Fanny Adams: 1859-1867 The Little Girl Whose Tragic Murder Gave Rise to the Phrase
'Sweet F.A.'
8 Year old Fanny Adams, a labourer's daughter, lived in Alton, Hampshire during the 1860s. It was a hot summers day on Saturday, 24th of August 1867 when she went out to play with her sister, Lizzie, 8, and their friend Minnie Warner.
As they wandered down a lane down to a meadow (known to locals as 'Flood Meadow') to play, they encountered a man dressed in black frock coat and light coloured waistcoat and trousers, who offered them money to go and buy sweets, offering Fanny more if she came with him up the road to the nearby village of Sheldon. In their innocence, Minnie and Lizzie took the money and carried on down the lane, whilst Fanny accompanied the strange man in the opposite direction.
A couple of hours later, Minnie and and Lizzie returned and when asked by a neighbour, Mrs Gardiner, where Fanny was, told her about the encounter with the strange man. Mrs Gardiner ran to fetch Mrs Adams and together they began to search frantically for the missing girl along the lane to Flood Meadow.
As they did so, they encountered a man matching the description given by the girls, and Mrs Gardiner demanded 'What have you done with the child?' The man admitted to having given money to the girls, as was his 'usual custom' with children, but denied all knowledge of Fanny's present whereabouts, insisting that the last time he had seen her, she was running back to her companions.
He informed them that he was a solicitor's clerk in Alton on his way back to work. His respectable appearance and countenance carried a lot of weight with ordinary people in 1860s Britain, especially in areas where crime was rare, and this encouraged the women in the belief that he was not the type to do anything untoward and so they left him to carry on down his way into Alton.
As the evening wore on, Fanny was still missing, and so the neighbours formed a search party and combed the surrounding area for the little girl. It did not take them long to find her in a nearby hop field near a stream. She was dead. Without wishing to delve too far into the horrific details, it is necessary to relate that she had not only been murdered, but that her body had also been dismembered and scattered over a wide area around the scene.
Upon the discovery, Mrs Adams ran to tell Mr Adams, who had been playing cricket some distance away. Upon being told of what had happened, Mr Adams, quite understandably, broke down and ran home to retrieve a shotgun in order to hunt down the man who had been described, fortunately, he was restrained and disarmed by his neighbours before the situation was made any worse.
ARREST AND TRIAL
The likely suspect was quickly identified, and the police arrested a 29 year old solicitor's clerk named Frederick Baker, who strongly protested his innocence. The identity of the suspect was no secret, and Baker had to be protected from a lynchmob that had formed outside the solicitor's office where he was arrested.
The evidence was pretty damning. In addition to eyewitness accounts of him being in the area at the time of the murder, his clothes were still spotted with blood in spite of attempts to wash them, and when he was searched, he was found to be carrying a knife that was stained with blood.
As if that wasn't enough, the police found his diary in his desk at work. For Saturday the 24th of August, a blasé entry simply recorded:
'Killed a young girl. It was fine and hot'
Baker was charged with murder. The defence team desperately tried to suggest that Baker had been misidentified, that the knife was too small to have been used to dismember the body and even that the diary entry had been incorrectly punctuated (it was suggested that Baker had forgot to put a comma after the word 'killed', and was therefore not a confession, but simply a statement of fact recording that a young girl had been killed).
Needless to say, it would have taken a pretty credulous jury to believe the case for the defence. Baker's only hope was that he might be found not guilty by reason of insanity, and the judge suggested to the jury that there was a good legal case for returning such a verdict, as Baker's family had a history of mental illness. His father had attempted to kill Baker and his siblings on several occasions during their childhoods, his cousin had been locked up in an asylum, his sister had died of a brain fever and Baker himself had once attempted suicide following a failed love affair.
Nevertheless, the jury, having been forced to endure the full sickening details of the crime during the course of the trial, was in no mood to be merciful, and they returned with a verdict of guilty within 15 minutes of retiring.
Baker was inevitably sentenced to death, and was subsequently hanged on Christmas Eve, 1867 outside Winchester Prison, in front of a 5,000-strong crowd which had gathered to watch him die. He was notably the last man in Hampshire to be publicly executed, as public executions were abolished in May the following year.
SWEET FANNY ADAMS
The gruesome details of the murder and the subsequent trial had been widely reported in the national press (filling a contemporary public obsession with lurid stories of ghastly murders, especially ones committed against innocent young girls, a fine old Victorian tradition that the tabloid press has preserved down to the present day).
The story was therefore very well known to most people in Britain at the time. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy was introducing a new type of tinned mutton ration for use at sea. This tinned mutton was not well regarded by the sailors, one of whom suggested that the tinned rations were not mutton at all, but the butchered remains of Fanny Adams. This anonymous sailor was evidently not the only jack with a sick sense of humour, and the phrase was widely adopted within the Navy, and the phrase 'Sweet Fanny Adams' came to be used as shorthand for something that was undesirable, and later, 'nothing at all'. The phrase itself evolved into 'Sweet F.A, which was said to stand for 'Sweet F*** All' or simply 'f*** all'. This slang phrase spread from the Navy to the British public at large, where it still remains in popular use.
Not the most tasteful tribute to a dead little girl, especially one who had died in such tragic and horrendous circumstances. Hopefully her parents remained ignorant of the phrase, or at least the origins of its later incarnations. No doubt they would have been far from impressed to discover the manner in which their daughter had been immortalised by introducing a new phrase into the English lexicon.
A more fitting tribute was provided thanks to generosity of members of the Victorian public, whose contemporary enthusiasm for memorialising the dead ensured that a suitably elaborate tombstone would stand at the grave of Sweet Fanny Adams, which can still be seen at Alton Cemetery, and is still well cared for by sympathisers who are probably well aware of the story behind the phrase 'Sweet F.A.'
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