DUNBLANE SAYS NOTHING ABOUT THE PRESENT
. . . but a lot about the past. Bernard Capp looks at the tragedy through an historian's eyes
History offers many paral- lels to the recent tragedies, even in the circumstantial details. Dunblane was not the first school classroom to be violated: in June 1795 a man burst into a schoolroom brandishing two pistols and shot dead the young teacher, Maria Bally, in front of her horri- fied pupils. A few decades before, a gov- erness in Italy smothered her four young charges, ostensibly for no other motive than deranged religious fervour. (The sole survivor of the killings, a girl called Maria, married an Englishman called Cosway and became a close friend of Thomas Jefferson.) Around the same time, an Edinburgh theology graduate brutally murdered two young boys with his penknife after taking them for a walk. The killings were a revenge for the chil- dren having disclosed his affair with a maidservant. Before his execution, the murderer said that his only regret was not having killed their sister as well.
Nor were Fred and Rosemary West the first married serial killers — even in Gloucester. A news report in 1675 described an earlier husband and wife who ran a cheap lodging house in the area; they murdered seven of the inmates over a number of years and buried the remains in the back yard. Even the brutal murder of little James Bulger was antici- pated long before the arrival of video nas- ties. For in May 1748, five-year-old Susan Mahew of Eyke, Suffolk, was tortured to death by a ten-year-old boy from the same village, who for no obvious reason subjected her to deliberate and sadistic mutilations and then went off calmly to have his breakfast. As in the Bulger case, society was unsure how to punish a killer so young. In the event, the boy was sen- tenced to death, reprieved and eventually pardoned.
Some crimes were easier to compre- hend. The killer might be an unstable character who suddenly 'snapped'. Robert Greenway of Beaconsfield began singing and dancing one morning in 1708. He tried to strangle his sister when she refused to join in. Fearing he had gone mad, she ran to the neighbours for help; by the time she returned he had already butchered his wife and four children with a hedge-bill.
Others — women as well as men — appear to have been psychopaths. Elizabeth Ridgway of Ibstock, Leices- tershire, aged 24, was burned to death in 1675 for poisoning her husband only three weeks after their wed- ding, and according to one account admitted that over the course of several years she had also poisoned her mother, a former boyfriend and a young fellow-servant. An account of the case by the Revd John Newton noted with grim humour that Elizabeth and her husband had lived 'in all seeming mutual love' for some three weeks after the wedding, but even this was too optimistic. They had quarrelled after only one week, and Eliza- beth decided to buy some arsenic, for the purpose of poisoning her husband, on a shopping trip. On the day of the murder, she stayed at home to prepare Sunday dinner while her husband attended church. She laced his portion of dinner with arsenic and a few hours later he died in agony. It transpired that Elizabeth had had suicidal urges for several years and often kept poison about her person. She had no fear of death, shocking officials by her frivolous attitude even after her trial and conviction, and clearly revelled in her notoriety.
All these crimes took place in a society where the Church and religious values remained strong, where the principles of authority and hierarchy were instilled in children from an early age, and where public execution was the standard punish- ment for murder. That should tell us that there is no simple panacea waiting to be discovered. Thoughtful contemporaries accepted that a broken home and poverty often played some contributory role in crime.
Canberry Bess had lost her job and had been cast off, penniless, by her family and friends; few would have been surprised at her downward spiral into prostitution and crime. The child killer of Susan Mahew was a pauper being brought up in the workhouse, an environment all too likely to breed alienation. Early social reform- ers put forward a variety of schemes to tackle crime by eliminating poverty, unemployment and family breakdown. The most ambitious were the utopian `welfare states' sketched out by Thomas More in the early 16th century and by Gerrard Winstanley the Digger in the mid-17th. Both urged common ownership of property (to eliminate poverty and envy), an even more authoritarian, patri- archal social order and tight ideological controls over the whole population from the cradle to the grave. Yet More, writing from a Catholic perspective, and Win- stanley, writing at the height of the Puri- tan revolution, both acknowledged that murder and other serious crimes could never be eradicated, even in Utopia. Given human nature, all they could do was to try to minimise the occasions and the opportunities for wrong-doing.
No social reforms, no rigorous social and ideological controls would have stopped the serial killer Elizabeth Ridgway, who was neither poor, nor from a broken home; nor the young man who shot the schoolteacher Maria Bally; nor Robert Greenway of Beaconsfield, whom we should probably see as an early warning of the perils of 'care in the community'. No rational measures can hope to control the behaviour of the irrational, the suicidal or the desperate.
Serial killers and mass murderers were rare in the past, as they remain today. Most homicides then as now were domestic, or the result of drunken brawls. The glamor- ised violence of television and cinema is of course new, but the bloodthirsty horrors on the Jacobean stage matched anything pro- duced so far by Tarantino. Most audiences have probably always been able to separate the fantasy violence of stage and screen from the real world. Far more persuasive is the argument that we are inured to vio- lence by the repeated depiction of real events.
In the past, public hangings at Tyburn and elsewhere taught the huge crowds who flocked to watch that crime might lead to a grisly end, but they also taught that life was cheap. The scaffold was, moreover, a the- atre where many criminals played their parts with gusto, savouring their hour of celebrity and cheered on by the spectators. Public executions sent out a very confused message. What should we make of the story of Edmund Kirk, who went to see a wife-killer hanged at Tyburn in May 1684, and two days later took his own wife for a Sunday stroll, paused at Tyburn to show her the gallows, and then strangled her and dumped her body in a pit? A few weeks later Kirk was back at Tyburn, this time to be hanged himself.
Crowds no longer gather at Tyburn; instead we devour every detail of horrific crimes through the blanket coverage in newspapers and on television. Every unbalanced misfit knows that a single out- rage will capture the headlines and make his name famous. The fact that Thomas Hamilton sent a dossier of his grievances to the BBC suggests that the promise of celebrity played its part in his own moti- vation. As we speculate on what pushed Hamilton from vengeful fantasy into vio- lent action we should ask whether the cer- tainty of saturation news coverage may have played a significant role.
In 1671 Thomas Lancaster of Hawks- head, near Windermere, committed one of the most horrific crimes of the century, murdering his new wife, her father, her three sisters, her aunt, a cousin and a young servant, all by poison. The motive was greed. For good measure, he poisoned some of the neighbours too, to divert atten- tion from himself. Lancaster was subse- quently arrested, convicted and hanged in chains, with an order that his body be left to rot on the gibbet. The investigating mag- istrate called it 'the most horrid act that hath ever been heard of in this country'. Yet perhaps the most astonishing feature of the case is that it was not even men- tioned in the press. In that period the Lake District was so remote from the capital that the London news-hounds simply failed to pick up the story.
If the Dunblane tragedy had occurred 300 years ago, the people in the region would have been appalled, but most peo- ple in England would never have heard of it. We now hear almost instantaneously of every tragedy, and in massive detail. Our wish to grieve and to understand is natu- ral; but saturation coverage in the media May be helping to push the next social misfit over the edge, dazzled by the celebrity he knows will be his at last.
Bernard Capp is Professor of History at the University of Warwick.
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