Charles Bravo

Charles Bravo (1845 – 21 April 1876) was a British lawyer who was fatally poisoned with antimony in 1876. The case is still sensational, notorious and unresolved. The case is also known as The Charles Bravo Murder and the Murder at the Priory.

It was an unsolved crime committed within an elite Victorian household at The Priory, a landmark house in Balham, London. Leading doctors attended the bedside, including the royal physician Sir William Gull, and all agreed that it was a case of antimony poisoning. The victim took three days to die, but gave no indication of the source of the poison during that time. No one was ever charged with the crime.

Background

Charles Bravo was born Charles Delauney Turner in 1845. He was the son of Augustus Charles Turner and Mary Turner, but later took the surname Bravo from his stepfather, Joseph Bravo. He became a barrister and by the time of his marriage to Florence Ricardo (née Campbell) he had fathered an illegitimate child.

His wealthy wife Florence had previously been married, in 1864, to Alexander Louis Ricardo, son of John Ricardo MP, but had been separated from him because of his affairs and violent alcoholism. She herself had had an extramarital affair with the much older Dr James Manby Gully, a fashionable society doctor who was also married at the time, and she had fallen out of favour with her family and society. Ricardo died in 1871 and Florence married Charles, a respected up-and-coming barrister, on 7 December 1875, terminating her affair with Gully.