The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

by Kate Summerscale

  The court heard evidence from several of the other witnesses who had testified in the West Ham court. Sherwood, in an effort to convince the jury that it was plausible that Fox had not been aware of the decomposing corpse, asked the Robertsons of 37 Cave Road if they had smelt anything odd.

  James Robertson said: ‘When I was in my garden I did not notice any smell coming from the house. I should not, because there are market gardens there at the back coming up to the Coombes’ garden, and manure is often put there, and there are often large quantities of manure and smells there.’ His wife, Rosina, testified that she had not noticed a bad smell either. The Coombes’ and Robertsons’ front doors were adjacent, she said, though their kitchen doors faced in opposite directions – the garden door of number 35 looked on to that of number 33. She had seen Fox playing cricket with the boys in the yard most evenings. ‘They seemed pretty cheerful,’ she said.

  In his examination of Charles Pearson, the National Line officer, and John Hewson, the National Line cashier, Sherwood attempted to establish that Fox was both trustworthy and simple-minded. Pearson said that he had known Fox for three years: ‘I have always found him honest, but he is not very bright as to intellect; I should think he is half-witted. He would not be put to do anything difficult, or any message that required much thought. I knew the Coombes knew him, and that he was in the habit of going to them and doing odd jobs there.’

  Hewson said that Fox had lived in the docks for more than twenty years. ‘Everybody knows him. He carried sailors’ and officers’ bags, and fetched things for persons from their houses, and posted letters. We are under the impression that Fox is half-witted, but otherwise well-behaved.’ He told the court about Fox being caught in the fire on the Egypt. ‘I think he was scared then.’

  From the pawnbrokers, Sherwood elicited that there had been nothing shifty about Fox’s behaviour when he had pledged the watches and mandolin. He ‘appeared to be like a sailor’, said Henry Goldsworthy of the Commercial Road. ‘He did not seem very bright,’ noted Richard Bourne of Plaistow. Many pawnbrokers were practised at giving testimony in court, since they frequently found themselves in possession of stolen goods. Goldsworthy had appeared at the Old Bailey as recently as the previous Monday, to testify to having been pledged an overcoat that formed part of a cargo stolen from a Jewish furrier at the Victoria Dock in 1893.

  Justice Kennedy announced that the trial would be adjourned until the following morning.

  At the close of the first day of the trial, the warders led Robert and John Fox back through the door in the dock and down the stairs to the Old Bailey basement, then along Birdcage Walk to the prison. Newgate had until 1882 been London’s main gaol, but was now used only to house prisoners waiting to be tried at the Old Bailey, or to be executed in the courtyard. Even when sessions were in progress, the gaol lay half-empty. If a prisoner were to meet anyone while being walked through its corridors, the Newgate rules stipulated that he should turn to face the wall, put his hands behind his back, and wait until the other person had passed.

  Robert and Fox were admitted through a thick iron door to a long stone corridor beneath tiers of cells. ‘It was as if you were walking at the bottom of the hold of some great petrified ship,’ observed the journalist W. T. Stead in 1886, ‘looking up at the deserted decks.’ Wire netting had been stretched across the well between the cells, to prevent prisoners from jumping to their deaths. The warders took Robert and Fox up the iron staircases to the balustraded walkways and into the cells in which they would spend the night.

  The Saturday Review, commenting on the evidence presented in the Old Bailey, objected to Dr Kennedy’s allusion to the ‘bushel’ of maggots in Emily Coombes’s room: ‘Why not two bushels, good doctor, or a dozen?’ it asked. ‘Give your evidence as to the cause of death directly, and leave the natural details to the charnel-house alone; there is enough for the jury to gape at.’ The doctor’s specificity had some relevance, though. The quantity and distribution of grubs helped to date the murder. A blowfly’s egg took a day to hatch into a maggot, which fed for four days before moving away to find a dark nook in which its soft body could stiffen into a cocoon. Ten days later it would break out as a fly. Since the maggots in Cave Road had strayed far beyond their breeding and feeding grounds in the body’s cavities, spilling on to the bed and the floor, it was evident that they had been alive for a week or more. Kennedy’s evidence about the extent of the decomposition was pertinent to John Fox’s claim that he had no notion that anything was wrong in the house; and it seemed proof of the callousness of the boys. Robert and Nattie had left their mother to rot, allowing the blowflies’ offspring to consume her as if the insects were their proxies. It was an additional desecration.

  Yet the court had also heard that after Thursday 11 July, when the corpse began to smell and the blowflies’ eggs began to hatch, Robert only once stepped inside the room. He chose to pawn his beloved mandolin, to write begging letters and to doctor documents rather than venture into the chamber and renew his pillage of the family valuables. He had already covered his mother’s face with a sheet and a pillow. Perhaps he failed to fetch more jewels or apply the lime because he could not bear to go near her changing body.

  In the ten days that Robert and Nattie shared the house with their mother’s corpse, reality was provisional for them; time was suspended. For as long as no adult knew about the murder, it had not quite happened. The boys continued to play: in the yard, at the park, in the parlour, in the street. They inhabited a make-believe world, in which Emily Coombes might be ‘all right’; she might be ‘kept’; she might even come back, as John Fox warned, to chastise her sons for making too much noise in the yard. The brothers tacitly agreed not to speak of the killing, and they chose the trusting, kindly Fox to sanction their pact. In this dreamlike moment, their lives had not yet been transformed, and their mother’s had not been ended. As Nattie had said to his brother on 8 July – in awe, in horror, in simple disbelief – ‘You ain’t done it.’

  The lawyers in the Old Bailey were presenting the court with opposed narratives: the prosecution told of a boy who was all head and no heart, a callous killer, while the defence depicted a boy whose reason had been utterly overthrown by his crazed emotions. There was no room for a story in which Robert was both scheming and desperate, ruthless and lost, in which he both knew and did not know what he had done and why he had done it.

  Outside the Old Bailey in the evening of 16 September, newsboys were touting papers that carried the first reports of the Coombes trial. The Spectator noted, with disapproval, that they were being snapped up as quickly as if they had carried updates on a political crisis, a military battle or an important sporting event. In Islington, north London, a wax worker was offering models of the Coombes boys’ and John Fox’s heads for sale to showmen. Across the Thames, on the south bank, a penny theatre was staging a melodrama about the murder. Already the narrative of Robert Coombes’s crime had been published throughout the country, illustrated by artists, and adapted for the stage. The appetite for news of the case, said the Spectator, ‘reveals a strange and bad condition of feeling’. The Saturday Review’s distaste for the lurid detail supplied by Dr Kennedy was also a revulsion at the journalists and dramatists and wax modellers, the readers and audiences of London descending like vermin on the story of Emily Coombes’s death.

  10

  THE BOYS SPRINGING UP AMONGST US

  A light fog settled on London on Tuesday morning, but once it had cleared the day proved bright and very warm. In the Old Bailey, Charles Gill QC continued to make the case against Robert Coombes and John Fox. He called PC Twort to the witness box.

  The constable described the events of Wednesday 17 July and read out Robert’s confession to murder. In reply to questions from Robert’s counsel, he confirmed that the boy was ‘very frank and open’ when he interviewed him: ‘he told me all he knew without my asking him questions’. Nor had Robert tried to hide the murder weapon, said Twort, or to di
spose of all the valuables in the house.

  When Sherwood questioned him on behalf of Fox, Twort testified that Fox had sat in silence in the back parlour on the Wednesday afternoon. ‘There was a good deal of talk amongst the women,’ said Twort. ‘Fox took no part in it. He took no notice. He did not seem to take any interest or appreciate the situation.’

  Harriet Hayward of number 39 gave her evidence about the events of Wednesday 17 July. On cross-examination by Grantham, she declined to describe Robert as ‘excitable’. ‘I always looked on Robert as a bright, intelligent boy,’ she said. ‘I did not see any excitability about him.’ She agreed that he had behaved honourably towards Fox when the crime was discovered: ‘He took the blame off Fox and incriminated himself.’

  When Sherwood asked her about his client, she said that she had seen Fox often at 35 Cave Road, chopping wood. She insisted on Fox’s integrity and kindness, as she had in the magistrates’ and coroner’s courts. ‘I always looked upon him as being very simple and good-natured,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe he would hurt anyone. Mrs Coombes always spoke of him as being very trustworthy. When she went out she could always trust him in the place. I could see that the Coombes liked him. They all liked him. He was fond of playing with the boys.’

  Inspector Gilbert described his search of the house and listed the items that the police had collected. A bloodstained piece of rag – the cloth left on Emily Coombes’s bed – lay on the desk in front of him as he gave his evidence. In reply to a question from Grantham, Gilbert confirmed that he had found items on which Robert could have raised money. He handed Robert’s nightshirt to the jury for inspection. The shirt had twenty or thirty spots of blood on the front and arms. Gilbert gave Robert’s collection of penny dreadfuls to the judge.

  ‘They are apparently sensational stories,’ said Kennedy. He looked through the bundle and then laid it down on the bench by his side.

  During Gilbert’s evidence, Robert quietly laughed to himself. He began to make comical, grotesque faces at both the inspector and the judge. He stuck out his tongue at Justice Kennedy, who looked back at him severely. The Evening News noted that the boy had devised a game whereby he would smile and look intelligent, then pass both hands down over his face before removing them to reveal his eyebrows twitching and his lips moving, as if he were repeating words to himself. He would replace this distorted face in a flash with a bright, calm expression. The London Daily News interpreted Robert’s changing faces not as a parody or impersonation of madness but as spasms of emotion. ‘His callousness in the dock was extraordinary,’ it reported, ‘though now and then he buried his face in his hands. At other times, he made hideous grimaces at the Judge and witnesses.’ He often looked ‘more like an ape than a human being’, said the Sun, ‘mouthing in a meaningless way like an idiot’. As a defendant in a murder trial, Robert was not entitled to give evidence. His equivocal plea – ‘Guilty’ and then ‘Not guilty’ – and his strange dumb show were the only representations he could make. His performance was hard to read: some observers saw a clever boy mocking the proceedings; others a child who had lost control.

  Once he had dismissed Inspector Gilbert, Gill had finished establishing the facts of the case. He would now summon witnesses to testify to Robert’s character: Gill intended to show that the boy was rational rather than insane. First he called the headmasters of the three board schools that Robert had attended in Plaistow.

  Robert and Nattie had been going to school since they were five. From nine o’clock to twelve o’clock each morning and from two to four each afternoon, they took classes in one of the large school buildings that had been established after the passage of the Education Act of 1870. A West Ham board school educated more than a thousand pupils, grouped in classes of between seventy and eighty. The infants (those children younger than seven) were usually housed on the ground floor, the girls on the next floor and the boys on the top.

  The regime in the board schools was strict. Children were expected to rise when an adult entered or left a room, to answer ‘Yes, ma’am’, ‘No, sir’, ‘If you please, ma’am’ when addressing teachers, to form neat lines to file in and out of the building. When not at their lessons, they were taught to hold their hands behind their backs or to place them on their heads. They learnt to stand to attention at their desks and to march on the spot in unison. The teachers in East London schools checked the children’s faces for dirt in the mornings and endeavoured to train their young charges not to drop the ‘h’s at the beginning of words. For discipline, they used the cane. Order, cleanliness and obedience were the chief precepts of the system.

  Critics complained that the board schools espoused a rigid, mechanical style of learning, driven by the fact that their grants were awarded according to the number of children who rose by an academic ‘standard’ each year. There was little incentive to foster the children’s creativity and self-expression. None the less, the towering school buildings were beacons of aspiration – ‘oases’, as one commentator described them, ‘in the desert of drab two-storied cottages’. ‘Each school,’ said another observer, ‘stands up from its playground like a church in God’s acre ringing its bell.’

  The Coombes boys’ first school was in Limehouse, where they and their parents lived until 1890. The family then moved temporarily to Toxteth Park, Liverpool, where the brothers spent a year at St Bride’s school. On their return to London in 1891 both boys attended Grange Road school, known locally as the Sewer Bridge school because of its proximity to the bridge over the Northern Outfall Sewer, which carried north London’s effluent to the Thames.

  ‘I am headmaster of the Grange Road school,’ said George Hollamby, a fifty-three-year-old widower who lived in Stratford and had worked at the school since it opened in 1881. ‘Robert Coombes was there in 1891, 1892 and 1893. He left in 1893, though there was a long interval of absence between 1891 and 1892.’ The Coombes family had again spent several months in Toxteth Park in this period. It was on their return to London that they moved to 35 Cave Road.

  ‘When he left he was in the fourth standard,’ said Hollamby. ‘His capacity was very good.’

  The fourth standard, which Robert attained when he was eleven, was the level required to graduate from elementary school at thirteen. To achieve this standard, a child needed to recite eighty lines of poetry, read with fluency and expression from a passage chosen by the school inspector, write from dictation, making no more than three spelling mistakes, solve maths problems relating to weight, length and area, and be tested in drawing, singing and two other subjects such as grammar, geography, science or history. To prepare for the tests, the pupils memorised material in their ‘readers’, textbooks containing a miscellany of literary extracts and factual lists of kings, battles, rivers, British colonies, and so on. Inspectors visited the schools to examine the children in the autumn.

  Robert’s counsel, Grantham, asked Hollamby why the boy had left his school.

  ‘In November 1893 he ran away from school,’ the headmaster said. ‘There was a slight trouble in the school with the teacher.’

  Grantham asked whether a doctor had been involved in Robert’s transfer from Grange Road to the nearby Stock Street board school.

  ‘I know nothing about his being removed owing to a doctor’s interference,’ replied Hollamby. ‘The school committee made a special order for his removal to Stock Street – that school was full at the time.’

  Grantham asked whether Robert had suffered from headaches.

  ‘While with me he complained of headache on more than one occasion,’ said Hollamby.

  Gill, for the prosecution, asked how often he had made such complaints, and to whom.

  ‘He complained that his head ached to me or to the teacher,’ said Hollamby. ‘Not often.’

  ‘I am headmaster of Stock Street school,’ said Gill’s next witness, Jesse Weber Smith, a forty-four-year-old teacher who lived in Forest Gate, north of Plaistow, and had been in charge of Stock Street since it op
ened in 1888. ‘Robert was in Standard V when admitted. He passed that and was in Standard VI. I should say he was a very clever boy for his age.’ The requirements for the fifth standard included a hundred-line recitation and the addition and subtraction of fractions. Since relatively few children attained this level, the class to which Robert graduated at Stock Street was smaller than those lower down the school, and dominated by ‘clean-collar’ boys from more respectable homes.

  In cross-examination, Grantham asked Smith about the circumstances of Robert’s transfer. Smith said that the West Ham school committee had made a special order for Robert’s admission to Stock Street. ‘Our school was full at the time – it was an unusual thing to make such an order.’

  Grantham asked him how Stock Street differed from Grange Road school.

  ‘There is very little difference between the schools,’ said Smith. ‘They are both public elementary schools. I suppose the exchange was made in consequence of a report by the attendance officer.’

  Grantham asked him about Robert’s behaviour. ‘I gave the boy a good character while with me,’ said Smith. ‘He was a very good boy, who gave no trouble whatsoever.’

  ‘He was very precocious?’ asked Grantham.

  ‘No,’ Smith replied. ‘I should not say that.’