MAY 29, 1949. Georgie put pencil to foolscap and wrote longingly to the Governor General of Canada, Harold Rupert Leofric George Alexander, or Viscount Alexander of Tunis, or His Excellency, the Administrator of the Government of Canada, to beg for his life. His tone: a supplicant’s saccharine mixed with a suicide’s cyanide. “So Sir that why I am humbling my self to You and Bagging you for my wife sake and two children Sake and for the good that in me and the new life I found in our Lord and in the name of Jesus Christ I Bag you sir to Spear my life.”
Unfortunately for George, Mr. Harold Alexander—once the British army’s youngest major-general, one who helped defeat Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps, and the cool engineer of two celebrated troop evacuations during the Anti-Fascist War—loved fishing in Manitoba and hunting in Quebec: a kind of Group of Seven outdoorsman, he was not the type to expend mercy on a snivelling killer.
In his letter, George swore to be “a good Canadain and preach the Word of God to others” because he was “a christian at heart” who’d given up “smoking and Reading filthy books.” He was “praying night and day so that you will see the truth in my Latter to you Sir” because “I am no murder or had no intention in my heart for it my brother kill silver with out me noing about it, and I no if I had not drop the hammer my Brother would of hit him with the beer bottal he had but I had comited a sin a mixed up in a crime witch in breaking the English Laws of Canada and I sin against God.”
Georgie was “constantly Reading my Bible … the book that brought peace and joy to my Sole.” George asked Alexander of Tunis to “pordon my wrighting Pleas Sir and my Spelling” and to let him have a second “Chanch.” He “amitted” that he did call the taxi, though he’d “never hit a man in my Life so when it came time to that I was supposed to hit him, I could not do it.” He clarified that “I am not guilty of hitting any Body in my LIfe, and I never planed with my Brother to kill any body …” but “I did planed Sir to go out and get some money and hit a man that is the truth.”
Georgie pleaded for his dream future and that of his children: “I am a good man at Heart I never wanted to hurt any body in my Life, Sir my two children and my wife I am setting here thinking what my children is got to face if get Hang people will tell them your father was a murder and was hang I am not no murder sir but I was found guilty, but I ask you sir please think about what will happen to my children, this is something I did not want to happen to them, I wanted to give them thing I never had and bring them up wright and give them a Schooling, and learnt them wright from wrong and build them a house, for my wife and children, but my Brother Rudy lead me into a trap and spoild all that.” George pleaded with His Excellency, “the Wright Honarble Govner General,” to save his life. He signed off as “your Truely Slave George Albert Hamilton I thank you sir with all my Heart and Soul.”
George’s letter overlooked, however, what Viscount Alexander—who’d just toured the University of New Brunswick and snagged a doctorate—could not: the body of Nacre Pearly Burgundy had spawned a host of bitter citizens clamouring for two black boys to swing from a beige fake tree. (Indeedy, Fredericton was anxious to see “shiftless, murderous niggers” hanged—in tune with the racket of hammers hitting nails, the crescendo of piano keys—hammers—striking chords and the machine-gun of typewriter hammers striking paper.) The greatest ex-general (since the Duke of Wellington) of His Majesty’s forces would bow to New Brunswick public opinion, which could be polled, while reserving respect for God’s opinion, which no one could divine.