A DISTRESSING SUICIDE.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3093, 27 May 1881, Page 3

A DISTRESSING SUICIDE.

On the 25th of February the Rev. Benjamin Speke, vicar of Dowlish Wake, Somerset, committed suicide by drowning, scarcly 24 hours after the death of his wife. By this double fatality eight children have been made orphans. This clergyman is the brother of Capt John Speke, who, in conjunction with Captain Grant, traced the,Nile to its source in the Victorian] Nyanza* lake. He was also himself the hero of a month's romance some 13 years ago, the incidents of which will still be in the recollection of many persons all the world, orer. On the 18tli of January, 1868, he left llminster station for London, for the purpose of officiating at the wedding of a friend. About dusk that evening he purchased a new hat in Warwick-street, Pimlicb, and ordered it to be sent to his hotel. Next morning he was missing, and his old hat was found in Birdcage Walk broken and battered. He had, it was well known, about £20 in gold in his possession, and a natural hypothesis was that he had been robbed and murdered. His mysterious disappearance caused an extraordinary excitement throughout the country. The efforts of the , police to elucidate the mystery were stimulated by the offer of a hundred pounds reward by his friends. The press "was crowded with correspondence on the subject, and the wildest conjectures were hazarded to account for the sudden disappearance. Mr Speke, it was said, had been a member of some secret society; ho had been a Freemason, and had violated his vows : he had been decoyed into some den of infamy, and there kept a prisoner ; he had been entrapped into some crimp's lodging in Ratcliff Highway; he had been drugged and murdered for the sake of his watch and money, and had then been thrown into the Thames, or buried in quicklime. None of these hypotheses, however, proved, correct, probable as they seemed at the time. The disappearance was voluntary and deliberate. Mr Speke, "with some vague idea of absconding to America, had gone by train from Waterloo to Basingstoko, and thence had tramped on foot to Padstow, in Cornwall, where he was found disguised as a cattle-drover. He was there arrested, under the mistaken idea that he was a burglar for whom the Hull police were searching, and his arrest led to the immediate discovery of his identity. After this strange escapade he went quietly back to his clerical duties, and the public heard no more of him until this recent tragedy revived the recollection of. the wild adventure of 1868. It was the opinion of the physicians by whom he was seen at the time that he was not altogether responsible for his acts, and his conduct was certainly incapable of any rational explanation. His suicide confirms the (impression long entertained that he was not sufficiently sane to be allowed to go at large or to control his own affairs without some sort of surveillance. The living of which he was incumbent was the gift of the family, and as it yielded a -very good income, it does not seem likely that pecuniary embarrassments had anything to do with his melancholy end. The suicide of the Eev. B. Speko inevitably recalls the tragic end of his brother, Captain Speke, who in 1864 was shot with his own gun. The verdict of tbe jury was one of accidental death, but the belief was very general among his friends at the time that the death was self-inflicted.