The Surgeon of Crowthorne Read online

  Yet it was not until the murder trial, held in early April, that the full extent of Minor’s illness was to become starkly apparent. Among the score of witnesses who appeared before the Lord Chief Justice in the court at Kingston Assizes – for this was Surrey’s jurisdiction still, not London’s – three of them told a stunned courtroom what they knew of the sad captain.

  The London police, for a start, admitted they were already somewhat acquainted with him, and that some time before the murder knew that they had a troubled man living in their midst. A Scotland Yard detective named Williamson testified that Minor had come to the Yard three months before, complaining that men were coming to his room at night, trying to poison him. He thought that they were Fenians, members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, militant Irishmen, and they were bent on breaking into his lodgings, hiding in the roof rafters, slipping through the windows.

  He made such allegations several times, said Williamson; shortly before Christmas Minor had persuaded the Commissioner of Police in New Haven to write a letter to the Yard, underlining the fears that Minor felt. Even after the doctor moved to Tenison Street, he kept in touch with Williamson: on 12 January he wrote that he had been drugged, and was afraid that the Fenians were planning to murder him and make it look as though his death were suicide.

  A classic cry for help, one might think today. But an exasperated Superintendent Williamson did nothing and told no one, beyond noting with some contempt in his log-book that Minor was clearly – and this was the first use of the word to describe the hapless American – insane.

  Then came a witness who had something very curious to offer from his observations of Minor during the time the American was held in remand in the cells at Horsemonger Lane.

  The witness, whose name was William Dennis, was a member of a profession that has long since receded from modern memory: he was what was called a Bethlem Watcher. Usually he was employed at the Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane – such a dreadful place that the name has given us the word bedlam today – where his duties included watching the prisoner-patients through the night, to make sure that they behaved themselves and did not cheat justice by committing suicide. He had been seconded to the Horsemonger Lane Gaol in mid-February, he said, to watch the nocturnal activities of the strange visitor. He had watched him, he testified, for twenty-four nights.

  It was a most curious and disturbing experience, Mr Dennis told the jury. Each morning Minor would wake and immediately accuse him of having taken money from someone, in order specifically to molest him while he slept. Then he would spit, dozens of times, as though trying to remove something that had been put into his mouth. He would next leap from his bed and scrabble about underneath, looking for people who, he insisted, had hidden there and were planning to annoy him. Dennis told his superior, the prison surgeon, that he was quite certain Minor was mad.

  From the police interrogation notes came the evidence of an imagined motive for the crime – and with them a further indication of Minor’s patent instability. Each night, Minor had told his questioners, unknown men – often lower class, often Irish – would come to his room while he was sleeping. They would maltreat him, they would violate him in ways he could not possibly describe. For months, ever since these nocturnal visitors had begun to torment him, he had taken to sleeping with his Colt service revolver, loaded with five cartridges, beneath his pillow.

  On the night in question he awoke with a start, certain that a man was standing in the shadows at the foot of his bed. He reached under the pillow for his gun: the man saw him and took to his heels, running down the stairs and out of the house. Minor followed him as fast as he could, saw a man running down into Belvedere Road, was certain that this was the intruder, shouted at him, then fired four times, until he had hit him and the man lay still, unable to harm him further.

  The court listened in silence. The landlady shook her head. No one could get into her house at night without a key, she said. Everyone slept very lightly. There could be no intruder.

  And as final confirmation, the court then heard from the prisoner’s stepbrother, George Minor. It had been a nightmare, said George, having brother William staying in the family house in New Haven. Every morning he would accuse people of trying to break into his room the night before and try to molest him. He was being persecuted. Evil men were trying to insert metallic biscuits, coated with poison, into his mouth. They were in league with others who hid in the attic, and came down at night while he was asleep, and treated him foully. Everything was punishment, he said, for an act he had been forced to commit while in the US Army. Only by going to Europe, he said, could he escape from his demons. He would travel, and paint, and live the life of a respected gentleman of art and culture – and the persecutors might melt away into the night.

  The court listened in melancholy silence, while Minor sat in the dock, morose, shamed. The lawyer whom the American Consul-General had procured for him said only that it was clear that his client was insane, and that the jury should treat him as such.

  The Chief Justice nodded his agreement. It had been a brief but sorry case, the defendant an educated and cultured man, a foreigner and a patriot, a figure quite unlike those wretches who more customarily stood in the dock before him. But the law had to be applied with just precision, whatever the condition or estate of the defendant; and the decision in this affair was in a sense a foregone conclusion.

  For thirty years the law in such cases had been guided by what were known as the McNaghten Rules – named for the man who, in 1843, shot dead the private secretary to Sir Robert Peel, and who was acquitted on the grounds that he was so mad he could not tell right from wrong. The Rules, which judged criminal responsibility rather than guilt, were to be applied in this case, he told the jury. If they were convinced that the prisoner was ‘of unsound mind’ and had killed George Merrett while under some delusion of the kind that they had just heard about, then they must do as juries were wont to do in this extraordinarily lenient time in British justice: they were to find William Chester Minor not guilty on grounds of insanity, and leave the judge to make such custodial sanction as he felt prudent and necessary.

  And this is what the jury did, without deliberation, late on the afternoon of 6 April 1872. They found Minor legally innocent of a murder that everyone including him knew he had committed. The Lord Chief Justice then applied the only sentence that was available to him – a sentence still passed occasionally today, and that has a beguiling charm to its language, despite the swingeing awfulness of its connotations.

  ‘You will be detained in safe custody, Dr Minor,’ said the judge, ‘until Her Majesty’s Pleasure be known.’ It was a decision that was to have unimaginable and wholly unanticipated implications, effects that echo and ripple through the English literary world to this day.

  The Home Department (more familiarly the Home Office) took brief note of the sentence, and made the further decision that Minor’s detention – which, considering the severity of his illness, was likely to occupy the rest of his natural life – would have to be suffered in the newly built showpiece of the British penal system, a sprawling set of red-brick blocks located behind high walls and spiked fences in the village of Crowthorne, in the royal county of Berkshire. Minor was to be transported as soon as was convenient from his temporary prison in Surrey to the Asylum for the Criminally Insane, Broadmoor.

  Dr William C. Minor, Assistant Surgeon, United States Army, now a forlornly proud figure from one of the oldest and best-regarded families of New England, was thus to be henceforward formally designated in Britain by Broadmoor Patient Number 742, and to be held in permanent custody as a Certified Criminal Lunatic.

  Chapter Two

  The Man Who Taught Latin to Cattle

  polymath (’polImæθ), sb. (a.) Also 7 polumathe. [ad. Gr. πoλuμαθης having learnt much, f. πoλυ- much + μαθ-, stem of μανθáνειν to learn. So F. polymathe.] a. A person of much or varied learning; one acquainted with various subjects of
study.

  1621 BURTON Anat. Mel. Democr. to Rdr. (1676) 4/2 To be thought and held Polumathes and Polyhistors. a 1840 MOORE Devil among Schol. 7 The Polymaths and Polyhistors, Polyglots and all their sisters. 1855 M. PATTISON Ess. I. 290 He belongs to the class which German writers… have denominated ‘Polymaths’. 1897 O. SMEATON Smollett ii. 30 One of the last of the mighty Scots polymaths.

  philology (fI’lɒləd3I). [In Chaucer, ad. L. philologia; in 17th c. prob. a. F. philologie, ad. L. philologia, a. Gr. φιλoλoγiα, abstr. sb. from φιλóλoγoς fond of speech, talkative; fond of discussion or argument; studious of words; fond of learning and literature, literary; f. φιλo- PHILO- + λóγoς word, speech, etc.]

  1. Love of learning and literature; the study of literature, in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation, the relation of literature and written records to history, etc.; literary or classical scholarship; polite learning.

  It took more than seventy years to create the twelve tombstone-sized volumes that made up the first edition of what was to become the great Oxford English Dictionary. This heroic, royally dedicated literary masterpiece was on its completion in 1928 first called the New English Dictionary; but, with the publication of the first supplement in 1933, it became the Oxford ditto, and thenceforward was known familiarly by its initials, as the OED. Over the years following there were five supplements and then, half a century later, a second edition that integrated the first and all subsequent supplement volumes into one new twenty-volume whole. The book remains, in all senses, a truly monumental work – and with very little serious argument is still regarded as a paragon, the definitive guide to the language that, for good or ill, has now become the lingua franca of the civilized modern world.

  Just as English is a very large and complex language, so the OED is a very large and complex book. It defines well over half a million words. It contains scores of millions of characters, and, in at least its early versions, many miles of handset type. The enormous and enormously heavy volumes of the second edition are bound in dark blue cloth: printers and designers and bookbinders worldwide see it as the apotheosis of their art, a handsome and elegant creation that looks and feels more than amply suited to its lexical thoroughness and accuracy.

  The OED’s guiding principle, the principle that has set it apart from most other dictionaries, is its rigorous dependence on gathering quotations from the published or otherwise recorded use of English, and employing them to illustrate the sense of every single word in the language. The reason behind this unusual and tremendously labour-intensive style of editing and compiling was both bold and simple: by gathering and publishing selected quotations, the Dictionary could demonstrate the full range of characteristics of each and every word with a very great degree of precision. Quotations could show exactly how a word has been employed over the centuries, how it has undergone subtle changes of shades of meaning, or spelling, or pronunciation, and, perhaps most important of all, how and more exactly when each word was slipped into the language in the first place. No other means of dictionary compilation could do such a thing: only by finding and showing examples could the full range of a word’s past possibilities be explored.

  The aims of those who began the project, back in the 1850s, were bold and laudable, but there were distinct commercial disadvantages to their methods: it took an immense amount of time to construct a dictionary on this basis, it was too time-consuming to keep up with the evolution of the language it sought to catalogue, the work that finally resulted was uncommonly vast and needed to be kept updated with almost equally vast additions. It remains to this day for all of these reasons a hugely expensive book both to produce and to buy.

  Yet withal it is widely accepted that the OED has a value far beyond its price; it remains in print and continues to sell well. It is the unrivalled corner-stone of any good library, an essential work for any reference collection. And it is still cited as a matter of course – ‘the OED says…’ – in parliaments and courtrooms and schools and lecture halls in every corner of the English-speaking world, and probably in countless others beyond.

  It wears its status with a magisterial self-assurance, not least by giving its half million definitions a robustly Victorian certitude of tone. Some call the language of the Dictionary outdated, high-flown, even arrogant. Note well, they say by way of example, how infuriatingly prissy the compilers remain, when dealing with so modest an oath as bloody. The modern editors place the original NED definition between quotation marks – it is a word ‘now constantly in the mouths of the lowest classes, but by respectable people considered “a horrid word”, on a par with obscene or profane language, and usually printed in the newspapers (in police reports, etc.) “b—y”’ – but even the modern definition is too lamely self-regarding for most: ‘There is no ground for the notion,’ today’s entry reassures us, ‘that “bloody”, offensive as from associations it now is to ears polite, contains any profane allusion.’

  It is those with ears polite, one supposes, who see in the Dictionary something quite different: they worship it as a last bastion of cultured Englishness, a final echo of value from the greatest of all modern empires. But even they will admit of a number of amusing eccentricities about the book, both in its selections and in the editors’ choice of spellings; a small but veritable academic industry has recently developed, in which modern scholars grumble about what they see as the sexism and racism of the work, its fussily and outdated imperial attitude. (And to Oxford’s undying shame there is even one word – though only one – that all admit was actually lost during the decades of its preparation – though the word was added in a supplement, five years after the first edition appeared.)

  There are many such critics, and with the book being such a large and immobile target there will no doubt be many more. And yet most of those who come to use it, no matter how doctrinally critical they may be of its shortcomings, seem duly and inevitably to come, in the end, to admire it as a work of literature, as well as to marvel at its lexicographical scholarship. It inspires real and lasting affection: it is an awe-inspiring work, the most important book of reference ever made, and, given the unending importance of the English language, probably the most important that is ever likely to be.

  The story that follows can fairly be said to have two protagonists. One of them is Minor, the murdering soldier from America; and there is one other. To say that a story has two protagonists, or three, or ten, is a perfectly acceptable, unremarkable modern form of speech. It happens, however, that a furious lexicographical controversy once raged over the use of the word – a dispute that helps to illustrate the singular and peculiar way that the Oxford English Dictionary has been constructed and how, when it flexes its muscles, it has a witheringly intimidating authority.

  The word protagonist itself – when used in its general sense of meaning ‘the chief personage’ in the plot of a story, or in a competition, or as the champion of some cause – is a common enough word. It is, as might be expected of a familiar word, defined fully and properly in the Dictionary’s first edition of 1928.

  The entry begins with the customary headings that show its spelling, its pronunciation and its etymology (it comes from the Greek πQẃ?τoς, meaning ‘first’, and áγωνιστń, meaning ‘one who contends for a prize, a combatant, an actor’, the whole meaning the leading character to appear in a drama). Following this comes the distinguishing additional feature of the OED the editors’ selection of a string of six supporting quotations which is about the average number for any one OED word, though some merit many more. The editors have divided the quotations under two headings.

  The first heading, with three sources quoted, shows how the word has been used to mean, literally, ‘the chief personage in a drama’; the next three quotations demonstrate a subtle difference, in which the word means ‘the leading personage in any contest’, or ‘a prominent supporter or champion of any cause’. By general consent this second meaning is the more mode
rn; the first is the older and now somewhat archaic version.

  The oldest quotation ever used to illustrate the first of these two meanings was that tracked down by the Dictionary’s lexical detectives from the writings of John Dryden in 1671. ‘’Tis charg’d upon me,’ the quotation reads, ‘that I make debauch’d Persons… my protagonists, or the chief persons of the drama.’

  This, from a lexicographical point of view, seems to be the English word’s mother-lode, a fair clue that the word may well have been introduced into the written language in that year, and possibly not before. (But the OED offers no guarantee. German scholars in particular are constantly deriving much pleasure from winning an informal lexicographic contest that aims at antedating OED quotations: at the last count the Germans alone had found 35,000 instances in which the OED quotation was not the first; others, less stridently, chalk up their own small triumphs of lexical sleuthing, all of which Oxford’s editors accept with disdainful equanimity, professing neither infallibility nor monopoly.)

  This single quotation for protagonist is peculiarly neat, moreover, in that Dryden explicitly states the newly minted word’s meaning within the sentence. So from the Dictionary editors’ point of view there is a double benefit, of having the word’s origin dated and its meaning explained, and both by a single English author.

  Finding and publishing quotations of usage is an imperfect way of making pronouncements about origins and meanings, of course – but to nineteenth-century lexicographers it was the best way that had yet been devised, and it is a method that has not yet been bettered. From time to time experts succeed in challenging specific findings like this, and on occasions the Dictionary is forced to recant, is obliged to accept a new and earlier quotation, and to give to a particular word a longer history than the Oxford editors first thought. Happily protagonist itself has not so far been successfully challenged on grounds of its chronology. So far as the OED is concerned, 1671 still stands: the word has for 300 odd years been a member of that giant corpus known as the English vocabulary.