Not everyone accepted that Oscar Slater was innocent. Indeed, the only two people who actually saw the man in the hall did not dismiss Oscar. To the end of her life Helen Lambie continued to believe that he had murdered her old mistress.

I am able to publish here for the first time extracts from letters of the utmost importance written absolutely spontaneously by Helen Lambie to her mother. They incontrovertibly prove that all the newspaper reports of her retraction of her evidence were false, and that the Empire News article of 23 October 1927, alleged to have been written by her, was completely bogus.

Here is the authentic voice of Helen Lambie, speaking from beyond the grave.

From Peoria, she writes to her mother:

November 13th, 1927.

… no one has come here yet and we are keeping all the pieces of newspaper … So we will see how far they will go, as I can see plainly all is a frame-up, and Conan Doyle has no statement from me in my handwriting. He says he has a copy, so Conan Doyle knows he is working on a false statement. The Government will not allow themselves to be fooled by falseness, and if I come forward on my own accord no one will pay our expenses. So I know to watch myself here. In 1914 at the private inquiry it was a false statement they used then. So Conan Doyle may give up, falseness will never clear or get Slater free. He should have got hanged years ago. They should hang him yet; as he is the man and no other man. Conan Doyle is only aggravating and causing an agitating [sic] in the papers to get the public on his side. If the public uses their brains they will see plainly it is a frame-up, all false … So, Mother, don’t let any of these Editors in your house, as they are liable to tell lies on you. I have had my experience with them all.

November 20th, 1927.

I had a letter with two pieces of Old Country newspapers from my Auntie Leezie. It was the Empire News. My Auntie Leezie says she feels very angry at the lies they have in the papers about me and she hopes Rabbie1 makes them stump up for it. There has never been anyone called at [sic] me yet, so this may be a move to try and find me out. Rabbie says if anyone calls on me when he is at work they have to be told to call back after six o’clock. He is going to tell them he is not going to allow me to say any more. That is all past. Mother, this is the reason why they are lying and agitating so much in the papers – so as to get me to come forward to [sic] my own expense. And I won’t do that. Nor even at their expense, whoever they are. I have already told them that Slater is the man. No one has ever come near me, and I never sent any statement – so that is all false. I still would say Slater is the man and no other.

November 27th, 1927.

Your papers received, and I also got another piece of paper of [sic] my Auntie Leezie last Monday, the 21st November, letting me know that Slater got out of jail on the 15th.² But Slater is no innocent man. What [sic] I account for Mary Barrowman changing her story, they Editors has used a sweet tongue and fooled her, as I see by the papers there are words, and far more, added to her statement than she really told.

November 29th, 1927.

We are all amused at the papers you sent, especially Maisie.³ Rabbie says that is a thing they can’t do as put me in the pictures.4

Rabbie says we can’t make a case, and I don’t see the Crown Head saying anything or doing anything, or even Miss Gilchrist’s friends trying to stop all this, and I have no wealth to start on [sic]. If I paid my passage home I would have nothing left. So Slater is lucky to have such a smart, wealthy body at his back, and being treated so kindly and given flowers on his return to Glasgow. Slater’s lawyers might be the means of him being a very wealthy man yet, if they can go on as they are doing and gets him compensation. I am thinking the Crown Head is waiting and watching to get a chance at Conan Doyle and the other agitators. I see by your letter you are angry. We are too over it all. There are [sic] no offer to back us. So that helps to keep us where we are. It’s enough to cause the public to raise trouble at a murderer being set free. Innocent – if he would tell the truth that would find him out, and he is no innocent man. He knows that, too, the coward. He is a fly man and it is these other smarties that is doing all for him.

December 6th, 1927.

Slater’s lawyer said I was telling lies when I was in New York. Slater sent for this lawyer. His name is Goodhart. He belongs to Baltimore. So if Slater says he is a poor Jew and pretends he can’t speak good English, he has a smart lot to speak for him, and if he proves his innocence it will be by telling lies, as I know perfectly well Slater is the man that passed me out of Miss Gilchrist’s house. Slater is a coward for not telling the truth … A mob should form up and blow Slater to pieces. Give him what he gave the old lady. Batter him to pieces.

December 12th, 1927.

Mother, I feel sorry to hear of those agents worrying you. Mother, Rabbie says I have to give no written statement with my name on it to the news agents, and if any of the Government officials calls say nothing to them either unless one of the Holytown policemen are with them so as you are sure of them. And then tell them I am still as I was at the trial.

December 18th, 1927. [With this letter to her mother Lambie enclosed a statement which she had written.]

December 18th, 1927
By Helen Lambie
or Mrs Gillon

I wish to put a denial to the statement recantly [sic] published in Newspapers. There is no truth in that statement. Connan [sic] Doyle used a false statement. I would not blame another man. Slater is the man that I saw coming out of the house of Miss Gilchrist. I am as strong and of the same mind as I was at the trial. If Slater would tell the truth he is not an inocent [sic] man.

From Helen Lambie
now in the U.S.A.

Mother … I think the best one to give this statement to is the police, as they can read it in court and it will be more valuable at that time. If an inquiry is held in Edinburgh, speak to the Holytown police. See the advice they give you.

Arthur Adams, too, has been reliably reported as secretly believing that it really was Slater whom he saw walking towards him across Miss Gilchrist’s lobby.

Adams’ fellow-musician, John Hardie Ratcliffe5, has amusingly recounted how on one occasion when it was suggested to Adams, physically a very small and rather delicate person, that he might at least have had a go at stopping the man from escaping, he held out his little arms expressively to indicate his size and weakness of physique, as if to say, ‘How could you expect me to be able to stop him?’

Ratcliffe, who was to become general secretary of the Musicians’ Union, knew Adams personally, and once actually asked him: ‘Was the man you saw in the hall Dr Charteris?’

The answer was a simple, unqualified ‘No’.

And in 1993, Mr Harry Gardner came forward to bear a kind of witness-at-a-remove testimony.

At a small dinner party in the winter of 1940-41, I met the late Horace Fellowes, a professional violinist with the Scottish Orchestra. He was a good friend of Arthur Adams’. He told us that Arthur had no doubt that Slater was the man who brushed against him. When asked why he had not then identified him in court, Adams replied that it was because he knew that if he, as well as Helen Lambie, had done so, Slater would have hanged, and that he [Adams] did not believe in capital punishment.

We have it also, it will be recalled, on the eminently sound authority of Sheriff Robert Dickson – Glasgow Herald, 20 July 1991 – that Craigie Aitchison was by no means convinced as to his client’s innocence.6

There are, unarguably, some points which go unfavourably for Slater. For instance: his inability to produce what, from a legal point of view, could be regarded as a firm, acceptably-witnessed alibi for the precise period of the commission of the murder. And, arguably, there is the massive consensus of identification evidence marshalled against him, albeit, when broken down, this did tend to evaporate.

Permit me to state unequivocally my personal conclusions and beliefs.

I believe that Oscar Slater was innocent. I do not for one moment suggest that he was a lovable or an admirable character. I am sure that his basic honesty was widely open to question, and there seems to me no doubt that he acted as a pander and significantly supported himself and his gambling upon the immoral earnings of women. But that is irrelevant. What is a crucial point is that despite, we may be sure, the most dedicated efforts, no one at any time was ever able to show there to have been any connection whatsoever between Oscar Slater and Marion Gilchrist.

I believe that, generally speaking, the Glasgow police did their honest best by their lights – even if they were moonbeams or penny candles lit in jars! – to catch the killer of Miss Gilchrist, but mesmerised themselves into the conviction that the German Jew pimp was the murderer.

I believe that no member of either the Birrell or Charteris families had anything at all to do with the brutal death of Marion Gilchrist. I have examined without prejudice every one of the relatives of Miss Gilchrist, as well as the non-blood-related candidates, and have been unable to find a jot or tittle of real evidence to indicate guilt against any one of them. Neither, frankly, can I find valid motive.

I believe that rumours, many of them started up by newspaper speculation and subsequently bedecked with spurious detail in pub, club, kitchen and drawing-room, became invested with the trappings of apparent truth, and increased and multiplied without let or hindrance down the decades.

I would put, against the widely sponsored view, disseminated in so many previous books and articles on the case, that the murder was an internecine domestic affair, the suggestion that the circumstances of a robbery that went wrong is a very persuasive scenario which could satisfactorily account for virtually all of the conflicting factors which have successfully bedevilled every effort to find a rational answer to questions which, for 93 years now, have buzzed like indestructible bluebottles about the unquiet grave of the old lady of West Princes Street.

Let us empty our minds of all the adherences with which the ingenuity – and ingenuousness – of the years has adorned the bare surfaces of the murder. What is the most outstanding feature of the tragedy at No. 49 West Princes Street? What stands out like a pricking thumb – or itchy palm?

Draw back without prejudice, and look.

It is the familiar criminal allurement: a rich old woman, living virtually alone, unprotected – the presence of a frail, 21-year-old girl can hardly rate as an adequate shield – surrounded by portable goodies. The enticing set-up focuses the gaze as irresistibly as one of those ‘pop-up’ pages in an old-fashioned, Victorian children’s book. And these things do get known; always get around. Who cleans? Who paints and decorates? Who sweeps the chimneys, washes the windows? Who services the gas? All, like G K Chesterton’s postman, are possessed of the quality of ‘invisibility’ – and an ‘Open, Sesame!’

There is, of course, the inevitable temptation to flirt with all those Agatha Christie-like complexities, permutations of plot and plotting: murder most maze-like. The plain truth, though, is that the more one sounds out, and rings the changes on, the fanciful familial-involvement theory, the more hollow the response becomes, especially since the purloining of the altered will as motive proves, when you pause to think about it, to be pure rubbish.

I believe, too, that over the years the received image of Miss Gilchrist’s absolutely invincible determination never to open her own front-door has become exaggerated. After all, we know for a solidly reported fact that she did so to the calling carpet-sellers at the time of the Great Glasgow Exhibition of 1901. It must be allowed also that, for all the talk of locks and bars, no home is really a fortress, however stout its bolts.

The ‘solving’ of the Oscar Slater Murder Case seems to have got somewhat out of hand – rather like what has happened in the case of Jack the Ripper.7

There is, I repeat, no target like a rich, elderly woman living on her own. But it is also a dangerous one. Things can, for the smallest unforeseen reasons, go drastically wrong. The elderly are fragile. In the 1990s, the aged femme sole, killed without specific intent in the course of a burglary, was an only too horrifyingly familiar figure.

We are not, I think, looking for Birrells or Charterises. The police did that, without profit. Nor, for that matter, are we looking for common or garden sneak thieves. We are, I am strongly inclined to think, looking for a pair – or possibly a trio or quartet, a gang – of heavy professional criminals after serious jewellery. They will have planned fastidiously. They will have been the watchers in the quiet street, seen by some of the witnesses. Criminals of this type actually prefer to carry out stop-watch robberies under pressure. They would have considered the maid’s ten-minute absence ample for their adrenalin-hyped purpose.

Rumours of good booty at No. 49 had got out. Miss Gilchrist, attracting by her extraordinary way of life, with, as it were, jewelled butterflies pinned to the curtains, inviting the fate that befell her, had the eminently predictable misfortune to be targeted by such prowling predators.

The joint-enterprise was robbery. We may be sure that one of the pair of entrants would boast all the skills of the con man, bringing with him the smooth-working key of a well-oiled tongue. One of the two, probably both, would have dressed, as Adams was to observe, in gentlemanly fashion. He would have been the one who went off to the bedroom to ransack for plunder, leaving his fellow-villain to take care of Miss Gilchrist, held hostage in the dining-room. They would have expected an 82-year-old, intimidated, to present no problem.

But this old lady, true to her known character, proved very unintimidated, very unco-operative, not to say downright difficult. She was, perhaps, delivered a sharp, admonitory tap, fell, hit her head on the coal-scuttle, and started to knock on the floor and kick up a rumpus, which ended, and was ended, only when, panicked, her assailant – who had no weapon with him as no violence had been intended as any part of the plan – picked up a heavy dining-chair and perpetrated a frenzied, silencing overkill. He then slithered out of the inches-open kitchen window, pushing it down again behind him in order to disguise his route of departure. His transit was, however, observed by the Adams sisters as he passed over their window on his way down the rone pipe.

The smooth one, searching in the spare room, was then disturbed; first, by Adams’ ringing, and after that by the arrival of Lambie and Adams. However experienced a criminal may be, he is still liable to panic when a crime goes wrong. The searcher would have abandoned all thoughts of theft, even leaving, as surprised robbers have been known to do in such circumstances, obvious and easy pickings untouched. Anyway, the plan having misfired, he would not have wanted, if the worst had come to the worst and he had been captured, to be found with swag on him. Albeit he might perhaps, almost absent-mindedly, as of habit, have pocketed the diamond crescent brooch – or, indeed, he might have picked it up before the alarm – and equally absent-mindedly, left his box of Runaway Matches behind. All thoughts other than the achievement of a safe getaway would, of necessity, have been driven out of his head.

Having glided towards Lambie and Adams on a snail-track of mimed insouciance, he would either have joined his fled companion on the back green and the pair of them gone over the wall into Down Lane, turned right along West Cumberland Street, and out into West Princes Street; or he might otherwise have rushed out of the close-door, hared up West Princes Street on his own and, higher up that street, been joined by his partner. A third, less likely, possibility is that both met at the front of No. 49 and rushed across West Princes Street to exit, via Queen’s Crescent and Melrose Street, into the swirling anonymity of Great Western Road. It seems likely that the pair were the well-dressed running men encountered by Agnes Brown as they sped out of the closeting, claustrophobic peril of the tight, dark plexus of sequestered streets, up Rupert Street towards the bright-lit, populous haven of Great Western Road.

The probability is that the two had worked together before. The near-certainty is that they never would again. After that terminal fiasco they would have split up for good and all.

Respectability of aspect would have been the best disguise, as most of the Scottish criminals of that era would have been thought of both by the police and, indeed, Miss Gilchrist, as being of the lower and rougher classes. Bill Sikes in kilts. This pair would have been distinctly out of the common run. The police should have been looking for a dark-featured con man who resembled Slater. Even if he had never been caught – although it is unlikely that he would not at some time in his criminous career have been arrested – there would surely have been previous incidents which conveyed a description.

Unfortunately, inter-regional police investigations were rudimentary in 1908. The ironic thing is that the police, following their instincts, were most probably right in the first place, when they regarded the Gilchrist murder as a robbery turned sour. Then they were taken in by the false clue of the pawned brooch and, although made very early aware of its falsity, never looked back from that Priestleyean dangerous corner … but went chasing off across the Atlantic after the aforesaid moonbeams.

The Imaginative Liftman. That was what, in his old-fashioned way, the late Jack House, writing in the Glasgow Evening News of 15 October 1954, called him. He wrote:

Next in my revelations comes a ‘confession’ about the West Princes Street murder. It’s an anonymous letter written in an illiterate hand. Though he doesn’t sign his name, I know it comes from a liftman employed in a Glasgow building.8 He sold his story to a Sunday newspaper a few years ago and it was published in a somewhat different form.

The previous story to which Jack House is referring appeared on 29 February 1948, four weeks after Oscar died, in the Sunday Express. Written by Brendon Kemmet, it claimed that, moved by the death of Slater, a man had come to him in the Glasgow office of the Scottish Sunday Express, and told him: ‘I know who committed the murder. I wish to tell the story that would have saved Slater and sent two men to the gallows.’

Kemmet’s informant, who was 59 – born in 1889, and therefore 19 in 1908 – had spent most of his life in prison. He said that at the time of the Slater case he was one of a gang of thieves in Glasgow.

There were four of us. The other three were: J., always well dressed. His appearance and general build much resembled Slater. But he was clean-shaven, whereas Slater had a moustache. At the time he was aged about 22-25. W. was not so much like Slater in build, but he had a broken nose (like Slater) and a moustache. At the time he was aged about forty. G., a barman, the only married man of the four, at one time fairly prosperous.

J. was the man who struck Miss Gilchrist down.

A fifth man whom I never met comes into the story. He was the brains behind our robberies. He used to supply us, through W., with information about the contents of houses, gleaned from charwomen and daily helps.

Before the Gilchrist murder a charwoman had told ‘The Brain’ that in West Princes Street was an old woman who lived alone with a large sum of money and a large quantity of jewellery in the house. W. brought us that news. But the address he gave us was that of a Miss Crosbie, another old lady who lived alone near Miss Gilchrist, but who, I have since found reason to believe, was poorly off. ‘The Brain’, I think, had got the addresses of Miss Gilchrist and Miss Crosbie mixed up.

For weeks we kept a watch on the house of Miss Crosbie. Never once were we lucky enough to catch her leaving the house unattended. Each of us took turns of visiting, on one pretext or another, but on each occasion Miss Crosbie answered the door. I posed as a window cleaner; J. and G. as insurance agents. During those weeks of watching the name of Miss Gilchrist was never mentioned. I did not know of her existence until she had ceased to exist.

A few months before the murder, G. and I were arrested on a charge of reset. He got 6 months, I got 12. After our arrest ‘The Brain’ seems either to have discovered his error or for some reason suggested switching to Miss Gilchrist’s house. The murder was committed while I was in prison. The first I heard of it was when a Glasgow detective named Gordon came to see me in Barlinnie Prison. Gordon, had he but known it, was on the right track. He had information, he said, that I ‘and others unknown’, had been watching and planning a robbery in the vicinity of the crime. ‘Who were the others?’ he demanded. I not only refused information, but I stoutly denied all knowledge of the affair.

Some months after my release, Gordon pounced on me for housebreaking, and brought several other charges against me. I was sent to a High Court, and received a five years’ sentence. I was 21 years old. A sentence of that type on a man of my age was rare. So for the greater part of the next 20 years I toiled and suffered in the granite quarries of Peterhead Prison – alongside Slater, the man I should have saved.

In 1921 I had six weeks of liberty, and for the first time in 13 years met W. We met in a public house in Crown Street, Glasgow. W. was more alarmed than pleased to see me. He was agitated throughout all the brief time we spent together. But he did tell me what had happened on the night of the Gilchrist murder.

W said he kept watch. J. went with his jemmy to the house. He rang the bell. Miss Gilchrist, thinking it was the maid coming back, opened the door and then returned to the dining-room. J. struck at Miss Gilchrist, but did not knock her out as he expected. So he followed her, striking again and again with his jemmy, until she collapsed. By this time the people underneath had become alarmed, and were making for Miss Gilchrist. J. had no time to hunt for money or jewellery. He may have snatched a piece or two hurriedly before he was disturbed, but to the best of my knowledge the two men gained nothing by the murder.

Miss Agnes Brown, a schoolteacher, told the police that two men rushed past her in West Princes Street. One, she said, had his arm pressed close to his side. That was J., supporting the jemmy under his jacket. The jemmy was thrown into the River Kelvin. J. who lived in Partick, went home by subway.

From the day of that meeting with W. I have never seen any of the old gang. If W. is alive today he is over 80. But Oscar Slater I did see, again and again. We became good friends in Peterhead. We never discussed the murder, for I was terrified to tell of what I knew.

Jack House’s rendering of the story contained a few additional bits and pieces –

The man who struck Miss Gilchrist down was a fully qualified chemist. He was a native of Partick … W., the outside man, cut through the park and home. He resided in Berkeley Street … Then our Imaginative Liftman goes on to traduce Detective Lieutenant Trench and David Cook, the lawyer, in a most despicable way.

And House opines: ‘I have seldom read such a farrago of nonsense… the Imaginitive Liftman’s tale is sheer tripe.’

That was not, however, the conclusion reached by ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Robert Colquhoun, who, in 1962, brought out, with the ghostly assistance of the well-known Scottish journalist, the late Bill Knox, his memoirs, Life Begins at Midnight (John Long, London), and in a final chapter, ‘Postscript to a Crime’, supplied a rather fuller account of the story first told by Brendon Kemmet.

Superintendent Colquhoun’s informant told a story which fundamentally agreed with those told by Kemmet’s anonymous visitor and House’s anonymous correspondent. Neither Kemmet nor House gave any nom de guerre to the man. Colquhoun designated him ‘Andy’.

The late Brendon Kemmet did, however, confide to Superintendent Colquhoun that the man who told him the story which he published in the Sunday Express was one James Inglis, a notorious Glasgow housebreaker, who died on June 29 1960, at the age of 71.

As a result of careful investigation of internal clues, I am able to reveal that Colquhoun’s informant, the man he calls ‘Andy’, was one Richard Craig. Glasgow born – in 1890 – and bred, Craig had been a reprehensively active member of the Caulfield-Craig gang, credited with much mischief during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. He and Caulfield were found guilty of breaking into a public-house, at 60 Eglinton Street, Glasgow, and stealing £3, and £28 from a lockfast safe. Tried at the High Court before Lord Salvesen, Caulfield, aged 36, was sentenced, on 25 February 1915, to ten years’ penal servitude. Craig’s record was much less weighty than that of his older criminous confederate, and Lord Salvesen, staying the full power of his elbow, gave him a serious warning, reinforced by a three-year spell of penal servitude in which to ponder the proposition that the game of burglary did not pay.

The tale which Craig had to tell is as follows.

In the year 1909, a 19-year-old at the outset of a career of safe-blowing, Craig found himself the unwilling recipient of a confidence, a confession really, of a friend, James Inglis, whom he had got to know when they were both doing time in Barlinnie Prison. Jimmy told Craig that there had been three men involved in the West Princes Street murder – himself, Wilson, an engineer who was periodically crippled with rheumatism, and Jamieson, a man about the same height and build as Slater, who had something to do with a chemist’s shop.

There was a woman who worked as a cleaner in various places around West Princes Street, and it was she who told her man that there was a Miss Crosbie who kept money in her house and that Miss Gilchrist had a box of jewellery which she kept hidden behind the grate in her room. And the cleaner’s man told Inglis and his friends about the old lady. They decided to get this box of jewellery, and kept loitering about Miss Gilchrist’s house, watching to see if they could find an opportunity to slip in.

It was just then that Jimmy Inglis was lifted by the police, and jailed for 12 months. It was while he was in custody that Miss Gilchrist was murdered. The next thing he knew was a detective whom the boys called Black Gordon (Detective Alexander Gordon from the Central Police Office) coming to interview him in Barlinnie. Gordon said that Inglis and two men had been seen loitering near Miss Gilchrist’s house, and asked Jimmy who the two men were. He just denied all knowledge. He had never been there. He knew nothing of any two men.

I consider it most unlikely that Inglis would invent such a story to tell Andy, who was his respected and genuine benefactor – and who I knew was always regarded by Inglis as his most intimate friend. I am convinced that Andy believes his account of the murder of Marion Gilchrist to be the truth. There are differences between the story published in 1948 and that told to me by Andy, but these are mostly trivial and both accounts obviously emanated from the same source.

Inglis, in his published account, refers to a man J. – the murderer – as being very like Slater in build, but clean-shaven. The man with him, W., was not so much like Slater in build but had a broken nose, like Slater, and a moustache. It seems quite possible that the man seen by Mary Barrowman could well have been Wilson flying from the scene. Jamieson would not be likely to emerge until a few minutes later, and could have done so after the girl had passed. Wilson could have waited nearby, until joined by Jamieson, and the teacher, Miss Brown, did speak of seeing two men running along West Princes Street from the direction of Miss Gilchrist’s house. Miss Brown also spoke of one of the men carrying a heavy article about the size of a walking stick, and Inglis speaks of the jemmy having been thrown into the River Kelvin. Andy agrees that this was never mentioned to him, but Miss Brown in her evidence said she saw the two men turn into Rupert Street towards Great Western Road. A bridge in that street crosses over the Kelvin.9

‘I believe,’ says Colquhoun, ‘that James Inglis’ story may well be the final solution.’

Whether it is, in fact, truth or fiction, may never be proved in terms of law. But Andy’s account should, I feel, be known.

Ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Colquhoun died on 22 September 1969.

I am very much persuaded – although I must, and do, emphasise that it is no more than a personal opinion, based upon a long study of the circumstances surrounding the case – that the true cause of the murder of Marion Gilchrist was a jewel theft that went wrong. It was the late Detective Lieutenant John Trench alone, who, with his almost universally contradicted testimony, brought the red herring of Dr Charteris into it, and all ensuing complications date from that.

1 Robert, her husband.

2 In fact, Slater had been released on Monday, 14 November 1927.

3 Her elder daughter, Margaret Balfour Gillon. Generally known as Maisie. She would be 16 then.

4 This must refer to the rumour that Slater was to appear in a film about the case.

5 The brother of the former Assistant Chief Constable of Glasgow, William Ratcliffe.

6 See p. 276

7 See The Quest for Jack the Ripper, by the author, Patterson Smith, New Jersey, 2001.

8 In Renfield Street, Jack House told me.

9 Miss Brown did not describe it as ‘a heavy article about the size of a walking stick’. Her actual words were: ‘It might have been a walking stick, but I thought it looked clumsier than a walking stick.’