Andrew Tierney - The Doctors Wife Is Dead: The True Story of a Peculiar Marriage, a Suspicious Death, and the Murder Trial that Shocked Ireland

Andrew Tierney, a native of Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, is a distant descendant of Ellen Langley. Trained as an archaeologist, he is working on the inaugural Pevsner Architectural Guide to the Irish midlands. The Doctors Wife is Dead is his first book.

Andrew Tierney

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THE DOCTORS WIFE IS DEAD

A Peculiar Marriage, a Suspicious Death, and a Murder Trial in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

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First published 2017

Copyright Andrew Tierney, 2017

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-97910-5

In memory of my grandmother Maura Hanly (ne McCutcheon), 19162013

In the chilly pre-dawn air, a group of women gathered on Barrack Street, a busy commercial thoroughfare running south-east from the town centre. They faced a modest two-storey house, with a garret in the roof lit by two small skylights. Few who passed the house would have imagined that its sole surviving adult occupant was, according to one contemporary observer, connected with most respectable families of [the] county.

When, after several minutes, the door remained closed, the women began hissing and jeering. Then, one of them picked up a stone and hurled it at the house.

Others followed her example. Their missiles crashed through the windows, striking a grandfather clock in the hallway. Within minutes they had shattered every pane of glass in the facade. Then, surging forward, they pushed their collective weight against the front door, determined to break it down. As they heaved, there was the sound of a key struggling in the lock.

The battered door suddenly swung open. Several men emerged from the interior of the house, carrying a pale timber coffin on their shoulders.

It was this the women had been waiting for.

The emergence of the coffin through the front door a common sign of respect for the dead had not been intended; in fact, the master of the house had expressly forbidden it. Instructing his housemaid, Mary Clancy, he had been emphatic on this point: the coffin should be taken out by the side gate. But the terrifying sound of crashing glass and the assault on the front door had frightened the servant into compliance with the mob outside.

As the small funeral cortge moved silently down the street, its modest character was clear for all to see. The coffin of thin boards, plainly cut and hammered together without trimmings or embellishment, was little better than that of a pauper the sort of coffin that had become a common sight in a town suffering the effects of prolonged famine. The pall-bearers bore it upon unprotected shoulders, without the napkins or silk shoulder scarves ordinarily seen at respectable mid-nineteenth-century funerals. Equally notable, the husband of the deceased was not present.

A further indignity was invisible to the mob: the lack of shrouding around the body. Even the Poor Law Guardians, who oversaw the towns overpopulated workhouse half a mile further down the road, considered clean white linen to be the only acceptable vestment for interment. In this case, though, the corpse had been left in an everyday chemise or undergarment.

In provincial Ireland, public anger flared occasionally in protests against evictions, and, more recently, the inadequacy of famine relief. But those demonstrating so violently in Nenagh on this May morning in 1849 had come out to protest against a provocation of an unexpected kind: the suspicious death of a doctors wife in her own home.

The death of Ellen Langley was a death foretold.

On the morning she died, 1 May 1849, her husband, Dr Charles Langley, sent the following letter to his neighbour James Carroll, who was the towns coroner.

Dear Sir My poor unfortunate wife having died, after an illness of ten or twelve days, in which she was attended by Drs Quin and Kittson, and having heard insinuations as to the cause of her death although her death was not sudden yet I am most anxious that a strict investigation should be held, as I consider it due to the public, and also for my own satisfaction. May I therefore request you will consider it a case to hold an inquest, as my sole wish is to have a fair, open, impartial and public investigation into her death. I know you will get a respectable and impartial jury on the occasion

It would soon be revealed that Dr Langley had written the letter three days before his wife had died.

In his anticipation of Ellens death, and of the rumours attaching to it, Dr Langley was not alone. On the same day that he drafted his letter to the coroner, James Jocelyn Poe, his wifes nephew, had paid visits to the coroner and the police sub-inspector to request that an inquiry should immediately be held if his aunt should happen to die.

Death came to Ellen Langley at 6 a.m. on 1 May.

As Dr Langley noted in his letter to the coroner, his wifes illness had been the subject of insinuations. Determined to put a stop to the unpleasant rumours, he evidently felt confident that an inquest at the coroners court would clear the air.

He was thoroughly familiar with the courts procedures. As chief medical officer of the local dispensary for eleven years, and an occasional private practitioner for seven more, he had often prepared reports for coroners inquests. During the 1830s and 40s, Tipperary was arguably the most violent county in Ireland; reports of its agrarian violence were a constant feature of the London papers.

Disputes between labourers and tenant farmers, caused by destitution or the threat of eviction, brought a stream of violent deaths through Nenaghs coroners court before and during the Great Famine. In the spring of 1849 almost 3,500 paupers crowded Nenaghs four workhouses and a further 10,000 were on outdoor relief, assistance for those unable to gain admittance to an institution. The week after Mrs Langleys death the Nenagh Guardian, the mouthpiece of the local landowning class, described the situation in stark terms. Destitution is every day becoming more appalling and wide-spread in this fertile but pauperised union, it reported.

Groups of half-starved looking creatures patrol the streets daily, begging for food, and hundreds of men and women, who not many months ago were able-bodied and well-looking, might be seen covered with miserable rags, wending their way to the workhouse, either in slow straggling steps, or conveyed in donkey carts. There were 200 admitted into the Workhouses last week.