THE YEARS BETWEEN THE WARS
“History of the War”--Sir Oliver Lodge--Military Arguments--“Sir
Nigel”--The Edalji Case--Crowborough--The Oscar Slater Case.
When I returned from South Africa, I found that my wife had improved in
health during her stay at Naples, and we were able to settle down once
more at Hindhead, where, what with work, cricket, and hunting, I had
some pleasant years. A few pressing tasks were awaiting me, however.
Besides the barren contest at Edinburgh I had done a history of the
war, but the war still continued, and I had to modify it and keep it up
to date in successive editions, until in 1902 it took final shape. I
called it “The Great Boer War,” not because I thought the war “great”
in the scale of history, but to distinguish it from the smaller Boer
War of 1881. It had the good fortune to please both friend and foe,
for there was an article from one of the Boer leaders in “Cornhill”
commending its impartial tone. It has been published now by Nelson in
a cheap edition, and shows every sign of being the permanent record of
the campaign. No less than £27,000 was spent upon an Official History,
but I cannot find that there was anything in it which I had not already
chronicled, save for those minute details of various forces which clog
a narrative. I asked the chief official historian whether my book had
been of use to him, and he very handsomely answered that it had been
the spine round which he built.
This history, which is a large-sized book, is not to be confused with
the pamphlet “The Cause and Conduct of the War in South Africa,” which
was a small concise defence of the British position. The inception and
result of this I have already described. I have no doubt that it was to
the latter that my knighthood, and my appointment as Deputy-Lieutenant
of Surrey, both of which occurred in 1902, were due.
I remember that on going down to Buckingham Palace to receive the
accolade, I found that all who were waiting for various honours were
herded into funny little pens, according to their style and degree,
there to await their turn. It chanced that Professor Oliver Lodge, who
was knighted on the same morning, was penned with me, and we plunged
at once into psychic talk, which made me forget where I was, or what I
was there for. Lodge was really more advanced and certain in his views
than I was at that time, but I was quite sure about the truth of the
phenomena, and only doubtful whether some alternative explanation might
be found for a discarnate intelligence as the force at the back of
them. This possibility I weighed for years before the evidence forced
me to the Spiritist conclusion. But when, among the cloud of lies with
which we are constantly girt, I read that Lodge and I were converted
to our present views by the death of our respective sons, my mind goes
back very clearly to that exchange of thought in 1902. At that time we
had both studied the subject for many years.
Among the many congratulations which I had on my knighthood there
were few which I valued more highly than that of my old comrade, H.
A. Gwynne, who knew so much about South African affairs. He was good
enough to say: “I look upon your work during this terrible South
African business as quite equal to that of a successful general.” This
may well be the exaggeration of friendship, but it is at least pleasing
to know that those who were in a position to judge did not look upon me
as a mere busybody who butts in without due cause.
There is one incident at this period which comes back to my memory, and
seems very whimsical. I had taken a course of muscular development with
Mr. Sandow, the strong man, and in that way had formed an acquaintance
with him. In the winter of 1901 Mr. Sandow had a laudable desire to
do something for the British wounded, and with that idea he announced
a competition at the Albert Hall. He was himself to show feats of
strength and then there was to be a muster of strong men who should
exhibit their proportions and receive prizes. There were to be three
prizes, a golden statue about two feet high, a silver replica, and
a bronze. Sandow asked Lawes the sculptor and myself to be the two
judges, he being referee.
It proved to be a very big event. The Albert Hall was crowded. There
were eighty competitors, each of whom had to stand on a pedestal,
arrayed only in a leopard’s skin. Lawes and I put them up ten at a
time, chose one here and one there, and so gradually reduced the number
until we only had six left. Then it became excessively difficult, for
they were all perfectly developed athletes. Finally the matter was
simplified by three extra prizes, and then we got down to the three
winners, but had still to name their order, which was all-important
since the value of the three prizes was so very different. The three
men were all wonderful specimens, but one was a little clumsy and
another a little short, so we gave the valuable gold statue to the
middle one, whose name was Murray, and who came from Lancashire. The
vast audience was very patient during our long judgment, and showed
that it was in general agreement. After the meeting Sandow had invited
the prize-winners, the judges and a chosen company to a late supper,
which was very sumptuous, with champagne flowing freely. When we had
finished it was early in the morning. As I left the place of banquet
I saw in front of me the winning athlete going forth into the London
night with the big golden statue under his arm. I had seen that he was
a very simple countryman, unused to London ways, so I overtook him and
asked him what his plans were. He confided to me that he had no money,
but he had a return ticket to Bolton or Blackburn, and his idea was to
walk the streets until a train started for the North. It seemed to me
a monstrous thing to allow him to wander about with his treasure at
the mercy of any murderous gang, so I suggested that he should come
back with me to Morley’s Hotel, where I was residing. We could not get
a cab, and it seemed to me more grotesque than anything of Steven’s
London imaginings, that I should be wandering round at three in the
morning in the company of a stranger who bore a great golden statue of
a nude figure in his arms. When at last we reached the hotel I told the
night porter to get him a room, saying at the same time, “Mind you are
civil to him, for he has just been declared to be the strongest man in
England.” This went round the hotel, and I found that in the morning
he held quite a reception, all the maids and waiters paying homage
while he lay in bed with his statue beside him. He asked my advice
as to selling it, for it was of considerable value and seemed a white
elephant to a poor man. I told him he should open a gymnasium in his
native town and have the statue exhibited as an advertisement. This he
did, and I believe he has been very successful.
A post-African task was the building up of rifle clubs, for I was
enormously impressed by the power of the rifle as shown in the recent
war. A soldier was no longer a specialized creature, but every brave
man who could hold a rifle-barrel straight was a dangerous man. I
founded the Undershaw Club, which was the father of many others, and
which was inspected by Lord Roberts, Mr. Seeley and other great men.
Within a year or two England was dotted with village clubs, though I
fear that few of them still hold their own.
I was so struck by the factors in modern warfare and I had thought so
much about them in Africa that I wrote about them with some freedom and
possibly even with some bitterness, so that I speedily found myself
involved in hot controversy with Colonel Lonsdale Hale, “The Times”
expert, and also with Colonel Maude, a well-known military writer.
Perhaps as a civilian I should have expressed my views in a more
subdued way, but my feelings had been aroused by the conviction that
the lives of our men, and even the honour of our country, had been
jeopardized by the conservatism of the military and that it would so
happen again unless more modern views prevailed. I continued to advance
my theories for the next ten years, and I have no doubt, when I judge
them by the experience of the Great War, that in the main I was right.
The points which I made were roughly as follows:
That the rifle (or machine-gun, which is a modified rifle) is the
supreme arbiter in war, and that therefore everything must be
sacrificed to concentrate upon that.
That the only place for swords, lances and all the frippery of the past
was a museum. Bayonets also are very questionable.
That cavalry could not divide their allegiance between rifle and sword
since entirely different ground and tactics are needed for each, the
swordsman looking for level sward, the rifleman looking for cover.
Therefore all cavalry should at once become Mounted Rifles.
That the very heaviest guns of our fortresses or battleships would be
transported by road and used in the field in our next campaign.
That field guns must take cover exactly as riflemen do.
That the Yeomanry, a very expensive force, should be turned into a
Cyclist organization.
In view of the fine work done by the Yeomanry, especially in the
Eastern deserts, I should reconsider the last item, and the bayonet
question is debatable, but all the rest will stand. I stressed the fact
also that the period of military training is placed too high, and that
an excellent army could be rapidly vamped up if you had the right men.
This also was proved by the war.
I remember a debate which I attended as to the proper arms and use
of cavalry. The cavalry were there in force, all manner of gallant
fellows, moustached and debonnaire, inclined to glare at those who
would disarm them. Sir Taubman-Goldie was in the chair. Three of us,
all civilians, upheld the unpopular view that they should lose all
their glory and become sombre but deadly riflemen. It is curious now
to record that the three men were Erskine Childers, Lionel Amery and
myself. Childers was shot at dawn as a traitor to Ireland as well as
to Britain, Amery became First Lord of the Admiralty, and I write this
memoir. I remember Amery’s amusing comparison when he twitted the
cavalry with wishing to retain the _arme blanche_ simply because their
Continental antagonists would have it. “If you fight a rhinoceros,” he
said, “you don’t want to tie a horn on your nose.” It is an interesting
commentary upon this discussion that on one morning during the war
there were duels between two separate squadrons of British and German
cavalry. The first two squadrons, who were Lancers, rode through
each other’s ranks twice with loss on either side and no conclusive
result. In the second case German Lancers charged British Hussars, who
dismounted, used their carbines, and simply annihilated the small force
which attacked them.
When my immediate preoccupations after the war had been got rid of,
I settled down to attempt some literary work upon a larger and more
ambitious scale than the Sherlock Holmes or Brigadier Gerard stories
which had occupied so much of my time. The result was “Sir Nigel,” in
which I reverted to the spacious days of the “White Company,” and used
some of the same characters. “Sir Nigel” represents in my opinion my
high-water mark in literature, and though that mark may be on sand,
still an author knows its comparative position to the others. It
received no particular recognition from critics or public, which was,
I admit, a disappointment to me. In England versatility is looked upon
with distrust. You may write ballad tunes or you may write grand opera,
but it cannot be admitted that the same man may be master of the whole
musical range and do either with equal success.
In 1906 my wife passed away after the long illness which she had borne
with such exemplary patience. Her end was painless and serene. The
long fight had ended at last in defeat, but at least we had held the
vital fort for thirteen years after every expert had said that it was
untenable. For some time after these days of darkness I was unable to
settle to work, until the Edalji case came suddenly to turn my energies
into an entirely unexpected channel.
It was in the year 1907 that this notorious case took up much of
my time, but it was not wasted, as it ended, after much labour, in
partially rectifying a very serious miscarriage of justice. The
facts of the case were a little complex and became more so as the
matter proceeded. George Edalji was a young law student, son of the
Reverend S. Edalji, the Parsee Vicar of the parish of Great Wyrley,
who had married an English lady. How the Vicar came to be a Parsee,
or how a Parsee came to be the Vicar, I have no idea. Perhaps some
Catholic-minded patron wished to demonstrate the universality of the
Anglican Church. The experiment will not, I hope, be repeated, for
though the Vicar was an amiable and devoted man, the appearance of a
coloured clergyman with a half-caste son in a rude, unrefined parish
was bound to cause some regrettable situation.
But no one could have foreseen how serious that situation would
become. The family became the butt of certain malicious wags in the
neighbourhood and were bombarded with anonymous letters, some of them
of the most monstrous description. There was worse, however, to come. A
horrible epidemic of horse-maiming had broken out, proceeding evidently
from some blood-lusting lunatic of Sadic propensities. These outrages
continued for a long time, and the local police were naturally much
criticized for doing nothing. It would have been as well had they
continued to do nothing, for they ended by arresting George Edalji
for the crime, the main evidence being that there were signs that the
writer of the anonymous letters knew something about the crimes, and
that it was thought that young Edalji had written the anonymous letters
which had plagued his family so long. The evidence was incredibly weak,
and yet the police, all pulling together and twisting all things to
their end, managed to get a conviction at the Stafford Quarter Sessions
in 1903. The prisoner was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude.
There were some murmurs among discerning people at the time, and Mr.
Voules, of “Truth,” has an honourable record for having kept some sort
of agitation going, but nothing practical was done until the unhappy
youth had already served three years of his sentence. It was late in
1906 that I chanced to pick up an obscure paper called “The Umpire,”
and my eye caught an article which was a statement of his case, made by
himself. As I read, the unmistakable accent of truth forced itself upon
my attention and I realized that I was in the presence of an appalling
tragedy, and that I was called upon to do what I could to set it right.
I got other papers on the case, studied the original trial, went up to
Staffordshire and saw the family, went over the scene of the crimes
and finally wrote a series of articles on the case, which began in the
“Daily Telegraph” of January 12, 1907. As I bargained that they should
be non-copyright they were largely transferred to other papers, sold
for a penny at street-curbs and generally had a very wide circulation,
so that England soon rang with the wrongs of George Edalji.
These wrongs would have been almost comic had they not had so tragic
an upshot. If the whole land had been raked, I do not think that it
would have been possible to find a man who was so unlikely, and indeed
so incapable, of committing such actions. He was of irreproachable
character. Nothing in his life had ever been urged against him. His
old schoolmaster with years of experience testified to his mild and
tractable disposition. He had served his time with a Birmingham
solicitor, who gave him the highest references. He had never shown
traits of cruelty. He was so devoted to his work that he had won the
highest honours in the legal classes, and he had already at the age of
twenty-seven written a book upon Railway Law. Finally he was a total
abstainer, and so blind that he was unable to recognize any one at the
distance of six yards. It was clear that the inherent improbability of
such a man committing a long succession of bloody and brutal crimes was
so great that it could only be met by the suggestion of insanity. There
had never, however, been any indication even of eccentricity in George
Edalji. On the contrary, his statements of defence were measured and
rational, and he had come through a series of experiences which might
well have unhinged a weaker intellect.
The original theory at the trial had been that Edalji had committed
the particular mutilations with which he was charged some time in the
evening. This line of attack broke down completely, and he was able
to advance a certain _alibi_. In the middle of the case, therefore,
the police prosecution shifted its ground and advanced the new theory
that it was done in the early hours of the morning. George Edalji, as
it happened, slept in the same room as his father, the parish vicar.
The latter is a light sleeper and is accustomed, as many people are,
to assure privacy by turning the key of his room. He swore that George
never left the room during the night. This may not constitute an
absolute _alibi_ in the eye of the law, but it is difficult to imagine
anything nearer to one unless a sentinel had been placed outside the
door all night. It is so near an _alibi_ that nothing but the most
cogent considerations could shake it, but far from there being any
such considerations, the case was such a thing of threads and patches
that one cannot imagine how any sane jury could have accepted it, even
though the defence was weakly conducted. So bad was this defence that
in the whole trial no mention, so far as I could ascertain, was ever
made of the fact that the man was practically blind, save in good
light, while between his house and the place where the mutilation was
committed lay the full breadth of the London and North-Western Railway,
an expanse of rails, wires and other obstacles, with hedges to be
forced on either side, so that I, a strong and active man, in broad
daylight found it a hard matter to pass.
What aroused my indignation and gave me the driving force to carry
the thing through was the utter helplessness of this forlorn little
group of people, the coloured clergyman in his strange position, the
brave blue-eyed, grey-haired wife, the young daughter, baited by
brutal boors and having the police, who should have been their natural
protectors, adopting from the beginning a harsh tone towards them and
accusing them, beyond all sense and reason, of being the cause of
their own troubles and of persecuting and maligning themselves. Such
an exhibition, sustained, I am sorry to say, by Lord Gladstone and all
the forces of the Home Office, would have been incredible had I not
actually examined the facts.
The articles caused a storm of indignation through the country.
“Truth,” Sir George Lewis and other forces joined in the good work.
A committee was formed by the Government to examine and report. It
consisted of Sir Arthur Wilson, the Hon. John Lloyd Wharton and Sir
Albert de Rutzen. Their finding, which came to hand in June, was a
compromise document, for though they were severe upon the condemnation
of Edalji and saw no evidence which associated him with the crime, they
still clung to the theory that he had written the anonymous letters,
that he had therefore been himself contributory to the miscarriage of
justice, and that for this reason all compensation for his long period
of suffering should be denied him.
It was a wretched decision, and the Law Society at the prompting of
Sir George Lewis showed what they thought of it by at once readmitting
Edalji to the roll of solicitors with leave to practise, which they
would never have done had they thought him capable of dishonourable
conduct. But the result stands. To this day this unfortunate man, whose
humble family has paid many hundreds of pounds in expenses, has never
been able to get one shilling of compensation for the wrong done. It
is a blot upon the record of English Justice, and even now it should
be wiped out. It is to be remembered that the man was never tried for
writing the letters--a charge which could not have been sustained--so
that as the matter stands he has got no redress for three years of
admitted false imprisonment, on the score that he did something else
for which he has never been tried. What a travesty of Justice! The
“Daily Telegraph” got up a subscription for him which ran to some
£300. The first use that he made of the money was to repay an old aunt
who had advanced the funds for his defence. He came to my wedding
reception, and there was no guest whom I was prouder to see.
So far, my work had been satisfactory. Where I caused myself great
trouble was that in my local exploration at Wyrley I had come
across what seemed to me a very direct clue as to both the writer,
or rather writers, of the letters, and also of the identity of the
mutilator--though the latter word may also have been in the plural. I
became interested, the more so as the facts were very complex and I had
to do with people who were insane as well as criminal. I have several
letters threatening my life in the same writing as those which assailed
the Edaljis--a fact which did not appear to shake in the least the Home
Office conviction that George Edalji had written them all. Mentally I
began to class the Home Office officials as insane also. The sad fact
is that officialdom in England stands solid together, and that when you
are forced to attack it you need not expect justice, but rather that
you are up against an unavowed Trade Union the members of which are not
going to act the blackleg to each other, and which subordinates the
public interest to a false idea of loyalty. What confronts you is a
determination to admit nothing which inculpates another official, and
as to the idea of punishing another official for offences which have
caused misery to helpless victims, it never comes within their horizon.
Even now, after the lapse of so many years, I can hardly think with
patience of the handling of this case.
The mistake that I made, so far as my own interests were concerned, was
that having got on the track of the miscreant I let the police and
the Home Office know my results before they were absolutely completed.
There was a strong _primâ facie_ case, but it needed the goodwill and
co-operation of the authorities to ram it home. That co-operation was
wanting, which was intelligible, in the case of the local police,
since it traversed their previous convictions and conclusions, but was
inexcusable in the Home Office. The law officers of the Crown upheld
their view that there was not a _primâ facie_ case, but I fear that
consciously or unconsciously the same trade union principle was at
work. Let me briefly state the case that the public may judge. I will
call the suspect “X.” I was able to show:
1. That “X” had shown a peculiar knife or horse-lancet to some one
and had stated that this knife did the crimes. I had this knife in my
possession.
2. That this knife or a similar knife must have been used in _some_ of
the crimes, as shown by the shallow incision.
3. That “X” had been trained in the slaughter-yard and the cattle-ship,
and was accustomed to brutal treatment of animals.
4. That he had a clear record both of anonymous letters and of
destructive propensities.
5. That his writing and that of his brother exactly fitted into the two
writings of the anonymous letters. In this I had strong independent
evidence.
6. That he had shown signs of periodical insanity, and that his
household and bedroom were such that he could leave unseen at any hour
of the night.
There were very many corroborative evidences, but those were the main
ones, coupled with the fact that when “X” was away for some years the
letters and outrages stopped, but began again when he returned. On the
other hand, when Edalji was put in prison the outrages went on the same
as before.
It will hardly be believed that after I had laid these facts before
the Home Office they managed to present the House of Commons with the
official legal opinion that there was not a _primâ facie_ case, while
a high official of the Government said to me: “I see no more evidence
against these two brothers than against myself and my brother.”
The points I mention are taken from the paper I laid before the law
officers of the Crown, which lies before me as I write, so the facts
are exactly as stated.
I had one letter in sorrow and also in anger from the Staffordshire
police complaining that I should be libelling this poor young man whose
identity could easily be established.
I do not know what has become of “X” or how often he has been convicted
since, but on the last occasion of which I have notes the magistrate
said in condemning him to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour:
“His character was extremely bad, he having been convicted of arson, of
stealing on three occasions and of damage. On his own confession he had
committed a deliberate and cruel theft from his aged mother and it was
impossible to overlook the seriousness of the case.” So much for the
inoffensive youth whom I had libelled! But what about Edalji’s three
years of gaol?
On September 18, 1907, I married Miss Jean Leckie, the younger daughter
of a Blackheath family whom I had known for years, and who was a dear
friend of my mother and sister. There are some things which one feels
too intimately to be able to express, and I can only say that the years
have passed without one shadow coming to mar even for a moment the
sunshine of my Indian summer which now deepens to a golden autumn. She
and my three younger children with the kindly sympathy of my two elder
ones have made my home an ideally happy one.
My wife’s people had a house at Crowborough, and there they had gone
to reside. As they were very attached I thought it would be a happy
arrangement not to separate them, so I bought a house close by, named
“Windlesham.” As I paid for it by a sum of money which I recovered
after I had been unjustly defrauded of it, my friends suggested
“Swindlesham” as a more appropriate name. Thus it came about that in
1907 I left Undershaw, Hindhead, after ten years’ residence, and moved
myself and my belongings to the highlands of Sussex, where I still
dwell in the few months of settled life which give me a rest between my
wanderings.
Very soon after my marriage, having just got clear of the Edalji case,
I became entangled in that of Oscar Slater. The one was in a way the
cause of the other, for since I was generally given credit for having
got Edalji out of his troubles, it was hoped by those who believed that
Slater’s condemnation was a miscarriage of justice that I might be able
to do the same for him. I went into the matter most reluctantly, but
when I glanced at the facts, I saw that it was an even worse case than
the Edalji one, and that this unhappy man had in all probability no
more to do with the murder for which he had been condemned than I had.
I am convinced that when on being convicted he cried out to the judge
that he never knew that such a woman as the murdered woman existed he
was speaking the literal truth.
In one respect the Oscar Slater case was not so serious as the Edalji
one, because Slater was not a very desirable member of society. He had
never, so far as is known, been in trouble as a criminal, but he was a
gambler and adventurer of uncertain morals and dubious ways--a German
Jew by extraction, living under an alias. Edalji, on the other hand,
was a blameless youth. But in another aspect Slater’s case was worse
than that of Edalji, since the charge was murder. He was very nearly
hanged, and finally the life sentence was actually carried out, so that
the wrong was never righted and at the present moment the unfortunate
man is in gaol. It is a dreadful blot upon the administration of
justice in Scotland, and such judicial crimes are not, I am convinced,
done with impunity even to the most humble. Somehow--somewhere, there
comes a national punishment in return.
The case was roughly this: an elderly woman, Miss Gilchrist, was done
to death most brutally in her flat, while her servant-maid, Helen
Lambie, was absent for ten minutes on an errand. Her head was beaten
to pieces by some hard instrument. The neighbours were alarmed by
the noise, and one of them, together with the maid, actually saw the
murderer, a young man, leave the flat and pass him at the door. The
police description at the time was by no means in agreement with
Slater’s appearance. Robbery did not appear to be the motive of the
crime, for nothing was missing unless it was a single diamond brooch.
On the other hand, a box of papers had been broken into and left in
disorder. The date was December 21, 1908.
And now comes the great fact which is admitted by all, and which makes
the whole case wildly improbable if not utterly impossible. It was
thought that a diamond brooch had been taken. It was found out that a
diamond brooch had also been pawned by the Bohemian Slater, who had
started for America. Was it not clear that he was the murderer? New
York was warned. Slater was arrested and in due time was returned to
Glasgow. Then came the fiasco. It was found beyond all doubt that the
brooch in question had been in Slater’s possession for years, and that
it had nothing to do with Miss Gilchrist at all.
This should have been the end of the case. It was too preposterous to
suppose that out of all the folk in Glasgow the police had arrested
the right man by pure chance--for that was what it amounted to. But
the public had lost its head, and so had the police. If the case had
completely gone to pieces surely it could be reconstructed in some
fresh form. Slater was poor and friendless. He had lived with a woman,
which shocked Scotch morality. As one writer boldly said in the press:
“Even if he did not do it, he deserved to be condemned, anyhow.” A case
was made up in the most absurd manner. A half-crown card of tools was
found in his box with the sort of tools which are found on such cards.
The frail hammer was evidently the instrument which had beaten in the
woman’s skull. The handle might have been cleaned. Then surely there
had been blood on it. The police description was already amended so as
to be nearer to Slater. He, a sallow, dark-haired Jew, was picked out
by witnesses from among a group of fair Scotsmen. Some one had been
seen waiting in the street for some nights before. This some one was
variously described by many witnesses. Some descriptions would fit
Slater, some were his very opposite. The people who saw the murderer
leave thought it might be Slater, but were not sure. The chief witness,
Adams, was very short-sighted and had not his glasses. A clear _alibi_
was proved by Slater, but as his mistress and his servant girl were
the witnesses, it was not allowed. Whom could he produce save the
inmates of his house? No attempt was ever made to show that Slater had
any connection with Miss Gilchrist, or with the maid, Lambie, and as
Slater was really a stranger in Glasgow, it was impossible to see how
he could have known anything about this retired old maid. But he was
not too well defended, while Mr. Ure, the Advocate-General of Scotland,
prosecuting for the State, thundered away in a most violent speech in
which several statements were made, uncorrected by Judge Guthrie, which
were very inexact, and which must have powerfully swayed the jury.
Finally, the Crown got a conviction by nine votes to six (five “not
proven”)--which, of course, would have meant a new trial in England,
and the wretched foreigner was condemned to death. The scaffold was
actually erected, and it was only two mornings before his execution
that the order came which prevented a judicial murder. As it was, the
man became a convict--and is one still.
It is an atrocious story, and as I read it and realized the wickedness
of it all, I was moved to do all I could for the man. I was aided by
the opinion of Sir Herbert Stephen, who read the evidence and declared
that there was not even a _primâ facie_ case against the man. I,
therefore, started a newspaper agitation and wrote a small book with an
account of the whole matter. The consciences of some people responded,
and finally we got up sufficient pressure to induce the Government to
appoint a Commissioner, Sheriff Miller, to examine the case. It was all
to no purpose, and the examination was a farce. The terms of reference
were so narrow that the conduct of the police was entirely excluded,
which was really the very thing at issue, since we held that where
their original evidence failed them, they had strained many points in
trying to build up a case and to obtain a verdict. It was also decided
that evidence should not be on oath. The result was that there was no
result nor could there be with such limitations. None the less, some
fresh evidence was put forward which further weakened the already very
weak case for the prosecution. For example, at the trial it had been
stated that Slater, on reaching Liverpool from Glasgow, had gone to a
Liverpool hotel under a false name, as if he were trying to throw the
police off his track. It was shown that this was not true, and that he
had signed the register with his own Glasgow name. I say his Glasgow
name, for he had several pseudonyms in the course of his not too
reputable career, and, as a fact, he took his actual passage under a
false name, showing that he intended to make a clear start in America.
He was, according to his own account, pursued by some woman--probably
his lawful wife--and this covering of tracks was to escape this
huntress. The fact that he used his own name at the hotel showed that
the new name was for American rather than for British use, and that he
had no fear of Glasgow pursuit.
We could do no more, and there the matter rested. There was a very
ugly aftermath of the case, which consisted of what appeared to be
persecution of Mr. Trench, a detective who had given evidence at
the inquiry which told in favour of our view. A charge was shortly
afterwards made against both him and a solicitor, Mr. Cook, who had
been conspicuous upon Slater’s side, which might well have ruined them
both. As it was, it caused them great anxiety and expense. There had
been a most unpleasant political flavour to the whole proceedings;
but on this occasion the case came before a Conservative Judge, Mr.
Scott Dickson, who declared that it should never have been brought
into court, and dismissed it forthwith with contempt. It is a curious
circumstance that as I write, in 1924, Judge Guthrie, Cook, Trench,
Helen Lambie, Miller and others have all passed on. But Slater still
remains, eating out his heart at Peterhead.
One strange psychic fact should be mentioned which was brought to my
notice by an eminent English K.C. There was a Spiritualist circle which
used to meet at Falkirk, and shortly after the trial messages were
received by it which purported to come from the murdered woman. She was
asked what the weapon was which had slain her. She answered that it
was an iron box-opener. Now I had pondered over the nature of certain
wounds in the woman’s face, which consisted of two cuts with a little
bridge of unbroken skin between. They might have been caused by the
claw end of a hammer, but on the other hand, one of the woman’s eyes
had been pushed back into her brain, which could hardly have been done
by a hammer, which would have burst the eyeball first. I could think
of no instrument which would meet the case. But the box-opener would
exactly do so, for it has a forked end which would make the double
wound, and it is also straight so that it might very well penetrate to
the brain, driving the eye in front of it. The reader will reasonably
ask why did not the Spiritualists ask the name of the criminal. I
believe that they did and received a reply, but I do not think that
such evidence could or should ever be used or published. It could only
be useful as the starting point of an inquiry.
* * * * *
There was one intervention during those years to which I look back with
satisfaction, and that was my protest against the King’s Oath before
the Coronation of King Edward. The Oath was actually changed, and
though my protest may have had no effect upon that historic fact, it
was none the less the first letter in “The Times” upon the subject.
It ran thus:
SIR,--
Surely Colonel Sandys and the members of the Protestant Reformation
Society should, looking at the matter simply from their own point of
view, recognize that the surest way to strengthen any creed is, as
the whole history of the world has proved, to persecute it. And it is
mere juggling with words to attempt to show that it is anything other
than persecution to hold up the Roman Catholic faith to obloquy in the
Coronation Oath, while every other creed, Christian or non-Christian,
is left unassailed. Is it not a shocking thing that, while Roman
Catholic chapels throughout the whole Empire are still draped in black
for a deceased Monarch, his successor should be compelled by law to
insult the most intimate convictions of these same mourners?
And is it not a most narrow and foolish policy, unworthy of this
tolerant age, that a young King should be forced to offend the
feelings of great numbers of Irishmen, Canadians and other subjects?
I feel sure that, apart from Catholics, the great majority of
broad-minded thinkers of any or of no denomination in this country are
of opinion that the outcry of fanatics should be disregarded, and that
all creeds should receive the same courteous and respectful treatment
so long as their adherents are members of the common Empire. To bring
these medieval rancours to an end would indeed be an auspicious
opening of a new reign.
Yours faithfully,
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE.