![]() The adjacent Hyde Farm was noted for the quality of its pigs. There were a handful of grand houses, including an estate owned by the Duke of Bedford, some tracts of common land and one or two farms. When The Priory was built in 1822, Balham was largely rural. Theories still abound as to what really happened – some have suggested Bravo poisoned himself – but none is entirely convincing. The killer walked free, though Florence and Gully had been thoroughly disgraced. Missing, though, was “sufficient evidence to fix the guilt upon any person or persons”. And, so the police said, she had lied in her first account of events leading up to the murder.Īfter days of public hearings, the jury declared itself persuaded that Bravo had indeed been “wilfully murdered by the administration of tartar emetic”. A widow with three children, she would have worried about being thrown on to the streets. Third in line for cross-examination was Florence’s companion and housemaid Mrs Jane Cannon Cox. ![]() With her new husband out of the picture, their affair might have resumed and, as a doctor, he had easy access to the necessary poison. Much older than his mistress, the married Gully resented her union with the younger Bravo. Florence had fallen pregnant during their affair and her doctor-lover had performed an abortion. What if Florence had simply upped the dose? He drank too much, and Victorian wives were often known to administer small amounts of antimony to curb their husbands’ alcoholism. Her new husband resented her riches, was physically aggressive and, the inquest heard, subjected her to “degrading sexual acts”. Freed from a violent first marriage by the death of her spouse, she had had a long affair with society physician James Manby Gully before stepping out with Bravo. The eldest daughter of a magnate who had made his fortune in Australian gold mines, she was wealthier than her husband. Tales of moneyed decadence filled the front pages.įirst on the list of likely assassins was Charles’s wife, Florence. A jury inquest was convened in the requisitioned billiards room of the nearby Bedford Hotel. The police soon found that they had two too many suspects. He took two days to die, but offered no clues as to the author of his agonies. The death of the 31-year-old barrister – the result, it was soon discovered, of poisoning with antimony – was protracted and painful. A century-and-a-half after Charles Bravo’s demise, writers and amateur sleuths are as intrigued as ever by the unsolved crime. If the grandeur has been lost, the mystery remains. The house itself has been split into flats for young professionals. On the edge of Tooting Bec common, its whitewashed, wedding cake façade is today hemmed in by modern shoebox apartments. The Priory stands on Bedford Hill in south London’s Balham neighbourhood. The starched prudery of the age was elbowed aside by public prurience as the nation listened in to lurid tales of drunkenness and debauchery. In 1876 their turbulent marriage ended in one of the most sensational murder cases of the century. His wife was a woman of – if not ill – then of fairly loose repute. Charles Delauney Turner Bravo was what contemporaries would have called a cad.
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