BBC4 TV Series History Cold Case “Crossbones Girl”

Elizabeth Mitchell of St Saviours Parish, London.

Elizabeth Mitchell, died at St Thomas’ Hospital and was buried in the pauper’s cemetary, on 22nd August 1851, aged 19 years. This girl was thought to be the unfortunate teenager whose skeleton was examined after an archaeological dig, and was reported on in the TV programme “History Cold Case”.

Whether or not the skeleton was that of this young girl, we can never know for sure, but we can certainly find more out about the girl who was Elizabeth Mitchell, and died at St Thomas’ Hospital.

St Thomas’ Hospital was a medieval establishment, possibly named after St Thomas A’Beckett. The hospital was situated in Southwark, beside the Borough High Street. There are some remnants of the old buildings to this day, but the hospital has now moved to a new site further up the Thames, opposite the Palace of Westminster.

Working in the hospital in 1851 was a young nurse named Elizabeth Mitchell, but this girl was aged 22. Her name was recorded in the census, which was taken on the night of 31st March. Hopefully she was fit and healthy, but the other girl of that name who was admitted to Magdalen Ward in the hospital was certainly not. The death certificate showed that she died of pneumonia. If the skeleton was indeed hers, then we know that she had severe rickets, with short bowed legs, also tertiary syphilis, with a nasty rash on her face, and some collapse of the upper nose. The bone on her skull was affected by the rash, and therefore had been present several months. Gummas are fibrous lumps in all sorts of tissue, and can present from 1-10 years or more after the initial infection. In this case the girls whose skeleton was found, had these under the skin on her forehead, with a number of unsightly swellings that also eroded the bone, including the base of the nose.

All of the censuses from 1841 (Sunday, June 6th.) have been fully computerised, and so we can search for all persons anywhere in UK of any given name and age, and determine where they were and what family they had.

The census of 1841 shows only two girls of this age in the London area with the same name.

The first girl that we find anywhere near, named Eliza Mitchell, lived at Streatham, south of Lambeth, with her family. They lived at the Rookery, Streatham, where her father, William, was a house keeper, her mother, named Elizabeth, also aged 45, brother John was aged 17, employed by a carrier, Charles aged 11, and Peter aged 6, were her other brothers. We can find a birth certificate for this girl, she appears in the Parish Register of St John the Evangelist at Coulsdon, south of Croydon, and was baptised on 22nd September 1832. This girl is found living with her parents in the absence of the brothers, at Streatham, in the 1851 census.William, her father, was then occupied as a carrier. This girl was not the one who died of pneumonia at St Thomas’ Hospital later in 1851, because we can find one other girl of the same name, whose history fits very well with what we already know.

The second and only other girl of this age anywhere in London is shown in the 1841 census as an orphaned child in the Greenwich Union Work House. Her parents appear to have died, and do not appear in the census roll of the work house at that date (though they may be elsewhere in the workhouse records).

Ten years later, there is an entry for Eliza Mitchell aged 19 as a servant at Croydon, North End, on the night of 31st March 1851. It would be encouraging to think that our girl may have lived in such a household at that time. If this is indeed our girl, she was living with two sisters, being Maria and Anna Collison, a stationer and her sister, ages 35 and 24, both unmarried. If this was so, the two sisters directed our Eliza to St Thomas’ Hospital for treatment when her rash broke out and worsened. Our girl was quite deformed with her stunted growth, but her reconstructed face was fair until she developed the rash, and the sisters may well have taken her on some time after she left the workhouse at a time in her early teens, say aged 12, when the syphilitic disease was dormant and had not visibly affected her. It appears that she had been born to very impoverished parents, saw little sunlight, and had a very poor diet as a child, since she was very short in stature, having severe rickets, with deformed leg bones. Few would have taken on such a child, but it seems that that the two single sisters, Maria and Ellen Anna Collison, came across her as an orphaned child in their local street, and felt able and willing to do so. It seems that she had left the workhouse. Unable to support herself in any other way, she had taken to a life on the streets in the St Saviour area, a red light district at that time.

If this was not our girl, then she had somehow escaped the 1841 census, which is unlikely indeed. Maria Collison and her sister were born in London, and this Eliza was born in Croydon it states in the 1851 census. As yet her parents are unidentified, but this may yet prove possible. The Collisons were connected with St Thomas area. We find their brother Charles Collison, a gun maker, aged 35 born in St Thomas Parish London, to be living in Birmingham, unmarried in 1851. It is computerisation of the census that allows us to piece this together in an amazing way. We find that in 1841, Maria Collison aged 25 was living in Borough Road, Southwark, with her parents and siblings. Her father Nicholas was a tax collector, aged 55. Her mother, Maria, was aged 55. Brother Charles was then aged 20, and working as x maker. Mary and Ellen were recorded as aged 15 years. This would seem a relatively well off family in this district. We might think this is the wrong family, but years later, as again recorded by census in 1871, Maria and Ellen Anne (Anna) had returned home. Their ages were now slightly different, having been corrected. We must remember that (most) ages in the 1841 census were rounded down to the nearest five years. Maria and Ellen had then moved home with their father now 89, interestingly, born in Norfolk; Maria herself born at Southwark, as were her siblings. Aged 58, she remained a stationer. Her mother had died.

There was one other Eliza Mitchell, who lived in Borough Road, Southwark, in 1841. This other girl was then shown as aged seven, so not rounded down in age, her father John, aged 30 was a tailor. The others in the family were mother, Mary, aged 30, William, Mary, and Emma, 6, 4, and 2. She was too young to be our girl who died in 1851, but for completeness we should check her out also, since she lived so close to the Collison family and to St Thomas’ Hospital. It is already clear why Maria Collison would send young Eliza to St Thomas’ when she became so ill. Maria had lived next door to St Thomas’ since she was a child. Also it seems clear to me that the Collisons found the money for the girl’s treatment. This last family (John the tailor) cannot be found together in 1851. It appears that some tragedy has arisen and the children were dispersed to the south west of England. Although living in the immediate area of St Thomas’ Hospital, this Eliza is too young to be our girl. She cannot however be found at a later date. Another Elizabeth Mitchell aged 14, born at Fetter Lane, London, was visiting in Wiltshire and might be our girl, but probably not.

A further child, also Elizabeth Mitchell, aged 12, was visiting those who appear to be her grand-parents in Marylebone on that same night. Again not the same girl, but these as yet I cannot fully account for. This exhausts the list of girls named Elizabeth Mitchell, one of whom died at St Thomas’ Hospital aged 19 years, on the 19th August 1851.

Thus it seems that our Eliza, poor girl, was first to be discovered as a nine year old at Greenwich Work House. It should be possible to find there her admission and other records, and quite possibly, her parentage. She may have contracted syphilis (if this is the same girl) from someone at the work house. It had been supposed that she was a prostitute, but it seems clear that she was taken in as a servant by a better-off family, although likely she had been previously abused, and then worked the streets around St Saviours for a period. As a result, some years later, after being rescued and taken on by Maria Collison, a stationer, and her sister Ellen Anna as a house servant, she developed tertiary syphilis and died of the complication of pneumonia, after the kindly family who had taken her on, had paid for her hospital treatment. There are grounds for hope that she had a pleasant few years working as a young servant for the Collison sisters, even though her early life was one of extreme poverty and its consequences.

Greenwich workhouse

Life in the Greenwich workhouse has been described by former inmates and in various reports. Conditions were clearly appalling, the site damp and subject to flooding. The water supply often foul. Many wards had no water supply at all, even in the new workhouse. When a patient in the infirmary had diarrhoea, this was simply allowed to run through the straw matress to be collected in a bucket underneath.

Children were seriously underfed, and discipline was harsh. A new brick built workhouse was built at Greenwich for 350 residents prior to 1776. The residents were employed in spinning mop yarn. A new workhouse was erected at Vanburgh Hill in 1840. “Boys under 12 at this Union are or were under-fed, 4 ozs. of sop bread for breakfast, 4 ozs. bread and butter for supper, and dinner in proportion is not enough. I know it because I have gone through it, and although from that time to this my life has been spent in workhouse schools or workhouses, I never knew such a scanty ration served out to boys between 6 and 12”.

In 1865 when there was a report of inspection in the Lancet, the workhouse was greatly overcrowded, with 906 inmates. No wonder that Eliza would have left at the earliest opportunity, despite having nowhere to go.

The Collison sisters and Eliza at Croydon, 1851

The burial register

London Parishes

St Thomas’ Hospital

Borough High Street

St Saviour’s Church

St Thomas’ Hospital

1800 Street Map

Borough High Street

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