Many onlookers detected an atavistic horror beneath the blank uniformity of East London. ‘As there is a darkest Africa, is there not also a darkest England?’ asked William Booth, the Methodist preacher who founded the Salvation Army. ‘The stony streets of London, if they could but speak, would tell of tragedies as awful, of ruin as complete, of ravishments as horrible, as if we were in Central Africa; only the ghastly devastation is covered, corpselike, with the artificialities and hypocrisies of modern civilisation.’ The technologically advanced environment seemed, perversely, to be propelling people back to their bestial origins, the factories and machines turning out morons and monsters. The landscape was both futuristic and primeval. Every resident of the district, wrote Hueffer, was ‘conscious of having, as it were at his back, the very green and very black stretches of the Essex marshes’. The American novelist Jack London characterised East Londoners as a ‘people of the machine and the Abyss’.
In The Nether World, a novel of 1889, George Gissing described a railway journey east out of the city. From the train carriage, the passengers see the ‘pest-stricken’ suburbs sweltering in sunshine that ‘served only to reveal the intimacies of abomination’. The train passes ‘above streets swarming with a nameless populace’, stops at stations ‘which it crushes the heart to think should be the destination of any mortal’. At last the train leaves ‘the city of the damned’, carrying its passengers ‘beyond the utmost limits of dread’.
5
A KISS GOODBYE
On the Thursday after the arrest of the Coombes boys and John Fox, the Star newspaper managed to secure an interview with Mary Jane Burrage, who had been present at the discovery of Emily Coombes’s body. Mrs Burrage told the reporter that she had been an intimate friend of the murdered woman, whom she used to see almost every day. Emily, she said, was a bright, happy person, an exemplary wife and mother, and a careful housewife. As for Robert and Nattie, ‘no boys were ever better brought up, but they were dark, sullen lads, with never a smile for anybody’. They were ‘deceitful and dishonest in small things’, she said, and when they told her that their mother had gone to Liverpool for a funeral she had known instantly that it was ‘all lies’: ‘I knew she would never go away without telling me, and I knew she would not leave the boys in the house alone.’
‘The neighbours laughed and sneered at me when I first said she was dead,’ said Mrs Burrage, ‘but now they see.’
Mary Jane Burrage was exhausted by her ordeal, said the Star. She recalled the horror of finding the corpse – ‘the thing on the bed’, as she described her friend’s body. ‘The smell!’ she exclaimed, reeling at the memory. ‘The flies were everywhere.’ On the right side of Emily’s face, she said that she had seen a clot of blood, apparently from a wound to the temple, and afterwards had watched the doctor remove the clot to reveal a writhing cluster of maggots.
Mrs Burrage reported that the boys’ grandmother in Bow was ‘nearly mad with shock’.
The Star correspondent asked if Fox had rented a room in the house.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Old John was not a lodger – Mrs Coombes never had any lodgers, she was not that kind of woman.’ Mrs Burrage was at pains to impress on the reporter that both she and her friend were respectable housewives who did not need to bring in extra cash.
Mrs Burrage claimed that Fox had never been to the house in Emily Coombes’s lifetime, unless perhaps to do a job for Mr Coombes. In this, as in other matters, she expressed with certainty things that she did not know for sure. Family, friends and neighbours were to testify that John Fox had been a frequent visitor to Cave Road before the murder, whether to chop wood for Emily Coombes or to look after the boys; he had even helped the family move in to the house in 1892. Mrs Burrage went on to assert that Fox was thirty-six (he was forty-five) and to cast doubt on his honesty, saying that he was adept at faking simple-mindedness, or ‘playing silly’.
The reporter asked her to comment on certain rumours about the boys and their mother.
‘It is not true that they were kept without pocket money,’ she replied, ‘and it is a lie to say that Mrs Coombes drank – as great a lie as ever was told. You can see that by her beautiful house.’ For Mrs Burrage, the condition of the house was proof of her friend’s virtue and sobriety. She told the reporter that 35 Cave Road was prettily furnished and well kept, replete with lovely and interesting objects, some of them valuable, which Mr Coombes had brought back from his travels.
Mrs Burrage said that she dreaded to think how he would take the news.
Throughout the murder and the arrests, through the first hearings before the magistrate and the coroner, Robert and Nattie’s father had been sailing to New York on the SS France, oblivious to the catastrophe that had befallen his family in Plaistow.
Robert Coombes senior was a slight man of fifty-one, with a receding chin, sandy sideburns and a moustache. The eldest son of a prosperous potato merchant and greengrocer, he was born in 1844 in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, but his family moved north of the river to Limehouse when he was a boy. He was a butcher by the age of fifteen and by twenty-five a master pork butcher in Notting Hill, West London, employing three men and three boys including his younger brother Frederick. In 1873, though, he was declared bankrupt. Thanks to an Act of 1869, bankrupts were no longer automatically imprisoned. Coombes instead had his assets seized and distributed among his creditors. Having lost his business, his home and its contents, he went north to Liverpool and became a ship’s steward for the National Steamship Company Limited, a fleet established in 1863 to ferry emigrants across the Atlantic.
It was in Liverpool that he met Emily Allen, whose father was a captain on emigrant ships to Australia. Emily was born in the town of Karachi, then part of India, and bore the middle name ‘Harrison’ in honour of a captain who had rescued her pregnant mother from a shipwreck on the river Indus. She was dark and attractive, with thick eyebrows and a firm jaw.
The two were married in 1878. Robert Coombes was thirty-three (though he gave his age as twenty-six on the marriage certificate) and Emily was twenty. They were said to be a loving couple. After the opening of the Royal Albert Dock in 1880, they moved from Liverpool to East London, where much of the National Line’s business was being transferred, and where he briefly ran his father’s greengrocery business. Robert, their first son, was born in Mile End Old Town on 6 January 1882 and Nathaniel in Limehouse on 20 February 1883. The family spent a year in Liverpool in 1890 and on their return to London rented a house at 24 Liddon Road, Plaistow, before moving half a mile north-east in 1892 to Cave Road. The people of East London were in constant flux, observed the social reformer Charles Booth: they shifted from one part of it to another ‘like fish in a river’.
Coombes served chiefly on the National Line vessels England and France, both of them iron-hulled steamships built in the 1860s, with single funnels (white with a black band circling the top) and three masts. Though the company’s steamers were large, they were neither as luxurious nor as fast as the Cunard or White Star liners. A National ship took a fortnight to reach New York from London, whereas rivals could make the crossing in six or seven days. By 1895 the company had abandoned the passenger trade and converted all of its ships to carry cattle. It was cheaper to transport live animals than to slaughter them first and keep the meat chilled on the crossing.
As a chief steward, Coombes drew on his experience as a butcher and a greengrocer. He bought the provisions for a voyage before setting sail and was in charge of the stores and the kitchen while at sea. Each crew member was apportioned rations of coffee, tea, water, sugar, bread, beef, pork and peas. They were prepared and served, under Coombes’s supervision, by a baker, a butcher, one or two cooks and a couple of assistant stewards. On a passenger liner, the steward could be a grand figure with dozens of staff, like the manager of a large hotel; on the cattle ships, he had a lowlier role. The sailors tended to look down on him and his men as ‘flunkeys’.
Coombes was pa
id a basic £7 for each five- or six-week round trip, which was supplemented by about £2 in tips and overtime – this was considerably more than most of the seamen, who received £4 per trip, though less than the master, the engineers and the ship’s mates. He undertook about seven voyages a year, giving him a total salary of about £65. According to a measure of affluence devised by Charles Booth in his massive survey Inquiry into Life and Labour in London (1889–1903), this placed Coombes above the poverty line, in category ‘E’, ‘fairly comfortable’. He and his wife aspired to the respectable, relatively well-to-do life to which they had been raised – with good clothes for churchgoing, musical instruments for the children, literary magazines, an exotic bird in a cage – but they did not own property and employ servants as their parents had done. Their income was stretched to the limit: when Coombes was at sea Emily sometimes wrote to ask him to send home extra funds, and she occasionally pawned their possessions. The family’s gold and silver watches, bracelets and rings were symbols of status but also insurance against an uncertain future, objects that could be easily pledged or sold.
Because he was a bankrupt, Coombes could not build up his own business as his father had done, and his job was not secure. A ship’s crew was discharged after each voyage and although he had so far been regularly re-employed by the company, there was no guarantee of work. The National Line was barely in profit: the market for American beef was declining, and the company’s difficulties had been exacerbated by the loss of two uninsured ships in 1889 and 1890. Five further ships were scrapped or abandoned in 1894 and early 1895, leaving just six in the fleet. There was talk of winding up the company altogether, or at least selling off the rest of the older vessels, which included both the England and the France.
On 20 July, the day of Emily Coombes’s burial, the France was approaching the lighthouse at Sandy Hook, a spit of land near New York at which the Atlantic steamers were met by the pilot boats that would guide them into the harbour.
George Waldie, the captain of one of the Sandy Hook pilot boats, was sent to deliver the news of Emily’s murder to her husband. Waldie, forty-eight, had emigrated to America from Scotland as a young man. On Saturday afternoon he took out Pilot Boat 13 to meet the France. He drew alongside and boarded, bearing a newspaper that carried a report of the murder in Plaistow. He delivered the paper to the ship’s captain, who called Coombes into his cabin and handed it to him. Captain Hadley reported that Coombes read the account of his wife’s death and his sons’ arrest ‘in a dazed sort of way’ and was afterwards unable to speak. He was ‘prostrated with grief and horror’.
When the France sailed in to the National Line’s berth on Pier 39 of the North River at noon the next day, a friend of Coombes boarded the ship and handed him a cable from one of his relatives that urged him to return immediately to London. The friend invited him to stay with him first at his home in Newark, New Jersey, which lay ten miles west of the North River piers. Coombes agreed. Before he left the France, though, he gave interviews to several newspapermen.
Coombes looked pale and bewildered. He described ‘in a mechanical way’, said the man from the New York Times, ‘what he knew of the characteristics of his inhuman offspring’, Robert.
‘I knew the boy was queer,’ he said, ‘but I never dreamed of this. It is terrible, terrible. I loved my wife devotedly, and to think. . .’
At this point, the journalist wrote, Coombes paused and looked straight into the mist gathering down the bay.
‘My elder boy had an abnormally developed brain,’ he continued. ‘I was so informed by my family physician, who told me that Robert must be carefully watched. There was always something peculiar about him.
‘When Robert was very young he began to act queerly. As he grew older he showed unusual intelligence for one of his years. He was a phenomenon in some respects and yet there were traits developed in him which indicated the existence of some mental failure. Local doctors could not diagnosticate his trouble. He was at times the embodiment of all that is lovable in a child, and then would come over him a spell that would frighten us. For instance, if he read of a ghastly murder, his whole mind would seem to be absorbed in it. Nothing could divert him from it. In these spells he would neglect the companionship of his playmates. After the spell passed he would be a child again, as innocent and unsophisticated as anyone of his age.
‘One time there was a murder near London. A man called Read had committed a brutal crime. The papers were filled with the particulars. My boy read about it and ran away from home. He travelled miles to get a look at the murderer.
‘According to the diagnosis of several physicians whom I called into the case, the boy was afflicted with a preponderance of brain matter. They said he had too much brain tissue for the size of the skull, and that in consequence the brain matter was crushed in too tight a space, and that accounted for the boy’s eccentricities, and also explained his periods of phenomenal mental brightness. I do not pretend to know what their theory was, but they told me that if he lived to be fourteen years old the brain trouble would disappear. But he did improve as the years went by, and I had come to believe that the doctors were right, and that he would eventually be of sound mind.
‘He kissed me on the docks in London two weeks ago Thursday,’ said Coombes, ‘and then to think he went back and killed his mother!’
Coombes was quick to clear Nattie of any part in the crime, and eager to implicate John Fox. ‘The younger boy was not to blame,’ he said. ‘He acted entirely on the command of the older boy. He was only eleven years old, and if the older boy told him it was all right he would believe it.’ Nattie was in fact twelve.
‘The half-witted man, John Fox, who is associated with the boys in this terrible crime, is responsible for it, I believe,’ said Coombes. ‘He was formerly employed on the National Line of steamers, but had become so irresponsible that he was not permitted to go to sea again. He frequently loitered around my premises doing chores and running errands. Latterly I have forbidden him to come to my house.’
Captain Hadley, who had been master of the France for more than ten years, endorsed Coombes’s suspicions. Fox, he told the New York Times reporter, used to sail with him but had become so useless that he was not allowed to come on board the steamer. On one occasion he was found ‘lurking’ in a dark gangway with a long knife, lying in wait for a shipmate against whom he bore a grudge. Captain Hadley said Fox was what he called a ‘softy’. The captain spoke highly of the Coombes boys, both of whom he said that he knew well; Mrs Coombes, he said, had been particularly proud of the intelligence of her elder son. Hadley expressed his belief that Fox was to blame for the crime.
A reporter from the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette noted that Mr Coombes was evidently under great mental strain. Coombes told him that he had lived on the best of terms with his wife and sons. ‘My wife had always been a good and kind mother to her children, and I am at a loss to understand how they could attempt this dreadful crime. I am positive that John Fox had some hand in the deed. It is evident that both boys have been influenced by him.’
The reporters spoke to other members of the crew. Those who knew the family described the chief steward’s wife as ‘extremely handsome’ and his sons as good-looking. They said that they had noticed nothing queer about Robert, but agreed that he had considerable influence over his younger brother.
A New York Tribune reporter who spoke to Coombes in his cabin found him a self-possessed and ‘intelligent-looking’ man. Coombes elaborated on Robert’s diagnosis. ‘The physicians who examined him said that when he arrived at the age of fourteen his skull would have become large enough for his abnormally developed brain.’ He explained that he had had no inkling that Robert might be violent. ‘While peculiar, he never did anything to lead us to believe that he might become dangerous. He appeared to be developing a morbid sentiment, which at times gave us uneasiness. If he happened to read of a ghastly or horrible murder, his whole mind appeared to become taken up by it, and
nothing could divert him. During these morbid spells he would read all the literature of that character that he could obtain. When the spell wore off he would become natural again and play with his companions as innocently as any child.’ Coombes recalled once more how on his last day in London, ‘Robert came down to the dock to see me off, and kissed me good-by.’
It would have been costly for Coombes to rush back to London rather than complete his round trip on the France. He told the reporters that he would stay in New York until the next Saturday, and return with his ship as planned.
In Holloway Road, north London, half a mile from Holloway prison, a widowed cooper (or barrel-maker) read a newspaper report about the murder of Emily Coombes and wondered whether the man who had been charged as an accessory to the crime was the same John Fox who had once been apprenticed to him. He visited Fox in gaol.
‘I found him to be my apprentice of many years ago,’ wrote the seventy-one-year-old John Lawrence in a letter to the West Ham Herald. ‘I feel it my bounden duty to do all I can on behalf of the poor fellow in the very serious and dreadful position that he has unwittingly placed himself in.’
6
THIS IS THE KNIFE
Fox, Robert and Nattie waited in Holloway gaol for a week. At six o’clock each morning, they were woken by the sound of keys grinding in locks as the warders opened the cell doors. At 7.30 they were given breakfast (a saucerful of porridge) and at ten taken to the exercise court, a large high-walled yard around which they walked in single file. They were returned to their cells after an hour. At midday they had dinner – meat or soup or ‘stirabout’ (corn and oatmeal) served in a tin pot – and at five a tea of bread and gruel or cocoa. Smoking was prohibited. Apart from the daily exercise hour and two chapel services on Sunday, they remained alone in their separate cells. The doors were locked for the night at seven.