The Wicked Boy (19 page)

After the iron plater's testimony, Charles Gill declared that the Crown's case was closed.

11

IT IS ALL OVER NOW

In the Old Court of the Old Bailey, William Grantham rose to make the case for the defence. Whereas most of the prosecution witnesses had been giving evidence for a second or even a third time, none of the defence witnesses had yet testified. Grantham told the jury that he intended to show that Robert Coombes was not in his right mind. He began by calling the boy's father to the witness stand.

Robert Coombes senior took the stand. He had ‘nothing of the seafarer about him', observed the
Star
; he was ‘respectable-looking', agreed the
Sun
.

Coombes recalled that his eldest son had suffered from headaches and excitability since the age of three or four. When the family was living in Limehouse in the 1880s, he explained, he had taken Robert to see a Dr Christopher Coward, who had prescribed medication for his headaches. He had continued to consult Dr Coward about Robert after moving to Plaistow in 1891, and – by correspondence – while the family was based in Toxteth Park, Liverpool.

‘He was very ill at Liverpool from headache,' said Coombes, ‘the same complaint, and in consequence of what Dr Coward told me I was specially careful.'

According to Coombes, Dr Coward considered Robert's brain particularly vulnerable to the pressures of schoolwork, as well as to the more obvious risk of being struck in punishment. ‘He always told me never to chastise him anywhere near the head, or to touch him on the head, or to give him any home lessons to do.' When the family returned to London, Coombes asked the doctor to write a note about Robert's frailty to George Hollamby, the headmaster of Grange Road school.

Several medical manuals warned parents not to let children study too much. The stress of tests and homework was believed to cause ‘brain irritation', headaches and worse. Over-education, claimed
Wynn Westcott
in 1885, could lead children to suicide by encouraging a ‘precocious development of the reflective faculties, of vanity, and of the desires'. These theories, like the theories about penny dreadfuls, reflected a worry about the effects of education on the poor.

‘The boy complained very often of his head at that time,' said Coombes, ‘at intervals of a week or a fortnight, sometimes a month. At such times he would sit down and look very sullen, as if he was having a headache, and would speak to nobody.'

‘In disposition,' he added, ‘he was a very good boy.'

Coombes showed the court a certificate that Dr Coward had made out in 1891, which stated that Robert was suffering from
cerebral irritation
. This was a diagnosis given to patients who experienced headaches, restlessness, impulsive fits, peevishness or melancholia without any discernible organic cause. It was believed that the disorder could develop into epilepsy, though it could also fade away by adulthood. The term implied a physiological basis for Robert's condition but was in truth merely descriptive. It gave no real clues as to the cause of his disturbance, which could be anything from unhappiness to physical injury.

Coombes believed that the trauma of birth might have damaged Robert's brain. He was away when his son was born, he said. ‘I think I had just gone to sea, or came home just afterwards, I cannot recollect. I know that my wife had a very bad time.' Robert had marks on his temples, he said, caused by the forceps that had wrenched him from the womb. He implied also that Robert might have been affected by his mother's temperament. ‘My wife was a very excitable woman from the first,' he told the court, ‘who very frequently laughed and cried at the same time.'

In 1893, Robert's difficulties recurred and he was moved from Grange Road school. Coombes described the problem as ‘a difference with the teachers' and added that ‘the other boys used to laugh at him'. The incident at school seemed to have made Robert a figure of mockery to his peers. Coombes said that Robert had complained of headaches ever since. This suggested that the boy's problems were exacerbated, even if they were not caused, by emotional distress.

Dr Coward died that year, aged fifty-four, and the Coombes family registered with John Joseph Griffin, who ran a practice in the Barking Road. ‘When anything special occurred in consequence of his complaints of violent headache I had to take him to Dr Griffin,' said Coombes. In December 1894, he discovered that Robert had run away from home while he had been at sea, and he took him to see the doctor. Griffin recommended that Robert accompany his father on his next voyage. A change of air, in the form of foreign travel, was often prescribed for nervous complaints.

In January 1895, Robert and his father
sailed to New York on the SS
England
, a sister ship to the
France
. One of the two assistant stewards on this trip was Robert's uncle Frederick, who had in the 1870s been an apprentice to his older brother in his ill-fated butchery business in Notting Hill. When the
England
set sail, London was enduring its coldest winter on record – the Thames had frozen over at London Bridge for the first time in eighty years.
The ship was pelted with rain
as she sailed out of the Thames estuary, and she ran into a powerful gale halfway across the Atlantic, accompanied by squalls of hail and very heavy seas. She was caught up in a hurricane, then a storm of thunder and lightning before she reached New York on 7 February. Robert and his father and uncle stayed in the city for a week before the ship cast off again into intense cold and high seas. The pitching of a cattle ship in a storm sometimes sent the cows crashing forward in their narrow stalls to break their knees or necks. The
England
took seventeen days to reach London, two days longer than usual, and Robert returned to Cave Road school on 11 March. Coombes claimed that the trip had done the boy good.

Gill cross-examined Coombes, asking him if there was a history of insanity in the family, and whether Robert had any intellectual impairments.

‘I have not heard of insanity on my side of the family or my wife's either,' said Coombes. ‘The boy always got on very well at school – he had no difficulty in learning. He is a very learned boy. He read a great deal.'

Gill indicated the penny dreadfuls on the bench. ‘Has he been reading these sensational books for any length of time?'

‘I am not aware that he read books of that kind,' said Coombes. ‘There were good books in the house, such as the
Strand Magazine
and the New York
Century
.' The
Strand
, which sold half a million copies a week to a predominantly middle-class readership, had become famous in the early 1890s for publishing Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. It advertised itself as ‘cheap, healthful literature', ‘absolutely pure'. The
Century
, formerly
Scribners
, was a prestigious American journal that ran pieces by the likes of Henry James and Mark Twain.

Justice Kennedy leafed through the penny dreadfuls. ‘Here is
Jack Wright and the Fortune Hunters of the Red Sea
,' he said. ‘They are what you would call sensational, but—'

Gill interrupted: ‘You will see one called
Revenged at Last, or the Crimson Coat
.'

Kennedy continued his inspection. ‘Well, some are apparently from the outside cover what one would call sensational, but one can't say exactly.' He threw down the books and turned back to his notes. ‘There were good books found among these. Go on.'

Gill pointed out that Robert's collection consisted of ‘books mostly relating to crime and criminals of some kind'.

‘The jury shall see them for themselves,' said Kennedy. He seemed unwilling to make much of the penny dreadfuls.

Gill asked Coombes about Robert's job at the ironworks.

‘I did not know that he got employment after leaving school till I arrived home.'

‘Did you ever know him to suffer from any delusion?' asked Gill.

No,' said Coombes, but added: ‘I have heard him say that he had heard noises in the night.'

Grantham rose to ask about the noises.

‘He complained of hearing noises about the house,' said Coombes. ‘The last time he complained of that was four months ago.' Coombes had been at home on some of these occasions, he said, and had not heard any noises himself.

This ended his testimony. Coombes had made it clear that he cared for his son and worried about his wellbeing: he had taken him to doctors for his headaches, to New York to try to restore his health. But it had also become apparent that he had been off-stage for many of the dramas of Robert's life: he was away at sea when his eldest boy was born, when he refused to attend school, when he left school and when he took his first job. Coombes seems to have shown no curiosity or concern about why both his sons had twice run away from their mother.

The next witness for the defence was Amelia England, the thirty-eight-year-old wife of a dock clerk, who lived at 33 Cave Road.
The Englands' two older sons
, like Robert and Nattie, had attended Grange Road school before transferring to Cave Road school when it was built in 1894. Mrs England's eldest son was the same age as Robert, and had just left school having passed the fourth standard.

‘I am a next-door neighbour of the Coombes,' said Amelia England. ‘I have known them for the last three years. I was very intimate with them.'

Grantham asked her to describe Emily and Robert Coombes.

‘The mother was rather excitable all the time I have known her,' she said. ‘Robert was very excitable indeed. I have on occasions gone to Dr Griffin for medicines for him. I knew he had pains in the head; he has complained in my presence. He has had very excitable fits.'

Gill, cross-examining, asked her to elaborate.

‘I can hardly explain the excitement,' she said. ‘If he could not get what he liked, he would fly into a passion, and then he would have these fits afterwards. I have known him to go right off into a fainting fit with them more than once. It was not always when he was in a great passion, but very often.'

Gill inquired how well she knew Robert.

‘I saw him every day nearly all the time they were living there. He was a very bright, intelligent boy when spoken to, and a well-spoken boy.' She related how she had chatted to him in the street in the week after the murder. ‘I spoke to him every day right up to the Friday in that week.'

Gill asked whether Robert enjoyed reading.

‘He was fond of reading,' said Mrs England; ‘passionately fond both of music and reading.'

Mrs England was dismissed, and Grantham called Dr Walker to the witness box.

George Walker had been a prison doctor
for more than twenty years by the time he was appointed medical officer of Holloway gaol in January 1894. He frequently gave evidence at the Old Bailey about the men and women in his charge, and had already testified in three trials during the current sessions. His testimony did not always support an insanity plea – at the trial of a twenty-three-year-old woman who had killed her child in 1894, he said that he had seen no evidence of madness while she was on remand – but often it did. In June 1895, for instance, he had diagnosed kleptomania in the case of a woman who had stolen goods from the John Lewis department store.

The insanity plea had become increasingly common
in English courts: in the 1860s, about 15 per cent of murderers were found insane, either before, during or after trial; in the 1890s the proportion rose to nearly 27 per cent. Yet the
Journal of Mental Science
observed in 1895 that the law on criminal responsibility was still in ‘hopeless confusion'. At a meeting of the British Medical Association that summer, Henry Maudsley argued that madness often went unrecognised by the courts. He disagreed with the legal profession's narrow definition of madness, which held that a defendant was criminally responsible if he or she knew right from wrong at the time of his or her crime, a test formulated after Robert McNaughten tried to assassinate the prime minister in 1843.
The ‘right from wrong'
test, said Maudsley, assumed ‘that reason, not feeling, is the motive force of human action'. He argued that some acts of violence sprang from a desire so strong that it bypassed thought and lit straight into action. ‘A disordered feeling,' Maudsley wrote, ‘is capable of actuating disordered conduct without consent of reason.'

In reply to Grantham's questions about Robert, Dr Walker noted that the violence applied to Robert's skull when he was born would have exerted pressure on his brain.

‘There is a distinct scar on his right temple,' Walker said, ‘and on a very careful examination I noticed also a faint scar in front of his left ear. Those scars might have been caused by instruments used at the time of birth.
The brain is always compressed
more or less when instruments are used, and it would occasionally affect the brain of a lad. I believe children have suffered from fits afterwards.'

‘I have noticed that the pupils of his eyes are at times unequal,' the doctor continued. ‘The variability of the pupils showed that the mischief is not in the eye itself but is probably due to cerebral irritation.'

Walker told the court what Robert had said about the voices in his head, and about his mother throwing knives at Nattie and threatening to kill him. He reported that Robert had said that he had ‘an irresistible impulse' to kill his mother.

Grantham asked if those had been Robert's exact words.

‘I took down these words,' said Walker.

Walker said that his conversation with Robert the previous Tuesday – when the boy had shown excitement about the trial, then distress about his cats and mandolin – was indicative of cerebral irritation.

‘I believe your opinion is also based on some letters written by him?' said Grantham.