A fatal affair

A disturbing tale of how private detectives were used in 1890s Liverpool, in a futile effort to stop a woman ruining her life...

On the morning of 27 July 1898, in Wavertree, Liverpool, Jane Yates died. Jane was 29 years old, and died at 140 Salisbury Road. She had previously been at her mother's home at 62 Edge Lane, but on 25 July, she had told her mother (also named Jane) that she was leaving. The following day, Mrs Yates and her youngest daughter Margaret were called to the Salisbury Road house, where they found Jane dying.

Liverpool in the 1890s

Jane Yates was a free-spirited young woman, who was 'in the habit' of going on jaunts around the country, including to Brighton, to stay with friends. One of her friends was Lieutenant Robert James Wark, who had previously run a riding school at Spekeland Street, Wavertree, but now lived in Woolwich, south London. Mrs Yates had sent Jane for riding lessons at Spekeland Street years earlier, and had since heard rumours about her daughter's relationship with the lieutenant. Robert Wark was a smooth-talking native of Derry, Ireland, and had lived for years in Khadki, India, where he and his wife Caroline had had seven children. They arrived back in Liverpool around 1889, where they had two more children: Willie in 1890, and Hilda the following year.

Mrs Yates was understandably concerned about her daughter, aged 22, being involved with the father-of-nine Wark. She warned Jane that Lieutenant Wark was married, and was concerned enough that her warnings were being ignored that she employed a series of private detectives to shadow the pair and to try and keep them apart.

Her efforts were in vain. In 1893, when Jane was 23, she became pregnant, and her mother realised that Wark, then aged 32, was the father. She was relieved when Wark relocated to Woolwich in 1896, and had hoped that the relationship between him and her daughter had ended.

But now Jane was dead, and a large number of letters were afterwards found in her bedroom at home - letters written to her by Captain Wark. Staff members at the Royal Hotel in Crewe confirmed that Wark and Jane had stayed together at the hotel on 20 July, a week before Jane's death. Then, on 25 July, Jane had gone to the house of Eleanor Jackson on Salisbury Road, and told her a doctor was coming to examine her 'because of a miscarriage'.

Eleanor claimed not to know Jane - she said she had identified herself as a 'Mrs Peacock' who had arrived from Woolwich the previous day. However, it was at her house that Jane had arranged to see a doctor, and a Dr Shaw duly turned up to examine Jane, staying with her for 45 minutes. That evening, Jane wrote a letter in pencil addressed to 'Captain R Peacock' at the Royal Artillery, Woolwich, and then admitted to Eleanor Jackson that she was not married, and asked Eleanor not to tell her mother. By what Eleanor later said, it appears that Eleanor had used an instrument to try and end a second pregnancy, and it had had caused septicaemia: "The doctors say there is no hope for me. Oh, I am so sorry I have done it."

Eleanor then sent another telegram to Wark, telling him his 'wife' was very ill; he then sent a telegram back: "I am coming, darling". He did indeed turn up - but by the time he arrived, Jane had died. He told Eleanor that Jane was his 'first and only love' and they had practically been living together for the previous five years.

Jane had been in a long-term relationship with a married man, and had been anxious to keep it from her worried mother, at one point screaming to Dr Shaw that he should not tell Mrs Yates that she was ill. Another family doctor, Dr John Bligh, had attended her five years earlier, when she had first been pregnant, and had joined Shaw and a third doctor - Dr Henry Briggs of the Liverpool Hospital for Women - at Salisbury Road when they realised how serious her condition was. They told her she would die, and encouraged her to make a statement about what had happened. She admitted inducing a miscarriage, and insisted that nobody had helped her. The police were sceptical, and a Brighton woman named Mrs Ethel Cross was interviewed, but she denied having advised Jane as to how to end her pregnancy. However, she later admitted she had received letters from Jane asking for a loan, and that she had sent her both £13 and a prescription for an unspecified medicine.

At a coroner's inquest, the jury returned a verdict that Jane Yates' death was caused from procuring an abortion, and that Lieutenant Wark was 'privy to the act'. He had denied having seen Jane in the three weeks before her death, but was proved to have actually been with her a week before. It was decided that he had aided and abetted the abortion, and was therefore arrested.

Wark initially appeared at the Liverpool Police Court, charged with wilful murder and procuring an abortion. Here, letters were produced that showed Jane and Wark discussing the pregnancy and how to abort it. Although extracts from the letters were published in the press, it was noted that 'some portions' of the evidence were 'quite unfit for publication'. Wark was tried and convicted at Liverpool Assizes, his defence funded by officers of the Liverpool Volunteer Artillery Corps, of which Wark was adjutant.

He was sentenced to death, but this sentence was soon commuted to three years' penal servitude. Petitions were raised asking for him to be given a free pardon, but these were rejected by the Home Secretary. Although a three year sentence for murder may seem lenient, it was an unusual case, and certainly, Wark seems to have been genuinely in love with Jane, and trying to help her organise an abortion that she equally wanted. The conviction led to him going to prison, and on 8 December 1898, it was announced that he had been 'removed from the army', his career at an end.

Robert Wark still proudly listed himself as 'late lieutenant, Royal Artillery' in the 1901 census, continuing to live with his long-suffering wife Caroline. After her death in 1910, he moved in with his daughter Clara and her family, helping her husband operate his greengrocer's business. He died in London in 1929.

My sympathies, however, lie with Mrs Yates, and her youngest child, Margaret. Margaret - four years Jane's junior - was present at her sister's death, a trusted friend and sibling. As a result of this, she was unable to give evidence at the inquest or trial, it being reported that she was suffering from mental health difficulties. The girls' mother, Jane, was a loving mother of six children, and supporter of her husband Thomas, who worked as a cook. After his death in 1882, she had continued to raise her children on her own, and had seen them die, one by one, her eldest sons dying before Jane's traumatic death. In 1900, her last son, Arthur, died, leaving Jane and her youngest child Margaret the only surviving members of the Yates family.

Jane and Margaret Yates continued to live at 62 Edge Lane - their home since at least 1881 - and were recorded there in 1911, the only two survivors of what was once a happy family of eight. Mrs Yates had tried to look after her children, even resorting to employing private detectives to stop her daughter's relationship with an older married man. She must have spent the rest of her life regretting that she could not do so.