Bessie Tyson was born in 1870 in Toxteth Park, Liverpool, the only child of Miles and Louisa Tyson – a lower-middle-class clerk-and-accountant household that did everything “right” by Victorian standards. By the 1890s, after the family’s move to London, Bessie’s life had slipped into a destructive relationship with alcohol. Between her early twenties and mid-thirties she appeared in the North London Police Court dozens of times for drunkenness in Dalston and Islington, was described in the press as “young but incorrigible,” and was eventually labelled by officials as a “police problem.”

Under the Inebriates Act she spent years in and out of prison and certified reformatories such as Farmfield in Surrey and the Eastern Counties Inebriates’ Reformatory, often recorded with no fixed abode and precarious work as a charwoman, machinist and, at one point, as a prostitute. Her parents died in 1901 and 1905, removing the last stable support in her life.

Bessie died in Stepney in 1929, recorded as a spinster and charwoman, from influenza and bronchopneumonia. Her story exposes how late Victorian and Edwardian Britain chose to criminalise addiction, especially in women, turning a respectable clerk’s daughter into a lifelong “case” of the courts.