Conan Doyle for the Defense

by Margalit Fox

  In another, from the Wolverhampton Express and Star, the writer reported, “Many and wonderful were the theories I heard propounded in the local ale-houses as to why Edalji had gone forth in the night to slay cattle, and a widely accepted idea was that he made nocturnal sacrifices to strange gods.”

  Tried in October 1903, Edalji was convicted and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. That the mutilations continued while he was in prison was not remotely exculpatory in the eyes of the police: they maintained that the work was being carried out by members of Edalji’s gang. England had no criminal appeals court then, and it seemed a foregone conclusion that Edalji would serve his entire sentence. But over time, as it would in Slater’s case, a measure of public unease arose; a petition drawn up by Edalji’s supporters garnered ten thousand signatures. In October 1906, after he had served three years, Edalji was released, without pardon or explanation.

  As a convicted felon, he could no longer practice law. Attempting to clear his name, Edalji wrote a number of articles about his plight. He had read the Sherlock Holmes stories in prison, and after his release he sent a packet of his articles to Conan Doyle.

  “As I read, the unmistakable accent of truth forced itself upon my attention and I realized that I was in the presence of an appalling tragedy, and that I was called upon to do what I could to set it right,” Conan Doyle later wrote. “What aroused my indignation and gave me the driving force to carry the thing through was the utter helplessness of this forlorn little group of people, the coloured clergyman in his strange position, the brave blue-eyed, grey-haired wife, the young daughter, baited by brutal boors and having the police, who should have been their natural protectors, adopting from the beginning a harsh tone towards them and accusing them, beyond all sense and reason, of being the cause of their own troubles.”

  Conan Doyle’s modus operandi, which he would repeat on a grand scale in Slater’s case, took three forms: investigation, publication, and agitation. After reviewing newspaper accounts and other documents relating to the case, he arranged to meet Edalji at a London hotel. A single glance, he reported in his 1907 pamphlet, The Case of Mr. George Edalji, told him that the young man could not possibly have been the culprit:

  The first sight which I ever had of Mr. George Edalji was enough in itself to convince me both of the extreme improbability of his being guilty of the crime for which he was condemned, and to suggest some at least of the reasons which had led to his being suspected. He had come to my hotel by appointment, but I had been delayed, and he was passing the time by reading the paper. I recognised my man by his dark face, so I stood and observed him. He held the paper close to his eyes and rather sideways, proving not only a high degree of myopia, but marked astigmatism. The idea of such a man scouring fields at night and assaulting cattle while avoiding the watching police was ludicrous to anyone who can imagine what the world looks like to eyes with myopia of eight dioptres….But such a condition, so hopelessly bad that no glasses availed in the open air, gave the sufferer a vacant, bulge-eyed, staring appearance, which, when taken with his dark skin, must assuredly have made him seem a very queer man to the eyes of an English village, and therefore to be naturally associated with any queer event. There, in a single physical defect, lay the moral certainty of his innocence, and the reason why he should become the scapegoat.

  What astounded Conan Doyle, who had trained as an ophthalmologist, was that Edalji’s lawyers had not brought this defect to light. “So bad was this defence that in the whole trial no mention, so far as I could ascertain, was ever made of the fact that the man was practically blind, save in a good light, while between his house and the place where the mutilation was committed lay the full breadth of the London and North-Western Railway, an expanse of rails, wires and other obstacles, with hedges to be forced on either side, so that I, a strong and active man, in broad daylight found it a hard matter to pass.”

  To drive home the point empirically, Conan Doyle had a pair of glasses made up that would replicate Edalji’s eyesight in a wearer with unimpaired vision. “My own sight is normal,” he wrote, “and I can answer for the feeling of helplessness which such a glass produces. I tried it upon a Press man, and defied him to reach the lawn-tennis ground in front of the house. He failed….To my mind it was as physically impossible for Mr. Edalji to have committed the crime as it would have been if his legs, instead of his eyes, were crippled.”

  Combing the trial transcript, Conan Doyle pinpointed the ambiguous nature of the stains that the police found on Edalji’s coat:

  Now the police try to make two points here: that the coat was damp, and that there were stains which might have been traces of the crime upon it. Each point is good in itself; but, unfortunately, they are incompatible and mutually destructive. If the coat were damp, and if those marks were blood-stains contracted during the night, then those stains were damp also, and the inspector had only to touch them and then to raise his crimson finger in the air to silence all criticism. But since he could not do so it is clear that the stains were not fresh….How these small stains came there it is difficult to trace—as difficult as to trace a stain which I see now upon the sleeve of my own house-jacket as I look down. A splash from the gravy of underdone meat might well produce it. At any rate, it may most safely be said that the most adept operator who ever lived would not rip up a horse with a razor upon a dark night and have only two threepenny-bit spots of blood to show for it. The idea is beyond argument.

  In January 1907, Conan Doyle set forth his conclusions in a series of articles in the Daily Telegraph, later published as The Case of Mr. George Edalji. Afterward, he wrote, “England soon rang with the wrongs of George Edalji.” Once his involvement in the case became public, Conan Doyle, too, began receiving letters threatening his life, written in the same hand as those the Edaljis received—“a fact,” he wrote, “which did not appear to shake in the least the Home Office conviction that George Edalji had written them all.”*

  From his work on the case, Conan Doyle formed a private theory about the identity of the culprit, a disreputable local youth named Royden Sharp. Among the points that told against Sharp logically, Conan Doyle came to believe, were the fact that he had worked as a butcher’s apprentice, which gave him both a knowledge of animal anatomy and skill with a knife, and the fact that he was away at sea during the periods when the menacing letters came to a halt. Mindful of the danger of accusing someone who hadn’t been charged, Conan Doyle suppressed this information; his pamphlet outlining his argument, The Case Against Royden Sharp, was published fully only in 1985.

  As a result of Conan Doyle’s investigation, the Home Secretary, Herbert Gladstone, convened a government commission to review Edalji’s conviction. In May 1907, the commission published its findings. “The conclusions it came to were very strange,” Conan Doyle’s biographer Pierre Nordon observed. “On one hand it disagreed with the jury which had condemned George Edalji in 1903 for disembowelling a pony, and declared the verdict unfounded; on the other hand it stated that Edalji was the writer of the anonymous letters incriminating himself….There was no question of granting him damages for his three years in prison nor an official vindication.”

  Though the result was a partial victory, Conan Doyle viewed it with bitterness. “It was a wretched decision,” he wrote. “This unfortunate man, whose humble family has paid many hundreds of pounds in expenses, has never been able to get one shilling of compensation for the wrong done. It is a blot upon the record of English Justice.”

  For Conan Doyle, however, there were three bright spots in the rest of 1907. The first was that Edalji was reinstated to the bar and could practice law again. The second, in September, was that he married his longtime love, Jean Leckie. Edalji was a guest at the wedding reception, and “Conan Doyle claimed,” his biographer Daniel Stashower has written, “that there was no guest he felt prouder to see.” The third was that his efforts on Edalji’s beh
alf helped spur the establishment of England’s first criminal appeals court. As a result of his highly public work on the case, Conan Doyle would be drafted into the even more formidable battle to exonerate Oscar Slater.

  * The Home Office is the British ministerial department in charge of domestic affairs; its purview includes judicial matters in England and Wales.

  Chapter 14

  PRISONER 1992

  In the archives of the National Records of Scotland lies a remarkable artifact. A tall, hardbound ledger, it contains a handwritten log by Peterhead warders, recording their observations of Slater over the course of a single week in 1911. From his eighteen-year incarceration there, this fragmentary account appears to be the only record of its kind that has survived. Its entries include these:

  Feb. 5: Prisoner was very quiet….Conduct very bad, had to be removed to separate cells….

  Feb. 5: At 7.20 the prisoner was very excited and talked a lot of nonsense to the Warder. At 2 pm the Prisoner was crying, and asked a mattress to lie on as his head was so sore he could not keep it up….

  Feb. 8: The prisoner has been singing at times also talking to himself now and again. When his cell door is opened he usually has a lot to say, mostly nonsense….During exercise he persisted in talking in a loud excited manner to the Officer in charge….

  Feb. 11: Nothing unusual except he won’t work but walks about his cell singing. The prisoner remarked that…he could feel the smell of his clothing….

  Slater’s erratic behavior appears to have begun almost as soon as he arrived at Peterhead, as a sheaf of disciplinary reports from the prison governor attests. Accumulated steadily during Slater’s eighteen and a half years, these reports form a thick stack of loose pages distinct from the bound warders’ log.

  “The convict is somewhat excited and seems to imagine that Prison Officials and the Police are working hand in hand against him,” reads one report, from April 1910, when Slater had been at Peterhead for nine months. From later that year: “Conduct somewhat indifferent. Is going to be a troublesome man.” Over time, Slater did garner the occasional “Conduct fair” and even “Conduct good,” but for the most part, the best he could hope for was “Conduct very indifferent,” a citation that shows up many times.

  Slater was often in trouble for failing to perform his quarry work satisfactorily, and, as his voluminous disciplinary record indicates, for a spate of other infractions. Entries during his first years include:

  May 22, 1909: Disobedience of orders—refused to go to bed, saying drugs were placed among the blankets…

  July 19, 1909: Refusing to work…

  Nov. 29, 1909: Destroying prison property (clinical thermometer)…

  Dec. 31, 1909: Disobedience, creating a disturbance, and attempting to assault an officer.

  The one stabilizing force was the stream of letters from home. From his mother’s steadfast pen came family news (“As regards Georg,*1 it is a pity to waste many words over him, he is a man without heart, and now that he is rich he has become more miserly than ever. His wife is no better, and the same may be said about his daughter”) as well as comic small talk (“Fanny’s girls are both unmarried—without effort it would be difficult, as you quite well know”). Through it all ran the inexorable passage of time:

  My beloved innocent Oscar…When I see your handwriting then I thank God, that you are feeling well….Now there is nothing but solitude round us….I am now the only one of all my…brothers and sisters who is still living. As you know, Uncle Salo and Aunt Minna died in the same year….We had to remove, as our landlord had intolerably increased the rent….

  If only God’s will would be, that your terrible affair will be cleared up, then we certainly…can enjoy the remainder of our life…even you had to work for us in the pit, my beloved child….Father’s illness is always the same….Of course he prays daily for his beloved Oscar and is blessing you every time, when he uses your name.

  Slater’s replies can display his characteristic tenderness. “I am most unhappy dearest to know that you are worrying about me,” he wrote to his mother on one occasion. “I have been here so long now that I am allowed to receive a letter from you every two months….It would be a happy thought for me if one of the younger generation could visit me during the summer, it is not so very expensive as you may imagine. There is a direct ship from Hamburg to here….The letter paper is not large enough to contain all my feelings for you.”

  Other letters home betray a darker tone. “I have appealed for reprieve at least seven to eight times, and always receive the same answer, ‘there is no ground for interfering,’ ” Slater wrote. “I wish a volcano would open and swallow up the unjust gentlemen with all their skin, bones and hair. You have no conception, dearest parents, without wishing to complain to you, how unhappy I often feel, and often wish I was out of this world if it were not for the thought of still possessing you in the outer world.”

  Still others are suffused with resignation, as Slater tries to assuage his family’s sense of loss—and his own. “Dear parents, do not grieve, this makes me still far unhappier than I am already,” he wrote. “To keep up my senses I try now always to think, It must be so….”

  * * *

  —

  SLATER’S PRISON FILE IS also thick with letters of complaint, written by him and directed to the board of commissioners that oversaw the prison. In many of them, he insists, in his impeachable English, that he knows he will soon be released; in others, he professes to have discovered who really killed Miss Gilchrist. In one, from 1912, he begs to be relieved of his quarry work:

  “I don’t likely satisfy the officials with my stone-dressing work, or the work, to break, great granite blocks…with a tremendous heavy hammer,” Slater wrote. “I would make myself very useful as a baker or cook….My Father is also a baker, and I am especially good in preparing pies & puddings, in fact pastery of all kinds.” (In a memorandum written in response, an unnamed Peterhead official said, “I did not consider him suitable as at times he becomes very excited.”)

  In March 1911, Slater wrote to Reverend Phillips, the Glasgow Jewish leader who would remain his advocate throughout his incarceration. This letter, with its desperate fantasies of release, was suppressed by Peterhead officials and never sent:

  I hope to get my liberty before long….I never can forget till my dying day, when you have just your arms around me and you said: Slater, I believe in your innocence, only trust in God, not everything is lost….This was in the court-house cellar in Edinburgh, after I was brought down and been found guilty to be a brutish murderer; lonely [Slater has underlined this word three times] I was standing between all my enemies and you appeared like a Saint in my misery to me….

  When I am out I am determined to show for humanity sake to the public, how my case in reality stands, and I assure you I will make some people sweat….When I am out, I will unmask dodgery to the world.

  Over time, Slater’s accusations grew even more concrete. In 1911 and afterward he wrote a stream of anguished letters to the chairman of the prison commission, who held the title Master of Polworth and who periodically visited Peterhead. One, from March 1911, reads:

  Master of Polworth, it is against humanity what was done against me, kindly listen: On the 21 of March…I was put in S.C. Cells*2 on 4 false charges and bread and water….It was also this time that drugs [this word is underlined three times] between my cough mixture have been given to me, to drink and for 36 hours I was madly raving in my cell and still it is not out of my bones and brain altogether. Please listen doctor and Governor, who are implicated in the affair I have to complain of, work hand in hand. It was intended to bring me before you…in a drugged condition….Master of Polworth this is more than murder and I must respectfully ask for your aid….How can on earth, such bad man as the doctor allow himself to play with my health like this, my nerves are total ou
t of order through this drug.

  Writing again the next day, Slater outlined an even more extreme scenario:

  On Saturday last this unchristian game was again used against me. Over my bed, blankets and especially pillows powder was spread the same I had in my milk and cough mixture before….My spiritual adviser visited me on the 15 this month, and after he left on a Saturday night the drug has been in my cell….The symptoms have been the same as when drinking my cough mix….As sure as I write this letter, Sir, I am going to lay down shortly with brain fever, if this don’t get stopped. I know my constitution is strong, I stood a lot only never I felt so nervous as at present time….Master of Polworth I ask for nothing more only fairness….Only let me come out as an innocent man before the world, especially for my dear old parents sake….I have only you in here and Mr. Phillips outside whom I fully trust….I am your most humble and obedient servant, Oscar Slater.

  P.S. I pray Sir, have this drugging game stopped.

  What Slater describes sounds like little more than paranoid delusion. Strikingly, though, the socialist leader John MacLean recounted something similar taking place at Peterhead—“an intractable hell through the drugging of the food”—when he was imprisoned there during the First World War. Addressing the jury from the dock at his 1918 trial for sedition, MacLean, describing an earlier incarceration, said:

  When I was in Peterhead it was plain sailing until the middle of December, and then the trouble began. I was fevered up, and being able to combat that, I was then chilled down….I protested that my food was being drugged….I know that potassium bromide is given to people in order to lower their temperature. It may have been potassium bromide that was used….I was aware of what was taking place in Peterhead from hints and statements by other prisoners there; that from January to March, the so-called winter period, the doctor is busy getting the people into the hospital, there breaking up their organs and their systems.