The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

by Kate Summerscale

  Those prisoners charged with murder or attempted suicide – on average two new admissions a day – were placed under the observation of George Walker, the Holloway medical officer, so that he could report to the Treasury on their mental condition. Dr Walker interviewed Robert, Nattie and John Fox soon after their admission. In the prison register, he listed Robert’s occupation as ‘errand boy’, his level of education as ‘imperfect’ and his mental state as ‘unsound’. He observed that Fox seemed very slow-witted.

  In the afternoon of Sunday 21 July two violent thunderstorms broke over London, unleashing the heaviest fall of rain in eight months. The streets and buildings were pelted with hailstones. After the downpour, noted the London Standard, the city looked ‘a fortnight younger’, its parks and gardens refreshed, its birds singing out in relief. The Evening News reported that an inch of water had fallen into the Lea, the river that divided West Ham from the rest of London, ending the longest drought in a hundred years.

  Robert, Nattie and John Fox were recalled to the West Ham magistrates’ court on Thursday 25 July. A magistrates’ court could not try capital crimes, but the hearing before Baggallay would determine whether the prisoners were to be committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. The boys and Fox were taken by three police constables from Holloway to Stratford, where they were met by Detective Inspector Mellish. It was a grey, warm morning, the air close and still. The prisoners alighted at the courthouse to find about a thousand people gathered on West Ham Lane in the hope of catching sight of them.

  Robert and Nattie had no legal representation, but a friend of Fox – probably his former master John Lawrence – had engaged a Stratford solicitor, Charles Crank Sharman, to defend him. Sharman met his client at the courthouse that morning.

  Charlie Sharman, forty-five, was a flamboyant, charismatic figure in the West Ham courts, known for sporting exotic flowers in his buttonhole and for mounting bold and often successful defences. In 1894 he secured the acquittal of a Walthamstow church verger, who had been charged with assaulting a seven-year-old girl, by arguing that it was ‘highly unlikely’ that he would risk his position by committing such an act. Sharman had been almost undone as a lawyer four years earlier, when a former clerk wrote a letter accusing him of attempted sexual assault. Sharman retaliated by prosecuting the clerk for blackmail and his case was supported in the West Ham court by Baggallay – a fellow Conservative Party activist, and therefore a political ally as well as a colleague. But when the case reached the Old Bailey in May, the court heard evidence that Sharman had a history of indecent assaults on men and women; the jury not only acquitted the clerk on the charge of blackmail but said that they believed him to have been justified in sending his letter. The disgrace to Sharman should have been devastating – the penalty for a homosexual assault was life imprisonment – but he was practising again in the East London courts by the end of the month. A call in the press to have him struck off the rolls went ignored, and though he resigned his post as Conservative agent for the constituency of West Ham North, by 1895 he had been reappointed even to this.

  Sharman had spent the summer of 1895 working as election agent for Ernest Gray, the Tory candidate in West Ham North, and his efforts paid off when, on 15 July, Gray took the seat from the Liberal incumbent. Since Gray had been absent through illness during the campaign, Sharman claimed the credit for the win. He seemed to be riding high when he took on John Fox’s defence, thoroughly restored to his position of influence in the district.

  Ernest Baggallay reached the courthouse before 10 a.m., much earlier than he had done on the previous Thursday. The reporters and the public pushed in to find their seats as soon as the court opened. When the usher called ‘Silence!’ they rose to their feet and Baggallay entered to take his place on the bench. He began by dealing with the charges against the men and women who had been arrested the previous day and held overnight at police stations in West Ham. The Coombes brothers and John Fox were called at 11.15 a.m.

  The court was hushed as Fox, Nattie and Robert walked in. They climbed the steps to a raised platform in the middle of the room, enclosed on three sides by iron rails and guarded on the fourth by a burly police constable. Fox looked even scruffier than before. He was no longer wearing Mr Coombes’s Sunday best, and instead had put on a greasy, ragged blue serge suit – it was ‘the sort of thing one expects to see on engine cleaners and stokers’, said the reporter from the Star. The Evening News correspondent described Fox as ‘a short squat man, clad in loose, wrinkled garments that hang flabbily from his sloping shoulders. He is limp and dingy looking, his hair tumbled, and a weedy growth of dark moustache and beard showing against the soiled pallor of his face.’

  Robert, by contrast, was a picture of composure and wellbeing. He was ‘a slim, active-looking lad of average height, healthy, and browned with open air and sunshine’, reported the Evening News: ‘such a boy as we see in scores on any playground of the people on a summer’s afternoon, wearing a dark blue tennis coat, piped with silk cord, white flannel trousers, turned up at the end, and brown leather shoes. He is cleaner than most boys of his class, his turn-down collar white, his sunburnt face well washed, his close cropped dark hair brushed off his forehead.’ To wear a shirt with a collar was a mark of respectability – the labouring classes usually went collarless – and the cricket flannels and tennis blazer also smacked of social aspiration: whereas football was a predominantly working-class game, both cricket and lawn tennis were preferred by the middle and upper classes.

  The Evening News reporter allowed himself a brief meditation on how Robert’s mother might have troubled herself over the burst of hair lifting off his forehead: ‘There is no curl in the bunch of it that rises stiffly from his brow,’ he wrote; ‘it is such obstinate hair as mothers labour at in the hope to coax it into a neat parting, and one thinks that a dead hand has often wrestled with its stubbornness when the church bells were ringing on a Sunday morning.’

  Nattie was wearing pale breeches, dark stockings, and a jacket with a white sailor collar. Though there was only a year between the brothers, he was dressed in the clothes of a schoolboy and Robert in those of a young man. Robert seemed quite the Cockney dandy, a worldly Dodger to Nattie’s wide-eyed Oliver Twist.

  Guy Stephenson, aged thirty-three, the son of the Director of Public Prosecutions and a barrister who practised at the Old Bailey, was first to address the court. As the junior lawyer in the legal team that would prosecute the case if it were tried, he was preparing the case for the Crown. He had performed a similar role in the trial of the murderer James Canham Read the previous year.

  ‘After very careful consideration,’ said Stephenson, ‘I wish to ask Your Worship to discharge the younger boy. I then intend putting Nathaniel Coombes into the witness box and asking him to tell us the whole story. He has not been approached, and would be merely asked to tell his story.’

  ‘Do you propose to offer any further evidence against the lad Nathaniel?’ said Baggallay. ‘At present I must say I see no evidence against him at all.’ Either the magistrate had not understood Stephenson’s request, or he was trying to claim the idea of dismissing Nattie as his own, because he asked him exactly the question that had just been put to him: ‘Would it not be as well if he should at once be discharged?’

  ‘If you please, Your Worship,’ said Stephenson.

  ‘Then he may be discharged,’ said Baggallay. ‘Let him stand down and go into that room till he is called for.’

  A police sergeant took Nattie to an anteroom. He was now to be a witness against his brother.

  Baggallay called the first witness, Police Sergeant Charles Orpwood of the Barking Road station, who had measured up 35 Cave Road. The sergeant produced a plan of the house and described its layout to the court. On the ground floor, Orpwood explained, were a passage, or hallway, a front parlour and a back parlour, each parlour measuring eleven foot by nine foot nine inches. Upstairs were two bedrooms, each fourteen foot wi
de and nine foot deep, with a communicating door. The staircase between the two floors had fourteen steps, and cut across the house, dividing the front and back parts. The house was narrow, with a total width of fifteen feet. The back yard, which contained a washhouse (elsewere described as the kitchen) and a privy, was about fifteen foot long.

  Next to be called were Mary Ann Brecht, who ran a general store at 273 Barking Road (two doors up from the undertaker who had arranged Emily Coombes’s funeral), and John Brecht, fourteen, the youngest of her five sons. The Sun characterised the Brechts’ store as a ‘kind of old curiosity shop’. Mrs Brecht had sold Robert the knife found next to his mother’s body.

  John appeared first. He said that he had been alone in his mother’s store when Robert Coombes had come in about three weeks earlier and pointed to a dagger among a set of knives displayed on a card in the window. ‘Johnny,’ he had said, ‘how much do you want for that knife in the window?’ John said that the knife cost sixpence. Robert said: ‘I will come tomorrow and see Mrs Brecht about it, and ask what will be the lowest you will take.’ John told the court that he remembered Robert as a fellow pupil at the North Street board school in Plaistow.

  Since Robert still had no solicitor to represent him, Baggallay gave him a chance to put his own questions to the witnesses: ‘Do you wish to ask any questions, Robert Coombes?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Robert. ‘I never went to North Street school, and I never knew his name.’ Robert had attended three West Ham schools, but North Street was not among them. This was irrelevant to the case: Robert was not disputing that he had been to the shop and enquired about the knife. By correcting John Brecht, he was acting like a schoolboy eager to score a point. He seemed to have little sense of what was at stake for him in this hearing.

  Baggallay addressed the witness. ‘Have you seen the prisoner before?’

  ‘Yes,’ said John Brecht.

  ‘Where?’ asked Baggallay.

  ‘I have seen him in the Broadway,’ said John, abandoning his claim that they had been schoolmates, ‘near my mother’s other shop.’ This was Plaistow Broadway, where Mrs Brecht had a second store, just north of Cave Road.

  Mary Ann Brecht, fifty-two, the daughter of a dairyman and the wife of a house painter, was next to testify. She said that Robert had entered her shop in the Barking Road on Wednesday 3 July or Thursday 4 July and asked her: ‘How much do you want for that knife in the window?’ ‘Which one?’ she said. He pointed to the knife and she told him it was sixpence. ‘Is that the lowest you will take for it?’ asked Robert. ‘Yes,’ she replied; ‘it is very cheap.’ Robert accepted the price and Mary Ann Brecht fetched the knife for him, asking if he wanted it wrapped up. ‘Yes please,’ he said. Mrs Brecht wrapped the knife and handed it to him. He gave her a sixpenny piece and she, relenting, gave him a penny in change. ‘It will make your mother a fine breadknife,’ she said. ‘Oh yes,’ said Robert as he left.

  The police produced the blood-stained knife in evidence. It was a sailor’s sheath knife with a curved, beak-like point, which had been made to look like a dagger by a cross-guard of brass between the four-and-a-half-inch blade and the black handle. The News of the World observed that it was nothing like a kitchen implement, but rather ‘a terrible dagger’, ‘the kind of knife one sometimes sees in the possession of a Malay sailor or a swarthy coolie hanging about the docks’. In assuring Robert that it would make his mother a good breadknife, Mrs Brecht may have been trying to assuage her unease about selling him just the kind of sharp, showy weapon that a boy might like to brandish.

  The court heard evidence from the pawnbrokers with whom Fox had pledged goods. William White of George Fish’s pawnshop in the Commercial Road remembered taking a gold-plated American watch from a short, dark man who gave the name Robert Coombes. He showed the watch to the court. Henry Goldsworthy of Ashbridge & Co produced a silver watch, which he said had been pledged by a short, dark man wearing a sailor’s peaked cap. Richard Bourne, who ran the pawnbrokers by Plaistow station, showed the court Robert’s mandolin.

  Aunt Emily, who had given evidence the previous week, was called back to answer questions about the pawned goods now laid out in the courtroom. The mandolin was Robert’s, she confirmed. The gold watch was his father’s, but his mother used to wear it when her husband was at sea. The silver watch was bought for Robert, she said, though she was not sure whether it had been given to him. She knew that he used to wear the watch when his father was away.

  Stephenson asked her how old Robert was.

  ‘He is thirteen years of age,’ Emily said.

  Baggallay interrupted to point out that they had a better authority for Robert’s age. ‘You have the certificate,’ he said to Stephenson. ‘Put it in.’

  Stephenson handed over a copy of Robert’s birth certificate, which Detective Inspector Mellish had obtained from the Registry for Births, Marriages and Deaths at Somerset House the previous day.

  Baggallay looked at the certificate. ‘He was thirteen last January,’ he observed. ‘It is not important as a matter of evidence, but it is important as a matter of fact.’

  Rosina Robertson of 37 Cave Road came forward to testify. Mrs Robertson, twenty-eight, was the wife of James, the painter and decorator who had changed Robert’s sovereign on 8 July. The couple had three boys, aged between one and six, and had recently moved to Plaistow from Canning Town. She and her husband had last seen Emily Coombes standing at her front door on the Saturday evening before her death, she said, and had stopped to chat to her for a few minutes.

  ‘On the evening before the discovery of the body,’ she said, ‘at about ten o’clock or a quarter past, I heard voices in the front bedroom of number 35.’

  She was asked if they were men’s or boys’ voices.

  ‘I could not say,’ she replied. ‘I called my husband’s attention to them.’

  She said that she had seen a swarm of flies at the two upper front windows of number 35, and had noticed that the blinds of the room were raised on Wednesday 10 July. She first saw Fox at the house on the same day.

  Charlie Sharman, on behalf of John Fox, questioned Mrs Robertson about the voices she had heard on the night before the body was discovered.

  ‘I was in bed at the time I heard the voices,’ she said – her bedroom was adjacent to Mrs Coombes’s bedroom next door. ‘The voices sounded as if they were in the front room, or on the little landing, I could not say which. The landing was at the top of the stairs.’

  Sharman asked Mrs Robertson exactly when the blinds had been raised and when she first saw Fox.

  ‘The blinds were up on Wednesday morning. It was not until the evening that I saw Fox.’

  Baggallay asked her how she came to notice him.

  ‘I was on the look,’ said Mrs Robertson, ‘like everyone else was.’

  John Hewson, the National Line cashier, told the court how Robert visited his office with the medical certificate attesting to Emily Coombes’s illness. Hewson said he had noticed that the top had been torn off the certificate, and he was not inclined to trust the boy in any case. A year or two earlier Robert had called on him and said: ‘My mother is very ill in bed – will you let me have £2?’ On that occasion, Hewson had given him the money and then discovered his story to be false.

  Stephenson asked him: ‘And two days later did the mother come and see you? What did she say?’

  ‘No, no,’ interrupted Baggallay, ‘we can’t have that. It is a fact that the boy called, and that he got the money.’

  Constable Twort testified that Robert’s letter to Hewson had been found in Fox’s jacket after his arrest.

  Inspector Gilbert produced the letters that he had found at 35 Cave Road. Baggallay glanced through them, and read out to the court Robert’s letter to the Evening News and then the letter that he had written to his father, in which he claimed that his Ma’s hand was hurt.

  Robert was calm throughout, occasionally letting a slight smile pass over his lips but otherwise betr
aying no emotion. The reporter from the Evening News noticed that he was none the less keenly aware of the journalists in the room. ‘Of all the people in this Court none seems so cool and unconcerned as this boy,’ he wrote. ‘He stands easily in the dock, his hands crossed on the rail in front of him, his eyes sometimes following the movements of the witnesses, but more often straying to the right, where the busy pens of the reporters are at work on their table.’

  As each witness prepared to leave the box the magistrate asked Robert: ‘Have you any questions to put?’ and Robert replied briskly: ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Even when evidence of the most fatal kind is being given against him he does not lose his indifferent air,’ noted the Evening News, ‘or the unconcerned smartness of his negative reply. He might be a confident pupil, sure of his answers to the teacher, so little does the tragedy in which he is the central figure move him.’

  Fox, on the other hand, seemed scared out of his wits. His face, said the reporter, was ‘almost blank in its expression of stupidity, straining to follow the thread of evidence. He keeps his hands clenched behind his back, the fingers ceaselessly shifting their grasp of each other in the effort to fix and retain a steady grip.’

  Nattie, too, looked terrified. Having been brought back into the courtroom to await his turn in the witness stand, he sat on a bench leaning against the shoulder of a ‘motherly woman’. He struck the Evening News reporter as ‘a poor little puny fellow. . . with a white face and eyes that bear traces of recent tears’. Though he had now been discharged from custody, ‘his little pale face is more full of fright and concern than that of the lad who stands in the dock’.