Tale of two schoolboys

THERE is not a school anywhere that doesn’t have a tragic tale to tell somewhere along the line.

Elizabeth College had two particularly painful experiences in the reign of Queen Victoria and one was notably close to home.

It was the principal’s son no less.

It was 1851 and Johnny Bromby was just 11 years old.

One of four sons of the then school principal, Dr John Bromby, he was larking about with the window ropes, just as boys tended to do in the boarders’ room.

But, Johnny tangled himself up in the ropes and accidentally hanged himself while nobody was apparently about.

A maid found him, rushed to tell his father and it was the principal who had the unenviable experience of having to cut down his own son.

As Bruce Parker noted in his wonderful ‘A History of Elizabeth College’, Bromby contemporary Charles Durand wrote: ‘A cloud fell over the whole school for he was very much loved and all of us went to his funeral. He is buried in Candie cemetery... we all subscribed to the beautifully carved monument.’

The loss of his oldest son must have had a terrible effect on the principal and three years later he resigned and headed to Australia, where he became a distinguished head of Melbourne Grammar School and even helped create Australian Rules Football.

The very first match was between Melbourne Grammar and their city rivals, St Kilda.

And the fact that Bromby was so highly influential in the formation of ‘Aussie Rules’, and that he had arrived in Victoria directly from St Peter Port, suggests that he could be the reason behind all Aussie Rules players winning their ‘guernsey’, as opposed to a ‘jersey’ or simply shirt.

Almost 30 years after Johnny Bromby’s demise, the school was under another dark cloud with the remarkably unfortunate death of the 17-year-old son of a Sir Walter Henry Midhurst, Consul General.

It was the summer term of 1880 when young Walter Nowell Midhurst popped into a Town chemist run by a Mr Atkinson.

The chemist also sold sweets and drinks and that fateful afternoon it is believed that the college boy was accidentally poisoned after a shop assistant took down a bottle of lemon sherbet and mixed it with a teaspoonful of water to make a drink for the schoolboy, who promptly drank it.

Four hours later Walter was dead, the victim of either a calamitous piece of shopkeeping in which the spoon used to mix the lemon sherbet had been contaminated by a previous order, or because the schoolboy, who was left alone in the shop for a short while, had helped himself to the deadly strychnine thinking it was an effervescent drink mix.

And while the reason behind Bromby’s death was clear cut, little added up with regard to Midhurst.

Young Walter entered the shop at 3.30pm and asked for a drink.

The proprietor knew him to be a frequent visitor to the shop and he left him with his assistant, Mr Way, and went upstairs.

Mr Way then took down from the shelf a bottle containing lemon sherbet and mixed up a teaspoonful with water in a tumbler that Walter drank.

Mr Way and Walter remained in conversation in the grocery department for about half-an-hour before Walter left to visit the home of a friend, Miss Russell, with whom the Midhurst family had stayed on a previous visit to the island.

She was not in.

He then went to the Royal Hotel and at about 5pm returned to Mr Atkinson’s shop.

At 5.20pm Atkinson came downstairs into the shop and found Walter in the grocery department engaged in conversation with Mr Way.

Shortly afterwards they were joined by a fellow college pupil, Edward Rice, and Mr Atkinson remarked that the college principal, the Rev. J. Oates, would be wondering where the boys were.

Walter left the shop to return to the college, where Rice caught him up at the gates and gave him chocolate. The two boys then joined other pupils for tea, when Rice offered his friend another piece of chocolate, which he refused.

Young Walter ate his tea ahead of his fellow pupils, but soon after started to complain of coldness in his hands.

That, in turn, worsened to a headache and trembling legs.

He went to lie down on a bed.

Before long he was seized with convulsions and, even though Dr Aikman was soon on the scene, he died a horrible death by poison, probably strychnine.

The following day’s post-mortem examination revealed Walter’s brain to be completely normal and in a perfectly healthy state. Walter’s body was discoloured and they decided to conduct experiments to discover if the contents of his stomach were poisonous or not.

They selected two frogs, to which they fed portions of the contents of his stomach, and soon witnessed the spasms associated with strychnine poisoning.

Half a gram of strychnine is ample to cause the death of an adult, taking effect from half-an-hour to three hours after digestion.

The inquest found on the side of an accident. All witnesses agreed that Walter was perfectly rational both in his mind and in his conduct during the last hours of his life. He had not taken the poison deliberately.

The funeral was arranged for 4pm on Monday 21 June and the cortege left Elizabeth College preceded by the principal and the curate of St Peter Port.

His coffin was carried by six of the college prefects and, like Bromby, was interred at Candie Cemetery.

Almost immediately a series of letters appeared in the Star newspaper regarding the lax handling of the sale of poisons on the island. Many islanders found it unacceptable that a schoolboy could wander at will unaccompanied through a chemist’s shop, satisfying his boyish curiosity by tasting from different bottles within his reach. Not only that, but in a shop which also sold drinks and sweets to schoolboys.

The end result was an island-wide Pharmacy Act which brought procedures in line with standard practices in England.

So what really happened?

Most probably either the spoon or glass at Mr Atkinson’s establishment, as used by Robert Way to mix up the lemon sherbet, was contaminated from a previous poisons order, and not thoroughly cleaned afterwards.

Or, Walter, finding himself alone in the shop at some point, had helped himself to the strychnine believing it to be an effervescent drink.