The Nightingale Shore Murder by Rosemary Cook Page B

sum as would provide a composition of 1s in the pound with costs of liquidation. The debts of Mr H. O. Shore were £92,996, of which £68,000 was expected to rank against the estate, with assets of nominal value of £1,982. The liabilities of Mr O. B. Shore were returned at £94,163, and the assets at £3,850.’
    Another paper, the Daily News, gave more background on the brothers’ financial dealings:
    â€˜The debtors in this case were two gentlemen connected with the Colonial Trusts Corporation who failed some months since, and whose affairs have been under investigation by Mr C. R. Miles, the trustee. They also appear to have been interested in various collieries, and to have suffered largely by the depreciation of that description of property.’
    Harrington Shore, this paper reported, was not a bankrupt, but was treated as a ‘liquidating debtor’, with unsecured liabilities of £92,996, while Offley Shore was bankrupt with unsecured liabilities of £68,000 – £20,000 owing to the Colonial Trusts Corporation. ‘
Both gentlemen’
, the paper concluded laconically, ‘
were mixed up in their transactions in regard to collieries and other public companies
.’
    Offley Shore would remain in bankruptcy for another 18 months, although his address throughout this period was Queen Anne’s Mansions, Westminster. This was a block of flats built by Henry Hankey in the 1870s, and, at 14 stories high, said to be the highest residential building in Britain. Too high, according to some: Queen Victoria is said to have complained that they blocked the view of the Houses of Parliament from Buckingham Palace. The flats were rented at considerable expense to highly respectable tenants: which raises the question of how Offley maintained this home throughout his bankruptcy, which was finally annulled in April 1881.
    The impact of this difficult time on his family is easier to deduce: in the 1881 census, Offley Shore is recorded as 42 years old, married, but living alone in London; an MD but ‘not practising.’ The following year is the first in a pattern of years in which the Southsea Visitors’ List records that Mrs Offley Shore was holidaying in the seaside town, not with Mr Shore, but with Mrs Leishman: Anna Maria and her mother staying at number 1 Marine Parade, or at Purbeck House, Clarence Parade, between 1882 and 1886. When not at Southsea, the two women lived together in London: according to a letter from Anna Maria’s son, they had to move from the Kensington Road to the Richmond Road, ‘
the former rooms having been let over their heads
.’ The children were all separated: Offley at Sandhurst training for the Army, Florence away in York and Urith staying with relatives. What Offley Shore was doing during this time would later become the basis for a bitter dispute in the matrimonial court.
    At the time that her father’s bankruptcy was annulled in 1881, Florence was 16 and, on the night of the census, she was at Middlethorpe Hall in York.
    The Hall, in the village of Bishopthorpe to the south east of York, was built for Thomas Barlow, an industrialist from Sheffield, between about 1699-1701. It stood three storeys high, originally with a flat roof and balustrade, though by Florence’s time there it had a pitched roof with an eagle from the Barlow family’s crest on it. The front door, under a columned porch, opened onto an entrance hall and a sweeping cantilevered wooden staircase, flanked by beautifully wood-panelled rooms. Two single storey wings had been added to the house early in the 18 th century, enlarging it even further, and there was an impressive stableyard and large garden outside. The Hall had remained the home of the Barlows – Thomas Barlow’s grandsons, John and Samuel, carving their initials in the newel post on the first floor landing in 1764 – until around 1850. That was the year that the last of the family