I read the file on the case at the National Archives in Kew, which contained transcripts of the witness statements and of the letters written by Robert and his mother. I studied apprenticeship and cemetery records at the London Metropolitan Archives in Islington, and crew agreements at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. I researched the Coombes and Fox families on genealogy websites and in newspaper archives. I traced and read as many as I could of the penny dreadfuls that had been found in 35 Cave Road, along with books, journals and newspapers that discussed the board school system, the London docks, pawnbroking, cheap literature for boys, degeneration, the Thames iron yard, cattle ships, the politics of East London, household budgets, boy labour, the law on insanity and on child protection. At the local archives in Stratford, I looked at the electoral rolls, the registers of the district’s schools, and maps and photographs of late-nineteenth-century West Ham. I visited Southend-on-Sea and the places in Plaistow in which the Coombes family and their friends had lived. The stretch of houses that included 35 Cave Road had been demolished, but most of the terrace was still standing, as were the playground walls of the school opposite Robert and Nattie’s house. I walked down the Barking Road to the now defunct docks and the site of the iron works and tried to imagine being there in 1895, when the district thundered with machines, reeked of coal tar and carcasses, explosives and glue. In West Ham, wrote the novelist Arthur Morrison, ‘the air was electrical’; there was, according to the Liberal MP Charles Masterman, ‘everywhere a stirring and an agitation’. Here more than anywhere in England, it seemed that the world was transforming as the century turned, mutating at unnatural speed, throwing up freaks, portents, atavistic selves, precocities and perversions. It was a time of tumult and foreboding.
In Robert’s home, too, the atmosphere had become charged with an unease that verged on menace. Emily Coombes was volatile, and Robert believed that she was dangerous. She threw knives, he said, and threatened death. His anxiety had already spiralled into fits and faints, spells of silence and withdrawal, a tendency to hear noises and feel pains in his head. His previous attempts to extricate himself and Nattie by running away from home had ended in failure, and the bromides that he was given for his headaches and attacks of excitement may have intensified his dissociation and disquiet. By July 1895 he was more alienated than ever, unsettled by the wrench of leaving school, the brutal monotony of the iron yard, the heavy heat of the summer. His father’s visit usually brought some respite, but this time Coombes and his wife had argued – about sex or money or both – and Emily had been left jittery and aggrieved. Robert’s own shame and frustration were resolving into a fury against her.
The boys spent the stifling days of 6 and 7 July at home with their mother. In the evenings Robert joined her in the marital bed, as he often did in his father’s absence. At some point that weekend, Emily thrashed her younger son for taking food and threatened the older boy. Robert had already bought the knife. Now he made his promise to Nattie. His mother had become a monster to him, like the serpent with which Jack Wright grapples in the cave beneath the sea.
Only a couple of matricides a year were reported in the British press in the 1880s and 1890s, and it has remained a very rare crime. Between 1968 and 1978 an average of six males killed their mothers in Britain each year, of whom about two were admitted annually to Broadmoor. In the United States, about 2 per cent of all homicides recorded between 1976 and 1998 were murders of a parent. Adolescent boys who kill their mothers are rarer still, but a few studies have been made of such crimes. Compared to other young murderers, young matricides rarely have a history of violence. Compared to older mother-murderers, they rarely have a history of psychosis. Their mothers tend to be dominating and intrusive; their fathers, typically, are passive or absent figures. The boys are more likely than their adult counterparts to have been mistreated, whether sexually, physically or emotionally. In many cases, they have tried to run away from home before the killing, and afterwards they often show relief, as if they have averted rather than invited catastrophe. They are unlikely to kill again.
Psychiatrists have suggested that a matricidal man or boy can have an overt motive for murder (such as a wish for enrichment or revenge) and also a motive hidden from himself. He may be desperate to rid himself of an excessive attachment to his mother, for instance, or to cast out the intolerable emotions that she arouses in him: feelings of desire and hatred, a terror of engulfment or of dissolution. In myth and literature, matricidal impulses can take disguised forms. They have been identified not only in the Greek tragedy in which Orestes slays his mother because she has killed and betrayed his father, or in the 1950s novel in which Norman Bates murders his mother in a jealous rage, but also in Hamlet’s feelings towards the ‘incestuous’ Gertrude, in Raskolnikov’s attack on the old woman in Crime and Punishment, in the defeat of the Sphinx by Oedipus, the Gorgon by Perseus, the dragon by St George. In life, too, such impulses may be expressed in an attack not on the mother herself but on another woman.
It was clear that Robert had been disturbed by his mother and had become convinced that he needed to kill her, but to understand whether his fears were grounded in reality I needed to know if he ever again acted with such cruelty or became gripped by such a fixation. I had to find out about his future as well as his past. Though there seemed to be no information about him in the newspapers after September 1895, I was able to glean a few facts from the files in Broadmoor’s recently opened archives. I was surprised by the gentleness of the regime at the asylum at the turn of the twentieth century and by the ways in which the institution had looked after Robert.
Broadmoor still houses some of the most disturbed patients in England, and I spoke about Robert’s case to a psychiatrist who had worked there since 1998. She said that it sounded as though Robert had experienced a psychotic breakdown when he murdered his mother, complete with auditory hallucinations, dissociation, disavowal, temporary amnesia. Such a breakdown, she said, was likely to have been provoked by extreme emotional strain. She told me that almost every one of the men and women whom she had treated at Broadmoor had suffered horribly as a child. They may have been born susceptible to mental illness, but their violent derangement was triggered by events in their lives. In the course of their treatment, they were frequently assailed by intense and painful emotions. Sometimes, they became suicidal before they became stable.
The Broadmoor admissions register showed that Robert was discharged to the Hadleigh colony in 1912, the doctors having deemed him sane. I researched the colony’s history at the Salvation Army headquarters in London and I went to Essex to look round the grounds, which were still in use as an employment training centre.
It was more difficult to establish what happened to Robert next. Only when I saw a photograph of his gravestone on a website about Australian cemeteries did I realise that he had emigrated and served in the Great War. Robert is buried in Coffs Harbour, on the coast of northern New South Wales. His stone bears a metal plaque inscribed with his name and his date of death, the names of his battalions, and his military rank and number. With the help of the service records in Australian archives, I was able to trace his movements during the war. I pictured him on the ridges of Gallipoli, watching disaster unfold. As a stretcher-bearer he was obliged to bear witness to horrific events before scrambling forward to tend to the injured, to salvage something from a scene of catastrophe.
At first I could find little about Robert’s life beyond 1919, apart from an approximate address and the circumstances of his death. My only lead was a phrase at the foot of the plaque on his gravestone: ‘Always remembered by Harry Mulville & family’. Though I did not imagine that the Harry Mulville who had known Robert would still be alive, I decided to try to track down his family. I found mentions of the name Mulville in the archives of the classified sections of the Coffs Harbour newspaper. I also found a phone number for an ‘H. Mulville’ in Coffs Harbour: I left a few messages but received no reply.
I next began to work my way through the numbers of all the Mulvilles in the New South Wales telephone directory, calling each one in the hope that he or she might be a relative. With my first call I struck lucky. A Mrs Mulville in Ulladulla, a coastal town south of Sydney, said, yes, she did have a family connection to a man called Harry Mulville who lived in Coffs Harbour, and she put me in touch with his daughter.
I emailed Harry Mulville’s daughter, telling her that I was writing about Robert Coombes. I explained that Robert had killed his mother when he was a boy living in London, and that after his release from an asylum he had served with distinction in the Great War. I said that I did not know whether her father was aware of the earlier, darker period of his friend’s life, and that I would understand if this was not something that she wanted to discuss with him. For several days I received no reply.
When I emailed again, she responded. ‘My family have been very distressed at this news,’ she wrote, ‘and we are still trying to come to terms with it. I will have to discuss this more with my family. My father is almost ninety-four years old now and we as a family cannot speak to him about this. It would probably kill him.’
I apologised to Harry’s daughter for causing such distress and I explained more about my research. She said that she would like to help me, but that her older brother and sister did not approve of my project. She asked me to speak to them. After my telephone conversations with Harry’s older children, I understood why they had found the news of the murder quite so disturbing.
Henry Alexander Mulville, always known as Harry, was born on an island in the Clarence River in New South Wales on 15 February 1919. He spent his early childhood by the river, helping his father to work a hand-cranked punt that carried horses, carts and motorised vehicles back and forth between the large island of Woodford and the village of Tyndale, on the mainland. The Mulvilles lived in two rooms of a former butcher’s shop near the Woodford jetty: one room was the kitchen and the other the bedroom. When the Clarence burst its banks in heavy rain, the water rushed into the building and the family was forced to take refuge with neighbours on higher ground until the flood subsided.
Harry’s parents had married in 1917, when his father was fifty-six and his mother thirty-two. His mother, Bertha, brought an illegitimate daughter to the marriage, and she and Charles Mulville had four children together: after Harry came Percy, Alfred and Ellen. In 1925 Harry and his brother Percy fell ill with pneumonia. The five-year-old Percy died and was buried in the local Roman Catholic cemetery.
Harry grew into a spirited, cheeky boy with long, skinny legs, brown hair, a square jaw, blue eyes and big ears. His father, as well as running the vehicle ferry, had the concession to carry foot passengers across the Clarence by rowing boat, and Harry soon learnt to row the boat himself.
The land near the river was dense with vegetation, some of which had been cleared for dairying and sugarcane farming. Harry loved to watch the workers cutting the cane in the fields. The plants were hacked down by a team of Hindu labourers, then stripped with brush hooks, carried to the river by cart, loaded on to punts with a crane and towed by steamer to the sugar mill. Harry helped the cook take refreshments to the cutters when they broke for tea in the afternoon, and in return was invited to share their rock cakes and biscuits.
Harry was educated first at the Tyndale school, where two huge fig trees shaded the playground, and then, with his older half-sister Christabel, was driven to school in the village of Maclean on the family’s horse and sulky (a light, two-wheeled cart). He enjoyed athletics, and did well in the sports competitions held at school on Empire Day. At home he helped to raise a small flock of poultry; the best of the family’s Rhode Island Reds and Brown Leghorns won awards at the local agricultural fair. On Sundays, Harry sometimes went to church with his mother, who played the pedal organ at Anglican services.
Harry and Chrissie used to read the children’s page in the Sydney Mail, and in 1927 both wrote letters to the editor. Harry, aged eight, announced that he had won prizes at school for English and arithmetic and asked to be put in touch with a pen pal. Chrissie, who was thirteen, expressed her enthusiasm for the Western adventures of the bestselling American novelist Zane Grey and asked for advice on naming her kittens. The children’s editor, ‘Cinderella’, suggested a suitable pen pal for Harry. She recommended the names ‘Mittens’ and ‘Muffet’ for Chrissie’s kittens, but was dubious about her taste in literature: Zane Grey was ‘rather bloodthirsty’, Cinderella thought; ‘so many of his characters meet a violent end’.
When Harry’s father was laid up in bed with an illness that year, Harry helped his mother to crank the vehicle punt across the river. As a general store delivery van was driving off the punt on to the jetty one day, the chain attaching the ferry to the land slipped and the van fell through the gap into the water, sinking twelve feet. The driver freed himself and swam up, but most of his cargo floated down the Clarence. Charles Mulville shortly afterwards lost his job as ferryman.
Bertha became unhappy. She attributed her difficulties with her husband to religious differences. She was a native of East London, and had been raised in the Church of England, whereas Charles was an Irish-born Roman Catholic. Bertha said that she did not like the Catholic priest calling at their house. In 1928 she left the family home, with her two surviving sons and her two daughters, to take a job as housekeeper to Harold William Smith, a farmer in his early fifties who lived fifty miles south of the Clarence.
Smith had a dairy herd at a farm between Glenreagh and Nana Glen, villages in the Orara Valley. His first wife had died in 1920 and his second had left him in 1926 after three years of marriage. Smith hired Bertha to cook and clean for him and to look after his three-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Bertha soon became her employer’s lover and in 1929 she also became the mother of his next child.
In the year of the baby’s birth, Charles Mulville’s neighbours on Woodford Island sent word to Bertha that her husband was seriously ill with influenza, and Bertha despatched the ten-year-old Harry to tend to him. Within a few days of Harry’s arrival, Charles developed pneumonia. He died in his son’s arms, aged sixty-eight, and was buried alongside Harry’s brother Percy in the Catholic cemetery. Harry returned to Nana Glen. A few months later Smith’s marriage was dissolved and he and Bertha were able to marry.
Harold Smith was born in 1874 into a well-known and well-to-do family in the north of New South Wales, but he had not made a success of himself. Since being declared bankrupt in 1898 he had scratched a living as a horseman and share-farmer. A hard-drinking man, ‘Tiger’ Smith often sat at the dinner table with a horse whip and was quick to strike his stepchildren. He attributed his short temper to the effects of gassing in the war. In fact, he had served for only five months, all of which were spent in training or long-range patrolling with the 5th Light Horse in Egypt; he was invalided home with rheumatism in September 1916, having seen no combat. He had been aggressive before the war, in any case: in 1899 he had been convicted of assaulting a man with whom he had argued about a horse.
As the eldest boy, Harry bore the brunt of his stepfather’s rage. One of Harry’s jobs was to hold Smith’s tools for him while he sharpened their blades. If he did not keep the tool’s handle steady, Smith would raise his steel file and smack him on the head.
The Smiths’ next-door neighbour was Robert Coombes, now in his mid-forties. Robert had settled in Nana Glen on his return from the Western Front. He may have chosen the district at the suggestion of Herbert Morrow, a Nana Glen farmer who had served with him in the 4th Division and who in 1918 had come back to Australia on the same ship. Robert’s fellow bandsman and stretcher-bearer Casimir Collopy, a veteran of both the 13th and 45th Battalions, also farmed in this part of New South Wales. Robert lived in a rickety two-room house, next to which he grazed seven or eight cows and tended a plot of vegetables. He and Smith were both tenants of a farmer called Isaac Cundy.
Robert’s house faced the dirt road that ran north from Nana
Glen to the larger village of Glenreagh. Just across the track was a bright sweep of grazing pasture, stretching down to a line of trees along the Orara river. A range of wooded hills rose in the distance, separating the valley from the ocean. Behind the house was the dense web of the bush: the blackbutt and bloodwood trees, blue gum, bottlebrush, wattle and ironbark, twined with vines and creepers. Kookaburras and white cockatoos cackled and shrieked in the trees, giant frogs rasped in the river and creeks. The climate was mild, the temperatures rarely dropping below freezing point even in winter. In the warm, wet summers, the breeze carried a tang of camphor and gum.
The region around the Orara river had been inhabited by whites since the 1860s: first the timber-getters, who felled the much-prized red cedars, and then the gold-miners, who sunk shafts into the reefs near the river and panned for nuggets in the creeks. The gold mines had become unprofitable by the 1920s, but the timber business was still going strong. The local men used cross-cut saws, axes and wedges to chop down mammoth gums and white mahoganies. They sliced them into long logs and tethered them to teams of bullocks, which dragged their loads through the bush to the saw mills. Some of the land cleared by loggers had been claimed by banana growers and dairy farmers.