Jack House was already a Glasgow journalist of wide renown in the town when he turned to the Slater case. There had been other journalists there before him.

In 1952, a barrister who had taken up the practice of journalism, Edgar Lustgarten, had entered the Slater lists. In the September of that year he was writing a series of articles, ‘Woman in the Case’, in Reynolds News. For him, Nellie Lambie was, as Irene Adler to Sherlock Holmes, the woman. And her bona fides were made the subject of an exceptionally devastating attack – a regular slatering, you could say.

Clearly pro-Oscar, he wrote that one would not have expected a lass like her to lend herself to the furtherance of a trumped-up murder charge. She was not, in his character evaluation, either a rogue or a fool. She was not in dread of the police because of something in her past, nor had she any illusions as to the impact of her actions upon the future – Slater’s future, or rather, curtailment thereof. She had defects. She seemed conceited, self-opinionated, pert at times to the point of insolence, but, equally, she had always, when it came to it, proved herself trustworthy and capable.

Lustgarten points out that,

Slater and the criminal were admittedly alike (we have Adams’ word that there was ‘a close resemblance’) and it may be, after so much concentrated priming, Helen did suspect – as she put it at first – that Slater was the man. And being a vain and mulish little madam, having once plumped for a particular view, she would fight tooth and nail to get that view upheld. In her limited and egocentric vision, the real issue at the trial was not ‘Is Slater guilty?’ but ‘Is Helen Lambie right?’ And no smart lawyer was going to prove her wrong.

Lustgarten was not alone in the harbouring of unflattering thoughts about Nellie. The trial judge called her ‘superficial and unreflective’. Craigie Aitchison appraised her as ‘untruthful’ and ‘unscrupulous’. William Roughead said that she was ‘ignorant and irresponsible’.

Lustgarten saw Slater as the victim of an organised conspiracy; his prosecution as the supreme example in British legal history of a manufactured case – ‘a lasting monument of shame to those who manufactured’. It is his feeling that although the names of functionaries stand highest on that monument, ‘inscribed there also in perpetuity is that of a young woman who, through vanity and pride and thoughtlessness, served their design more faithfully than she knew’.

I think that the defence-minded Mr Lustgarten is decidedly overstating his case here. We shall have considerably more to say in respect of Nellie Lambie’s true beliefs later on.

The first footings of the positive edifice which Jack House was to raise over the next three decades were dug in shifting sand. The foundation was laid down in the autumn of 1954 in a lengthy series, ‘Glasgow’s Square Mile of Murder’, which he contributed to the Glasgow Evening News, the last five parts of which, published 4-8 October, dealt with the Slater case.

‘Was Oscar Slater the Scottish Dreyfus?’ he asked. ‘Was he an innocent man round whom the authorities bound a chain of “evidence”, and whom they kept in prison in order, to put it politely, to save trouble?’

And he answered his own question.

‘In my opinion he was. I believe many people in the Glasgow Police and among the Crown officials knew in their hearts that Oscar Slater was not guilty. But with a single exception, they thought it better to keep their mouths shut.’

House then presents what I can only suppose to be a deliberate false clue. He confides to his reader that ‘one particular and somewhat distinguished’ name has been bandied about Glasgow for years. This man he describes as ‘an important official, but also a rather raffish character’, and adds that there are many people who will tell you that he is the real murderer of Marion Gilchrist. ‘In fact,’ says House, ‘he was as innocent as Slater.’ So all this hope-raising verbiage swiftly cancels itself out.

But next we are given House’s theory as to what really happened that drizzly December night.

Two men called on Miss Gilchrist. Their object neither robbery nor murder. It was merely to get possession of some document, say a will, or proof of illegitimacy, or legitimacy for that matter. They wait until Lambie goes out for the evening paper. Then ring the bell. Miss Gilchrist lets them in without hesitation. She knows them. They have been in her house before. One man hustles her into the ‘parlour’. The other goes straight into the spare bedroom, lights the gas and prepares to search for the document. Miss Gilchrist faces up to the first man in the parlour. There is an angry scene. In sudden rage the man strikes her. The old lady falls back and hits her head on the fender. Though losing consciousness, she gives the signal to the Adams family below, knocking three times on the floor with her heels. Her assailant sees this signal, realises that she will be able to identify her attacker. He lifts a chair and, kneeling on her chest, uses one of the legs of the chair to smash the old lady’s head. Arthur Adams comes up and rings the bell. Getting no response to his ringing, he goes back to his own house. While the coast is clear the murderer flees. House has him exit down the staircase and out of the front-door of the close into the empty street. All this time the other man is in the spare room searching for the elusive document. He hears the stramash in the parlour, but carries on searching. Then Helen Lambie opens the door. He decides to brave it out, walks through the lobby, dashes down the stairs, out of the front-door and away into the night. Lambie does not say a word, because, like Miss Gilchrist, she knows him as a perfectly respectable visitor to the house.

This piece of pure fiction has, over the years, become the received truth.

Mr House defends it:

This theory fits every single bit of evidence in the Gilchrist murder case. The original descriptions given by witnesses were of two men, and they were described as young and gentlemanly. A private detective in Glasgow went to police headquarters with information as to the real identity of the murderer, and was told to go away and mind his own business. One thing is perfectly obvious. Helen Lambie knew the man she saw in the lobby that night.

Four years later, in December 1958, House comes back for another six bites at the cherry, and adds a further storey to the house of cards he was busily building. In a six-part series, ‘Oscar Slater: The Facts at Last’ – 15-20 December – contributed this time to the Glasgow Evening Times, poor old Paddy Nugent got it! House revealed that Slater himself had suggested that Lambie’s boyfriend, Patrick Nugent, should be investigated. He had not said that Nugent had committed the murder, but he thought that Nellie might have told him about her mistress’ jewels – in fact, she had – and that Nugent might have told a pal.

Next, House resuscitates the ‘dead’ Lambie. There is, he says, ‘only one person alive who can deny what I have to say – Helen Lambie, now 71, and living in the north of England’. And yet in his previous article of 4 October 1954, House had written that Helen Lambie died without revealing a word as to the identity of A.B..

Accompanying the 1954 article there had been a picture captioned as being that of Helen Lambie ‘taken in 1929, when she was 41’. It has been used many times since and in many places: it is actually a photograph of Minnie Hayburn or Hamilton or Brown.

Writing in 1958, with a new note of positivism, House tells his readers that, although he knows their names, because the two men involved in the murder are survived by their families in Glasgow, he is not going to reveal them –

Even though a relative of one of them came to me not long ago and said, ‘We know that Uncle did the murder.’ Strangely enough he was wrong. ‘Uncle’ was the A.B. of the Slater case, and A.B. did not commit the murder.

House is here claiming that he was approached by one of the Charterises’ nephews.

His next disclosure is that Miss Gilchrist gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, and that she kept this daughter with her as a servant for some time. The daughter then got married and had a baby girl. ‘Miss Gilchrist was very fond of her daughter, and even fonder of her granddaughter. She made a will leaving most of her money and estate to them. This did not make her popular with the rest of the family.’

What House writes can only refer to Mrs Ferguson and Marion Gilchrist Ferguson, but as we have already seen, no doubt exists as to Maggie Galbraith or Ferguson’s Barra parentage.

House now improves upon the detail of his 1954 theory. The ‘two men’ who called on Miss Gilchrist become ‘two young men close relatives of Miss Gilchrist’. New circumstantial details – totally devoid of any substantiating evidence – are supplied. These two young men

discussed the position. They were in the house of the mysterious A.B.. He was one of the young men and we’ll call the other C.. They determined to face Miss Gilchrist and extract from her a paper which would be valuable to them. It’s possible, too, that they’d been watching Miss Gilchrist’s flat for some time to find out the best moment for a private visit.’

Why then, one wonders, choose the ten minutes, if that, when the servant was out getting an evening paper, instead of the matter of hours available while Lambie was away on her afternoon or evening off?

Some time before seven o’clock that night they left A.B.’s house [situated at 400 Great Western Road] by the back garden and a lane, and made their way to 49 West Princes Street. They waited till they saw Helen Lambie leave the flat, and then rang the bell. Normally, she would open the door to her relatives, even if she didn’t like them. This explains the mysterious entry.

House then makes the most extraordinary statement.

I should explain that C. suffered from epileptic fits. Not the serious kind, but more like the Adolf Hitler sudden-rage type. Under the influence of such a fit C. was capable of doing anything and not realising its consequence. C. lost his temper with Miss Gilchrist and struck her …

When Lambie opened the flat door and the man walked across the hall, she showed no surprise.

Why should she? She knew A.B. was a relative of Miss Gilchrist’s and had seen him in the flat before that night … A.B. ran down the stairs, was joined by C., and they both ran back along West Princes Street and up Rupert Street to get into the lane behind A.B.’s house. They were seen just then by the schoolteacher, Agnes Brown – a key witness, who was not called. The Crown were satisfied with Mary Barrowman, the wee message girl. And so A.B. and C. got back to A.B.’s house and were sitting there, quite joco, when the police arrived to make inquiries. They could assure the police they had never left the house all evening.

This is utter nonsense. There was never any question of the police’s having paid a visit to Dr Charteris’ house on the night of 21 December.

But Mr House will not desist.

In Victorian and Edwardian days the great thing was to be respectable. The Glasgow police just could not conceive that any such respectable chaps as A.B. and C. had anything to do with the brutal murder of Miss Marion Gilchrist.

In the days of Elizabeth II, the great thing was to be circumspect regarding the perils of defamation. Thus, in the sixth and final part of his ‘Oscar Slater: The Facts at Last’ series, 20 December 1958, House declared: ‘The two men I wrote of yesterday, when I presented my reconstruction of what happened in Miss Gilchrist’s flat on the night of 21 December 1908, are dead.’

Untruth, it would seem, as well as discretion, is the better part of valour.

In 1961 Mr House decided that his news-sheet labour was worthy of more permanent preservation between hard covers. Messrs W & R Chambers, apparently agreeing, issued the 253-page, full dress, bound version of Square Mile of Murder. It was to become his best-known book. Its subject was those four outstanding Glasgow murder cases – Madeleine Smith, Jessie McLachlan, Dr Edward William Pritchard, and Oscar Slater – of which he had treated in his newspaper series. His accounts of the first three cases were in the main unexceptionable. His study of the Slater affair, titled ‘The Man Who Didn’t’, fell, alas, a shade or two short, while, at the same time, advancing a league or two too far along a dubious route.

The account rendered in the first edition is, generally speaking, the same as that previously presented in the newspaper versions, but a few extra mistakes are introduced. Nothing really major, but worrying evidence of carelessness as to details. Miss Gilchrist’s age is given as 83. Lambie is sent off to collect an Evening News instead of an Evening Citizen. Arthur Adams is said to have been a flautist in the Scottish Orchestra. (There is no mention of his name in the Scottish Orchestra records.) Oscar is said, incorrectly, to have died on 3 February, 1948, at the age of, also incorrect, 75.

But there are compensatory revelations. Many years after the trial, says House, Mary Barrowman turned up at ‘a certain house in Glasgow’ – sadly, we are never told which – wanting to confess. She had not been in West Princes Street at all on the night of the murder. Her mother, who was an alcoholic, had made her tell the story so that she could share in the reward. The one drawback to this fascinating insight is that at the time when Mary Barrowman first told her story no reward was on offer.

House’s reconstruction of the crime remains much the same. A ‘t’ is crossed here, an ‘i’ dotted there. The two men – A.B. and C. – are the same, but now either Nellie Lambie let them in before she went out, or they arrived soon after she left. And House supplies a reason why we know that two men were involved. If, he says, the man who lit the gas in the bedroom with the Runaway Matches had been the murderer, then his hands would inevitably have been bloodstained. Since no marks of blood were found on the casket, the matches, or anywhere in the room, he cannot have been the killer. And A.B.’s mission is here, for the first time, hailed as successful – ‘In the back bedroom A.B. had found the document at last.’

Who says so? What document?

Now, C. is no longer down ‘in the back green’ or ‘across West Princes Street’, but ‘waiting on the landing above’.

Again, who says so?

The second edition of Square Mile of Murder appeared in 1975. By then Dr Charteris was 11 years’ dead, and people could, and did, attack his post mortem reputation with courageous impunity.

When this book was first published, I put forward my theory. Since then I have realised I was wrong. The difficulty with this case is the identification of A.B., the mysterious man who walked through the lobby past Nellie Lambie and Arthur Adams and was supposed to have done the murder. He has been identified over the years with a Dr Charteris, a nephew of Miss Gilchrist’s.1

When, many years after the murder, he was asked if he was A.B., he denied it completely. But, of course, what he was denying was that he had murdered Miss Gilchrist, because all through the case, AB is supposed to have been the murderer.

It is absurd for Jack House to say that Charteris denied that he was A.B.. As we have seen, the term A.B. signified Dr Charteris – nothing more, nothing less. House’s equating of the term A.B. with ‘the mysterious man who walked through the lobby past Nellie Lambie and Arthur Adams’ betrays a dangerous confusion.

House also fails to make the crucial point that Charteris stated that, at the time that the murder was committed, he was at his own house in Great Western Road. He was not making any limited admission or confession of partial guilt. What he was saying, politely, loud and admirably clear, was that he was elsewhere at the time of the killing and had had nothing to do with it. ‘But,’ House continues, ‘if you think it out carefully, you must realise that the man who walked through the lobby, call him by any initials you like, was not the murderer. Let me spell out the theory I have come to over many years …‘

Then, like a cony out of a gibus, Mr House magically produced Mr Austin Birrell.

Now, as I see it, two men called together on the night of the murder. They were, I believe, relatives – the aforesaid Dr Charteris and a man named Austin Birrell. It’s not real proof of course, but I have met a nephew of Austin Birrell’s, who told me that the whole family knew that Uncle Austin had done the murder.

It is to be observed that Mr House appears to have had the happy knack of meeting up with the loquacious nephews of the putative assassins of Miss Gilchrist, for had he not reported 20-odd years before that a nephew of A.B.’s had come and told him, ‘We know that Uncle did the murder’? Austin Birrell, verily, but entirely coincidentally, bearing the initials A.B., is endowed with the epileptiform fits formerly ascribed to C., and the theory as to the shape of events on the night of the murder remains unaltered, save for the fact that now, instead of running rapidly downstairs after the murder, Austin Birrell went

upstairs to the landing where the flat was unoccupied … waiting on the landing above, he saw Charteris leave, followed him, and the two ran along West Princes Street to Charteris’ house. They were not seen by Mary Barrowman, because Mary Barrowman, as we know now, was never there. They were seen by Agnes Brown, the schoolteacher.

Alastair Phillips, that doughty Scots journalist and indefatigable chronicler of the Slater and Trench causes, wrote, in the course of a lively piece in the Glasgow Herald, on 15 February 1975, beguilingly titled ‘The Case of the Dedicated Detective’:

Among the fairy tales that have been current among the local experts wanders a dingy and demented character full of remorse by the name of Austin Birrell. This is the imaginary A.B., a person of whom there is no true record, and who almost certainly never existed.

Now the man who begat Austin Birrell was Jack House, in the fifth article in his Glasgow Evening Times series, ‘Oscar Slater: The Facts at Last’, 19 December 1958. He did not, however, put a name to him until 1975, when he brought out the second edition of Square Mile of Murder.

I myself conducted a really deep-raking archival search for this sinister and unwholesome personage, whom I remember House telling me he had had pointed out to him as Austin Birrell, and whom thereafter he used to see from time to time on the streets of Glasgow. He described him, memorably, as having a weird stretch of dark, ‘dead-looking’ skin on the back of his head and neck. I could find not the flimsiest breath of evidence that – under the name of Austin Birrell – he ever existed.

I put my conclusion fairly and squarely to my friend House that Austin Birrell was a sort of Glaswegian fata Morgana, and he most carefully explained to me the genesis of this phantasmagoric being as having been presented to him in convincing detail by the man’s own nephew.

The name of this nephew, I elicited, was Alexander Macdonald Sommerville. He lived at No. 2 Grenville Drive, Cambuslang, Glasgow, and was chairman and managing director of Sommerville & Milne, Ltd, a Glasgow advertising agency. He had, I discovered, died in Hairmyres Hospital, East Kilbride, on 25 August 1953, aged 58. I managed, however, to track down a relative of his, Mrs Elizabeth Tulloch, who, interviewed, said that, so far as she knew, the late Mr Sommerville had never had any particular interest in the Slater case. On the other hand, yes, he had been a larger than life character, a leg-puller with a great sense of humour. He was also a notable raconteur, and the story of someone called Austin Birrell being his uncle and the killer of Miss Gilchrist was just the sort of tale he could have dreamed up.

I duly communicated this intelligence to Jack House, and from that day forward Austin Birrell was expunged from the House guest list of suspects.

Not so, unfortunately, in the case of the authors, George Forbes and Paddy Meehan, of Such Bad Company, issued by Paul Harris Publishing, Edinburgh, in April 1982. The book, telling the story of the ‘long and bloody saga of Glasgow criminality’ – the Neds and all that – paints, in the words of the Scotsman’s critic, George Saunders, ‘a very vivid picture of the Glasgow underworld’. The Slater case, however, figuring as Chapter 5, ‘The Judas Goat’, goes back a long, long way, and must of necessity have relied upon hearsay. By line six, Austin Birrell has been resurrected. In this incarnation he is – shades of Nigel Morland and the Misses Adams – ‘the son of a prominent city businessman’. His companion, watching and waiting round Miss Gilchrist’s flat at 14 [sic] Queen’s Terrace, is Dr Charteris, ‘a nephew of the old woman’.

As it was in the beginning, so it is the whole way through. Lambie has supplied these two relatives of 83-year-old [sic] Aunt Marion with a duplicate set of keys. Having poisoned the watchdog, they plan to steal a newly-made will which leaves their aunt’s considerable fortune to her illegitimate daughter. These two quietly enter the premises, using their duplicate keys, and start searching the spare bedroom for the casket containing the will. But Miss Gilchrist, ever alert, caught them at it. Austin Birrell thereupon dragged her into the dining-room and, in an epileptic frenzy, bludgeoned her. He escaped out of the back window, shinning down a drain-pipe. More shades of Morland! Charteris, who had finally found the will, walked calmly past Lambie and Adams, met up with Birrell in the street outside, and the two of them ran off to Charteris’ house nearby, to clean up, change their clothes and await, composed and prepared to act as each other’s alibi, what they thought would be the imminent arrival of the police.

But to be fair, Jack House had, by 1982, following my long and earnest chat with him, jettisoned ‘poor Austin’. His new view as to the ‘onlie begetter’ of the West Princes Street tragedy was echoed in an article, ‘A Very Respectable Murder’, by Maggie Allen, published in the Scottish Field in June 1987.

By now, Austin Birrell is away with the fairies, whence he should never have been summoned in the first place. In his stead, at Dr Charteris’ side, stands the doctor’s brother, Archibald (who had as much to do with the affair as John Betjeman’s teddy bear, Archie!), a prominent solicitor and lecturer in law at the University of Glasgow.

The guiding hand of Miss Allen’s Slaterian mentor seems plain. She had, by the way, been the script editor of a BBC 1 television programme, The Trials of Oscar Slater, which had been put out on 10 and 17 July 1980, as the two final parts of a series based on House’s Square Mile of Murder. The illegitimate daughter fallacy is repeated. The Charteris brothers visit Miss Gilchrist – who would, of course, admit them – to ask for the reinstatement as heiress of their half-sister, Mrs Mary Greer Gilchrist or McCall. Charteris is now searching, not for a will or legitimacy document, but for the letter to his aunt in which he had arranged the meeting. The article, quite incorrectly, avers that Charteris ‘shortly before his death, at the age of 90 in 1963 [sic], admitted that he had been the man in the hall seen by Lambie’.

Miss Allen’s impeachment of the brothers Charteris seems very shaky, although it was not without its appeal to those who look for a class-based solution. She holds to the familiar theory – favoured by Trench among others – that there was a furious family row over Miss Gilchrist’s will, and informs us that a month before the murder the old lady added a codicil cutting out Mary McCall.

Now Miss Gilchrist’s will, that subject of so much ill-founded speculation, rests in Register House, Edinburgh, for all to see. A look at it instantly reveals that what Miss Allen says is wrong. Nobody was in fact disinherited by that November 1908 codicil. Mrs McCall, together with her two children, receive substantial legacies, unaffected by the provisions of the codicil.

Miss Allen claims that a police cover-up operation directed that the Charteris brothers’ names be kept out of all reports. Yet I have before me a copy of Detective Inspector John Pyper’s precognition. In it, he states that both brothers have been seen and that ‘they do not resemble the description given of the man wanted’.

Miss Allen believes, too, that she has discovered a new cover-up for the respectable Charterises. This concerns the schoolteacher, Agnes Brown. Miss Brown positively identified Slater as one of her two men. It is virtually axiomatic that she was not called to give evidence at the trial because her testimony, showing Slater running in the wrong direction, would have cancelled out that of the prosecution star witness, Mary Barrowman. According to Miss Allen, the two fleeing men were the brothers Charteris. She also claims, absolutely wrongly, that ‘No relevant report survived or was published’. Actually, Miss Brown’s statement was sent to New York for Slater’s extradition proceedings, and she gave further evidence at the Secret Inquiry of 1914. Her statements are preserved in official archives, and, in any case, are reproduced in Roughead’s Trial volume.

Finally, Miss Allen sees the Charteris brothers’ respective career moves – Francis to St Andrews and Archie to Australia – made more than ten years after the murder, as flights from justice!

During Heritage Week 1988, Jack House delivered, on 6 June a lunch-time talk on the Slater case at Hutchesons’ Hall in John Street, Glasgow, in which he announced that the actual murderer was a man named Archibald Charteris!

That was really Jack House’s swan-song. He died, on 11 April 1991, aged 84, in Glasgow’s Western Infirmary, where, so many years before, the young Dr Francis Charteris had been an assistant house physician.

The wheel had somehow turned full circle.

It felt like the end of an era.

1 Which, as we have already noted, he was not.