A baby's skeleton in a garret

Sensational news raced around the village of Stanton Harcourt in late 1867. The skeleton of a small child had been discovered at Cut Mill. The inquest was covered in thrillingly grisly detail in the Oxford Journal on 8 February 1868.

Said James Hutt: “I live at Cut Mill, and am a farmer. I and my brother and my sister, Esther Hutt, and my half-sister, Mary Eagle, have been the only people who have lived there during the last seven years. We have had no servants. 

“On the 3rd of November, on a Sunday, my sisters were gone to church, and my brother was out; I went up through a trap-door on a floor which took me into a hole in the roof of the house made by a chimney-stack and the walls of the house; the hole was floored with boards at the bottom so as to be quite safe to stand on. There is an opening through the rafters of the garret and which leads to this hole; the opening is large enough for anyone to get through, and from the floor of the garret to the floor of the hole there is a drop of 8 feet 6 inches. I never was in this hole before, and I did not before know of its existence.

“I went through the trap-door to see what I could find. I didn’t expect to find anything in particular. When I saw the hole I went and fetched a prong for the purpose of seeing whether the floor was safe to stand upon. When I got the prong I dabbled about at the bottom, and brought the skull part of a child up first, and afterwards the body. This was before I went down into the hole. I laid the child on the floor, and then got down into the hole, and there I found only some bits of paper, now produced. I put the child back in the hole, and went downstairs, and never said anything about it to anyone until the following Sunday, when I told my brother and sisters, and I told them not to tell anyone.” Hutt, however, placed no such tiresome constraint upon himself, and promptly blabbed to the wheelwright, the vicar, and a local farm labourer.

Asked why he had felt the need to search the garret in the first place, Hutt explained: “On the 11th of October last I had a dispute with the postmaster here about a letter. It was in consequence of something which then occurred which induced me to go to the place where I found the child. I accused Burchell [the postmaster] of keeping and opening a letter, and then a spirit appeared to me which appeared like my father's spirit. Burchell threatened to tell about something which was in my house. I did not understand what it was that Burchell threatened to tell about. Burchell said I should have to go on my hands and knees to find it. It was in consequence of what Burchell told me that night, and what I saw (I mean the evil spirit), that led me to examine the hole. The spirit was like the ‘Old One’ [ie, ‘the old man’, my father]. During the quarrel Burchell said that I had no right to the farm, and that I and my brother were both illegitimate children. Burchell went on about my mother and father; and about how my father went on.

“It was about a fortnight after… when I next saw the child. My sisters and I went to look at it; my sisters examined the child, and we left it on the garret floor. I have seen the child many times since. About two or three weeks ago I put it down the hole again. My sisters were there. At the beginning of last week I again went down into the hole and brought up the child and put it on the garret floor, and there it remained… On Tuesday the policeman came and I showed the child to him, and the next day he fetched it away.”

Police-constable Willmott confirmed: “In consequence of information received… I went to Cut Mill and James Hutt showed me the child. I took possession of it the following day, and now produce it as I took it. The five cloths now produced were with the child when it was shewn to me.” 

Augustine Batt MD reported: “I have examined the body now produced. The child is in a mummified condition; it is rather the skeleton, just covered in parts by the dried skin. The skull is separated from the trunk; around adherent to the trunk is tightly bound a piece of calico cloth which is in good preservation but stained with blood. The right hand and arm are still loosely attached; the left arm without the hand is here, but not attached to the body. The length of the child is from 21 to 22 inches. The brain and also the soft parts are gone; the nails on the hands are fully developed; the crown of a milk tooth is found in one of the tooth cavities of the upper jaw. The child was a mature one. I cannot tell whether the child was born alive or if so how long it lived.”

William Burchell’s aspersions upon the character of Thomas Wood Hutt of Cut Mill were based on the fact that Thomas did indeed allow himself considerable latitude when it came to the favours of Hannah Townsend, who lived with her mother in Standlake. Their sons Henry and James Hutt were both born illegitimate. But Thomas did marry Hannah in 1841, and in ordinary families at the time this generally wiped out the stain of illegitimacy. Thomas died at Cut Mill in April 1842 aged 33; perhaps he knew he did not have long to live and married Hannah precisely in order to ensure his sons’ inheritance. A few weeks after Thomas’s death, the couple’s final child, Esther, was born.

With three small children, Hannah now needed help at Cut Mill, and in 1844 she married Robert Eagle, farm labourer and son of a local corn-dealer. In the following year she gave birth to a son, Walter. By 1861 Robert Eagle described himself as a farmer, head of the household at Cut Mill. Ten years later, in 1871, he had retired and Henry and his brother James Hutt were farming at Cut Mill as business partners. Since postmaster Burchell made his cruel remark in 1868, and James Hutt makes clear that only he and Henry plus their two sisters lived at Cut Mill by that time, the boys had evidently taken charge of the property. Perhaps this was hard to take for those on Team Eagle: the two illegitimate sons of Robert Eagle’s wife took precedence over Walter Eagle, the legitimate son of the head of the household. Hannah Eagle died in 1874, and this signalled the end of Robert Eagle’s days at Cut Mill. In 1881 he was lodging as a miller’s assistant at Charney Bassett, and he died in the workhouse in 1886. 

And what about the poor, dead baby whose mysterious death is the reason we are permitted this glimpse into the seething tensions in the village of Stanton Harcourt at the time? The jury, after hearing and considering the evidence, returned a verdict of "found dead”. William Burchell was evidently keen to hint at a connection with the moral failings of Thomas Wood Hutt thirty years before. What James Hutt was hoping to achieve by invoking the “evil” spirit of his father is unclear. Perhaps, like many a good Scooby-Doo villain, he simply wished to discourage too close an inspection of the circumstances surrounding his ghastly revelation.

Any suggestion of an illegitimate baby being either done away with or at least concealed inside Cut Mill would seem to rule out Hannah Eagle. As far as we can tell, she exhibited little bashfulness on the matter of her two illegitimate sons. Dr Batt’s conclusion that the child had been dead for between three and thirty years did not narrow it down much. There were three other women in the household during the period in question: Hannah’s daughters Esther Hutt, Emily Eagle, and Mary Eagle. Esther Hutt’s fate is rather surprising. Her brother Henry Hutt died in 1878 and by 1881 the head of the household at Cut Mill was not Henry’s brother James, but his sister Esther. James was working for her as an agricultural labourer. Did the Hutt brothers fear a legal challenge by the Eagles and find it prudent to transfer any rights in the property to their legitimate sister? I find no record of a marriage for Esther Hutt, and the presence of a husband could well have compromised the smooth passage of the property to Esther’s brothers.

Hannah’s next daughter Emily Eagle was born in 1846. She died at only 16 years old in 1863. Did she die in childbirth? Did her father Robert Eagle insist that the baby’s body was concealed in order to deflect the taint of illegitimacy that already attached to the Hutts? Finally, Mary Eagle was born in March 1850, so why was she not baptised until 1863, when she was 13 years old? Had she misbehaved and the resulting child been disposed of quietly, followed by Mary’s baptism as a sort of redemption? After her mother Hannah’s death, Mary went with her younger brother Hayward to Eagle relatives in Hammersmith. Again, I find no record of a marriage for her, but that does not mean that no marriage took place.

There is no reason to suppose, however, that the child must have been concealed by its mother. A young man might just as easily have his own reasons for hiding an indiscretion. So it is interesting that Dr Batt readily cast the net so far back in time as to encompass the glory days of Thomas Wood Hutt’s notorious paternal career. Like Hannah, Thomas does not seem to have felt the need to employ deception around the births of his sons. But maybe those very same sons, Henry and James, might have been keen to arrange that, thirty years later, Dr Batt should propose a time slot for the birth of the infant that was wide enough to allow for suspicion to light upon a known offender from the past? Why, perhaps even James Hutt himself, the man who went straight to the body under the unlikely guidance of an evil spirit, had something to hide…