How Charles Bravo Died: The Chronicle of Cause Célèbre

The Bravo case, described as 'the prize puzzle of British criminal jurisprudence', was a domestic tragedy which descended in a split second upon a family of wealth and social position. At 10 p.m. on April 18th, 1876, Charles Bravo, a young barrister, was heard calling from his bedroom. Almost as help reached him he vomited and collapsed, and it became clear to the hastily-summoned doctors that a fatal dose of an irritant poison had been swallowed. In the fifty-four hours which elapsed between his return to consciousness and death he was 'in full possession of his faculties': but while neither the six medical men who attended him, the beautiful woman whom he had married only four months before, nor his mother could extract an 'admission' from him as to the name of the poison or the means whereby it had entered his body, it was clear to demonstration that he suspected no one of having administered it to him. Analysis proved death to be due to a large dose of antimony, and at the subsequent inquest, though the Coroner indicated that he expected a verdict of suicide, the jury returned an open one, and gossip-fed suspicion fell upon the widow and her lady-companion. Public excitement resulted in an order for a fresh enquiry, the extra-judicial nature of which was such to amount to a 'trial by inquest' with the widow and her companion in the position of accused persons. After twenty-three days the jury returned a verdict of Wilful Murder, adding that 'there was not sufficient evidence to fix the guilt on any person or persons'. No charge was ever preferred, and for years the case has provided criminologists with an unsolved mystery; but in the light of a private letter of that great Judge, the late Sir Arthur Channell, Yseult Bridges reaches a conclusion similar to that which he propounds.