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Heaven Knows Who
The Trial of Jessie M’Lachlan
Christianna Brand
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
For
HENRIETTE MEYER
An isometrical view of the basement at 17 Sandyford Place is on page 27 and of the ground floor on page 29; a detailed ground plan of the basement is at the end of the book. Jessie M’Lachlan’s route to and from the spirit shop is shown on a plan of Sandyford Place on page 31.
FOREWORD
Any work on the case of Jessie M’Lachlan must owe a vast amount to the great William Roughead, who edited this, among so many others, in the Notable British Trials series. It was his favourite, ‘the ideal murder’; and H. B. Irving, a great connoisseur in these matters, wrote to him that it was ‘the best murder trial I ever read’.
In a humble attempt not to seem to be in my turn simply editing Mr Roughead, I scoured England and Scotland for extra scraps of information about my dear Jessie—always to find that he had been there before me. Fortunately for me, he hadn’t had space to use by any means all of it and I did proudly discover a very few interesting facts which he seems to have missed, and make one—to me interesting—deduction which he didn’t make. For the rest—though lots of it ‘on soul and conscience’ I declare I found for myself before I got access to his library and saw that he had noted it too—I gratefully acknowledge my huge indebtedness. I would like to say thank you also to Mr W. N. Roughead for his ready permission to make as much reference as ever I liked to his late father’s work; he says he couldn’t stop me, but it’s still very pleasant to be made free of it so graciously. I should also like to thank Messrs. William Hodge Ltd, for the loan of blocks printed on pages 27 and 29 and at the end of the book. And lastly, I do thank all the people in Glasgow and Edinburgh for their wonderful helpfulness in what I rather grandly call my research; they have a heart-warming talent for making one feel not a nuisance.
Mr Roughead tells me that his father’s habit of writing only M’ in all surnames prefixed Mac or Mc was partly to assist the printers but largely ‘just a fad.’ Any fad of William Roughead’s is a fad of mine.
C.B.
CHAPTER ONE
She wore a straw bonnet throughout her trial—a lilac wool gown, a little black shawl and the straw bonnet, trimmed with broad satin ribbons, its brim edged with a frilling of narrow black lace. One can’t help wondering how she got it—this special bonnet to be worn during the four days of her trial for murder. Did the prison matron go out and buy it for her? Was James, her perfidious husband, commissioned to choose it, with anxious recommendations as to colour and trimming? If she had one poor, pitiful, seldom indulged little vanity, it was a fondness for pretty clothes.
This is the true story of the trial of Jessie M’Lachlan for murder—the ferocious murder of her dearest friend. It is in every possible detail authentic. If Jessie is described as having smiled or sighed, if a witness is said to have thought a thought—then there is evidence somewhere of that smile or that sigh or that thought. Where dialect is reproduced it is the reported dialect actually used by that speaker at the time. If a place or a person is described, it is from a contemporary description or picture. Background, ‘plot’, dialogue, character—all this, which may read like fiction, was true enough and real enough, only too true and only too real, a hundred years ago.
The murder was of a young woman named Jess M’Pherson, at 17 Sandyford Place, Glasgow, on the night of July 4, 1862. Her friend, Jessie M’Lachlan, stood her trial for four days in the Old Court, Jail Square, Glasgow—the court sitting for eleven hours of each of the first three days. At the end of this time, the jury, having deliberated for exactly fifteen minutes, returned with a unanimous verdict. It was, moreover, an unequivocal verdict. There was no question of ‘not proven’.
And the trial was interesting in this, if in nothing else—that the defence was simply that the prisoner had been nowhere near the scene when the crime was committed, that it had been committed by another person, a named person, a supposedly respectable old gentleman, Mr James Fleming, of 17 Sandyford Place. Mr Fleming variously described himself as eighty-seven years of age and seventy-eight. Whether or not his word was entirely to be trusted, we shall see: but eighty-seven is obviously a more unlikely age to be embarking on murder. It may be said here that there was no question of any collusion in the murder: one person alone, in both senses of the phrase, killed poor Jess.
The crime took place, as has been said, in Glasgow, some time in the night between July 4 and July 5, not far from the scene of three other causes célèbres. It is interesting to note their outcomes: for of the three accused, Dr Pritchard, infamous mass murderer, was executed—the last to be publicly hanged in that same Jail Square where Jessie stood her trial; the resourceful Miss Smith was set free, and Oscar Slater, after twenty years of wrongful imprisonment was granted a free pardon. As for Jessie M’Lachlan—once again, we shall see.
She was about twenty-eight at the time of the murder: a frail, slender, rather pretty creature with a lovely figure, brown eyes in an oval face and soft straight light brown hair pulled back into a bun. Everyone seems to have liked her. Her sisters-in-law, it is true, who came of a large and cheerful family, thought she was not quite forthcoming enough and considered herself above them; and indeed she is often described as having ‘a ladylike air’. But she was said to be very delicate and got easily tired: and self-contained and reserved she might be, but she was ‘a very mild, gentle and kindly woman’, and ‘of a religious turn of mind’. Her neighbour, a lady rejoicing in the name of Mrs Clotworthy, gave testimony at the time of the trial that, ‘being in great distress from a melancholy accident that happened to one of my children in falling into a sawpit’ she was further discomposed by a siege of the curious flocking about her home. Mrs M’Lachlan alone refrained from joining the sensation seekers, but sent round constantly with kind enquiries. The ladies hardly knew one another, they were both people who kept themselves to themselves; but Mrs Clotworthy strongly approved of Mrs M’Lachlan. She seemed ‘a feeling, kind woman and she was particularly quiet, contrasting favourably with the other neighbours who were anything but quiet’. She was especially kind to Mrs Clotworthy’s children, who seem to have had a propensity for getting themselves into dangerous situations. But then she was fond of all children. She had a little boy of her own, of three years old.
She had been married four or five years and now, after several changes of address, lived at 182 Broomielaw Street—a district running along the banks of the Clyde, commonly referred to as the Broomielaw. The main industry of Glasgow, then as now, was ship-building, at that time in the process of changing over from wood to iron. It is a crowded, shabby city, with a beauty all its own—built on the foothills of a low valley but so packed with buildings that nothing of its conformation is to be seen except where the steep streets shoot up off the main highways, each ending in a skyline. It is built largely of red and yellow sandstone which weathers in its smoke and fog to a dark blue black; but, without the glitter of granite or the glow of Portland stone, it has nevertheless, its own loveliness of smokey blacks and greys, undertoned with sepia and rose. Through it all runs the reddy brown waters of the river Clyde, a tidal river up almost as far as the Broomielaw where Jessie lived. Here, as all over Glasgow, had been built tenement houses for the workers, so solid and strong that most of them stand to this day, though some are two hundred years old. They are mostly two or three storeys high, with a feature peculiar to Scotland—the ‘close’, presumably so called because it is on the contrary quite open, a passage at
ground level running through from front to back of the building, without doors at either end. From this the stairs run up to the several flats, or houses as they are, rather confusingly, called. The opening of the passage into the street is called the ‘close mouth’. (The term ‘close’ appears also to be given to the narrow, cobbled lanes running between the main streets, with many of these tenement houses opening on to them; these are also called vennels, or wynds. In Jessie’s day, the pump would be situated in the centre of the wynd and a gutter ran down one side; they seem to have been, and indeed still are, indescribably dirty and unlovely. No traffic, of course, runs through them, and the people simply sit on the cobbles to do their gossiping, their backs against the houses, while the children play about them; above them the lines of washing hang drying on poles stuck out of the windows.)
It was in one such tenement—Clydesdale Buildings—that Jessie lived; opening out not on to a wynd, but on to Broomielaw Street itself, with only the cobbled road and the wharf-side buildings between her close-mouth and the Clyde. There was a walledin court at the back with a door to the streets. The building is gone but many like it still stand along the Broomielaw, and the streets she walked are all the same.1 Her ‘house’ was on the second floor, or ‘stair’ as she would call it—three rooms leading off a single passage, all on the same side of it. She had also the use of a cellar in the basement.
She was pitifully poor. Her husband, James M’Lachlan, was a sailor, and out of his pay of thirty shillings a week he must keep back twelve—ten for food, for he provided his own board when he was with his ship, which was for three or four days in each week, and a couple for himself—leaving her with only eighteen shillings for rent, heating, food, clothing and any further expenses for themselves and the child. The further expenses were heaviest of all for, it was explained at her trial, she was obliged to pay out ceaselessly for doctors and medicine and for help in the house. She suffered from a heart condition which since the birth of her baby had become very much worse—from palpitations and breathlessness, and often from a total weakness which kept her bedridden for many weeks at a time. She had been in bed four months after the birth, and the doctors had now warned them that, unless she had some sort of assistance with the work of her home, she might fall dead at any moment. So she got in a woman, a Mrs Adams, to do her washing and cleaning. ‘She might be able to wash a few things for herself,’ said Mrs Adams, ‘but not a day’s washing. She was a weakly woman and had often trouble.’ She paid Mrs Adams a shilling a day and employed her twelve-year-old daughter, Sarah, to do odd chores at a further six or seven shillings a week. But how was she to pay for it all out of eighteen shillings? Her brother was very good to her, giving her constant gifts of money; all her friends were kind, even her landlords maintained a polite fiction as to the time she had to pay in. But you couldn’t struggle against illness and helplessness. To try to make ends meet she let off two of her three rooms to lodgers. They can’t have added much to her income, for her total rent for the ‘house’ was five shillings a week, but anyway they were mostly sailors like her husband, and not only did they sometimes bilk her of her rent altogether but they often went off to sea leaving money owing. Her only recourse was to pawn such possessions as they left in her keeping, hastily redeeming them before the owners got back. ‘They were left as a kind of pledge,’ said the child, Sarah Adams, who knew all about it, ‘not to pawn,’ and her mother confirms, ‘She was often compelled to pawn the clothes they had left with her. They were never pawned to raise money for intemperances or extravagance but to pay for medicine or the doctor, or me, or for what the house needed. In living she was very moderate. She was a very temperate woman. She did not drink unless by the doctor’s orders—she would take one glass of spirits but she would take no more. She could not live more economically than she did.’ She—Mrs Adams—and Sarah, were invariably employed upon these missions to the pawnshop. Jessie never went herself and she always instructed them to give false names. She evidently did not care to have too many people knowing about her business. They would not have far to go—every third shop in those days was a pawnshop (and every fourth a spirit shop).
So, all in all, she must have been thankful when a chance arose to let her rooms to a Mrs Campbell, who might be more regularly solvent or who at least wouldn’t always be going off to sea. Mrs Campbell in turn sublet one room—still to a sailor—but now it was her responsibility to collect the rent. The sailor’s name was John MacDonald, and Mrs Campbell had besides a young daughter who shared her room. It must have been something of a scrum—six people living in three small rooms.
On that night, then—the night of the murder—a couple of months after they had moved in, Mrs Campbell and her daughter were sleeping in what was in fact the kitchen, nearest to the front door of the apartment; her lodger was snoring away, from eleven o’clock on, in the middle room; and Mrs M’Lachlan’s little boy was in the end room, ordinarily the parlour, to which he and his parents were now reduced. James M’Lachlan was away at sea. And Jessie—Jessie, alas, was not at home that night.
Jessie M’Lachlan’s great friend was another Jessie, Jessie M’Pherson, more often called Jess. The names in this chronicle are not helpful to clear narrative. The two principals were called Jessie, there are two John Flemings, three Mr Flemings in all plus a Doctor Fleming, no relation. Two principal witnesses at the trial were called Paton, a detective was M’Laughlin—the list could go on for ever. To complicate matters—for the author at any rate—by the Scottish custom all married women are referred to by their maiden as well as their married names—‘Agnes Wardrope or Christie’. To avert a major muddle, Mrs M’Lachlan is always referred to as Jessie, the murdered woman as Jess.
Jess was about thirty-eight at the time of her death—a big, brawny woman though ‘of a genteel figure and generally tasteful in dress’, who had once in a friendly trial put a policeman on the floor—he had asked for a kiss. She had been less on the defensive, apparently, with two other gentlemen similarly inclined, for she had suffered two ‘misfortunes’, one of which had resulted in a stillborn child, the other in a boy who had thrived and who at the time of her death seems to have been in Australia. She was herself an illegitimate child; her name in fact, or her mother’s name, was Richardson. The mother was now married, but Jess had been brought up by foster-parents and had taken their name. They remained devoted to her, and she does seem to have been a delightful person, kind and generous and ‘with a peculiar faculty for making and keeping friends’. She had been put out to service at the age of ten and had worked as a domestic servant ever since, retiring only for brief periods to allow for the ‘misfortunes’ and for a break of one year, when she left the family with whom she was then employed—the Flemings, of Sandyford Place—and set up a little grocery stores with a friend and ex-fellow servant, Mary Downie. But the business failed. It was run on the ‘passbook system’, that is to say on credit; times were hard in Glasgow, their hearts were too kind to allow them to pursue their debtors—though it was suggested when she died that she had been murdered by some enraged creditor whom she had got sent to prison—and after only a year they had to shut up shop. She went back to the Flemings and at the time of her death had, all in all, been with them—a much trusted and valued servant—for six or seven years. Jessie M’Lachlan before her marriage had worked for two years with the same family, in Sandyford Place, and it was thus that she and Jess had become such friends. The friendship had lasted ever since.
The standing joke between Jessie and Jess was ‘Grandpa’. Grandpa was Mr Fleming senior, and the joke was that he wanted to marry Jess. The house belonged to his son, John Fleming, an accountant, respectable and prosperous, who lived there with his son, also John, who was about twenty, and two daughters. He was evidently a widower, for his sister, Margaret Fleming, kept house for him. His father lived with them, having a room on the ground floor and, especially when the rest of the family were away, haunting the servants’ quarters in the basement and m
aking a nuisance of himself. They were away a good deal, for they had a cottage by the sea, near Dunoon, and Miss Fleming and the girls spent most of the summer there, taking one of the two maids and leaving the other to run the house in town. John Fleming and John junior joined them at the week-ends. They appear not to have loved Grandpa so dearly that they often took him with them. More commonly he was left at home in Sandyford Place with Jess.
Jessie, of course, knew the old gentleman well. She called him ‘Grandpa’, and after she was married he now and again dropped in to see her in her own home and have a cup or ‘a dram’. They seemed quite intimate and friendly, said a witness who was once present when he called, ‘like familiar acquaintances’. He was affable to her husband also, and on two occasions at least there are accounts of James M’Lachlan going round with his wife to Sandyford Place and having a drink with the old man—though of course in the basement, with Jess. The Fleming family were at this time on the way up socially; and it may well be that the grandfather, who had started life as a hand-loom weaver, was more easy in the company of these humble people than his son and his grandson would have been. On the other hand, he was considered a little eccentric, and one of his oddities may have lain in this disposition to be friendly with their domestic staff.
On Friday night, July 4, 1862, Jessie had arranged to go round to Sandyford Place and see her friend. They met very frequently: they were as affectionate and easily intimate as two devoted sisters. Jess M’Pherson earned about fourteen pounds a year, but she had her keep above that, and she was always kind and generous to poor ailing and harassed Jessie. She was always giving her things that ‘she would require to buy for herself straight after’; and once when a friend suggested that she should summon Jessie for money still owing for goods from her grocery shop she said ‘never to heed, for Jessie had been to great expense on account of her illness and she’d pay when she got better.’ Jess had stayed three weeks with the M’Lachlans at the time she opened her shop with no question of payment between them; and on one occasion—it would doubtless be while she was working on her own—when she couldn’t pay her baker’s bill, Jessie had pawned some clothes and her husband’s watch to help her; it can’t have been much of a watch, the whole bill was four shillings. Jess, spent much of her meagre off time at the Broomielaw, and Jessie was always in and out of the basement at Sandyford Place. She knew it well, of course; she had lived there herself for two years, and many an evening, especially when the family were away and Jess therefore not so busy, she would go round and spend an hour talking over old times, confiding her own troubles and listening to Jess’s complaints about the old gentleman.
Heaven Knows Who Page 1
