The Wicked Boy (14 page)

Since 1884, when the vote had been extended to most British men,
the press had often pointed out
that children raised on penny dreadfuls would grow up to elect the rulers of the nation. Such pamphlets were ‘the poison which is threatening to destroy the manhood of the democracy', announced the
Pall Mall Gazette
in 1886. The
Quarterly Review
went a step further, warning its readers in 1890 that ‘the class we have made our masters' might be transformed by these publications into ‘
agents for the overthrow of society
'. The penny bloods gave a frightening intimation of the uses to which the labourers of Britain could put their literacy and newly won power: these fantasies of wealth and adventure might foster ambition, restlessness, defiance, a spirit of insurgency. There was no knowing the consequences of enlarging the minds and dreams of the lower orders.

8

HERE GOES NOTHING

In Holloway gaol on Monday 5 August, Robert became highly agitated. The warders informed George Walker, the prison's medical officer, that the boy was singing, whistling and being impertinent. Dr Walker asked that he be brought to him in his office. Robert took a seat at the table and told Walker that he had pains in his head. The doctor asked him if he heard voices. Robert replied that he heard voices saying, ‘Kill her, kill her', and, ‘Kill her, kill her, and run away!' Walker questioned him about how the voices spoke to him. Robert said that they seemed to whisper into his ear.

During this interview, Robert explained to Dr Walker that he had decided to kill his mother because he was afraid that if he did not do so she would kill Nattie. She had thrown knives at his younger brother, Robert said, and had threatened to knock out his brains with a hatchet.

It was common for a parent
to use physical force to discipline a child – in many households, a cane or a strap hung by the fireplace for this purpose – but Robert was describing assaults that were dangerous and uncontrolled. If his account was true, Emily Coombes was not only doting, indulgent, affectionate to her children, but also given to bursts of anger and violent reproof.
She switched between surrendering her authority
and enforcing it with abandon. Nattie's complicity in the murder plot made clear that both boys could feel hatred for her. She frightened her sons.

On Saturday, Robert was frenzied again, to such an extent that he was moved to a padded room in the infirmary for several hours – most prisons were equipped with such cells, cushioned with horse-hair and leather, to contain epileptic, insane or suicidal inmates. The afternoon was humid, but the night was broken by an hour and a half of thunder and lightning, and then the rain came down in torrents. On Sunday, Robert was calmer, and he was returned to his normal quarters.

One of the more gruesome stories in Robert's collection of penny bloods featured a wild-eyed loon. In
The Rock Rider
; or, the Spirit of the Sierra
, an American cavalry officer called Beckford loses his wits after his wife is killed and his daughter abducted by a posse of Red Indians. For many years afterwards he lives in a cave in the mountains of the Mid-West. From time to time he hears voices in his head telling him, ‘Ride! Ride! Blood comes!', at which he snaps ‘into the white heat of fury all at once' and becomes ‘the maniac all over'. Blazing with hatred, Captain Beckford strikes out on his mule to slaughter Indians, carrying a shield over which he has stretched the mummified face of his wife, as menacing as the Gorgon Medusa: it is ‘pinched and white, with wide-open, staring eyes, and teeth revealed by parted lips'.

Beckford kills and decapitates Indians. He hoards their heads in a cave in the mountains, which is watched over by his negro sidekick, Cato. ‘'Tis thy place to guard the Cavern of Death,' Beckford tells Cato; ‘'tis mine to bring in the victims, for I am the avenger of innocent blood.' Cato is terrified by the cave. ‘Don't make me go in dar, sah!' he pleads. ‘De heads dey groan, and de devil he be at work at dem.'

The whites and the Indians in
The Rock Rider
are fighting over the land of the Mid-West, an erotic landscape of clefts, craters and recesses, wild vines and jutting mountains, hollows and pools. Much as they defend the terrain they have conquered, the white men are determined to preserve the purity of their women, whom they would rather destroy than see taken and defiled by the ‘red niggers'. Towards the end of the story, a dashing Frenchman rescues Beckford's kidnapped daughter, Blanche, from an Indian camp in a ‘haunted gorge'. He is dressed in gleaming thigh-high boots with silver spurs, white corduroy trousers, a slashed and braided velvet jacket. Blanche wears a short, tight tunic. ‘Sooner than give you back alive,' the French dandy promises her, ‘I will blow out your brains with my own hands.' By the deranged chivalric code of the penny dreadfuls, to kill a woman could be the means of saving her honour. A murder pre-empted – and mimicked – a rape.

Robert and Nattie's father spent a week in New York
while the
France
was prepared for the return trip. It took several days for the dockhands to fuel the steamer, carrying coal alongside by barge and hoisting it up to the deck in buckets. At the company office near the pier, Coombes hired fifteen itinerant workers to look after the cargo of cattle on the journey back to England. These ‘cowboys of the sea' would be given free passage both ways across the Atlantic, with 11 shillings to cover their board and lodging in the ten days or so that the ship was docked in London.

Several hundred head of cattle, captured on the plains of the American West and carried to New York by train, were herded up a narrow gangplank and into pens between decks. When the ship cast off on Saturday 27 July, the cows stumbled and slipped in their pens until they learned to sway with the roll of the ship. At night, some of the cattlemen patrolled the vessel with lanterns. Others rose at five to feed and water the animals. They sluiced the decks, pitched manure into the ocean, fetched hay, desalinated buckets of sea water for the cows to drink.

The
France
sailed in to the Thames Estuary on Saturday 10 August, the day that Robert became wild in Holloway. The cattle bellowed with excitement, sensing that land was near.

From the mouth of the Thames, wrote Joseph Conrad
, London appeared in the distance as ‘a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars'. The river was busy with craft – barges, skips, yachts, tugs, lighters, steamers – and as the ship sailed into the city, the factories and warehouses reared up on either side. ‘
The river runs
as between high walls,' wrote Ford Madox Hueffer, ‘shining with a more metallic glitter under smoke and the shadow of groves of masts, crane-arms, chains, cordage.'

On Sunday the
France
docked
at Deptford, on the south bank of the Thames. The cows were released from their pens and driven by the cattlemen down a gangway to the pier and then into a shed to be slaughtered. Coombes headed to Holloway to see his sons.

That morning at Westminster Abbey,
Canon Basil Wilberforce delivered a sermon
in which he contrasted the villainy of the West Ham ‘boy-murderers' with the heroism of the East Ham sewage workers, who had given their lives in their efforts to save one another. Yet he urged compassion for the Coombes brothers. Like the French alienists, he attributed the murder to a physiological flaw that affected both boys: the Plaistow matricide, said Wilberforce, was clearly the result of hereditary madness. He asked the congregation not to think of the brothers as ‘children of the devil' but instead to remember that they possessed a ‘deep inmost God nature, which is ever present in man, however much it might be concealed'.

The master cooper John Lawrence was raising money by subscription to hire a barrister for John Fox in the forthcoming trial.
Lawrence explained in his letter
to the
West Ham Herald
why he had such faith in Fox's innocence. During the years of his apprenticeship, Lawrence wrote, he had found Fox ‘at all times to be very truthful, honest, civil, and industrious; in fact, all that an employer would desire, both morally and physically. But his mental capacity was far inferior to any of the children who were his chosen and only associates.' Fox had sometimes caused him ‘great annoyance', said Lawrence, but he had none the less ‘always been to me an object of pity'.

John William Fox was born
to an unmarried, illiterate woman in a dingy courtyard opposite the Leadenhall poultry market in the City of London in April 1850. His mother was unable to support him, so when John was nine the City's Board of Guardians sent him to its
industrial school in West London
. The 800 children at the school were housed in large dormitories; they spent half of their time at schoolwork and half labouring on the estate. Fox was due to be transferred at the age of sixteen to the City of London workhouse, where he would continue to be maintained at the rate-payers' expense, but the Board managed to find him a position as an apprentice instead. He was indentured to John Lawrence in the summer of 1866, his parish providing £50 to contribute to his board and lodging over the next seven years. Fox remained with Lawrence for the full term of the
apprenticeship
, living with him and his wife and daughter in their house in the Holloway Road.

In the 1870s, Fox left the Lawrences and moved east to West Ham. There was plenty of work in the district for coopers, who made and repaired barrels for the docks, the breweries and the sugar refineries, but he began to take jobs on the ships. Fox became a servant to captains (he was paid just over £1 for each voyage) and then an assistant steward with the National Line, working for a time under Robert and Nattie's father. He performed menial duties, cleaning and cooking for the officers and crew, and earned about £3 per voyage, less than half of the amount paid to the chief steward and £1 less than the ordinary sailors. Between trips, he lodged in a carpenter's house in Canning Town.

In the summer of 1890 Fox was one of ninety-five men aboard the
Egypt
, the largest of the National Line steamships, as it crossed the Atlantic from New York to Liverpool with a cargo of cattle and cotton. On 17 July
a fire broke out
in the ship's hold. All the men on board worked furiously to douse the burning cotton bales with hoses and jets of steam, while the 600 cows tied up on the decks hollered in pain as the flames licked at them. Eventually, the master told his men to abandon ship.

The sailors were lowered into the water in six lifeboats. They rowed away and after a quarter of a mile stopped to look back. They saw the mainsail fall blazing into the ship's heart. Some of the cows broke free of their halters and leapt away from the flames into the sea, then struggled to swim clear of the burning vessel. The oarsmen rowed hard to avoid being capsized by the terrified, thrashing creatures.

A passing ship saw the distress signal set off by the
Egypt
's boatswain and sailed to the rescue of the men in the lifeboats. Once the sailors had been lifted to safety, the captain's wife tended to their burns. For hours afterwards, the men occasionally spotted a cow beating its legs against the water until it gave up the fight and surrendered to the sea.

The rescued sailors were conscious of their luck. Six months earlier the National Line steamship
Erin
,
on which Fox had also once served
, had vanished in the middle of the Atlantic with 527 head of cattle and seventy-four men. The two disasters wiped out the National Line's reserve funds.

John Fox had been badly burnt in the fight to put out the
Egypt
's fire. He was so shaken by his experience that he developed a stutter, and a horror of the open sea. He did not serve on a ship again.

In August 1895 John Lawrence visited his former apprentice in prison and forwarded a transcript of their conversation to the
Evening News
.

‘How came you to be in the house with the boys Coombes for days after they killed their mother?' asked Lawrence in the interview, published on 13 August.

‘They came and fetched me from the ship,' said Fox.

‘How came you to be wearing their father's clothes?'

‘Robert Coombes said they were a misfit,' said Fox, ‘and his mother told him to give them to me.'

Lawrence asked him what share of the money from the pawnbrokers Robert had given to him.

‘He did not give me any share at all,' said Fox. ‘He gave me nothing.'

‘But surely, if you gave him all the money, he gave you some back?'

‘No. Not a penny.'

‘Is it true that you went with a letter to Mr Hewson containing an application for money?'

‘Yes; Robert told me to take it and I did.'

‘Did he read the note to you, or give it to you open?'

‘No, he did not read it to me and he fastened it up.'

‘How, then, did you know that it contained an application for money?'

‘Well, I supposed so because he told me to wait and bring some money back.'

‘Did you not smell something very disagreeable?'

‘No, nothing at all,' said Fox. ‘My smell is not very good and they must have opened the windows upstairs to let the smell out. Oh, they are two very wicked boys.'

Lawrence asked him to explain how Mrs Coombes's purse came to be found in his pocket.

‘I put it there myself. Robert Coombes gave me that and a shilling at the same time, and that was the only money he gave me all the time I was there.' Fox was apparently contradicting himself on the issue of whether Robert had given him any money, but this seemed a sign of confusion rather than dishonesty.

Lawrence asked him if he would have stayed in the house if he had known what had been done to Emily Coombes.

‘Oh, no,' said Fox. ‘I would have run out of the house as fast as I could. I would not have stayed there if I had known it for a thousand pounds.'