Men of Letters – the extraordinary story of lexicographer and hibernophobe WC Minor

A 1998 bestseller, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, tells the remarkable true story of WC Minor, an American of great learning who murdered a man in London in 1871, was found guilty but insane, and spent the rest of his life incarcerated while, via correspondence, becoming a major contributor to the epic research project that produced the first Oxford English Dictionary.

An intriguing subplot was the supposed trigger of his mental breakdown – a bad case of what dictionaries call Hibernophobia, or fear of Irish people.

During the trial, his London landlady described Minor’s obsession with always knowing whether she had any Irish servants or lodgers. Police recalled that he had complained about suspected “Fenians” coming into his room at night. Under questioning, he repeated stories of “unknown men, often lower class, often Irish”, trying to poison or otherwise maltreat him while he slept.

This caused him to keep a loaded revolver under his pillow and to wake in distress at imagined happenings. It may also have been why he rushed out into the street one night in 1871, ostensibly pursuing an intruder, and shot dead an innocent passer-by, who happened to be English.

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It eventually emerged that Minor’s paranoia was connected with an incident, real or invented, from his time as a US army surgeon during the American Civil War. According to himself, he had been forced to brand an Irish union soldier with the letter “D” for “deserter”. The survivor of this painful and humiliating punishment (it was on his face, to make things worse) was now seeking revenge. Or so Minor’s delusion insisted.

In The Surgeon of Crowthorne, Simon Winchester imagines the shackled young soldier as Minor must have done: "He was exhausted and frightened […] like an animal – a far cry from the young lad who had arrived, cock-sure and full of Dublin mischief, on the West Side of Manhattan three years before."

The prisoner begged and screamed to avoid the punishment, but the surgeon inflicted it anyway. And although the pain would pass in time, the disfigurement would be permanent.

In America it would mark him as a coward. Back in Ireland, it would make him an object of suspicion both to the British authorities and those fighting them. The Fenians were using the US army as a training ground, but the "D" would label him as the wrong stuff. As Winchester, channelling Minor, concluded: "His future as an Irish revolutionary was, in other words, quite over."

All of this may indeed have featured in Minor’s mental torments, although he could have been unhinged by the war in general.

There may also have been underlying causes of his mania, which deepened towards the end of his life.

Even if the trigger event did happen, the fears it unleashed were hardly justified. As the archives of this newspaper testify, branding for desertion was a common feature of 19th-century army life, at least on this side of the Atlantic. In its later form, it was done with a crude tattooing implement rather than a hot iron. But often this was overshadowed by the flogging that accompanied it.

An 1859 report, headlined “Military Barbarity at Woolwich”, described the punishment of two deserters who had each been sentenced to 84 days’ imprisonment, 50 lashes, and branding. The lashes seem to have been the worst part. The back of one young man was already covered with “large, inflated boils”, which “bled profusely” at every stroke. He screamed for mercy while observers “swooned away at the sickening spectacle”. This does not seem to have been Victorian exaggeration. The report added: “One officer and upwards of twenty [other] men long in the service fainted”, while others again “stopped their ears and closed their eyes . . . ”

As for the lifelong humiliation Minor feared he had inflicted, this too may have been misplaced. Many Fenians who had abandoned the British army in favour of revolution were also branded (on the chest or hip usually), including the celebrity Catalpa escapees, who in 1876 fled Australia for New York on a getaway ship.

Another leading Fenian was Patrick John Lennon, a Dubliner who may not have been cocksure and full of mischief but was described in an Irish Times court report as having "extraordinary ability for a person of his rank".

After deserting the British army (with a high-quality horse), he was caught and branded, only to desert again in 1863. He too fled to New York, where he led a Fenian parade down Broadway. The “D” did not prevent him fighting for the union in the civil war, as a lieutenant. He went on to become a US citizen and had his “D” tattooed into a flag.