The year 1912 having been laid in burnt-out ashes to rest, with wreaths of dead nettles in the place of autumn’s optimistic bouquets of dahlias, 1913, justifying the endemic pessimism of the triskaidekaphobes, passed in a hiatus of unease, fertilising no new bloomings of hope.
But 1914 was, from the very start, to be different. The harbinger of hope renewed was that same detective who, in July 1912, had brought his confidential information to Alexander Shaughnessy. Now we may discover his name: John Thomson Trench.
The son of a ploughman of Lasswade, in the parish of Liberton, Midlothian, Trench had joined the Glasgow police in 1893, aged 24. Prior to that, he had served seven years in the 1st Battalion Royal Highlanders – the Black Watch. His career in the force had been one of steady progression, from constable 3rd class to his commissioning as a lieutenant of police on 5 November 1912. A highly successful organisation man, it remains to this day a puzzlement as to who – or what – it was that had, back in 1912, steered his steps to Mr Shaughnessy’s door. And now, two years on, one January day in 1914, he was telling his disquieting tale again, to another Glasgow solicitor, David Cook.
Cook, practising at 59 Bath Street, was 41 in 1914. He was attractive neither as to appearance nor personality. Peter Hunt, doubtless via Roughead’s advising, describes him as ‘heavy-jowled, with a large head and sparse grey hair. There were pouches under his eyes. His mouth was large, his lips thin, his complexion grey. His voice was rasping.’1
But he was an astute lawyer and an able pleader, with a lifetime’s experience in defending people charged with criminal offences. He was also an old and intimate friend of Trench’s.
On 27 January 1914, Dr James Devon, Medical Officer of Duke Street Prison and one of His Majesty’s Prison Commissioners, to whom Cook had the previous day shown Trench’s statement, addressed a letter to McKinnon Wood. Naming no names, referring to Trench merely as ‘a member of the Glasgow police force’, Devon said that he had had put before him a statement which had surprised and shocked him. ‘I have assured the officer and the lawyer in question that you can be absolutely relied upon to act fairly.’
On 13 February McKinnon Wood replied: ‘If the constable mentioned in your letter will send me a written statement with the evidence in his possession … I will give the matter my best consideration.’
Ten days later, Cook provided McKinnon Wood with Trench’s name, adding in his letter that that officer was
naturally apprehensive that his disclosures regarding the conduct of the police may ultimately come to the ears of his superiors … he fears that he will be a marked man should he be for a moment suspected as the person revealing the inside information. Had the information now supplied by Trench been laid before the jury, I venture to say there would have been no possibility of a conviction.
Wood’s reply – on 10 March – threw Cook and Trench into a real flurry.
You speak of treating the matter as confidential. I fear this is impossible … I propose to send the papers to the Procurator-fiscal at Glasgow … this seems to be the appropriate and inevitable course to adopt.
Appropriate? Anything but. Inevitable? Cook and Trench prayed not. Off to McKinnon Wood by the first available post went Cook’s somewhat anguished response.
If Mr Hart conducts the enquiry he does so with the knowledge that his office in the event of Slater’s ultimate liberation will be more or less under the lash of public opinion. I fail to see how Mr Hart can be expected to do justice to himself and to Slater.
And the following day Cook wrote again to Wood:
In the event of your deciding that Mr Hart shall conduct the investigation, I will be compelled to have recourse to the columns of the press, if for no other reason than to put the parties connected with the investigation on their guard. I may add that from the outset Hart believed that Slater was the murderer. Surely a neutral person ought to be entrusted with the inquiry?
McKinnon Wood ‘heard’.
On 8 April 1914, a package was delivered to James Gardner Millar, KC, Sheriff of Lanarkshire, wherein were parcelled copies of the correspondence with David Cook, together with certain precognitions, and an invitation from Mr McKinnon Wood to inquire into and report on these matters.
What has since become scathingly known as the Secret Inquiry opened on the morning of 23 April 1914, in Sheriff Millar’s room at the County Buildings, Ingram Street, Glasgow. This apartment, behind the closed doors of which the not-so-grand inquisition was to take place, was a large one, almost as large, in fact, as any of the court-rooms in the building. At the top end was the sheriff’s desk, where he sat with, on his right, his clerk, Andrew Sandilands, who was to take down in longhand the evidence of witnesses, who would be seated at the other side of the desk facing the sheriff. These witnesses, while waiting their turn to be called, were accommodated in charge of an officer in a court-room on the opposite side of the corridor. Each witness was seen alone, and as each in turn crossed to Sheriff Millar’s private chamber, the door was meticulously locked behind them.
Millar’s terms of reference were, to say the least – or, indeed, the most – of them, limited. The inquiry was to be confined to questions of fact; it should in no way relate to the conduct of the trial; it was to take place not in public, but in strict privacy; no witness was to be put on oath, but should be merely admonished to speak truly. In view of this stultifying, toothless brief, Cook, Roughead and Doyle shared the opinion that the inquiry would be ‘more or less a farce’.
This is the point at which the libelling of the blameless Dr Charteris begins. In short, Trench had claimed that Lambie had told Miss Birrell that the man she had seen in Miss Gilchrist’s hall was Dr Charteris.
Trench stated:
On December 23rd, I was instructed by Chief Superintendent Orr to visit and take a statement from Miss Birrell, 19 Blythswood Drive. I had particular instructions to question her with regard to Dr Charteris, and as to what Lambie said when she visited her house on the night of the murder.
What Trench alleges that Miss Birrell had to say is based upon his claimed ‘word for word’ recollection. The document gets off to a dubious start, describing Miss Birrell as ‘now residing at 6 Kelvinside Terrace, or 275 Wilton Street, Glasgow’. To begin with, the address in question should have been 6 Kelvinside Terrace North, anyway – another directional straw! – but the unfortunate truth is that the Miss Margaret Birrell who had indeed lived at that address was not Miss Gilchrist’s niece. A further disqualification is that the lady had died in October 1912, at the age of 66.
Here is what, according to Trench, Miss Birrell had had to say in the statement which he insisted that he had taken from her.
I know that Marion [sic] Gilchrist or McColl [sic)] a daughter of Miss Gilchrist’s brother, was the supposed heir to Miss Gilchrist’s wealth. I am aware that Miss Gilchrist visited the McColl [sic] family at Bournemouth. That was some time previous to the murder. On her return, she time and again declared her determination to alter her will. It was believed by some of her relatives that she had done so. She made no secret of her intention. She was positively nasty with any relative who might call. Miss Gilchrist stated to me that none of the Charteris family would finger a penny of her money.
If one accepts this Trench-transcribed statement, Nellie Lambie had, on the night of the murder, told her:
‘Oh, Miss Birrell, Miss Birrell, Miss Gilchrist has been murdered, she is lying dead in the dining-room, and Oh, Miss Birrell, I saw the man who did it.’ I replied, ‘My God, Nellie, this is awful. Who was it, do you know him?’ Nellie replied, ‘Oh, Miss Birrell, I think it was Dr Charteris. I am sure it was Dr Charteris.’ I said to her, ‘My God, Nellie, don’t say that. A murder in the family is bad enough, but a murderer is a thousand times worse. Unless you are very sure of it, Nellie, don’t say that.’ She again repeated to me that she was sure it was Dr Charteris. The same evening Detectives Pyper and Dornan visited me, and I learned from them that she had told them it was Dr Charteris. I told a number of my friends about it, including a member of the Glasgow Corporation, who communicated with Chief Superintendent Orr. On Wednesday afternoon, 23rd December, 1908, Detective Trench visited me, and I told him exactly what Lambie had told me.
Trench said that on receiving this statement he returned immediately to the Central Police Office and told Superintendents Orr and Ord what Miss Birrell had said.
Chief Superintendent Orr seemed impressed with the statement, and remarked, ‘This is the first real clue which we have got.’ I was instructed to write out the statement. I did so. In handing that statement to Superintendent Ord, he said, ‘I have been ringing up Douglas (that is Superintendent Douglas of the Western) and he is convinced that Dr Charteris had nothing to do with it.’.
Trench further asserted that, with Detective Keith, he visited, on 3 January 1909, Nellie Lambie, then staying with her aunt at 15 South Kinning Place. He showed her a sketch of Oscar Slater which he had received from Superintendent Ord. She did not recognise the man.
I touched on Dr Charteris, asking her if she really thought he was the man she saw. Her answer was, ‘It’s gey funny if it wasn’t him I saw.’ It will be noted that some time after the murder, but on the same evening, Dr Charteris called at Miss Gilchrist’s house. Lambie in addition to saying it was ‘gey funny, etc.’, made the further remark, ‘Fancy him asking me to go and stay with him that night. I would watch it. He might have done the same to me.’ She further said, ‘Gey funny he appeared so quick back in the house.’
And Trench summed-up:
My conclusion after meeting Lambie was that, if she had had anyone to support her, she would have sworn to Dr Charteris. If Dr Charteris was the man, the whole mystery (as yet unexplained) of how the murderer obtained access to the house is cleared up. The aunt opened the door to her nephew.
Margaret Dawson Birrell, spinster, aged 49, living now at 61 Rupert Street, where she practised as a masseuse, gave evidence crystal-clear and adamantine. It homed like a guided missile straight to the core of Trench’s tale – ‘Helen Lambie did not say to me that she knew the man. She did not mention to me the name of Dr Charteris.’ Shown the statement said to have been made by her to Trench on 23 December 1908, she said: ‘I now solemnly declare that I have never made such a statement, and all that is contained in it is absolutely false.’
Next came Helen Lambie, now Mrs Gillon and the mother of a three-year-old daughter, to deny with equal vehemence the statement alleged by Trench to have been made by her. Not one word of truth in it she said, ‘absolutely false’. She had, she told the sheriff,
seen Dr Charteris in Miss Gilchrist’s house on one occasion before, and I was at his wedding along with Miss Gilchrist and Marion Ferguson, the former maid’s daughter. The man I saw leaving the house was not at all like, nor did I ever see Dr Charteris dressed like, the man I saw. I saw Dr Charteris that night when he came along to the house. As I could not be left alone in the house, he asked me to come and stay in his house, but I told him I preferred to go to my aunt’s.
Lambie recalled Trench and Keith’s visit to her at her Aunt Helen’s, but not their showing her a sketch of Oscar Slater. Neither of the detectives had mentioned Dr Charteris, and she had not said, ‘It’s gey funny if it wasn’t him I saw’. She had made no such remark as ‘Fancy him asking me to go and stay with him that night’, or ‘It was gey funny he appeared so quickly back in the house’. Then, very earnestly, Lambie said to Millar: ‘I wish to make it quite clear that neither to the Procurator-fiscal nor to the police, nor to anyone else, did I make the statement that Dr Charteris was the man I saw leaving the house.’
Charles Frederic Cowan, a 36-year-old analytical chemist, who was Miss Birrell’s lodger, assured Sheriff Millar that he had not heard Helen Lambie mention Dr Charteris, either when she arrived at Miss Birrell’s or when, later, he escorted her to her aunt’s.
In the matter of young Mary Barrowman, Trench had in his statement confessed cynicism.
I am forced to the conclusion that Mary Barrowman was not at or near Miss Gilchrist’s close at the time the murderer rushed there from. I have had from her employer and from his sister an emphatic statement that Barrowman did not deliver a message on the night of the 21st at Howitt’s house.2
Trench points out that in her original statement Barrowman made no mention of having been at a Band of Hope meeting – ‘If one compares the statements, it cannot be doubted but that Barrowman either lied in her original statement or lied at the trial.’ Nor was there, said Trench, any reference in her original precognition to a man knocking up against her. It had merely said that the man ran past her.
Trench’s misgivings regarding the reliability of Mary Barrowman’s evidence were now evaluated.
William Roxburgh Barbour, grain merchant, aged 45, voluntary superintendent of the Band of Hope Mission at Lansdowne Mission Hall in Walker Street, spoke well of young Mary and of her honesty, but he could not help on the matter at issue, being unable to say whether or not she had been present at the 21 December meeting.
Then, cheerfully inflexible, in tripped Mary herself, to tell her story to the sheriff. And, yes, she definitely had been at that Band of Hope meeting.
Her boss, Colin Maccallum, owner of the boot and shoe shop, confirmed his certainty that Mary had gone with a parcel to Mr Howat’s on the night of 21 December, adding for good measure: ‘I never said to Lieutenant Trench that I was sure that Barrowman did not go that message on the night of the murder … That statement is absolutely false.’
Time and time again that phrase, ‘absolutely false’, came beating like a recurrent theme through the responses of the witnesses.
Sheriff Millar thought it right to obtain a statement from Agnes Brown, a 37-year-old schoolteacher, whose testimony seemed to have a bearing on the identification by Barrowman. She said that shortly after 7.08pm on the evening of 21 December 1908, she had encountered two men running in a westerly direction along West Princes Street. They had turned down Rupert Street and run on towards Great Western Road. She had identified one of them as Oscar Slater.
The evidence of Duncan MacBrayne, who knew Slater and had seen him standing a few yards from his own close-mouth at about 8.15pm on December 21st, also struck Millar as reflecting significantly on Barrowman’s statement.
Nor was it only lay witnesses who were denying the claims put forward by Trench. His own colleagues in the force were testifying against him. Here are a half-dozen of them. They surely cannot all be out of step.
Chief Superintendent John Orr, now Assistant Chief Constable of Glasgow, did not recall instructing Trench to visit Miss Birrell, or receiving any report from him of his questioning of her. He had, moreover, never remarked, ‘This is the first real clue we have got.’
Superintendent John Ord said that the police had satisfied themselves at the time that Dr Charteris had nothing to do with the murder. He was quite certain that Trench had not told Orr and himself that Miss Birrell had said that Lambie had told her that the man she saw leaving the hall was Dr Charteris – ‘I am astonished to hear such a statement made, and I say quite solemnly that it is not true.’ He added that if, as Trench claimed, a written statement had been handed to him, it should be on the file. It was not – and the numbers on the file were consecutive.
Detective Inspector Andrew Nisbet Keith, who had accompanied Trench on the Lambie interview of 3 January 1909, had ‘no clear recollection of what occurred’. But he definitely did not remember any pencil sketch of Slater, or Trench, bringing the conversation round to the question of whether Lambie had known the man who left Miss Gilchrist’s house, although he conceded ‘it was very likely that was done’. He had heard no talk of anything being ‘gey funny’ or of Lambie’s being invited to stay the night at Dr Charteris’ and saying: ‘I would watch it. He might have done the same to me.’ Having had all the parts of Trench’s statement that concerned him read over to him by the sheriff, Keith commented: ‘The whole thing is news to me, and I have no recollection of its having occurred.’
Superintendent William Miller Douglas’ version of events contrasted strongly with Lieutenant Trench’s. In the matter of an alleged visit by the police to the house of Dr Charteris, the contrast could scarcely have been more stark. Trench’s allegation was:
I am aware that on 22nd December, the day after the murder, Superintendent Douglas, along with Detectives Pyper and Dornan, drove in a taxi-cab to the house of Dr Charteris, at 400 Great Western Road. I am also aware that they did so in view of information supplied by Helen Lambie. I have endeavoured from time to time to elicit what took place in Dr Charteris’ house, but I am without information.
Douglas told Sheriff Millar:
I am perfectly sure it is untrue to say that on 22nd December, accompanied by Detectives Pyper and Dornan, I drove in a taxi-cab to the house of Dr Charteris … The statement made by Lieutenant Trench with reference to this supposed visit to Dr Charteris’ house has been read over to me and it is absolutely without foundation. The true story with regard to the visit is that on 23rd December Detectives Pyper, Gordon and I went to the house of Mrs Charteris at 4 Queen Margaret Crescent, partly on account of a statement made by Helen Lambie on the 22nd, as to the unfriendly relationship between Miss Gilchrist and Mrs Charteris and partly to exhaust the enquiry as to Miss Gilchrist’s relatives.
In this connection, a hitherto undiscovered document is of paramount importance. It is a report of a police interview with Helen Lambie on the day after the murder and it is reposited in the Crown Office’s vast archive on the Slater case.
Lambie is specific.
During the whole time I was in the deceased’s employment I always cleaned the windows and did the washing. We had no charwomen or window cleaners coming about the house, and the only persons whom I ever heard the deceased say anything against was [sic] Mrs Charteris of No. 4 Queen Margaret Crescent, Hillhead … and her daughter by James Gilchrist viz. Mary Gilchrist or McColl [sic], who resides in England, Boscombe Court, Boscombe, Bournemouth. She frequently said to me that she disliked them … She [Mrs Charteris] had three sons … and the only time that I saw any of them at the house was about three years ago when Dr Charteris attended a party in the house and at that time he brought an Irish Terrier to Miss Gilchrist.
Superintendent Douglas also told the sheriff that Dr Charteris had explained how he came to be at Miss Gilchrist’s later on the night of the murder. Someone, on hearing of the murder, had telephoned to Mr James Macdonald, who was Charteris’ solicitor, under the mistaken impression that he was Miss Gilchrist’s law agent, who, by one of the series of incredible coincidences with which the Slater case is positively starred, was also a James Macdonald.3
On hearing of the murder, Charteris’ agent had promptly telephoned him, suggesting that he should break the news to his mother. Charteris determined that, before agitating her, he would go along to Miss Gilchrist’s and verify that she really had been killed.
Douglas said that ‘full enquiry was made into the movements of Dr Charteris by the police, and I am satisfied that he had nothing whatever to do with the murder’.
Detective Lieutenant William Gordon gave evidence to the effect that when he took a statement from Miss Birrell on 22 December 1908, she had said nothing of Lambie’s having told her that the man in the hall was Dr Charteris. Indeed, on the night of the murder he had himself pressed Lambie regarding the man, and ‘She told me she was quite unable to identify him’.
Chief Detective Inspector Pyper echoed this – ‘She [Lambie] never said anything to me about Dr Charteris being the man.’ He had also examined Miss Birrell, who told him in terms that she had no suspicion of any person. ‘I have not a shadow of doubt that Dr Charteris had nothing to do with the murder,’ concluded Pyper.
Finally, James Dornan, promoted now from sergeant to inspector, came forward to state that although he had been present at a number of interviews with Miss Birrell and Nellie Lambie, he had never heard either of them say anything at all that would throw suspicion on Dr Charteris.
And the odd policeman out, the solitary colleague who seemed, partly anyway, to confirm Trench’s story, was Chief Inspector Alexander Cameron. He remembered that
previous to my visit to Mr and Mrs Birrell [Miss Margaret Birrell’s Uncle Dawson and Aunt Jane] on January 9th, 1909, he [Trench] told me that Miss Birrell had said to him that the girl Lambie had said to her that the man who had passed her in the lobby was like Dr Charteris.
In spite of all these locked-horn refutations, Lieutenant John Thomson Trench, compeared by the sheriff, stood unabashed.
Notwithstanding I am told that both Miss Birrell and Helen Lambie emphatically deny the whole story and express astonishment at it, I adhere to my statement that that was what Miss Birrell told me … I visited Helen Lambie … I was so much impressed with her statement that I mentioned the fact to Superintendent Ord next morning, asking if Dr Charteris might not be the man, and his reply was: ‘Douglas has cleared all that up, and what can we do?’
Ridiculing – and this time on securer ground – the Crown allegation of a flight from justice, Trench had suggested – in the statement which he had submitted earlier to the Secretary for Scotland – that Slater had made preparations to leave Glasgow well before Allan McLean had gone to the Central Police Office. Nor had the journey out of Glasgow been a secretive one. Slater and Antoine booked tickets to Liverpool. Their luggage was conspicuously labelled ‘Liverpool – Lime Street’. In Liverpool, staying in Room No. 139 at the North Western Hotel, where he registered as Oscar Slater, the ‘fugitive’ made no secret of having come from Glasgow and of intending to depart on the Lusitania for America. Nine witnesses – a Glasgow shop assistant, two Glasgow street porters, three Glasgow railway workers, a Liverpool shipping office passenger manager, a Liverpool hotel baggage porter and a Liverpool superintendent of police, who submitted 16 depositions from Liverpool witnesses – all testified to Slater’s departure being as cool, calm, collected, and open as daylight. This overt itinerary did not impress one as being that of a guilt-ridden fugitive.
Trench brought his precognition to an end with something of an – albeit rather garbled – explanation:
I have never seen Dr Charteris. I did not make any statement previous to the trial, either to the Fiscal or the Agent for the defence, as to what I now say Miss Birrell and Helen Lambie had said to me. I said nothing at all after Slater was condemned to death until he was reprieved, and even then not for a considerable period, when I mentioned it to Mr Shaughnessy, the agent for Oscar Slater.
Then comes this most opaque sentence: ‘I did not think much of the incident by itself, and it was only when I discovered other facts that I brought this one up.’
A theory has been punted that there was an official police ‘conspiracy’ to spare Dr Charteris, of whose innocence they stood in no doubt, from what they regarded as the potentially damaging assertions to his good name made by Lambie. Trench might have got wind of this ‘cover up’ and misinterpreted it, convinced that powerful friends were hushing up the part that the well-connected doctor had played in Miss Gilchrists’ death, and made the foreign Jew the scapegoat. His sense of justice and fairplay outraged, he set to work to fix the guilt where he believed it truly lay.
All things are, of course, possible, but this I would frankly have thought ingenious but unlikely.
By Saturday evening, 25 April, 29 witnesses had been questioned by Millar and their answers recorded by Sandilands. The Sabbath having, in solid Scots tradition, been kept holy as a day of rest, the inquiry papers, together with Sheriff Millar’s report, were, on Monday, 27 April 1914, posted off to London.
1 Oscar Slater: The Great Suspect, page 158
2 Actually, James Howat, of 36 Cleveland Street.
3 According to Dr Charteris himself, it was not his but his mother’s solicitor who contacted him.