Conan Doyle for the Defense

by Margalit Fox

  Last to testify on day one was John Thomson Trench. The next day, David Cook wrote to Conan Doyle:

  The Inquiry as you are aware opened yesterday. Trench was the last witness to be examined for the day. I saw him later on. He is a very shrewd man and absolutely upright. He told me that in his view the Inquiry was as big a farce as had been perpetrated for some considerable time in legal circles.

  In the first place the Sheriff went for him like a pick-pocket: told him that Miss Birrell and Lambie had denied the Charteris matter and would he dare to insist. He replied that he insisted, and produced his Diary which has been kept in first class order showing that he made the visits….

  The hand of the police permeates the whole case….To release Slater as a result of the present agitation practically means a censure on the Police, on the Fiscal, on the Lord Advocate and on the Judge. Rather than have the matter come to the light of day, every effort has been and will be made to burke honest investigation.

  When the hearing ended, Sheriff Millar sent a transcript to Secretary McKinnon Wood for review. “With regard to the manner of those making statements,” he wrote in an accompanying note, “I think it is enough to say that Miss Birrell…seemed to be [a] very intelligent, careful and trustworthy witness….Mrs. Gillon [Helen Lambie], Miss Mary Barrowman, and Mr. MacBrayne seemed to be honest and anxious to tell the truth.” On June 17, 1914, McKinnon Wood announced his decision. “I am satisfied,” he said, “that no case is established that would justify me in advising any interference with the sentence.”

  Incensed, Conan Doyle fired off a letter to the press that burned with rationalist rage. “This inquiry was held in camera before a single local sheriff, with no oath administered to witnesses,” he wrote. “It savoured rather of Russian than of Scottish jurisprudence.” He added: “The whole case will, in my opinion, remain immortal in the classics of crime as the supreme example of official incompetence and obstinacy.”

  Despite Conan Doyle’s eminent anger, “we could do no more,” he wrote, “and there the matter rested.” For Trench and Cook, however, a dark new phase of the case was about to begin.

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  ON JULY 14, 1914, Detective Lieutenant John Thomson Trench was suspended from duty; on September 14, he was formally dismissed from the Glasgow police department. Disgraced and with few prospects, he joined the military, becoming a drill instructor, and later a provost sergeant, in the Royal Scots Fusiliers. In May 1915, as he was about to ship out with his battalion to the Dardanelles, two Glasgow police officers arrested him; Cook was arrested the same day. They were charged with having resold items stolen in the robbery of a Glasgow jeweler’s shop in January 1914.

  Trench had been a detective on that case. Authorized by his superiors, he had enlisted Cook to mediate between the shop’s insurance company and the fence who had the jewels. Cook did, and, in exchange for £400 from the insurer, the jewels were returned. Now the procurator fiscal, James Hart, declared that he had never been told of the arrangement. The transaction by Cook and Trench, he charged, constituted an illegal sale of stolen goods.

  The trial of Cook and Trench opened in August 1915. Mercifully, the judge nearly laughed the case out of court, instructing the jury to find them not guilty. The jury complied, with a unanimous verdict. Trench went on to serve with distinction in World War I and was discharged from the military in October 1918. Both he and Cook would die young, Trench in 1919, at fifty; Cook in 1921, at forty-nine.

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  IT WOULD BE MORE than a decade after the inquiry before Conan Doyle involved himself in Slater’s affairs again. As he wrote:

  I got weary of this case for I spent months on it…but felt I was up against a ring of political lawyers who could not give away the police without also giving away themselves. There is no doubt that Mr. Ure went far too far in his speech for the prosecution, and that this must be admitted when justice is done….

  We want a complete and impartial investigation. It will be a huge scandal when it comes—if it ever does come.

  Oscar Slater never knew that Miss Gilchrist existed, and there is no evidence worthy of the name against him. As to who did it that is dangerous ground. Anyhow Slater did not.

  By 1924, when Conan Doyle published the first edition of his autobiography, which included a summary of the Slater case up to that time, most of the principals from the trial and secret inquiry were dead. “It is a curious circumstance that as I write…Judge Guthrie, Cook, Trench,…Millar and others have all passed on,” Conan Doyle said. “But Slater still remains, eating out his heart at Peterhead.”

  *1 Then the name of the governing body that ran the city.

  *2 A Scottish dialect term meaning “very” or “really.”

  Chapter 17

  CANNIBALS INCLUDED

  The war years were hellish for Slater. On one occasion, inflamed with the anti-German sentiment that pervaded Britain, Peterhead guards tied him to a post—as punishment either for talking or for failing to perform his quarry work—and left him outside in the sun for two hours. This incident, at least, which Slater recounted in a 1925 complaint to prison officials, seems not to have been paranoid fantasy: it is also described in William Gordon’s newspaper article about Slater’s life behind bars, published after Gordon’s release in 1925. “It is a recognised thing for warders to turn a blind eye when they see a man talking or committing some other minor breach of prison rules,” Gordon wrote. “But Slater was reported—and punished—more frequently than others.”

  War also put an end to the sustaining flow of letters from Beuthen. Slater’s file of family correspondence, bursting with letters in both directions, is, from the summer of 1914 to the spring of 1919, utterly bare. “Dearest Parents,” he would write in 1919. “Your last letter, my dears, I received on the 8/8/1914—five years ago.” He continued:

  After the signing of peace, I hoped to hear from you first—my present feelings God only knows….During the war I could get no letters. I have artificially kept up my courage, but now it is difficult. The war is finished, ways and means are open again for letters to be sent to me, and to be still without news from you, my dears, makes me quite unhappy. The uncertainty begins to tell on me….You, my dearest parents are old, I am getting old and broken in health. We all go the same way, and I beg you with all my heart to write to me soon with all details—I am prepared for anything.

  In April 1919, Slater received his first piece of mail after the war: a letter from his sister Malchen. It was the first time a family member other than his parents had written. “I need not hide from you any longer, dear Oscar, that Mother was very ill, and it is a special grace from God that she has been spared to us,” Malchen wrote. “We were all happy to get a sign of life from you again. I will write to you again as soon as I am permitted to do so. I visit our parents almost weekly or as often as possible.”

  Then, the following February, came the news for which Slater had long steeled himself. “I can imagine, dear Oskar, how the death of our dear ones would grieve you and I hope you have got over the first shock,” Malchen wrote to him in a later communication. “I will now tell you something about the last days of our parents”:

  Father had been frail for many years, so that his death was a relief. Mother took diabetes and suffered also from heart trouble, added to which she suffered on your account….You cannot imagine how everything has changed, the terrible prices for everything in Germany and the scarcity of food. Georg took stomach trouble suddenly. It developed into cancer….His wife died from a swollen throat, which could not be operated on, as she had a weak heart….[Their] youngest boy Karl, a fine, intelligent fellow, fell in the war. Ernst the older one is in an institution for nervous troubles….I do not come together with Phemie at all. She was very unkind to our departed mother….After mother’s death she behaved badly to me also, and the conse
quence is that I have lost the whole inheritance. I do not mind so much from a financial point of view, only her bad treatment worries me.

  Slater’s reply has not survived, but in October 1920, Malchen wrote again:

  It is a pity that you have to write in English…as I am afraid I will not get your letters translated correctly, and some of their contents may, therefore, be lost to me. Now, I will answer your questions about the dying day of our dear parents. Our dear father died first, on the 11th of June, 1916; Georg on the 18th April, 1917; and a few days later on the 1st May, our dear mother. She was unaware of the death of Georg….

  My dear husband still travels in the cloth line and so does my eldest boy, Felix, who was established himself, but business is very bad now. The war has changed everything. Harry does not give me much joy, but Kätel and Felix make up for this. Now, dear Oscar, you know all the sad news. Keep your head high and remain in good health. With God’s help we will see each other again, this is my daily prayer. Is there still no ray of light over your dark affair?

  To the end of his incarceration, Malchen would be Slater’s primary link to the family. “Good Malchen…I shall write regularly every 6 weeks to you, & should I be bound to write to somebody else, then I will ask for special permission,” Slater wrote her in an undated letter from the early 1920s. “I am very happy to hear that you are 44 years old, 25 years married….I look like a old grey Tom-Cat.”

  In March 1922, Malchen, who lived in Breslau, a hundred miles northwest of Beuthen, replied:

  Certainly I will write you promptly every six weeks if this is permitted and expect you in return to do the same….With Phemie’s children I am on good terms, but herself I will never meet in this life again. I promised this to our dear mother, and, besides, she has annoyed me a great deal….

  Imagine, practically the whole of Upper Silesia including Beuthen has been assigned to Poland and a journey there now is connected with great difficulties and is very expensive.* Nevertheless, I intend going every year to visit the grave of our dear parents.

  Then, in August, a surprise: a letter from Phemie herself. “We often think of you, and our children have nothing but good to relate of Uncle Oscar,” she wrote him. “All our dear ones have been called away too soon. My child Lilli died when 18 years of age….Max and the children send heartfelt greetings.”

  In the envelope, Phemie enclosed a last letter from Slater’s parents, written eight years before. Dated August 3, 1914, it had remained unsent throughout the war. “My beloved Oscar,” Pauline wrote:

  You may be sure, dearest child, I count every day to the time when your letters can reach us….You must not give up hope till your last breath. Your innocence must be established sooner or later. A child such as you have been towards your parents can expect from God that his innocence will be established some day….I often think of the Dreyfus affair where right conquered in the end….

  Father is getting frail. His greatest amusement is to eat well and smoke a good cigar. Things are not so comfortable as they were two years ago….

  The wife of the man with whom you served your apprenticeship has gone all wrong, as he only deserved….Georg gives us every month 50 Marks and this even without having asked it of him….I can earn nothing now myself, and father is able to do nothing whatever….The arrival of your letter is always a pleasing event, and there is nothing suspicious about it. Even the postman has no suspicion of where the letter comes from….

  Keep up your strength, and with hope of kisses from your loving Mother.

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  IN JANUARY 1925, on his release from Peterhead, Prisoner 2988, William Gordon, underwent a rigorous search by prison guards, from the lining of his coat to the hollow handle of his suitcase. Despite their vigilance, he managed to pass out of prison with his false teeth, and Slater’s note—whose glazed-paper wrapping had been lifted from the prison bookbinding shop—intact.

  Gordon found his way to Windlesham, the home in southeast England that Conan Doyle shared with Jean; their sons, Adrian and Denis; and their daughter, also named Jean. (Years later, Adrian Conan Doyle recalled his father having shown him the rolled-up scrap containing Slater’s urgent plea.) An expansive Victorian villa, Windlesham supported a staff that included, a biographer wrote, “a butler…a cook and five maids in the house, two gardeners and a chauffeur outside, plus a garden boy who cleaned the boots and shoes and doubled as a pageboy, with a green bellhop uniform and pillbox hat.” As curious as it might seem to envision a freshly paroled convict turning up in such surroundings, given Conan Doyle’s portfolio as a real-world detective, the sight was not altogether unknown.

  Gordon’s minuscule cargo seemed to embody the ethos of Joseph Bell, who had written, “The importance of the infinitely little is incalculable.” For that message-in-miniature would set in motion a chain of events that in late 1927 would bring about Slater’s release, including a new book about the case, edited and published by Conan Doyle; a widely read newspaper exposé; and dramatic recantations of their courtroom testimony by Helen Lambie and Mary Barrowman.

  Though Conan Doyle had forsaken work on the case after the 1914 debacle, he had been far from idle. After making several visits to the front during World War I, where he came under fire, he began work on what would be a six-volume history of the war, The British Campaign in France and Flanders. Nor did he neglect crime fiction: by this time he had written fifty-four of the sixty Holmes tales.

  “From time to time,” Conan Doyle later wrote, “one hears some word of poor Slater from behind his prison walls like the wail of some wayfarer who has fallen into a pit and implores aid from passers-by.” On receiving the smuggled note from Gordon, he was once again moved to lend his energies to Slater’s cause.

  Gordon’s message was not Conan Doyle’s first experience with secret communication. In 1915, he had sent a series of covert dispatches to British prisoners of war in Germany. “It was not very difficult to do,” he explained, “but it had the effect of cheering them by a little authentic news, for at that time they were only permitted to see German newspapers. It came about in this way”:

  A dear friend of my wife’s, Miss Lily Loder Symonds, had a brother, Captain Willie Loder Symonds, of the Wiltshires, who had been wounded and taken in the stand of the 7th Brigade….He was an ingenious fellow and had written home a letter which passed the German censor, because it seemed to consist in the description of a farm, but when read carefully it was clear that it was the conditions of himself and his comrades which he was discussing. It seemed to me that if a man used such an artifice he would be prepared for a similar one in a letter from home. I took one of my books…and beginning with the third chapter—I guessed the censor would examine the first—I put little needle-pricks under the various printed letters until I had spelled out all the news. I then sent the book and also a letter. In the letter I said that the book was, I feared, rather slow in the opening, but that from Chapter III onwards he might find it more interesting. That was as plain as I dared to make it. Loder Symonds missed the allusion altogether, but by good luck he showed the letter to Captain the Hon. Rupert Keppel, of the Guards, who had been taken at Landrecies. He smelled a rat, borrowed the book, and found my cipher. A message came back to his father, Lord Albemarle, to the effect that he hoped Conan Doyle would send some more books. This was sent on to me, and of course showed me that it was all right. From that time onwards every month or two I pricked off my bulletin.

  For Conan Doyle, the Great War had been a time of consuming activity and consuming loss. After Britain entered the war, he tried, with characteristic patriotism, to enlist. The authorities declined: he was fifty-five. He busied himself instead in creating what became a nationwide network of two hundred thousand civilian reservists, who stood ready to defend the home front. “Our drill and discipline were excellent,” Conan Doyle wrote, “nor were our marching powers contem
ptible when one remembers that many of the men were in the fifties and even in the sixties. It was quite usual for us to march from Crowborough to Frant, with our rifles and equipment, to drill for a long hour in a heavy marshy field, and then to march back, singing all the way. It would be a good 14 miles.”

  In 1914, after three British warships were sunk by German torpedoes in a single day, leaving more than a thousand sailors flailing in the water until they drowned, Conan Doyle wrote to the navy, proposing that every British sailor be issued an inflatable rubber collar that would keep him afloat in the sea. The navy adopted the measure soon afterward.

  For Conan Doyle, as for many, the war brought the duality of the age into sharp relief: the wonders of science and technology, fields so bright with promise in the nineteenth century, seemed far less wondrous in the twentieth when realized as air warfare and nerve gas. The war had robbed him of two beloved family members: his eldest son, Kingsley, from his marriage to Louise, and his younger brother, Innes. Both had been in combat, and both, battle weary, had died soon afterward, in the influenza pandemic of 1918–19.

  Now the foundational certainties of the Victorian age—class and honor; God, queen, and country—seemed to count for little. Amid the crush of modernity, many began seeking the kind of spiritual sustenance they felt the new century had expunged. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, scientist, rationalist, and abductive logician par excellence, was one of the foremost among them.