Genealogy Series: Betsy (or Elizabeth) Esplin Bell (1858-1930).

Betsy (or Elizabeth) Esplin Bell (1858-1930).

She had a long criminal record driven by her addiction to drink,
but was she her husband’s victim?

by Stewart Stevenson.

Betsy was born on 26^th January 1858 in Dundee to David Bell, a carpenter, and his wife, Agnes Sandeman.ⁱ Father registered the birth, but is recorded as “Not Present”. George T Bisset-Smith, the Registration Examiner, published his book “Vital Registration”, the manual for Scottish Registrars in 1907.ⁱⁱ In it he states that a “liberal interpretation” should be given to the word “Present” in this context but also states that “Not Present” must not be used. I suspect that leaves most genealogists, me included, little the wiser as to what “Present” was actually supposed to mean.

So let’s pass on to the story.

Betsy’s parents married in 1856,ⁱⁱⁱ with her mother Agnes making her mark, an ”X”, rather than signing the registration record, indicating that she was illiterate. Her husband David signed.

Betsy appears to have been the second and final child of this marriage. By the 1861 Census, she was living without her parents as a three-year-old boarder at 3 Coldside, Dundee, with a widow named Helen Anderson.^iv Her older brother David, living in George’s Place, Dundee, is described as a grand-child to the Head of Household, Betsy Bean. Two other grandchildren, Betsy Bell and George Costley also lived there.^v Perhaps a rather discouraging start to what ultimately was a rather chaotic life.

Indeed we see no more of Betsy’s father, David Bell, in Scotland but there is one in Australia, who marries another woman there in 1861 and has a large family with her. All without the inconvenience of divorcing his Scottish wife. While not conclusive, the evidence provided in Australia of his birth is entirely consistent with this being Betsy’s father.

At the 1871 Census, we see mother and her two offspring back together in Hospital Wynd, Dundee.^vi The mother, Agnes, is described as Head of the Household, aged 34 and employed as a power loom weaver. She is shown as married rather than as a widow, thus suggesting that she choose to believe, or at least record, that David Bell was still alive. But he was demonstrably not living with them.

Agnes’ daughter Betsy appears again in the record when she married Hugh Higgins, a coal miner, in April 1878.^vii Like her mother, she made her mark, indicating her illiteracy. She too is a power loom weaver and declares herself to be 20 years old. Her first and only child arrived in October of that year,^viii thus indicating that she was pregnant when she married.

Three years after marrying Hugh, the 1881 Census shows her as married and living in Blackness Road, Dundee, as the Head of the Household. Her mother, now dubiously described as a widow – her presumed husband actually died in Australia seven years later, and her two-year-old daughter were staying with her, but there is no husband present.^ix She had reverted to her maiden name, Bell, and her forename is Elizabeth rather than Betsy.

By now, Betsy’s husband Hugh is living with his brother and mother in Bothwell, Lanarkshire.^x He is still a coal miner, although his age is shown as 25 rather than 22, as suggested by his declaring he was 19 when he married three years earlier. Ten years later, the 1891 census shows him still a miner, still in Lanarkshire with his mother, but now declaring himself to be 32 years old.^xi Indeed no further records show his living in Dundee. He seems to have been with his wife and daughter for a very short time.

Meanwhile, by 1891 Betsy is living in Hilltown, Dundee, with her mother, who is Head of Household, and her daughter. Betsy now describes herself as unmarried. She is described as a Jute Weaver and claims to be 33.^xii

Soon she is a regular in the courts and in the columns of the local papers.

The Dundee Evening Telegraph reported in its edition of 14^th October 1893 that Betsy Bell or Higgins had been found guilty of loitering in Dundee’s Cowgate. That’s the delicate Victorian term for soliciting for the purposes of prostitution.

She was sentenced to a fine of ten shillings and sixpence or seven days in prison.^xiii

Nineteen or so years later, the Dundee Courier reported in its edition of 1^st May 1912, under the heading “Dundee Woman’s Record”, that Betsy Bell or Higgins had passed a century of court appearances when she was fined forty shillings or twenty days in prison after pleading guilty to a charge of drunkenness.^xiv

The somewhat incomplete Dundee prison records show her having been incarcerated for being Drunk and Incapable (28 times), Breach of the Peace (7 times), Riotous Conduct (3 times) and twice each for Loitering, Obscene Language and Breach of Section 70 of the Licensing (Scotland) Act of 1903. In total, about 850 days of short sentences.^xv xvi

Of these, the last may be particularly interesting in that it leads to a photograph of Betsy.

The 1903 Act^xvii provided for a blacklist of people who had been convicted of drink-related offences three times in the preceding twelve months. The list contained details of the most recent offence and a photograph of the inebriant. It placed a duty on sellers of alcohol to refuse to serve such people and to report any purchase attempts that they made. The police distributed copies of the blacklist to all licensees.

The Dundee Courier, in a recent “past times” article, reported that the 1905 black list had 42 Dundonians on it, 35 of whom were female.^xviii And, yes, Betsy Higgins or Bell appears there.^xix

As a method of dealing with the problem, it failed utterly and was soon abandoned.

But it was not just the legal system that lost its way in its search for a solution to drunkenness.

In January 1907, the British Medical Journal carried an article^xx which stated, inter alia, “many of the committals are in the lowest state of unimprovable degradation”. Continuing, “upwards of 62 per cent are insane or mentally deficient”. Photographs were provided that purported to show that the cause lay with “congenital defect .. [which] determined the condition in which these cases are found”.

In Betsy’s case, the evidence might suggest environmental factors, family circumstances, rather than a congenital defect drove her problems.

With the leading medical journal of its time discussing chronic insobriety thus, it should be no surprise that medicine offered no more of a solution to this addiction than the 1903 Act.

In the meantime, Betsy’s spouse, Hugh Higgins, resurfaces in Edinburgh on 25th March 1901 when he participates in a marriage ceremony with Janet Scott Brown Greig.^xxi This is in the absence of any record of a divorce from his first wife, who continues to present herself in the Dundee courts as his spouse. Indeed, Betsy spends 31^st March 1901, census night, in prison and is described as married.^xxii

We might assume that Hugh’s new wife, Janet, having given birth to a child without a named father five years earlier, was in want of a husband. At the marriage, she was 27 and a spinster, while Hugh declared himself to be 37 and, despite still being married to Betsy, a bachelor.

He probably knew that he was entering a bigamous marriage as when he died in 1918,^xxiii he was described as married to Elizabeth Bell. And there was no reference to his bigamous wife, Janet.

Six days after the “marriage” in 1901, Hugh and Janet established their home in Campbell's Close, Edinburgh, with Janet’s five-year-old daughter.^xxiv

But we can see nothing in the records suggesting that Janet had any contact with Hugh Higgins after a few years of this “marriage”.

In the 1911 Census, she is a housekeeper in Uphall, West Lothian, attesting that she has been married eleven years and is without any children from the marriage.^xxv

Things now take a dramatic turn for the worse, and she is received into the Lanark District Asylum in December of that year as a pauper, with the diagnosis “she labours under mania”.^xxvi She remained there for three days. But she returned at a later date and died there in 1916 from a cerebral haemorrhage.^xxvii The death record shows she was married to Hugh Higgins.

She was buried in the Hartwood Asylum cemetery in lair 242.^xxviii

The formal records cannot readily show what responsibility Hugh Higgins had for the damaged lives of the two women he married and then abandoned. But it is hard to argue that he had none.

And Betsy’s previous family history was somewhat chaotic.

But despite it all, Betsy survived to die in 1930 aged 69,^xxix somewhat older than her life expectancy at the time of her birth. She was then described as the widow of Hugh Higgins, a man the records show as having had two wives. And her father, David Bell, is shown as deceased, with nothing in Scottish records to show that, like her husband, he was a deserting spouse who committed bigamy.

Both the husbands whose bigamous misdeeds are described here, escaped detection during their lives. Only with the ready access that modern genealogists have to the critical and census records, can we see the infamy of such cruel husbands.

APPENDIX

Illustration Courtesy of Dundee Central Library

SOURCES

i Births (CR) Scotland. 21 Rosebank Road, Dundee, Angus. 26 January 1858. BELL, Betsy Esplin. 282/1 196. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

ii Bisset-Smith, G.T. 1907. Edinburgh. Vital Registration. p.13. William Green & Sons, Law Publishers.

iii Marriages (CR) Scotland. Dundee, Angus. 01 February 1856. BELL, David and SANDEMAN, Agnes. 282/1 18. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

iv Census Scotland. 3 Coldside, Dundee, Angus. 07 April 1861. BELL, Betsay. 282/1 20/ 40. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

v Census Scotland. 10 George's Place, Dundee, Angus. 07 April 1861. BELL, David. 282/1 14/ 9. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

vi Census Scotland. 39 Hospital Wynd, Dundee, Angus. 02 April 1871. BELL, David. 282/3 31/ 10. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

vii Marriages (CR) Scotland. 9 Ward Road, Dundee, Angus. 09 April 1878. HIGGINS, Hugh and BELL, Elizabeth. 282/ 2 55. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

viii Births (CR) Scotland. 37 Rosebank Road, Dundee, Angus. 16 October 1878. HIGGINS, Agnes Bell. 282/3 791. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

ix Census Scotland. 80 Blackness Road, Dundee, Angus. 03 April 1881. BELL, Elizabeth. 282/1 21/ 10. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

x Census Scotland. Whitagreen Row, Bothwell, Lanarkshire. 03 April 1881. HIGGINS, Hugh. 625/2 5/ 20. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

xi Census Scotland. 24 Ravenscraig Hamlet, Dalziel, Lanarkshire. 05 April 1891. HIGGINS, Hugh. 639/ 18/ 7. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

xii Census Scotland. 237 Hilltown, Dundee, Angus. 05 April 1891. BELL, Betsy. 282/4 41/ 29. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

xiii The Evening Telegraph. p.3. 14 October 1893. Dundee. https://www.findmypast.co.uk/image-viewer?issue=BL%2F0000453%2F18931014&page=3.

xiv The Courier. p.4. 01 May 1912. Dundee. https://www.findmypast.co.uk/image-viewer?issue=BL%2F0000164%2F19120501&page=4.

xv Dundee Prison Admissions. National Records of Scotland. 1901-1907 and 1911-1913. HH21/72/1,2,3,4.

xvi Prison Register Index. Scottish Indexes.
https://www.scottishindexes.com/ScotlandsCriminalDatabase.aspx.

xvii Licensing (Scotland) Act, 1903. 3 Ede 7 chap 25. vlexJustis. https://vlex.co.uk/vid/licensing-scotland-act-1903-861206502.

xviii Brown, Kate. Meet the drunken Dundonians who were blacklisted from the city’s pubs. The Dundee Courier. 05 April 2022. https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/past-times/3160439/dundee-black-list/.

xix Bell or Higgins, Betsy. Section 70 Blacklist, Licensing (Scotland) Act 1903. Local History Collection, Central Library, Wellgate Shopping Centre, Dundee DD1 1DB. Entry No 28. [https://www.leisureandculturedundee.com/library/localhistory]

xx The Report of the Inspector under the Inebriates Acts concerning the inmates. The British Medical Journal. p.26. (1907, January 5th). https://www.bmj.com/content/1/2401/26.

xxi Marriages (CR) Scotland. 35 George IV Bridge, Edinburgh, Midlothian. 25 March 1901. HIGGINS, Hugh and GREIG, Janet Scott Brown. 685/4 159. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

xxii Census Scotland. H.M. Prison, West Bell Street, Dundee, Angus. 31 March 1901. BELL or HIGGINS, Elizabeth. 282/2 27/ 6. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

xxiii Deaths (CR) Scotland. Barnhill Poor House, Glasgow, Lanarkshire. 22 May 1918. HIGGINS, Hugh. 644/5 484. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

xxiv Census Scotland. 3 Campbell's Close, Cowgate, Edinburgh, Midlothian. 31 March 1901. HIGGINS, Hugh. 685/4 27/ 14. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

xxv Census Scotland. Coatland View, Uphall, West Lothian. 02 Apr 1911. HIGGINS, Janet. 672/ 11/ 34. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

xxvi Mental Health Records, Scottish Indexes, Lanark District Asylum, Shotts, Lanarkshire. 06 December 1911. GREIG or HIGGINS, Janet. Patient Number 105989, NRS Ref (General Register) MC7/13 p.435, NRS Ref (Admission Form) MC2/633. https://www.scottishindexes.com/hentry.aspx?hid=1343507.

xxvii Deaths (CR) Scotland. Hartwood Asylum, Shotts, Lanarkshire. 08 December 1916. HIGGINS, Janet. 655/1 141. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.

xxviii Greig or Higgins, Janet. Lair 242. History, Names and Lairs, Our 1255 souls, Lairs 201-300. Friends of Hartwood Paupers Cemetery. https://www.fohpc.com/history-1/names-and-lairs/our-1255-souls/lairs-201-300.

xxix Deaths (CR) Scotland. 24 Mains Loan, Dundee, Angus. 08 February 1930. BELL, Elizabeth. 282/3 89.  http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk.