The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

by Kate Summerscale

  Robert milked the cows each day. He roped the cattle into sheds, pumped their milk into buckets by hand, skimmed off the cream with a separator and decanted it into cans. The cans were collected by a truck from the Orara Co-Op Dairy Society and delivered to the district town of Grafton, thirty-five miles north of Nana Glen. On the cream truck’s return trip, the driver dropped off the empty cans along with supplies from Grafton. There were a handful of shops in Nana Glen itself: a bakery, a butcher, a general store, a post office, a combined billiards room and hairdresser, a pie shop, a saddlery. Robert bought tobacco with which to roll himself cigarettes.

  In the evenings, Robert often dined on dampers: pancakes of flour, salt and milk baked in the hot ashes of a fire. He ate vegetables from his plot and drank the milk produced by the cows. Occasionally, he killed a calf for its meat, sharing or trading the veal with neighbours. Nana Glen had no electricity or running water. Most villagers kept kerosene lamps to light their homes at night and they washed their clothes in metal tubs by the creek.

  Robert had once hankered after romance and riches in far-off lands, but in New South Wales he made a life free of either. In Nana Glen he formed no close friendships with other men, courted no women, accrued no property. He seemed to have relinquished the desires for wealth and power that had animated him as a boy, along with the desires for sex and companionship that might have come to him as a man. His journey conformed only to the most innocent penny dreadful plot: that of the lad who flees the busy modern world for the rugged simplicity of the Australian bush. Instead of love and money, he had found peace and safety.

  Robert became acquainted with Bertha and her children when they moved to the farm next to his in the late 1920s. He learnt that Bertha, a policeman’s daughter, was born in East London in the 1880s and brought up in West Ham. Like Robert, she had emigrated to Australia early in 1914.

  By 1930, the Smith family was under increasing financial strain. Harold was supporting six children: the baby he had with Bertha, the four children she had brought to the marriage, and his daughter Elizabeth. In the economic depression that had taken hold in Australia, work was scarce and the prices of dairy products were falling. Smith was running up a large debt at the general store in the neighbouring village of Glenreagh. To try to make ends meet, he killed most of his calves for their hides, and he took on a contract to build a dairy and a set of milking stalls at a farm twelve miles away. He left many of the tasks on the home farm to Harry.

  Before milking Smith’s half-dozen cows on winter mornings, Harry would warm his feet in a patch of grass on which a cow had lain overnight. Afterwards, he would often run barefoot the four miles to Nana Glen public school to make it in time for class; and run home again to do the afternoon’s milking at the end of the school day. In the evenings, it fell to Harry to round up the calves and bring them close to home so that they would be safe from dingoes. If he couldn’t find one of the calves in the bush, Smith was likely to beat him.

  In the middle of 1930, Harold Smith’s landlord Ike Cundy complained that the property was becoming overgrown with black wattle. He told Smith to cut the bush back. Harry helped Smith to fell the trees and stack them up for burning. They used an axe to chop the timber, and a brush hook – a scythe with a foot-long curved blade – to hack at the undergrowth. Harry was kept so busy with this work that he was hardly able to go to school at all.

  When Cundy called round to inspect the land on 3 June 1930, Smith lost his temper and struck his sixty-eight-year-old landlord with a whip handle. Cundy was injured badly enough to need medical attention. He reported the assault to the police and threatened Smith with legal action.

  Six days later, on Monday 9 June, Smith accused Harry of laziness and told him to get off the farm. Harry, now eleven, had been suffering from flu. When Smith found the boy still on the property in the afternoon, he attacked him, repeatedly hitting him with the handle of the brush hook and punching him in the face.

  Harry was seriously injured. On Thursday he took himself to the police station at Glenreagh, four miles north along the track that ran past their house, and reported to the officer on duty that his stepfather had beaten him. Police Constable Lawrence Freebody dressed the boy’s wounds, then put him in a car and drove him back to the farm. Smith was at the table, eating, when the policeman came in with Harry. Bertha was also in the room.

  ‘This boy informs me that you assaulted him with a brush hook,’ said Constable Freebody.

  Smith carried on eating. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Freebody removed the bandages from Harry’s right arm and asked Smith if he had caused the injuries with his brush hook, as Harry claimed, and punched him in the face with his closed fist. Smith, recanting, admitted only to having spanked him with an open hand while they were both milking. The cow, he said, had then kicked the boy.

  Freebody asked him if he had hunted Harry away from the farm that day.

  ‘Yes,’ said Smith, ‘I told him he would have to get out as he would not work.’

  Bertha interrupted to say that Harry was not unwell because he had been beaten, but because he had influenza.

  Freebody told Smith that he would be charged with assault. He then drove Harry to the district hospital in Grafton. A doctor treated the severe cuts and bruises on the boy’s right elbow, his right eye, his nose, his left cheek and his legs. Harry was kept in hospital for a week.

  On Friday 20 June, Harry was taken to give evidence against his stepfather at the children’s court in Grafton.

  Smith denied the assault. He said that he could not remember having told Freebody that he spanked Harry during the milking. ‘The cow kicked him down,’ he said, ‘and I spanked him afterwards.’ He admitted having hit Harry on the lower part of his body with an old axe handle that he had stuck on his brush hook, but insisted that the child’s injuries had been caused by the cow trampling on him. Most of the time, said Smith, he and the lad got on well together.

  Harry was then questioned by the magistrate. He said that he had been cutting bottlebrushes on 9 June when his stepfather, out of the blue and without saying a word, had started to beat him with the brush hook.

  Bertha told the court that her son helped out on the farm and she believed that he always did his best but, of course, he was very young and had never lived on a farm before. Her husband was usually kind and considerate to all of her children, she added, and gave them everything he possibly could. She was eager to exculpate Smith, perhaps because she feared for her family’s livelihood if he were convicted. But she acknowledged to the court that some of Harry’s injuries were caused by his stepfather striking him with a brush hook.

  The magistrate found Smith guilty of unlawful assault and fined him £5 with £7/7/6 in witness and medical expenses. He ordered him to deposit a further £20 with the court, which would be returned only if he remained on good behaviour for two years; the alternative was two months’ imprisonment. The fine, said the magistrate, could be paid in instalments of £3 a month.

  Upon learning what had happened to Harry, Robert Coombes decided to risk the careful, solitary life that he had created for himself: he offered to look after the boy. Harold Smith moved with his family to Grafton soon after his attacks on his landlord and his stepson. Harry stayed with Robert in Nana Glen.

  Robert and Harry lived together in the house by the track. Though Harry helped out on the farm, Robert continued to milk the cows himself, and he made sure that Harry went back to school – he had been absent so long that he had to re-enrol at the end of June 1930. Sometimes Harry got a lift home in a neighbour’s sulky or, to his delight, in one of the few cars in the village, such as Sam Green’s Morris Cowley or Charles Wright’s Chevy. In the afternoons, Robert helped him with his homework.

  Towards the end of 1930, a bush fire spread across Ike Cundy’s land, catching on the trees and dry grass and then on the hessian that clad Robert and Harry’s house. The building and most of its contents were destroyed, including Robert’s cornet and vi
olin. His four military medals survived the blaze, though they were damaged by the fire and the ribbons were burnt away.

  Robert and Harry slept in the cow stalls while they built themselves a shack, using the burnt iron from the old house as a roof. The owners of the farm across the road, the Playford family, gave them clothes and bedding to replace what they had lost, and at Christmas brought over cake, pudding and nuts.

  The next year Robert found a new house on a small rise of land that belonged to Reginald Gill, an English-born farmer who lived about a mile south of Cundy’s place. Gill’s son ploughed the field so that they could plant a vegetable garden, and Robert agreed to give his landlord a quarter of his profits in return for the use of the house and land. At first the going was hard, as Robert and Harry had to fetch water for the garden from Coldwater Creek, a tributary of the Orara, and carry it several hundred yards up the hill in four-gallon kerosene cans. But Robert soon spotted a nice patch of flat land right by the creek and arranged with its owner to farm this plot while continuing to rent Gill’s house.

  Robert devoted himself to the garden. In the rich dark soil by the creek, he planted cauliflowers, cabbages, pumpkins, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers and peas. Most local families grew their own vegetables, but Robert’s produce was so good that he was rarely short of customers. His peas and tomatoes were particularly fine. The O’Connells, who had a dairy farm in Nana Glen, used to send their eldest son down on a pony to buy Robert’s tomatoes when the Catholic priest stopped by for lunch.

  Harry hawked their vegetables around the neighbouring farms. At first he rode a bicycle, his wares thrown over his back in sugar sacks. Once a week or so he hitched a lift on the cream truck to Glenreagh, where he would sell vegetables until the truck came back through on its return trip. After a couple of years he and Robert acquired a brown mare, a sulky and harness so that Harry could drive himself up to Glenreagh with his goods. Harry supplemented the vegetables with fruit, buying watermelons and oranges from the Playfords to sell on at a profit. He also earned money by collecting mail from the post office and delivering it to neighbouring farms.

  Harry always addressed Robert as ‘Mr Coombes’ and Robert called Harry ‘Boy’. As with an army officer and a soldier, or an asylum attendant and a patient, there was never any doubt about who was in charge. It was Robert’s duty to lead, protect and care for Harry, and the child’s duty to obey his guardian. Robert grew fond of Harry, and he let the boy depend on him.

  Robert was tidy in his habits. He trained Harry to wash the dishes and to clean the house thoroughly. They both wore shorts to work and had smarter outfits for best: Robert chose jackets for Harry at Mackelly’s clothing store in Grafton. He could alter and repair their clothes himself, thanks to his training in Charles Pike’s tailoring shop at Broadmoor. Robert and Harry slept on folding stretcher beds in the bedroom. They kept a bull terrier as a pet, then two fox terriers. They shared their meals with the dogs.

  In time, Robert restored the medals that had been damaged in the fire and he replaced their ribbons: the red, white and blue watered silk of the 1914–15 Star, the orange blaze of the British War medal, the double rainbow of the Victory medal, the deep blue, white and crimson of the Military Medal. He bought a new violin and a new cornet, and would play the piano at neighbours’ houses when he stopped by for tea. He taught music to children in the village.

  Just over the creek from Robert’s garden, also on the road to Glenreagh, were the village cricket pitch and two tennis courts. At weekends, Robert crossed the creek to play cricket or to watch the younger Nana Glen men compete against other teams. When electricity was run to a few buildings in Nana Glen in the mid-1930s, cricket enthusiasts were able to listen to broadcasts of international games on the radio in ‘Pop’ Thompson’s pie shop.

  Though the 45th Battalion had been dissolved in 1919, the band kept going. In the 1920s it was one of the few such bands regularly to compete in regional competitions, military gymkhanas and tattoos. Robert used to go by train to Sydney to perform in Armistice and Anzac Day parades. One April in the mid-1930s he took Harry with him to the Anzac parade and the Royal Easter Show. They stayed for two days in a small boarding house, eating their meals in a café across the road. On 25 April, the anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, Harry stood in the crowd to see his guardian play the cornet and march with his fellow veterans through the streets.

  Robert impressed Harry as an educated, strong-minded man who could converse on any subject. He was a keen reader of books – novels and histories borrowed from the Grafton public library – and he followed the news, including the international cricket tests, in the Sydney Morning Herald. Robert also competed in chess tournaments at local clubs and by post. In the late 1920s the Australasian newspaper printed details of three correspondence games that he had won against a clerk from the town of Lismore, New South Wales.

  In Holloway gaol, Robert had wept for his cats and his mandolin. In the Australian bush, he took solace in his violin and his dogs, in cricket, chess and books. And he had Harry, a child to look after as he had tried to look after Nattie.

  Nattie occasionally came to visit his brother. After being demobilised in May 1919, when the Swan returned to Sydney, he had settled in Newcastle, 300 miles south of Nana Glen, and found work as a stoker on government boats that dredged the state’s rivers and harbours. He married a widow called Mary May in 1928, when he was forty-five and she forty-seven.

  On one visit to the Orara Valley, Nattie stayed overnight in the Glenreagh Hotel, a single-storey clapboarded building where Robert and Harry joined him for dinner. Robert seemed to bear his younger brother no grudge, despite the fact that Nattie had testified against him in 1895. If Nattie had ever resented Robert – for killing their mother, for upending their lives, for disappearing to Broadmoor – he seemed to have laid that to rest, too. Just as he had been chief witness to his brother’s crime, Nattie had become the chief witness to his life: during the war, Robert had asked that he be notified of all his injuries, promotions, decorations; and now he introduced him to Harry.

  Harry rarely saw his own family, but he learned later that Harold Smith had continued to hurt and frighten his stepchildren. When Harry’s younger brother Alf was helping to fix a fence on a farm one day, Smith became furious with him for holding the barbed wire incorrectly, and as punishment he tore the barbs through the boy’s palms. On another occasion, Smith ordered Alf to sharpen a piece of steel and drive the spike through the heart of a sick horse. Alf was too distressed to carry out the task, so Smith made the boy hold the animal’s head while he shot at its temple with a pistol; to Alf’s horror, Smith missed, instead shooting off the horse’s ears.

  In October 1936, after a year of drought, bush fires were blown in to Nana Glen by fierce, fast winds. Robert and Harry were working in the garden by the creek when the flames shot to the tops of the surrounding bush, lighting the trees like beacons, and the sparks flew ahead to their house on the hill. They rushed to the building but were too late to save it. The farmers of the district battled for days and nights to quench the fires with water. Scores of cows and pigs were burnt to death in their sheds and sties, hundreds of miles of fencing were lost; pastures were scorched and plantations razed. The O’Connells barely escaped from their blazing farm: the parents bundled their three children into a sulky, wrapped in wet towels and blankets, and drove them out to safety through the burning trees.

  This second fire marked the end of Robert and Harry’s life together. While Robert started to piece together a shed of wood and iron at the garden by the creek, Harry was given shelter by the family of Herb Morrow, the soldier who had returned to Australia on the same ship as Robert, and he was then offered a room to rent in Reg Gill’s house. He was seventeen, over six feet tall, and he felt ready to leave Robert’s care.

  Harry joined the 15th Light Horse Regiment of the AIF, a part-time militia that trained in nearby camps for several weeks a year, and he took a job as a road-builder for the fo
restry department, clearing land and laying tracks to ease the loggers’ access to the bush. He would cycle twenty miles up the mountain to work on a Monday morning, stay in the bush for three nights, and cycle back to Nana Glen on Thursday night. At weekends, he spent time with Herb Morrow’s niece Isabelle Rockey. Belle had been a fellow pupil at the Nana Glen school: Harry remembered that she and her best friend Maizee, an aboriginal girl, had read aloud to the class from the Australian children’s classic Dot and the Kangaroo. Belle was a good tennis player, he now discovered, and an excellent dancer. Her parents gave Harry permission to take her to dances organised by the Methodist Church. The couple won a box of chocolates in a waltzing competition at the Cavalry Ball in the Nana Glen village hall in 1938, and two prizes at the Younger Set Ball the next year. The dance band was led by the Cowling brothers, Jack and Bill, local boys whom Robert had taught to play the drums and piano.

  Robert continued to tend his garden and he now sold the vegetables himself. He carried his produce around the neighbourhood on the sulky, pulled by a small bay pony. His dark hair was greying and streaked with white.

  When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Robert joined a volunteer defence corps in Nana Glen, composed chiefly of those too young or too old to join the army. The group met twice a week for training: in the village hall on one evening and at the sports ground each Sunday morning. Robert would take along his cornet to play for the small corps. Military service, for him, was an opportunity for music.

  Just over a year into the war, Robert was able to join the army itself. The Australian government put out a plea at the end of 1940 for First World War veterans to form an emergency defence force to protect the coast of New South Wales in the event of a Japanese invasion. Robert volunteered for the 8th Garrison Battalion in February 1941. Since the unit would accept only men younger than fifty-five, Robert gave his age as fifty-four when he signed up (he was in fact fifty-nine). Before leaving home he wrote a will in which he left everything to Harry; his chief allegiance was no longer to his brother, but to his ward.