12

‘He was my bosom friend’

Southsea, Hampshire, 1872

On the afternoon of 22 May 1872, well digger Thomas Ford was working with builder James Biden on a vacant plot in Duncan Terrace, Southsea, the two men chatting and exchanging pleasantries as they worked. Ford bent down, his attention fixed on something on the ground and, as he stooped, Biden suddenly ran behind him shouting fearfully, ‘Don’t, don’t!’ Ford looked up and saw William McGinn walking towards them, his arm stretched straight out in front of him.

As McGinn got closer, Ford could see that he was holding a revolver. It was obvious that Biden was the intended target, as McGinn brusquely ordered Ford to get out of the way, but Biden was clutching him so tightly around his waist that Ford was unable to move. When he was less than ten feet from the two men, McGinn stepped round to the right of Ford in an almost mechanical fashion, aimed at Biden and pulled the trigger, firing two shots in quick succession. Biden immediately fell to the ground, at which McGinn replaced the gun in his pocket, abruptly turned on his heel and walked away. Apprentice carpenter William Saunders was looking out of the window of a nearby workshop and saw the entire tragedy unfolding. He tried to go for help but as McGinn passed him he growled at the boy, telling him to stay where he was and Saunders was so frightened that he immediately froze, waiting until the gunman had left the street before he dared to move.

Forty-seven-year-old Biden was unconscious and bleeding. He was carried back to his home in Albert Road, Southsea, and laid on the floor. His bloody face was washed then he was taken upstairs to his bedroom, where he was attended by surgeons Mr Bentham and Mr Parson. Recognising the gravity of Biden’s condition, they sent for a third surgeon, Mr Kester Edward Knight. The doctors found that Biden had a round hole in his left temple, from which blood continued to ooze for several hours, which they believed was caused by a small bullet that had penetrated Biden’s brain. Since Biden’s right eyelid drooped over his eye, the surgeons concluded that he was paralysed on the right-hand side of his body, a state which they attributed to the presence of a foreign body in the brain.

It was immediately obvious that Biden’s case was hopeless and it was simply a matter of time before he died from the effects of the gunshot wound to his head. As it was, he urvived for approximately forty-eight hours, and apart from occasionally mumbling his wife’s name, he remained unconscious until his death. A post-mortem examination confirmed the cause of death as brain damage, resulting from a gunshot wound. Surgeons removed a single bullet from Biden’s brain and noted that he had a second gunshot wound in his left upper arm, which they surmised was sustained when he threw his arms up in an effort to protect his head.

Meanwhile, immediately after the shooting, McGinn went directly to the home of PC George Barber, who he had known personally for between four and five years. ‘Barber,I’m come to give myself up in your charge to save you the trouble of coming to fetch me, for I’ve done it,’ McGinn told the policeman.

‘What do you mean?’ Barber asked.

‘I’ve shot Jim. He’s dead,’ McGinn explained.

Barber knew that McGinn was good friends with ‘Jim’ Biden and therefore assumed that Biden was the victim. He pressed McGinn for more details, asking where the shooting took place and what had happened to the gun, which McGinn claimed to have handed to a passer-by as he walked to the policeman’s house. ‘I should have liked to have got them both together but I could not wait for that,’ McGinn told the policeman, without specifying who he meant by ‘them both’.

Coroner Mr W.H. Garrington opened an inquest at The Volunteers’ Arms public house in Southsea, at which his first task was to deal with a man named Francis Broomfield, who was most reluctant to serve as a juror. Broomfield first argued that his summons for jury duty was not legal, since it was not served on him in person but merely left at his house. When Garrington assured him that the summons was legally binding, Broomfield protested that he would rather not serve.

‘It is not a question as to whether you would rather or rather not serve. You have been summoned and must serve,’ Garrington insisted, ignoring Broomfield’s objections that he was a personal friend of both the deceased and the man suspected of killing him.

‘The fact of your being a friend will not prevent you doing justice between them,’ the coroner ruled and Broomfield finally took his seat and was sworn onto the jury.

Having heard from the two men who witnessed the shooting, followed by medical testimony from the doctors who treated the deceased until his death, one of the last witnesses to appear at the inquest was PC Barber. The policeman described McGinn as being sober but ‘very much excited’ when he handed himself in after the shooting. It emerged that both Biden and McGinn were Freemasons and since Barber knew both the victim and his alleged killer personally, the jury were keen to elicit information from him about the relationship between the two men.

The jury’s persistent questioning placed the police officer in a difficult position, since Barber was aware that McGinn had recently separated from his wife and that, as a consequence, McGinn and Biden were no longer on good terms.

‘Do you know any reason for that?’ asked the jury.

‘He can’t know that,’ interjected the coroner.

‘He lives in the neighbourhood,’ reasoned a juror.

Eventually the coroner allowed Barber to reveal that he had seen McGinn’s wife talking to Biden on more than one occasion.

‘You never saw anything improper?’ the coroner clarified.

‘No,’ admitted Barber.

‘They were merely talking together,’ stressed the coroner.

‘That’s all,’ agreed the policeman.

In his summary of the evidence for the jury, the coroner advised them that it was not for them to decide why Biden had been shot. The medical evidence unequivocally proved that death was due to a bullet wound and there was clear, conclusive evidence from not one, but two, eyewitnesses as to the circumstances under which that injury was inflicted. There was no quarrel immediately before the shooting and, if the jury believed the evidence they had heard, the firing of the gun was done in cold blood. With this in mind, the coroner told his jury that he would be failing in his duty if he didn’t inform them that there was no other verdict they could return other than one of wilful murder against McGinn. The jury needed only a few minutes’ deliberation to concur and McGinn was committed for trial at the next Winchester Assizes.

By the time McGinn was brought before magistrates at the Borough Police Court, the police had located two important witnesses, who did not appear at the inquest. The first was gunsmith James Haigs of Portsea, who told the magistrates that at around 1 p.m. on the day of the shooting, a man came into his shop on St James’s Street asking to purchase a second-hand revolver. Unfortunately, Haigs had no second-hand guns available and the man, who Haigs identified as William McGinn, eventually agreed to purchase a new revolver for the sum of 21s. At McGinn’s request, Haigs loaded two of the revolver’s chambers and took McGinn out into the back yard of the shop to practice firing it. After some instruction, McGinn fired the two shots, before asking Haigs to load all six chambers, after which he left.

The other new witness at the police court was Martha McCormack, the wife of John McCormack, the landlord of The Belgrave Tavern, Southsea. Mrs McCormack told the court that she had known Biden for twelve years and McGinn for four. The two men had been the best of friends until February 1872, when McGinn’s wife left him. Mrs McCormack was in absolutely no doubt that an intimate relationship existed between Biden and Mrs McGinn and she knew that William McGinn was terribly upset because of it. She had seen McGinn on the day of the murder, when he confided that the conduct of his wife and Biden were driving him mad. ‘I could better have borne it from a stranger but from a dear friend such as I thought him I cannot stand it,’ he told her.

Mrs McCormack seems to have been a bit of a busybody, who was not above tittle-tattling about McGinn’s wife. Having revealed that the current Mrs McGinn was William’s second wife and that their sixteen-year marriage had produced four children, the youngest of whom was about three years old, she told the court that, two days before the murder, McGinn unexpectedly turned up on her doorstep in a frantic state, having just met his wife and Biden walking arm in arm across nearby Southsea Common. ‘I can’t bear it. He was my bosom friend,’ McGinn sobbed to Martha and her husband, who tried their best to calm him down by offering him a cup of tea, which he refused. McGinn revealed that he had punched Biden and knocked him down but his wife immediately began hitting him about the head with her hat and shouting ‘Don’t strike him, you brute’, until two men eventually came to her assistance and took McGinn away.

In the days immediately prior to the murder, Mrs McCormack sincerely believed that McGinn was going mad and told the court that she was afraid of him. On the morning of the murder, he arrived at her establishment very early, not having washed or shaved and appearing ‘very excited’. ‘I shall go out of my mind. I think I am,’ he told Mrs McCormack before abruptly shaking her hand and running out.

On 8 July 1872, William McGinn stood trial at the Hampshire Assizes in Winchester. The fifty-two-year-old shoemaker and former soldier, with twenty-four years’ military service, pleaded not guilty to the charge of wilful murder against him and was allowed a chair in the dock as Mr Collins and Mr Loveland opened the case for the prosecution.

Collins started by saying that the facts of the case were short and simple, before proceeding to outline them for the jury. Having explained that McGinn suspected his wife of having an affair with Biden, Collins recounted McGinn’s actions on 22 May, when he first purchased a gun from Mr Haigs then later used it to shoot Biden. The prosecution called Thomas Ford and William Saunders, who had witnessed the shooting, followed by PC Barber, Haigs, Martha McCormack and surgeon Kester Edward Knight. Once the surgeon had testified, the prosecution rested, leaving Mr Cole to begin his defence of McGinn.

Cole began by telling the jury that, whatever verdict they arrived at, they would surely deeply sympathise with the miserable man who now stood before them, on trial for his life. He conceded that the prosecution had relayed the bare facts of the case but added that it was his job to fill in the gaps. There was no denying that Biden’s life had been taken and that McGinn was responsible for taking it. However Cole asked the jury to consider the state of his client’s mind at the time of the murder.

McGinn had suspected for some months that his wife and James Biden were having an affair, even though Mrs McGinn repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. Matters eventually came to a head when Mrs McGinn left the family home and moved into lodgings. Cole revealed that McGinn had spent a lot of time watching his wife after she left, trying to establish the truth about her relationship with Biden. Meanwhile, Mrs McGinn and Biden treated him with contempt, once revealing to Mrs McCormack that they had hidden behind a tree laughing together at 1.30 a.m. watching as McGinn lurked outside his wife’s lodgings, trying to find out where she was and who she was with.

Just two days before the shooting took place, McGinn had seen his wife and her paramour walking arm in arm across Portsea Common. Cole reminded the jury that, in English law, if a man caught his wife in the act of committing adultery and he struck and killed the man involved, the charge against him would be manslaughter, since the law recognised and excused such moments of overwhelming passion. It was Cole’s contention that certain parallels could be drawn between a man finding his wife in the act of adultery and a man having irrefutable evidence of that adultery placed before him. Was it strictly necessary that a man should actually have to witness the horrible sight with his own eyes, asked Cole? No doubt, it could be argued that McGinn didn’t kill the adulterer when he first discovered the relationship but there was a distinct possibility that he could have done but for the interference of passers-by, who pulled him away after he hit Biden and knocked him down. Cole argued that, when McGinn actually did kill Biden, he was still in the same frame of mind as he had been when his suspicions of his wife’s adulterous relationship were finally confirmed. It might be said that there was ample time for McGinn’s blood to cool but did it, asked Cole?

There were witnesses who had testified that McGinn was nearly raving mad. Admittedly, the gunsmith who sold McGinn the gun noticed nothing unusual in his manner but then all he cared about was making a sale of what he himself described as ‘a deadly little weapon and very cheap’.

Cole’s line of reasoning proved new to presiding judge Mr Justice Lush, who announced that he would like to take a few moments to consult with Mr Justice Mellor on the points of law raised. The judge left the court briefly and on his return, Cole called several defence witnesses.

William Valler, who worked as a delivery man for a firm of auctioneers, testified to delivering a double bedstead to James Biden and Mrs McGinn in May 1872. Valler knew McGinn and his wife and had also seen McGinn walking past the auctioneer’s offices towards Biden’s workshop about an hour before the shooting occurred, at which time McGinn was very red-faced and wild eyed. ‘He looked in a heat,’ added Valler, who had also spoken to McGinn on the day before the murder, at which time he was ‘very excited’. Valler’s employer, James Moore, confirmed his story. He recalled McGinn coming into his office on 21 May, at which time he was ‘like a man out of his mind’. According to Moore, McGinn was raving incoherently about a man who had ‘served him very cruelly’, who he described as ‘a brother Mason.’ Moore was unable to understand McGinn’s ranting, saying that the man did not appear to have full possession of his reason. He also saw McGinn passing the office on the way to shoot Biden, when he was gesticulating and alternately throwing his arms about or holding his hands to his head.

The defence team had traced one of the men who intervened in the fight on Portsea Common between McGinn and Biden. Baker and grocer Mr Pyle recalled hearing shouts of ‘Pull him off! He will stab me!’ and running to see what was happening. He found Biden and McGinn grappling on the ground, McGinn holding his wife’s leg with one hand and grasping Biden’s throat with the other. When the combatants were separated, Mrs McGinn and Biden walked off together, leaving Pyle with William McGinn.

Pyle repeated what McGinn said at the time. Overwrought and agitated, McGinn told Pyle that he was ‘done for’ and was too ashamed ever to show his face in the neighbourhood again. Although there had been rumours and gossip about his wife’s affair with Biden, he had never believed them but now he had seen the two of them together with his own eyes, he could scarcely deny the rumours and could never hold his head high again. Several more witnesses testified to the fact that quiet, respectable, inoffensive William McGinn had undergone a complete personality change after observing evidence of his wife’s infidelity with his best friend.

Once the last witnesses had testified, Cole gave his closing speech for the jury. He described McGinn as ‘an unhappy man of the most gentle disposition and kindly temper, who suddenly rushed into this crime’, asking if the jury believed it possible that such a man as the defendant could commit a crime like this if his mind was not off balance? He was nothing but ‘a sleepless, wandering wretch’ from the moment his dreadful suspicions were confirmed to the moment the shooting was committed.

For the prosecution, Mr Collins argued that Biden, a married man with nine children, had been ‘hurried into eternity’. Manslaughter, explained Collins was ‘unlawful and felonious killing without malice, express or implied’ and, according to English law, every killing was murder unless there was evidence to convince a jury that there were circumstances that reduced the crime to manslaughter. The law was equally clear on adultery, continued Collins. If a wife was caught in the act of adultery with a man, the law had sufficient respect for the feelings of the husband that if he suddenly killed the adulterer in the heat of passion and on the spur of the moment, he was guilty of manslaughter not murder. Yet the law was equally clear on another point – if the man went away and allowed time for his blood to cool before going back and killing the adulterer, he was as guilty of murder as if someone now shot a member of the jury.

Collins then addressed the law pertaining to insanity, saying that for the jury to acquit McGinn on those grounds, they would need to be satisfied that at the time of the shooting, he was unaware that what he was doing was wrong. A man who handed himself into the police immediately after killing someone could hardly be unaware of his wrongdoing, suggested Collins.

There was no doubt that the realisation and confirmation of his wife’s infidelity came as a terrible blow to McGinn, neither was there any doubt that during the following two days he was overwrought and irritated to the point of distraction. Every man would be deeply aggrieved at discovering his wife’s unfaithfulness, especially with someone who he had always considered a close friend, someone to whom he was also bound by the deep bonds of Freemasonry. Yet McGinn waited for two whole days to extract his revenge on the adulterer.

Collins closed by bringing to the jury’s attention the fact that not a single medical man had been called to testify to McGinn’s mental state, now or at the time of the shooting. Nobody from his lodgings had been called and there was not one witness who could describe his conduct in the days following the murder. McGinn may have been ‘excited’ and overwrought but there were times when he also displayed extreme coolness, such as when purchasing the gun and in trying to make sure that Ford moved out of the way, leaving him a clear shot at his intended target. Collins was confident that the judge would confirm that mere feelings of excitement and of being wronged were not enough to reduce the crime to manslaughter and therefore the killing of James Biden was nothing short of murder.

In his summing up of the case, Mr Justice Lush said that he did not believe that there could be a single person in court who did not sympathise with the prisoner on account of the provocation he received at the hands of the deceased. However, juries could not act on their feelings – their duty was to administer the law. Lush confirmed what Collins had already stated that, in law, all killing was murder, unless certain strict conditions could be shown to apply. If the act was done under great provocation from violence or any other serious provocation, if it was committed in the heat of passion, while the blood was hot and still under irritation caused by that provocation – if a man so provoked turned on the aggressor and dealt him a blow that caused his death then the provocation negated the malice that was a vital ingredient to every murder. But the act must be done at once, while the person was still smarting – if there was enough time for the blood to cool before the man took the life of the person who provoked him, that was murder. Deliberate homicide on the principle of revenge was murder if the killer had ample time to reflect or deliberate on the provocation before taking the life. In a civilised country, the idea of anyone taking the law into his own hands and inflicting his own revenge could not and would not be tolerated.

If the jury believed that, by applying the facts of the case to the law, the defendant was guilty of murder then that must be their verdict. On the other hand, if the jury wished, it was for them to judge whether or not there were any grounds on which they could reduce the offence from murder to manslaughter. Nobody could deny that the defendant had been grieved beyond measure by his wife’s conduct – in fact there could hardly be a more grievous, agonising injury than this unhappy man suffered. If he had taken Biden’s life at the moment when his worst suspicions were first confirmed, there was no doubt that his offence would be manslaughter in the eyes of the law. However, as it was, there were two days before the fatal act was committed and that was quite long enough for the prisoner’s blood to cool and his passion to abate.

Mr Justice Lush prompted the jury to recall that McGinn had purchased the gun from Mr Haigs three hours before firing it at Biden. Was that evidence of a deliberate intention to take life, asked the judge? And what had McGinn meant when he told PC Barber ‘I should have liked to have got them both together but I could not wait for that’? Did those words indicate purpose and intent? The law made allowances for human infirmity, when a man experienced the sudden sting of provocation, but made no such allowance if revenge was nursed and then carried out by deliberate act.

The jury needed only ten minutes of deliberation before returning their verdict of guilty of wilful murder, although in view of McGinn’s age, previous good character and the great provocation he had endured, they strongly recommended him to mercy. McGinn was asked if he knew any reason why sentence of death should not be passed upon him and replied that he had spent twenty-four years in the army, twenty of which were as a non-commissioned officer and had never once been brought before his superior officer for the slightest offence. He was very sorry he had come to this but had nothing further to say.

Mr Justice Lush put on his black cap and addressed McGinn, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘Nothing can increase the feelings of commiseration which I entertain for a person who has served his country well, has arrived at the age you have with a good character and is found in the position in which you now are. But I have no discretion. On a verdict of guilty in a case of this kind, the law requires me to pass sentence of death.’

It was widely believed that McGinn would not be executed and, as well as the jury’s recommendation, petitions were raised on his behalf and sent to the Home Secretary. The execution date was provisionally fixed for 30 July 1872 but on 22 July McGinn’s death sentence was formally commuted to one of penal servitude for life. It proved to be a short sentence, as he is believed to have died in 1874.

Note: Different contemporary newspapers name the defendant as MacGinn not McGinn. I have taken the most frequently used variation, as I have with the Portsea gunsmith, who is variously named James or Joseph Haigh or Haigs.