In the Old Court of the Old Bailey, William Grantham rose to make the case for the defence. Whereas most of the prosecution witnesses had been giving evidence for a second or even a third time, none of the defence witnesses had yet testified. Grantham told the jury that he intended to show that Robert Coombes was not in his right mind. He began by calling the boy’s father to the witness stand.
Robert Coombes senior took the stand. He had ‘nothing of the seafarer about him’, observed the Star; he was ‘respectable-looking’, agreed the Sun.
Coombes recalled that his eldest son had suffered from headaches and excitability since the age of three or four. When the family was living in Limehouse in the 1880s, he explained, he had taken Robert to see a Dr Christopher Coward, who had prescribed medication for his headaches. He had continued to consult Dr Coward about Robert after moving to Plaistow in 1891, and – by correspondence – while the family was based in Toxteth Park, Liverpool.
‘He was very ill at Liverpool from headache,’ said Coombes, ‘the same complaint, and in consequence of what Dr Coward told me I was specially careful.’
According to Coombes, Dr Coward considered Robert’s brain particularly vulnerable to the pressures of schoolwork, as well as to the more obvious risk of being struck in punishment. ‘He always told me never to chastise him anywhere near the head, or to touch him on the head, or to give him any home lessons to do.’ When the family returned to London, Coombes asked the doctor to write a note about Robert’s frailty to George Hollamby, the headmaster of Grange Road school.
Several medical manuals warned parents not to let children study too much. The stress of tests and homework was believed to cause ‘brain irritation’, headaches and worse. Over-education, claimed Wynn Westcott in 1885, could lead children to suicide by encouraging a ‘precocious development of the reflective faculties, of vanity, and of the desires’. These theories, like the theories about penny dreadfuls, reflected a worry about the effects of education on the poor.
‘The boy complained very often of his head at that time,’ said Coombes, ‘at intervals of a week or a fortnight, sometimes a month. At such times he would sit down and look very sullen, as if he was having a headache, and would speak to nobody.’
‘In disposition,’ he added, ‘he was a very good boy.’
Coombes showed the court a certificate that Dr Coward had made out in 1891, which stated that Robert was suffering from cerebral irritation. This was a diagnosis given to patients who experienced headaches, restlessness, impulsive fits, peevishness or melancholia without any discernible organic cause. It was believed that the disorder could develop into epilepsy, though it could also fade away by adulthood. The term implied a physiological basis for Robert’s condition but was in truth merely descriptive. It gave no real clues as to the cause of his disturbance, which could be anything from unhappiness to physical injury.
Coombes believed that the trauma of birth might have damaged Robert’s brain. He was away when his son was born, he said. ‘I think I had just gone to sea, or came home just afterwards, I cannot recollect. I know that my wife had a very bad time.’ Robert had marks on his temples, he said, caused by the forceps that had wrenched him from the womb. He implied also that Robert might have been affected by his mother’s temperament. ‘My wife was a very excitable woman from the first,’ he told the court, ‘who very frequently laughed and cried at the same time.’
In 1893, Robert’s difficulties recurred and he was moved from Grange Road school. Coombes described the problem as ‘a difference with the teachers’ and added that ‘the other boys used to laugh at him’. The incident at school seemed to have made Robert a figure of mockery to his peers. Coombes said that Robert had complained of headaches ever since. This suggested that the boy’s problems were exacerbated, even if they were not caused, by emotional distress.
Dr Coward died that year, aged fifty-four, and the Coombes family registered with John Joseph Griffin, who ran a practice in the Barking Road. ‘When anything special occurred in consequence of his complaints of violent headache I had to take him to Dr Griffin,’ said Coombes. In December 1894, he discovered that Robert had run away from home while he had been at sea, and he took him to see the doctor. Griffin recommended that Robert accompany his father on his next voyage. A change of air, in the form of foreign travel, was often prescribed for nervous complaints.
In January 1895, Robert and his father sailed to New York on the SS England, a sister ship to the France. One of the two assistant stewards on this trip was Robert’s uncle Frederick, who had in the 1870s been an apprentice to his older brother in his ill-fated butchery business in Notting Hill. When the England set sail, London was enduring its coldest winter on record – the Thames had frozen over at London Bridge for the first time in eighty years. The ship was pelted with rain as she sailed out of the Thames estuary, and she ran into a powerful gale halfway across the Atlantic, accompanied by squalls of hail and very heavy seas. She was caught up in a hurricane, then a storm of thunder and lightning before she reached New York on 7 February. Robert and his father and uncle stayed in the city for a week before the ship cast off again into intense cold and high seas. The pitching of a cattle ship in a storm sometimes sent the cows crashing forward in their narrow stalls to break their knees or necks. The England took seventeen days to reach London, two days longer than usual, and Robert returned to Cave Road school on 11 March. Coombes claimed that the trip had done the boy good.
Gill cross-examined Coombes, asking him if there was a history of insanity in the family, and whether Robert had any intellectual impairments.
‘I have not heard of insanity on my side of the family or my wife’s either,’ said Coombes. ‘The boy always got on very well at school – he had no difficulty in learning. He is a very learned boy. He read a great deal.’
Gill indicated the penny dreadfuls on the bench. ‘Has he been reading these sensational books for any length of time?’
‘I am not aware that he read books of that kind,’ said Coombes. ‘There were good books in the house, such as the Strand Magazine and the New York Century.’ The Strand, which sold half a million copies a week to a predominantly middle-class readership, had become famous in the early 1890s for publishing Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. It advertised itself as ‘cheap, healthful literature’, ‘absolutely pure’. The Century, formerly Scribners, was a prestigious American journal that ran pieces by the likes of Henry James and Mark Twain.
Justice Kennedy leafed through the penny dreadfuls. ‘Here is Jack Wright and the Fortune Hunters of the Red Sea,’ he said. ‘They are what you would call sensational, but—’
Gill interrupted: ‘You will see one called Revenged at Last, or the Crimson Coat.’
Kennedy continued his inspection. ‘Well, some are apparently from the outside cover what one would call sensational, but one can’t say exactly.’ He threw down the books and turned back to his notes. ‘There were good books found among these. Go on.’
Gill pointed out that Robert’s collection consisted of ‘books mostly relating to crime and criminals of some kind’.
‘The jury shall see them for themselves,’ said Kennedy. He seemed unwilling to make much of the penny dreadfuls.
Gill asked Coombes about Robert’s job at the ironworks.
‘I did not know that he got employment after leaving school till I arrived home.’
‘Did you ever know him to suffer from any delusion?’ asked Gill.
No,’ said Coombes, but added: ‘I have heard him say that he had heard noises in the night.’
Grantham rose to ask about the noises.
‘He complained of hearing noises about the house,’ said Coombes. ‘The last time he complained of that was four months ago.’ Coombes had been at home on some of these occasions, he said, and had not heard any noises himself.
This ended his testimony. Coombes had made it clear that he cared for his son and worried about his wellbeing: he had taken him to doctors for his headaches, to New York to try to restore his health. But it had also become apparent that he had been off-stage for many of the dramas of Robert’s life: he was away at sea when his eldest boy was born, when he refused to attend school, when he left school and when he took his first job. Coombes seems to have shown no curiosity or concern about why both his sons had twice run away from their mother.
The next witness for the defence was Amelia England, the thirty-eight-year-old wife of a dock clerk, who lived at 33 Cave Road. The Englands’ two older sons, like Robert and Nattie, had attended Grange Road school before transferring to Cave Road school when it was built in 1894. Mrs England’s eldest son was the same age as Robert, and had just left school having passed the fourth standard.
‘I am a next-door neighbour of the Coombes,’ said Amelia England. ‘I have known them for the last three years. I was very intimate with them.’
Grantham asked her to describe Emily and Robert Coombes.
‘The mother was rather excitable all the time I have known her,’ she said. ‘Robert was very excitable indeed. I have on occasions gone to Dr Griffin for medicines for him. I knew he had pains in the head; he has complained in my presence. He has had very excitable fits.’
Gill, cross-examining, asked her to elaborate.
‘I can hardly explain the excitement,’ she said. ‘If he could not get what he liked, he would fly into a passion, and then he would have these fits afterwards. I have known him to go right off into a fainting fit with them more than once. It was not always when he was in a great passion, but very often.’
Gill inquired how well she knew Robert.
‘I saw him every day nearly all the time they were living there. He was a very bright, intelligent boy when spoken to, and a well-spoken boy.’ She related how she had chatted to him in the street in the week after the murder. ‘I spoke to him every day right up to the Friday in that week.’
Gill asked whether Robert enjoyed reading.
‘He was fond of reading,’ said Mrs England; ‘passionately fond both of music and reading.’
Mrs England was dismissed, and Grantham called Dr Walker to the witness box.
George Walker had been a prison doctor for more than twenty years by the time he was appointed medical officer of Holloway gaol in January 1894. He frequently gave evidence at the Old Bailey about the men and women in his charge, and had already testified in three trials during the current sessions. His testimony did not always support an insanity plea – at the trial of a twenty-three-year-old woman who had killed her child in 1894, he said that he had seen no evidence of madness while she was on remand – but often it did. In June 1895, for instance, he had diagnosed kleptomania in the case of a woman who had stolen goods from the John Lewis department store.
The insanity plea had become increasingly common in English courts: in the 1860s, about 15 per cent of murderers were found insane, either before, during or after trial; in the 1890s the proportion rose to nearly 27 per cent. Yet the Journal of Mental Science observed in 1895 that the law on criminal responsibility was still in ‘hopeless confusion’. At a meeting of the British Medical Association that summer, Henry Maudsley argued that madness often went unrecognised by the courts. He disagreed with the legal profession’s narrow definition of madness, which held that a defendant was criminally responsible if he or she knew right from wrong at the time of his or her crime, a test formulated after Robert McNaughten tried to assassinate the prime minister in 1843. The ‘right from wrong’ test, said Maudsley, assumed ‘that reason, not feeling, is the motive force of human action’. He argued that some acts of violence sprang from a desire so strong that it bypassed thought and lit straight into action. ‘A disordered feeling,’ Maudsley wrote, ‘is capable of actuating disordered conduct without consent of reason.’
In reply to Grantham’s questions about Robert, Dr Walker noted that the violence applied to Robert’s skull when he was born would have exerted pressure on his brain.
‘There is a distinct scar on his right temple,’ Walker said, ‘and on a very careful examination I noticed also a faint scar in front of his left ear. Those scars might have been caused by instruments used at the time of birth. The brain is always compressed more or less when instruments are used, and it would occasionally affect the brain of a lad. I believe children have suffered from fits afterwards.’
‘I have noticed that the pupils of his eyes are at times unequal,’ the doctor continued. ‘The variability of the pupils showed that the mischief is not in the eye itself but is probably due to cerebral irritation.’
Walker told the court what Robert had said about the voices in his head, and about his mother throwing knives at Nattie and threatening to kill him. He reported that Robert had said that he had ‘an irresistible impulse’ to kill his mother.
Grantham asked if those had been Robert’s exact words.
‘I took down these words,’ said Walker.
Walker said that his conversation with Robert the previous Tuesday – when the boy had shown excitement about the trial, then distress about his cats and mandolin – was indicative of cerebral irritation.
‘I believe your opinion is also based on some letters written by him?’ said Grantham.
‘Yes,’ said Walker. ‘I have had a very extraordinary letter handed to me from him. The letter is inconsistent with the action of a sane person. It was written on Saturday last.’ The Clerk of Arraigns read out Robert’s letter to the Reverend Francis Shaw, in which he expressed his desire to die and gave instructions for the disposal of his imaginary fortune.
The letter carried two signatures, not only Robert’s but also that of Charlie Sharman. Apparently Robert’s father had hired Sharman to conduct his sons’ defence. The solicitor may have been instrumental in publicising Robert’s letter to the curate, since the document – and especially its threat of suicide – shored up the defence claim that the boy was insane. Equally, Dr Walker may have come across the letter in the course of his duties, since all the prisoners’ correspondence in Holloway was vetted. Either way, Sharman’s signature authenticated the document.
‘Does that letter strengthen your opinion as to the boy’s mental condition?’ Grantham asked Walker.
‘Yes,’ said the doctor. He explained that he believed that Robert had been suffering from ‘homicidal mania’. ‘There are two kinds of homicidal mania,’ said Walker. ‘Sometimes the crime is committed on the impulse of the moment; sometimes with great deliberation and cunning.’
Grantham remarked: ‘The reading of pernicious literature would have a bad effect on such a mind.’
Justice Kennedy intervened: ‘It would have a bad effect upon the mind of any boy I should think.’
‘But it would be worse for a boy suffering from mental affections?’ asked Grantham.
‘Yes,’ said Walker. ‘Certainly.’
‘Homicidal mania’ was a condition identified by the French psychiatrist Jean-Etienne Esquirol earlier in the century. A homicidal monomaniac, said Esquirol, became obsessed by the desire to kill, and after a murder achieved a sort of peace. ‘The act accomplished, it seems that the attack is over,’ he wrote, ‘and some homicidal monomaniacs seem to be relieved of a state of agitation and anguish, which was exceedingly painful to them. They are composed, and free from regret, remorse or fear. They contemplate their victim with indifference, and some even experience and manifest a kind of satisfaction. The greater part, far from flying, remain near the dead body.’ A maniac of this kind felt so lightened that he did not need to flee, his pain having been cast out and destroyed in the act of killing.
Esquirol specified that children could be prey to homicidal mania. Evidence of delusion was usually required to support the diagnosis, though some doctors argued that the murder itself could be the sole marker of insanity. All such syndromes were defined only by their symptoms; medics tended to believe that their origin was physiological – that they were diseases of the brain rather than the mind – and that they were therefore innate and incurable.
Under cross-examination by Charles Gill, Dr Walker acknowledged that in some of his conversations with Robert the boy had appeared sane. ‘I should say the conversations were held in a lucid interval. He appeared to talk to me quite rationally and showed no insanity when I first examined him – that was the day after he was received into prison. He answered my questions intelligently. He appears to be a boy of more than average intelligence. He is well educated, and able to take advantage of the opportunities given him at school.’
So where, asked Gill, was the proof of delusion?
‘I only find trace of delusion from the boy’s own statement,’ said Walker. ‘Apart from the murder, I saw no delusion.’
Gill questioned him about whether Robert had really used the words ‘irresistible impulse’ in their conversation. The idea of irresistible impulse was sometimes invoked by defence counsel as an alternative to the traditional ‘knowing right from wrong’ test of insanity. It was an improbably technical phrase for a boy to use. Gill was implying that Walker had put words into Robert’s mouth; or that, if Robert had indeed used the term, it might have been at the suggestion of his lawyer.
‘“Irresistible impulse” is what I have written,’ said Walker. ‘I would not swear those were the very words he used, but he said something to that effect, either “impulse” or “irresistible impulse”.’
Charles Gill also expressed scepticism about Robert’s ‘excitability’, inquiring of Walker whether fits of passion could really be taken as evidence of insanity.
‘A boy may be very passionate and may be vicious without being insane,’ agreed Walker. ‘Some boys do give way to extraordinary violent fits of passion, especially if they are interfered with and not allowed to have their own way; but I do not speak of those fits of passion, but attacks of mental excitement, as the father described it to me. That is very different.’ He had himself witnessed the boy in a state of mental excitement, he said, and Robert’s father had told him that he experienced these attacks every two or three months. Walker was making a distinction between a temper tantrum and an episode of confused thinking.
Gill asked whether Robert was in the throes of such an attack when he purchased the knife from Mrs Brecht’s shop.
‘He might have been under the influence of delusion when he bought the knife,’ said Walker. ‘I do not know that he was. He might have bought it while suffering from an attack of mania.’
‘Do you seriously mean,’ asked Gill, ‘that he would go to the shop, select the knife, bargain for it and buy it while under the influence of mania?’
‘Yes,’ said Walker. ‘Under the influence of homicidal mania these crimes are done with great deliberation.’
Gill asked if Robert had described the murder to him.
‘The first time he told me he had no recollection of stabbing her,’ said Walker, ‘but remembered hitting her on the head with a truncheon. On another occasion he told me that he had stabbed her.’ This was the first time that the truncheon had been cited as a murder weapon. Perhaps this, rather than the knife or the pillow, had been the means by which Robert had finally dispatched his mother after Nattie heard her groan. The police doctor had not mentioned finding a head injury during the post mortem, but Mary Jane Burrage had referred to seeing a horrible wound on her friend’s temple.
Grantham intervened to ask Walker if he could explain why Robert had claimed that he had hit her with a truncheon.
‘His different accounts of the crime showed loss of memory,’ said Walker.
‘Are you of opinion that he was not of sound mind?’ asked Grantham.
The judge interrupted before Walker could reply. ‘That is a matter on which the jury must form their own conclusion,’ he said. Walker had frequently been permitted to give his opinion on a defendant’s insanity in the Old Bailey courts, but Kennedy, implementing the most rigorous interpretation of the law, would not allow it.
Gill asked Walker a last question about Robert: was it compatible with insanity that the boy took himself off to Lord’s on the day that he murdered his mother?
‘I could not conceive anyone going to Lord’s cricket ground and acting as the lad did after committing such a crime if he were sane,’ returned Walker.
Walker’s reply went to the heart of the puzzle of the murder. Robert’s coolness before and after the killing could be read as evidence of culpability; and yet his very indifference might be the strongest sign that he was mad.
Charles Gill asked Dr Walker for his assessment of John Fox.
The doctor said that Fox had ‘a badly shaped head and a highly arched palate’. ‘He is slow in understanding what is said to him,’ he added, ‘and does not know common things you would expect an ordinary man to know. He is slow of apprehension. He has the peculiar hesitation in speech often noticed in weak minds.’
Grantham’s next witness was John Joseph Griffin, medical attendant to the Coombes family since 1893. Dr Griffin was an Irish-born bachelor, aged forty, who lived and worked in a large terraced house in the Barking Road. He was the author of the sick note for Emily Coombes that Robert had altered in July.
Griffin testified that Emily Coombes was a ‘hysterical’ woman, ‘very emotional, and subject at times to fits of crying and laughing. She used to laugh and cry with the least exciting cause. She was generally of a weak and nervous disposition.’ He agreed that ‘the nervous disposition and temperament of the mother sometimes affects the children’, but stopped short of saying that Robert had inherited her weakness.
Griffin told the court how he had treated Robert for the ‘disordered nervous system’ and ‘attacks of mental excitement due to cerebral irritation’ that his predecessor, Dr Coward, had diagnosed. Robert’s father usually brought him to a consultation, Griffin said, though the boy sometimes came with his mother.
‘When the attacks were on him,’ said Griffin, ‘he had an irresistible impulse to run away without reason. I advised the father to take him to sea for a trip in consequence of those attacks.’ By echoing Walker’s use of the phrase ‘irresistible impulse’, Griffin supported the defence case that Robert had moments in which he could not control his actions. Yet the supposed symptom – the desire to run away ‘without reason’ – looked less like madness than misery. Griffin may even have perceived that Robert’s problems were related to his mother: after all, he prescribed a journey that would enable him to escape her influence.
Justice Kennedy said that it seemed obvious that Robert was not suffering from mania.
‘I never saw him in any condition of mania,’ acknowledged Griffin. ‘What I know is from what the father stated to me. He said his boy used to get up in the morning and complain of severe headache, and was restless, fidgety and excitable, and twitching in his limbs. His father used to put him to bed. I gave him bromide of potassium to calm him.’ Bromide of potassium was a sedative and depressant used to treat disorders of the brain. This was the medication that Amelia England had fetched for Robert when he became agitated. Though recommended in the Dictionary of Psychological Medicine as a safe drug, prolonged use could cause a condition known as ‘bromism’: the symptoms included stupor, paranoid delusions, pupillary dilation, insomnia, restlessness and psychosis.
Griffin said that he had seen Robert in Newgate the previous day, and that his condition seemed to have developed into mania. ‘He was in a condition of great mental excitement yesterday,’ said the doctor, ‘and not responsible for what he was doing.’
The last witness for the defence was John Cossington, a West Ham attendance officer of thirty-six who lived in the Barking Road. Attendance officers were employed by the local authorities to ensure that children went to school. In the spring, the ‘Punishment Men’, as they were known, walked the streets of their district, compiling a register of all school-age children in houses rated at £28 or less. If a child did not turn up to at least seven of the ten school sessions a week, the officer would call at his or her house and issue a warning to the parents. If this was ignored, the parents were summoned to a magistrates’ court and, unless able to justify the child’s absence, could be fined five shillings.
‘I had reason to make inquiries in October 1893 as to the boy’s non-attendance at school,’ Cossington told the court. ‘I went to the mother.’ Emily Coombes told him that Robert was ‘sick through excitement’. ‘When I did see the boy,’ said Cossington, ‘he was in a very sullen mood, and would not answer me.’
Emily succeeded in convincing Cossington of Robert’s unhappiness and his need to be moved, even to an already oversubscribed neighbouring institution. At her urging, Cossington said, he had paid a visit to Dr Griffin, who lived across the road from him. ‘In consequence of what I saw, read and heard from the doctor, and by request of the mother, that I would get him another school, I obtained a special order from the school committee for his removal from one school to another.’
Cossington did not allude to the nature of Robert’s difficulties at Grange Road school. Nor did the defence press him on this, being keen to emphasise Robert’s mental instability rather than the fact that he might have been mistreated by a teacher or bullied by other boys.
When cross-examined by Gill as to why Robert had left Grange Road, Cossington said only: ‘The boy did not want to go back to the same school. He had stayed away from that school.’
Grantham did not call any further witnesses. As the defence was pleading insanity, any evidence of Robert’s good character – such as the Reverend Shaw might have offered – would have done the boy no favours.
In his address to the jury Grantham said that this was one of the saddest cases ever to come before a court. He asked them to accept that Robert Coombes was insane, reminding them of the absence of motive in the case and the fact that the boy had not tried to escape. He began to expound the law on insanity but the judge stopped him, saying that the jury must take the law from him alone. Robert’s counsel sat down.
Frederick Sherwood next urged the jury to acquit Fox. He insisted that the evidence showed that Fox knew nothing of the murder. The smell in the house, he said, ‘only became acute on the opening of the door and disturbance of the corpse, and there is no reason for supposing that it was sufficiently present in the house as to induce Fox, a man of dull intellect, much given to smoking and used from his dock calling to unpleasant smells, to make inquiry as to its origin or investigate its cause’. Even if the jury believed that Fox knew of the murder, said Sherwood, ‘he has not done a single act with the view of defeating the ends of justice or concealing the crime’.
Sherwood further submitted that if Robert Coombes were found insane, Fox must be acquitted: he contended that it was impossible in law to find Fox guilty of being accessory to an insane act. This was the same argument that Kennedy had dismissed when it was proposed by Gill at the outset of the trial. But now the judge said that he agreed. Bizarrely, he even complimented Sherwood upon his discovery of the point. The argument was in fact wrong, as several legal journals subsequently explained. Since 1882 the law had stipulated that the insane could be found guilty of committing crimes, even if they were deemed not to have been culpable, and others could therefore be found guilty of abetting such crimes.
Gill summed up for the Crown, submitting that Robert’s insanity had not been proven. On the contrary, he said, the boy’s actions showed him to be a lad of exceptional capacity. He conceded that Dr Walker’s evidence was important, but, as the doctor had himself said, his diagnosis of insanity was based largely on the absence of motive for the murder.
The Star remarked that Gill adopted a ‘studiously mild’ tone in his final speech. He was respectful of the defence’s medical evidence, and seemed to leave open the possibility that Robert was mad. ‘Had Robert Coombes been a full-grown man,’ said Lloyd’s Weekly, ‘the counsel for the prosecution would have resisted the theory of insanity, and possibly with success; but with so young a prisoner there seemed to be a desire all round to take the most lenient view.’
This leniency did not extend to Justice Kennedy. Though his role was supposed to be neutral, when he made his summing-up at 4.40 p.m. he set out the case against Robert far more strongly than Gill had done. The jury should not infer insanity, said Kennedy, because someone who had led an apparently blameless life suddenly committed a callous act. Nor should they jump to the conclusion that Robert was insane just because it was difficult to believe that a sane lad of thirteen could perpetrate such an atrocious crime. He had planned the death of his mother with skill and had displayed ‘the most masterly sagacity’ afterwards. The letter to Francis Shaw might be a sham, suggested the judge, written to simulate madness. Though Dr Walker had said that homicidal mania was often accompanied by cunning, Kennedy observed, ‘even Dr Walker can not have known before such a case as this where the cunning and the madness were mixed up with so much pleasure and enjoyment of life’. He described Nattie, who was sitting in the courtroom surrounded by female relatives and neighbours, as ‘a little slip of a boy wholly under the thumb of his elder brother’.
The one relevant question, Kennedy told the jury, was whether Robert knew that what he was doing was wrong. Repeating Sherwood’s incorrect assertion, he added that if they did find Robert insane, they must also acquit Fox.
The sun set in the course of Kennedy’s ninety-minute summing-up, and the gas was lit in the glass globes hanging from the courtroom ceiling.
At ten minutes past six o’clock, the jurors retired to consider their verdict. They returned at twelve minutes past seven. Their foreman, a south London butcher of thirty-seven who had three infant sons, confirmed to the Clerk of Arraigns that they had reached a verdict: they found Robert Coombes guilty, said Harry Edis, but they made a strong recommendation to mercy on the ground of his youth, and because they did not believe that he realised the gravity of his crime.
Robert stood in the dock, his skin flushed, his eyes shining. He seemed at last alert to the seriousness of the proceedings. In the course of the day, he had, for the first time, heard people stand up in court to defend him. Several witnesses had spoken kindly, even warmly, of him – his schoolteachers, his father, Amelia England – and the doctors had done their best to absolve him of responsibility. Now the jury, too, was showing him compassion.
But Justice Kennedy refused to accept the recommendation of mercy. He insisted that the jurors again retire, and return with one of two conclusions: they must declare Robert guilty or guilty but insane.
They withdrew as directed but were back within two minutes. This time, in reply to the clerk’s question, Harry Edis said that they found Robert Coombes guilty, but that he was insane at the time he committed the act.
Robert was composed as he heard the verdict, though tears ran down his cheeks.
The Clerk of Arraigns asked the jury: ‘Do you find John Fox guilty or not?’
‘Not guilty on the evidence,’ said the foreman. Edis was keen to make clear that the jurors had acquitted Fox not on the technical issue of whether he could be an accessory to an insane act, but because they believed him to be innocent.
Fox was discharged. He left the dock and glided out through the courtroom, said the Star, like a somnambulist.
Robert turned quickly to a warder, smiling excitedly, and whispered something to him.
Nattie was ‘looking on with an air of cold unconcern that was extraordinary’, according to the Star; like Fox, he was probably more stupefied than indifferent.
The judge passed sentence on Robert. ‘The only judgment I can give,’ said Kennedy, with evident displeasure, ‘is that the prisoner Robert Allen Coombes be detained in strict custody in the gaol in Holloway until the pleasure of Her Majesty be known.’
When Robert heard the sentence, his face convulsed, said the Star, as if he were about to break down in tears or to shout out in anger. He had been expecting the gallows, but a far weirder fate awaited him. Murderers detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure were usually given an indefinite detention in Broadmoor, a fortified criminal lunatic asylum that housed the most notorious killers in Britain.
Two Holloway warders quickly took hold of Robert and turned him to the door that led to the cells below the court. As they ushered him away he recovered his air of detached mockery. He laughed and remarked to one of his guards: ‘It is all over now.’