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

Acknowledgements

acknowledgment (æk’nɒlId3mənt). Also acknowledgement (a spelling more in accordance with Eng. values of letters). [f. ACKNOWLEDGE v. + -MENT. An early instance of -ment added to an orig. Eng. vb.]

1. The act of acknowledging, confessing, admitting, or owning; confession, avowal…

5. The owning of a gift or benefit received, or of a message; grateful, courteous, or due recognition…

6. Hence, The sensible sign, whereby anything received is acknowledged; something given or done in return for a favour or message, or a formal communication that we have received it.

1739 T. SHERIDAN Persius Ded. 3. I dedicate to you this Edition and Translation of Persius, as an Acknowledgment for the great Pleasure you gave me. 1802 M. EDGEWORTH Moral T. (1816) I. xvi. 133 To offer him some acknowledgment for his obliging conduct. 1881 Daily Tel. Dec. 27 The painter had to appear and bow his acknowledgments. Mod. Take this as a small acknowledgement of my gratitude.

When I first came upon this story, which was mentioned all too briefly, just as an aside, in a rather sober book about the dictionary-making craft, it struck me immediately as a tale that was worth investigating, and perhaps telling in full. But for several months I was alone in thinking so. I had in the works a truly massive project about an altogether different subject, and the advice from virtually all sides was that I should press on with that, and leave this amusing little tale well alone.

But four people did find the story just as fascinating as I did – and saw too that by telling the poignant and human tale of William Minor, I could perhaps create some kind of prism through which to view the greater and even more fascinating story of the history of English lexicography. These four people were Bill Hamilton, my long-time friend and London agent; Anya Waddington, my editor at Viking, also in London; Larry Ashmead, the Executive Editor of HarperCollins in New York; and Marisa Milanese, then an editorial assistant in the offices of Condé Nast Traveler magazine, also in New York. Their faith in this otherwise unregarded project was total and unremitting, and I thank them for it unreservedly.

Marisa, who remains a paragon of ceaseless enthusiasm, dogged initiative and untiring zeal, then went on to assist me with the American end of the research; together with my close friend of a quarter-century, Juliet Walker in London, they helped me spin my basic ideas into a complex web of facts and figures, which I have since attempted to settle into some kind of coherent order. The extent to which I have succeeded or failed in this I cannot yet judge; but I should say here that these two women presented me with a bottomless well of information, and if I have misinterpreted, misread, misheard or miswritten any of it, then those mistakes are my responsibility, and mine alone.

Access to Broadmoor Special Hospital, and to the voluminous files that have been kept on all patients, was clearly going to be the key to cracking this story; and it took some weeks before Juliet Walker and I were allowed in. Paul Robertson and Alison Webster, two remarkable and kind employees of the Hospital, proved hugely helpful: without their help this book would never have managed to be much more than a collection of conjectures. The Broadmoor files provided the facts, and Paul and Alison provided the files. John Heritage and Bernard Fourness, who worked as volunteers in the Hospital Archive, gave of their own time generously, helping make some sense of the vast tonnage of paperwork.

On the other side of the Atlantic, matters proceeded rather differently – despite the best efforts of the splendid Marisa. St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC, is now no longer a federal institution, but is run by the Government of the District of Columbia – a government that has experienced some well-publicized troubles in recent years. And at first, perhaps because of this, the hospital refused point-blank to release any of its files, and went so far, quite seriously, as to suggest that I engage a lawyer and sue in order to obtain them.

However, a cursory search I made some while later of the National Archives pages on the World Wide Web suggested to me that the papers relating to Minor – who had been a patient at St Elizabeth’s between 1910 and 1919, when the institution was undeniably under federal jurisdiction – might well actually be in federal custody, and not within the Kafkaesque embrace of the District. And indeed, as it turns out, they were. A couple of requests through the Internet, a happy conversation with an extremely helpful government official in College Park, Maryland, and suddenly more than 700 pages of case notes and other fascinating miscellaneous files arrived in a FedEx package. It was somewhat pleasing to be able to telephone St Elizabeth’s the next day, and tell them which file I then had sitting before me on my desk. They were not best pleased.

Oxford University Press were, by contrast, wonderfully helpful; and while I am naturally happy to thank the officials at the Press who so kindly sanctioned my visits to Walton Street, I wish to acknowledge the very considerable debt that I owe first to Elizabeth Knowles, now of Oxford’s Reference Books Department, who had made a study of Minor some years before and was happy to share her knowledge and access with me. I am delighted also to be able to thank the irrepressibly enthusiastic Jenny McMorris of the Press archives, who knows Minor and his remarkable legacy more intimately than anyone else, anywhere. Jenny, together with her former colleague Peter Foden, proved a tower of strength, during my visits and long after: I only hope that she manages to find an outlet for her own fascination with the great Henry Fowler, whom she rightly regards, along with Murray, as one of the true heroes of the English language.

Several friends, and a number of colleagues who had a professional interest in parts of the story, read the manuscript’s early drafts, and made many suggestions for improving it. In almost all cases I have accepted their proposals with gratitude; but if on occasion I did, through carelessness or pigheadedness, disregard their warnings or demands, then the caveat about the responsibility for all errors of fact, judgement or taste remaining firmly with me applies as well: they did their best.

Among those friends I wish to thank heartily are Gully Wells, Graham Boynton, Pepper Evans, Rob Howard, Jesse Sheidlower, Nancy Stump and Paula Szuchman. And to Anthony, who complained to me that he was denied romantic favours one summer morning because his fiancée was bent on completing the reading of Chapter Nine, my apologies, and my embarrassed thanks for your forbearance.

James W. Campbell of the New Haven Historical Society gave great assistance in finding the Minor family in their old home town; the librarians and staff at the Yale Divinity Library told me much about William Minor’s early life in Ceylon. Pat Higgins, an Englishwoman living in Washington state, and with whom I only corresponded by e-mail, became fascinated also by the Ceylon and Seattle ends of the Minor family story, and gave me several intriguing tips.

Michael Musick of the US National Archives then found most of Minor’s military files, and Michael Rhode of the Walter Reed Army Hospital tracked down his handwritten autopsy reports. The National Park Service was helpful in giving me access to military bases in New York and Florida where he had been stationed; the Index Project in Arlington, Virginia, assisted me in finding additional records relating to his wartime career.

Susan Pakies of Virginia’s Orange County tourist office, along with the immensely knowledgeable Frank Walker, then took me around all of the important sites where the Battle of the Wilderness had been fought, and later, to cheer us all up, took me to several of the delightful old inns that are hidden away in this spectacularly lovely corner of America. Jonathan O’Neal patiently explained civil war medical practice at the old Exchange Hotel-cum-hospital that is now a museum in Gordonville, Virginia.

Nancy Whitmore of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland, was an enthusiastic supporter of the project and painstakingly dug up a huge amount of highly relevant arcana. Dr Lawrence Kohl at the University of Alabama was kind enough to take time to discuss both the mechanics of Civil War branding, and of speculating (in an impressively informed way) of the effects such punishment might have on Irishmen who fought in the Union Army – the latter his particular speciality as an historian of the period. Mitchell Redman of New York filled in some details of Minor’s later personal life, about which he had once written a short play.

Gordon Claridge of Magdalen College, Oxford, had much that was helpful to say about the origins of mental illness; Jonathan Andrews, a historian of Broadmoor, helped also; and Isa Samad of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, told me a great deal about the history of the treatment of paranoid schizophrenia.

Dale Fiore, Superintendent of the Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, then added fascinating footnotes about the end of William Minor’s life – the length of the coffin, the depth at which it is buried, the names of those who surround him in his plot.

Life became a great deal easier once I had tracked down one of the few known living relatives of William Minor, Mr Jack Minor of Riverside, Connecticut. He was kindness itself, giving me an enormous amount of useful information about the great-uncle he never knew, and offering me access to the treasure trove of pictures and papers that had sat for years, undisturbed, in a wooden box in his attic. He and his Danish wife, Birgit, became as fascinated by the story as I was, and I thank them for pleasant waterside dinners and time spent talking about the nature of their most curious relation.

David Merritt, of the Merritt International Family History Society in Swanley, Kent, gave me valuable help in ferreting out details of where George Merrett’s descendants might be: I eventually found one, a Mr Dean Blanchard in Sussex, who was equally interested in the fortunes of his distant family and shared much that was valuable with me.

I am indebted also to my American agent Peter Matson, his colleague Jennifer Hengen, and to Agnes Krup who, once enthused by the strange nature of this story, became one of its keenest supporters and kept me going, writing hard, during a long hot American summer.

I should also like to record my special thanks to Sara Marafini for her splendidly alluring design of the paperback jacket.

And finally my wife Catherine saw to it that I remained undisturbed, and offered generously the kind of serenity and sanctuary that the writing of a tale like this more than amply demands and deserves: my gratitude to her is, as always, incalculable.

Simon Winchester

Wassaic, New York