The Surgeon of Crowthorne Read online

  The railway chiefs of old never bothered to build a grand station hotel at Waterloo – though they did build monster structures of great luxury at the other London stations, like Victoria and Paddington, and even St Pancras and King’s Cross. For Lambeth has long been one of the nastier parts of London; until very recently, with the further development of the South Bank Centre, no one of any style and consequence has ever wanted to linger there, neither a passenger back in the days of the Victorian boat-trains, nor anyone for any reason at all today. It is slowly improving; but its reputation dogs it.

  A hundred years ago it was positively vile. It was low and marshy and undrained, a swampy gyre of pathways where a sad little stream called the Neckinger seeped into the Thames. The land was jointly owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Duke of Cornwall, landlords who, rich enough in their own right, never bothered to develop it in the manner of the great lords of London – Grosvenor, Bedford, Devonshire – who created the squares and mansions and terraces on the far side of the river.

  So it was instead a place of warehouses and tenant shacks, and miserable rows of ill-built houses. There were blacking factories and soap-boilers, small firms of dyers and lime-burners, and tanning yards where the leather-workers used a substance for darkening skins that was known as ‘pure’ and that was gathered from the streets each night by the filthiest of the local indigents – ‘pure’ being a Victorian term for dog turds.

  A sickly smell of yeast and hops lay over the town, wafting from the chimneys of the great Red Lion Brewery that stood on Belvedere Road, just north of the Hungerford Bridge. And this bridge was symbolic of what encompassed the entire Marsh: the railways, hefted high over the swamps, on viaducts on which the trains (including those of the London Necropolis Railway, built to take corpses to Woking) chuffed and snorted, and across which miles of wagons lurched and banged. Lambeth was widely regarded as one of the noisiest and most sulphurous parts of a capital that already had a grim reputation for din and dirt.

  Lambeth Marsh was also, as it happened, just beyond the legal jurisdiction of both the cities of London and Westminster. It belonged administratively, at least until 1888, to the county of Surrey – meaning that the relatively strict laws that applied to the capital’s citizens did not apply to anyone who ventured, via one of the new bridges like Waterloo, Blackfriars, Westminster or Hungerford, into the wen of Lambeth. The village thus became fast known as a site of revelry and abandon, a place where public houses and brothels and lewd theatres abounded, and where a man could find entertainment of all kinds – and disease of all varieties – for no more than a handful of pennies. To see a play that would not pass muster with the London censors, or to be able to drink absinthe into the small hours of the morning, or to buy the choicest of pornography newly smuggled from Paris, or to have a girl of any age and not be concerned that a Bow Street Runner, or her parents, might chase after you – you ‘went Surreyside’, as they said, to Lambeth.

  But, as with most slums, its cheapness attracted respectable men to live and work in Lambeth too, and by all accounts George Merrett was one of them. He was a stoker at the Red Lion Brewery; he had been there for the previous eight years, employed all the time as one of the gang who kept the fires burning through the day and night, keeping the vats bubbling and the barley malting. He was thirty-four years old and he lived locally, at 24 Cornwall Cottages on the Cornwall Road.

  George Merrett was, like so many young workers in Victorian London, an immigrant from the countryside, and so was his wife, Eliza. He came from a village in Wiltshire, she from Gloucestershire. They had both been farm labourers, and, with no protection from unions, no solidarity with their fellows, had been paid a pittance to perform pointless tasks for pitiless masters. They had met at a farm show in the Cotswolds, and vowed to leave together for the immeasurable possibilities that were offered by London, now only two hours away on the new express train from Swindon. They moved first to north London, where their oldest child, Clare, was born in 1860; then they shifted into the city centre; and finally in 1867, the family having become too large, costly and manual work too scarce, they found themselves near the brewery site in the bustling wen of Lambeth.

  The young couple’s surroundings and lodgings were exactly as the illustrator Gustave Doré had drawn on one of his horrified expeditions from Paris: a dim world of bricks and soot and screeching iron, of huddled tenements, of tiny backyards with privy and clothes-boiler and washing-line, and everywhere an air of damp and gritty stench, and even a rough-hewn rollicking hugger-mugger devil-may-care and peculiarly London type of good cheer. Whether the Merretts missed the fields and the cider and the skylarks, or whether they imagined that ideal truly ever was the world they had left, we shall never know.

  For by the winter of 1871 George and Eliza had, as was typical of the inhabitants of the dingier quarters of Victorian London, a very substantial family: six children, ranging from Clare at nearly twelve years old, to Freddy at twelve months. Mrs Merrett was about to be confined with her seventh pregnancy. They were a poor family, as were most in Lambeth: George Merrett brought home twenty-four shillings a week, a miserable sum even then. With rent payable to the Archbishop, and with food needed for the eight ever open mouths, theirs were straitened circumstances indeed.

  On the Saturday morning, just before 2 a.m., Merrett was awakened by a neighbour tapping on his window, as prearranged. He rose from bed, and readied himself for the dawn shift. It was a bitter morning, and he dressed as warmly as he could afford: a threadbare greatcoat over the kind of smock-jacket that Victorians called a slop, a tattered grey shirt, corduroy trousers tied at the ankle with twine, heavy socks and black boots. The clothes were none too clean: but he was to heave coal for the next eight hours, and could not be bothered with appearance.

  His wife recalled him striking a light before leaving home: her last sight of him was under one of the bright gas lamps with which Lambeth’s streets had recently been outfitted. His breath was visible in the cold night air – or maybe he was just puffing on his pipe – and he walked purposefully down to the end of Cornwall Road before turning left into Upper Ground, and then down to its continuation, Belvedere Road. The night was clear and starlit and, once his footsteps had faded, soundless except for the clanking and puffing of the ever present railway engines.

  Mrs Merrett had no reason to be concerned: she assumed, as she had for each of the twenty previous nights on which her husband had worked the dawn shift, that all would be well. George was simply making his way as usual towards the high walls and ornate gates of the great brewery where he worked, shovelling coal beneath the shadow of the great red lion – the brewer’s symbol – that was one of London’s better-known landmarks. There may have been little money in the job; but working at so famous an institution as the Red Lion Brewery, well, that was some reason for pride.

  But that night George Merrett never reached his destination. As he passed the entrance to Tenison Street, between where the south side of the Lambeth Lead Works abuts on to the north wall of the brewery, there came a sudden cry. A man shouted at him, appeared to be chasing him, was yelling furiously. Merrett was frightened: this was something more than a mere footpad, a silent and menacing figure who lurked in the dark with a cosh and a mask. Merrett began to run in terror, slipping and sliding on the frost-slick cobbles. He looked back: the man was still there, still chasing after him, still shouting angrily. Then, quite incredibly, he stopped and raised a gun at him, took aim and fired.

  The shot missed, whistling past and striking the brewery wall. George Merrett tried to run faster. He cried out for help. There was another shot. Perhaps another. And then a final shot that struck the unfortunate Merrett in the neck. He fell heavily on to the cobbled pavement, his face down, a pool of blood spreading around him.

  Moments later came the running footfalls of Constable Burton, who found the man, lifted him, attempted to comfort him. The other policeman, William Ward, summoned a passing hansom cab up from the
still busy thoroughfare ofWaterloo Road. They picked up the wounded man gently from the ground and hoisted him into the vehicle and ordered the driver to take them as fast as possible to St Thomas’s Hospital, 500 yards further south on Belvedere Road, across from the Archbishop’s London palace. The horses did their best, their hoofs striking fire from the cobbles as they rushed the victim to the emergency entrance.

  It was a fruitless journey. Doctors examined George Merrett, attempted to close the gaping wound in his neck. But his carotid artery had been severed, his spine snapped by two large-calibre bullets.

  The man who had perpetrated this unprecedented crime was, within moments of committing it, in the firm custody of Constable Henry Tarrant. He was a tall, well-dressed man of what the policeman described as ‘military appearance’, with an erect bearing and a haughty air. He held a smoking revolver in his right hand. He made no attempt to run, but stood silently as the policeman approached.

  ‘Who is it that has fired?’ asked the constable.

  ‘I did,’ said the man, and held up the gun.

  Tarrant snatched it from him. ‘Whom did you fire at?’ he asked.

  The man pointed down Belvedere Road, and to the figure lying motionless beneath a street lamp, just outside the brewery store. He made the only droll remark that history records him as having made – but a remark that, as it happens, betrayed one of the driving weaknesses of his life.

  ‘It was a man,’ he said, with a tone of disdain. ‘You do not suppose I would be so cowardly as to shoot a woman!’

  By now two other policemen had arrived on the scene, as had other inquisitive locals – among them the Hungerford Bridge toll-collector, who at first had not dared go out ‘for fear I would take a bullet’, and a woman undressing in her room in Tenison Street – a street in which it was apparently far from uncommon for women to be undressing at all hours. Constable Tarrant, pointing towards the victim and ordering his two fellow policemen to see what they could do for him, and prevent a crowd from gathering, escorted the supposed – and unprotesting – murderer to the Tower Street Police Station.

  On the way his prisoner became rather more voluble, though Tarrant describes him as cool and collected, and clearly not affected by drink. It had all been a terrible accident, he said; he had shot the wrong man, he insisted. He was after someone else, someone quite different. Someone had broken into his room; he was simply chasing him away, defending himself as anyone surely had a perfect right to do.

  ‘Don’t handle me!’ he then said, when Tarrant put a hand on his shoulder. But he added, rather more gently, ‘You have not searched me, you know.’

  ‘I’ll do that at the station,’ replied the constable.

  ‘How do you know I haven’t got another gun, and might shoot you?’

  The policeman, plodding and imperturbable, replied that if he did have another gun, perhaps he would be so kind as to keep it in his pocket, for the time being.

  ‘But I do have a knife,’ replied the prisoner.

  ‘Keep that in your pocket also,’ said the stolid peeler.

  There turned out to be no other gun; but a search did turn up a long hunting knife in a leather sheath, strapped to the man’s braces behind his back.

  ‘A surgical instrument,’ he explained. ‘I don’t always carry it with me.’

  Tarrant, once he had completed the search, explained to the desk-sergeant what had happened on Belvedere Road a few moments before. The pair then set about formally interviewing the arrested man.

  His name was William Chester Minor. He was thirty-seven years old, and, as the policemen suspected from his bearing, a former army officer. He was also a qualified surgeon. He had lived in London for less than a year and had taken rooms locally, living alone in a simple furnished upstairs room near by at 41 Tenison Street. He evidently had no financial need to live so economically, for he was in fact a man of very considerable means. He hinted that he had come to this lubricious quarter of town for reasons other than the simply monetary, though what those reasons were did not emerge in the early interrogations. By dawn he was taken off to the Horsemonger Lane Gaol, charged with murder.

  But there was one additional complication. Minor, it turned out, came from New Haven, Connecticut. He had a commission in the United States Army. He was an American.

  This put a wholly new complexion on the case. The American Legation had to be told: and so in the mid-morning, despite being a Saturday, the Foreign Office formally notified the United States Minister in London that one of their army surgeons had been arrested and was being held on a charge of murder. The shooting on Belvedere Road, Lambeth, already because of the rarity of a shooting a cause célèbre, had now become an international incident.

  The British papers, always eager to vent editorial spleen on their transatlantic rivals, made hay with this particular aspect of the story.

  ‘The light estimation in which human life is held by Americans,’ sniffed the South London Press,

  may be noted as one of the most significant points of difference between them and Englishmen, and this is a most shocking example of it brought to our own doors. The victim of a cruel mistake has left a wife near confinement, and six children, the eldest only twelve, to the mercy of the world. It is gratifying to be able to record that the benevolent are coming forward with alacrity to the succour of the widow and the fatherless, and it is most sincerely to be hoped that all who can spare even a trifle will do their best to help the victims of this dreadful tragedy. The American Vice-Consul-General has, in the most thoughtful manner, opened a subscription list, and issued an appeal to Americans now in London to do what they can to alleviate the misery which an act of their countryman’s has entailed.

  Scotland Yard detectives were soon put on to the case, so important had it suddenly become that justice was seen to be done on both sides of the Atlantic. Since Minor, silent in his prison cell, was offering no help except to say that he did not know the victim and had shot him in error, they began to investigate any possible motive. In doing so, they uncovered the beginning of the trail of a remarkable and tragic life.

  William Chester Minor had come to Britain the previous autumn, because he was ill – suffering at least in part from an ailment that some papers said ‘was occasioned by the looseness of his private life’. It was suggested by the lawyer later appointed to defend him that his motivation in coming to England was to quieten a mind that had become, as Victorian doctors were apt to say, ‘inflamed’. It was said that he had suffered ‘a lesion on the brain’, and many causes were put forward as to why this had happened. He had, his lawyer said, been in an asylum in America, and had taken retirement from the army on the grounds of ill health. He had been described by those who met him as ‘a gentleman of fine education and ability, but with eccentric and dissolute habits’.

  He first settled at Radley’s Hotel, in the West End, and from there travelled by train to the major cities of Europe. He had brought with him a letter from a friend at Yale University, recommending him to John Ruskin, the celebrated British artist and critic. The two men had met, once; and Minor had been encouraged to take his water-colouring equipment along with him on his travels, and paint as a form of relaxation.

  As the police imagined, Minor had moved from the West End shortly after Christmas 1871 and settled in Lambeth – a highly dubious choice for a man like this unless, as he later admitted, it offered him easy access to easy women. The American authorities told Scotland Yard they already had records of his behaviour as an army officer: he had a long history of frequenting what were then beginning to be called the ‘tenderloin districts’ of the cities in which he had been posted – most notably New York, where he had been sent to Governors Island and from where, on his leave days, he had gone regularly to some of Manhattan’s roughest bars and music-halls. He had, it was said, a prodigious sexual appetite. He had caught venereal disease at least once, and a medical examination conducted at Horsemonger Lane Gaol showed that he had a case of gonorrhoea
even now. He had caught it, he said, from a local prostitute, and had tried to cure it by injecting white Rhine wine into his urethra – an amusingly inventive attempt at a remedy, and one that, not surprisingly, failed.

  His room, however, betrayed none of this seamier side. The detectives found his heavy leather and brass-bound portmanteaus, a great deal of money – mainly French, in twenty livre notes, a gold watch and chain, some Eley’s bullets for his gun, his surgeon’s commission and his letter of appointment as a captain in the US Army. There was also the letter of introduction to Ruskin, as well as a large number of water-colours, evidently completed by Minor himself. They were said by everyone who saw them to be of the highest quality – views of London, largely, many from the hills above the Crystal Palace.

  His landlady, Mrs Fisher, said that he had been a perfectly good tenant but odd. He used to go away for several days at a time and, on returning, rather ostentatiously left his hotel bills – the Charing Cross Hotel was one she remembered, the Crystal Palace another – lying around for all to see. He seemed, she said, a very anxious man. Often he demanded that the furniture in his room be moved. He seemed afraid that people might break in.

  He had one particular worry, Mrs Fisher told the police: Minor was apparently formidably afraid of the Irish. He would ask interminably whether or not she had any Irish servants working in the house – and, if so, demand that they be sacked. Did she have Irish visitors, any other Irish lodgers? He was always to be kept informed – of a possibility that, in Lambeth (which had a large population of casual Irish labourers, working on the legions of London construction sites), was in fact all too real.