On 23 March 1732, the Derby Mercury1 published a report on the trial of Robert Hallam.
Hallam was accused of throwing his wife, Jane, out of a window on 9 December 1731, when she was “big with child”.2
The Hallams, who lived in the parish of St Ann’s in Soho, London, had been married for about thirteen years and had three surviving children, but their relationship was unstable. Robert, who was a former sailor turned waterman, was also the landlord of a public house called the Dick Shore, and left the management of that to Jane. According to the Newgate Calendar, it was a place of “riot and confusion” “frequented by the lowest of the people.”
Some time before the murder, Robert accused Jane of being unfaithful with another waterman and beat her. She confessed and he beat her harder.3 He himself “had illicit connexions with several women.”
According to witnesses at his trial at the Old Bailey, he returned home drunk and told Jane to dress for bed. She hesitated in fear and he exploded in anger. She ran down the stairs but after he managed to lock the front door, she retreated to the dining room. When he went to look in another room for a cane with which to continue the assault, she locked him in.
He broke down the door and grabbed hold of her.
“Murder!,” she cried. “For God’s sake, Robin, don’t throw me out of the window.”
He did.
Jane landed on her head and was mortally injured. Robert came out in his nightshirt and swore at her, telling concerned neighbours that she was drunk. Then he dragged her into the house.
Hallam claimed that Jane had thrown herself out of the window and that he wasn’t even in the room.
Plenty of witnesses spoke against him.
A next-door neighbour, Ann Anderson, told the court that because the walls between their houses were so thin she could hear Hallam attacking Jane. It sounded “more like beating an ox than a woman big with child.” She woke her husband and said, “Hallam is beating his wife, according to custom.” Jane had previously shown her her bruised arms.
John Fleming, another neighbour, said that Robert Hallam had been in court recently for abusing his wife, “throwing her on the bed while he had a knife in his mouth and swearing he would rip her up.”
No witnesses saw Hallam in the act of throwing his wife from the window but two passers-by saw a man “like you” near the window and after Jane fell saw Hallam come out of the house.
Jane died at about six o’clock in the morning. Hallam called for the midwife, perhaps hoping that the child could be salvaged. A doctor came at nine and pronounced them both dead.
At the trial, the doctor said the bruises on Jane’s arms were “like the mark of a kick” and a wound on her right palm which “seemed to be a stab with a knife”. He said Jane and her child had been killed by the fall. The midwife said the child was black with bruises from head to foot.
Many witnesses spoke for Hallam, including Lydia Stevens, a washerwoman at the Dick Shore. Jane told her “I drop’d myself out of the window. I feel a pain in the bottom of my belly” and that before Jane died she said her husband was innocent.
The Jury found Hallam guilty and he was condemned to death.
His father visited him in prison, and while he confessed to beating Jane in a “barbarous, cruel and outrageous manner” he continued to deny killing her.
Just before he was executed at Tyburn on 14 February 1732, after he had declared himself penitent and ready to be saved by the mercy of God and through the merits of Christ, the executioner took the opportunity to ask him whether it was true that he had, while at sea, been involved in the theft of £700 and the murder of the mate. He strenuously denied it. An odd interlude.
For me, its the details that make me want to weep. Jane Hallam asking a friend to leave her cellar door open so that she could run in when Robert was on the rampage. The apprentice who lodged with them deciding against intervention in the fatal row because his bed-mate, a young disabled boy begged him not to out of fearfulness. A woman who saw Jane fall, but not who pushed her, describing Jane seeming to “catch at the [pub] signpost in falling, but miss’d it, and came to the ground. She gave dismal groans.” They bring the event into the present. It’s no longer age-old vignette from history but a true and pitiful tale still told with pitiful and relentless regularity.
- via the British Newspaper Archive website – recommended.
- Here I have conflated the account in the Derby Mercury with details from the Old Bailey proceedings, the Newgate Calendar and a pamphlet: The life, trial, &c. of Robert Hallam, convicted at the Hampshire Assizes, for the wilful murder of his wife, who was big with child, by inhumanly, barbarously, and cruelly beating her, and throwing her out of a one pair of stairs window: Including his dying confessions. Likewise the particulars of his behaviour at the place of execution, &c. York : Printed and sold by C. Croshaw, Coppergate; available on the Studies in Scarlet website. The Studies in Scarlet website, a section of the Harvard University site, has digitised images of over 420 separately published trial narratives from the Harvard Law School Library’s extensive trial collections. It’s a real gold mine. Highly recommended.
- According to the Newgate Calendar.
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