Free The Children of Silence by Linda Stratmann Page B

Gillan, who understood the value of information as an item of commerce and appreciated that it passed in two directions.
    On this occasion, Frances was not looking for anything in particular but simply wanted to examine all the newspapers for the few months before and after the disappearance of Mr Edwin Antrobus for any clues that might throw some light on the event. Since the finding of the remains in the canal the entire focus of the investigation had moved from Bristol to Bayswater, and who could tell what gem might be lying in plain sight, unclaimed because no one had looked for it?
    Her arrival at the offices of the Chronicle always caused a stir of excitement, especially amongst the younger clerks, one of whom, Mr Gillan had once hinted, was ‘sweet’ on her. If he thought Frances would trouble herself to enquire as to which one then he was fated to be disappointed. In any case, she did not need to ask since a diminutive youth, who looked scarcely old enough to lace his own boots, jumped up as soon as she appeared, carried a small table and a comfortable chair into the storeroom where the volumes of bound papers were kept and volunteered to bring her anything else she needed. As Frances took her seat she explained that she needed a lamp, the 1877 Chronicle and solitude, in that order, and he hurried away to oblige. She did not flatter herself that she had aroused the young gentleman’s romantic feelings and suspected rather that he thought her peculiar and therefore interesting in a way that only a newsman would appreciate. The youth returned, pink-cheeked under the weight of the bound volume, and then scurried away to fetch the lamp. Before retiring to his desk he said shyly that his name was Ibbitson and if there was anything further she required she had only to ask.
    Starting in June of 1877 Frances found the last rumblings of the debate between Dr Goodwin and Mr Dromgoole and was curious enough to go further back through the pages to its beginning. Dromgoole’s initial letter published in May was headed ‘Warning of the Dangers of Tobacco’:

    For many years now the medical profession has subscribed to the view that smoking or chewing tobacco is harmful to the health of our nation, especially in the young. Consumption of tobacco, it is well known, affects the heart, the arteries, the teeth, the digestion and even the eyesight. But I have discovered that it can also affect the hearing and that it is not even necessary for the afflicted person to make use of tobacco but only to be in the constant company of a smoker. By inhaling another’s smoke, or even the aroma of tobacco that clings to the clothing of a smoker, substances deleterious to health will pass via the Eustachian tube to the middle ear. A gentleman, robust and mature, might not suffer any ill effects, but what of his wife and her more delicate constitution? How will she combat the vile poison nicotine? A case has recently come to my attention, and I am doing no more than my duty as a physician to announce it to the world, of an unfortunate lady married to a gentleman in the tobacco trade, whose organs of hearing are so affected by tobacco that she feels pain from even the smallest noise and cannot undertake many of the duties of a wife. This is, I believe, a new disease in the medical canon, unknown to the ancients and therefore wholly attributable to the effects of tobacco on the female. Women everywhere must ask their husbands to give up this noxious habit.

    The letter was signed ‘Bayswater M.D.’.
    Whatever the medical issues, Frances could see that this theory was unlikely to find favour with the Antrobus family.
    A week later came the response from Dr C. Goodwin, M.D., consultant in otology at the Bayswater School for the Deaf and Dumb, and the Central London Throat Nose and Ear Hospital:

    I must correct several errors in the letter signed Bayswater M.D., whose identity, wisely, in my opinion, he has chosen to keep secret. The affliction