sentenced to death by Mr Justice Darling at the Old Bailey, despite a recommendation of mercy from the jury. Theirs was the first execution at Holloway since its conversion to a women’s prison the year before, and the last double female hanging in Britain. The bodies of both women were removed from the prison grounds in 1971 and taken to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, where they are buried together.
Most of the material included in Josephine’s untitled novel is reported in or suggested by the various newspaper accounts of the arrest and trial. When she died, Amelia Sach left behind a husband and young daughter, but their names were not Jacob and Lizzie, and their fates as depicted in
In 1927, Mary Size became the first female deputy governor of Holloway Prison. Although her improvements fell short of her own ideals, the reforms she introduced—mirrors and photographs in cells, a system for prisoners to earn their own money and a prison shop, financial aid to help with debt and the provision of clothing on release— brought a new humanity to the incarceration of women and did much to bring the standard of women’s prisons more in line with those for men. Her story is told in an autobiography,
Josephine Tey was one of two pseudonyms created by Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896–1952) in a successful career as playwright and novelist; it first appeared in 1936, paying tribute to her late mother and her Suffolk great- great-grandmother, and it is the name by which we know her best today. As Josephine Tey, although her output was small, Mackintosh wrote some of the most original and modern crime novels of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, including
For most of her life, Elizabeth Mackintosh lived in her hometown, Inverness, where she kept house for her father, but she loved England and spent a good part of each year south of the border or, occasionally, in Europe. Her time in London was usually spent at the Cowdray Club, a club for nurses and professional women where she was a member from 1925 until her death in 1952. As well as providing a convenient and comfortable base in town, the club gave Tey the names of many of her characters; look through the membership lists for those years, and you will find a Grant, an Ashby, a Blair, a Farrar and a Marion Sharpe. The club no longer exists (not because of murder or scandal, which are all my invention), but the building in Cavendish Square is still the headquarters of The Royal College of Nursing.
Mackintosh is widely believed to have lost a lover at the Somme in 1916; although her early work supports this, her lifelong friend from Inverness, who was with her at Anstey during the war, knew of no such relationship, and Mackintosh shied away from close emotional entanglements. The most significant attachments of her later life were almost exclusively with women, many of whom she had met during the West End run of her phenomenally successful play,
Praise
“A new and assured talent; Nicola Upson is to be congratulated.” —P.D. James
They were the most horrific crimes of a new century: the murders of newborn innocents for which two British women were hanged at Holloway Prison in 1903. Decades later, mystery writer Josephine Tey has decided to write a novel based on Amelia Sach and Annie Walters, the notorious “Finchley baby farmers,” unaware that her research will entangle her in the desperate hunt for a modern-day killer.
A young seamstress—an ex-convict determined to reform—has been found brutally slain in the studio of Tey’s friends, the Motley sisters, amid preparations for a star-studded charity gala. Despite initial appearances, Inspector Archie Penrose is not convinced this murder is the result of a long-standing domestic feud—and a horrific accident involving a second young woman soon after supports his convictions. Now he and his friend Josephine must unmask a sadistic killer before more blood flows—as the repercussions of unthinkable crimes of the past reach out to destroy those left behind long after justice has been served.
