An 1883 Blast That Rocked The Tenements

The story of George and Mary Stephenson really is easily told. They met, courted, fell in love, had a couple of children, much to the displeasure of Mary’s father, and, as quite often happened in the 19th century, the marriage eventually fell apart and they separated.

What makes their story slightly more unusual than most is that the couple would ultimately die in a murder-suicide. Where things get a little messy, however, is in the manner in which they departed this mortal coil on a chilly July evening in 1883, while wandering the considerably less than genteel streets of The Devil’s Half-Acre.

George Stephenson had not always been the sort of man you would expect to find at the centre of one of the country’s most horrific murder tragedies. In fact, there had been a time when his life appeared to be heading in a reasonably respectable direction. He had worked as a clerk for the Bank of New South Wales in Cromwell before becoming involved in quartz mining, a venture that proved successful enough to make him a considerable amount of money.

For a while, things were looking good for George Stephenson. He had money, a successful business behind him and enough social standing to court Mary Stenhouse, the daughter of Henry Blyth Stenhouse, a prominent Dunedin contractor. Unfortunately for George, he appears to have possessed one rather significant character flaw, and unfortunately for Mary, it was one that was to become increasingly difficult to live with.

George drank heavily, very heavily, and over time, the money he had made from mining began to disappear, along with his employment and whatever respectability he once had. All of this contributed to George developing what can only be assumed was an increasingly unstable state of mind. The more George drank, the fewer his chances of employment became, and the angrier and more violent he grew. This resulted in numerous encounters with the police, and so the circle continued.

As George’s bouts of sobriety became less and less frequent and his behaviour increasingly unpredictable and violent, Mary eventually sought the protection of the law. She was granted a formal separation on the grounds of his habitual drunkenness, threats and violence. When desperate for somewhere to live, Mary moved herself and her two children into a small house on the edge of The Devil’s Half-Acre. She gained employment as a milliner at Saunders, McBeath and Co. and successfully began to rebuild her life.

Unfortunately, George wasn’t too happy about all of this. When Mary refused to grant him access to the children, George didn’t take this too well. Needing a scapegoat for the miserable state of his life and the terrible situation that had befallen him, Mary became the central figure of his rage.

In the weeks and months that followed, filled with alcohol and anger, George became an increasingly enraged figure, stalking Mary on the streets of Dunedin and around her home until the day of 6 July 1883, when he effectively, and completely, lost the plot. The reports of what happened that day paint a picture of a man spiralling steadily towards his final act. At some point, George attempted to abduct one of his children from school. When this failed, he apparently moved on to Plan B.

That evening, at around six o’clock, George followed Mary from her work, stalking her along the darkening Dunedin streets as she headed home on a Friday night. Within sight of her home, George suddenly appeared, grabbed her around the neck and chest and pinned her against a wooden fence. He then pulled a stick of dynamite from his pocket. The fuse had been shortened and replaced with a match head. Holding the dynamite between them, against their chests, he lit the match.

Needless to say, both were killed instantly, and the resulting blast was immense, shaking the neighbourhood and echoing across the flat of the city. The physical devastation was horrific. Mary and George’s bodies were left mutilated on the footpath, leaning against the fence. The scene was reported to be “sickening beyond description”, while evidence of the blast was thrown into the gardens and onto the roofs of nearby houses.

When the police searched George’s body, they found a second, identical dynamite cartridge in his pocket, along with a box of matches and an unmailed appeal to the Minister of Justice regarding his separation order.

It was nothing short of a tragedy, and its location, right on the geographical fringe where the respectable residential streets met the dense, volatile alleys of The Devil’s Half-Acre, only added to the Victorian media’s narrative of the neighbourhood.

To the broader, conservative Dunedin public, the event was proof that the entire quarter was a powder keg of instability, vice and sudden, explosive ruin. For decades afterwards, when journalists or social reformers wrote about the moral dangers of the Walker and Stafford Street slums, the “Manor Place Dynamite Tragedy” was invoked as the ultimate, shocking example of what happened in the dark corners of the city.

Next Dispatch: The Alleyway Murder