The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer

by Kate Summerscale

  The sun set in the course of Kennedy’s ninety-minute summing-up, and the gas was lit in the glass globes hanging from the courtroom ceiling.

  At ten minutes past six o’clock, the jurors retired to consider their verdict. They returned at twelve minutes past seven. Their foreman, a south London butcher of thirty-seven who had three infant sons, confirmed to the Clerk of Arraigns that they had reached a verdict: they found Robert Coombes guilty, said Harry Edis, but they made a strong recommendation to mercy on the ground of his youth, and because they did not believe that he realised the gravity of his crime.

  Robert stood in the dock, his skin flushed, his eyes shining. He seemed at last alert to the seriousness of the proceedings. In the course of the day, he had, for the first time, heard people stand up in court to defend him. Several witnesses had spoken kindly, even warmly, of him – his schoolteachers, his father, Amelia England – and the doctors had done their best to absolve him of responsibility. Now the jury, too, was showing him compassion.

  But Justice Kennedy refused to accept the recommendation of mercy. He insisted that the jurors again retire, and return with one of two conclusions: they must declare Robert guilty or guilty but insane.

  They withdrew as directed but were back within two minutes. This time, in reply to the clerk’s question, Harry Edis said that they found Robert Coombes guilty, but that he was insane at the time he committed the act.

  Robert was composed as he heard the verdict, though tears ran down his cheeks.

  The Clerk of Arraigns asked the jury: ‘Do you find John Fox guilty or not?’

  ‘Not guilty on the evidence,’ said the foreman. Edis was keen to make clear that the jurors had acquitted Fox not on the technical issue of whether he could be an accessory to an insane act, but because they believed him to be innocent.

  Fox was discharged. He left the dock and glided out through the courtroom, said the Star, like a somnambulist.

  Robert turned quickly to a warder, smiling excitedly, and whispered something to him.

  Nattie was ‘looking on with an air of cold unconcern that was extraordinary’, according to the Star; like Fox, he was probably more stupefied than indifferent.

  The judge passed sentence on Robert. ‘The only judgment I can give,’ said Kennedy, with evident displeasure, ‘is that the prisoner Robert Allen Coombes be detained in strict custody in the gaol in Holloway until the pleasure of Her Majesty be known.’

  When Robert heard the sentence, his face convulsed, said the Star, as if he were about to break down in tears or to shout out in anger. He had been expecting the gallows, but a far weirder fate awaited him. Murderers detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure were usually given an indefinite detention in Broadmoor, a fortified criminal lunatic asylum that housed the most notorious killers in Britain.

  Two Holloway warders quickly took hold of Robert and turned him to the door that led to the cells below the court. As they ushered him away he recovered his air of detached mockery. He laughed and remarked to one of his guards: ‘It is all over now.’

  12

  BOX HIM UP

  For the next week Robert waited in Holloway gaol for the Home Office to arrange his admission to Broadmoor asylum. ‘Broadmoor!’ as R. J. Tucknor wrote in a short story for Reynolds’s Newspaper: ‘What visions of horror, ruined lives, and blasted aspirations, of madness and despair, does that single word conjure up!’ The newspapers and journals of Britain, meanwhile, mulled over Robert’s crime and his punishment.

  The Lancet endorsed the verdict, approving of how, with ‘sound common-sense’, the jury had ignored the judge’s insistence that only intellectual insanity could relieve Robert of responsibility: the boy’s supposed motive for the murder was totally inadequate, the journal argued, and it was clear that he had a history of ‘moral alienism’ that had culminated in ‘impulsive homicidal mania’. But few other commentators believed that Robert was mad. Rather, they concluded that the jurors had taken pity on him. ‘In plain English,’ said the Star, ‘they didn’t want to hang the boy.’ The Times was glad that in these ‘tender times’ they had found a way to spare him the gallows.

  The Spectator was appalled by such soft-heartedness: ‘This generation,’ it announced, ‘is going mad with pity.’ For those who wanted to see Robert punished, it was some consolation, at least, that he was likely to remain in the most tightly guarded asylum in Britain for the rest of his days rather than be released – like most of those sentenced to life imprisonment – after twenty years. ‘As he is thirteen years of age,’ said the St James’s Gazette, ‘it is, on the whole, more desirable to pretend that he is mad, and so box him up in Broadmoor for life, rather than to send him for penal servitude, with the high probability that the carnivorous animal would be let loose upon the world again at three-and-thirty.’

  The language of racial atrophy pervaded the newspaper coverage. If Robert was a bloodthirsty beast to the Gazette, he was ‘a half-formed monster’ to the London Daily News, and a ‘monster of depravity’ to the News of the World, while the Evening News considered him among ‘the waste products of civilisation’, ‘one of the curiously morbid growths’ of the modern world. Before and during the Old Bailey trial, newspaper artists had depicted Robert as a classically handsome boy with even and well-proportioned features. Nattie looked feebler: some sketches emphasised the younger boy’s hooded, shadowed eyes and his weak chin. The illustrations published by the Star immediately after the verdict were quite different: Robert was jowly, dark and vacant, while Nattie was a pretty child with fair curly hair. These were images drawn not from life but from degeneration theory.

  The St James’s Gazette observed that Robert’s schooling had not made him more civilised but more savage, accentuating rather than arresting the degenerative process: ‘all that elementary education did for Master Coombes was to provide him with weapons, as it were, to sharpen the claws of the little tiger’. The Daily Chronicle noted that Robert showed an eerie ‘mixture of shrewdness and hysteria, ability and corruption’, adding: ‘This type is not rare. It might have been foreseen as an outcome of the close-herded life of the English town, as the price of some aspects of England’s greatness.’ Robert Coombes was one of a new breed of urban lunatic, said the Chronicle, a tribe of vicious, quick-witted degenerates who had replaced the ‘grinning and harmless imbeciles that sunned themselves in the towns and villages of an older England’.

  The Saturday Review, too, suggested that Robert’s desolate environment had played a part in his regression. A lively-minded boy in the affluent West End of London could play at violence and adventure, the journal argued. He could scalp Indians in his playroom, unearth treasure beneath the trees of the square opposite his house: he had ‘space and colour in the actual events of his life’. But in West Ham, where the dingy streets ‘reeked with malaria from the marshes and smoke from the docks’, and the atmosphere was ‘poisoned by exhalations from earth sickened by its crowded life’, Robert had been driven not just to imagine but to enact his drama. ‘Plaistow is practical,’ observed the Review, drily.

  This journal expressed wonder that Robert had not been scanned for the markers of degeneration: ‘Did he show any of the signs now recognised by the great Continental experts as stigmata of physical and therefore mental degeneracy? It was a test case for the application of the new knowledge. If Robert Allen Coombes is a physical criminal or madman, how about his brother, plainly an accomplice, and now turned free on society to propagate a possibly degraded strain?’ A lifetime’s detention in an insane asylum would ensure that Robert would not reproduce, but no restrictions had been placed on Nattie.

  The Pall Mall Gazette argued that Robert and Nattie were so self-evidently depraved that both should simply have been put to death, regardless of whether they were mad. ‘We must all be conscious of a pang of regret that these boys are not to be hung. It would be well if we could choke such moral abortions at birth, as we now choke physical ones. But since we cannot diagnose them at sight, it
is surely wiser, cheaper, and kinder to dispose of them at once, when they do declare themselves, with no more excitement or doubt than a housemaid gives to the crushing of a beetle.’

  Taking their cue from Justice Kennedy, most journalists concluded that the penny dreadfuls had not played much part in the murder. The Pall Mall Gazette, which in the past had inveighed against the dreadfuls, now declared that they were merely a scapegoat. ‘When a boy of the lower class murders his mother or does similar things that he ought not to have done, what a blessing it is to get beyond elementary education, heredity, the social system – all the things we might dispute about – and find ourselves at one in blaming the penny dreadful for it all. Most of us have no idea what a penny dreadful is like. We only know that little boys buy them in dark shops in back streets, and that there is nobody to defend them. Therefore, down with the penny dreadful!’

  ‘The truth is,’ said the Gazette, ‘that in respect to the effect of reading on boys of the poorer class the world has got into one of those queer illogical stupidities that so easily beset it. In every other age and class man is held responsible for his reading, and not reading responsible for man. The books a man or woman reads are less the making of character than the expression of it.’

  The Journal of Mental Science agreed: ‘It seems obvious that while stories full of bloodshed and horrors might help to confirm and encourage, and even to give direction to, a tendency already existing, they cannot be considered responsible for the origination of such a tendency.’

  Others pointed out that there was no real difference between the trashy books in the back parlour of 35 Cave Road and classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (the hero of that novel, like Robert, was a boy ‘full of sea-dreams’, bewitched by ‘anticipations of strange islands and adventures’). The Duchess of Rutland noted that there were ‘guinea dreadfuls’ as well as ‘penny dreadfuls’.

  Some journalists even expressed a rueful sympathy for Robert’s fantasies. His murder plot was ‘borrowed from the stock-in-trade not only of penny dreadfuls but of all the literature of boys’ adventure’, said the Saturday Review. ‘The purchase of a knife from a marine-store dealer, the hiding of it, the secret talks with an admiring brother, the choice of pretexts for the deed (he would call it a deed), the signal from the other room, and the swift and sudden action – we know them all, and we can understand how they engrossed his mind to the exclusion of all else.’ Robert yearned for ‘the Island’ of children’s fiction, observed the Review, ‘its rocks, no doubt, covering hidden treasure, its shores littered with attractive wrecks’. Even John Fox was a familiar figure of the genre: ‘the faithful retainer, not fully in the confidence of his master but ready to serve him to the death, and possessed, no doubt, of a practical knowledge of islands’. The cosy retreat in the back parlour recalled the hideaway of a band of fugitives. Robert, Nattie and Fox ‘played cards in their den, no doubt “with fierce oaths”, and began their adventures by sleeping on unaccustomed couches’.

  The Star reporter who attended the Old Bailey trial also recognised the boy’s dreams. ‘Alas! that island,’ he lamented. ‘We all wanted to get there in our day to live in a hut and shoot pirates and slavers, though happily the road there was less bloodthirsty than that which unhappy Robert Coombes chose.’

  The origin of the crime was still a mystery. In their bid to secure an insanity verdict, Robert’s lawyers had tried to wipe out motive rather than to find it: their medical witnesses had characterised the killing as a psychic spasm with no emotional content or meaning. The newspapers, too, placed the blame for the murder on Robert’s physiology, though most argued that his degeneracy had rendered him immoral rather than insane.

  Just one publication argued that Robert might be neither mad nor bad. The Child’s Guardian, the journal of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, proposed that the cause of the crime lay not in the boy’s disordered body but in the history of his home: specifically, in his relationship with his mother. ‘Of the dead, we speak no ill in courts,’ it observed in October in a piece entitled ‘Boy Murderers’. ‘Of the dead, in this particular case, we know no ill to speak, but we are of opinion that it is of great public concern to know what were the relations of the dead mother and her murderous child.’

  The Child’s Guardian suggested, as the lawyers had not, that Robert had assaulted Emily Coombes because she was physically brutal. This, after all, was what Robert had said. He had told the police that he had decided to kill his mother because she had beaten Nattie and threatened them both; and that he finally attacked her because she punched him as he lay in bed. He had told Dr Walker that he had killed her because she had thrown knives at Nattie and warned that she would stick a hatchet in his head. The Child’s Guardian pointed out that Nattie had colluded in the murder plan. ‘Was he, too, insane?’ it asked sceptically.

  Legislation had been passed to protect children from violent parents – the Children’s Acts of 1889 and 1894 stipulated that physical correction should be ‘reasonable’ and ‘within the bounds of moderation’ – but neither the police, the coroner, the solicitor nor the magistrate in the Coombes case seemed to have inquired into the frequency, force or emotion with which Emily beat her boys. They accepted Nattie’s and the neighbours’ assurances that she was kind to her sons, and ignored Robert’s accounts of her threats and aggression. As the Child’s Guardian suggested, this was in part because it was unseemly to speak ill of the dead, especially of a murdered woman: whatever she had done, she had not deserved this. Most people in any case believed that parents were entitled to punish their children by whatever means they felt necessary; and the Coombes family appeared to be a respectable, churchgoing household, neither dissipated nor desperate. None the less the NSPCC, which had been prosecuting parents for cruelty since its inception in 1884, had no difficulty in believing the worst. ‘That brute force begets brute force and injustice injustice is beyond doubt,’ it observed. ‘That there are thousands of parents – both fathers and mothers – whose conduct to their children is worse than barbarous, the records of this Society’s work during but a few years places beyond doubt.’

  In a booklet published a few years later, the NSPCC reminded its inspectors of the need to interpret the language used by children. ‘What the starved child calls stealing may not be stealing,’ advised The Inspector’s Directory (1901), ‘yet as his parents call it stealing, the child calls it so, too. Never take a frightened, ill-treated child’s names for its actions; find out, in particular, what those actions were.’ This applied not only to Nattie’s crime – the ‘stealing’ of food – but also to his punishment: the boys adopted their mother’s description of the ‘hiding’ she administered, but the event may have been much more alarming than that term implied.

  Violent parents not only inflicted physical suffering on their children, observed the Child’s Guardian, but also caused psychological ‘degradation’. As the older and favoured boy, Robert occupied a confusing position in his household: sometimes his mother punished him as a child, sometimes she enlisted him as a companion. The intensity of their relationship was particularly acute when his father was away, a closeness made literal on the nights that he slept alongside her. The NSPCC journal stopped short of addressing the oddity of a thirteen-year-old boy sharing his mother’s bed, though such arrangements were usually witnessed only in slums and tenements that did not have enough space for adults and older children to sleep apart. A drawing in the Illustrated Police News picked up on the sexual symbolism of the murder scene: Robert is shown plunging a knife through the half-revealed breast of his mother while holding a truncheon at his groin. Pain is inscribed on the faces of both mother and son, one twisted in grief and the other in rage. Next to this image of savage and debauched frenzy, the newspaper published a sketch of Robert as a smooth-faced, clean-cut schoolboy standing in the dock.

  The Illustrated Police News images dramatised the bewildering duality of Robert’s behaviou
r: he was the good boy and the bad, child and man, beast and sophisticate. Robert ‘appears to have two personalities’, wrote the Times critic J. F. Nisbet, ‘two memories which remain distinct’. His case played to the contemporary preoccupation with double selves. ‘Every person consists of two personalities,’ the French psychologist Pierre Janet had argued in 1886, ‘one conscious and one unconscious.’ Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, identified a ‘subliminal self’ that lay ‘below the threshold of ordinary consciousness’. ‘Two or more distinct trains of memory, feeling, will, may exist in the same personage,’ wrote Myers in 1892. He proposed that the buried self communicated with the conscious mind by such means as auditory hallucination. Others speculated that unconscious selves might be revealed by hypnotism and mesmerism, or break forth spontaneously in somnambulism, epilepsy and homicidal insanity. ‘Man is not truly one,’ says Dr Jekyll in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ‘but truly two.’ By killing his mother, Robert had tried to resolve an intolerable tension, to simplify his divided self.

  PART IV

  THE MURDERERS’ PARADISE

  13

  THOSE THAT KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO

  On Monday 23 September, six days after his conviction, Robert Coombes and two warders from Holloway gaol travelled by train to a village in Berkshire, forty miles south-west of London. Robert was wearing his cricketing trousers, his tennis jacket with gold piping and a pair of handcuffs by which he was attached to one of his guards. The day was blazing hot, but the boy was ‘very cool and collected’, reported the Hampshire Telegraph. ‘He returned the glances of the passengers who travelled with him with careless smiles.’