‘Malaria Has Spoilt It’: Malaria, Neuropsychiatric Complications, and Insanity in ex-Servicemen in Post-First World War Britain

Summary

This article focuses on the cases of two British ex-servicemen who contracted malaria during or immediately after the First World War, were charged with murder in the 1920s, and pled insanity due to their malaria and long-term neuropsychiatric complications. One was found ‘guilty but insane’ and committed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in June 1923, while the other was convicted and hanged in July 1927. It argues that, at a time when the medical community sought out the causes of mental disease in the physical body, medico-legal arguments about malaria and insanity were received inconsistently by inter-war British courts. Class, education, social status, institutional support and the nature of the crime all mattered, as they had in the diagnoses, treatment and trials of other ex-servicemen with psychiatric illnesses.

On the morning of 7 April 1923 in Maida Vale in west London, two bodies flashed past the first-floor tenants of Leith Mansions—one landed with a ‘thud’ on the stone footpath 10 feet or so in front of the flats, and the second in the bushes, nearer the ground-floor wall. Moments before, George Stephen Penny, headmaster at the Marylebone Grammar School, had thrown his three-year-old daughter, Jean, over his family’s fourth-floor balcony. Subsequently, he pressed his wife, Lucy, up against the balcony’s rails as he tried to throw her over the ledge too. Penny eventually relented and let go of his wife, but within minutes he threw himself over the balcony.

When the Metropolitan Police constable arrived, he found an unconscious Penny lying amongst the bushes in the garden. The second body in the bushes was Jean’s, who had landed on the stone-paved walkway about nine feet to the left of her father. Jean was admitted to St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington with multiple fractures and a bruised forehead. Although at first Jean’s condition improved under treatment, 18 days later she was dead—the young girl had developed meningitis, secondary bacterial pneumonia and liver abscesses due to sepsis.

On the date of the crime, the police constable had found in Penny’s inside jacket pocket two suicide notes—one addressed to his mother and the other to his wife. In the letter written to his mother, penned on 6 April, Penny explained that his and his family’s finances had been in disorder for some time, at least since his return home from the First World War in 1919. Marylebone Grammar School had not paid Penny while he was being demobilised from the British Army between March and August 1919, he had to furnish their new flat at Leith Mansions, he had been locked in an acrimonious and expensive lawsuit with a former landlord, and, as Britain slipped into an economic recession in the early 1920s, Penny’s school had slashed his monthly salary by 10 per cent. On top of it all, Penny’s poor health—from 1917 onwards he suffered from malaria symptoms after contracting Plasmodium falciparum, which culminated in cerebral malaria, and Plasmodium vivax in Macedonia—had forced him to seek out costly treatments by private physicians and to pay for it all by turning to disreputable moneylenders. Seeing the work of ‘providence’ and a responsibility to spare his family from a life of poverty in his decision to murder his daughter, his wife and then to kill himself—a common motive for both paternal and maternal child-murderers in the late Victorian era and early twentieth century—Penny ruminated on the past six years of his life.¹ ‘As I look back’, he wrote near the end of his letter,

I wish earnestly I had gone under in 1917 when I so nearly did die, but again, I was not meant to do so. Perhaps there may have been some value in the work I have done since, but malaria has spoilt it. I ask pardon of any I have wronged and without grudge or malice against any believing that whatever I have gone through has been meant for my good, and having heard the call month by month more clearly.

Penny signed the letter, ‘Your failure of a son, George.’²

At his trial in June 1923, Penny’s barrister contended that ‘malignant malaria’—as P. falciparum, the deadliest form of malaria, was often called—and possibly also ‘hereditary taint’ had triggered in Penny a state of ‘confusional insanity’, and that he was not criminally responsible for his actions. The jury was sympathetic to the defence’s case. George Stephen Penny was found ‘guilty but insane’ on 7 June. A week later, he was admitted to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in the Berkshire countryside, as was common since 1889 for defendants found insane.³

In what was possibly the first murder trial held at the Old Bailey in London in which an ex-serviceman pled insanity by way of malaria, Penny’s case, described by two members of the press as a ‘pathetic story’ of ‘war-bred murder’, grabbed newspaper headlines.⁴ The case was, in some ways, a story about the failures of reintegrating ex-servicemen in debt-ridden, post-war Britain, some of whom, but perhaps not as many as contemporaries had imagined, became violent.⁵ It was also a cautionary tale of the downfall of a middle-class, Cambridge-educated father. No longer able to provide financially for his family and fulfil his role as breadwinner, Penny had committed an act that Victorian and Edwardian ‘alienists’ often struggled mightily to understand—indeed, how to explain Penny’s seemingly unnatural and out-of-character actions?⁶

This article follows Penny’s case in June 1923 and finishes by comparing it to one further murder trial of a malarial ex-serviceman, Arthur Harnett, who pled insanity, was convicted, and hanged in August 1927. It argues that, at a time when the medical and psychiatric communities—‘alienists’, especially—believed that ‘mental disease could be located, somewhere, deep within the bodily fabric’, as Jennifer Wallis has argued, medico-legal arguments about malaria and insanity were received inconsistently by inter-war British courts.⁷ The part played by malaria in explaining criminal behaviour and responsibility was appreciated differently at different times in different ex-servicemen, even though the medical understanding of malaria’s neuropsychiatric complications held firm between 1923 and 1927. Class, education, social status, institutional support, and, of course, the nature of the crime, all likely mattered, as they had in the diagnoses, treatment and trials of shell-shocked ex-servicemen, those with general paralysis of the insane (GPI), and other psychiatric illnesses—what could save one middle-class and well-educated ex-serviceman from the gallows in 1923, as we will see, had no bearing on a working-class ex-serviceman four years later.⁸

The problem(s) raised by Penny’s case and others like it was potentially massive, both for Britain’s medical community and its courts. Returning home from the First World War were nearly half a million British Empire soldiers, men who had fought mostly in Africa, the Middle East and in Greek Macedonia, harbouring malaria-causing microbes.⁹ Although four Plasmodia—protozoan parasites that cause malaria—were known to affect humans by the time of the First World War, the majority of soldiers returned home with the mostly benign P. vivax but some with the potentially deadly P. falciparum still in their blood.¹⁰

At the time, malariology was a discipline in some flux. Malaria’s vector, the anopheline mosquito, had been known since the turn of the century, as had malaria’s life cycle.¹¹ Malaria’s spread had been controlled by programmes from Panama to India to Italy to eradicate anopheline mosquitoes and their breeding grounds, and, in some cases, by the distribution of prophylactic quinine.¹² The length and severity of P. vivax relapses was still up for debate—the existence of hypnozoites, a dormant parasite in the liver, was unknown—as was at what dose and by what method—intravenous, intramuscular, oral—quinine was an effective prophylactic or treatment.¹³ The deadlier falciparum, if left untreated, was known to cause cerebral malaria, a condition in which infected red blood cells bunch together, evade the spleen, and attack the heart, lungs, liver, kidney and brain, killing somewhere between a quarter to half of those infected.¹⁴ Those who survived cerebral malaria often struggled with a startling and sometimes crippling range of physical and neuropsychiatric complications.¹⁵ In an odd twist, malaria was also shown to have therapeutic value in the treatment of GPI—in Vienna, the Austrian physician Julius Wagner von Jauregg had treated GPI by deliberately infecting patients with a strain of P. vivax drawn from a returned Austro-Hungarian soldier from the Balkans.¹⁶

Moreover, Penny’s trial came at a time when the medical community’s investigations into ‘organic illnesses’ and mental disorders, had, in the words of historian Violeta Ruiz, increasingly ‘tied the mind and the body together through biology’. Encephalitis lethargica (EL)—colloquially referred to as sleepy sickness—had been shown to produce sudden and often aggressive and erratic behavioural changes, especially in children.¹⁷ By the late nineteenth century, GPI—now referred to as neurosyphilis—was understood to be a complication of untreated, late-stage syphilis and had produced in patients significant mental and physical changes. Psychiatrists and neuropathologists literally looked at the brains and skulls, the muscles and tissues, of those with GPI to explain their mental changes.¹⁸ British colonial asylum superintendents in nineteenth-century India were convinced that influenza could act as a ‘biological stressor’ and trigger episodes of mental illness.¹⁹ Mental illness and criminal responsibility were even debated in cases of pyromania.²⁰

Ample attention has been paid to the men who returned home from the war ‘shell-shocked’ from their experiences of the battlefields of Europe and abroad. We know much about the medical infrastructures, therapies, and financial supports put in place to rehabilitate them.²¹ We also know how neurasthenia or shell shock played a part in the criminal proceedings of ex-servicemen. As historian Clive Emsley has written, shell shock was ‘commonplace’ in British courts by the end of the Great War, used as a defence in cases ranging from assault and bigamy to theft and murder, and used most often when the evidence against a soldier or ex-serviceman was overwhelmingly in favour of the prosecution.²²

But apart from a few passing references to men with malaria-causing parasites toiling away in mental asylums across Britain and Ireland, the long-term neuropsychiatric complications of malaria and the appearance of malarial ex-servicemen in British courts have passed almost without comment.²³ Malaria’s omission in medical and medico-legal histories of the First World War is surprising for two reasons. First, because at least as many British Empire soldiers contracted malaria as those who suffered from psychiatric illnesses—nearly half a million, as mentioned earlier, contracted malaria, compared to 325,000 ‘psychiatric casualties’, of which 144,000 were diagnosed as cases of shell shock or neurasthenia. Secondly, because hundreds if not thousands of war disability pension files for malaria exist alongside those for neurasthenia and shell shock as part of the PIN/26 collection at the National Archives, Kew.²⁴ Their stories are waiting to be told.

Penny’s Great War and Malaria

At 28 years old George Stephen Penny enlisted in the Motor Transport, Army Service Corps in 1914. After a few months of training, he was commissioned in the Royal Artillery and posted to a Cadet School for instruction. Picked up by the War Office because of his cursory knowledge of Greek, which he acquired while studying at Cambridge University, Penny was gazetted a second lieutenant and sent to Macedonia. There, he oversaw the work of local Greek and Bulgarian labourers on road-making duties behind the frontline, near the village of Güvezne, in the Struma Valley—a ‘highly malarious’ area, wrote George Milne, the commander-in-chief of the British Salonika Force, where marshlands running alongside the river’s banks formed textbook breeding grounds for malaria’s vector, the anopheline mosquito.²⁵

By mid-November 1917, still recovering from an attack of sandfly fever, Penny went sick with P. falciparum. His temperature spiked at 105° Fahrenheit, he was evacuated to a stationary hospital, and his family was notified that his condition was ‘dangerous’—he was, as he later wrote in his autobiography, ‘between life and death’, suffering from cerebral malaria. After 13 weeks in hospital, Penny recovered and was discharged as fit for duty. After another six months supervising the work of local labourers on the lines of communication, Penny spent the remainder of the war at General Headquarters, Salonika, as chief British censor, and then carried out intelligence work with the Army of the Black Sea’s occupation of Istanbul.

By December 1918, Penny’s health was improving but he suffered a relapse of P. vivax around Christmas. After returning to England in April 1919, Penny’s body had withstood three bouts of malaria, including at least one of falciparum and cerebral malaria in 1917 that had nearly killed him. Between 1919 and 1922, Penny continued to experience relapses, worse in March and April, but was able to continue on in his job as the headmaster at Marylebone Grammar School as well as tutoring at a local evening institute. All the while his physical condition deteriorated. His spleen was enlarged—common in malarial patients, as the spleen works to remove infected red blood cells—and he felt ‘morose and listless’. His mental condition, in his own words, sank into an ‘intense depression’.²⁶

The Malaria Link

Suspicion that Penny’s malaria had played a part in the crimes he committed had been raised from the start. Robert Matthew Bronte, the specialist in pathology at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, addended his post-mortem report on Penny and Lucy’s daughter, Jean, with a speculative observation on Penny’s mental fitness, suggesting that he had ‘known malaria to lead to suicide, and to bring about a state of unsound mind’. Bronte possibly drew his conclusion from personal experience—he had served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) on the Western Front in 1918, when 21 battalions of men carrying malaria-causing parasites arrived from Macedonia in July to reinforce the Allies’ position in the aftermath of the German Spring Offensive, and he had also spent time in West Africa, likely in Sierra Leone.²⁷ David Levi, the attending physician, was dubious. Levi found no malaria parasites in Penny after completing a blood smear. Penny might have contracted malaria in the past, he conceded, but to Levi’s knowledge—he was wrong, of course—there was ‘no post malarial condition which makes a person mentally + physically unstable’ nor any ‘school of medical thought’ that held otherwise. Instead, as was common in murder cases from the late nineteenth century onwards, when ‘anxiety about hereditary transmission and the propagation of the mentally unfit was at its height in the psychiatric profession’, Levi dug deep into Penny’s family past for a history of insanity or suicide.²⁸

Despite Levi’s objections, Bronte’s belief that malaria might have played a part in Penny’s case was backed up by Henry Robert Oswald, a trained doctor, lawyer and the West London Coroner. Oswald was no stranger to controversial cases involving ex-servicemen—13 months before Penny’s trial, he was the coroner in the high-profile case of former Royal Flying Corps pilot Ronald True, who had asphyxiated to death a prostitute in central London, was found guilty but declared insane, and committed to Broadmoor.²⁹ At the Paddington Coroner’s Court, Oswald deposed that a ‘man who had had malaria and who had pecuniary difficulties as Penny had would be the more likely to do such an act’, finding in malaria a cause for Penny’s impulsive behaviour.³⁰

Bronte’s and Oswald’s conclusions about Penny’s mental well-being were supported by the senior medical officer at Brixton Prison, William Norwood East. By the time of Penny’s trial in June 1923, East had spent 24 years as a prison medical officer, had completed multiple studies on insanity at HM Prison Manchester and at HM Prison Liverpool, and was often called on as an expert witness at the Old Bailey. Like the coroner, East had also been summoned as an expert witness by the defence in the Ronald True case in May 1922.³¹

For 26 days starting on 1 May 1923, East met daily with Penny at Brixton Prison. He also spoke with Penny’s relatives—who, exactly, he did not reveal—and Penny’s assistant master at Marylebone Grammar School. East started his report to the director of public prosecutions with a deep dive into Penny’s family history, something that was standard operating procedure in murder trials, and a nod to the belief that insanity had a ‘hereditarian component’.³² East found widespread evidence of mental illness, as it was understood in the early twentieth century, in Penny’s family tree: both Penny’s maternal and paternal grandparents were cousins, as were his parents; one grandparent was an epileptic; Penny’s mother had, at least once, attempted suicide; Penny’s brother suffered from visual and auditory hallucinations and had committed suicide by jumping in front of a train; Penny’s sister was thought to be insane but manageable enough not to be certified; his mother’s cousin had committed suicide; and Penny’s paternal aunt, ‘weak-minded and neurasthenic’, had died of multiple sclerosis.

East’s conversations with Penny revealed that the latter had suffered relapses of malaria since his near-death contraction of P. falciparum and cerebral malaria in Macedonia in 1917, and also P. vivax in 1918. ‘This disease’, East noted, ‘has been frequently observed in connection with the form of insanity which in my opinion the accused later developed’. Family members were certain that Penny’s demeanour had changed considerably, and for the worse, since being demobilised—he had become irritable and easily agitated, depressed, suffered from insomnia, ‘dementia praecox’ (schizophrenia), and short-term memory loss.³³ At Marylebone Grammar School in the months leading up to the crime, Penny had started to confuse the names of his colleagues and submitted receipts for reimbursement twice over. Financial difficulties had added to, but were not the primary reason, East theorised, for Penny’s mental decline. East concluded that Penny had ‘at that time, and for some considerable time before’ the crime been suffering from confusional insanity. Since Penny had been in custody, East had found him cognizant of the nature and seriousness of his crimes and that they were wrong. He determined that Penny was fit to stand trial.³⁴

The connection between malaria and psychiatric illness made by Bronte, Oswald, and East came on the heels of medical research into the links between psychiatric illness and diseases like EL, GPI, and influenza. The belief that malaria, too, could lead to neuropsychiatric complications in its worn-down victims was gaining ground both in Europe and the British Empire. German and French psychiatrists had been developing links between malaria and neuropsychiatric complications since the late nineteenth century—Germans more often pointed to malaria’s depressive effect on mood and behaviour, while French psychiatrists highlighted confusion.³⁵

Thanks to the First World War and the hundreds of thousands of British Empire soldiers infected with the disease, British research into malaria and its neuropsychiatric complications was also burgeoning. As Arthur G. Phear, formerly the consulting physician to the British Salonika Force and the Army of the Black Sea, had put it to a meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine in London in March 1920, the war in Macedonia had provided a ‘greater wealth of clinical material from the physician’s point of view’ than any other theatre of war.³⁶ Over 161,000 soldiers in Macedonia were admitted to hospitals for malaria between 1916 and 1918, a ratio of 1,053 per 1,000 men.³⁷

While the British Army struggled to contain the malaria problem at the front line, behind the line there was further evidence of a link between malaria, mostly falciparum and cerebral malaria, and ‘confusional insanity’, the diagnosis that would eventually spare Penny from the death sentence. Cases of confusional insanity were found in soldiers with malaria at Dykebar War Hospital, Lord Derby Hospital in Warrington, Cheshire, Cane Hill Mental Hospital in Croydon, Haslar Hospital in Gosport, Hampshire, at the Mental Division at the Welsh Metropolitan War Hospital in Cardiff, and at Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital.³⁸ At Claybury Asylum in London, malaria, alongside venereal disease and fever, was thought of as an antecedent to exhaustion and ‘shell shock’.³⁹ The officer in charge of ‘D’ Block at the Royal Victoria Hospital was certain that malaria and other febrile illnesses were ‘very productive of confusional states as sequelae, and there seems no doubt’, he wrote in 1920, ‘that the toxins and exhaustion from these disorders were often offenders in this respect’.⁴⁰ In Macedonia, malaria, A.T.W. Forrester wrote in the Lancet in January 1920, was ‘far and away the biggest factor in the causation of mental disease amongst our troops’. ‘Indeed’, he continued, ‘the admission rate of the latter is almost an exact parallel of the malaria curve’. Although ‘almost any of the recognised types of psychosis can be set up by the malaria parasite’, Forrester insisted, one symptom, ‘mental confusion’, stood out—it was present in over 68 per cent of all cases, followed by depression in nearly 38 per cent of all cases. Forrester explained that symptoms ranged from severe delirium to short-term amnesia and a ‘complete dissociation of personality’, which produced, in his words, ‘beautiful and typical examples of the occurrence of a definite fugue’. Most of the men—much like Penny, as we will see—‘had been conscious for some time previous to the actual breakdown of a failing in physical and mental vigour’.⁴¹

By July 1923, not long after Penny’s trial had wrapped up, the president of the Medico-Psychological Association of Great Britain and Ireland described something of a consensus in the medical community—there was little doubt that in the ‘course of toxic and febrile processes’, including but not limited to malaria, he explained, ‘psychoses may arise’.⁴² With some kind of consensus forming in Britain about malaria and insanity, it is little surprise, then, that Bronte, Oswald, and East all considered malaria as the trigger for Penny’s psychological downward spiral and his unnatural and violent outburst.

The Trial

Since Penny did not dispute that he had killed his three-year-old daughter, Jean, his trial in June 1923 focused on whether he was legally sane. The M’Naghten Rules of 1843, intended to bring the question of criminal insanity under the law, as historian Roger Smith has written, were clear—the accused could only be considered insane if, due to a ‘defect of reason’ or ‘disease of the mind’, they neither knew the ‘nature or equality’ of their acts nor that what they were doing was wrong.⁴³ The Rules were rarely if ever referred to by name, and by the turn of the century doctors and lawyers knew full well that the Rules were loosely applied and that ‘guilty but insane’ verdicts were on the rise—in the 1910s, 32 per cent of those found guilty of murder were declared ‘guilty but insane’, 39 per cent in the 1920s, and almost 45 per cent in the 1930s.⁴⁴

Contemporary theories about the origins of insanity varied, but, by the time of Penny’s trial, there was little doubt amongst alienists and others that the root cause of mental illness was hiding, festering even, in skin tissue, muscle fibres, bones, the brain, the nervous system, and bodily fluids like blood, cerebro-spinal fluid, and urine.⁴⁵ Such thinking became commonplace in the courtroom when insanity pleas were heard. Juries at the Old Bailey in London were told of multiple causes of madness, ‘spanning the spectrum’, as historian Joel Peter Eigen has written of trials between 1760 and 1913, ‘from the psychological to the organic, from the traditional—delirium, insensibility, imbecility—to the contemporary: moral insanity, irresistible impulse, vertige épileptique’.⁴⁶ Male defendants at the turn of the century, especially when they had committed child murder—like Penny had done—pointed to melancholia. In cases of homicidal mania, lawyers stressed that the defendant’s violent episode was, in fact, an aberration, an uncontrollable fit, that produced unmistakable physical signs—staring eyes, fixed expressions, and sudden recoveries coupled with short-term amnesia. Juries had also been presented with evidence that head injuries, brain fever, a fractured skull, and sunstroke could produce an ‘organic impairment’, hindering one’s ability to know right from wrong.⁴⁷ Heredity, too, with its links to race and socio-economic status, was emphasized in the latter half of the nineteenth century.⁴⁸ Delusion, melancholia, organic impairment, irresistible impulse, heredity, all of these would be marshalled in some way or another by Penny’s barrister, who drew a line, if not always a straight one, between Penny’s near-death contraction of malaria during the First World War and the murder of his daughter six years later.

The prosecution in Penny’s case was led by the Cambridge-educated and accomplished barrister, Travers Humphreys. Humphreys’ argument was constructed to establish without any doubt Penny’s intent to kill his family and to commit suicide, and that he was motivated solely by financial troubles and a bounced cheque. When Penny himself sat in the witness-box—a move that the Journal of Mental Science, covering the case, considered ‘very unusual in cases in which insanity is the line of defence’—Humphreys charted Penny’s homicidal intent. From December 1922 onwards, Penny had started to think it better should he and his family ‘die together’. In April 1923, two days before he threw Jean off the family’s fourth-floor balcony and attempted to throw his wife, Lucy, over the ledge too, he had brought home from Marylebone Grammar School two bottles of prussic acid and chloroform from the school’s laboratory, but ‘had not the strength of mind … to do anything with them’.⁴⁹ The night before the murder, on 6 April, Penny had also contemplated turning on the gas stove in his bedroom, with a mind to asphyxiate himself and his family. What set off Penny on the morning of 7 April, Humphreys asserted, was not any sort of malaria-induced rage or irresistible impulse, but instead the return of a £5 cheque from a local tradesman.⁵⁰

Defending Penny was the experienced and well-connected Sir Ryland Adkins, an Oxford graduate, Liberal Party MP for Middleton, Lancashire, and a prominent member of the Northamptonshire County Council. Adkins’ defence leaned on the testimonies of his two psychiatric experts, the aforementioned William Norwood East and Francis Edwards, the medical superintendent of Camberwell House Asylum in London. Adkins contended that Penny was both the product of bad heredity—recall East’s deep dive into Penny’s family history of mental illness—and was ‘seeing red’ before the murder, a state of visual hallucination brought on by his wartime contraction of P. falciparum and cerebral malaria, and undeniable proof of his confusional insanity.⁵¹ East reiterated what he had written to the director of public prosecutions two weeks before the trial, that Penny was ‘suffering from confusional insanity at the time of the act’ because of his malaria—a position in line with East’s understanding of impulses as both ‘genuine’ and ‘irresistible’ in the mentally ill.⁵² Edwards, when questioned by Adkins, agreed with East—Penny had suffered from ‘exhaustion psychosis’ that manifested as ‘confusional insanity’. ‘Malignant malaria’, he assured the courtroom, using the contemporary colloquial medical term to describe P. falciparum, ‘would tend to act as an exciting cause’. Penny’s claim that he was ‘seeing red’ before he carried out the acts was ‘exactly the condition’ Edwards saw ‘in a person passing into a state of complete confusion’.⁵³ Although ‘seeing red’, he claimed, was common in epileptics, referring almost certainly to photosensitive epilepsy, Penny was not an epileptic. Edwards was clear—malaria, not epilepsy, had caused Penny’s confusional state.⁵⁴

Adkins followed up his psychiatric experts by turning to Penny’s assistant master at Marylebone. The assistant master deposed that Penny had suffered from attacks of malaria since his return to the school in November 1919—P. vivax was known to relapse up to eight to ten months after quinine treatment, which loosely fit the date of Penny’s vivax contraction in Macedonia in 1918 and his demobilisation in August 1919.⁵⁵ The attacks were at their worst in early spring. On 7 March 1923, Penny confided to him, ‘I dread this month. I am always worse then’. He seemed ‘ill and depressed, but carried on to Easter, when he went away for a few days’. After Penny returned to the school, he complained of insomnia for two or three nights, he ‘looked bad’, and had made multiple and uncharacteristic accounting errors.⁵⁶

Adkins had, in short, fashioned a defence that incorporated aspects of nearly every contemporary understanding of insanity—Penny’s family history of mental illness had perhaps predisposed him to insanity, and he had suffered a delusional, epileptic-like fit, an ‘organic impairment’, brought on by his disease, malaria, that caused a break in his normal behaviour before the crime and an irresistible impulse in him to carry out such an irrational and unnatural act as child murder.⁵⁷

The Verdict, Broadmoor and After

On 7 June 1923, as the jury was set to retire and deliberate Penny’s fate, Justice Rigby Swift spoke plainly but firmly about what was at stake. At a time when a ‘strict judicial interpretation’ of criminal insanity, as Tony Ward has written, butted up against the ‘increasingly generous application of the defence by juries’, Penny’s ‘peculiar’ case was ‘of grave importance and of an extraordinary character’, Swift told the court.⁵⁸ ‘There were many states of mind’, he lectured the jury, alluding to the M’Naghten Rules in all but name, ‘which many people would be inclined to speak of as insanity, but which were very far short of the insanity recognised in law as a reason for a jury returning a special verdict’. Formerly a barrister, Swift had some experience with the law and insanity pleas, employing the defence at least once in 1900.⁵⁹ Unmoved by the psychiatric experts called on by Adkins, Swift left no uncertainty about where he stood on the matter—‘Penny was perfectly sane when he made up his mind to kill his wife and child and when he made the effort to do it’. Penny’s rational deliberation, his preparedness and planning, seemed incompatible with his insanity plea—an issue that also arose in cases of pyromania.⁶⁰ Unless the jury believed that Penny had passed into a ‘moment of madness’, that he had experienced an irresistible impulse brought on by the malaria-causing microbes of P. falciparum he had contracted in Macedonia and his slow but steady decline, ‘there was no basis for the defence’. After 50 minutes, the jury had reached its verdict—Penny had taken his daughter’s life while ‘in a state of temporary insanity’ and ‘he was not conscious of the nature and quality of his act’. ⁶¹ For the jury, Penny’s malaria had satisfied the M’Naghten Rules’ criteria about a ‘disease of the mind’ and its impact on responsibility.⁶² He would not hang.

To be sure, Penny’s case was not the only high-profile murder case involving a ‘guilty but insane’ ex-serviceman in the war’s aftermath. As mentioned earlier, 39 per cent of those convicted of murder in the 1920s were declared ‘guilty but insane’, a figure that included multiple, well-known trials of ex-servicemen such as Norman Rutherford, Archibald Crockford, and Ronald True.⁶³ Nonetheless, as historian Ginger S. Frost points out, ex-servicemen rarely got away with murder, especially when the act appeared to be premeditated—Penny and others like him were the exceptions, not the norms, as Arthur Harnett’s case will soon show.⁶⁴

The outcome of Penny’s case, according to the pro-labour Daily Herald, was bound to have ‘a big effect in moving opinion to the view that all murderers should be treated as patients for medical treatment and not as subjects for punishment’. The Herald’s prophecy was never quite realized.⁶⁵

Spared from the gallows, Penny was transferred to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum a week later. In the Berkshire countryside, Penny turned to composing poetry, took up gardening, played the organ, his wife visited him monthly, and he had even struck up a friendship at Broadmoor with fellow ex-servicemen Norman Rutherford and Ronald True. Despite the pleasant distractions, he often fell into ‘uncontrollable fits of weeping’, and, in spring and autumn, he claimed, was ‘habitually’ in the ‘throes of a sharp bout of malaria’. In June or July 1924, Lucy left Penny—her husband was confined indefinitely at Broadmoor at ‘His Majesty’s Pleasure’, a daunting prospect for the then 34-year-old—leaving him feeling ‘hopeless and dejected’. But good news was coming. After a fellow patient at Broadmoor, an ex-serviceman with dementia, was awarded a disability pension by the Ministry of Pensions, Penny applied, was examined by a medical board, and was awarded a 100 per cent pension for ‘malignant malaria and melancholia’, from which £1 a week was deducted for his maintenance at Broadmoor.⁶⁶

Emboldened by his successful application to the Ministry of Pensions, in December 1924 Penny petitioned the Home Secretary and Conservative Party politician William Joynson-Hicks to be transferred from Broadmoor to the Ministry of Pensions Clinic for Officers at Latchmere House in Ham Common, Surrey, a stately Victorian-era home reserved for men in ‘needy circumstances’.⁶⁷ Penny’s missive to Joynson-Hicks was everything the Home Office wanted to hear: he had been a model patient in his 18 months at Broadmoor, proving himself ‘amenable + steady’; he was remorseful, citing the destruction of his ‘domestic happiness’ as his ‘most severe and lasting punishment’; he had community support, pointing to the near £1000 raised by other grammar school headmasters and headmistresses in a subscription fund for his criminal defence; his parents, brother, and sister were willing to care for him and accommodate him; Penny’s former commanding officer in Macedonia, who often visited Penny at Broadmoor, was willing to help him find employment; he thanked the staff of Broadmoor, notably its medical superintendent, for their ‘invariable kindness and consideration’ and the ‘very real benefit’ of his stay there; and, most importantly, the fact that the Ministry of Pensions had awarded Penny a full disability pension ‘on the grounds of malaria and melancholia’, both of which were ‘attributable to my war service in the Near East during which I contracted malignant malaria’, meant that the Ministry had effectively sympathised with Penny’s trial plea of confusional insanity due to P. falciparum and agreed with the jury’s verdict.⁶⁸ In short, Penny had argued that Broadmoor and its medical officers had done their jobs—he had been restored to good health.⁶⁹

Penny’s transfer request set off a wave of correspondence between the medical superintendent of Broadmoor, the director general of medical services at the Ministry of Pensions, the secretary and undersecretary of state at the Home Office, and officials at Latchmere House. The Home Office’s primary concern in releasing men from Broadmoor had always been their risk to the public, and anxiety, greater from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, about heredity and the ‘propagation of the mentally unfit’.⁷⁰ On 1 January 1925, Brixton’s Medical Superintendent, W.C. Sullivan—in 1923, Sullivan had found Ronald True ‘certifiably insane’ and a ‘moral imbecile’, and, in 1924, published the well-received Crime and Insanity—submitted his report on Penny’s time at Broadmoor to the Under-Secretary of State, Conservative Party politician Lord Hacking. Penny had made ‘excellent progress’, he assured Hacking, his ‘neurasthenia and mental depression’, both of which ‘were due to war stress and malaria, have now cleared up’. Sullivan approved of Penny’s transfer to Latchmere House and assuaged any fears at the Home Office that Penny would harass his former wife, Lucy.⁷¹ In correspondence sent between the undersecretary of state and the secretary of state, concern was raised that Penny had spent less than two years at Broadmoor, and, once at Latchmere House, the Ministry of Pensions would be free to discharge him at their own discretion. ‘The murder of a child + the attempted murder of a wife are serious crimes’, wrote one official. Amidst the concern shown by the Home Office that releasing Penny into the care of the Ministry of Pensions was ‘somewhat risky’, compassion was also shown. Home Office officials recognised that the longer Penny stayed at Broadmoor, ‘the more difficult it will be for him to make a fresh start in life’. Near the end of February, the secretary of state informed the Ministry of Pensions that the Home Office had agreed to Penny’s transfer, but that he ‘should not be discharged from hospital without some prospects of employment + at such a short notice’—the secretary of state, Home Office minutes recorded, had ‘a definite interest in this man’. Fifteen months later, Penny was a free man. After securing a job as a commercial traveller for Messrs J. Lyons & Co., the prominent catering company, he was discharged by the Ministry of Pensions.⁷²

The Home Office’s ‘interest’ in Penny was revived in 1931 when Penny’s autobiography, ‘Guilty But Insane', was published pseudonymously under the pen name, ‘Warmark’. One official, jotting down notes in the minutes section of Penny’s Home Office file, called it a ‘most remarkable book’. Another unnamed official, tasked with producing a synopsis of the book for the Home Office, wrote that Penny’s malaria was ‘commonly associated with some forms of mental weakness’, although it was not his prerogative to agree or disagree with Justice Swift, who had cautioned the jury to find Penny guilty. He was, however, confident enough about one thing—Penny’s case was an indication that ‘the prevention of the marriage of cousins could be better defended on facts than the sterilization of “defectives”!’⁷³ The Royal Medico-Psychological Association was also interested in Penny’s autobiography, adding the book to its library two years later and encouraging its members to read it.⁷⁴

The Less Fortunate

George Stephen Penny, perhaps a victim of neuropsychiatric complications due to P. falciparum and cerebral malaria or, less charitably, the beneficiary of a brilliant barrister and a sympathetic jury, was, in a way, fortunate—in June 1923 the jury declared Penny guilty but insane. He was committed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum where he spent less than 24 months before being transferred to a Ministry of Pensions Clinic for Officers at Latchmere House in Ham Common. He had escaped the hangman’s noose. But others—men without Penny’s academic pedigree, his oratory, his social station, and his detached, almost dissociated, ability to look back at his actions with near scientific precision—were less fortunate.

Arthur Harnett, a 28-year-old collier from Hemsworth, West Yorkshire who had murdered his mistress, Isabella Moore, by cutting her throat with a razor and assaulted a police constable in August 1927, was one such man. Harnett’s barrister, like Penny’s, presented his client as a product of bad heredity, pointing to a suicidal grandmother and insane grandfather. Harnett was also a long-term malaria sufferer who had had his health worn down by repeated infections of P. falciparum and P. vivax parasites during the war in India and afterwards while serving with the York and Lancaster Regiment in Mandatory Iraq from 1919 to 1925. But Harnett’s defence failed to convince the jury. After deliberating for 20 minutes, the jury convicted Harnett of murder. Harnett’s own mother had voiced her frustration with the trial to the press. During the war, she and her husband had received three telegrams from the War Office about Harnett’s dire health. ‘He had had six attacks of malaria since coming back [from the war],’ she told the press,

and has been as many times off work, but he would never have a doctor and would never take anything from the unemployment fund … If only the full story of what he had suffered had been told by the military at the trial I am sure more attention would have been paid to his mental condition.’⁷⁵

Harnett’s father, brother, and a friend—a fellow miner—had all testified that Harnett had ‘periodically complained of pains in his head and chest’ since he had returned from the war.⁷⁶ Although the local Miners’ Association in Leeds wrote in support of Harnett’s character, petitioning the Home Office for clemency, and Harnett himself wrote directly to the home secretary in a short but passionate request for leniency, their pleas fell on deaf ears. Harnett was sentenced to death in July 1927. His appeal for clemency was rejected by a three-man panel that included the same Justice Swift who had presided over Penny’s case four years earlier and had urged that jury to reject Penny’s insanity plea.⁷⁷

Why did Harnett hang while Penny was shown leniency—both, after all, had claimed to have been products of bad heredity and long-term malaria sufferers, and their actions not entirely of their own doing? Unlike Penny, Harnett had never applied for a war disability pension, as his mother noted, and had not the institutional backing of the Ministry of Pensions or a parade of asylum psychiatrists and prison medical officers to back up his plea. The support of the local Miners’ Association, which included four MPs, was not enough. The lone medical expert consulted during the trial, Robert Le Geyt Worsley, the medical officer at Armley Prison in Leeds, had found Harnett to be ‘rational and normal in conduct and conversation’—Harnett might have had a touch of melancholia in him, but had he suffered a ‘melancholic episode of malaria’ or ‘insanity due to malaria’, Worsley assured the jury, ‘he would not have appeared normal immediately before and after the murder’.⁷⁸ In other words, Worsley doubted that Harnett’s malaria or its melancholic after-effects had influenced him only during his violent act.

The nature of their crimes surely mattered. Penny had committed an act—child murder—that Victorian and Edwardian ‘alienists’ found ‘so contrary to the expectations of fatherhood’ that ‘it was considered a contradiction of human nature’.⁷⁹ The father’s role as protector was an engrained part of Victorian and Edwardian masculinity and fatherhood. Child murder was seen as a confusing upending of that essential responsibility.⁸⁰ Harnett’s case, in contrast, appeared simple and straightforward—he was a spurned lover who had committed a crime of passion. Before the murder, Harnett had failed to persuade his mistress, Moore, to leave her husband and three children. Two weeks before the crime, he had strangled her when she tried to end their dalliance.⁸¹ For Victorian and Edward juries, evidence of premeditation or a past history of violence tended to reinforce the forming of mens rea.⁸² Neither Victorian and Edwardian juries nor the Home Office looked sympathetically on men who had killed defenceless women—recall even the Home Office’s hesitation in releasing Penny to the care of the Ministry of Pensions. The local physician in Harnett’s case deposed that Moore had suffered two-inch cuts on her left palm, left thumb, and other cuts to her index and middle fingers on her right hand, sure signs that she had tried unsuccessfully to defend herself.⁸³ And although ‘insane jealousy’ was thought to have a moral or physical cause, medical witnesses, according to historian Jade Shepherd, ‘overlooked the passion as a cause of insanity’.⁸⁴

Preserving the family unit might have also been a factor. Giving Penny the death sentence would have widowed Penny’s wife who had already lost her infant daughter. Indeed, both men and women who had committed child murder had a better chance at release from Broadmoor—men, especially—than the average Broadmoor patient.⁸⁵ While sparing Penny might have kept together a devastated but not completely broken home, Harnett and his adulterous relationship had, instead, come close to destroying an intact family.

Penny’s educational background and social status—a Cambridge-educated headmaster at a respected metropolitan grammar school, and formerly a wartime officer in the British Army—also made his condition and behaviour more difficult to understand, let alone explain. As Peter Barham has written of shell shock, even the best, most progressive alienists and military doctors subscribed to a ‘hierarchical psychology in which a superior value was placed on officers over common soldiers, and psychiatric assessments were inextricably reflections of moral and social divisions’.⁸⁶ Clive Emsley has also spotted this trend in the trials of middle- and upper-class ex-servicemen convicted of murder during and after the war—officers, physicians, and other men from the professional classes (like Penny) were spared, or, if convicted, declared insane, while blacksmith’s strikers and coal miners (like Harnett) were hanged.⁸⁷ Unlike Penny’s privileged education, Harnett had left school in Hemsworth at the age of 14 and subsequently worked at various collieries in West Riding until he joined the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry in March 1916. After spending nine years in the British Army, he never rose above the rank of sergeant.⁸⁸

Yet at least one member of the medico-legal community stepped up to support Harnett. W.K. Anderson, the crusading Glaswegian psychiatrist who specialized in malaria ‘psychoses and neuroses’, after being notified of Harnett’s case by Sir John Weir, consultant physician at the London Homeopathic Hospital and physician royal to King George V, appealed directly to the Home Office. Writing to the Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks, Anderson explained that, from what he could gather from press coverage of the trial, Harnett was ‘an ex-soldier, who contracted malaria in Persia + Mesopotamia during the war, + has had much malaria since’. ‘Malaria’, he continued, emphasizing his point, ‘is not widely understood in this country as a cause of mental and nervous trouble + many cases of this kind (homicide, suicide) are cropping up from time to time’. Anderson pointed out that there were at least three cases in his Oxford University Press book, which examined 131 cases of malaria psychoses and neuroses in ex-servicemen, that bore strong similarities to that of Harnett’s—the earliest appearing in Glasgow in 1919—and that Joynson-Hicks’s predecessor, Labour Party politician Arthur Henderson, had seen fit to commute their death sentences after Anderson’s interventions.⁸⁹ Neither G.B. Griffiths of the Prison Medical Department—who had also received Anderson’s book—nor Joynson-Hicks were moved to consider seriously Anderson’s request for leniency; Griffiths called Anderson a ‘fanatic on the subject’ and did not take ‘either himself or his book very seriously’, and Joynson-Hicks, deferring to Griffiths, maintained that there ‘was no recommendation to mercy’ and that he had ‘failed to discover any grounds which would justify him in advising His Majesty to interfere with the due course of law’.⁹⁰ Harnett had come up against a judiciary and Home Office, whether conservative or liberal, that had since the turn of the century regarded insanity pleas with ‘skeptical scrutiny’.⁹¹ On 2 September 1927, Arthur Harnett was hanged at HM Prison Leeds, one of eight English or Welsh to be executed that year.

Conclusion

The Daily Herald’s prediction that George Stephen Penny’s trial, conviction, and committal to Broadmoor as ‘guilty but insane’ would force murderers to be seen as ‘patients’ and not as ‘subjects for punishment’ missed the mark. Some malarial ex-servicemen, like Penny, an articulate, Cambridge-educated family man, headmaster, and with the institutional backing of a robust governmental body like the Ministry of Pensions, who had committed a ‘gross breach of the moral order’, were not hanged but rehabilitated.⁹² Others, like Harnett, a Yorkshire collier who had murdered a defenceless woman, and who had no family other than his parents and no government body to back him, save for a handful of local MPs, encountered a sceptical judiciary and Home Office, and paid the ultimate price.⁹³ Anderson himself had written in his 1927 Malarial Psychoses and Neuroses—published earlier in the year that Harnett was hanged—of the ‘difficulties of trying to convince judge and jury’ of the ‘medico-legal importance’ of amnesia, mania, melancholia, and other mental disturbances in ‘malarial subjects who have committed motiveless homicide’.⁹⁴

Ultimately, these cases can and should also draw our attention to other men who returned home from the First World War, their physical and mental health broken down by infections and diseases from dysentery to cholera, and the ways that these illnesses were received by the medico-legal community and the courts.

Biography

Justin Fantauzzo is an associate professor in the Department of History, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Canada. He is the author of The Other Wars: The Experience and Memory of the First World War in the Middle East and Macedonia (Cambridge University Press, 2019). His current project, ‘The Great War Against Malaria’, investigates the British Empire’s efforts to find a cure for malaria during and after the First World War.