CHAPTER 25

Death in the Church of Humanity

1913

Miss Crompton was lying dead with a bullet wound through her head …

illiam Macdonald, just twenty years old, was a carpenter who had several intellectual interests, among them ‘Marxism and Positivism’, the powerful creed of a sub-culture who met in Upper Parliament Street at their base called, grandly, the Church of Humanity. The young man therefore had strong social and political opinions, but he was looking for a cause on his own doorstep in Liverpool, and he found it in this splinter-group church. He was a man of great passion and profoundly extreme allegiances and affections.

The Positivists were led by Sidney Style, a local solicitor. They met weekly at 69 Hope Street, and it was at these gatherings that Macdonald met an older woman, the daughter of the founder of the group, Mary Crompton. She was forty-two. Macdonald did not tell her of his affection for her, and so we have the beginning of a strangely violent and ragingly sadistic sequence of events. Much of the problem was made worse by some of the odd rituals and conventions of the Church of Humanity.

Mary’s father was Albert Crompton and a granddaughter of a Justice of the Peace, Sir Charles Crompton, who had died in 1865. When a young man called Paul Gaze, a church member, was orphaned when young, one of the rules of the Church came into play: a member had to be found who would act in loco parentis, as mentor and parent. Mary became this parent to Gaze. She obviously developed a close friendship with him and was often in his company, and when he went to work in Africa, she still kept in touch and was always his guiding hand in religious matters.

But this bond of friendship began to rankle with young Macdonald, who was loving Mary from a distance and allowing his feelings to implode in him, to divert and create all kinds of unhealthy emotions. It seems strange that, even when Gaze came home from Africa with a wife, Macdonald was still jealous. It is also clear that Macdonald was far from a loyal and unthinking member of the brotherhood. This seems quite understandable when we consider his Marxism. Members often considered him to be antagonistic and had problems in absorbing their beliefs.

The crisis in Macdonald’s unbalanced life came nearer when Gaze and his wife, after coming to Liverpool, followed the Church’s ruling that after a civil ceremony, a young married couple had to observe a probationary period of three months of celibacy. Gaze was living in lodgings and his new wife was staying with Mary Crompton until the three months were up. The young wife knew no English, she was Portuguese, and also spoke French. Again, it is the case that Mary was a good guide and mentor to the young woman in this strange foreign culture.

As this three-month period was coming to an end, things came to a head in the odd and dangerous mind of Macdonald. On 7 October 1913 he called at the house of the man who had first brought him into the fold at the Church of Humanity – Richard Price Roberts. Something had shifted all reason from Macdonald’s mind and he went there with an intention to kill the man. He failed, in spite of one of the two fired bullets going into Roberts’ head, and into his nose. Grove Street was the next stop, where he could find Gaze, and this time he shot the man dead in the hall.

At 81 Bedford Street South, the killer’s spree continued, and this time it was Mary who was the victim. He shot her in the head and death was quick. The natural outcome of all this was turning the gun on himself, and he did so. It took him three hours to die. When they found Mary Crompton she was lying dead with a bullet-wound through her head.

At the inquest on 9 October, Mr Inglis had to hear Miss Huckwell say that she had identified the body of her friend Mary. The result was going to be obvious: wilful murder and suicide, but it was adjourned for a few days for further information to be gathered. It would surely be too complicated to look into exactly what it was that appealed to young people in this particular group of worshippers. Aldous Huxley, perhaps unfairly, said that the Positivist Church was ‘Catholicism without Christianity.’ All that can be said is that no-one can legislate for the new recruit to any religious sect: how to accommodate an individual who may have complex and most unhealthy reasons for seeking out the companionship in worship and togetherness such as the Church offered Macdonald.

Who could possibly have known that the young and bookish man who enjoyed critical debate would one day stop speculating with his mind and use a gun to come to some conclusions?