The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester

 

     Simon Winchester's The Surgeon of Crowthorne was an international bestseller and tells an extraordinary true story of murder, madness and an extraordinary friendship in the nineteenth century. It is the tale of James Murray, the compiler of the first Oxford English Dictionary, and his most valued helper: Dr Minor of Crowthorne, who was also a homicidal lunatic, confined to Broadmoor asylum for murder. This is an enthralling and beautifully written work of literary detection.

The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester (Extract)

     In Victorian London, even in a place as louche and notoriously crime-ridden as the Lambeth Marsh, the sound of gun-shots was a rare event indeed. The Marsh was a sinister place, a jumble of slums and sin that crouched, dark and ogre-like, on the bank of the Thames just across from Westminster; few respectable Londoners would ever admit to venturing there.

It was a robustly violent part of town as well – the footpad lurked in Lambeth, there had once been an outbreak of garrotting, and in every crowded alley there were the roughest kinds of pickpocket. Fagin, Bill Sikes and Oliver Twist would have all seemed at home in Victorian Lambeth: this was Dickensian London writ large.

But it was not a place for men with guns. The armed criminal was a phenomenon little known in the Lambeth of Gladstone's day, and very little known in the entire metropolitan vastness of London. Guns were costly, cumbersome, difficult to use, hard to conceal. Then, as today, the use of a firearm in the commission of a crime was thought as somehow a very un-British act – and as something to be written about and recorded as a rarity. 'Happily,' proclaimed a smug editorial in Lambeth's weekly newspaper, 'we in this country have no experience of the crime of "shooting down", so common in the United States.'

So when a brief fusillade of three revolver shots rang out shortly after two o'clock on the moonlit Saturday morning of 17 February 1872, the sound was unimagined, unprecedented and shocking. The three cracks – perhaps there were four – were loud, very loud, and they echoed through the cold and smokily damp night air. They were heard – and considering their rarity were just by chance instantly recognised – by a keen young police constable named Henry Tarrant, who was then attached to Southwark Constabulary's 'L' Division. The clocks had only recently struck two, his notes said later; he was performing with routine languor the duties of the graveyard shift, walking slowly beneath the viaduct arches beside Waterloo Railway Station, rattling the locks of the shopkeepers and cursing the bone-numbing chill. When he heard the shots, Tarrant blew his whistle to alert any colleagues whom he hoped might be on patrol near by, and began to run. Within seconds he had raced through the warren of mean and slippery lanes that made up what in those days was called a village, and emerged into the wide riverside swatch of Belvedere Road, from where he was certain the sounds had come.

Another policeman named Henry Burton, who had heard the piercing whistle, as had a third, William Ward, rushed to the scene. According the Burton's notes, he dashed towards the echoing sounds and came across his colleague Tarrant, who was by then holding a man, as if arresting him. 'Quick!' cried Tarrant. 'Go to the road – a man has been shot!' Burton and Ward raced in the direction of Belvedere Road and within seconds found the unmoving body of a dying man. They fell to their knees, and onlookers noted they had their helmets and gloves cast off, and were hunched over the victim.

There was blood gushing on to the pavement – blood staining a spot that would for many months afterwards be described in London's more dramatically minded papers as the location of a Heinous Crime, a Terrible Event, an Atrocious Occurrence, a Vile Murder. 

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