The tomorrow of Freedom dawned on 10 November 1927.

Sir John Gilmour announced:

I have felt justified in deciding to authorise his [Slater’s] release on licence as soon as suitable arrangements can be made.’

Not good enough.

Justice demanded more than the minimal restoration of his freedom. The Daily News put it exactly and succinctly. ‘This unfortunate creature is to be made a ticket-of-leave man in order to get the Secretary of State for Scotland out of an embarrassing dilemma.’ If Sir John Gilmour and the department over which he presided imagined that it was possible thus cunningly to close the controversy, without turning a hair, without admitting a wrong conviction, without putting so much as a finger within its compensation-money pocket, they were reckoning without a vociferous press and public’s notions regarding the subject of wrong-righting.

William Park telegraphed the Daily News: ‘The release is only a makeshift to side-track the real issues. Investigation and compensation are still imperative.’

Monday, 14 November 1927.

Dawn crept up from the east, a slow, grey ice-floe, drowning out the darkness, smothering the sparse shimmer of pinpoint yellow lights speckling the land that ran down to the sea. Outside Peterhead Prison, murky figures, huddled in the lee of the high wall for illusory protection from the bone-scraping cold, watched and waited. Inside, within his cage of stone, Slater lay, hypnopompic, listening to the muffled wingbeats of freedom rippling the still air in the chilled granite passages.

Tomorrow had come.

Time: 3pm A closed car hummed swiftly up to the main entrance of the prison. A minute’s parley with the serge Cerberus. The gate swung open. The car disappeared into the stony maw.

3.08pm Several warders appeared. Took up positions outside the big gate, came smartly to attention and saluted as the same dark car nosed smoothly out. A small group of convicts sweeping the drive in front of the Governor’s house attempted to muster a thin parting cheer, but it was rapidly burked by their vigilant keepers. At high speed, the motorcade – for by now, pursued by a swarm of pressmen in their cars and taxi-cabs, the procession had swelled to such considerable a proportion – moved off. Inside the lead car, Oscar, dressed in his prison ‘demob suit’ of rough grey tweed, a small brown paper parcel of all his worldly goods on his knee, sat, a mixture of elation and dazedness, beside his guardian ad litem, as it were, the Reverend Eleazer Philip Phillips, gulping in the first grateful lungfuls of the fresh air of freedom. Purring through the duskening November afternoon, Oscar and escort were being borne to Peterhead railway station, where they were to catch the 3.35pm to Aberdeen: the first lap of the journey back to Glasgow.

It was 9.25pm when the North Express steamed slowly into the bay flanked by Platforms 4 and 5 at Glasgow’s Buchanan Street Station. Waiting there to greet Oscar and the Reverend Phillips was the Rabbi’s daughter, Amy. All three clambered into a hired car and were driven off to the Rabbi’s house – No. 40 Kelvingrove Street.

The Pilgrim was among the few members of the press permitted to talk with Oscar that night. He recalled:

Slater struck me as a remarkable man. At the trial his manner was described as ‘dominating’. It still is. Though nothing remained in outward appearance of the dapper, well-dressed gambler of 1908, there was the same shrewdness, the same occasional geniality, and the same tendency to dominate. In addition there were clear signs of smouldering indignation.

Present, too, was William Park, whose first meeting with Slater this was to be, and there was a caller, anxious that Oscar should know that he had come. His name was Sam Reid.

And that first night in Slater’s own words:

I had supper with the Rabbi, his good wife, and other friends. What an experience it was to find a spotless white linen cloth on a table that carried the silver that I had almost forgotten existed! When I sat down to that meal in such surroundings and company I felt that I had suddenly been transported to fairyland.

It was long past midnight when Oscar left the house of the Rabbi. He slipped away unseen. Exactly where he spent that first night of freedom was kept – and has remained – a secret. According to Oscar, it was in the house of

a friend not very far away … I had my first night’s sleep in a real bed for nearly twenty years. The feeling of getting into a proper bed spread with delightful bedding and pillows into which I sank I am totally unable to describe, and I will never be able to forget.

One of the first, most satisfying draughts of the wine of freedom was shopping; entering a chemist’s shop to buy a toothbrush, a newsagent’s to buy a paper, various shops to stock up with new collars, shirts, boots, kid gloves, a bowler hat and a walking stick.

Then he took himself off for a holiday, to Ayr, where he stayed in a comfortable boarding-house, Mount Olive, in Blackburn Road, and where he took a daily stroll on the sea-front and went to a cinema for the first time in his life.

What may be called the politics of the Oscar Slater release were now moving forward at a fairly steady pace. All the political parties were, it would seem, in concert as to the desirability of opening up the case to further investigation, but the great obstacle to doing so was that the Criminal Appeal (Scotland) Act 1926 dated only from October 1926. It would require the enactment of special legislation, therefore, if the case of Oscar Slater, dating from 1909, were to be brought before the Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal. That would necessitate a single-clause special Bill to bring Slater’s case within an enlarged scope of the Act. If that special Bill were to be passed, the Court could then treat the case as if it were an ordinary appeal. It would have before it the complete record, in the form of shorthand notes of the original trial, and would hear, if need be, any new evidence that might be brought, examine witnesses on oath, and call for the production of documents. The Court’s decision would be final. There would be no question of a re-trial.

On 15 November, just one day after Slater’s release, the House of Commons had been taken completely by surprise by the Secretary of State for Scotland’s reply to a question put by Colonel Harry Day, Socialist Member for Central Southwark, as to whether in releasing Oscar Slater he proposed to set up an inquiry into the evidence produced at the trial. And Sir John Gilmour had intimated that,

Had the conviction in this case taken place after 31st October, 1926, I should have had the power to remit questions regarding it to the Court of Criminal Appeal, under the provisions of Section 16 of the Criminal Appeal (Scotland) Act 1926. If I could obtain from Parliament the legislation necessary to extend the Act, so as to enable me to refer this case under the provisions mentioned, I am prepared to take that course.

At the end of question time on 16 November 1927, the necessary special Bill was introduced into the House, Sir John Gilmour, of all people, presenting it. This announcement was such a total capitulation to popular demand that MPs paused to take breath after hearing it. Then a murmur of approval passed round the chamber, followed by approbatory cheers. Having passed through all the necessary stages and received Royal Assent, the Bill duly became law.

As a matter of mandatory procedure, Slater had now to present a petition to the Secretary of State for Scotland praying for a free pardon from the King. The Scottish Secretary would then refer the case to the Court of Criminal Appeal in Scotland.

With optimism riding high, there came tidings of the possibility that the well-known Scottish KC, Mr Craigie M. Aitchison, an advocate widely experienced in the matter of murder, would be asked to state Slater’s case before the Appeal Court. Things now came down to the common level of pounds, shillings and pence. Roughead told Park: ‘Sir Arthur is offering to pay Craigie’s fees! We must all get up public funds to stop that. It is magnificent on his part. This act makes him bigger than ever.’ But Roughead felt that to permit such generosity would not be fair.

For his part, Doyle was apparently worried that the cost of the legal proceedings might turn out to be bigger than ever he had supposed. He wrote to Roughead:

[Park] said among other things that the coming proceedings are going to cost ‘thousands of pounds’ … I will make myself responsible as far as I can, and I will find a way of raising money for the trial, but I have no idea of such a sum as that. I agree with you that we should have nothing but the best, but I would like some limitation in advance. Would you give me a word of advice about that.

Roughead passed on Doyle’s bursal misgivings to the chosen solicitors, Messrs Norman Macpherson & Dunlop, SSC, of 2a Hill Street, Edinburgh, who wrote promptly and reassuringly to Sir Arthur: ‘You may depend upon it that we shall throughout keep the costs moderate.’

A fund was opened to meet the expenses of the appeal. There were – not very successful – door-to-door collections. The Jewish communities in Glasgow, Manchester, and various other cities throughout the country, contributed. But prising money from the public generally proved like drawing back teeth. By the end of June, the fund’s final not-so-grand total stood at only £630 7s 3d.

As the year 1927 drew to a close, Conan Doyle sat quietly down in the writing room of the Athenaeum and put his thoughts on paper for Park.

Heading the sheet ‘What we are for’, he proceeded to enumerate their objectives.

(1) Safeguarding public against Police. That has already been done for 50 years ahead by the row already made.

(2) Punishing offender.

Useless.

(3) To see Slater’s honour cleared with attendant compensation. That is the vital thing.

(4) The misstatements of Ure and Guthrie should alone quash the verdict.

(5) But that won’t clear Slater’s honour.

To do that we rely on:

A. Lambie (Can we get her?)

B. Barrowman (We must guarantee her against perjury proceedings.)

C. The new witness.1

D. Adams, if still alive.²

These seem the essential things – all else is subsidiary.

A.C.D.

The petition setting out the grounds on which Slater’s appeal was based had been completed by 2 March 1928, and despatched to the Right Honourable the Secretary of State for Scotland. The petitioner was meanwhile residing quietly in Ayr.

I await the result of the coming re-trial of my case with the confidence in British justice which kept me alive for 18 years, and saved me, though often driven to despair, from seeking by my own hand the death to which I, an innocent man, had been condemned long years before for a crime I never committed.

So spoke Oscar Slater, not, one suspects, without a considerable degree of ventriloquous aid and sentimental splinting on the part of ‘Our Man in Ayr’, author of what the Daily Express of 27 March 1928, claimed to be

the first exclusive statement by Oscar Slater, whose manhood years lie buried in Scotland’s Sing Sing … He is here in a peaceful Scottish seaside town, in the land of Burns amid the inspiring Lowland grandeur which saw the birth of Scotland’s champion of liberty and justice, who in words of poetic fire cried to the world for humanity to the oppressed, and arraigned it for ‘Man’s inhumanity to man.’

Maintaining his alarmingly high note, this Daily Express very Special Correspondent, marches blithely on to, and over, the top.

No scene could be more in harmony with the cause of a man about to join battle with all the powerful forces of the State … which branded him as the foulest criminal known to human law – a murderer. Oscar Slater, still by prison law a convict, is in appearance the antithesis of a murderer. The keen winds of the western seas which wash this rugged Scottish coast have brought back the glow of health to his cheeks … He is tall, brown, erect, and sprucely-dressed, and carries himself with the air of a guardsman.

Extending the portrait, the Empire News informed its readers:

He spends his time in walks in the surrounding country. He is a wonderfully vigorous walker, 14 miles at a stretch not being too much for his physical strength. A kindly and genial atmosphere – the people of Ayr have been most kind and sympathetic in their mixings with him – has melted out the real man from that icy figure released in November last. There is a ruddy healthy bloom on his cheeks; there is a sturdy strength in his swinging gait. His mind, too, has freshened up. He laughs and jokes; joins in stories over the fireside; and can ‘crack’ a good one, too. With keen interest and confidence he awaits the ordeal of the rehearsing of his case.

The Lord Justice-General, Lord Clyde, having received the Scottish Secretary’s letter and Slater’s petition, and pondered upon them for some four and a half weeks, replied, on 13 April, that he held the said petition as a note of appeal by the said Oscar Slater, and appointed him to lodge a Supplementary Note containing such further specification and particulars with regard to any of the several grounds of appeal set forth in the said petition; and such other grounds of appeal (if any) as he might desire to submit for the consideration of the High Court of Justiciary, and that on or before the nineteenth day of May next.

The second stint of legal beavering began. Meetings were held at 4pm on sundry Edinburgh spring afternoons at Mr Craigie Aitchison’s residence – 12 India Street – attended by Slater, Park, Roughead, and the representative of Messrs Norman Macpherson & Dunlop.

The Supplementary Note was hammered out; seven closely-typed pages. Dense as an uncut thicket hedge, it presented amplifications under twelve separate heads.

The appointed time for the preliminary hearing, June 8th, was now drawing near. And still there was no sign of Helen Lambie.

Friday, 8 June 1928. The Parliament House, Edinburgh. Court No. 3.

It was as if time had clicked into another gear, ratcheted back 19 years. The setting, the furniture, were identical. Only the individuals – or some of them – supplying the set figures had changed. The dock was different. Empty. The prisoner, the accused, sat in the public bar on one of the richly-coloured benches that was, and always had been, at the back of the court. He had arrived early, accompanied by Rabbi Phillips, Mrs Phillips and Amy.

Another early arriver at the High Court of Justiciary that morning was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He and Slater were about to meet for the first time. As Slater sat down, Doyle, seated two rows in front of him, turned round and greeted him with a smile. They were then introduced by Rabbi Phillips and shook hands warmly.

Beneath the same wooden canopy, with the lion and the unicorn, sat an identically-robed, scarlet-and-ermine pride of judges, five of them – Lord Clyde, the Lord Justice-General, presiding, occupying the seat previously occupied by Lord Guthrie; Lord Alness, the Lord Justice-Clerk; Lords Sands, Blackburn and Fleming.

Mr Craigie Aitchison, opening, said that the appeal was based on fact and law. He asked leave to call the appellant himself as a witness. He applied for leave to recall Helen Lambie. He referred also to a deposition by Duncan MacBrayne, and asked that it should be produced.

Lord Alness: Is your assertion that the Crown had knowledge of MacBrayne and what he could have said at the time?

Mr Aitchison (bluntly): We know it.

Counsel went on to contend that there was evidence in the possession of the Crown, which could have assisted the defence case, that there was no question of a flight from justice.

The Lord Justice-General remarked that some day they might come to try the police or other authority for their conduct in this case, but they were not doing so now. To which observation Mr Aitchison rejoined that if they made a serious challenge about the conduct of the police vitiating the identification, inquiry could not and ought not to be excluded, and he went on to say that he required to recover the signed precognition of Inspector Warnock, and to be permitted to call witnesses to support the appellant’s averral that the alleged identification at New York was entirely vitiated.

The arguments ground on. Aitchison also wanted to call three witnesses in respect of the pointing out of Slater in the corridor outside the Commissioner’s room in New York – Mr Goodhart, Mr Miller, and Deputy United States Marshal, Mr John W. Pinckley. Continuing, Counsel informed the Court that he proposed to call an additional witness on the question of identification, a woman who saw a fugitive figure precipitately leaving Miss Gilchrist’s house.2

The hearing ran into a second day.

The Lord Advocate, the Right Honourable William Watson, KC, resumed the speech in reply to Mr Aitchison’s submissions which he had been unable to complete before the previous day’s adjournment. What remained of it did not occupy much time. The hearing came to an end in less than an hour.

After a quarter of an hour’s adjournment to see if their Lordships were in agreement, the judges trooped back to give their decision on the points raised.

They were prepared to allow Helen Lambie’s evidence on the question of identification, her alleged statement and denial, and the evidence on that subject of Lambie’s former mistress, Mrs Guthrie.

The Court was prepared, too, to allow the evidence of Mr Pinckley about Slater’s being handcuffed in the presence of witnesses in the New York corridor, but would not permit the examination of Messrs Miller and Goodhart, solicitors to the appellant. The evidence of Mrs Hamilton or Brown they had determined to allow to be received.

As to the topic of medical evidence, the Court was prepared to allow the evidence of Mr Roughead and Dr Adams’ widow, in regard to what the late Dr Adams had opined, but did not see its way to allowing the evidence of Sir Bernard Spilsbury.

Lastly, the motion for the examination of the appellant: allowing Slater to speak for himself. The judges felt that he had nothing new to say, and that: ‘In these circumstances it would be quite unreasonable to spend time over his examination now, and the Court therefore is not prepared to allow his evidence to be received.’

And that, Lord Clyde thought, exhausted the whole of the application. All that remained was for the Court to fix the time for the hearing of the appeal.

Monday, July 9th, 1928, was the chosen day.

When the Court rose, Slater hastened out by a side-door without speaking to anyone. He was baffled, furious and bitterly disappointed because he was not to be allowed to go into the witness-box to tell his side of the story.

Back in Ayr, brooding, Oscar came to a dramatic decision. Filled with resentment at what he regarded as his muzzling, he resolved to withdraw his appeal. Still seething, he got himself aboard a train and, on Monday, 11 June, presented himself on Conan Doyle’s London doorstep and informed the horrified Sir Arthur that he had made up his mind to abandon the appeal. Doyle managed, but only with the greatest difficulty, to persuade him to do no such thing.

Afterwards, hearing a rumour, unfounded as it proved, that Oscar had since gone back on his word and had indeed tried to withdraw his appeal, Doyle wrote to Park: ‘Oscar Slater seems to me to be mad.’ And on a postcard to Roughead he confessed of his reaction to Slater’s threat: ‘I was in a mood to sign a petition that the original sentence be carried out.’

Thirty days – less than the normal calendar month – to go, and neither sight nor sound nor even quasi-reliable report of the elusive emigrant Gillons. Then … someone talked.

Glasgow, Saturday Night (16 June)

The Sunday Mail is now able to disclose the address of Miss Helen Lambie She is now living in comfortable circumstances with her husband, Mr Robert Gillon, formerly a miner in Thankerton Colliery, Holytown.

The Gillons’ house is at 1005 Garden Street, Peoria, Illinois, U.S.A. Mr Gillon is employed in a foundry at Peoria.

Claiming the discovery of Lambie’s whereabouts as the result of their extensive inquiries, the Sunday Mail went on to give away the secret of their actually very simply-achieved success: ‘The Peoria address has been Helen Lambie’s abode for several years, and only recently one of her daughters wrote from it to a friend in Lanarkshire.’

Doyle dashed off a letter to Park on 19 June 1928: ‘I see that Helen Lambie is at last located … I have written Edinburgh suggesting that we send reply cable to ask her to come – all paid. She won’t come, but it will do good with press and Court.’

None of this grand discovery was news to the Crown Office. They had known all about Mrs Gillon, her location and her views, since January.

The Peoria Star made hay, a Page One splash, with the story that dropped out of a clear blue sky for them on 19 June 1928.

SLAYER’S FATE IS IN PEORIAN’S HAND

The fate of Oscar Slater, convicted of murder 19 years ago in Glasgow, Scotland, may hinge on the testimony of one person. She is Mrs Robert M. Gillon, 1005 Garden Street …

Mrs Gillon has refused to discuss the case at any great length, but she did talk to a reporter of the Peoria Star.

Wiping her suds-covered hands on her apron, Mrs Gillon, a slender, ruddy faced woman, appeared at the door of her humble little home in the rear of a barber shop in answer to the reporter’s long knocking. On the floor of the kitchen were heaps of clothing, ready for the electric washer that was at work some feet away.

I’m too excited,’ she blurted out when pressed … and each question she answered with a ready, ‘That’s my business.

Wednesday, 20 June’s Peoria Star contained a follow-up story.

Mrs Robert M Gillon, formerly Helen (Nellie) Lambie, will not return to her native Scotland to testify in the appeal of Oscar Slater. This she emphasized to the Star in an exclusive interview, and her husband, guarding the interests of his wife, adds that she will not go back even if served with official summons. ‘Sir Conan Doyle should not keep stirring up this affair,’ says the husband, who does not now permit his wife to leave the house. ‘We have tried to live a good life, why go all over that again, it is not fair to our two children,’ he says.

In view of the extremely important part which she played in the Oscar Slater story, it seems appropriate to set on record here something of what we know of the personal history of that indomitable little Scotswoman, Helen Lambie.

Nellie was hewn from a solid seam of coal-mining stock, of pure Scottish and part Irish extraction. Both her grandfathers were miners, as was her father, and she was to marry a miner, who was a miner’s son. Born on 22 March 1887, she was brought up in the Lanarkshire mining village of Holytown. She was one of at least ten children.

Nellie’s decision to ‘go into service’ was more or less automatic. Her mother had been a servant before her marriage at the age of 16. It was about February 1901, shortly before her fourteenth birthday, that Nellie took her first job, working for a Mr Levi Newman, at 38 Park Road, Glasgow. In August 1903, she went to work for Mrs Agnes M. Guthrie, in Spring Gardens, Kelvinside. She left there to go to Miss Gilchrist’s.

A month after Slater’s trial, Nellie, then aged 22, married, on 18 June 1909, at her home, Neilson’s Land, Holytown, Robert Miller Gillon, a 27-year-old coal-miner. He was a widower. Robert and Nellie’s first child, a daughter, Margaret Balfour – always known as Maisie – was born on 30 March 1911, at Sunnyside Road, Holytown. A second daughter, Marion – named, one wonders, after Miss Gilchrist? – was born on 18 October 1918, at No. 3 Sunnyside Road, Holytown. It was some time after the end of World War 1 – precisely when is not documented – that the Gillons, doubtless seeking wider horizons and less narrow pay scales than Holytown and Thankerton Colliery had on offer, emigrated to the New World. Most likely it was around 1921. Exactly where it was that they settled first is not recorded either. One picks up the trail in Peoria in 1923.

Even today, Peoria is a somewhat less than inspiring place to live. It has, of course, expanded and changed since the Gillons’ time. A population of close on 105,000 in 1930 had increased a decade later to just short of 112,000. It is the home of the internationally known Caterpillar Tractor Company; of Bradley University and its nationally-celebrated baseball teams; and of the Corn Stock summer theatre-in-the-round. It is quintessential Middle America. One understands the significance of the anxious question which, it is said, used regularly to be asked by theatricals seeking a yardstick of likely middlebrow reaction to their latest play or film: ‘How will it play in Peoria?’

And yet … and yet … There must be those who view the old place differently; or else, whence the stirring sentiment in song, ‘I wish I was back in Peoria’? You or I might find it a bit like Shotts (Lanarkshire) or Wigan (Lancs.) on a wet Sunday afternoon, but other eyes see other things, and the Gillons must have found the place to their taste as they stayed there for nearly ten years.

A copy of Leschnik’s – memories of Leschziner! – Peoria City Directory, consulted in Peoria Public Library, revealed that in 1923 Robert and Ellen [sic] Gillon were roomers at No. 2704 South Adams Street. But by the following year they had moved to No. 1005 Garden Street, which I found to be just a short distance away, and where Robert (entered as ‘Miner, Groveland Mine’) and Helen Gillon were again described as ‘roomers or boarders’. The premises were somewhat cramped and situated at the rear of a barber’s shop. But in 1925, Robert is no longer a roomer, but a householder. Moreover, the barber must have moved, for in 1926 Haag Bros., washing machine manufacturers, appear to be occupying the shop premises at the front.

In 1927, Leschnik’s became Polk’s Peoria City Directory, and in it Robert Gillon is shown as a labourer with Haag Bros. In 1929, however, he is a miner again. Then, in 1930, reverts to labourer. On his last directory appearance, in 1931, he is listed as employed – in what capacity it is not stated – by the Commercial Solvent Corporation, which seems to have taken over the front shop from, Messrs Haag Bros. In 1928, Margaret Gillon, who would be 17, had taken a job as a mangle operator at the Kew Laundry Company. She moved the following year to the Ideal Troy Cleaners, where she continued listed as a laundry worker up to the final 1931 directory entry.

The house at which throughout all those years the Gillons lived is now No. 2105 Garden Street, re-numbering having taken place in 1956. Whatever it may have been in the 1920s, the area today is somewhat seedy, not to say downright dangerous after nightfall, when the crack pedlars come out from under their stones, and another kind of crack – that of revolver shots – is to be all too frequently heard.

According to the Glasgow Herald of 17 April 1956, the Gillons returned to Holytown in 1933, and remained there until the 1950s, when they moved to the north of England. Nellie’s younger daughter, Marion, a nursemaid, married, aged 23, on 23 April 1942, at The Manse, Holytown. Her groom was 22-year-old Jack Cook, a carpenter, of 16 Eric Street, Bramley, Leeds, Yorkshire.

Nellie’s mother died at 29 Sunnyside Avenue, Holytown, on 1 June 1951. She was 86 years of age. Robert Miller Gillon, Nellie’s husband, ‘coal hewer, retired’, died, aged 74, on 29 June 1956, at No. 1 Lascelles Mount, Harehills, Leeds. Cause of death: cardiac failure and arteriosclerosis.

Four years later, on 2 May 1960, at St James’ Hospital, Burmantofts, Leeds, Helen Lambie or Gillon died of cerebral thrombosis and pernicious anaemia. She was 73.

Still fluttering around in the dark, Messrs Norman Macpherson & Dunlop had written to the Crown Agent on 16 June 1928: ‘We shall be obliged if you will let us know the last address of the witness Helen Lambie.’ Then … sudden illumination. On 18 June they wrote to the Crown Agent again:

We see from a paragraph in today’s Daily Record that Helen Lambie’s address is given as 1005 Garden Street, Peoria, Illinois. The paragraph also states ‘that she may announce her readiness to return to this country in time for the Enquiry at the request of the Crown Authorities.’

The Crown Agent replied on 5 July 1928: ‘We beg to intimate to you that Helen Lambie is not to be a witness, she having refused to come.’

Not the only disappointment; behind the urbane face of professional preparation things had been going more than a bit awry as regards the Slater faction’s much-vaunted new witness. She was not proving to be at all what she had seemed.

On 4 July a precognition of one George Christie Stirton, Detective Lieutenant, Central Division, Glasgow, had been forwarded by John Drummond Strathern, the Glasgow Procurator-fiscal, to the Crown Agent. It stated:

I have known Mrs Brown for a period longer than ten years and I am of opinion that she is unstable mentally and wholly unreliable. She is an associate of well-known prostitutes. She occupies a five-room and kitchen house with her husband at 3 Robertson Street, and my opinion is that it is, at any rate occasionally, used as a brothel.

Mrs Brown’s police record is as follows:-

14 December, 1921. Central Police Court, Glasgow. Brothel-keeping: continued to 22nd December, 1921, when charge found not proven.

13th July, 1923. Sheriff Court, Glasgow. Charged with brothel-keeping in her house at 3 Robertson Street: sentenced to three months’ imprisonmment.

I also know Mrs Brown’s husband, to a lesser extent. He is a stevedore at the docks. Mr Brown has been at the Police Office repeatedly complaining about his wife’s conduct. He has himself been charged several times in the Police Court with assaulting his wife. My recollection is that he has undergone a sentence of imprisonment.’

The precognition of 60-year-old Archibald Brown, also enclosed, stated:

On 4 September 1915, I married the witness Minnie Hayburn or Brown. My wife had not been previously married according to my understanding. She certainly stated in the particulars that she was a spinster. She had then a daughter, whose father, I understood, was a Mr Hamilton, but so far as I know she is illegitimate. My wife is neurotic and is very erratic in her conduct and temperament. She has hallucinations and harbours delusive ideas which she believes to be true. She attributes to me and to other people happenings which never occurred and she also has delusive ideas as to herself. In my opinion, my wife would be a most unsatisfactory witness in any case, and so far as the present case of Slater is concerned, I do not believe what she says. From what I know of her she is inclined to think a thing and after she thinks something for a time she believes it to be true and goes on repeating it. I think my wife should be medically examined. I think my wife is beginning to realise that her foolish talk with regard to this Slater case is bringing about a lot of trouble and might possibly result in landing her in trouble. She is in a state of very great excitement, so much so that it is impossible for me to live in the house with her. I doubt whether she will voluntarily go to the court to give evidence. As far as I can see, her desire at the moment is to get out of the whole business.

So it was that, just four days before the appeal was due to be heard, Slater’s legal advisers received the following communication:

I am desired by Crown Counsel to inform you that at the hearing of the Oscar Slater appeal on 9 July 1928, leave of the Court will be asked to produce Extract conviction against Minnie Hayburn or Brown.

That did it – and did for it. The following day Messrs Norman Macpherson & Dunlop informed the Crown Agent that they had resolved not to call Mrs Brown as a witness.

That is what you could call starting with a handicap.

1 Minnie Hayburn or Hamilton or Brown. See p. 179

2 Dr. John Adams

2 This was Minnie Hayburn or Hamilton or Brown.