by Margalit Fox
What was needed, Peterhead’s town fathers had concluded by the mid-1880s, was a vast breakwater, built from native granite, to tame the savage sea. The brutal work of hewing the stone and erecting the breakwater could be given to convicts. That there was no prison in the area was no impediment: the town would simply build one, ensuring a perennial supply of captive labor.
A looming fortification known during the reign of Queen Victoria as Her Majesty’s Prison Peterhead, the penitentiary opened in 1888. “We are always being told that the treatment in the Scottish prisons is very just, so that no further evil can happen to you,” Slater’s mother would write to him hopefully in 1910. She was only partly correct.
If the turn of the twentieth century was a pivotal time in British criminology, it was also an era of transition in penology. The nineteenth century had viewed criminals as incorrigibles, and as a result incarceration was a thoroughly punitive affair, with isolation, hard labor, and meager rations the wide standard. The new century saw the rise of a more progressive approach, with the nation’s most enlightened prison governors, as the chief wardens are known, treating prison as a place of rehabilitation. To a degree, Peterhead embodied this divide: it had a library and at least a few social activities, including the debating society at which Slater would pass his covert message to William Gordon. But it remained overwhelmingly a place of spartan brutality, home to some of Scotland’s most notorious convicts. “I would rather be immediately put to death than condemned to a life sentence in Peterhead,” the Scottish revolutionary socialist John MacLean, who was incarcerated there more than once, said in 1918.
The original prison building housed some two hundred men, one to a cell. Each cell measured roughly four feet by eight feet, with the ceiling less than seven feet high—“just a little box,” MacLean wrote. The only furniture in each cell was a sleeping hammock, secured to two walls, and a narrow, wood-topped iron table that folded down from one wall. In each cell was a single window, eighteen inches square and heavily barred.
“Each cell is heated by warmed air from the hall,” MacLean, who had been imprisoned at Peterhead for sedition, wrote:
The air in the hall is heated by American stoves burning coal, and enters the cell by two slits or openings at the foot of the door. Most cells are very cold in winter as the method of heating is of no use, and to wrap oneself round with blankets is a crime the governor can punish by sending a man to the “separate” cells, each more miserable than the others. Of course, anything can be made a crime, and by nagging and threatening to bring men before the governor the warders are able to make their charges’ lives unbearable. The purpose is to break up the men’s nervous system, and veritable wrecks are made of many.
An essay by Gerald Newman, another convict of the period, further describes Peterhead life: “The endless dreary days spent in the Quarries, the harsh treatment, the coarse & badly served food, the punishment of dark cells & bread & water….The freezing winter nights in a cell in which not one particle of heat can enter, the blazing summer sun striking down upon your head in the dry & dusty quarry, where the very chisel & mallet you are working with seem to burn your very hands & the glare of the sun scorches your very eyes.”
In MacLean’s time, a prisoner’s uniform consisted of a pair of stout boots, moleskin knickers, woolen stockings, shirt, waistcoat, and vest. For outdoor work in winter, there was a jacket of dense brown wool and a pair of mittens. Convicts’ hair, cut twice a month, was kept closely cropped by the prison barber; a tam of thick brown wool, like that of the jacket, kept the head warm. Each man’s underclothing, MacLean wrote, with no apparent irony, was “kept clean and sanitary by being washed once a fortnight.”
Prison warders were also specially accoutered. Because many inmates had to leave Peterhead to perform their labor, the guards who supervised them were heavily armed. From the prison’s earliest days through the late 1930s, each guard was issued a cutlass; until the late 1950s, some also carried rifles. “The blades were no ornamental comic opera pieces of weaponry,” the Scottish journalist Robert Jeffrey has written. “To an unarmed man a crack across the chest with a sword blade was a considerable disincentive to misbehaviour, and the warders knew it.”
It was into this setting, 180 miles northeast of Glasgow, that Oscar Slater was transported on July 8, 1909. He would be known for the next eighteen and a half years as Prisoner 1992.
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SLATER’S PRISON INTAKE SHEET, filled out for Peterhead officials by Detective Superintendent Ord, encapsulates much of the cultural bias that had caused him to be where he was in the first place:
NAME AND ALIASES: Oscar Slater, alias Otto Sands [sic], alias Oscar Leschziner…
CHARACTER AS REGARDS HONESTY: Is a Gambler and a resetter of stolen property.
CHARACTER AS REGARDS INDUSTRY: Follows no lawful occupation.
CHARACTER AS REGARDS SOBRIETY: Is temperate in his habits.
MEANS OF LIVELIHOOD: Gambling and living on the immoral earnings of prostitutes. He is also a reputed thief and resetter.
CLASS OF LIFE: Low. A thorough blackguard. Cannot be said to have a single good quality.
OCCUPATION: No lawful occupation…
CHARACTER OF FRIENDS AND ASSOCIATES: Thieves, Resetters, Gamblers, Prostitutes, Blackmailers. (With the exception of his parents who are comparatively respectable.)
NAMES AND ADDRESSES OF ANY RESPECTABLE PERSONS WHO CAN GIVE TRUSTWORTHY INFORMATION ON THE FOREGOING POINTS: …Detective Superintendent John Ord and Detective Inspector Pyper, Criminal Investigation Department, Glasgow.
At five each morning, inmates awoke to the clang of the prison bell. At five-thirty, each man got porridge and skim milk in his cell. At seven, they were herded outside to the prison yard, where each was searched before joining his work party. Slater was assigned to the quarry, “to break great granite blocks (hard like iron) with a tremendous heavy hammer,” as he would write. They were destined for a new prison building.
A stark narrative of his life at hard labor can be found in a newspaper article written by William Gordon after his release in 1925. In it, Gordon, who early that year had carried Slater’s plea to Conan Doyle in his mouth, described working beside him in the quarry. His prose was doubtless polished by editors, but the account is evocative nonetheless.
“He was a quiet, well-spoken man, and I took an instinctive liking to him,” Gordon wrote. “Each man working in the quarries—in that particular party—had to drill 30 holes in a day: 30 holes over a foot deep in solid blocks of granite. It is a hard day’s work when you are accustomed to it….Slater and I worked side by side in the quarries day after day for months on end.”
At eleven-thirty, the convicts reassembled in the yard, where each was searched before being returned to his cell for lunch, which consisted, MacLean wrote, of “a pint of broth, seven oz. of beef, six oz. of bread with variations as to potatoes, cheese, etc.” At one in the afternoon, they went back to work, returning at five, when “14 oz of dry bread and a pint of coffee was served out (less since 1917).” The men could read in their cells until lights-out at eight-thirty. The sleeping hammock could be used only between 8:30 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. without medical dispensation.
This regimen was broken only by mail from home, for Slater a tangible lifeline across the sea. “My innocent Oscar,” his mother, Pauline, wrote in one of her earliest letters to him, “I can send you the joyful assurance that we are not sitting idle with our hands in our laps….God keep you in health, don’t lose courage, innocent of my heart. The sun will yet bring all to the light of day. The warmest kisses from your Mother who loves you with her last breath.”
Some time afterward, Slater wrote: “In your last letter you ask me, dearest mother, if I can retain your letters. Yes, I can do this; still this does not assist me to remember what answer I have sent to your letters, not being allowed to keep
a copy [of the replies], however we will not worry over this, and if I should sometimes repeat myself I am sure you will excuse me….Your letters, dear mother, I have pasted together like a prayer book, and when my thoughts, as they often do, wander across to my dear home, I read your letters over again and find great consolation….I also, dear father, endeavor with all my might to keep bright, and the humourous way of my dear mother helps me greatly.”
The letters from the Leschziners, most written by Pauline in the early years, are filled with homey evocations of the family circle (“You need not get anxious my child if you do not see father’s handwriting; he is still fond of his dominoes, but he has asked me specially to leave him some space as he intends to add his greeting”) and portraits of village life: “You would hardly know Beuthen, so many changes have taken place during the last few years,” Pauline wrote. “There are only a few houses left that do not have electric light now.” (From Slater: “Electric light is very convenient, especially for elderly people. You must consider this.”)
There was also quotidian gossip (“Yes! It is quite correct Mrs. Lechtenstein has a big wart with long hair on her face”) and, above all, deep, spiritual affirmations of support. “You were always a good child, and why should you not extend the same affection towards us in your days of misfortune, which, after all, is all that we can exchange,” his mother wrote. She continued:
With you my dear child I begin the day, and you are never out of my thoughts. I count the days when I again may look for a letter from you. I often dream about you and picture you as a free being possessed with plenty of the good things of this world.
Would to God it were true….Yes, dearest Oscar, one gets accustomed to everything.
We have reconciled ourselves to your misfortune and are happy when we know that you are well….My only wish is that that Almighty might bring us together if only for a quarter of an hour before our days in this life are to come to an end….
All the other friends and relations make constant enquiries about you….Aunt Eva sends special regards….I do my best to make ends meet by letting some of our rooms.
Alas, such letters were not something on which Slater could depend. Convicts’ mail in both directions was rigorously monitored, and inmates could send and receive mail only at specified intervals, depending on their conduct and time served. On arriving at Peterhead, and for at least several years afterward, Slater was allowed to write home only once every six months. Problems of translation increased the delays: prison censors required correspondence in both directions to be in English. Whenever Slater’s parents wrote to him, they had to cast about Beuthen for someone who knew the language; otherwise, their German letters, on reaching Peterhead, were sent to Edinburgh for translation before Slater could see them. His letters to them, which he was obliged to write in English, had to be translated on the receiving end.
“We were very much rejoiced over your letter which I have had properly translated into German,” Slater’s mother wrote him in September 1909, when he was newly arrived at the prison. “We are all eager to hope that it may be possible to discover the real murderer or to bring proof of your innocence to light, my dearest child, and you may recover your freedom as soon as possible….May courage be given to you to bear your sad lot, and may your trust in the Almighty to do justice be strengthened….How we all look forward yearningly to the moment when we can embrace you.”
As his parents’ correspondence makes clear, finding a translator in Beuthen was an uncertain proposition. “My beloved and good son,” Pauline wrote him the next year:
We were dying to get a sign of life from you….The lady who wrote the letters for me in English was a teacher and has left Beuthen, and I have not been able to come across any gentleman who could undertake English correspondence….The anxiety about you, my beloved and innocent child, has shaken all my nerves. I will now do everything in my power to gather strength again, so that I may still be preserved for the sake of my dear Oskar; the moment that you, my dear child, obtain your just freedom then there will be no more worry about our existence, even if you were to earn your bread as a common labourer for yourself and us….Now, my darling child, may God give you courage and health and protect you further. Be kissed by your ever loving Mother.
For a man reported not to possess “a single good quality,” Slater penned a stream of letters home that pulsate with tenderness.
“I should like to give you some news, but, alas, I know nothing of what goes on the outer world,” he wrote on New Year’s Day 1912. “The knowledge that you my dearest mother are living as the only one of all the many sisters makes me happier, and gives me hope that there is a possibility of your attaining the age of 100; of course you must keep dear father well in hand that he also may reach that great age….May God keep you in our midst for a long time to come, this, and this alone, is my earnest desire. Your photograph, which I have in my cell, will of course take the place of honour over my bed on your birthday.”
Even Peterhead could not completely extinguish Slater’s roguish humor, as some letters attest. “When I was sitting at my supper the photographs were handed to me and so, with joy, leisure, and a full stomach, I have been pondering over them for a long time,” he wrote his parents in 1913. “You should not worry, dear father if your legs (at your age) are not so willing to do their duty as you would wish them….I am healthy and pray God that you may yet live a long time and look no worse than you do in your photograph….God protect you my dear parents and I remain—Your son, considered guilty, Oscar.”
But these loving exchanges could not buoy Slater’s spirits for long, as his other correspondence makes plain. Grim, melancholic, sometimes bitter, it is anguishing to read. In May 1910, in a letter to a Dr. Mandowsky, a lawyer in Beuthen known to his family, he wrote: “This is a very deep business….From the beginning, I was sought out to serve as a scape-goat and…all levers were operated to prevent the injustice which was done me being brought to light….My affair is a second Dreyfus affair….I am a broken and a ruined man and will—so long as I live—make every endeavor—so far as possible—to free my family from this awful shame.”
Prisoners were allowed scant correspondence with their lawyers and few visits from them, or from anyone else apart from immediate family. At the start of Slater’s incarceration, Antoine wrote several times to Peterhead officials, asking to see him. Her requests were always denied, and she soon fades from view.
Though the Leschziners remained steadfast in their support, their precarious finances kept them from traveling to Scotland. “The question of visiting you…would cost as much as 1000 marks,” Pauline wrote in 1910. “As we are, as you know, not in a position to face the smallest outlay…we would need to give up on the idea of the journey….The whole business, also, involves heavy expenses, without any expectation of the least result.*2….They are great at taking money but they can effect very little at home, how much less abroad.” In his nearly two decades in Peterhead, Slater was not able to see a single member of his family, even once.
And so it went, month by month and year by year. In October 1912, when Slater had been at Peterhead for just over three years, he sent his parents an especially heartrending dispatch. “Unfortunately I have to confess that in my case, it doesn’t look very promising with hope,” he wrote. “The police is my chief enemy, it is the police who has fabricated the whole affair. They have…done everything possible to see me hanged….My only hope which I still have is, that the murderer, before closing his eyes for ever and forced by remorses, will make a confession before witnesses.”
That wish would never come to pass. But although Slater almost certainly did not know it, his great champion, Arthur Conan Doyle, had already joined his case.
*1 The main port of Scotland’s Shetland Islands, about 180 miles north of Peterhead.
*2 She is referring to the family’s efforts to retain a lawyer on Slate
r’s behalf, which were ultimately of no avail
Chapter 12
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, CONSULTING DETECTIVE
Slater’s solicitor Ewing Speirs, whose memorial had helped avert his client’s judicial murder, died in December 1909, at thirty-seven, after an apoplectic fit. He was succeeded on the case by a colleague, Alexander Shaughnessy, and it was almost certainly Shaughnessy who persuaded Conan Doyle to take up Slater’s cause.
Shaughnessy could not have enlisted a better advocate. By 1912, when he began looking deeply into Slater’s conviction, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the most famous men in Britain. He had built steadily, and increasingly publicly, on his earlier exploits, in 1896 covering the war between the British and the Dervishes in Egypt for the Westminster Gazette, and in 1900 volunteering as a military doctor in a pestilence-ridden South African field hospital amid the Boer War. (“For them the bullets, for us the microbes, and both for the honour of the flag,” he would write, with characteristic patriotic grandeur.) He published an account of the conflict, The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, in 1902, and that year was knighted for his services in connection with the war. He lectured throughout Europe and America on a variety of subjects.
He also continued publishing Sherlock Holmes tales, which had already made him one of the highest-paid writers of the day. “At a time in history when a middle-class British professional might make £150 a year, Conan Doyle earned £100 per thousand words,” the American mystery writer Steven Womack has observed. “The American magazine Collier’s Weekly would eventually offer $25,000 for six Sherlock Holmes short stories, roughly a decade’s income or more for most Americans of the time. To describe it in today’s terms, Conan Doyle was the Stephen King of his time.”
Though Conan Doyle personified late Victorian sensibilities as much as any other public figure, he seemed refreshingly, if not entirely, free of the period’s endemic anti-Semitism. His account of touring World War I battlefronts, for instance, reveals an attitude of commendable liberalism, though for present-day readers it is marred by more than a dash of stereotype:
