by Alison Bruce
Douglas Newton Potts. (Cambridgeshire Collection, Cambridge Central Library.
The inquest heard from a series of witnesses in an attempt to build a picture of the preceding weeks’ events, which had culminated in these deaths. One of the first called was Walter Potts, Douglas’s father. He had identified his son’s body and explained that they had last seen each other on 22 April as his son left to return to Cambridge after visiting for Easter. Mr Potts admitted that his son ‘was of a rather excitable and nervous disposition. He was highly strung.’ But he also explained that he and his son had been on the best of terms and he had always had considerable confidence in him, as he had ‘never caused him a moment’s anxiety or worry’. Douglas’s father had not suspected a problem until Monday 26 May when a letter had arrived from Wollaston explaining that Douglas had been absent for two nights.
Potts replied by sending his son a letter and a telegram asking him to get in touch and explain his absence before he had to reply to his tutor. The letter was returned. Mr Potts did not hear from his son again.
As he finished giving his evidence he said: ‘May I express regret at this terrible tragedy, and at the same time, on behalf of my family say we strongly resent the newspapers’ lack of humanity to those who are left behind.’ This was no doubt referring to the article in the late edition of The Times, which came out before there had been an opportunity to inform relatives. Particularly objectionable was the portion that read: ‘After shooting the two men Potts shot himself through the head. He was not killed at once, but died of his injuries in hospital this evening.’
Some of the other witnesses were other undergraduates. According to F. Clifford, a fellow member of the Blue Melodians, Potts had a ‘bizarre taste in dress’ and ‘he used to wear grey flannel plus fours, brilliantly coloured stockings, white shoes with brown leather facings, and a high-necked jumper, either scarlet or canary yellow’. According to other descriptions he often also sported a false moustache.
One of the places Potts, Newton and some of their fellow students would visit was The Bell Hotel in the High Street, Mildenhall. This was a trip of about twenty miles and the friends would travel there in a borrowed car. The landlord’s daughter commented that Potts always had ‘plenty of money to spend’ and never seemed to visit Mildenhall in the same car twice. He regaled locals with stories about being a prince and claimed that some of his companions were also blue-blooded.
At one point Potts had suggested to Newton that they should take to a life of crime. On occasion Potts used the nom-de-plume of Victor Morrell. Newton had an alias of Gordon Frazer that he never used. In fact at the inquest Newton described most of Potts’ antics as ‘ragging’ but it seems that Potts was finding it hard to distinguish between fact and fiction. The fact that Newton went along with Potts’ escapades and did not think that some of the more extreme facets of his friend’s behaviour were particularly theatrical could have encouraged Potts to continue along his fantasist route.
On the evening of 4 May Potts stole an automatic pistol from another student. This may have been meant just as a prop for his fictional charades but it was not long before he drew attention to himself; Potts had visited several local gents’ outfitters and at each said that he had wanted to order a suit for his friend. While this friend was being measured Potts would select other items for himself and asked to be sent a single bill to his home address. At one shop the owner refused and Potts pulled out the loaded gun and began waving it around.
The owner of the pistol, a Webley automatic, was David Gattiker. He had a firearms licence and had bought the gun and 500 rounds of ammunition from Messrs Gallyon of Bridge Street, Cambridge. He used the pistol for target practice at a local range and had last seen it on Sunday 4 May. When he went to get it the next day it had gone and he reported its loss to the police on 7 May. He knew Potts but they were not close friends.
Potts had arrived uninvited to Gattiker’s rooms at about half past nine in the evening. With him were seven or eight other undergraduates. They had attended a party and were mostly acting as if they were drunk. Gattiker told Potts that he was unhappy about their presence. As far as he knew Potts had not been aware that he owned a gun but it had disappeared by the following morning.
The longest statement was made by John Newman. He had met Potts two or three weeks after arriving at King’s College and they had soon become firm friends. Newman played the trumpet and they had a shared interest in music and soon formed their band.
While their friendship was still relatively new Potts had made his suggestion that they should try a life of crime. At this point Newman claimed that he found Potts to be normal but of ‘a rather theatrical nature’. Therefore he did not take much notice as the suggestion had been made in front of others and was just taken as a joke.
Newman had been with Potts when he had said he was going to look up a friend and had visited Gattiker’s rooms. Gattiker was out and Newman thought that Potts had left a note. While he was there Newman had noticed a gun on the top of a cupboard. Potts picked it up and took it away with him. Newman claimed he that was not sure whether his friend was borrowing it or already owned it, but admitted that Potts had later told him that the gun did not belong to him. Newman also saw the pistol on a police list of items reported missing. They were in Norman and Bradley’s, pawnbrokers, at the time – somewhere they had both gone to raise money on numerous occasions.
The Blue Melodians had not played outside Cambridge, mainly gigging at small local charity events. Socially though, Newman, Potts and others had been further afield and he admitted that he had had to appear before his own tutor, Mr Thatcher, for going to Mildenhall in cars. This reprimand was enough to prompt Newman to leave Cambridge rather than face his family to explain his behaviour.
Potts had already had the idea of going abroad and they had gone as far as getting the forms to apply for passports before abandoning the idea. Potts now partially resurrected it, suggesting that they went away for a month before getting a job. Between them they owned a motorcycle, which they had bought a few days earlier, and thought they would use for transport. At first they also planned to sell their possessions to raise funds but, except for a few items that Potts carried with him, they abandoned this idea after deciding that they would set out for London immediately.
Within twenty-four hours the ill-conceived plan was in disarray; they arrived in the capital at 3.15 p.m. on 24 May and, with nowhere to stay, spent the night on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields. During the evening they sold the motorbike for £22 10s but were paid with a cheque that they would not be able to cash until the coming Monday.
They had no accommodation and, even with the cash from the cheque, they found themselves broke again very quickly. Their lifeline came in the form Madge Miller, who they did not know personally but had been told to look up by a mutual friend.
Miller was a 25-year-old dance instructor who lived in Shaftesbury Avenue. By the time they contacted her it was Thursday 29 May and they claimed they had not slept for the previous seven nights. They had run out of money and had spent the previous night walking along the Embankment. They arrived at her flat between two and three in the morning and she took them in. The only money she gave them was enough to get their luggage from Charing Cross Station, but she did feed them and let them sleep in her spare bedroom. They eventually left on Monday 2 June.
In her witness statement she told the jury that on the night of their arrival there had been no milk in the flat so they had drunk tea Russian style and had talked for so long that she had lost track of the time. In the morning Potts had sent her maid out for a loaf of bread and the two young men had left the flat at 11.30. She overheard them talking about meeting a man called Desmond at the Savoy for lunch. Potts hoped this Desmond would give them some money but they came back empty handed. It was never clear whether ‘Desmond’ even existed.
When they returned to her flat on the Friday night she saw that each of them carried a gun. She asked: ‘Ar
e they loaded?’ to which one of them replied in the affirmative.
Wondering why they had guns Potts told her, ‘We shall need these.’ Miller asked them not to load them.
Potts told her that there were problems at college. He often referred to John Newman as Gerald, one of his middle names: he asked, ‘Hasn’t Gerald told you about the trouble?’ Potts went on to say that there was trouble about money, a smashed car and also a man was taking out a warrant for his arrest.
Under questioning from the coroner Newman admitted that he had also owned a revolver. He had bought it in Cambridge and claimed that his sole purpose in owning it was to cover Potts’ weapon with the single licence. He also admitted that both of them had threatened to commit suicide with their guns. He assured the coroner that they had not been serious threats. While in London Potts and Newman had run into several acquaintances and the threats of suicide had been a ruse to give the impression that they were desperate and could not face returning to Cambridge. This, they hoped, would discourage anyone from turning them over to their tutors.
Triple shooting tragedy at Cambridge. (Police Illustrated News)
Miller advised them to return to face the music but Potts and Newman went on to spend the weekend with her; she paid for them all to go the cinema twice. They played cards together in the evenings and on Sunday afternoon they walked around Fleet Street and High Holborn. At one point Potts stopped to point out the office where his father worked.
On Saturday Potts sent two letters, one to a girl in Tonbridge, the other to a friend at Cambridge. He told Miller that he planned to see this girl as soon as he had the money to do so.
On Monday, 2 June, after they had risen at about 11 a.m., Miller had a brief conversation with Potts. He said: ‘Gerald is going home. I am really glad because I think he is going to have a breakdown. He looks ill.’ She checked this with Newman who replied: ‘I will be back in two days’. Later that afternoon he telephoned and left the same message with her housekeeper. But Miller did not see either of them again until she read of the shootings and saw Newman at the inquest. Potts and Newman did not leave London, they just felt that they could not impose on their host any further and had another sleepless night on their own.
Meanwhile, on the same Monday, the letter Potts had sent to Cambridge arrived with a third-year undergraduate, Frederick Waterwell Bolton. Bolton had known Potts for a few months after Newman had introduced them. The last time Bolton had seen his friends was 24 May, the day they left college. Newman had come straight from his tutor’s rooms and was very agitated. He had asked Bolton to take a letter to Potts, which he said was a demand for £5 from a man at Mildenhall.
Bolton then had a conversation with Potts who said he had wired the man 50s the day before but the letter was a demand for the other 50s. Potts said he only had £1. Bolton kindly agreed to lend him the other £1 10s. Potts also said that he was about to be sent down.
The last time Bolton saw the two was the same afternoon as they were preparing to leave Cambridge on their motorcycle. The letter Bolton received on Monday 2 June read :
Many many thanks for all you did for us when we were leaving. We shall never forget the services of a true friend. Here are things for you to do if you will be so kind. I enclose the pawn ticket for Gerald’s watch. You can get it out of ‘pop’ and wear it yourself, and sell it, pay a bill, and keep the rest for yourself. I enclose a letter, which perhaps you will be kind enough to post. Thanking you for my dress clothes. Pack them up and send the dress suit and the waistcoats to Stephen Morris Esq. Poste Restant, Charing Cross Post Office. Can you tactfully send to Mr and Mrs Newman – Gerald is quite safe in London.
Bolton decided to go to Mr Thacker, the censor of Fitzwilliam House,1 and tell him of the letter. Thacker told Bolton to go to Charing Cross Post Office, to find Potts and Newman and tell them to return to Cambridge. He said that they had overestimated the seriousness of the trouble they were in and in addition Newman needed to know that his father was seriously ill.
Bolton arrived at the post office at 9 a.m. on Tuesday morning. At 9.40 Potts walked in and was surprised to see him. Bolton told Newton and Potts that they should return to Cambridge, to which Potts said: ‘I am going back to Cambridge and I shall be putting my head into a hornet’s nest.’
Bolton advised him to cheer up and encouraged him to believe that everything would be all right. He drove them back to Cambridge and, despite Potts’s earlier comment, found him to be an extremely cheerful companion. They arrived in Cambridge at just after 1 p.m. and Potts left them outside Fitzwilliam House. In the few minutes that followed he met Wollaston and together they headed for Wollaston’s rooms and their final ill-fated meeting.
Bolton was shocked when he heard of the shootings. He said he had always known Potts to be ‘brilliant but excitable’ but had found him to be very calm on that day.
One of the final witnesses was R.J. Pearson, the Chief Constable, who told the court of the last entry in Sergeant Willis’s notebook – it was the serial number of the Webley pistol that was to kill him.
Shortly afterwards the jury retired. It took them only thirty minutes to return with the verdict that Douglas Newton Potts had committed suicide during temporary insanity and that he murdered Wollaston and Willis during temporary insanity.
The funerals of all three victims took place on Saturday 7 June. Potts was buried at the borough cemetery in Newmarket Road, Cambridge at 9 a.m. His parents and Revd Church, who conducted the service, were the only mourners present.
In contrast the service held for Alexander Frederick Richmond Wollaston was at 2.30 p.m. in King’s College chapel and was attended by a huge number of college staff and members of his family. Wollaston was cremated, and in a rare tribute to their lost tutor the ashes were later placed in the crypt of the chapel. The following brief obituary, which appeared in the next publication of the Cambridge University Reporter, does not express the great affection that was clearly felt for Wollaston.
‘Died at Cambridge on Tuesday, 3 June 1930, Alexander Frederick Richmond Wollaston, M.A., B. Chir, Fellow and Tutor of King’s College, aged 55 years.’
The funeral for Sergeant Francis James Willis took place in his home town of Haverhill. His coffin was taken from his parents’ house to the West End Congregational Church, and from there to the burial ground. On its journey it was followed by 120 police officers representing eleven different police forces. His wife was left with a widow’s pension of £85 a year. A charitable fund was set up to help Willis’s family and public donations exceeded £50.
Potts had been considered to be academically brilliant but it is fair to say that he was not realistic about how to behave or what he could achieve outside his academic life. Newman seemed to find Potts’ behaviour to be normal and this may have helped Potts stray further from reality. When they went to London they soon discovered that they were incapable of being independent and their anxiety was compounded by lack of sleep. For Newton, the opportunity to return to Cambridge may have come as a relief; for Potts it clearly did not.
No doubt Mr and Mrs Potts must have spent the rest of their lives wondering what had triggered their son’s final bloody outburst and whether it could have been prevented. Perhaps Mr Potts replayed the following exchange in his memory and wondered whether they had truly found the answer.
Counsel: ‘Do you think from your knowledge of your son that in an excitable moment, in a moment of great stress, with the responsibility of being faced with the shame of being taken to the police station and of having to confess to you, that he may have temporarily lost his balance?’
Potts: ‘I think that that is the true story of this – that he was afraid to face me, that he thought he had let me down.’
Counsel: ‘That is your considered opinion?’
Potts: ‘Yes.’
Counsel: ‘Was he always ambitious that you, his father, should be proud of him?’
Potts: ‘Yes, he told me he was going to try and get a fellowship
at King’s.’
Potts may have had lofty ambitions but Wollaston had realised many of his. He had not married until he was 48, and his chance to raise a family was most cruelly thwarted. In 1977 Wollaston’s son, who had been only 4 years old at the time of his father’s death, wrote an article for the Telegraph’s Sunday magazine. In it he describes the loss his family suffered and the painful way his mother learned of her husband’s death while spending a day in London:
The news rocked the college and raced through the town, and before the end of the afternoon it had reached the London papers. My mother, walking in Leicester Square, saw a terrifying headline across the front of the Evening Standard: UNDERGRADUATE SHOOTS TUTOR DEAD: AMAZING DRAMA AT CAMBRIDGE. She fumbled for a penny and gave it to the man. ‘Read all about it’, he said, and she did.
Notes
1 The censor acted as Head of House for non-collegiate students attached to Fitzwilliam House. In 1966 Fitzwilliam House achieved collegiate status.
14
THE DOG WAS THE FIRST TO DIE
On Saturday 28 May 1932 Cambridge was rocked by a multiple murder that is probably better understood now than when it was committed.
Meads End is a large detached house standing on the corner where Hills Avenue meets Hinton Avenue in a quiet suburb of Cambridge. The house was owned by Herbert Tebbutt who lived there with his family; Helen, known by their staff as his wife, Helen’s daughter Betty aged 12, and their young boys, Michael, 2 and 1-year-old Dickie.
Herbert Tebbutt had been educated at the Leys School in Cambridge and was a keen cricketer. While in his twenties, before the First World War, he had captained the Cambridgeshire County Cricket Team. Speaking shortly after Tebbutt’s death an official from the Cambridgeshire Cricket Association had gone on record to say, ‘Mr. Tebbutt was one of the finest bats the county ever had. While at Leys he held the record for the greatest number of runs obtained in a season. Many years ago I played with him for the Y.M.C.A. and other teams.’
