Sometime during the weekend of 6/7 June 1895 Robert Coombes killed his mother with a hunting knife he had purchased a few days earlier. His mother’s body was not discovered for another 10 days. When it was finally found it was still in the bed where she had died and in an advanced state of decomposition. During that time Robert and his younger brother Nattie had stayed in the same house and amused themselves by, among other things, excursions to the cricket in the Oval.
The case was a sensation of the day and provided an opportunity for all sorts to give vent to the moral decline of society and the delinquency of youth.
There was no doubt about Robert’s guilt, but the jury baulked at sending a child to the gallows, so found him instead guilty but insane. He was sent to Broadmoor for the criminally insane and spent 14 years there, in, perhaps surprisingly, a progressive and rehabilitative environment. Robert was finally released into a Salvation Army community where he worked as a tailor, a skill he had learned in Broadmoor.
Eventually he emigrated to Australia and with the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the Australian Army and served with distinction throughout the war, in particular as a stretcher-bearer in the bloody fighting of Gallipoli.
Kate Summerscale’s book is a remarkable thing: it is part biography of Robert, part social and military history. At its heart though it is a story of redemption, of how a disturbed boy became a quietly extraordinary man. It is a compelling and moving story, elegantly written by a writer with a genuine feeling for her story and her subject.
My first proper memory of Muhammed Ali was waking up to the news of his victory over George Foreman in Kinshasa in 1974. I watched the BBC Sports film of the fight the next evening. It was awe-inspiring.
Agnes Magnusdottir has been condemned to death for her involvement in the murder of two men, one of them her lover. As she awaits confirmation of her sentence she recounts the events leading up to these deaths to a young priest, appointed as her spiritual advisor, and the members of the family she has been billeted with.
On Easter Monday, 24th April, 1916, a group of armed Irish rebels occupied the General Post Office (GPO) and other major buildings across the city of Dublin. It was the beginning of the Irish War of Independence that would last with varying degrees of political and military intensity until 1921.
After six days it was over, crushed by the might of the British Empire that overwhelmed them with troops and heavy guns. The O’Rahilly, despite his opposition to the rebellion, ultimately felt duty bound to participate, and was killed towards the end leading an attack on a British machine gun position to give cover to the withdrawal from the GPO. As The O’Rahilly himself had put it in a phrase later taken up by Yeats, the man who had helped wind the clock came to hear it strike.
By the standards of the First World War this was a trifling affair. In the blood bath of the Somme that would begin a few weeks later thousands of Irishmen, nationalist and unionist alike, were pointlessly butchered alongside English, Scots, and Welsh, in the name of Empire.
It is also essentially the same system that the UK government has in place for overseas domestic workers. The reforms that that government is currently proposing are cosmetic. They will do little to alter this de facto legalisation of trafficking for domestic servitude of many who are mothers sacrificing their lives and freedom in the hope of a better life for their children.
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