The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

by Kate Summerscale

  The streets by the Thames teemed with British and Irish labourers, and with sailors from all over the world – Malays, Lascars, Swedes, Chinamen. ‘There is no seaport in the country,’ said the novelist Walter Besant, ‘which is so charged with the atmosphere of ocean and the suggestion of things far off.’ The noise was tremendous: the clatter of trains and trams, the blasts of ship horns, the grinding of chains, the whine of winches, the thunder and crash of the machines at the Thames Ironworks Shipbuilding Company, where Robert had briefly worked in June.

  Robert and Nattie were admitted to the Royal Victoria Dock through a giant gate by the hydraulic coal cranes. John Fox was usually to be found on one of the vessels owned by the National Line, for which the boys’ father worked, so Robert and Nattie went first to the National’s steamer Spain. The ship stank of animal flesh, urine and excrement, the main trade of the National Line vessels being the carriage of live cattle from New York to London. Robert asked an officer on the Spain whether Fox was on board.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Charles Pearson, chief officer of the National steamship Queen. ‘Go and look. Whose boy are you?’

  Robert replied that he was Mr Coombes’s son. Pearson knew the older Robert Coombes, having sailed with him on the SS Holland out of Liverpool. He asked Robert who wanted Fox.

  ‘The man at the gate,’ said Robert.

  Pearson turned to Nattie: ‘I suppose you are one of Mr Coombes’s boys too?’ Nattie said that he was.

  The brothers went aft in search of Fox. As they could not find him, they decided to try the SS America, the only other National Line vessel then moored in London.

  The America was in the Royal Albert Dock, which lay immediately east of the Royal Victoria, but the scale of the docks was such that it took the boys more than two hours to tramp round one and then the other, past the metal sheds and the pungent tobacco warehouses and the skeletal cranes, round the dockers loading and unloading the cargos. The river alongside was low and sluggish, glittering in the sun.

  Many noxious industries that were banned from the centre of London had established themselves on this stretch of the Thames, and a haze of coal dust and smoke hung over the docks. The sour, urinous scent of the Bryant & May match works mingled with the musty caramel of the Tate and the Lyle sugar refineries; with the smells of rotting cow carcasses in the John Knight soap factory; of simmering oranges and strawberries in James Keiller’s marmalade and jam works; of boiling bones and offal in Odam’s chemical manure works; of bird-droppings at the Guano Works; and with the acrid, stinging chemical vapours of the factories making rubber, caustic soda, sulphuric acid, telegraph wire, dyes, creosote, disinfectant, cables, explosives, poisons and varnish. For weeks there had been no rain to rinse the air.

  The boys could not find Fox on the America, so they went back to the Victoria Dock to try the Spain again. This time Nattie waited outside the gate while Robert approached the dock constable on duty.

  ‘I want to go to the National Line steamer lying just alongside there to see John Fox,’ Robert told William Gradley. ‘I have an important message to deliver to him, having come from Plaistow.’

  Gradley let him through.

  ‘I shall not be long,’ said Robert.

  At last Robert found Fox on the Spain. A short man of forty-five, with a thin moustache and a straggly beard, Fox was wearing a dark, threadbare suit and a peaked sailor’s cap. Robert asked him to come to stay with them in Cave Road: their mother had gone suddenly to Liverpool to visit her family, he said, and had left word that she wanted Fox to look after the boys and the house. Robert told Fox that when Emily Coombes returned she would pay him half a crown for each day that he spent at Cave Road – half a crown was 2/6d (an eighth of £1), a decent daily rate for unskilled work. Fox agreed to come. The pair crossed the bridge out of the docks.

  ‘Good night, Bradley,’ called Fox to Gradley as they went out through the dock gate; though he had known the dock constable for six years, Fox still hadn’t learnt his name.

  They joined Nattie and made the journey back to Plaistow.

  In the back parlour of 35 Cave Road, Robert reached behind the door and lifted down a dark grey tweed suit belonging to his father.

  ‘Here you are, John,’ he said. ‘Here’s a pair of father’s trousers for you. They don’t fit him.’

  Fox went to the kitchen behind the parlour to put on the suit. He left his old clothes on a stool by the copper cauldron that heated the household’s water.

  Robert told Fox that his mother had suggested that they pawn the family’s watches to raise some money until her return. He asked whether Fox would pledge them on their behalf – pawnbrokers would not take pledges from children.

  ‘I will try if I can,’ said Fox.

  The boys handed him their watches – Robert’s gold and Nattie’s silver – and the three went out to Limehouse. They travelled three miles west, crossing the iron bridge over the black waters of Bow Creek, the mouth of the River Lea and the repository of West Ham’s untreated sewage.

  Limehouse was a Thames-side neighbourhood in the older part of East London, frequented by sailors. Robert and Nattie had lived here until they were nine and eight years old, latterly in a large house in Three Colt Street that their grandparents had owned. In the past few years the district had grown even noisier and more louche. It was a hive of brothels, pubs, Chinese laundries and opium dens.

  John Fox visited two pawnbrokers, one for each watch. At George Fish’s shop in the Commercial Road the boys waited outside while Fox went in to pledge the American-made gold-plated watch. The manager, William White, had difficulty with the catch, but once Fox had shown him how to open it he offered a ten-shilling loan against the watch’s value. He issued a square pasteboard ticket bearing a description of the pawned item, attached a duplicate to the watch and entered in his ledger the name and address that Fox gave him: Robert Coombes, 35 Cave Road. He did not question Fox’s identity – this was a transient part of London, where most customers were strangers, and in any case it was common practice for hired ‘moppets’ to pawn goods on behalf of respectable people who did not wish to advertise their financial troubles. White deducted the halfpenny ticket fee from the loan and gave Fox the remainder. The watch could be redeemed by returning the money with 25 per cent interest within the next three months.

  A few doors along, at Ashbridge & Co., Fox tried to get twelve shillings for the silver watch but accepted ten.

  Fox handed Robert the pawn tickets and the proceeds – just under twenty shillings, or £1.

  ‘Let us share it between the three of us now,’ said Robert.

  Robert and Nattie had missed the final day of the Gentlemen v Players fixture at Lord’s. The evening papers carried reports of the match (the Players had won by a slender thirty-two runs) as well as the results of the latest games in the nineteenth Wimbledon lawn tennis championships, and the news that the polling dates for a general election had been set. The very unpopular Liberal prime minister, the Earl of Rosebery, had resigned in June, and Parliament had since been dissolved. The polling for a new government would take place over three weeks, starting on 13 July. The date set for the voters of West Ham South and West Ham North to elect their Members of Parliament was the next Monday, 15 July.

  At Cave Road on Wednesday evening, Robert fetched a blanket from the back bedroom upstairs, and he, Fox and Nattie went to bed in the back parlour. Fox lay on the floor, as he had done before when staying overnight.

  Robert asked Fox if he knew the way to India. Fox said that he did.

  In the Jack Wright stories, the young hero takes two comrades on his adventures around the world: Fritz Schneider, a short Dutchman, and Timothy Topstay, a wooden-legged, glass-eyed, tobacco-chewing, whiskery old sailor who has served on merchant ships with Jack’s father. John Fox, the former shipmate of Robert and Nattie’s father, was now hunkered down with the boys in the back parlour like Tim Topstay hunkered down with Jack and Fritz in the sealed cabin of Jack’
s electrical submarine.

  2

  ALL I KNOW IS THAT WE ARE RICH

  Flush with their pawnshop funds, Robert, Nattie and John Fox walked the next morning to William Richards’s coffee house, at the junction of Cave Road and the Barking Road. The boys were carrying bamboo fishing rods, having decided to take a trip to the seaside after breakfast. Fox was wearing his new suit. All three entered the coffee house but Nattie stopped in the lobby and, despite Robert’s entreaties, refused to come any further.

  Mr Richards’s place was one of dozens of coffee shops in West Ham, serving coffee and tea, slices of bread and butter, eggs, bacon, chops and steaks. The windows of a coffee shop, described by Punch magazine as ‘the restaurant of poor respectability’, were usually decorated with gold lettering, while the interior gleamed with polished wood and brass. The customers – labourers, hansom cab drivers, the lower grade of clerk – sat on benches in wooden stalls, where they could peruse the day’s papers as they dined. Mr Richards greeted Robert and Fox, remarking that Fox was looking smart. Fox smiled. He and Robert ordered and ate their breakfast, and then Robert paid the bill with a shilling (12d, or a twentieth of £1) and offered the coffee-house keeper a chunk of cake tobacco. Mr Richards said he did not smoke but Robert left the tobacco on the table anyway. He and Fox collected Nattie from the lobby, crossed the road to a fruiterers, and set out on their excursion to Southend-on-Sea.

  The nearest seaside town to London, Southend lay at the mouth of the Thames forty miles east of West Ham. In the eighteenth century the highwayman (and penny dreadful hero) Dick Turpin had smuggled goods to Plaistow from Southend. The town was now a favourite destination for the London working classes: they steamed down to the coast by train or boat on Sunday school excursions, works outings and bank holiday beanos. A record 35,000 people had travelled by rail to Southend for the Whit bank holiday in June. The train from central London, which cost 2/6d for the round trip, called at Plaistow and West Ham stations, while the London Belle steamship sailed from Woolwich, across the river from the Victoria and Albert docks, at 10.15 each morning.

  John Fox, Robert and Nattie reached Southend at about noon. The sun was hot and the sky blue. They walked through the Pier Hill fairground, which boasted a steam-powered ‘razzle-dazzle’ (an aerial platform that tilted as it turned), a merry-go-round, swing boats, coconut shies, and stalls selling shrimps, oysters and cockles. The famous iron pier, completed five years earlier, stretched a mile and a half out to sea. Just inside its stuccoed entrance was a pavilion, at which Little Elsie the Skirt Dancer would twirl her silk robes at that evening’s show, and an electric train that carried visitors to the pier head. At low tide a vast bed of mud stretched beneath the promenade decking; at high tide the water lapped at the pier’s pillars, and yachts danced close by on the waves. The boys cast their fishing lines into the sea.

  Robert told Fox they would all three of them soon sail away to some place.

  ‘What place?’ asked Fox.

  ‘Some island,’ said Robert.

  Almost exactly twelve months earlier, Robert had visited Southend to see the most notorious murderer of recent years.

  Robert was a pupil at Stock Street school in Plaistow when he read of the killing of Florence Dennis, a twenty-three-year-old dressmaker whose body had been found pressed into the mud by a brook just outside Southend on 24 June 1894. She had been shot through the head and had fallen to the ground still clasping her straw hat in one hand; the post mortem revealed that she was eight months pregnant. James Canham Read, a thirty-seven-year-old employee of the Royal Albert Dock, was immediately identified as the chief suspect: he had been seen twice with Florence in Southend that weekend.

  Read, who had lived in East London for nearly twenty years, was known around the docks as a responsible and educated family man. He earned more than £150 a year as a cashier and was entrusted with paying out some £2,000 a day to the Albert Dock’s labourers and to the lightermen who ferried goods by barge from the ships to the quays. A slim, fastidious figure with a dark moustache, he was fond of reading, and had set up a library when he worked in the Victoria Dock. He lived with his wife and eight children in Jamaica Street, Stepney, just west of Limehouse.

  On the day that Florence Dennis’s body was discovered Read went on the run, taking with him more than £100 from his office at the dock. Crowds gathered outside his house in Jamaica Street and hollered abuse at his family. The local and national papers reported avidly on the hunt for the fugitive.

  After a fortnight, the police tracked Read down to a village south-west of London, where he was living under a false name with yet another woman. He had been leading a triple life, and it seemed that he had killed Florence Dennis because she had threatened to expose him and so to collapse the walls between his several selves. The ‘lower-middle-class Lothario’, as The Times described him, was taken by train to Southend to be arraigned.

  The news of Read’s arrest spread fast. By the time he and his police guards reached Southend in the evening of 7 July, scores of people were waiting beside the railway. They ran after the cab that drove Read to the police station.

  When Robert learned of Read’s arrest, he slipped away from his house and set off for Southend. He had two shillings for the train fare, which was enough to take him only as far as Grays, a village on the Thames twenty miles east of London. He walked the remaining twenty miles to Southend, stopping to catch some sleep under a hedge by the roadside.

  At 11 a.m. on Monday 9 July, Read appeared before a magistrate in the courthouse by the police station, just off the main road between Southend railway station and the pier. Hundreds of people pressed in to the court or stood outside looking up at the windows, hooting and whistling.

  Read wore a light tweed suit and a white straw hat. He affected a nonchalant air, approaching the dock with a quick and elastic step and then calmly denying the murder charge. The magistrate remanded him for trial at Chelmsford, Essex.

  When Read was tried for murder in November, he again displayed uncanny control of his emotions – his ‘command of himself’ was ‘simply marvellous’, said the Pall Mall Gazette. He continued to protest his innocence, and his brother Harry provided an alibi, but the circumstantial evidence against him was very strong. James Canham Read was found guilty of murder on 15 November. He walked jauntily out of the courthouse, stopping to shake hands with people who had assembled outside, and stepped gaily up the steps of the prison van.

  Few doubted Read’s guilt, observed the Evening News, but his ‘nerve’, his ‘cool, yet daring’ demeanour and his ‘keen and bright intelligence’ won the admiration of many: the crowd seemed to feel ‘an inclination to cheer him’. Harry Read followed him out of the court – he was ‘obviously shaken’, said the paper, ‘but behaved with wonderful fortitude, showing of what stuff these two remarkable brothers are made’. A peculiar heroism had attached itself to the pair. On 4 December 1894, James Canham Read was hanged. In his will, he left nothing to his wife or children but instead bequeathed everything to the brother who had tried to protect him. Harry drowned in the Regent’s Canal in East London the next year, apparently in a drunken accident.

  James Canham Read was refined, calculating, ruthless, with a compulsion to possess and control women even if it meant killing them. In his smooth composure, he resembled both the villains and the heroes in the penny dreadfuls that Robert liked to read. The killer in The Bogus Broker’s Right Bower, a New York crime story in Robert’s collection, had ‘a coolness somewhat remarkable even in a murderer’. The detective on his track is ‘the coolest and best prepared ferret’, ‘a fox with nerves of steel’. Mora, the villainess, is the chilliest of all: ‘Everything depends on coolness and holding on with bull dog tenacity,’ she says. ‘I am still Mora, the Cool.’ Mora acts with icy precision even as her gypsy blood boils. Her coolness is a capacity, the ability to have two faces and to hide one from the world.

  In the five days after their trip to Southend, the Coombes bro
thers amused themselves by playing cricket with John Fox in the back yard, and cards at the parlour table. They visited the Balaam Street recreation ground, a park near their house that had opened the previous summer. It contained a pond on which children could sail toy boats, a raised stand on which a brass band performed each week, lawns and ornamental flower gardens. The boys of Plaistow also played in the streets, as they had before the park opened, sometimes in small gangs known as ‘clicks’. Robert would take his bat out for a game of cricket, wedging a stump between the stones on the pavement opposite the house. Football was popular with the local boys, as were games of knocking down ginger (rapping on people’s doors and then running away), pitch and toss (a gambling game), leapfrog, and ‘robbers and thieves’. Nattie continued to skip school.

  Though Plaistow was a crowded working-class suburb, it was bordered by fields and marshland. Just over the wall at the end of the Coombes family’s yard was a large market garden. From the front of the house on a clear day, you could see across the marshes and the river to the hills of Kent. The German writer H. A. Volckers had strolled up to the neighbourhood from the docks one summer Sunday in 1886, approaching through the fields directly south of Cave Road. ‘The country was all level, with ditches of water running through,’ he reported, ‘and on each side was the smooth roads; fields, containing fine grass; sleek, fat cows, calves, and horses feeding on them; acres of land with onions, young turnips, lettuce, rhubarb, &c.’ In Plaistow, Volckers passed a crowd listening to members of the Peculiar People sect sing ‘Jerusalem, my happy home’ and another group following a Salvation Army drum and flute band down the street. Many middle-class visitors to West Ham recoiled at the repeating streets, the level, dingy, narrow vistas, the shabby men and women herding themselves into trams like cattle; but on this sunny afternoon, the German traveller was struck by the rosy cheeks of the children, and the abundance of carnations, roses and geraniums filling the pots on the windowsills of the neat little houses.