Respected doctor who was exposed as 20th century ‘Bluebeard’
IN 1947 Dr Robert George Clements took a large hit of morphine at his home on Southport Promenade.
Being an experienced and practised physician, Dr Clements, who until recently was the Medical Officer for Health in Blackburn, took just enough to overdose and kill himself.
When the police found Dr Clements at his home, there was a handwritten note beside his body.
It read: “To whom it may concern... I can no longer tolerate the diabolical insults to which I have recently been exposed.”
The “diabolical insults” he referenced were a mystery. His wife had recently died, surely her death might have been the cause of his misery?
But the truth was all the more sordid and all the more intriguing and relates to Southport’s very own Bluebeard killer...
To understand the namesake attributed to Dr Clements, one has to go back to 15th Century France and the legend of Bluebeard.
Bluebeard was a fairytale and mythical story which centred on a French nobleman whose wives continued to mysteriously die.
Gilles De Rais, born in 1405, was a baron during the middle stages of the Hundred Years War. A knight in the French army, he would become a companion in arms to Joan of Arc, helping to beat back the English tide and forge a peace treaty with the weak king Henry VI.
But he ended his life being hung for torturing and murdering up to 200 children.
The term Bluebearding, or to be a Bluebeard, since became synonymous with husbands killing several of their wives or even seducing and abandoning a series of women.
Another famous ‘Bluebeard’ was Hunri Desire Landru (1869-1922) who killed at least ten women plus one of their sons.
As for Southport’s connection...a Belfast physician, born in Belfast, (then) Ireland in 1880, it was almost inevitable that Robert George Clements was going to make his way across the Irish Sea and towards the North West.
Millions of Irish people continued to flood into England following the Great Potato Famine and the North West built strong Irish communities throughout the later 19th and early 20th Centuries. But for Dr Clements, later referenced as a proud Ulsterman (ie proud to be Northern Irish and thus British), he would have seen living in England as a source of pride.
Little is known of Dr Clements’ early life, only that he attended medical school at 18, graduating in 1904, gaining further qualifications in 1908 and then becoming a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1912 in Edinburgh.
He had a distinguished career, rising through the ranks of several medical professions and becoming chief medical officer for health in Blackburn during the Second World War, valiantly taking up the post when the regulars were called up to active service.
He was a smart man, not just a doctor but a doctor at the top of his field. He was a fellow of the faculty of insurance whilst contributing papers to several distinguished medical journals including Lancet and the British Medical Journal.
A friend told the Liverpool ECHO in May 1947 that Dr Clements was “jovial and always ready for a joke” as well as being “one of the best friends you could ask for.”
He was well known, he was wealthy, he was proud and seemingly a very approachable man.
Dr Clements also had a son in 1925, Robert George Wilson Clements, who stayed in his father’s native Belfast and grew up to become a farmer. He was certainly still involved in his father’s life as he travelled from Northern Ireland to Southport in 1947 to attend his stepmother’s funeral.
Dr Robert George Clements marries his fourth and final wife Amy Victoria Burnett – a discrepancy over cause of death attracted the attention of police, leading eventually to a tragic conclusion on the day of her funeral
Dr Clements was a normal, rather intelligent family man and quite possibly a faithful husband.
In 1947, a friend of his told the Liverpool ECHO that “he and his wife were a devoted couple. I don’t know of a more devoted couple in Southport.”
The anonymous friend told the ‘paper that every morning his wife would accompany Dr Clements as he got on the train and would meet him there as he came back.
“She had no eyes for anybody but her husband.”
But there was something decidedly more sinister about this doctor – and it would spell tragedy for four women, all of whom came to be known as Mrs Clements.
Wife number one was Edith Anne Mercier, another proud unionist from Belfast who was active in an Ulster women’s unionist council and happened to be the daughter of a wealthy grain merchant called William Turpin Mercier.
He owned the illustrious Dufferin Flour and Meal Mills company and invented, and patented, a new method of bleaching and conditioning wheat, flour and cereals in 1903. He was rich as a result and his daughter was due to inherit that fortune.
In 1920 she died of a mysterious ‘sleeping sickness’ aged just 40. Sleeping sickness, also known as African
Trypanosomiasis, is an insect-borne disease which can be passed on by an infected fly. Dr Clements signed the death certificate.
Dr Clements remarried, this time to a much younger woman called Mary McCreary, the daughter of an industrialist who was based in Manchester, another woman who could inherit from a rich father. He moved to Moss Side in Manchester to join his wife.
She died suddenly in 1925, aged jut 25, from endocarditis. A heart condition which can cause swelling of the organ and lead to heart failure, stroke