The Wicked Boy (21 page)

Gill summed up for the Crown, submitting that Robert's insanity had not been proven. On the contrary, he said, the boy's actions showed him to be a lad of exceptional capacity. He conceded that Dr Walker's evidence was important, but, as the doctor had himself said, his diagnosis of insanity was based largely on the absence of motive for the murder.

The
Star
remarked that Gill adopted a ‘studiously mild' tone in his final speech. He was respectful of the defence's medical evidence, and seemed to leave open the possibility that Robert was mad. ‘Had Robert Coombes been a full-grown man,' said
Lloyd's Weekly
, ‘the counsel for the prosecution would have resisted the theory of insanity, and possibly with success; but with so young a prisoner there seemed to be a desire all round to take the most lenient view.'

This leniency did not extend to Justice Kennedy. Though his role was supposed to be neutral, when he made his summing-up at 4.40 p.m. he set out the case against Robert far more strongly than Gill had done. The jury should not infer insanity, said Kennedy, because someone who had led an apparently blameless life suddenly committed a callous act. Nor should they jump to the conclusion that Robert was insane just because it was difficult to believe that a sane lad of thirteen could perpetrate such an atrocious crime. He had planned the death of his mother with skill and had displayed ‘the most masterly sagacity' afterwards. The letter to Francis Shaw might be a sham, suggested the judge, written to simulate madness. Though Dr Walker had said that homicidal mania was often accompanied by cunning, Kennedy observed, ‘even Dr Walker can not have known before such a case as this where the cunning and the madness were mixed up with so much pleasure and enjoyment of life'. He described Nattie, who was sitting in the courtroom surrounded by female relatives and neighbours, as ‘a little slip of a boy wholly under the thumb of his elder brother'.

The one relevant question, Kennedy told the jury, was whether Robert knew that what he was doing was wrong. Repeating Sherwood's incorrect assertion, he added that if they did find Robert insane, they must also acquit Fox.

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'.