The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

by Kate Summerscale

  Upon his daughter’s death, the once amiable Currah went mad with grief. He would wake screaming in the night, and by day he shuffled about muttering to himself, swearing, and tying knots in lengths of string. He tried to prosecute the Gorings for cruelty and neglect, but he met with no success in the courts. One night in June 1889 he made his way to the stage door of the Canterbury music hall in Lambeth and waited until George Goring and his entourage arrived in their private omnibus. As Goring alighted, Currah lunged forward and stabbed the acrobat in the stomach. ‘I’ve got you this time, old boy,’ he cried. He then drew a pistol and shot himself.

  Goring died of his wounds. Currah survived to be charged with murder. The Old Bailey jury found him unfit to plead – being ‘undeniably insane’, in the words of the doctor who examined him, ‘full of hallucinations and illusions’ – and he was sent to Broadmoor without standing trial. Currah had tried to punish both of the men whom he blamed for Beatrice’s death: Goring and himself. His act of violence was driven, like the crimes of many inmates of the asylum, by a deranging fusion of rage and shame.

  In Broadmoor, Currah became again a peaceful, jovial fellow. When the celebrated author and journalist George Sims visited the asylum in the late 1890s, he found Currah in a day room smoking a briar-root pipe. The grey-haired, ruddy-faced old man engaged the visitor in conversation. He proved eager to discuss Sims’s writings, particularly a series of poems about the plight of the poor. Sims was struck by Currah’s warm, lilting voice and his soft blue eyes. As he left, he noticed that Currah returned to reading a copy of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, a novel in which the young heroine comforts and forgives her aged imprisoned father.

  Several of Robert’s fellow Block 2 inmates had more directly destroyed their children. Richard Oakes, a chemist, had been confined in the asylum since 1890, when he and his wife had been so financially desperate that they had decided to poison themselves and their eight-year-old son, Arthur. In a suicide note, Oakes explained: ‘We have, God forgive us, taken our darling Arty with us out of pure love and affection, so that the darling should never be cuffed about, or reminded or taunted with his heartbroken parents’ crime.’ The strychnine quickly killed the boy but the dose was insufficient to kill the parents, and when their landlady found them both were lying in a blood-soaked bed, having tried to finish themselves off by cutting their throats with razors. They were charged with murder and attempted self-murder, found guilty but insane and sent to Broadmoor. In the asylum, Oakes was tranquil and well behaved and showed no signs of insanity. He rarely saw his wife: the Broadmoor men had no contact with the women except at chapel on Sundays, and even then the men were all seated on the ground floor, facing the front, by the time the women were allowed to file in to the first-floor gallery. An attendant found Oakes dead in his room in Block 2 in November 1895, aged sixty-four, apparently having suffered a heart attack. He was buried in the asylum cemetery.

  A few months later George Pett, a retired grocer from Brighton, was admitted to the asylum. In February 1896 Pett had pushed his two daughters into the sea from a flint promenade on Brighton beach and then jumped in after them. He left his hat on the promenade, having tucked inside it a note addressed to his wife, explaining: ‘Life is unendurable’. Pett and his younger daughter were fished out of the water alive but the twelve-year-old Lilian had drowned. At Broadmoor, Pett was initially placed under keen observation, since he had made an attempt at suicide, but when his mood improved in June he was transferred from the infirmary to Block 2. He put on weight after his transfer, the attendants reported; he became cheerful and talkative; and he seemed to enjoy playing billiards and reading the newspapers.

  Some of the block’s elders were distinctly eccentric, among them a doctor who wrote to the royal family to pledge outlandish sums of money for the building of hospitals. ‘From time to time,’ recalled a fellow inmate, ‘his sense of identity became confused. Every Good Friday, for instance, he would plead indisposition and retire to bed, remaining invisible in his room till early on Easter Sunday morning he would make a dramatic reappearance.’ Another doctor in the block, Archibald Campbell, had been the superintendent of a private asylum in Cumberland until he was convicted in 1898 of having carnal knowledge of a lunatic. Three maids had seen him having sex with a female patient in a laundry cupboard. Although it had become apparent at his trial that Campbell had been very drunk at the time of the crime, several of his fellow alienists testified that he had been suffering from a bout of insanity. The jury concurred and it was arranged that he be sent to Broadmoor. ‘He has no symptoms of actual insanity,’ reported Brayn after his fellow superintendent’s admission, ‘but he is very conceited, egotistical and boastful, and has an exaggerated sense of his own capabilities and importance.’

  As well as doctors, the asylum housed several would-be writers. Isaac Jacob Mauerberger, a Polish journalist arrested in 1887 for sending death threats to Lord Rothschild, was composing a series of treatises on Jewish social and philosophical questions, later published under the title A Voice from an Asylum. Roderick Maclean, who had fired a pistol at Queen Victoria in 1882, wrote sonnets for other Broadmoor inmates at a shilling a time. His attack on the queen, which was the last of the eight attempts made on her life by different men, had been partly provoked by her failure to acknowledge receipt of a poem he had composed about Prince Albert. The most scholarly inhabitant of Broadmoor was both a medical and a literary man: William Chester Minor, an American army surgeon who had killed a ship’s stoker in London in 1872, had during his two decades in the asylum become a prolific and treasured contributor to the inaugural edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Minor was provided with an extra room in Block 2 to accommodate his library of rare books, which he was using in the late 1890s to furnish the new dictionary with thousands of quotations a year.

  For the rich men in Block 2, there was little restriction on how they could spend their money. Some wore frock coats and fancy ties instead of the dark grey asylum uniform. Some ordered pheasants and other delicacies from London or from the local village, Crowthorne. Some employed poorer patients as personal servants. On one of his visits to the asylum, George Sims was invited into a bedroom (probably Dr Minor’s) that was hung with fine engravings, furnished with a Chippendale bookcase that held dozens of first editions, and decorated with vases of cut flowers. The occupant offered Sims an expensive cigar and rang a bell to order coffee, which was brought to the room on a silver salver.

  Robert was one of the few lower-class patients in Block 2, but a year after his admission another working lad was assigned to the building. Alfred Gamble, a former assistant to a greengrocer in Chapel Market, Islington, arrived in Broadmoor in 1896, at the age of sixteen. He had been arrested twice in 1895, the first time on suspicion of the murder of Sydney Dowling, a two-year-old boy who was found in a bin, his naked body wrapped in a sack and his mouth stuffed with a page from the Daily Telegraph. Gamble had been seen handing Siddy a piece of fruit outside his house that morning. ‘I ain’t done nothing at all,’ Gamble said when questioned. ‘I only gave him a pear. I wouldn’t kill a child. Other people knows that.’ He was discharged for lack of evidence. A few weeks later William Cattel, aged three, went missing while on a trip to a sweetshop. He was discovered in a stable in Islington, still alive but with severe wounds to his lower body. He too was wrapped in a sack and his mouth was stuffed with chaff and dirt. This time the evidence against Gamble was compelling: the greengrocer for whom he worked had sent him to the stable on an errand that day; he had been seen in the vicinity with Willie Cattel; and the child had been found in a sack marked with the name of Gamble’s employer.

  A tall, thin boy, Gamble appeared before the magistrates in December in a dirty red scarf, an untidy frock coat and corduroy trousers. He was charged with maliciously wounding a child and remanded at Holloway pending his trial at the Old Bailey. Gamble was found unfit to plead (Dr Walker of Holloway pronounced him an imbecile) and in January 1896 he was sent
directly to Broadmoor. ‘The case belongs to the same group as the Plaistow murder,’ observed the Journal of Mental Science; ‘that of crimes by “instinctive” juvenile criminals.’

  Like Robert, Gamble was placed in the gentlemen’s block on account of his age rather than his social standing. The boy’s vulgar manners irritated some of his fellow inmates. Archibald Campbell, the disgraced asylum superintendent, took a ‘great dislike’ to Gamble, according to an attendant, and complained that his loud voice ‘went through his head’ to such an extent that it made him want to ‘blow his brains out’ – it was unclear, from the attendant’s report, whether he wished to blow out his own brains or those of the boy. Gamble was employed as a servant by Sherlock Hare, a former barrister who was among the more combative residents of Block 2. Hare sometimes gave the lad paintings as gifts, and sometimes accused him of poisoning his supper.

  Events from the wider world occasionally penetrated the cloister of Broadmoor: in 1897 the asylum took part in the celebrations of the queen’s sixtieth jubilee (one patient ate a jubilee medal, though it passed through him without ill effects); in 1899 all the asylum’s pigs contracted swine fever and were slaughtered; in the same year a few of the attendants and one of the doctors were called up to serve in the Boer War.

  Even more occasionally, the affairs of Broadmoor were exposed to the world. In the summer of 1898 a new inmate caused a small furore in the press. Jonathan Lowe, a middle-aged night porter, was charged in April with murdering his former landlady. Both of the medical witnesses at the trial believed Lowe to be insane, but the judge refused to allow the defence to examine them; he guided the jury towards a guilty verdict and sentenced Lowe to death. Afterwards, the Home Office asked Brayn and Nicolson to interview Lowe – the Criminal Lunatics Act of 1884 gave the home secretary the power to order a medical inquiry if there was doubt about the sanity of a condemned prisoner. The doctors reported back that Lowe had been infatuated with his landlady to the point of monomania. He had come to believe that she had a mystical influence on him, and when she ignored his letters to her he became depressed and suicidal. They concluded that this was a ‘very clear case of insanity’. Upon reading Brayn and Nicolson’s report, the home secretary repealed the death sentence and sent Lowe to Broadmoor.

  A few weeks after his admission, Lowe gave a glowing account of his new home. ‘The superntend, the doctors and all the atendents are all very kind and respectfull to the patents,’ he wrote to a friend in July. ‘We have about five hours and half out in the gardens every day. There is books to read, periodicals, and the daly paper to read; biliards, bagatle, cards, demonios, chess, draphs, and everything that is nessery fer our amusement. Band plays out in the grounds, and there is plenty of musick amongst the patents themselves. We have our beer and tobaco and plenty of fruit; in fact, I am very comfortable. I am very well satesfied with my lot.’

  Lowe’s friend sent a copy of this letter to the Globe, which printed it in full. Newspapers all over the country followed suit, several of them appending outraged editorials about the luxurious conditions at the asylum. Lloyd’s Weekly reported that many of the inmates were perfectly sane, and that the attendants were ‘highly amused at the tricks which must have been used to fool doctors and juries so as to secure admission’ to this ‘murderers’ paradise’. The lunatics and pseudo-lunatics, the paper’s informants claimed, ‘eat, drink, laugh, and grow fat’.

  Brayn felt obliged to defend the asylum’s practices to his employers. In a memorandum to the home secretary, he wrote: ‘Recreation, in the form of entertainments and games of various kinds, has long been universally recognised as an important remedial agent in mental diseases, and as a valuable means of treatment now forms an essential part of the routine of every lunatic asylum. The days are long gone by when the irrational beliefs and violent acts of lunatics were dealt with by harsh measures of punishment, as if they were voluntary.’ Jonathan Lowe, he said, ‘is a man of low mental development who has spent a considerable portion of his life in the workhouse and amidst more or less sordid surroundings, and to him the comforts of an Asylum may appear attractive by comparison, but the greater number of the inmates, who are capable of appreciating it, consider that the privileges accorded to them in Broadmoor are a very poor compensation for the loss of their liberty’.

  A former inmate of the asylum wrote a letter to the press that echoed Brayn’s point: detention in Broadmoor was ‘a living death’, he said. ‘To be separated from all you hold dear on earth is a terrible thing to one who has any love for home; it was to me. . . With all the kindness, there are many in Broadmoor who wish they had been hung.’ He signed the letter ‘An Ex-Madman’. The correspondent – John Brailsford, who had killed a fellow lunatic in a Birmingham asylum in 1859 – sent a copy of his published letter to Brayn, with a note attached. ‘I am very thankful for all the kindness I received at Broadmoor,’ he told the superintendent. He added that he often thought of his fellow inmates; he had learned to love and respect many of them and he wished that they could be free.

  The pain and despair of Broadmoor patients was most evident in the back blocks, where the men sometimes lashed out in horror or rage and the attendants wore padded jackets with hidden buttons to protect themselves from injury. Robert and the other residents of Block 2 came across the inmates from other blocks rarely, in communal areas such as the infirmary, the chapel and the hall. Some of the more disturbed men were vacant and abstracted, some aggressive, some caught in dreams of divinity or fantasies of persecution. These were patients closer to the deranged squires in Robert’s penny dreadfuls. One elderly inmate, said to have killed his mother in 1849, would inform passersby that he had great mysteries, comets, suns and fires fastened to his shoulders. Another announced: ‘My name is T Perkins, and I have been murdered here, by those that know not what they do, because they have ether in their heads, for Christ’s sake.’

  In the back blocks, the most violent patients were locked in their rooms for hours at a time. Towards the end of the 1890s, the lunacy commissioners who made annual inspections of Broadmoor censured Dr Brayn for his excessive use of this practice.

  Among the more frequently secluded inmates of the back blocks was Thomas Cutbush, who had been admitted in 1891, aged twenty-six, after attacking and wounding two women in south London. He was a dark, slight, sharp-eyed and educated man, described in his medical notes as ‘very insane’. He would deliver disjointed soliloquies as he sat in his room: ‘You can buy a box of sardines for six pence,’ he said. ‘If I take my food there’s mercury in it. My coat is not good enough. I will see Sir Edward Blackall of Scotland Yard. It is all a fraud. If I had any knife from the pawn brokers I would settle the whole damn crew of the cut throats.’ Cutbush used to promise to ‘rip up’ the attendants with a knife and when his mother leant over to kiss him at the end of a visit he tried to bite her face. He sometimes attacked other patients – one Block 2 man (Arthur Gilbert Cooper, a curate who had cut his vicar’s throat in 1887) was hit hard in the face by Cutbush when he encountered him in a corridor in 1891. Three years later, two reporters from the Sun newspaper visited Cutbush in Broadmoor. He greeted them with silence, and they wrote an article in which they identified him as Jack the Ripper, the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders of the late 1880s.

  Even in Block 2, the anguish and disturbance of an inmate occasionally interrupted the calm routines. One morning in May 1897, George Pett, the affable grocer who had drowned one of his daughters off Brighton beach, was found dead in a fellow patient’s room, having hanged himself with cord from a hinge on the window.

  Robert, too, seems to have suffered a breakdown. In November 1898, at the age of sixteen, he was sent from Block 2 to the more closely supervised Block 3 and kept there for fourteen months. He had arrived at the asylum smooth and blank, his rage and fear sealed over. It may have been the kindness as much as the strangeness of Broadmoor that eventually cracked him open: not just to sensations of anger and anxiety now, but also to gr
ief.

  14

  TO HAVE YOU HOME AGAIN

  Among the papers that the police found on the writing desk in 35 Cave Road on 17 July 1895 was a letter written by Emily Coombes to her husband. It was composed on Sunday 7 July, the older Robert Coombes’s fifty-first birthday and the day before Emily’s death.

  Although Coombes had left home as recently as 4 July, the postal services were so swift that Emily had already sent him a parcel and received a note in return. She probably sent the parcel to Gravesend, in Kent, where his ship stopped on its passage out of the Thames. She had addressed her latest letter to the pier in New York at which the France would dock more than two weeks later. It was not read out in any of the court hearings because it had no direct bearing on the case, but it had probably been read by Robert, who wrote his own letters at the same desk in the ten days after his mother’s death. When the Coombes boys were charged with murder the letter was copied for the West Ham magistrates’ court and retained in its files. The transcriber could not make out all of Emily’s last written words, and many of the allusions are in any case unclear: it was a hurried note, an instalment in a conversation. Yet the letter casts some light on the younger Robert Coombes’s story – not so much on the mystery of why he killed his mother as on the mystery of how he might recover from having done so.