So what manner of man was Oscar Slater – the Great Suspect? Well, to start with, his name was not Slater: it was Oscar Joseph Leschziner …

It had been a big decision and it took big courage. More courage, perhaps, than to bend to the will of the Fatherland. But 22-year-old Oscar had decided that rather than, like the rest of the Junge Männer of his cohort, allow himself to be conscripted into the army to do a stint of compulsory national soldiering, he would up sticks – such thin bundle of sticks as he possessed – and quit the Homeland. He would be a soldier … of fortune.

In a sense, the decision was not a new one. Since his boyhood years Oscar had realised that Beuthen, the small, smoke-circled and coal-dust-begrimed mining town on the right bank of the Oder, in Upper Silesia, was not for him. Indeed, it had not proved a propitious place for the Leschziner family. His memories of it would all be as gritty as the fine coat of soot that had seemed to powder, and smother, everything in Beuthen that your fingers touched.

Adolf Leschziner, his father, a master baker, had not prospered there. It had been a long, hard struggle, selling his daily bread to earn his daily bread. But for a time German-Jewish persistence – industry, attention to detail, reliability in the quality of his goods, politeness to his customers, husbanding of his small resources – had seemed to pay dividends. The faltering business blossomed slowly, and not without pain, into a flourishing concern.

Then … disaster. Sadly, Adolf Leschziner’s flesh was not as strong as his will. His health broke down. He and his family came to know hard times. Fortunately, Oscar’s mother, Paula, was a sterling character. She it was who shouldered the burden, became what so many fine Jewish mothers before and after have had to become, the family’s mainstay. With her master baker enfeebled by progressive disease, she took the bread-maker’s place as the breadwinner, turning her skill as a midwife into the slender means of eking out a bare, harsh existence for them all.

It was perhaps as a ‘perk’ of her greatly appreciated status in the service of the community, that her son, Oscar Joseph, was brought into a not overly kind world within the carefully sanitised portals of the Midwives’ Institution at Oppeln, then located in the upper Silesian province of Prussia.1 The day of the birth was Monday, 8 January, in the leap year, 1872.

Oscar’s youth was not quite so brave as the retrospective face he put on it. After a local elementary school, and a brief spell at the Beuthen Gymnasium, he was, in 1887, at the age of 15, apprenticed by his mother, at considerable personal sacrifice, to a Beuthen dealer in wood, Herr Schuttenberg.

In 1890, his indentures served, Oscar left the wood merchant’s. He was, and always would be, different from his brothers and sisters. They were cast in the mould of orthodoxy, content to remain in and around Beuthen. Although not religious, he was a good Jewish boy in that Hebraic familial essential of being a loving and unforgetful son, but he was shot through with an alien streak of romance. He was dreamy, imaginative and ambitious, made of that pioneering stuff which, despising the safe, quiet, humdrum existence of a little provincial town, ends up on Ellis Island or the fatal shore of Australia. He wanted other things.

His bred-in-the-bone restlessness would take him to New York, San Francisco, St Louis, Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, Nice, Monte Carlo, Brussels, London, Edinburgh and Glasgow: a long way from Beuthen. He was never to return there. All the rest of his life would be lived abroad. He would find himself as an entrepreneur, an exploiter, a Wandering Jew. He would not, he swore, be one of life’s victims, like his poor father. He had long ago decided to be one of the takers. Small Quixotic generosities aside, it was not in him to give, save on the basis of cast bread being returned on the waters increased ten-per-cent-fold. He had been all his years thus far closely acquainted with poverty. Now he wished to sever the connection.

Oscar’s first step to that wider freedom, which was in the end to teach him that poverty may grind men down, but riches are illusory, took him away to Berlin, where he found work in a timber merchant’s office. He did not warm the seat of the high stool long. The soles of his feet beginning again to itch, he moved on a couple of hundred miles north-west to Hamburg, where he was soon financially well installed as a clerk in a bank. Presently espying an opportunity for self-betterment, he took up a position in the cashier’s office of Hamburg Municipal Hospital at Eppendorf. It was while there that he reached military age and was called up for medical examination. A healthy, strongly built young man, he was passed A1 by the doctors and drafted into the artillery section of the army. He never arrived at the barracks.

Oscar Joseph Leschziner vanished. Oscar Slater was born.

By his own reckoning, it was about the year 1895, that, at the age of 23, Oscar first set foot on English soil. London was his objective, and it was there that the – relatively – innocent young man from Beuthen underwent a strange metamorphosis. The process had, no doubt, begun shortly after he had cut the umbilical apron-strings of home. He would have become necessarily street-wise in the big cities of Berlin and Hamburg. Consider his predicament in London: on the run from the military, he arrived on the unknown shore and entered the unknown city which spoke an unknown tongue. He would have saved some small money from his last gainful employment. It would not have gone far, and now things must have taken on a frightening aspect.

I was handicapped by a lack of knowledge of the language. I could not work in an office. [So] I turned towards the things I could do, and in turn became a clerk for bookmakers, was a bookmaker myself, and in the end conducted several clubs.

He pursued his further education through the academies of billiard halls and card schools, acquiring a winning skill that left little to chance and nothing to luck. Other tempting things beckoned. An uncounted part of the young Oscar’s capital available for investment was his youthful good looks and that sturdy, attractive body on which the military authorities had set their sights. Different sights were set upon it now – those of eager young foreign women reaping a reasonable harvest in London from prostitution. They looked with lust, but saw, too, the desirable protection that would be afforded by the young Lothario’s physical strength.

Time has washed away the addresses of the cheap rooms in cheap hotels and boarding-houses where Oscar struck early camps, but it is likely to have been within the Kings Cross–Bloomsbury–Fitzrovia–Soho quarter that he found his first shelter, and hereabouts set up with a pliant, or even suppliant, young adventuress, like himself a stranger in a strange land. And it was here that he reached a Priestleyan dangerous corner, destined to alter the direction and shape of the entire remainder of his life. He fell for her … and fell from grace.

Many foreign women and their ‘bullies’ were at that time heading up over the border, and Oscar was one of those who made his way to Edinburgh. The first reliable intelligence as regards his residence in that Athenian city dates from 1897. It emanates from the Edinburgh City Police, under whose eye Oscar had come because of the disreputable life he was by now leading. PC 284 David Valentine recalled: ‘I knew Slater well. He used to frequent a brothel in Cheyne Street, occupied by a foreign prostitute.’

Always extremely smartly dressed, quite a dandy in fact, and with a good deal of money passing through his hands, flashing his bundle of fivers in the bars and billiard rooms, he impressed some of his associates as a man of charm, education and culture. Others thought him a mountebank, a liar, and, at cards especially, a cheat. Besides being a great billiards player, Oscar was an acknowledged expert at all manner of card games – and a highly skilled sharper. At a house in Thistle Street which he ran as a club or card saloon, and which was largely frequented by Germans who played faro, he was rumoured to keep one of the most skilfully devised machines for manipulating cards that was ever invented.

He is said to have been a man of very violent temper, and complaints were repeatedly lodged with the police concerning his ill-usage of Annie Hansen, a professional prostitute with whom he lived as man and wife. It was this evil temper of his which was responsible for the sole occasion upon which he found himself in the hands of the Edinburgh police. On 4 November 1899, he appeared in the police court charged with disorderly conduct; to wit, fighting with a fellow-German on Waverley Bridge. The prosecution alleged that he had been drunk. He was fined 20 shillings or seven days. The other man was also fined 20 shillings.

Following a run of convictions for prostitution and one for assaulting a police officer, and faced with yet another charge of prostitution, Annie Hansen or Slater, due to come up again at the police court on 26 June l900, failed to appear. Her bail was forfeited and a warrant granted for her apprehension. But the warrant was never put in force, as she had left the town. Glasgow was now about to be favoured with the presence of Oscar and Annie.

But before he quit Edinburgh, Oscar had his nose broken in a fist-and-foot fight with a compatriot well-named Brash. The fight was promoted by the impossibility of the combatants seeing eye to eye over the proportional division of some tainted money.

As he turned his battered profile to the West, and Edina’s fair city slipped away, castle and rock like a fading mirage behind him, Oscar felt a faint stab of regret, embryonic nostalgia.

Glasgow had decided to celebrate the new century with a Great Exhibition. Its buildings spread across the 73 acres of Kelvingrove Park and its immediate neighbourhood, and during the six months of its opening – 2 May to 9 November, 1901 – the Exhibition drew a record of 11,500,000 visitors; and among the many shady moths attracted by its bright flame was Oscar.

The record is, as one might expect in the case of so impetuous a character as Slater, smudged about the edges, but the likelihood is that, between the leaving of Edinburgh and the triumphant entry into the golden fleecing fields of Glasgow, there was a breath-gathering intermezzo back in London, for he was to write:

And so I came to the time of my life when I met a lady from Norfolk, who was afterwards to become my wife. I first saw her in London. I have not the desire to go deeply or more fully into this part of my career, but will tell you that eventually we were married in Glasgow and were as happy as any pair of lovers could be.

The facts do not quite bear out this idyll. The name of the lady in question was Mary (or Marie or May) Curtis Pryor, and she was an American subject. They married on 12 July, 1901, at Shamrock Street Register Office, and settled in at 33 Kelvinhaugh Street. It did not take the Glasgow police long to divine what was going on at No. 33. It was being used as a brothel, and the police saw Mrs Slater repeatedly taking men to the house. So the brutal truth emerges to shatter the Oscarean idyll. And, the final nail in the coffin of idealised romance, not only was May Slater leading an immoral life, but she was also an incorrigible drunkard.

Oscar’s periods of residence in Glasgow between 1901 and 1905 were liberally punctuated by longish away-break spells, mainly back in London. It was there that he met Robert Rogers. He was to become his best metropolitan friend. In his thirties, Rogers, of 36 Albemarle Street, London West, described himself as a financial agent. He had a business interest in jewellery, and it was at Hatton Garden that he first encountered Oscar, where the latter, doubtless in full flower as one of his diamond merchant incarnations, was cannily buying, and equally cannily selling, precious stones. The two of a kind instantly took to each other.

There was a definite away-break in September 1902, when Oscar and May went to Scarborough, in Yorkshire. It was there, on 17 October, 1902, that Mary Slater was convicted on two charges of theft from a house where she and Oscar had taken furnished lodgings. For having taken more than just lodgings, she was sentenced to two terms of imprisonment of three months, to run concurrently.

It was after the Scarborough débâcle and its unfortunate consequences, and a brief period of recovery and rehabilitation in Glasgow, that, in 1903, Oscar and May took off for the south of France – to Nice, and to test his luck at the tables of Monte Carlo. His luck was out. Hoping to combine pleasure with business, hoping to enjoy – and win at – a few friendly poker parties, hoping to cover expenses and realise a healthy profit, not only did he lose his stake money, but also his own and his wife’s jewellery. Later in 1903, he was back in London – and back in trouble: fined five shillings for being found in a gambling club, and bound over on his own £10 bail not to go into the club for a year. And more trouble in Glasgow: fined one pound for striking a man named Ferdinand, with whom he had been gambling, and who had, said Oscar, insulted him.

By the following year, 1904, Oscar and May’s fairy-tale marriage was over. They had separated. Not uninvolved in the matter of their separation was a personage referred to by May Slater as ‘the woman Junio’. This was Andrée Junio Antoine, an attractive, 19-year-old Frenchwoman, whom Slater had, literally, picked up at that redoubtable Victorian and Edwardian flesh-mart, the promenade of the Empire, Leicester Square. In 1905, they began to live together as man and wife. Of his legal spouse, Oscar had only this to say: ‘She was a drunken woman and I adopted aliases to prevent her tracing me.’ Surprisingly starry-eyed and unbitter about him to the end, May would neither say nor hear anything wrong said about her defecting husband. He had, she said, always treated her with the greatest kindness.

In the early months of 1906, Oscar and Andrée embarked on a trip to Europe, before sailing from Cherbourg, aboard the Lucania, for the United States, reaching New York on 5 May 1906. There, in partnership with John Devoto, who, said Oscar, had seven gambling places, he rented from one Peter de Silvestri premises at 114 West Twenty-Sixth Street, in the borough of Manhattan, for $60 a month, and opened up a gambling club. By the following year, 1907, Oscar was the proud manager of another, more impressive, uptown and upmarket club on Sixth Avenue. Business was good. He was making plenty of money. On 9 November 1907, brimful of optimism, he filled in a Declaration of Intention form, which was an application to become a citizen of the United States of America. Whatever his intention, the gods had already decided the disposal of that intention.

For the sake of Andrée’s health, the couple returned to Paris in January 1908. They stayed there for a matter of weeks before returning to New York in February. But a mere three months after that they were back again in Paris, where they remained until August. Then, in the last days of that month, they arrived in London.

On 5 September 1908, Oscar, representing himself as Mr O. Junio (or, it has been said, Junior), rented a furnished flat at 45 Newman Street, off Oxford Street, for Andrée, where, as Madame Junio, he set her up, together with the prostitute’s de rigueur guardian maid, a German girl named Katharina Schmalz. Men run truer to form than racehorses. Andrée had become the latest in Oscar’s string – Annie Hansen, May Slater, Andrée Junio Antoine. During those weeks while Andrée was ‘working’ in Newman Street, Oscar stayed with his friend Robert Rogers at 36 Albemarle Street, and, now wearing his dental hat, brandished a shiny new visiting-card engraved with that address and the legend ‘A. Anderson, Dentist.’

Stricken once more mit der Wanderlust, on 29 October Oscar packed and took a train, and travelled to Glasgow once again. In his A. Anderson persona, he put up at the Central Station Hotel. It was early in those first days back in Glasgow that, strolling nostalgically down Sauchiehall Street at about five o’clock in the evening, he bumped into an old friend of eight summers before. This was none other than the Moudie. They had originally met over the green baize at the Crown Hall Billiard Rooms, 98-100 Sauchiehall Street, in 1900, and he was destined to become Oscar’s closest Glaswegian crony.

The Moudie had not, though, been Oscar’s first encounter with a familiar face. He had barely stepped off the train at Central Station when, next morning, he found himself shaking hands with Max Rattmann, who had himself just stepped off the train from London. Rattmann, a 28-year-old German, had lived in Britain since 1897. He had known Oscar in London, where he had kept a restaurant. They had never been on terms of intimacy, but used to meet frequently at a gambling place, the Travellers’ Society Club, No. 12 Denmark Street, off the Charing Cross Road. Police inquiries were subsequently to identify Rattmann as a man otherwise known as George Schmidt, who had four convictions for dishonesty in London, and whose last sentence had been three and a half years’ penal servitude in 1902.

By Tuesday, 3 November, the Oscarean finances, dented after five days of mounting hotel bills, patently stood in need of relief, and to that end Oscar betook himself to more modest lodgings in a boarding-house in Renfrew Street. And it was to this signally less expensive domicilement that Andrée and Katharina were summoned. They duly arrived on 4 November.

With the women temporarily ensconced in Renfrew Street, Oscar started to hunt around for more permanent quarters. Wandering about the West End, keeping an eye open, he spotted a flat to let in an imposing sandstone block, St George’s Mansions, hard by Charing Cross. It was situated on the third floor of the right-hand wing of the same building as Messrs Stuart & Stuart, house furnishers. Letting no grass grow under his feet, Oscar negotiated an 18-month lease on the flat at No. 69 St. George’s Road, furnished it with goods hire-purchased to the tune of £178 16s 6d from Messrs Stuart & Stuart, and had Andrée, Katharina and himself comfortably established therein by 10 November.2

During the course of the next five weeks a regular pattern of living evolved, as described by Schmalz:

Madame received gentlemen there at No. 69, and walked the principal streets. Madame usually went out in the afternoon, and visited the Empire3 at night. Mr Slater usually went out in the morning at about eleven, and returned to lunch at two o’clock. He would go out again after lunch, and returned to dinner at about seven o’clock. After dinner he would go out, and usually returned after twelve at night.

It could never be Miltonically said of Oscar that he did ‘scorn delights, and live laborious days’. Laborious nights, perhaps; tinkling ‘tombwards to the lilt of coins,’ through an ambience of pubs and clubs and spirit shops, billiard rooms and music-halls hung thick with eye-stinging, throat-catching, lung-threatening cigar and cigarette smoke, heavy-laden with fumes of beer and reek of whisky, all deceptively ameliorated by the sickly perfume-waftings of what Arthur Symons called the Juliets of the streets.

With Oscar Slater we enter into a whole, novel, Germano-Glaswegian underworld, peopled by strange denizens with Runyonesque monikers – the Moudie, the Soldier, the Acrobat, Willy the Artist, Little Wrestler, the Diamond Merchant – and curious demi-mondaines of the stamp of Max Rattmann, Josef Aumann and Max Brooks. A tricksy world of street-betting, whores and whoring, reset or the harbouring of ‘iffy’ goods, playing the horses and the cards, and tickling the ivories of billiard-balls for money. In such surroundings, Oscar would never be far to seek. There he would be, rubbing shoulders with thieves and touts, resetters and recidivists, bookmakers and boxing men, wrestlers, prize-fighters and fellow-ponces, in drinking club, billiard hall, gambling den or brothel … lurking behind the festoons of secret curtains, flicking down a winner’s card, cutting a fine public figure on the green baize, treating crony or victim to a convivial glass. Wherever, at all hours of the day and night, his potential prey might be, there could be found Oscar, spreading a net for the innocent – such as still-wet-behind-the-ears young men, diurnally employed in the offices and warehouses of the district, having a macho night on the town – and not-so-innocent, older and should-be-wiser men hopelessly addicted to gambling and gaming.

At this period Oscar was very much in the company of Hugh Cameron, the Moudie. They shared the good – and easy – life. Mornings, perhaps a game or two of billiards at James Galbraith’s Crown Hall Billiard Rooms, or in Peter Johnston’s rooms, one stair up at 126 Renfield Street, opposite the Pavilion Theatre, not to mention the Imperial Billiard Conservatory, at 84 Mitchell Street. In the afternoon, it might be a visit to the roller-skating rink in Victoria Road, or to one, or several, of a host of favourite watering-holes, including Alexander Gall’s public-house at 15 Cowcaddens Street, Peat’s public-house and Galloway’s spirit shop, in Hope Street, or Andrew Miller’s, at 92 Cambridge Street, so favourite a haunt of exiled Germans that it was known as ‘The Hamburger’. And in the evening, if not a trip to a music-hall, then the city heart was generously encircled by a fine, glittering coronal of clubs – the Mascot, in Renfrew Street, the MOSC or Sloper Club, and the Motor Club, next door to each other in India Street, where gambling delights were to be had into the really wee hours of the morning – like 7am!

It was, as we have already noted, Hugh Cameron who introduced Oscar to the MOSC. The letters of the club’s official (registered in Edinburgh), acronymic designation stood for ‘Members of the Sloper Club’. Ally Sloper was a popular cartoon character of the period. Oscar was elected a member on 23 December 1908, but he had, as a prospective member, been allowed to use the club since the latter part of November. Although he was to be seen on at least a couple of occasions within the portals of the Sloper’s illustrious neighbour, the Motor Club, which occupied the first floor of No. 26 India Street, Oscar was never a member, and had merely been taken there as guest of the ubiquitous Moudie.

Moving about the city in 1908, Oscar became again what he had been in 1901, 1903, 1904 and 1905, a familiar Glasgow figure, and the omens were all indicating that he was digging in, preparing to settle down. What more harmless and respectable presignification than his Saturday visit to the hardware merchants’ establishment of Messrs Hepburn & Marshall, at 54 St George’s Road, and his purchase of such touching items of premeditated domesticity as a galvanised pail and a bouquet of brushes to go with it? And in further support of the doctrine of good intention, did not the nest-building Oscar return to the hardware merchants’ emporium three days later – 10 November – and purchase two dozen coat hooks, one toilet fixture, and a half-crown, pre-packaged ‘Card of Household Tools’, which included a screwdriver, a brogue, a gimlet, a pair of pincers, and a small, lightweight hammer, all of nine inches long.

Little by little, treading softly, and occasionally on people’s corns, Oscar became accepted, or, if not precisely accepted, recognised and tolerated in the milieu of his day to day existence, his somewhat erratic interchange with the shopkeepers, in and around St George’s Road.

Throughout that November and December of 1908, the graph of the state of Oscar’s financial affairs went up and down as ecrhythmously as the temperature markings on the chart of a patient with blackwater fever!

12 November. Hopeful prognosis. Oscar opens a Post Office Savings Bank account in the name of A. Anderson, and buys Consuls.

14 November. Relapse. Oscar pledges a diamond scarf-pin with Liddell’s for £5.

17 November. Decided trough. Oscar pledges purse, studs, and other small bits and pieces for an obviously much-needed £6.

18 November. Trough deepens. Oscar pledges a crescent-shaped diamond brooch at Liddell’s, getting £20 on it.

The financial doldrums persisted.

7 December. Oscar pledges a pair of binoculars at Bryce’s pawnshop for £2 10s.

9 December. Oscar raises a further £9 from Liddell’s on the diamond crescent-brooch pledged on November 18th.

17 December. Slight upcurve in fiscal health graph. Oscar deposits £5 in his Post Office Savings account.

19 December 19. Remission seems to have been only slight and transient. Oscar borrows five shillings from George Sabin, secretary of the Sloper Club, and another modest sum from a gambling friend, Robert Scott Beveridge.

20 December. Financial state of health plunges. Oscar writes to the Post Office Savings Bank asking for all his money ‘at once’.

 

Monday, 21 December 1908.

A cross-roads.

And, as so often happens at life’s cross-roads, two events provided signposts. Two letters: one from London, one from San Francisco. The London letter, from Robert Rogers, brought the news to Oscar’s breakfast-table that his wife, hot on his trail for money, was demanding his address. The San Francisco letter was from John Devoto. Come out, it invited, to San Francisco, where business is good …

1 Since 1945 it has been in the Katowice province of southern Poland, and is now known as Opole.

2 Negotiations for the letting of the flat were conducted with the manager of Messrs Stuart & Stuart’s, who rejoiced in the wonderful name of Isaac Paradise. Interestingly, Messrs. Stuart & Stuart, who rented the flat to Slater, were themselves only tenants of the building. The quidditative fact is that the owners of the property and ultimate landlords of Slater’s questionably utilised flat were … the Glasgow Police.

3 The Moss Empire Palace Theatre, 35 Sauchiehall Street.