A doctor and Mr Hedley were called, and Mr Hedley was so shocked
at the sight of Mrs Smith he issued a warrant for her husband's
arrest for neglect. This would be too late to save Mrs Smith,
after three years of starvation, freezing and beatings she was
dying. Knowing she was dying and no longer afraid she told of her
beatings and starvation to the doctor and Mr Hedley. She told of
how she was left lying in the dark filthy smelling room starving,
while her husband and Isabella Johnson his mistress went out
drinking. When they came back they would sing and dance and feast
on meat before going to their new bed together.
Also how the mistress not much older than their daughter was
pregnant by her husband, having told this sad story Mrs Ann Smith
died. The inquest was heard in the Londonderry Arms on the 18th
March, where they heard harrowing tales from the neighbours about
Mrs Smith's suffering. One young girl described how Mrs Smith had
pleaded with her to buy a turnip to ease her hunger, with a
farthing she had found and still no one thought to get the poor
woman help.
Because Mrs Smith died, Mr Smith had been charged with murder. In
July when he appeared before Durham Assizes Mr Smith produced
several drinking pals who told the court he was a kind and
generous husband. Incredibly the jury acquitted Mr Smith of murder
and he was free to go, and so he escaped the blame for his wife's
death and neglect but Sunderland's respectable public did not.
The story caused such shock the editor of the Sunderland News
wrote an article commenting on the moral state of the town: In
this great borough, with it's wealthy traders and merchants, in
this religious town, so full of Christian people, a fellow
creature famishes for months in a living tomb, and finds nobody to
relieve her torture until death, 'the poor man's dearest friend'
steps in and releases the weary soul. We speak in terms of
indignant horror when we hear of innocent people incarcerated in
loathsome foreign cells but here, at our very doors, a poor woman
was kept for years in a domestic bastile.
A more dreadful picture could scarcely be conceived than of this
female, worn to skin and bone, crouching upon the low seat her
tyrant allowed her while chewing a piece of tin in a vain attempt
to cheat the fiend of famine that was preying mercilessly on her.
Had the case been known in time, Ann Smith would not have been
allowed to die of starvation.
