The Wicked Boy (18 page)

‘They are apparently sensational stories,' said Kennedy. He looked through the bundle and then laid it down on the bench by his side.

During Gilbert's evidence, Robert quietly laughed to himself. He began to make comical, grotesque faces at both the inspector and the judge. He stuck out his tongue at Justice Kennedy, who looked back at him severely. The
Evening News
noted that the boy had devised a game whereby he would smile and look intelligent, then pass both hands down over his face before removing them to reveal his eyebrows twitching and his lips moving, as if he were repeating words to himself. He would replace this distorted face in a flash with a bright, calm expression. The
London Daily News
interpreted Robert's changing faces not as a parody or impersonation of madness but as spasms of emotion. ‘His callousness in the dock was extraordinary,' it reported, ‘though now and then he buried his face in his hands. At other times, he made hideous grimaces at the Judge and witnesses.' He often looked ‘more like an ape than a human being', said the
Sun
, ‘mouthing in a meaningless way like an idiot'. As a defendant in a murder trial, Robert was not entitled to give evidence. His equivocal plea – ‘Guilty' and then ‘Not guilty' – and his strange dumb show were the only representations he could make. His performance was hard to read: some observers saw a clever boy mocking the proceedings; others a child who had lost control.

Once he had dismissed Inspector Gilbert, Gill had finished establishing the facts of the case. He would now summon witnesses to testify to Robert's character: Gill intended to show that the boy was rational rather than insane. First he called the headmasters of the three board schools that Robert had attended in Plaistow.

Robert and Nattie had been going to school since they were five.
From nine o'clock to twelve o'clock
each morning and from two to four each afternoon, they took classes in one of the large school buildings that had been established after the passage of the Education Act of 1870. A West Ham board school educated more than a thousand pupils, grouped in classes of between seventy and eighty. The infants (those children younger than seven) were usually housed on the ground floor, the girls on the next floor and the boys on the top.

The regime in the board schools was strict. Children were expected to rise when an adult entered or left a room, to answer ‘Yes, ma'am', ‘No, sir', ‘If you please, ma'am' when addressing teachers, to form neat lines to file in and out of the building. When not at their lessons, they were taught to hold their hands behind their backs or to place them on their heads. They learnt to stand to attention at their desks and to march on the spot in unison. The teachers in East London schools checked the children's faces for dirt in the mornings and
endeavoured to train their young charges not to drop the ‘h's
at the beginning of words. For discipline, they used the cane. Order, cleanliness and obedience were the chief precepts of the system.

Critics complained that the board schools espoused a rigid, mechanical style of learning, driven by the fact that their grants were awarded according to the number of children who rose by
an academic ‘standard'
each year. There was little incentive to foster the children's creativity and self-expression. None the less, the towering school buildings were beacons of aspiration – ‘
oases', as one commentator described them
, ‘in the desert of drab two-storied cottages'. ‘
Each school
,' said another observer, ‘stands up from its playground like a church in God's acre ringing its bell.'

The Coombes boys' first school
was in Limehouse, where they and their parents lived until 1890. The family then moved temporarily to Toxteth Park, Liverpool, where the brothers spent a year at St Bride's school. On their return to London in 1891 both boys attended Grange Road school, known locally as the Sewer Bridge school because of its proximity to the bridge over the Northern Outfall Sewer, which carried north London's effluent to the Thames.

‘I am headmaster of the Grange Road school,' said George Hollamby, a fifty-three-year-old widower who lived in Stratford and had worked at the school since it opened in 1881. ‘Robert Coombes was there in 1891, 1892 and 1893. He left in 1893, though there was a long interval of absence between 1891 and 1892.' The Coombes family had again spent several months in Toxteth Park in this period. It was on their return to London that they moved to 35 Cave Road.

‘When he left he was in the fourth standard,' said Hollamby. ‘His capacity was very good.'

The fourth standard, which Robert attained when he was eleven, was the level required to graduate from elementary school at thirteen. To achieve this standard, a child needed to recite eighty lines of poetry, read with fluency and expression from a passage chosen by the school inspector, write from dictation, making no more than three spelling mistakes, solve maths problems relating to weight, length and area, and be tested in drawing, singing and two other subjects such as grammar, geography, science or history. To prepare for the tests, the pupils memorised material in their ‘readers', textbooks containing a miscellany of literary extracts and factual lists of kings, battles, rivers, British colonies, and so on. Inspectors visited the schools to examine the children in the autumn.

Robert's counsel, Grantham, asked Hollamby why the boy had left his school.

‘In November 1893 he ran away from school,' the headmaster said. ‘There was a slight trouble in the school with the teacher.'

Grantham asked whether a doctor had been involved in Robert's transfer from Grange Road to the nearby Stock Street board school.

‘I know nothing about his being removed owing to a doctor's interference,' replied Hollamby. ‘The school committee made a special order for his removal to Stock Street – that school was full at the time.'

Grantham asked whether Robert had suffered from headaches.

‘While with me he complained of headache on more than one occasion,' said Hollamby.

Gill, for the prosecution, asked how often he had made such complaints, and to whom.

‘He complained that his head ached to me or to the teacher,' said Hollamby. ‘Not often.'

‘
I am headmaster of Stock Street school,' said Gill's next witness, Jesse Weber Smith, a forty-four-year-old teacher who lived in Forest Gate, north of Plaistow, and had been in charge of Stock Street since it opened in 1888. ‘Robert was in Standard V when admitted. He passed that and was in Standard VI. I should say he was a very clever boy for his age.' The requirements for the fifth standard included a hundred-line recitation and the addition and subtraction of fractions. Since relatively few children attained this level, the class to which Robert graduated at Stock Street was smaller than those lower down the school, and dominated by ‘clean-collar' boys from more respectable homes.

In cross-examination, Grantham asked Smith about the circumstances of Robert's transfer. Smith said that the West Ham school committee had made a special order for Robert's admission to Stock Street. ‘Our school was full at the time – it was an unusual thing to make such an order.'

Grantham asked him how Stock Street differed from Grange Road school.

‘There is very little difference between the schools,' said Smith. ‘They are both public elementary schools. I suppose the exchange was made in consequence of a report by the attendance officer.'

Grantham asked him about Robert's behaviour. ‘I gave the boy a good character while with me,' said Smith. ‘He was a very good boy, who gave no trouble whatsoever.'

‘He was very precocious?' asked Grantham.

‘No,' Smith replied. ‘I should not say that.'

Grantham was trying to suggest that Robert was mentally abnormal. Many scientists, Lombroso among them, held that precocity was a form of disease. ‘
Singularly precocious
' children ‘of extreme nervous constitution', observed the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, were the ‘outcomes of a process of degeneracy in the stock'. The
Dictionary of Psychological Medicine
advised that such children were more prone to madness than others.

The latest instalment of Thomas Hardy's new novel
 – subsequently published as
Jude the Obscure
 – featured just such a child, a prematurely adult nine-year-old called Little Father Time.
Little Time is an old soul
in a young body, a figure of the despair and foreboding of the
fin de siècle
. He is tormented by the idea that he and his younger siblings are a burden to his parents and, in the chapter published in
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
in September 1895, he decides to kill the other children and then himself. They are found in their bedroom dangling from clothes hooks.

‘The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us,' says the child's father, Jude; ‘boys of a sort unknown in the last generation – the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them.'

The next witness for the prosecution was Charles Truelove, forty, another resident of Forest Gate and the headmaster of Cave Road school. Both Coombes brothers had transferred to this school when it opened in July 1894. The entrance to the boys' playground was through a decorative brick archway directly opposite the front door of 35 Cave Road. Truelove testified that Robert had left school for good on 30 May, having reached the age as well as the standard required by law.

‘He was a very intelligent lad,' said Truelove. ‘He passed the sixth standard with me and was placed in the seventh. He was a very good boy.' To pass the sixth standard, a boy needed to be able to understand proportion, vulgar fractions and recurring decimals (the education department ruled that questions involving recurring decimals would not be put to girls) as well as to recite 150 lines by Shakespeare, Milton or another canonical author, and to explain the allusions in the passage that he had learnt.

Nattie was still on the school roll, said Truelove. He had passed the fifth standard exams in the autumn and was now studying for the sixth. Nattie had attended school until Friday 5 July, said the headmaster, but was absent on the following Monday. This was the day of his mother's murder. ‘I sent to ask about him,' said Truelove, ‘and a verbal answer came that he had gone into the country.'

The testimony of all three headmasters contradicted the rumours that had been published in the papers about Robert's persistent truancy and disobedience. Rather, he emerged as a compliant and very able pupil, well liked by his teachers. He had flourished at school, the mysterious incident at Grange Road excepted. Gill had succeeded in establishing that the boy was astute and rational, but in the process had made him a more sympathetic figure: sensitive, gifted, eager to please his elders.

Gill's last witness was Robert's employer at
the Thames Iron Works
, the shipyard at which he had taken a job a fortnight after leaving Truelove's school.

Johnson described himself as foreman plater at the Thames Iron and Shipbuilding Company Limited. He said that Robert was employed by the company in June as a plater's boy. ‘He worked under my supervision and I considered his capacity was very good.'

Robert was one of about 3,000 employees of the Thames Iron Works, a company that manufactured and built vessels on the dry docks. When he joined ‘the Limited', as the works were known locally, the yard was building a Japanese battleship,
the
Fuji Yama
, a project that had been severely delayed by the ice and frosts of the winter. In June, in the heat, the construction was proceeding at a furious pace – the workers were putting 150 tons of iron on to the ship's frame each week.

The managers of heavily unionised industries such as shipbuilding and boilermaking found it much cheaper to hire boys than men.
A couple of decades earlier
, boys had been employed as apprentices to platers, riveters and caulkers, but the increase in automation meant that they were now more often used to run errands and mind machines. A plater's boy might also assist his boss in the workshop, cutting and shaping sheets of iron on a lathe, placing them on moulds and bending them into shape. The armour plates, more than fifteen feet long, three feet wide and four inches thick, were sent to the ship's skeleton to be riveted and welded into place.

The work in the shops and the dry docks was dirty and exhausting, and it could be dangerous. Some employees fell to their deaths from scaffolds over the ships, were crushed by iron sheets, burnt by red-hot bolts or blown up by exploding boilers. Most were eventually deafened by the roar of the yard. The hammers rang and pounded, the machines thrashed and whirred, the lathes shrieked through metal, the guns fired rivets into the plates.

Robert wanted to leave the shipyard almost as soon as he had started but his mother insisted that he stick with it:
she had withstood years of relative hardship
in the expectation that the family's collective income would rise when the boys went out to work. Though Robert's pay was far less than an adult worker's wage it was still a significant contribution to the family purse – typically, an assistant to a plater would earn between five and eight shillings a week. Boy workers handed their earnings over to their mothers, who usually gave them about sixpence back as pocket money. Since women controlled the household budgets, even men tended to give the bulk of their wage packets to their wives.

George Johnson informed the court that Robert worked at the iron yard until Monday 24 June, and came back for his money the next day. He left without giving a reason. Johnson provided him with a good reference for future employers.

Robert resigned from the ironworks on the day after the
France
reached London. He may have calculated that his father's return would both ease the immediate pressure on the family finances and shield him from his mother's wrath.
Coombes brought home £9 2/-
from his latest trip. Having not even known that his son had taken a job, he could not be angry with him for quitting it. But the problem of Robert's employment was left unresolved. Although he had chosen to leave the yard, it was humiliating for him to be without work. Other boys of his age took pride in being able to put food on the family table and pleasure in being able to buy treats for themselves: cigarettes, novelettes, music-hall tickets, fish and chips. To become a breadwinner was a step towards manhood, and it brought a rise in a boy's status within the home – at mealtimes, for instance, the wage earners would be served first and most generously. Without employment, Robert had no rights over the family provisions: the power to give or withhold remained with his mother.