'The deceased had always evinced the greatest horror of self-destruction when anything of the kind came before him': The Criminal Suicide of Mr Justice Willes

In the last post, I twice quoted Mr Justice James Shaw Willes as he railed against men who held the notion that they had some entitlement to beat their wives. Here, I will explain a little more about him, and explore the ways in which society responded to his suicide, as well as looking at general attitudes towards those who took, or attempted to take, their own lives. Born in Cork in 1814, Willes attended Trinity College, Dublin, graduating in 1836. In 1840, he was called to the bar at Inner Temple. Most famous for his decision in Phillips v Eyre in 1870, Willes also presided over the trial of Constance Kent in 1865. Standing trial for the murder of her 3-year-old half-brother five years earlier, Kent’s story caused a great deal of public speculation. Kate Summerscale’s excellent book, TheSuspicions of Mr Whicher or the Murder at Road Hill House is definitely worth reading to gain an understanding of the case; Summerscale is easily one of the best writers in the genre of historical true crime. In his address to the defendant in this case, Willes reportedly sank into weeping on at least two separate occasions, with the Birmingham Daily Post reporting that he ‘bent forward and wept for some few seconds’. In an earlier trial, that of Agnes Bradley in 1856, Willes had demonstrated a similar tendency toward tearfulness when, according to the Times, ‘the learned Judge became painfully affected, so much so, that at one time he buried his face in his note-book and shed tears and seemed almost unable to proceed with the evidence’. For anyone who is particularly interested in the tears of Justice Willes, Thomas Dixon has written an excellent essay with that very title, published in the Journal of Victorian Culture. Willes’ relevance to this post, however, lies in the way in which he met his end; that is, by his own hand.

On October 4th 1872, the Leeds Mercury reported his death in these terms: ‘We regret to state that Mr Justice Willes committed suicide on Wednesday by shooting himself at Otterspool, near Watford. The Learned Judge had suffered much from gout and the disease, it is thought, had flown to his head.’ The inquest, held the day before, had returned a verdict of “temporary insanity”.  On the same day that the Leeds Mercury published its notice, the Pall Mall Gazette went into greater detail in its reporting of the inquest. Witnesses reported that Willes had been depressed for a time, behaving slightly oddly and seeming distant and deeply unhappy. Some reasons were put forward which may explain this mood; chiefly, his declining health and resultant physical suffering, but also the fact that his three sisters were also suffering from illnesses. The article opens by stating that ‘a report was current in London yesterday afternoon, but was received with great distrust, that Mr Justice Willes had committed suicide. Late in the evening the news was ascertained to be true, and everywhere the deepest regret was expressed.’ Suicide, and the stigma it carried with it, was not something that most expected to find in the drawing rooms of respectable society. As far away as Massachusetts, the Boston Globe was reporting the sad affair. ‘Everyone is talking about Mr Justice Willes,’ the newspaper announced on 22nd October, ‘“What an awful thing,” says one. “Poor fellow!” says another. “Excellent judge,” says a third. “The very last man one would have thought to do such a thing,” says a fourth’. Indeed, one witness at the trial reportedly testified that if anything Willes had always expressed a sense of horror when confronted with matters relating to suicide. 

Suicide had been a crime in England for centuries, based chiefly on ecclesiastical notions of sin. Even before attempted suicide became an offence, Canon law had expressly stated that to take one's own life was a sin; it was, in essence, a form of murder. As a result, successful suicides could not be buried in consecrated ground and attempted suicides could easily find themselves excommunicated. At a certain point in time, such was the fear of eternal damnation brought on by an act of suicide, there were those who would take drastic measures in order to sidestep these heavenly laws and end their days on earth without sacrificing their souls. One such was Christina Johansdotter, a bereaved and suicidal Swedish woman whose fiancé had passed away. In 1770, determined to find a way to join him in heaven, Christina decided to went to a friend and asked to borrow the friend’s baby, stating that she had a visitor from the country and wished to show the baby off. As soon as the friend handed over the infant, Christina took it outside and promptly decapitated it with an axe. It was the perfect plan from a religious teaching point of view: children did not require absolution before death and so she would not be depriving the child of its place in heaven. In addition, executed people were still able to access heaven so long as they repented. Finally, the murder of a child would guarantee her the execution she desired, while the killing of another adult might not. 

In 1789, the Oxford Journal reported the story of a man in the village of Ferring in West Sussex, who had several times impregnated his own daughter, before finally murdering her and cutting his own throat. Discovered lying in a ditch, it appears that the man survived and was charged with what the article describes as 'the most atrocious Crimes of Incest, Murder, and attempted Suicide'. Clearly on some level, the suicide is seen as equally heinous as the other, to us more shocking , crimes. Into the 19th century, those who were unsuccessful in their suicide attempts appear to have routinely faced prosecution. While the penalties were light by the standards of the day, they now seem quite shocking. In 1865, 'an elderly woman of haggard appearance' pleaded guilty to the charge of attempted suicide. The sentence of the Recorder was reported by the Alnwick Mercury: 

The learned Recorder expressed sorrow at seeing the prisoner placed in such a position, and said he had had some difficulty in arriving at the decision respecting the sentence he should pass upon her. It was a very serious offence, and one that was much on the increase in the country at the present time. He trusted, however, that the very lenient sentence he was about to pass would deter her from making any similar attempt in future. In the event, however, of her doing so, and being convicted before him, he should most assuredly award a punishment of not less than two years' imprisonment; but, under all circumstances, the sentence he should now pass would be one of six weeks' imprisonment

Eliza's attempted suicide,

Unknown artist

1868

Credit: victorianweb.org

In Hampshire in 1867, a blacksmith was sentenced to eight days imprisonment for attempting to cut his own throat. That same year, 'a poor, miserable-looking woman' pleaded guilty for having attempted suicide on the previous Christmas Day. The Chairman spoke a few words to the prisoner, reiterating 'the enormity of the offence in the sight of God and man' before sentencing her to a week of hard labour. Also in 1867, a fifty-four year old inmate of the Union Workhouse in Luton was brought before the court for having attempted suicide by strangulation. While the case is slightly unusual in that the woman concerned was released on the promise that she would not attempt the act again, it is interesting for the fact that the Chairman addressed her in detail about the apparent immorality of what she had done. According to the Bedfordshire Times, he felt that 'she ought to be made sensible of the awful position in which she had placed herself by an attempt on her own life. Had she succeeded she would have at once deprived herself of all means of repentance, and shut out all hope of a better state hereafter'. Evidently, religious concerns were still at the forefront of the minds of the authorities.

Two years after the above cases, the Totnes Weekly Times reported the case of another man, this time in Brixham, who was brought before the court for a similar attack on himself. The prisoner explained that he had been driven to such extremes by poverty; the Chairman, unmoved, responded that 'if the prisoner's family were in a bad state of destitution it was owing to his own character'. This man received a sentence of three months' hard labour. 

The Exeter Flying Post, July 1890

Over time, societal attitudes towards suicide began to shift. It was not that it became necessarily more acceptable, but the lens through which it was viewed began to be one of mental illness rather than sin. Increasingly, cases of attempted suicide were viewed as the tragic result of a mind unhinged. In 1889, a case came before the London County Sessions regarding a man who shot himself with a revolver while travelling on the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway. The Court was told that the man in question had been suffering from a bout of acute neuralgia and, as his uncle had promised to take care of him, he was released. Similarly, a decade later, an elderly man in Tonbridge was charged with having attempted suicide with a razor, but was released into the care of his son. Still, cases resulting in sentences of a month imprisonment or more continued into the 1920s. 

The Observer, November 1922

By the 1940s, the majority of cases resulted in fines, costs, or probation. In 1959, an article was published in The Guardian reporting on the recommendations laid out in a booklet written by a Church of England committee. Arguing that medical or spiritual help would be more appropriate in the case of unsuccessful suicides, the booklet continued that, 'the law is not uniformly enforced, and it ought to be repealed or amended'. 

A year earlier, one hundred MPs had signed a motion drafted by the MP for St Pancras North, Kenneth Robinson. Later to become Minister for Health in the Government of Harold Wilson, Robinson had a keen interest in mental health, and this would bring him into conflict with the Church of Scientology in the 1960s. Robinson himself is worth reading about, but here he features at the beginnings of the movement to remove attempted suicide from the statute books. Indeed, according to the Guardian in 1958, a mere one in every hundred attempted suicide convictions even resulted in a prison sentence and that same year, the Times argued that attempted suicide appears to have ended up as a crime simply by accident. By the beginning of the 1960s, a decade which would see an absolute flurry of progressive legislation and policy enacted in England, newspapers were enthusiastically publishing arguments for the repeal of the crime of attempted suicide, and suggesting all manner of enlightened alternatives. In 1960, for example, the Guardian informed its readers that the Swedish authorities had opened an emergency depression clinic in Stockholm, with apparently positive results, suggesting that perhaps a similar idea could be brought to London. 

Suicide was not a crime in Scotland and indeed, England and Wales appeared to stand alone in having it so. The MP for Islington East, Mr Fletcher, commented in 1961, as the Suicide Act was being debated, that 'nothing in this Bill is intended to undermine the sanctity of human life or the general view of society that suicide is a dreadful offence against nature'. Unsurprisingly, a great deal of stigma was still attached to suicide and this arguably continues to the current time. In more recent years there has been a push to change the language used when discussing the issue, removing the term "commit suicide" from the lexicon with all of its connotations of criminality. 

Sir Kenneth Robinson, MP

The once criminalised act of attempted suicide provides an excellent example of the ways in which concepts of deviance - and therefore concepts of criminality - evolve over time. Where once suicide was not only seen as a matter for the courts, but was also frequently published (with the names of those concerned) in the press, 21st century sensibilities view it to be a private matter. Support and, hopefully, treatment, are now routinely considered to be the appropriate response to cases of attempted suicide. The sad souls who faced imprisonment or financial consequences as a result of their desperation, as well as having it splashed across the nation's newspapers, are now mere footnotes in criminal history.