Robert and his fellow veterans were issued with uniforms and weapons, and sent to train in camps near Newcastle for three weeks at a time. The pay was six shillings a day, as it had been in the Great War. The 8th Garrison Battalion band led the Armistice Day parade in Newcastle in November 1941.
Harry was training as a gunner near Maitland, in southern New South Wales. On visits to Nana Glen he continued to court Belle Rockey and in September 1940 they became engaged. The following March the two were married in the Nana Glen Methodist church. Belle’s health deteriorated soon afterwards, and in July 1941 the army discharged Harry on compassionate grounds, so that he could look after his wife. He worked in a Nana Glen sawmill, cutting timber for defence works.
Robert, too, became unwell. In February 1942 he developed heart problems and was discharged from the army. He returned to Nana Glen and resumed his gardening. Over the next few years he took part in local events – in 1946 he was a guest of honour at a meeting of the Orara Valley branch of the Returned Servicemen’s League and a judge at a fancy-dress ball in the village hall. He kept at work on his land. Once or twice when Coldwater Creek burst its banks and the garden flooded he had to be rescued from the iron roof of his shack.
In 1945 Nattie fell ill with lung cancer, an occupational hazard for ships’ stokers, and in September 1946 he died, aged sixty-three. He was cremated in Newcastle, New South Wales, and his estate of £103 passed to his widow.
Robert had a heart attack at the beginning of May 1949 and was taken to the hospital in Coffs Harbour, seventeen miles south-east of Nana Glen. Harry, who had recently moved to Coffs Harbour with his family, was notified of Robert’s illness but did not manage to get to the hospital before his former guardian died on 7 May. The causes of Robert’s death were given as chronic nephritis and arteriosclerosis, diseases of the kidneys and the heart. The assets he had bequeathed to Harry amounted to £3-worth of shares in the Orara Dairy Co-op, issued during his dairy-farming days. He had already given him his medals.
At the time of Robert’s death, Harry was building a bungalow for his family and did not have the money to commission a gravestone. Robert was buried in an unmarked grave in the Church of England section of the town cemetery.
In the decades that followed, Harry worked at various sawmills, helped to raise his three children and to look after Belle, whose health was still poor: she suffered from kidney disease, severe stomach ulcers and anaemia. Harry accompanied her to Sydney for treatments; he once slept in his car for six weeks while she was recovering in a Sydney hospital from a stomach operation, as he could not afford a hotel. At home he made use of the skills that Robert Coombes had taught him: he cooked, washed up, cleaned and tidied, tended a bed of roses, petunias and marigolds in front of their house. In another plot he planted lettuce, squash, tomatoes and beans. Harry had adopted his wife’s faith, and the family went regularly to Methodist services.
Harry used to talk to his children about Robert, and how he had rescued him from Harold Smith. He passed on to his son the war medals that Robert had entrusted to him. In the 1960s he appealed to the War Graves Commission for funds to erect a headstone for his former guardian, but the application was rejected on the grounds that Robert’s military service had not caused his death.
Belle Mulville died in 1995, aged seventy-six, and the next year Harry decided at last to commission a headstone for Robert. It was almost half a century since he had died. When the stone and plaque had been installed in the Coffs Harbour cemetery, Harry took his youngest daughter to visit the grave. He placed a posy of plastic flowers on the tomb. His daughter, seeing that he was close to tears, remarked that it was a lovely thing that he had done for Mr Coombes. ‘He looked after me very well,’ Harry replied.
When I spoke to Harry Mulville’s children in November 2012, I realised that Robert had been like a father to Harry, and a symbol of strength and kindness to them all. Harry’s son told me that he had no wish to learn any more about Robert’s past.
‘What I want to retain,’ he said, ‘is Mr Coombes’ goodness to my dad.’
He asked me not to speak to his father about the murder, though he wondered aloud whether the secret of the crime might not have been Robert’s alone.
‘The pertinent question is whether my father knew,’ he said. ‘I think there is a fifty-fifty chance that he knew.’
Though they did not want to talk to me further, Harry’s son and older daughter told me that it would not affect their relationships with their sister if she chose to help me with my book.
Harry’s younger daughter and I corresponded for more than a year. When she visited her father in his nursing home in Coffs Harbour, she would ask him about his life with Robert, and then email or telephone me to pass on his recollections. She sent me a photograph of Robert and several pictures of Harry. In this way, I gathered much of the information that I needed to put together a narrative of their years in Nana Glen.
In February 2014 I travelled to Australia. I visited a few libraries and archives in Canberra and Sydney to look up the diaries and letters of men who had served in Robert’s battalions in the First World War. Then I flew from Sydney to Coffs Harbour. On the flight, I chatted to the man in the seat next to mine about why I was visiting the area, and he volunteered to trace some ‘old-timers’ from Nana Glen on my behalf. Within a couple of days, he had put me in touch with several men in their eighties and nineties who had seen Robert riding about with his vegetables when they were boys.
Maurice O’Connell described Robert’s last home as a ‘bloody old shack’ next to a garden packed with ‘beautiful veg’ – it was Maurice’s brother who used to ride over to buy tomatoes when the priest called round. Ernie Herd, who as a sixteen-year-old served in the Volunteer Defence Corps, recalled Robert as ‘a gentlemanly sort of bloke’ and a wonderful gardener and musician. Mick Towells described ‘Bob’ Coombes as a ‘very quiet sort of chap’ who ‘stuck to himself’ but would greet everyone with a friendly ‘g’day’. Duncan McPherson said that he was ‘a short, nuggety sort of bloke’ – compact and stocky – who was very well liked in the neighbourhood. Len Goodenough told me that Robert taught music to the Cowling brothers, while Len Towells remembered that ‘Coombesy’ used to come across the creek from his shack to watch the cricket. The local lads had not known much about him: only that he was English, that he had served at Gallipoli, and that he had been awarded the Military Medal. If he seemed reticent about his past, so were many who had seen horrors in the Great War.
I visited Robert’s grave in Coffs Harbour, in a grassy cemetery planted with tall palms and surrounded by eucalyptus trees. I noticed that Harold Smith, who had died in 1944, was buried only a few feet away. ‘Lest we forget’, read the inscription on his gravestone.
Harry’s younger daughter took me to Nana Glen and showed me the places in which Robert and Harry had lived. She then offered to take me to meet her father. She had told him that an English writer was visiting Coffs Harbour to research the life of Robert Coombes, and he had agreed to see me.
We visited Harry in his nursing home in the morning of 5 March. He was sitting in a tall armchair in his room. His hair was white, his eyes bright and pale. He had just turned ninety-five. He did not ask me why I was writing Robert’s story and I did not volunteer an explanation.
Harry answered my questions about his years in Nana Glen. He told me that his guardian had been a ‘fine old gentleman’, fair and steady. ‘He kept an eye on me,’ said Harry. ‘He didn’t punish me but he kept me on the straight and narrow.’ I asked whether Robert spoke of the war. Harry replied that he talked only about the military band. Mr Coombes loved music, Harry said: in the shack by the creek at Nana Glen, he used to play his violin late into the night.
When I asked Harry about Harold Smith’s assault on him, he expressed no bitterness: his stepfather had been a ‘war wreck’, he said. Harry believed that Smith was violent because he had been subjected to violence, that suffering had made him brutal.
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br /> Harry tilted his head to show me a scar above his right eyebrow, where Smith had hit him more than eighty years earlier. He pushed up a sleeve to expose a mark on his right elbow, rolled up a trouser leg to reveal a scar on his right shin. I saw how badly hurt he had been, and I imagined how frightened he had felt. His stepfather had sprung at him with the brush hook, whacking his body, punching his face. It was like the attack on Nattie that Robert had pictured as a child: their mother flaring up suddenly in fury and swinging a hatchet at the younger boy. Yet it was also like the terrible attack that Robert had made on his mother in the warm night of 8 July 1895, when he went at her with his knife and before she could speak or cry out cut her to the heart.
I believed that Robert had offered shelter to Harry in June 1930 because he recognised the boy’s helplessness and fear, but also the rage of his assailant.
As I stood up to leave, Harry smiled and reached over to clasp my hand. He seemed glad to have told me what Robert had done for him. When I started work on this book, all that I had known about Robert Coombes was that he had stabbed his mother to death in the summer of 1895. It was astonishing to hold the hand of a man whom he had saved from harm. I still couldn’t be sure whether Harry knew about the murder. I hoped that he did, and had loved Robert anyway.
NOTES
Most of the events in Part I are drawn from testimony given in the West Ham coroner’s court, West Ham magistrates’ court and Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey between 18 July and 17 September 1895, as reported in newspapers including the London Standard, London Daily News, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Morning Post, Daily Chronicle, Sun, Star, Illustrated Police News, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, News of the World, St James’s Gazette, Manchester Times, Manchester Guardian, Reynolds’s Newspaper, Forest Gate Gazette, Essex Newsman, Leytonstone Express and Independent, Chelmsford Chronicle, East Ham Echo, West Ham Herald and South Essex Gazette and the Stratford Express. The same publications are the sources of most of the narrative in Parts II and III. Where the newspapers are quoted directly, dates are given in the Notes. Other sources include transcripts of witness depositions to the West Ham courts held at the National Archives in London (TNA: CRIM 1/42/9) and the transcript of the Old Bailey trial in the Old Bailey Session Papers (OBSP), online at www.oldbaileyonline.org.
Where not otherwise indicated, biographical details throughout are from census returns and records of birth, marriage, death and probate held by the National Archives in London (TNA) and the National Archives of Australia in Canberra (NAA), the electoral registers in the Newham Archives and Local Studies Library, London, the 1896 Post Office London Suburbs Street Directory of Plaistow and the editions of Kelly’s Directory of Stratford of 1894–5, 1895–6 and 1896–7.
ABBREVIATIONS
AWM Australian War Memorial, Canberra
BRO Berkshire Record Office, Reading, Berkshire
LMA London Metropolitan Archives
ML Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
NAA National Archives of Australia, Canberra
NMM National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
OBSP Old Bailey Session Papers
PP Parliamentary Papers
TNA The National Archives, London
PART I: TEN DAYS IN JULY
CHAPTER 1: THE THREE OF US
already bright and warm. . . The sun rose at 3.53 a.m. that morning, according to the London Standard of 8 July 1895, and set at 8.15 p.m. The Standard of 9 July reported that the temperature on Monday rose to 81 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.
pay the rent. . . East London landlords and landladies traditionally called for the rent on a Monday morning and signed a rent book on receipt of the week’s money. ‘You just walk round on Monday mornings (or maybe you even drive in a trap),’ reflects the novice landlord Jack Randall in Arthur Morrison’s short story collection Tales of Mean Streets (1894), ‘and you collect your rents’.
the Gentlemen v Players match. . . Account of the match from reports of 8, 9 and 10 July 1895 in the Morning Post, London Daily News, Evening News and London Standard; and from David Kynaston, WG’s Birthday Party (2011).
about average for the area. . . See Jim Clifford, ‘The Urban Periphery and the Rural Fringe: West Ham’s Hybrid Landscape’ in Left History, Spring/Summer 2008.
‘Light Ahead ’. . . From The Era, 28 November 1891, 21 January 1893, 22 June 1895 and 13 July 1895; and Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 29 November 1891.
Among Robert’s most recent purchases. . . Jack Wright and the Fortune Hunters of the Red Sea was first published by the Boys’ Star Library in New York in 1892 as Jack Wright and his Submarine Yacht; or, The Fortune Hunters of the Red Sea. The undated British reprint, which cost a penny, must have appeared on 3 or 10 July 1895, as it was number 51 in a weekly series that had been published by the Aldine Cheerful Library each Wednesday since July 1894, and it was found in 35 Cave Road on 17 July 1895. About 120 Jack Wright stories were printed between 1891 and 1904. The creations of the Cuban-American author Luis Senarens, they were even more wild, fantastical and racist than the adventures of the more famous dime novel hero Frank Reade Jr. For descriptions and images of Jack Wright and other early science-fiction heroes, see Jess Nevins’s ‘Fantastic Victoriana’ (www.reocities.com/jessnevins/vicw) and John Adcock’s ‘Yesterday’s Papers’ (john-adcock.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/steam-men-and-electric-horses). Many of the British reprints are listed on Steve Holland’s ‘The British Juvenile Story Papers and Pocket Libraries Index’ (www.philsp.com/homeville/bjsp/0start).
The horse-drawn trams. . . These were the cheapest form of transport, usually a penny a ride. The tram rails enabled two horses to pull fifty passengers, twice the number that they could shift in an omnibus. See Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God (2007).
The route was busy with shops. . . From Plaistow Post Office Directory (1896), Kelly’s Directory of Stratford 1894–95, the West Ham electoral registers 1890–6 at the Newham Archives in Stratford and the 1894 ordnance survey map of West Ham and environs.
a new public hall. . . The Canning Town Library – the first library in the borough – was opened at 110 Barking Road in 1893, according to Donald McDougall (ed.), Fifty Years a Borough, 1886–1936: The Story of West Ham (1936); the library’s electricity was generated next door at the Canning Town Public Hall from 14 February 1895.
Over the previous two decades. . . According to White, London in the Nineteenth Century (2007), the migration of the working classes to outer East London was also encouraged by the Cheap Trains Act of 1883, which compelled railway companies to run special low-fare trains for workmen. Thanks in part to the cheap tariffs offered by the Great Eastern Railway, which served most of ‘London-in-Essex’, the population of the eastern suburbs almost doubled between 1881 and 1901. For the development of West Ham in the late nineteenth century, see Archer Philip Crouch, Silvertown and Neighbourhood: A Retrospect (1900), McDougall (ed.), Fifty Years a Borough, and W. R. Powell (ed.), A History of the County of Essex: Vol 6 (1973).
‘London over the Border’. . . The phrase was coined by Henry Morley in his article ‘Londoners over the Border’, published in Household Words in 1857.
Malays, Lascars, Swedes, Chinamen. . . From an article by Robert Bontine Cuninghame Graham in The Workers’ Cry of July 1891.
‘There is no seaport in the country. . .’ In Walter Besant, East London (1901), which also describes the noises of the docks.
low and sluggish. . . For description of the Thames, see Evening News, 4 July 1895.
The sour, urinous scent. . . See Roy Porter, London: A Social History (1994) and Harry Harris, Under Oars: Reminiscences of a Thames Lighterman, 1894–1909 (1978), as well as Crouch, Silvertown and Neighbourhood, McDougall (ed.), Fifty Years a Borough and Powell (ed.), A History of the County of Essex.
John Fox visited two pawnbrokers. . . Details of the pawnbroking trade from Melanie Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and Working-
class Credit (1983) and George Sims, Living London: Its Work and its Play, its Humour and its Pathos, its Sights and its Scenes, Vol. I (1901). The poorer classes often paid weekly visits to the pawnbroker, going in on a Monday to pledge clothes that had been worn over the weekend and returning to redeem the clothes when they received their wage packets on Friday. Women tended to visit a pawnbroker’s shop on a Monday, to raise money for rent, whereas young men frequently came on a Wednesday or Thursday evening, to pledge a watch in exchange for beer money. The pawnbrokers that Fox visited in the Commercial Road were of a ‘medium’ grade, and catered to a relatively respectable and occasional clientele, most of whom pledged items worth five to ten shillings to tide them over in an emergency. The pawnbrokers’ statutory opening hours were from 7 a.m to 8 p.m. in the summer months.
CHAPTER 2: ALL I KNOW IS THAT WE ARE RICH
dozens of coffee shops. . . The coffee in such shops was usually ‘a dreadful draught’, reported Punch magazine on 19 August 1882, ‘served up in dirty crockery, accompanied by huge slabs of brown-crusted bread smeared with a yellow deposit of oily butter. Tea, too, is forthcoming upon call, a long-stewed, dingy-tinted potion of uncertain origin, flat as stale soda-water, nauseous as a sarsaparilla drench. Eggs which are musty, bacon which is rusty, steaks which are tough, and chops which are tainted, even sodden cuts from half-cooked joints, and wedges of flabby pastry, may be procured at the more pretentious Coffee-Houses, while at the humbler ones the sense is regaled with the strong savour of red-herrings and smoked haddocks’ (see victorianlondon.org).
A record 35,000 people. . . The Essex Newsman of 8 June 1895 reported that about 9,000 visitors rode the electric trams and 8,000 the steamboats that Whit Monday. At Pier Hill fairground a north London man died after being struck in the ribs by a swing boat, two girls were injured after falling out of swings, a man sustained a bullet wound in the shooting gallery and several children cut their feet on broken bottles on the beach.
The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer Page 26