History Is Present

A Doomed Romance During The Great War

Annie Baker was like any other respectable Edwardian wife. Annie and her husband, Arthur, lived in East London with their infant daughter Florence.
In 1915, when Annie was 23, her husband Arthur was called up, joining the Poplar and Stepney Rifles in the December of that year. Their daughter would have been 4 or 5 years old.
Annie took a job in a cafe to provide for herself and Florence and it was there she would met and feel in love with a docker named Richard Luck. Tragically, it was a love story with a fatal ending.
‘I have loved this man, and he loves me, from the first time I met him . . .’ Annie wrote in her diary at the time. She sounds lovely me a woman in love for the first time. Anne's story has been turned into a novel but the trust is far more devastating.
There was a great amount of pressure on women of strict moral codes of the "respectable" working classes; how to be the perfect wife and mother. Adultery was not expectable in Edwardian Society (or any period throughout history) and any married woman discovered having an affair would have been disowned by her family and isolated by the local community. Once war came, women were expected to do their duty, to roll up their sleeves and support the war effort wholeheartedly.
With Arthur in France, Annie was left to bring up their child on the meagre separation allowance of 3s 6d a week, topped up to 7s by the Government but it wasn't enough and so, Annie took a job in a cafe where she regularly encountered a handsome young docker named Richard Luck and the two swiftly embarked on an love affair.
Despite the affair, Annie, who was described as ‘respectable, sober and hard-working’ by her employer, continued to write regularly to her husband as he fought in France, Greece and Egypt.
But in late summer 1917, Annie's carefully constructed world came crashing down when she discovered that she was pregnant. It was clear that she couldn't pass the child off as Arthur's as he had been away for 16 months without leave.
Annie was shunned by her family and forced to leave her job. She moved out of the East End terrace she’d been sharing with her sister and moved in with Luck in a fourth-floor flat in Whitechapel. But even then she wasn't able to escape the opprobrium heaped on her for falling in love with a man not her husband.
In July 1918, six weeks after baby Annie Elizabeth was born, Annie received a letter from her husband that announced he was being allowed home from the Front on leave.
Convinced that she would be separated from her children and a life in the workhouse, Annie could see only one way out.
On the morning of July 18th, police arrived at the flat in Whitechapel to find Annie and her baby lying dead in bed. Both had died from poison. Annie was just 26.
'Well, there are plenty like me,' wrote Annie in what would prove to be her last diary entry. 'I shall not be missed for long.' She could see no possible way out. So sad.
Luck, then 32, attempted sucide  by throwing himself under a train at Aldgate East station but was unsuccessful and instead found himself under arrest for Annie and her child murder.
Two months later, he was convicted of their murder and spent the rest of the war in prison before being recommended for release in 1921.
The law stated that if there was a suicide pact and one person survived, the survivor was automatically charged with murder. Richard was sentenced to hang but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment after a petition was sent to the Home Office.  In 1921, Richard was recommended for release, but there the trail goes cold. The most likely explanation is that Richard changed his name when he was released.
Annie's daughter was left to be brought up by relatives while Arthur was devastated by his wife's death who was both bewildered by his wife's actions and left distraught by her death which he was told of in a blunt telegram that read: 'Wife and baby dead. Suicide.'
He never recovered from what happened and tried to drown his misery with drink. He died in hospital in the 1940s.