When
Wittgenstein arrived into Birmingham for the second time, almost exactly a year
since he last stayed at Lordswood House, the moods of suicidal despair which
had plagued him during his holiday with David in Norway, had forced him into a
resolution of sorts. He had decided to cut himself off from the man he loved
and from all the chatter and distractions of Cambridge life. At the end of the
week he planned to Norway and live a wholly ascetic life in devotion to the
study of Logic.
As a
male heir of Karl Wittgenstein[1] a threat to take
one’s own life was to be taken seriously. As a role model Karl had been less
than exemplary. Even after his death at the beginning of 1913, his intimidating
expectations of great purpose in life were still plaguing his three surviving
sons. Kurt would go on to shoot himself in the last days of the war while the
Austrian troops were in general retreat. This was either because he wished to
avoid the dishonour of court martial after he refused to pointlessly sacrifice
his men, or, as the other version states, he shot himself when his troops deserted
him, leaving him to be captured or killed. But Kurt’s suicide was by no means
the first in the family.
Karl’s eldest two sons had already taken their own lives. In
1902 Hans disappeared. It was reported as a canoeing accident in Chesapeake
Bay, but the family eventually accepted it as suicide. Nevertheless, somewhat
fanciful rumours circulated that he had actually faked his death, and fled into
obscurity to escape his Wittgensteinian identity. Hans was the eldest son and
bore the greatest expectations from his father who insisted that he follow him
into business and engineering. But Hans had no intention nor inclination to
follow in his father’s footsteps. Described by his sister as ‘peculiar’, Hans
may have been on the autistic spectrum. He was incredibly mathematical in his
outlook and extremely talented musically. Music was, in fact, his greatest love
and the career his wished to follow, but Karl would have none of it to the
point of strictly regulating his access to instruments. His suicide was a
stubborn defiance against Karl’s plans for him. There was also a report that
Hans was homosexual. If the truth of his sexuality was vague, his brother
Rudi’s was less so.
Exactly
two years after Hans’s disappearance, Rudi Wittgenstein walked into a bar in
Berlin, ordered some food and a glass of milk to which he dissolved some
crystals of potassium cyanide. He asked the pianist to play a mournful song as
he drank the deadly concoction. Two minutes later he was unconscious and beyond
saving. Like Hans, Rudi was passionate about music, and also photography and
theatre, but in Berlin he was studying chemistry. Unlike Hans, however, the
story of his demise centres on his sexuality rather than his career choice. It
seems Rudi had been out-ed as gay when the sexologist Dr Magnus Hirschfeld
published a case-study which implicitly identified him. A year before Rudi had
gone to the Scientific Humanitarian Committee for help with his sexuality, but
when the organisation published its year book, to his horror he felt
Hirschfeld’s piece contained too much detail about him. Compromised and
betrayed, Rudi decided there was only one course of action: to end his life
For his
father Karl, the pain and humiliation were unspeakable. No sooner were the
burial rites concluded than he hurried his family from the cemetery, forbidding
his wife from turning to look back at the grave. In future neither she nor any
member of the family would be permitted to utter Rudolf’s name in his presence
again.[2]
In
Birmingham the local press of October 1913 showed that suicide was not
restricted to the noble young men of Viennese society. If Ludwig Wittgenstein
had read the papers on his last visit, he would have discovered that cutting
one’s own throat was the local style of self-annihilation in 1912. A year later
the papers reported poison to be the popular choice.
As he
was arriving into New Street Station to meet David Pinsent, not far away in the
Wagon & Horses pub on Edgbaston Street, William Pethard[3]
of Small Heath ordered a glass of brandy to which he added his owner deadly
mixer from a bottle of oxalic acid. He then took out an envelope and wrote,
“Goodbye; sorry for what I have done. Can’t stand the worry any longer.” He was
later joined in hospital by Benjamin Hardiman[4] of Ladywood who,
having reached for a glass of whisky, had instead drank nitric acid. Already in
hospital, however, lay Charlotte Betterley[5] of Duddeston who
had been admitted on Sunday after a row with her husband which had culminated
in her downing a bottle of disinfectant.
If
these attempts to end it all, planned, mistaken or spontaneous, had not been shocking
enough, one of the biggest local stories of the week was the investigation into
the Smethwick Poisoning Mystery.
Robert
Anderson Carter was described as ‘excitable’ by those who knew him a little.
Those who knew him better added that he was inclined to melancholic moods and
had often spoken of being tired of life. He had in fact attempted suicide once
before. He might have been described today as having a bi-polar condition.
Carter, 35, lived in Smethwick, and worked as a deputy to the registrar of
births and deaths, Fred Stevens, 44. Their relationship went beyond work as
Stevens had taken Carter in to share his home.
On the
afternoon of 26th September Stevens called into the workplace of Herbert
Griffiths, a tailor’s salesman in Birmingham. The two knew each other and decided
to head off to the Colonnade Hotel [above] for a drink, and then another at the White
Horse on Congreve Street where they were joined by Carter for more bottles of
beer. With some business to be conducted in an antique shop on Broad Street,
the trio headed there, then for a final drink that afternoon at the Crown Inn [below],
beside the Church of the Messiah. Feeling peckish now Stevens, Griffiths and
Carter drove back to Smethwick. After dinner Stevens and Carter had words.
Stevens being the boss, had pointed out a mistake Carter had made in one of their
ledgers. The relationship must have been fraught for it seems to have
been a final straw for Carter.
With
dinner out of the way, Carter in a bit of a huff announced he was going out. Stevens
and Griffiths then left half an hour later for the Red Cow Inn, also on
Smethwick’s High Street. After drinking in a hotel in Soho, Carter decided now
that he would join them, but first he made a stop at the pharmacy run by Horace
Oakley where he convinced the chemist to sell him a bottle of tablets containing
perchloride of mercury. Carter claimed they were to be used in photograph
development. At the Red Cow more beers were imbibed until 11.30 when the party,
now joined by the pub’s pianist Frank Cruise, returned to Stevens’s house,
Carter returning with a bottle of whisky, and they ‘commenced to have a time of
jollification’.[6] At first
everything seemed quite merry with everyone enjoying a drunken sing-song, but
then Stevens and Carter had words again and the latter’s mood changed for the
worse.
Stevens had clearly heard it all before from Carter as he
refused to believe his threats to take his own life. He even dismissed warnings
from Herbert Griffiths about the poison in Carter’s possession. When Carter
swallowed four of the perchloride of mercury tablets, Stevens, presumably in an
attempt to show him up as a dramatic liar, or perhaps for a much darker reason,
took two of the tablets and swallowed them. Griffiths, and this surely must be
a decision only someone without the full faculty of reason under the influence
of alcohol could make, put one in his mouth and immediately felt a dreadful
burning sensation. Sobriety must have kicked in at this point as he spat it out
and the family doctor was sent for.
When Dr Kendal arrived at the house he found the two men in
agony. Carter who was laid out on the couch was falling in and out of
consciousness surrounded by vomit. Stevens was also in a bad way but managed to
survive the experience. Carter however was clearly dying, and despite the
doctor’s attempts to restore him, a magistrate and his clerk were summoned to
take his deathbed deposition.
W.C. Checkley, Deputy Coroner, led the enquiry at Smethwick
Town Hall. There were conflicting testimonies from the witnesses. Their dubious
claims of sobriety that Friday evening were undermined by differing versions of
events produced by their inability to recall clearly what exactly had happened.
Rumours spread throughout the neighbourhood. Rumours which Checkley called
unfounded. The jury returned a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind.
The police were not convinced that Stevens’s intake of the
poison was an accident and charged him with attempted suicide. The case was
referred to the Registrar General, Sir Bernard Mallet, who summoned the Clerk
of the Birmingham Union’s Board of Guardians (who had supervisory powers over
the registration) for interview at Somerset
House. Stevens was immediately suspended from his job as Smethwick’s Registrar by Mallet. On Wednesday 15th October the General Purposes Committee
of the Birmingham Board of Guardians discussed the case at their regular
meeting. The committee, under the chairmanship of Althans Blackwell and vice-chairmanship
of Frank Juckes[7], heard
selections of the evidence presented to the Police Court and subsequently recommended
that Stevens should not be reinstated despite his case having been dismissed by
the magistrates. The evidence, and no doubt the rumours, had been enough to
condemn him in the committee’s eyes. If not guilty of a crime, he was ‘guilty
of conduct quite unbecoming a person holding his responsible position’.[8] With Carter dead
and Stevens out, it was left to the acting Deputy Registrar, W.E. Curtis, to
record the demise of his predecessor.
[1]
See Alexander Waugh, The House of
Wittgenstein: A Family at War (Bloomsbury, 2008), pp22-27
[2]
Waugh, p23
[3]
Birmingham Daily Post, Tuesday 7th October 1913
[4]
ibid
[5]
Birmingham Daily Post, Monday 6th October 1913
[6]
Birmingham Gazette, Wednesday 15th October 1913
[7]
Frank Juckes (1857-1926) was a Justice of the Peace, Guardian of the Poor,
chairman of the board of Birmingham Union (1912-13), governor of Birmingham
University (1912-1913), City Councillor (1911-1912), Freemason, supporter of
the Moneyhull Colony and Prisoners’ Aid Society, chairman of the visiting
committee of the prison, and, by trade, a printer. It was the company he
founded, Frank Juckes Ltd, which printed Nicholas Bachtin’s only publication in
his lifetime, Introduction to the Study
of Modern Greek (1935).
[8] Birmingham Union: General Purposes
Committee Minute Book 1912-1914 (Library of Birmingham Archives GP/B/2/8/2/1)
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