The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

by Kate Summerscale

  My Darling Husband,

  I received your welcome letter from ? and pleased you received the things safe. Robert I do miss you. Emily was down and was not doing anything and no money for rent. I don’t know what they will do. I gave her the coat I could not help doing so – young Robert did not like to see her crying not like some one told me – never mind Robert don’t go away by thinking there is some one comes to your house far from it. I am quite surprised at you – after all these years and the nice little home you have got it takes keeping up also your boys are not the same – they can eat more than you can but my love you don’t look at that. Well did you find your ? I wish you all the love and Good wishes and long life on your birthday and only wish you had been home for it – never mind. I trust you will soon xxxx. I have not seen anything of your mother or Annie. I am writeing to Mrs Cooper – going there this week if she at home. Robert I have sent you the paper mind and will send next Sunday also for you – not quite so bad never mind write untill you get the next one. I can just see you having a fine lark. Well dear the boys sends there love to you and hopes you are well & longing to have you home again also myself and accept true love from me.

  From your, ever True and Faithfull Wife

  EH Coombes

  Emily and her husband had evidently quarrelled just before he left for New York. He had voiced a suspicion that she had ‘some one’ secretly come to the house in his absence – a lover, maybe, since Emily seems at pains in the letter to insist on her fidelity; or a debt collector or impoverished friend, given how she justifies her expenditure. Robert and Nattie, in that close-quartered house, had probably heard their father accuse their mother of promiscuity or profligacy. In the letter Emily is flustered, defensive, upset. She tells her husband how much she and the boys miss him, though he has been gone for just three nights, and reminds him what she has to put up with – the demands of his sister-in-law, the appetites of his sons, the responsibility for his ‘nice little home’. As if to calm herself, she repeats the phrase ‘never mind’ after each burst of indignation or worry. She mentions that she has sent him a paper with news ‘not quite so bad’ as the last one. That Sunday’s newspapers reported that American beef slaughtered at Deptford, the chief cargo of the National Line, was still selling poorly but was fetching slightly more than it had in the previous week – meat sales, particularly of American beef, had been badly hit by the drought.

  The letter evokes something of the atmosphere of agitation and strain in 35 Cave Road on the weekend of the beating and the murder. Emily was a highly strung woman, and she seems to have been wound tighter still by her argument with her husband and his departure for America. That Sunday was hazy with heat – the temperature rose to 80 degrees in the shade – and she faced a long summer alone with her restless, hungry boys. She does not allude in the letter to her fury with Nattie for stealing food, nor to her thrashing of him. Perhaps all that unfolded later in the day.

  For though her letter is threaded with anxiety, Emily emerges from it also as the tender wife and mother whom her friends described. She is warm, sympathetic, alert to the unhappiness of others. She tells her husband that she has impulsively given his sister-in-law a coat that weekend, presumably to sell or pawn, and that Robert was distressed to see his aunt upset. She insists on her eldest son’s sensitivity – his capacity to care – as she had insisted to the attendance officer that he was suffering at school. Whatever cruelties and confusions Emily Coombes may have inflicted on Robert, she also loved him. She believed that he was a boy who could feel sorrow as others did.

  15

  IN THE PLASTIC STAGE

  Robert was allowed back to Block 2 on 8 January 1900, two days after his eighteenth birthday. Upon his return he immersed himself in the life of the asylum.

  About half of the Broadmoor inmates were deemed stable enough to work on the estate: they were assigned jobs in the workshops, on the farm, in the laundry, in the kitchens and bakehouse, and as carpenters, bricklayers and cleaners. ‘Suitable occupation,’ advised the Red Book for attendants, ‘has a most salutary effect on both the body and the mind. It diverts the Patient from his morbid fancies, and leads his thoughts into a healthy channel.’

  Robert worked in the tailors’ shop, part of a three-pronged building behind the central hall. Amid the smells of the horsehair and leather in the adjoining mattress-makers’ and bootmakers’ shops, he and the other tailors made and repaired the dark blue uniforms of the staff, and the underclothes, bedlinen and grey suits of the patients. They cut the winter jackets and trousers from heavy cloth such as Melton, corduroy and fustian, the summer wear from flannel and drill.

  Each working patient was given an extra meal a day (an eleven o’clock lunch of bread, cheese and oatmeal) and paid about five shillings a month, an eighth of the going rate for labour. Robert could use his wages, which were entered as credit in a book kept by the Broadmoor steward, to order extra provisions such as tea and tobacco, or seeds to plant in his allotment.

  Robert’s supervisor was Charles Leach Pike, a master tailor who had joined the Broadmoor staff in 1895, aged twenty-three and newly married. One of eight occupational attendants in the asylum, Pike was paid a salary of £57 to train and oversee the men in his workshop. The attendants were enjoined in the Red Book not to ‘hold themselves aloof from their charges or be content with supervising them’, but rather to ‘join heartily in their occupations and amusements, and work both with and for the Patients’. Pike heeded this advice. He was vice-captain of the Broadmoor Cycling Club, a keen pianist and a frequent performer in the asylum’s theatrical entertainments. The costumes for the shows were put together in his workshop. As accompanist to the Broadmoor string band, Pike inspired several of the inmates in his charge to take up music. Robert learnt to play new instruments – the violin, the piano and the cornet – and he became an enthusiastic member of the asylum’s brass band.

  Brass bands were amateur, working-class ensembles, of which there were tens of thousands in Britain at the turn of the century, whereas string bands had more refined, upper-class antecedents. The editor of the British Bandsman complained about the class distinction, finding ‘no reason why Tom who plays the cornet, should be in a lower social or musical grade than Dick, who plays a violin’. It was a mark of the oddity of Robert’s position, as a working-class lad among the educated lunatics of Block 2, that he played both brass and string instruments, and probably was a member of both bands. The bands performed in concerts in the hall; at staff balls at Easter and Christmas; at ceremonies in the asylum grounds. In the summer of 1900, the brass players gave a concert on the Broadmoor cricket pitch to celebrate the relief of the siege of Mafeking, the South African town that Colonel Robert Baden-Powell had held against the Boer forces for seven months.

  Charles Coleman, the Principal Attendant of Block 2 and the member of staff most directly responsible for Robert’s welfare, was another passionate performer and musician. Born in Dorset in 1850, Coleman had been a drummer with the Dorset Militia before joining the staff of Broadmoor in 1873. He lived in Crowthorne with his wife and children, among them a daughter who was an attendant in the Broadmoor women’s wing. Coleman played in the string band and performed with gusto in entertainments in the hall. He was a well-loved figure in the asylum, especially prized for his comic turns in seasonal revues: his impersonation in November 1900 of a statue of Alexander the Great had the audience helpless with laughter.

  From his office on the ground floor of Block 2, Coleman wrote detailed, sometimes dryly humorous reports to the asylum’s Chief Attendant about the upsets and altercations on the block, taking care to follow the guidance in The Attendant’s Companion: ‘never say that a patient thinks this, or imagines that, or feels the other. You cannot be sure of what a patient thinks or imagines or feels. All that you can be sure of is what he says and does, and your reports should be strictly limited to his sayings and doings.’

  Several of the reports relating to Block 2 inmates feat
ured the irascible and increasingly paranoid barrister Sherlock Hare, who had been admitted to Broadmoor in 1892, aged forty-one, after attacking a newspaper editor in Burma. Over the years, Hare complained to the Block 2 attendants that the cook had prepared him poached eggs instead of omelette; that other inmates had made fun of his name; that his chops had been poorly cooked (he wanted to take this up with the home secretary); that attendants and patients had blown tobacco smoke in his face; that the doctors had inoculated him with syphilis; and that he had been accommodated in a single room – he said that he supposed only murderers were allowed two, a barbed reference to William Chester Minor’s double suite. When Hare insisted that someone had been sitting on his bed while he was in the airing court, Coleman investigated, and established that the bedclothes were rumpled because Hare himself had sat on the bed to put on his boots before going outside.

  Another of Coleman’s reports described a spat between Hare and a patient called Ben Hewlett, a widowed policeman who in 1887 had attacked his nine-year-old son with a chopper. In a Block 2 corridor, wrote Coleman, he saw Hare push Hewlett and Hewlett push Hare back. When Coleman intervened, Hewlett said that Hare had started the scuffle. Hare denied it and called Hewlett a liar. ‘And you,’ replied Hewlett, ‘are a lunatic.’ Coleman gently advised Hewlett to return to work, and Hare to repair to his room.

  The flags at Broadmoor were flown at half-mast upon the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901, and the asylum observed a day of mourning. The next year the patients assembled in the hall to watch a series of short films – probably the first moving pictures they had seen – of the coronation of Victoria’s son as Edward VII. They were now detained not at Her Majesty’s but at His Majesty’s Pleasure.

  A few local shocks were felt at the asylum in the opening years of the new century: a fireball hit the gatehouse during a thunderstorm in 1900, smashing off a chimney pot; in the same year an attendant’s three-year-old son fell into a water butt on the estate and drowned; in 1902 an attendant was invalided out of Broadmoor after being stabbed fifteen times in the face by a patient in the back blocks. On 3 December 1902 Coleman hurried to the aid of William Chester Minor, who was crying out in pain. ‘He had cut his penis off,’ wrote Coleman in his report to the Chief Attendant. ‘He said he had tied it with string, which had stopped the bleeding. I saw what he had done.’ The sixty-eight-year-old lexicographer had long been tormented by sexual fantasies and delusions, and he had lopped off his penis, he said, ‘in the interests of morality’. He was taken to the infirmary. Three months later he had recovered and was back in his Block 2 quarters.

  Robert remained rational enough to stay in Block 2. The attendants kept an eye on him, as he was still considered fragile, but he seemed now to be able to tolerate the pressure of dark thoughts, to sit out a low mood rather than snap under its strain. ‘RAC rather depressed this evening,’ wrote an attendant in a note of 4 October 1901; ‘he says he is alright.’

  Robert took part in many of the asylum recreations. He excelled at billiards, which was played on a frayed old table in one of the two day rooms at the front of Block 2. Many inmates liked to watch the matches, and some acted as bookmakers, setting odds on the result of a tournament and taking bets in batches of tobacco, cigarettes and cigars. Each male patient was allotted an ounce of tobacco a week, drawn from the government stock of contraband seized by Customs & Excise officers.

  Dr Brayn used to tell how he once consented to play billiards with a patient, who proceeded to win the game.

  ‘There you are,’ said the superintendent. ‘I knew you would beat me.’

  ‘Ah, sir,’ remarked another criminal lunatic, consolingly, ‘to be expert in billiards is the sign of a misspent life.’

  Robert was also one of a small group of patients who played chess, continuing a tradition established by inmates such as Edward Oxford, the first of the eight men to try to assassinate Queen Victoria, and Richard Dadd, a patricide who while at Broadmoor had decorated the asylum hall with a series of fantastical murals. Robert proved a talented chess player, as did his fellow Block 2 inmate Reginald Saunderson.

  Saunderson had been admitted to Broadmoor in the same year as Robert, at the age of twenty-one. He was a pale, tall young Irishman of aristocratic descent, with deep-set grey eyes. In November 1894 Saunderson had absconded from an institution for ‘mentally deficient boys’ near London and cut the throat of a woman in Kensington. He fled to Ireland, where he surrendered himself to the police. It emerged that, like Robert, he had taken an obsessive interest in the capture and trial of James Canham Read; the day on which Saunderson turned himself in, 4 December 1894, was the day of Read’s execution.

  Unlike Robert’s family, Saunderson’s parents were rich enough to hire doctors to help to save him from the gallows. The famous alienist Lyttelton Forbes-Winslow interviewed Saunderson and reported that the young man told him: ‘Everything around me appears to me as if in a dream, and I have no recollection of having committed the murder of which you speak; had I done so, I cannot understand the wickedness of the act, or what I should suffer in consequence. I hear, and have heard for some time, and do at the present moment hear people speaking to me, who apparently are hidden behind the walls; I have been persecuted by these voices for a long period of time, urging me to do the various acts, and I believe in their reality.’ On the basis of this suspiciously comprehensive and precise fulfilment of the definition of insanity, Saunderson was found unfit to plead and sent straight to Broadmoor.

  Both Saunderson and Robert took up correspondence chess, a form of the game that had become popular in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Each match was conducted by post, one move at a time, and could last for several months. Saunderson was at one point playing seventy-one correspondence games simultaneously. He secured many of his opponents through the offices of Frideswide Rowland, a former Irish women’s chess champion who ran competitions in the Weekly Irish Times and the chess journal The Four-Leaved Shamrock. By way of thanks, Saunderson used to post boxes of asylum-grown strawberries to Mrs Rowland every summer. He was a ‘bright, pleasant’ correspondent, she recalled, and a strong player.

  In 1902, to mark the coronation of Edward VII, Mrs Rowland advertised in the pages of The Four-Leaved Shamrock for volunteers to take part in an Ireland v England match. Saunderson and Robert both signed up. Saunderson was allotted to the Irish team, since he had been born in Dublin, and Robert to the English. The standard was high: the forty or so competitors included the future English correspondence chess champion and the future Irish over-the-board champion. In all, 111 games were played, with a point being awarded for a win and a half for a draw. Saunderson lost his match but Robert beat his Irish opponent, and when the competition concluded in 1904 England won by 68½ points to Ireland’s 42½.

  Saunderson ceased his correspondence with Mrs Rowland soon after this match. She later heard that the Broadmoor authorities had limited the patients’ participation in chess, as the game was proving ‘too exciting’ to some on the cold damp days that they were confined in the block.

  In the summer months, both Robert and Saunderson played cricket for the Block 2 team, as did Alfred Gamble, the costermonger’s boy who had attacked young children, Arthur Gilbert Cooper, the curate who had cut his vicar’s throat, and Roderick Maclean, the would-be royal assassin and aspiring poet. Dr Brayn often captained the Block 2 side, while John Baker, his deputy, led a team drawn from the patients in Blocks 3, 4 and 5 (Blocks 1 and 6, the back blocks, did not field any players). On other occasions, the Block 2 attendants and patients played together, or a team of gardener patients played a combined team of tailors, upholsterers and bootmakers. As well as adhering to the usual rules of the game, the patients had to observe the asylum’s strictures on cricket: they were to walk to the field in a ‘compact manner’, flanked by attendants, and during a match had to keep a distance of twenty yards from those attendants assigned to form outposts; if they wished to relieve themselves, they had to do
so at a designated spot supervised by a member of staff.

  The fixtures were organised by the Broadmoor chaplain, the Reverend Hugh Wood, a first-class cricketer who in the late 1870s had played for Cambridge University and then for the Yorkshire county team. Wood arranged up to seventy matches at the asylum each season in the early 1900s, and oversaw the laying of a new pitch within the walls in 1903. The Broadmoor First XI increasingly competed against teams fielded by local institutions such as Sandhurst Royal Military College and the Windsor police. Robert played in a side that beat the Reading Gas Company in 1907. In the same year he was listed in the local paper, the Reading Mercury, as one of the batsmen who helped the Broadmoor side to victory over Crowthorne.

  By the asylum’s standards, Robert was a decent batsman – he was usually placed halfway down the batting order – and an able bowler. He shared the bowling duties with Dr Brayn, George Melton (a railway-van boy who hit his mother on the head with a hammer in 1896), Henry Spurrier (a lance-corporal who knifed a fellow soldier in 1899), Kenneth Murchison (a renowned Boer War gunner who had shot a reporter through the head in Mafeking in 1899) and Thomas Shultz (an office boy who attacked his boss with an axe in 1904).

  Of the players in the Block 2 cricket team, the one whose crime most closely recalled Robert’s was a lad called Frank Rodgers, admitted to Broadmoor in 1904 at the age of fifteen. Robert was by then twenty-two; Frank took his place as the baby of the asylum.

  Frank had a more moneyed and educated background than Robert. At the beginning of 1904 he had been living in a large house called The Gables in the pretty village of Meldreth, near Cambridge. The Rodgers family had recently moved from London in the hope that the peace and seclusion of the countryside would help to cure Frank’s mother, Georgina, of her weakness for alcohol. Frank’s father, a City solicitor, commuted daily to London, leaving Frank and his mother at home with Frank’s sisters Winifred and Queenie and his older brother William. Georgina continued to drink heavily.