Britain's Most Notorious Prisoners

by Stephen Wade

  The heart of the situation was the strychnine and the corned beef she knew was her husband’s last meal. Ethel had admitted that she knew some corned beef in the cupboard was not really edible and yet she had left it, saying nothing to anyone. She had known Arthur was due to eat it. Looking into the tale of the corned beef was to be important in court. Contradictory things were said about the purchase of the tin of beef; Ethel saying Arthur had sent Lawrence to buy it, and Lawrence saying the opposite. All this cast doubt on Ethel’s statement, though it has to be said that the retailer recalled that Lawrence had come for the beef and said that his father had given him the money to buy it.

  Tom Brown did, however, have quite a lot to say about Arthur Major’s character, relating that when Brown’s first wife had died in 1929, Arthur had come to the Major’s place very drunk and had used threatening words. Ethel Major’s daughter, Auriel Brown, was asked about the love letters and the supposed affair Arthur was having with Mrs Kettleborough. Birkett knew that if there was to be any chink in the armour of the prosecution’s case, it was going to be in the possibility of provocation with regard to this affair. The focus of their dialogue was not promising in this respect:

  Mr Birkett: Did you ever see anything that you thought suspicious between Mrs Kettleborough and Major?

  Auriel: I saw them once making eyes at each other. Mrs Kettleborough was always outside the house when Major came home. She put herself in his way.

  Mr Birkett: The advances that you saw were on one side?

  Auriel: Both sides.

  A great deal more information about the Majors’ life together was to emerge. They hated the very sight of each other; Arthur Major had severe financial problems and he was of the opinion that his wife was a spendthrift and was helping to ruin him. Only a few days before he died, Arthur Major had placed an announcement in the local paper, the Horncastle News, removing himself for any responsibility in debts his wife had accrued. The situation at No. 2 council houses was far worse than many around the village would have suspected.

  One fundamental cause of their rift was the fact that Ethel, before she met Arthur, had given birth to a child (Auriel) in 1914, when she was only twenty-three. She never revealed the name of the father, and the girl was brought up as a daughter of the Browns. This refusal to give details of the business infuriated Arthur; things deteriorated so much that she left him for a while, going back home to the family home.

  In court at Lincoln, Lord Birkett wrote later, he knew the verdict of the jury when they came back into court after an hour’s deliberation; none of them looked in the direction of Ethel Major. They found her guilty, but with a recommendation for mercy. Ethel collapsed and moaned that she was innocent as she was carried away.

  There was a sure feeling that a formal appeal was a waste of time; but Birkett did join a group of lawyers who petitioned the Home Secretary for a reprieve. The response was that there were ‘insufficient grounds to justify him in advising His Majesty to interfere with the due course of law’. One last ditch appeal came from the Lord Mayor of Hull, in the form of a telegram to the King and Queen, pleading for their intervention.

  On 19 December, Ethel Major was executed by Thomas Pierrepoint, with the Under Sheriff of Lincolnshire present. As usual, the Governor, Captain Roberts, made the statement about the hanging being done in ‘a humane and expeditious manner’.

  Yet in many ways, this is only the beginning of the Ethel Major story. After all, the sentence was based on circumstantial evidence and there were certainly factors of provocation, an argument that she was not her normal self when she acted, and that there was considerable enmity and aggression towards her from her husband.

  A more close and searching account of Ethel Major’s life is helpful in understanding these events, and also in seeing why there have been so many reassessments of the case. She was born Ethel Brown in Monkton Bottom, Lincolnshire, in 1891. Her father was a gamekeeper and they lived on the estate of Sir Henry Hawley. By all accounts she lived a good life as a child, with her three brothers and parents, going to a small school at Coningby and then at Mareham-le-Fen. She stayed at home for some years, learning dressmaking and the usual domestic skills. But after came the liaison with the unknown lover and her pregnancy. Some writers make something of this with regard to her later criminality; it has been pointed out that of eight women hanged in Britain in important cases, five had illegitimate children. That doesn’t have any real significance, but it illustrates the need some writers on crime have to find patterns and profiles.

  Ethel had known Arthur Major when they were children. In 1907, he left the area to live in Manchester, but then, in the Great War, he joined the Manchester Regiment and they began to meet. When he was wounded and hospitalised back home, in Bradford, they wrote to each other. Keeping the truth about Auriel quiet until they were married was perhaps the basic error in her understanding of her new husband’s personality. In court, in 1934, there was to be a great deal said about potential provocation on the part of Arthur Major, and even more written in years to come.

  Birkett cross-examined Lawrence in an attempt to provide a clearer picture of Arthur Major’s character traits. Lawrence confirmed that his father came home drunk almost every night and that this was becoming more severe in recent months. The topic then shifted to violence and fear:

  Birkett: When he was in that state, did he quarrel violently with your mother?

  Lawrence: Yes, if we were in.

  When wife and son did retreat to Tom Brown’s, they would sleep on a couch in the kitchen or in a garden shed, Lawrence sleeping in his topcoat and all his day-clothes. A story began to emerge that would, in other times and places, be part of a full picture of provocation and mitigating circumstances. In 1931, Ethel Major had taken out a summons for separation, so violent had his behaviour been. Arthur made vows to reform his life and Ethel changed her mind. Tom Brown had confirmed that ‘Major used violent and filthy language to his wife and also threatened her.’

  As in most marital situations of such conflict, questions will be asked about the nature of the relationship and whether or not there really was a victim and an aggressor. At this trial, Judge Charles and indeed Norman Birkett used this approach. Birkett boldly asked young Lawrence, ‘Should I be right in saying that your mother all your life has been very kind to you, and your father very wicked?’ Judge Charles went ahead and asked witnesses in general about where blame might lie.

  Therefore we have questions such as ‘What sort of a fellow was Major? and ‘Did you ever see him the worse for liquor?’ One could guess the outcome of this. People such as the vicar’s wife and the rector talked of Major as ‘sober’ as far as they knew. He was a man with a very amiable public persona; yet inside his own home he was often monstrous to his own family.

  If we turn to the other element in potential defence of provocation, the subject of the love letters comes up. What exactly was the truth about Arthur Major and his affair? We need to recall here that Major was many things in the village: not only voluntary work for the church but time put in as a local councillor. Ethel’s report was that she found some love letters in their bedroom, and of course this has the implication that she had been searching for evidence after so much innuendo and whispering about an ‘affair’. One such was this, which was read out in court:

  To my dearest sweetheart,

  In answer to your dear letter received this morning, thank you dearest. The postman was late I was waiting a long time for him … I see her watching you in the garden … Well, sweetheart, I will close with fondest love to my Precious one …

  From your loving sweetheart,

  ROSE

  When she faced Arthur with her new knowledge (she had already told her physician, Dr Armour) he said he would do nothing. The issue became a cause and a local crusade for Ethel; she wrote complaints about her husband to the local police and even tried to change the terms of the leasehold of their property so that she could be classed as a ‘tenant’. Th
e natural end of this was a talk with a solicitor, and a letter was drafted, as she said, on behalf of her husband, warning Mrs Rose Kettleborough not to write again. This solicitor had witnessed Major making violent threats against Ethel, but not taken it to be anything serious.

  The Kettleboroughs in court provide a record of what can only be called tittle-tattle, and some of the discussion of the case on record seems entirely trivial; yet when Rose herself took the stand, there was clearly something interesting to come. In her fur coat, this small, attractive woman said that she had never ‘been out’ with Arthur Major. She also denied loitering to wait for Arthur by the house, as Auriel had said.

  When the subject of the letters came up, Birkett tried very hard to do some amateur handwriting analysis, comparing her orthography and style in the love letters to other writing she had done. Nothing was achieved by this, and even an exploration of her past knowledge of Arthur led to nothing significant. To sum up, Birkett had attempted every ploy he could think of, but in the end, the record of the trial can be made to read more like an indulgence in small scale scandal than a murder case.

  But this is not the end of the saga of Ethel Major. A study of the case by Annette Ballinger in 2000 takes a closer look at the provocation line of thought. In her book, Dead Women Walking (2000), Ballinger pays attention to comments made at the time about the discontent in the Major home, such as the statement by a solicitor’s clerk that ‘Arthur often threatened his wife. I gather that their home life was unhappy.’ She also puts great emphasis on the change in Major as he drank more. His son’s words that ‘The drink was having an effect on my father, he was not the man he had been’ do imply an almost submerged narrative that has only been re-examined closely since this sad affair came to a close.

  For Ballinger, it was the issue of the right to remain silent that shaped Ethel’s destiny. The factors which stood most prominently in court – the fact that the day before Major’s death he had withdrawn from responsibility for her debts, and her husband’s apparent condition of being a poor victim – made her silence worse. As Ballinger notes: ‘… the case of Ethel Major demonstrates how the prisoner’s right to remain silent could be interpreted as evidence of guilt. Thus the judge referred to Ethel’s non-appearance in the witness box no less than six times in his summing up.’

  The 1898 Criminal Evidence Act had made the ‘right to silence’ concept very important in the construction of defences. But unfortunately, the unforeseen side-effects were that juries would tend to interpret silence as guilt in many cases. This would be despite the fact that some people in the dock would be nervous, apprehensive, or even in some cases, would have been advised by their brief to say nothing.

  Ballinger sees Ethel Major as a ‘battered woman’ and notes that generally such women are too traumatised to give evidence. But there was no militant, prominent feminist movement in the interwar years, of course. One common view, and this is something that helps us understand Ethel Major’s situation, is that, according to Lind Gordon, ‘wife beating became part of a general picture of slovenly behaviour, associated with drunkenness, and squalor of the wife’s own making’.

  Finally, if the notion of Ethel’s failure to safeguard her reputation is on the agenda in this notorious case, then aspects of her behaviour in the village have to be an important factor in understanding how she was perceived and judged in court. Her eccentric questioning of various neighbours, her interviews with the doctor, and her letters to the press, all add up to a picture of a woman who was both desperate and indeed in a very nervous state. The documented behaviour of this woman as she worked hard to put things right in the household only made her situation worse. Of course, in court, these actions would be seen as reinforcing the moral condemnation of her as someone who had, earlier in her life, had a bastard child and not told her husband about it.

  Part of the judgement on her was also that she was generally bad tempered, and this was made more prominent than her husband’s equally capricious and aggressive behaviour. On one occasion she had thrown a brick and had ‘embarked on a wild round of revenge and malice that included half the population of the village’, according to another commentary on the case.

  The executioner at the time, Albert Pierrepoint, wrote about the other way women killers need to be seen: not as the hard, rational poisoners of the media images, but as ‘ordinary women, rarely beautiful … Square faced, thin mouthed, eyes blinking behind National Health glasses … hair scraped thin by curlers, lumpy ankles above homely shoes …’ As Annette Ballinger has said, ‘… poison was responsible for her death’. By that she means that the nature of that specific version of homicide carries with it a discourse and a media amplification going back centuries, as something that has entered folklore. When Ethel Major’s case started covering the main pages of newspapers, the whole back-list of women poisoners was invoked. All the images of women using arsenic on husbands, from Mary Ann Cotton back in the mid Victorian times, to the earlier Lincolnshire instances, were on the stage as the sad story unfolded. For decades, the pages of the Police Gazette had been full of lurid tales of women poisoners; what hope was there for truth to emerge when the media had categorised them as the worst kind of heartless killers?

  Alderman Stark of Hull, when he wrote a last appeal for clemency, saying ‘For the sake of humanity I implore you to reconsider your decision, especially having regard to the nearness of Christmas … The heartfelt pleas contained in this telegram are those of 300,000 inhabitants and particularly those of the women of this great city’ was fighting more than a judicial decision. He was going against the grain of many centuries of myths around the ‘women are more deadly than the male’ notion.

  The sense of defeat and the inevitable conclusion on the scaffold was hovering over her defence from the beginning. Lord Birkett’s memoirs contain his view that Crown Counsel had opened with a statement that had a ring of finality: ‘The case is really on the evidence unanswerable.’ One of the very best defence lawyers in the land could do nothing. It seems odd with this in mind that the Daily Express had insisted that ‘Nobody believes she will be hanged’, just a few weeks before the sentence.

  There was no way that an appeal based on the unfairness of the judge’s summing up would succeed. Whoever ‘Fairplay’ was who sent the anonymous letter, he or she had opened the path to the gallows for Ethel Major, and the only consolation, looking back over the years, is that the Pierrepoints were very skilled men in their trade. Ethel would have left this world very speedily indeed, though they must have felt something similar to John Ellis when he hanged Edith Thompson in 1922: ‘My own feelings defy description … I kept telling myself that the only humane course was to work swiftly and cut her agony as short as possible.’ This is a stark reminder of what feelings were with James Berry when he dealt with Mary Lefley.

  Unfortunately, in spite of all the above discussion of this fascinating case study, the reference books will always have the same kind of simplified statements for the record, as these words from Gaute and O’Dell’s The Murderers’ Who’s Who (1979): ‘Major, Ethel Lillie, a 43-year-old Lincolnshire gamekeeper’s daughter who murdered her husband with strychnine.’ The woman who never gave evidence at her trial is being judged by posterity, still enveloped in silence. In modern terms, and with a more feminist, open-minded view of mens rea, the mindset to take a life, it can be argued that in 1934 there was a too narrow definition of intention, because the accused is supposed to see the same probability that the jury do, in the way that the intention is given to them by lawyers interpreting the defendant’s actions.

  But all that would have been far too subtle for the court in Ethel Major’s case.

  CHAPTER 7

  Lord Haw Haw: Germany Calling

  William Joyce, alias Lord Haw Haw, was a problematic case from the start. He had broadcast propaganda to Britain in the Second World War, and so he had incited hatred and fear. Was that traitorous? He definitely had an impact. I can recall talk of him in my
childhood in the 1950s; my family all knew of him and the aunts and uncles could all imitate his cut-glass voice. In effect, he had infiltrated the British consciousness. Hitler wanted to undermine morale, and he found the right man for the job. Some found the broadcasts genuinely unnerving, while others scoffed at them.

  Whatever the opinion we have of Joyce might be, with hindsight, at the time he was very much a wanted man, and he became as troublesome a prisoner as he was an enemy existing purely on the air, rather than in the field.

  Joyce was an American citizen, born there in 1906, and after that he was in Ireland until 1921. He moved to England until the outbreak of war, and then he moved to Germany. Within a few weeks of that move he was employed to broadcast from various stations in Germany. He had obtained and used a number of passports, and that became the issue in court that would decide whether he lived or died.

  He did have an effect: the BBC conducted some research into this in 1940, and they found that a significant proportion of the population listened to Joyce’s broadcasts regularly. 750 people filled in the BBC questionnaire, and over half of them said that they listened because it was entertaining. Surprisingly, 29% said that they thought the broadcasts would give the German view of the war – a credible one. The subsequent report said, ‘If there were widespread discontent … this would be Hamburg’s opportunity. The impact of Hamburg propaganda should be kept under proper observation.’