In the spring of 1904, the case of a missing book-keeper occupied newspaper editors and writers. She had left her home to go to a regular shorthand class, but seemingly vanished into thin air. Her disappearance mystified her family and the public, but her apparently motiveless departure masked deeper issues, which, as was perhaps often the case in Edwardian England, were hidden from public view.

Florence Harris was 17 years old when she vanished. The press reported that she and her younger sister Louisa were staying with an aunt in Paddington – the result of their mother being incarcerated in the lunatic asylum at Hanwell. It was known that she worked as an assistant book-keeper at a laundry, and that she was seeking to develop her skills by going to a local board school – the Amberley Road school in Paddington – once a week, where shorthand classes were put on.

There were no photographs of Florence in the press, but the Daily Illustrated Mirror employed an artist to draw a picture of her based on a family photo. The simple line drawing shows a girl looking straight out, with a face that is hard to read. She looks young; she has dark, wavy hair, pulled back into a bun or ponytail, and is wearing a shirt with a sailor collar. She looks younger than 17; this drawing could be taken from a photo that is a couple of years old, or Florence could simply have looked younger than her age.

She was described elsewhere as being tall – 5 feet 8 inches – with dark blue eyes and dark hair. She was known as Florrie, was seen as an attractive young woman, and was of good, simple habits. She was employed at a laundry, and might have been expected to want a bit of glamour and entertainment after work – but in fact, she always came straight home from work in the evening. She was reserved; she had no young man, but was particular about her appearance. When she went to her shorthand class, she usually put combs in her hair, and wore jewellery, a waistbelt and gloves.

On 23 March 1904, Florrie had come home from work as usual. Normally, she would then go to the shorthand class with her sister, but Louisa had been kept late at work. Florrie, therefore, headed off on her own. Unusually, however, she did not dress as usual, leaving her waistbelt and gloves at home. She was wearing a black skirt and jacket, a dark red blouse, kid shoes, black stockings, and a striking navy blue and cream sailor hat with black trim. This tall, dark, pretty woman with her distinctive hat should have been memorable to anyone who saw her; yet she headed off for her class, and promptly disappeared somewhere between her aunt’s home and the school. It was nine days before the Mirror published her likeness, describing her as the ‘lost lady book-keeper’.

There were clues, however, as to Florrie’s state of mind. Not only was there a family history of insanity, but she had been under stress at work, worried about how much work she was being given as the result of another clerk being off sick. Yet her aunt, although anxious about Florrie’s mental health, felt it improbable that she would commit suicide over it – ‘Florrie was too much of a coward to harm herself,’ she told her local magistrate in Marylebone when she reported her niece missing.

Trying to trace Florence Annie Harris and her family in the archives is quite frustrating. The main relative mentioned in the press is her aunt, whose name is given as Kate Beeseman or Heeseman. Neither the 1901 nor 1911 census reveal Kate or any other member of the Harris family living at the property where Kate was based when Florrie went missing, suggesting that it was not a long-term family home. Kate is not present in any census prior to 1911, and nor is Florrie.

What I have been able to find out is that her parents were labourer Matthew Harris and his wife Sarah (née Cotteral). They married in Kensington in 1886, and Florence Annie was their eldest child, born on 10 March 1887. She was born at 5 Southam Street in Notting Hill. The family was still at that address when sister Louisa Amelia was born on 11 June 1888. In the summer of 1890 a brother, Charles Matthew, was born.

The 1891 census records the family living together at 5 Southam Street: it states that Sarah Harris had been born in Chelsea in 1850; that Matthew was 12 years her senior and born in Paddington. The three children were four, three, and nine months old. Sadly, baby Charles Matthew would be dead by the end of that year.

Hard times
Florrie’s father Matthew was absent in 1901 simply because he had died the previous year. He died at his home – 28 Adair Road in North Kensington – with probate being granted to Florrie’s aunt Kate, her name spelled Heisman in the probate calendar. He left effects worth just £95. So there was a simple explanation from his absence from the 1901 census, and presumably Sarah Harris was already an inmate at the Middlesex County Asylum in Hanwell (popularly known as St Bernard’s) at this time. With Matthew dead, his daughters needed homes elsewhere. The 1901 census shows 12-year-old Louisa Harris staying with her grandfather Joseph Harris and family at 3 Aston Road in Kensington. Joseph and his first wife – Florrie and Louisa’s grandmother – were from Leicestershire originally, but had been living in the Paddington area since the dawn of the Victorian age; all their children had been born in Paddington. Joseph had worked as a coffee shop keeper in Marylebone, but had retired by 1901, when he was listed as being 81 and living on his own means. Also in his house at that time was his third wife Christian, and Emily Harris, his daughter-in-law, then aged 42.

Florrie, the older sister, was not with Louisa. She may have been working by this point, being 14 – and there is a girl of her name and age working as the sole servant for widow Sarah Jackson in Islington in the same year. Certainly, being girls with no father and with their mother incarcerated, they would have needed to work wherever they could, and to gain some financial independence.

However, by 1904, both Florrie and her younger sister Louisa were staying at Kate Heeseman’s house at 55 Goldney Road, Paddington. Kate was described as their aunt, but there is no record of her being related to either Matthew or Sarah Harris. Matthew’s probate entry also describes her as a spinster, so she was born a Heeseman, or Heisman, rather than being a Harris or Cotterill by birth. It could be that she was a cousin, as it was not unusual to describe relatives rather loosely, or it could simply be that she was a family friend who had volunteered to look after the girls, and that they described her as ‘aunt’ rather than attempting to describe their relationship to others in a more awkward way.

55 Goldney Road was a four-storey, late Georgian or early Victorian terraced house, with steps up to a front door flanked with a pair of pillars, and a basement floor below. Kate would certainly have rented it, but given its size, it’s likely that she only rented a few rooms within the larger building. There was presumably room enough for three single women, all of whom were out working during the day, but it may not have been that spacious a space for them.

However, it suited Florrie. The route she would take to her book-keeping classes was a walk of around a third of a mile, down the length of Goldney Road, along Marylands Road, a brief stretch of the Harrow Road, and then left down Amberley Road. Amberley Road is situated parallel to the Grand Junction Canal, winding its way towards Little Venice. Although the board school, built around 1881, faced the road, it would later be extended with a building that backed straight onto the canal.

Florrie had walked out of her aunt’s home on the evening of 23 March and vanished. The police knew where she was heading, and the route she would have taken, but this didn’t help them find her. Her aunt gave desperate interviews to the police and the press in the hope of finding her niece. Throughout the last week of March and the first week of April 1904, the press covered this missing person’s case eagerly, wondering what had happened to the young woman, illustrating their articles with an illustration of the pretty 17-year-old, and emphasising the fact that she was a ‘tall, good-looking and fascinating girl’. It is a feature of today’s newspapers that a missing person gets more attention when the person is a young, good-looking woman, and this seems to have been the case over a century ago as well.

Mystery solved
In April, however, the story was finally solved, and it wasn’t a happy ending. The body of Florence Annie Harris was found in the Grand Junction Canal by Frank Lock, assistant master of Paddington Workhouse. He had been in the workhouse grounds on the afternoon of Thursday 7 April when he saw a body floating in the water and managed to get it to the shore. The doctor who examined the body found that it had been there since Florrie went missing, and that although she had several broken bones, these were likely to have been inflicted after death by barges passing up and down the canal.

It now emerged that she had not only been stressed at work (saying ‘her business worried her’), but depressed about her mother’s incarceration in the asylum. It seems she feared that her mother’s insanity was genetic, and one night had burst out crying, saying that Sarah Harris ‘had no right to be married and have children’, because she thought her own mental faculties had been affected. Another fact, not mentioned before, now came to light: the night before her disappearance, her aunt – who shared her bed – had woken up at 2am to find Florrie sitting at the end of the bed with scissors in her hand. When Kate asked what she was doing, Florrie said, ‘I am trying to cut my throat with the scissors.’ She had not yet injured herself, and Kate was able to take the scissors from her. At her inquest, the jury returned a verdict of suicide during temporary insanity.

It was being missing that made Florence Harris newsworthy, and the press reports detailing what happened to her are mainly a single paragraph here and there. This may not, in fact, have been the end of the family’s tragedy. Records show that a Kate Heasman (sic) was admitted to the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum five years later, in 1909, and was kept there until her own death seven years later.

Florrie’s case shows that young people faced pressures both from their own family and externally – and, in fact, in April 1904, the papers mention several young women who had committed suicide by jumping into local canals. In Florrie’s case, she was a girl who should have been about to start an exciting adulthood, but who instead was worried about congenital mental illness affecting her. She had already lost her father and little brother, although this was not a unique situation for Victorian and Edwardian girls, but she also lived every day with the fact that although her mother was still alive, she was incarcerated and thus buried alive, not there for her daughter to talk to. Florrie’s family situation meant that she had to work full time, but she was ambitious and thus spent evenings learning further skills. She was tired, stressed and worried about her own mental health. It seems that the week of her death was a hard one for her; she had tried to kill herself only to be stopped, and the next night, as she walked to her class, a route that took her virtually to the canal, she decided to walk a minute further to the water itself and put a stop to her worries. {