Phoebe Hessel: The Amazon of Stepney & Brighton

PHOEBE HESSEL

Phoebe, who was born in Limehouse London, was known as “The Amazon of Stepney” and allegedly spent 17 years serving in the British Army, disguised as a man before becoming one of Brighton's oldest and most celebrated residents. However, it is often very difficult to separate the fiction from the facts when recounting Phoebe Hessel’s very unusual life story.

Born Phoebe Smith at Limehouse in 1713, she was baptised at St Dunstan’s Church in Stepney on 13 April 1713. Some sources indicate that her father was a soldier who disguised his young daughter as a boy after the death of her mother and smuggled her into the British army, where she became a fife and drum player.

Other accounts say that aged 15, in 1728 Phoebe fell in love with a soldier called William Golding and subsequently enlisted in the Fifth Foot Regiment to remain with him when he was posted to the West Indies and Gibraltar. In 1745 she was wounded in the arm by a bayonet at the Battle of Fontenoy, but when Golding was wounded and invalided home too, Phoebe was said to have revealed her true sex to the commanding officer's wife after which both she and Golding were honourably discharged. She was given no punishment, but had her salary paid out as any other soldier who was discharged from the army.

Linda Grant de Pauw tells a slightly different story in Battlecries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present (University of Oklahoma 1998). She believes on the evidence of a sergeant of the 13th Light Dragoons, that Phoebe was sentenced to the lash for some breach of discipline. Her sex was initially revealed when she was undressed to be whipped, upon which she only commented: "Strike and be damned!"  The flogging story may or may not be true. It feels like a stock element of the woman-soldier-in-disguise story that was so popular in Georgian plays and ballads but, as evidence shows, these ballads were often based on real facts.

Phoebe and William Golding were married for about twenty years and after their discharge they lived in Plymouth where they had nine children, eight of whom died in infancy - sadly their only surviving son died later at sea.

After Golding's death Phoebe settled in Brighton and married fisherman Thomas Hessel. He died when she was aged 80. After Hessel’s death, she was given three guineas from the parish, so Phoebe bought a donkey and hawked fish and other goods in nearby villages to make a living. 

After overhearing a conversation in a Shoreham inn one day, she provided key evidence resulting in the conviction and execution at Goldstone Bottom of one Mr James Rooke for robbery. Highwayman Rook and Howell his accomplice stole a horse and robbed the post boy of half a guinea. Horse stealing and robbing the mail were both capital offences, so the two were hanged at Horsham where their execution was watched by 1400 spectators. Their corpses were tarred and placed in a gibbet that hung at Hangleton bottom. Rook's mother, was said to have waited beneath the gibbet for her son's bones to drop and then collected them in her apron so she could bury him piece by piece. Nearly 100 years later, Alfred Lord Tennyson found this story so moving, that he wrote the poem 'Rispah' to tell the world about it.

In about 1800, when she was eighty-seven years old, Phoebe was selling ginger-bread, oranges and apples at the corner of Old Steine and Marine Parade near the Brighton Pavilion. Clad in a brown serge dress, with a spotless white apron and a hooded black cloak, her only concession to her increasingly great age was a stout oak walking stick. She became very well known in Brighton, due to her great age and unusual experiences but not long after this she was taken into the workhouse.

She discharged herself from the workhouse in August 1806 and in 1808 was granted a pension of a half guinea per week by the Prince of Wales. As the oldest inhabitant in the town she was entitled to sit beside the vicar at a Napoleonic celebration dinner on the Level on 12 August 1814, and, although now blind, she also attended the town's coronation celebrations on 19 July 1821.

Phoebe Hessel died on 12 December 1821 at the grand age of 108 and a local pawnbroker Hyam Lewis paid for the large gravestone to be placed in her honour. 

Research has often revealed conflicting evidence with Phoebe's story; and it was only later in her life that she recalled all her military exploits. It has been suggested by sceptics that the army tale was merely a good story designed to encourage listeners to open their purses to her and help her stave off poverty

PHOEBE HESSEL'S GRAVESTONE

However, the Northumberland Fusiliers, successors to Phoebe's alleged regiment, certainly believe the story to be true as they restored her grave at the Church of St. Nicholas, Brighton in the 1970s.

Her gravestone reads:

In memory of Phoebe Hessel who was born at Stepney in the year 1713. She served for many Years as a private Soldier in the 5th Regt of Foot in different parts of Europe and in the Year 1745 fought under the command of the Duke of Cumberland at the Battle of Fontenoy where she received a Bayonet wound in her Arm. Her long life which commenced in the time of Queen Anne extended to the reign of George IV by whose munificence she received and support in her latter years. Died at Brighton where she had long resided, 12 December, 1821. Aged 108 years.

Amazon Street and Hessel Street (both named in her honour) still exist today in Stepney in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Phoebe is also immortalized on one of Brighton’s buses, all of which are named after famous residents.