The Charles Bravo case
Charles Delauney Turner Bravo, a barrister, thirty years old and four months married.
Charles Bravo, a thirty year old barrister, died at The Priory in Balham in April 1876 after swallowing antimony. A second inquest returned wilful murder by a person or persons unknown. Nobody was ever charged, and the case has been argued over ever since.
What is not in dispute.
On the night of 18 April 1876 Charles Bravo went to bed at The Priory, the house he shared with his wife Florence in Balham, and was taken violently ill. He died three days later.
The cause was antimony, taken as tartar emetic. He was conscious for most of those three days and was asked repeatedly what he had taken. He said laudanum, for toothache, and nothing else.
The first inquest returned a verdict of accidental death. The finding was unsatisfactory enough that a second inquest was opened, which sat for a month in public and heard the household give evidence against each other.
The second inquest returned wilful murder, by a person or persons unknown. Nobody was ever charged.
Where the record stops.
Everything after that. The three people whose names have been argued over ever since are Florence Bravo, her companion Mrs Jane Cox, and Dr James Gully, with whom Florence had had an affair before the marriage. No court ever tested any of it, and no account of the case has ever closed it.
What this page is, and is not.
No one was ever convicted of this. What is written above is the part of the record that is not in dispute. Where something is argued over, this page says it is argued over and does not pick a side. No real person is accused here of anything a court did not find, and no confession is invented for anybody.
- Poisoned at the Priory is not a reconstruction. It is an original crime set in this world, with an invented killer. Every real person at your table is innocent of the murder in the game.
- The victim is a person, not a prop. Charles Delauney Turner Bravo, a barrister, thirty years old and four months married.
- We publish the rules we work to. How we treat real cases sets out the six things this catalogue will not do, including the two cases that were dropped for failing them.
If you think we have crossed a line, the policy page is the standard to hold us to, and the email address is on it.
Poisoned at the Priory
Because the evidence is a household's worth of competing accounts, taken under oath, that cannot all be true. That is the hardest thing to write and the easiest thing to hand to a table.
Six to twelve people at your table, hosted from a TV and your guests' phones. The evidence arrives a piece at a time and nobody sees the whole of it until the last act. Read the full case file, including the content note for this one.