by Margalit Fox
From Helen Lambie now in the USA
In a letter to Conan Doyle, Park dismissed the new statement. “Lambie will go down as a shifty wretch,” he wrote. “I suggest that [her] mother was seen by someone at this end who was anxious that Helen should disavow the interview. That would be the Glasgow police or a representative of the Birrell-Charteris conspiracy….Lambie could not steer through a day’s severe cross-examination.”
Asked to come to Scotland for the appeal, Lambie dug in her heels. She could not legally be compelled to return, and the case went ahead without her.
* * *
—
SLATER’S APPEAL RESUMED ON July 9, 1928. Witnesses testifying on his behalf included William Roughead, who had interviewed John Adams, the first physician on the scene, for his book Trial of Oscar Slater. Dr. Adams had died in 1922, and Roughead was allowed to testify to their interview: “He expressed a very strong view that the hammer could have no possible connection with the crime, in view of the injuries that he had observed,” Roughead said. “He said he first looked at the head, saw the injuries, and then it occurred to him was there anything in the room likely to cause them. Looking round…he noticed this chair, an ordinary Victorian chair, and he saw the back leg ‘dripping’—as he described it to me—with blood….He said that leg must manifestly have been in contact with the wounds.”
U.S. marshal John W. M. Pinckley came from America to recount what had happened at the extradition hearing, when he led Slater past the witnesses:
Q. Was it possible for either Lambie or Barrowman to be under the impression that the man who was handcuffed to you was not a prisoner in custody?
A. I do not see how it could be….
Q. You are satisfied that [Lambie] did see you coming down the corridor along with the prisoner?
A. She must have.
Q. If she had eyes to see?
A. Yes.
The acknowledged star of the appeal was Slater’s lawyer, Craigie Aitchison. Addressing the judges, he spoke for some fourteen hours, dissecting every aspect of the investigation, manhunt, and prosecution. Conan Doyle set the scene in the Sunday Pictorial; it bears noting that even in 1928 his description is suffused with the Victorian idea about the link between physiognomy and character:
For three days I have sat in the well of the court. For three days a dignified row of five Scottish judges have sat at the back of me. For three days my whole vision has consisted of one man in front of me, and of the court-room crowd behind him. But that one man is worth watching….
It is a Pickwickian figure. His face is as pink as a baby’s, and a baby might have owned those eyes of forget-me-not blue. A little heavy the face, but comely and fresh-complexioned withal, redeemed from weakness by the tight, decided lips.
Yes, it is for fourteen hours exactly that he has been talking. He has been untangling the difficulties of a most intricate case.
Deft to the last degree has been that disentanglement. It is a miracle of analysis. What I recall most clearly are those blue eyes, and the little plump, capable hands.
He talks and talks with a gentle melodious voice, clearing up the difficulties. Those little plump hands accentuate points. There comes an objection from the judges. The blue eyes seem pained and surprised. Up fly the little plump hands. Once more the gentle voice takes up the tale….
And then suddenly one’s eyes are arrested. One terrible face stands out amongst all the others. It is not an ill-famed face nor is it a wicked one, but it is terrible none the less for the brooding sadness that is in it. It is firm and immobile and might be cut from that Peterhead granite which has helped to make it what it is….It is Slater….
Scotland may have erred both in administration and in her Judiciary twenty years ago, but it cannot be denied that she has vindicated her civilisation…by assembling a court which could have had weight and dignity enough to try the Kaiser in order to expiate an old-time miscarriage of justice to an unknown alien.
After Aitchison sat down, Watson, the Lord Advocate, argued the Crown’s case for upholding Slater’s conviction. The judges then retired to deliberate. When court reconvened on July 20, 1928, they issued rulings on four points of law. Slater was seen to lean forward, one hand cupping his ear.
The first ruling upheld the original verdict. So did the second. So did the third. Then the judges ruled on the fourth point: whether the conviction should be overturned as a result of misdirection by the trial judge, Lord Guthrie. As the ruling unfolded, Slater’s prospects looked darker than ever. “That a man should support himself on the profits of prostitution is regarded by all men as blackguardism, but by many people as a sign of almost inhuman depravity,” the judges began. Then, significantly, they continued:
It cannot be affirmed that any members of the jury were misled by feelings of this kind in weighing the question of the appellant’s guilt, but neither can it be affirmed that none of them were. What is certain is that the judge’s charge entirely failed to give the jury the essential warning against allowing themselves to be misled by any feelings of the kind referred to. It is manifestly possible that, but for the prejudicial effect of denying to the appellant the full benefit of the presumption of innocence, and of allowing the point of his dependence on the immoral earnings of his partner to go to the jury…the proportion of nine to five for “guilty” and “not proven” respectively might have been reversed….
The instructions given in the charge amounted to misdirections in law, and…the judgment of the Court before whom the appellant was convicted should be set aside.
Peter Hunt described what happened next: “It was some moments before Slater realised that he had won. [Then] the smile of triumph which had, for a moment, flickered across his face, gave way to a dark scowl.” Hotheaded, romantic, and impractical as always, Slater had sought nothing less than complete vindication—not on a technicality but because he was neither a murderer nor a pimp, two truths that he burned for the world to acknowledge. He had been exonerated, but he remained, in his view, dishonored. “I Oscar Slater, was not guilty of the terrible charge of murder and, equally not guilty of the infamous life that has been ascribed to me not only at my trial twenty years ago but repeated in the decision of the Court of Appeal,” he said in a statement afterward. “I will tell the whole truth and dispel this calumny.”
In a letter to Conan Doyle that betrays the deep Victorian concern with reputation, Slater revealed his mixed emotions:
Dear Sir Arthur,
Many thanks for your Congratulations and from the bottom of my heart many, many thanks for your great work.
Sir Arthur, they went too far in throwing muck at me in an open Court, yet I don’t care—but I care for my relatives and friends and I must do something for their sake.
This cruel 5 judges…who knew the frame up of my case, should have limited themselves a little and in not doing so, even the layman in the street know now that my character was the staff for the Crown to lean on.
I will fight and expose them all. All of them who I know have taken my confidence have betrayed me. I shall fight regardless of consequences.
Yours very sincerely,
Oscar Slater
Conan Doyle, who was grateful for the verdict, knew the battle was finished. “My own connection with the case ends now that I have succeeded in establishing Slater’s innocence,” he told the press. But as he would discover to his disgust, his association with Slater was far from over.
* A record of donors includes the crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, who contributed three guineas—three pounds and three shillings.
Chapter 21
THE KNIGHT AND THE KNAVE
For Slater, there was still the matter of compensation for wrongful imprisonment. At first, with typical volatile pride, he declared he would have none. “As far as I, Oscar Slater, am concerned there will n
ever be a bill sent in,” he said in a statement to the Empire News. “I will choose first to go to my grave than do such a thing.”
By mail, Conan Doyle urged him not to act rashly:
I can quite understand your feelings, but you may be sure that you will get no compensation, not a penny, if you do not apply for it….I would suggest £10,000.* You won’t get it, but still it certainly is not an unjust claim. Any claim above that would alienate sympathy.
However, as I have said, this is your affair. What however has to be done in any case is the paying of our just debts….Your lawyers, both in the Chambers and in court, have worked splendidly and left no stone at all unturned. The legal expenses, which I think are very moderate compared to most big cases which I know of, work out at roughly £1,200. Of this I have raised £700, in round figures, by my efforts. To the £500 which remains to be met there are certain just extra charges. Mr. Park should have a fee (if he will accept it). I would suggest 100 guineas….I will charge you nothing, but I spent £30 on seeking Helen Lambie and £20 in advertisements which should be refunded to me….
I think that pending your own claim you should send in a claim for expenses incurred which you may fairly put at £1600 less £700 in order to meet the various items….If you are generous in refusing compensation for yourself (if you really think that is wise) you will agree that you must be just in paying what you owe to those who have worked so long and well.
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely
A.C.D.
On August 4, of its own accord, the office of the Secretary of State for Scotland offered Slater £6,000, with nothing additional for expenses. Without consulting any of his advisers, Slater accepted. In doing so, he opened a bitter rift with Conan Doyle.
To Slater—so often at loose ends, so long at hard labor—the £6,000 was his due, and he was not prepared to reimburse anyone for anything. Conan Doyle was wealthy, Slater knew, and could readily afford the few hundred pounds he had laid out. But what Slater did not comprehend was that to Conan Doyle the issue was a matter of deep, abiding principle: absolute probity in fiscal matters, as he had taken pains to teach his children, was one of the canonical imperatives of the upright life.
Both men had been reared in poverty. One became a knight, the other a knave, and it was clear, from their bitter exchange of letters in 1928 and 1929, that neither had the capacity to understand the other. Here the story takes on a regrettable Pygmalion aspect, for while Conan Doyle had made Slater a free man, he could not, however much he might have wished it, make him a gentleman. He had fought to return Slater to the law’s protection, only to have Slater respond like a man ungoverned by law. To Conan Doyle such behavior—which seemed to flout reason and honor, the lodestars of his own life—was simply not cricket.
In the increasingly vitriolic correspondence between them, the central tensions of the late Victorian age—over class, over conduct, over reputation—were played out in discordant duet. When one reads their exchange, it becomes clear that Conan Doyle had long been operating under a sustained misdiagnosis: a deep, unwitting failure of identification. Slater’s past had discomforted him from the moment he joined the case—“a disreputable, rolling-stone of a man,” he had called him—and for two decades Conan Doyle made sure to hold him at arm’s length. As a result, he saw Slater more as an archetype than an individual.
It was not that Conan Doyle damned Slater as foreigner or Jew, as so many of his era had done. A “Liberal Imperialist” to the end, he had managed to resist the least savory aspects of the Victorian mania for group identification. But as for almost anyone navigating the divide between “us” and “them,” a measure of the classifying impulse remained. What Conan Doyle did, over time, was to cast Slater as the noble ideal of the wronged innocent, “eating out his heart at Peterhead.”
Now Slater’s ungentlemanly past seemed to be reasserting itself, giving the lie to that cherished ideal. In constructing the vision of Slater that had made sustained involvement in his case possible, Conan Doyle seems to have slipped unconsciously into “the easy reading, the one toward which the inertia of our prejudices inclines us.” For in the end, his treatment of Slater as an abstraction rather than as a fallible, flesh-and-blood human being was simply a benevolent, though no less convenient, way of keeping the convenient Other at bay.
* * *
—
“LEST I DO YOU an injustice I put the question to you again,” Conan Doyle wrote to Slater in August 1928. “Do you propose to relieve those who supported you of the costs of your defence in case the Government does not pay them? I should like a direct and clear reply.”
Later that month, he wrote again: “You seem to have taken leave of your senses….If you are indeed quite responsible for your actions, then you are the most ungrateful as well as the most foolish person whom I have ever known. Now that I have learned to know you I have no desire for further direct correspondence, but you may rest assured that you will be held accountable for your just debts.”
Before long, Conan Doyle took to the newspapers, a time-honored arena for defending one’s reputation in public. As he wrote to the Empire News in May 1929:
Early in the proceedings I had a letter from Oscar Slater in which he declared that no one should be put out of pocket over his defence. That was before he got his verdict. Since then I have written to him several times pointing out the facts, but have received either no reply or an evasive one. The lawyers have now, very properly, applied for the money and of course I have honoured my personal guarantee and have paid in full.
Had Slater lost this case I would cheerfully have taken this expense upon myself, but as he has received £6000 compensation it seems a monstrous thing that these charges should be met by me.
In September 1928, Conan Doyle gave an interview to the Telegraph. “ ‘It is a shocking ending to what might have been a very noble story,’ was the comment made by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle yesterday regarding his attempt to recover money he had paid towards the expenses of Oscar Slater,” the article read. “ ‘I am naturally terribly disappointed and annoyed….It is not so much a question of the money as the principle of the thing.’ ”
In an interview of his own with the Daily Mail, Slater displayed the hotheaded irrationality that had plagued him through the years:
Let him call me ungrateful dog. The abuse he heaps on me now will only rebound on himself. It is beneath my dignity to answer abuse with abuse….I will not even call him a money-maker or a hunter for notoriety….
Poor man!…The lawyers are pressing him. Did he not make hundreds of pounds by writing about me when I was in prison?…
Then he wrote articles about me when I was released and he was paid £50 for each one of them. It was good business for him. He raised a subscription for me, and people said “How good he is.”
Incensed, Conan Doyle shot back in the same edition of the newspaper: “Making money[!]…For 18 years I worked for him. I wrote a book about him which was sold at 6d., and never brought me a penny.” He was further inflamed by another Daily Mail article, in which a reporter caught up with Slater, then living in a hotel in the English seaside resort of Brighton and to all appearances scaling new heights of Continental dandyism. “Oscar Slater shook hands with me at his hotel here to-day, offered me a cigar from an expensive gold-bound case, and drank Italian Vermouth as an appetiser before an excellent luncheon,” the reporter wrote. “He is enjoying life. He bathes, golfs, dances and is a regular theatre-goer. His face is tanned a deep brown and health sparkles from his eyes.”
Conan Doyle responded in the Evening News. “He has behaved disgracefully and nearly everything he says is untrue….I see Slater was found at Brighton smoking a big cigar, and enjoying himself generally. He is doing that partly with my money.”
When Slater remained unmoved, Conan Doyle turned to the courts. In the archives
of the National Records of Scotland lies a file whose title betrays one of the most painful chapters of the twenty-year saga: a sheaf of papers with the unimaginable heading “Conan Doyle v. Slater.” Filed in the autumn of 1929, the suit sought £250 compensation.
Providentially, the case was settled before coming to trial. In October 1929, Slater’s representatives persuaded him to offer Conan Doyle the £250, and prevailed on Conan Doyle to accept. “At the time the man’s ingratitude hurt me deeply,” Conan Doyle wrote in early 1930, “but I have reflected since that one could hardly go through eighteen years of unjust imprisonment and yet emerge unscathed.”
And with those words, the Slater saga, begun amid acute social-class tensions and concluded much the same way, finally drew to a close.
* * *
—
WITH ONLY A FEW months to live, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—“Big-Hearted, Big-Bodied, Big-Souled Friend Conan Doyle,” in the words of the Victorian writer Jerome K. Jerome—had fought his valedictory battle. An ardent spiritualist to the last, he wrote: “I have had many adventures. The greatest and most glorious of all awaits me now.”
On July 7, 1930, his health failing badly, Conan Doyle asked to be moved from his sickbed at Windlesham to a chair by the window overlooking the Sussex countryside: it was clear that he wanted to preempt the unmanly fate of dying in bed. His wife, Jean, and their three children helped him to the chair, and it was there that Conan Doyle died that night, at seventy-one. Perhaps it was only then, with the passing of its most emblematic avatar, that the long nineteenth century was well and truly over.
* About £560,000, or $800,000, today.
