Ancestor Stories: Bess Iddles

“She believed she’d been to Hell twice — and that she was beyond saving.”

That’s a direct quote from a Doctor at Holloway Sanatorium in 1897. And the woman they were talking about was Bess Emily Jane Iddles — later known as Bess Harvey.

Her story begins in Stroud, Gloucestershire, where she was born in 1860 to Edward and Esther Iddles. Her father was a grocer. She was one of six children, and spent her early years roaming market streets and helping in her family’s shop until, in the early 1870s, the Iddleses moved to London.

By 1881, Bess was living in Willesden and working as a milliner — designing and hand-making hats and trims, a skilled and fashionable trade for Victorian women. In 1885 she married Henry John Harvey, a solicitor’s clerk. They welcomed two sons: Harold in 1889, and Henry Jr. in 1892. By 1896, the family had settled in the quiet North London suburb of Edmonton.

That’s when things started to unravel.

One of her boys came down with scarlet fever, and Bess nursed him through it. Within weeks, her health — physical and mental — collapsed. Her mother later told doctors that “for the past two months she has been peculiar in her manner: full of religious ideas, fearful of harming others, and convinced she was lost.” Night after night, Bess reported hearing voices whispering from behind her, telling her she was damned. She tried to leap from windows, and staff records note “periodic fits of violence necessitating restraint” and that she was alternately “taciturn and talkative.”

On February 17, 1897, at age 36, she was admitted to Bethlem Royal Hospital.

Dr. Deeping’s notes describe a “wild and distraught expression” — she signed in at just 6 stone 4 lb, anaemic, weak, and scarcely able to keep still. Her doctor noted she had “delusions of identity,” insisting she’d met every woman in her ward before and calling out their names as though they were old acquaintances. Her nights were the worst: the voices rose to such a pitch they “kept her awake,” he wrote.

By March, her distress had deepened. Staff moved her under “suicidal caution,” then into a padded room when she began trying to swallow sharp objects. She paced endlessly, sometimes muttering that she was “utterly lost & eternally damned.” Two nurses were posted to her bedside around the clock.

There were fleeting respites. A week of calmer sleep. A day when she managed to eat without prompting. But each small break was followed by a new wave of panic, confusion, and restlessness. She was recorded as “unoccupied, nervous, and apprehensive” — always hearing those voices.

After sixteen months of this cycle, in July 1898 she was deemed stable enough for transfer to St. Luke’s Hospital — a gentler institution for long-term patients. There, she showed slight improvement: a little weight gain, less frantic agitation, a tremor in her fingers noted only at night.

But she never returned home.

She remained in care at St. Luke’s until 22 January 1900, when she died of influenza and heart failure. She was just 39 years old. Her name stayed on the registers, but she never came back to her family.

Stories like Bess’s are why I do what I do. Behind every clinical note or census entry is a real person — someone who laughed, worked, loved, and struggled. And too often, they were forgotten.

We can’t change how Bess’s life ended — but we can make sure she’s remembered. And we can do the same for the people in your family history. Start your journey at yourfamilyline.co.uk.