After a long and thorough investigation, experts believe they know what happened to the boy known only as ‘Baby Auckland’
During the summer of 2024 a builder working to renovate flats above a takeaway in Bishop Auckland lifted an upstairs floorboard to reveal a haunting secret. Sealed in the dark, untouched for decades, was a tiny, skeletal body.
The baby boy was carefully wrapped in sheets from The Umpire, a long-defunct newspaper dated June 1910, while a piece of brown twine remained knotted around his small throat.
At an inquest area coroner for County Durham and Darlington Crispin Oliver, delivered a devastating verdict: the child, aged between 38 and 40 weeks old, was “garrotted with twine” shortly after his birth, reports the Mirror.
“The conclusion that I am driven to, on the balance of probabilities, is that the twine was applied to Baby Auckland’s neck after he was born and while he was still alive,” Oliver stated, ruling the death was a homicide.
“The most likely explanation for this is that a person in a position to care for him… took the decision to end his life by means of strangulation using the twine as a garrote. As such, this was a homicide.”
“I find that Baby Auckland died in or around 1910, having been garrotted by an unknown third party shortly after the baby was born”, he concluded.
Very little is known about ‘Baby Auckland’, as he is fondly known to locals, and the exact tragic circumstances which led to his short life ending so quickly after it began may never be known.
What is known, is for decades on end at least, Baby Auckland lay undisturbed and unclaimed in an upstairs room, on Fore Bondgate, a bustling historic street with quaint pubs dating back to the Tudor era.
The building where he was placed is now a pizza takeaway, while the flat above has been completely renovated.
Recalling the moment he found the body, builder Peter Moody told the inquest he’d found the “small skeleton of a baby under the floorboards”, and the child had been “about 50 to 60 inches long.”
A statement read aloud by Mr Oliver read: “I took up the floorboards and found the skeleton with some newspapers. The newspapers were very old under the floorboards. I picked up what appeared to be a ball and thought, ‘This is a baby’. I called the council, and they recommended that I call the police.”
Fore Bondgate was a bustling hub of working-class life in 1910, teeming with pubs, shops and some homes, a historic street where, as historian Tom Hutchinson put it, “everybody knew everybody”.
Dating back to Medieval times, it is located in one of the most historically significant places in the town of Bishop Auckland, close to where, in the 14th Century, the Bishop of Auckland built a bridge across the River Weir to reach his hunting estates.
Back then, Bishop Auckland was a wealthy place for the working classes to live, where streets such as Fore Bondgate would have been “well paved and lighted by gas by a company, supplied with water from works”.
At the weekends, the pubs would have been filled with off-shift miners. Many of those living nearby would have been employed in the then-booming coal and iron industries, a number of which had closed down by the depression era of the 1930s. tthen, the sense of community had stuck.
Number 27 operated as a ground-floor shop with a popular cafe, which Tom believes would have been situated on the first floor, catering to working-class people stopping by for a refreshment.
According to the 1911 census, three people lived in the spacious eight-room dwelling upstairs: 53-year-old café owner Elizabeth Adamson, listed as married and head of the household, presumably by that point widowed or with a husband working elsewhere.
She lived with her son, 14-year-old apprentice Earnest Adamson, and a 22-year-old domestic servant named Mary Walker.
Mary, who hailed from around four miles north of Bishop Auckland, had been a single woman at that time, and it was her name that stood out to Tom as he considered the sad death of Baby Auckland.
As the eldest of 14 children from a coal miner’s family, Mary had grown up in a four-bedroom home, where she would have faced the precarious realities of needing an income to survive.
As noted by Tom, when coal miners living in the late 19th and 20th centuries lost their jobs, they also lost their homes, given that these were often owned by the colliery companies. Similarly, unless one of his sons worked at the same pit, even if a miner sadly died, his widow and children could well be thrown out of their own homes.
This made mining life a “very precarious existence”, with pressure put on older children in case disaster struck. As Tom put it: “Get a job – keep it if at all possible. No reason to think that females wouldn’t have the same mindset. That mindset didn’t really start changing until the later part of the 20th century.”
For young women living outside of the family home, there were additional challenges to face, particularly among those potentially left to face pregnancies alone without support. Tom reflected: “Presumably, it would be very shameful, putting it mildly. There aren’t any statistics, so you don’t really know whether other occasions, similar to this, did occur at times.”
Census records showed Mary remained at Number 27 for decades, working as a servant and cook through multiple changes of management until after World War Two. She never married, spent her entire life in Bishop Auckland, and passed away in 1975 at the age of 87.
“You could argue that if Mary Jane was the mother, that she hid them, and maybe, for whatever reasons, she stayed there to make sure it wasn’t discovered,” said Tom.
While Mary didn’t have any known children, the Walker family was a large one, and Tom believes it is likely that she may well have nephews and nieces still living in the area.
He pondered: “Bearing in mind that she lived to 1975, it could well be that there are a few siblings around in the Bishop Auckland area who knew her before she died. If she knew anything about it, she could have mentioned this in passing; their suspicions might have been aroused.”
Though two women claiming to be related to a servant at the address came forward during the investigation, DNA testing didn’t provide a match with the long-dead baby.
With the inquest determining that death took place in 1910, the sheer size of the property explains how it might not have been too difficult to conceal a secret right beneath the feet of those living there.
“You can assume if the premises had eight rooms that there would be rooms that weren’t even used,” Tom said. “The top floor may have been a storeroom, and also possibly where Mary Jane Walker had her room. It would be comparatively easy to hide something.”
Whether the infant belonged to Mary or another resident, the truth remains buried with the past.
But Durham Constabulary ensured the child was not left forgotten, with officers treating Baby Auckland with the respect you would expect for any child of our modern era, giving him the funeral he had been denied.
Speaking at the service in April, Celebrant Gemma Dobson said: “Though we do not know the details of their days, we stand here knowing something simple— this child was here, and this child is worthy of love, dignity, and rest.
“Today, Baby Auckland is not alone. As we gather here to say farewell today, we recognise that Baby Auckland will be part of this place— this quiet, beautiful place— for all time.”
Speaking after the verdict, Detective Chief Inspector Mel Sutherland of Durham Police, who led the investigation, stated: “There were no modern checks available, such as CCTV. We had to think laterally and explore all available techniques, such as forensic evidence and carbon dating.
“Baby Auckland was killed shortly after he was born. He never got the chance to experience anything in life. But there was a heart-warming end to his life at the funeral and the compassion he received.”
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