The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

by Kate Summerscale

  A carriage met Robert and his guards at the railway station and they were driven up the hill and along the thickly wooded road to Broadmoor asylum, a group of tall, red turreted buildings encircled by a sixteen-foot wall.

  The asylum gate was set in an archway flanked by towers and topped by a clock of black and gold. A turnkey unlocked the gate and the cab passed through the arch to a courtyard.

  Robert was uncuffed, taken into the building and officially admitted to the asylum. His occupation was entered in the register as ‘labourer in iron works’, his crime ‘murder of his mother by stabbing her with a knife’. He was sent to a bathroom, where an attendant watched over him while he bathed, and another took away his jacket and trousers and replaced them with a long calico nightshirt. His belongings were listed and stored. He was allotted a bed in one of the admissions wards in the asylum’s central complex, where he would remain while his mental condition was assessed. Since he was considered a suicide risk, he was observed closely.

  During Robert’s first week in Broadmoor the sun shone from dawn to dusk in a cloudless sky, and the temperature repeatedly reached 80 degrees Fahrenheit – it was the hottest September ever recorded. The admissions wards faced south, with a view through French windows to the open country at the front of the asylum: an undulating landscape of pastures, knolls and copses, run through by dark belts of pine and fir. Between the lawns and flowerbeds on the terrace outside the ward, a gravel drive was shaded from the bright sky by an avenue of limes. Below the drive the ground fell away gently in richly planted terraces to the foot of the ridge. The wall bounding the southern reach of the estate lay beneath the terraces.

  It was as idyllic a prospect as a city boy like Robert had ever seen. In this pastoral setting the inmates of Broadmoor were returned to a kind of innocence: they were stripped of their freedoms and responsibilities, rendered as powerless and unencumbered as children. In Broadmoor they were unlikely to be reproached for their crimes. They entered a suspended existence, with little reference to the past or the future, a strange corollary to the dissociated, dreamlike state that often attended psychosis. The asylum was both gaol and sanctuary, fortress and enchanted castle. The spell by which the patients were bound within its walls could be lifted only at the behest of the queen.

  Robert was interviewed by one of the asylum’s four doctors within a few days of his admission. ‘When questioned as to the murder of his mother,’ the physician wrote in his notes, he ‘at first pretended to have forgotten the occurrence: but subsequently admitted the deed.’ Robert may genuinely, if briefly, have lost his memory of the killing, as he had done in Holloway. His grasp of the crime he had committed was fitful and unsteady. To survive the horror of the murder, Robert needed to forget. To recover from it, he would need to remember.

  Broadmoor was built in the early 1860s to house the growing number of men and women found insane in the criminal courts. Its first patients were transferred from the Bethlem asylum in London in 1864 and the institution now held almost 500 men and more than 150 women. Just under half of the men had committed homicide, and about half of these had killed a member of his family. Robert became one of twelve male inmates who had murdered their mothers. Of the women in Broadmoor, who were housed in a separate part of the asylum, 80 per cent had killed one or more of their children.

  In October, Robert was joined in the admissions ward by two more patients who had been convicted at the Old Bailey. Henry Jackson, an unemployed postman in his twenties, had suffocated his six-month-old baby. ‘He seemed to hear a voice, not human, telling him to do the deed,’ Dr Walker of Holloway gaol testified at his trial, ‘and he felt he must kill the child; and after he had done it he felt a satisfaction.’ Jackson was apparently suffering from the same species of mania – the compulsion to kill, the relief after killing – that Dr Walker had identified in Robert. Yet the insanity verdict in his case, too, masked the difficulty and unhappiness that lay behind his violent act. Henry Jackson’s mother described the very tangible pressures on her son: he and his family were in a state of ‘dreadful distress’ after he lost his job, she said, having sold everything they owned in order to buy food.

  The other arrival, Carmello Mussy, had shot at his landlord before trying to take his own life. Mussy was an elderly Italian, wispy-haired, grey-whiskered, lame, his speech a garbled blur of French, English and his native tongue, often punctuated by sobs. The Old Bailey jury, moved by his vulnerability, had found him guilty but insane. The judge complained afterwards that the jury’s mercy was misguided: he had intended to give Mussy a light sentence, but the insanity verdict meant that the old man, like all the ‘Pleasure Men’ in Broadmoor, might never be free again. Robert’s situation was similar. If he had been found simply guilty, his death sentence would almost certainly have been commuted – no one under the age of sixteen had been hanged in England since the execution in 1831 of the fourteen-year-old John Bell, who had killed another boy – but the combination of Justice Kennedy’s intransigence and the jury’s pity had ensured that his detention would be indefinite. ‘Those with long experience at the Old Bailey,’ asserted the Sheffield Independent when Robert was convicted, ‘remark that no case is on record of a person sentenced as a criminal lunatic ever being released.’ This was a common misconception – several Broadmoor inmates were discharged each year – but most inmates did remain within its walls until they died.

  After a few weeks, each new patient was assigned to one of Broadmoor’s six ‘blocks’, which contained up to a hundred men apiece. The heavily staffed Blocks 1 and 6 – the ‘back blocks’, set against the woods behind the asylum – were inhabited by those patients who were considered dangerous to themselves or others. Blocks 3 and 4, which contained the infirmary and the admissions wards, were for the men who needed fairly constant supervision. Blocks 2 and 5 were the lightly staffed ‘privilege blocks’, for patients whose behaviour was more or less sane. Of the two, Block 2 was reserved for the more socially able and educated inmates. Robert, being young and therefore relatively impressionable, was sent to this building.

  Block 2 sat to the side and slightly forward of the main complex and enjoyed fine views over the surrounding country. The building was 250 foot long and three storeys high. Most of its inhabitants were housed in single chambers, twelve foot long and eight foot wide, each furnished with a bed, a desk and a cupboard. Their windows were fitted with iron bars. Robert was issued with a toothbrush, hairbrush and comb and with a set of clothes: two day shirts, several sets of underwear and a flannel vest, a pair of strong grey trousers and a dark grey jacket.

  Each morning, at 6 a.m. in summer and 7 a.m. in winter, Robert’s door was unlocked and he rose to empty his chamberpot, wash himself with a flannel at a stand in his room, and dress for the day. He took a breakfast of tea, bread and butter in the Block 2 dining room. Afterwards, he and the other patients were released to the airing court for their first period of exercise. An attendant drew the bolts on the main door and then turned his key in the lock to let the men out, while another attendant stood by to count them as they passed: ‘Three out, four out’. Security was tight in Broadmoor: there had been only six successful escapes from the asylum in thirty years, the most recent in 1888.

  The Block 2 airing court encompassed several terraces below the main buildings. In spring its fruit trees blossomed against the weathered red brick of the asylum walls. In summer the beds brimmed with flowers, while sycamore and chestnut trees afforded shelter from the sun. A few attendants kept watch as the men played croquet, smoked and chatted, or walked alone. Some patients tended to their private gardens, small patches of land on which they could grow fruit and vegetables to eat or trade. The allotments were planted with strawberries, raspberries, cucumbers, tomatoes, plum trees, carnations. Thomas Henry Townsend, who had plotted to assassinate the prime minister in 1893, used to walk in the gardens gazing at the plants. ‘I love beautiful things,’ he explained. His failure to kill Gladstone, by his own account, stemmed f
rom similarly tender instincts. ‘He gave me such a sweet smile that he melted my heart,’ Townsend would say, ‘and I just couldn’t pull the trigger.’

  The patients were counted again as they returned to the block after each spell in the airing court: ‘Five in, six in,’ and so on. Once they were all back in the building, the door was closed, the bolts were rattled into their sockets, the key was turned in the lock and the ring buckled back on the attendant’s belt.

  Most of the patients’ food came from the asylum farm, which grew crops and raised cows, pigs and sheep. The meals were prepared in a central kitchen and delivered to the block dining rooms. A typical dinner, served at about 12.30 p.m., was mutton, beef or pork, with potatoes or vegetables, followed by a steamed raisin or fruit pudding and accompanied by tea or weak beer. The Block 2 men were permitted to use knives at mealtimes, but the cutlery was counted out of the canteen as it was handed to the patients and counted back in once the meal was over. If the numbers did not tally, no patient could leave the block until the missing implement was found.

  As well as the dining hall, the ground floor of Block 2 housed a pantry, a scullery, the attendants’ offices, a billiards room and a day room. The day room had an open fireplace, upholstered benches along the walls, plants and flowers in pots and vases, and chairs and tables at which the patients could read and write or play card games. Through the barred windows, they could see the shallow valley and hills beyond the asylum. The tables were scattered with weekly periodicals, such as Punch, and daily newspapers, from which the attendants had snipped out any articles that they believed might hurt or excite a patient’s feelings. Block 2 was the only block to have its own library; the books, which were chosen by the chaplain, included Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

  The inmates’ health, comfort and cleanliness were monitored closely. The common areas were heated by open fires and by warm air fanned up through grates in the floor; the temperature was regulated to 60 degrees in the day rooms, 55 in the dining room, 50 in the corridor. In 1896 the Block 2 urinals were supplemented with teak-seated flushing lavatories. The asylum’s own plant burnt coal to supply gas for lighting and, from 1897, its engine house was able to run hot water to the blocks. On one evening a week, Robert took a warm bath. An attendant supervised, handing him a brush and carbolic soap with which to wash himself and carefully measuring the water temperature with a thermometer (the bath was heated to between 90 and 96 degrees Fahrenheit). As Robert grew older, an attendant shaved his face three times a week, while another stood by to ensure that the razor remained in his colleague’s charge. The attendants were watchful about any means by which a patient might harm himself or others: no matches were allowed in the wards (the attendants lit the inmates’ cigarettes, pipes and cigars), no mops, brooms or pokers were left lying about, all cupboards were kept locked, all fires extinguished at bedtime.

  When dark fell, the common rooms and corridors were lit by mantled coal-gas lamps. Robert was given a supper of bread, butter and tea before being sent to bed at 7.45 p.m. and bolted into his room at eight. He slept under a sheet and blanket on a horsehair mattress stuffed and sewn in an asylum workshop. Throughout the night, the attendants made regular trips down the long corridors, checking on the patients by shining torches through narrow, glazed apertures in the bedroom doors.

  The Broadmoor superintendent was Dr David Nicolson, who at the time of Robert’s admission had run the asylum for almost a decade. Nicolson was tall, broad and jowly, with a bulbous nose and a drooping walrus moustache. A protégé of the pioneering Broadmoor superintendent William Orange, Nicolson took a liberal and humane line on crime and insanity. He was an outspoken opponent of criminal anthropology: the idea of hereditary criminality was a dangerous nonsense, he said in July 1895, ‘because it does not include circumstance and motive in the computation, and because without these no standard of capacity, or of conduct, or of responsibility can be regarded as trustworthy or even possible’. Nicolson also held a broad view of what constituted an insane crime, and would have had no difficulty with the idea that Robert Coombes’s murder of his mother, though premeditated, was an act of madness: ‘an insane man has frequently a definite purpose of committing the act,’ he said, ‘and a clear knowledge of the results’.

  Since he believed that madness was at least partly caused by a person’s surroundings and experience, Nicolson tried in Broadmoor to foster an environment conducive to sanity. Unlike prison governors, he rarely employed attendants with military backgrounds. ‘I prefer to train up an ordinary man,’ he said; ‘perhaps it might be a labouring man or an artisan – because there is not so much of the “toe the line” business on their part as a soldier naturally has, and which is necessary in prisons; there is more of the element and idea of nursing with us; that is to say, we have to get the inmates to rub along somehow from day to day.’

  In keeping with the precepts of ‘moral management’ established earlier in the century, Nicolson impressed on his attendants the need to be gentle and sympathetic towards the patients. They were encouraged to accommodate erratic behaviour and to quietly ignore delusions. The Handbook for the Instruction of Attendants on the Insane (1885), known as the Red Book, advised asylum attendants to ‘exercise such tact as will comfort the depressed, soothe the excited, and check the impulsive, irritable and destructive’. Some of the patients, observed The Attendant’s Companion (1892), ‘like elder children, may be trusted to do many things for themselves; others, like younger children, must have everything done for them’. In the asylum, Robert was treated as a child among children.

  The Broadmoor staff used no mechanical restraints, such as straitjackets and fetters – there was not even a padded room on the premises. Instead, an attendant was taught to summon help if a patient became unruly, and then to try with one or more other staff to hold the patient until he or she was calm. If a struggle was unavoidable, the attendants were warned never to place their knees on an inmate, nor to twist his or her limbs in any way. The asylum rules stipulated that kindness and forbearance should be the touchstones of the patients’ treatment. Drugs were used sparingly: morphine was occasionally dispensed as a sedative, brandy as a tonic. The only therapies were the tranquil setting, the steadiness of the staff and the pattern of the days.

  The attendants at Broadmoor were better paid than those at other asylums (most earned between £45 and £80 a year, while the Chief Attendant received £130), and some remained at the institution for life. In 1895 almost 80 per cent of the staff had served at Broadmoor for more than five years, and 60 per cent for more than ten. They did not always live up to the standards set out in the rule books but very few incidents of ill-treatment were recorded in the ledger of staff misdemeanours. Rather, the attendants were occasionally penalised for being late or drunk, for sitting down in a day room to read a newspaper or take a nap, for leaving the medicine cabinet open, miscounting the inmates, flirting with female patients, or failing to notice a missing spoon.

  Within a few months of Robert’s arrival, Nicolson was succeeded as medical superintendent by Richard Brayn, a dapper, clean-shaven man who had previously worked as a doctor in the prison service. He was employed on a salary of £900 (his deputy earned £500 and the two other doctors in the asylum £225 and £180 a year). Brayn gained a reputation as a strict superintendent, though this was based principally on the fact that in his first years he increased the use of solitary confinement in the back blocks. His views about the inmates were similar to those of his predecessors. He would remind visitors to the asylum that his charges were morally innocent: they were patients, not prisoners, and they had no need to expiate their crimes.

  Brayn and Nicolson worked together on Home Office assignments before and after Brayn took charge of the asylum. In October 1895, when Robert had just been admitted to Broadmoor, the two doctors were asked by the home secretary to appraise the mental condition of Oscar Wilde, who was still being held at Wandsworth prison. After examining Wilde, Brayn and Nicolson conclude
d that he was not mentally ill, but suggested that his conditions be improved: he should be moved to a prison outside London, they recommended, and given more food, more space and more books. They advised that it was dangerous to his mental wellbeing to deprive him of a wide range of literature. Wilde was transferred in November to Reading gaol.

  Under Brayn’s stewardship, the life of Block 2 continued as before. The well-known war correspondent George Steevens, on a visit to Broadmoor in 1897, was taken by Brayn to the Block 2 day room. A dozen or so patients were sitting around, some reading and some playing cards. Like the other journalists who toured the asylum, Steevens was asked not to identify any of the inmates but was otherwise free to report on what he saw. The day room, wrote Steevens in an article published in the Daily Mail, ‘looked like the smoking room of a comfortable but unpretentious hotel. . . Here was a quiet, trim, scholarly-looking man who had pushed his wife over a cliff; there a rougher, ragged-bearded elder who had throttled his senior partner; there, reading the Daily Mail, a mild-eyed visionary whose mission in life is to kill a royal person.’ Steevens noticed two attendants in dark blue uniforms standing by like waiters, ‘quiet, decorous, tactful, but vigilant’. The patients bade the superintendent ‘Good afternoon’ and paid no more attention to his guest than the residents of a gentlemen’s club would have paid to another member’s visitor.

  Robert Coombes was the youngest inmate of Broadmoor by several years – there were no other patients below the age of twenty – and only the fourth boy ever to have been admitted to the asylum. Yet the mature and cultivated manners of some of his fellow residents concealed crimes quite as desperate as his own.

  Among the patriarchs of the asylum was an engineer called Nathaniel Currah, from Lambeth in south London. In 1887 Currah’s thirteen-year-old daughter Beatrice had pleaded with her parents to let her join George and Olga Goring’s troupe of acrobat cyclists, and they had reluctantly agreed. Beatrice spent the next year on tour with the trick cyclists, in England, France and Germany, sometimes performing five times a night at different theatres and music halls. Over the months, she became sickly and weak. The Gorings disguised her skeletal legs by wrapping her shins in bandages and tights before she was seen on stage. One night she was so feeble that she dropped a young boy in the troupe, a slip that provoked hissing from the audience. In June 1888, the Gorings decided that she was too ill to perform and sent her home to Lambeth. Beatrice’s condition worsened, and in December she died of consumption.