Revolting Cruelty to Children

Ruyton of the XI Towns is one of the more curious names in an English gazetteer. It is a cluster of Shropshire villages that a young doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle once described as "not big enough to make one town, far less eleven." In 1893, the Rev. William Backhouse Gowan became the new vicar of the ancient red stone church of St. John the Baptist. With his wife, Isabella, and their four children, he settled in to the large vicarage over the road. 

Almost immediately, owing to the sequential death of the vicar's sister and her husband, Rev. Gowan agreed to take in their two daughters, Charlotte and Beatrice Harris. Their father left the vicar £650 to house and school the Harris girls. According to all reports, the arrangement began well; the cousins all got on nicely. 

It should be said that Mr. Gowan's tenure in Ruyton had not been trouble-free. He clashed with a local grandee. On another memorable Sunday, police had to be called to Ruyton church when Gowan tried to fire the incumbent organist and replace him with his son. It did not go well. But few could have anticipated the sensation when Mr. and Mrs. Gowan were charged by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) with cruelly treating their two adopted nieces. 

In the fall of 1898, the Gowans were tried in Shrewsbury at the Quarter Sessions. The NSPCC's Inspector George Luff testified that when he showed up at the vicarage, Mr. Gowan tried to block his entry. But Luff insisted and made his way inside, only to find Mrs. Gowan furiously scrubbing two naked girls. The girl's clothing, piled up nearby, was taken away. Shown in court - "dirty, black, and ragged" - this created a great sensation. Charlotte May, 12, and 8 year old Beatrice had been examined by doctors. They found Beatrice's hair was thick with lice and other vermin. Her uncut toenails resembled claws. Charlotte was in slightly better condition, but her hands were red and swollen, "extraordinary hands for a child." 

According to Inspector Luff, it was the systematic habit of Mrs. Gowan to beat these children "with practically any instrument that came to hand." Charlotte told the court that Mrs. Gowan hit her with a frying pan, a cane, a bread-board, a whip, a broom-handle and more. The two girls were questioned closely. Charlotte, the elder, said that she and Beatrice were given all the drudgery chores. They had to be up at 5:30 to make breakfast for the Gowans. If anything was amiss, the Harris girls would get no breakfast. Food was regularly used to discipline the girls; Charlotte once went hungry for 29 hours. When Beatrice was caught eating a potato meant for the pigs, she was beaten and kicked by Mr. Gowan. Several former Gowan servants: a housemaid, groom and governess, supported the girls' horrific stories.

The Gowans needed a daily police escort to get through the hissing and hooting crowds drawn for the three day session. Inside, the vicar assured the court that discipline was only used when required. Alas, he stated, these two recalcitrant girls had not been properly raised. They were habitual liars, had filthy habits, especially at the dinner table (thus they ate with servants) and they were thieves who would eat every "dainty" in the larder they got their hands on. Mrs. Gowan admitted she sometimes kept the children without food as a punishment but never for 29 hours, a "pure invention." She never hit the girls with a pan, but admitted to using a wooden cane when required. She blamed this overblown story on their village enemies, and vengeful discharged servants.

In the closing arguments, the NSPCC described the Harris girls' existence as a "hell on earth." The Gowans' counsel conceded that Mrs. Gowan may have been "stronger than necessary" in her discipline, but consider her provocation. As for Mr. Gowan, the jurors were told that the evidence against the vicar was very slender. However, the Shropshire jury took only twenty minutes to return with two guilty verdicts. The Sessions Chairman denounced the Gowans; their position and education made the offence more heinous than otherwise. He sentenced each to four months' imprisonment, "with such hard labour as they could do." The outcome was cheered "by the many thousands of people congregated outside the court."

The Harris girls were handed over to Benjamin Waugh, founder of the NSPCC, who was hopeful that other relatives might come forward to take charge of them. [Thanks to Phil Poole with the Shropshire Family History Society for the following: After their ordeal with the Gowans and the trial, the Harris girls were placed with St. Scholastica's, a small "Anglo-Catholic" school for girls in Oxford. Phil believes Charlotte lived to be more than 100 years old; Beatrice would later be a nurse in London but has been harder to trace.]

As for the Rev. Gowan, the Bishop of Shrewsbury quickly stripped him of the Ruyton vicarage. Gowan certainly couldn't go back to a village where people were calling him "an incarnate devil." After serving his sentence, Gowan found clerical employment rather quickly in the Diocese of London. He was a curate in Bromley-by-Bow and then later in Bethnal Green, living well in to the 20th Century. Isabella Gowan died in 1903.

Full length accounts of such Victorian scandals can be found in Clerical Errors - A Victorian Series, Volume 2.