Most of the events in Part I are drawn from testimony given in the West Ham coroner’s court, West Ham magistrates’ court and Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey between 18 July and 17 September 1895, as reported in newspapers including the London Standard, London Daily News, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Morning Post, Daily Chronicle, Sun, Star, Illustrated Police News, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, News of the World, St James’s Gazette, Manchester Times, Manchester Guardian, Reynolds’s Newspaper, Forest Gate Gazette, Essex Newsman, Leytonstone Express and Independent, Chelmsford Chronicle, East Ham Echo, West Ham Herald and South Essex Gazette and the Stratford Express. The same publications are the sources of most of the narrative in Parts II and III. Where the newspapers are quoted directly, dates are given in the Notes. Other sources include transcripts of witness depositions to the West Ham courts held at the National Archives in London (TNA: CRIM 1/42/9) and the transcript of the Old Bailey trial in the Old Bailey Session Papers (OBSP), online at www.oldbaileyonline.org.
Where not otherwise indicated, biographical details throughout are from census returns and records of birth, marriage, death and probate held by the National Archives in London (TNA) and the National Archives of Australia in Canberra (NAA), the electoral registers in the Newham Archives and Local Studies Library, London, the 1896 Post Office London Suburbs Street Directory of Plaistow and the editions of Kelly’s Directory of Stratford of 1894–5, 1895–6 and 1896–7.
ABBREVIATIONS
PART I: TEN DAYS IN JULY
CHAPTER 1: THE THREE OF US
already bright and warm. . . The sun rose at 3.53 a.m. that morning, according to the London Standard of 8 July 1895, and set at 8.15 p.m. The Standard of 9 July reported that the temperature on Monday rose to 81 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.
pay the rent. . . East London landlords and landladies traditionally called for the rent on a Monday morning and signed a rent book on receipt of the week’s money. ‘You just walk round on Monday mornings (or maybe you even drive in a trap),’ reflects the novice landlord Jack Randall in Arthur Morrison’s short story collection Tales of Mean Streets (1894), ‘and you collect your rents’.
the Gentlemen v Players match. . . Account of the match from reports of 8, 9 and 10 July 1895 in the Morning Post, London Daily News, Evening News and London Standard; and from David Kynaston, WG’s Birthday Party (2011).
about average for the area. . . See Jim Clifford, ‘The Urban Periphery and the Rural Fringe: West Ham’s Hybrid Landscape’ in Left History, Spring/Summer 2008.
‘Light Ahead ’. . . From The Era, 28 November 1891, 21 January 1893, 22 June 1895 and 13 July 1895; and Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 29 November 1891.
Among Robert’s most recent purchases. . . Jack Wright and the Fortune Hunters of the Red Sea was first published by the Boys’ Star Library in New York in 1892 as Jack Wright and his Submarine Yacht; or, The Fortune Hunters of the Red Sea. The undated British reprint, which cost a penny, must have appeared on 3 or 10 July 1895, as it was number 51 in a weekly series that had been published by the Aldine Cheerful Library each Wednesday since July 1894, and it was found in 35 Cave Road on 17 July 1895. About 120 Jack Wright stories were printed between 1891 and 1904. The creations of the Cuban-American author Luis Senarens, they were even more wild, fantastical and racist than the adventures of the more famous dime novel hero Frank Reade Jr. For descriptions and images of Jack Wright and other early science-fiction heroes, see Jess Nevins’s ‘Fantastic Victoriana’ (www.reocities.com/jessnevins/vicw) and John Adcock’s ‘Yesterday’s Papers’ (john-adcock.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/steam-men-and-electric-horses). Many of the British reprints are listed on Steve Holland’s ‘The British Juvenile Story Papers and Pocket Libraries Index’ (www.philsp.com/homeville/bjsp/0start).
The horse-drawn trams. . . These were the cheapest form of transport, usually a penny a ride. The tram rails enabled two horses to pull fifty passengers, twice the number that they could shift in an omnibus. See Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God (2007).
The route was busy with shops. . . From Plaistow Post Office Directory (1896), Kelly’s Directory of Stratford 1894–95, the West Ham electoral registers 1890–6 at the Newham Archives in Stratford and the 1894 ordnance survey map of West Ham and environs.
a new public hall. . . The Canning Town Library – the first library in the borough – was opened at 110 Barking Road in 1893, according to Donald McDougall (ed.), Fifty Years a Borough, 1886–1936: The Story of West Ham (1936); the library’s electricity was generated next door at the Canning Town Public Hall from 14 February 1895.
Over the previous two decades. . . According to White, London in the Nineteenth Century (2007), the migration of the working classes to outer East London was also encouraged by the Cheap Trains Act of 1883, which compelled railway companies to run special low-fare trains for workmen. Thanks in part to the cheap tariffs offered by the Great Eastern Railway, which served most of ‘London-in-Essex’, the population of the eastern suburbs almost doubled between 1881 and 1901. For the development of West Ham in the late nineteenth century, see Archer Philip Crouch, Silvertown and Neighbourhood: A Retrospect (1900), McDougall (ed.), Fifty Years a Borough, and W. R. Powell (ed.), A History of the County of Essex: Vol 6 (1973).
‘London over the Border’. . . The phrase was coined by Henry Morley in his article ‘Londoners over the Border’, published in Household Words in 1857.
Malays, Lascars, Swedes, Chinamen. . . From an article by Robert Bontine Cuninghame Graham in The Workers’ Cry of July 1891.
‘There is no seaport in the country. . .’ In Walter Besant, East London (1901), which also describes the noises of the docks.
low and sluggish. . . For description of the Thames, see Evening News, 4 July 1895.
The sour, urinous scent. . . See Roy Porter, London: A Social History (1994) and Harry Harris, Under Oars: Reminiscences of a Thames Lighterman, 1894–1909 (1978), as well as Crouch, Silvertown and Neighbourhood, McDougall (ed.), Fifty Years a Borough and Powell (ed.), A History of the County of Essex.
John Fox visited two pawnbrokers. . . Details of the pawnbroking trade from Melanie Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and Working-class Credit (1983) and George Sims, Living London: Its Work and its Play, its Humour and its Pathos, its Sights and its Scenes, Vol. I (1901). The poorer classes often paid weekly visits to the pawnbroker, going in on a Monday to pledge clothes that had been worn over the weekend and returning to redeem the clothes when they received their wage packets on Friday. Women tended to visit a pawnbroker’s shop on a Monday, to raise money for rent, whereas young men frequently came on a Wednesday or Thursday evening, to pledge a watch in exchange for beer money. The pawnbrokers that Fox visited in the Commercial Road were of a ‘medium’ grade, and catered to a relatively respectable and occasional clientele, most of whom pledged items worth five to ten shillings to tide them over in an emergency. The pawnbrokers’ statutory opening hours were from 7 a.m to 8 p.m. in the summer months.
CHAPTER 2: ALL I KNOW IS THAT WE ARE RICH
dozens of coffee shops. . . The coffee in such shops was usually ‘a dreadful draught’, reported Punch magazine on 19 August 1882, ‘served up in dirty crockery, accompanied by huge slabs of brown-crusted bread smeared with a yellow deposit of oily butter. Tea, too, is forthcoming upon call, a long-stewed, dingy-tinted potion of uncertain origin, flat as stale soda-water, nauseous as a sarsaparilla drench. Eggs which are musty, bacon which is rusty, steaks which are tough, and chops which are tainted, even sodden cuts from half-cooked joints, and wedges of flabby pastry, may be procured at the more pretentious Coffee-Houses, while at the humbler ones the sense is regaled with the strong savour of red-herrings and smoked haddocks’ (see victorianlondon.org).
A record 35,000 people. . . The Essex Newsman of 8 June 1895 reported that about 9,000 visitors rode the electric trams and 8,000 the steamboats that Whit Monday. At Pier Hill fairground a north London man died after being struck in the ribs by a swing boat, two girls were injured after falling out of swings, a man sustained a bullet wound in the shooting gallery and several children cut their feet on broken bottles on the beach.
They walked through the Pier Hill fairground. . . Description of rides and stalls from the Chelmsford Chronicle, 21 September 1894.
Little Elsie the Skirt Dancer. . . The Era of 13 July 1895 reported that a burlesque actress, a clown and a group of jugglers were also to appear in the Pavilion that night.
At low tide. . . Account of the pier adapted from Walter Besant’s description of a day trip to Southend in East London (1901).
the most notorious murderer. . . Account of James Canham Read’s crime and conviction from the London Standard of 27 June, 9 July and 8 December 1894, Morning Post of 10 July 1894, Chelmsford Chronicle of 13 July 1894, Essex Standard of 14 and 21 July 1894, Illustrated Police News of 7 July, 14 July and 24 November 1894, Evening News of 15 and 16 November 1894 and Reynolds’s Newspaper of 18 November 1894.
When Robert learned. . . In the Old Bailey, Robert’s father said that Robert ‘went to Southend to see Read’ without specifying a date. Read appeared in the Southend police court on 9 and 16 July. Robert was on the register of Stock Street school at the time, but according to his headmaster did not attend after 7 July, the day of Read’s arrest.
The killer in ‘The Bogus Broker’s Right Bower’. . . The preposterously titled The Bogus Broker’s Right Bower; or, Ralph Rolent’s (Felon 26) Tigress Shadower was one of the tuppenny magazines in Robert’s collection, a sixty-four-page Aldine O’er Land and Sea story originally published by Beadle’s Dime Library in New York on 14 March 1894.
the Balaam Street recreation ground. . . See McDougall (ed.), Fifty Years a Borough. The construction of the park cost £11,206, according to the Chelmsford Chronicle of 15 June 1894, and provided employment for some of the jobless labourers of West Ham.
games of knocking down ginger. . . In The Love of a Brother: From Plaistow to Passchendaele (2011), Percy Cearns recalls his childhood in the 1890s and 1900s: ‘What terrors of Plaistow Park Road we lads must have been. I wonder how many fruitless journeys to open front doors we have caused ladies in the neighbourhood through our propensity to play a game, colloquially known as “knocking down ginger”. “Kick can”, “buttons”, “egg cap”, “leap frog”, “robbers and thieves” were among other famous sports which we young ruffians were wont to pass our evenings.’ Percy and his brother Fred shared a bedroom, where at night they read the ‘forbidden fruit’ of penny literature by candlelight. When their father found the magazines, he confiscated them and lectured his sons about their reading habits: ‘Dad . . . always told us there were plenty of books in the bookcase to read “instead of such trash”. I am afraid we neither of us took much notice of this advice however, as we would always replace the lost copies and impatiently await the next numbers.’
From the front of the house. . . Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper of 21 July 1895 observed that Cave Road lay ‘in the open part of Plaistow, looking across the flats and the river to the Kentish hills’.
The German writer H. A. Volckers. . . In Part XII of ‘A Journey to Europe’, Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 31 July 1886.
As the eldest son. . . For boys’ chores, see Michael J. Childs, Labour’s Apprentices: Working-Class Lads in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (1992) and Edward John Urwick (ed.), Studies of Boy Life in Our Cities (1904).
There was no age restriction. . . In East London, Besant observed that East London boys smoked cheap cigarettes, known as ‘fags’, as a way of asserting their manhood. They also liked to read penny dreadfuls ‘featuring the likes of Jack Harkaway knocking down the ship’s captain on the quarter deck’, and to play cards, known locally as ‘darbs’. On boy smokers, also see Childs, Labour’s Apprentices.
When an overladen National Line vessel disappeared. . . In Cattle Ships: Being the Fifth Chapter of Mr. Plimsoll’s Second Appeal for Our Seamen (1890), the MP Samuel Plimsoll reported that the widows of the lost Erin sailors told him that only the cashier had shown them kindness. Plimsoll recorded his name as ‘Euston’, presumably a mishearing of ‘Hewson’, since John Hewson was chief cashier of the National Line at the time.
Dear Sir. . . A transcript of this letter is Exhibit A in TNA: CRIM 1/42/9.
The weather had cooled off. . . See London Daily News, 15 July 1895.
Buffalo Bill. . . The story found in Cave Road was probably Buffalo Bill; or, Life and Adventures in the Wild West, a reprint of a Beadle’s Dime Library number, published in London in 1890 by the Aldine O’er Land and Sea Library. The young Billy’s exploits are described in Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood, published in New York by Beadle and Adams in about 1882. Bill Cody staged his ‘Wild West’ show at Earl’s Court from June to October 1892.
Over the weekend, the election campaigning. . . See Stratford Express, 17 July, and West Ham Herald, 20 July 1895.
‘to lift the weary load. . .’ From a speech at an open-air meeting by the docks in Silvertown on Monday 8 July 1895, reported in West Ham Herald, 13 July.
‘feel that there is sunshine. . .’ From an article by the socialist MP Robert Bontine Cuninghame Graham in The Workers’ Cry, July 1891.
In 1895 some 10,000 men. . . See Stephen Inwood, City of Cities: The Birth of Modern London (2005).
Edward Leggatt had been prosecuted. . . See Essex Newsman, 6 July 1895, and Barking, East Ham & Ilford Advertiser, 13 July 1895.
an activist had accidentally blown himself up. . . This incident inspired Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907).
A donkey. . . See Stratford Express, 17 July 1895.
‘West Ham Workers – Attention!. . .’ See Evening News, 15 July 1895.
Robert’s novelette ‘Joe Phoenix’s Unknown’. . . Joe Phoenix’s Unknown; or, Crushing the Crooks Combination was an American detective story featuring East London criminals first published by Beadle’s Dime Library in New York in 1892 and reprinted in London in 1894 by the Aldine O’er Land and Sea Library.
‘I certify that Mrs Emily Coombes. . .’ A transcript of Griffin’s note is Exhibit B in TNA: CRIM 1/42/9; the torn-off date is Exhibit C.
Dear Pa. . . A transcript of this letter and of the bill from Greenaway are Exhibits E and F in TNA: CRIM 1/42/9.
‘Sir,’ wrote Robert. . . A transcript of Robert’s letter to the Evening News is Exhibit D in TNA: CRIM 1/42/9.
‘£2 wanted privately. . .’ Evening News, 4 July 1895.
There was no running water. . . See London Standard, 17 July 1895.
As the polling deadline of 8 p.m. approached. . . Account of election night from West Ham Herald, Forest Gate Gazette and Leytonstone Express and Independent of 20 July and Stratford Express of 17 July 1895.
along roads lit by gas lamps. . . According to McDougall (ed.), Fifty Years a Borough, there were 1,831 gas lamps in West Ham in 1886, lighting sixty miles of streets. Charles Masterman in The Heart of Empire (1902) describes other lights in the neighbourhood: ‘At night long lines of barrows brilliant with flaring kerosene lamps contribute an element of weirdness. Past these drifts a continuous stream of tired women haggling for whelks and cauliflowers and other necessities of existence. Every corner sports the brilliantly lighted gin palace with its perpetual stream of pilgrims.’ In From the Abyss (1903), he notices ‘the wildly flaring naphtha lamps from strings of stalls in the gutters’.
CHAPTER 3: I WILL TELL YOU THE TRUTH
The police discovered. . . A list of the evidence gathered by the police is in TNA: CRIM 1/42/9.
PART II: THE CITY OF THE DAMNED
CHAPTER 4: THE MACHINE AND THE ABYSS
The courthouse in West Ham Lane . . . See Clare Graham, Ordering Law: The Architectural and Social History of The English Law Court to 1914 (2003).
The ‘Sun’. . . the ‘Star’. . . On 18 July 1895.
Ernest Baggallay. . . See ‘Spy’ caricature of Baggallay, captioned ‘A Popular Magistrate’, in Vanity Fair of 13 July 1905 and obituary of Baggallay in The Times, 11 September 1931.
In Canning Town police court. . . See West Ham Herald, 20 July 1895.
Despite the passage of the Children’s Act. . . See Lionel Rose, The Erosion of Childhood: Child Oppression in Britain, 1860–1918 (1991) and George K. Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England 1870–1908 (1982).
The ‘Stratford Express’ approved. . . 20 July 1895.
a street vendor in Northern Road. . . See West Ham Herald, 27 July 1895, which reported that on 23 July the vendor was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment with hard labour.
Holloway gaol. . . See Arthur Griffiths, Secrets of the Prison House: Gaol Studies and Sketches (1894); Philip Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives: English Prison Biography 1830–1914 (1985); ‘In Holloway “on Remand”’, Pall Mall Gazette, 27 October 1892; and evidence given in 1894 by George Walker (the Holloway doctor), Lt-Col Everard Stepney Milman (the governor) and Rev. George Purnell Merrick (the chaplain) in the Departmental Committee on Prisons’ Report and Minutes of Evidence, PP, C7702 (1895).
Charles Carne Lewis. . . For his appointment as coroner, see Chelmsford Chronicle, 18 August 1882. For Florence Dennis inquest, see Chelmsford Chronicle, 6 July 1894. For sewage works inquest, see Morning Post, 19 July 1895.
The room was furnished. . . See Evening News, 29 July 1895.
a double coffin. . . See Cassells Household Guide, Volume I (1880).
burial insurance. . . See Maud Pember Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week (1913) and Cassells Household Guide, Vol. I (1880).
Many of the headstones had fallen down. . . See Mrs Basil Holmes, The London Burial Grounds (1896) and the page on Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in www.londongardensonline.org.uk.
At 1 p.m. Emily’s body was lowered. . . Burial details from Daybook of Burials in Consecrated Ground, City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery, LMA: CTHC 01/056.
a fourteen-year-old boy had climbed a tree. . . See Illustrated Police News, 8 and 15 July 1895.
The penny paper ‘Lloyd’s Weekly’. . . The article was published on 21 July 1895, as was the News of the World piece. The Forest Gate Gazette, West Ham Herald and Stratford Express ran their first pieces about the crime on 20 July 1895.
the British author Hugh E. M. Stutfield. . . In an article entitled ‘Tommyrotics’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, June 1895. See Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c.1880–1900 (2000).
An ‘Illustrated London News’ reporter. . . See ‘Picturesque Aspects of the East End III’, 9 April 1892.
The French novelist Emile Zola. . . See Manchester Guardian, 3 October 1893.
The English writer Ford Madox Hueffer. . . In The Soul of London (1905).
Walter Besant. . . In East London.
‘As there is a darkest Africa. . .’ From William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890).
The American novelist Jack London. . . ‘Far better to be a people of the wilderness and desert, of the cave and the squatting-place, than to be a people of the machine and the Abyss,’ writes London in The People of the Abyss (1903).
CHAPTER 5: A KISS GOODBYE
an interview with Mary Jane Burrage. . . See Star, 18 July 1895.
certain rumours. . . The Illustrated Police News of 27 July 1895 reported that Robert resented his mother for not giving him enough spending money, but the suggestion that Emily Coombes was a heavy drinker seems not to have appeared elsewhere in the press.
he was declared bankrupt. . . The petition against him was heard on June 1873 and his creditors received their first dividends (of 1/6d for every pound they were owed) in July 1874. See London Gazette, 27 June 1873 and 8 July 1874.
Emily was born. . . The Register for Births and Baptisms in India shows that she was born in India on 1 March 1858, the daughter of George and Tryphena Allen, both natives of Poole in Dorset. The story about the rescue on the river Indus was reported in the Illustrated Police News, 3 August 1895. Her father’s naval service is detailed in United Kingdom Merchant Navy Seamen Records 1835–1941, TNA: BT113.
Robert, their first son. . . According to his birth certificate, Robert was born in 23 Edwards Street, ten minutes’ walk north of his grandparents’ house in Three Colt Street. At the age of seven, he was enrolled at Farrance Road board school, Limehouse, where Nattie joined him a year later. See Grange Road School Admissions Register 1888–1906, Newham Archives, Stratford Library. Upon the death of the boys’ grandfather in 1882, their father temporarily moved the family into the house in Three Colt Street.
The people of East London. . . From Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, Vol. 1 (1889). A docker’s wife in Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets explains why she and her family are leaving Limehouse: ‘My ’usband finds it too far to get to an’ from Albert Docks mornin’ and night. So we’re goin’ to West ’Am.’
the National Line vessels ‘England’ and ‘France’. . . See N. R. P. Bonsor, North Atlantic Seaway: An Illustrated History of the Passenger Services Linking the Old World with the New (1955); Arthur J. Maginnis, The Atlantic Ferry: Its Ships, Men and Working (3rd edition, 1900); F. E. Chadwick, John H. Gould, J. D. J. Kelley, William H. Rideing, Ridgely Hunt and A. E. Seaton, Ocean Steamships: A Popular Account of their Construction, Development, Management and Appliances (1891); and John Kennedy, The History of Steam Navigation (1903).
By 1895 the company had abandoned the passenger trade. . . See Leeds Mercury, 29 December 1894.
As a chief steward. . . For details of rations, see NMM: RSS/CL/1895/60015 SS France and NMM: RSS/CL/1895/29996 SS England. For a steward’s status and duties, see Frank Thomas Bullen, The Men of the Merchant Service (1900).
Coombes was paid. . . For pay of Coombes and his shipmates, see NMM: RSS/CL/1895/60015 SS France and NMM: RSS/CL/1895/29996 SS England.
There was talk. . . At the annual meeting, reported the Sheffield Evening Telegraph of 28 February 1895, some shareholders suggested that the company be wound up.
a friend of Coombes. . . This was probably his wife’s brother-in-law John William Macy, an American master mariner who had married Emily’s older sister Mary in 1866. Macy was said to be a good friend of Robert Coombes senior and he was in the United States at the time.
he gave interviews to several newspapermen. . . The reports appeared in the New York Times, Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette and New York Tribune on 22 July 1895. A fanciful article also appeared in the New York Sun that day, claiming that ‘Mr Coombs stood on the porch of his little vine-covered cottage in Plaistow. . . and bade good-by to his wife and two sons’, with the words, ‘Boys, take care of your mother’.
‘I found him to be my apprentice. . .’ Letter published in West Ham Herald on 27 July 1895.
CHAPTER 6: THIS IS THE KNIFE
At six o’clock. . . For the routine at Holloway, see note to p.52.
In the prison register. . . Walker described his form of mental debility as ‘recurrent mania’ and the ‘probable cause’ as ‘?injury to head at birth’. See Report of the Commissioners of Prisons and the Directors of Convict Prisons 1895–96, for the Year Ended 31 March 1896, PP, 1896, XLIV, 235.
‘London Standard’. . . 22 July 1895.
‘Evening News’. . . 22 July 1895.
Charlie Sharman. . . Sharman was born in Great Baddow, Essex, in 1850; his father was a schoolteacher and his mother, who was blind, played organ in the village church. As a young clerk, Sharman worked in Chelmsford, Essex, but was driven out of town in 1887 after being accused of indecent assaults – see Chelmsford Chronicle, 8 May 1891. For his law suits against his former clerk, see Essex Newsman of 2 May 1891, Chelmsford Chronicle of 15 May 1891 and Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald of 16 May 1891. For his defence of the Walthamstow verger, see Chelmsford Chronicle of 23 March 1894. For his success in the general election see Chelmsford Chronicle of 20 November 1896.
‘Star’. . . 25 July 1895.
‘Evening News’. . . 26 July 1895.
To wear a shirt with a collar. . . In The Nether World (1889), George Gissing notes that navvies, scaffolders, costermongers and cab touts usually went collarless, while shopmen and mechanics were likely to sport collars.
On the ground floor, Orpwood explained. . . According to the criteria laid out in Joseph Rowntree’s survey of working-class housing in York in 1900, the Cave Road terrace was of the type designed for relatively well-off working-class families. The best workmen’s dwellings were slightly larger, with five rather than four rooms, but like the Coombes residence they had a bay window, cornicing, a small railed garden to the front, frontages of fifteen to seventeen foot and a scullery behind the back parlour. The front parlour in such houses was used on Sundays as a room in which to receive guests, and otherwise only occasionally – for letter-writing or music practice, for instance. See John Burnett, A Social History of Housing 1815–1985 (1986).
‘Sun’. . . 29 July 1895.
‘News of the World’. . . 28 July 1895.
‘Illustrated Police Budget’. . . 27 July 1895.
‘Daily Chronicle’. . . Quoted in Evening News, 27 July 1895.
Cesare Lombroso. . . For instance, in The Criminal Man – the third edition, published in 1884, drew heavily on theories of degeneration.
‘Evening News’. . . 26 July 1895.
the wicked Mr Hyde. . . In Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Robert Louis Stevenson describes Hyde as like ‘a schoolboy’ who casts off his burden of respectability to ‘spring headlong into the sea of liberty’. He has ‘the light step, leaping pulses and secret pleasures’ of youth, as well as being an atavistic, ‘ape-like’ creature. See Claudia Nelson, Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature (2012).
A group of doctors. . . Quoted in Evening News, 27 July 1895.
‘the profoundest impression. . .’ See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1964).
‘East London Advertiser’. . . Interview published on 3 August 1895.
‘Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff ’. . . Published by Beadle’s Dime Library in New York on 2 May 1894, as Fire-Eye: the Thugs’ Terror; or, Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff, and reprinted in London in 1895 by the Aldine O’er Land and Sea Library.
CHAPTER 7: CHRONICLES OF DISORDER
‘Leytonstone Express’. . . 3 August 1895.
‘Sun’. . . 29 July 1895.
‘India in London’. . . See Daily Telegraph, 2 July 1895, and Evening News, 3 July 1895.
The Children’s Act of 1889. . . Law of Parent and Child, a guide of 1895, quoted Lord Coleridge: ‘It is not enough to show neglect of reasonable means for preserving and prolonging the child’s life; but to convict of manslaughter it must be shown that the neglect had the effect of shortening life.’ For the Peculiar People cases, see also Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England.
Lewis announced that he was ‘sick and tired’. . . See Evening News and Daily Chronicle, 26 July 1895.
Lewis berated the parents. . . See Barking, East Ham & Ilford Advertiser, 3 August 1895.
penny dreadfuls. . . For the history of the penny dreadful, see John Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta Rap, 1830–1997 (1999); E. S. Turner, Boys Will be Boys: The Story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton, et al (1948); Robert J. Kirkpatrick, From the Penny Dreadful to the Ha’penny Dreadfuller: A Bibliographical History of the Boys’ Periodical in Britain, 1762–1950 (2013); Kelly Boyd, Manliness and the Boys’ Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855–1940 (2002); Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson, Juvenile Literature and British Society 1850–1950: The Age of Adolescence (2009); Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (1991); and Troy Boone, Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire (2005).
penny bloods. . . ‘Bloods is what we calls ’em in the trade,’ a London shopkeeper told the journalist John Foster Fraser in 1899 – quoted in Fraser’s Vagabond Papers (1906). ‘“Penny bloods” is the trade name for penny dreadfuls’, reported the Bristol Mercury on 27 September 1895.
‘Tons of this trash. . .’ Motherwell Times, 2 March 1895
proper novels for boys. . . See Freeman’s Journal, 6 November 1895 and Fortnightly Review, November 1895.
a ‘St James’s Gazette’ journalist. . . His articles were published on 25, 26, 29 and 30 July 1895. He reported that the authors of penny dreadfuls were paid three and a half to four shillings per thousand words. The speed at which the bloods were composed is apparent in some of the stories in Robert’s collection. William G. Patten’s Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff, published by Beadle’s in 1894, is laden with errors of typing, spelling, grammar and punctuation, as if written in a tremendous rush and printed without being read over: ‘Her eyes unclosed,’ writes Patten, ‘at the very instant when his fingers were present over her lips’ (that is, the heroine opened her eyes just as the villain was about to touch her lips); ‘The open air was grateful to the lovers after the time they had spent in the mysterious cottage.’
The adventure yarns. . . Quotes from John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (1999).
New York dime novels. . . On 16 November 1895 the Marlborough Express in New Zealand compared ‘these vile, flaringly coloured, cheap novels’ to undesirable immigrants and suggested that they should be destroyed by the Customs authorities.
‘The Secret of Castle Coucy’. . . A story by the British New Yorker Frederick Whittaker, published by Beadle’s Dime Library in 1881 as The Severed Head; or, The Secret of Castle Coucy, A Legend of the Great Crusade and reprinted by the Aldine O’er Land and Sea Library in about 1894.
The novelist James Joyce. . . ‘An Encounter’ is the second story in Dubliners, a collection completed in 1905 though not published until 1914.
In an article of 1888. . . ‘About Penny Dreadfuls’, Pall Mall Gazette, 29 June 1888.
Every month, it seemed. . . The reports cited here are from the Gloucester Citizen, 29 March 1889; Dundee Courier, 29 November 1892; Manchester Evening News, 31 October 1893; Yorkshire Evening Post, 17 November 1892; Coventry Evening Telegraph, 8 January 1894.
In 1888 two eighteen-year-olds. . . See London Daily News, 15, 18, 26, 27 October and 15 December 1888.
the publishing magnate Alfred Harmsworth. . . In an article in the Sunday Times in 1948, A. A. Milne remarked that Harmsworth eventually ‘killed the “penny dreadful” by the simple process of producing the ha’penny dreadfuller’. Harmsworth also owned the bestselling Evening News, in which Robert had planned to place an advertisement, and in 1896 founded the Daily Mail.
‘Union Jack’. . . Justice Kennedy referred to issues of this magazine being found in Cave Road (see News of the World, 22 September).
the press had often pointed out. . . For instance, Edward G. Salmon in Juvenile Literature as It Is (1888) argued that the dreadfuls were dangerous because they ‘are patronised chiefly by the sons of working-men, who are the future masters of the political situation’. For the national anxiety about penny dreadfuls, see especially Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics, which includes a discussion of the Coombes case.
‘Pall Mall Gazette’. . . 4 November 1886.
‘agents for the overthrow of society’. . . Francis Hitchman in the article ‘Penny Fiction’: ‘We have cast out the unclean spirit of ignorance from the working-class mind, and left it empty, swept, and neatly garnished with “the three Rs”. Let us beware lest the unclean spirit returns with seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and turn the class we have made our masters into the agents for the overthrow of society.’ Quoted in Boone, Youth of Darkest England.
CHAPTER 8: HERE GOES NOTHING
It was common for a parent. . . See Rose, The Erosion of Childhood.
She switched between surrendering her authority. . . In Studies of Childhood (1895) the psychologist James Sully warned against ‘alternations of gushing fondness with almost savage severity, or fits of government and restraint interpolated between long periods of neglect and laisser faire’.
‘The Rock Rider’. . . A story by Frederick Whittaker, author of The Secret of Castle Coucy, first published in 1880 by Beadle’s Dime Library in New York and reprinted by the Aldine O’er Land and Sea Library in London in 1894.
Robert and Nattie’s father spent a week in New York. . . Details of employment of cattlemen and of the ship’s schedule in NMM: RSS/CL/1895/60015 SS France. For life on a cattleship, see Plimsoll, Cattle Ships; W. H. Davies, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908); I. M. Greg and S. H. Towers, Cattle Ships and our Meat Supply (1894); Chadwick et al., Ocean Steamships; and Report of the Departmental Committee of the Board of Trade and the Board of Agriculture on the Transatlantic Cattle Trade, C6350 (PP, 1890–91, vol. LXXVIII).
From the mouth of the Thames, wrote Joseph Conrad. . . In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). H. G. Wells describes the ‘monstrous variety of shipping’ on this stretch of the river: ‘great steamers, great sailing-ships, trailing the flags of all the world. . . witches’ conferences of brown-sailed barges, wallowing tugs, a tumultuous crowding and jostling of cranes and spars, and wharves and stores’ (Tono-Bungay, 1909).
‘The river runs. . .’ In Hueffer’s The Soul of London. Joseph Conrad writes that the Thames near the city ‘flows oppressed by bricks and mortar and stone, by blackened timber and grimed glass and rusty iron, covered with black barges, whipped up by paddles and screws, overburdened with craft, overhung with chains, overshadowed by walls making a steep gorge for its bed, filled with a haze of smoke and dust’ (The Mirror of the Sea, 1906).
On Sunday the ‘France’ docked. . . See NMM: RSS/CL/1895/60015 SS France. In The Atlantic Transport Line 1881–1931: a History with Details on All Ships (2012), Jonathan Kinghorn notes that in the 1890s cattle could be landed only at the Deptford wharf; the meat was sold at Smithfield Market. By 1896, more than 200,000 head of cattle a year were being landed in London (see Paula Young Lee, Meat, Modernity and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse, 2008). In ‘The Feeding of London’, published in The Leisure Hour in 1889, W. J. Gordon describes the process of transporting and slaughtering cattle (online at victorianlondon.org).
Canon Basil Wilberforce delivered a sermon. . . See East Ham Echo, 16 August 1895.
Lawrence explained in his letter. . . In West Ham Herald, 27 July 1895.
John William Fox was born. . . He was born on 19 April 1850 to Hannah Fox, who signed his birth certificate with a cross, in 4 Bell Yard, off Gracechurch Street. She was resident in the Flower Pot pub in Bishopsgate when he was sent to the Hanwell School, and she had married a shoemaker in Shoreditch, East London, by the time he was apprenticed to Lawrence – see LMA: CBG/359/006 and LMA: CBG/361/003.
industrial school in West London. . . See Central London District Poor Law School admission and discharge register, 14 Apr 1857–20 Jul 1863: LMA: CLSD/165 7.
apprenticeship . . . See City Board of Guardians Register of Apprenticeship and Service Papers 1866–97, LMA: CBG/36, apprentice bundles LMA: CBG/359/006 and LMA: CBG/361/003, and City of London Union Minute Books, March to Dec 1866 (2 volumes, LMA: CBG/47 and LMA: CBG/48). See also London City Press, 28 April and 20 October 1866.
a fire broke out. . . Account of fire on Egypt from Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 26 July 1890.
on which Fox had also once served. . . Fox joined the Erin at Gravesend in August 1885 as a captain’s servant on a voyage to New York (NMM: RSS/CL/1885/50274 SS Erin).
‘Evening News’. . . Interview conducted on 3 August and published 13 August 1895.
The new home secretary. . . See Manchester Courier, 17 August 1895.
‘Leeds Times’. . . 3 August 1895.
‘Lancet’. . . 17 August 1895.
‘Penny Dreadfuls Again’. . . See Evening News, 27 August 1895. The same headline was given in the Nottingham Evening Post on 10 September to an article about a fifteen-year-old from Shepherd’s Bush, West London, who had poisoned himself with carbolic acid. His father had given him a ‘good hiding’, the paper reported, because he had been out of work for a month. The boy left a note reading ‘I wish you to know the reason I did it is because I could not work’, but the judge none the less ascribed his death to his consumption of ‘literary offal’.
Hugh Chisholm. . . In ‘How to Counter-act the Penny Dreadful’, Fortnightly Review, November 1895.
Wilde’s decadent productions. . . See also Merrick Burrow, ‘Oscar Wilde and the Plaistow Matricide: Competing Critiques of Influence in the Formation of Late-Victorian Masculinities’, Culture, Society and Masculinities, 1 October 2012.
twenty boys at a north-west London board school. . . See Hampshire Advertiser, 21 August 1895.
‘epidemic of suicide’. . . See Evening News, 25 July, and The People, 28 July 1895.
childhood had been prized. . . See Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900 (2010), Henry Maudsley, The Pathology of Mind (edition of 1895), James Crichton-Browne, ‘Education and the Nervous System’ in Malcolm A. Morris (ed.), The Book of Health (1883), and Sully, Studies of Childhood.
interview to the ‘Evening News’. . . Published on 16 September 1895.
Sir Forrest Fulton. . . Fulton had been elected Conservative MP for West Ham North in 1886. When unseated by a Liberal in 1892, he was appointed Common Serjeant of London, deputy to the most senior permanent judge at the Old Bailey.
Kennedy proceeded to hear. . . See OBSP.
a fifth of Londoners. . . According to White’s London in the Nineteenth Century, one in five Londoners was a regular churchgoer in the 1890s. The proportion in the east of the city was even lower: Besant reported in East London that in a census on church attendance in 1886 just 7 to 8 per cent of East Londoners said that they took part in a form of worship on a Sunday.
Francis Longsdon Shaw. . . See Clergy List of 1896, Crockford’s Clerical Directory of 1898, and Nigel Scotland, Squires in the Slums: Settlements and Missions in Late Victorian Britain (2007). Shaw’s conversion was reported in the North Wales Chronicle of 30 August 1890 and his ordination in the Chelmsford Chronicle of 25 May 1894. For a photograph of the vicar and curates of St Andrews, including Shaw, see TNA: 1/436/885.
Allen Hay. . . See Crockford’s Clerical Directory of 1898.
a mandolinist called Miss Halfpenny. . . From West Ham Herald, 16 June 1894.
PART III: THESE TENDER TIMES
CHAPTER 9: COVER HER FACE
taken from their cells. . . For the trip to Newgate and Old Bailey, see Departmental Committee on Prisons, Report and Minutes of Evidence, PP, C7702 (1895).
Paul Koczula. . . See Haydn’s Dictionary of Dates and Universal Information (1895) and Morning Post, 15 August 1894.
the Old Bailey courthouse. . . For Old Bailey building and procedures, see Sims, Living London, Vol. I; R. Thurston Hopkins, Life and Death at the Old Bailey (1935); Anon, London Characters and the Humorous Side of London Life (1870); Anon, The Queen’s London: A Pictorial and Descriptive Record of the Streets, Buildings, Parks, and Scenery of the Great Metropolis in the Fifty-Ninth Year of the Reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (1896): Montagu Williams, Round London: Down East and Up West (1894); and the page on the Old Bailey on Lee Jackson’s website www.victorianlondon.org.
‘Star’. . . 16 September 1895.
‘pea-soupers’. . . See Inwood, City of Cities.
Justice William Rann Kennedy. . . See obituary in The Times, 18 January 1915, entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and report in Liverpool Echo, 28 October 1892. The National Portrait Gallery in London has a photograph of him in the early 1900s: NPG x35957.
The case against Robert and Fox. . . The prosecution case had been prepared by Frederick Frayling, a clerk in the joint office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and Solicitor to the Treasury. The total cost of the case to the Crown, from its inception on 19 July to its conclusion on 17 September 1895, was £63 10/ 10d – see Report of the Commissioners of Prisons and the Directors of Convict Prisons 1895–96, for the Year Ended 31 March 1896, PP, 1896, XLIV, p. 235.
Charles Gill. . . See obituary in The Times, 23 February 1923, and portrait by ‘Spy’ in Vanity Fair, 9 May 1891.
Horace Avory. . . See entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and caricature by ‘Spy’ in Vanity Fair, June 1904.
the Crown had made the fullest possible inquiries into Robert’s state of mind. . . This arrangement dated from 1886, when the offices of the Director of Public Prosecutions and Solicitor to the Treasury were merged, and the Treasury solicitor was required to ensure that any evidence about a prisoner’s sanity was placed before the court. See Tony Ward, Psychiatry and Criminal Responsibility in England 1843–1939 (DPhil thesis, 1996).
In reply to his questions . . . The examination of the witnesses is drawn from newspaper reports and the transcript of their testimony in OBSP. In places, a barrister’s question has been inferred from his witness’s response.
trajectory of degeneration . . . Bénédict Morel, Traité des Dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine (1857).
‘Sun’. . . 16 September 1895.
Newgate. . . See Griffiths, Secrets of the Prison House; Anon, The Queen’s London; Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives; and the Departmental Committee on Prisons’ Report and Minutes of Evidence, PP, C7702 (1895).
W. T. Stead in 1886. . . In ‘My First Imprisonment’, quoted in Priestley, Victorian Prison Lives. Stead was a renowned investigative journalist and crusader against child prostitution. He was a passenger on the Titanic in 1912, and died after the ship hit an iceberg.
‘Saturday Review’. . . 21 September 1895.
‘Spectator’. . . 21 September 1895.
a wax worker was offering models. . . In an advertisement in the Era, 27 July 1895.
a melodrama about the murder. . . See Spectator, 21 September 1895.
CHAPTER 10: THE BOYS SPRINGING UP AMONGST US
‘Evening News’. . . 17 September 1895.
‘London Daily News’. . . 18 September 1895.
‘Sun’. . . 17 September 1895.
From nine o’clock to twelve o’clock. . . For the board school regime, see Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street 1870–1914 (1986); Hugh B. Philpott, London at School: The Story of the School Board, 1870–1904 (1904); and Rose, The Erosion of Childhood.
endeavoured to train their young charges not to drop the ‘h’s. . . See Charles Morley, Studies in Board Schools (1897). In The Soul of London, Hueffer identified south Essex as the source of the ‘extraordinary and miasmic dialect’ of East London. As well as dropping and misplacing aitches, the late-nineteenth-century East Londoner would replace ‘e’ for ‘a’ in such words as ‘catch’, according to White’s London in the Nineteenth Century, ‘v’ for ‘th’ in words such as ‘they’ or ‘there’ and ‘ff’ for ‘th’ in ‘three’ and ‘thank you’. He or she would typically use double negatives (‘I don’t know nuffing’), double superlatives (‘more quicker’), pronounce ‘gate’ as ‘gite’ and ‘Victoria’ as ‘Victawia’. Most of the witnesses’ dialect in the Coombes case was standardised by the court reporters, but the occasional Cockney idiom slips through, for instance, in Mrs Hayward’s phrase ‘on the look’ or in an unaltered transcription of Nattie’s brief exchange with Robert after the murder: ‘I done it’; ‘You ain’t done it.’ Some of Robert’s penny bloods revelled in the street slang of East London. Cockney Bob in Cockney Bob’s Big Bluff is full of ripe expostulations: ‘Blow me, but you are a stunner’, ‘Oh, drop it, darling’, ‘Capital!’, ‘Well, I should smile!’
an academic ‘standard’. . . See William W. Mackenzie, A Treatise on the Elementary Education Acts, 1870–1891 (with the Acts in an Appendix) (1892).
‘oases’, as one commentator described them. . . Masterman, The Heart of Empire.
The Coombes boys’ first school. . . Details of Robert and Nattie’s changes of school are in the Grange Road School Admissions Register 1888–1906, Newham Archives. Robert reached the fourth standard in October 1892, according to this register, and left Grange Road for Stock Street in November 1893. Nattie left in July 1894 to attend the school at Cave Road, which opened that month. For the West Ham board schools, see Powell (ed.), A History of the County of Essex: Vol. 6. The National Archives has files on individual schools: Grange Road ED 21/5644; Stock Street ED 21/5679; Cave Road ED 21/5629.
‘Each school. . .’ In Booth (ed.), Life and Labour of the People in London, Vol. 1.
‘Singularly precocious. . .’ In the 1895 edition of Maudsley’s The Pathology of Mind. Victorian ideas of precocity are discussed in Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child, and in Nelson, Precocious Children and Childish Adults. As well as Little Father Time, Nelson cites the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist (1838) and Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island (1883) as literary examples of the precocious child in Victorian England. Their counterpart was the childish man, exemplified by the simple, sweet-hearted Mr Dick in David Copperfield (1850) – a figure as benign and innocent as John Fox.
‘Dictionary of Psychological Medicine’. . . Edition of 1892, ed. Daniel Hack Tuke.
The latest instalment of Thomas Hardy’s new novel. . . The serial ran in twelve instalments under the title The Simpletons and then Hearts Insurgent in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine between December 1894 and November 1895; in November it was published as the novel Jude the Obscure.
Little Time is an old soul. . . See ‘“Done because we are too menny”: Little Father Time and Child Suicide in Late-Victorian Culture’ by Sally Shuttleworth in Phillip Mallett (ed.), Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts (2003).
The Thames Iron Works. . . See Booth (ed.), Life and Labour of the People in London, Vol. I; A. J. Arnold, Iron Shipbuilding on the Thames: An Economic and Business History (2000); and the National Maritime Museum’s illustrated history of the Thames Iron Works at www.portcities.org.uk/london/server/show/ConNarrative.59/Thames-Ironworks.
the ‘Fuji Yama’. . . The ship’s construction was described in the Thames Iron Works Gazette of 29 June 1895, the edition that also announced the formation of the football club that later became West Ham United. The vessel was launched in September as the Fuji.
she had withstood years of relative hardship . . . For the role of boy workers in the family, see Childs, Labour’s Apprentices, Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (1993), and Clare Rose, ‘Working Lads in Late-Victorian London’ in Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England: Diversity and Agency, 1750–1914 (2013).
A couple of decades earlier. . . For the decline of the apprentice system see Urwick (ed.), Studies of Boy Life in our Cities. In Manchester Boys: Sketches of Manchester Lads at Work and Play (1905), C. E. B. Russell observes that the working lad was usually ‘set to some work which only calls for intelligence of the meanest kind. . . At this work he remains for week after week, year after year, his mind dormant, his hands moving with the precision and dullness of a machine.’
Coombes brought home £9 2/-. . . See NMM: RSS/CL/1895/60015 SS France.
CHAPTER 11: IT IS ALL OVER NOW
‘Star’. . . 17 September 1895.
‘Sun’. . . 17 September 1895.
Wynn Westcott. . . In Suicide: Its History, Literature, Jurisprudence, Causation and Prevention (1885).
cerebral irritation. . . In 1892 the Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease (vol. 19) reported on research by Dr Jules Simon into children with cerebral irritation. They were often melancholy, mentally unsteady, cruel to animals, oversensitive and capricious, said Simon. Sometimes they experienced epileptoid attacks, sometimes violent localised pains or impulsive movements. He recommended treating the condition with increasing doses of bromide of potassium.
sailed to New York on the SS ‘England’. . . The New York Times of 22 July 1895 reported that the pair sailed on the England in 1895; the ship’s voyage of January to March tallies with the dates of Robert’s absence from school. For dates and crew, see NMM: RSS/CL/1895/29996 SS England.
The ship was pelted with rain. . . Details of outward journey from New York Evening World of 7 February 1895. The Western Daily Press of 15 February 1895 claimed that the Atlantic crossing that month was the worst on record. In the Rudyard Kipling poem ‘Mulholland’s Contract’, which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette on 6 June 1895, the narrator describes cattle ships as ‘more like Hell than anything else I know’.
The Englands’ two older sons. . . See Grange Road School Admissions Register 1888–1906 in Newham Archives.
George Walker had been a prison doctor. . . For Walker’s background and his work at Holloway, see his testimony in the Departmental Committee on Prisons’ Report and Minutes of Evidence, PP, C7702 (1895). For his evidence in other Old Bailey trials see OBSP.
The insanity plea had become increasingly common. . . See Ward, Psychiatry and Criminal Responsibility in England 1843–1939; Martin J. Wiener, ‘Judges v Jurors: Courtroom Tensions in Murder Trials and the Law of Criminal Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century England’ in Law and History Review, Autumn 1999; Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law and Society in the Fin de Siècle (1989); and Joel Peter Eigen, ‘Diagnosing Homicidal Mania: Forensic Psychiatry and the Purposeless Murder’, Medical History, October 2010. Both Ward and Eigen discuss the Coombes case.
The ‘right from wrong’ test, said Maudsley. . . At the annual meeting of the British Medical Association on 1 August 1895, published in the Journal of Mental Science of October 1895. In 1890, the lunacy law expert Wood Renton claimed that a ‘silent revolution’ had taken place, whereby the ‘knowing right from wrong’ test was frequently ignored by judges and juries. See Ward, Psychiatry and Criminal Responsibility in England 1843–1939.
‘The brain is always compressed. . .’ The Dictionary of Psychological Medicine (1892) warned that clumsily applied forceps could cause brain damage.
‘Homicidal mania’. . . See Etienne Esquirol, Mental Maladies: a Treatise on Insanity (1845), and Eigen, ‘Diagnosing Homicidal Mania’.
the sole marker of insanity. . . See, for instance, ‘Insanity of Conduct’ by George H. Savage and C. Mercier in the Journal of Mental Science, April 1896, which argues that an act of violence can be ‘the one insane symptom’.
Walker had frequently been permitted. . . Ward, in Psychiatry and Criminal Responsibility in England 1843–1939, notes that medical witnesses were meant to testify only to the facts on which they based their opinions of a prisoner’s state of mind and not to the opinions themselves, but observes that this rule was honoured largely in the breach by the late 1880s.
a ‘hysterical’ woman. . . According to the Dictionary of Psychological Medicine (ed. Daniel Tuke, 1892), hysteria was characterised by an ‘undue prominence of feelings uncontrolled by intellect’ and was often attributed to ‘dammed-up sexual emotions’.
‘bromism’. . . In The Diagnosis of Psychosis (2011), Rudolf N. Cardinal and Edward T. Bullmore report that high doses of bromide, which was prescribed in the late nineteenth century as a sedative and anti-epileptic, can cause a neurotoxic condition in which the patient may become psychotic.
The last witness for the defence. . . For methods of attendance officers, see Philpott, London at School and David Rubinstein, School Attendance in London 1870–1904: A Social History (1969).
Since 1882 the law had stipulated. . . In 1882 Queen Victoria objected to the fact that Roderick Maclean, who had shot at her with a pistol, was found ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’, as the insanity verdict was then phrased. As a result, the wording of the verdict was changed to ‘guilty but insane’. While Sherwood’s argument might have had some merit before 1883, an insane defendant was now technically guilty of a crime.
‘Star’. . . 17 September 1895.
‘Lloyd’s Weekly’. . . 22 September 1895.
a strong recommendation to mercy. . . Juries had successfully pleaded for mercy on account of a defendant’s age in the trial of a twelve-year-old boy who had killed his grandfather with poison in 1847, and in the trial of a sixteen-year-old who had killed a fellow apprentice in 1867. In both cases, the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
Edis was keen to make clear. . . On 20 September 1895, Harry Edis wrote to the London Daily News to reiterate the jury’s position: ‘you say that Fox gets the benefit of the contention raised by counsel – that the insane can do no wrong, consequently there can be no accessory after the fact. Now, in fairness to Fox, I think it necessary to state that the verdict was not guilty upon the evidence.’
CHAPTER 12: BOX HIM UP
‘Broadmoor! ’. . . From ‘Christmas Day at Broadmoor: an Ex-Warder’s Story’ by R. J. Tucknor, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 20 December 1896.
newspapers and journals. . . Those quoted in this chapter include the Star of 17 September, The Times, St James’s Gazette, London Daily News, Pall Mall Gazette, Evening News and Daily Chronicle of 18 September, the Saturday Review, Lancet and Spectator of 21 September, and the News of the World of 22 September 1895.
The ‘Journal of Mental Science’. . . In January 1896.
Others pointed out. . . On 5 October 1895, the Graphic noted that ‘The “penny dreadful” scare, one notices with relief, appears to be slightly abating. . . The cheap romance of blood has really proved sometimes on a closer inspection to be not so very much more sanguinary than some of the modern classics of adventure.’
The Duchess of Rutland. . . Evening Telegraph, 3 December 1895.
The ‘Child’s Guardian’. . . See Monica Flegel, Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth- Century England: Literature, Representation and the NSPCC (2009), which refers to the Coombes case.
‘Was he, too, insane?’. . . The journal seemed to ridicule the idea that both boys were mad, but the phenomenon of folie à deux, a type of madness described in the Journal of Mental Science in April 1895, could conceivably have afflicted Robert and Nattie. This was a form of shared insanity that relied on the two sufferers having a similar predisposition and a deep and protracted intimacy – an affinity that was possible between siblings. It usually manifested itself in a shared persecutory paranoia that had some plausibility, as the Coombes boys’ terror of their mother might have done if her punishments were severe.
In a booklet. . . Quoted in Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England. According to Behlmer, of more than 10,000 families investigated by the NSPCC between 1889 and 1891, only about 400 had a weekly income below 20/-. More than 3,000 had an average family income of 27/-, well above the average weekly wage of 21/-. This indicated that abuse was by no means confined to very poor households. ‘The motive of cruelty is often the cruel person’s own self-loathing,’ observed an NSPCC report. ‘Generally speaking, the faults with which children are credited by cruel people are the illusions of bad minds. Hating the child, hateful things are seen in it. The devil in them sees a devil in the child.’
The ‘Illustrated Police News’. . . On 27 July and 3 August 1895.
the ‘Times’ critic J. F. Nisbet. . . In The Human Machine (1899).
Pierre Janet. . . Quoted in Nelson, Precocious Children and Childish Adults.
Frederic Myers. . . See his essay ‘The Subliminal Consciousness’ in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 1892.
PART IV: THE MURDERERS’ PARADISE
CHAPTER 13: THOSE THAT KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO
Broadmoor asylum. . . The Broadmoor archives are held at the Berkshire Record Office, Reading, Berkshire (BRO). For the layout, rules and routines at the asylum, see Rules for the Guidance of Officers, Attendants, and Servants of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum (1869); Mark Stevens, Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (2013) and Life in the Victorian Asylum: the World of Nineteenth Century Mental Health Care (2014); and the Superintendent’s annual reports 1895–1912, BRO: D/H14/A2/1/1.
‘Hampshire Telegraph’. . . 28 September 1895.
His occupation. . . See Admission Registers, 1863–1900, BRO: D/H14/D1/1.
the sun shone. . . See London Standard, 27 September 1895.
an undulating landscape. . . See George Griffith, Sidelights on Convict Life (1903) and ‘Warmark’, Guilty but Insane: A Broadmoor Autobiography (1931).
‘When questioned as to the murder. . .’ Note in Robert Coombes’s file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1671, dated 24 September 1895. Under the current protocol between the Berkshire Record Office and the West London Mental Health Trust, Robert’s case file is closed until 2042 (160 years after his birth), but the Trust allowed the BRO to disclose some of its contents.
Broadmoor was built in the early 1860s. . . For the history of the asylum, see Harvey Gordon, Broadmoor (2012); Stevens, Broadmoor Revealed; and Ralph Partridge, Broadmoor: A History of Criminal Lunacy and its Problems (1953).
the institution now held. . . Figures from the Superintendent’s annual report for 1895 in BRO: D/H14/A2/1/1.
joined in the admissions ward. . . From Admission Registers, 1863–1900, BRO: D/H14/D1/1.
Henry Jackson. . . See trial at OBSP; and Ward, Psychiatry and Criminal Responsibility in England 1843–1939.
Carmello Mussy. . . See his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1674, and his trial at OBSP.
‘Sheffield Independent’. . . 19 September 1895.
housed in single chambers. . . In a meeting at Broadmoor reported in the Journal of Mental Science of April 1901, both the superintendent and his predecessor argued against the dormitory system and in favour of single rooms for intractable and well-behaved patients alike.
An attendant drew the bolts. . . See ‘Warmark’, Guilty but Insane.
A few attendants kept watch. . . See Frederick Dolman’s article about Broadmoor in Cassell’s Magazine of February 1899.
The allotments were planted. . . See G. W. Steevens, Things Seen: Impressions of Men, Cities, and Books (1900).
Thomas Henry Townsend. . . Quoted in John Edward Allen, Inside Broadmoor (1953).
A typical dinner. . . See Superintendent’s annual reports in BRO: D/H14/A2/1/1.
the attendants had snipped out any articles. . . See Frederick Dolman’s piece in Cassell’s Magazine of February 1899.
‘Jude the Obscure’. . . See Hayden Church, ‘The Strange Case of Dr Minor: II’, The Strand, January 1916.
Throughout the night. . . See ‘A Visit to Broadmoor: a Day among Murderers’, Pall Mall Gazette, 17 February 1886.
an outspoken opponent of criminal anthropology. . . In Nicolson’s inaugural address as president of the Medico-Psychological Society, delivered in July 1895 and published in the Journal of Mental Science in October.
‘an insane man. . .’ and ‘I prefer to train up. . .’ See Nicolson’s evidence of 6 December 1894 in Departmental Committee on Prisons’ Report and Minutes of Evidence, PP, C7702 (1895).
Some of the patients. . . See Charles Arthur Mercier, The Attendant’s Companion: The Manual of the Duties of Attendants in Lunatic Asylums (1892).
no mechanical restraints. . . See ‘Broadmoor Asylum and Its Inmates’ in The Green Bag: an Entertaining Magazine for Lawyers (1893).
The attendants at Broadmoor. . . Information on staff at Broadmoor from the Defaulters Book, 1867–1922 (BRO: D/H14/B1/3/1/3); Order Book: Attendants, 1863–1900 (BRO: D/H14/A2/1/7/1); Register of Staff Appointments, 1862–1920 (BRO: D/14/B2/1/1); Staff Payments, 1863–1973 (BRO: D/H14/B3/1/1/3 and BRO: D/14/B3/1/1/4); and the Superintendent’s annual reports in BRO: D/H14/A2/1/1. Details of the staff’s ages, origins and families are chiefly from census returns; Broadmoor patients are included in the returns, too, though from 1901 they are identified only by their initials.
He would remind visitors. . . Such as Frederick Dolman, whose article about Broadmoor was published in Cassell’s in February 1899.
the mental condition of Oscar Wilde. . . See Harford Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde: the Aftermath (1963).
George Steevens. . . See Steevens, Things Seen; the chapter on Broadmoor was first published as ‘During Her Majesty’s Pleasure’ in the Daily Mail, 24 November 1897.
Robert Coombes was the youngest inmate. . . According to Gordon’s Broadmoor, one boy under sixteen had been admitted in the 1860s, one in the 1870s and one in the 1880s. Of the three, two had been convicted of arson. The ten-year-old arsonist who arrived in 1885 (who had turned twenty by the time of Robert’s arrival) became the longest-serving inmate of Broadmoor, remaining there until his death in 1962.
Nathaniel Currah. . . See BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1442; TNA: CRIM1/321; and articles in London Standard, 24 June 1889, Western Times, 25 June 1889, and the Era, 29 June 1889. His examination by the alienist Lyttelton Forbes Winslow is described in Winslow’s Mad Humanity: Its Forms Apparent and Obscure (1898). Though Sims does not name him, he describes their encounter in Cassell’s Saturday Journal, reprinted in the Otago Witness of 10 December 1902 as ‘Life Sketches in Sunshine and Shadow: Broadmoor’. Currah died in Broadmoor in 1915.
Several of Robert’s fellow Block 2 inmates. . . The assignment of some patients to the block is detailed in the Daily Log of Admissions, Removals and Deaths, Male, January 1898–April 1913 (BRO: D/H14/D1/7/1/1) and in the records of individual patients.
Richard Oakes. . . See his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1492, and OBSP. Oakes’ suicide note is reproduced in William Booth’s In Darkest England.
George Pett. . . See his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1689, and Sussex Advertiser, 17 February 1896.
‘From time to time. . .’ See ‘Warmark’, Guilty but Insane. The book’s author, George Penny, was not admitted to Broadmoor until 1923, but he reported that the delusional doctor was the ‘doyen’ of Block 2, having been there for more than forty years.
Archibald Campbell. . . See his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1798.
Isaac Jacob Mauerberger. . . See Reynolds’s Newspaper, 30 January 1887, and Leeds Times, 5 February 1887. He died in Broadmoor in 1925.
Roderick Maclean. . . Maclean’s case file (BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1095, closed until 2022) reportedly suggests that he was resident in blocks other than Block 2, but he played for the Block 2 team several times in the early 1900s, according to the asylum’s cricket books (BRO: D/H14/G1/1/1 and D/H14/G1/1/2). He seems to have been in the Block 2 day room during the visit by Sims in 1902 (Sims notices that a man who had shot at the Queen is reading a copy of Punch in the day room occupied by the most affluent inmates). His sonnet-writing in Broadmoor is described in an article by Julius M. Price in the Westminster Budget of 21 January 1898 – Price, too, seems to have seen him in the Block 2 day room. Maclean’s case is described in Paul Thomas Murphy, Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy (2012). Maclean died in the asylum in 1921.
William Chester Minor. . . See Simon Winchester, The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words (1998); Church, ‘The Strange Case of Dr Minor: II’ in The Strand of January 1916; and Stevens, Broadmoor Revealed.
Some wore frock coats . . . See Steevens, Things Seen.
On one of his visits. . . From Sims’s article in Cassell’s Saturday Journal in 1902.
George Sims was invited into a bedroom. . . See Daily Mail, 21 November 1905.
Alfred Gamble. . . See Morning Post of 12, 15 and 21 October 1895; London Standard, 15 October, 4, 5 and 13 December 1895; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 29 October and 8 December 1895; Lloyd’s Weekly, 8 December 1895. The Daily Log of Admissions, Removals and Deaths, Male, January 1898–April 1913 (BRO: D/H14/D1/7/1/1) indicates that he was discharged to the Salvation Army colony in Hadleigh in 1917.
pronounced him an imbecile. . . See OBSP.
‘Journal of Mental Science’. . . In April 1896.
Sherlock Hare. . . See his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1553.
the queen’s sixtieth jubilee. . . See Reading Mercury, 3 July 1897.
swine fever. . . See Superintendent’s annual report of 1899 in BRO: D/H14/A2/1/1.
the Boer War. . . See Reading Mercury, 18 November 1899 and 17 March 1900.
Jonathan Lowe. . . See BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1779 and TNA: HO144/558/A60060. Lowe was in Block 5, the other of the two privilege blocks, when he wrote his letter, and was later transferred to Block 2. Another inmate who liked Broadmoor better than the world beyond its walls was August Deneis (or Denies), a Dutchman who was detained in the asylum in 1886, having attacked his wife with a mallet. He was discharged as sane in 1895, and entrusted to the care of his children in France, but in November 1896 he turned up at the asylum gates, begging to be readmitted. He died in Broadmoor in 1903. See Deneis’ case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1714.
Lloyd’s Weekly. . . 7 August 1898.
A former inmate. . . Brailsford’s letter is in Lowe’s case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1779.
One elderly inmate. . . See ‘A Visit to Broadmoor: a Day among Murderers’, Pall Mall Gazette, 17 February 1886.
‘those that know not what they do. . .’ See Steevens, Things Seen. The inmate was alluding to Christ’s words on the Cross, cited in the Gospel According to Luke: ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’
the lunacy commissioners. . . See Partridge, Broadmoor.
Thomas Cutbush. . . See his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1523. Cutbush died in the asylum in 1903.
Arthur Gilbert Cooper. . . See Morning Post, 16 November 1887. He died in the asylum in 1927.
One morning in May. . . See Pett’s case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1689.
In November 1898, at the age of sixteen. . . See Daily Log of Admissions, Removals and Deaths, Male, January 1898–April 1913 (BRO: D/H14/D1/7/1/1).
CHAPTER 14: TO HAVE YOU HOME AGAIN
a letter written by Emily Coombes. . . Exhibit J in TNA: CRIM 1/42/9.
‘the nice little home. . .’ In Urwick (ed.), Studies of Boy Life in Our Cities, Reginald Bray reflects on the working-class ideal of ‘the little home’, which consisted not of the rented house itself but its moveable contents – the tables and chairs and pictures and ornaments. He notes the ‘pride and affection’ that the typical working family took in ‘the little home that they have got together’.
‘your mother or Annie’. . . That is, her husband’s mother Mary Coombes and his widowed sister Anne, who lived together in Lockhart Street by Bow cemetery.
‘Mrs Cooper. . .’ Robert at first pretended that his mother was visiting a Mrs Cooper when his aunt confronted him in the back parlour on 17 July 1895.
That Sunday’s newspapers. . . For instance, Lloyd’s Weekly of 7 July 1895 reported that meat prices were ‘still depressed’ but ‘firmer than last week’. The same paper carried an advertisement for Light Ahead at the Theatre Royal in Stratford, the play that Robert and Nattie were to attend two days later.
hazy with heat. . . See Evening News and London Daily News, 8 July 1895.
219–20presumably to sell or pawn. . . It was common practice to pawn blankets and coats in the summer, with the intention of redeeming them in winter. See Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet.
CHAPTER 15: IN THE PLASTIC STAGE
Robert was allowed back. . . See Daily Log of Admissions, Removals and Deaths, Male, January 1898–April 1913 (BRO: D/H14/D1/7/1/1).
worked in the tailors’ shop. . . Notes in his file (BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1671) indicate that he was working there in May 1896 and on 18 November 1904. ‘Shows a fair degree of application at work in tailor’s shop,’ according to a note dated 5 April 1897. In total, according to the Superintendent’s reports, about forty-five men worked in the various workshops.
They cut the winter jackets. . . See Superintendent’s annual reports in BRO: D/H14/A2/1/1 and ‘Warmark’, Guilty but Insane.
an eighth of the going rate. . . See Griffith, Sidelights on Convict Life.
Charles Leach Pike. . . His appointment as master tailor was announced in the London Gazette of 2 January 1895. The Reading Mercury noted his participation in many shows and concerts over the next twenty years.
vice-captain of the Broadmoor Cycling Club. . . Reading Mercury, 18 March 1899.
The costumes for the shows. . . Reading Mercury, 2 January 1904.
an enthusiastic member of the asylum’s brass band. . . Notes in Robert’s file (BRO: D2/2/1/1671) in 1905, 1907 and 1911 indicate that he was playing in the ‘asylum band’, presumably the brass band, and in 1907 he was said to take a ‘great interest’ in it. Since he emerged from Broadmoor able to play the violin and piano as well as the cornet it is likely that he also played with the string band, which was accompanied by the tailor Charles Pike and included Block 2 staff such as Coleman and Block 2 patients such as Frank Rodgers.
The editor of ‘The British Bandsman’. . . Sam Cope, quoted in Trevor Herbert, The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History (2000).
a concert on the Broadmoor cricket pitch. . . Reading Mercury, 2 June 1900.
his impersonation in November 1900. . . Reading Mercury, 24 November 1900.
Sherlock Hare. . . See his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1553.
the death of Queen Victoria. . . Reading Mercury, 26 January and 9 February 1901.
the coronation. . . Reading Mercury, 13 December 1902.
a fireball. . . Reading Mercury, 16 June 1900.
an attendant’s three-year-old son. . . Reading Mercury, 30 June 1900.
an attendant was invalided out. . . Reading Mercury, 8 November 1902.
Coleman hurried to the aid of William Chester Minor. . . Minor was discharged to the care of his brother in America in 1910.
‘RAC rather depressed. . .’ Noted in his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1671.
excelled at billiards. . . Noted in 1902 in his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1671, and reported in Martin Smith’s blog streathambrixtonchess.blogspot.co.uk.
a frayed old table. . . See Griffith, Sidelights on Convict Life. ‘I should say that it dates from somewhere in the Fifties,’ observes Griffith. ‘At any rate, it looks a great deal older than the asylum itself, although, of course, it amply fulfils its purpose, and is quite as suitable for the playing of a match between a homicide and an incendiary as the most up-to-date exhibition table would be.’
taking bets in batches of tobacco. . . See Sims’s article of 1902 in Cassell’s Saturday Journal.
allotted an ounce of tobacco. . . See Griffith, Sidelights on Convict Life.
Dr Brayn used to tell. . . See Hargrave Lee Adam, The Story of Crime: From the Cradle to the Grave (1908).
played chess. . . According to a note in his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1671, reported in streathambrixtonchess.blogspot.co.uk.
Edward Oxford. . . and Richard Dadd. . . See Stevens, Broadmoor Revealed, Murphy, Shooting Victoria, and streathambrixtonchess.blogspot.co.uk.
Reginald Saunderson. . . See TNA: CRIM1/41/4 and Winslow, Mad Humanity. For his chess prowess, and details of the match in which he and Robert competed between 1903 and 1904, see Tim Harding, Correspondence Chess in Britain and Ireland 1824–1987 (2010) and streathambrixtonchess.blogspot.co.uk. Reginald Treherne Bassett Saunderson died in Broadmoor in 1943.
both Robert and Saunderson played cricket. . . For cricket players, see cricket score books at BRO: D/H14/G1/1/1 (July 1904 to Aug 1906) and D/H14/G1/1/2 (June 1907 to July 1908).
the asylum’s strictures on cricket. . . See Rules for the Guidance of Officers, Attendants, and Servants of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
the Reverend Hugh Wood. . . See cricketarchive.com. Wood left Broadmoor in 1906 and was succeeded by the Reverend Albert Whiteley, a Yorkshire grammar-school boy and Cambridge graduate who remained at the asylum until 1934.
the laying of a new pitch. . . See Partridge, Broadmoor.
Sandhurst Royal Military College and the Windsor police. . . See cricket score book 1907–08, BRO: D/H14/G1/1/2.
listed in the local paper. . . Reading Mercury, 6 July 1907.
George Melton. . . See London Standard, 13 March 1896, and BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1695.
Henry Spurrier. . . See Hampshire Advertiser, 18 February 1899. According to the admissions register (BRO: D/H14/D1/1), he was discharged to the care of the Salvation Army in 1923.
Kenneth Murchison. . . One of the best gunners in South Africa, Murchison had played a decisive part in the battle of Cannon Kopje at the beginning of the siege of Mafeking. When the Boers prepared to attack Mafeking on 31 October 1899, Colonel Baden-Powell sent about fifty men to fight them off from a small hill outside the walls. Murchison was put in charge of a seven-pounder cannon, which he used to tremendous effect, and by the end of the day the small band of British soldiers had defeated a force of about a thousand Boers. The next evening, Murchison dined at Dixon’s Hotel in Mafeking with a British war reporter. The pair drank heavily and in the course of the meal Murchison’s companion began to taunt him, accusing him of knowing nothing about guns; as they left the hotel, the journalist followed the lieutenant out into the town square, still goading him. Murchison suddenly pulled out his pistol and shot the man dead. Afterwards Murchison was bewildered and distraught, claiming to have no memory of the shooting. Pending his court-martial, he was confined in a gaol in Mafeking, from which he was temporarily released – with a rifle – when the Boers launched a heavy attack on the town in May 1900. He helped to drive back the enemy by nightfall and then returned to his cell. In June 1900, after the relief of Mafeking, Murchison was court-martialled by Baden-Powell, found guilty and sentenced to death. Thanks to a petition by his friends, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he was sent to Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight. In 1902, the South African war ended with a British victory over the Boers. After further pleas for clemency, Murchison was deemed to have been insane at the time of his crime, and was transferred to Broadmoor. See Oxford Journal, 11 August 1900, Lloyd’s Weekly, 3 June 1900, Warwick Argus, 22 September 1900, and TNA: HO144/946/A61992. He died in Broadmoor in 1917.
Thomas Shultz. . . See trial in OBSP. Shultz was discharged to the care of his father in 1910.
Frank Rodgers. . . Account of his crime from the Cambridge Daily News, 3 and 4 June 1904, and the Herts and Cambs Reporter and Royston Crow, 14, 15, 16, 21 and 29 April 1904, reproduced on meldrethhistory.org.uk. Details of his crime and his time in Broadmoor from TNA: HO144/995/119149.
Thomas Anstey Guthrie’s ‘Vice Versa’. . . The boy in this novel is discussed in Nelson, Precocious Children and Childish Adults.
Granville Stanley Hall’s ‘Adolescence’. . . Quotes from Ferrall and Jackson, Juvenile Literature and British Society 1850–1950. Hall claims that psychoses and neuroses are especially common in early adolescence. He reminds his readers of ‘the omnipresent dangers of precocity’ in ‘our urbanised hothouse life, that tends to ripen everything before its time’, and recommends that a child be encouraged to visit nature, the ‘wild, undomesticated stage from which modern conditions have kidnapped and transported him’. Quoted in Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child.
He was one of 175 patients. . . See Partridge, Broadmoor.
Patrick Knowles. . . See TNA: T1/11342 and TNA: HO144/11429.
In his fifteen years in charge. . . See Partridge, Broadmoor.
In the most recent of these. . . See Gwen Adshead, ’A transient frenzy?’, British Medical Journal, 1 August 1998.
The band played. . . Reading Mercury, 3 February 1912.
Dr Brayn had taken the view. . . In a report in Robert’s case file (BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1671) dated 20 July 1905, Brayn assessed his mental condition as ‘rational and tranquil’, but replied ‘yes’ when asked whether his insanity might recur if he were discharged. A Home Office note in the file suggests that the same assessment was made each May between 1906 and 1911.
As Brayn told a visiting journalist. . . See Griffith, Sidelights on Convict Life.
Baker wrote to the home secretary. . . Letter in Robert’s case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1671.
‘He is not likely to trouble the Broadmoor authorities. . .’ From ‘Mustard & Cress’, a column written by George Sims under the alias Dagonet, Sunday Referee, 22 September 1895.
he handed back his uniform. . . For the discharge process, see ‘Warmark’, Guilty but Insane.
in the custody of Charles Pike. . . According to a note in Robert’s case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1671.
PART V: WITH TRUMPETS AND SOUND OF CORNET
CHAPTER 16: SMOOTH IN THE MORNING LIGHT
An Essex woman. . . See Chelmsford Chronicle, 15 March 1912.
Colony at Hadleigh. . . For a history of the colony, see H. Rider Haggard, The Poor and the Land: Report on the Salvation Army Colonies in the United States and at Hadleigh, England, with Scheme of National Land Resettlement (1905) and Regeneration: Being an Account of the Social Work of the Salvation Army in Great Britain (1910); Mark Sorrell, ‘The Farm Colony at Hadleigh, Essex’ in Essex Journal, spring and winter 1992; Anon, Hadleigh: The Story of a Great Endeavour (Salvation Army Press, 1902); Walter Besant, ‘The Farm and the City’, Living Age, 29 January 1898; Anon, ‘Up from Despair: the Salvation Army Industrial Colony at Hadleigh’ in Boston Evening Transcript, 4 May 1901; Gordon Parkhill and Graham Cook, Hadleigh Salvation Army Farm: A Vision Reborn (2008).
The Salvation Army. . . See Pamela J. Walker, Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain (2002) and Boone, Youth of Darkest England.
8,000 of the 11,000 Mancunians who volunteered for service. . . See Urwick (ed.), Studies of Boy Life in Our Cities, which also reported that 30 per cent of young men examined for the Army nationwide were rejected as unfit, and a further 40 per cent were thrown out in their first two years of service. The decline in men’s health was attributed by the author to the massive shift of population over the previous fifty years from the country to the town.
‘We came down in a farm wagon. . .’ Quoted in an illustrated guide to the Hadleigh farm colony published by the Salvation Army in 1926.
despatched to Canada. . . Essex Newsman, 29 March 1912.
he wrote to the chief steward. . . Robert’s requests and acknowledgements, addressed to Alexander Sayer at Broadmoor from Castle House in Hadleigh, are in his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1671.
He could see. . . Description of the view adapted from the Salvation Army publication Hadleigh: the Story of a Great Endeavour.
Robert’s father had moved out. . . When he left London as chief steward on the France on 10 October 1895, he gave his address as 509 Barking Road, Plaistow – see NMM: RSS/CL/1895/60015 SS France.
found time to visit his son. . . A note in Robert’s case file, BRO: D2/2/1/1671, shows that his father visited on 26 November 1895 – no further visits were recorded from him or anyone else, but the case files rarely include such records and no visitors’ log from the period survives.
Charlie Sharman was declared bankrupt. . . For his bankruptcy and theft from clients, see Essex Newsman, 12 September 1896, and Chelmsford Chronicle, 20 November 1896. For his alleged assault, see Chelmsford Chronicle, 19 February 1897. For his career in organised crime, see James Morton, East End Gangland (2009). He was convicted of theft at the Old Bailey in 1925, at the age of seventy-five, and sentenced to three years’ penal servitude. He died in 1933, five years after his release from Dartmoor prison.
Nattie remained the smaller. . . See his Royal Navy record, TNA: ADM 188/500/306663.
‘the lowest class of sailorman’. . . Robert Machray, The Night Side of London (1902).
Nattie had been scarred. . . See his Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy records, TNA: ADM 188/500/306663 and NAA: A6770, Coombes NG.
The stokers ‘come and go. . .’ In Chadwick et al., Ocean Steamships.
He had been lent. . . See Nattie’s RAN record of service, NAA: A6770, Coombes NG.
HMAS ‘Australia’. . . See Vince Fazio, The Battlecruiser HMAS Australia, First Flagship of the Royal Australian Navy: A Story of Her Life and Times (2000) and www.navy.gov.au/hmas-australia-i.
‘I have been down many coal mines. . .’ See Maitland Daily Mercury, 27 September 1913 .
hailed by the defence minister. . . See www.navy.gov.au/hmas-australia-i.
to execute his father’s will. . . When probate was granted on 11 October 1913, Robert gave his occupation as ‘tailor’ and his address as ‘West View, Hadleigh’ – West View was a two-storey dormitory with its own library, which had been built in 1912.
He sailed on 2 January 1914. . . See passenger list for SS Otranto in TNA: Passenger Lists Leaving UK 1890–1960 (BT 27).
She sailed out to the Atlantic. . . See Sydney Evening News and Perth Daily News, 3 February 1914.
Nattie had lodgings. . . For Nattie’s address in Australia, see RAN record of service, NAA: A6770, Coombes NG. He gave his next of kin as his cousin Robert Macy, the son of his aunt Mary, who had moved to Newcastle, NSW, a few years earlier.
He found work. . . See 13th Battalion embarkation roll, AWM: 8/23/30/1.
CHAPTER 17: SUCH A HELL OF A NOISE
When war broke out. . . See Peter Pedersen, The Anzacs: Gallipoli to the Western Front (2007).
About a quarter. . . See Peter Hart, Gallipoli (2011).
Robert trained in a series of camps. . . Account of training camps from Thomas A. White, The Fighting Thirteenth: The History of the 13th Battalion AIF (1924); Arthur Graham Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, 1914–1918, Volume I – Gallipoli, Palestine and New Guinea (2nd edition, 1938); Winsome McDowell Paul, Blessed with a Cheerful Nature: a Reading of the Letters of Lieutenant George Stanley McDowell MC, 13th Battalion AIF 1914–1917 (2005); and diary of Charles Francis Laseron, ML: MSS 1133, at Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.
Robert was assigned to the 13th Battalion. . . For his service with the 13th Battalion, from September 1914 to December 1915, see 13th Battalion embarkation roll (AWM: 8/23/30/1) at Australian War Memorial in Canberra (awm.gov.au) and his AIF record (NAA: B2455, Coombes RA) at National Archives of Australia in Canberra (naa.gov.au).
Robert was one of about twenty-eight men selected. . . A picture of the band was published in Sunday Times, Sydney, 29 November 1914.
the band marched through Melbourne. . . See diary of Byron Hobson, AWM: 2DRL/0694.
During the six-week voyage. . . Account of life on board from diaries of the 13th Battalion soldiers William Frederick Shirtley (AWM: 2DRL/0792), Byron Hobson (AWM: 2DRL/0694), Charles Francis Laseron (ML: MSS 1133) and Eric Susman (ML: CY4933 1–98). See also Barrier Miner, 5 February 1915, and Bea Brewster and Marie Kau (eds), Diary of Bandsman H. E. Krutli, D Company, 14th Battalion, 4th Infantry Brigade Australian Imperial Forces (AIF): September 1914 to April 1916 (2009). Krutli played with the 14th Battalion band, which travelled on the same transport as the 13th.
The 13th trained hard. . . Account of 13th in Egypt from diaries of Laseron, Shirtley, Susman and Hobson (see above), 13th Infantry Battalion war diaries November 1914–December 1915 (AWM: 4, 23/30/1–14) and White, The Fighting Thirteenth.
‘The Terror’. . . See photographs by Joseph Cecil Thompson at www.flickr.com/photos/eethompson.
the same penny fiction. . . A few commentators connected the spirit of the dreadfuls to the practice of war. ‘Do not grow indignant when you see an errand boy with his eyes glued to a penny dreadful!’ cautioned the Aberdeen Evening Express on 23 May 1917. ‘We have seen in the heroism of our battlefield the result of the love of courage and adventure it engenders and keeps alive.’ In the Century Magazine of November 1916, St John G. Ervine described the armed insurrection in Dublin in Easter 1916 as an accident that grew out of romantic fantasies: ‘It was as if boys, letting their imaginations feed too fat on penny dreadfuls, had forgotten that they were only pretending to be wild Indians attacking Buffalo Bill, and had suddenly scalped a companion or halved his skull with a tomahawk.’
At the start of a night march. . . Described by the 13th Battalion bandmaster, Percy ‘Richo’ Copp, Reveille, 1 May 1940.
their battalion’s stretcher-bearers. . . Account of training from George M. Dupuy, The Stretcher Bearer (1915).
On 11 April, recalled Sergeant Charles Laseron. . . Account of trip to Gallipoli mainly from Laseron’s diary (see above), and his article in the Sunday Times, Sydney, on 11 July 1915. In the newspaper version, he softened the punchline of the song about Major Ellis, replacing ‘May God strike him dead’ with ‘Something strike him red’. Details also drawn from White, The Fighting Thirteenth; diaries of Susman, Hobson and Shirtley (see above); Copp’s reminiscences in Reveille, 1 May 1940; and recollections of Lt W. H. Mankey in Sunday Times, Perth, 11 June 1916.
Gallipoli. . . Account of Gallipoli campaign chiefly from Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vols I & II (11th edition, 1941); Pedersen, The Anzacs; Hart, Gallipoli; Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, 1914–1918, Vol. I. Details of 13th Battalion at Gallipoli from White, The Fighting Thirteenth; the battalion’s war diaries November 1914–December 1915 (AWM: 4, 23/30/1–14); Thomas Ray Crooks’s war diary, 11 February 1915 to 24 May 1918 (ML: MSS 838); and diaries of Laseron, Hobson, Shirtley (see above).
The bearers were kept busy. . . See Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, 1914–1918, Vol. I; Emily Mayhew, Wounded: From Battlefield to Blighty, 1914–18 (2013); Mark Johnston, Stretcher-Bearers: Saving Australians from Gallipoli to Kokoda (2015); Joseph Lievesley Beeston, Five Months at Anzac: a Narrative of Personal Experiences of the Officer Commanding the 4th Field Ambulance, Australian Imperial Force (1916); and war diary of Frederick Wray, chaplain to 4th Brigade, AWM: PR00247.
‘The stretcher-bearers are great. . .’ From letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald by Harold G. Massey, cited in P. Cochrane, Simpson and the Donkey: the Making of a Legend (1992).
Private Ray Lingard. . . Letter printed in Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, 16 July 1915.
James Dow. . . See transcript of Dow’s letter at ddoughty.com. According to his AIF record (NAA: B2455, Dow, JG), Dow was invalided home with neurasthenia in April 1916. According to Ben Shephard’s A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (2000), the troops most vulnerable to shell shock in the First World War were those who were obliged to endure enemy assaults without being able to retaliate.
‘It was just hell pure and simple. . .’ George McClintock, quoted in Pedersen, The Anzacs.
‘Some of these are very ghastly. . .’ Quoted in Pedersen, The Anzacs.
‘We have been fighting now. . .’ Quoted in Hart, Gallipoli.
‘There is not a front line. . .’ In a letter to Sorrell’s parents in Lithgow, reproduced in Sydney Morning Herald, 29 June 1915.
‘Grenades like showers of peas. . .’ Quoted in Hart, Gallipoli.
Robert had escaped serious injury. . . He had been blown up twice on Gallipoli and also sustained a gunshot wound, according to the information he gave on being discharged – see repatriation case file NAA: C138/ R30557.
Robert’s fellow bearer James Dow. . . See ddoughty.com.
About 10,000 AIF soldiers. . . See Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, 1914–1918, Vol. I.
Nattie was also serving. . . Some 850 Royal Navy men were serving with the Royal Australian Navy at the outbreak of the war, comprising about a fifth of the RAN. Nattie’s war career is detailed in NAA: A6770, Coombes NG. For the fortunes of the Australia see Arthur Wilberforce Jose, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 Volume IX: The Royal Australian Navy, 1914–1918 (9th edition, 1941) and Fazio, The Battlecruiser HMAS Australia.
‘The perspiration dripped. . .’ See Richmond River Herald, 4 January 1916.
rabbit-skin coats. . . See Graphic, 9 June 1916.
transferred to one of the sanitary sections. . . Robert was assigned to the 3rd Sanitary Section in February and transferred to the 4th Sanitary Section when the 4th Division was created in March. For his service with the 4th Sanitary Section, from March to October 1916, see NAA: B2455, Coombes RA; the 4th Sanitary Section war diaries (AWM: 4 26/79); and Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, 1914–1918, Vol. II – The Western Front (1941).
building box-latrines. . . Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol. III: the Australian Imperial Force in France, 1916.
the first anniversary of the Gallipoli landings. . . See McDowell Paul, Blessed with a Cheerful Nature.
recommended for a Military Medal. . . See www.awm.gov.au/people/rolls/R1583110.
incidence of shellshock. . . 236 cases were diagnosed in the 4th Division in 1916, compared to three in the 3rd Division, according to Butler’s Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, 1914–1918, Vol. II; the author points out that this may have been in part because the 4th’s Medical Officer was more inclined to diagnose the condition.
Sergeant Rodgers. . . See Frank Rodgers’s record (regimental number 47019) in TNA: British Army WW1 Service Records, 1914–20 and his medal card at TNA: WO 372/17/65366. The record indicates that Frank’s life after the war was rockier. In 1929 he was remanded at Marylebone police court on a charge of larceny and receiving. He died in Lambeth in 1965.
45th Battalion. . . For Robert’s service with the 45th Battalion, from October 1916 to October 1918, see NAA: B2455, Coombes RA; the 45th Battalion diaries (AWM: 4 23/62); Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, 1914–1918, Vol. II; and J. E. Lee, The Chronicle of the 45th Battalion, AIF (1927).
the ‘London Gazette’ announced. . . On 27 October 1916. See www.awm.gov.au/people/rolls/R1542612.
‘It was too bad! ’. . . Cairns Post, 28 April 1919.
Robert proved an effective bandmaster. . . According to the reminiscences of Henry Herbert Neaves of the 45th Battalion (AWM: 2DRL/0752), Robert ‘proceeded to lick the bandsmen into shape’. In his history of the 45th Battalion, J. E. Lee reported, ‘The men soon became very proud of their band whose influence in assisting to maintain the morale of the unit in the strenuous months ahead was invaluable.’
William Alabaster. . . See NAA: B2455, Alabaster W, and letters from Alabaster to his family, AWM: 1DRL/0016.
The AIF no longer used its musicians. . . In ‘The Stretcher-Bearer Tradition’, an essay in As You Were: A Cavalcade of Events With the Australian Services From 1788–1947 (1947), Charles Bean explained, ‘Until the First Battle of the Somme many battalions had used their bandsmen as stretcher-bearers. After that battle this system generally was abandoned. For one thing, after such battles the band was too badly needed for cheering up the troops! A battle like Pozières sometimes made a clean sweep of the regimental bearers. Also, on its side, the work of the bearers was too important to be left to unselected men; they were now specially selected for their physique and guts.’
marching out to meet the troops. . . In a diary entry of 26 February 1917, Thomas Ray Crooks records, ‘Our Band came up from “Dernancourt” this afternoon and gave the Bn some music, cheered the boys up a little’ (ML: MSS 838).
it struck camp once every five days. . . See Lee, The Chronicle of the 45th Battalion, AIF.
the band sometimes led the way. . . In diary entries of 27 February 1917, for example, Thomas Crooks and James Vincent of the 45th record that the band led the battalion from Mametz to Bècourt (Crooks diary, ML: MSS 838, and Vincent diary, AWM: PR90/025).
The mechanisms in the men’s rifles. . . See E. P. F. Lynch, Somme Mud: The Experiences of an Infantryman in France, 1916–1919, a fictionalised memoir by a 45th Battalion soldier, composed in the 1920s, edited by Will Davies and published in 2006.
On the coldest nights. . . See G. D. Mitchell, Backs to the Wall: A Larrikin on the Western Front (1937).
Christmas Day 1916. . . See war reminiscences of H. H. Neaves, AWM: 2DRL/0752.
‘We live in a world of Somme mud. . .’ From Lynch, Somme Mud.
Herring recommended him for the Military Medal. . . See www.awm.gov.au/people/rolls/R1594096. The award was announced in the London Gazette, 16 August 1917 – see www.awm.gov.au/people/rolls/R1520876.
‘We’re a pretty casual sort of army. . .’ From Lynch, Somme Mud.
Robert and his friend Bill Alabaster. . . Robert told Red Cross staff that he had spent a leave with Alabaster and knew his people in Forest Gate (Red Cross wounded and missing roll, AWM: 1DRL/0428).
A photographer took a series of pictures. . . The photographs were taken at Meteren on 6 March 1918. See AWM: E01790 and E01791.
On 5 April he was hit by a shell. . . See Red Cross wounded and missing roll, AWM: 1DRL/0428.
the Grand Theatre. . . They performed at the Grand Theatre du Havre on 15 and 16 August 1918. See AWM: PUBS002/004/001/001/015.
granted special leave. . . See NAA: C137/ R30557.
He and the other soldiers were greeted. . . See Sydney Morning Herald, 30 December 1918.
Of the 32,000 men. . . See Anthony MacDougall, ANZACs: Australians At War (1991).
EPILOGUE: ANOTHER BOY
‘the air was electrical’. . . See Morrison, Tales of Mean Streets. ‘Several large and successful movements had quickened a spirit of restlessness in the neighbourhood,’ he writes, ‘and no master was sure of his men.’
‘a stirring and an agitation. . .’ From Masterman, The Heart of Empire.
it has remained a very rare crime. . . See C. M. Green, ‘Matricide by Sons’, Medicine, Science and the Law, 21 (1981); and Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States (1998).
281–2Adolescent boys who kill their mothers. . . See Kathleen M. Heide and Autumn Frei, ‘Matricide: a Critique of the Literature’ in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse II (2010); Kathleen M. Heide, Understanding Parricide: When Sons and Daughters Kill Parents (2012); B. F. Corder, B. C. Ball, T. M. Haizlip, R. Rollins and R. Beaumont, ‘Adolescent Parricide: A Comparison with Other Adolescent Murder’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 133 (1976); K. M. Heide, Why Kids Kill Parents: Child Abuse and Adolescent Homicide (1992); D. J. Scherl and J. E. Mack, ‘A Study of Adolescent Matricide’, Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychology, 5 (1966); D. H. Russell, ‘A Study of Juvenile Murderers of Family Members’, International Journal of Offender Therapy & Comparative Criminology, 28 (1984); Frederic Wertham, Dark Legend: a Study in Murder (1941); E. Tanay, ‘Adolescents who Kill Parents: Reactive parricide’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 7 (1973).
Psychiatrists have suggested. . . See Wertham, Dark Legend, Green, ‘Matricide by Sons’, Scherl and Mack, ‘A Study of Adolescent Matricide’.
in myth and literature. . . See Gilbert Murray, Hamlet and Orestes (1914); M. Kanzer, ‘Dostoevsky’s Matricidal Impulses’, Psychoanalytic Review, 35 (1948); Green, ‘Matricide by Sons’; Wertham, Dark Legend and ‘The Matricidal Impulse: Critique of Freud’s Interpretation of Hamlet’, Journal of Criminal Psychopathology, 2 (1941); Aeschylus, Oresteia (circa 458 BC); Robert Bloch, Psycho (1959); Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1861); William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (circa 1600).
a psychiatrist. . . Carine Minne, consultant psychiatrist in forensic psychotherapy at Broadmoor Hospital, Berkshire, and the Portman Clinic, London.
a photograph of his gravestone. . . On austcemindex.com.
Henry Alexander Mulville. . . Account of his life from a handwritten memoir by Harry Mulville and from conversations and emails with his youngest daughter and her husband.
a hand-cranked punt. . . Charles Mulville paid £135 a year for the right to run the Tyndale ferry – see Lismore Northern Star, 18 January 1918. Harry said that he took £15 a month in fares.
Sydney Mail. . . 29 June 1927.
Smith’s marriage was dissolved. . . The dissolution of his marriage to Pearl May Smith (née Garland) was announced in the Sydney Morning Herald, 15 January 1930. Entry on Harold William Smith, Pearl May Smith and Victor Rose (co-respondent) in the Matrimonial Causes files at the New South Wales State Library in Sydney (8/3110, 482.1928 and 8/3110, 1543.1928). ‘I would not go back to Smith again,’ Pearl told the official who served divorce papers on her. For his marriage to Bertha, see Grafton Daily Examiner, 10 May 1930.
a well-known and well-to-do family. . . See obituaries of his father and mother, William and Elizabeth Smith of Wollongbar House, in Lismore Northern Star, 25 April 1923 and 13 May 1925.
declared bankrupt in 1898. . . See Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, 19 February 1898.
he had served for only five months. . . He was a part-time trooper with the New South Wales Lancers from 1900, and volunteered for the AIF in November 1915. See NAA: B2455, Smith W. See also Jean Bou, Light Horse: a History of Australia’s Mounted Arm (2009).
convicted of assaulting a man. . . See Lismore Northern Star, 11 March 1899.
Robert had settled in Nana Glen. . . He appears in New South Wales electoral registers as a farmer in Glenreagh and Nana Glen from 1920 to 1949. For the experience of soldiers in the aftermath of the Great War, see Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return (1996).
the dense web of the bush. . . For history of the flora and fauna of the Orara Valley see Orara River Rehabilitation Project, Landholders Booklet, published by Coffs Harbour City Council in 2012.
The region around the Orara. . . For history of the area, see Mary and Clarrie Brewer, Looking Back: Nana Glen, 1879–1979 (1979), Annette Green and Margaret Franklin, A History of Nana Glen Primary School, 1892–1992 (1992), Elizabeth Webb, Glenreagh: a Town of Promise (1998), John Vader, Red Gold: the Tree that Built a Nation (2002), Nan Cowling (ed.), Coffs Harbour Time Capsule Book: 1847–2011 (2011).
The cans were collected. . . Account of the Orara to Grafton cream truck run in Sydney Morning Herald, 29 March 1932. For dairy industry, see Terry Kass, Regional History of the North Coast (1989).
Nana Glen public school. . . Harry enrolled at the school in September 1928, according to the Nana Glen Public School Register 1928–1981 at the Coff’s Harbour District Family History Society.
Cundy was injured. . . Grafton Daily Examiner, 30 July 1930.
Harry was seriously injured. . . See Grafton Daily Examiner, 21 June 1930, and Sydney Morning Herald, 23 June 1930. None of the family is identified in these reports.
Harold Smith moved with his family to Grafton. . . Smith was found guilty of assaulting Isaac Cundy, and fined a further £7 plus £10 9/- in medical and witness expenses. See Grafton Daily Examiner, 30 July 1930.
he had to re-enrol. . . See Nana Glen Public School Register 1928–1981, Coff’s Harbour District Family History Society.
the band kept going. . . In 1925, for instance, the 45th Battalion band performed in a competition in Taree, 150 miles south of Nana Glen, in a military tattoo to welcome the American fleet to Sydney, and in the Sydney Armistice Day parade (Cessnock Eagle and South Maitland Recorder, 5 May 1925, Sydney Morning Herald, 31 July and 10 November 1925). From 1928, the band also played at battalion reunions. The popularity of brass bands in Australia faded after the advent of radio in the 1920s. See Duncan Bythell, ‘The Brass Band in the Antipodes: the Transplantation of British Popular Culture’, in Herbert, The British Brass Band.
competed in chess tournaments. . . See Australasian, 26 November 1927 and 14 January 1928.
after a year of drought. . . See Barrier Miner, Brisbane Courier-Mail, Grafton Daily Examiner and Lismore Northern Star, 29 October 1936, and Brewer, Looking Back. In 1945 Robert wrote to the AIF to request replacements for the discharge papers that had been destroyed in the blaze (see NAA: B2455, Coombes RA). He said that since he did not have his birth certificate he needed the papers for ‘some legal formalities’ – he may have been applying for a pension: if he had been born in 1886, as he had claimed when he joined the Army in 1940, he would have been about to turn sixty.
the 15th Light Horse Regiment. . . The Light Horse had just doubled its troopers’ pay to eight shillings a day. See Bou, Light Horse.
The couple won. . . See Grafton Daily Examiner, 14 October 1938 and 6 June 1939.
Robert volunteered for the 8th Garrison Battalion. . . See NAA: B884, N105727. Call for recruits and terms of service in Newcastle Morning Herald, 21 November 1940.
led the Armistice Day parade. . . See Newcastle Morning Herald, 10 November 1941.
Harry was training. . . See his service records, NAA: B883, NX46646.
in 1946 he was guest of honour. . . Grafton Daily Examiner, 7 March and 13 June 1946.
died on 7 May. . . See death certificate, repatriation case file NAA: C138, R30557 and obituary in Grafton Daily Examiner, 13 May 1949.
The assets he had bequeathed to Harry. . . See deceased estate files at State Records Authority of New South Wales: NRS 13340/B29325/20/4740.
he appealed to the War Graves Commission. . . See NAA: C138, R30557.
Harold Smith, who had died in 1944. . . See obituary in Grafton Daily Examiner, 21 December 1944.
For details of newspapers and periodicals, unpublished papers, parliamentary papers, websites and ‘penny dreadfuls’, see Notes.
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Winslow, Lyttelton Forbes, Mad Humanity: Its Forms Apparent and Obscure (London, 1898)
Thanks above all to the late Harry Mulville, who died in Coffs Harbour in August 2014, to his daughter Joy Northcott and her husband, John, for their tremendous trust and generosity, and to Harry’s other children, who made it possible for their sister to help me. I was also helped in Australia by Iain Couper in Coffs Harbour, Rachel Hollis at the State Records Authority of New South Wales, the Bloomsbury team in Sydney, and the staff of the Australian War Memorial, the National Library of Australia, the Mitchell Library, the State Library of New South Wales, the Coffs Harbour District Family History Society and the Coffs Harbour City Library.
Mark Stevens at the Berkshire Record Office gave me invaluable information about Broadmoor, as did Amlan Basu, Sheena Ebsworth and Estelle Morris at Broadmoor Hospital and, especially, Carine Minne at the Portman Clinic in London. Thank you to the staff of the British Library, the London Library, the National Archives, the Wellcome Library, the London Metropolitan Archives, Reading Central Library, Stratford Library, the Museum of London Docklands and the National Maritime Museum. I am grateful to Steve Holland for his research on penny dreadfuls, to Martin Smith for his knowledge about chess at Broadmoor, to Saul David and Mark McKenna for their help on the Great War, and to Sally Shuttleworth for her guidance on childhood in Victorian England. For excellent advice, thank you to Deborah Cohen, Chris Hilliard, Chris Hilton and Rada Vlatkovic.
Huge thanks to my friends and my family, particularly to Sam Randall and to those who read or talked to me about this book as I was writing, among them Philippa Barton, Lorna Bradbury, Cristina Bruno, Alex Clark, Toby Clements, Will Cohu, Hal Currey, Tamsin Currey, Miranda Fricker, Manuela Grayson, Stephen Grosz, Victoria Lane, Sinclair McKay, Ruth Metzstein, Chris Michallet, Kathy O’Shaughnessy, Robert Randall, John Ridding, Fotini Roberts, Martha Stutchbury, Wycliffe Stutchbury, Claire Sturge, Ben Summerscale, Juliet Summerscale, Lydia Syson, Georgia Vuksanovic and Keith Wilson.
Thank you again to my agent, David Miller, to the rest of the brilliant team at Rogers, Coleridge & White, including Laurence Laluyaux, Stephen Edwards, Peter Robinson and Federica Leonardis, to Julia Kreitman at The Agency and to Melanie Jackson at MJA. I am grateful to my wonderful editors, Alexandra Pringle and Anna Simpson in London and Virginia Smith Younce in New York. Thank you also to Kate Johnson for her superb copy-editing; to Vicky Beddow, Richard Charkin, Madeleine Feeny, David Mann, Nigel Newton and Rachel Nicholson at Bloomsbury; and to Ann Godoff and Scott Moyers at Penguin Press. And my thanks to the other publishers who have supported this book – Dominique Bourgois in Paris, Sofia Ribeiro in Lisbon, Nikolay Naumenko in Moscow, Andrea Canobbio in Turin and Henk ter Borg in Amsterdam.