The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (3 page)

So it was instead a place of warehouses, tenant shacks, and miserable rows of ill-built houses. There were blacking factories (shoe polish makers, like the one in which the young Charles Dickens worked) and soap boilers, small firms of dyers and lime burners, and tanning yards where the leatherworkers 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, which 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 the cemeteries in the suburb of Woking) chuffed and snorted, and across which miles of wagons lurched and banged. Lambeth was widely regarded as one of the noisiest and most sulfurous parts of a capital that had already 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 fast became known as a site of revelry and abandon—a place where public houses, brothels, and lewd theaters 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, to be able to drink absinthe into the small hours of the morning, to buy the choicest pornography newly smuggled from Paris, or to have a girl of any age and not be concerned that a Bow Street runner (as London’s early police were known), 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 younger 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 laborers and—with no protection by unions, no solidarity with their fellows—had been paid trifling sums to perform humiliating tasks for pitiless masters. They had met at a farm show in the Cotswolds and had vowed to leave together for the immeasurable possibilities offered by London, only two hours away on the new express train from Swindon. They moved first to north London, where their first daughter, Clare, was born in 1860; then they shifted into the city center; and finally in 1867, the family having become too large and costly and manual work too scarce, they found themselves near the brewery site in the bustling sty 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, each with a privy and clothes boiler and washing line, and everywhere an air of damp and sulfurous stench, and even a rough-hewn, rollicking, hugger-mugger, devil-may-care, peculiarly London type of good cheer. Whether the Merretts missed the fields and the cider and the skylarks, or whether they imagined that that ideal had ever truly been the world they had left, we shall never know.

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 thirteen 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 neighbor 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 gray 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 too 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 equipped. 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 into 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 toward the high walls and ornate gates of the great brewery where he worked, shoveling coal beneath the shadow of the great red lion 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 Tennison Street, between where the south side of the Lambeth Lead Works abutted onto 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—that silent and menacing figure who lurked in the dark carrying a lead-tipped cosh and wearing a mask; this was something quite out of the ordinary, and 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, took aim, and fired.

The shot missed, whistling past him 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 onto 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, and attempted to comfort him. The other policeman, William Ward, summoned a passing hansom cab from the still-busy thoroughfare of Waterloo Road. They gently picked the wounded man up from the ground, hoisted him into the vehicle, and ordered the driver to take them as fast as possible to St. Thomas’s Hospital, five hundred yards farther south on Belvedere Road, across from the archbishop’s London palace. The horses did their best, their hooves striking sparks from the cobbles as they rushed the victim to the emergency entrance.

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

The man who had perpetrated this unprecedented crime was, within moments of committing it, in the firm custody of Constable 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 still-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, holding up the gun. Tarrant snatched it from him.

“Whom did you fire at?” he asked.

The man pointed down Belvedere Road, 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 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 on Tennison Street—a street in which it was apparently far from uncommon for women to be undressing at all hours. Constable Tarrant, pointing toward the victim and ordering his two colleagues to see what they could do for him and to 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 described him as cool, collected, and clearly not affected by drink. It had all been a terrible accident; 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 said, when Tarrant put a hand on his shoulder. But then, rather more gently, he said to the policeman: “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 constable.

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 belt behind his back.

“A surgical instrument,” it was 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 nearby at 41 Tennison 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 might be did not emerge in the early interrogations. By dawn he was taken off to the Horsemonger Lane jail, charged with murder.

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

This put a wholly new complexion on the case. The American legation had now to be told: And so in midmorning, despite its being a Saturday, the Foreign Office formally notified the U.S. 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 its rarity 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 seven children, the eldest only thirteen, 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 onto 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 beginnings of the trail of a remarkable and tragic life.

William Minor had come to Britain the previous autumn, because he was ill—suffering at least in part from an ailment 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 quiet 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 for it. He had, according to his lawyer, been in an asylum in the United States, and he 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.”