“Your husband is fighting for his country, and his children have the right to be protected,” said the Chairman of the Chesterfield Bench to a soldier’s wife. Her children were found starving while she was drinking, and one day the little boy of three was found crouching naked inside the fender, trying to get warm. The police described the house as foul from top to bottom, with a heap of horrible rags for a bed, and a food cupboard that made the house unendurable when the door was opened.
Facts in “Yorkshire Telegraph,” March 24, 1916
The wife of a missing soldier was sent to prison at Chesterfield for neglecting three children between 13 years and 16 weeks old. She had gone astray through drink, and the youngest child, born under terrible conditions, was not her husband’s. It was found lying on a filthy bed, and its drunken mother, to satisfy its pangs of hunger, had given it pennyworths of laudanum. Eleven people slept in two foul bedrooms.
Chesterfield Police Records, October 9, 1916
Five hundred children of soldiers are being cared for in the great Homes founded by Mr. Quarrier in Scotland, and most of them are there because of drinking mothers.
Facts in Reports
A soldier’s wife at Biggleswade spent her allowance on drink and left her three children locked up in the house for days at a time.
Police Court Records of Biggleswade, September 1915
A soldier’s wife was found reeling in the streets of Dublin with a baby in her arms. At her home were found four other children, cruelly neglected.
Facts in “Dublin Mail,” August 16, 1916