The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

by Kate Summerscale

  The Coombes boys’ first school. . . Details of Robert and Nattie’s changes of school are in the Grange Road School Admissions Register 1888–1906, Newham Archives. Robert reached the fourth standard in October 1892, according to this register, and left Grange Road for Stock Street in November 1893. Nattie left in July 1894 to attend the school at Cave Road, which opened that month. For the West Ham board schools, see Powell (ed.), A History of the County of Essex: Vol. 6. The National Archives has files on individual schools: Grange Road ED 21/5644; Stock Street ED 21/5679; Cave Road ED 21/5629.

  ‘Each school. . .’ In Booth (ed.), Life and Labour of the People in London, Vol. 1.

  ‘Singularly precocious. . .’ In the 1895 edition of Maudsley’s The Pathology of Mind. Victorian ideas of precocity are discussed in Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child, and in Nelson, Precocious Children and Childish Adults. As well as Little Father Time, Nelson cites the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist (1838) and Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island (1883) as literary examples of the precocious child in Victorian England. Their counterpart was the childish man, exemplified by the simple, sweet-hearted Mr Dick in David Copperfield (1850) – a figure as benign and innocent as John Fox.

  ‘Dictionary of Psychological Medicine’. . . Edition of 1892, ed. Daniel Hack Tuke.

  The latest instalment of Thomas Hardy’s new novel. . . The serial ran in twelve instalments under the title The Simpletons and then Hearts Insurgent in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine between December 1894 and November 1895; in November it was published as the novel Jude the Obscure.

  Little Time is an old soul. . . See ‘“Done because we are too menny”: Little Father Time and Child Suicide in Late-Victorian Culture’ by Sally Shuttleworth in Phillip Mallett (ed.), Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts (2003).

  The Thames Iron Works. . . See Booth (ed.), Life and Labour of the People in London, Vol. I; A. J. Arnold, Iron Shipbuilding on the Thames: An Economic and Business History (2000); and the National Maritime Museum’s illustrated history of the Thames Iron Works at www.portcities.org.uk/london/server/show/ConNarrative.59/Thames-Ironworks.

  the ‘Fuji Yama’. . . The ship’s construction was described in the Thames Iron Works Gazette of 29 June 1895, the edition that also announced the formation of the football club that later became West Ham United. The vessel was launched in September as the Fuji.

  she had withstood years of relative hardship . . . For the role of boy workers in the family, see Childs, Labour’s Apprentices, Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (1993), and Clare Rose, ‘Working Lads in Late-Victorian London’ in Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England: Diversity and Agency, 1750–1914 (2013).

  A couple of decades earlier. . . For the decline of the apprentice system see Urwick (ed.), Studies of Boy Life in our Cities. In Manchester Boys: Sketches of Manchester Lads at Work and Play (1905), C. E. B. Russell observes that the working lad was usually ‘set to some work which only calls for intelligence of the meanest kind. . . At this work he remains for week after week, year after year, his mind dormant, his hands moving with the precision and dullness of a machine.’

  Coombes brought home £9 2/-. . . See NMM: RSS/CL/1895/60015 SS France.

  CHAPTER 11: IT IS ALL OVER NOW

  ‘Star’. . . 17 September 1895.

  ‘Sun’. . . 17 September 1895.

  Wynn Westcott. . . In Suicide: Its History, Literature, Jurisprudence, Causation and Prevention (1885).

  cerebral irritation. . . In 1892 the Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease (vol. 19) reported on research by Dr Jules Simon into children with cerebral irritation. They were often melancholy, mentally unsteady, cruel to animals, oversensitive and capricious, said Simon. Sometimes they experienced epileptoid attacks, sometimes violent localised pains or impulsive movements. He recommended treating the condition with increasing doses of bromide of potassium.

  sailed to New York on the SS ‘England’. . . The New York Times of 22 July 1895 reported that the pair sailed on the England in 1895; the ship’s voyage of January to March tallies with the dates of Robert’s absence from school. For dates and crew, see NMM: RSS/CL/1895/29996 SS England.

  The ship was pelted with rain. . . Details of outward journey from New York Evening World of 7 February 1895. The Western Daily Press of 15 February 1895 claimed that the Atlantic crossing that month was the worst on record. In the Rudyard Kipling poem ‘Mulholland’s Contract’, which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette on 6 June 1895, the narrator describes cattle ships as ‘more like Hell than anything else I know’.

  The Englands’ two older sons. . . See Grange Road School Admissions Register 1888–1906 in Newham Archives.

  George Walker had been a prison doctor. . . For Walker’s background and his work at Holloway, see his testimony in the Departmental Committee on Prisons’ Report and Minutes of Evidence, PP, C7702 (1895). For his evidence in other Old Bailey trials see OBSP.

  The insanity plea had become increasingly common. . . See Ward, Psychiatry and Criminal Responsibility in England 1843–1939; Martin J. Wiener, ‘Judges v Jurors: Courtroom Tensions in Murder Trials and the Law of Criminal Responsibility in Nineteenth-Century England’ in Law and History Review, Autumn 1999; Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law and Society in the Fin de Siècle (1989); and Joel Peter Eigen, ‘Diagnosing Homicidal Mania: Forensic Psychiatry and the Purposeless Murder’, Medical History, October 2010. Both Ward and Eigen discuss the Coombes case.

  The ‘right from wrong’ test, said Maudsley. . . At the annual meeting of the British Medical Association on 1 August 1895, published in the Journal of Mental Science of October 1895. In 1890, the lunacy law expert Wood Renton claimed that a ‘silent revolution’ had taken place, whereby the ‘knowing right from wrong’ test was frequently ignored by judges and juries. See Ward, Psychiatry and Criminal Responsibility in England 1843–1939.

  ‘The brain is always compressed. . .’ The Dictionary of Psychological Medicine (1892) warned that clumsily applied forceps could cause brain damage.

  ‘Homicidal mania’. . . See Etienne Esquirol, Mental Maladies: a Treatise on Insanity (1845), and Eigen, ‘Diagnosing Homicidal Mania’.

  the sole marker of insanity. . . See, for instance, ‘Insanity of Conduct’ by George H. Savage and C. Mercier in the Journal of Mental Science, April 1896, which argues that an act of violence can be ‘the one insane symptom’.

  Walker had frequently been permitted. . . Ward, in Psychiatry and Criminal Responsibility in England 1843–1939, notes that medical witnesses were meant to testify only to the facts on which they based their opinions of a prisoner’s state of mind and not to the opinions themselves, but observes that this rule was honoured largely in the breach by the late 1880s.

  a ‘hysterical’ woman. . . According to the Dictionary of Psychological Medicine (ed. Daniel Tuke, 1892), hysteria was characterised by an ‘undue prominence of feelings uncontrolled by intellect’ and was often attributed to ‘dammed-up sexual emotions’.

  ‘bromism’. . . In The Diagnosis of Psychosis (2011), Rudolf N. Cardinal and Edward T. Bullmore report that high doses of bromide, which was prescribed in the late nineteenth century as a sedative and anti-epileptic, can cause a neurotoxic condition in which the patient may become psychotic.

  The last witness for the defence. . . For methods of attendance officers, see Philpott, London at School and David Rubinstein, School Attendance in London 1870–1904: A Social History (1969).

  Since 1882 the law had stipulated. . . In 1882 Queen Victoria objected to the fact that Roderick Maclean, who had shot at her with a pistol, was found ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’, as the insanity verdict was then phrased. As a result, the wording of the verdict was changed to ‘guilty but insane’. While Sherwood’s argument might have had some merit before 1883, an insane defendant was now technically guilty of a crime.

  ‘Star’. . . 17 September 1895.

  ‘Lloyd’s Weekly’. . . 22 September 1895.

>   a strong recommendation to mercy. . . Juries had successfully pleaded for mercy on account of a defendant’s age in the trial of a twelve-year-old boy who had killed his grandfather with poison in 1847, and in the trial of a sixteen-year-old who had killed a fellow apprentice in 1867. In both cases, the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

  Edis was keen to make clear. . . On 20 September 1895, Harry Edis wrote to the London Daily News to reiterate the jury’s position: ‘you say that Fox gets the benefit of the contention raised by counsel – that the insane can do no wrong, consequently there can be no accessory after the fact. Now, in fairness to Fox, I think it necessary to state that the verdict was not guilty upon the evidence.’

  CHAPTER 12: BOX HIM UP

  ‘Broadmoor! ’. . . From ‘Christmas Day at Broadmoor: an Ex-Warder’s Story’ by R. J. Tucknor, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 20 December 1896.

  newspapers and journals. . . Those quoted in this chapter include the Star of 17 September, The Times, St James’s Gazette, London Daily News, Pall Mall Gazette, Evening News and Daily Chronicle of 18 September, the Saturday Review, Lancet and Spectator of 21 September, and the News of the World of 22 September 1895.

  The ‘Journal of Mental Science’. . . In January 1896.

  Others pointed out. . . On 5 October 1895, the Graphic noted that ‘The “penny dreadful” scare, one notices with relief, appears to be slightly abating. . . The cheap romance of blood has really proved sometimes on a closer inspection to be not so very much more sanguinary than some of the modern classics of adventure.’

  The Duchess of Rutland. . . Evening Telegraph, 3 December 1895.

  The ‘Child’s Guardian’. . . See Monica Flegel, Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth- Century England: Literature, Representation and the NSPCC (2009), which refers to the Coombes case.

  ‘Was he, too, insane?’. . . The journal seemed to ridicule the idea that both boys were mad, but the phenomenon of folie à deux, a type of madness described in the Journal of Mental Science in April 1895, could conceivably have afflicted Robert and Nattie. This was a form of shared insanity that relied on the two sufferers having a similar predisposition and a deep and protracted intimacy – an affinity that was possible between siblings. It usually manifested itself in a shared persecutory paranoia that had some plausibility, as the Coombes boys’ terror of their mother might have done if her punishments were severe.

  In a booklet. . . Quoted in Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England. According to Behlmer, of more than 10,000 families investigated by the NSPCC between 1889 and 1891, only about 400 had a weekly income below 20/-. More than 3,000 had an average family income of 27/-, well above the average weekly wage of 21/-. This indicated that abuse was by no means confined to very poor households. ‘The motive of cruelty is often the cruel person’s own self-loathing,’ observed an NSPCC report. ‘Generally speaking, the faults with which children are credited by cruel people are the illusions of bad minds. Hating the child, hateful things are seen in it. The devil in them sees a devil in the child.’

  The ‘Illustrated Police News’. . . On 27 July and 3 August 1895.

  the ‘Times’ critic J. F. Nisbet. . . In The Human Machine (1899).

  Pierre Janet. . . Quoted in Nelson, Precocious Children and Childish Adults.

  Frederic Myers. . . See his essay ‘The Subliminal Consciousness’ in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 1892.

  PART IV: THE MURDERERS’ PARADISE

  CHAPTER 13: THOSE THAT KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO

  Broadmoor asylum. . . The Broadmoor archives are held at the Berkshire Record Office, Reading, Berkshire (BRO). For the layout, rules and routines at the asylum, see Rules for the Guidance of Officers, Attendants, and Servants of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum (1869); Mark Stevens, Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (2013) and Life in the Victorian Asylum: the World of Nineteenth Century Mental Health Care (2014); and the Superintendent’s annual reports 1895–1912, BRO: D/H14/A2/1/1.

  ‘Hampshire Telegraph’. . . 28 September 1895.

  His occupation. . . See Admission Registers, 1863–1900, BRO: D/H14/D1/1.

  the sun shone. . . See London Standard, 27 September 1895.

  an undulating landscape. . . See George Griffith, Sidelights on Convict Life (1903) and ‘Warmark’, Guilty but Insane: A Broadmoor Autobiography (1931).

  ‘When questioned as to the murder. . .’ Note in Robert Coombes’s file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1671, dated 24 September 1895. Under the current protocol between the Berkshire Record Office and the West London Mental Health Trust, Robert’s case file is closed until 2042 (160 years after his birth), but the Trust allowed the BRO to disclose some of its contents.

  Broadmoor was built in the early 1860s. . . For the history of the asylum, see Harvey Gordon, Broadmoor (2012); Stevens, Broadmoor Revealed; and Ralph Partridge, Broadmoor: A History of Criminal Lunacy and its Problems (1953).

  the institution now held. . . Figures from the Superintendent’s annual report for 1895 in BRO: D/H14/A2/1/1.

  joined in the admissions ward. . . From Admission Registers, 1863–1900, BRO: D/H14/D1/1.

  Henry Jackson. . . See trial at OBSP; and Ward, Psychiatry and Criminal Responsibility in England 1843–1939.

  Carmello Mussy. . . See his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1674, and his trial at OBSP.

  ‘Sheffield Independent’. . . 19 September 1895.

  housed in single chambers. . . In a meeting at Broadmoor reported in the Journal of Mental Science of April 1901, both the superintendent and his predecessor argued against the dormitory system and in favour of single rooms for intractable and well-behaved patients alike.

  An attendant drew the bolts. . . See ‘Warmark’, Guilty but Insane.

  A few attendants kept watch. . . See Frederick Dolman’s article about Broadmoor in Cassell’s Magazine of February 1899.

  The allotments were planted. . . See G. W. Steevens, Things Seen: Impressions of Men, Cities, and Books (1900).

  Thomas Henry Townsend. . . Quoted in John Edward Allen, Inside Broadmoor (1953).

  A typical dinner. . . See Superintendent’s annual reports in BRO: D/H14/A2/1/1.

  the attendants had snipped out any articles. . . See Frederick Dolman’s piece in Cassell’s Magazine of February 1899.

  ‘Jude the Obscure’. . . See Hayden Church, ‘The Strange Case of Dr Minor: II’, The Strand, January 1916.

  Throughout the night. . . See ‘A Visit to Broadmoor: a Day among Murderers’, Pall Mall Gazette, 17 February 1886.

  an outspoken opponent of criminal anthropology. . . In Nicolson’s inaugural address as president of the Medico-Psychological Society, delivered in July 1895 and published in the Journal of Mental Science in October.

  ‘an insane man. . .’ and ‘I prefer to train up. . .’ See Nicolson’s evidence of 6 December 1894 in Departmental Committee on Prisons’ Report and Minutes of Evidence, PP, C7702 (1895).

  Some of the patients. . . See Charles Arthur Mercier, The Attendant’s Companion: The Manual of the Duties of Attendants in Lunatic Asylums (1892).

  no mechanical restraints. . . See ‘Broadmoor Asylum and Its Inmates’ in The Green Bag: an Entertaining Magazine for Lawyers (1893).

  The attendants at Broadmoor. . . Information on staff at Broadmoor from the Defaulters Book, 1867–1922 (BRO: D/H14/B1/3/1/3); Order Book: Attendants, 1863–1900 (BRO: D/H14/A2/1/7/1); Register of Staff Appointments, 1862–1920 (BRO: D/14/B2/1/1); Staff Payments, 1863–1973 (BRO: D/H14/B3/1/1/3 and BRO: D/14/B3/1/1/4); and the Superintendent’s annual reports in BRO: D/H14/A2/1/1. Details of the staff’s ages, origins and families are chiefly from census returns; Broadmoor patients are included in the returns, too, though from 1901 they are identified only by their initials.

  He would remind visitors. . . Such as Frederick Dolman, whose article about Broadmoor was published in Cassell’s in February 1899.

  the mental condition of Oscar Wilde. . . See Harford Montgo
mery Hyde, Oscar Wilde: the Aftermath (1963).

  George Steevens. . . See Steevens, Things Seen; the chapter on Broadmoor was first published as ‘During Her Majesty’s Pleasure’ in the Daily Mail, 24 November 1897.

  Robert Coombes was the youngest inmate. . . According to Gordon’s Broadmoor, one boy under sixteen had been admitted in the 1860s, one in the 1870s and one in the 1880s. Of the three, two had been convicted of arson. The ten-year-old arsonist who arrived in 1885 (who had turned twenty by the time of Robert’s arrival) became the longest-serving inmate of Broadmoor, remaining there until his death in 1962.

  Nathaniel Currah. . . See BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1442; TNA: CRIM1/321; and articles in London Standard, 24 June 1889, Western Times, 25 June 1889, and the Era, 29 June 1889. His examination by the alienist Lyttelton Forbes Winslow is described in Winslow’s Mad Humanity: Its Forms Apparent and Obscure (1898). Though Sims does not name him, he describes their encounter in Cassell’s Saturday Journal, reprinted in the Otago Witness of 10 December 1902 as ‘Life Sketches in Sunshine and Shadow: Broadmoor’. Currah died in Broadmoor in 1915.

  Several of Robert’s fellow Block 2 inmates. . . The assignment of some patients to the block is detailed in the Daily Log of Admissions, Removals and Deaths, Male, January 1898–April 1913 (BRO: D/H14/D1/7/1/1) and in the records of individual patients.

  Richard Oakes. . . See his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1492, and OBSP. Oakes’ suicide note is reproduced in William Booth’s In Darkest England.

  George Pett. . . See his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1689, and Sussex Advertiser, 17 February 1896.

  ‘From time to time. . .’ See ‘Warmark’, Guilty but Insane. The book’s author, George Penny, was not admitted to Broadmoor until 1923, but he reported that the delusional doctor was the ‘doyen’ of Block 2, having been there for more than forty years.

  Archibald Campbell. . . See his case file, BRO: D/H14/D2/2/1/1798.

  Isaac Jacob Mauerberger. . . See Reynolds’s Newspaper, 30 January 1887, and Leeds Times, 5 February 1887. He died in Broadmoor in 1925.