It was Bruce McKain, Law Correspondent of the Glasgow Herald, who broke the news therein, on 7 October 1992, that Thomas Toughill, ‘a former history teacher and Hong Kong policeman has written a book, confidently entitled Oscar Slater: The Mystery Solved, revealing in print for the first time the name of the man the author is convinced is the real killer’.
That man was Wingate Birrell.
What, in a nutshell, were Thomas Toughill’s contentions and conclusions?
In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, conspiracy theories have become the currency of the self-styled mystery-solvers at what Frederic Lindsay,1 with every justification, calls ‘this disillusioned end of the century’. And Toughill alleges that Slater was the victim, not of a simple miscarriage of justice, but of a conspiracy which extended to the topmost levels of the Scottish legal establishment. He firmly believes that early on in the history of the case it was agreed to settle the blame on Oscar Slater for the murder which had been committed by Wingate Birrell, and in which crime the Charteris brothers were crucially involved. He subscribes to the well-whiskered theory that the murder came about as the ultimate result of a family squabble over Miss Gilchrist’s will. He contends that, months before her death, the old lady had determined to bequeath the bulk of her estate to her illegitimate daughter.2 Prior to this, the heir presumptive had been Mrs Mary Greer Gilchrist or McCall, the daughter of Mrs Elizabeth Charteris by her first marriage to Miss Gilchrist’s brother, James Gilchrist. Hearing of this change of will, the Charteris family were up in arms. They determined to seize the offensive document, either to destroy or challenge it. Cannily anticipating such a reaction, Miss Gilchrist virtually barricaded herself in her flat, and went to considerable pains to keep unwanted visitors out.
Toughill tells us that the old lady was known to be dying of kidney disease, which meant that time was of the essence, and, against the clock, entrance had somehow to be effected to Fort Gilchrist. I am not aware of any evidence that Miss Gilchrist’s kidneys were in a condition that was putting her life at risk, let alone threatening a close-looming terminal illness. As we have already seen, the post-mortem report stated merely that both kidneys were granular from chronic kidney infection, but that she was, overall, in very good health for a woman of her years.
We are, then, presented by Mr Toughill with the following scenario: the Charteris brothers – Francis the doctor and Archibald the lawyer – decide to exploit Miss Gilchrist’s mentally unbalanced nephew, Wingate Birrell, in a bid to lay hands on the old lady’s will.
As it happens, I had at one time myself harboured very serious suspicions about Wingate Birrell and, consequently, taken a very close-focus look to see what I could discover about this hitherto somewhat shadowy figure.
Wingate Birrell was the sixth child and fifth son of Walter and Janet Gilchrist or Birrell, born at 9 pm on Monday, 28 September 1868, at Rockbank House, Helensburgh. In 1892, the 24-year-old Wingate was in business, with a partner – J F Aitken, of 3 Hayburn Crescent, Partick – trading as Messrs Aitken & Birrell, general agents, at 93 Hope Street, Glasgow, and was probably living at home with his parents, his 29-year-old brother, George Gilchrist Birrell, and his 28-year-old sister, Margaret Dawson Birrell, at Middlefield, Partickhill, Glasgow. Their elder brother, James Aitken Birrell, aged 36, long fled the parental nest and married, was living with his wife elsewhere in Glasgow.
By 1893, the firm of Aitken & Birrell had vanished from the Glasgow Post Office Directory, never to reappear. The next sure point I was able to establish was Wingate’s enlistment in the 10th Hussars, on 17 June 1895, at Glasgow. His regimental number was 4011. He is described in his military record as: Height: 5 ft 8½ in. Complexion: Fresh. Hair: Brown. Eyes: Grey. Scar upper lip. Indistinct tattoo mark on left forearm. Trade: Clerk. His age is given as 26½.
Three years later, he was posted as a deserter, having disappeared from Canterbury on 31 December, 1898. It was after this desertion, some time between 1899 and 1909, that, calling himself, for what are now obvious reasons, William Gilchrist, he served in the merchant navy. My researches have for the first time disclosed that it was on 19 January 1909 that he was admitted to the Dreadnought Seaman’s Hospital, Greenwich. His private address at the time of his admission was given as 31 Albert Road, North Woolwich, and his occupation as hawker and seaman. The occupant of No. 31 is listed in a contemporary Kelly’s Directory as George Sayers, builder. The likelihood is that the place was a rooming-house.
Since Wingate is described as a ‘hawker and seaman’, we may reasonably suppose that he had not been functioning solely as a seaman for quite a while. A hawker’s life, travelling from door to door in all weathers, offering, often unwanted, goods for sale, is a hard enough life for anyone. For a man with tuberculosis draining away his vitality it must have been appalling. He had never married, so now, in his hour of absolute need, there was no wife to look after him, no in-laws to stand by him. His situation would be dire. Did he somehow contrive to scrape the shillings together to buy himself a someway decent second-hand suit and overcoat? Did he make the supreme effort to clean and tidy himself up to the old respectability? Did he, by heaven alone knows what shifts and devices, raise the money for a third-class one-way ticket to Glasgow? Did he set off, a rare ray of hope illumining the dark places of his soul, to see his well-heeled Aunt Marion and beg her for a little help in this his truly bleakest moment?
Suppose, just suppose, that he did manage to summon up from his rapidly waning health the strength to do all these things. It would not be the first time a Birrell had come cap-in-hand, pride-in-pocket, to Aunt Marion seeking help, and been flea-in-ear despatched3. Suppose that he knocked at Aunt Marion’s door, and that, flesh of her flesh, she let him in. Suppose that he made his request – humbly, desperately – for a little late charity, and suppose that he received the same sort of response as Mary Birrell, his sister-in-law, had received. Or, indeed, rougher, as befitted a male ‘scrounger’.
Miss Gilchrist was said to have a nasty tongue on her. Perhaps she used it once too often. It may be that, goaded, his poverty mocked, his terrible ill-health set at a contemptuous, uncaring discount, Wingate, beside himself, hit out at Aunt Marion. She fell. Cracked her skull against the sharp edge of the coal-scuttle. Blood. Everywhere. Panic. Horrified by what he had done, frantic, afraid of the consequences, Wingate seized a chair, began to beat … and beat … and beat … at the supine figure on the hearth-rug. Seeing her there, now become a grotesquely transformed, injured, blood-covered object, he hit, and hit, and hit again, in the sort of paroxysmal terror one has of a half-mangled, half-alive creature coming at one, the overwhelming need to prevent that at all costs, as, barefoot, one hammers and hammers at a scuttling cockroach with the heel of a shoe, long after reason tells you that it is quite, quite dead. Then, somehow, Wingate manages to pull himself together, begins a search for money in the bedroom, is disturbed by the advent of Lambie and Adams, picks up a diamond crescent brooch en passant, so as not to depart this disaster totally empty-handed, and, made rigid and ultra-calm by the sheer fear of necessity, disciplines his ravaged body and ragged nerves to an automatory casual exit through the lobby, past the stuffed pink flamingo that stands sentinel in the hall, past the transfixed Lambie and Adams. The chair had shielded him from the ambuscades of spurting blood and soft flying pellets of brain tissue. That very night he takes a train back to London and a shabby room in Woolwich.
Such is the Wingate scenario. I did not believe in it for one minute. I am now in a position to dismiss it absolutely, for the following documentation has come to light:
Copying Book No. 45. Page 33. Typewritten.
Copy of telegram received from the London Metropolitan Police.
Office stamp.
Glasgow, Dec 31, 08.
Limehouse, 36/1/24. Received 1-49 p.m.
To Chief Supt. City Police, Glasgow.
Re. your letter and telegram re. Gilchrist: it has been ascertained that William Gilchrist alias Birrell was at home at North Woolwich on night of 21st inst.
Supt. Cameron, Limehouse, London.
John Ord, Supt.
This telegram refers to Wingate Birrell. He died, six weeks later, on Thursday, 4 March 1909, of pulmonary tuberculosis – at that time a very common disease among seamen – certified by A S Burgess, MRCS, and the informant of his death being J W Garnier, Steward at the Seaman’s Hospital.
I have been told that Wingate was at one time in trouble with the police – allegedly for housebreaking. If that is so, it would mean that after his desertion from the Army the general trend of Wingate’s progress was downhill. He may even have landed up for a time in prison. But that does not make him a murderer.
My friend, the late Andrew Melbourne, who had spent many decades studying the Slater case, sent me a copy of a letter which he had received from a Mr Alex Thomson, of 38 Preston Street, Glasgow. It was dated 15 July 1961.
I am 76 years old and remember relatives of old Miss Gilchrist. I lived, in those days far-away, with my father and mother, plus two brothers who are now dead, in Woodlands Road. My memory serves me reasonably. It was known to some that Mr Slater didn’t do the murder of the old spinster, but it was a relative W. Birrell, who done the awful murder. William [sic] Birrell was a bad lot and was convicted for shopbreaking at least once, around the time of 1905, in Glasgow. He drank heavily and was barred from Miss Gilchrist’s house by her. In the twenties I wrote to Mr Conan Doyle and got no answer to my letter. Oscar Slater was innocent, that I’m sure of. W. Birrell I am sure had something to do with her death. Birrell had a slight squint. My father drank with him in Harvey’s public-house and some of the clubs of the day in Glasgow.
Melbourne told me:
When I pressed the old fellow for more concrete information as to his allegations and the source of these important revelations, he told me that he was reared in the Woodside district of Glasgow [which embraces West Princes Street] and that his own father knew Miss Gilchrist and most of her Glasgow relations, and that it was well known that Miss Gilchrist had discouraged the male members of the family from visiting her, and that the reason for this bar was that the Birrell males were constantly tapping Miss Gilchrist for money. I, personally, when interviewing Mr Thomson, felt he was genuine and very sincere.
It is tempting, especially with suspicion at least buttressed by the anonymous letters seen by Toughill and myself in official files opened up in recent years, to go nap on Wingate Birrell as the murderer. Toughill does. I do not.
Toughill suggests that Wingate, so that he might when the necessary time came be smuggled into Aunt Marion’s flat, wooed Nellie Lambie, promising her marriage, and an easeful, as well as a happy, ever after. He and the Charteris brothers then set a watch on No. 49 West Princes Street. They also poisoned Miss Gilchrist’s watchdog. On the evening of the murder Wingate was in the flat with Lambie’s innocent connivance. After she had gone off to get an evening paper, he let Dr Charteris in. Then we are back to the old, old story … the search for the will. Charteris began to hunt for it in the bedroom. Suddenly, something went wrong. There was a fierce flare-up between Wingate and his aunt. He lost his temper and battered her to death, then fled in panic, escaping via the kitchen window and climbing down the drain-pipe at the back of the house.
Dr Charteris was still rummaging in the bedroom when Adams and Lambie arrived on the scene. He walked calmly past them and hurtled down the stairs. Archibald Charteris was waiting in the street, and the pair ran off to Francis’ nearby home, where Wingate presently joined them. Having heard his account of what had happened, the Charteris brothers told him that he would have to get out of Glasgow. Wingate rushed off to Kelvinbridge subway station, where his erratic and panicky behaviour drew the attention of Miss Annie Armour, the booking clerk at the turnstile. Dr Charteris returned to Miss Gilchrist’s flat. He was exercised that Lambie’s recognition of him should not be put on record by the police. He was also anxious to supply senior police officers with an account of what had really taken place, coupled, perhaps, with a timely reminder of this family’s personal friendship with Alexander Ure.
So, within hours of the murder, the upper echelons of the Glasgow detective force knew the identity of the murderer, exactly how the murder had come about, and that two influential Glasgow families – the Charterises and the Birrells – were guiltily involved, although, of course, such junior officers as Trench then was would not have been informed of the true situation.
It was, says Toughill, in the due process of their inquiries into Lambie’s background that Oscar Slater first came to the attention of the officers investigating the killing of Marion Gilchrist. Those inquiries led them to Hugh Cameron, who, calling himself Patrick Nugent, was paying assiduous court to Helen Lambie. He was found to be in possession of a pawn-ticket for a diamond brooch. This, he quickly explained, was the property of a German Jew named Oscar Slater, a professional gambler, who was on the verge of departing for America. Slater proved to have a minor criminal record and was known to the police as a man suspected of living off the proceeds of prostitution. In fact, his flat was currently under active surveillance for evidence of its being used as a brothel.4 The watch was now stepped up and Cameron was told that he must inform the police the moment that he knew when Slater was going to leave the country.
Toughill states that a physical resemblance between Slater and the Charteris brothers was noted by senior police officers and the Procurator-fiscal quite early on. I must frankly confess that my eye cannot be as good as theirs. I fail to see the resemblance. Particularly registered, Toughill points out, was the curious dip at the bridge of the nose which all three shared. This clue, he adds, may well have been provided by Lambie, who, according to him, knew Slater by sight. Something, incidentally, that she expressly denied – and something for which I have failed to find any confirmatory evidence.
If the authorities had taken a deliberate decision to set Slater up as the murderer, why, it may be wondered, was he not arrested there and then? Toughill provides the simple answer: the authorities wanted Slater to get away to America. What is more, they did not want the extradition proceedings to succeed. They would normally have feigned outrage, made great show of their dissatisfaction at the lack of co-operation by the United States authorities, but the resultant impasse would in reality have suited them extremely well. Wingate Birrell, Doctor Charteris and Lawyer Charteris would be well clear of danger of prosecution. Slater would have come to no harm, and the Gilchrist murder would, in the fullness of time, have been written off as an attempted burglary that went tragically wrong. It even seems possible, Toughill thinks, to detect the hand of Archibald Charteris, expert on international law, collector of comic anecdotes,5 in this well-woven web.
It was Slater himself who scuppered the master-plan by, most unexpectedly, electing to return to Scotland to clear his muddied name. And the consequence was: that what had started out merely as an attempt to pervert the course of justice escalated to an official conspiracy to the judicial murder of Oscar Slater.
Toughill confides: in the moment of her crisis, Mrs Elizabeth Charteris turned to her trusted family friend, Ure, the Solicitor-General and Lord-Advocate-to-be, to protect her sons, Frank and Archie. Nor did he let her down. It was his influence which induced the Procurator-fiscal, James Hart, as well as William Douglas, John Ord, and other top-brass CID officers of Glasgow, to pursue Slater; to make the Jewish pimp the scapegoat. To be fair to them, though, it was not just friends that Ure, Hart, Douglas and Ord were shielding; like good Scots, they were intent upon preserving the order and well-being of the Scottish Establishment. It did not bear thinking of that the sons of a professor and nephews of a leading light of the Church of Scotland should even be involved in so sordid a case, never mind being actually put on trial for murder.
Professor Glaister was surely another friend to whom the Charterises could have turned. And did he not give it as his expert medical opinion that Slater’s little tin-tack hammer could have wrought such savage lethal havoc? Did he not also choose to dismiss the auger, with its adherent cargo of iron-grey strands of what appeared to be the victim’s hair?
It is likely, Toughill believes, that Ure and Hart were hoping for a Not Proven verdict from the Slater jury, but Ure, for the prosecution, went too hard. Clearly, Lord Pentland was not happy with the death sentence, and Lord Guthrie, consulted, thought that life imprisonment would more suitably meet the case. But Pentland’s deputy, Dodds, was strong for the prescribed penalty to be carried out. It was the day before making his final decision to reprieve that Pentland received an anonymous letter from ‘an unknown lady’, who felt herself under compulsion by ‘divine command’ to tell to him the truth.
Toughill’s theoretical solution founds heavily upon two anonymous letters – never the safest of foundations. Both were probably from the same hand, although that is not, nor claimed to be, certain. Toughill concludes only that the writing of both was in a female hand. Both were addressed to the Secretary for Scotland, and received while Slater lay under sentence of death in Duke Street Prison. One of them is no more than a surviving fragment of the original. The second, however, is an intact, full-length letter. The two of them had, for 80 years, remained hidden from prying eyes in the fastness of the closed official files, but in January 1989, File HH16/109 was released for public inspection, and herein Thomas Toughill made what he considered to be the grand find.
Now I, too, had examined the letters which so excited Toughill, but reached a somewhat different conclusion. I think it best to begin by providing the reader with the full texts of the documents, so that he or she may, in due season, make his or her own value judgment.
The fragment of the letter received at the office of the Secretary for Scotland on 18 May 1909, reads:
… the letter that was sent to Duke Street – was to put off scent of real Murderer, who was a relation of Miss Gilchrist and left Glasgow between 21 and 23rd of Dec – He also was a Member of Ally Sloper and Moter Club – He often said he would do for the ‘Aunty’ yet. Hugh Cameron courted Nelly Lambie – as a single man, to get information. He is (Nugent seen with her aft …
Someone, clearly an official, has written at the top of the fragment a remark which would seem to relate to the content of the Duke Street letter referred to in the said fragment: ‘ … Glasgow says “Adams did Murder and his sisters screamed … (indecipherable) No. No.” ’
James Miller Dodds, Under Secretary for Scotland, has written on the cover of the file containing this fragment: ‘The L[ord] A[dvocate] informs me that these suggestions were familiar to the prosecution and the defence, and were regarded as without foundation.’
The second anonymous letter contained a great deal of material which claimed to shed a new and true light on the murder.
West Princes Street,
Glasgow
May 20, 1909
To the Secretary for Scotland
My Noble Lord!
I am so frightened you are going to hang Oscar Slater – He never committed the Murder – Nelly Lambie was engaged to Birrell, Miss Gilchrist’s Nephew – he was a very wild chap – and none of his people would have anything to do with him as he was always borrowing money from them & kicking up rows – But Nelly said she did not care as she would be far grander than anybody in the Street some day – her Mistress was a bad woman – and had two weans – when she was young so she walked out with Cameron the Bookie – who said he was Nugent – to hear all about Birrell on the night of the Murder she had a man in the kitchen – at 6.30 when she went out or was expecting anyone she put a piece of coal between the doorstep & door, then a slight push opened it. She told all the servants to do that – although we never did – she said the old Lady once found a bit of coal in the lobby & she said it fell of the shovel – she is fly well after the Murder the man went over the Kitchen window crossed the Street into the Crescent saw the crowd around the close – and walked away – he left that night for London sold the brooch to a Dealer in Little College St and left for New Zealand before anyone knew, after Slater is hanged Nelly Lambie is going to join him – Cameron and Nelly – know who did the Murder – Nelly never knew Slater – she had heard of him – only – as the Toff – who gambled and kept a lovely Girl for his self. The Gilchrists gave out in March that Birrell had died in London, big lie – lift coffen & see – they say. Disgusted with old woman – [indecipherable] all the servants in the street were warned by their masters not to tell the police anything or the world would say they were harlots, & Slater deserved to be hanged – Cameron is afraid to return the Boys are going to give him a killing [kicking?] I cried when my Mistress said it was a pity for Slater’s old folks at Germany. I don’t know Slater even by sight but I know Cameron and Lambie – don’t tell anyone I told you (God told me to tell you) or I will get notice to leave my place. Please forgive me It is all true
So far as the alleged plot on high to inculpate Slater is concerned, Toughill does not seem able to supply any convincing reason as to why these lofty officials – the Lord Advocate of Scotland, the Procurator-fiscal of Lanarkshire, senior police officers of Glasgow and eminent pathologists – should expose themselves to the possibility of total professional ruin just to protect the Charterises and the Birrells from the consequences of their own avarice and folly. Furthermore, the image of them which he purveys as two ‘distinguished’ Glasgow families is overblown. To be sure, the Charterises were well settled in the ranks of the solid middle class, but the Birrells were in no wise a well-connected or influential clan. They were, to be truthful, thoroughly down-at-heel by 1908. The brothers James and George, living distinctly threadbare lives, could by no stretch of charitable imagination be regarded as constituents of one of Glasgow’s more illustrious houses.
In the world of conspiracy, the miniaturisation enthusiasts’ slogan, ‘small is beautiful’, sings a very true note. Mr Ure’s conspiracy, as punted by Toughill, would plainly have involved just too many people in too many spheres for the comfort, not to say the safety, of the individual conspirators. It is central to Toughill’s thesis that the powerful Alexander Ure should be prime mover in the plot. But where is the proof of motivation? Why should he have laid his professional life, his whole peaking career, on the line for the albeit respectable Charterises and the far from illustrious Birrells?
Ted Ramsey was not going to stand by mute. He had poked his head above the parapet very smartly after Bruce McKain’s article extolling Toughill’s enterprise appeared. His response in the Herald6 (14 October 1992) to the preliminary trumpeting of Toughill’s achievement had been, as one would expect, forthright – ‘Thomas Toughill will have to come up with some better evidence if he wants to convince the public that he has solved the mystery of the murder of Marion Gilchrist.’ He then takes aim and snipes at a couple of Toughill’s reported points: ‘Toughill claims that Miss Gilchrist was suffering from chronic kidney failure … I find this remarkable … Glaister made the specific point that the internal organs were all healthy and functioning normally.’ Mr Ramsey also remarks that it ‘would be interesting to know on what ground Toughill bases his claim that the Crown Office quite deliberately attempted to fail in the extradition of Slater from America’.
A fortnight later, ignoring the second question, Toughill replied in the Herald (28 October 1992): ‘I do suggest in my book that Miss Gilchrist was dying from kidney failure and quote as evidence the post-mortem report.’ But that report says that, other than the presence of small tumours in the womb and its appendages, all the organs of Miss Gilchrist’s body were healthy. Both kidneys were described as being ‘granular from chronic kidney affection,’ but there was no expressed, or indeed justifiable, view that she had been menaced by any imminent life-threatening kidney failure. Granulated contracted kidney, otherwise nephrosclerosis, is a frequently encountered senile change. It is of little importance clinically or pathologically, as sufficient kidney tissue remains unaffected and kidney function is not seriously impaired. It most certainly does not amount to a death sentence.
Relying upon the anonymous letter’s assertion of Miss Gilchrist’s having delivered forth two illegitimate weans, Toughill cites, first, Maggie Galbraith, and secondly – signposting this with large-letter warnings of ‘Speculation Only’ – Wingate Birrell, as her offside offspring. And this becomes one of his pivotal concepts.
Toughill had not, apparently, yet learned that one should always exercise a benign caution when any discussion arises relative to the quantum of a lady’s years. His polite mistake was to take a woman’s word as to her age! Unfortunately, misled by Maggie Galbraith’s own statement as to her quotient of years he selected the wrong Galbraith. Failing to widen his search sufficiently, he could find recorded only, for the year 1863, the birth, on Barra, on 11 February of a child – christened not Margaret but Mary – whose parents’ christian names, John and Isabella, were, confoundingly, the same as those of the parents of Maggie Galbraith. He should, however, have held his hand when he saw that this John Galbraith was not a ‘shoemaker master’, as Maggie described her father on her marriage certificate, but a crofter. Nonetheless, Toughill, while admitting his failure to find available documentary evidence to support his contention that Miss Gilchrist was Maggie Galbraith’s mother, finds, notwithstanding, strong reasons for crediting the story. Barra, isolated and remote, strikes him as providing an ideal locus for a pregnant Victorian spinster’s discreet confinement and parturition. And a poor crofter could surely have been, without too much difficulty, induced by the great universal persuader – money – to have accepted the infant as his own.
Wingate Birrell’s birth certificate seems deceptively all in order. It shows Walter Birrell, ship-broker, and Janet Gilchrist or Birrell as his parents. Toughill concedes that a major objection to the illegitimacy theory is that Walter Birrell duly signed Wingate’s birth certificate. Even so, he thinks that Walter, who appears to have been on terms of close and sympathetic affection with his wife’s family, might well have felt sorry for his sister-in-law Marion’s plight if once again she had become an unmarried mother. Toughill sharply notes that, whereas the other three Birrell children were all born in Glasgow, the circumstance that Wingate was born in Helensburgh might be significant. Toughill writes of Helensburgh that it was ‘a small resort town on the banks of the Clyde about fifteen miles to the west of the city. Did Marion Gilchrist go there to have her second child, away from prying eyes and wagging tongues?’ It seems to me very wrong, smacking indeed of the sort of wrong about which he complains in the case of Oscar Slater, that Toughill should cast this veridically unsupported slur upon the good name and pious memory of a God-fearing, completely respectable spinster lady.
It is Toughill’s serious belief that it was after reading the second, that is to say the full-length and circumstantially detailed-seeming, anonymous letter, that Lord Pentland could not have permitted Slater’s execution to take place. It is my view that the Secretary for Scotland would be unlikely to feel obliged to interfere with the law’s taking its course upon the basis of a last-minute letter containing immediately unverifiable material written by a correspondent who declines to reveal his or her identity. In practically every major legal cause letters of varying tone, from sheer crankiness to alarmingly persuasive plausibility, come toppling in to the authorities, and the general, unwritten, rule has self-protectively evolved to discount any documents to which the sender refuses, or omits, to append his or her authentic, or authenticating, signature.
In this case, viewing the internal evidence, it has been thought that the anonymous correspondent may have been one of the female servants employed in West Princes Street or its vicinity. Elizabeth McIntosh, the 19-year-old maid who worked for Dr John Adams at No. 1 Queen’s Crescent, and who had as it happens spent part of the afternoon of the day of the murder in Miss Gilchrist’s flat with her close friend Nellie Lambie, has been put forward as the possible author of the letter, or rather letters, for it is thought that both communications were penned by the same person. Looking at them, Toughill asks, with a very proper caution, if it is all true or if, indeed, any of it is true. He confesses to being impressed by the tone and detail of the letters, and by the sincerity of the writer – God told her to write. More than that, she becomes, with Trench, the dedicatee of his book: ‘ … and to an anonymous lady who obeyed God’s commands’.
It is from these letters that Toughill derives the story of Hugh Cameron, the Moudie, setting out, posing as a single man and using the name Patrick Nugent, to court Lambie, so as to hear all about Birrell.
Frankly, this does not seem to me to hold water. We know for a fact that Nellie had been introduced to the real Nugent at a dance at Craigneuk way back at the end of 1907 or beginning of 1908, by a man named Charles Findlay. They had subsequently met on a great many occasions, even contemplating marriage at one time. It is unlikely that this man was Cameron. Incidentally, both Lambie and Cameron stoutly denied in their respective precognitions that they had known each other prior to the murder. And, the anonymous letter apart, there is no reason to doubt this. Toughill’s response to their denial is of the Mandy Rice-Davies brand – ‘Well, they would, wouldn’t they?’ In his scenario the Moudie becomes an exceedingly busy character. He is impersonating Nugent. He is courting Lambie. He is trying to sell Slater’s pawn-ticket. He is working for the police.
But it is what the anonymous letters have to say regarding Wingate Birrell that is supremely important. Having made that gentleman’s more intimate acquaintance for the first time in these letters, Toughill, accepting, it is to be presumed, the writer’s evidentially unsupported testimony that Wingate, whom we did already know to be a wild character and not on good terms with his family, was a member of the Sloper and Motor Clubs, and engaged to Nellie Lambie, apparently accepts him as the killer of Aunt Marion. Interpreting somewhat widely the adjective ‘wild’, Toughill seems to graft on to Wingate the characteristics previously ascribed to the fictitious Austin Birrell – violent, epileptic, mentally unbalanced, not quite right in the head – without the smallest piece of properly attested evidence. He uncritically accepts, or at any rate does not question, the letter-writer’s claim that Wingate left for London later on the night of 21 December; that he sold Miss Gilchrist’s diamond crescent brooch to a dealer in Little College Street, Westminster, (incidentally, was there a jewellery dealer’s premises in Little College Street in December 1908? Did Toughill check?); and that he subsequently left for New Zealand.
Toughill ‘hears’ that Wingate’s death is not what it seems. A false death certificate has been issued. Noting that the certificate bears two names for the deceased – Wingate Birrell and William Gilchrist – Toughill asks why would a man use his mother’s name? Did he find it necessary because he could not use the name of his real father? One is left to suppose that the Dreadnought Seaman’s Hospital, where he was said to have died of tuberculosis on 4 March 1909, was also in on Alexander Ure’s plot.
And, taking on board the anonymous writer’s assertion that the official story of Wingate’s demise was a ‘big lie’, Toughill indicates that he would certainly wish to ‘lift the coffin and see’ … Would it be empty? Would it contain some other person’s body? Or, if it really was Wingate’s corpse, would it display the suicide’s broken neck or strategic bullet hole? Or would it, perhaps, contain tell-tale traces of poison? Then he would not have died of TB. And if not … Once again, Toughill stands by the ever-open door of unlimited speculation.
One such speculation gangs a-gley. Thinking to catch the Glasgow force out in dubious conduct, Toughill observes that Ord stated in a precognition dated 2 March 1909, that the manner in which Miss Gilchrist was killed suggested that the murder had been committed by someone ‘acquainted with deeds of violence in America’, rather than by a Scotsman, and that this information had led the police to inquire about foreigners in the city. Comments Toughill:
One is surely justified in suspecting that Ord invented these details and included them in order to point the finger of accusation towards a foreigner like Slater, who had spent time in America…. It need hardly be said that none of this is supported by contemporary evidence.
Oh, but it is! The reader will recall the letter received from the sea-captain, J Lumsdane.7 And how does the world and his wife’s favourite suspect, Dr Francis Charteris, come out of all this? Toughill definitely exonerates him, so far as the wielding of the bludgeon or being the lethal ‘chairman’: that is, he unequivocally did not kill Miss Gilchrist. But, in Toughill’s book, he was present when the bludgeoning was done. And he was the man who walked past Lambie and Adams.
Here, Toughill echoes the view taken by Peter Costello, who, in his book, The Real World of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1991,8 devoted a couple of chapters to ‘The Case of Oscar Slater’ and ‘Why Miss Gilchrist Died’. Costello subscribed to the ‘Dr Charteris was the man in the hall’ school of thought. He also accepted the somewhat threadbare motive of the unpopular Gilchrist will. He embraced, too, the now well-exploded fallacy of the illegitimate daughter, and made the mistake of saying that the residue of Miss Gilchrist’s £12,259 1s 4d estate went to Mrs Galbraith or Ferguson, instead of to her daughters.9
Toughill claims that Margaret Dawson Birrell was ‘the woman who orchestrated the accusation against Dr Charteris’ (that is, of course, if one accepts Trench’s story), and he reminds us that she was the sister of the man named in the anonymous letter as the murderer. Interestingly, Toughill’s apparent discovery that Margaret Birrell made not one but two statements to Trench or his supporters is completely at variance with the evidence given by Trench himself.
Another argument advanced by Toughill is that although Charteris may have been tall and thin as a young man, whereas Slater was unquestionably stocky, ‘facially the two men had a general likeness. The shape of Charteris’ nose is particularly important’. Toughill is thoroughly satisfied – displays photographs to prove it – that both Francis and Archibald Charteris bore a strong resemblance to Slater. I absolutely dispute it. Obviously, resemblance must, like beauty, lie in the eye of the beholder. Everyone who ever beheld Slater observed that he looked Jewish and looked foreign. The Charterises certainly did not.
Most puzzling is Toughill’s declaration that what lay behind the accusations against Francis Charteris was ‘the hatred which the Birrells felt towards the Charteris family’. I have discovered no hint of there being any such animosity between the two houses. Toughill, who has frequent resort to Shakespeare, seems to have elected to cast the twain as the Montagues and Capulets of Glasgow.
It will be recalled that Charteris, in his interview with Mowat Phillips in 1961 – more than half a century after the murder – had given the same explanation as to how he had learned of the murder as he had given to Superintendent Douglas at the time, namely, that the police had contacted Mrs Charteris’ lawyer in the mistaken belief that he was Miss Gilchrist’s lawyer. And the lawyer, in turn, had telephoned Dr Charteris with the bad news. Toughill repeats the mistake perpetuated by Costello – that Charteris had said that it was the police themselves who had got in touch with him. Triumphantly, he cites this apparent change of story as a palmary example of a man condemning himself out of his own mouth. He maintains that in his relating of a story which does not stand up to the smallest scrutiny, Charteris, at one fell swoop, swept away any faint doubts which might have remained that he was the stranger in the hall, the man who walked past Lambie and Adams on the night of the murder. And Toughill espies confirmation of his suspicions in the circumstance that the police themselves do not corroborate having asked the doctor to break the news of Miss Gilchrist’s murder to his mother. On the contrary, he points out, Superintendent Douglas actually quotes Charteris’ statement that he came to Miss Gilchrist’s house because he had been informed of her death by a lawyer.10
Precisely.
I think that Mr Toughill and Mr Costello must both have suffered a lapsus oculi when reading – as I trust they did – Mowat Phillips’ account of his interview with Professor Charteris in the Scottish Daily Mail of 5 October1961.11
An interesting item which I had not seen recorded elsewhere appears in Costello’s book. The prison chaplain at Peterhead during part of the time that Slater was there was John Lamond, friend, and later biographer, of Conan Doyle. He heard Slater’s insistent claims to innocence without a qualm. Never for a moment did it occur to him that Slater might be innocent.
1 Reviewing Toughill’s book in Scotland on Sunday, 5 December 1993.
2 Actually, it was not to Mrs Maggie Galbraith or Ferguson (whom Toughill identifies as Miss Gilchrist’s illegitimate daughter) who was named as Miss Gilchrist’s main beneficiary. Her residual fortune was, as we have already recorded, willed to Mrs Ferguson’s daughters, Marion and Margaret.
3 Remember the approach made by Mrs Mary Nimmo or Birrell in 1901, and its abortive result, p. 69.
4 Which it was not: a brothel being a premises where more than one woman is engaged in the trade.
5 He published in 1932 When the Scot Smiles in Literature and in Life. (Alexander Maclehose, London).
6 It had become the Herald, shedding Glasgow from its masthead with effect from 6 February 1992
7 See p. 31
8 Robinson Publishing, London.
9 After the disbursement of legacies totalling £5,820 (including a bequest of £1,000 to Mrs Ferguson), the remainder amounted to £6,439. Costello gives the residual figure as £6,280.
10 Miss Gilchrist’s solicitor, James Macdonald, lived some distance away from the scene of the murder, at 2 Buckingham Terrace, off Great Western Road. Mrs Elizabeth Charteris’ solicitor, the other James Macdonald, lived at 8 Queen’s Crescent, about 100 yards from Miss Gilchrist’s flat. Documents in Register House, Edinburgh, confirm that this James Macdonald was Mrs Charteris’ agent.
11 See page 255.