The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder,Madness and the Oxford English Dictionary

Chapter Six

The Scholar in Cell Block 2

bedlam (’bεdləm). Forms: 1–3 betleem, 3 beþ-þleæm, 3–6 beth(e)leem, 4 bedleem, 4–8 bethlem, 6– -lehem, 3–7 bedlem, 5 bedelem, 6 bedleme, 6–7 -lame, 6– bedlam. [ME. Bedlem = Bethlem, Bethlehem; applied to the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, in London, founded as a priory in 1247, with the special duty of receiving and entertaining the bishop of St. Mary of Bethlehem, and the canons, etc. of this, the mother church, as often as they might come to England. In 1330 it is mentioned as ‘an hospital’, and in 1402 as a hospital for lunatics (Timbs); in 1346 it was received under the protection of the city of London, and on the Dissolution of the Monasteries, it was granted to the mayor and citizens, and in 1547 incorporated as a royal foundation for the reception of lunatics. Thence the modern sense, of which instances appear early in 16th c.]…

2. The Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, used as an asylum for the reception and cure of mentally deranged persons; originally situated in Bishopsgate, in 1676 rebuilt near London Wall, and in 1815 transferred to Lambeth. Jack or Tom o’ Bedlam: a madman.

3. By extension: A lunatic asylum, a madhouse.

‘Minor, William Chester. A thin, pale and sharp-featured man with light sandy-coloured hair, deep-set eyes and prominent cheek bones. He is thirty-eight years old, of superior education, indeed a surgeon, but of no known religion. He weighs ten stone, one pound, and is formally classified as being Dangerous to Others. He was charged with the willful murder of one George Merrett of Lambeth, was found Not Guilty on the Grounds of Insanity. He says he has been the victim of persecution for years – the victim of the lower classes, in whom he has no faith. Persons unknown are trying to injure him, with poison.’

So begin the case notes for Broadmoor Patient Number 742, based on an examination conducted in the afternoon of the day he was admitted, Wednesday, 17 April 1872.

Guards had brought him there in shackles, along with another murderer – a man who was classified as too insane to be tried – named Edmund Dainty: both had been waiting in gaol at Newington in Surrey until the necessary papers had been brought down from London. They were brought first by steam train to the small red-brick and Gothic railway station that had been built by and then named for Wellington College, one of the great public schools of southern England, which stood near by. A black Broadmoor landau, its roof closed shut, then took Minor and his escorts through the narrow, leafy lanes winding around the tiny village. The horses were sweating slightly as they hauled the four-wheel vehicle and its occupants up the low sandstone hill at the top of which stands Broadmoor itself.

The Special Hospital, as it is called today, still looks a forbidding place, even though much of what must have rendered it quite terrifying in Victorian times is now hidden discreetly behind its high, smoothly round-topped modern high-security walls. In 1872 Minor came to the original front gate: two triple-storeyed towers with heavily barred windows, with a high archway between, topped by a large black-faced clock. The arch was closed by a massive pair of thick green outer wooden doors. A peep-hole in one snapped open at the sound of the horses’ hoofs, the doors swung back to reveal another set of heavy gates ten yards deeper into the asylum.

The landau moved swiftly inside, the front doors were slammed closed and bolted hard, and the lights in the dim and cavernous reception area were turned on. Minor was ordered to step out, to be searched. His chains were removed, and would be taken back to Surrey. The escorting tipstaff handed over the papers – a long warrant in elegant copperplate, under the signature of Henry Austin Bruce, Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department. The asylum superintendent, a kindly and sympathetic man named William Orange, had his deputy sign the receipt.

Minor was led through the second set of gates and into Block 4, the admissions block. He heard the horses turn around, heard his escort get back on to the leather seat and order the driver to return to the railway station. He heard the outer gates open to let the carriage out, and close again. There was a resounding second crash as the inner metal gates shut and were bolted and chained. He was now formally and properly a Broadmoor inmate, confined in what would probably be his home for the rest of his natural life.

It was a fairly new home, however. Broadmoor had been opened just nine years. It had been built because the state’s main lunatic asylum, the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem – from which we gain the word bedlam, a madhouse, and which was, by coincidence in Lambeth, less than a mile from the murder site – was now full to bursting. Legal recognition of criminal madness had been established by Parliament in 1800, and judges had for the past half century been dispatching into asylums, and sentencing to stay there until the monarch’s ‘Pleasure be known’, scores of men and women who hitherto would have been sent to ordinary prisons.

The Victorians, with their characteristic mix of severity and enlightenment, believed the inmates could be kept securely away from the public to whom they were so dangerous, as well as properly treated. But the enlightenment only went so far: while nowadays the Broadmoor inmates are patients, and Broadmoor itself a special hospital, a century ago there was no mincing of words: the inmates were lunatics and criminals, they were treated by alienists and mad-doctors, and Broadmoor was indubitably an asylum in which they were firmly imprisoned.

Broadmoor certainly looked and felt – and was meant to look and feel – like a prison. It had been designed by a military architect, Sir Joshua Jebb, who had previously created two of England’s darkest high-security penitentiaries, Pentonville and Dartmoor. It had long, gaunt cell blocks, severe and intimidating; all the buildings were of dark red brick, all windows were barred, there was a huge wall with iron spikes and broken glass.

The institution slouched crab-like, ugly and forbidding, on top of its hill: villagers would look up towards it, and shudder. They tested the escape sirens every Monday morning: the banshee wails that echoed and re-echoed across the hills were spine-chilling; people said the birds remained silent, frightened, for many minutes afterwards.

But Minor, an American murderer – where to put him? The normal practice, which, to judge from his case notes, was almost certainly followed in Minor’s case, was to spend several early days asking the newcomer about himself, and then, if he wanted to discuss it, about the crime that had caused him to be sent there. (One newcomer, asked about why he had killed his wife and children, told the superintendent: ‘I don’t know why I am telling you all of this. It’s none of your business. As a matter of fact it was none of the judge’s business either. It was a purely family affair.’)

Once that was duly accomplished – and it was standard Broad-moor procedure never to ask again about the crime – the superintendent decided which of the six male blocks (there were two others for women, securely fenced off from the men) was most suitable. If the patient was judged suicidal (and his records thereafter being written on pink cards, not white) he was put in a cell in Block 6, where there were extra staff for observing him all the time; if he was diagnosed epileptic he was put in another cell in the same block, a special room that had padded walls and a wedge-shaped pillow so he could not suffocate himself during a fit.

If he was thought to be dangerous and violent he was also shut up in Block 6, or maybe the slightly less staffed Block 1 – the two blocks being known variously as the Strong Blocks, the Disturbed Blocks or, more recently, the Refractory Blocks. The two buildings, more grim and gaunt than the rest, were known by the inmates as the Back Blocks, because they had no view over the landscape. They were secure, tough, miserable.

After the first few days of interrogation the Broadmoor doctors realized that their new charge – who was a doctor himself, after all – was not epileptic, or liable to kill himself, or sufficiently violent to do anyone an injury. So he was sent to Block 2 – a relatively comfortable wing that was usually kept for parole patients. It was called ‘the swell block’, the word not so much used in the American sense as in the British, meaning it tended to be occupied by swells. A visitor once wrote that Block 2 had an atmosphere ‘described by someone familiar with both, as identical with that at the Athenaeum Club’. It is difficult to imagine that too many of the members of this most genteel of London’s gentlemen’s clubs, and which included on its rolls most of the bishops and learned men of the land, were thrilled by the comparison.

Yet he was made more than just tolerably comfortable – not least because he was a well-born, well-educated man, and with an income: all the Broadmoor officials knew he was a retired soldier, with a regular army pension paid from the United States. So he was given not one cell but two, a pair of connecting rooms at the south end of the block’s top floor. The rooms were kept unlocked by day; at night they were bolted from the outside. A long narrow vertical slot, too narrow for an arm to reach out, was used to observe the patient and his room: the design was such that an attendant could see everything within.

The windows had iron bars on the inside, but to compensate there was an enchanting view: a long shallow valley of cattle-filled meadows with the cows standing in the shadow of great oak trees, the Broadmoor tennis courts and small cricket pitch to one side, a line of low blue hills crowned with beeches in the distance. On that early spring day, with clear skies and lilacs and apple blossom and the songs of larks and thrushes, the sentence cannot have seemed altogether a nightmare.

At the north end of the corridor sat the guard – known at the asylum as the attendant – who kept watch over the twenty men on his floor. He had keys, and presided over the ever locked door to the floor itself, and would let them in and out of their rooms to visit the bathroom; and during the day he kept a small gas flame burning beside him, from a brass jet. The men were not allowed matches: this is where they came to light their cigarettes or their pipes, from the ration they were handed each week. (The tobacco all came from H M Customs service: anything confiscated as contraband at the ports was handed over to the Home Office, for distribution at the prisons and the state lunatic asylums.)

Within days the American Vice-Consul-General was writing, making sure that their hapless army officer was being well looked after. Might it be possible for ‘our poor friend’, he prayed, to have some of his personal effects sent down? (They had been left at the consulate to help pay any of the diplomats’ expenses at court.) Is it in theory possible to visit? To cheer him up, could we send him a pound of Dennis’s coffee, and some French plums? Mr Orange was silent on the specific matter of plums, but told the diplomat that Dr Minor could have whatever he liked, so long as it didn’t prejudice his safety or the disciplined running of the asylum.

So a week later the official sent up a leather portmanteau by rail: it held a frock coat and three waistcoats, three pairs of drawers and four undervests, four shirts, four collars, six pocket handkerchiefs, a prayer-book, a box of photographs, four pipes, cigarette papers, a bag of tobacco, a map of London, a diary, and a fob-watch and gold chain – the last a family heirloom, it had been said during the trial.

Most important of all, the superintendent reported later, the doctor was given back his drawing materials: a deal drawing-box and contents, a paintbox and a collection of pens, a drawing-board, sketch-books and painting-cards. He would now be able to occupy his time constructively, which all patients were encouraged to do.

Over the succeeding months Minor furnished his cells comfortably – much, indeed, as a member of the Athenaeum might. He had money: a pension of about twelve hundred dollars a year was paid to his brother Alfred in Connecticut – he acted for William, whom the state had designated ‘an incapable person’ – and Alfred regularly telegraphed funds to England to keep his sick brother’s running account up to date. Using this constant credit, Minor satiated his one consuming passion: books.

He demanded first that his own books be sent over from home in New Haven. Once they were installed he ordered, from the big London bookstores, scores upon scores of new and second-hand volumes, which he first stood in precarious piles in his cells until he asked – and paid for – bookshelves to be built. In the end he had converted the more westerly of the two rooms into a library, with a writing-desk, a couple of chairs and teak bookshelves that ran from floor to ceiling.

He kept his easel and paints in the other, easterly room; he also kept a small selection of wine and some bourbon with which the envoy kept him supplied. He took up the flute again, and gave lessons to some of his neighbour inmates. He also found he was permitted – and was well able to afford – to pay one of his fellow patients to perform work for him – tidying his room, sorting his books, cleaning up after a painting session. Life, which in those first months had been at least tolerable, now started to become really quite agreeable: Minor was able to live a life of total leisure and security, he was warm and reasonably well fed, his health was attended to, he could stroll along the long gravel pathway known as the Terrace, he could take his ease on one of the benches by the lawn and gaze at the shrubberies, or he could read and paint to his heart’s content.

His cells still exist – not much at Broadmoor has changed in a century, and although Block 2 is now called Berkshire House, it is still much the preferred home for those patients who are in for the long haul. Economy and the exigencies of today’s criminal justice and mental health systems mean that two patients are now housed where once there was only one: each of Minor’s two rooms, the more westerly one that had been his library, the other that had been his sitting-room, offer home and hearth and some spartan comfort to a present-day inmate.

Minor’s sanity, or lack thereof, was never in doubt. He was never so ill as to be ordered away from the benign atmosphere of Block 2 and into the harsher regime of the Back Blocks (though a strange and terrible incident in 1902 did take him away from his rooms for many weeks). But the ward notes show that his delusions became over the years ever more fixed, ever more bizarre, and that there seemed no likelihood that he would ever regain his reasoning. He was comfortable in Broadmoor, maybe; but there was nowhere else he could be allowed to live.

The ward notes from his first ten years show the sad and relentless progress ofhis downward spiral. Already at the time he was admitted he had a detailed awareness of the curious happenings that plagued him at night – always at night. Small boys, he believed, were put up in the rafters above his bed; they came down when he was fast asleep, chloroformed him and then forced him to perform indecent acts – though whether with them as boys, or whether with the women of whom he dreamed constantly, the record-keepers were never clear. He would awaken with abrasions around his nose and mouth where they had clamped the gas bottle; the bottoms of his pyjama legs were always damp, he said, indicating he had been forced to walk in a stupor through the night.

April 1873: ‘Dr Minor is thin and anaemic, excitable in manner, though appears rational by day and occupies himself with painting and playing the flute. But at night he barricades the door of his room with furniture, and connects the handle of the door with the furniture using a piece of string, so that he will awaken if anyone tries to enter the bedroom.’

June 1875: ‘The doctor is convinced that intruders manage to get in – from under the floor, or through the windows – and that they pour poison into his mouth through a funnel: he now insists on being weighed each morning to see if the poison has made him heavier.’

August 1875: ‘The expression of his face in the morning is often haggard and wild, as though he did not obtain much rest. He complains that he feels as if a cold iron has been pressed against his teeth at night, and that something is being pumped into him. Otherwise, no change.’

A year later the demons were seeming to have a depressing influence. In February 1876 the doctors noted: ‘A fellow patient stated today that Dr Minor came to see him in the Boot Room and said he would give him everything, if only he would cut his – Dr Minor’s throat. An attendant was ordered to look after him.’

The following year was no better. ‘Socially,’ he was reported as explaining to an attendant in May 1877, ‘all systems are based on schemes of corruption and knavery, and he is the subject of their machinations. This lies at the heart of the brutal torture to which he is subjected each night. His spinal marrow is pierced and his heart is operated on with instruments of torture. His assailants come through the floor.’

In 1878 technology becomes a part of the villainy. ‘Electric currents from unseen sources are passed through his body, he insists. Electric buttons are placed in his forehead, he is placed in a wagon and trundled across the countryside.’ He was taken as far afield as Constantinople, he told an attendant once, where he was made to perform lewd acts, in public. ‘They are,’ he declared, ‘trying to make a pimp of me!’

But while the delusions clearly persisted and worsened over those early asylum years, the clinical notes do show – and crucially to this story – the parallel development of a more thoughtful and scholarly side to the afflicted man. ‘With the exception of his impressions on the subject of his night-time visitations,’ says one entry in the late 1870s, ‘he talks very coherently and intelligently on most topics. He works in his bit of garden, and is fairly cheerful just now – but he has his days of moodiness and reserve.’ A year later a doctor recorded simply: ‘He is rational and intelligent for the most part.’

He also begins to settle down, and starts to regard the great hospital as his home, and the attendants as his family. ‘He is not particularly aware that he is anxious to go back to America, as at one time he was,’ wrote another doctor. ‘All he asks is a little bit more freedom, perhaps to go and see sights in London, or perhaps visit the orchid show for which he had just received a card.’ Yet the doctor who conducted this particular interview was certain of his patient’s condition, and inscribed a sentence that seems in hindsight almost to have sealed Minor’s eternal fate: ‘There can be no doubt that Dr Minor, though on occasion very calm and collected, is generally speaking more abundantly insane, and shows himself to be more so, than he was some years ago. He has the calm and firm conviction that he is almost nightly the victim of torment and purposive annoyance, on the parts of the attendants and others connected with an infernal criminal scheme.’

It was at about this time that there came two developments, one of which by chance led indirectly to the other. The first stemmed from a factor that is not uncommon among those who commit appalling crimes: Minor became truly remorseful for what he had done, and made a resolution to try and make some kind of amends. It was with this in mind that he took the bold step of writing to his victim’s widow, via the American Embassy, which he knew had helped to raise a fund for her back in the months immediately following the tragedy.

He explained to Eliza Merrett how inexplicably sorry he was for what he had done, and offered to try to help her in any way he could – perhaps by settling money on her or her children. Already Minor’s stepmother, Judith, had contributed: now, perhaps, and if she would only be so gracious as to accept, he could do rather more.

The letter seems to have worked a small miracle: not only did Eliza agree to accept financial help from Minor, she also asked if it might be possible to visit him. It was an unprecedented request, that an incarcerated murderer be allowed to spend time with a relation of his victim; but the Home Office, after discussing the matter with Dr Orange, the Broadmoor superintendent, agreed to one experimental supervised visit. Accordingly, some time during late 1879 Eliza travelled up from Lambeth to Broadmoor, and first met the man who had ended her husband’s life seven years before, and who had so drastically changed her own life, and those of her seven children.

The meeting, according to Dr Orange’s notes, was at first tense, but it progressed well, and by its end Eliza had agreed to come again. Before long she was making monthly ventures down to Crowthorne, eager to talk with interested sympathy to this now seemingly harmless American. And though the conversations stopped short of developing into any real friendship, it is believed she made Minor an offer that was to lead to the second of the major developments of this period of his life. She apparently agreed to bring parcels of books to Minor from the antiquarian dealers up in London.

Eliza knew very little of books – indeed, she was barely literate. But when she saw how keenly Minor collected and cherished his old volumes, and when she listened to his querulous remarks about the delays and costs of the postal service between London and Crowthorne, she made an offer to collect his orders for him, and bring them down on her visits. And so it happened that month by month Eliza began delivering packages, wrapped in brown paper and sealed with twine and wax, from West London’s great book emporiums, like Maggs and Bernard Quaritch and Hatchards.

The delivery system, such as it was, probably remained in place for only a few months – Eliza eventually took to drink, and lost all interest in the curious old man. But it appears to have been the most serendipitous event in Minor’s otherwise melancholy life.

For it was in the early 1880s that he might have stumbled across the first of James Murray’s famous appeals for volunteers, which asked for interested parties to indicate that they would be prepared to work on the new Dictionary. Murray first published his appeal in April 1879, and had 2,000 copies printed and circulated by booksellers: one would almost certainly have found its way, probably fairly soon after its distribution, into one or more of the packages that Eliza brought to Minor at the asylum.

The eight pages explained in very broad terms what was likely to be required. First there were Murray’s own suggestions for the kind of books that needed to be read:

In the Early English period up to the invention of Printing so much has been done and is doing that little outside help is needed. But few of the earliest printed books – those of Caxton and his successors – have yet been read, and any one who has the opportunity and time to read one or more of these, either in the originals, or accurate reprints, will confer valuable assistance by so doing. The later sixteenth-century literature is very fairly done; yet here several books remain to be read. The seventeenth century, with so many more writers, naturally shows still more unexplored territory. The nineteenth-century books, being within the reach of everyone, have been read widely; but a large number remain unrepresented, not only of those published during the last ten years while the Dictionary has been in abeyance, but also of earlier date. But it is in the eighteenth century above all that help is urgently needed. The American scholars promised to get the eighteenth-century literature taken up in the United States, a promise which they appear not to have to any extent fulfilled, and we must now appeal to English readers to share the task, for nearly the whole of that century’s books, with the exception of Burke’s works, have still to be gone through.

After this, Murray listed rather more than 200 specific authors whose works, in his view, were essential reading. The list was quite awesome: most of the volumes were rare, and likely to be in the hands of only a very few collectors. Some books, on the other hand, were already available at Murray’s newly established Dictionary Library at Mill Hill: they could be sent to readers who promised to do work on them. (And vouched to return them: when Furnivall had been editor he found that a number of disgruntled readers used the lending scheme as a means of swelling their own library collections, and neither sent in the requested quotation slips, nor ever returned the books.)

Minor wrote to Murray, formally volunteering his services as a reader. It is not wholly clear, though, just when this was – not clear exactly when Minor first started his legendary work. Murray recalled later that he had received Minor’s letter ‘very soon after I commenced the Dictionary’. No correspondence between the doctor and the Dictionary has been traced, however, until 1885 – which is hardly ‘very soon’.

But one clue exists: there had been an article in the Athenaeum magazine in September 1879, suggesting that Americans might like to become more keenly involved: and it is quite probable that Minor, who is known to have subscribed to the magazine in Broadmoor, would have seen it. Based on this assumption, on Murray’s recollections, and on the records of Minor’s contributions that have been lately unearthed in the OED archives, it seems probable that his relationship with the Dictionary got under way in either 1880 or 1881.

But where did Murray think his correspondent was living, and what did he think he did? Murray told a correspondent that he remembered only that the first and subsequent letters from Minor had been addressed to the Dictionary office simply from Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire. Murray was too busy to ruminate on the matter, no matter how curiously familiar the address might have been. By the time he read the first letter he had already received about 800 similar letters in response to his appeal – he was being swamped by the success of his entreaty.

He replied to Minor with his characteristic courtesy, saying that, on the basis of his apparent qualifications, enthusiasm and interest, he should start reading immediately, going through any of the volumes he might already have, or else looking to the Dictionary office for copies of books he might require.

In due course, Murray continued, the doctor could expect to receive particular word requests – in the particular event that the Dictionary editors had trouble finding quotations for a specific word on their own. For the time being, however, Dr Minor and all the other early respondents, to whom the editor expressed his ‘considerable gratitude’, should just start reading, should start making word-lists and writing quotations in a careful, systematic but general way.

Two additional sheets of printed paper that Murray was enclosing with the letter, and which underlined a formal agreement that Minor had been officially welcomed as a volunteer reader, would offer any necessary further advice.

But through all of this, Murray explained some years later, ‘I never gave a thought to who Minor might be. I thought he was either a practising medical man of literary tastes with a good deal of leisure, or perhaps a retired medical man or surgeon who had no other work.’

The truth about his new American correspondent was a great deal more strange than this detached, innocent and other-worldly Scotsman could have ever imagined.