The year, 1909. The seventh day of May. A gallowsman now, with the eight o’clock walk a mere three clear Sundays distant, Oscar was taken back to Duke Street Prison and housed in Cell No. 1, Hall D. A large, well-lighted place, it was the condemned cell. Here Prisoner No. 942 would await his death – never from this day forward for a single second alone, guarded, nursed, cosseted like a fattening calf, ‘lest himself should rob their scaffold of its prey’.
Eighteen days the unhappy man lay under sentence of death. Welcome divisions in the slow drip of hours were the practically daily visits of Rabbi Phillips, with his constantly reiterated message of hope.
While Oscar, lost to the world, was making brave efforts to come to terms with ‘the terrible inevitable’, within the grim walls of Duke Street, others, without their frowning compass, were making equally brave efforts on his behalf. For there was a strong feeling abroad that the verdict had not been justified by the evidence.
Lord Guthrie felt no such doubt. ‘As the judge in the case,’ he wrote to the Secretary for Scotland, Lord Pentland, ‘there is strictly only one question which falls to me to answer, namely, was the evidence legally sufficient to entitle the jury to convict? I answer this question in the affirmative.’ He did, however, have opinions to offer on two other questions. Did he consider the verdict right; would he, sitting without a jury, have held the charge proven? Answer: Yes, he would. Second question: In the whole circumstances, should the sentence be commuted to penal servitude for life? Answer: Yes. ‘The question of the propriety of a reprieve … is a question of statesmanship rather than of law, and the important element seems to me the fact that, out of 15 jurymen, six were in favour of acquittal.’
The Evening Citizen of 14 May purveyed the chilling news that what was discreetly referred to as ‘the hangman’s paraphernalia’ was being taken into Duke Street that Friday.
A Memorial, a most workmanlike document prepared by Ewing Speirs, pointing up all the weaknesses and contradictions in the Crown’s case, was forwarded to Lord Pentland, accompanied by petition sheets bearing well over 20,000 signatures.
For some days Oscar had been hearing the echo of the hammers putting together the intended instrument of his doom. Pierrepoint had been engaged. Slater’s coffin – a simple deal box – had been knocked up. All was set for ‘the law to take its course.’ Oscar confided to Warden D. McLeod that he would rather hang than spend 15 years in prison and then come out into the world branded a murderer.
At seven o’clock on the evening of 25 May, Governor William Bedlington Buglass at Duke Street Prison received a telegram from the Secretary for Scotland. Buglass and the prison medical officer, Dr James Devon, went to give the good news to Slater. As they entered the condemned cell its occupant’s manner became instantly and intensely anxious and pathetic. Holding forth his hands, he cried: ‘Am I to be hanged?’ Told that Lord Pentland had instructed that sentence of death should be respited, Oscar turned ashen; he did not know the meaning of the word ‘respited’. Hastily, the Governor explained.
And so it came to pass that Oscar saw the sun rise on what was to have been his day of destiny, Thursday, 27 May 1909, and was also alive at the darkening of the day.
May 26 1909 dawned for Oscar Slater at 5.45am.
It was the first day of the rest of his life.
Public reaction to the news of his sparing was mixed. There seems to have been some confusion as to the precise significance of ‘respite’ – the Scots understanding of the meaning of the word no better than Slater’s own, initially.1 This confusion has, indeed, lingered on to puzzle a recent writer on the case, Thomas Toughill, who observes:
If he [Slater] was guilty, he should hang; if he was innocent he should be set free. There was no halfway house. The “Conditional Pardon” granted by Edward VII is therefore not easy to comprehend.
Mr Toughill’s difficulty seems to arise from his failure to appreciate the entirely formal nature of the standardly expressed official document to which he refers as a ‘Conditional Pardon signed by King Edward VII’, who, says Toughill, ‘pardoned Slater of Miss Gilchrist’s murder on condition that he spent the rest of his life in penal servitude’.
Quite so.
But this document was not unique, specially tailored for Slater; it was the usual document issued in any case where a reprieve is granted. It is signed not by the monarch himself, but, at a remove, by Lord Pentland, ‘By His Majesty’s Command’. Toughill announces in triumph: ‘The existence of this pardon has not been revealed until now.’ This is a meaningless point. Its existence did not need to be ‘revealed’; the fact of Slater’s reprieve predicated its existence.
Mr Toughill’s is, I am afraid, the discovery that never was!
His further point that Slater’s subsequent appeal ‘seemed to be a nonsense in view of the fact that Slater had already received a Royal Pardon in respect of Miss Gilchrist’s murder, a fact of which no mention was made during the entire proceedings’ is, I fear, itself ‘a nonsense’. Slater’s appeal was directed to the establishment of his innocence of the murder. This had nothing to do with a pardon for a crime which he utterly denied having committed. He had been dismissed with a large, undeserved, question-mark still suspended about his neck.
Lord Guthrie’s comment in a private letter to James Miller Dodds, Under Secretary for Scotland, is of significant interest. ‘You remember that at the meeting at the Chancellor’s [Lord Loreburn], the view was expressed that if Slater were respited, the case would not be one for release, under the ordinary practice, at the end of 20 years.’ Here, surely, is provided a measure of officialdom’s genuine belief in Slater’s blood-guilt.
Envisage if you will – which fortunately for the preservation of his sanity Oscar Slater did not – a granite block of eighteen years’ imprisonment within the penitentiary walls of the drear edifice on the bleak north-east coast of Aberdeenshire, Peterhead Convict Prison.
Thursday morning, 8 July 1909, was the day the call came for Oscar to gather up his thin tally of worldly goods and head north. ‘Slater will now have to dree his weird,’2 commented the Weekly Mail pragmatically.
That fate meant working in the quarries. Known henceforth as Convict No. 1992, he was given a big hammer and told to break the massive granite blocks. Thus, in hard labour, did the heavy toll of days drag by: every new dawn importing a false sunrise of hope, each evening seeing its unfulfilled demise.
As the months mounted, the granite entered Oscar’s soul. Unpicked at the seams by time’s relentless fingers, the moth-ravaged mantle of easy urbanity slipped and fell away. The globe-trotting cosmopolitan’s charm and courtesy and ever-ready smile gave place to the – always underlying – dour, heavy, Germanic persona; the infra-stratum of enduring despair. A resentful, sullen, unresponsive and rebelliously touchy-tempered loner, isolated not only by language, but also by alien habitude of thought, he loomed and lumbered threateningly in the dank stone passages of the prison, and bulked large and menacing in the fogs and mists of the quarries. He called them the places ‘where men’s souls have been hammered into the very granite they have broken’.
The raw Scottish winter was to prove a perennial punishment which there was no avoiding. ‘One is unable to work in the cell in winter time as it is punishingly cold. At night the only garment a prisoner is allowed to retain is his shirt. In the winter it is terrible in these refrigerators.’
But in the long litany of cruel inflictions administered by nature and by man to man in that harsh penal settlement perched on the iron lip’s edge of the German Ocean, most terrible of all was the eternal, enveloping, smothering silence. ‘A silence of silences,’ wrote Slater. ‘So great is it that one might hear a pin dropping on the floor. It is this silence which plays such havoc with a man’s mind.’
It was this silence which was about to be riven by the trumpet calls of a certain great ‘paladin of lost causes’ who had decided to take up that of the forlorn and fretting prisoner of Peterhead.
Brooding in Peterhead on grievances major and minor, real and imagined, Oscar wrote – on 25 February 1910 – to Alexander Shaughnessy, the solicitor who had replaced Ewing Speirs, who had most unexpectedly died at the unhappily early age of some 35 years while attending a political meeting the previous December, ‘Everything is going against me, and I can see myself lost and buried in prison.’
Although it is nowhere survivingly recorded as a matter of historic fact, it is nonetheless virtually certain that it was Alexander Shaughnessy who brought ‘the great paladin’, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, into the Slater affair.
In April 1910, William Hodge & Company, the Edinburgh and Glasgow publishers, issued in their Notable Scottish Trials series a volume on the Trial of Oscar Slater, edited by William Roughead. With Doyle’s triumph in the rehabilitation of the young Parsee solicitor, George Edalji, the convicted horse-maimer of Great Wyrley, fresh in his mind, and Roughead’s masterly volume fresh from the press, Shaughnessy made a diffident approach to Doyle, sending him a copy of Roughead’s book. Doyle found it an atrocious story, ‘realised the wickedness of it all’ and was ‘moved to do all I could for the man’.
In truth, Oscar had already been doing everything he could for himself. The first quaintly expressed, and equally quaintly spelt, appeal, painstakingly scribed on blue prison notepaper, had gone out to the Scottish Secretary on 19 July 1909. Others followed on 13 October and 31 December. On that last day of 1909, he had petitioned the Secretary for Scotland –
Please help me … I lay helpless here in prison, my dear old parents, whose days are only counted, praying that light shall come in my Affair. Your servants have taken me, like a sheep is taken to the slaughterhouse, and knowing all the time I had nothing to do with the crime. My Lord, I am an innocent man, I swear by God the Almighty that I never heard the name of the murdered woman …
Throughout 1910, Oscar continued to bombard the Scottish Secretary with petitions for justice denied. There was a blue paper petition from Convict No. 1992 on 8 July and another on 20 August. In this last, Oscar wrote:
My Lord – Only 14 days ago, I received from my Glasgow agent a copy of my trial [with Roughead’s Introduction carefully excised], and by reading it I have found some points which not have been cleared up at my trial because the chance to be examined as a witness was taken away from me by my counsel.
Oscar’s final communication to the Secretary for Scotland in 1910 was dated 14 November. In it he confesses to Lord Pentland that he has lived an ‘unsteady life’, but asks, ‘Why shall I for this reason only be made to be a murderer? Fifteen years I am in Great Britain, and never have been in prison for any crime.’
Nor did Oscar cease from strife in 1911. Twice he wrote to Pentland. On 7 March: ‘I, as an innocent, broken-down man, crave to you to inform me if anything regarding my liberty has been done by you My Lordship.’ And on 23 September:
My Lord I pray you to help me, I am an innocent man and know nothing about the murder, I never (to my belief) have even been in the street where the lady Miss Gilchrist was murdered. Never I will cease to trust in you my Lord, and I alwise [sic] will live in hope to get my justice of you.
But his Lordship’s servant, ‘most humble and most obidient [sic]’, cried out in vain into the unanswering void. The silence around Peterhead remained heart-breakingly unbroken.
However … on 1 December 1911 there came to Alexander Shaughnessy from Windlesham, Crowborough, Conan Doyle’s Sussex home, a letter from Sir Arthur. ‘I must wait a short time as I am full of work. Then I will look over the whole question thoroughly.’
Nearly two months went by. On 29 January 1912, Doyle wrote apologetically to Shaughnessy: ‘If I have done nothing in the Slater matter it is not that I have lost interest, but that I have been somewhat overworked and unable to do much.’
Then … five months on … triumph.
On 12 July 1912 Sir Arthur sent a letter to Shaughnessy bearing the eagerly-awaited grand news. ‘I have been long delayed but now I have come back to Slater and hope to have the article finished by this weekend. My plan is to publish it in one of the prominent monthlies, as this will ensure considerable comment on the case.’
It was on that same 12 July that Shaughnessy wrote to the Crown Agent in Edinburgh, telling him that he had learned lately of the existence of a certain statement made by Helen Lambie which did not emerge at the trial. Apparently, immediately after the murder Lambie had ‘proceeded to a dwelling-house within a short distance of the murdered lady’s house and informed the occupant of that house that Miss Gilchrist had been murdered and that she knew the person who did it, as she had identified him when he passed her. She mentioned the person’s name and it certainly was not Oscar Slater’.
In his letter to the Crown Agent, Shaughnessy requested a copy of that statement. He also asked for the name and address of the person to whom Lambie had made this statement.
I have myself searched the extant official archives thoroughly for evidence behind the explosion of this delayed-action bomb and found nothing. There is absolutely no trace of any such statement.
What I have, however, discovered is a sufficiency of dispersed data with which one may, like Professor Owen building up Dinornis from a single fragment of femur, assemble a satisfactory reconstruction of the course of events.
The key document was a letter, written on 16 July 1912, by Shaughnessy to Roughead. In it, he tells him that the informant referred to in his [Shaughnessy’s] letter to the Crown Agent was a detective, and that this informant had said that
the Detective Department were [sic] very much surprised at the verdict and practically every one of them are [sic] convinced that Slater is innocent. Over and above, my brother3 had a talk with a prominent official in the CID here, who gave him the same information. Of course, this latter individual did not wish his name disclosed.
I also found among the Crown Office papers a letter, dated 24 July 1912, to the Crown Agent from Fiscal Hart, who wrote: ‘I feel certain that no such statement was made by her [Lambie] either to the police or to me. I never heard a suggestion of such a statement having been made by her at any time.’ He then reveals the identity of the person to whom Lambie’s alleged statement was made. ‘The witness Miss Birrell4 was not examined by the police … I find she was not asked with regard to Lambie having called at her house that night and she certainly made no statement on the subject.’
Shaughnessy’s comment, written to Roughead, was: ‘The inevitable conclusion … is that by some means the statement was allowed to slip out of sight in its transmission from the Detective Department, Glasgow, to Edinburgh.’
Mr Shaughnessy’s ‘inevitable conclusion’ depended, of course, upon the reliability of his informant, the unnamed detective. This proposition we shall presently examine.
Doyle, to whom all this had been confided, wrote to Shaughnessy (July 16th, 1912):
If Lambie knew the murderer – and her conduct at first was so extraordinary that one could almost imagine that she was in connivance with him – then she had some strong reason for shielding him and putting the guilt elsewhere. What reason could it be save love? Have you any idea who it was that she eventually married? I would like also to have Miss Gilchrist’s will looked up and see what were its terms. I wish I felt surer about Nugent and his pals.
In a second letter, Doyle writes, exonerating Nugent: ‘I am glad about Nugent as it clears a difficulty. On the other hand it can’t be said definitely that he could not in all innocence have told others about the jewels.’ And Doyle went on to say that he had always felt it possible that the man who killed Miss Gilchrist was not after her jewels. ‘He did not take anything but the brooch and that may have been a blind. It was the box of papers which attracted him.’
This was a wild, completely unjustified leap, as was Sir Arthur’s subsequent assumption that the intruder had been searching for the old lady’s will. He was performing well below the standard of his fictive alter ego, Sherlock Holmes. The letter concluded:
Have you any knowledge of whom Miss G’s heir was? Or was there any mauvais sujet among the young men of the Gilchrist family? I don’t suppose Lambie would now stultify herself by telling the truth and if we could only get at the relative whom she saw that evening. Would it be impossible to get in touch with the Gilchrist family and find from them what relative lived near in 1908. If a fiver will open that detective’s mouth I’m ready to provide it – or even a tenner if he will really help us. I think it would be wiser to investigate without asking help of the authorities, for if we do they may very well warn Lambie and others to shut their mouths.
Sir Arthur is, it would seem, sketching in the first shadowy lines adumbratory of an official conspiracy theory.
What Shaughnessy believed to be a vitally important meeting took place on Saturday, 20 July 1912, when the anonymous detective came to his office, Ocean Chambers, at 190 West George Street, with his strange, off-the-record tale.
Still, despite his previous avowal to the contrary, bulldogishly toying with the notion of Nugent’s guilt, Doyle asked Shaughnessy:
I wonder if you ever collated two separate pieces of evidence got in New York and Edinburgh. The one showed that the last time Lambie saw Nugent was the final week of September before the murder. The other that Miss G’s dog was poisoned on September 7th. That is remarkable is it not? I suppose Roughead knows what he is saying when he says Nugent was fully exonerated. But how about Nugent’s disreputable friends in the gambling line whom he told of this old lonely rich woman. Nugent through his hold over Lambie could have got duplicate keys which were surely used, poisoned the dog and made all easy for the assassin.
Then came the good news.
I have finished my task. It [the proposed article] has run to such length that I am inclined to think that a sixpenny pamphlet would be the best way of ensuring widespread attention.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 99-page pamphlet, The Case of Oscar Slater, was published by Hodder and Stoughton in August 1912, in an edition of 25,000 copies, grey wrappers, at sixpence.
In it, Doyle wrote:
It is notorious that nothing is more tricky than evidence of identification. The evidence for the prosecution really resolved itself into two sets of witnesses for identification. The first set were those who had actually seen the murderer, and included Adams, Helen Lambie, and the girl Barrowman.
He noted the worrying discrepancies in the original descriptions provided by this trio. The second set consisted of twelve people who had, at various dates, seen a man frequenting the street in which Miss Gilchrist lived, and loitering in a suspicious manner before the house. These witnesses had, said Sir Arthur, seen portraits of the accused. They were well aware that he was a foreigner, ‘and then they were asked to pick out his swarthy Jewish physiognomy from among nine Glasgow policemen and two railway officials. Naturally they did it without hesitation.
Doyle also pointed out that,
What the police never could produce, however, was the essential thing, and that was the least connecting link between Slater and Miss Gilchrist, or any explanation how a foreigner in Glasgow could even know of the existence, to say nothing of the wealth, of a retired old lady, who had few acquaintances and seldom left her guarded flat.
The challenge presented by the gauntlet thrown down by Sir Arthur, the White Knight, was taken up by the newspaper reviewers with markedly varied responses. The Scottish ‘heavies’ were preponderantly dour. The Scotsman commented, thin-lipped, regarding the view of ‘an outside spectator, even if he is the creator of the most popular detective fiction of our day. The gist of the special plea set up is that the evidence of identification was deficient and that the Crown failed to connect Slater with the robbery committed at the time of the murder.’ The Glasgow Herald, no more enthusiastic, opined: ‘It seems improbable that this movement for the review of Slater’s sentence will have any result. It is indicative of Sir Arthur’s bent for special pleading that he seems ready to accept an alibi supported by Slater’s mistress and their servant.’
The point here, though, was that the Lord Advocate stated that the prisoner was hopelessly unable to produce a single witness to say that he was anywhere else than at the scene of the murder that night.
Doyle counters:
The evidence of the mistress that Slater dined in the flat at seven on the night of the murder I pass, but I do not understand why Schmalz’s positive corroboration should be treated by the Lord Advocate as non-existent. What evidence could he [Slater] give, save that of everyone who lived with him?
Under Scots law at that time a re-trial would have been impossible, there being no Court of Criminal Appeal such as recently established in England, but it was possible for the Secretary for Scotland to advise the Crown that there might be a reconsideration of the evidence and a re-examination of the witnesses.
How did the Sassenach newspaper pack react?
Pride of place to the old Thunderer. Sitting decorously upon the fence, The Times, of 21 August, pronounced:
There is but one answer to all [Sir Arthur’s] objections, and that is that they have probably been considered already, and with extreme care. If Sir Arthur’s arguments lead the authorities to revise the case, no one will think the labour wasted; but it is by no means certain that such a revision will result in the prisoner’s favour.
The Westminster Gazette, less bet-hedging, came out firmly for Doyle:
If the evidence against Slater were no stronger than the creator of “Sherlock Holmes” shows it to be, then only an uncommon stupidity and a deliberate plot could have brought about the conviction.
The issuing forth of Doyle’s book was almost like an unconscious answer to an appeal wrung from the prisoner of Peterhead back in October 1910, when he wrote in his curious English to Rabbi Phillips:
Is no help for me, Mr Phillips? Is it not possible that a writer could be found who brings the wrong done against me to the light? Surely the people who thinks I am innocent believes it is a mistaken identity; they don’t know it is what you call a put-up job.
The fire lit by The Case of Oscar Slater began to take hold. It was reported that when Parliament reassembled questions were to be asked regarding the Slater case. And while the controversy smouldered, Doyle despatched – on 7 September – a letter and a copy of his booklet to the Secretary for Scotland. The effect was galvanic. Two copies of Roughead’s book were ordered post-haste, and, on the instruction of John Lamb, Assistant Under Secretary, a communication sped off to the Crown Agent, Sir William Haldane, requesting that ‘the precognitions and productions in the case of Oscar Slater be sent up to us for perusal’. The Scottish Office was patently girding its loins.
Three months passed. A quietus. Then, the Secretary for Scotland was informed that on 10 December Mr Marshall Hall would ask him in the House whether any further investigations could be made into the propriety of the conviction of Oscar Slater … and, ‘in view of the uneasiness as to the justice of the verdict which has been expressed both in Scotland and in England, will he state what steps he proposes to take’.
An unmoved and immovable Mr McKinnon Wood, who had that year succeeded Lord Pentland as Secretary for Scotland, duly replied that no new considerations had, in his opinion, emerged, such as would justify his re-opening the case, and he did not consider it to be his duty to enter into public discussion of the case in reply to the honourable and learned gentleman’s question.
The curtain fell on hope.
1 ‘Respite’ just means stopping the execution for a temporary or fixed period. There are two types of pardon: absolute or conditional. ‘The ordinary case of a conditional pardon occurs where a person sentenced to death is pardoned on condition that he is detained in penal servitude for life.’ (The Late Rt. Honourable Sir JHA MacDonald, Lord Justice-Clerk, A Practical Treatise on the Criminal Law of Scotland 1948, p.353)
2 Endure his fate.
3 John Shaughnessy, his partner in the firm.
4 Margaret Dawson Birrell, of 19 Blythswood Drive.