Albeit an excellent military surgeon, George Henry Lamson found rural general practice pointless and dull. He was fond of travel and holidays and had a firm dislike for hard graft and honest toil. Since his bedside manner was far from the best, the locals found him flippant, inattentive and unreliable. He often showed his contempt for the trivial complaints he was presented with. After his position in Rotherfield had become untenable, he spent the remainder of Mrs Lamson’s inheritance to buy another practice in Bournemouth. The problem was that Dr Lamson had become addicted to morphine during his years as a military surgeon, and that with time, this addiction escalated out of control. He became incapable of running his practice, claimed medical degrees and military decorations to which he was not entitled, and circulated libellous statements about the wife of a friend of his. A bad businessman, he accumulated considerable debts and eventually had to flee Bournemouth in disgrace as a bankrupt, leaving his wife and daughter behind in a cheap Chichester hotel. George Henry Lamson returned to the United States, making futile attempts to combat his morphine addiction, before going to Shanklin to see his family. After a jolly family gathering in August 1881, the cripple Percy Malcolm John became severely ill, groaning with pain and vomiting copiously; just beforehand, Dr Lamson had purchased a quantity of the potent poison aconitine. The hapless Percy recovered from this attempt on his life, however. As Dr Lamson sat brooding over his failures in Rotherfield and Bournemouth, and his futile travels to America, alone in his tiny hotel room in the London November gloom, he was becoming increasingly desperate. Not long ago, he had possessed a comfortable house, a good medical practice, and a steady income; now, he had neither of these things, and he was poor as a church mouse. Dr Lamson entirely lacked employment and occupation, something that did not agree with him, and we all know who it is who finds work for idle hands to do. Had the Doctor been classically minded, he would have been reminded of the legend of the once-famous Byzantine general Belisarius, said to have been reduced to a blind beggar in his old age, having to ask passers-by ‘Date obolum Belisario’ – ‘Give a coin to Belisarius’. Dr Lamson had once had power over life and death, the wounded Serbian and Romanian soldiers relying upon him for their recovery like if he had been something of a deity; now, he was just yet another penniless, unemployed vagabond, struggling to keep his head above water amongst London’s unwanted flotsam and jetsam. Once more, George Henry Lamson thought of Percy Malcolm John, upon whose demise his wife would inherit much
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money. In December 1881, he visited the school in Wimbledon and persuaded Percy to swallow a gelatine capsule, with the words “Here, Percy, you are a swell pill-taker; take this and show Mr Bedbrook [the headmaster] how easily it may be swallowed!” When Percy died in agony the same evening, the doctors present suspected that this was a case of murder. Dr Lamson had fled to France, but due to the lack of both money and morphine, he did not carry out his plan to hide in France, but returned to London to face the music, hoping that the poison he had made use of could not be detected. When Percy had been autopsied, samples of various organs had been kept for analysis, however, and the forensic scientists found that he had been poisoned with the uncommon vegetable toxin aconitine. This sealed the fate of Dr Lamson: he was found guilty of murder, sentenced to death, and executed at Wandsworth Prison on April 28 1882. During his criminous and wasted life, the Doctor had accomplished some good but also much wickedness; short and evil had been his days, as he stood on the scaffold counting one or two more seconds, the longest lasting in his life, waiting for the drop to open. The police detectives, and even Lamson’s barrister Montagu Williams, felt certain that Dr Lamson was a double murderer, having poisoned both his brothers-in-law for the sake of profit. Comparing his murderous career with those of the prolific medical killers Palmer and Pritchard, it indeed seems likely that Dr Lamson murdered Hubert John as well and got away with it. As a military surgeon, he had seen that life was cheap, with the wounded soldiers dying like flies; now both Hubert and Percy were invalids, crippled by tuberculosis and scoliosis, worthless and parasitic existences whose sufferings should be put an end to, he must have reasoned, like hastening the death of a badly mutilated soldier. Perhaps the greatest mystery in the Lamson case is why he did not wait until he had Percy under his influence at the Chichester hotel, where the invalid could be given some ‘medicine’ with complete security, before Lamson signed the death certificate himself. At Blenheim House School, all was not well after the execution of Dr Lamson. Many parents objected to keeping their sons in a notorious murder school, and although the headmaster Mr Bedbrook tried to convince them that there were no longer any murderous doctors on the premises, he was soon in serious difficulties due to the lack of pupils. It did not help that there were rumours that the ghost of Percy was haunting the murder school: nervous young boys swore that they had seen his spectre and heard the whirring of the wheels of his spectral wheelchair.
HAUNTED MAGAZINE
The Blenheim House murder school at No. 1-2 St George’s Road, Wimbledon, from Famous Crimes Past & Present.
Dr Lamson, and some vignettes from his career, including Percy Malcolm John in his wheelchair, from the Illustrated Police News, March 11 1882.
What appears to be a small print about the ‘Wimbledon Mystery’.
