Grantham was trying to suggest that Robert was mentally abnormal. Many scientists, Lombroso among them, held that precocity was a form of disease. ‘Singularly precocious’ children ‘of extreme nervous constitution’, observed the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, were the ‘outcomes of a process of degeneracy in the stock’. The Dictionary of Psychological Medicine advised that such children were more prone to madness than others.
The latest instalment of Thomas Hardy’s new novel – subsequently published as Jude the Obscure – featured just such a child, a prematurely adult nine-year-old called Little Father Time. Little Time is an old soul in a young body, a figure of the despair and foreboding of the fin de siècle. He is tormented by the idea that he and his younger siblings are a burden to his parents and, in the chapter published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in September 1895, he decides to kill the other children and then himself. They are found in their bedroom dangling from clothes hooks.
‘The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us,’ says the child’s father, Jude; ‘boys of a sort unknown in the last generation – the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them.’
The next witness for the prosecution was Charles Truelove, forty, another resident of Forest Gate and the headmaster of Cave Road school. Both Coombes brothers had transferred to this school when it opened in July 1894. The entrance to the boys’ playground was through a decorative brick archway directly opposite the front door of 35 Cave Road. Truelove testified that Robert had left school for good on 30 May, having reached the age as well as the standard required by law.
‘He was a very intelligent lad,’ said Truelove. ‘He passed the sixth standard with me and was placed in the seventh. He was a very good boy.’ To pass the sixth standard, a boy needed to be able to understand proportion, vulgar fractions and recurring decimals (the education department ruled that questions involving recurring decimals would not be put to girls) as well as to recite 150 lines by Shakespeare, Milton or another canonical author, and to explain the allusions in the passage that he had learnt.
Nattie was still on the school roll, said Truelove. He had passed the fifth standard exams in the autumn and was now studying for the sixth. Nattie had attended school until Friday 5 July, said the headmaster, but was absent on the following Monday. This was the day of his mother’s murder. ‘I sent to ask about him,’ said Truelove, ‘and a verbal answer came that he had gone into the country.’
The testimony of all three headmasters contradicted the rumours that had been published in the papers about Robert’s persistent truancy and disobedience. Rather, he emerged as a compliant and very able pupil, well liked by his teachers. He had flourished at school, the mysterious incident at Grange Road excepted. Gill had succeeded in establishing that the boy was astute and rational, but in the process had made him a more sympathetic figure: sensitive, gifted, eager to please his elders.
Gill’s last witness was Robert’s employer at the Thames Iron Works, the shipyard at which he had taken a job a fortnight after leaving Truelove’s school.
Johnson described himself as foreman plater at the Thames Iron and Shipbuilding Company Limited. He said that Robert was employed by the company in June as a plater’s boy. ‘He worked under my supervision and I considered his capacity was very good.’
Robert was one of about 3,000 employees of the Thames Iron Works, a company that manufactured and built vessels on the dry docks. When he joined ‘the Limited’, as the works were known locally, the yard was building a Japanese battleship, the Fuji Yama, a project that had been severely delayed by the ice and frosts of the winter. In June, in the heat, the construction was proceeding at a furious pace – the workers were putting 150 tons of iron on to the ship’s frame each week.
The managers of heavily unionised industries such as shipbuilding and boilermaking found it much cheaper to hire boys than men. A couple of decades earlier, boys had been employed as apprentices to platers, riveters and caulkers, but the increase in automation meant that they were now more often used to run errands and mind machines. A plater’s boy might also assist his boss in the workshop, cutting and shaping sheets of iron on a lathe, placing them on moulds and bending them into shape. The armour plates, more than fifteen feet long, three feet wide and four inches thick, were sent to the ship’s skeleton to be riveted and welded into place.
The work in the shops and the dry docks was dirty and exhausting, and it could be dangerous. Some employees fell to their deaths from scaffolds over the ships, were crushed by iron sheets, burnt by red-hot bolts or blown up by exploding boilers. Most were eventually deafened by the roar of the yard. The hammers rang and pounded, the machines thrashed and whirred, the lathes shrieked through metal, the guns fired rivets into the plates.
Robert wanted to leave the shipyard almost as soon as he had started but his mother insisted that he stick with it: she had withstood years of relative hardship in the expectation that the family’s collective income would rise when the boys went out to work. Though Robert’s pay was far less than an adult worker’s wage it was still a significant contribution to the family purse – typically, an assistant to a plater would earn between five and eight shillings a week. Boy workers handed their earnings over to their mothers, who usually gave them about sixpence back as pocket money. Since women controlled the household budgets, even men tended to give the bulk of their wage packets to their wives.
George Johnson informed the court that Robert worked at the iron yard until Monday 24 June, and came back for his money the next day. He left without giving a reason. Johnson provided him with a good reference for future employers.
Robert resigned from the ironworks on the day after the France reached London. He may have calculated that his father’s return would both ease the immediate pressure on the family finances and shield him from his mother’s wrath. Coombes brought home £9 2/- from his latest trip. Having not even known that his son had taken a job, he could not be angry with him for quitting it. But the problem of Robert’s employment was left unresolved. Although he had chosen to leave the yard, it was humiliating for him to be without work. Other boys of his age took pride in being able to put food on the family table and pleasure in being able to buy treats for themselves: cigarettes, novelettes, music-hall tickets, fish and chips. To become a breadwinner was a step towards manhood, and it brought a rise in a boy’s status within the home – at mealtimes, for instance, the wage earners would be served first and most generously. Without employment, Robert had no rights over the family provisions: the power to give or withhold remained with his mother.
After the iron plater’s testimony, Charles Gill declared that the Crown’s case was closed.
11
IT IS ALL OVER NOW
In the Old Court of the Old Bailey, William Grantham rose to make the case for the defence. Whereas most of the prosecution witnesses had been giving evidence for a second or even a third time, none of the defence witnesses had yet testified. Grantham told the jury that he intended to show that Robert Coombes was not in his right mind. He began by calling the boy’s father to the witness stand.
Robert Coombes senior took the stand. He had ‘nothing of the seafarer about him’, observed the Star; he was ‘respectable-looking’, agreed the Sun.
Coombes recalled that his eldest son had suffered from headaches and excitability since the age of three or four. When the family was living in Limehouse in the 1880s, he explained, he had taken Robert to see a Dr Christopher Coward, who had prescribed medication for his headaches. He had continued to consult Dr Coward about Robert after moving to Plaistow in 1891, and – by correspondence – while the family was based in Toxteth Park, Liverpool.
‘He was very ill at Liverpool from headache,’ said Coombes, ‘the same complaint, and in consequence of what Dr Coward told me I was specially careful.’
According to Coombes, Dr Coward considered Robert’s brain parti
cularly vulnerable to the pressures of schoolwork, as well as to the more obvious risk of being struck in punishment. ‘He always told me never to chastise him anywhere near the head, or to touch him on the head, or to give him any home lessons to do.’ When the family returned to London, Coombes asked the doctor to write a note about Robert’s frailty to George Hollamby, the headmaster of Grange Road school.
Several medical manuals warned parents not to let children study too much. The stress of tests and homework was believed to cause ‘brain irritation’, headaches and worse. Over-education, claimed Wynn Westcott in 1885, could lead children to suicide by encouraging a ‘precocious development of the reflective faculties, of vanity, and of the desires’. These theories, like the theories about penny dreadfuls, reflected a worry about the effects of education on the poor.
‘The boy complained very often of his head at that time,’ said Coombes, ‘at intervals of a week or a fortnight, sometimes a month. At such times he would sit down and look very sullen, as if he was having a headache, and would speak to nobody.’
‘In disposition,’ he added, ‘he was a very good boy.’
Coombes showed the court a certificate that Dr Coward had made out in 1891, which stated that Robert was suffering from cerebral irritation. This was a diagnosis given to patients who experienced headaches, restlessness, impulsive fits, peevishness or melancholia without any discernible organic cause. It was believed that the disorder could develop into epilepsy, though it could also fade away by adulthood. The term implied a physiological basis for Robert’s condition but was in truth merely descriptive. It gave no real clues as to the cause of his disturbance, which could be anything from unhappiness to physical injury.
Coombes believed that the trauma of birth might have damaged Robert’s brain. He was away when his son was born, he said. ‘I think I had just gone to sea, or came home just afterwards, I cannot recollect. I know that my wife had a very bad time.’ Robert had marks on his temples, he said, caused by the forceps that had wrenched him from the womb. He implied also that Robert might have been affected by his mother’s temperament. ‘My wife was a very excitable woman from the first,’ he told the court, ‘who very frequently laughed and cried at the same time.’
In 1893, Robert’s difficulties recurred and he was moved from Grange Road school. Coombes described the problem as ‘a difference with the teachers’ and added that ‘the other boys used to laugh at him’. The incident at school seemed to have made Robert a figure of mockery to his peers. Coombes said that Robert had complained of headaches ever since. This suggested that the boy’s problems were exacerbated, even if they were not caused, by emotional distress.
Dr Coward died that year, aged fifty-four, and the Coombes family registered with John Joseph Griffin, who ran a practice in the Barking Road. ‘When anything special occurred in consequence of his complaints of violent headache I had to take him to Dr Griffin,’ said Coombes. In December 1894, he discovered that Robert had run away from home while he had been at sea, and he took him to see the doctor. Griffin recommended that Robert accompany his father on his next voyage. A change of air, in the form of foreign travel, was often prescribed for nervous complaints.
In January 1895, Robert and his father sailed to New York on the SS England, a sister ship to the France. One of the two assistant stewards on this trip was Robert’s uncle Frederick, who had in the 1870s been an apprentice to his older brother in his ill-fated butchery business in Notting Hill. When the England set sail, London was enduring its coldest winter on record – the Thames had frozen over at London Bridge for the first time in eighty years. The ship was pelted with rain as she sailed out of the Thames estuary, and she ran into a powerful gale halfway across the Atlantic, accompanied by squalls of hail and very heavy seas. She was caught up in a hurricane, then a storm of thunder and lightning before she reached New York on 7 February. Robert and his father and uncle stayed in the city for a week before the ship cast off again into intense cold and high seas. The pitching of a cattle ship in a storm sometimes sent the cows crashing forward in their narrow stalls to break their knees or necks. The England took seventeen days to reach London, two days longer than usual, and Robert returned to Cave Road school on 11 March. Coombes claimed that the trip had done the boy good.
Gill cross-examined Coombes, asking him if there was a history of insanity in the family, and whether Robert had any intellectual impairments.
‘I have not heard of insanity on my side of the family or my wife’s either,’ said Coombes. ‘The boy always got on very well at school – he had no difficulty in learning. He is a very learned boy. He read a great deal.’
Gill indicated the penny dreadfuls on the bench. ‘Has he been reading these sensational books for any length of time?’
‘I am not aware that he read books of that kind,’ said Coombes. ‘There were good books in the house, such as the Strand Magazine and the New York Century.’ The Strand, which sold half a million copies a week to a predominantly middle-class readership, had become famous in the early 1890s for publishing Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. It advertised itself as ‘cheap, healthful literature’, ‘absolutely pure’. The Century, formerly Scribners, was a prestigious American journal that ran pieces by the likes of Henry James and Mark Twain.
Justice Kennedy leafed through the penny dreadfuls. ‘Here is Jack Wright and the Fortune Hunters of the Red Sea,’ he said. ‘They are what you would call sensational, but—’
Gill interrupted: ‘You will see one called Revenged at Last, or the Crimson Coat.’
Kennedy continued his inspection. ‘Well, some are apparently from the outside cover what one would call sensational, but one can’t say exactly.’ He threw down the books and turned back to his notes. ‘There were good books found among these. Go on.’
Gill pointed out that Robert’s collection consisted of ‘books mostly relating to crime and criminals of some kind’.
‘The jury shall see them for themselves,’ said Kennedy. He seemed unwilling to make much of the penny dreadfuls.
Gill asked Coombes about Robert’s job at the ironworks.
‘I did not know that he got employment after leaving school till I arrived home.’
‘Did you ever know him to suffer from any delusion?’ asked Gill.
No,’ said Coombes, but added: ‘I have heard him say that he had heard noises in the night.’
Grantham rose to ask about the noises.
‘He complained of hearing noises about the house,’ said Coombes. ‘The last time he complained of that was four months ago.’ Coombes had been at home on some of these occasions, he said, and had not heard any noises himself.
This ended his testimony. Coombes had made it clear that he cared for his son and worried about his wellbeing: he had taken him to doctors for his headaches, to New York to try to restore his health. But it had also become apparent that he had been off-stage for many of the dramas of Robert’s life: he was away at sea when his eldest boy was born, when he refused to attend school, when he left school and when he took his first job. Coombes seems to have shown no curiosity or concern about why both his sons had twice run away from their mother.
The next witness for the defence was Amelia England, the thirty-eight-year-old wife of a dock clerk, who lived at 33 Cave Road. The Englands’ two older sons, like Robert and Nattie, had attended Grange Road school before transferring to Cave Road school when it was built in 1894. Mrs England’s eldest son was the same age as Robert, and had just left school having passed the fourth standard.
‘I am a next-door neighbour of the Coombes,’ said Amelia England. ‘I have known them for the last three years. I was very intimate with them.’
Grantham asked her to describe Emily and Robert Coombes.
‘The mother was rather excitable all the time I have known her,’ she said. ‘Robert was very excitable indeed. I have on occasions gone to Dr Griffin for medicines for him. I knew he had pains in the head; he has complained i
n my presence. He has had very excitable fits.’
Gill, cross-examining, asked her to elaborate.
‘I can hardly explain the excitement,’ she said. ‘If he could not get what he liked, he would fly into a passion, and then he would have these fits afterwards. I have known him to go right off into a fainting fit with them more than once. It was not always when he was in a great passion, but very often.’
Gill inquired how well she knew Robert.
‘I saw him every day nearly all the time they were living there. He was a very bright, intelligent boy when spoken to, and a well-spoken boy.’ She related how she had chatted to him in the street in the week after the murder. ‘I spoke to him every day right up to the Friday in that week.’
Gill asked whether Robert enjoyed reading.
‘He was fond of reading,’ said Mrs England; ‘passionately fond both of music and reading.’
Mrs England was dismissed, and Grantham called Dr Walker to the witness box.
George Walker had been a prison doctor for more than twenty years by the time he was appointed medical officer of Holloway gaol in January 1894. He frequently gave evidence at the Old Bailey about the men and women in his charge, and had already testified in three trials during the current sessions. His testimony did not always support an insanity plea – at the trial of a twenty-three-year-old woman who had killed her child in 1894, he said that he had seen no evidence of madness while she was on remand – but often it did. In June 1895, for instance, he had diagnosed kleptomania in the case of a woman who had stolen goods from the John Lewis department store.
The insanity plea had become increasingly common in English courts: in the 1860s, about 15 per cent of murderers were found insane, either before, during or after trial; in the 1890s the proportion rose to nearly 27 per cent. Yet the Journal of Mental Science observed in 1895 that the law on criminal responsibility was still in ‘hopeless confusion’. At a meeting of the British Medical Association that summer, Henry Maudsley argued that madness often went unrecognised by the courts. He disagreed with the legal profession’s narrow definition of madness, which held that a defendant was criminally responsible if he or she knew right from wrong at the time of his or her crime, a test formulated after Robert McNaughten tried to assassinate the prime minister in 1843. The ‘right from wrong’ test, said Maudsley, assumed ‘that reason, not feeling, is the motive force of human action’. He argued that some acts of violence sprang from a desire so strong that it bypassed thought and lit straight into action. ‘A disordered feeling,’ Maudsley wrote, ‘is capable of actuating disordered conduct without consent of reason.’
The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer Page 14