The war years were hellish for Slater. On one occasion, inflamed with the anti-German sentiment that pervaded Britain, Peterhead guards tied him to a post—as punishment either for talking or for failing to perform his quarry work—and left him outside in the sun for two hours. This incident, at least, which Slater recounted in a 1925 complaint to prison officials, seems not to have been paranoid fantasy: it is also described in William Gordon’s newspaper article about Slater’s life behind bars, published after Gordon’s release in 1925. “It is a recognised thing for warders to turn a blind eye when they see a man talking or committing some other minor breach of prison rules,” Gordon wrote. “But Slater was reported—and punished—more frequently than others.”
War also put an end to the sustaining flow of letters from Beuthen. Slater’s file of family correspondence, bursting with letters in both directions, is, from the summer of 1914 to the spring of 1919, utterly bare. “Dearest Parents,” he would write in 1919. “Your last letter, my dears, I received on the 8/8/1914—five years ago.” He continued:
After the signing of peace, I hoped to hear from you first—my present feelings God only knows….During the war I could get no letters. I have artificially kept up my courage, but now it is difficult. The war is finished, ways and means are open again for letters to be sent to me, and to be still without news from you, my dears, makes me quite unhappy. The uncertainty begins to tell on me….You, my dearest parents are old, I am getting old and broken in health. We all go the same way, and I beg you with all my heart to write to me soon with all details—I am prepared for anything.
In April 1919, Slater received his first piece of mail after the war: a letter from his sister Malchen. It was the first time a family member other than his parents had written. “I need not hide from you any longer, dear Oscar, that Mother was very ill, and it is a special grace from God that she has been spared to us,” Malchen wrote. “We were all happy to get a sign of life from you again. I will write to you again as soon as I am permitted to do so. I visit our parents almost weekly or as often as possible.”
Then, the following February, came the news for which Slater had long steeled himself. “I can imagine, dear Oskar, how the death of our dear ones would grieve you and I hope you have got over the first shock,” Malchen wrote to him in a later communication. “I will now tell you something about the last days of our parents”:
Father had been frail for many years, so that his death was a relief. Mother took diabetes and suffered also from heart trouble, added to which she suffered on your account….You cannot imagine how everything has changed, the terrible prices for everything in Germany and the scarcity of food. Georg took stomach trouble suddenly. It developed into cancer….His wife died from a swollen throat, which could not be operated on, as she had a weak heart….[Their] youngest boy Karl, a fine, intelligent fellow, fell in the war. Ernst the older one is in an institution for nervous troubles….I do not come together with Phemie at all. She was very unkind to our departed mother….After mother’s death she behaved badly to me also, and the consequence is that I have lost the whole inheritance. I do not mind so much from a financial point of view, only her bad treatment worries me.
Slater’s reply has not survived, but in October 1920, Malchen wrote again:
It is a pity that you have to write in English…as I am afraid I will not get your letters translated correctly, and some of their contents may, therefore, be lost to me. Now, I will answer your questions about the dying day of our dear parents. Our dear father died first, on the 11th of June, 1916; Georg on the 18th April, 1917; and a few days later on the 1st May, our dear mother. She was unaware of the death of Georg….
My dear husband still travels in the cloth line and so does my eldest boy, Felix, who was established himself, but business is very bad now. The war has changed everything. Harry does not give me much joy, but Kätel and Felix make up for this. Now, dear Oscar, you know all the sad news. Keep your head high and remain in good health. With God’s help we will see each other again, this is my daily prayer. Is there still no ray of light over your dark affair?
To the end of his incarceration, Malchen would be Slater’s primary link to the family. “Good Malchen…I shall write regularly every 6 weeks to you, & should I be bound to write to somebody else, then I will ask for special permission,” Slater wrote her in an undated letter from the early 1920s. “I am very happy to hear that you are 44 years old, 25 years married….I look like a old grey Tom-Cat.”
In March 1922, Malchen, who lived in Breslau, a hundred miles northwest of Beuthen, replied:
Certainly I will write you promptly every six weeks if this is permitted and expect you in return to do the same….With Phemie’s children I am on good terms, but herself I will never meet in this life again. I promised this to our dear mother, and, besides, she has annoyed me a great deal….
Imagine, practically the whole of Upper Silesia including Beuthen has been assigned to Poland and a journey there now is connected with great difficulties and is very expensive.* Nevertheless, I intend going every year to visit the grave of our dear parents.
Then, in August, a surprise: a letter from Phemie herself. “We often think of you, and our children have nothing but good to relate of Uncle Oscar,” she wrote him. “All our dear ones have been called away too soon. My child Lilli died when 18 years of age….Max and the children send heartfelt greetings.”
In the envelope, Phemie enclosed a last letter from Slater’s parents, written eight years before. Dated August 3, 1914, it had remained unsent throughout the war. “My beloved Oscar,” Pauline wrote:
You may be sure, dearest child, I count every day to the time when your letters can reach us….You must not give up hope till your last breath. Your innocence must be established sooner or later. A child such as you have been towards your parents can expect from God that his innocence will be established some day….I often think of the Dreyfus affair where right conquered in the end….
Father is getting frail. His greatest amusement is to eat well and smoke a good cigar. Things are not so comfortable as they were two years ago….
The wife of the man with whom you served your apprenticeship has gone all wrong, as he only deserved….Georg gives us every month 50 Marks and this even without having asked it of him….I can earn nothing now myself, and father is able to do nothing whatever….The arrival of your letter is always a pleasing event, and there is nothing suspicious about it. Even the postman has no suspicion of where the letter comes from….
Keep up your strength, and with hope of kisses from your loving Mother.
IN JANUARY 1925, on his release from Peterhead, Prisoner 2988, William Gordon, underwent a rigorous search by prison guards, from the lining of his coat to the hollow handle of his suitcase. Despite their vigilance, he managed to pass out of prison with his false teeth, and Slater’s note—whose glazed-paper wrapping had been lifted from the prison bookbinding shop—intact.
Gordon found his way to Windlesham, the home in southeast England that Conan Doyle shared with Jean; their sons, Adrian and Denis; and their daughter, also named Jean. (Years later, Adrian Conan Doyle recalled his father having shown him the rolled-up scrap containing Slater’s urgent plea.) An expansive Victorian villa, Windlesham supported a staff that included, a biographer wrote, “a butler…a cook and five maids in the house, two gardeners and a chauffeur outside, plus a garden boy who cleaned the boots and shoes and doubled as a pageboy, with a green bellhop uniform and pillbox hat.” As curious as it might seem to envision a freshly paroled convict turning up in such surroundings, given Conan Doyle’s portfolio as a real-world detective, the sight was not altogether unknown.
Gordon’s minuscule cargo seemed to embody the ethos of Joseph Bell, who had written, “The importance of the infinitely little is incalculable.” For that message-in-miniature would set in motion a chain of events that in late 1927 would bring about Slater’s release, including a new book about the case, edited and published by Conan Doyle; a widely read newspaper exposé; and dramatic recantations of their courtroom testimony by Helen Lambie and Mary Barrowman.
Though Conan Doyle had forsaken work on the case after the 1914 debacle, he had been far from idle. After making several visits to the front during World War I, where he came under fire, he began work on what would be a six-volume history of the war, The British Campaign in France and Flanders. Nor did he neglect crime fiction: by this time he had written fifty-four of the sixty Holmes tales.
“From time to time,” Conan Doyle later wrote, “one hears some word of poor Slater from behind his prison walls like the wail of some wayfarer who has fallen into a pit and implores aid from passers-by.” On receiving the smuggled note from Gordon, he was once again moved to lend his energies to Slater’s cause.
Gordon’s message was not Conan Doyle’s first experience with secret communication. In 1915, he had sent a series of covert dispatches to British prisoners of war in Germany. “It was not very difficult to do,” he explained, “but it had the effect of cheering them by a little authentic news, for at that time they were only permitted to see German newspapers. It came about in this way”:
A dear friend of my wife’s, Miss Lily Loder Symonds, had a brother, Captain Willie Loder Symonds, of the Wiltshires, who had been wounded and taken in the stand of the 7th Brigade….He was an ingenious fellow and had written home a letter which passed the German censor, because it seemed to consist in the description of a farm, but when read carefully it was clear that it was the conditions of himself and his comrades which he was discussing. It seemed to me that if a man used such an artifice he would be prepared for a similar one in a letter from home. I took one of my books…and beginning with the third chapter—I guessed the censor would examine the first—I put little needle-pricks under the various printed letters until I had spelled out all the news. I then sent the book and also a letter. In the letter I said that the book was, I feared, rather slow in the opening, but that from Chapter III onwards he might find it more interesting. That was as plain as I dared to make it. Loder Symonds missed the allusion altogether, but by good luck he showed the letter to Captain the Hon. Rupert Keppel, of the Guards, who had been taken at Landrecies. He smelled a rat, borrowed the book, and found my cipher. A message came back to his father, Lord Albemarle, to the effect that he hoped Conan Doyle would send some more books. This was sent on to me, and of course showed me that it was all right. From that time onwards every month or two I pricked off my bulletin.
For Conan Doyle, the Great War had been a time of consuming activity and consuming loss. After Britain entered the war, he tried, with characteristic patriotism, to enlist. The authorities declined: he was fifty-five. He busied himself instead in creating what became a nationwide network of two hundred thousand civilian reservists, who stood ready to defend the home front. “Our drill and discipline were excellent,” Conan Doyle wrote, “nor were our marching powers contemptible when one remembers that many of the men were in the fifties and even in the sixties. It was quite usual for us to march from Crowborough to Frant, with our rifles and equipment, to drill for a long hour in a heavy marshy field, and then to march back, singing all the way. It would be a good 14 miles.”
In 1914, after three British warships were sunk by German torpedoes in a single day, leaving more than a thousand sailors flailing in the water until they drowned, Conan Doyle wrote to the navy, proposing that every British sailor be issued an inflatable rubber collar that would keep him afloat in the sea. The navy adopted the measure soon afterward.
For Conan Doyle, as for many, the war brought the duality of the age into sharp relief: the wonders of science and technology, fields so bright with promise in the nineteenth century, seemed far less wondrous in the twentieth when realized as air warfare and nerve gas. The war had robbed him of two beloved family members: his eldest son, Kingsley, from his marriage to Louise, and his younger brother, Innes. Both had been in combat, and both, battle weary, had died soon afterward, in the influenza pandemic of 1918–19.
Now the foundational certainties of the Victorian age—class and honor; God, queen, and country—seemed to count for little. Amid the crush of modernity, many began seeking the kind of spiritual sustenance they felt the new century had expunged. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, scientist, rationalist, and abductive logician par excellence, was one of the foremost among them.
Conan Doyle had long believed the gulf between science and the spirit to be bridgeable. First attracted to spiritualism in the 1890s, he had been exploring it with quiet, methodical skepticism ever since. Now the pull of the field, with its central belief in an afterlife and its promise of a vanished past that remained discernible in the present—allowing the living to converse with departed loved ones—became consuming. “Those who, in later years, professed astonishment that someone as down to earth as Conan Doyle should espouse spiritualism,” his biographer Russell Miller has written, “failed to appreciate that the movement in the late Victorian era, far from being dominated by cranks and charlatans, attracted some of the country’s leading scientific minds.”
To his quest to determine whether life endured beyond death, Conan Doyle brought (or so he felt) the same brand of empirical investigation that he applied to the detection of crimes. His work involved attending séances by a spate of professed mediums, writing extensively on the subject, and releasing his findings through the Psychic Press, the publishing house he had founded. “How thorough and long were my studies,” he wrote, “before I was at last beaten out of my material agnostic position and forced to admit the validity of the proofs….When, on the other hand, it is found that the medium has introduced false drapery or accessories…we are in the presence of the most odious and blasphemous crime which a human being can commit.”
On questions of spiritualism, it is clear that Conan Doyle’s ardent personal longing eclipsed his scientific acumen. By the 1920s, he had come to believe almost unreservedly in ghosts, fairies, and the reality of life after death. In his books, articles, and lectures of the period, he espoused the conviction that Spiritualism embodied fundamental human truths more fully than Christianity did. Not surprisingly, Miller wrote, this stance did not sit well with many observers:
At Windlesham, Conan Doyle became accustomed to receiving hate mail, most of which he disregarded, but there was one particularly vituperative letter, dated 16 December 1919, from Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s former lover and a relatively recent convert to the Roman Catholic church: “Sir, What a disgusting beast you are with your filthy caricatures of ‘Christ.’ The proper way to deal with such a man as you would be to give you a thrashing with a horse whip.”…Douglas accused Conan Doyle of promoting spiritualism for the sake of money and notoriety, “in short for the same purposes and with the same flat-footed low persistence as you worked your idiot ‘Sherlock Holmes’ business.” He went on to prophesy that Conan Doyle’s “blasphemous ravings” would bring a “dreadful judgement” on him and signed himself “Yours with the utmost contempt.” Conan Doyle replied the following day, with a masterful and succinct dismissal: “Sir, I was relieved to get your letter. It is only your approval which could in any way annoy me.”
But even in the opinion of more moderate critics, Conan Doyle’s involvement in spiritualism, and the public derision it aroused, may well have undercut his efforts on Slater’s behalf.
AS THE 1920S UNSPOOLED, Slater’s sisters continued their correspondence, with Malchen in particular assuming their mother’s role as the keeper of the lamp in the window. “In vain I have waited so many months for a sign of life from you,” she wrote in 1923. “As soon as you possibly can, dear Oscar, let us hear something from you….Life is still very hard for Germany….I pray daily to the dear God that your innocence will come to light and you will gain your freedom.”
Some time later, Slater wrote: “You write me in your letters that there is no wonder if I have lost interest in you….But you are very far wrong dear Malchen. I can only lose interest in you when I cease to exist. I think daily of you all.”
Phemie, too, wrote regularly. “Max speaks often about you and the children do so as well,” she wrote in March 1924. “Magda, Erna, Erich and Hans are married. Walter is still single and an eighteen year old daughter (Lilli) is most unfortunately lost by death during the war. My old Max (he is now 60 years old) is still quite robust and must still work skillfully and earn money….If only there were a prospect of your being seen again! Our dear parents always prayed to God for that, but unfortunately they left this life so quickly….From your loving sister, Phemie, Max and all 5 children.”
The following September, she wrote: “I have just come from the grave of our dear blessed parents and send as a greeting a few leaves therefrom….We would take you in gladly, myself as well as Malchen. You know well that Max had always plenty to spare for you and our brotherly love is not extinct….Our dear mother would rejoice with all her heart, if she had seen how we are sticking to you and how willingly we would have you in our midst.”
By the mid-1920s, Slater’s lot at Peterhead had improved in one respect: after fifteen years, and many requests, he had been relieved of hard labor in the quarry and now worked in the prison carpentry shop. But though his letters from this period express relief at the new assignment, they remain shot through with despair.
“I don’t know if there is a Being in this wide world (Cannibals included) who feel how I feel,” he wrote expressively to a Glasgow friend, Samuel Reid, in 1924. “It [has been] 15½ years that I was thrown into prison for a crime, of which I feel myself guiltless….At the present time I feel like bursting….Will not a little allowance be made for the great doubt in my case?” Slater’s smuggled message of 1925 would bring about that allowance at last.
* At the conclusion of World War I, after much of Silesia was awarded to Poland, Beuthen became known as Bytom and Breslau as Wrocław.