The Cretingham Murder (3 page)

This raises the question of what was Harriet doing the following year in Portsea? Was she hoping this time to find a husband from the Royal Navy? Did she need to find a husband to support her? She is described on the census as an ‘Annuitant’. This means she was in receipt of a regular income which may or may not have been more than adequate to keep her. There is no way of telling how much, if any, of her original inheritance from Paget was left but from her late husband she apparently received very little.

Reading the will made by Col Moule just eleven days before his death, it would appear that it was not just his health that had deteriorated. From its tone and the bequests that he made, it looks as if his relationship with Harriet Louisa had become very strained and from some of the wording, one might wonder if, in fact, the couple were living together at the time of his last illness. The colonel started by making a large bequest to his mother of shares in the National Bank of New Zealand and London, the London Steamboat Company and some Japanese Bonds. His sister in New Zealand was also to receive shares and a mortgage on some land in that country while his sister in Essex received shares in a New Zealand woollen factory. To his brother, Robert, he left the house in East Moseley and all its contents excepting ‘wearing apparel jewellery trinkets belonging to and appertaining to my wife and such furnishings as he may feel disposed to give to my wife.’ Harriet Louisa was also left fifty shares in the Wellington Gas Company and some Ottawa Bonds and along with all the other legatees was to receive £15 immediately following the colonel’s death.

Sorting out this will was a very protracted affair involving solicitors both in this country and New Zealand. It was years before it was finally settled, by which time Harriet had remarried. Possibly in the interim she did receive the interest on her shares in the Gas Company but when what was left after all the legal fees had been settled was finally paid out, there was no mention anywhere of the Wellington Gas Company. Perhaps it was her dubious financial position that made Harriet accept the Revd Farley’s proposal.

If, as she later said, she had been used to looking after the young officers in her husband’s regiment, then the villagers of Cretingham must have been in for a shock as she began her cheerful ministrations among them. Having been left to themselves as the previous Mrs Farley had become increasingly infirm, they were probably not ready to be organized on military lines by the colonel’s lady. How fitted she was to take on religious affairs we can’t tell but certainly she involved herself in matters clerical, discussing parish affairs with her new husband.

Cretingham was not a particularly taxing parish. One service a week was the norm, two on special occasions and festivals. ‘Communion Sundays’ were held on an irregular basis while weddings, funerals and baptisms came at infrequent intervals. So Mr Farley was not unduly overworked. This was just as well as his health began to fail. With his increasing weight, he became less mobile, relying on Frank Bilney, the young groom, to drive him to wherever he needed to go. It appears that sometime in 1886–7 he had a minor stroke which incapacitated him further. One of the effects of this was a constriction to the throat which made speech, and therefore the taking of services, very difficult.

His fellow clergy in neighbouring parishes helped out when they could but a long-term solution was needed. It may have been Archdeacon Groome’s suggestion, or perhaps Harriet Louisa’s, that Farley should secure the services of a curate. Somewhat reluctantly, since he would have to pay the curate’s stipend out of his own pocket, Farley agreed to accept the young man recommended by the archdeacon.

The Revd Arthur Gilbert-Cooper

And so it was that in late September 1886, the third player in this drama entered upon the scene. Into this household of an ageing, infirm and short-tempered man, his much younger, still vivacious, and probably frustrated wife, came 33-year-old Arthur Edward Gilbert-Cooper. Small in stature, not much over 5ft tall, he was a good looking, open faced young man. He had thick black hair, and in the fashion of the time, a light brown moustache and neat, small side-whiskers. His vivid grey eyes dominated a face that was still boyish. Here was enough to set aflutter the hearts of susceptible village maidens – and possibly that of the vicar’s wife, too.

Arthur was not only presentable to look at, but he also came from an impeccable background. The Gilbert-Coopers could trace their lineage back at least to the fifteenth century. In return for service to the Crown, Henry VIII had granted early members of the family lands in Nottinghamshire following the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Thurgarton Priory became the family seat for generations and it was there that Arthur’s father, the Revd William Wright Gilbert-Cooper had been born. That he had not had to struggle on a clergy stipend is revealed by his will which not only mentions substantial financial settlements made on his marriage, and later those of his daughters, as well as large bequests to each of his children, but also lists among household items family portraits by the renowned artists Kneller, Lely and Sir Thomas Lawrence.

Arthur’s mother, Catherine (née Shuldham) also came from an ancient lineage. Her family was well established in Norfolk by the fourteenth century but coincidentally, could be traced back to Suffolk when in the first years of the fifteenth century an early Shuldham had married a co-heiress of Roger Wolverston who owned the lands of the village that bears that name. Catherine, however, had a much closer connection with Suffolk, her mother having been the daughter of the Revd Naunton Leman of Brampton Hall. Her father, who was descended from the Irish Shuldhams, was a Royal Navy Commander who had seen action at the famous Battle of Copenhagen alongside Nelson. The commander was also an inventor and one of the many ideas he laid before the Admiralty in the first years of the nineteenth century was that for a torpedo. However, their Lordships rejected the proposal on the grounds that it was ‘too cruel an instrument of war’!

Catherine’s two older brothers are of interest because they were both to play a small part in the subsequent history to be unfolded. Lt-Col. Arthur Shuldham had served in India in the 1850s and 60s in the Inniskilling Fusiliers. (Lt-Col. Moule had also been in this regiment.)The second brother, Naunton, was an academic who went into the Church. He was for a time a master at Eton and had the distinction of being chosen to act as personal tutor to Prince Leopold, one of Queen Victoria’s sons. Later, taking up a living in Lincolnshire, he spent his last years diagnosed as irrevocably insane.

The Revd William Gilbert-Cooper and Catherine started their life together in the Dover area where William had the curacy of the parishes of River and Guston. Then, in 1854, perhaps prompted by his brother-in-law, he took up an appointment in India as chaplain to the Ecclesiastical Establishment in Madras where he remained for over twenty years. It was in India that Arthur and his brother and four sisters spent their childhood. The only known fact about this period is that when Arthur was about seven he had very severe sunstroke which gave great cause for concern as he was racked with fever for more than six weeks.

Following the pattern of the period, he was later sent home to England to attend Magdalen College School in Oxford. Of his academic prowess there is no record but he does feature in the
MCS Journal
for 1870–3 as having played cricket for the Next 22 against the 1st XI in a match where he scored four runs before being bowled out by a pupil named Faber. In a subsequent match he was out for a duck, so he was not a gifted sportsman. He went on to enter Magdalen College itself, graduating with a BA in 1875 and at the same time being ordained as a deacon in the Church of England.

Again following the trend, he now embarked on a short career as a schoolmaster. He found a position at a school in Godalming in Surrey run by the Revd E.S. Dodd. Although he was immediately popular with both staff and boys, his tenure was brief, receiving instant dismissal for a sudden and frenzied attack on one of the pupils.

A temporary curacy was found for him at Hadzon. It was unlikely he could do much harm in this remote parish near Alnwick in Northumberland where the population of 116 was crammed into eighteen houses.

After a family holiday in Brighton in 1876, his next attempt at employment was in Dorset in the parish of Stourpaine with the much smaller one of Iwerne Steepleton. It was here that Arthur was ordained into the full priesthood. And it may have been here, too, that he was admitted to the brotherhood of Freemasons.

Just when it must have looked as if the Revd and Mrs Gilbert-Cooper had finally got their second son settled, news came in mid-July of 1878 that he had been taken ill and admitted to a private home for the mentally sick in Blandford. The Revd Gilbert-Cooper arrived from his home in Burwash Weald in Kent and, assessing the situation, arranged for Arthur to be removed to London to Northumberland House, opposite Finsbury Park.

Described as ‘a private Home for the reception and treatment of patients suffering from Nervous and Mental Diseases’, Northumberland House was opened in 1814 for the care and treatment of ladies and gentlemen of the upper and middle classes. The prospectus showed an elegant country house, set on high ground, surrounded by gardens extending over seven acres. Information is given that ‘arrangements are made for the classification of the patients according to their various mental conditions and separate villas away from the main Institution afford excellent accommodation for suitable cases, and have nothing of the asylum character about them. Besides medical treatment, every effort is made to promote recovery by means of occupation, exercise and excursions, whilst various indoor amusements, such as Dances, Re-unions, Billiards, Music etc. are provided.’

The rooms were furnished very much as one would expect of a comfortable house of the period. Sofas, easy chairs and pianos feature in the sitting rooms where pictures, pot plants and flowers abounded. Similarly, the dining rooms showed the elegance of gracious living. Only the bedrooms with their six beds in some of them suggested that this was an institution rather than a large family home. Outside, among the well-tended gardens and walks, summer houses offered quiet areas for sitting out while for more active recreation there were tennis courts.

Arthur, however, did not respond to the treatment at Northumberland House. Dr Wright, the medical superintendent, reported that his patient seemed to be under the delusion that he was being poisoned. He was convinced that toxins were seeping out of his body through his fingertips.

His stay there was brought to an abrupt end. One day, at the end of a meal, he rose from the dining table, taking with him one of the dummy knives with which the inmates were provided. Walking past his fellow diners, he stopped behind the chair of a Mr Abbott. He pinioned the poor man and then proceeded to draw the blunt knife across his victim’s throat.

The assault led to Arthur’s immediate transfer to the more secure St Luke’s Hospital. Situated just outside London Wall, the asylum was already almost a hundred years old, having been built in 1787. Vastly overcrowded, it accommodated 300 patients in premises that the contemporary
Commission on Lunacy
described as gloomy and lacking in space for the recreation of the patients. The acquisition of a disused burial ground did something to alleviate the latter situation! Images of the worst asylums we have seen depicted in period films spring to mind but we are assured that after 1856 ‘restraint’ was no longer in use in the hospital and that during the time Arthur was there, bars were removed from the windows to avoid the impression that the institution was a prison.

The food served was nutritious, if uninteresting, but the chief criticism was the lack of activities such as had been available at Northumberland House to occupy the mind. The hospital did, however, have a high reputation for its medical treatment, with most patients being admitted in the expectation that they would be cured. Very few were held indefinitely.

Diagnosed as suffering from ‘Mania’, Arthur entered St Luke’s on 2 November 1878, his father paying 14
s
a week for his maintenance.

Almost four years were to pass before he was discharged by the hospital on 8 September 1882 as ‘relieved but not cured’. The hospital records show that the request for his discharge came from ‘friends’. This term is often used in Victorian times to indicate relatives but it is known that Arthur did have friends who had supported him throughout his illness. One of these was John Stainer, better known to us as Dr Stainer, the composer of the oratorio
The Crucifixion
. He had been organist at Magdalen College during the period that Arthur had been resident there but now he held the prestigious post at St Paul’s Cathedral. It was to Stainer’s lodgings that Arthur went when he left hospital. The musician being at St Paul’s at the time, Arthur was directed to seek him there. Accounts vary about what happened when the two men met. One version was that Stainer offered him accommodation for the night and sent him off next day to other ‘friends’. The other is that Stainer gave him the address of a relation who in turn gave him half a sovereign to pay for a bed in a hotel for the night.

His movements from his release until 1884 are unknown. It is possible that he returned to his father’s home in Burwash Weald in Kent, occasionally assisting with services and parish duties there. Certainly he was known and well liked by his father’s parishioners. When it seemed that he had sufficiently recovered, he became a curate for the parishes of River and Guston on the outskirts of Dover. That his father had held a similar post here some thirty years earlier suggests that the living was held by a family connection.

Was it here or at his father’s home that he became romantically involved? Wherever it was, the prospect of a liaison between his son and the daughter of a farmer did not meet with approval. The newspaper account which mentions this affair implied that the match was not allowed on grounds of class. It was reported that as one of Arthur’s sisters had just married into the upper echelons of Kent society, his forming an alliance with farming stock was unthinkable. It seems much more likely that in view of his history, his family thought it prudent he remain single. This episode may also account for certain actions which were taken later at Cretingham.