The Surgeon of Crowthorne

  Minor wrote back promptly, saying that he would of course be delighted to receive the editor, that he was so sorry that physical circumstances – he did not elaborate – had made it hitherto impossible for him to come up to Oxford, and suggested a number of trains from those listed in the Bradshaw. Murray duly selected a November Wednesday, and a train that, with a change in Reading, was due in to the Wellington College Railway Station shortly after lunch.

  He telegraphed the details to Crowthorne, wheeled out his faithful black Humber tricycle and, with his white beard blowing over his shoulder in the chilly breeze, set out down the Banbury Road, past the Randolph Hotel, the Ashmolean and Worcester College, and to the ‘up’ platform of Oxford Station.

  The journey took just a little over an hour. He was pleasantly surprised, on arriving at Crowthorne, to find a brougham and a liveried coachman waiting for him. His long-held assumption that Minor must be a leisured man of letters was reinforced: perhaps, he thought to himself, he was even a man of means.

  The horses clip-clopped through the fog-damp lanes. The magnificent pile of Wellington College lay neatly in the distance, a respectable way from Crowthorne village itself, which was no more than a cluster of cottages, the piles oflawn-leaves smouldering behind them. It was a pretty little place, quiet, well wooded and rather self-contained.

  After a couple of miles the coachman swung the horses into a poplar-lined driveway that climbed a long, low hill. The cottages thinned out, and were replaced by a number of smaller, red-brick houses of a rather more severe look. Then the horses stopped before an imposing front gate, a pair of towers with a great black-faced clock between, and a green-painted door that was being opened by a servant.

  Murray removed his cap and unbuttoned the Inverness tweed cape that had protected him from the cold. The servant said nothing, but ushered him inside and up a flight of marble stairs. He was swept into a large room with a glowing coal fire and a wall covered with portraits of gaunt-looking men. There was a large director’s desk and, behind it, a portly man of obvious importance. The servant backed out and closed the door.

  Murray advanced towards the great man, who rose. Murray bowed stiffly, and extended his hand.

  ‘I, Sir, am Dr James Murray of the London Philological Society,’ he said in his finely modulated Scottish voice, ‘and editor of the New English Dictionary.

  ‘And you, sir, must be Dr William Minor. At long last. I am most deeply honoured to meet you.’

  There was a pause. Then the other man replied: ‘I regret not, sir. I cannot lay claim to that distinction. I am the Superintendent of the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Dr Minor is an American, and he is one of our longest staying inmates. He committed a murder. He is quite insane.’

  Murray, as the story then continues, was in turn astonished, amazed and yet filled with sympathetic interest. ‘He begged to be taken to Dr Minor, and the meeting between the two men of learning who had corresponded for so long and who now met in such strange circumstances was an extremely impressive one.’

  The story of this first meeting is, however, no more than an amusing and romantic fiction. It was created by an American journalist named Hayden Church, who lived in London for most of the first half of this century. It first appeared in England in the Strand magazine in September 1915, and then again, revised and amplified in the same journal, six months later.

  In fact Church had already tried it out on an American audience, writing anonymously for the Sunday Star in Washington, D C, in July 1915. The story was splendidly sensationalized, with the kind of lurid multilayered headline that has sadly gone almost out of fashion: AMERICAN MURDERER HELPED WRITE OXFORD DICTIONARY read the first, extending over all eight columns of the page. MYSTERIOUS CONTRIBUTOR TO AN ENGLISH DICTIONARY PROVED TO BE A RICH AMERICAN SURGEON CONFINED IN BROADMOOR CRIMINAL LUNATIC ASYLUM FOR A MURDER COMMITTED WHILE HE WAS IN A DERANGED CONDITION – HOW SIR JAMES MURRAY, EDITOR OF THE DICTIONARY, WHO SET OUT, AS HE THOUGHT, TO VISIT THE HOME OF A FELLOW SAVANT, FOUND HIMSELF AT THE ASYLUM AND HEARD THE EXTRAORDINARY TALE, WHICH BEGINS DURING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, WHEN THE PRINCIPAL WAS A SURGEON IN THE NORTHERN ARMY – CONTRIBUTOR WEALTHY AND NOW LIVING IN AMERICA, SAYS HIS FRIEND.

  The breathless headline told of an even more exhausting story – but one made more than faintly ludicrous by its author’s inability or unwillingness to name Minor. In every reference he is called simply Dr Blank, as in ‘And you, sir, must be Dr Blank. I am most honoured to meet you…’

  The story went down well with its American audience, who had been given hints and snippets of the story in the years before – the arrest of one of their soldiers for murder in London not having passed unnoticed at the time, his imprisonment receiving occasional dustings-off as new correspondents and new diplomats found their way to London. But the revelation of his work for the Dictionary was new, and in this regard Hayden Church had a good, old-fashioned scoop. The wires picked the story up; it appeared in papers around the world, and as far away as Tientsin in China.

  But in London it did not go down so well. Henry Bradley, who by this time had taken over from Murray as editor of the Dictionary, took exception to the Strand article. He wrote an angry letter to the Daily Telegraph complaining of the ‘several misstatements of fact’, and saying that ‘the story of Dr Murray’s first interview with Dr Minor is, so far as its most romantic features are concerned, a fiction’.

  Hayden Church rushed off a spirited reply to Bradley, which the Telegraph, naturally liking a fight, happily published. It contains vague rebuttals, citing only ‘a host of correspondents, some of them of great eminence’ – but none of whom is named – who had confirmed the major aspects of the story. It pleads, limply, that ‘I have the best of reasons for believing the account of the meeting between Minor and Murray to be accurate.’

  The oddest part of Church’s reply, however, is its enigmatic postscript. ‘I have just been in communication with one of the most distinguished literary men in England, who… pointed out that there did not appear in my article what he personally considered the most striking feature of all in the American’s history.’ To that we shall come later.

  Hayden Church’s account of the first meeting, whether it was strictly true or not, turned out to be simply far too good to ignore. It enthralled all England, people said. It took their mind off the Great War – 1915, after all, was the year of the second battle of Ypres, of Gallipoli, of the sinking of the Lusitania, and people were no doubt content to have such a saga as a diversion from the grim realities of the fighting. ‘No romance,’ said the Pall Mall Gazette, ‘is equal to this wonderful story, of scholarship in a padded cell.’

  Virtually all subsequent references to the saga of Oxford Dictionary-making retell Church’s story, to a greater or lesser degree. In her justly celebrated biography of her grandfather, K. M. Elisabeth Murray retells Church’s version of events almost without question, as does Jonathon Green in a more general book on the history of lexicography that was published in 1996. Only Elizabeth Knowles, an Oxford University Press editor who became intrigued by the story in the early 1990s, takes a cooler and more detached view: but she is clearly perplexed that no definitive account of the first meeting can be found. The patina offered by decades of good use has made the legend pleasingly credible.

  The truth, however, turns out to be only marginally less romantic. It surfaces in a letter that Murray wrote in 1902 to a distinguished friend, Dr Francis Brown, in Boston, and that turned up in a wooden box in the attic of one of Minor’s very few living relations, a retired businessman now living in Riverside, Connecticut. The letter appears to be the original, although it was the exhausting habit of many letter-writers of the time to prepare a fair copy of all their outgoing mail, and in doing so occasionally edit and elide some passages. The letter to Dr Brown appears full and complete.

  His first contact with Minor, writes Murray, came very soon after the beginning of his work on the Dictionary – probably 1880 or 1881. ‘H
e proved to be a very good reader, who wrote to me often,’ and, as I have already mentioned, Murray thought only that he must be a retired medical man with plenty of time on his hands.

  By accident, my attention was called to the fact that his address, Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire, was that of a large lunatic asylum. I assumed that (perhaps) he was the medical officer of that institution.

  But our correspondence was of course entirely limited to the Dictionary and its materials, and the only feeling I had towards him was that of gratitude for his immense help, with some surprise at the rare and expensive old books that he evidently had access to.

  This continued for years until one day, between 1887 and 1890, the late Mr Justin Winsor, Librarian of Harvard College, was sitting chatting in my Scriptorium and among other things remarked, ‘You have given great pleasure to Americans by speaking as you do in your preface of poor Dr Minor. This is a very painful case.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I said with astonishment, ‘in what way?’

  ‘Mr W. was equally astonished to find that in all these years I had corresponded with Dr Minor I had never learned nor suspected anything about him; and he then thrilled me with his story.

  The great librarian – for Justin Winsor remains one of the grandest figures in all of nineteenth-century American librarianship, and a formidable historian to boot – then told the story, which Murray retells to his friend in Boston. Some of the facts are wrong, as facts tend to be when related over a period of years – Murray says that Minor went to Harvard (while in fact he went to Yale), and repeats the probably apocryphal story that he was driven mad by having to witness the execution of two men after a court martial. He goes on to say that the shooting happened in the Strand – then as now one of London’s more fashionable streets – rather than in the grim purlieus of the Lambeth waterside. But essentially the story is relayed correctly, after which Murray resumes his own narrative.

  I was of course deeply affected by the story, but as Dr Minor had never in the least alluded to himself or his position, all I could do was to write to him more respectfully and kindly than before, so as to show no notice of this disclosure, which I feared might make some change in our relations.

  A few years ago an American citizen who called on me told me he had been to see Dr Minor and said he found him rather low and out of spirits, and urged me to go to see him. I said I shrank from that, because I had no reason to suppose that Dr Minor thought I knew anything about him personally.

  He said: ‘Yes, he does. He has no doubt that you know all about him, and it really would be a kindness if you would go and see him.’

  I then wrote to Dr Minor telling him that, and that Mr (I forget the name) who had recently visited him had told me that a visit from me would be welcome. I also wrote to Dr Nicholson, the then Governor, who warmly invited me – and when I went, drove me from and to the Railway Station and invited me to lunch, at which he also had Dr Minor, who I found was a great favorite with his children.

  I sat with Dr Minor in his room or cell many hours altogether before and after lunch, and found him, as far as I could see, as sane as myself, a much cultivated and scholarly man, with many artistic tastes, and of fine Christian character, quite resigned to his sad lot, and grieved only on account of the restriction it imposed on his usefulness.

  I learned (from the Governor, I think) that he has always given a large part of his income to support the widow of the man whose death he so sadly caused, and that she regularly visits him.

  Dr Nicholson had a great opinion of him, gave him many privileges and regularly took distinguished visitors up to his room or cell, to see him and his books. But his successor the present Governor has not shown such special sympathy.

  The meeting took place in January 1891 – six years earlier than is favoured by the romantics who repeat the Dictionary Dinner story. Murray had written to Nicholson asking for permission, and in the letter we can almost feel his child-like knee-squeezing anticipation of the event.

  It will give me great satisfaction to make the acquaintance of Dr Minor, to whom the Dictionary owes so much, as well as yourself who have been so kind to him. I shall probably come by the train you name (the 12 from Reading) but have not had time to look up the time-table, or rather to ask my wife to do so; for in such matters I deliver myself automatically into her hands, and she tells me ‘Your train starts so and so, and you will go by such a train, and I will come into the Scriptorium and fetch you to get ready five minutes before.’ I thankfully comply, and do my work until the ‘five minutes before’ arrives.

  It is now abundantly clear that the two men knew each other personally, and saw each other regularly, for almost twenty years from that date. The first encounter over lunch was to begin a long and firm friendship, based both on a wary mutual respect and, more particularly, on their passionate and keenly shared love for words.

  For both men, the first sight of the other must have been peculiar indeed, for they were uncannily similar in appearance. Both were tall, thin and bald. Both had deeply hooded blue eyes, neither using spectacles (though Minor was profoundly myopic). Minor’s nose looks a little hooked, Murray’s finer, straighter. Minor has an air of avuncular kindliness; Murray much the same, but with a trace of the severity that might well mark a lowland Scot from a Connecticut Yankee.

  But their beards and moustaches were the most obvious similarity – in both cases white and long and nicely swallow-tailed beards, with thick moustaches and sideburns and ample bugger grips. Both looked like Father Time; boys in Oxford would see Murray tricycling by and call out ‘Father Christmas!’ at him.

  True, Minor’s had a more ragged and unkempt look about it, doubtless because the arrangements for cutting and washing inside Broadmoor were rather less sophisticated than in the outside world. Murray’s beard, on the other hand, was fine and well combed and shampooed, and looked as though no particle of food had ever been allowed to rest there. Minor’s was the more homely, while Murray’s was more of a fashion-statement. But both were magnificently fecund arrangements. When the beards were added to the pair’s other individual aspects, each must have imagined, for a second, that he was stepping towards himself in a looking-glass, rather than meeting a stranger.

  The two men met dozens of times in the next several years. By all accounts they liked each other – a liking that was subject only to Minor’s moods, to which Murray became over the years fully sensible. He often had the foresight to telegraph Nicholson, to ask how the patient was: if low and angry, he would remain at Oxford; if low and likely to be comforted, he would board the train.

  When the weather was poor the men would sit together in Minor’s small and practically furnished cell, not too dissimilar from a typical Oxford student’s room, and just like the room that Murray was to be given at Balliol, once he was made an honorary Fellow. All of its bookshelves were open except for one glass-fronted case that held the rarest of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works from which much of the Dictionary work was being done. The fireplace crackled merrily. Tea and Dundee cake were brought in by a fellow inmate whom Minor had hired to work for him – one of the many privileges that Nicholson accorded to his distinguished inmate.

  There was a whole raft of other perks besides. He was able to order books at will from various antiquarian dealers in London, New York and Boston. He was able to write uncensored letters to whomever he chose. He was able to have visitors more or less at will – and boasted to Murray with some pride that Eliza Merrett would come to his rooms quite frequently. She was not an unattractive woman, he said, though it was thought that she drank rather too much for comfort.

  He subscribed to magazines, which he and Murray would read to each other: the Spectator was one of his favourites, and Outlook, which was posted to him by his relations in Connecticut. He took the Athenaeum, as well as the splendidly arcane Oxford publication Notes & Queries, which even today makes puzzling inquiries of the literary community about unsolved mysteries of the bookish world
. The Dictionary used to publish its word desiderata there; until the assistants began to write to him with specific queries, this had been his principal means of finding out on which particular words the Dictionary staff were working.

  Although the men talked principally about words – most often about a specific word, but sometimes about more general lexical problems of dialect and the nuances of pronunciation – they did, it is certain, discuss in a general sense the nature of the doctor’s illness. Murray could not help noticing, for instance, that Minor’s cell floor had been covered with a sheet of zinc – ‘to prevent men coming in through the timbers at night’ – and that he kept a bowl of water beside the door of whichever room he was in – ‘because the evil spirits will not dare to cross water to get to me’.

  Murray was aware too of the doctor’s fears that he would be transported from his room at night and made to perform ‘deeds of the wildest excess’ in ‘dens of infamy’ before being returned to his cell by dawn. Once aeroplanes were invented – and Minor, being American, kept keenly up to date with all that happened in the years after the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk – he incorporated them into his delusions. Thenceforth, men would break into his rooms, place him in a flying machine and take him to brothels in Constantinople, where he would be forced to perform acts of terrible lewdness with cheap women and small girls. Murray winced as he heard these tales but held his tongue. It was not his place to regard the old man with anything other than sad affection: and besides, his work for the Dictionary continued apace.