The gruesome origin of ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’

 

The gruesome origin of ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’

The phrase ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’ came into popular usage in Victorian England to mean nothing or very little, but was there a real Fanny Adams? The answer is yes, and her story is anything but sweet.

The rural village of Alton, a quiet and peaceful place in Hampshire, became the talk of the nation when on Saturday August 24th 1867 the abduction of a girl called Fanny Adams and subsequent murder and mutilation created horror and revulsion throughout the land. Nobody at the time could recall any murders in Alton prior to this, let alone one of such savagery.

On that dreadful day three little girls went out to play together not knowing their innocent lives would change forever and one of the girls would not return home alive.

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Fanny aged 7

Fanny, eight years old, her sister Lizzie, seven, and friend Minnie Warner, eight, walked off happily together from Fanny’s home in Tanhouse Lane towards Flood Meadow. Soon they met up with twenty-nine year old Frederick Baker, a solicitor’s clerk. He was smartly dressed in a black frock coat, waistcoat and light coloured trousers. Outwardly, Baker looked respectable as befitting his position, but had been drinking fairly heavily.

Baker offered Little Minnie three halfpence if she would take herself and Fanny’s sister Lizzie away somewhere else to play, Fanny was offered a halfpenny to go with Baker to ‘The Hollow’, which led to the village of Shalden, but when he gave her the money, she refused to accompany him. Annoyed Baker picked her up and carried her off into a hopfield and out of sight. This was about 1:30 in the afternoon.

The two girls, Minnie and Lizzie, played together until about 5:00pm and then decided to make their way home. A Mrs Gardiner, neighbour of the Adams’, spotted the girls and asked where Fanny was. When Mrs Gardiner was told what had happened ‘alarm bells’ began to ring in her head. She and Minnie rushed back up the lane in search of them both. Finding Baker returning alone to the village,she demanded to know where Fanny was and what he had done with her, and his reply was simply, ‘nothing’. He refuted the allegations against him including his denial of giving Minnie three halfpence if she and Lizzie would go off and leave Fanny with him but said the money he gave Minnie was for sweets. Baker was threatened with the police but he told Mrs Gardiner to do what she liked and walked away.

Eventually, about 7:00pm, a search party was formed and they made their way to the hop garden and what they found there was the most ghastly sight one could imagine.

In the gateway they found a pool of blood and beneath a hedge the decapitated head of little Fanny stuck on two hop poles. Scattered around the field was the rest of her defiled body, hacked into pieces. Fanny’s father was told of the find, and in a blind rage he made his way back home to get a shotgun, but fortunately for him and for Baker, he was disarmed.

Frederick Baker was arrested at his office but insisted his innocence, but spots of blood were seen on his clothing. The people were outraged at this hideous crime and would have probably ‘lynched’ Baker had the police superintendent not smuggled him out of the back door of the police station.

After Baker was charged with the murder he was held in custody for a week and then transferred by cab to Winchester where an angry crowd was waiting for him, the Police however managed to thwart the baying crowd trying to grab him.

The inquest was held in The Duke’s Head Inn on the Tuesday evening and the evidence was heard and the sad remains of Fanny were viewed. Baker was asked if he had anything to say and all he could say was “I am innocent.” He was remanded for trial which began on Thursday 29th of August in Alton Town Hall. One of the most shocking pieces of evidence was an entry for the 24th of August in Baker’s diary found in his office.

“killed a young girl, it was fine and hot.”

It took only fifteen minutes for the verdict of the jury to find him guilty and the judge advised them that maybe Baker was not responsible for his actions due to him being abused by his father when he was a child. This plea was rejected by the jury and the judge had no choice but to hand out the death sentence. On the 24th of December 1867, Frederick Baker had the dubious honour of being the last person to be hanged in public at Winchester.

To add insult to injury over a murder case so shocking, in 1869 tins of mutton were introduced into the Royal Navy food rations and when sailors opened the tins, they declared the contents must be the butchered remains of ‘sweet Fanny Adams,’ the tins themselves became known as ‘Fanny’s’.

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Fanny Efimovna Kaplan ,Socialist Revolutionary , Party to assassinate Vladimir Lenin.

Fanny Efimovna Kaplan ,Socialist Revolutionary , Party to assassinate Vladimir Lenin.

Fanny Efimovna Kaplan (Russian: Фа́нни Ефи́мовна Капла́н; real name Feiga Haimovna Roytblat, Фейга Хаимовна Ройтблат; February 10, 1890 – September 3, 1918) was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party who allegedly tried to assassinate Vladimir Lenin.

As a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), Kaplan viewed Lenin as a "traitor to the revolution" when the Bolsheviks banned her party. On 30 August 1918, she approached Lenin as he was leaving a Moscow factory, and fired three shots, badly injuring him. Interrogated by the Cheka, she refused to name any accomplices, and was shot on 3 September. The Kaplan attempt and the Moisei Uritsky assassination provoked the Soviet government to reinstitute the death penalty after its abolition on October 28th, 1917.\

Biography
There is some confusion as to Kaplan's birth name. Vera Figner, in her memoirs, At Women's Katorga, gives the name Feiga Khaimovna Roytblat-Kaplan (Фейга Хаимовна Ройтблат-Каплан). Other sources give her original family name as Ройтман (transliterated from Russian as Roytman, which corresponds to the common German/Yiddish name Reutemann). She is also sometimes called "Dora."[1]

Kaplan was born into a Jewish family, as one of seven children. She became a political revolutionary at an early age and joined a socialist group, the Socialist Revolutionaries. In 1906, when she was 16 years old, Kaplan was arrested in Kiev over her involvement in a terrorist bomb plot, and committed for life to the katorga (a hard-labor prison camp). She served in the Maltsev and Akatuy prisons of Nerchinsk katorga, Siberia, where she lost her sight (partially restored later). She was kept in the Maltzevskaya prison, where she was severely caned on her bare body as disciplinary corporal punishment.[2] Fully undressed corporal punishment was not usual for political prisoners at that time. She was released on March 3, 1917, after the February Revolution overthrew the imperial government. As a result of her imprisonment, Kaplan suffered from continuous headaches and periods of blindness.

Kaplan became disillusioned with Lenin as a result of the conflict between the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik party.[3] The Bolsheviks had strong support in the soviets; however, in elections to a competing body, the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks failed to win a majority in the November 1917 elections and a Socialist Revolutionary was elected president in January 1918. The Bolsheviks, favoring soviets, ordered the Constituent Assembly to be dissolved. By August 1918 conflicts between the Bolsheviks and their political opponents had led to the banning of most other influential parties - most recently, of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had been the Bolsheviks' principal coalition partner for some time, but had organized the Left SR uprising in July because of their opposition to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Kaplan decided to assassinate Lenin because she considered him "a traitor to the Revolution".[4]

Assassination attempt

Vladimir Pchelin's depiction of the assassination attempt
On 30 August 1918, Lenin spoke at the Hammer and Sickle, a Michelson arms factory in south Moscow.[5] As Lenin left the building and before he entered his car, Kaplan called out to him. When Lenin turned towards her, she fired three shots with a Browning pistol.[1] One bullet passed through Lenin's coat, the other two struck him: one passing through his neck, puncturing part of his left lung, and stopping near his right collarbone; the other lodging in his left shoulder.[1][6]

Lenin was taken back to his living quarters at the Kremlin. He feared there might be other plotters planning to kill him and refused to leave the security of the Kremlin to seek medical attention. Doctors were brought in to treat him but were unable to remove the bullets outside of a hospital. Despite the severity of his injuries, Lenin survived. However, Lenin's health never fully recovered from the attack and it is believed[7] the shooting contributed to the strokes that incapacitated and eventually killed him in 1924.

Execution
Kaplan was taken into custody and interrogated by the Cheka. She made the following statement:

My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Akatui for participating in an assassination attempt against a Tsarist official in Kiev. I spent 11 years at hard labour. After the Revolution, I was freed. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.[8]

When it became clear that Kaplan would not implicate any accomplices, she was executed in Alexander Garden, on September 3, 1918 with a bullet to the back of the head.[1] Her corpse was bundled into a barrel, and set alight. The order came from Yakov Sverdlov who, just six weeks before, had ordered the execution of the tsar and his family.[citation needed]

Culpability
Some historians such as Arkady Vaksberg and Donald Rayfield have questioned the actual role of Kaplan in the assassination attempt.[9] Vaksberg states that Lidia Konopleva, another SR, was the culprit, believing it would be all too comforting that Lenin narrowly avoided being assassinated by a woman whose personality is so far from the stereotype of a national hero.[10] In particular, it is suggested that she was working on behalf of others and after her arrest assumed sole responsibility. The main argument put forth in this and other versions is her near-blindness. Another argument points to the contradiction between the official Soviet account (which states that angry workers who witnessed the event immediately seized Kaplan) and official documents, in particular a radiogram by Yakov Peters, which mentions the arrest of several suspects.

Legacy

Moisei Uritsky

In the official announcement of the assassination attempt, Kaplan was declared a Right Eser (Right SR). Moisei Uritsky, People's Commissar for Internal Affairs in the Northern Region and head of the Cheka in Petrograd, had been assassinated nearly two weeks prior to the attack on Lenin. While the Cheka did not find any evidence linking the two events, their co-occurrence appeared significant in the overall context of the intensifying civil war. The Bolshevik reaction was an abrupt escalation in the persecution of their opponents.

An official decree on Red Terror was issued only hours after the Kaplan shooting, calling for all-out struggle against enemies of the revolution. In the next few months, about 800 Right SRs and other political opponents of Bolsheviks were executed. During the first year, the scope of the Red Terror expanded significantly.

Fictional
The event is portrayed in Reilly, Ace of Spies, a 1983 British TV series. Kaplan has been the subject of or character in several plays including (Fanny Kaplan by Venedikt Yerofeyev; Kill me, o my beloved! by Elena Isaeva) and books (Europe Central by William T. Vollmann).

FANNY BRICE , AMERICAN ACTRESS BORN 1891,OCTOBER 29

FANNY BRICE , AMERICAN ACTRESS
 BORN 1891,OCTOBER 29

Fanny Brice was a popular American singer and comedian who was long associated with the Ziegfeld Follies. She was portrayed by Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl.

“Being a funny person does an awful lot of things to you. You feel that you mustn't get serious with people. They don't expect it from you, and they don't want to see it. You're not entitled to be serious, you're a clown.”
—Fanny Brice

Synopsis
Born on October 29, 1891, in New York City, Fanny Brice sang in a talent contest when she was 13 at Keeney's Theatre, and won first prize. In 1910, Florenz Ziegfeld heard Brice singing in a burlesque house and made her a headliner in his Follies that year. Brice was a Follies perennial after 1910, and her comic routines and parodies were highly popular. She also appeared in a few motion pictures. Shortly after having a stroke, Brice died in 1951 at the age of 59.
Early Life

Actress, comedian and singer Fanny Brice was born Fannie Borach on October 29, 1891, in New York City, to Charles Borach, a bartender, and Rose Stern, a factory worker. At 4 years old, Fanny moved with her parents and three siblings to Newark, New Jersey. Less than a decade later, her father's gambling problem led Fanny's parents to separate, with Rose taking the children and moving back to New York, this time settling in Brooklyn.
Early Career
It was in Brooklyn, at Keeney's Theatre, that Fanny Brice made her stage debut as an entertainer: At the age of 13, she won the venue's amateur night competition and $5 after singing "When You Know You're Not Forgotten by the Girl You Can't Forget." Her victory on the small stage ignited Brice's passion for the spotlight, and she soon left school to pursue a career in the music industry. After several failed attempts at living out her dream, Brice began working at a burlesque house—one of the least competitive forms of entertainment at the time.
'The Ziegfeld Follies'
While working for the Transatlantic Burlesquers, Brice performed as part of the production The Girls from Happyland in 1908—marking the first time she used her stage name, "Fanny Brice," taken from a family friend. While working as a burlesque performer, Brice was discovered by producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. Seeing her comedic potential, Ziegfeld brought Brice aboard for his 1910 production, Follies.

Though she had comedic appeal, Brice didn't get many parts in the act because she wasn't seen as beautiful by Ziegfeld's standards. Thusly, the young Jewish girl who often resorted to self-deprecation and stereotypes for laughs failed to have her contract renewed in 1911. After struggling to find work yet again, Brice teamed up with Blanche Merrill, a songwriter who specialized in working with women. With Merrill's help, Brice became a comedic entertainer who took the Ziegfeld Follies of 1916 and 1917 by storm with songs like "The Yiddish Bride."
Serious Roles
For a decade after her return to the Ziegfeld Follies, Fanny Brice remained a strong and sidesplitting presence on the stage. Hoping to be taken more seriously as an actress and comedian, Brice began performing "My Man" without any accent or over-the-top movements—unlike her other numbers—in 1921's Follies production. Two years later, she underwent plastic surgery to alter her nose, a characteristic that she felt most reflected her Jewish heritage and caricature acting. Following her cosmetic surgery, Brice appeared in the David Belasco production Fanny (1926), which unfortunately flopped.

Film Career and 'Baby Snooks'

Though Brice was forced to return to comedy following her valiant but failed effort to take on more serious roles, her comedic return was triumphant. Transitioning to film in 1928, Brice became the first woman to star in a film with sound; she played the landmark role of Fannie Brand in the film My Man that year, though her performance didn't garner much appreciation. Brice went on to star in several more films, including Be Yourself! (1930) and The Great Ziegfeld (1936), but she never gained the same stardom in front of the camera that many of her female counterparts managed to attain.
Unable to shake her connection to the Follies, Brice added to her repertoire of characters "Baby Snooks," a troubled toddler known for her tantrums. The character was a hit and became one of Brice's most well-known acts; in November 1938, she brought Baby Snooks to the airwaves, where the character became nationally known. Brice and her character remained on the radio until 1948, when Brice's contract ended. She returned to radio the following year, bringing Baby Snooks with her, and continued performing her act on the radio waves for two years thereafter.


Death

Not long after considering retirement, Fanny Brice suffered a stroke on May 24, 1951. The legendary actress and comedian died less than a week later, on May 29, 1951, in Los Angeles, California. She was 59 years old.