The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

by Kate Summerscale

  In the 1870s, Fox left the Lawrences and moved east to West Ham. There was plenty of work in the district for coopers, who made and repaired barrels for the docks, the breweries and the sugar refineries, but he began to take jobs on the ships. Fox became a servant to captains (he was paid just over £1 for each voyage) and then an assistant steward with the National Line, working for a time under Robert and Nattie’s father. He performed menial duties, cleaning and cooking for the officers and crew, and earned about £3 per voyage, less than half of the amount paid to the chief steward and £1 less than the ordinary sailors. Between trips, he lodged in a carpenter’s house in Canning Town.

  In the summer of 1890 Fox was one of ninety-five men aboard the Egypt, the largest of the National Line steamships, as it crossed the Atlantic from New York to Liverpool with a cargo of cattle and cotton. On 17 July a fire broke out in the ship’s hold. All the men on board worked furiously to douse the burning cotton bales with hoses and jets of steam, while the 600 cows tied up on the decks hollered in pain as the flames licked at them. Eventually, the master told his men to abandon ship.

  The sailors were lowered into the water in six lifeboats. They rowed away and after a quarter of a mile stopped to look back. They saw the mainsail fall blazing into the ship’s heart. Some of the cows broke free of their halters and leapt away from the flames into the sea, then struggled to swim clear of the burning vessel. The oarsmen rowed hard to avoid being capsized by the terrified, thrashing creatures.

  A passing ship saw the distress signal set off by the Egypt’s boatswain and sailed to the rescue of the men in the lifeboats. Once the sailors had been lifted to safety, the captain’s wife tended to their burns. For hours afterwards, the men occasionally spotted a cow beating its legs against the water until it gave up the fight and surrendered to the sea.

  The rescued sailors were conscious of their luck. Six months earlier the National Line steamship Erin, on which Fox had also once served, had vanished in the middle of the Atlantic with 527 head of cattle and seventy-four men. The two disasters wiped out the National Line’s reserve funds.

  John Fox had been badly burnt in the fight to put out the Egypt’s fire. He was so shaken by his experience that he developed a stutter, and a horror of the open sea. He did not serve on a ship again.

  In August 1895 John Lawrence visited his former apprentice in prison and forwarded a transcript of their conversation to the Evening News.

  ‘How came you to be in the house with the boys Coombes for days after they killed their mother?’ asked Lawrence in the interview, published on 13 August.

  ‘They came and fetched me from the ship,’ said Fox.

  ‘How came you to be wearing their father’s clothes?’

  ‘Robert Coombes said they were a misfit,’ said Fox, ‘and his mother told him to give them to me.’

  Lawrence asked him what share of the money from the pawnbrokers Robert had given to him.

  ‘He did not give me any share at all,’ said Fox. ‘He gave me nothing.’

  ‘But surely, if you gave him all the money, he gave you some back?’

  ‘No. Not a penny.’

  ‘Is it true that you went with a letter to Mr Hewson containing an application for money?’

  ‘Yes; Robert told me to take it and I did.’

  ‘Did he read the note to you, or give it to you open?’

  ‘No, he did not read it to me and he fastened it up.’

  ‘How, then, did you know that it contained an application for money?’

  ‘Well, I supposed so because he told me to wait and bring some money back.’

  ‘Did you not smell something very disagreeable?’

  ‘No, nothing at all,’ said Fox. ‘My smell is not very good and they must have opened the windows upstairs to let the smell out. Oh, they are two very wicked boys.’

  Lawrence asked him to explain how Mrs Coombes’s purse came to be found in his pocket.

  ‘I put it there myself. Robert Coombes gave me that and a shilling at the same time, and that was the only money he gave me all the time I was there.’ Fox was apparently contradicting himself on the issue of whether Robert had given him any money, but this seemed a sign of confusion rather than dishonesty.

  Lawrence asked him if he would have stayed in the house if he had known what had been done to Emily Coombes.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Fox. ‘I would have run out of the house as fast as I could. I would not have stayed there if I had known it for a thousand pounds.’

  The polling for the general election had concluded on 7 August with a Conservative victory. Lord Salisbury was appointed prime minister.

  The new home secretary, Sir Matthew White Ridley, Bt, almost immediately addressed the matter of the penny dreadfuls. He told the House of Commons on 16 August that there was little prospect of restricting the publication of such works, as a Home Office inquiry of 1888 had been unable to demonstrate a connection between cheap books and juvenile crime. Under existing laws, only publications that were blasphemous, obscene or seditious could be banned.

  Though the government declared itself powerless to act against the dreadfuls, the press continued to make a connection between the Coombes boys’ books and their crime. The Leeds Times surmised that the brothers ‘had lived in a world of hallucination’, their brains addled by the cheap and fantastical stories that they kept in the back parlour. Confusing the real and the imaginary, they ‘had begun to look on daggers as lead pencils, quite as harmless and innocent in making their mark’.

  In an editorial on the case, the medical journal The Lancet explained the process by which the dreadfuls could foster violence. People of a lower evolutionary type, the journal said, had an ape-like tendency to imitation. If exposed to stories of suicide or murder, degenerate individuals might be impelled to act them out.

  ‘Penny Dreadfuls Again’, ran the headline in several papers when a fifteen-year-old errand boy stole a metal clock in London in mid-August. The mother of the boy said that his behaviour had been exemplary until he became keen on such stories – all he wanted now was to go to sea and read books about pirates. The magistrate looked over the samples of literature with which the mother presented the court, and shook his head ominously.

  The journalist Hugh Chisholm suggested that the outcry over the penny dreadfuls was especially marked because the Coombes crime had come so soon after the exposure of the ‘abominable’ crimes of Oscar Wilde, a purveyor of ‘non-moral literature’ for the upper circles of the literary world. Wilde was in prison in Wandsworth, south London, having been convicted in May on twenty-five counts of gross indecency. The dreadfuls, said Chisholm, were the lower-class equivalent of Wilde’s decadent productions.

  Yet it remained impossible to prove a pattern of cause and effect: penny dreadfuls were continually being discovered in the bedrooms and pockets of young criminals and suicides, but perhaps only because they were in the bedrooms and pockets of most boys in Britain. In August a group of about twenty boys at a north-west London board school signed a petition to the newly assembled House of Commons that begged the politicians not to issue a ban. ‘We read that some people who are too old to care about adventures put all the murders down to reading these tales,’ they wrote. ‘We do not think there is any truth in all this, and we hope you won’t suppress any of the following papers.’ The boys appended a list of their favourite journals.

  The Home Office turned its attention to the welfare of the Coombes brothers. There were already rumours that Nattie had threatened suicide, and now Robert had become deranged enough to be locked in a padded cell. The Lancet, in its editorial on the Coombes case, referred to an ‘epidemic of suicide’ in Britain that was especially marked among the young. The Sunday paper The People reported that the number of suicides in London in the past month had far exceeded the figure for July 1894, and included at least five victims who were younger than eighteen: ‘The peculiar state of the atmosphere in consequence of the excessive heat has been considered to
have been the cause in many cases.’ The home secretary told the governor of Holloway that the Coombes boys should be kept under strict observation by the medical officer and the chaplain. They should be housed in the prison infirmary, he advised, given plenty of exercise, and kept away from other inmates.

  Earlier in the century childhood had been prized as a time of purity and innocence, but by the 1890s darker interpretations prevailed. To those influenced by the theories of Lombroso, children were quintessentially base, not so much unblemished as primeval. ‘The child is, naturally, by his organisation, nearer to the animal, to the savage, to the criminal, than the adult,’ wrote Havelock Ellis in The Criminal (1890). ‘Children are naturally egoists; they will commit all enormities, sometimes, to enlarge their egoistic satisfaction.’ The celebrated psychiatrist James Crichton-Browne in 1883 urged parents to ‘remember that children are not little nineteenth-century men and women, but diamond editions of very remote ancestors, full of savage whims and impulses, and savage rudiments of virtue’. Henry Maudsley, the other pre-eminent psychiatrist of the age, wrote in 1895: ‘Whoever observes sincerely what a child’s actual mind is, without being biased by preconceived notions of its primal purity, innocence, and natural inclination to good, must see and own that its proclivities are not to good but to evil, and that the impulses which move it are the selfish impulses of passion. Give an infant in arms power in its limbs equal to its passions, and it would be more dangerous than any wild beast.’

  But the psychologist James Sully, an early researcher into child development, took a different view. Sully held that children were complex and vulnerable creatures, whose treatment by adults was decisive in forming their characters and fate. A child was ‘not yet a moral being’, said Sully in 1895, ‘and there is a certain impertinence in trying to force it under our categories of good and bad, pure and corrupt’. He observed that the young confused fact and fiction because, to them, ‘words are not dead thought-symbols, but truly alive’. Children often could not articulate their fears, even to themselves, and this only made those fears the more intense: ‘how carefully are they wont to hide from our sight their nameless terrors, physical and moral. Much of the deeper childish experience can only reach us, if at all, years after it is over, through the faulty medium of adult memory.’

  Robert and Nattie’s father visited the boys in Holloway gaol frequently – fourteen times in four weeks, he said – and he remained in London when the SS France sailed for New York on 19 August (the chief steward of the Spain took his place on the ship). In early September, Coombes gave an interview to the Evening News in which he outlined the plans for his sons’ defence: Robert would be defended on the grounds of insanity, Nattie on the grounds that he was wholly under Robert’s influence. This was the narrative that Coombes had established when interviewed by the newspapermen in New York, before even speaking to his sons or the police: Robert was the leader and Nattie the follower; Robert was warped and Nattie was impressionable. Yet the boys’ schoolteachers and neighbours made no such distinction: they characterised both brothers as quick-witted, competent lads. If either was naughty, it was Nattie, who, according to Mary Jane Burrage, ‘cheeked’ his mother and stole her food. By his own account, Nattie had gone along with the killing and its cover-up, and afterwards it was he who seemed the most alive to the danger they faced: he hovered in the background when they encountered adults; he fled when their Aunt Emily entered the house. Many commentators at first accepted that Nattie had encouraged Robert’s murder plan, but their father firmly steered the story so that the boys – and their fates – were divided. Within days of the New York interviews the Treasury had asked Baggallay to discharge Nattie so that he could be called as a witness. Coombes was shrewd to focus on saving the son who might plausibly be saved, but his strategy entailed turning one brother against the other, and leaving Robert to bear the consequences of the killing alone.

  Coombes did not repeat his allegation that he had banned Fox from the house, nor Captain Hadley’s story about Fox lurking in a gangway with a knife. Now that he was back in England, he saw that it was hopeless to try to pin the blame for the killing on Fox. There was no evidence that the man had any prior knowledge of the murder, and the worst that the police or the newspapers had been able to dredge up about him was that he once had been charged as a ‘suspected person’ after being found in an East End railway station late at night. He might be convicted of helping to conceal the crime, but this would do nothing to exculpate Robert or Nattie.

  Coombes told the Evening News that his eldest son had always been a most humane child, but was strongly drawn to morbid subjects. On his most recent visit to see his boys, he said, Robert appeared to have returned to his better self: he was ‘much affected’ by the fact of the murder, ‘and expressed wonder that he could have killed his mother’. Robert seemed bewildered, unable to fathom what he had done. Both his father and Dr Walker saw signs in him of anxiety and distress.

  On Monday 9 September, the September sessions opened at the Old Bailey. The Common Serjeant, Sir Forrest Fulton, addressed the Grand Jury that had been assembled to grant the cases on the roster a ‘true bill’ and so enable them to proceed to trial.

  Fulton remarked on the great number of cases before the jury – 183 to be heard in the four courts over ten days – and the unusual gravity of many of them. There was always a build-up of charges over the six-week summer break, said Fulton, but he could not remember a heavier calendar than this. Nor could he remember a case of ‘greater cruelty and heartlessness’ than the first that they were to consider, the murder of Emily Harrison Coombes. He told the jury that Nathaniel George Coombes would not be tried, despite having been charged under the coroner’s inquisition, but would instead be called as a witness for the Crown. John Fox would be indicted as an accessory after the fact – that is, he would be charged with having known of the crime and assisted in concealing it. Robert Allen Coombes would be charged with murder.

  In Holloway on Tuesday, Fox, Nattie and Robert learnt that the Grand Jury had returned true bills and that the trial might be held as early as Wednesday, when a judge of the Queen’s Bench would come to the Old Bailey to hear the sessions’ most serious cases. Nattie was informed that he would appear as a witness rather than a defendant, but would go in to the dock with the others. Robert knew for certain now that he would face the murder charge alone, and that his brother’s testimony might help to convict him.

  Dr Walker talked to Robert that day about the forthcoming trial. The boy at first seemed gleeful at the prospect of going to the Old Bailey, telling the doctor that it would be a ‘splendid sight’ and he was looking forward to it. He would wear his best clothes, he said, and have his boots well polished. He started to talk about his cats, and then suddenly fell silent. A moment later he burst into tears. Dr Walker asked him why he was crying. ‘Because I want my cats,’ said Robert, ‘and my mandolin.’

  On Wednesday, Justice Kennedy of the Queen’s Bench went from the Royal Courts of Justice to take his seat in the Old Court of the Old Bailey. He announced that he did not intend to hear the Coombes case that day but would appoint any other day that suited counsel in the case. One of the prosecutors suggested Friday and Kennedy agreed. He confirmed that the charge against Nattie was being withdrawn.

  Kennedy proceeded to hear two other cases on Wednesday (a fatal assault and a child rape) and two on Thursday (a woman charged with neglecting a baby who had died in her care, and a man accused of the manslaughter of his wife). Friday and Saturday came and went without the Coombes trial being heard. Instead, Kennedy dealt with a fishmonger’s assistant who had accidentally killed another man in a fight about a woman; an American lawyer who had tried to blackmail a Dorset rector; a soldier who had shot at a woman who turned down his advances; and a thirteen-year-old servant girl accused of starting fires in her mistress’s house. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on this last case. They were dismissed and a fresh jury appointed. Fox and Robert learnt that the
ir trial would be held on Monday.

  Remand prisoners were entitled to send a letter a day, posted at the government’s expense, and on Saturday 14 September, Robert wrote to the Reverend Francis Shaw, a curate at a mission church off the Barking Road. The Coombes family went regularly to church – they were among only a fifth of Londoners to do so – and Robert and Nattie also attended Sunday school. It was said that the boys had been to church with John Fox even on the Sunday after the murder. According to the interview their father gave to the Evening News, Robert was a great favourite of the Reverend Shaw, and the curate had recently prepared the boy for confirmation. Coombes said that Shaw had offered to give evidence on Robert’s behalf at the Old Bailey.

  Francis Longsdon Shaw was the youngest son of a Derbyshire corn merchant. His mother had died in 1872, when he was a baby, and he was sent to board at a vicarage in Staffordshire. At the age of ten he had an epiphany during a mission service on a beach in the Welsh resort of Llandudno. Seven years later he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read theology, and in May 1894 he was licensed to the curacy at St Andrew’s, at the Plaistow end of the Barking Road. St Andrew’s was a highly ceremonial church, known for its promotion of English plainsong. The parish had grown so dramatically since the church was built in 1870 that two of its curates – Shaw, who was twenty-three, and Allen Hay, another Cambridge graduate – were deputed to establish a mission a little further up the Barking Road. They raised funds by staging benefits in the parish hall (one featured a mandolinist called Miss Halfpenny and a ventriloquist and ‘necromancist’ known as Signor Ralpho) and were able to open St Martin’s Mission in the summer of 1894. The Reverends Shaw and Hay had eschewed comfortable livings in the hope of bringing spiritual and practical relief to this deprived neighbourhood. They organised magic-lantern shows for local children, and they lived among their flock, lodging in ordinary terraced houses near the mission. Shaw was the most highly educated man that Robert knew.