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

Chapter Twelve

Postscript

memorial (mI’mɔərIəl), a. and sb. [a. OF. memorial (mod.F. mémorial) = Sp., Pg. memorial, It. memoriale, ad. L. memoriālis adj. (neut. memoriāle, used in late Latin as sb.), f. memoria MEMORY.] A. adj.

1. Preserving the memory of a person or thing…

3. Something by which the memory of a person, thing, or event is preserved, as a monumental erection…

This has been the story of an American soldier whose involvement in the making of the world’s greatest dictionary was singular, astonishing, memorable and laudable – and yet at the same time wretchedly sad. And in the telling, it is tempting to forget that the circumstances that placed William Chester Minor in the position from where he was able to contribute all his time and energy to the making of the OED began with his horrible and unforgivable commission of a murder.

George Merrett, who was his victim, was an ordinary, innocent working-class farmer’s son from Wiltshire, who came up to London to make his living, but who was shot dead, leaving a pregnant wife, Eliza, and six young children. The family were already living in the direst poverty, trying to maintain some semblance of their farm-country dignity among the squalor of one of the roughest and most unforgiving parts of the Victorian city. Matters now took a terrible turn for the worse.

All London was shocked and horrified by the killing, and funds were raised and money collected to help the widow and her brood. Americans in particular, stunned at the outrage committed by one of their own, were asked by their Consul-General to contribute to a diplomatic fund; the vicars in Lambeth banded together to make collections, ecumenically; a series of amateur entertainments – including one ‘of an unusually high-class character’ with readings of Longfellow and of a selection from Othello, and held at the Hercules Club – was staged across town to raise money; and the funeral itself was a splendid affair, as impressive as that of any grandee.

George Merrett had been a member of the Ancient Order of Foresters – one of the many so-called Friendly Societies that were once popular across Britain as a means, in the absence of any government or privately funded schemes, of providing cooperative pensions and other financial help for the working classes. On the night that he died Merrett had been relieving a shift-worker who was a brother Forester: this act of small benevolence made the Order doubly obliged to offer their late member a handsome farewell.

The cortège was half a mile long: the Foresters’ Band playing the ‘Funeral March’ from Saul came first, then scores of emblem-wearing members, then the horse-drawn hearse and four black mourning-coaches to carry the bereaved. Eliza Merrett rode in the leading carriage, holding her youngest baby in her arms, and sobbing. Hundreds of brewery workers followed, and then thousands of ordinary members of the public, all wearing black crêpe bands around their arms or hats.

The procession wound for the entire afternoon from Lambeth, past the spot on Belvedere Road where the tragedy had occurred, past the Bedlam Hospital and up to the vast cemetery at Tooting, where George Merrett was finally buried.

His grave may have once been marked, but it lacks a marker now, and where the records say George Merrett lies there is no more than a patch of discoloured grass, a tiny patch of settled earth among a sea of more noble and newer monuments.

In his lucid moments Minor was contrite, appalled by the consequences of his moment of mad delusion. But Eliza never really recovered from the shock of the murder: she took to drink, and when she died it was of liver failure. There is no grave.

Two of her sons’ lives unravelled most curiously: George, the second eldest boy, took a gift of money from Minor’s stepmother to Monaco, won a considerable sum and remained there, styling himself the King of Monte Carlo, before dying in impoverished obscurity in the South of France. His younger brother Frederick shot himself dead in London, for reasons that have never been fully explained. The fact that two of Minor’s brothers also died by their own hand invests the entire story with more sadness than is bearable.

But the principal tragic figure in this strange tale is the man who is the least well remembered, and who was gunned down on the damp and cold cobblestones of Lambeth on that Saturday night in February 1872.

The only public memorials ever raised to the two most tragically linked of this saga’s protagonists are miserable, niggardly affairs. Minor has just a simple little gravestone in a New Haven cemetery, hemmed in between litter and slums. George Merrett has for years had nothing at all, except for a patch of greyish grass in a sprawling graveyard in south London. Minor does, however, have the advantage of the great Dictionary, which some might say acts as his most lasting remembrance. But nothing else remains to suggest that the man he killed was ever worthy of any memory at all. George Merrett has become an absolutely unsung man.

Which is why it now seems fitting, more than a century and a quarter on, that this modest account begins with the dedication that it does. And why this book is offered as a small testament to the late George Merrett of Wiltshire and Lambeth, without whose untimely death these events would never have unfolded, and this tale could never have been told.