The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

by Kate Summerscale

  Fox and the boys occasionally ate out, but they usually dined off food prepared by Robert. As the eldest son in a family without daughters, Robert had learned to be handy about the house; he was not only accustomed to ‘boys’ jobs’ (fetching coal, laying the fire, emptying the privy in the yard) but also to washing, cooking and cleaning. The ground floor of 35 Cave Road was supplied with gas and running water, and the kitchen was equipped with a coal-powered iron range. Robert took deliveries from the tradesmen who called at the house, asking them to leave the usual quantities and paying them for the goods; he baked sausage rolls and jam tarts with a batch of flour that his mother had ordered; he washed his clothes and hung them to dry on a line over the fireplace. He and Nattie also had to feed the family’s cats and an American mocking bird named Bill.

  Each evening, Fox smoked his pipe and Robert smoked cigarettes. There was no age restriction on who could purchase tobacco, despite public concern about the number of boy smokers, and it was possible to buy a box of five ‘fags’ for a penny; rolling tobacco was cheaper still.

  The trio continued to use the back parlour as their bedroom, though on the night after their trip to Southend, Robert suggested to Fox that he sleep in the back room upstairs. Robert and Nattie went up with him and, while Fox was preparing the bed, Robert unlocked the door to their mother’s bedroom and went in for a couple of minutes. Nattie waited outside. The boys then went down to their usual berths in the back parlour.

  Robert set about devising fresh money-raising schemes. On Saturday he wrote a letter for Fox to take to the National Line offices at the Albert Dock. Fox delivered the letter to John Hewson, the company’s chief cashier, at about noon. Hewson, who was sixty-four, lived in the relatively well-to-do West Ham district of Forest Gate, north of Plaistow. He was responsible for paying Robert’s father’s wages, and was able to hand out cash advances. A distinguished-looking man with a long nose and a white beard, Hewson was known to be tender-hearted. When an overladen National Line vessel disappeared on its way from New York to London in 1889, with seventy-four seamen aboard, the distraught wives of the missing men turned up at the company offices in the City, pleading for an advance on their husbands’ wages. They were treated harshly by everyone except Hewson. ‘He was kind and said he was sorry for us,’ one woman told an MP inquiring into the case: ‘he was troubled for us; the rest were angry with us for coming to the office.’

  In his office at the Albert Dock, Hewson read Robert’s letter.

  ‘Dear Sir,’ it ran. ‘Will you please advance the sum of four pounds as my mother is very ill with heart disease and will have to pay a heavy docters bill. Will you plese bring it yourself or give it to John Fox. I remain, Yours truly, R Coombes.’

  Despite his good nature, Hewson was suspicious. Robert had once before obtained money from him under false pretences. He handed the letter back to Fox, saying he would not believe it unless he were provided with a doctor’s certificate. Fox pocketed the letter and went back to Cave Road with the news.

  On learning that this plan had failed, Robert asked Fox to pawn his mandolin. Robert was as fond of playing music as he was of reading, and the mandolin was a treasured possession. Between eight and nine o’clock in the evening, Fox took the instrument to another pawnbroker, this one much closer to home: Richard Bourne’s shop, opposite the railway station on Plaistow High Street. When the broker observed that there was no key to fasten the mandolin’s case, Fox said that the case would close securely without being locked. Bourne advanced him five shillings. This time Fox gave the name Nathaniel Coombes, along with the address 35 Cave Road.

  The boys and Fox spent much of Sunday in the back yard. The weather had cooled off a little but was still bright and dry, with more than nine hours of sunshine. Fox, wearing Mr Coombes’s jacket, trousers and waistcoat, played his harmonica, breaking off to chat with James Robertson of number 37 over the garden fence. Robert and Nattie shot at each other with toy bows and arrows. They grew so noisy that Fox warned them that if they didn’t pipe down he would report them to their mother when she got back.

  Cowboy and Indian games were popular among English boys. Robert’s penny dreadful collection included a reprint of an American ‘dime novel’ about Buffalo Bill, as the famous bison hunter and showman William F. Cody was known. For six months in 1892, when Robert was ten, Cody had staged a Wild West extravaganza at Earl’s Court in London, with a herd of horses and a troupe of Red Indians. According to the stories, the young Buffalo Billy was marked out by pluck, endurance, nerve, a restless urge for adventure. He was loyal and honourable – he tended to his wounded comrades, gave his widowed mother the money he earned by driving cattle – but could be ruthless in a crisis. On one occasion he got into a fight with a boy who had set him up for a humiliating whipping at school. Since the bigger boy was getting the better of him, Billy drew a pocket knife, opened the blade with his teeth, drove it into his enemy’s side, and left him for dead.

  Over the weekend, the election campaigning in West Ham South gathered pace. The incumbent Member of Parliament, James Keir Hardie of the Independent Labour Party, led a parade through the streets on Saturday, with marching bands and banners. At an evening meeting at the public hall in the Barking Road, the socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw gave a speech in support of Keir Hardie, and an organ belted out rousing tunes. ‘Glory, glory hallelujah,’ the people sang, ‘Keir Hardie’s marching on.’

  The constituency had recently acquired a reputation for radicalism. In a famous strike of 1889, the dockers of West Ham had succeeded in securing a minimum rate of 6d an hour, and when Keir Hardie was elected MP in 1892 West Ham South had become the first Independent Labour seat in the country. A long-haired, wild-eyed Scottish miner, Hardie told his followers that he would use the state ‘to lift the weary load which is crushing the heart and life, and beauty and joy out of the common people’. He was able, according to a supporter, to make the workers ‘feel that there is sunshine somewhere if they could but come at it’. But a rise in unemployment in 1894 had been worsened by a harsh winter of fogs, ice and snow, when parts of the Thames froze over and many of the yards were forced to close. In 1895 some 10,000 men in West Ham were without work, and the district was poorer than ever. Many blamed Lord Rosebery’s Liberal government, which Keir Hardie’s party had supported, for failing to relieve the people’s plight.

  There were more radical elements in West Ham even than Keir Hardie. Earlier in July a local anarchist called Edward Leggatt had been prosecuted for travelling second class on the railway while carrying a third-class ticket. ‘I only recognise one class,’ proclaimed Leggatt, ‘namely, the working class, who produce all the wealth of the world, and are therefore the only useful class, and the only class entitled to ride.’ Given the choice of a fine or fourteen days in prison, Leggatt said: ‘I’ll do the fourteen days – long live Anarchy, and to hell with the Government!’ Some anarchists took more lethal action: in 1894 an activist had accidentally blown himself up while trying to bomb the Greenwich Observatory, across the river from West Ham.

  At 8 a.m. on Monday 15 July the polls opened in the twin constituencies of West Ham South and West Ham North and the men of the borough began to turn out to elect their MPs – an Act of 1884 had extended the vote to all men who lived in a property worth £10 or more. A donkey traipsed up and down Balaam Street bearing placards that urged voters to support Major George Banes, the Tory candidate, while a bricklayer brandished a hod and shovel adorned with portraits of Keir Hardie. The right-wing Evening News, encouraging its readers to drive the Liberals and radicals out of London, appealed directly to the labourers of Canning Town: ‘West Ham Workers – Attention! the late Liberal government refused to place any of the recent naval contracts at the Thames Iron Works, Canning Town, although there was exceptional distress there through slack trade.’ The local publicans also supported the Conservatives, who had promised not to interfere with the licensing laws. Some of the owners of the ‘boozing shops’ near th
e docks were charging a penny for three shots of whisky and a threepenny cigar, then bundling their customers into vehicles provided by the Tories to ferry voters to the polling stations.

  While Nattie went to play in the Balaam Street park, Robert made his way to the Albert Dock to try to persuade John Hewson to give him some money. He took with him an old doctor’s certificate, from which he had torn off the date in the top corner – 20 March 1895 – in the hope that Hewson would accept it as new. The sharper villains in Robert’s penny dreadfuls were adept at forging and altering documents: ‘I am an extra good penman, you know,’ boasts the Irish master criminal Captain Murphy in Robert’s novelette Joe Phoenix’s Unknown, ‘and by means of a little dextrous use of chemicals it will be easy for me to take out the original numbers of the bonds, or shares, and put in others.’

  Robert placed the certificate on Hewson’s desk and waited as he read it: ‘I certify that Mrs Emily Coombes of 35 Cave Rd is under my care,’ read Hewson. ‘She is suffering from an internal complaint and still remains in a very weak state. JJ Griffin MD.’

  Hewson told Robert that he would come later to Cave Road to visit Mrs Coombes.

  ‘Will you bring the money with you?’ asked Robert.

  ‘I’ll see,’ said Hewson. He put the letter in his file.

  Robert again looked in on his mother’s room that day, then locked the door and gave Nattie the key. ‘Keep the key,’ he said. Nattie put the key in the back parlour. Robert told Nattie that he was going to write a letter to their father. He sat at the table, with a blotting pad, paper, pen and ink, and proceeded to do so. ‘Dear Pa,’ Robert wrote,

  I am very sorry to iform you that me ma has hert her hands. You no that sore on her finger it has spread out all over her hands and is unable to write to you. Just before I had writen in this letter a bill from Mr Greenaways come and Ma had to pay it. Mr Griffin also had charged a heavy doctors bill. Ma said will you please send her home a dollar or two. We are all very well and Ma’s hand Improving. Ma was offered four pounds for bill the mocking bird. I enclose the bill and hopeing you are very well. I remain, Your loving son, R Coombes.

  Robert folded the letter and put it in an envelope with a £1 8/6d bill from the Limehouse tailor Isaac Greenaway & Sons. The tailor’s bill, dated 10 July, detailed the costs of repairing a jacket, fitting the same jacket with a fur collar, and purchasing a waistcoat and a pair of fancy Scotch grey trousers.

  Robert also wrote a letter to the Evening News, the bestselling evening paper in London. Its edition of 15 November 1894, which carried the first reports of James Canham Read’s conviction for murder, had sold close to 400,000 copies – a world record, the paper claimed. The Evening News was pitched at the respectable and conservative working classes who populated the Plaistow end of West Ham South, while poorer, more dissident types prevailed in Canning Town and the other riverside districts.

  ‘Sir,’ wrote Robert to the editor, ‘Will you please be kind enough to place my advertisement in the Evening News for 1 week. I send the money in stamps.’ The newspaper’s classified section promised that an advertisement could be placed for the price of a telegram – that is, sixpence for twelve words and half a penny for each additional word. Robert’s notice read: ‘Wanted £30 for 6 months will pay £6 a month by instalments. Write to RC 35 Cave Rd Barking Rd Plaistow E.’

  Robert had modelled the wording on similar ads that had appeared in the paper’s columns: ‘£2 wanted privately for 2 months at 10 per cent interest’, announced ‘F’ of Kensington on 4 July. Robert was asking for a bigger loan and a longer period to pay it back, and in return was offering a generous interest rate of 20 per cent. He addressed the letter to the newspaper’s offices near Fleet Street.

  At about six o’clock in the evening of 15 July, Robert and Nattie’s aunt Emily called round to see her sister-in-law. Emily was a dark-haired woman of thirty-eight, whose husband, Nathaniel, was a younger brother of Robert and Nattie’s father. He worked as a greengrocer, as his father had before him, but in the depression of the early 1890s was struggling to make ends meet. The couple lived with their seventeen-year-old daughter a mile north-east of Cave Road, in another of the terraces that had been built on the marshland in the past two decades, as regular as if they had been punched out on a production line.

  Emily brought with her a friend called Mary Jane Burrage, who was also a friend of her sister-in-law. Mrs Burrage, a thick-set woman of forty-five, was married to the chief butcher on the SS Ionic, a White Star liner that ferried sheep to England from New Zealand. Like Robert and Nattie’s father, George Burrage had sailed with the National ships out of the Liverpool docks until moving to West Ham with his family in the 1880s to work on vessels based in East London.

  When Aunt Emily knocked at 35 Cave Road, John Fox came to the door and opened it a few inches. Emily had never seen Fox before. She noticed that he was wearing her brother-in-law’s best churchgoing suit, which she had herself brushed and put away after its purchase six weeks earlier. She nudged her foot across the threshold and asked for Mrs Coombes. Fox told her that she was not in. He kept the door almost closed, as if to stop Emily seeing into the house.

  ‘Where is she?’ asked Emily.

  ‘She is out,’ replied Fox.

  Emily pressed him: ‘I am her sister-in-law and I want to know where she has gone to.’

  Fox replied that Mrs Coombes had gone to her sister’s in Liverpool, for a holiday.

  Emily observed that it was funny that her sister-in-law had not mentioned this to her, at which Fox pushed the door shut. She and Mrs Burrage were turning away to leave when they saw Robert and Nattie running towards them. The boys had been playing in the park. Nattie stopped at the gate but Robert came forward to greet his aunt. Emily asked him where his Ma was.

  ‘She has gone to Liverpool, auntie,’ he replied. ‘A rich aunt has died and left us a lot of money and all that I know is that we are rich.’ Then Robert started back towards the recreation ground.

  Aunt Emily remarked to Mrs Burrage that it was unkind of her sister-in-law to go away without mentioning it to her. Robert reappeared with some other boys and called to Nattie, who ran after him. Aunt Emily and Mrs Burrage gave up and made their way home.

  That evening, a girl from Cave Road called on Aunt Emily at her house in Boleyn Road, East Ham. The girl said that she had been sent by her mother, who had noticed an unpleasant smell at number 35 and did not think that all was right.

  There was no running water when Robert and Nattie got home from the park. At 5 p.m. the East London Water Company had shut off West Ham’s supply without warning; the reserves were so low that the company had decided to open its taps for only two and a half hours a day. East London slowly became suffused with the smell of unflushed drains.

  As the polling deadline of 8 p.m. approached, boisterous crowds assembled near the public hall at the southern end of the Barking Road, hooting and cheering the last men to cast their votes for West Ham South’s MP. In the course of the evening the crowd moved north to Stratford to hear the borough’s results, along roads lit by gas lamps, past the glowing lanterns of the pubs and the wild flares of the oil lamps on the costermongers’ stalls. By 11 p.m. about 20,000 people had congregated outside the ornate town hall on Stratford Broadway, bringing the traffic to a standstill. When a tram tried to drive through, the crowd scattered, some people running into the front line of constables who had been sent to keep order. The policemen retaliated with punches, while the mounted patrols rode their horses into the mass of men and women. Rather than fight back, the residents of West Ham launched into a rendition of ‘Rule Britannia’, singing out that ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’.

  At midnight, the candidates for West Ham South and West Ham North appeared on the balcony of the town hall for the reading of the results. It was announced that the Tory contender for West Ham South, Major Banes, had secured 4,750 votes to Labour’s 3,975: he had beaten Keir Hardie, the dockers’ champion. The Liberal
incumbent for West Ham North had also been ousted from his seat by the Conservative challenger.

  Keir Hardie made his way back to Canning Town to thank his supporters, thousands of whom had gathered outside the Labour Party’s central committee room in the Barking Road. ‘Tomorrow,’ he told them, ‘when the news reaches a hundred thousand workmen’s homes, there will be a feeling as if something has gone out of their lives.’ Yet he urged his supporters not to lose heart: they would win through one day. ‘Good night, lads!’ he said. Many of the men in the street broke down in tears.

  The local publicans celebrated the Tory win with a triumphant display of fireworks and coloured lights.

  3

  I WILL TELL YOU THE TRUTH

  As the milkman left his delivery on the doorstep of 35 Cave Road early in the morning of Wednesday 17 July, he noticed a particularly horrid smell emanating from the building. He informed the neighbours, who again sent word to the boys’ aunt in Boleyn Road.

  Aunt Emily turned up at 35 Cave Road at 9 a.m. No one answered when she knocked, so she collected Mary Jane Burrage from her home in New City Road, on the other side of the Barking Road, and at 10 a.m. they once more tried Emily Coombes’s front door. Since there was still no reply, the two women decided to call on Robert and Nattie’s grandmother in Bow, west of Plaistow, to see if she knew what was going on.

  The seventy-four-year-old Mary Coombes lived on the edge of Bow Cemetery in a two-up, two-down terraced house almost identical to the homes of her elder sons in Plaistow. She shared the house with her unmarried son, Frederick, and her widowed daughter, Ann. She also owned several properties in Limehouse that had been left to her by her husband upon his death in 1882. Aunt Emily asked her if she knew the whereabouts of her other daughter-in-law Emily, whom they had ‘lost’. The older Mrs Coombes said that she had no idea where she was. Emily assured her that they would find the missing woman that day.