A true story from the newspaper columns of Victorian South Wales
On the afternoon of Monday 26 September 1892, three magistrates took their seats at Penarth Police Court. Colonel Guthrie, Major Thornley and Mr Llewellen Wood had a summons before them that was new to the court. A solicitor from Cardiff, Mr Harry White, rose to say that he appeared for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. It was, he told the bench, the first case of its kind ever tried there.
The defendants were a dock labourer named Henry Rendall and his wife Louisa, of Harriet Street, Cogan. The charge was cruelty to their four children, “whose ages ranged from seven years downward”.
Neither parent had come.
Police Constable Thomas Evans swore that the summons had been served. Mr White said that, under the circumstances, he would ask the bench to proceed anyway. Then he called his first witness, a neighbour.
Cogan lies between Penarth and the Cardiff docks, in the shadow of the coal trade that made the district rich. Harriet Street was a working street. The Hoopers lived at Nos. 34 and 35, and the Rendalls in the next house but one. In a place study, those few doors matter, because this case came to court through who lived near whom.
Mary Hooper lived at 35 Harriet Street, in the next house but one to the Rendalls. She was a married woman and, by her own account, had known the family for four or five months.
For three months, she said, she had watched the children in the street, “in a filthily dirty condition”. They were always nearly naked, with barely a rag to cover them. She had never once seen their faces washed. The baby, George, who was two years old, she had seen “perfectly naked and starving several times”.
Then she described the scene that the newspapers would put in their headlines. A week or so earlier she had looked out and seen George and his sister Lenelia, who was four, crouched at the dung heaps behind the houses. They were picking up turnip peel and eating it.
“In fact,” she told the court, “they lived on street offal.”
The reporters noted “sensation in court”.
She had fed them many times, she said, and being sorry for the little ones she had given them clothes. But the clothes were never taken off. They stayed on the children until they fell off from rottenness and filth. Where the skin showed, she said, it was plain that swarms of vermin lived on it. She had also seen the mother seize one of the children, and bump his head against the wall. And both parents drank heavily. She did not think she had ever seen Louisa Rendall sober.
The magistrates did not need to hear more. They ordered warrants for the arrest of both parents. The family, Mary Hooper added, had by now moved from Cogan to Cadoxton.
Put aside the headlines, and four small people are left.
Henry was seven, the eldest, and the boy whose head his mother was said to have bumped against the wall. Next came a girl of six, whom the reporters called Louisa, or Lucy, and who was christened Mary Louisa. Then there was a girl of four. The newspapers could not agree on her name. Lenelia, Lanelia, Lanella and Lenella all appear in the columns, as though the reporters wrote down whatever they thought they heard. Her proper name, according to the birth and death records, was Lavinia. And last was George, the toddler, who at two was so weak he had only just learned to walk.
Their father was a hobbler. That word has dropped out of use, but in Cardiff and Barry in the 1890s it described a casual labourer on the docks who took whatever work was offered by the hour or the day, and waited about the docks to hear whether a ship had come in. At the time, the docks were booming. Coal poured out of the valleys and ships crowded in, and the towns grew faster than the housing, drains and charities that were meant to serve them. A man in Henry’s trade could earn a good wage in a good week and nothing at all in a bad one.
Their mother, Louisa, took in washing when she could.
The Western Mail printed the story the next morning under the heading “HORRIBLE CASE OF DESTITUTION AT COGAN: CHILDREN LIVING ON STREET OFFAL”. Other papers followed. The Barry Dock News went further and ran a headline of twenty-one words, ending on “THEIR BODIES COVERED WITH DIRT AND VERMIN”. The reporters knew what a Victorian reader wanted.
The police moved fast. Inspector Rees, of Barry Dock Central Station, took the matter in hand, and on Wednesday he found both parents at Cadoxton and arrested them. By Thursday 29 September they stood before a different bench, at Barry Dock Police Court, under Alderman O. H. Jones and Major-General Lee.
The charge had grown more precise. Between 1 June and 15 September, while living in Harriet Street, they were said to have “culpably neglected” their four children. The reporters noted that the defendants themselves looked “ill clad” and “seemed to have been ill fed”. They had no solicitor. They would speak for themselves.
Mary Hooper gave her evidence again, and this time she added a detail that must have been hard to hear. Some months earlier, she said, she had seen several of the children on the street with feet “so full of putrid sores that the matter ran out of the sores as they walked along”. She believed that was why little George, now between two and three, could only just walk. She put it down to weakness from ill-treatment.
Her neighbour at No.34, Esther Hooper, backed her up. The children’s bodies, she said, had been badly “tormented by vermin”. She told a small and bitter story. On a Saturday, Louisa Rendall had come to her door asking for a loan of threepence. Esther refused, but gave her a penny. Louisa spent it on beer. On the following Monday, Esther saw the children across the street eating turnip rind. When she gave them proper food, “they ate it ravenously”. Her husband then went to the police.
Louisa Rendall’s answer was short. She had been out washing all that Saturday, she said, and Esther Hooper was “telling a lot of lies”.
Next came Police Constable Evans. On the evening of 12 September he had been called to the Rendall house about a disturbance. Louisa slammed the door in his face and kept him out for some time. When he got in, he found the children crying and very badly clothed. The only furniture was a bucket for their use, and the smell was “something fearful”. He saw no food anywhere. Louisa was very much under the influence of drink, he said, and she and the landlady were forever sending out for beer, and quarrelled when it was not shared out fairly.
Two days later, on 14 September, the Society’s inspector, Mr F. R. Smithers, visited the house. He examined the children. The eldest boy’s body was badly bitten by vermin, and the two others were bitten too. The upstairs room had been recently washed out but still smelt foul. Downstairs he found a table, a fireguard, a few rags, and a lot of bottles and rubbish. There was no food of any kind. Louisa told him that her husband had given her eleven shillings the week before and two shillings the week before that.
Smithers then described what I think is the most revealing moment in the case. He had followed Louisa to a house in Charlotte Street, where he overheard the relieving officer, Mr Williams, ask whether she needed help. He would give her a ticket for the workhouse. She said no. “That was not what she wanted.”
What did she want? The record does not say. A workhouse ticket meant the family broken up, and perhaps she knew it.
Henry Rendall had one witness: his employer, Mr John Harris of High Street, Barry. Harris said that the man had not averaged more than five or eight shillings a week for the past five months, because trade had been very slack. He had often given Rendall two shillings to buy food for his family. As far as he knew, Henry did not drink much. Even if he had spent every penny he earned on drink, Harris said, he could not have got drunk very often on that.
The chairman asked a sharp question: why didn’t Rendall find work with someone else? “Because he is always with us,” came the answer. Under cross-examination, Harris explained that when he had no need of the man, he simply stayed “hanging about” all day, because they never knew within an hour or so when he might be wanted.
That small exchange explains what it meant to be a hobbler: to get any work you had to be on hand, and while you waited you earned nothing.
Then Mr David Edwards, the Barry relieving officer, spoke, and he surprised the court. He had seen the children only the day before, at Cadoxton Moors, and had taken them to the workhouse. The two youngest looked “exceptionally well”, he said, and the two eldest “not quite so well”. They were exceptionally clean, and appeared well fed. There was no vermin on them. The younger two, he said, were “a couple of pictures”.
It is hard to square this with a house full of vermin and a toddler eating turnip peel. Edwards himself conceded under cross-examination that he had not seen them a fortnight before, and that the improvement might have happened in the meantime. Perhaps neighbours had scrubbed and fed them. Perhaps the Society had. Or perhaps the horror in the newspapers had been, at least a little, made larger in the telling.
Henry told the bench that they had hardly had anything to keep themselves in food apart from clothes, but he knew the children were always given food. His wife went out working to support them while he was away, and “naturally” the children would get out and a little dirty. It was untrue, he said, that he was always drinking.
Louisa said the prosecution witnesses had told wilful lies. And she added a detail that nobody seems to have followed up. The landlord, she said, had recently taken all their furniture, which was why the rooms looked so bare.
The magistrates did not send the parents to gaol. They bound them over, each in the sum of £10, to come up for judgment within twelve months if called upon. It was a way of saying, behave yourselves, and we will leave this alone. A modern reader may find it a gentle outcome for such a case, but £10 was a heavy sum for a family that could not find threepence for bread, and the court may well have known the money would never be collected. I suspect the magistrates saw the poverty as clearly as they saw the drink.
And then, in the reports, everyone vanishes. There is no mention of a doctor’s visit, other than Henry’s passing remark that the children “were all right when the doctor went to the house”. There is nothing about whether the children went back to Cadoxton Moors that night, or stayed in the workhouse, or were handed to a relative. The papers had their sensation, and moved on to the next one.
As a genealogist, I read this story twice, once for the human drama and once for the evidence. The evidence is messy.
The family name appears as Rendall, Rendell and Randell, sometimes in the same article. The street is Harriet Street in one paper and Harriett Street in another. Mary Hooper becomes Maria Hooper in the Cardiff Times. In the very first, brief report in the Western Mail, Louisa is called “Susan”, which looks like a reporter’s slip, since every other account has her as Louisa. The two accounts of Henry’s earnings do not agree either, with the prosecution claiming two pounds ten shillings to five pounds a week, and the defence five to eight shillings. Both could be true. A hobbler’s week could be a feast one fortnight and a famine the next.
Then there is Lavinia. If I had searched only for “Lenelia” I might never have found her. It was only by checking civil registration and death records that her real name turned up, hidden behind four mishearings.
Newspapers are also not neutral. The earlier reports lean hard into the sensational: the offal, the vermin, the drunkenness. Only later do they include the defence. That is a useful reminder that a vivid source is not necessarily a reliable one. The Hoopers may have been exactly the compassionate neighbours they appeared to be. They may also have had old quarrels with the Rendalls, as Louisa suggested. Most likely, both are partly right.
The Rendalls were not remarkable. They were poor in a time and place where poverty was common, and the particular shape of their trouble, the casual work, the drink, the landlord, the neighbours, was repeated in thousands of streets. What makes their case unusual is only that it was written down, and that the writing survived.
The case also stands at a turning point. The Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act had been passed only three years earlier, in 1889, and the Society behind this prosecution had existed for less than a decade. The state had begun to step through a family’s front door, and the magistrates were feeling their way between punishing parents and recognising that punishment would not fill a child’s stomach.
A baptism tells you a child existed. A court report can tell you what they ate, where they slept, and who gave them a coat. That is the kind of detail that turns a name on a chart into a person.
Henry, Mary Louisa, Lavinia and George were children in a busy corner of the Welsh coast, and for one week in September 1892 their lives were on the front pages. Whatever the records say, they deserve to be more than a headline.
Note: Quotations come from the seven newspaper reports listed below, with some modernised punctuation. What each person saw and said is drawn from the reported evidence. Everything else is my interpretation.
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