives – the last conclusion was greeted with loud applause from the many people that filled the room. The Coroner considered the case perilously near to manslaughter against the police and other officials. An inquiry into the treatment given by the workhouse was held the following month, by which time the medical staff of the workhouse seem to have rediscovered their professionalism and denied any negligence on their part – it’s unknown whether the police conducted a similar investigation into the initial assessment by the police medical officer which informed the treatment of Charles James Skelton over the last few days of his life, and which prevented his wife and children seeing him before he died alone in the workhouse. As for the place of death recorded in the burial register – was this an administrative error or a blotting out of the workhouse? We’ll never know.


Illustration

Front: Cleveland Street workhouse London


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