Access to Broadmoor Special Hospital, and to the voluminous files that have been kept on all patients, was clearly going to be the key to cracking this story; and it took some weeks before Juliet Walker and I were allowed in. Paul Robertson and Alison Webster, two remarkable and kind employees of the Hospital, proved hugely helpful: without their help this book would never have managed to be much more than a collection of conjectures. The Broadmoor files provided the facts, and Paul and Alison provided the files. John Heritage and Bernard Fourness, who worked as volunteers in the Hospital Archive, gave of their own time generously, helping make some sense of the vast tonnage of paperwork.
On the other side of the Atlantic, matters proceeded rather differently – despite the best efforts of the splendid Marisa. St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC, is now no longer a federal institution, but is run by the Government of the District of Columbia – a government that has experienced some well-publicized troubles in recent years. And at first, perhaps because of this, the hospital refused point-blank to release any of its files, and went so far, quite seriously, as to suggest that I engage a lawyer and sue in order to obtain them.
However, a cursory search I made some while later of the National Archives pages on the World Wide Web suggested to me that the papers relating to Minor – who had been a patient at St Elizabeth’s between 1910 and 1919, when the institution was undeniably under federal jurisdiction – might well actually be in federal custody, and not within the Kafkaesque embrace of the District. And indeed, as it turns out, they were. A couple of requests through the Internet, a happy conversation with an extremely helpful government official in College Park, Maryland, and suddenly more than 700 pages of case notes and other fascinating miscellaneous files arrived in a FedEx package. It was somewhat pleasing to be able to telephone St Elizabeth’s the next day, and tell them which file I then had sitting before me on my desk. They were not best pleased.
Oxford University Press were, by contrast, wonderfully helpful; and while I am naturally happy to thank the officials at the Press who so kindly sanctioned my visits to Walton Street, I wish to acknowledge the very considerable debt that I owe first to Elizabeth Knowles, now of Oxford’s Reference Books Department, who had made a study of Minor some years before and was happy to share her knowledge and access with me. I am delighted also to be able to thank the irrepressibly enthusiastic Jenny McMorris of the Press archives, who knows Minor and his remarkable legacy more intimately than anyone else, anywhere. Jenny, together with her former colleague Peter Foden, proved a tower of strength, during my visits and long after: I only hope that she manages to find an outlet for her own fascination with the great Henry Fowler, whom she rightly regards, along with Murray, as one of the true heroes of the English language.
Several friends, and a number of colleagues who had a professional interest in parts of the story, read the manuscript’s early drafts, and made many suggestions for improving it. In almost all cases I have accepted their proposals with gratitude; but if on occasion I did, through carelessness or pigheadedness, disregard their warnings or demands, then the caveat about the responsibility for all errors of fact, judgement or taste remaining firmly with me applies as well: they did their best.
Among those friends I wish to thank heartily are Gully Wells, Graham Boynton, Pepper Evans, Rob Howard, Jesse Sheidlower, Nancy Stump and Paula Szuchman. And to Anthony, who complained to me that he was denied romantic favours one summer morning because his fiancée was bent on completing the reading of Chapter Nine, my apologies, and my embarrassed thanks for your forbearance.
James W. Campbell of the New Haven Historical Society gave great assistance in finding the Minor family in their old home town; the librarians and staff at the Yale Divinity Library told me much about William Minor’s early life in Ceylon. Pat Higgins, an Englishwoman living in Washington state, and with whom I only corresponded by e-mail, became fascinated also by the Ceylon and Seattle ends of the Minor family story, and gave me several intriguing tips.
Michael Musick of the US National Archives then found most of Minor’s military files, and Michael Rhode of the Walter Reed Army Hospital tracked down his handwritten autopsy reports. The National Park Service was helpful in giving me access to military bases in New York and Florida where he had been stationed; the Index Project in Arlington, Virginia, assisted me in finding additional records relating to his wartime career.
Susan Pakies of Virginia’s Orange County tourist office, along with the immensely knowledgeable Frank Walker, then took me around all of the important sites where the Battle of the Wilderness had been fought, and later, to cheer us all up, took me to several of the delightful old inns that are hidden away in this spectacularly lovely corner of America. Jonathan O’Neal patiently explained civil war medical practice at the old Exchange Hotel-cum-hospital that is now a museum in Gordonville, Virginia.
Nancy Whitmore of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland, was an enthusiastic supporter of the project and painstakingly dug up a huge amount of highly relevant arcana. Dr Lawrence Kohl at the University of Alabama was kind enough to take time to discuss both the mechanics of Civil War branding, and of speculating (in an impressively informed way) of the effects such punishment might have on Irishmen who fought in the Union Army – the latter his particular speciality as an historian of the period. Mitchell Redman of New York filled in some details of Minor’s later personal life, about which he had once written a short play.
Gordon Claridge of Magdalen College, Oxford, had much that was helpful to say about the origins of mental illness; Jonathan Andrews, a historian of Broadmoor, helped also; and Isa Samad of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, told me a great deal about the history of the treatment of paranoid schizophrenia.
Dale Fiore, Superintendent of the Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, then added fascinating footnotes about the end of William Minor’s life – the length of the coffin, the depth at which it is buried, the names of those who surround him in his plot.
Life became a great deal easier once I had tracked down one of the few known living relatives of William Minor, Mr Jack Minor of Riverside, Connecticut. He was kindness itself, giving me an enormous amount of useful information about the great-uncle he never knew, and offering me access to the treasure trove of pictures and papers that had sat for years, undisturbed, in a wooden box in his attic. He and his Danish wife, Birgit, became as fascinated by the story as I was, and I thank them for pleasant waterside dinners and time spent talking about the nature of their most curious relation.
David Merritt, of the Merritt International Family History Society in Swanley, Kent, gave me valuable help in ferreting out details of where George Merrett’s descendants might be: I eventually found one, a Mr Dean Blanchard in Sussex, who was equally interested in the fortunes of his distant family and shared much that was valuable with me.
I am indebted also to my American agent Peter Matson, his colleague Jennifer Hengen, and to Agnes Krup who, once enthused by the strange nature of this story, became one of its keenest supporters and kept me going, writing hard, during a long hot American summer.
I should also like to record my special thanks to Sara Marafini for her splendidly alluring design of the paperback jacket.
And finally my wife Catherine saw to it that I remained undisturbed, and offered generously the kind of serenity and sanctuary that the writing of a tale like this more than amply demands and deserves: my gratitude to her is, as always, incalculable.
Simon Winchester
Wassaic, New York
Suggestions for Further Reading
The book which first inspired me to look into this story was Jonathon Green’s Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made (Jonathan Cape, 1996), which devoted a page and a half to the tale, and led me, via its bibliography, to the rather more celebrated work about the making of the OED, Caught in the Web of Words: J. A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press and Yal
e University Press, 1977), written by the great editor’s granddaughter, K. M. Elisabeth Murray. In both cases the tale of the first meeting between Murray and Minor is the well-known myth; but it was not until Elizabeth Knowles wrote a more accurate account in the quarterly journal Dictionaries that some of the truth of the encounter became more properly recognized. Both books will delight the enthusiast: the journal tends towards the academic, but since the disciplines of lexicography are frankly not too testing, many may profit from looking at it as well.
For those interested in the basic principles behind the making of word-books, Sidney Landau’s definitive Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography (Cambridge University Press, 1989) is an essential read. For those iconoclasts wishing to understand the flaws in the OED, John Willinsky explains much in his rather ill-tempered Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED (Princeton University Press, 1994), which offers a politically correct revisionist view of Murray’s creation – albeit from a somewhat admiring stance. It is worth reading, even if just to make the blood boil.
Copies of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary can usually still be found quite easily – reproductions of the large-format two-volume editions have been produced on presses in such unlikely settings as the city of Beirut, from where I recently purchased a copy for $250. It is difficult to find a good original first edition for under $15,000. But there is a witty and useful distillation, with words selected by E. L. McAdam and George Milne (paperback reissued in 1995 by Cassell) .
Oxford University Press deserves a history of its own, and indeed has several: I recommend Peter Sutcliffe’s The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (Oxford University Press, 1978), which covers the saga of the making of the OED very well, and with reasonable impartiality.
The American Civil War is of course very comprehensively covered. The best book relating to the fighting in which Minor played a small but, for him, crucial part is Gordon C. Rhea’s The Battle of the Wilderness (Louisiana State University Press, 1994), which I enjoyed enormously. D. P. Conyngham’s 1867 classic The Irish Brigade and Its Campaigns has recently been reissued (Fordham University Press, New York, 1994), with an introduction by Lawrence F. Kohl, whose help with my own book I acknowledge elsewhere. Among the many books on Civil War medicine I enjoyed: George Worthington Adams’s Doctors in Blue (Louisiana State University Press, 1980) and In Hospital and Camp by Harold Elk Straubing (Stackpole Books, Pennsylvania, 1993). I also took time to read the relevant chapters in the elegant giant of a book The American Heritage New History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton and with an introduction by James M. Macpherson (Viking, 1996), which answers every imaginable question about the minutiae of those four years of bloody fighting.
The nature of the possible mental ailments that plagued Minor, and which may have been triggered by his experiences during the war, are comprehensively explained by Gordon Claridge in Origins of Mental Illness: Temperament, Deviance and Disorder (Oxford University Press, 1985). Andrew Scull’s splendid Masters of Bedlam (Princeton University Press, 1996) offers a fascinating history of the mad-doctoring trade before the times of psychiatric enlightenment.
I looked to Roy Porter – also an expert on madness and its treatment – for his rightly acclaimed social history of the city where Minor committed his murder: London: A Social History (Hamish Hamilton, 1994) sets the scene admirably, and remains one of the best books on England’s remarkable capital.
But the one book that above all should be read in conjunction with this small volume is one of the biggest and most impressive works of scholarship to be found – the twelve-volume first edition, the 1933 supplement, the four-volume supplements of Robert Burchfield or the fully integrated twenty-volume second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary itself.
It makes for an expensive and bulky set of books – which is why nowadays the CD – ROM is much preferred – but it does, most importantly of all to his fans, acknowledge formally the existence and contributions of William Chester Minor. And I find that somehow the simple discovery of his name, buried as it is among the contributors who helped to make the OED the great totem that it remains today, is always an intensely touching moment. While it is of course in and of itself no justification for ever needing to own the great book, the finding of the name presents perhaps the finest of examples of the kind of serendipitous moment for which the OED is justly famous. And few would disagree that serendipity, in dictionaries, is a most splendid thing indeed.
Simon Winchester, The Surgeon of Crowthorne
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