The Wicked Boy (25 page)

In the back blocks, the most violent patients were locked in their rooms for hours at a time. Towards the end of the 1890s,
the lunacy commissioners
who made annual inspections of Broadmoor censured Dr Brayn for his excessive use of this practice.

Among the more frequently secluded inmates of the back blocks was
Thomas Cutbush
, who had been admitted in 1891, aged twenty-six, after attacking and wounding two women in south London. He was a dark, slight, sharp-eyed and educated man, described in his medical notes as ‘very insane'. He would deliver disjointed soliloquies as he sat in his room: ‘You can buy a box of sardines for six pence,' he said. ‘If I take my food there's mercury in it. My coat is not good enough. I will see Sir Edward Blackall of Scotland Yard. It is all a fraud. If I had any knife from the pawn brokers I would settle the whole damn crew of the cut throats.' Cutbush used to promise to ‘rip up' the attendants with a knife and when his mother leant over to kiss him at the end of a visit he tried to bite her face. He sometimes attacked other patients – one Block 2 man (
Arthur Gilbert Cooper
, a curate who had cut his vicar's throat in 1887) was hit hard in the face by Cutbush when he encountered him in a corridor in 1891. Three years later, two reporters from the
Sun
newspaper visited Cutbush in Broadmoor. He greeted them with silence, and they wrote an article in which they identified him as Jack the Ripper, the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders of the late 1880s.

Even in Block 2, the anguish and disturbance of an inmate occasionally interrupted the calm routines.
One morning in May
1897, George Pett, the affable grocer who had drowned one of his daughters off Brighton beach, was found dead in a fellow patient's room, having hanged himself with cord from a hinge on the window.

Robert, too, seems to have suffered a breakdown.
In November 1898, at the age of sixteen
, he was sent from Block 2 to the more closely supervised Block 3 and kept there for fourteen months. He had arrived at the asylum smooth and blank, his rage and fear sealed over. It may have been the kindness as much as the strangeness of Broadmoor that eventually cracked him open: not just to sensations of anger and anxiety now, but also to grief.

14

TO HAVE YOU HOME AGAIN

Among the papers that the police found on the writing desk in 35 Cave Road on 17 July 1895 was
a letter written by Emily Coombes
to her husband. It was composed on Sunday 7 July, the older Robert Coombes's fifty-first birthday and the day before Emily's death.

Although Coombes had left home as recently as 4 July, the postal services were so swift that Emily had already sent him a parcel and received a note in return. She probably sent the parcel to Gravesend, in Kent, where his ship stopped on its passage out of the Thames. She had addressed her latest letter to the pier in New York at which the
France
would dock more than two weeks later. It was not read out in any of the court hearings because it had no direct bearing on the case, but it had probably been read by Robert, who wrote his own letters at the same desk in the ten days after his mother's death. When the Coombes boys were charged with murder the letter was copied for the West Ham magistrates' court and retained in its files. The transcriber could not make out all of Emily's last written words, and many of the allusions are in any case unclear: it was a hurried note, an instalment in a conversation. Yet the letter casts some light on the younger Robert Coombes's story – not so much on the mystery of why he killed his mother as on the mystery of how he might recover from having done so.

My Darling Husband,

I received your welcome letter from ? and pleased you received the things safe. Robert I do miss you. Emily was down and was not doing anything and no money for rent. I don't know what they will do. I gave her the coat I could not help doing so – young Robert did not like to see her crying not like some one told me – never mind Robert don't go away by thinking there is some one comes to your house far from it. I am quite surprised at you – after all these years and
the nice little home
you have got it takes keeping up also your boys are not the same – they can eat more than you can but my love you don't look at that. Well did you find your ? I wish you all the love and Good wishes and long life on your birthday and only wish you had been home for it – never mind. I trust you will soon xxxx. I have not seen anything of
your mother or Annie
. I am writeing to
Mrs Cooper
 – going there this week if she at home. Robert I have sent you the paper mind and will send next Sunday also for you – not quite so bad never mind write untill you get the next one. I can just see you having a fine lark. Well dear the boys sends there love to you and hopes you are well & longing to have you home again also myself and accept true love from me.

From your, ever True and Faithfull Wife

EH Coombes

Emily and her husband had evidently quarrelled just before he left for New York. He had voiced a suspicion that she had ‘some one' secretly come to the house in his absence – a lover, maybe, since Emily seems at pains in the letter to insist on her fidelity; or a debt collector or impoverished friend, given how she justifies her expenditure. Robert and Nattie, in that close-quartered house, had probably heard their father accuse their mother of promiscuity or profligacy. In the letter Emily is flustered, defensive, upset. She tells her husband how much she and the boys miss him, though he has been gone for just three nights, and reminds him what she has to put up with – the demands of his sister-in-law, the appetites of his sons, the responsibility for his ‘nice little home'. As if to calm herself, she repeats the phrase ‘never mind' after each burst of indignation or worry. She mentions that she has sent him a paper with news ‘not quite so bad' as the last one.
That Sunday's newspapers
reported that American beef slaughtered at Deptford, the chief cargo of the National Line, was still selling poorly but was fetching slightly more than it had in the previous week – meat sales, particularly of American beef, had been badly hit by the drought.

The letter evokes something of the atmosphere of agitation and strain in 35 Cave Road on the weekend of the beating and the murder. Emily was a highly strung woman, and she seems to have been wound tighter still by her argument with her husband and his departure for America. That Sunday was
hazy with heat
 – the temperature rose to 80 degrees in the shade – and she faced a long summer alone with her restless, hungry boys. She does not allude in the letter to her fury with Nattie for stealing food, nor to her thrashing of him. Perhaps all that unfolded later in the day.

For though her letter is threaded with anxiety, Emily emerges from it also as the tender wife and mother whom her friends described. She is warm, sympathetic, alert to the unhappiness of others. She tells her husband that she has impulsively given his sister-in-law a coat that weekend,
presumably to sell or pawn
, and that Robert was distressed to see his aunt upset. She insists on her eldest son's sensitivity – his capacity to care – as she had insisted to the attendance officer that he was suffering at school. Whatever cruelties and confusions Emily Coombes may have inflicted on Robert, she also loved him. She believed that he was a boy who could feel sorrow as others did.

15

IN THE PLASTIC STAGE

Robert was allowed back
to Block 2 on 8 January 1900, two days after his eighteenth birthday. Upon his return he immersed himself in the life of the asylum.

About half of the Broadmoor inmates were deemed stable enough to work on the estate: they were assigned jobs in the workshops, on the farm, in the laundry, in the kitchens and bakehouse, and as carpenters, bricklayers and cleaners. ‘Suitable occupation,' advised the Red Book for attendants, ‘has a most salutary effect on both the body and the mind. It diverts the Patient from his morbid fancies, and leads his thoughts into a healthy channel.'

Robert
worked in the tailors' shop
, part of a three-pronged building behind the central hall. Amid the smells of the horsehair and leather in the adjoining mattress-makers' and bootmakers' shops, he and the other tailors made and repaired the dark blue uniforms of the staff, and the underclothes, bedlinen and grey suits of the patients.
They cut the winter jackets
and trousers from heavy cloth such as Melton, corduroy and fustian, the summer wear from flannel and drill.

Each working patient was given an extra meal a day (an eleven o'clock lunch of bread, cheese and oatmeal) and paid about five shillings a month,
an eighth of the going rate
for labour. Robert could use his wages, which were entered as credit in a book kept by the Broadmoor steward, to order extra provisions such as tea and tobacco, or seeds to plant in his allotment.

Robert's supervisor was
Charles Leach Pike
, a master tailor who had joined the Broadmoor staff in 1895, aged twenty-three and newly married. One of eight occupational attendants in the asylum, Pike was paid a salary of £57 to train and oversee the men in his workshop. The attendants were enjoined in the Red Book not to ‘hold themselves aloof from their charges or be content with supervising them', but rather to ‘join heartily in their occupations and amusements, and work both with and for the Patients'. Pike heeded this advice. He was
vice-captain of the Broadmoor Cycling Club
, a keen pianist and a frequent performer in the asylum's theatrical entertainments.
The costumes for the shows
were put together in his workshop. As accompanist to the Broadmoor string band, Pike inspired several of the inmates in his charge to take up music. Robert learnt to play new instruments – the violin, the piano and the cornet – and he became
an enthusiastic member of the asylum's brass band
.

Brass bands were amateur, working-class ensembles, of which there were tens of thousands in Britain at the turn of the century, whereas string bands had more refined, upper-class antecedents.
The editor of the
British Bandsman
complained about the class distinction, finding ‘no reason why Tom who plays the cornet, should be in a lower social or musical grade than Dick, who plays a violin'. It was a mark of the oddity of Robert's position, as a working-class lad among the educated lunatics of Block 2, that he played both brass and string instruments, and probably was a member of both bands. The bands performed in concerts in the hall; at staff balls at Easter and Christmas; at ceremonies in the asylum grounds. In the summer of 1900, the brass players gave
a concert on the Broadmoor cricket pitch
to celebrate the relief of the siege of Mafeking, the South African town that Colonel Robert Baden-Powell had held against the Boer forces for seven months.

Charles Coleman, the Principal Attendant of Block 2 and the member of staff most directly responsible for Robert's welfare, was another passionate performer and musician. Born in Dorset in 1850, Coleman had been a drummer with the Dorset Militia before joining the staff of Broadmoor in 1873. He lived in Crowthorne with his wife and children, among them a daughter who was an attendant in the Broadmoor women's wing. Coleman played in the string band and performed with gusto in entertainments in the hall. He was a well-loved figure in the asylum, especially prized for his comic turns in seasonal revues:
his impersonation in November 1900
of a statue of Alexander the Great had the audience helpless with laughter.

From his office on the ground floor of Block 2, Coleman wrote detailed, sometimes dryly humorous reports to the asylum's Chief Attendant about the upsets and altercations on the block, taking care to follow the guidance in
The Attendant's Companion
: ‘never say that a patient
thinks
this, or
imagines
that, or
feels
the other. You cannot be sure of what a patient thinks or imagines or feels. All that you can be sure of is what he
says
and
does,
and your reports should be strictly limited to his sayings and doings.'

Several of the reports relating to Block 2 inmates featured the irascible and increasingly paranoid barrister
Sherlock Hare
, who had been admitted to Broadmoor in 1892, aged forty-one, after attacking a newspaper editor in Burma. Over the years, Hare complained to the Block 2 attendants that the cook had prepared him poached eggs instead of omelette; that other inmates had made fun of his name; that his chops had been poorly cooked (he wanted to take this up with the home secretary); that attendants and patients had blown tobacco smoke in his face; that the doctors had inoculated him with syphilis; and that he had been accommodated in a single room – he said that he supposed only murderers were allowed two, a barbed reference to William Chester Minor's double suite. When Hare insisted that someone had been sitting on his bed while he was in the airing court, Coleman investigated, and established that the bedclothes were rumpled because Hare himself had sat on the bed to put on his boots before going outside.

Another of Coleman's reports described a spat between Hare and a patient called Ben Hewlett, a widowed policeman who in 1887 had attacked his nine-year-old son with a chopper. In a Block 2 corridor, wrote Coleman, he saw Hare push Hewlett and Hewlett push Hare back. When Coleman intervened, Hewlett said that Hare had started the scuffle. Hare denied it and called Hewlett a liar. ‘And you,' replied Hewlett, ‘are a lunatic.' Coleman gently advised Hewlett to return to work, and Hare to repair to his room.

The flags at Broadmoor were flown at half-mast upon
the death of Queen Victoria
in January 1901, and the asylum observed a day of mourning. The next year the patients assembled in the hall to watch a series of short films – probably the first moving pictures they had seen – of
the coronation
of Victoria's son as Edward VII. They were now detained not at Her Majesty's but at His Majesty's Pleasure.