Fitfully, like a fire that will not go out, the interwoven Slater and Trench cases keep flaring up. The news broke on 7 March 1989, via Jack Webster’s column in the Glasgow Herald, that a former Glasgow shop steward, Ted Ramsey, who had been made redundant from Lanarkshire steelworks, where he was a plant engineer, had that day published under his own aegis a book about the Slater case. It was the first for 37 years and was titled Stranger in the Hall.
Mr Ramsey had unquestionably shouldered an enormous work load of research, but, unfortunately, his version of events does not seem to lie easy with received reality. The act of murder, he decides, was performed by Nellie Lambie, in cahoots with her lover, Patrick Nugent. The killing did not take place, as generally believed, in the dining-room. Nor did it occur at around 7pm. No. It was about five o’clock when Miss Lambie lured her mistress into the kitchen, and there struck her down with a cosh supplied by Paddy, with whom she was having a passionate affair. Miss Gilchrist’s body was then dragged into the dining-room.
Patrick Nugent was the stranger in the hall, seen by Adams and an unsurprised Lambie.
The motive for the killing was that Lambie had been found out fiddling Miss Gilchrist’s household accounts. She was also in the habit of borrowing her mistress’ jewellery, wherewith to adorn herself on her nights out. This had not as yet been discovered, but since she had recently had the misfortune to lose Miss Gilchrist’s celebrated diamond crescent brooch, it was only a matter of time before her perfidy was revealed.
Ramsey tells us – but neglects to indicate the source of his information – that Archibald Robertson, whom he describes as Miss Gilchrist’s stockbroker, ‘who called every Saturday afternoon’, had interceded on the young maid-servant’s behalf to prevent Miss Gilchrist from sacking her, as he privately considered that Marion Gilchrist was too tight with her money. It was, says Ramsey, a combination of these factors which pushed Nellie into a conspiracy to murder with Nugent. But Nugent, as we know, was thoroughly investigated – and exonerated – by Trench; and despite the most careful searching I have found no precognitions by the said Archibald Robertson, who was not anyway Miss Gilchrist’s stockbroker. That was John Stewart.
Ramsey’s other main assertion is that A.B. was not Dr Charteris, but one Alexander Birrell.1 This man was, he claims, a nephew of Miss Gilchrist’s, and also a cousin of the Glasgow millionaire shipping magnate Sir William Burrell (1861-1958), the man behind the world-famous Burrell art collection. Lambie is said to have deliberately put the finger of suspicion on this Alexander Birrell, and William Burrell2 used his influence to expunge any mention of his cousin from the police records of the case, in order to protect the Burrell family name.
What, in essence, Ramsey does, is, first, to confuse Margaret Dawson Birrell, Miss Gilchrist’s niece proper, who lived at 19 Blythswood Drive and later at 61 Rupert Street, Glasgow, with quite another Margaret Birrell, who lived at No. 6 Kelvinside Terrace North, alternatively designated No. 275 Wilton Street, and who had a brother, Alexander.3 This family of Birrells was not in any way related to Marion Gilchrist.
Secondly, confusion worse confounded, Ramsey insists that this Margaret and Alexander Birrell were cousins of William Burrell This, again, is not correct. According to Ramsey, the person who supplied the vital link between the Birrells and the Burrells was one Alexander Burrell, an uncle of Sir William Burrell’s.
Sir William’s grandfather, George Burrell, and grandmother, Janet Houston or Burrell, had three sons – William, George and Alexander. Ramsey informs us that Alexander was born in 1837, in the Parish of Old Kilpatrick, Dunbartonshire, and that his family moved to Glasgow when he was a child.
Wrong. Alexander Houston Burrell, Sir William Burrell’s uncle, was born in Glasgow, not in 1837, but in 1856, and died, aged 51, on 4 April 1908. It is Ramsey’s assertion that, ‘for some unfathomable reason’, this Alexander changed his name to Birrell, and married Miss Marion Gilchrist’s sister, Margaret, with whom he lived at 6 Kelvinside Terrace North.
As a matter of historic fact, Alexander Burrell did not change his surname to Birrell; he did not marry at all. His supposed wife, Margaret Gilchrist, died, aged eight, on 23 January 1844, more than twelve years before he himself was born, on May 4th, 1856. He was not the Alexander Birrell who lived in Kelvinside Terrace North.
And what of the Birrells who did live at that address? There was an Alexander Birrell there. And he did have a wife named Margaret, and a daughter, Margaret, and sons, Samuel and Alexander. It is this son Alexander who is Ramsey’s candidate for A.B., and he died, aged 66, on 21 May 1929. His sister, Margaret Birrell, never married, and she continued to occupy the old family house at 6 Kelvinside Terrace North – which had been bought by her father, Alexander Birrell, in 1874 – until shortly before her death, also at the age of 66, on 3 October 1912. It is obvious, then, that this Margaret Birrell could not have been the one who was a witness at the 1914 Inquiry.
Mr Ramsey is also, as the Christian Scientists say, in error, in his belief that Helen Lambie had previously been Miss Margaret Birrell’s servant. Which Miss Birrell, one is tempted to wonder. The answer is very definitely neither’s. Nellie’s first job was, as we have seen, with a Mr Levi Newman, whose employ she entered around February 1901, a short time before her fourteenth birthday and with whom she remained for about two and a half years. Then, circa August 1903, she went to work for Mrs Agnes Martin Scott or Guthrie, before going into Miss Gilchrist’s service.
Interviewed by George Forbes, Ted Ramsey was reported in the Glasgow Evening Times (20 February 1993) as saying:
I found that in those Edwardian days the Police Committee had the power to hire and fire members of the force at will, with no appeal. They could promote or ruin a career in the force. And the man who chaired the committee at the relevant time was Sir William Burrell. He was in a position to influence events in any police investigation. The chief suspect was an Ayrshire businessman called Austin Birrell.4
It was the name which probably threw most researchers off the scent because to all intents and purposes he was a nonentity with no influence at all. I found by digging into the family tree that the Birrells were in fact a branch of the Burrell family, whose name had been slightly changed in the distant past.
On the well-established principle that it never rains but it pours, also in 1989, actually within a mere four months of Ted Ramsey’s 37-year-silence-breaking volume, another Glaswegian, Frank Kuppner, who had hitherto practised mainly as poet and playwright, produced, on 26 June, a book, A Very Quiet Street. Herein, based upon the circumstance that he had, in 1951, been born in, and subsequently brought up in, the house next door to Miss Gilchrist’s – ‘virtually through the wall from the scene of a classic murder’ – he took an oblique look at Slater and his times through his 1980s’ eyes.
The result is a curious and curiously fascinating hybrid work, part novel, part journal, part factual, part faction, in which, somewhat in A J A Symons’ Corvine quest style, he acquaints himself and his reader simultaneously with random-seeming pickings-over of the Slater-Trench story. Kuppner states: ‘I don’t start this book with a definite opinion telling what is what. I take it step by step, changing my mind where I learn new facts.’ A later Kuppner opinion: ‘It is clear the murderer was known to Miss Gilchrist and must have been one of these (youngish) male relatives.’ He adds: ‘I have heard that another of these ambiguous gentlemen had a criminal record, but I could find out nothing more about him.’
Mr Kuppner pursues the trail and trial through the Mitchell Library, the second-hand bookshops and chance meetings with sundry others making collections of rescued facts. He finds the murder accounts ‘brimming with social history of a kind you seldom meet in text books; what people ate, how much they drank, at what time they rose in the morning’.
He lived and wrote in a room overlooking Wilton Street – where the wrong Margaret Birrell had lived – picking his way along pathways through mountains of books he buys from the city’s old book dealers. He does not read much fiction. ‘I agree with Emerson: why go for imitation, ersatz, when the real thing is out there around you, always fascinating.’ And, Slaterwise by candlelight, he sums up: ‘Despite pressures throughout the years, the authorities remained steadfast. If the police were not just plain inefficient, then something very murky indeed was going on.’
But looking for an answer is like asking the wrong person for street directions, or opening an infinite series of diminishing Russian dolls. What does the dumbstruck nucleal figurine say? That the man in the hall was Charteris? That Charteris had been told by the police of the murder? That it was most interesting to discover that Miss Gilchrist’s niece, Margaret Birrell, had been Helen Lambie’s previous employer? Not a lot. And all wrong.
A Very Quiet Street is a captivating book written around the Slater case, but it does not add, does not pretend to add, anything of any real factual or interpretative importance to the enduring mystery. It is a daring jeu d’esprit on a dark stage.
It was in the December of the year following the Slaterian resurgence promoted by Messrs Ramsey and Kuppner, that Mr Tom Walsh, a former dominie taken in his retirement to television script and song writing, took also to the Slater case, and proceeded to set up his stall for yet another attempt at the redemption of the late John Trench.
The tidings of this newest venture were brought to the readers of the Glasgow Herald on the morning of 22 December, 1990.
Eighty-two years ago yesterday the murder of Glasgow spinster Marion Gilchrist set in train a series of events which shamed British justice … Now the case of Detective Trench has been taken up by Tom Walsh, who wants Slater cleared by posthumous pardon and Trench rehabilitated.
Then comes the claim. The needle slips into the well-worn groove. ‘Walsh has unearthed startling records which support the theory that Slater was the victim of an elaborate and scandalous cover-up.’ Murray Ritchie, in an article, ‘Following the Loot in the Trench Case’, explained: ‘Now Tom Walsh, retired teacher, has taken up the cause of clearing Trench … His inspiration in examining this case was Simon Jenkins, editor of The Times, who wrote recently that the iron rule of investigative journalism was to “follow the loot”.’
Suiting the action to the tag, Mr Walsh hared off for a look at Miss Gilchrist’s will, ‘which produced some absorbing theories’.
One stroke of beginner’s luck for Mr Walsh was that the onset of his research happily happened to coincide with written evidence, which had recently been made available by the Scottish Records Office, officially and unequivocally identifying A.B. ‘Following the loot’, Tom Walsh suggests that Dr Charteris stood to gain handsomely by finding favour with Miss Gilchrist. ‘The old woman, who could be disagreeable, had made a will seven months earlier. And a month before she was murdered she had added a codicil. If Charteris had been cultivating her for a bequest he had failed.’
Walsh arrived at the conclusion that the actual killer was Dr Charteris’ brother, Archibald – in accord, that is, with Jack House’s last testament. But, says Walsh, his task is not to apportion guilt, but to remove injustice. What, above all, the papers which he has unearthed show is ‘the lengths to which the Scottish legal establishment was prepared to go in suppressing any mention of Dr Charteris’.
One of the newly-released documents which he saw had been written by an aide to the Lord Advocate, who pointed out that, in his view, the mere suppression of Charteris’s name in the publication of the 1914 report would be insufficient to ensure anonymity; it would still be possible for a number of people to identify him from the context, unless that, too, were excised. The writer of this note added:
There is one question on which I confess I should have liked a little light and perhaps the Secretary for Scotland would also, if his attention were drawn to it. What led the police to make inquiries regarding Dr C. at all, why did they think it necessary to satisfy themselves that he had nothing to do with it? His arrival at the house after the murder and his explanation to Superintendent Douglas as to how he came to be there, would not have aroused any suspicions. What made the police think inquiries as to his movements necessary?
‘In other words,’ says Tom Walsh, ‘even before the suppressed paper was issued, the suppressor was expressing the gravest disquiet about the whole business.’
Pointing out that when Trench gave his evidence to the Secret Inquiry everyone contradicted him – Margaret Birrell changed her story, saying that Nellie Lambie never mentioned Charteris; Nellie said that her alleged statement about Charteris was false; police witnesses professed no knowledge of Trench’s talking about Charteris – Walsh asks: ‘How was this done? And, more important, why was this done?’
Replying to his own question, Walsh hazards: ‘The answer, of course, is that the police fell over themselves to believe in Slater’s guilt. In their hurry to pin the murder on Slater they were prepared to ignore evidence from other sources: and that was good news for the Charteris family.’
Still on the trail of the loot, Walsh noted – and accepted – that the murdered spinster had an illegitimate child. He also noted that Miss Gilchrist’s will showed her principal beneficiaries to be Marion Gilchrist Ferguson, whom he named as her granddaughter, and Maggie Galbraith Ferguson, who, according to Walsh, was Miss Gilchrist’s daughter.
‘All other beneficiaries in a trust she set up were female [writes Murray Ritchie], with the exception of a grand-nephew and, curiously, a James Johnstone in Shanghai, to whom she left a generous bequest. ‘I wonder,’ says Tom Walsh, ‘if that might be the father of Marion Gilchrist’s illegitimate child?’ Miss Gilchrist was determined to cut out the men in her family. Her will excluded men gaining from their wives’ interests and exempted the women’s bequests from debts incurred by their menfolk.
Tom Walsh expands:
Here is a rich old lady, alienated from her nearest relatives and with few visitors, the most frequent being her illegitimate daughter and her much-loved granddaughter. The Charteris family was only indirectly related to Miss Gilchrist, the mother being the widow of one of Miss Gilchrist’s brothers. Yet Dr Francis Charteris began to cultivate socially this unpleasant old lady. He visited her, and more important, he invited her to his wedding, along with her servant, Nellie, and her favourite grandchild, Marion Gilchrist Ferguson. Why, one asks? The answer must surely be to curry favour in the hope of benefiting from the old woman’s wealth.’
If so, it certainly did not work. Walsh states that the last item in Miss Gilchrist’s will stipulates that the residue of her estate shall go to Marion Gilchrist Ferguson, or, if she died before Miss Gilchrist, to Marion’s brothers and sisters. That will was signed on 28 May 1908, but on 20 November following, a codicil was added cutting out her male grandchildren in favour of her two Ferguson granddaughters. Any hope that the Charteris brothers may have cherished of gaining from her death was thus removed.
Walsh then takes a gigantic step into the surmisal business.
Getting wind of this, Francis and his brother, Archie, visited her [Miss Gilchrist] when Nellie popped out for an evening paper. When tempers were lost Archie struck her, fatally, as Francis searched for her will in another room. The neighbours arrived to investigate the noise …
Recipe: the mixture as before.
The Charteris brothers were taken to the police station, dismissed and discounted as suspects. Why, remains a mystery. But they must have had friends in high places.
Walsh goes along with the popular theory among Oscar Slater investigators that Nellie simply yielded to police pressure to change her statement and Margaret Birrell’s retraction was made to save the Charteris family from scandal.
Walsh’s final say:
Whoever was the murderer, however fascinating, is now irrelevant because all the participants are dead and the guilty cannot be brought to justice. But justice can still be sought on two other counts. Slater’s innocence has never been formally declared. His conviction was quashed on grounds of misdirection of the jury. He deserves a posthumous pardon.
The bait dangled by Murray Ritchie’s article and Tom Walsh’s punditry was smartly seized by Ted Ramsey. Letter. Glasgow Herald, 4 January 1991:
Walsh quite clearly believes that he is the first person to have ‘followed the loot’ by his reading of Miss Gilchrist’s will … on the morning after the murder detectives called on the lady’s solicitor where they examined the will. It was, however, a wasted morning for the will contained nothing that might point to the identity of the murderer.
It would seem that Walsh did not read the will too closely. Contrary to what he suggests there are four men named as beneficiaries – Robertson, Stewart, McColl [sic], and Johnston.5 The fact that one beneficiary was to enjoy the income from a small trust with the capital going to certain charities on death is not extraordinary.
Walsh ‘notes’ that Miss Gilchrist had an illegitimate daughter, an allegation common at the time of her death and without a scrap of proof to support. It was also alleged that she was, variously, a notorious fence, the chief of a gang of criminals, and the procuress of young women for wealthy men. There was also, for some reason, a rumour that she buried a cache of diamonds under a flagstone in the street as well as leaving more diamonds littering the floor of her flat.
In one of the original stories concerning the illegitimate child, Marion Ferguson, the 17-year-old daughter of Margaret Ferguson, a former maid, is identified as the daughter. This would have made Miss Gilchrist 67 at the time of the birth. A variant of this story says that Margaret Ferguson is the daughter, which would have made Miss Gilchrist about 42 at the time of the birth. Scarcely more credible.
But, if nothing else, Walsh is, Ramsey is prepared to allow, clearly a trier.
On the strength of his having been left £500 in the will he identifies John [sic] Johnston of Singapore as being the possible father of these elusive children. And yet at the same time he admits to not having the slightest idea who Johnston was. He could have been a small boy for all he knew.
Trench, admirable detective that he undoubtedly was, was never involved directly in the investigation of the Gilchrist murder. As he himself said the nearest he ever got to the scene of the crime was the landing outside the flat. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that he was an unswerving believer in the innocence of Oscar Slater. Although he would later appear to criticise the series of farces that passed for identification parades, it must not be forgotten that he was the man who set up the parades.
In Ted Ramsey’s opinion, what seems to have been more likely is that
Trench was made angry when, in the wake of the conviction of Slater, he saw lesser men being promoted ahead of him. It would seem that this was in part his motive for beginning his unofficial investigation into the murder. What this investigation quickly turned up was undoubted proof of the deliberate destruction by senior officers of part of the file and the wholesale suborning of witnesses. This was seemingly the burden of his submission to the Secretary of State. As a successful outcome for Trench would have meant the establishing of the guilt of these officers, then Trench simply had to be crushed.
Tom Walsh replied – on 9 January:
The reason for my studying the will was not only to see where the money went, but also where it did not go. Mr Ted Ramsey opines that it seems I did not read the will too closely. Closely enough. Two of the men he lists were mentioned in Murray Ritchie’s article (Johnston and McCall, the grand-nephew); the other two were her executors.
If Miss Gilchrist’s illegitimate daughter was the 17-year-old Marion Gilchrist Ferguson’s mother, Margaret Galbraith Ferguson, Miss Gilchrist would have been, according to Mr Ramsey, about 42 at the time. ‘Scarcely more credible’, he says. On the contrary it is most conceivable, as many women aged about 42 will attest.
Mr Ramsey, some time ago, produced a book, Stranger in the Hall, suggesting to his own satisfaction that the mysterious A.B. was a certain Alexander Birrell … Documentary evidence is now available for scrutiny, and was reproduced in Murray Ritchie’s article, that proves beyond all doubt that A.B. was simply a code name for Dr Francis Charteris.
The sixty-third anniversary of the quashing of the conviction of Oscar Slater by the newly-created Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal was marked by the publication, on 20 July 1991, in the Glasgow Herald, of an article by Robert Dickson, Sheriff of South Strathclyde, Dumfries and Galloway at Airdrie, ‘Murder Story That Awaits a Final Twist’. In it, Sheriff Dickson remarked: ‘Perhaps the most interesting point to come to light recently is the fact that despite his eloquent plea on behalf of Oscar Slater and his triumph of 63 years ago Craigie Aitchison did not share Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s faith in Slater’s innocence,’ and, Dickson comments,
If Oscar Slater did not do it, who did, and why were there no clues found that gave any indication of the presence of such a third party? Despite all that has been written and said about the matter, and about its principal character, the question as to whether the mysterious German Jew was responsible for the brutal murder and robbery remains a mystery.
Out of the thus drawn covert popped Ted Ramsey, for a spot of kettle calling pot. Glasgow Herald, 1 August 1991.
I am surprised that Sheriff Dickson should have made so many mistakes in his article. He would have done well to have first referred to my book on the case … There is no doubt in my mind that the person who murdered Miss Gilchrist was her maid, Helen Lambie. During her evidence at the extradition trial in New York, Gordon Miller, Slater’s American attorney, forced Helen Lambie to admit that there was only one set of keys to the Gilchrist flat. This was confirmed by police records. When Helen Lambie went to buy the paper that night she locked the door behind her and took the keys with her. Thus the whole time she was out of the flat no one could get in or out. In the commission of the murder Helen Lambie was assisted by Paddy Nugent, her married lover, a bookmaker from Motherwell. According to a friend of mine who knew Nugent all his life, the description of the man seen by Rowena Adams at the door to the Gilchrist close shortly before Helen Lambie left the house fitted Nugent.
I have also a copy of an anonymous letter written by someone claiming to be a maid in a house in West Princes Street and a friend of Helen Lambie. This girl claims that Nugent was in the Gilchrist flat that evening at 6.30. I suspect that the author of this letter was the girl who was known to have spent most of the afternoon with Helen Lambie in the Gilchrist flat just before the murder. Who killed Miss Gilchrist should never have been a mystery to anyone who approached the case with an open mind. Helen Lambie only got away with it, in my opinion, simply because being a maid she was generally accepted to be stupid. After hours of the most detailed examination in the witness-box at the hearing in New York, she still had her wits about her sufficiently to stop Gordon Miller dead in his tracks. Miller never had any doubt about the fact that Helen Lambie was guilty nor that she was very clever.
Whence Mr Ramsey derives his ‘facts’ is a puzzlement. All that can be said is that the greater part of them do not square with those presented by the majority of students of the case, and my own very extended research has failed to find any confirmation as to their correctness.
Replying to a swift interlocutory from the pen of Lewis MacDonald – published in the Glasgow Herald of 14 August 1991 – Ramsey writes:
Trench says that while he went alone to interview Margaret Gilchrist [he means Birrell], Pyper and Douglas, the two senior officers in the case, were away interviewing A.B. But all he appeared to have known with certainty was that the two officers went by taxi to A.B.’s house. Dr Frank Charteris was at that time living at 400 Great Western Road. His widowed mother and solicitor brother were living nearby in Queen Margaret Crescent. It is difficult to see, then, how the two senior officers could justify the expense of a taxi to visit a suspect who lived on a main road well serviced with tram cars and about fifteen minutes’ walk away.
Ramsey now descends into realms where it is impossible to follow him: ‘Superintendent Douglas told the secret inquiry that, as usual in murder cases, all of Miss Gilchrist’s male relatives were interviewed.’ So far, so good. But then we are told:
Alexander Birrell, Margaret’s brother, had recently married and had bought himself a house just outside Prestwick. As he seems to have been the only relative living out of town then he would seem to be the likeliest candidate for a visit by taxi. Certainly the police had every reason to question him for a week before her death, Alexander had visited his aunt to try and borrow money. According to Helen Lambie this meeting ended in a row. Helen Lambie knew both Charteris and Alexander and in turn she pointed the finger of suspicion at both men.
This brought a new war correspondent, Thomas Toughill, hastening into the bloodied field.
Herald. October 1st, 1991: Toughill expressed amazement that Mr Ramsey should be ignoring one of the basic facts of the Slater case; to wit, that Dr Francis Charteris was A.B. It should always be remembered that, as Toughill is careful to distinguish, A.B. is not synonymous with the stranger in the hall. Neither is the stranger in the hall necessarily synonymous with the murderer of Miss Gilchrist. They are three separate entities.
Nor was Toughill at all happy about the slur which he considered to have been cast on Trench, whom he regarded as a man of the highest integrity, who sincerely believed that Slater had been wrongfully convicted. He thought the suggestion that Trench had brought about the Inquiry simply because some of his colleagues had been promoted above him preposterous.
Stung, as though by an ichneumon, Ramsey reacted angrily, hazarding in the Herald of 9 October:
I would guess that the reason why Mr Toughill dislikes my book is that it destroys many of the myths in which he so obviously believes. Toughill accuses me of ignoring one of the basic facts in the Slater case, Dr Charteris. This, of course, is nonsense, for Charteris can in no way be described as being a basic fact unless it is being suggested that he was the murderer. As Toughill admits he is making no such claim, then the doctor’s rôle in the affair is reduced to that of being one of the unfortunates upon whom suspicion fell for a brief moment. As I say in my book, Charteris was at that time nothing more than a red herring, and it would seem that he is still playing that unwanted rôle today.
One of the principal myths still surrounding the case is that of John Trench selflessly sacrificing his career as a police officer in an attempt to prove Slater’s innocence. In truth this claim, widely believed, has even less going for it than the claim that Charteris was the stranger in the hall. We now know that, with one exception apart from Trench, all the witnesses who appeared before the 1914 inquiry were lying. The mystery, then, has to be why Trench ever imagined that they would tell the truth. Trench made a mess of his case by moving before he had collected all the evidence and had it tied up tightly. It is this that suggests to me that he was acting out of personal anger.
The mystery for me, is how Ted Ramsey came to reach the bizarre conclusions in which, with such obvious sincerity, he has come to believe.
1 The Alexander Birrel (of Chapter 18, page 250) has now acquired an additional terminal ‘L’.
2 He was not of course Sir William then. He was knighted in 1927, when he was 66 years old, for his services to art.
3 The same mistake, indeed, as Trench made in his 1914 pre-Inquiry statement.
4 Mr Forbes’ pen, or word processor, appears to have slipped a ratchet here, unless it was the interviewee’s memory that slipped, for Mr Ramsey’s A.B. was Alexander Birrell – not Austin Birrell.
5 The beneficiary referred to is actually James Johnston of Shanghai. Walsh calls him James Johnstone of Shanghai. Ramsey refers to him as John Johnston of Singapore.