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| Ordnance Survey map of Cobham, 1907 revision. Dadd's Hole is just below the centre of the map. |
Right up until at least the mid-sixties, Ordnance Survey maps of Cobham village showed a small gravel pit, just off of Halfpence Lane and to the west of the avenue leading to Cobham Hall. Originally called “Paddock Hole”, it became known as “Dadd’s Hole” after the unfortunate Robert Dadd, who was brutally murdered there on August 29th 1843 by his son, Richard.
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| The Avenue, Cobham Hall.... |
These days, “Dadd’s Hole” features on no OS map and it seems as if the original pit and pond has been filled in. Just by the entrance to the avenue of trees that runs up to Cobham Hall is a signpost for the “Richard Dadd Path”, which follows the eastern edge of
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| Sign for "Richard Dadd path"... |
Anyone expecting to come across a plaque with the words “In this place…” will be disappointed. Instead, the path leads onwards past what is left of Dadd’s Hole, a fenced-off depression in the ground bearing some small trees, surrounded by open grassland peacefully grazed by a few sheep...
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| "Dadd's Hole", as it is today... |
Most local people know the bare bones of the story: “artist goes mad, kills his Dad, gets locked up in an asylum, paints a famous picture.” Such a bald summary hardly does justice to a strange and tragic tale that really deserves to be told in much more detail...
Richard Dadd was born in
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| Richard Dadd, self portrait, 1841. |
In 1837 Richard became a student in the Royal Academy of Arts and proved to be an excellent draughtsman who went on to win a series of awards for his drawings. Whilst there, Dadd formed a clique with fellow artists Augustus Egg, Alfred Elmore, William Powell Frith, Henry Nelson O'Neil, John Phillip and Edward Matthew Ward. This group (rather unimaginatively called “The Clique”) rejected what they considered to be the pretentious world of academic art. They formed a sketching club where the members would all sketch the same subject matter and have their pieces judged by “non-artists.” The group would hold social evenings where they would challenge each other to paint scenes from the works of their favourite writers, such as Shakespeare or Byron.
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| Titania Sleeping by Richard Dadd, 1841... |
Richard became recognised as one of the rising stars of the Victorian artistic world, starting a promising career by exhibiting and selling his early paintings. Two that are still known, “Titania Sleeping” and “Puck” (both c. 1841), show his early poetic imagination and fondness for fantasy subjects, and the following year he was commissioned to illustrate Robin Goodfellow for S C Hall’s “Book of British Ballads”.
In the summer of 1842, Dadd was invited
by Sir Thomas
Phillips to accompany him on a trip through Europe and to tour the
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| Sir Thomas Phillips, as painted by Dadd |
The purpose of this important commission for Richard was to make drawings for Sir Thomas of all the places they visited, these being days before the advent of the portable camera for photography. Such an arrangement was then common for the travelling English aristocrat, and one which appealed to Richard as a chance to see the world and gain a new source of inspiration for his art.
Phillips and Dadd departed on their Grand Tour on July 16th 1842, travelling first to Ostend and then, by rail, caliche, horse, mule, foot, steamboat, char-à-banc, vettura and rowing boat, through France and Northern Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and the Holy Land.
Phillips turned out to be less than an ideal travelling companion on the trip, as he seemed to be more interested in ticking places to visit off his list rather than spending any time in them, giving Dadd very little time to draw them. Nevertheless, Dadd sketched what he could of the sights and sites, recording as best he could the exotic peoples and places, but feeling that he had insufficient time to do them justice.
The pace was unrelenting and the
two men stayed wherever they could find lodgings, from Maronite convents to
peasant mud huts. The pair travelled through Turkey to Damascus, followed by a
stay in Jerusalem. It was around this time that Richard began showing signs of
the mental health issues that were to plague him for the rest of his life. In a
letter to his friend and
“At times the excitement of these scenes has
been enough to turn the brain of an ordinary, weak-minded person like myself,
and I have often lain down at night with my imagination so full of wild vagaries
that I have really and truly doubted of my own sanity. The heat of the day,
perhaps, contributed somewhat to this, or the motion of riding is also another
reason for this unusual activity of the fancy…”
From there they went to Jericho where they caught a steamer to Alexandria in Egypt, with the plan being to sail up the Nile to Karnak. To achieve this, Phillips hired a boat with a crew of sixteen to navigate the Nile. Christmas saw them in Cairo. In Egypt, Dadd was tremendously impressed by the scale and grandeur of the ancient monuments and temples, and began a fateful interest in the mythology of the Ancient Egyptians. This stimulus seemed to push Richard into a more severe form of mania. He now began to believe himself to be possessed by the ancient Egyptian god Osiris, and declared that he intended to “rid the world of all its evil”. He was certainly aware that he was becoming unbalanced and desperately tried to fight off his descent into insanity.
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| The Flight Out Of Egypt by Richard Dadd, 1849... |
His travelling companion, Sir Thomas, seemed to attached no importance to Richard’s behaviour however, and put it all down to sunstroke. By the time they returned to Cairo, Richard was in “melancholic spirit”, and spending three weeks in quarantine in Malta after they left the country did little to improve it. He was later to describe the misery of his sea passage to Malta, writing that:
“…I never passed six more miserable days. I
scarcely know – perhaps I should say that I am perfectly ignorant of – the
cause of the nervous depression that I experienced”...
This disturbed state persisted when they moved on to the final leg of their trip, Italy.
The subject of Richard’s
disturbance was one appropriate to their setting: religion. During the long
Nile trip he and Sir Thomas had discussed the Egyptian gods extensively, and
now the Christian iconography surrounding him in
In Rome, he decided that the Pope was the epitome of the world’s evil, and when Pope Gregory XVI made a public appearance, Richard’s state of mind led him to think about attacking him. However he was still in enough control to take note of the guards that the pope (who was afraid of being attacked in retaliation for his crackdown on Freemasonry) had surrounded himself with and so he and Sir Thomas left Rome without incident.
In
It was now obvious that there was something seriously wrong with Dadd. In his youth he had been noted for his calm, kind, considerate and affectionate nature, full of humour and mirth, but now he was gloomy and reserved, unpredictable and occasionally violent, convinced he was being watched by unknown enemies, haunted by devils, and that his actions were governed by the will of the Egyptian god Osiris.
When he and Sir Thomas had arrived at their final stop in Paris, they came to blows. Given later events, it may be that Phillips was lucky to escape with his life. Richard could finally bear no more and, leaving Sir Thomas behind, he fled home to London.
There, Dadd retreated into relative seclusion, and his friends all thought that he was suffering from sunstroke. Some began to worry about his sanity, however, and watched carefully for any signs of mental instability.
Samuel Carter Hall, editor of the Art Journal, made several visits to Richard’s London flat during the weeks immediately following the latter’s return from the ‘Grand Tour’. In his autobiography, Carter Hall, noted that:
“I could never tell why, but, although I
liked him, had always in his presence a sense of apprehension. One evening, at
my house, he was more than usually gloomy and spoke little, but his eyes seemed
to roll about the assembled group. It was whispered by more than one ‘What is
the matter with Dadd?’…”
After Dadd’s later arrest, a paper was found in his flat, containing outline portraits of all the artists then present, each with a dash of red paint across their throats.
And whilst Carter Hall may have had a ‘sense of apprehension’, others were totally unnerved by him. Indeed, his landlady would often hear him ranting and raging in his room and on occasions she would glimpse a knife waved under the door.
Dadd’s descent into insanity
undoubtedly had a hereditary element: four of the seven children born to Dadd’s
father and first wife died insane. His condition was undoubtedly worsened by
the hardship of the ten-month journey to the
Dadd’s behaviour became more and more erratic. After his subsequent arrest, at his rooms at Newman St, the remains of over three hundred eggs and quantities of ale were found, his only diet then being boiled eggs and ale.
This didn’t impede his artistic output though, as sketches he had done on his journey matured into glorious Orientalist paintings. He even made contact with Sir Thomas Phillips and finally held up his end of the bargain to give him the illustrations of their trip.
Around this time Richard’s father sought help from a friend of his, Dr Alexander Sutherland, who was an early psychiatrist (though the word didn’t actually exist at the time - he was known by the unflattering title of “mad doctor”). On hearing the account of Richard’s behaviour, Sutherland’s opinion was the Richard was “non compos mentis” and should be placed under restraint. Whether his father told Richard about this or not is unclear, but he was devoted to his son and determined to care for him himself.
In August of 1843, Richard asked his father to accompany him to Cobham, a favourite childhood haunt, where he promised to ‘unburden his mind’. Robert was clearly unaware of the danger that his son represented, but others were not. His eldest daughter, Mary-Ann, tried to persuade him not to meet Richard, sending a note to her brother Stephen and asking him to look after their father. (The note was to reach him too late.)
Nevertheless, Robert and Richard
met in London and took a steamer together down the Thames to Robert’s old
hometown of Chatham. On the evening of Monday 28th August, they
arrived in nearby Cobham, then as now one of
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| The Ship Inn, Cobham, c.1900... |
Shortly before 7am the next day, Charles Lester and his uncle, Abraham Lester, were passing through Cobham Woods. Both of them were butchers, travelling from Rochester to Wrotham market with the intention of buying livestock for their trade.
As their horse-drawn cart drove down Halfpence Lane into Cobham, they saw the body of a man lying face down in a hollow some thirty yards from the road. Charles initially assumed that they had come across a victim of the drinking booths at Strood Fair, which had been held the previous day, but nevertheless the pair stopped to investigate further. As Charles stepped down from the road, passing through a gap in the trees, he could see that the man was wearing a smart black suit and a green plaid waistcoat and was very still indeed. Upon trying to rouse him, the truth began to dawn upon Charles.
“It seems that he is dead”, he called back to his uncle.
As Charles made to turn the body over, he saw another man within haling distance. This was George Briggs, a 32-year old shepherd who lived nearby. Charles called out to him and between them they turned the body over. The cause of death was immediately apparent. The fallen man had been repeatedly knifed, with his coat torn and his face and hands covered with blood.
Between them, Briggs and Lester decided to call the local constable, William Dawes. In those days, the role of a local village constable was very much an amateur one: Dawes himself was a full-time tailor and was ill-equipped to deal with a crime as rare and as serious as murder.
Allowing the Lesters to continue on with their journey, Dawes found that the victim had been stabbed in the chest and shoulder and had also had his throat cut. He searched the area around the body and soon found a clasp knife that had obviously been used in the attack. Dawes also searched the body itself and found a gold watch and a sum of money: robbery had clearly not been the motive for the killing.
By then, word had gone round and several other villagers had made their way to the scene of the crime. One of them found a blood-stained razor blade nearby. Bloody handprints were also found on a stile to the north leading to Watling Street, the main road back to Rochester.
Among these villagers was John Adams, a waiter at the nearby Ship Inn. Adams recognised the victim, naming him as Robert Dadd. The previous evening, the man had called at the Ship and requested a bed for the night, but the Ship could not accommodate him and Adams had instead arranged for him to stay at a nearby cottage. More importantly, Adams confirmed that Robert Dadd was not alone: he had been accompanied by his son, Richard. Following their arrival at the Ship, both men had taken refreshment before going out for a late-evening walk. According to Adams, they had left the inn at around 9pm. He was not sure which direction they had taken, but assumed they had gone to Cobham Park.
From later evidence it appears that Adams was correct. Richard and Robert Dadd had skirted the perimeter of the park, passing behind Cobham Hall before heading back to the village via Halfpence Lane.
As they approached the hollow called Paddock Hole, it seemed that Richard attacked his father from behind with a specially-purchased rigging (or “clasp”) knife, which he pulled across the left side of his victim’s neck. Although it resulted in a great deal of blood, the wound was only superficial. Robert, although taken off-guard, fought back and made a grab for the knife. Both men fell to the ground, but Richard used his free hand to repeatedly punch his father in the face. Weakened by the blows and the loss of blood Robert fell back and was stabbed deeply in his shoulder. Again, the wound was not fatal but Robert, in pain and greatly weakened, could no longer fight back. Richard stabbed his father twice more, each strike delivered to Robert’s chest. The second of these pierced his father’s lung in two places, finally killing him.
Richard Dadd then fled the scene, crossing the nearby stile and leaving the bloody handprint, and then ran along Halfpence Lane. He must have been given a lift by an unsuspecting traveller, as it was later reported that Richard had entered the City of Rochester by about 10pm.
At the time, none of this was known to the humble village constable, William Dawes. Thinking that Richard may well have been murdered as well, Dawes organised a thorough search of the surrounding area, with everyone involved detailed to look out for a second body. What he did not do was send a message to the local magistrates, who had the authority to raise a “hue and cry”, by which means the entire county would have been alerted to the existence of an escaping felon. This oversight allowed Richard Dadd to reach Dover, where he subsequently hired an open boat that took him to Calais.
He may well have stayed in France had he not remained in the grip of the mania that had possessed him. So it was that whilst travelling on a coach through Valence, Dadd started to hear voices which ordered him to kill his fellow passenger. Producing a razor, he lunged at the man’s throat, inflicting painful cuts. Fortunately, the victim was able to overpower his attacker and upon arrival of the coach at the next town, Richard was arrested.
He made no attempt to conceal his identity and freely admitted the earlier attack upon his father. Indeed, Dadd claimed that “his father was an evil stand-in, the devil, his real father was the Egyptian god Osiris, and he was following instructions to kill this impostor”. In his own words, Dadd was “the son and envoy of God, sent to exterminate the men most possessed with the demon.” The immediate outcome was that the French authorities certified him insane and committed him to the asylum at Clermont, fifty miles north of Paris, where he was to remain until the following summer.
Although
Public judgment of Richard was initially harsh. Many of his friends felt almost personally betrayed by his actions, and some even spoke of him as if he were already dead. The papers were convinced he soon would be; the fact that most so-called “lunatics” were usually suffering from neurosyphilis meant that there was a popular perception that mental illness would cause death.
Richard’s siblings could not fully
blame Richard for their father’s death after they had seen his state and they
were happy that the authorities took the same view. At his initial hearing,
Richard alternated between confessing, denying the murder, and verbally
attacking the court. The judges subsequently decided that there was no need for
him to make an appearance at the Maidstone Assizes. Instead, Richard was
certified insane under the Criminal Lunatic Act and on 22nd August
1844, was taken to the
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| New Bethlem Hospital, 1817 - now the Imperial War Museum... |
Bethlem
That caution was justified, as for the first few years of his imprisonment he was definitely still a dangerous individual. He would lash out at others, and then offer his sincere apologies. It was not him guiding his hands, he insisted, but the spirit that moved his hands, that of Osiris, who dwelled within his body. In later years however, Richard became less prone to violent outbursts and was given a greater degree of freedom to express himself through his art.
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| Photograph of Richard Dadd painting Contradiction, c.1853 |
From 1852, Bethlem was ran by Dr William Charles Hood, a man of vision and compassion, who introduced larger windows to the hospital and had each ward furnished with an aviary of singing birds, flowers, pictures, statues and books, to provide the inmates with distractions, interests and amusement. His steward, George Henry Haydon, a similarly enlightened man, assisted Hood and they encouraged Dadd’s return to painting.
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| Dadd's portrait of Alexander Morison |
Several of Richard’s paintings during his time in Bedlam revolved around religious themes, mostly Christian (painting saints or biblical scenes) but some pagan. He was extremely prolific, and in 1853 he produced a series of thirty-three watercolour drawings titled Sketches to Illustrate the Passions. These pieces, perhaps inspired by the psychology of his keepers as much as his own circumstance, bore titles that ran a wide spectrum of emotions, including Pride, Love, Jealousy, Disappointment, Agony-Raving Madness, and Murder.
And then in 1854 he returned to a subject that had been a mainstay of his early career – fairies. Fairies were popular in painting at the time, as they were through most of the Victorian period.
However, Richard was not painting for the mass-market: he was painting for himself.
The painting he created in 1854, Contradiction: Oberon and Titania, marks that
freedom from the constraints of commercialism. Dadd dedicated it to Dr. Hood
and spent four years working on it: in the only photograph of Dadd (taken by
the
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| Contradiction: Oberon and Titania, by Richard Dadd, 1854 |
Many maintain that this was his finest work although not his most famous, which was painted for Haydon, and who admired Contradiction so much that he asked Dadd to paint another fairy picture for him. This was The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke.
It was shortly after he completed Contradiction that Richard began sketching out what would eventually be considered his masterwork. Once again it involved fairy folk, and once again they were linked to Shakespeare. This time the play was Romeo and Juliet, and the fairy in question was Queen Mab, who was, according to Shakespeare, the “fairy midwife” who birthed dreams in the heads of dreamers. She does not appear in the play, but is instead the subject of a monologue that Mercutio uses to entertain Romeo:
“O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone…
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut,
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.”
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| The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, by Richard Dadd, 1864 |
The painting is not of Queen Mab herself, but instead shows a fairy axeman poised to chop a hazelnut and make her a new carriage. The entire miniature court has turned out to watch him perform this feat, providing a level of detail possibly even greater than that of Contradiction. The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke is infused with a detail and realism that draws the viewer in. The perspective created by the reeds in the foreground makes the observer part of the scene as if they are one of those fairy creatures, drawn to see the feller perform his feat (the detail can be appreciated here).
The painter worked on the scene diligently for nine years, inscribing the back of the canvas with the words “The Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke, Painted for G. H. Haydon Esqre by Rd. Dadd quasi 1855–64.” Even after nearly a decade of work, Dadd considered it an unfinished piece, with the background of the lower left corner left only sketched in.
Although it was never clearly stated, a possible reason why this work that Dadd spent nine years on was left incomplete may lay in its “finish” year of 1864. It was in this year that Dadd was transferred to a new facility, Broadmoor, Britain’s first dedicated hospital for the criminally insane, which would become home to some of Britain’s most notorious killers.
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| The Wandering Musicians, by Richard Dadd |
In 1877, an article about Richard Dadd was published in World magazine, carrying a somewhat baroque account of his life in the asylum:
…A recluse doing the honours of his modest
unpretending abode; a pleasant visaged old man with a long and flowing snow
white beard, with mild blue eyes that beam benignly through spectacles when in
conversation…At Christmastide a few hours suffice to produce a host of humorous
cartoons, comical street figures, policemen, papas, merry children, clowns and
pantaloon; he will turn out as rapidly diagrams and illustrations for a lecture
or entertainment. He has adorned and beautified the asylum walls; above all
upon the asylum theatre he has lavished much decoration of a peculiarly florid
kind, quaint arabesques, and lines painted in a medley of vivid colours…
This prompted some interest in the incarcerated artist, and his works began to receive some exposure in the artistic world. Dadd’s health was now in gradual decline though, due to a lack of exercise and his long confinement. Shortly before Christmas 1885, he contracted a “serious lung disease” (probably tuberculosis) and on 7th. January 1886 he died in Infirmary No.4. As was customary practice, he was buried on the asylum grounds, the site marked by a numbered stone that has long since been removed.
He was sixty-eight years old.
The art of Richard Dadd was largely forgotten until the 1930s, when The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke was given as a wedding gift to the poet Siegfried Sassoon. He loaned the painting to various museums, and its uniqueness was soon recognised. By the 1960s the painting had been bequeathed to the Tate Gallery by Sassoon and it subsequently became a pop culture icon. In 1974 the band Queen even released a song named after and based upon the painting.
As Ciaran Conliffe writes in his excellent Headstuff article (and one which I have drawn heavily upon throughout here):
“Plays
and poems soon came to be written starring Richard Dadd, all mythologizing this
figure of the “tortured artist”. Just as he, in the throes of his illness, had
reinterpreted his world in symbolic figures and archetypes; now he himself
became a symbol. The messy complexity of the man was, as always, left behind by
the legend
The
clichéd idea of the “thin line between genius and insanity” is one that has
been discussed by psychiatrists, cultural commentators and pop psychologists
for decades… It’s an iteration of the “tortured artist” stereotype that’s used
by those who hear about the miserable lives of the great creators and decide
that it was necessary in order for them to have produced great art…
Similarly
the idea of mental illness linking to creativity is in general merely down to
our larger focus on the mental processes of artists…(and) by doing so, we all
too often trivialise the very real tragedies that these illnesses have caused.
And
few are more tragic than the story of Richard Dadd…”
References:
1) Richard Dadd, Artist and Mentally Disturbed Killer by Ciaran Conliffe (Headstuff, August 17, 2018)
2) Murder in
3)
The Awful
Affliction of the Fairy Feller by Mick Hartley (The
Study, 8 December 2012)
4) Dadd’s Murder: The Frightful Tale Behind the Famous Fairies (Hushed-Up Histories, September 13, 2019)
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