One evening in April, Frank and Winifred returned from a visit to a friend’s house to find their mother drunk. While the children ate their supper, Georgina lay dozing in an armchair in the dining room. Afterwards Frank went upstairs and Winifred went to the drawing room to play the piano. A few minutes later Frank entered the drawing room with a revolver in his hand. ‘I have shot Mother,’ he told Winifred. ‘It is for the best.’
Winifred rushed out to find her mother lying in the hallway with a bullet in her neck. She quickly summoned a doctor, while Frank took his youngest sister, the six-year-old Queenie, across the road to a public house. He asked the landlady if Queenie could stay there for the night, as he had shot his mother. He then sat down to read a newspaper.
Winifred and William followed Frank to the pub. ‘Frank,’ said William, ‘why did you do it?’ ‘I did it for Queenie’s sake,’ Frank replied. He repeated this to Winifred: ‘It is for Queenie’s sake. She cannot live the life we have had for the past two years.’
When the doctor arrived at The Gables he found Georgina Rodgers dead. Frank confessed readily to him – ‘I have done it’ – and handed him the revolver, saying that he had taken it from his brother’s drawer. A policeman came to arrest the boy.
At Frank’s trial for murder, Winifred confirmed that their domestic life had been very unhappy for the past couple of years because their mother had so often been drunk. Frank was their mother’s favourite child, she said, known by the others as ‘Mother’s boy’. William then testified: Frank had been restless for many weeks, he said, often rising from his bed in the middle of the night to lock the bedroom door. The family doctor confirmed that Georgina Rodgers was nearly always inebriated when he saw her. He said that Frank had told him that for the past two or three months he had frequently sensed his mother standing right behind him, looking over his shoulder, but when he turned she seemed to disappear. Frank had also told him that as he advanced on his mother with the revolver he heard a voice say, ‘Do it quickly’. Finally, two alienists appointed by the Crown gave evidence. The first said that Frank was unable to tell right from wrong because his determination to put an end to his family’s trouble had narrowed his mind. The second said that Frank had become convinced that ‘there was no other way out of it’. The press described Frank’s manner in court as gentlemanly, intelligent, polite.
The boy’s plight aroused the compassion of many. ‘The sympathy of the whole neighbourhood appears to be with young Frank Rodgers,’ noted the Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire Reporter, observing that the boy had ‘brooded over the unhappy conditions of things at The Gables and in this state of mind committed the terrible deed, perhaps feeling prepared to suffer himself for the sake of his little sister Queenie and the rest of the family’. The jury, without leaving the box, arrived at a verdict of guilty but insane.
The home secretary was uneasy about sending Frank Rodgers to Broadmoor. He asked Dr Brayn how the boy would be accommodated. ‘I should propose to place him at first in one of the infirmary wards,’ replied the superintendent, ‘where he would be under the constant supervision of an attendant day and night.’ This was the same arrangement that had been made when Robert was admitted and, again, when he became unstable at the age of sixteen. Brayn explained that if Frank was sufficiently rational he would be sent on to Block 2, to reside with ‘patients of the better class’.
Frank was admitted to Broadmoor in June and transferred to Block 2 in July. He engaged in many of the same pursuits as Robert. He followed the cricket in the newspapers and was a keen participant in the asylum games. He and Robert played their first game together in July; Robert was the leading scorer of the match, making sixty-three runs before he was caught out by Alfred Gamble. Frank also took up the violin, practising on four evenings a week in the winter months, and became a member of the string band. He learnt to play chess. He taught himself French and shorthand and was given lessons in mathematics by the chaplain. He grew apples and strawberries on his allotment.
Frank’s father sent him hampers containing oysters, French bread, cuts of rabbit and pork, bottles of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce and copies of the Boy’s Own Paper. This magazine was a middle-class version of the story papers found in Robert’s house, having been founded as an antidote to the dreadfuls – it was full of tales of adventure and derring-do, but firmly pinned to the virtues of valour, self-sacrifice, the defence of Empire. Frank was a voracious reader. While on remand in prison, he had read both Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the submarine fantasy of 1870 that inspired the Jack Wright stories, and Thomas Anstey Guthrie’s Vice Versa: a Lesson to Fathers, a novel of 1882 about a schoolboy and his father, a City merchant, who exchange bodies and inhabit each others’ lives. The boy’s father is taught how trapped a lively-minded boy can feel when he has ‘no money and few rights’, ‘virtually no way to assert himself in the world around him’.
Dr Brayn wrote to the Home Office with his observations about Frank Rodgers’s crime. ‘Defect of will power and the influence of puberty were no doubt largely responsible,’ said the superintendent; ‘he is still in the plastic stage of adolescence and very susceptible to extraneous influences.’ In another memo he summed up the cause of the murder as ‘Domestic worry. Adolescence.’
Adolescence had been identified only recently as a distinct developmental phase, notably with the publication in 1904 of the American psychologist Granville Stanley Hall’s Adolescence: its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. Hall described the adolescent years as the occasion of ‘a marvellous new birth’ but also a time of ‘storm and stress’, characterised by conflicts with parents, moodiness and risk-taking. This period, he suggested, was ‘pre-eminently the criminal age’.
‘At no time of life,’ Hall said, ‘is the love of excitement so strong as during the season of the accelerated development of adolescence, which craves strong feelings and new sensations, when monotony, routine, and detail are intolerable.’ A love of cheap fiction was one of the symptoms, Hall wrote: at about the age of twelve many boys were seized by a ‘reading craze’, and in their eagerness to ‘have the feelings stirred’ they sought out ‘flash literature’. They became subtly imprinted by such fiction, he suggested, acquiring a half-conscious, shadowy fantasy world, impossible to articulate except, sometimes, in action: ‘There is now evolved a penumbral region in the soul more or less beyond the reach of all school methods, a world of glimpses and hints. . . Perhaps nothing read now fails to leave its mark. It can not be orally reproduced at call, but on emergency it is on hand for use.’
There were many correspondences between the histories of Frank Rodgers and Robert Coombes. Both were bright boys and passionate readers. In the months that preceded their matricides both suffered from headaches, nightmares, irritability. They had been their mother’s favourites before becoming their destroyers. After the killing each calmly confessed (though Robert took longer to do so), and seemed relieved rather than tormented by his act; in explaining his crime, each boy cited a need to protect a younger sibling. One of the alienists who examined Frank Rodgers for the Crown reported that the lad’s ‘immature judgement. . . had for some time led him to believe there was moral justification’ for the matricide: ‘He thought it was the right thing to do.’ Dr Brayn agreed that Frank had become ‘convinced that his mother’s death was imperative’. Robert too had imagined that there was justice and necessity in the killing of his mother.
Both boys seemed to have unacknowledged motives for murder. They chose to present themselves as the defenders of weaker children but were also driven by fear. Frank had imagined his mother creeping up on him; he had locked his door against her at night. His claim that he did it for Queenie served to mask his anxieties. By invoking Nattie’s thrashing as the motive for the murder, Robert similarly played down or displaced his own dread of an unsteady and overwhelming mother.
Frank and Robert drew their murder
plots from the fiction-fed shadowland that G. S. Hall had described. For much of their childhood, storybooks had offered these boys an escape from anxiety, and when they found themselves in crisis they framed their solutions in the language of those books. Frank’s was a Boy’s Own narrative of chivalric heroism, Robert’s a more muddled and lurid penny adventure of rescue and revenge, self-sacrifice and self-interest. The purity of Frank’s narrative aroused compassion in his audience; Robert’s tawdrier story invoked disgust as well as pity. Unlike Frank, Robert lied and dissembled after the murder, and he stole his mother’s money. The heroes whom he emulated included not just the noble knight but also the independent lad setting out to sea in search of a new life, and the clever criminal outwitting the establishment. Robert aspired to be a hero, to protect and rescue Nattie. He aspired to be a villain, cool and notorious, free of all feeling.
In 1905 Frank’s father applied to the Home Office for Frank to be conditionally discharged, and Dr Brayn advised that since the boy seemed sane there was no need for him to remain in the asylum. The home secretary refused the application, on the grounds that to discharge him so soon ‘would encourage popular belief that sane murderers are sent to Broadmoor and released after a short time’ but the next year agreed that Frank could be entrusted to his father’s care. The seventeen-year-old left Broadmoor on Christmas Eve 1906. He was one of 175 patients to be discharged between 1896 and 1910 (of these, forty-nine relapsed and were re-admitted to the asylum). Frank took a job as a clerk in his father’s office in the City; at home in the evenings he practised the violin with his sister Winnie.
Frank Rodgers was married in 1910, four years after leaving Broadmoor, and by 1911 he and his wife had a baby daughter.
In 1910 another young criminal was admitted to Block 2. Patrick Knowles was born in 1894 in Teesside, north-east England, to a shipyard ironworker and his common-law wife. As a child, he sold matches for a living. In 1903, when he was nine, Patrick killed a one-year-old boy by burying him on a piece of wasteland and then attempted to abduct and kill two other infants. He was apprehended and charged with murder. The Home Office asked Drs Brayn and Nicolson to examine Patrick. They pronounced him insane – or rather, ‘of unsound and unformed mind in consequence of childhood and immaturity of development’, a phrasing that suggested that most children were legally mad. On the basis of this assessment, the Home Office announced that rather than face trial the child would be confined in Broadmoor at His Majesty’s Pleasure. Unknown to the press and public, Patrick was instead conditionally discharged and sent incognito to an industrial school for poor and delinquent children. Only in 1910, when he was sixteen, was he transferred to Broadmoor, and even then the Home Office had doubts about whether it was a suitable place for someone so young. ‘I fear this is the only course open,’ read a note on Patrick’s file. ‘It is not a satisfactory thing to send a boy of 16 to Broadmoor, but it has not worked badly in the case of one or two other boys of that age.’
Dr Brayn was still running the asylum when Patrick was admitted, but he retired a few months later. In his fifteen years in charge, he had reduced the use of solitary confinement to even fewer hours than when he had taken over, and increased the life expectancy of the inmates. He was succeeded by his deputy, John Baker, an unmarried Aberdonian born in 1861, who had written papers on epilepsy, criminal anthropometry and infanticide. In the most recent of these, published in 1902, Baker observed that many of the female patients in Broadmoor had killed their babies in a fit of ‘transient frenzy’, a single, fleeting episode of psychosis.
Patrick Knowles, like the other young patients, was placed in Block 2. As he had already learnt the rudiments of tailoring at the industrial school, he was given a job in the tailor’s shop with Robert. The tailor, Charles Pike, described Patrick as a painstaking and intelligent worker, quiet, respectful, obliging and of a happy disposition. Dr Baker echoed Pike’s appraisal: far from displaying ‘inherent vicious or criminal tendencies’, said Baker, Patrick’s conduct and demeanour were exemplary and he was a favourite with both staff and inmates.
In December 1911, after thirteen months in the asylum, Patrick was discharged to the care of the industrial school at which he had already spent seven years, and where he was now to remain until he was able to support himself. The head of the school wrote to the Home Office to ask for funds to help the lad to emigrate. He explained that he feared that Patrick would otherwise be tempted to go back home to Teesside. The headmaster saw the boy’s home as the source of his troubles; Dr Brayn, too, had believed that Patrick’s crime was rooted in his ‘squalid’ family life. The press usually interpreted juvenile atrocities as evidence of the innate, hereditary nature of criminality and madness. The staff at Broadmoor, on the contrary, saw young murderers as the most malleable of their charges; they suspected that the causes of their violence often lay in their unhappy circumstances, and that they might flourish under different influences. The doctors who dealt with avowedly insane children often detected emotional as well as physiological causes for their outbreaks of unreason. To get better, such patients needed to recognise the pain that they had endured as well as the pain that they had inflicted.
Charles Coleman, the Principal Attendant of Block 2, was promoted to Chief Attendant of the asylum in 1906, but at the beginning of 1912 was obliged to retire. Coleman had served at Broadmoor for almost forty years. The band played at his leaving ceremony, and Samuel Smith, who succeeded him as acting Chief Attendant, made a eulogistic speech of farewell.
For many years Dr Brayn had taken the view that Robert, though ‘rational and tranquil’, was not fully stable: despite his apparent sanity, the superintendent worried that he might become dangerous again, whether to himself or others, if he were set at liberty. As Brayn told a visiting journalist, many patients whose behaviour was perfectly normal within the asylum walls could revert once they were in the wider world. To illustrate the point, Brayn introduced his visitor to a quiet, well-spoken inmate who was tending a flowerbed, and explained that the man had once been discharged from the asylum as cured and within three days had smashed his wife’s head to a pulp with a hammer. But Brayn’s successor, Dr Baker, was more optimistic about Robert’s chances. When Robert petitioned the Home Office for his discharge in February 1912, Baker wrote to the home secretary in support of his application. ‘I have the honour to submit, herewith, a petition from Robert Coombes. . . He is a good tailor, a member of the Asylum band and cricket team. . . In my opinion his prayer might receive favourable consideration without undue risk.’
The Broadmoor authorities could not release a patient unless to the care of a person or agency prepared to oversee his or her return to normal life and to report back to the asylum if anything went awry. Since no member of Robert’s family was able to look after him, Dr Baker recommended him to a Salvation Army colony at Hadleigh, Essex, which occasionally took in the asylum’s discharged men. Robert was offered a place at the Hadleigh colony in March, and the Home Office agreed that he could be conditionally discharged.
When Robert had been admitted to Broadmoor in September 1895, some newspapers had predicted that his spell in the asylum would be short and unhappy. ‘He is not likely to trouble the Broadmoor authorities very long,’ said The Sunday Referee; ‘within a few years he will probably die raving mad.’ As it turned out, Robert spent seventeen years in the asylum, and was the longest-serving of the eight men set free in 1912.
On Friday 15 March, at the age of thirty, Robert packed his belongings and said goodbye to the staff and his friends. In the office of Samuel Smith, the acting Chief Attendant, he changed into a going-away suit that had been cut and stitched for him in the tailor’s shop and he handed back his uniform. Robert left the asylum in the custody of Charles Pike, the tailor attendant, who had been assigned to accompany him on his journey out of Broadmoor and back to Essex.
PART V
WITH TRUMPETS AND SOUND OF CORNET
16
SMOOTH IN THE MORNING LIG
HT
The king was George V, who had succeeded to the throne on the death of Edward VII in 1910. The prime minister was H. H. Asquith, a Liberal, whose party had regained power in 1905 after a decade of Conservative rule. Asquith’s government was contending with a surge of discontent. Hundreds of thousands of workers had gone on strike in 1911, protesting about their conditions and wages: cotton weavers in Lancashire, sewing-machine makers on the Clyde, dockers and carters in London, railwaymen and seamen throughout the country. Even schoolchildren went on strike in September, demanding shorter hours and free pencils. In November, scores of women stormed Parliament to insist on their right to vote.
The unrest continued into the new year. A million coal miners were on strike when Robert left Broadmoor in mid-March, and a band of suffragettes had been smashing shop windows in London. An Essex woman – the wife of W. W. Jacobs, author of the horror story ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ – was charged with breaking four windows in Earl’s Court Road.
‘I have done this because I think it is my duty as the mother of five children,’ Eleanor Jacobs explained to the magistrate.
‘What!’ said the magistrate. ‘Your duty as a mother of five children to smash property up!’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is the only way we can protest against the action, or rather the inaction, of the Government in refusing justice.’
The magistrate was so baffled by Mrs Jacobs’s statements that he thought that she might be demented, so he had her remanded for seven days while a doctor investigated the state of her mind. She was found sane and sentenced to a month’s hard labour.
Because of the coal shortages caused by the miners’ strike, only half of the trains were running, but Robert and Charles Pike managed to make their way by rail through London to Essex. The Salvation Army Farm Colony at Hadleigh overlooked the Thames Estuary a few miles from Southend. It sat on a hilltop by the ruin of a thirteenth-century castle, above a scrubby foreshore piled with cockleshells. The sharp winds from the river and sea carried a salty reek of fish and algae. The Essex clay was springy and sticky underfoot. At the colony headquarters, Pike gave Robert into the care of the Salvation Army officers and then headed back to Broadmoor.
The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer Page 20