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In April 1906 Mrs Mary Ann Guy, of Clyde St, Island Bay , saw an advertisement in the Evening Post seeking a kind person to take over the care or adopt a baby girl. Mrs Guy made contact with the advertiser, a single mother called Bellair Smith. It was agreed that Mrs Guy would adopt the child, Nellie, in return for which Miss Smith would pay £20 in instalments with £5 down. Mrs Guy later asked for a further £1 and then for £3 which Miss Smith did not pay. By this time Miss Smith had moved from Wellington to Masterton.
By September, the Nellie was dead and Mrs Guy was accused of manslaughter and branded a ‘baby farmer’ a pejorative terms for people, mainly women, who cared for or adopted children in return for money.
“Before organised crèches or day-care centres, single mothers – and some married women, too – paid other people to look after their children. This could be a temporary arrangement while a woman was out at work, or it could end up being permanent as women simply paid others to take their children off their hands – a form of unofficial adoption. The practice came under intense public scrutiny in the late 19th century. High-profile British and Australian court cases in the 1880s introduced New Zealanders to the sinister practices of baby farmers: paid caregivers who neglected children in their care, concealed their deaths or deliberately murdered the infants.
New Zealand newspapers soon reported suspected cases of baby farming. There was usually more smoke than fire. An 1889 police survey in Christchurch revealed more honest caregivers than baby farmers. Interest was aroused though, and New Zealanders began to discover baby farmers in their midst. 'I have no hesitation in saying that the evil of "Baby-Farming" exists in this Colony to a large extent,' reported Arthur Hume, the Commissioner of Police in 1893. He claimed to know of 20 baby farms in Christchurch alone.
In an attempt to stamp out this 'fearful slaughter of the innocents', the state regulated the system of paid childcare. Under the Infant Life Protection Act, passed in 1893, all homes that received payment for looking after infants under the age of two for more than three consecutive days had to be licensed as foster homes and were subject to police inspection”.
Further restrictions followed the murder conviction and execution by hanging of ‘baby farmer’ Minnie Dean in Southland in 1895. But these restrictions on the ‘supply-side’ of childcare in the context of a totally inadequate social welfare system for solo mothers did nothing to restrict demand, and cases of child abuse and neglect continued.
Mrs Guy’s case was less extreme than that of Minnie Dean, involving fewer children and a charge of manslaughter rather than murder. It did not have the sensational impact of the hanging of the first and only woman to be so punished in New Zealand.
As a result there was far less press coverage at the time and, unlike the case of Minnie Dean, there seems to be no local memory or legend associated with Mrs Guy’s case.
Mary Ann Guy was caring for five children, aged from two months to five years, at the time she was arrested on a charge of manslaughter. This was in itself a crime because, in 1904, she had lost her licence after being convicted on two charges of committing a breach of the Infants Life Protection Act 1893. The court was told that her house was well kept but there had been a previous breach of the Act in February 1904. In this case Mrs Guy had “taken in one child in excess of the number allowed by her licence. The police had not been notified of the child’s admission and it was only after the child had died, and a doctor had declined to give a certificate of death, that the defendant gave the police notice of the event.” Mrs Guy was fined £1 for failing to record details of the death and £1 for keeping too many children. The police said they did not seek a higher penalty because the licence was cancelled and there was no chance of it being renewed.
Mrs Guy’s manslaughter case was covered in newspapers throughout New Zealand, usually dispassionately. The Truth newspaper, however, was crudely sensationalist, sending an artist to court to sketch both Mrs Guy and Nellie’s mother and running the strained alliterative headline “Grievous Graveyard Guy”. Truth called the 62-year-old Mrs Guy a ‘wicked old baby farmer’, a ‘weazened (sic) old hag’, ‘a dreadful old woman’, ‘miserable’, and ‘a harridan’ ‘of a greedy, grasping nature’.
The evidence given in the Supreme Court began with that of Nellie’s mother, Bellair Smith, described as a cook. She gave details of the financial arrangements she made with Mrs Guy and said that at the time the child was perfectly healthy although shortly after birth she was taken to the Wellington Hospital, where she was treated for five weeks for an eye problem. Miss Smith said the hospital doctor had told her Nellie was not a strong child, and would require a lot of care. Although formal adoption had been refused by a magistrate, Mrs Guy told the mother she would keep Nellie in any case, as she loved her. Miss Smith went to live at Masterton.
She gave evidence that when she saw Nellie, after Mrs Guy had had her for some months, she was apparently in good health.
An inquest into Nellie’s death had been held by Alexander Simpson, J.P. He told the court that Emily Thompson, of Tory-street, at whose bouse the deceased child was born, gave evidence that the child was weak when she returned from the hospital, but before she was taken by Mrs Guy she was strong and healthy. She said she saw Nellie after her death and she was then very thin and poorly.
A doctor, John H. Kemp, M.D was called by Mrs Guy the day after Nellie died. Mrs Guy told him that the child had not been well; that she then gave her nourishment but that she became worse, and died on the Sunday morning. Mrs Goy also reported to the doctor that she had given Nellie some ‘lung medicine’ – Castle’s Lung Balsam and ‘Extract of Malt’. James Scott Maclnurin, a Government Analyst, told the court that he found traces of morphine in Nellie’s stomach and in bottles of the Balsam found a small amount of morphine.
Castles Lung Balsam was still being advertised in the 1930s as was a cough syrup for children without the opiates implicated in Nellie’s death
Asked why a doctor had not been called in earlier Mrs Guy told Dr Kemp that she did not like to disturb a doctor on Sunday, seeing the child was already dead, and nothing could be done for her. A police office, Constable Carmody, gave evidence that Mrs Guy had asked him if there was likely to be an inquest and when told that there would be, replied that she did not care, as she had done her duty by the child. She also confirmed that her home was unlicensed and clamed it did not need to be as she had received no payments.
The court also heard that Mrs Guy had signed a statement for the coroner’s inquest saying she had asked Miss Smith, Nellie’s mother, to say [falsley] that she had paid no money to accused, and that her reason for making the request was that neither of them might get into trouble.
A doctor, Kingston Fyffe, M.D., desribed Nellie’s postmortem examination: She was described as distinctly emaciated, weighing about half of what she should at her age. Her stomach contained no food but a liquid, smelling like Castles Lung Balsam. There was opium in the balsam, and there was always danger in giving opium to a child except under strict medical supervision.
Death, according to Dr Fyffe and another doctor who examined the body, Claude Dawson Henry MD, was due to starvation. Mrs Guy’s lawyer, Mr. Blair attempted in cross examination to show that Nellie was only one third below the average weight for a child of her age, and not one half. Mr. Blair told the jury that the only evidence against Mrs Guy was that of the two doctors, who based their opinions on a postmortem examination. Despote their findings of neglect, he said, it had been shown that in life Nellie the child was always kept in a perfectly clean condition and had been fed at 6 p.m. on Saturday night. Mr Blair also argued that Nellie had been delicate throughout her life and, by giving her medicine, Mrs Guy had showed proof that she was doing her best to remedy tho child's ailments. Had she wanted Nellie to die, he said, Mrs Guy could have allowed her to die of her diseases.
The Judge however, told the jury it was evident Nellie had ‘not been properly nurtured’ and although the child was wasting [away] but Mrs Guy had not thought it serious enough to need the calling in of a doctor. Mrs Guy, he said, was not charged with wilfully causing the child's death but with neglecting her and before the jury could find her not guilty they would have to reject the evidence of the two doctors.
It took the jury fifty minutes to find Mrs Guy guilty but they added a strong recommendation for mercy.
While the jury was considering its verdict the court convicted Mrs Guy on another charge - having made a false declaration of death regarding an infant called Gladys Vera Reid, otherwise Nicholls, by asserting that its name was Guy. This dead child was one for which Mrs Guy had been paid £40. There seems to have been no case made that she was responsible for this death; the allegation is that she sought to cover up the fact she was caring for Gladys for payment without a licence to do so.
Mrs Guy’s lawyer, at sentencing, pleaded for leniency on the basis of her age. Truth’s account of the judge’s sentencing suggests he put little emphasis on this, or on the jury’s call for mercy, although he did consider 62 to be ‘a great age’:
“The Chief Justice told the miserable old woman that she had been properly found guilty by the jury of killing a child by neglect and not giving it food and attention to preserve its life. One would have thought, His Honor said, that such a helpless infant would have appealed to the heart of any woman and cause her to have attended to it in sickness and distress. Had this been the first case of its kind with which she had been connected he might feel inclined to take a more merciful view of the case. He was, however, afraid that this was not the first infant she had had in her charge that had been neglected. Two children had died under her care. In one case a doctor. had been called in just before death, and he had giver a certificate, rather rashly, he thought, not having known the child’s state. The prisoner had then made a false declaration concerning the child’s death. By declaring it to be her son’s child, no doubt in order to avoid investigation by the. police, she had possibly thought to evade a prosecution. She had lost her license by taking in more children than the law allowed, and had the evidence showed that she had neglected other children he would deal with her very severely. He would take into consideration her great age of 62 years. Her offence was a grave one. and seeing that it was of neglecting’ a poor, helpless child so as to cause its death he could not pass a less sentence than three years’ imprisonment.”
Nellie’s death registration
Nellie’s unmarked grave (plot Public/D/334, Karori cemetery
Mrs Guy was, I am sure, not as Truth depicted her. Its reporting fed into popular predudices of the time about ‘baby farming’ at a time of high infant mortality, widespread poverty and no state support for women who gave birth and lacked the support of a partner or family, or for women who reached old age without a steady income. Pensions applied only after the age of 65. The jury’s ‘strong recommendation for mercy’ suggests that even at the time she was considered by her peers to be at least in part a victim, just as little Nellie was.
It seems (unless there was another woman of the same name born in the same year) that Mrs Guy lived on into her 90s. Newspapers reported her death with no mention of past convictions and estimated she had more than 100 descendants.
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