The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity

by Simon Winchester

  But what was most obviously similar about the men were their beards—in both cases white, long, and nicely swallow-tailed—with thick moustaches, sideburns, and ample buggers’ grips. Both looked like popular illustrations of Father Time; boys in Oxford would see Murray tricycling by and call out, “Father Christmas!” at him.

  True, Doctor Minor’s had a more ragged and unkempt look about it, doubtless because the arrangements for cutting and washing inside Broadmoor were rather less sophisticated than in the outside world. Murray’s beard, on the other hand, was fine and well-combed and shampooed, and looked as though no particle of food had ever been allowed to rest there. Minor’s was the more homely, while Murray’s was more of a fashion statement. But both were magnificently fecund arrangements. When the beards were added to the other collections of the pair’s individual attributes, each must have imagined, for a second, that he was stepping toward himself in a looking-glass, rather than meeting a stranger.

  The two men met dozens of times in the next several years. By all accounts they liked each other—a liking subject only to Doctor Minor’s moods, to which Murray became over the years fully sensitive. He often had the foresight to telegraph Nicholson, to ask how the patient was; if low and angry, he would remain at Oxford; if low and likely to be comforted, he would board the train.

  When the weather was poor the men would sit together in Minor’s room—a small and practically furnished cell not too dissimilar from a typical Oxford student’s room, and just like the room Murray was to be given at Balliol, once he was made an honorary fellow. It was lined with bookshelves, all of which were open except for one glass-fronted case that held the rarest of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works from which much of the OED work was being done. The fireplace crackled merrily. Tea and Dundee cake were brought in by a fellow inmate whom Minor had hired to work for him—one of the many privileges Nicholson, like Orange before him, accorded his distinguished inmate.

  There was a whole raft of other perks besides. He was able to order books at will from various antiquarian dealers in London, New York, and Boston. He was able to write uncensored letters to whomever he chose. He was able to have visitors more or less at will—and told Murray with some pride that Eliza Merrett, the widow of the man he murdered, would come to his rooms quite frequently. She was not an unattractive woman, he said, though it was thought that she drank rather too much for comfort.

  He subscribed to magazines, which he and Murray would read to each other: The Spectator was one of his favorites, and Outlook, which was mailed to him by his relations in Connecticut. He took the Athenaeum, as well as the splendidly arcane Oxford publication Notes & Queries, which even today makes puzzling inquiries of the world’s literary community, about unsolved mysteries of the bookish world. The OED used to publish its word desiderata there; until Murray began visiting Crowthorne, this was Minor’s principal means of finding out which particular words the OED staff were working on.

  Although the men talked principally about words—most often about a specific word, but sometimes about more general lexical problems of dialect and the nuances of pronunciation—they did, it is certain, discuss in a general sense the nature of the doctor’s illness. Murray could not help noticing, for instance, that Minor’s cell floor had been covered with a sheet of zinc—“to prevent men coming in through the timbers at night”—and that he kept a bowl of water beside the door of whichever room he was in—“because the evil spirits will not dare to cross water to get to me.”

  Murray was aware, too, of the doctor’s fears that he would be transported from his room at night and made to perform “deeds of the wildest excess” in “dens of infamy” before being returned to his cell by dawn. Once airplanes were invented—and Minor, being American, kept keenly up to date with all that happened in the years after the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk—he incorporated them into his delusions. Men would then break into his rooms, place him in a flying machine, and take him to brothels in Constantinople, where he would be forced to perform acts of terrible lewdness with cheap women and small girls. Murray winced as he heard these tales, but held his tongue. It was not his place to regard the old man with anything other than sad affection; and besides, his work for the dictionary continued apace.

  When the weather was fine the two men would walk together on the Terrace—a wide gravel path inside the asylum’s south wall, shaded by tall old firs and araucaria, the monkey-puzzle tree. The lawns were green, the shrubbery filled with daffodils and tulips, and once in a while other patients would emerge from the blocks to play football, or walk, or sit staring into space from one of the wooden benches. Attendants would lurk in the shadows, making sure there were no outbreaks of trouble.

  Murray and Minor, hands behind their backs, would walk in step, slowly back and forth along the three hundred yards of the Terrace, always in the shadows of either the gaunt red buildings or of the seventeen-foot wall. They always seemed animated, deep in conversation; papers were produced, sometimes books. They did not speak to others, and gave the impression of inhabiting a world of their own.

  Sometimes Doctor Nicholson would invite the pair in for afternoon tea; and on one or two occasions Ada Murray came to Broadmoor too, and remained with Nicholson and his family in the superintendent’s comfortably furnished house while the men pored over the books in the cell or on the gravel walkway. There was always sadness when the time came for the editor to leave: The keys would turn, the gates would clang shut, and Minor would be left alone again, trapped in a world of his own making, redeemed only when, after a day or so of quiet mourning, he could take down another volume from his shelves, select a needed word and its most elegant context, pick up his pen, and dip it in the ink to write once more: “To Dr. Murray, Oxford.”

  The Oxford Post Office knew the address well: It was all that was needed to communicate by letter with the greatest lexicographer in the land, and make sure the information got through to him at the Scriptorium.

  Few enough letters between the two men survive. There is a lengthy letter from 1888, in which Minor writes about the quotations containing the word chaloner—an obsolete name for a man who manufactured shalloon, which was a woolen lining material for coats. He is interested, according to a later note, in the word gondola, and finds a quotation from Spenser, in 1590.

  Murray talked about his new friend often, and liked to include him—and indeed, with some discreet reference to his condition—in the speeches he was often obliged to make. In 1897, for instance, his notes survive for a speech he was to give at a dictionary evening at the Philological Society: “About 15 or 16,000 add’l slips rec’d during the past year. Half of those supplied by Dr. W. C. Minor whose name and pathetic story, I have often before alluded to. Dr. M. has in reading 50 or 60 books, mostly scarce, of the 16th-17th C. His practice is to keep just ahead of the actual preparation of the Dictionary.”

  Two years later Murray felt able to be more fulsome still:

  The supreme position…is certainly held by Dr. W. C. Minor of Broadmoor, who during the past two years has sent in no less than 12,000 quots [sic]. These have nearly all been for the words which Mr. Bradley and I were actually occupied, for Dr. Minor likes to know each month just what words we are likely to be working on during the month and to devote his whole strength to supplying quotations for those words, and thus to feel that he is in touch with the making of the Dictionary.

  So enormous have been Dr. Minor’s contributions during the past 17 or 18 years, that we could easily illustrate the last 4 centuries from his quotations alone. (Emphasis added.)

  But the devotion of his whole strength was beginning to prove taxing, both to his body and his mind. His kindly friend Doctor Nicholson retired in 1895—still in pain from being attacked by a patient six years earlier, who hit him on the head with a brick concealed in a sock. He was replaced by Doctor Brayn, a man selected (for more than his name alone, one trusts) by a Home Office that felt a stricter regime needed to be empl
oyed at the asylum.

  Brayn was indeed a martinet, a jailer of the old school who would have done well at a prison farm in Tasmania or Norfolk Island. But he did as the government required: There were no escapes during his term of office (there had been several before, causing widespread alarm), and in the first year two hundred thousand hours of solitary confinement were logged by the more fractious inmates. He was widely feared and loathed by the patients—as well as by Doctor Murray, who thought he was treating Minor heartlessly.

  And Minor continues to whinge. He complains of a hole in the heel of his sock, doubtless caused by some stranger’s shoe into which, at night, he had been obliged to place his foot (November 1896). Minor is suspicious that his wines and spirits are being tampered with (December 1896).

  One curious snippet of information came from the United States later that same year, when it was noted rather laconically that two of Minor’s family had recently killed themselves—the letter going on to warn the staff at Broadmoor that great care should be taken lest whatever madness gripped their patient turned out to have a hereditary nature. But even if the staff thought Minor a possible suicide risk, no restrictions were placed on him as a result of the American information.

  Some years before he had asked for a pocket knife, with which he might trim the uncut pages of some of the first editions of the books he had ordered: There is no indication that he was asked to hand it back, even with the harsh Doctor Brayn incharge. No other patient was allowed to keep a knife, but with his twin cells, his bottles, and his books, and with his part-time servant, William Minor seemed still to belong to a different category from most others in Broadmoor at the time.

  In the year following the disclosure about his relatives, the files speak of Minor’s having started to take walks out on the Terrace in all weathers, angrily denouncing those who tried to persuade him to come back in during one especially violent snowstorm, insisting in his imperious way that it was his business alone if he wished to catch cold. He had more freedom of choice and movement than most.

  Not that this much improved his temper. A number of old army friends from America happened to come over to London in 1899, and all asked to come to Broadmoor. But the old officer refused to see any of them, saying he did not remember them, and besides, he did not want to be disturbed. He formally applied to be given some “freedom of the vicinage,” to be let out on parole—the word he used being rather rare, and meaning essentially the same as “the vicinity.”

  The elegance of his language convinced no one, however, and his application was firmly denied. “He is still of unsound mind and I am unable to recommend that his request be granted,” the superintendent wrote to the Home Secretary. (Or typed, it should be said: This is the first document in Minor’s file that was produced on a typewriter—an indication that while the patient remained in a miserable stasis, the outside world around him was changing all too rapidly.) The Home Secretary duly then turned down the prayer; on the form is added a bleak initialed notation from the heartless Doctor Brayn: “Patient informed, 12.12.99. RB”

  His diet ticket shows him to be eating fitfully—lots of porridge, sago pudding, custard every Tuesday, but bacon and other meat only occasionally. He appears to have become increasingly unhappy, troubled, listless. “He seems unsettled,” is a constant theme of the attendants’ notes. A visit from Murray in the summer of 1901 cheered him up, but soon afterward the staff at the dictionary were beginning to notice a depressing change in their keenest surviving volunteer.

  “I notice that he has sent no Q quotations,” wrote Murray to a friend.

  But he has been very slack altogether for many months, and I have scarcely heard anything from him. He always is less helpful in summer, because he spends so much more time in the open air, in the garden and grounds. But this year it is worse than usual, and I have been feeling for a good while that I shall have to take a day to go and see him again, and try to refresh his interest.

  In his lonely & sad position he requires a great deal of nursing, encouraging and coaxing, and I have had to go from time to time to see him.

  A month later and things were no better. Murray wrote about him again—by now there are stories of him “putting his back up” and “refusing” to do the work that was wanted. He wrote something about the origin of the word hump, as on a camel—but aside from that, and coincident with the death of Queen Victoria, he lapsed into a sullen silence.

  Another old army friend writing from Northwich, in Cheshire, in March 1902 asks Superintendent Brayn if he might be allowed to visit Minor, telling him in some distress that Minor himself had written saying that he ought not to, since “things were much changed, and that I might find it unpleasant.” Please give me your advice, the writer adds: “I do not wish to expose my wife to anything unpleasant.”

  Brayn agreed: “I do not think it would be advisable for you to visit…there are no indications of any immediate danger, but his years are beginning to tell on him…his life is precarious.”

  It was at about this time that there came the first indication that it might be better if Doctor Minor now be allowed to return to the United States, to spend his declining years—as he did seem to be in decline—close to his family.

  Minor had been in Broadmoor now for thirty years—he was by far the longest-staying patient. He was sustained only by his books. Sadness had utterly enveloped him. He missed the ever-sympathetic Doctor Nicholson; he was perplexed by the more brutish regime of Doctor Brayn. His sole intellectual colleague among the Block 2 patients, the strange artist Richard Dadd, who had been sent to an asylum for stabbing dead his own father, had long since died. His own stepmother, Judith, whom he had seen briefly in 1885 on her way back from India, had died in New Haven in 1900. Age was fast winnowing out all those who were close to the mad old man.

  Even old Fitzedward Hall had died, in 1901—an event that prompted Minor to fire off a letter of deep and abiding sadness to Murray. Along with his condolences went a request that the editor might perhaps enclose some more slips for the letters K and O—the news of the passing of his fellow countryman seems to have revived Minor’s interest in work a little. But only a little. He was now quite alone, in worsening health, harmless to all but himself. He was sixty-six years old, and showing it. The facts of his circumstances were beginning to weigh heavily on him.

  Dr. Francis Brown, the distinguished physician in Boston to whom Murray had written the full account of Minor and their first meeting, thought he might intervene. After hearing from Murray he had written to the Department of the Army in Washington and then to the American Embassy in London, and now in March to Doctor Brayn, suggesting that—without Minor’s knowledge—a petition be sent to the Home Office asking for his release into his family’s custody and his return to the United States. “His family would rejoice to have him spend his last days in his own land and nearer to them.”

  But the pitiless Brayn did not make the recommendation to the Home Secretary; and neither the embassy nor the U.S. Army chose to become involved. The old man was to stay put, encouraged only by the occasional correspondence from Oxford, but increasingly dispirited, angry, and sad.

  A crisis was clearly about to erupt—and erupt it did. The event that in Hayden Church’s orotund phrase “was the most striking feature in the American’s history” struck without any warning that was heeded, on a cold morning at the beginning of December 1902.

  10

  THE UNKINDEST CUT

  Masturbate (), v. [f. L. masturbāt-, ppl. stem of masturbārī, of obscure origin: according to Brugmann for *mastiturbārī f. *mazdo- (cf. Gr.pl.) virile member + turba disturbance. An old conjecture regarded the word as f. manu-s hand + stuprāre to defile; hence the etymologizing forms MANUSTUPRATION, MASTUPRATE, -ATION, used by some Eng. writers.] intr. and refl. To practise self-abuse.

  “At 10.55 am Dr. Minor came to the bottom gate, which was locked, and he called out: ‘You had better send for the Medical Officer at once! I have injured my
self!’”

  The words are the first lines of a brief penciled note that lurks anonymously among the scores of other papers that measure out the trivial details of the life of Broadmoor’s patient number 742. Reports of the more mundane features of William Minor’s now almost solitary life—his diet, his steadily diminishing number of visitors, his growing frailty, his curmudgeonly lapses, his insane ruminations—are usually made in ink, the writing steady and confident. But this single page, which is dated December 3, 1902, is very different. The fact that it was written in thick pencil sets it apart—but so does the handwriting, which makes it look as though it was scrawled urgently, in a hurry, by a man who was breathless, panicky, in a state of shock.

  Its author was the Block 2 principal attendant, a Mr. Coleman. He had good reason to be appalled:

  I sent Attendant Harfield for the Medical Officer and went to see if I could assist Dr. Minor. Then he told me—he had cut his penis off. He said he had tied it with string, which had stopped the bleeding. I saw what he had done.