The Mysterious Death of Miss Nellie Pratt

Content warning: this story references suicide.

The story begins

I was recently asked to undertake research into the women of the Pratt family and had as my starting point several photographs that had been donated to the Booth Museum. Fortunately the owner added helpful notes on the reverse giving me a starting point.

Clue or red herring?

When someone is lost to history leaving no trace, the UK Register of Births, Marriages & Deaths is a good place to start. From this register an application can be made to the UK government’s General Register Office for birth, marriage, and death certificates.

Nellie Maud Pratt’s birth certificate shows she was born 6 November 1879 at 44 Clifton Street Brighton, the fifth child and first daughter of Edwin Pratt, a “naturalist” (term for a taxidermist) and his wife Elizabeth Eleanor Pratt.

Nellie never married, and since she died aged just 40, I was curious as to the cause of her death. In truth, I was looking for arsenic poisoning because arsenic was one of the noxious substances used in Victorian taxidermy and in green paints and dyes. Arsenic can be absorbed through the skin. After years of barehandedly processing animal skins and feathers treated with arsenic, it would be possible to absorb dangerous levels of poison. Slow poisoning could have terrible consequences.

On 11 April 1904 a Lewes taxidermist named John Armitage was incarcerated in the County Asylum at Haywards Heath with the following note made of his condition “mania, confused, excitable, incoherent, violent” symptoms associated with arsenic poisoning.  He died two weeks later.

The dangerous art of artificial flowers

Next time you visit the Booth Museum of Natural History take a closer look at the settings in which the taxidermised birds are placed. The bramble leaves in this example are made from wax and painted to mimic nature. The hyper-real effect is as outstanding in artistic accomplishment as the detail in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Yet the makers of these art leaves are not known.

The making of wax flowers was a highly skilled craft undertaken by women in the Victorian period for use in household decoration, millinery, clothing and in place of fresh flowers that would not survive the smoky pollution of industrial towns and cities.

In his 1869 study ‘The Seven Curses of London’ James Greenwood observes of the city’s flower girls

“…. Very little experience enables one to tell at a glance almost how these girls are employed, and it is quite evident that (she) and her companions are engaged in the manufacture of artificial flowers. Their teeth are discoloured, and there is a chafed and chilblainish appearance about their nostrils, as though suffering under a malady that were best consoled with a pocket-hand­kerchief. The symptoms in question, however, are caused by the poison used in their work—arsenite of copper, probably, that deadly mineral being of a “lovely green,” and much in favour amongst artificial florists and their customers…”

The cause of poisoning was well known, as Greenwood points out. In time laws were enacted to stop the use of dangerous dyes. Victorian wax leaves and flowers are extremely fragile, and few survive outside museum collections where they exist in carefully monitored sealed containers as objects of strange beauty and fascination.

Nellie’s death certificate: A surprise discovery

Nellie did not die from arsenic poisoning. Nevertheless, the cause of her death came as a surprise.

Previous searches for deaths in younger members of the Pratt family revealed tuberculosis, so I was expecting Nellie to have died of the same all-too-common disease of the lungs. Nellie’s death registered on 17 January 1919 gave the following shocking cause:

“Laceration of the brain caused by severe injuries to the skull the result of an accidental fall from a window at Clare House, Dyke Road Brighton on 11 January 1919.”

The death certificate revealed there was an inquest into Nellie’s death. This was held on 14 January at the Sussex County Hospital. Brighton Coroner’s documents are now lodged on public record at The Keep archive at Falmer.

Opening a cold case: murder, accidental death, or suicide?

After pre-ordering the inquest documents, I visited The Keep where the archivist handed me a large bundle of papers, unopened in over 100 years. Nellie was a person lost to history save for the one haunting photograph of a handsome intelligent-looking woman with clear eyes and a firm set of mouth.

Who would go looking for Nellie? She had no children. Of her ten nephews and nieces the eldest was only 13 when she died. Memories of Aunt Nellie would soon fade. Nellie had four brothers and a sister. Her closest brother, Frederick died in 1967 aged 88 taking Nellie’s story with him.

Nellie should have lived into the 1950s. Instead, she was falling from a window to her death two months after the First World War ended at the signing of the armistice on 11 November 1918.

How and why did Nellie fall? After reading the inquest documents, I sat back in my chair puzzled. Several statements were made to the police – the witness who found Nellie’s body on the pavement, the police officer who was called, the house surgeon at the Sussex County Hospital, and Nellie’s 73-year-old mother with whom she lived and who slept through the incident. The coroner concluded accidental death, yet something did not quite add up, and so I began my investigation.

Cause of death

Nellie’s body lay in the morgue at the Sussex County Hospital in the depths of winter in the war-weary seaside town of Brighton. She died on Sunday 12 January 1919 at half past midnight, sixteen hours after falling from the window of Clare House. A medical statement was made by Luis Fernando Garces at the County Borough of Brighton Police Force offices at the Town Hall later that day.

“Luis Fernando Garces says I am the House Surgeon at the Royal Sussex County Hospital. The deceased was admitted into the hospital at 7.10a.m. Saturday 11^th inst. She was unconscious and suffering from injuries to the skull. She was detained and died at 12.30a.m. Sunday 12^th inst.”

The accident makes local news. The Brighton Gazette and Brighton Herald newspapers report “other extensive injuries.” In pre-NHS days private-practice surgeon, Mr Garces was doing charitable duty at the hospital. Nellie is his brief patient whose treatment was rudimentary. In 1919 Brighton hospitals were filled with badly wounded soldiers including patients being treated at the Royal Pavilion temporary military hospital where Mr Garces surely spends much time.

Fatal accidental window falls are uncommon in adults. Victims are sadly more likely to be children although modern window restrictors help prevent falls occurring. The height of the drop and the surface onto which the person falls effects the outcome. Nellie fell from a second floor window. This height alone is enough to be fatal. Impacting a stone pavement made death all the more certain. Nellie did not die at the scene. She was found lying alive but unconscious by a man passing by.

The first witness

On opening the witness statement made by the man who found Nellie’s body I thought, “I know you!” He was no other than Mr. James Lassetter (1860-1927), whose family I had lately researched in connection with Preston Manor.

In 1923 James’s son, Cecil Frank Lassetter married Emily Holkham, parlourmaid at the Manor. Cecil, known as ‘Las’ worked as a handyman and helped install the iron-work gates on the west side of Preston Manor. I knew James’s age, address, family, and occupation that January day in 1919. He was 52-years-old and on his way to work at Smithers Brewery in Brighton – demolished now but on the site of M&S opposite Churchill Square.

January 12 was a Saturday, but in 1919 a 5½ day working week was common. Long before dawn James left the family home at 30 Kingsley Road near Preston Park station and walked in the dark, for wartime restrictions were still in place meaning no streetlights. He arrived at the junction of Highcroft Villas and Dyke Road and “…when passing the shops in Dyke Road, near the Dyke Road Hotel I heard some groans. It was pouring with rain and very dark.” He gives the time as 6.15 a.m. when on seeing “an object lying on the pavement about two yards in front of me” he lights matches to discover a bloodied woman in night attire.

Hailing a passing boy on a bicycle the pair move the woman into a doorway. The boy is sent to find a policeman. Looking up James sees an open window “I formed an opinion that she might have fallen out.”

The window is identified as Nellie’s bedroom window.

The search for the window

I knew Nellie’s address from her death certificate, the unnumbered Clare House, Dyke Road. No such house name exists today and to compound the problem of locating the address (if the house still existed) the numbering of sections of Dyke Road changed in 1926-1927 and again in 1953. I needed to locate Clare House and I needed to see that window!

Dyke Road is very long at 2.25 miles. However, Mr. Lassetter’s description named a public house in existence today as The Dyke Alehouse. Nellie’s fall onto a pavement indicates a house with no front garden – meaning her residence was above one of the shops. Next, I turned to the 1920 electoral register. Pleasingly I discovered that the Dyke Alehouse was run as the Dyke Road Hotel by the same family from 1902 to 1973 with the distinctive searchable surname, Stanwix. The name pinpointed the location on the electoral register which showed publicans Henry and Amy Caroline Stanwix and thereafter the houses of their neighbouring properties including house names. I found Clare House listed but the exact building was unclear. Not every resident was on the electoral register of the period before universal voting rights.

The electoral register

The 1918 Representation of the People Act gave women the right to vote in Government Elections if they were over 30 and satisfied occupational (residential) criteria.

Nellie’s widowed mother, Mrs Elizabeth Eleanor Pratt qualified due to her resident tenancy and age and so she appears on the electoral register 1918 to 1920 when she moves elsewhere. Nellie does not appear. She is over 30 in 1918 but does not hold the tenancy of the property. It will be 1928 before all women over 21 gained the right to vote without clauses attached.

Identifying Clare House

Clare House was unnumbered during Nellie’s residence. Many houses at this time existed as named properties. To live in a house with a name rather than a number added a classy veneer to one’s address. Several Edwardian name plates can still be seen in this part of Dyke Road, unfortunately not Clare House, which proved difficult to identify.

Unpicking changes to name, occupancy, and usage in this unremarkable row of shops took some weeks and another trip to The Keep archive to look at street and trade directories.

Demolished houses

The 1918 electoral register shows two substantial mansion houses that once stood in this location, Highcroft (and its gardener’s lodge which still stands) and Bleak House. Today the site of Highcroft House contains Brighton Audi and the Quebec Barracks at 200 and 198 Dyke Road.

Bleak House was the home of Mr. Edward Booth until his death in 1890. All that remains is Mr. Booth’s large warehouse containing his taxidermy collection opened as The Booth Bird Museum in 1891 and still open as the Booth Museum of Natural History at 194 Dyke Road.

The shops in Dyke Road 1920 to 2023

Pinpointing Clare House took me on a search of the electoral registers for 1918, 1920, 1924, 1925 and 1926 then street directories and Council surveyors plans.

Interesting to see the types of shops once typical of every high street and the lengthy occupancy of some people. Miss Gibbs runs her sweet shop next to the pub in 1920 and is still resident forty years later. She must have been a well-known character popular with generations of local children. Miss Gibbs would have known Miss Nellie Pratt and been shocked at her death just a few doors away.

Cross-referencing against the electoral register helped locate Clare House at what is now 208 Dyke Road (formerly 143 Dyke Road).

How did Nellie fall from the window?

I went to examine the window from which Nellie fell. Standing underneath 104 years on was a chilling experience. If you fall from 30ft (9m) you hit the ground at a fatal 50 miles per hour.

Nellie wasn’t pushed from that window. She lived alone with her mother. If Nellie wasn’t pushed, did she jump, or did she fall by accident?

In her police statement at the inquest Mrs Pratt reveals clues to work with.

“The floor under the window in my daughter’s room is polished boards and had been polished that day. This makes them slippery. I have formed an opinion that in throwing up her window had slipped and had fallen out.”

Sergeant Troup, the policeman investigating, agrees with Mrs. Pratt’s suggested chain of events adding, “the floor cloth near the window was of a slippery nature having been polished and in my opinion the deceased slipped forward after opening the window.” The kindly policeman adds a touch of drama conjuring a scene from the popular silent movies of the period in which the brave heroine “…no doubt tried to save herself by clinging to the red tiles which are on the wall, a little to the left and about a foot below the window as several of these were displaced and found broken on the pavement.”

And this appears to be the end of the matter. Nellie slipped and fell in a terrible accident.

What really happened that night?

Returning to the night of 11^th January 1919 a minute-by-minute account can be made from the evidence presented. Fresh reading opens the possibility of an alternative verdict.

Mrs. Pratt sets the time, “we retired as usual at about 10.30pm and after my daughter was in bed, I gave her a sleeping draught.” This is the last time Mrs. Pratt will see her daughter alive.

6.30a.m the following morning and Mr. Lassetter finds Nellie unconscious and in her bedwear lying on the pavement with an open window above her.

Nellie’s state of mind troubled me. Far from being restful in bed she is a person up and about in the night. “My daughter has from some time suffered from insomnia and has been attended by Dr. Edmonds who prescribed sleeping draughts for her.”

Why was medication for a grown adult aged 40 being administered by her mother? At this time the medication was certainly the new strong hypnotic sedative, Veronal. Did Mrs. Pratt distrust Nellie with the drug? Did she fear her daughter might take an overdose and keep the Veronal locked away?

The Brighton police must have queried the possibility of suicide for Mrs. Pratt states “she has never threatened to take her life and I have no reason to think she would be likely to do so. There was nothing in the room to throw any light on the matter.”

In other words, there was no suicide note (or no note admitted to). Mrs Pratt reiterates her statement at the coroner’s inquest saying, “the deceased was not depressed at all. She was making preparations to take up an engagement with a lady doctor as secretary. She had never threatened to take her life.”

Evidence suggests Nellie slept badly that night in spite of the Veronal dose. She is awake in the small dark hours. Perhaps she paced the room awake all night. James Lassetter gives us a clue.

“She was in night attire and was wearing a dressing gown and socks. Some slippers were lying near.” Decorum prevents the man from mentioning the lady’s nightgown although it would have been a substantial long-sleeved garment to modern eyes. The evidence of Nellie’s clothing suggests she did not leap up from sleep to open the window. She is up, out of bed, dressed in warm clothing and footwear.

Examining the window

In his evidence Mr Lassetter states than on looking up he notices that “a side window was open” and this puzzled me for some time as all windows are front-facing.

The black and white postcard above does not show Clare House, but it does show the two identical properties adjoining the Dyke Road Hotel now identified as Miss Gibb’s sweetshop and ‘Helenslea’, a tobacconist. Examination shows each casement divided into three narrow sash-type windows (with middle and two ‘sides’) that could be opened individually.

Those 1919 windows have long been replaced. However, sensitivity to architectural integrity shows the modern replacements made to original styling. It is clear that Nellie opened a side window of not much more than shoulder width making the possibility of an accidental fall all the more unlikely especially by one dressed in bulky Edwardian nightwear.

The Brighton Police consider the window from the inside. “The side window was open about 3ft, the bottom sill of the window was about 2ft 6” from the floor of the room” notes Sergeant Troup.

This equates to about thigh-high to the average sized woman of 1919. Building regulations today stipulate a higher safer sill for new builds. Mrs Pratt tells us that Nellie is familiar with the window in question. “Sometimes she would sit at the window in her dressing gown.”

Nellie must lift the lower frame upwards to open the window. Wooden windows in damp cold January are liable to swell and stick requiring force to open if infrequently opened. However, Nellie’s mother states “she usually slept with the window wide open.” Recent rough weather had caused Nellie to alter her usual habit “the window was shut when she went to bed.”

Or did Mrs. Pratt purposely close and lock her troubled daughter’s bedroom window after she administered the sleeping draught? Of course, it is possible in exerting herself Nellie’s feet slipped on the rug but to then propel an adult woman out of the window like a cannonball becomes a cartoonish scenario.

A new verdict: reasons why Nellie’s fall may have been deliberate.

1. The First World War was a traumatic period to live through. No one could avoid the loss, destruction, and misery of war. The depressing sight of the numerous wounded blinded and maimed men seen in Brighton is reported at length in local newspapers. Possibly Nellie lost a sweetheart to the war. Food and fuel shortages made daily life hard.
2. Nellie has just turned 40. In 1919 terms she is an ageing spinster. Life ahead looks hopelessly unpromising. Millions of women of Nellie’s generation are deprived of husband, children, and a family life because of men lost to war.
3. Nellie suffers from depression linked to trauma in childhood. Nellie is aged 9 when her brother Charles dies aged 12. Three years later her father dies of tuberculosis aged just 41. As eldest daughter Nellie must emotionally support her widowed mother and four siblings.
4. The winter weather is especially miserable. A flat atmosphere of gloom and grey has been hanging over Brighton for months. The Brighton Gazette of Wednesday 1 January 1919 reports “the fourteenth wet Sunday in succession was reached last weekend and it has been said by many who know Brighton well, that such a season for bad and damp weather has never been known.” The storm of 11 January 1919 (which causes Nellie to go to bed with her window uncharacteristically closed) is described as “the first really serious atmospheric disturbance of the present winter.”
5. Was Nellie’s relationship with her mother disagreeable? Perhaps Nellie resents her forced role as mother’s companion, the spinster daughter of an infuriating old lady. Nellie loathes being treated like a child. Tellingly after the events of 1919 Mrs. Pratt lives alone until her death aged 76 in 1924. She lives at Clare House 1919-1920 then at 81 Preston Place, as shown on the 1921 census. Lone living of the elderly was uncommon in this period. Mrs Pratt had five living adult children. The Pratt family of Brighton were reasonably prosperous by the 1920s. Was the family matriarch intolerable to live with?
6. The two women employ no servants. When the police first knock on the door of Clare House no one answers. At 6.30a.m. a servant would be awake starting her duties. A servantless house indicates women living in genteel poverty. Inflation spiralled alarmingly during and after the war. Money worries loom in Nellie’s mind. Her mother is too elderly to work. There is no income. Nellie must work. She has recently applied for a post as a doctor’s secretary. Will the pay be enough to keep two people? Women’s wages were low. Did Nellie have life insurance? An accidental death would mean a pay-out to her mother. Nellie contrives the scene of an ‘accidental death’ by polishing the floorboards and leaving the window wide open, a scene she has rehearsed many times while sitting at the window.
7. Nellie may be suffering from early onset menopause. One in 100 women reach menopause by the age of 40. Many suffer debilitating symptoms. There is no treatment in 1919.
8. Nellie and her mother have recently left the family home of 30 years. The Pratt family lived at 169 Ditchling Rise until the war years. Mother and daughter move to Clare House on Dyke Road, a wrench for them both. Possibly they can no longer afford the rent (most houses were rented in this period). Clare House is divided into flats and rooms-to-rent above shops. The women have come down in the world.
9. Nellie suffers from insomnia, a common symptom of anxiety and depression. She is being treated by a doctor and prescribed the sleeping draught, Veronal. Taken in quantity the drug can cause hallucinations, a staggering gait, breathing difficulties and overheating.
10. Today the Health & Safety Executive assesses deliberate falls from a window as a recognised risk for people with certain health conditions, particularly those with a history of drug abuse, self-harm, or mental disorder.
11. If Nellie worked making the artificial flowers, fake leaves, and naturalistic settings for taxidermy cases she handled material, dyes and paints containing arsenic. Over the years she would have absorbed the poison with devastating effect on the body. Nellie’s outer demeanour hides the unsightly, itchy, and painful skin lesions, hair loss and disturbance of the mental state of the arsenic victim.

Why the verdict of accidental death not suicide?

Re-evaluating the scene today from the evidence presented it is likely that a kindness was shown by the authorities in coming to this verdict.

Before the 1961 UK Suicide Act, suicide was a crime. Had Nellie recovered from deliberately attempting to take her life she could have been prosecuted and imprisoned. Had she not survived, her family could be prosecuted.

Criminalisation of suicide reflected religious and moral attitudes. In Christian belief to take one’s life was an act against God, a mortal sin. Attributing Nellie’s death to suicide would be to label her an immoral criminal lost to eternal salvation. 1919 Britain was a country steeped in death as most families had suffered loss of their young men in the Great War. Heaping yet more pain on Nellie’s bereaved elderly mother by coming to the verdict of suicide may have been considered pointless and cruel in the minds of the coroner and police.

Nellie’s last moments

What happened that night can never be known. My verdict conflicts with the Brighton Police and Brighton Coroner. After reading all evidence, which is too lengthy to include here, I conclude the following turn of events.

Depressed in the cold dark hours of mid-January after four long years of war and worry, bitterly cold, unwell, sleep deprived and intoxicated with Veronal, Nellie slides the sash window open. She sits on the windowsill as she has done many times. However, this is no practice run. Nellie positions herself with her back to the narrow opening. One last moment of contemplation, perhaps a glance at the little nurse’s watch she habitually wears, and at the allotted time of six in the morning she deliberately leans backwards tipping herself out of the window.

Nellie is an intelligent woman. She calculates death will be immediate if she lands on her head, hence her fall backwards. The dislodged tiles noted by Sergeant Troup are a red herring. The hanging tiles were dislodged by the fierce storm of January 11^th, a not infrequent occurrence in buildings high on a hill facing the prevailing wind. A person falling from height does not have time to start grabbing at the building façade. Nellie hits the pavement and is rendered mercifully unconscious. Minutes later she will be stumbled upon by a shocked Mr. Lassetter.

The last of Nellie Maud Pratt

The last known document attached to Miss Nellie Maud Pratt is from the UK Wills & Probate records. Nellie’s effects of over £81 represent a sizeable nest-egg of savings and possessions. The value represents three years’ salary to Mr. Lassetter’s daughter-in-law, Emily Holkham working as parlourmaid at Preston Manor. Yet clever Nellie knows this sum cannot fund her life for the next thirty years.

The details of Nellie’s funeral and her place of internment are as yet unknown.