The Surgeon of Crowthorne

by Simon Winchester

  He demanded first that his own books be sent over from home in New Haven. Once they were installed he ordered, from the big London bookstores, scores upon scores of new and second-hand volumes, which he first stood in precarious piles in his cells until he asked – and paid for – bookshelves to be built. In the end he had converted the more westerly of the two rooms into a library, with a writing-desk, a couple of chairs and teak bookshelves that ran from floor to ceiling.

  He kept his easel and paints in the other, easterly room; he also kept a small selection of wine and some bourbon with which the envoy kept him supplied. He took up the flute again, and gave lessons to some of his neighbour inmates. He also found he was permitted – and was well able to afford – to pay one of his fellow patients to perform work for him – tidying his room, sorting his books, cleaning up after a painting session. Life, which in those first months had been at least tolerable, now started to become really quite agreeable: Minor was able to live a life of total leisure and security, he was warm and reasonably well fed, his health was attended to, he could stroll along the long gravel pathway known as the Terrace, he could take his ease on one of the benches by the lawn and gaze at the shrubberies, or he could read and paint to his heart’s content.

  His cells still exist – not much at Broadmoor has changed in a century, and although Block 2 is now called Berkshire House, it is still much the preferred home for those patients who are in for the long haul. Economy and the exigencies of today’s criminal justice and mental health systems mean that two patients are now housed where once there was only one: each of Minor’s two rooms, the more westerly one that had been his library, the other that had been his sitting-room, offer home and hearth and some spartan comfort to a present-day inmate.

  Minor’s sanity, or lack thereof, was never in doubt. He was never so ill as to be ordered away from the benign atmosphere of Block 2 and into the harsher regime of the Back Blocks (though a strange and terrible incident in 1902 did take him away from his rooms for many weeks). But the ward notes show that his delusions became over the years ever more fixed, ever more bizarre, and that there seemed no likelihood that he would ever regain his reasoning. He was comfortable in Broadmoor, maybe; but there was nowhere else he could be allowed to live.

  The ward notes from his first ten years show the sad and relentless progress ofhis downward spiral. Already at the time he was admitted he had a detailed awareness of the curious happenings that plagued him at night – always at night. Small boys, he believed, were put up in the rafters above his bed; they came down when he was fast asleep, chloroformed him and then forced him to perform indecent acts – though whether with them as boys, or whether with the women of whom he dreamed constantly, the record-keepers were never clear. He would awaken with abrasions around his nose and mouth where they had clamped the gas bottle; the bottoms of his pyjama legs were always damp, he said, indicating he had been forced to walk in a stupor through the night.

  April 1873: ‘Dr Minor is thin and anaemic, excitable in manner, though appears rational by day and occupies himself with painting and playing the flute. But at night he barricades the door of his room with furniture, and connects the handle of the door with the furniture using a piece of string, so that he will awaken if anyone tries to enter the bedroom.’

  June 1875: ‘The doctor is convinced that intruders manage to get in – from under the floor, or through the windows – and that they pour poison into his mouth through a funnel: he now insists on being weighed each morning to see if the poison has made him heavier.’

  August 1875: ‘The expression of his face in the morning is often haggard and wild, as though he did not obtain much rest. He complains that he feels as if a cold iron has been pressed against his teeth at night, and that something is being pumped into him. Otherwise, no change.’

  A year later the demons were seeming to have a depressing influence. In February 1876 the doctors noted: ‘A fellow patient stated today that Dr Minor came to see him in the Boot Room and said he would give him everything, if only he would cut his – Dr Minor’s throat. An attendant was ordered to look after him.’

  The following year was no better. ‘Socially,’ he was reported as explaining to an attendant in May 1877, ‘all systems are based on schemes of corruption and knavery, and he is the subject of their machinations. This lies at the heart of the brutal torture to which he is subjected each night. His spinal marrow is pierced and his heart is operated on with instruments of torture. His assailants come through the floor.’

  In 1878 technology becomes a part of the villainy. ‘Electric currents from unseen sources are passed through his body, he insists. Electric buttons are placed in his forehead, he is placed in a wagon and trundled across the countryside.’ He was taken as far afield as Constantinople, he told an attendant once, where he was made to perform lewd acts, in public. ‘They are,’ he declared, ‘trying to make a pimp of me!’

  But while the delusions clearly persisted and worsened over those early asylum years, the clinical notes do show – and crucially to this story – the parallel development of a more thoughtful and scholarly side to the afflicted man. ‘With the exception of his impressions on the subject of his night-time visitations,’ says one entry in the late 1870s, ‘he talks very coherently and intelligently on most topics. He works in his bit of garden, and is fairly cheerful just now – but he has his days of moodiness and reserve.’ A year later a doctor recorded simply: ‘He is rational and intelligent for the most part.’

  He also begins to settle down, and starts to regard the great hospital as his home, and the attendants as his family. ‘He is not particularly aware that he is anxious to go back to America, as at one time he was,’ wrote another doctor. ‘All he asks is a little bit more freedom, perhaps to go and see sights in London, or perhaps visit the orchid show for which he had just received a card.’ Yet the doctor who conducted this particular interview was certain of his patient’s condition, and inscribed a sentence that seems in hindsight almost to have sealed Minor’s eternal fate: ‘There can be no doubt that Dr Minor, though on occasion very calm and collected, is generally speaking more abundantly insane, and shows himself to be more so, than he was some years ago. He has the calm and firm conviction that he is almost nightly the victim of torment and purposive annoyance, on the parts of the attendants and others connected with an infernal criminal scheme.’

  It was at about this time that there came two developments, one of which by chance led indirectly to the other. The first stemmed from a factor that is not uncommon among those who commit appalling crimes: Minor became truly remorseful for what he had done, and made a resolution to try and make some kind of amends. It was with this in mind that he took the bold step of writing to his victim’s widow, via the American Embassy, which he knew had helped to raise a fund for her back in the months immediately following the tragedy.

  He explained to Eliza Merrett how inexplicably sorry he was for what he had done, and offered to try to help her in any way he could – perhaps by settling money on her or her children. Already Minor’s stepmother, Judith, had contributed: now, perhaps, and if she would only be so gracious as to accept, he could do rather more.

  The letter seems to have worked a small miracle: not only did Eliza agree to accept financial help from Minor, she also asked if it might be possible to visit him. It was an unprecedented request, that an incarcerated murderer be allowed to spend time with a relation of his victim; but the Home Office, after discussing the matter with Dr Orange, the Broadmoor superintendent, agreed to one experimental supervised visit. Accordingly, some time during late 1879 Eliza travelled up from Lambeth to Broadmoor, and first met the man who had ended her husband’s life seven years before, and who had so drastically changed her own life, and those of her seven children.

  The meeting, according to Dr Orange’s notes, was at first tense, but it progressed well, and by its end Eliza had agreed to come again. Before long she was making monthly ventures down to Crowthorn
e, eager to talk with interested sympathy to this now seemingly harmless American. And though the conversations stopped short of developing into any real friendship, it is believed she made Minor an offer that was to lead to the second of the major developments of this period of his life. She apparently agreed to bring parcels of books to Minor from the antiquarian dealers up in London.

  Eliza knew very little of books – indeed, she was barely literate. But when she saw how keenly Minor collected and cherished his old volumes, and when she listened to his querulous remarks about the delays and costs of the postal service between London and Crowthorne, she made an offer to collect his orders for him, and bring them down on her visits. And so it happened that month by month Eliza began delivering packages, wrapped in brown paper and sealed with twine and wax, from West London’s great book emporiums, like Maggs and Bernard Quaritch and Hatchards.

  The delivery system, such as it was, probably remained in place for only a few months – Eliza eventually took to drink, and lost all interest in the curious old man. But it appears to have been the most serendipitous event in Minor’s otherwise melancholy life.

  For it was in the early 1880s that he might have stumbled across the first of James Murray’s famous appeals for volunteers, which asked for interested parties to indicate that they would be prepared to work on the new Dictionary. Murray first published his appeal in April 1879, and had 2,000 copies printed and circulated by booksellers: one would almost certainly have found its way, probably fairly soon after its distribution, into one or more of the packages that Eliza brought to Minor at the asylum.

  The eight pages explained in very broad terms what was likely to be required. First there were Murray’s own suggestions for the kind of books that needed to be read:

  In the Early English period up to the invention of Printing so much has been done and is doing that little outside help is needed. But few of the earliest printed books – those of Caxton and his successors – have yet been read, and any one who has the opportunity and time to read one or more of these, either in the originals, or accurate reprints, will confer valuable assistance by so doing. The later sixteenth-century literature is very fairly done; yet here several books remain to be read. The seventeenth century, with so many more writers, naturally shows still more unexplored territory. The nineteenth-century books, being within the reach of everyone, have been read widely; but a large number remain unrepresented, not only of those published during the last ten years while the Dictionary has been in abeyance, but also of earlier date. But it is in the eighteenth century above all that help is urgently needed. The American scholars promised to get the eighteenth-century literature taken up in the United States, a promise which they appear not to have to any extent fulfilled, and we must now appeal to English readers to share the task, for nearly the whole of that century’s books, with the exception of Burke’s works, have still to be gone through.

  After this, Murray listed rather more than 200 specific authors whose works, in his view, were essential reading. The list was quite awesome: most of the volumes were rare, and likely to be in the hands of only a very few collectors. Some books, on the other hand, were already available at Murray’s newly established Dictionary Library at Mill Hill: they could be sent to readers who promised to do work on them. (And vouched to return them: when Furnivall had been editor he found that a number of disgruntled readers used the lending scheme as a means of swelling their own library collections, and neither sent in the requested quotation slips, nor ever returned the books.)

  Minor wrote to Murray, formally volunteering his services as a reader. It is not wholly clear, though, just when this was – not clear exactly when Minor first started his legendary work. Murray recalled later that he had received Minor’s letter ‘very soon after I commenced the Dictionary’. No correspondence between the doctor and the Dictionary has been traced, however, until 1885 – which is hardly ‘very soon’.

  But one clue exists: there had been an article in the Athenaeum magazine in September 1879, suggesting that Americans might like to become more keenly involved: and it is quite probable that Minor, who is known to have subscribed to the magazine in Broadmoor, would have seen it. Based on this assumption, on Murray’s recollections, and on the records of Minor’s contributions that have been lately unearthed in the OED archives, it seems probable that his relationship with the Dictionary got under way in either 1880 or 1881.

  But where did Murray think his correspondent was living, and what did he think he did? Murray told a correspondent that he remembered only that the first and subsequent letters from Minor had been addressed to the Dictionary office simply from Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire. Murray was too busy to ruminate on the matter, no matter how curiously familiar the address might have been. By the time he read the first letter he had already received about 800 similar letters in response to his appeal – he was being swamped by the success of his entreaty.

  He replied to Minor with his characteristic courtesy, saying that, on the basis of his apparent qualifications, enthusiasm and interest, he should start reading immediately, going through any of the volumes he might already have, or else looking to the Dictionary office for copies of books he might require.

  In due course, Murray continued, the doctor could expect to receive particular word requests – in the particular event that the Dictionary editors had trouble finding quotations for a specific word on their own. For the time being, however, Dr Minor and all the other early respondents, to whom the editor expressed his ‘considerable gratitude’, should just start reading, should start making word-lists and writing quotations in a careful, systematic but general way.

  Two additional sheets of printed paper that Murray was enclosing with the letter, and which underlined a formal agreement that Minor had been officially welcomed as a volunteer reader, would offer any necessary further advice.

  But through all of this, Murray explained some years later, ‘I never gave a thought to who Minor might be. I thought he was either a practising medical man of literary tastes with a good deal of leisure, or perhaps a retired medical man or surgeon who had no other work.’

  The truth about his new American correspondent was a great deal more strange than this detached, innocent and other-worldly Scotsman could have ever imagined.

  Chapter Seven

  Entering the Lists

  catchword (’kæt∫w3ːd). [f. CATCH- 3 b + WORD.]

  1. Printing. The first word of the following page inserted at the right-hand lower corner of each page of a book, below the last line. (Now rarely used.) Also in Manuscripts.

  2. A word so placed as to catch the eye or attention; spec. a. the word standing at the head of each article in a dictionary or the like…

  1879 Directions to Readers for Dict., Put the word as a catchword at the upper corner of the slip. 1884 Athenæum 26 Jan. 124/2 The arranging of the slips collected… and the development of the various senses of every Catchword.

  The two small closely printed sheets that came as an addendum to Murray’s first letter turned out to be a set of meticulously worded instructions. When his morning mail was delivered by the ward staff that day, Minor must have fallen upon this one envelope eagerly, reading and rereading its contents. But it was not the content alone that fascinated him: a list of rules for Dictionary helpers was not the cause of his excitement.

  It was the simple fact that they had been sent to him in the first place. The letter from James Murray must have represented, in Minor’s view, a token of further forgiveness and understanding, which Eliza Merrett’s visits to him had already suggested. The invitation seemed a long-sought membership badge of the society from which he had been so long estranged. By being sent these sheets of rules he was, he felt, being received back into a corner of the real world. A corner that, admittedly, was still housed in a pair of cells in an alien madhouse – but one that had firmly forged links to the world of learning, and connections with a more comfortable reality.

 
After a decade of languishing in the dark slough of imprisonment, intellectual isolation and remove, Minor felt that at last he was being hoisted back up on to the sunlit uplands of scholarship. And with what he saw as this re-enlistment in the ranks, so Minor’s self-worth began, at least marginally, to re-emerge, to begin seeping back. From the little evidence that survives in his medical records, he appears to have started recovering his confidence and even his contentment, both with every moment that he spent reading Murray’s acceptance letter, and then when he prepared to embark on his self-set task.

  For a while at least he seemed truly happier. Even the sternly worded Victorian ward notes of the day hint that the temper of this usually suspicious, broody, prematurely elderly-looking middle-aged man (he was now coming up to his fiftieth birthday) had somehow started to turn. He was undergoing, even if only for a short while, a sea-change in his personality – and all because, at long last, he had something valuable to do.

  Yet in its very value lay a problem, as Minor saw it. The doctor came swiftly to realize, and was daunted by the realization, that this great work’s immense potential value to history, to posterity and to the English-speaking world meant it had to be done properly. Murray’s papers had explained that the Dictionary was all about the gathering of hundreds of thousands of quotations. It was a task that was almost unimaginably vast. Could it be done from an asylum cell?

  Minor was both wise enough to understand and to ask himself the question (since he knew well where he was, and why he was there) and then, in a partial answer, to applaud Murray for having taken the right approach to the work on which he was about to embark (his own love of books and literature giving him some knowledge of dictionaries, and an appreciation of what was good and what not so good about those that had already been published). So on reflection he decided that he very much wanted to work for the project, and to be a part of it – not solely because it would give him something worth while to do – which was his first reason – but mainly because in his opinion Murray’s plan for doing it was so self-evidently right.