ALL I KNOW IS THAT WE ARE RICH
Flush with their pawnshop funds, Robert, Nattie and John Fox walked the next morning to William Richards’s coffee house, at the junction of Cave Road and the Barking Road. The boys were carrying bamboo fishing rods, having decided to take a trip to the seaside after breakfast. Fox was wearing his new suit. All three entered the coffee house but Nattie stopped in the lobby and, despite Robert’s entreaties, refused to come any further.
Mr Richards’s place was one of dozens of coffee shops in West Ham, serving coffee and tea, slices of bread and butter, eggs, bacon, chops and steaks. The windows of a coffee shop, described by Punch magazine as ‘the restaurant of poor respectability’, were usually decorated with gold lettering, while the interior gleamed with polished wood and brass. The customers – labourers, hansom cab drivers, the lower grade of clerk – sat on benches in wooden stalls, where they could peruse the day’s papers as they dined. Mr Richards greeted Robert and Fox, remarking that Fox was looking smart. Fox smiled. He and Robert ordered and ate their breakfast, and then Robert paid the bill with a shilling (12d, or a twentieth of £1) and offered the coffee-house keeper a chunk of cake tobacco. Mr Richards said he did not smoke but Robert left the tobacco on the table anyway. He and Fox collected Nattie from the lobby, crossed the road to a fruiterers, and set out on their excursion to Southend-on-Sea.
The nearest seaside town to London, Southend lay at the mouth of the Thames forty miles east of West Ham. In the eighteenth century the highwayman (and penny dreadful hero) Dick Turpin had smuggled goods to Plaistow from Southend. The town was now a favourite destination for the London working classes: they steamed down to the coast by train or boat on Sunday school excursions, works outings and bank holiday beanos. A record 35,000 people had travelled by rail to Southend for the Whit bank holiday in June. The train from central London, which cost 2/6d for the round trip, called at Plaistow and West Ham stations, while the London Belle steamship sailed from Woolwich, across the river from the Victoria and Albert docks, at 10.15 each morning.
John Fox, Robert and Nattie reached Southend at about noon. The sun was hot and the sky blue. They walked through the Pier Hill fairground, which boasted a steam-powered ‘razzle-dazzle’ (an aerial platform that tilted as it turned), a merry-go-round, swing boats, coconut shies, and stalls selling shrimps, oysters and cockles. The famous iron pier, completed five years earlier, stretched a mile and a half out to sea. Just inside its stuccoed entrance was a pavilion, at which Little Elsie the Skirt Dancer would twirl her silk robes at that evening’s show, and an electric train that carried visitors to the pier head. At low tide a vast bed of mud stretched beneath the promenade decking; at high tide the water lapped at the pier’s pillars, and yachts danced close by on the waves. The boys cast their fishing lines into the sea.
Robert told Fox they would all three of them soon sail away to some place.
‘What place?’ asked Fox.
‘Some island,’ said Robert.
Almost exactly twelve months earlier, Robert had visited Southend to see the most notorious murderer of recent years.
Robert was a pupil at Stock Street school in Plaistow when he read of the killing of Florence Dennis, a twenty-three-year-old dressmaker whose body had been found pressed into the mud by a brook just outside Southend on 24 June 1894. She had been shot through the head and had fallen to the ground still clasping her straw hat in one hand; the post mortem revealed that she was eight months pregnant. James Canham Read, a thirty-seven-year-old employee of the Royal Albert Dock, was immediately identified as the chief suspect: he had been seen twice with Florence in Southend that weekend.
Read, who had lived in East London for nearly twenty years, was known around the docks as a responsible and educated family man. He earned more than £150 a year as a cashier and was entrusted with paying out some £2,000 a day to the Albert Dock’s labourers and to the lightermen who ferried goods by barge from the ships to the quays. A slim, fastidious figure with a dark moustache, he was fond of reading, and had set up a library when he worked in the Victoria Dock. He lived with his wife and eight children in Jamaica Street, Stepney, just west of Limehouse.
On the day that Florence Dennis’s body was discovered Read went on the run, taking with him more than £100 from his office at the dock. Crowds gathered outside his house in Jamaica Street and hollered abuse at his family. The local and national papers reported avidly on the hunt for the fugitive.
After a fortnight, the police tracked Read down to a village south-west of London, where he was living under a false name with yet another woman. He had been leading a triple life, and it seemed that he had killed Florence Dennis because she had threatened to expose him and so to collapse the walls between his several selves. The ‘lower-middle-class Lothario’, as The Times described him, was taken by train to Southend to be arraigned.
The news of Read’s arrest spread fast. By the time he and his police guards reached Southend in the evening of 7 July, scores of people were waiting beside the railway. They ran after the cab that drove Read to the police station.
When Robert learned of Read’s arrest, he slipped away from his house and set off for Southend. He had two shillings for the train fare, which was enough to take him only as far as Grays, a village on the Thames twenty miles east of London. He walked the remaining twenty miles to Southend, stopping to catch some sleep under a hedge by the roadside.
At 11 a.m. on Monday 9 July, Read appeared before a magistrate in the courthouse by the police station, just off the main road between Southend railway station and the pier. Hundreds of people pressed in to the court or stood outside looking up at the windows, hooting and whistling.
Read wore a light tweed suit and a white straw hat. He affected a nonchalant air, approaching the dock with a quick and elastic step and then calmly denying the murder charge. The magistrate remanded him for trial at Chelmsford, Essex.
When Read was tried for murder in November, he again displayed uncanny control of his emotions – his ‘command of himself’ was ‘simply marvellous’, said the Pall Mall Gazette. He continued to protest his innocence, and his brother Harry provided an alibi, but the circumstantial evidence against him was very strong. James Canham Read was found guilty of murder on 15 November. He walked jauntily out of the courthouse, stopping to shake hands with people who had assembled outside, and stepped gaily up the steps of the prison van.
Few doubted Read’s guilt, observed the Evening News, but his ‘nerve’, his ‘cool, yet daring’ demeanour and his ‘keen and bright intelligence’ won the admiration of many: the crowd seemed to feel ‘an inclination to cheer him’. Harry Read followed him out of the court – he was ‘obviously shaken’, said the paper, ‘but behaved with wonderful fortitude, showing of what stuff these two remarkable brothers are made’. A peculiar heroism had attached itself to the pair. On 4 December 1894, James Canham Read was hanged. In his will, he left nothing to his wife or children but instead bequeathed everything to the brother who had tried to protect him. Harry drowned in the Regent’s Canal in East London the next year, apparently in a drunken accident.
James Canham Read was refined, calculating, ruthless, with a compulsion to possess and control women even if it meant killing them. In his smooth composure, he resembled both the villains and the heroes in the penny dreadfuls that Robert liked to read. The killer in The Bogus Broker’s Right Bower, a New York crime story in Robert’s collection, had ‘a coolness somewhat remarkable even in a murderer’. The detective on his track is ‘the coolest and best prepared ferret’, ‘a fox with nerves of steel’. Mora, the villainess, is the chilliest of all: ‘Everything depends on coolness and holding on with bull dog tenacity,’ she says. ‘I am still Mora, the Cool.’ Mora acts with icy precision even as her gypsy blood boils. Her coolness is a capacity, the ability to have two faces and to hide one from the world.
In the five days after their trip to Southend, the Coombes brothers amused themselves by playing cricket with John Fox in the back yard, and cards at the parlour table. They visited the Balaam Street recreation ground, a park near their house that had opened the previous summer. It contained a pond on which children could sail toy boats, a raised stand on which a brass band performed each week, lawns and ornamental flower gardens. The boys of Plaistow also played in the streets, as they had before the park opened, sometimes in small gangs known as ‘clicks’. Robert would take his bat out for a game of cricket, wedging a stump between the stones on the pavement opposite the house. Football was popular with the local boys, as were games of knocking down ginger (rapping on people’s doors and then running away), pitch and toss (a gambling game), leapfrog, and ‘robbers and thieves’. Nattie continued to skip school.
Though Plaistow was a crowded working-class suburb, it was bordered by fields and marshland. Just over the wall at the end of the Coombes family’s yard was a large market garden. From the front of the house on a clear day, you could see across the marshes and the river to the hills of Kent. The German writer H. A. Volckers had strolled up to the neighbourhood from the docks one summer Sunday in 1886, approaching through the fields directly south of Cave Road. ‘The country was all level, with ditches of water running through,’ he reported, ‘and on each side was the smooth roads; fields, containing fine grass; sleek, fat cows, calves, and horses feeding on them; acres of land with onions, young turnips, lettuce, rhubarb, &c.’ In Plaistow, Volckers passed a crowd listening to members of the Peculiar People sect sing ‘Jerusalem, my happy home’ and another group following a Salvation Army drum and flute band down the street. Many middle-class visitors to West Ham recoiled at the repeating streets, the level, dingy, narrow vistas, the shabby men and women herding themselves into trams like cattle; but on this sunny afternoon, the German traveller was struck by the rosy cheeks of the children, and the abundance of carnations, roses and geraniums filling the pots on the windowsills of the neat little houses.
Fox and the boys occasionally ate out, but they usually dined off food prepared by Robert. As the eldest son in a family without daughters, Robert had learned to be handy about the house; he was not only accustomed to ‘boys’ jobs’ (fetching coal, laying the fire, emptying the privy in the yard) but also to washing, cooking and cleaning. The ground floor of 35 Cave Road was supplied with gas and running water, and the kitchen was equipped with a coal-powered iron range. Robert took deliveries from the tradesmen who called at the house, asking them to leave the usual quantities and paying them for the goods; he baked sausage rolls and jam tarts with a batch of flour that his mother had ordered; he washed his clothes and hung them to dry on a line over the fireplace. He and Nattie also had to feed the family’s cats and an American mocking bird named Bill.
Each evening, Fox smoked his pipe and Robert smoked cigarettes. There was no age restriction on who could purchase tobacco, despite public concern about the number of boy smokers, and it was possible to buy a box of five ‘fags’ for a penny; rolling tobacco was cheaper still.
The trio continued to use the back parlour as their bedroom, though on the night after their trip to Southend, Robert suggested to Fox that he sleep in the back room upstairs. Robert and Nattie went up with him and, while Fox was preparing the bed, Robert unlocked the door to their mother’s bedroom and went in for a couple of minutes. Nattie waited outside. The boys then went down to their usual berths in the back parlour.
Robert set about devising fresh money-raising schemes. On Saturday he wrote a letter for Fox to take to the National Line offices at the Albert Dock. Fox delivered the letter to John Hewson, the company’s chief cashier, at about noon. Hewson, who was sixty-four, lived in the relatively well-to-do West Ham district of Forest Gate, north of Plaistow. He was responsible for paying Robert’s father’s wages, and was able to hand out cash advances. A distinguished-looking man with a long nose and a white beard, Hewson was known to be tender-hearted. When an overladen National Line vessel disappeared on its way from New York to London in 1889, with seventy-four seamen aboard, the distraught wives of the missing men turned up at the company offices in the City, pleading for an advance on their husbands’ wages. They were treated harshly by everyone except Hewson. ‘He was kind and said he was sorry for us,’ one woman told an MP inquiring into the case: ‘he was troubled for us; the rest were angry with us for coming to the office.’
In his office at the Albert Dock, Hewson read Robert’s letter.
‘Dear Sir,’ it ran. ‘Will you please advance the sum of four pounds as my mother is very ill with heart disease and will have to pay a heavy docters bill. Will you plese bring it yourself or give it to John Fox. I remain, Yours truly, R Coombes.’
Despite his good nature, Hewson was suspicious. Robert had once before obtained money from him under false pretences. He handed the letter back to Fox, saying he would not believe it unless he were provided with a doctor’s certificate. Fox pocketed the letter and went back to Cave Road with the news.
On learning that this plan had failed, Robert asked Fox to pawn his mandolin. Robert was as fond of playing music as he was of reading, and the mandolin was a treasured possession. Between eight and nine o’clock in the evening, Fox took the instrument to another pawnbroker, this one much closer to home: Richard Bourne’s shop, opposite the railway station on Plaistow High Street. When the broker observed that there was no key to fasten the mandolin’s case, Fox said that the case would close securely without being locked. Bourne advanced him five shillings. This time Fox gave the name Nathaniel Coombes, along with the address 35 Cave Road.
The boys and Fox spent much of Sunday in the back yard. The weather had cooled off a little but was still bright and dry, with more than nine hours of sunshine. Fox, wearing Mr Coombes’s jacket, trousers and waistcoat, played his harmonica, breaking off to chat with James Robertson of number 37 over the garden fence. Robert and Nattie shot at each other with toy bows and arrows. They grew so noisy that Fox warned them that if they didn’t pipe down he would report them to their mother when she got back.
Cowboy and Indian games were popular among English boys. Robert’s penny dreadful collection included a reprint of an American ‘dime novel’ about Buffalo Bill, as the famous bison hunter and showman William F. Cody was known. For six months in 1892, when Robert was ten, Cody had staged a Wild West extravaganza at Earl’s Court in London, with a herd of horses and a troupe of Red Indians. According to the stories, the young Buffalo Billy was marked out by pluck, endurance, nerve, a restless urge for adventure. He was loyal and honourable – he tended to his wounded comrades, gave his widowed mother the money he earned by driving cattle – but could be ruthless in a crisis. On one occasion he got into a fight with a boy who had set him up for a humiliating whipping at school. Since the bigger boy was getting the better of him, Billy drew a pocket knife, opened the blade with his teeth, drove it into his enemy’s side, and left him for dead.
Over the weekend, the election campaigning in West Ham South gathered pace. The incumbent Member of Parliament, James Keir Hardie of the Independent Labour Party, led a parade through the streets on Saturday, with marching bands and banners. At an evening meeting at the public hall in the Barking Road, the socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw gave a speech in support of Keir Hardie, and an organ belted out rousing tunes. ‘Glory, glory hallelujah,’ the people sang, ‘Keir Hardie’s marching on.’
The constituency had recently acquired a reputation for radicalism. In a famous strike of 1889, the dockers of West Ham had succeeded in securing a minimum rate of 6d an hour, and when Keir Hardie was elected MP in 1892 West Ham South had become the first Independent Labour seat in the country. A long-haired, wild-eyed Scottish miner, Hardie told his followers that he would use the state ‘to lift the weary load which is crushing the heart and life, and beauty and joy out of the common people’. He was able, according to a supporter, to make the workers ‘feel that there is sunshine somewhere if they could but come at it’. But a rise in unemployment in 1894 had been worsened by a harsh winter of fogs, ice and snow, when parts of the Thames froze over and many of the yards were forced to close. In 1895 some 10,000 men in West Ham were without work, and the district was poorer than ever. Many blamed Lord Rosebery’s Liberal government, which Keir Hardie’s party had supported, for failing to relieve the people’s plight.
There were more radical elements in West Ham even than Keir Hardie. Earlier in July a local anarchist called Edward Leggatt had been prosecuted for travelling second class on the railway while carrying a third-class ticket. ‘I only recognise one class,’ proclaimed Leggatt, ‘namely, the working class, who produce all the wealth of the world, and are therefore the only useful class, and the only class entitled to ride.’ Given the choice of a fine or fourteen days in prison, Leggatt said: ‘I’ll do the fourteen days – long live Anarchy, and to hell with the Government!’ Some anarchists took more lethal action: in 1894 an activist had accidentally blown himself up while trying to bomb the Greenwich Observatory, across the river from West Ham.
At 8 a.m. on Monday 15 July the polls opened in the twin constituencies of West Ham South and West Ham North and the men of the borough began to turn out to elect their MPs – an Act of 1884 had extended the vote to all men who lived in a property worth £10 or more. A donkey traipsed up and down Balaam Street bearing placards that urged voters to support Major George Banes, the Tory candidate, while a bricklayer brandished a hod and shovel adorned with portraits of Keir Hardie. The right-wing Evening News, encouraging its readers to drive the Liberals and radicals out of London, appealed directly to the labourers of Canning Town: ‘West Ham Workers – Attention! the late Liberal government refused to place any of the recent naval contracts at the Thames Iron Works, Canning Town, although there was exceptional distress there through slack trade.’ The local publicans also supported the Conservatives, who had promised not to interfere with the licensing laws. Some of the owners of the ‘boozing shops’ near the docks were charging a penny for three shots of whisky and a threepenny cigar, then bundling their customers into vehicles provided by the Tories to ferry voters to the polling stations.
While Nattie went to play in the Balaam Street park, Robert made his way to the Albert Dock to try to persuade John Hewson to give him some money. He took with him an old doctor’s certificate, from which he had torn off the date in the top corner – 20 March 1895 – in the hope that Hewson would accept it as new. The sharper villains in Robert’s penny dreadfuls were adept at forging and altering documents: ‘I am an extra good penman, you know,’ boasts the Irish master criminal Captain Murphy in Robert’s novelette Joe Phoenix’s Unknown, ‘and by means of a little dextrous use of chemicals it will be easy for me to take out the original numbers of the bonds, or shares, and put in others.’
Robert placed the certificate on Hewson’s desk and waited as he read it: ‘I certify that Mrs Emily Coombes of 35 Cave Rd is under my care,’ read Hewson. ‘She is suffering from an internal complaint and still remains in a very weak state. JJ Griffin MD.’
Hewson told Robert that he would come later to Cave Road to visit Mrs Coombes.
‘Will you bring the money with you?’ asked Robert.
‘I’ll see,’ said Hewson. He put the letter in his file.
Robert again looked in on his mother’s room that day, then locked the door and gave Nattie the key. ‘Keep the key,’ he said. Nattie put the key in the back parlour. Robert told Nattie that he was going to write a letter to their father. He sat at the table, with a blotting pad, paper, pen and ink, and proceeded to do so. ‘Dear Pa,’ Robert wrote,
I am very sorry to iform you that me ma has hert her hands. You no that sore on her finger it has spread out all over her hands and is unable to write to you. Just before I had writen in this letter a bill from Mr Greenaways come and Ma had to pay it. Mr Griffin also had charged a heavy doctors bill. Ma said will you please send her home a dollar or two. We are all very well and Ma’s hand Improving. Ma was offered four pounds for bill the mocking bird. I enclose the bill and hopeing you are very well. I remain, Your loving son, R Coombes.
Robert folded the letter and put it in an envelope with a £1 8/6d bill from the Limehouse tailor Isaac Greenaway & Sons. The tailor’s bill, dated 10 July, detailed the costs of repairing a jacket, fitting the same jacket with a fur collar, and purchasing a waistcoat and a pair of fancy Scotch grey trousers.
Robert also wrote a letter to the Evening News, the bestselling evening paper in London. Its edition of 15 November 1894, which carried the first reports of James Canham Read’s conviction for murder, had sold close to 400,000 copies – a world record, the paper claimed. The Evening News was pitched at the respectable and conservative working classes who populated the Plaistow end of West Ham South, while poorer, more dissident types prevailed in Canning Town and the other riverside districts.
‘Sir,’ wrote Robert to the editor, ‘Will you please be kind enough to place my advertisement in the Evening News for 1 week. I send the money in stamps.’ The newspaper’s classified section promised that an advertisement could be placed for the price of a telegram – that is, sixpence for twelve words and half a penny for each additional word. Robert’s notice read: ‘Wanted £30 for 6 months will pay £6 a month by instalments. Write to RC 35 Cave Rd Barking Rd Plaistow E.’
Robert had modelled the wording on similar ads that had appeared in the paper’s columns: ‘£2 wanted privately for 2 months at 10 per cent interest’, announced ‘F’ of Kensington on 4 July. Robert was asking for a bigger loan and a longer period to pay it back, and in return was offering a generous interest rate of 20 per cent. He addressed the letter to the newspaper’s offices near Fleet Street.
At about six o’clock in the evening of 15 July, Robert and Nattie’s aunt Emily called round to see her sister-in-law. Emily was a dark-haired woman of thirty-eight, whose husband, Nathaniel, was a younger brother of Robert and Nattie’s father. He worked as a greengrocer, as his father had before him, but in the depression of the early 1890s was struggling to make ends meet. The couple lived with their seventeen-year-old daughter a mile north-east of Cave Road, in another of the terraces that had been built on the marshland in the past two decades, as regular as if they had been punched out on a production line.
Emily brought with her a friend called Mary Jane Burrage, who was also a friend of her sister-in-law. Mrs Burrage, a thick-set woman of forty-five, was married to the chief butcher on the SS Ionic, a White Star liner that ferried sheep to England from New Zealand. Like Robert and Nattie’s father, George Burrage had sailed with the National ships out of the Liverpool docks until moving to West Ham with his family in the 1880s to work on vessels based in East London.
When Aunt Emily knocked at 35 Cave Road, John Fox came to the door and opened it a few inches. Emily had never seen Fox before. She noticed that he was wearing her brother-in-law’s best churchgoing suit, which she had herself brushed and put away after its purchase six weeks earlier. She nudged her foot across the threshold and asked for Mrs Coombes. Fox told her that she was not in. He kept the door almost closed, as if to stop Emily seeing into the house.
‘Where is she?’ asked Emily.
‘She is out,’ replied Fox.
Emily pressed him: ‘I am her sister-in-law and I want to know where she has gone to.’
Fox replied that Mrs Coombes had gone to her sister’s in Liverpool, for a holiday.
Emily observed that it was funny that her sister-in-law had not mentioned this to her, at which Fox pushed the door shut. She and Mrs Burrage were turning away to leave when they saw Robert and Nattie running towards them. The boys had been playing in the park. Nattie stopped at the gate but Robert came forward to greet his aunt. Emily asked him where his Ma was.
‘She has gone to Liverpool, auntie,’ he replied. ‘A rich aunt has died and left us a lot of money and all that I know is that we are rich.’ Then Robert started back towards the recreation ground.
Aunt Emily remarked to Mrs Burrage that it was unkind of her sister-in-law to go away without mentioning it to her. Robert reappeared with some other boys and called to Nattie, who ran after him. Aunt Emily and Mrs Burrage gave up and made their way home.
That evening, a girl from Cave Road called on Aunt Emily at her house in Boleyn Road, East Ham. The girl said that she had been sent by her mother, who had noticed an unpleasant smell at number 35 and did not think that all was right.
There was no running water when Robert and Nattie got home from the park. At 5 p.m. the East London Water Company had shut off West Ham’s supply without warning; the reserves were so low that the company had decided to open its taps for only two and a half hours a day. East London slowly became suffused with the smell of unflushed drains.
As the polling deadline of 8 p.m. approached, boisterous crowds assembled near the public hall at the southern end of the Barking Road, hooting and cheering the last men to cast their votes for West Ham South’s MP. In the course of the evening the crowd moved north to Stratford to hear the borough’s results, along roads lit by gas lamps, past the glowing lanterns of the pubs and the wild flares of the oil lamps on the costermongers’ stalls. By 11 p.m. about 20,000 people had congregated outside the ornate town hall on Stratford Broadway, bringing the traffic to a standstill. When a tram tried to drive through, the crowd scattered, some people running into the front line of constables who had been sent to keep order. The policemen retaliated with punches, while the mounted patrols rode their horses into the mass of men and women. Rather than fight back, the residents of West Ham launched into a rendition of ‘Rule Britannia’, singing out that ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’.
At midnight, the candidates for West Ham South and West Ham North appeared on the balcony of the town hall for the reading of the results. It was announced that the Tory contender for West Ham South, Major Banes, had secured 4,750 votes to Labour’s 3,975: he had beaten Keir Hardie, the dockers’ champion. The Liberal incumbent for West Ham North had also been ousted from his seat by the Conservative challenger.
Keir Hardie made his way back to Canning Town to thank his supporters, thousands of whom had gathered outside the Labour Party’s central committee room in the Barking Road. ‘Tomorrow,’ he told them, ‘when the news reaches a hundred thousand workmen’s homes, there will be a feeling as if something has gone out of their lives.’ Yet he urged his supporters not to lose heart: they would win through one day. ‘Good night, lads!’ he said. Many of the men in the street broke down in tears.
The local publicans celebrated the Tory win with a triumphant display of fireworks and coloured lights.