Another Boy
I began researching Robert Coombes’s life in the summer of 2012, after coming across an account of his arrest in an old newspaper. I was intrigued by the story, so I looked up the transcript of the trial at the Old Bailey, then more articles about the case. Some of the reports dubbed the matricide ‘The Plaistow Horror’; others called it ‘The Plaistow Tragedy’. The story of Emily Coombes’s murder and its aftermath did seem at once tragedy and horror show, a tale to make you recoil in disgust and to pull you close in pity. I was fascinated by Robert: in his court appearances he seemed hollow, light, scoured clean of feeling; and yet the killing suggested a catastrophic disturbance, an unbearable intensity of emotion. There was something disjointed and fractured about his story. At the time of the murder, many believed that Robert simply had no feelings for others – that he was, in modern terminology, a psychopath. Others held that he was weird because he was insane – that he suffered from a psychotic illness. I wondered whether his strangeness might have sprung more from events in his life. I wanted to know if his history had a bearing on his crime, and I decided to find out what I could about his boyhood.
I read the file on the case at the National Archives in Kew, which contained transcripts of the witness statements and of the letters written by Robert and his mother. I studied apprenticeship and cemetery records at the London Metropolitan Archives in Islington, and crew agreements at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. I researched the Coombes and Fox families on genealogy websites and in newspaper archives. I traced and read as many as I could of the penny dreadfuls that had been found in 35 Cave Road, along with books, journals and newspapers that discussed the board school system, the London docks, pawnbroking, cheap literature for boys, degeneration, the Thames iron yard, cattle ships, the politics of East London, household budgets, boy labour, the law on insanity and on child protection. At the local archives in Stratford, I looked at the electoral rolls, the registers of the district’s schools, and maps and photographs of late-nineteenth-century West Ham. I visited Southend-on-Sea and the places in Plaistow in which the Coombes family and their friends had lived. The stretch of houses that included 35 Cave Road had been demolished, but most of the terrace was still standing, as were the playground walls of the school opposite Robert and Nattie’s house. I walked down the Barking Road to the now defunct docks and the site of the iron works and tried to imagine being there in 1895, when the district thundered with machines, reeked of coal tar and carcasses, explosives and glue. In West Ham, wrote the novelist Arthur Morrison, ‘the air was electrical’; there was, according to the Liberal MP Charles Masterman, ‘everywhere a stirring and an agitation’. Here more than anywhere in England, it seemed that the world was transforming as the century turned, mutating at unnatural speed, throwing up freaks, portents, atavistic selves, precocities and perversions. It was a time of tumult and foreboding.
In Robert’s home, too, the atmosphere had become charged with an unease that verged on menace. Emily Coombes was volatile, and Robert believed that she was dangerous. She threw knives, he said, and threatened death. His anxiety had already spiralled into fits and faints, spells of silence and withdrawal, a tendency to hear noises and feel pains in his head. His previous attempts to extricate himself and Nattie by running away from home had ended in failure, and the bromides that he was given for his headaches and attacks of excitement may have intensified his dissociation and disquiet. By July 1895 he was more alienated than ever, unsettled by the wrench of leaving school, the brutal monotony of the iron yard, the heavy heat of the summer. His father’s visit usually brought some respite, but this time Coombes and his wife had argued – about sex or money or both – and Emily had been left jittery and aggrieved. Robert’s own shame and frustration were resolving into a fury against her.
The boys spent the stifling days of 6 and 7 July at home with their mother. In the evenings Robert joined her in the marital bed, as he often did in his father’s absence. At some point that weekend, Emily thrashed her younger son for taking food and threatened the older boy. Robert had already bought the knife. Now he made his promise to Nattie. His mother had become a monster to him, like the serpent with which Jack Wright grapples in the cave beneath the sea.
Only a couple of matricides a year were reported in the British press in the 1880s and 1890s, and it has remained a very rare crime. Between 1968 and 1978 an average of six males killed their mothers in Britain each year, of whom about two were admitted annually to Broadmoor. In the United States, about 2 per cent of all homicides recorded between 1976 and 1998 were murders of a parent. Adolescent boys who kill their mothers are rarer still, but a few studies have been made of such crimes. Compared to other young murderers, young matricides rarely have a history of violence. Compared to older mother-murderers, they rarely have a history of psychosis. Their mothers tend to be dominating and intrusive; their fathers, typically, are passive or absent figures. The boys are more likely than their adult counterparts to have been mistreated, whether sexually, physically or emotionally. In many cases, they have tried to run away from home before the killing, and afterwards they often show relief, as if they have averted rather than invited catastrophe. They are unlikely to kill again.
Psychiatrists have suggested that a matricidal man or boy can have an overt motive for murder (such as a wish for enrichment or revenge) and also a motive hidden from himself. He may be desperate to rid himself of an excessive attachment to his mother, for instance, or to cast out the intolerable emotions that she arouses in him: feelings of desire and hatred, a terror of engulfment or of dissolution. In myth and literature, matricidal impulses can take disguised forms. They have been identified not only in the Greek tragedy in which Orestes slays his mother because she has killed and betrayed his father, or in the 1950s novel in which Norman Bates murders his mother in a jealous rage, but also in Hamlet’s feelings towards the ‘incestuous’ Gertrude, in Raskolnikov’s attack on the old woman in Crime and Punishment, in the defeat of the Sphinx by Oedipus, the Gorgon by Perseus, the dragon by St George. In life, too, such impulses may be expressed in an attack not on the mother herself but on another woman.
It was clear that Robert had been disturbed by his mother and had become convinced that he needed to kill her, but to understand whether his fears were grounded in reality I needed to know if he ever again acted with such cruelty or became gripped by such a fixation. I had to find out about his future as well as his past. Though there seemed to be no information about him in the newspapers after September 1895, I was able to glean a few facts from the files in Broadmoor’s recently opened archives. I was surprised by the gentleness of the regime at the asylum at the turn of the twentieth century and by the ways in which the institution had looked after Robert.
Broadmoor still houses some of the most disturbed patients in England, and I spoke about Robert’s case to a psychiatrist who had worked there since 1998. She said that it sounded as though Robert had experienced a psychotic breakdown when he murdered his mother, complete with auditory hallucinations, dissociation, disavowal, temporary amnesia. Such a breakdown, she said, was likely to have been provoked by extreme emotional strain. She told me that almost every one of the men and women whom she had treated at Broadmoor had suffered horribly as a child. They may have been born susceptible to mental illness, but their violent derangement was triggered by events in their lives. In the course of their treatment, they were frequently assailed by intense and painful emotions. Sometimes, they became suicidal before they became stable.
The Broadmoor admissions register showed that Robert was discharged to the Hadleigh colony in 1912, the doctors having deemed him sane. I researched the colony’s history at the Salvation Army headquarters in London and I went to Essex to look round the grounds, which were still in use as an employment training centre.
It was more difficult to establish what happened to Robert next. Only when I saw a photograph of his gravestone on a website about Australian cemeteries did I realise that he had emigrated and served in the Great War. Robert is buried in Coffs Harbour, on the coast of northern New South Wales. His stone bears a metal plaque inscribed with his name and his date of death, the names of his battalions, and his military rank and number. With the help of the service records in Australian archives, I was able to trace his movements during the war. I pictured him on the ridges of Gallipoli, watching disaster unfold. As a stretcher-bearer he was obliged to bear witness to horrific events before scrambling forward to tend to the injured, to salvage something from a scene of catastrophe.
At first I could find little about Robert’s life beyond 1919, apart from an approximate address and the circumstances of his death. My only lead was a phrase at the foot of the plaque on his gravestone: ‘Always remembered by Harry Mulville & family’. Though I did not imagine that the Harry Mulville who had known Robert would still be alive, I decided to try to track down his family. I found mentions of the name Mulville in the archives of the classified sections of the Coffs Harbour newspaper. I also found a phone number for an ‘H. Mulville’ in Coffs Harbour: I left a few messages but received no reply.
I next began to work my way through the numbers of all the Mulvilles in the New South Wales telephone directory, calling each one in the hope that he or she might be a relative. With my first call I struck lucky. A Mrs Mulville in Ulladulla, a coastal town south of Sydney, said, yes, she did have a family connection to a man called Harry Mulville who lived in Coffs Harbour, and she put me in touch with his daughter.
I emailed Harry Mulville’s daughter, telling her that I was writing about Robert Coombes. I explained that Robert had killed his mother when he was a boy living in London, and that after his release from an asylum he had served with distinction in the Great War. I said that I did not know whether her father was aware of the earlier, darker period of his friend’s life, and that I would understand if this was not something that she wanted to discuss with him. For several days I received no reply.
When I emailed again, she responded. ‘My family have been very distressed at this news,’ she wrote, ‘and we are still trying to come to terms with it. I will have to discuss this more with my family. My father is almost ninety-four years old now and we as a family cannot speak to him about this. It would probably kill him.’
I apologised to Harry’s daughter for causing such distress and I explained more about my research. She said that she would like to help me, but that her older brother and sister did not approve of my project. She asked me to speak to them. After my telephone conversations with Harry’s older children, I understood why they had found the news of the murder quite so disturbing.
Henry Alexander Mulville, always known as Harry, was born on an island in the Clarence River in New South Wales on 15 February 1919. He spent his early childhood by the river, helping his father to work a hand-cranked punt that carried horses, carts and motorised vehicles back and forth between the large island of Woodford and the village of Tyndale, on the mainland. The Mulvilles lived in two rooms of a former butcher’s shop near the Woodford jetty: one room was the kitchen and the other the bedroom. When the Clarence burst its banks in heavy rain, the water rushed into the building and the family was forced to take refuge with neighbours on higher ground until the flood subsided.
Harry’s parents had married in 1917, when his father was fifty-six and his mother thirty-two. His mother, Bertha, brought an illegitimate daughter to the marriage, and she and Charles Mulville had four children together: after Harry came Percy, Alfred and Ellen. In 1925 Harry and his brother Percy fell ill with pneumonia. The five-year-old Percy died and was buried in the local Roman Catholic cemetery.
Harry grew into a spirited, cheeky boy with long, skinny legs, brown hair, a square jaw, blue eyes and big ears. His father, as well as running the vehicle ferry, had the concession to carry foot passengers across the Clarence by rowing boat, and Harry soon learnt to row the boat himself.
The land near the river was dense with vegetation, some of which had been cleared for dairying and sugarcane farming. Harry loved to watch the workers cutting the cane in the fields. The plants were hacked down by a team of Hindu labourers, then stripped with brush hooks, carried to the river by cart, loaded on to punts with a crane and towed by steamer to the sugar mill. Harry helped the cook take refreshments to the cutters when they broke for tea in the afternoon, and in return was invited to share their rock cakes and biscuits.
Harry was educated first at the Tyndale school, where two huge fig trees shaded the playground, and then, with his older half-sister Christabel, was driven to school in the village of Maclean on the family’s horse and sulky (a light, two-wheeled cart). He enjoyed athletics, and did well in the sports competitions held at school on Empire Day. At home he helped to raise a small flock of poultry; the best of the family’s Rhode Island Reds and Brown Leghorns won awards at the local agricultural fair. On Sundays, Harry sometimes went to church with his mother, who played the pedal organ at Anglican services.
Harry and Chrissie used to read the children’s page in the Sydney Mail, and in 1927 both wrote letters to the editor. Harry, aged eight, announced that he had won prizes at school for English and arithmetic and asked to be put in touch with a pen pal. Chrissie, who was thirteen, expressed her enthusiasm for the Western adventures of the bestselling American novelist Zane Grey and asked for advice on naming her kittens. The children’s editor, ‘Cinderella’, suggested a suitable pen pal for Harry. She recommended the names ‘Mittens’ and ‘Muffet’ for Chrissie’s kittens, but was dubious about her taste in literature: Zane Grey was ‘rather bloodthirsty’, Cinderella thought; ‘so many of his characters meet a violent end’.
When Harry’s father was laid up in bed with an illness that year, Harry helped his mother to crank the vehicle punt across the river. As a general store delivery van was driving off the punt on to the jetty one day, the chain attaching the ferry to the land slipped and the van fell through the gap into the water, sinking twelve feet. The driver freed himself and swam up, but most of his cargo floated down the Clarence. Charles Mulville shortly afterwards lost his job as ferryman.
Bertha became unhappy. She attributed her difficulties with her husband to religious differences. She was a native of East London, and had been raised in the Church of England, whereas Charles was an Irish-born Roman Catholic. Bertha said that she did not like the Catholic priest calling at their house. In 1928 she left the family home, with her two surviving sons and her two daughters, to take a job as housekeeper to Harold William Smith, a farmer in his early fifties who lived fifty miles south of the Clarence.
Smith had a dairy herd at a farm between Glenreagh and Nana Glen, villages in the Orara Valley. His first wife had died in 1920 and his second had left him in 1926 after three years of marriage. Smith hired Bertha to cook and clean for him and to look after his three-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Bertha soon became her employer’s lover and in 1929 she also became the mother of his next child.
In the year of the baby’s birth, Charles Mulville’s neighbours on Woodford Island sent word to Bertha that her husband was seriously ill with influenza, and Bertha despatched the ten-year-old Harry to tend to him. Within a few days of Harry’s arrival, Charles developed pneumonia. He died in his son’s arms, aged sixty-eight, and was buried alongside Harry’s brother Percy in the Catholic cemetery. Harry returned to Nana Glen. A few months later Smith’s marriage was dissolved and he and Bertha were able to marry.
Harold Smith was born in 1874 into a well-known and well-to-do family in the north of New South Wales, but he had not made a success of himself. Since being declared bankrupt in 1898 he had scratched a living as a horseman and share-farmer. A hard-drinking man, ‘Tiger’ Smith often sat at the dinner table with a horse whip and was quick to strike his stepchildren. He attributed his short temper to the effects of gassing in the war. In fact, he had served for only five months, all of which were spent in training or long-range patrolling with the 5th Light Horse in Egypt; he was invalided home with rheumatism in September 1916, having seen no combat. He had been aggressive before the war, in any case: in 1899 he had been convicted of assaulting a man with whom he had argued about a horse.
As the eldest boy, Harry bore the brunt of his stepfather’s rage. One of Harry’s jobs was to hold Smith’s tools for him while he sharpened their blades. If he did not keep the tool’s handle steady, Smith would raise his steel file and smack him on the head.
The Smiths’ next-door neighbour was Robert Coombes, now in his mid-forties. Robert had settled in Nana Glen on his return from the Western Front. He may have chosen the district at the suggestion of Herbert Morrow, a Nana Glen farmer who had served with him in the 4th Division and who in 1918 had come back to Australia on the same ship. Robert’s fellow bandsman and stretcher-bearer Casimir Collopy, a veteran of both the 13th and 45th Battalions, also farmed in this part of New South Wales. Robert lived in a rickety two-room house, next to which he grazed seven or eight cows and tended a plot of vegetables. He and Smith were both tenants of a farmer called Isaac Cundy.
Robert’s house faced the dirt road that ran north from Nana Glen to the larger village of Glenreagh. Just across the track was a bright sweep of grazing pasture, stretching down to a line of trees along the Orara river. A range of wooded hills rose in the distance, separating the valley from the ocean. Behind the house was the dense web of the bush: the blackbutt and bloodwood trees, blue gum, bottlebrush, wattle and ironbark, twined with vines and creepers. Kookaburras and white cockatoos cackled and shrieked in the trees, giant frogs rasped in the river and creeks. The climate was mild, the temperatures rarely dropping below freezing point even in winter. In the warm, wet summers, the breeze carried a tang of camphor and gum.
The region around the Orara river had been inhabited by whites since the 1860s: first the timber-getters, who felled the much-prized red cedars, and then the gold-miners, who sunk shafts into the reefs near the river and panned for nuggets in the creeks. The gold mines had become unprofitable by the 1920s, but the timber business was still going strong. The local men used cross-cut saws, axes and wedges to chop down mammoth gums and white mahoganies. They sliced them into long logs and tethered them to teams of bullocks, which dragged their loads through the bush to the saw mills. Some of the land cleared by loggers had been claimed by banana growers and dairy farmers.
Robert milked the cows each day. He roped the cattle into sheds, pumped their milk into buckets by hand, skimmed off the cream with a separator and decanted it into cans. The cans were collected by a truck from the Orara Co-Op Dairy Society and delivered to the district town of Grafton, thirty-five miles north of Nana Glen. On the cream truck’s return trip, the driver dropped off the empty cans along with supplies from Grafton. There were a handful of shops in Nana Glen itself: a bakery, a butcher, a general store, a post office, a combined billiards room and hairdresser, a pie shop, a saddlery. Robert bought tobacco with which to roll himself cigarettes.
In the evenings, Robert often dined on dampers: pancakes of flour, salt and milk baked in the hot ashes of a fire. He ate vegetables from his plot and drank the milk produced by the cows. Occasionally, he killed a calf for its meat, sharing or trading the veal with neighbours. Nana Glen had no electricity or running water. Most villagers kept kerosene lamps to light their homes at night and they washed their clothes in metal tubs by the creek.
Robert had once hankered after romance and riches in far-off lands, but in New South Wales he made a life free of either. In Nana Glen he formed no close friendships with other men, courted no women, accrued no property. He seemed to have relinquished the desires for wealth and power that had animated him as a boy, along with the desires for sex and companionship that might have come to him as a man. His journey conformed only to the most innocent penny dreadful plot: that of the lad who flees the busy modern world for the rugged simplicity of the Australian bush. Instead of love and money, he had found peace and safety.
Robert became acquainted with Bertha and her children when they moved to the farm next to his in the late 1920s. He learnt that Bertha, a policeman’s daughter, was born in East London in the 1880s and brought up in West Ham. Like Robert, she had emigrated to Australia early in 1914.
By 1930, the Smith family was under increasing financial strain. Harold was supporting six children: the baby he had with Bertha, the four children she had brought to the marriage, and his daughter Elizabeth. In the economic depression that had taken hold in Australia, work was scarce and the prices of dairy products were falling. Smith was running up a large debt at the general store in the neighbouring village of Glenreagh. To try to make ends meet, he killed most of his calves for their hides, and he took on a contract to build a dairy and a set of milking stalls at a farm twelve miles away. He left many of the tasks on the home farm to Harry.
Before milking Smith’s half-dozen cows on winter mornings, Harry would warm his feet in a patch of grass on which a cow had lain overnight. Afterwards, he would often run barefoot the four miles to Nana Glen public school to make it in time for class; and run home again to do the afternoon’s milking at the end of the school day. In the evenings, it fell to Harry to round up the calves and bring them close to home so that they would be safe from dingoes. If he couldn’t find one of the calves in the bush, Smith was likely to beat him.
In the middle of 1930, Harold Smith’s landlord Ike Cundy complained that the property was becoming overgrown with black wattle. He told Smith to cut the bush back. Harry helped Smith to fell the trees and stack them up for burning. They used an axe to chop the timber, and a brush hook – a scythe with a foot-long curved blade – to hack at the undergrowth. Harry was kept so busy with this work that he was hardly able to go to school at all.
When Cundy called round to inspect the land on 3 June 1930, Smith lost his temper and struck his sixty-eight-year-old landlord with a whip handle. Cundy was injured badly enough to need medical attention. He reported the assault to the police and threatened Smith with legal action.
Six days later, on Monday 9 June, Smith accused Harry of laziness and told him to get off the farm. Harry, now eleven, had been suffering from flu. When Smith found the boy still on the property in the afternoon, he attacked him, repeatedly hitting him with the handle of the brush hook and punching him in the face.
Harry was seriously injured. On Thursday he took himself to the police station at Glenreagh, four miles north along the track that ran past their house, and reported to the officer on duty that his stepfather had beaten him. Police Constable Lawrence Freebody dressed the boy’s wounds, then put him in a car and drove him back to the farm. Smith was at the table, eating, when the policeman came in with Harry. Bertha was also in the room.
‘This boy informs me that you assaulted him with a brush hook,’ said Constable Freebody.
Smith carried on eating. ‘Yes,’ he said.
Freebody removed the bandages from Harry’s right arm and asked Smith if he had caused the injuries with his brush hook, as Harry claimed, and punched him in the face with his closed fist. Smith, recanting, admitted only to having spanked him with an open hand while they were both milking. The cow, he said, had then kicked the boy.
Freebody asked him if he had hunted Harry away from the farm that day.
‘Yes,’ said Smith, ‘I told him he would have to get out as he would not work.’
Bertha interrupted to say that Harry was not unwell because he had been beaten, but because he had influenza.
Freebody told Smith that he would be charged with assault. He then drove Harry to the district hospital in Grafton. A doctor treated the severe cuts and bruises on the boy’s right elbow, his right eye, his nose, his left cheek and his legs. Harry was kept in hospital for a week.
On Friday 20 June, Harry was taken to give evidence against his stepfather at the children’s court in Grafton.
Smith denied the assault. He said that he could not remember having told Freebody that he spanked Harry during the milking. ‘The cow kicked him down,’ he said, ‘and I spanked him afterwards.’ He admitted having hit Harry on the lower part of his body with an old axe handle that he had stuck on his brush hook, but insisted that the child’s injuries had been caused by the cow trampling on him. Most of the time, said Smith, he and the lad got on well together.
Harry was then questioned by the magistrate. He said that he had been cutting bottlebrushes on 9 June when his stepfather, out of the blue and without saying a word, had started to beat him with the brush hook.
Bertha told the court that her son helped out on the farm and she believed that he always did his best but, of course, he was very young and had never lived on a farm before. Her husband was usually kind and considerate to all of her children, she added, and gave them everything he possibly could. She was eager to exculpate Smith, perhaps because she feared for her family’s livelihood if he were convicted. But she acknowledged to the court that some of Harry’s injuries were caused by his stepfather striking him with a brush hook.
The magistrate found Smith guilty of unlawful assault and fined him £5 with £7/7/6 in witness and medical expenses. He ordered him to deposit a further £20 with the court, which would be returned only if he remained on good behaviour for two years; the alternative was two months’ imprisonment. The fine, said the magistrate, could be paid in instalments of £3 a month.
Upon learning what had happened to Harry, Robert Coombes decided to risk the careful, solitary life that he had created for himself: he offered to look after the boy. Harold Smith moved with his family to Grafton soon after his attacks on his landlord and his stepson. Harry stayed with Robert in Nana Glen.
Robert and Harry lived together in the house by the track. Though Harry helped out on the farm, Robert continued to milk the cows himself, and he made sure that Harry went back to school – he had been absent so long that he had to re-enrol at the end of June 1930. Sometimes Harry got a lift home in a neighbour’s sulky or, to his delight, in one of the few cars in the village, such as Sam Green’s Morris Cowley or Charles Wright’s Chevy. In the afternoons, Robert helped him with his homework.
Towards the end of 1930, a bush fire spread across Ike Cundy’s land, catching on the trees and dry grass and then on the hessian that clad Robert and Harry’s house. The building and most of its contents were destroyed, including Robert’s cornet and violin. His four military medals survived the blaze, though they were damaged by the fire and the ribbons were burnt away.
Robert and Harry slept in the cow stalls while they built themselves a shack, using the burnt iron from the old house as a roof. The owners of the farm across the road, the Playford family, gave them clothes and bedding to replace what they had lost, and at Christmas brought over cake, pudding and nuts.
The next year Robert found a new house on a small rise of land that belonged to Reginald Gill, an English-born farmer who lived about a mile south of Cundy’s place. Gill’s son ploughed the field so that they could plant a vegetable garden, and Robert agreed to give his landlord a quarter of his profits in return for the use of the house and land. At first the going was hard, as Robert and Harry had to fetch water for the garden from Coldwater Creek, a tributary of the Orara, and carry it several hundred yards up the hill in four-gallon kerosene cans. But Robert soon spotted a nice patch of flat land right by the creek and arranged with its owner to farm this plot while continuing to rent Gill’s house.
Robert devoted himself to the garden. In the rich dark soil by the creek, he planted cauliflowers, cabbages, pumpkins, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers and peas. Most local families grew their own vegetables, but Robert’s produce was so good that he was rarely short of customers. His peas and tomatoes were particularly fine. The O’Connells, who had a dairy farm in Nana Glen, used to send their eldest son down on a pony to buy Robert’s tomatoes when the Catholic priest stopped by for lunch.
Harry hawked their vegetables around the neighbouring farms. At first he rode a bicycle, his wares thrown over his back in sugar sacks. Once a week or so he hitched a lift on the cream truck to Glenreagh, where he would sell vegetables until the truck came back through on its return trip. After a couple of years he and Robert acquired a brown mare, a sulky and harness so that Harry could drive himself up to Glenreagh with his goods. Harry supplemented the vegetables with fruit, buying watermelons and oranges from the Playfords to sell on at a profit. He also earned money by collecting mail from the post office and delivering it to neighbouring farms.
Harry always addressed Robert as ‘Mr Coombes’ and Robert called Harry ‘Boy’. As with an army officer and a soldier, or an asylum attendant and a patient, there was never any doubt about who was in charge. It was Robert’s duty to lead, protect and care for Harry, and the child’s duty to obey his guardian. Robert grew fond of Harry, and he let the boy depend on him.
Robert was tidy in his habits. He trained Harry to wash the dishes and to clean the house thoroughly. They both wore shorts to work and had smarter outfits for best: Robert chose jackets for Harry at Mackelly’s clothing store in Grafton. He could alter and repair their clothes himself, thanks to his training in Charles Pike’s tailoring shop at Broadmoor. Robert and Harry slept on folding stretcher beds in the bedroom. They kept a bull terrier as a pet, then two fox terriers. They shared their meals with the dogs.
In time, Robert restored the medals that had been damaged in the fire and he replaced their ribbons: the red, white and blue watered silk of the 1914–15 Star, the orange blaze of the British War medal, the double rainbow of the Victory medal, the deep blue, white and crimson of the Military Medal. He bought a new violin and a new cornet, and would play the piano at neighbours’ houses when he stopped by for tea. He taught music to children in the village.
Just over the creek from Robert’s garden, also on the road to Glenreagh, were the village cricket pitch and two tennis courts. At weekends, Robert crossed the creek to play cricket or to watch the younger Nana Glen men compete against other teams. When electricity was run to a few buildings in Nana Glen in the mid-1930s, cricket enthusiasts were able to listen to broadcasts of international games on the radio in ‘Pop’ Thompson’s pie shop.
Though the 45th Battalion had been dissolved in 1919, the band kept going. In the 1920s it was one of the few such bands regularly to compete in regional competitions, military gymkhanas and tattoos. Robert used to go by train to Sydney to perform in Armistice and Anzac Day parades. One April in the mid-1930s he took Harry with him to the Anzac parade and the Royal Easter Show. They stayed for two days in a small boarding house, eating their meals in a café across the road. On 25 April, the anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, Harry stood in the crowd to see his guardian play the cornet and march with his fellow veterans through the streets.
Robert impressed Harry as an educated, strong-minded man who could converse on any subject. He was a keen reader of books – novels and histories borrowed from the Grafton public library – and he followed the news, including the international cricket tests, in the Sydney Morning Herald. Robert also competed in chess tournaments at local clubs and by post. In the late 1920s the Australasian newspaper printed details of three correspondence games that he had won against a clerk from the town of Lismore, New South Wales.
In Holloway gaol, Robert had wept for his cats and his mandolin. In the Australian bush, he took solace in his violin and his dogs, in cricket, chess and books. And he had Harry, a child to look after as he had tried to look after Nattie.
Nattie occasionally came to visit his brother. After being demobilised in May 1919, when the Swan returned to Sydney, he had settled in Newcastle, 300 miles south of Nana Glen, and found work as a stoker on government boats that dredged the state’s rivers and harbours. He married a widow called Mary May in 1928, when he was forty-five and she forty-seven.
On one visit to the Orara Valley, Nattie stayed overnight in the Glenreagh Hotel, a single-storey clapboarded building where Robert and Harry joined him for dinner. Robert seemed to bear his younger brother no grudge, despite the fact that Nattie had testified against him in 1895. If Nattie had ever resented Robert – for killing their mother, for upending their lives, for disappearing to Broadmoor – he seemed to have laid that to rest, too. Just as he had been chief witness to his brother’s crime, Nattie had become the chief witness to his life: during the war, Robert had asked that he be notified of all his injuries, promotions, decorations; and now he introduced him to Harry.
Harry rarely saw his own family, but he learned later that Harold Smith had continued to hurt and frighten his stepchildren. When Harry’s younger brother Alf was helping to fix a fence on a farm one day, Smith became furious with him for holding the barbed wire incorrectly, and as punishment he tore the barbs through the boy’s palms. On another occasion, Smith ordered Alf to sharpen a piece of steel and drive the spike through the heart of a sick horse. Alf was too distressed to carry out the task, so Smith made the boy hold the animal’s head while he shot at its temple with a pistol; to Alf’s horror, Smith missed, instead shooting off the horse’s ears.
In October 1936, after a year of drought, bush fires were blown in to Nana Glen by fierce, fast winds. Robert and Harry were working in the garden by the creek when the flames shot to the tops of the surrounding bush, lighting the trees like beacons, and the sparks flew ahead to their house on the hill. They rushed to the building but were too late to save it. The farmers of the district battled for days and nights to quench the fires with water. Scores of cows and pigs were burnt to death in their sheds and sties, hundreds of miles of fencing were lost; pastures were scorched and plantations razed. The O’Connells barely escaped from their blazing farm: the parents bundled their three children into a sulky, wrapped in wet towels and blankets, and drove them out to safety through the burning trees.
This second fire marked the end of Robert and Harry’s life together. While Robert started to piece together a shed of wood and iron at the garden by the creek, Harry was given shelter by the family of Herb Morrow, the soldier who had returned to Australia on the same ship as Robert, and he was then offered a room to rent in Reg Gill’s house. He was seventeen, over six feet tall, and he felt ready to leave Robert’s care.
Harry joined the 15th Light Horse Regiment of the AIF, a part-time militia that trained in nearby camps for several weeks a year, and he took a job as a road-builder for the forestry department, clearing land and laying tracks to ease the loggers’ access to the bush. He would cycle twenty miles up the mountain to work on a Monday morning, stay in the bush for three nights, and cycle back to Nana Glen on Thursday night. At weekends, he spent time with Herb Morrow’s niece Isabelle Rockey. Belle had been a fellow pupil at the Nana Glen school: Harry remembered that she and her best friend Maizee, an aboriginal girl, had read aloud to the class from the Australian children’s classic Dot and the Kangaroo. Belle was a good tennis player, he now discovered, and an excellent dancer. Her parents gave Harry permission to take her to dances organised by the Methodist Church. The couple won a box of chocolates in a waltzing competition at the Cavalry Ball in the Nana Glen village hall in 1938, and two prizes at the Younger Set Ball the next year. The dance band was led by the Cowling brothers, Jack and Bill, local boys whom Robert had taught to play the drums and piano.
Robert continued to tend his garden and he now sold the vegetables himself. He carried his produce around the neighbourhood on the sulky, pulled by a small bay pony. His dark hair was greying and streaked with white.
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Robert joined a volunteer defence corps in Nana Glen, composed chiefly of those too young or too old to join the army. The group met twice a week for training: in the village hall on one evening and at the sports ground each Sunday morning. Robert would take along his cornet to play for the small corps. Military service, for him, was an opportunity for music.
Just over a year into the war, Robert was able to join the army itself. The Australian government put out a plea at the end of 1940 for First World War veterans to form an emergency defence force to protect the coast of New South Wales in the event of a Japanese invasion. Robert volunteered for the 8th Garrison Battalion in February 1941. Since the unit would accept only men younger than fifty-five, Robert gave his age as fifty-four when he signed up (he was in fact fifty-nine). Before leaving home he wrote a will in which he left everything to Harry; his chief allegiance was no longer to his brother, but to his ward.
Robert and his fellow veterans were issued with uniforms and weapons, and sent to train in camps near Newcastle for three weeks at a time. The pay was six shillings a day, as it had been in the Great War. The 8th Garrison Battalion band led the Armistice Day parade in Newcastle in November 1941.
Harry was training as a gunner near Maitland, in southern New South Wales. On visits to Nana Glen he continued to court Belle Rockey and in September 1940 they became engaged. The following March the two were married in the Nana Glen Methodist church. Belle’s health deteriorated soon afterwards, and in July 1941 the army discharged Harry on compassionate grounds, so that he could look after his wife. He worked in a Nana Glen sawmill, cutting timber for defence works.
Robert, too, became unwell. In February 1942 he developed heart problems and was discharged from the army. He returned to Nana Glen and resumed his gardening. Over the next few years he took part in local events – in 1946 he was a guest of honour at a meeting of the Orara Valley branch of the Returned Servicemen’s League and a judge at a fancy-dress ball in the village hall. He kept at work on his land. Once or twice when Coldwater Creek burst its banks and the garden flooded he had to be rescued from the iron roof of his shack.
In 1945 Nattie fell ill with lung cancer, an occupational hazard for ships’ stokers, and in September 1946 he died, aged sixty-three. He was cremated in Newcastle, New South Wales, and his estate of £103 passed to his widow.
Robert had a heart attack at the beginning of May 1949 and was taken to the hospital in Coffs Harbour, seventeen miles south-east of Nana Glen. Harry, who had recently moved to Coffs Harbour with his family, was notified of Robert’s illness but did not manage to get to the hospital before his former guardian died on 7 May. The causes of Robert’s death were given as chronic nephritis and arteriosclerosis, diseases of the kidneys and the heart. The assets he had bequeathed to Harry amounted to £3-worth of shares in the Orara Dairy Co-op, issued during his dairy-farming days. He had already given him his medals.
At the time of Robert’s death, Harry was building a bungalow for his family and did not have the money to commission a gravestone. Robert was buried in an unmarked grave in the Church of England section of the town cemetery.
In the decades that followed, Harry worked at various sawmills, helped to raise his three children and to look after Belle, whose health was still poor: she suffered from kidney disease, severe stomach ulcers and anaemia. Harry accompanied her to Sydney for treatments; he once slept in his car for six weeks while she was recovering in a Sydney hospital from a stomach operation, as he could not afford a hotel. At home he made use of the skills that Robert Coombes had taught him: he cooked, washed up, cleaned and tidied, tended a bed of roses, petunias and marigolds in front of their house. In another plot he planted lettuce, squash, tomatoes and beans. Harry had adopted his wife’s faith, and the family went regularly to Methodist services.
Harry used to talk to his children about Robert, and how he had rescued him from Harold Smith. He passed on to his son the war medals that Robert had entrusted to him. In the 1960s he appealed to the War Graves Commission for funds to erect a headstone for his former guardian, but the application was rejected on the grounds that Robert’s military service had not caused his death.
Belle Mulville died in 1995, aged seventy-six, and the next year Harry decided at last to commission a headstone for Robert. It was almost half a century since he had died. When the stone and plaque had been installed in the Coffs Harbour cemetery, Harry took his youngest daughter to visit the grave. He placed a posy of plastic flowers on the tomb. His daughter, seeing that he was close to tears, remarked that it was a lovely thing that he had done for Mr Coombes. ‘He looked after me very well,’ Harry replied.
When I spoke to Harry Mulville’s children in November 2012, I realised that Robert had been like a father to Harry, and a symbol of strength and kindness to them all. Harry’s son told me that he had no wish to learn any more about Robert’s past.
‘What I want to retain,’ he said, ‘is Mr Coombes’ goodness to my dad.’
He asked me not to speak to his father about the murder, though he wondered aloud whether the secret of the crime might not have been Robert’s alone.
‘The pertinent question is whether my father knew,’ he said. ‘I think there is a fifty-fifty chance that he knew.’
Though they did not want to talk to me further, Harry’s son and older daughter told me that it would not affect their relationships with their sister if she chose to help me with my book.
Harry’s younger daughter and I corresponded for more than a year. When she visited her father in his nursing home in Coffs Harbour, she would ask him about his life with Robert, and then email or telephone me to pass on his recollections. She sent me a photograph of Robert and several pictures of Harry. In this way, I gathered much of the information that I needed to put together a narrative of their years in Nana Glen.
In February 2014 I travelled to Australia. I visited a few libraries and archives in Canberra and Sydney to look up the diaries and letters of men who had served in Robert’s battalions in the First World War. Then I flew from Sydney to Coffs Harbour. On the flight, I chatted to the man in the seat next to mine about why I was visiting the area, and he volunteered to trace some ‘old-timers’ from Nana Glen on my behalf. Within a couple of days, he had put me in touch with several men in their eighties and nineties who had seen Robert riding about with his vegetables when they were boys.
Maurice O’Connell described Robert’s last home as a ‘bloody old shack’ next to a garden packed with ‘beautiful veg’ – it was Maurice’s brother who used to ride over to buy tomatoes when the priest called round. Ernie Herd, who as a sixteen-year-old served in the Volunteer Defence Corps, recalled Robert as ‘a gentlemanly sort of bloke’ and a wonderful gardener and musician. Mick Towells described ‘Bob’ Coombes as a ‘very quiet sort of chap’ who ‘stuck to himself’ but would greet everyone with a friendly ‘g’day’. Duncan McPherson said that he was ‘a short, nuggety sort of bloke’ – compact and stocky – who was very well liked in the neighbourhood. Len Goodenough told me that Robert taught music to the Cowling brothers, while Len Towells remembered that ‘Coombesy’ used to come across the creek from his shack to watch the cricket. The local lads had not known much about him: only that he was English, that he had served at Gallipoli, and that he had been awarded the Military Medal. If he seemed reticent about his past, so were many who had seen horrors in the Great War.
I visited Robert’s grave in Coffs Harbour, in a grassy cemetery planted with tall palms and surrounded by eucalyptus trees. I noticed that Harold Smith, who had died in 1944, was buried only a few feet away. ‘Lest we forget’, read the inscription on his gravestone.
Harry’s younger daughter took me to Nana Glen and showed me the places in which Robert and Harry had lived. She then offered to take me to meet her father. She had told him that an English writer was visiting Coffs Harbour to research the life of Robert Coombes, and he had agreed to see me.
We visited Harry in his nursing home in the morning of 5 March. He was sitting in a tall armchair in his room. His hair was white, his eyes bright and pale. He had just turned ninety-five. He did not ask me why I was writing Robert’s story and I did not volunteer an explanation.
Harry answered my questions about his years in Nana Glen. He told me that his guardian had been a ‘fine old gentleman’, fair and steady. ‘He kept an eye on me,’ said Harry. ‘He didn’t punish me but he kept me on the straight and narrow.’ I asked whether Robert spoke of the war. Harry replied that he talked only about the military band. Mr Coombes loved music, Harry said: in the shack by the creek at Nana Glen, he used to play his violin late into the night.
When I asked Harry about Harold Smith’s assault on him, he expressed no bitterness: his stepfather had been a ‘war wreck’, he said. Harry believed that Smith was violent because he had been subjected to violence, that suffering had made him brutal.
Harry tilted his head to show me a scar above his right eyebrow, where Smith had hit him more than eighty years earlier. He pushed up a sleeve to expose a mark on his right elbow, rolled up a trouser leg to reveal a scar on his right shin. I saw how badly hurt he had been, and I imagined how frightened he had felt. His stepfather had sprung at him with the brush hook, whacking his body, punching his face. It was like the attack on Nattie that Robert had pictured as a child: their mother flaring up suddenly in fury and swinging a hatchet at the younger boy. Yet it was also like the terrible attack that Robert had made on his mother in the warm night of 8 July 1895, when he went at her with his knife and before she could speak or cry out cut her to the heart.
I believed that Robert had offered shelter to Harry in June 1930 because he recognised the boy’s helplessness and fear, but also the rage of his assailant.
As I stood up to leave, Harry smiled and reached over to clasp my hand. He seemed glad to have told me what Robert had done for him. When I started work on this book, all that I had known about Robert Coombes was that he had stabbed his mother to death in the summer of 1895. It was astonishing to hold the hand of a man whom he had saved from harm. I still couldn’t be sure whether Harry knew about the murder. I hoped that he did, and had loved Robert anyway.