CHAPTER 4

A Crime of Lunacy
1861

I was reading a newspaper last week and there were accounts of some most dreadful murders in it, and to think that I should be the cause of another!

On Tuesday 26 March 1861, the men of the 3rd Regiment of the Royal Surrey Militia were stationed in their barracks in Kingston. For the married men, such as Sergeant Major Charles Bradish, a forty-year-old, born in London, their wives were also sleeping there. Bradish had enlisted in the 36th Regiment of Foot, the Herefordshire Regiment, in 1850 and served for ten years, before joining his current unit. Next door to the Bradish’s room there slept on a sofa Diana Wickens, a woman of twenty years, who was Mrs Martha Bradish’s stepsister. Martha had been born in Woolhampton, Berkshire, in about 1816. Miss Wickens had been in domestic service for the last eighteen months, but was now without a place and for the last two weeks had stayed with the Bradishes, which was Mrs Bradish’s suggestion, rather than her going to stay with relatives in Berkshire. She was literate and had been seen copying religious tracts.

Bradish left the marital bed at about seven that morning and stepped out into the parade ground. Almost as soon as he had left, his wife, a tall, powerful, plain middle-aged woman, went next door to where her stepsister slept. With her she took one of her husband’s razors, which he kept in a drawer in their room.

Shortly afterwards, Sergeant Alexander Oates was crossing the parade ground. He later recalled:

I was going towards the quarters of Sergeant Major Bradish … when I saw Mrs Brandish come out from them very excited. She came up to me and said, ‘Come in Sergeant Oates; I have murdered my sister’. I observed at this time that the prisoner’s hands were covered with blood, and she went to the pump and washed them. Seeing her excited state, and knowing that her husband was not in his quarters, as I had observed him go out a minute or two before, I thought something had happened and I went into the prisoner’s room and the first thing I saw was a young woman lying in the floor with her throat cut. I saw her limbs move and she was covered with blood.

Oates immediately left the room and went to find Mrs Bradish’s husband and then a doctor. When he returned, the woman, who was only wearing a chemise, and whose name he then did not know, was dead.

Mr Cory, a surgeon, of St James’ Road, Kingston, had returned with Oates. It was now just after seven. He later recounted what he saw:

She was dead, but the flesh was quivering and she was quite warm. I observed a large wound on the right side of her neck, which completely divided the carotid artery, the jugular vein and the windpipe, and on the ring finger on the right hand I also observed a lacerated wound. The prisoner was in the room and when she saw me, she said, ‘Oh God, doctor, if I had had your advice before this would never have happened.’ I looked around the room to see if I could find any instrument with which the injuries had been inflicted, and then asked the prisoner how she had done it, and she took a razor from a drawer and then handed it to me. It appeared to have been recently washed.

The doctor had seen Mrs Bradish in the previous year, when she was suffering from a diseased liver. He recalled:

She had been, I believe, in the West Indies, and this had caused the malady from which she was suffering. She was very ill at that time, but she recovered, and I advised her to keep herself quiet and free from excitement.

Mrs Bradish was indeed not a well woman. She had contracted yellow fever whilst she and her husband were in the West Indies in 1857. She suffered from pains in the head and took laudanum for her sleeplessness and had troubled dreams.

PC John Gunner was the first policeman on the scene. Mrs Bradish told him, ‘I have cut that young woman’s throat and you must take me to the station.’ With the arrival of the police, Mrs Bradish was taken to the police station, and Elizabeth Barker, wife of a police sergeant there, searched her. She found some blood on her stocking, apparently caused when Mrs Bradish walked across the room without any shoes on. Sergeant Parsonage received her. He read the charge against her and cautioned her. She was very excited, and on seeing a newspaper, remarked, ‘Oh, a newspaper. I was reading a newspaper last week and there were accounts of some most dreadful murders in it, and to think that I should be the cause of another!’ Then she said, ‘I know where I am. I am in the station house.’

Inspector Armstrong was at the police station at 9am. He entered the charge against her on the police sheet. When he first saw the prisoner, she said, ‘This is a shocking thing I have done.’ He then cautioned her about saying anything else until she saw a legal representative.

On 26 March, at Kingston Town Hall, the magistrates held court. Mrs Bradish kept interrupting the proceedings by hysterical sobs and emotional shouts. All the time, her husband (never named in newspaper accounts) held her hand. She was committed to trial at the next sitting of the Assizes. Meanwhile, the inquest was held at the Compasses Inn in Kingston, two days later and the jury decided that this was a case of murder and that Martha Bradish was responsible.

Martha Bradish was tried at the Home Circuit Assizes, held at Croydon, before Mr Justice Blackburn, on 5 August 1861. She pleaded ‘not guilty’. Mr Robinson was the prosecutor and argued that there could be no doubt that Mrs Bradish had struck her step sister a fatal blow. The question, rather, was whether she was responsible for her actions or not. Jealousy nor anger were the motives for the murder. The facts of the murder were then recounted. Medical evidence suggested that Mrs Bradish had suffered from ‘foreign climates’ and this might have affected her mental state.