‘For once you have fallen low. Let us see in the future how high you can rise.’
Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Adventure of the Three Students’
What does a person do when he is allowed to walk free from court but with his name destined to bear the taint of suspicion for evermore? That was the quandary that faced Monson as the euphoria of dodging a capital sentence subsided.
It was quickly obvious that he could put away hope of fading into the shadows – assuming that he wanted to, anyway. As a new year rolled along and the weeks turned into months since the curtain fell on Edinburgh’s hottest show of 1893, there was still an appetite for Ardlamont stories no matter how superficial their link to the case. For instance, in January 1894, the Sketch, a new journal for the ‘cultivated people who in their leisure moments look for light reading and amusing pictures’, published an interview with Helen Mathers – a popular novelist of the time. She also happened to be Cecil Hambrough’s aunt, and coincidentally had worked with Doyle the previous year on The Fate of Fenella, a collaborative serial novel by twenty-four authors. Despite a general unwillingness to discuss her nephew’s demise, she did reveal an uncanny feeling she’d had the night before his death, when she was staying in Brighton. She described how she had woken in a state of depression and full of fear, telling her hostess that she was sure that something dreadful had happened – a claim, she explained, that was met by general derision. As she took the train later that day, she was full of foreboding in regard to her son, Phil. When she arrived home, she discovered her husband carrying a telegram in his hand, which he at first refused to share with her. ‘It’s Phil,’ she said, pleadingly. At that point, he handed it to her and she read the news: ‘Cecil is killed – gun accident.’
This was the sort of melodramatic fluff lapped up by those not yet ready to give up on the Ardlamont saga. Nor did Monson prove much good at keeping his name out of legal proceedings. Little over a month after his acquittal, bankruptcy proceedings began against the Leicester Industrial Assurance and Building Company, a business of which he was nominally a director even if he seems to have had little active involvement in its running. In its advertisements, the company had boasted it possessed the ‘experience of wise men who are entitled to public faith and trust’. Given the nature of his newfound fame, it goes without saying that Monson hardly qualified as their poster boy.
For a while, it seems that Monson had entertained the idea of running away from all the adverse attention – a tactic he had employed so regularly throughout his life. Back in October 1893, while his fate remained in the balance, he had written to his cousin, Lord Galway:
I am as you are probably aware placed in a position of extreme difficulty. My mother refused to afford any assistance [this was, of course, not actually true – rather, she had not given him as much as he had wanted] unless she was backed up by other members of the family – your name was mentioned coupled with Lord Oxenbridge. My request simply amounts to this, that if I had a sum of £500 placed at my disposal I would at once leave the country and start life elsewhere but although pressed and advised by her solicitors my mother refused to accede to the request unless she was supported by others.
This money was not apparently forthcoming, so his plans were forced to change. In the immediate aftermath of the trial, he and Agnes returned to the north of England. For a few weeks the couple found relative happiness, staying in a house not far from York that boasted a view of the Minster. As Agnes would tell it, Monson was in good spirits as his health and energies revived. Before long, though, his restless spirit returned. He grew tired of having no money and decided to seek his fortune anew in London. Having survived the ordeal of having his name dragged through the courts and his reputation picked apart by the newspapers, he was now eager to turn some profit from his torment.
In short order, he signed a deal with Charles Morritt, who worked variously as impresario, mentalist, hypnotist and magician – indeed, he is credited with having created several of Harry Houdini’s spectacular tricks, including the ‘Vanishing Elephant’. Monson signed a year-long, twelve-performances-per-week contract for a princely £500 per month. The show was to comprise a first half of ventriloquism and conjuring acts, with Monson making his appearance in the second half to lecture upon his experiences. The show was scheduled to open in January 1894 at Prince’s Hall in London’s Piccadilly, before travelling around the provinces for a year. However, for some reason Monson got cold feet and just two hours before curtain-up on the first night – at least, according to Morritt’s account – Monson withdrew.
He did, however, see through his contractual obligations to the publisher Marlo & Company, writing The Ardlamont Mystery Solved, which was released early in 1894. Running to just under a hundred pages, it was a remarkably dull affair, mainly regurgitating the evidence that the defence had offered in court just a few weeks earlier and which had been so assiduously reported by the newspapers. Anyone expecting dramatic revelations was to be sorely disappointed. In terms of original insight, Monson gave little beyond his general annoyance at the Scottish judicial system. He remained convinced, at least in public, that an English coroner would have undertaken a proper initial investigation into Cecil’s death, which would have precluded the chance of Monson being arrested on trumped-up charges weeks after the event. It was an ambitious argument. An English coroner discovering a man dead from a shot to the back of the head, fired while in the company of another man theoretically set to benefit from his death, would surely have reached a similar conclusion to the Scottish authorities – that there was a case to answer.
The most intriguing part of the book was the section that purported to be Scott’s diary, covering the period from 7 August until Christmas Day 1893. This was published, it should be remembered, at a time when Scott/Sweeney was still missing as far as the world at large was concerned. Elements of the Canadian press, for example, were reporting quite erroneously that the mystery man was likely then residing in their country. One newspaper also bizarrely asserted that he was ‘well known in London music halls as an expert shot, whose business is trick shooting with saloon firearms’. The diary that Monson published as Scott’s account of events was truly a curiosity. If Monson intended it to sound authentic, he failed dismally. It was, for one thing, written in a retrospective voice and full of unsubtle attempts to prove how neither Scott nor Monson could have been involved in the death. On the morning of the shooting, for instance, Scott ‘chaffed Hambrough about the way he carried his gun – everyone noticed this’, and on 18 August, after apparently leaving Glasgow for London, Scott ruminated: ‘Don’t like the notion of appearing to have run away.’
There was also a distinct element of the picaresque to the narrative. On 16 August, Scott reportedly had a drink with a policeman, who was of course unaware of his identity. ‘I am always pretty chummy with “the force”,’ Scott revealed. ‘They’re not bad chaps in their way, but it takes a lot of intellectual dynamite to make a hole in a policeman’s helmet, and let a new idea in.’ On 12 September, he decided to don a disguise as the wanted posters sprang up around him: ‘Now, as the police were looking for a man in a jacket and a bowler, it was highly improbable that they would arrest a man in a frock coat and a chimney-pot.’ The diary then proceeded to describe Scott’s imagined travels, first to Birmingham and then Manchester, where he overheard a man in a café saying that Hambrough had committed suicide to escape Scott’s clutches and was ‘only one of many victims’. ‘I could not stand it any longer,’ the diarist exclaimed, ‘but, seizing a box of draughts that were on the table before me, I hurled it at the speaker’s head. He dodged, but the corner of the box caught his cheek, making an ugly gash, and finished by dropping on a table and upsetting a tray full of cups of hot coffee that had just been placed there by the waitress.’ Coffee spilled over a table full of men who tried to beat Scott up before the proprietor stepped in to save him.
Next, it was to Leeds, then Liverpool and back to London, where Scott slept rough and was woken from his slumbers one night by a copper on the Embankment: ‘You’d have been a dead ’un if I hadn’t woken you up,’ the oblivious bobby is supposed to have said, even as Scott feared the end of the road. As for the period of the trial, the diary claimed Scott was in court for its duration, ready to show himself if the interests of justice demanded it. However, believing that the result was never in doubt and that Monson was destined to walk free, he decided instead to remain a mere spectre at the feast. The final entry, written on 25 December, comprised but three words: ‘A Merry Christmas.’
There can hardly have been anyone unable to see through the diary’s artifice, yet Monson maintained its legitimacy, claiming he had received it through the post. ‘I have hesitated whether or not I should publish this remarkable diary,’ he wrote. However, he explained, he ‘considered it my duty to do [so] – I feel that I have no alternative but to lay it before the public, leaving them to form their own judgements, without any comments from me’. The Ardlamont Mystery Solved was, quite rightly, a commercial flop.
For anyone who hung on to the belief that ‘Scott’s diary’ was a genuine artefact, Scott/Sweeney himself stepped back into the light three months later to confirm it was none of his doing and entirely fictitious. Sweeney effectively handed himself into the offices of the Pall Mall Gazette on 5 April, whereupon the public-spirited editorial staff persuaded him to turn himself over to the police. They even provided him with legal representation, not to mention the platform from which to deliver his take on events. The paper made much of its role in securing his ‘surrender’, although in truth Scotland Yard no longer had a warrant out for him and nor was the Procurator-Fiscal searching for him.
The Gazette ran daily pieces over the course of a week under the headline: ‘The Truth Out at Last: by Scott (the Missing Man)’. ‘I make no claim to literary powers,’ Scott/Sweeney began, ‘but will do my best to show by my statement how by one mistake (I mean my harmless adoption of a name other than that by which I was commonly known on the turf for reasons which I will explain) I woke up to find myself involved in a mystery, charged with murder, hunted like a dog, declared an outlaw, and doomed to suffer more than by my poor ability I can ever hope to make my readers appreciate.’ Fleet Street rivals were largely underwhelmed, and not merely because they had missed out on a scoop. The Sketch memorably voiced its thoughts in verse:
In vain is ‘Scott’ paraded round
By journalists undaunted;
When wanted, he could not be found,
When found, he isn’t wanted.
In May 1894, Scott/Sweeney made his way to Edinburgh, where he formally petitioned the courts for the recall of his sentence of outlawry. The Crown offered no opposition and the motion was accepted in a matter of just a few minutes.
While Monson and Scott/Sweeney remained figures of public interest, there was limited appetite to embrace them as celebrities. Nor was their cause helped by their insistence on peddling their essentially quite dull version of what happened at Ardlamont. It would, of course, have been folly for them to do otherwise – it was the narrative that had saved Monson from the noose and which also effectively ended the pursuit of Scott/Sweeney. But it did not make for the sorts of headlines that the nation’s editors had enjoyed printing when their fates were up in the air and conjecture was the order of the day.
Monson’s tentative forays into the entertainment business were also held back by his involvement in yet another trial in early 1894. Although it lacked the obvious explosiveness of December’s proceedings, it nonetheless had significant legal implications. Indeed, it is fair to say that this second trial impacted the practice of law far more than his murder trial. And this time, it was Monson who instigated proceedings. In January 1894, he began an action against Madame Tussauds, the famous waxworks museum. Monson accused Tussauds of having libelled him. It was an ambitious writ but, if proven, might have netted him a tidy sum in compensation.
As with all things Monson-related, it was a far from straightforward story. The saga began two weeks after the murder trial ended when Madame Tussauds, on Marylebone Road in London, began exhibiting a figure of Monson along with an encased landscape entitled ‘The Scene of the Tragedy’. All might have been well were it not for the positioning of the exhibit – just by the entrance to ‘The Chamber of Horrors’, preserved for effigies of murderers, conmen and other infamous figures from history. Moreover, the waxworks who shared the room with Monson included such publicly reviled characters as Napoleon, Mrs Maybrick (convicted of murdering her husband with arsenic in 1889) and Richard Pigott, who killed himself after being revealed as a forger. On 22 January, Monson appealed for an injunction to remove his likeness on the grounds of libel. The court initially agreed with him but the ruling was overturned on appeal a few days later, not least because there was a significant question as to whether Monson had originally given his consent to the display. Madame Tussauds argued that they had bought certain mementos included in the exhibit from Tot, who had claimed he was acting as Monson’s agent. Yet another plot began to thicken around the pair.
According to Monson’s version of events, he had been staying at Tot’s house in London when Tot began negotiations with Tussauds. It was agreed that Monson would sit for a modelling session and would also supply the gun he had been carrying and the suit he was wearing at the time of the shooting. The Procurator-Fiscal being still in possession of the weapon, Tot bought a stand-in for £34 10s from Charing Cross Road and presented it to the waxworks along with Monson’s brown knickerbocker suit. In return, he received a £50 down payment, with a further £50 to come once Monson had completed his sitting. However, a couple of days later Tot returned the cheque, saying that Monson would not cooperate and was furious that such a deal had been struck without his consultation. As ever with Monson and Tot, it is difficult to discern with precision where truth lies but Tot would later claim that Monson was initially keen to strike a deal but soon felt he was being undersold at negotiations where he was not present.
However, John Tussaud – owner of the museum – was just as put out since he had undertaken the negotiations in good faith. Monson must be made to comply, he insisted. Meanwhile, Tot suggested to Monson an approach to Louis Tussaud’s waxworks in Birmingham, with the intention of arranging a new deal but at an inflated price – somewhere in the region of £200 this time. Louis Tussaud was the brother of John Tussaud, but he had struck out on his own so the two museums were separate legal entities. He, too, however, had chosen to display Monson near a turnstile for his ‘Chamber of Horrors’, although Monson’s waxwork was this time among a fairly respectable crowd that included members of the royal family, the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Despite Tot’s efforts, no deal was reached.
It was at this point that Monson lost patience and adopted a new strategy. His privacy had been breached and his name besmirched, he would claim as he sought an injunction forcing Tussaud to remove the display. It would be a year of legal to-ing and fro-ing before the full libel trial began at the law courts on the Strand in London on 28 January 1895. The case was heard in front of a special jury and lasted three days. In court, Monson expressly denied an allegation that he hoped to make a thousand pounds from the action. This was, he suggested, a case about protecting his rights.
While Monson’s lawyers portrayed him as a man publicly wronged yet again, Tot made a sensational appearance as a defence witness. He was accompanied by a jail warder, since he was by then serving a sentence of three-month’s hard labour, having been convicted in December 1894 of theft. It was symptomatic of the rapid decline in his friendship with Monson over the twelve months following the Ardlamont acquittal. Monson had accused Tot of dispensing of some £700 worth of furniture that the moneylender had been holding in trust for him in Leeds under the pseudonym of John Kempton. Tot argued instead that he had been swindled by Monson and so felt entitled to sell the property in lieu of monies owed. Alas for him, the court did not agree and found him guilty of larceny as a bailee.
Now, just a few weeks later, the pair faced-off once more and Tot was not about to hold back. He claimed that the negotiations with John Tussaud had gone awry because Monson felt that the £100 fee was far too low. Nonetheless, it had been Monson who suggested buying a gun to replace the original artefact held by the Procurator-Fiscal – evidence, it was claimed, that he did not object to the display per se, but only to the amount of money he was getting for it. Moreover, he had accompanied Tot on his way to the waxworks when Tot had sought a renegotiation of the financial terms. Monson, Tot said, was meant to stay in a hotel around the corner while the talks were ongoing but when Tot went to find him – having been unable to squeeze any more cash from Tussaud – he discovered him already gone. Tot thus concluded the deal on the original terms.
When Monson learned what had transpired, he was deeply unhappy but Tot reminded Monson that he owed him a significant sum of money (by his own admission, Monson was not paying Tot any rent at this time) and there the matter seemed to have been laid to rest. Tot also took his chance in the witness box to announce his intention, once free, to prosecute Monson on charges of perjury and theft relating to the larceny trial.
All in all, Monson’s conduct as described by Tot did not seem like that of a man whose primary concern was either his privacy or his good name. Moreover, the counsel for Tussauds rejected the idea that Monson had been defamed at all, arguing that any public figure could be pictorially represented without risk of libel. Furthermore, the inclusion of the twenty-bore gun was said to be proof that the museum was casting no aspersions, given that it had been the twelve-bore that was responsible for Hambrough’s death. The waxworks were merely showing that Monson was connected to a murder trial, not suggesting that he was the murderer.
In his summing-up, the judge suggested the question was less whether Monson was being cast as the murderer full-stop, but instead whether he was being depicted as ‘a notorious person connected with a tragedy (which was still a mystery) in a way discreditable to him’. The judge then outlined to the jury the dual purpose of a libel action – to vindicate character and determine the extent of damages. The jury was sent to consider its verdict, taking only about fifteen minutes to find for Monson. In doing so they established a legal precedent, that of ‘libel by innuendo’, that has informed the drafting of libel laws ever since. In essence, the Monson case acknowledged two principles – that a waxwork effigy may be libellous and that even an apparently innocuous statement or representation may be considered libellous if it suggests a defamatory meaning to those with special knowledge. In this case, the waxwork of Monson did not explicitly suggest Monson’s guilt, but its siting close to the Chamber of Horrors implied as much. As to the extent of damage his reputation had suffered, the jury put it at just a farthing (a quarter of a penny). To add insult to injury, Monson was also made responsible for paying his own costs. The Scotsman wryly noted: ‘There is a Portuguese coin called a maravedi, a shovelful of which are said to be a penny. A maravedi would have been a more accurate estimate of the solatium due in this case; but a farthing is near enough for practical purposes.’
Monson’s attempts to extract some profit from the tumult in which he found himself after Cecil’s death were, like so many of his get-rich schemes over the years, ill-conceived and poorly executed. It would take a man more agreeable and empathetic to persuade a sceptical public that he was worthy of their sympathy, let alone their money. Or perhaps he needed to play his hand entirely differently, acting up to his dastardly image rather than attempting to portray himself still as the wronged innocent. He may have avoided the prison cell, but the shackles of suspicion and innuendo were harder to escape.
There was, nonetheless, one curious incident that found its way into the papers and hinted at a different side to the man. It occurred in late August 1894, at Mablethorpe, a seaside town on the Lincolnshire coast. A party of bathers were paddling in the sea when they discovered that the tide had rapidly come in. When they returned to their bathing machine (a contraption that allowed modest bathers to change from daywear to swimming costume and back again away from prying eyes), they discovered its floor was under water. Nor could the attached horse budge it, since the wheels had become embedded in the sand. As the wind got up and the sea came in further, a crowd gathered on the shore as the machine began to rock. In the words of the Huddersfield Chronicle:
The onlookers … although fully realizing the danger, seemed powerless to render assistance, until a young gentleman said to be Mr A. J. Monson, dressed in flannels, came hurrying up to the scene. Without a moment’s hesitation he pluckily plunged into the sea and soon reached the bathing machine. One child was conveyed from the machine to one of the horses, and two others were rescued in a similar manner. Next the rescuer conveyed two scantily attired young ladies safely to shore, but not without considerable effort, as at one moment struck by a large wave his burden appeared too much for him. He again returned to the machine, and released another lady from her perilous position. There then only remained one occupant of the machine, an elderly lady. A huge wave now lifted the machine and threw the lady into the water. She struggled until she succeeded in grasping the collar of the bathing van horse, and was conveyed on shore.
Monson was thus elevated – in Mablethorpe at least – from villain to hero. It was not, however, a status he would enjoy for long.