The Wicked Boy (26 page)

A few local shocks were felt at the asylum in the opening years of the new century:
a fireball
hit the gatehouse during a thunderstorm in 1900, smashing off a chimney pot; in the same year
an attendant's three-year-old son
fell into a water butt on the estate and drowned; in 1902
an attendant was invalided out
of Broadmoor after being stabbed fifteen times in the face by a patient in the back blocks. On 3 December 1902
Coleman hurried to the aid of William Chester Minor
, who was crying out in pain. ‘He had cut his penis off,' wrote Coleman in his report to the Chief Attendant. ‘He said he had tied it with string, which had stopped the bleeding. I saw what he had done.' The sixty-eight-year-old lexicographer had long been tormented by sexual fantasies and delusions, and he had lopped off his penis, he said, ‘in the interests of morality'. He was taken to the infirmary. Three months later he had recovered and was back in his Block 2 quarters.

Robert remained rational enough to stay in Block 2. The attendants kept an eye on him, as he was still considered fragile, but he seemed now to be able to tolerate the pressure of dark thoughts, to sit out a low mood rather than snap under its strain. ‘
RAC rather depressed
this evening,' wrote an attendant in a note of 4 October 1901; ‘he says he is alright.'

Robert took part in many of the asylum recreations. He
excelled at billiards
, which was played on
a frayed old table
in one of the two day rooms at the front of Block 2. Many inmates liked to watch the matches, and some acted as bookmakers, setting odds on the result of a tournament and
taking bets in batches of tobacco
, cigarettes and cigars. Each male patient was
allotted an ounce of tobacco
a week, drawn from the government stock of contraband seized by Customs & Excise officers.

Dr Brayn used to tell
how he once consented to play billiards with a patient, who proceeded to win the game.

‘There you are,' said the superintendent. ‘I knew you would beat me.'

‘Ah, sir,' remarked another criminal lunatic, consolingly, ‘to be expert in billiards is the sign of a misspent life.'

Robert was also one of a small group of patients who
played chess
, continuing a tradition established by inmates such as
Edward Oxford
, the first of the eight men to try to assassinate Queen Victoria, and Richard Dadd, a patricide who while at Broadmoor had decorated the asylum hall with a series of fantastical murals. Robert proved a talented chess player, as did his fellow Block 2 inmate
Reginald Saunderson
.

Saunderson had been admitted to Broadmoor in the same year as Robert, at the age of twenty-one. He was a pale, tall young Irishman of aristocratic descent, with deep-set grey eyes. In November 1894 Saunderson had absconded from an institution for ‘mentally deficient boys' near London and cut the throat of a woman in Kensington. He fled to Ireland, where he surrendered himself to the police. It emerged that, like Robert, he had taken an obsessive interest in the capture and trial of James Canham Read; the day on which Saunderson turned himself in, 4 December 1894, was the day of Read's execution.

Unlike Robert's family, Saunderson's parents were rich enough to hire doctors to help to save him from the gallows. The famous alienist Lyttelton Forbes-Winslow interviewed Saunderson and reported that the young man told him: ‘Everything around me appears to me as if in a dream, and I have no recollection of having committed the murder of which you speak; had I done so, I cannot understand the wickedness of the act, or what I should suffer in consequence. I hear, and have heard for some time, and do at the present moment hear people speaking to me, who apparently are hidden behind the walls; I have been persecuted by these voices for a long period of time, urging me to do the various acts, and I believe in their reality.' On the basis of this suspiciously comprehensive and precise fulfilment of the definition of insanity, Saunderson was found unfit to plead and sent straight to Broadmoor.

Both Saunderson and Robert took up correspondence chess, a form of the game that had become popular in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Each match was conducted by post, one move at a time, and could last for several months. Saunderson was at one point playing seventy-one correspondence games simultaneously. He secured many of his opponents through the offices of Frideswide Rowland, a former Irish women's chess champion who ran competitions in the
Weekly Irish Times
and the chess journal
The Four-Leaved Shamrock
. By way of thanks, Saunderson used to post boxes of asylum-grown strawberries to Mrs Rowland every summer. He was a ‘bright, pleasant' correspondent, she recalled, and a strong player.

In 1902, to mark the coronation of Edward VII, Mrs Rowland advertised in the pages of
The Four-Leaved Shamrock
for volunteers to take part in an Ireland v England match. Saunderson and Robert both signed up. Saunderson was allotted to the Irish team, since he had been born in Dublin, and Robert to the English. The standard was high: the forty or so competitors included the future English correspondence chess champion and the future Irish over-the-board champion. In all, 111 games were played, with a point being awarded for a win and a half for a draw. Saunderson lost his match but Robert beat his Irish opponent, and when the competition concluded in 1904 England won by 68½ points to Ireland's 42½.

Saunderson ceased his correspondence with Mrs Rowland soon after this match. She later heard that the Broadmoor authorities had limited the patients' participation in chess, as the game was proving ‘too exciting' to some on the cold damp days that they were confined in the block.

In the summer months,
both Robert and Saunderson played cricket
for the Block 2 team, as did Alfred Gamble, the costermonger's boy who had attacked young children, Arthur Gilbert Cooper, the curate who had cut his vicar's throat, and Roderick Maclean, the would-be royal assassin and aspiring poet. Dr Brayn often captained the Block 2 side, while John Baker, his deputy, led a team drawn from the patients in Blocks 3, 4 and 5 (Blocks 1 and 6, the back blocks, did not field any players). On other occasions, the Block 2 attendants and patients played together, or a team of gardener patients played a combined team of tailors, upholsterers and bootmakers. As well as adhering to the usual rules of the game, the patients had to observe
the asylum's strictures on cricket
: they were to walk to the field in a ‘compact manner', flanked by attendants, and during a match had to keep a distance of twenty yards from those attendants assigned to form outposts; if they wished to relieve themselves, they had to do so at a designated spot supervised by a member of staff.

The fixtures were organised by the Broadmoor chaplain,
the Reverend Hugh Wood
, a first-class cricketer who in the late 1870s had played for Cambridge University and then for the Yorkshire county team. Wood arranged up to seventy matches at the asylum each season in the early 1900s, and oversaw
the laying of a new pitch
within the walls in 1903. The Broadmoor First XI increasingly competed against teams fielded by local institutions such as
Sandhurst Royal Military College and the Windsor police
. Robert played in a side that beat the Reading Gas Company in 1907. In the same year he was
listed in the local paper
, the
Reading Mercury
, as one of the batsmen who helped the Broadmoor side to victory over Crowthorne.

By the asylum's standards, Robert was a decent batsman – he was usually placed halfway down the batting order – and an able bowler. He shared the bowling duties with Dr Brayn,
George Melton
(a railway-van boy who hit his mother on the head with a hammer in 1896),
Henry Spurrier
(a lance-corporal who knifed a fellow soldier in 1899),
Kenneth Murchison
(a renowned Boer War gunner who had shot a reporter through the head in Mafeking in 1899) and
Thomas Shultz
(an office boy who attacked his boss with an axe in 1904).

Of the players in the Block 2 cricket team, the one whose crime most closely recalled Robert's was a lad called
Frank Rodgers
, admitted to Broadmoor in 1904 at the age of fifteen. Robert was by then twenty-two; Frank took his place as the baby of the asylum.

Frank had a more moneyed and educated background than Robert. At the beginning of 1904 he had been living in a large house called The Gables in the pretty village of Meldreth, near Cambridge. The Rodgers family had recently moved from London in the hope that the peace and seclusion of the countryside would help to cure Frank's mother, Georgina, of her weakness for alcohol. Frank's father, a City solicitor, commuted daily to London, leaving Frank and his mother at home with Frank's sisters Winifred and Queenie and his older brother William. Georgina continued to drink heavily.

One evening in April, Frank and Winifred returned from a visit to a friend's house to find their mother drunk. While the children ate their supper, Georgina lay dozing in an armchair in the dining room. Afterwards Frank went upstairs and Winifred went to the drawing room to play the piano. A few minutes later Frank entered the drawing room with a revolver in his hand. ‘I have shot Mother,' he told Winifred. ‘It is for the best.'

Winifred rushed out to find her mother lying in the hallway with a bullet in her neck. She quickly summoned a doctor, while Frank took his youngest sister, the six-year-old Queenie, across the road to a public house. He asked the landlady if Queenie could stay there for the night, as he had shot his mother. He then sat down to read a newspaper.

Winifred and William followed Frank to the pub. ‘Frank,' said William, ‘why did you do it?' ‘I did it for Queenie's sake,' Frank replied. He repeated this to Winifred: ‘It is for Queenie's sake. She cannot live the life we have had for the past two years.'

When the doctor arrived at The Gables he found Georgina Rodgers dead. Frank confessed readily to him – ‘I have done it' – and handed him the revolver, saying that he had taken it from his brother's drawer. A policeman came to arrest the boy.

At Frank's trial for murder, Winifred confirmed that their domestic life had been very unhappy for the past couple of years because their mother had so often been drunk. Frank was their mother's favourite child, she said, known by the others as ‘Mother's boy'. William then testified: Frank had been restless for many weeks, he said, often rising from his bed in the middle of the night to lock the bedroom door. The family doctor confirmed that Georgina Rodgers was nearly always inebriated when he saw her. He said that Frank had told him that for the past two or three months he had frequently sensed his mother standing right behind him, looking over his shoulder, but when he turned she seemed to disappear. Frank had also told him that as he advanced on his mother with the revolver he heard a voice say, ‘Do it quickly'. Finally, two alienists appointed by the Crown gave evidence. The first said that Frank was unable to tell right from wrong because his determination to put an end to his family's trouble had narrowed his mind. The second said that Frank had become convinced that ‘there was no other way out of it'. The press described Frank's manner in court as gentlemanly, intelligent, polite.

The boy's plight aroused the compassion of many. ‘The sympathy of the whole neighbourhood appears to be with young Frank Rodgers,' noted the
Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire Reporter
, observing that the boy had ‘brooded over the unhappy conditions of things at The Gables and in this state of mind committed the terrible deed, perhaps feeling prepared to suffer himself for the sake of his little sister Queenie and the rest of the family'. The jury, without leaving the box, arrived at a verdict of guilty but insane.

The home secretary was uneasy about sending Frank Rodgers to Broadmoor. He asked Dr Brayn how the boy would be accommodated. ‘I should propose to place him at first in one of the infirmary wards,' replied the superintendent, ‘where he would be under the constant supervision of an attendant day and night.' This was the same arrangement that had been made when Robert was admitted and, again, when he became unstable at the age of sixteen. Brayn explained that if Frank was sufficiently rational he would be sent on to Block 2, to reside with ‘patients of the better class'.

Frank was admitted to Broadmoor in June and transferred to Block 2 in July. He engaged in many of the same pursuits as Robert. He followed the cricket in the newspapers and was a keen participant in the asylum games. He and Robert played their first game together in July; Robert was the leading scorer of the match, making sixty-three runs before he was caught out by Alfred Gamble. Frank also took up the violin, practising on four evenings a week in the winter months, and became a member of the string band. He learnt to play chess. He taught himself French and shorthand and was given lessons in mathematics by the chaplain. He grew apples and strawberries on his allotment.

Frank's father sent him hampers containing oysters, French bread, cuts of rabbit and pork, bottles of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce and copies of the
Boy's Own Paper.
This magazine was a middle-class version of the story papers found in Robert's house, having been founded as an antidote to the dreadfuls – it was full of tales of adventure and derring-do, but firmly pinned to the virtues of valour, self-sacrifice, the defence of Empire. Frank was a voracious reader. While on remand in prison, he had read both Jules Verne's
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
, the submarine fantasy of 1870 that inspired the Jack Wright stories, and
Thomas Anstey Guthrie's
Vice Versa
: a Lesson to Fathers
, a novel of 1882 about a schoolboy and his father, a City merchant, who exchange bodies and inhabit each others' lives. The boy's father is taught how trapped a lively-minded boy can feel when he has ‘no money and few rights', ‘virtually no way to assert himself in the world around him'.