CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Tinker’s Curse
BRISBANE TO DURBAN
— 1909 —
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing;
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice; then the darkness again and a silence.
Amongst the first documents that General Louis Botha, the new Prime Minister of the Transvaal and South African War hero, discovered on his desk upon taking office, in February 1909, were papers relating to the extradition of Jack McLoughlin dating back to 1906. Recent changes to the constitution of the colony had slowed the momentum but Botha knew that McLoughlin was due to be released in April 1909, and was determined to hurry the process along. Using Section 29 of the Imperial Fugitive Offenders Act of 1881, he requested the Governor, Lord Selborne, to resume earlier efforts to have McLoughlin extradited through the offices of the Governor of Queensland, Lord Chelmsford.1
A burst of telegraphic fire between Johannesburg and Brisbane followed. But not even electric pulses directed across the ocean could help to align due process with the speed demanded by commonsense compassion and justice. Chelmsford was a former Fellow of All Souls, a notable who would go on to become the Viceroy of India as well as First Lord of the Admiralty. A cautious man, he was not about to be nudged into a false step, even though he trusted Selborne, another Oxford man.
On the same afternoon that a one-armed hopeful had anticipated the Otter carrying him to freedom, 16 April 1909, Selborne felt the need for a little more insistent probing. ‘Will extradition McLoughlin be granted on documents already submitted?’ he telegraphed Chelmsford. ‘Upon affirmative reply,’ he continued, ‘officer will be sent to produce original documents and identify McLoughlin.’2 In Pretoria, both Botha and Selborne were becoming concerned. In 1906, the Australian courts had taken months to extradite McKelvey, a Durban insolvent, back to Natal.3
But telegrams can settle in a Governor’s in-tray almost as gently as snowflakes on fox fur. Five days later, on 21 April, Chelmsford, correct right down to the flourish beneath his expansive signature, replied: ‘All now required is identification of prisoner and of signatures to documents by officer from Transvaal. McLoughlin remanded until 24th April.’4 Selborne was so pleased to get a response that he telephoned the Prime Minister to let him know that the Eye had winked in agreement to a request first initiated by the Kruger government 11 years earlier. The club was always more comfortable doing business with members. And as the wheels of justice ground round and round, the subject of the enquiries sat it out in the Boggo Road Gaol on remand, week after week.
Granted provisional approval, the Botha administration, cautious to the point of suspicion, yet revelling in being a newly admitted member of the imperial family, responded with alacrity and professionalism. Mindful of diplomatic niceties and the need to be able to supplicate in English, it was decided that two men rather than one should be sent to escort the fugitive back to South Africa. Given McLoughlin’s fearsome reputation it might also need two officers to subdue him should he decide to play up. The policemen, one English- and the other Afrikaans-speaking, could also play ‘good cop/bad cop’ roles. The state’s choices were inspired.
The roots of the Mynotts lay in the fenlands of East Anglia and, more particularly, Cambridgeshire. Charles Albert Mynott, drawn into the country by the South African War, was an educated, well-spoken detective. Difficult to intimidate and a keen observer, Mynott would be comfortable providing testimony in a Queensland Magistrate’s Court and dealing with the paper-work. But, since Mynott was unacquainted with the fugitive, he would be accompanied and relieved, when necessary, by someone from the Transvaal Town Police – a man familiar with the old Irish Brigade, who knew McLoughlin from time spent in the old Visagie Street gaol in the early 1890s. It was indeed Constable Matthew John de Beer, the same man who, as a former member of Kruger’s State Artillery, had in 1892 taken leave of McLoughlin by saying ‘tot siens’.5
Mynott and De Beer were given only hours to prepare for two voyages across the Indian Ocean before heading to Park Station. They scrambled aboard the night train across the Orange Free State and pushed south, across the Karoo. They would be gone for three months. The outward passage, at £15 for a shared berth, was one of the few perks of their working lives – a cruise aboard one of the truly great ocean liners of the day. They boarded the White Star’s SS Persic in Cape Town on 28 April. Selborne promptly sent Chelmsford a telegram confirming their departure.6 The ship on its regular run from Liverpool to Brisbane via the Cape and Sydney was greatly admired by the passengers. But the Persic’s officers, keen to promote the line’s rivalry with Cunard, spoke only about the hull of a larger vessel that had just been laid in the yards of Harland & Wolff, in Belfast – the Titanic.
After a month in southern seas it took a few hours before Brisbane’s streets steadied themselves beneath Mynott and De Beer’s feet. After a while they found their bearings but the unfamiliar surroundings lent an air of unreality to proceedings. It was as if they were locked into time, suspended. The closing days of May were spent shuffling from pillar to post, dealing with unknown officials and strange places, lodging papers, preparing for McLoughlin’s final appearance in the Central Police Court.
Like Hermes, herald of the Olympian gods and patron of boundaries, they sought to smooth the way back home by making reservations for the inbound passage from Brisbane to Sydney and then on to Durban. Once their choice of dates and vessels became apparent, however, Hermes, who knew how all lives ended, may have smiled. Poseidon had made him party to a truth that would take weeks to manifest itself. And, down the Boggo Road, where his hatred of the Australians was becoming as pronounced as his dislike of New Zealand authorities, a one-time Irish ‘tinker’ sat and fumed as he waited. Could it be that Hermes, Robber and Trickster had been moved by a thief’s plight and decided to grant him a last chance before deciding what to do with him?
If he had, there was no sign of it on 2 June, when proceedings in the Central Police Court got under way before Magistrate RA Ranking. Far from being comforted by the idea that after so many years the Johannesburg police were unlikely to come up with any surprises, McLoughlin was astounded to be confronted by a man whose words had haunted him ever since he had taken leave of him in 1892. It could not be – and yet there he was – Matthew de Beer. He was as amazed as he was when Kenny had arrested him on the Otter, but this time he would give away nothing. But what would he say if De Beer confirmed his identity?
Angry questions ripped through his mind as due process – like an old dog following its master to the village shop – padded along behind the law. Chelmsford, away on official duties, had not missed a trick. No less than a barrister of the Queensland Supreme Court, LW Marsland, had been retained to argue that the Imperial Eye was within its rights in seeking extradition. McLoughlin failed to understand the intricacies of the argument and was in no position to offer a counter-argument. For all that, he felt that somewhere within proceedings that had dragged on in two countries for eight years, lengthy sentences with hard labour, and seemingly endless remands, lay an injustice of sorts. As a reporter noted: ‘On one occasion, in court, he declared that there were no grounds whatever for the charge against him. He likewise declared, somewhat bitterly, that an Englishman had no chance in the colonies.’7
The hearing ground on and on and Mynott took forever to lodge a slew of affidavits along with a description and a photograph of the fugitive. When the Magistrate asked McLoughlin whether he wanted to put any questions to Mynott, he smiled and replied: ‘I do not know the gentleman, and I am sure he does not know me.’ It was true. But De Beer was then called and he confirmed the prisoner’s identity. When Ranking asked McLoughlin if he had any questions to put to De Beer, he stepped forward and told the big lie: ‘I do not know the man.’8
McLoughlin hoped to say no more and leave it at that. But, when the Magistrate indicated that he would be recommending that the extradition order be granted, subject to the approval of Sir Arthur Morgan, who was acting Lieutenant Governor during Chelmsford’s absence, the prisoner asked permission to address the court. He again stated that ‘he did not know the man De Beer, and that Constable de Beer had never seen him before’. ‘He does not know me from a cod-fish; but, of course, he has been put up to it,’ he said, positing the well-worn old conspiracy theory.9
He was escorted back to Boggo Road under guard and in low spirits to wait on Morgan’s word. He waited. He seemed always to be waiting, waiting for somebody or for something to happen. When and how would this business be concluded? The gaol, as forbidding as any he had been in, seemed gloomier than ever. The inmates were subdued, waiting on news more awful than any he could receive, yet somehow only too pertinent. A 21-year-old, Arthur Ross, was awaiting execution for having shot a bank clerk while hoping to empty a safe at the Gayndah Branch of a Sydney bank.10 He, too, was just waiting.
Ranking was nothing if not efficient. He conveyed his decision to support the request for extradition to Morgan that same Wednesday afternoon.11 The rest of the week limped along, with no news forthcoming by the time that the inmates settled down for the long period of uninterrupted isolation that characterised Saturdays and Sundays. Then, early on the Monday morning of 7 June, well before the normal prison routine could be activated, Ross was hanged. McLoughlin and the other inmates were mired in resentment.
Two days after the execution, on 9 June, Sir Arthur Morgan telegraphed Selborne to let him know that, three years after the matter was first mooted, the extradition had been approved.12 After a decent interval the information was allowed to filter down through the ranks of the bureaucracy. In keeping with protocol, Mynott and De Beer were told that they could call in at Boggo Road and inform their prisoner of the arrangements they had made for a journey from which there would be no return. They found McLoughlin so low in spirits that they agreed that he might be considering taking his own life. It had the makings of a logistical nightmare, and for some long and painful watches aboard ship.
He remained locked up on the Boggo Road during the second week of June. It was hard to know which was worse – being confined in a cell of his own, or being out in the yard where the whisperings of the inmates still centred on the execution of Ross. Then on the morning of the 19th, Mynott and De Beer appeared to collect him for the first leg of the journey to a place which, for all the difference it made, even he considered to be ‘home’.
Once clear of the gaol he sensed his mood improving. It was good to be out and heading for the docks. He enjoyed being out, on the open sea, and it was not as if he was on a train to Johannesburg. Yet. It would, he convinced himself, be a short but pleasant run down the coast. The dismal, far longer, haul to South Africa would, in truth, only commence once they embarked at Sydney.
As he had learnt when seeing the Mount Sirion for the first time, there was one thing agreeable about travelling at government expense. The state had no interest in lining the pockets of owners of inferior ships. They would not be sailing on some sea-stained old tub with seagull-shit dripping down the wheel-house and rusted chains cluttering the deck. All treasuries liked doing business with established shipping lines, helping to reinforce the circles of influence, power and wealth that kept the rich ruling with the rest of humanity following at a respectful distance.
The sixty-nine ton SS Wyreema did not disappoint. All bold brass and smoothed paint, she was not yet a year out of a Clydeside yard and built to provide passengers along the Pacific fringes with all the comforts of modern steamship travel. Mynott was shown to the two cabins that had been reserved for the three of them. The policemen took turns to unpack their belongings and they all settled in as the ship nosed slowly out into Moreton Bay and then, at a brisker pace, on past St Helena Island. It felt good to be leaving the bay and even better after he had been served lunch in his cabin-cell. It was no hotel, but he was in an expansive mood.
Mynott recalled well one of the few animated conversations the officers had with Jack McLoughlin on a voyage that lasted a month:
Shortly after lunch the accused was very talkative. From the time I took him over he was very talkative about Australia [and] the old days of the Transvaal. He was asking De Beer many things about people who had done time and speaking about the prisoners escaping from Pretoria Gaol and it led to him telling me about the Pretoria safe robbery. It was quite voluntary. I asked him no questions whatever.13
It was a seminal moment and helped determine McLoughlin’s attitude towards both men for the rest of their time aboard ship. He enjoyed chatting to the anglicised Afrikaner, De Beer, because they had things in common. They shared experiences including tales about the Visagie Street prison. De Beer knew most of the burglars, coach-robbers, gold-thieves, highwaymen and safe-robbers who had operated on the Witwatersrand frontier long before the railways had sidelined horses. He knew most of the members of the old Irish Brigade, including the legendary bank robber turned social bandit who had escaped to Australia, Jack McKeone.
Most important of all, however, Constable de Beer understood who he – ‘One-Armed Jack’ McLoughlin – was. He respected his status and standing in prison and in the Johannesburg underworld; he appreciated his reputation for courage and daring, and he knew about his unparalleled success as a safe-cracker. In short, De Beer brought him round briefly from a prolonged state of social death – he saw him as a living, functioning, person with both a past and a present, if not a future. By contrast, McLoughlin was wholly contemptuous of Mynott, a Johnny-come-lately, an officer and gentleman who got on with the higher-ups, a man who bore no knowledge of him or the exploits of the Irish Brigade on the frontier. It was Mynott and his type who had made his life hell ever since that night at the Red Lion. And it was Charles Mynott who now had to sanction his every waking moment. A curse on Mynott too!14
The tension between a rough-hewn son of an Irishman raised in the mills of Manchester and Mynott, a scion of rural East Anglia, was palpable. It eased only briefly when they reached Sydney, where, in line with arrangements, they boarded the vessel that would take them on to Durban almost immediately upon disembarking. McLoughlin’s musings about the quality of a berth when travelling at government expense were again vindicated. The Wyreema had been comfortable, but the new liner was simply magnificent, modern and luxurious in almost every respect.
Barely eight months out of Clydeside, the 16 000 tonner was on only its second voyage between Australia and the United Kingdom. It was the flagship of the Lund brothers’ Blue Anchor Line and under the command of Captain JE Ilbury, a 69-year-old Lancastrian.15 Ilbury, the very experienced Commodore of the Fleet, was an easy choice as captain of a new vessel propelled by twin screws and state-of-the-art marine engineering. Although pre-eminently a passenger liner with an impressively stacked superstructure that housed 100 first-class cabins and 300 more second-class berths, there was a cleverly designed duality to what undoubtedly was the pride of the line.16
On the outward leg, from Liverpool, the vessel’s convertible holds were turned into dormitories catering for the lucrative emigrant trade as Britain continued to feed its colonies with settlers. A crew of 150 served over 1 000 passengers in eight state rooms, a music lounge with a ‘minstrels’ gallery’, a saloon and promenade decks. But on the inward leg, to England, the dormitories disappeared and refrigerated holds were stuffed with the colonial foodstuffs, fresh produce and raw materials needed back ‘home’. The name of this new floating wonder was derived from New South Wales’s most striking flower – the Waratah.17
* * *
As representatives of the Blue Anchor Line and Mynott both appreciated, Jack McLoughlin’s presence on board was a source of potential embarrassment for some of the ship’s well-heeled passengers. A one-armed convict from St Helena being extradited to face a charge of murder was about as welcome on board a liner as a rag-and-bone man at the Lord Mayor’s banquet. The fact that it was midwinter and there were therefore fewer bookings to the United Kingdom than expected helped, but did not solve the problem. There were questions of safety and standards to consider and so the names of the small party joining from Brisbane did not appear on the list of passengers who had boarded the ship at Sydney.18 Common courtesy demanded that the prisoner be kept out of sight. Mynott decided that any meals in the lounge would be at the end of sittings with the prisoner handcuffed.
For McLoughlin, sensitive about his missing hand, the arrangement combined hardship and humiliation. Already subject to Mynott’s authority for permission to be freed of the cuffs in order to clean himself, shave, or use the toilet, he now had to be seen in public with his ‘good’ left hand shackled to a detective. So he promptly stopped shaving. Not only did it save him from having to supplicate, but it would make it more difficult for witnesses at any identity parade to recognise him. At the time of Stevenson’s shooting he was clean-shaven but for a large, military-style moustache. But shaving was the least of his problems and he found the restrictions and dependency alike deeply distressing.19
In Sydney, he watched gloomily as a paltry score of passengers boarded the Waratah, including one or two from New Zealand. Among the latter was Claude Sawyer, a well-travelled engineer of extremely nervous disposition who was keeping his options open as to whether he would disembark in South Africa or carry on directly to the United Kingdom.20 The ship’s hold swallowed hundreds of bales of wool as well as oats, skins and tallow before they eventually set sail in a southerly direction on 26 June.
Confined to cabin and in low spirits, he found it difficult to come to terms with the fact that he was leaving Australia permanently, that he was bound for Natal and, beyond that, the Witwatersrand and the unknown. It reminded him of earlier, life-defining moments in his career. He had said nothing to Mynott or De Beer about his earlier visits to Sydney or Melbourne in the mid-1880s, or of that in 1900 while on his way to Fremantle. In Melbourne the Waratah slumped into an all-too-familiar routine; for all the difference it made to him he might as well have been back on St Helena. The Blue Anchor Line man was disappointed by how few joining passengers there were. Only 20 boarded the vessel, but it did take on 1 000 boxes of butter destined for South Africa.
When the ship left Melbourne and first encountered open water, on 1 July, Sawyer noted that the Waratah listed to port for a while before righting itself. Later, in more unsettled seas, it appeared to list to starboard. He may not have been the only one to think that there could be a problem. The ship’s movements became the subject of small talk around the dining table. Sawyer was left with the impression that there were others who felt that the ship rolled more than was usual for a vessel of its size. But with largely fine weather after leaving Melbourne and across the Bight, the problem faded and he said little more about it.
Given the cost of berths and freight charges, it was predictable that Port Adelaide – the last Australian port before crossing the Indian and Atlantic oceans – would see more activity than in the east-coast ports. Captain Ilbury, aware of the challenge ahead, took on seven new crew members and looked on with satisfaction as no fewer than 82 new passengers boarded his ship. The Waratah also took on additional consignments of butter, frozen meat and grain and 300 tons of lead concentrate.21 Given all the additional cargo, weighing 6 000 tons, and some folks’ misgivings about the vessel’s alleged propensity to list, it may be noteworthy that some passengers claimed later that, while in port, Ilbury had insisted on personally overseeing the loading of the ship.
For Mynott, De Beer and McLoughlin, the stop-over in Port Adelaide promised a change of routine and the chance for some respite from interpersonal tensions. The ever-efficient Mynott got the Adelaide police to agree to keep his prisoner confined in the local gaol for the duration of the Waratah’s stay. For McLoughlin, it was another bittersweet moment. On being handed over he said to one of the warders in Adelaide: ‘I know this place. I spent a month here once.’22 Indeed he had, and he had then gone on to acquire sufficient funds to re-cross the Tasman Sea and engage his passion for gambling and the horses in distant Auckland.
Mynott and the Blue Anchor people were relieved to have the one-armed man away from the ship and out of sight of any new passengers for a couple of days. Their efforts were successful but they had a narrow escape. On the afternoon that the ship sailed, 8 July, an enterprising reporter on the Adelaide Advertiser who had been following the McLoughlin story ever since his arrest on board the Otter, got wind of the fact that he was being held in the local gaol. The following morning, shortly after the vessel had sailed, readers in the city awoke to get their first account of McLoughlin’s recent exploits. While passengers aboard the Waratah remained ignorant about their shipmate, McLoughlin’s name, already well known in many parts, was being spread further around the shores of the antipodean world.23
Had McLoughlin got to see it, the report in the Advertiser would have cheered him up. It was affirmation of a sort. Instead, he grew more despondent as the ship put distance between itself and Adelaide. Midwinter meant there were more storms and less sunlight around than he had been accustomed to on the Queensland coast. Mynott and De Beer took no chances. ‘We were handcuffed to him six hours a day and he was prevented from making away with himself.’24 Elsewhere on the ship, Sawyer was wrestling his old demons. He grew even more concerned when, one day, he noted that the water in his bath was inclined at an angle of 45 degrees.25 Hurrying up on deck to see what was happening he noted that whenever confronting the swell head-on the ship’s bow seemed more inclined to plough through a wave than rise up on the incoming surge. Despite all the additional cargo the vessel had taken on, the Waratah still appeared to be slightly top-heavy.
In the second-class cell that doubled as a cabin, tensions between McLoughlin and Mynott were approaching boiling point. Unfortunately, it is only Mynott’s account that survived:
I told [McLoughlin] on board ship I would make it hot for him if he did not behave himself. He called me a bloody mongrel and said he would pull my wind-pipe out. He wanted to see the captain and would not come out of the cabin and I told him to come out and stand outside to let the steward scrub the cabin out. He used a lot of bad language and would not come out and called me everything that he could lay his tongue to. After the captain had seen him he refused to have the handcuffs on whilst we went to lunch. He jumped up and attempted to strike me and used bad language and I thought he was going to strike me when I put the handcuffs on and I shoved him over.26
It is difficult to know what to make of this version but two things do stand out. First, an old sea dog, McLoughlin knew where the ultimate authority on board ship lay. He won a significant battle by getting Ilbury to intervene. The captain was not unsympathetic to McLoughlin’s complaints about being handcuffed at lunch. The fact that they were both Lancastrians and older than Mynott might have helped.27 Secondly, regardless of the outcome, Mynott only got his way on other issues by overpowering the prisoner, and thereafter had to ‘put up with a lot of inconvenience’. The handcuffs bound two men, not just one.
Once clear of the depression-driven winter weather off south-western Australia the Waratah made better than expected progress, even if its pitching and rolling continued to trouble some passengers. Sawyer’s suspicions about a possible structural problem in the ship’s design deepened when a female passenger lost her footing during a minor tempest and had to be kept in a wheelchair for the remainder of the voyage.28 It is also possible that Sawyer had by then talked himself into a position where he might have lost face among some of his shipmates if he was not seen to act upon his misgivings about the ship’s stability.
The Waratah steamed into Durban a day earlier than expected, docking on 19 July. Most of the onward passengers, refreshed after 10 uninterrupted nights at sea, were pleased to learn that they would be in port for a week and set about exploring the city. But the two policemen and their prisoner had seen enough of the cabin to last a lifetime. Mynott was in a hurry to get back to the Witwatersrand and to rid himself of his prisoner. It had been four long weeks since they had set sail from Brisbane and the detective lost no time at all in getting reservations on the night train to Johannesburg. Local journalists were either unaware of the three men’s presence, or not particularly interested in their arrival.29
For different reasons, Sawyer was as relieved to get off the Waratah as the Mynott party. He decided not to continue his journey and scurried off to the post office to send a telegram to his wife, waiting in London. ‘Thought Waratah top-heavy,’ he informed her, so ‘landed Durban’. Sawyer may have been a bit unstable, because he later claimed to have had bad dreams about the ship’s fate.30 That said, he may have been correct in his assessment of the Waratah’s alleged propensity to list. The condition of his mental or physical health was not necessarily at variance with his professional judgement. It is impossible to know.
Mynott and De Beer were home and Jack McLoughlin in The Fort, in Johannesburg, by the time that the Waratah put to sea on 26 July. The ship had over 200 passengers and crew for the three-day voyage down the coast to Cape Town. It was midwinter and the weather turned foul, with gale-force gusts of wind and huge swells. On the evening of 27 July, amidst stormy weather that showed no sign of abating, two passing ships made partial contact with a vessel they believed to be the Waratah.31 But the ship never reached Cape Town. No more was heard or seen of the vessel. Her disappearance remains the great unsolved mystery of the southern ocean.
Within days of the vessel being reported overdue three of the Royal Navy’s Simonstown-based cruisers – Forte, Pandora and Hermes – were sent to search for the ship or wreckage, but nothing conclusive was found.32 The lack of news about the Waratah’s fate occasioned great distress all around Australasian shores, and nowhere more so than in Adelaide, where the ship had taken on its largest contingent of passengers and additional crew. Incomplete or misleadingly optimistic reports compounded mounting tension. On 10 August, a telegram from South Africa claimed that the ship had been sighted slowly making her way to Durban. The Speaker of the House in the Australian Parliament interrupted proceedings to convey what turned out to be a false report. In Adelaide, church bells rang out for hope raised and lost.
The failed Royal Navy search was followed by another, paid for by the Blue Anchor Line. Yet others, privately funded or partially financed through public subscription, followed. Days turned into weeks and weeks into months before it was conceded that the ship had been lost at sea for reasons unknown.33 Early on, amidst the on-going anguish, newspapers around the Pacific learnt that Jack McLoughlin had been aboard when the ship left Adelaide. There was speculation as to whether or not a man well known in Australia and New Zealand had gone down with the SS Waratah.34 In South Africa nobody bothered to make the connection.
By then a silent synchronicity, ordained by a Greek god or flowing from a tinker’s curse, had set in across the southern world. Between July and December 1909, men and women around Australasia were in purgatory, waiting, month upon month, to see whether members of their families, friends or loved ones aboard the Waratah had been doomed or saved. And as they waited on Tasman shores, somewhere in a cell in Johannesburg, another man sat and waited to hear the date of the trial that would determine whether he would live or die. For four months the counsel of priests was freely sought. The souls of the living waited for news of those damned to a watery grave, and one of the living dead waited to hear about his own fate. For a time, the hand of fate and the Eye of Empire were perfectly co-ordinated in their unspeakable cruelty.
But a tinker’s curse could often be more personal than Poseidon’s indiscriminate wrath. Once officers and men in Johannesburg’s central police station accepted that the Waratah had been lost, they took to referring to Mynott as ‘Lucky Mynott’ – as part of a joking tribute to his fortunate escape. The sobriquet, however, held for barely forty-eight months. In July 1914, Mynott was fatally wounded while attempting to arrest members of the ‘Foster Gang’ hiding in a house in the city’s southern suburbs. Robert Foster, who shot Mynott, was another South African gangster of Irish extraction who, like Jack McKeone, had been raised in the foothills of the Drakensberg before moving on to Kimberley.
In Johannesburg, McLoughlin relapsed into a Waratah-like trance. By December 1909, that sunny afternoon in Moreton Bay, back in April, seemed not only half a world, but half a lifetime away. The seven intervening months had been spent waiting to find out when the Johannesburg court that would decide whether he was to live or die might sit. But, under almost every judicial system, outside the church, living in the Valley of the Shadow of Death counted for precisely nothing. It was something just added to a death sentence if it were to be passed.
He often thought about things that he could, or might, say in court about the shooting of Stevo. But it was impossible to come up with anything that would easily be understood by anybody who had not been there at the time. So much had changed since that night that it would be impossible to conjure up place, time or motive in ways that seemed meaningful or relevant. It now all seemed so trivial, so meaningless that it was difficult to believe that he had done it, or that he had shot the unfortunate Hadji Mustaffa. Try as he might, he could not come up with anything that sounded remotely like a convincing defence or a motive that a jury might understand. It was depressing. But then, as men are wont to do under adverse circumstances, he attempted to wring hope out of the hopeless. If he could not conjure up the past in a way that evoked sympathy, then surely the prosecution would find it equally difficult to conjure up the events at the Red Lion after so many years?