Robert was allowed back to Block 2 on 8 January 1900, two days after his eighteenth birthday. Upon his return he immersed himself in the life of the asylum.
About half of the Broadmoor inmates were deemed stable enough to work on the estate: they were assigned jobs in the workshops, on the farm, in the laundry, in the kitchens and bakehouse, and as carpenters, bricklayers and cleaners. ‘Suitable occupation,’ advised the Red Book for attendants, ‘has a most salutary effect on both the body and the mind. It diverts the Patient from his morbid fancies, and leads his thoughts into a healthy channel.’
Robert worked in the tailors’ shop, part of a three-pronged building behind the central hall. Amid the smells of the horsehair and leather in the adjoining mattress-makers’ and bootmakers’ shops, he and the other tailors made and repaired the dark blue uniforms of the staff, and the underclothes, bedlinen and grey suits of the patients. They cut the winter jackets and trousers from heavy cloth such as Melton, corduroy and fustian, the summer wear from flannel and drill.
Each working patient was given an extra meal a day (an eleven o’clock lunch of bread, cheese and oatmeal) and paid about five shillings a month, an eighth of the going rate for labour. Robert could use his wages, which were entered as credit in a book kept by the Broadmoor steward, to order extra provisions such as tea and tobacco, or seeds to plant in his allotment.
Robert’s supervisor was Charles Leach Pike, a master tailor who had joined the Broadmoor staff in 1895, aged twenty-three and newly married. One of eight occupational attendants in the asylum, Pike was paid a salary of £57 to train and oversee the men in his workshop. The attendants were enjoined in the Red Book not to ‘hold themselves aloof from their charges or be content with supervising them’, but rather to ‘join heartily in their occupations and amusements, and work both with and for the Patients’. Pike heeded this advice. He was vice-captain of the Broadmoor Cycling Club, a keen pianist and a frequent performer in the asylum’s theatrical entertainments. The costumes for the shows were put together in his workshop. As accompanist to the Broadmoor string band, Pike inspired several of the inmates in his charge to take up music. Robert learnt to play new instruments – the violin, the piano and the cornet – and he became an enthusiastic member of the asylum’s brass band.
Brass bands were amateur, working-class ensembles, of which there were tens of thousands in Britain at the turn of the century, whereas string bands had more refined, upper-class antecedents. The editor of the British Bandsman complained about the class distinction, finding ‘no reason why Tom who plays the cornet, should be in a lower social or musical grade than Dick, who plays a violin’. It was a mark of the oddity of Robert’s position, as a working-class lad among the educated lunatics of Block 2, that he played both brass and string instruments, and probably was a member of both bands. The bands performed in concerts in the hall; at staff balls at Easter and Christmas; at ceremonies in the asylum grounds. In the summer of 1900, the brass players gave a concert on the Broadmoor cricket pitch to celebrate the relief of the siege of Mafeking, the South African town that Colonel Robert Baden-Powell had held against the Boer forces for seven months.
Charles Coleman, the Principal Attendant of Block 2 and the member of staff most directly responsible for Robert’s welfare, was another passionate performer and musician. Born in Dorset in 1850, Coleman had been a drummer with the Dorset Militia before joining the staff of Broadmoor in 1873. He lived in Crowthorne with his wife and children, among them a daughter who was an attendant in the Broadmoor women’s wing. Coleman played in the string band and performed with gusto in entertainments in the hall. He was a well-loved figure in the asylum, especially prized for his comic turns in seasonal revues: his impersonation in November 1900 of a statue of Alexander the Great had the audience helpless with laughter.
From his office on the ground floor of Block 2, Coleman wrote detailed, sometimes dryly humorous reports to the asylum’s Chief Attendant about the upsets and altercations on the block, taking care to follow the guidance in The Attendant’s Companion: ‘never say that a patient thinks this, or imagines that, or feels the other. You cannot be sure of what a patient thinks or imagines or feels. All that you can be sure of is what he says and does, and your reports should be strictly limited to his sayings and doings.’
Several of the reports relating to Block 2 inmates featured the irascible and increasingly paranoid barrister Sherlock Hare, who had been admitted to Broadmoor in 1892, aged forty-one, after attacking a newspaper editor in Burma. Over the years, Hare complained to the Block 2 attendants that the cook had prepared him poached eggs instead of omelette; that other inmates had made fun of his name; that his chops had been poorly cooked (he wanted to take this up with the home secretary); that attendants and patients had blown tobacco smoke in his face; that the doctors had inoculated him with syphilis; and that he had been accommodated in a single room – he said that he supposed only murderers were allowed two, a barbed reference to William Chester Minor’s double suite. When Hare insisted that someone had been sitting on his bed while he was in the airing court, Coleman investigated, and established that the bedclothes were rumpled because Hare himself had sat on the bed to put on his boots before going outside.
Another of Coleman’s reports described a spat between Hare and a patient called Ben Hewlett, a widowed policeman who in 1887 had attacked his nine-year-old son with a chopper. In a Block 2 corridor, wrote Coleman, he saw Hare push Hewlett and Hewlett push Hare back. When Coleman intervened, Hewlett said that Hare had started the scuffle. Hare denied it and called Hewlett a liar. ‘And you,’ replied Hewlett, ‘are a lunatic.’ Coleman gently advised Hewlett to return to work, and Hare to repair to his room.
The flags at Broadmoor were flown at half-mast upon the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901, and the asylum observed a day of mourning. The next year the patients assembled in the hall to watch a series of short films – probably the first moving pictures they had seen – of the coronation of Victoria’s son as Edward VII. They were now detained not at Her Majesty’s but at His Majesty’s Pleasure.
A few local shocks were felt at the asylum in the opening years of the new century: a fireball hit the gatehouse during a thunderstorm in 1900, smashing off a chimney pot; in the same year an attendant’s three-year-old son fell into a water butt on the estate and drowned; in 1902 an attendant was invalided out of Broadmoor after being stabbed fifteen times in the face by a patient in the back blocks. On 3 December 1902 Coleman hurried to the aid of William Chester Minor, who was crying out in pain. ‘He had cut his penis off,’ wrote Coleman in his report to the Chief Attendant. ‘He said he had tied it with string, which had stopped the bleeding. I saw what he had done.’ The sixty-eight-year-old lexicographer had long been tormented by sexual fantasies and delusions, and he had lopped off his penis, he said, ‘in the interests of morality’. He was taken to the infirmary. Three months later he had recovered and was back in his Block 2 quarters.
Robert remained rational enough to stay in Block 2. The attendants kept an eye on him, as he was still considered fragile, but he seemed now to be able to tolerate the pressure of dark thoughts, to sit out a low mood rather than snap under its strain. ‘RAC rather depressed this evening,’ wrote an attendant in a note of 4 October 1901; ‘he says he is alright.’
Robert took part in many of the asylum recreations. He excelled at billiards, which was played on a frayed old table in one of the two day rooms at the front of Block 2. Many inmates liked to watch the matches, and some acted as bookmakers, setting odds on the result of a tournament and taking bets in batches of tobacco, cigarettes and cigars. Each male patient was allotted an ounce of tobacco a week, drawn from the government stock of contraband seized by Customs & Excise officers.
Dr Brayn used to tell how he once consented to play billiards with a patient, who proceeded to win the game.
‘There you are,’ said the superintendent. ‘I knew you would beat me.’
‘Ah, sir,’ remarked another criminal lunatic, consolingly, ‘to be expert in billiards is the sign of a misspent life.’
Robert was also one of a small group of patients who played chess, continuing a tradition established by inmates such as Edward Oxford, the first of the eight men to try to assassinate Queen Victoria, and Richard Dadd, a patricide who while at Broadmoor had decorated the asylum hall with a series of fantastical murals. Robert proved a talented chess player, as did his fellow Block 2 inmate Reginald Saunderson.
Saunderson had been admitted to Broadmoor in the same year as Robert, at the age of twenty-one. He was a pale, tall young Irishman of aristocratic descent, with deep-set grey eyes. In November 1894 Saunderson had absconded from an institution for ‘mentally deficient boys’ near London and cut the throat of a woman in Kensington. He fled to Ireland, where he surrendered himself to the police. It emerged that, like Robert, he had taken an obsessive interest in the capture and trial of James Canham Read; the day on which Saunderson turned himself in, 4 December 1894, was the day of Read’s execution.
Unlike Robert’s family, Saunderson’s parents were rich enough to hire doctors to help to save him from the gallows. The famous alienist Lyttelton Forbes-Winslow interviewed Saunderson and reported that the young man told him: ‘Everything around me appears to me as if in a dream, and I have no recollection of having committed the murder of which you speak; had I done so, I cannot understand the wickedness of the act, or what I should suffer in consequence. I hear, and have heard for some time, and do at the present moment hear people speaking to me, who apparently are hidden behind the walls; I have been persecuted by these voices for a long period of time, urging me to do the various acts, and I believe in their reality.’ On the basis of this suspiciously comprehensive and precise fulfilment of the definition of insanity, Saunderson was found unfit to plead and sent straight to Broadmoor.
Both Saunderson and Robert took up correspondence chess, a form of the game that had become popular in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Each match was conducted by post, one move at a time, and could last for several months. Saunderson was at one point playing seventy-one correspondence games simultaneously. He secured many of his opponents through the offices of Frideswide Rowland, a former Irish women’s chess champion who ran competitions in the Weekly Irish Times and the chess journal The Four-Leaved Shamrock. By way of thanks, Saunderson used to post boxes of asylum-grown strawberries to Mrs Rowland every summer. He was a ‘bright, pleasant’ correspondent, she recalled, and a strong player.
In 1902, to mark the coronation of Edward VII, Mrs Rowland advertised in the pages of The Four-Leaved Shamrock for volunteers to take part in an Ireland v England match. Saunderson and Robert both signed up. Saunderson was allotted to the Irish team, since he had been born in Dublin, and Robert to the English. The standard was high: the forty or so competitors included the future English correspondence chess champion and the future Irish over-the-board champion. In all, 111 games were played, with a point being awarded for a win and a half for a draw. Saunderson lost his match but Robert beat his Irish opponent, and when the competition concluded in 1904 England won by 68½ points to Ireland’s 42½.
Saunderson ceased his correspondence with Mrs Rowland soon after this match. She later heard that the Broadmoor authorities had limited the patients’ participation in chess, as the game was proving ‘too exciting’ to some on the cold damp days that they were confined in the block.
In the summer months, both Robert and Saunderson played cricket for the Block 2 team, as did Alfred Gamble, the costermonger’s boy who had attacked young children, Arthur Gilbert Cooper, the curate who had cut his vicar’s throat, and Roderick Maclean, the would-be royal assassin and aspiring poet. Dr Brayn often captained the Block 2 side, while John Baker, his deputy, led a team drawn from the patients in Blocks 3, 4 and 5 (Blocks 1 and 6, the back blocks, did not field any players). On other occasions, the Block 2 attendants and patients played together, or a team of gardener patients played a combined team of tailors, upholsterers and bootmakers. As well as adhering to the usual rules of the game, the patients had to observe the asylum’s strictures on cricket: they were to walk to the field in a ‘compact manner’, flanked by attendants, and during a match had to keep a distance of twenty yards from those attendants assigned to form outposts; if they wished to relieve themselves, they had to do so at a designated spot supervised by a member of staff.
The fixtures were organised by the Broadmoor chaplain, the Reverend Hugh Wood, a first-class cricketer who in the late 1870s had played for Cambridge University and then for the Yorkshire county team. Wood arranged up to seventy matches at the asylum each season in the early 1900s, and oversaw the laying of a new pitch within the walls in 1903. The Broadmoor First XI increasingly competed against teams fielded by local institutions such as Sandhurst Royal Military College and the Windsor police. Robert played in a side that beat the Reading Gas Company in 1907. In the same year he was listed in the local paper, the Reading Mercury, as one of the batsmen who helped the Broadmoor side to victory over Crowthorne.
By the asylum’s standards, Robert was a decent batsman – he was usually placed halfway down the batting order – and an able bowler. He shared the bowling duties with Dr Brayn, George Melton (a railway-van boy who hit his mother on the head with a hammer in 1896), Henry Spurrier (a lance-corporal who knifed a fellow soldier in 1899), Kenneth Murchison (a renowned Boer War gunner who had shot a reporter through the head in Mafeking in 1899) and Thomas Shultz (an office boy who attacked his boss with an axe in 1904).
Of the players in the Block 2 cricket team, the one whose crime most closely recalled Robert’s was a lad called Frank Rodgers, admitted to Broadmoor in 1904 at the age of fifteen. Robert was by then twenty-two; Frank took his place as the baby of the asylum.
Frank had a more moneyed and educated background than Robert. At the beginning of 1904 he had been living in a large house called The Gables in the pretty village of Meldreth, near Cambridge. The Rodgers family had recently moved from London in the hope that the peace and seclusion of the countryside would help to cure Frank’s mother, Georgina, of her weakness for alcohol. Frank’s father, a City solicitor, commuted daily to London, leaving Frank and his mother at home with Frank’s sisters Winifred and Queenie and his older brother William. Georgina continued to drink heavily.
One evening in April, Frank and Winifred returned from a visit to a friend’s house to find their mother drunk. While the children ate their supper, Georgina lay dozing in an armchair in the dining room. Afterwards Frank went upstairs and Winifred went to the drawing room to play the piano. A few minutes later Frank entered the drawing room with a revolver in his hand. ‘I have shot Mother,’ he told Winifred. ‘It is for the best.’
Winifred rushed out to find her mother lying in the hallway with a bullet in her neck. She quickly summoned a doctor, while Frank took his youngest sister, the six-year-old Queenie, across the road to a public house. He asked the landlady if Queenie could stay there for the night, as he had shot his mother. He then sat down to read a newspaper.
Winifred and William followed Frank to the pub. ‘Frank,’ said William, ‘why did you do it?’ ‘I did it for Queenie’s sake,’ Frank replied. He repeated this to Winifred: ‘It is for Queenie’s sake. She cannot live the life we have had for the past two years.’
When the doctor arrived at The Gables he found Georgina Rodgers dead. Frank confessed readily to him – ‘I have done it’ – and handed him the revolver, saying that he had taken it from his brother’s drawer. A policeman came to arrest the boy.
At Frank’s trial for murder, Winifred confirmed that their domestic life had been very unhappy for the past couple of years because their mother had so often been drunk. Frank was their mother’s favourite child, she said, known by the others as ‘Mother’s boy’. William then testified: Frank had been restless for many weeks, he said, often rising from his bed in the middle of the night to lock the bedroom door. The family doctor confirmed that Georgina Rodgers was nearly always inebriated when he saw her. He said that Frank had told him that for the past two or three months he had frequently sensed his mother standing right behind him, looking over his shoulder, but when he turned she seemed to disappear. Frank had also told him that as he advanced on his mother with the revolver he heard a voice say, ‘Do it quickly’. Finally, two alienists appointed by the Crown gave evidence. The first said that Frank was unable to tell right from wrong because his determination to put an end to his family’s trouble had narrowed his mind. The second said that Frank had become convinced that ‘there was no other way out of it’. The press described Frank’s manner in court as gentlemanly, intelligent, polite.
The boy’s plight aroused the compassion of many. ‘The sympathy of the whole neighbourhood appears to be with young Frank Rodgers,’ noted the Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire Reporter, observing that the boy had ‘brooded over the unhappy conditions of things at The Gables and in this state of mind committed the terrible deed, perhaps feeling prepared to suffer himself for the sake of his little sister Queenie and the rest of the family’. The jury, without leaving the box, arrived at a verdict of guilty but insane.
The home secretary was uneasy about sending Frank Rodgers to Broadmoor. He asked Dr Brayn how the boy would be accommodated. ‘I should propose to place him at first in one of the infirmary wards,’ replied the superintendent, ‘where he would be under the constant supervision of an attendant day and night.’ This was the same arrangement that had been made when Robert was admitted and, again, when he became unstable at the age of sixteen. Brayn explained that if Frank was sufficiently rational he would be sent on to Block 2, to reside with ‘patients of the better class’.
Frank was admitted to Broadmoor in June and transferred to Block 2 in July. He engaged in many of the same pursuits as Robert. He followed the cricket in the newspapers and was a keen participant in the asylum games. He and Robert played their first game together in July; Robert was the leading scorer of the match, making sixty-three runs before he was caught out by Alfred Gamble. Frank also took up the violin, practising on four evenings a week in the winter months, and became a member of the string band. He learnt to play chess. He taught himself French and shorthand and was given lessons in mathematics by the chaplain. He grew apples and strawberries on his allotment.
Frank’s father sent him hampers containing oysters, French bread, cuts of rabbit and pork, bottles of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce and copies of the Boy’s Own Paper. This magazine was a middle-class version of the story papers found in Robert’s house, having been founded as an antidote to the dreadfuls – it was full of tales of adventure and derring-do, but firmly pinned to the virtues of valour, self-sacrifice, the defence of Empire. Frank was a voracious reader. While on remand in prison, he had read both Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the submarine fantasy of 1870 that inspired the Jack Wright stories, and Thomas Anstey Guthrie’s Vice Versa: a Lesson to Fathers, a novel of 1882 about a schoolboy and his father, a City merchant, who exchange bodies and inhabit each others’ lives. The boy’s father is taught how trapped a lively-minded boy can feel when he has ‘no money and few rights’, ‘virtually no way to assert himself in the world around him’.
Dr Brayn wrote to the Home Office with his observations about Frank Rodgers’s crime. ‘Defect of will power and the influence of puberty were no doubt largely responsible,’ said the superintendent; ‘he is still in the plastic stage of adolescence and very susceptible to extraneous influences.’ In another memo he summed up the cause of the murder as ‘Domestic worry. Adolescence.’
Adolescence had been identified only recently as a distinct developmental phase, notably with the publication in 1904 of the American psychologist Granville Stanley Hall’s Adolescence: its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. Hall described the adolescent years as the occasion of ‘a marvellous new birth’ but also a time of ‘storm and stress’, characterised by conflicts with parents, moodiness and risk-taking. This period, he suggested, was ‘pre-eminently the criminal age’.
‘At no time of life,’ Hall said, ‘is the love of excitement so strong as during the season of the accelerated development of adolescence, which craves strong feelings and new sensations, when monotony, routine, and detail are intolerable.’ A love of cheap fiction was one of the symptoms, Hall wrote: at about the age of twelve many boys were seized by a ‘reading craze’, and in their eagerness to ‘have the feelings stirred’ they sought out ‘flash literature’. They became subtly imprinted by such fiction, he suggested, acquiring a half-conscious, shadowy fantasy world, impossible to articulate except, sometimes, in action: ‘There is now evolved a penumbral region in the soul more or less beyond the reach of all school methods, a world of glimpses and hints. . . Perhaps nothing read now fails to leave its mark. It can not be orally reproduced at call, but on emergency it is on hand for use.’
There were many correspondences between the histories of Frank Rodgers and Robert Coombes. Both were bright boys and passionate readers. In the months that preceded their matricides both suffered from headaches, nightmares, irritability. They had been their mother’s favourites before becoming their destroyers. After the killing each calmly confessed (though Robert took longer to do so), and seemed relieved rather than tormented by his act; in explaining his crime, each boy cited a need to protect a younger sibling. One of the alienists who examined Frank Rodgers for the Crown reported that the lad’s ‘immature judgement. . . had for some time led him to believe there was moral justification’ for the matricide: ‘He thought it was the right thing to do.’ Dr Brayn agreed that Frank had become ‘convinced that his mother’s death was imperative’. Robert too had imagined that there was justice and necessity in the killing of his mother.
Both boys seemed to have unacknowledged motives for murder. They chose to present themselves as the defenders of weaker children but were also driven by fear. Frank had imagined his mother creeping up on him; he had locked his door against her at night. His claim that he did it for Queenie served to mask his anxieties. By invoking Nattie’s thrashing as the motive for the murder, Robert similarly played down or displaced his own dread of an unsteady and overwhelming mother.
Frank and Robert drew their murder plots from the fiction-fed shadowland that G. S. Hall had described. For much of their childhood, storybooks had offered these boys an escape from anxiety, and when they found themselves in crisis they framed their solutions in the language of those books. Frank’s was a Boy’s Own narrative of chivalric heroism, Robert’s a more muddled and lurid penny adventure of rescue and revenge, self-sacrifice and self-interest. The purity of Frank’s narrative aroused compassion in his audience; Robert’s tawdrier story invoked disgust as well as pity. Unlike Frank, Robert lied and dissembled after the murder, and he stole his mother’s money. The heroes whom he emulated included not just the noble knight but also the independent lad setting out to sea in search of a new life, and the clever criminal outwitting the establishment. Robert aspired to be a hero, to protect and rescue Nattie. He aspired to be a villain, cool and notorious, free of all feeling.
In 1905 Frank’s father applied to the Home Office for Frank to be conditionally discharged, and Dr Brayn advised that since the boy seemed sane there was no need for him to remain in the asylum. The home secretary refused the application, on the grounds that to discharge him so soon ‘would encourage popular belief that sane murderers are sent to Broadmoor and released after a short time’ but the next year agreed that Frank could be entrusted to his father’s care. The seventeen-year-old left Broadmoor on Christmas Eve 1906. He was one of 175 patients to be discharged between 1896 and 1910 (of these, forty-nine relapsed and were re-admitted to the asylum). Frank took a job as a clerk in his father’s office in the City; at home in the evenings he practised the violin with his sister Winnie.
Frank Rodgers was married in 1910, four years after leaving Broadmoor, and by 1911 he and his wife had a baby daughter.
In 1910 another young criminal was admitted to Block 2. Patrick Knowles was born in 1894 in Teesside, north-east England, to a shipyard ironworker and his common-law wife. As a child, he sold matches for a living. In 1903, when he was nine, Patrick killed a one-year-old boy by burying him on a piece of wasteland and then attempted to abduct and kill two other infants. He was apprehended and charged with murder. The Home Office asked Drs Brayn and Nicolson to examine Patrick. They pronounced him insane – or rather, ‘of unsound and unformed mind in consequence of childhood and immaturity of development’, a phrasing that suggested that most children were legally mad. On the basis of this assessment, the Home Office announced that rather than face trial the child would be confined in Broadmoor at His Majesty’s Pleasure. Unknown to the press and public, Patrick was instead conditionally discharged and sent incognito to an industrial school for poor and delinquent children. Only in 1910, when he was sixteen, was he transferred to Broadmoor, and even then the Home Office had doubts about whether it was a suitable place for someone so young. ‘I fear this is the only course open,’ read a note on Patrick’s file. ‘It is not a satisfactory thing to send a boy of 16 to Broadmoor, but it has not worked badly in the case of one or two other boys of that age.’
Dr Brayn was still running the asylum when Patrick was admitted, but he retired a few months later. In his fifteen years in charge, he had reduced the use of solitary confinement to even fewer hours than when he had taken over, and increased the life expectancy of the inmates. He was succeeded by his deputy, John Baker, an unmarried Aberdonian born in 1861, who had written papers on epilepsy, criminal anthropometry and infanticide. In the most recent of these, published in 1902, Baker observed that many of the female patients in Broadmoor had killed their babies in a fit of ‘transient frenzy’, a single, fleeting episode of psychosis.
Patrick Knowles, like the other young patients, was placed in Block 2. As he had already learnt the rudiments of tailoring at the industrial school, he was given a job in the tailor’s shop with Robert. The tailor, Charles Pike, described Patrick as a painstaking and intelligent worker, quiet, respectful, obliging and of a happy disposition. Dr Baker echoed Pike’s appraisal: far from displaying ‘inherent vicious or criminal tendencies’, said Baker, Patrick’s conduct and demeanour were exemplary and he was a favourite with both staff and inmates.
In December 1911, after thirteen months in the asylum, Patrick was discharged to the care of the industrial school at which he had already spent seven years, and where he was now to remain until he was able to support himself. The head of the school wrote to the Home Office to ask for funds to help the lad to emigrate. He explained that he feared that Patrick would otherwise be tempted to go back home to Teesside. The headmaster saw the boy’s home as the source of his troubles; Dr Brayn, too, had believed that Patrick’s crime was rooted in his ‘squalid’ family life. The press usually interpreted juvenile atrocities as evidence of the innate, hereditary nature of criminality and madness. The staff at Broadmoor, on the contrary, saw young murderers as the most malleable of their charges; they suspected that the causes of their violence often lay in their unhappy circumstances, and that they might flourish under different influences. The doctors who dealt with avowedly insane children often detected emotional as well as physiological causes for their outbreaks of unreason. To get better, such patients needed to recognise the pain that they had endured as well as the pain that they had inflicted.
Charles Coleman, the Principal Attendant of Block 2, was promoted to Chief Attendant of the asylum in 1906, but at the beginning of 1912 was obliged to retire. Coleman had served at Broadmoor for almost forty years. The band played at his leaving ceremony, and Samuel Smith, who succeeded him as acting Chief Attendant, made a eulogistic speech of farewell.
For many years Dr Brayn had taken the view that Robert, though ‘rational and tranquil’, was not fully stable: despite his apparent sanity, the superintendent worried that he might become dangerous again, whether to himself or others, if he were set at liberty. As Brayn told a visiting journalist, many patients whose behaviour was perfectly normal within the asylum walls could revert once they were in the wider world. To illustrate the point, Brayn introduced his visitor to a quiet, well-spoken inmate who was tending a flowerbed, and explained that the man had once been discharged from the asylum as cured and within three days had smashed his wife’s head to a pulp with a hammer. But Brayn’s successor, Dr Baker, was more optimistic about Robert’s chances. When Robert petitioned the Home Office for his discharge in February 1912, Baker wrote to the home secretary in support of his application. ‘I have the honour to submit, herewith, a petition from Robert Coombes. . . He is a good tailor, a member of the Asylum band and cricket team. . . In my opinion his prayer might receive favourable consideration without undue risk.’
The Broadmoor authorities could not release a patient unless to the care of a person or agency prepared to oversee his or her return to normal life and to report back to the asylum if anything went awry. Since no member of Robert’s family was able to look after him, Dr Baker recommended him to a Salvation Army colony at Hadleigh, Essex, which occasionally took in the asylum’s discharged men. Robert was offered a place at the Hadleigh colony in March, and the Home Office agreed that he could be conditionally discharged.
When Robert had been admitted to Broadmoor in September 1895, some newspapers had predicted that his spell in the asylum would be short and unhappy. ‘He is not likely to trouble the Broadmoor authorities very long,’ said The Sunday Referee; ‘within a few years he will probably die raving mad.’ As it turned out, Robert spent seventeen years in the asylum, and was the longest-serving of the eight men set free in 1912.
On Friday 15 March, at the age of thirty, Robert packed his belongings and said goodbye to the staff and his friends. In the office of Samuel Smith, the acting Chief Attendant, he changed into a going-away suit that had been cut and stitched for him in the tailor’s shop and he handed back his uniform. Robert left the asylum in the custody of Charles Pike, the tailor attendant, who had been assigned to accompany him on his journey out of Broadmoor and back to Essex.