A Stroke of Bad Luck

by Diane Janes

‘And after you had heard the car?’ prompted Mr Paley Scott.

  ‘Soon after we heard the car, Brown came back into the kitchen and Mrs Morton said, “Was that the Chrysler?” and Brown said, “Yes. The boss has been in and he’s gone out again”.’

  ‘And had you heard the sound of a car going back up the drive in the opposite direction?’

  ‘No. I had not heard any sound of a car turning, or going back up the drive.’

  ‘And how did Brown seem at this time.’

  The witness darted another quick look at the man in the box. ‘He seemed bold and at his ease,’ her voice said, while her eyes said, but he’s not sitting so easy now.

  ‘So you continued to sit there together – the three of you, in the kitchen?’

  ‘Yes. We stayed there until it was nearly midnight, then Mrs Morton and I went up to bed. I knew that she had gone into the bathroom, and I did not undress, but stayed at my bedroom window. At about half past midnight I saw Brown again, moving about in the yard. He looked up at my window and saw me standing there, and he glared up at me. Then he unlocked the kitchen door with his key and came back into the house. This made me so afraid that I went and joined Mrs Morton in the bathroom. After that we heard the boards creaking, as Brown moved about the house. Later on we went to sit on the bed in my bedroom and the same thing happened, while we waited together in there.’

  ‘And what did you do then?’

  ‘We didn’t do anything. We sat on the bed, too frightened to get undressed. We just stayed there talking quietly and listening for Brown moving about, until eventually we heard the crackling noises, and Mrs Morton looked out of the window and saw that the garage was on fire.’

  Ernest listened carefully as the girl repeated the story of their subsequent flight to Towton. Unlike Dolly, she had not returned to Saxton Grange immediately, but had stayed at the Stuart’s house, taking care of the still sleeping baby, Diana, until he himself had been sent to fetch her back to the farm at around seven in the morning. He could picture it all clearly. A low sun rising in the pale blue sky as they drove past the stubble fields, coming at last level with the orchard, where the apples were still ripening on the trees. He remembered how she had sat alongside him in the front of the horsebox, with the baby in her lap, not speaking a word to him – fancying herself, as she always had, a cut above the mere farm labourers, but gasping aloud when they came in sight of the smoking ruins which represented what was left of the garage and some of the outbuildings.

  ‘At what time approximately did you return to the farm?’ asked Mr Paley Scott.

  ‘It was about seven o’clock in the morning. When I saw what awful devastation had occurred to the garage, I made some sort of exclamation, and Brown said, “Isn’t it terrible? I’m afraid the boss must be in it.” Then he gave me a threatening look.’

  ‘And did you have any further conversation with Brown that morning?’

  ‘Yes. At around eleven o’clock I went up to Brown and asked him what had happened when he had seen Mr Morton the night before, and he told me that Mr Morton was drunk when he got home and was racing the engine of the Chrysler.’

  ‘And had you heard the engine racing, the night before?’

  ‘No, I had not. The car had freewheeled down the drive and I had not heard the sound of an engine at all.’

  The December afternoon had closed in, darkening the big skylights upon which the court relied for natural illumination. During a pause in the evidence, it had been possible to make out the voices of some carol singers, youngsters by the sound of it, working their way through Once in Royal David’s City. The electric lights had been burning all day long, but now they were making the brass railing glow across the front of the dock, and reflecting off the gold topped pen on the judge’s bench. ‘You’ll be back home in time for Christmas,’ his brother-in-law, Charlie, had said, during his last visit to the prison. The youthful voices of the carollers reminded him of Ethel, at home in Huddersfield, dreaming of Father Christmas. Ma said she was hoping for a new doll.

  A flurry of hailstones pelted against the ceiling glass, just as Mr Streatfield stood up to take his turn at questioning the witness.

  ‘Now, Miss Houseman, I want to ask you to tell us a little more about that evening, in the kitchen. Were you really terrified of Mr Brown the whole of that time?’

  The young woman hesitated. ‘Not the whole time, no.’

  ‘For example, when Brown initially entered the kitchen that night and asked you to fetch Mrs Morton down from the nursery, because he had something that he wished to speak with her about, did you have any reason to be afraid of him then?’

  ‘No. Not then, though Mrs Morton seemed to be distressed and a bit frightened.’

  ‘How about later on, when Ernest Brown asked you to leave the room, so that he could speak with Mrs Morton alone, were you very afraid of him then?’

  ‘Not so much then. But Mrs Morton was very afraid of him. She asked me not to go.’

  ‘I am not asking you to tell us about your impression of Mrs Morton. What about when you asked him to hand you the gun? Were you afraid of him then?’

  ‘I was afraid then, yes.’

  ‘And you asked him for the gun, but you did not take it?’

  ‘No, I was afraid.’

  ‘You did not take the gun because you were afraid? So it is not fair to say, as you did a little while ago, that you would have taken it, except that it was snatched away too quickly?’

  ‘No.’ Her head drooped like a snowdrop: a child caught out in a fib.

  ‘Now you have told the court that you did not go upstairs that night until almost midnight. During this long evening of sitting in the kitchen, you did not sit in silence, did you?’

  ‘No. We had the wireless on.’

  ‘And as well as the wireless, you had some conversation, did you not?’

  ‘Some, yes.’

  ‘Conversation between all three of you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was Mr Brown talking about, during this time?’

  ‘Well,’ the witness hesitated again, as if surprised by the question. ‘Just about the horses and the farm. Normal things.’

  ‘So, he was able to talk in an ordinary way, about ordinary things?’

  ‘Not in an ordinary way. He looked wild… mad.’

  ‘And yet what he said about the horses and cattle and so on, was perfectly ordinary and sensible, was it not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When Mrs Morton made her remark about the telephone call from Scotland, I put it to you that your recollection is slightly at fault… Didn’t Brown merely say, “Have they?” when Mrs Morton told him that someone had rung up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And even if he did say something to the effect that he had not heard the telephone ringing for some time, it was no more than the truth, was it?’

  The witness’s cheeks had lost their colour. The Head Girl was vanishing before their eyes.

  ‘Was it?’ Mr Streatfield repeated. ‘Because the telephone had not rung for some time, had it?’

  ‘No.’ There was no disguising the young woman’s petulance. Surely, Ernest thought, a point for our side.

  ‘You say that you had become very afraid of Ernest Brown during the course of the evening, and yet you did not attempt to use the telephone, to summon help. Why was that?’

  ‘We were too afraid. We didn’t know where Brown was, from one minute to the next.’

  ‘Ah yes. You had seen him coming downstairs from the attic, I think. Did you know that spare ropes were kept up in the attic?’

  ‘No. I’ve never been in the attic, I don’t know what’s kept up there.’

  ‘When you saw Ernest Brown descending the stairs, did you not see what he was carrying?’

  ‘I didn’t notice whether he was carrying anything o
r not.’

  ‘So it is quite possible that he was in fact carrying some ropes?’ When he received no response, Mr Streatfield returned to pursue his original line of questioning. ‘Surely, if you felt the need to obtain some help, you could have got to the telephone at some point? Could not one of you have kept watch while the other made the call? Just one word to the operator would have been enough, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘The exchange are always very slow in answering.’

  ‘But once you got through to the exchange, it would have taken only seconds to summon some assistance?’

  ‘When we telephone from Saxton Grange we sometimes have to wait quite a long time before we get any answer from the exchange at all.’

  ‘Now at various times, Miss Houseman, you have described how the defendant appeared to you that night. He seemed “wild”, you have said, and “mad” and yet he was also “bold and at his ease”. Can you explain how he can have been all these things at once?’

  The young woman hesitated. ‘Well he did not show any signs of going to bed. He looked as if he was going to stay in the kitchen all night.’

  ‘He did not show any signs of going to bed?’ The barrister repeated the words, as if in incredulity. ‘Is that what you call “looking mad”? ’

  ‘No. He had a wild look about him, the whole time.’

  ‘Yet you have said that he was talking normally, about quite ordinary things.’

  ‘Well yes,’ she said, a shade desperately. ‘When he was talking about general things, he was … sort of… ordinary… But if you looked at him, you could see that he was, well… wild.’

  ‘But his voice was ordinary, and his conversation was ordinary?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And his clothing and his hair, they were not disarranged in any way?’

  ‘No.’ It was a reluctant concession.

  ‘Was it dark that night, by the time you went up to bed?’

  ‘Oh yes, it was midnight or soon afterwards.’

  ‘Are there any lights in the farm yard at night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘When you watched from your bedroom window and saw Ernest Brown approaching the house, was he carrying a torch or a lantern?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How then, were you able to see the expression on his face?’

  The young woman in the witness box made no reply.

  ‘Now Miss Houseman, I think you have told us that from your bedroom window, you observed Ernest Brown re-enter the kitchen, after you had gone to bed? But is it not the case that your bedroom is directly above the kitchen and therefore that from your bedroom window, it is not possible to actually see the kitchen door at all?’

  ‘Well, you can see if someone approaches the kitchen door.’

  ‘But not the actual door itself, I think. Miss Houseman, did you actually see this man come back into the house, after you had gone upstairs to your bedroom, or hear any actual distinct footsteps on the landing, or the stairs?’

  ‘Well it sounded like footsteps.’

  ‘Are you prepared to swear that you heard footsteps inside the house that night?’ thundered the defending counsel.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Houseman.’ Mr Streatfield turned to Travers Humphreys and with the words: ‘I have no further questions for this witness my lord,’ he swept back to his seat, leaving the girl to creep meekly from the box, a figure somewhat diminished from the confident one which had entered it earlier.

  Chapter Eight

  Wednesday 13 December 1933

  Leeds Town Hall, The Yorkshire Assizes

  Mrs Hendrie, the wife of a Galston cattle dealer, had come all the way from Ayrshire to testify, but the court did not detain her for long. Mr Paley Scott merely asked her to confirm what had occurred when she had tried to telephone Mr Frederick Morton regarding a matter of business, on Tuesday 5 September. When Mr Streatfield announced that he had no questions for her at all, Mrs Hendrie seemed almost disappointed. It was such a dull little tale of how she had asked the operator to connect the call and how he had come back on the line a moment or two later, to tell her that Mr Morton was not at home, but would probably be back in about fifteen minutes; a transaction which had been followed up with a second attempt to connect the call, after which the operator had told her that there was now no reply from Mr Morton’s number at all.

  Mrs Hendrie was followed into the witness box by a succession of telephone operators from the exchanges which had been needed to route the call across the border and along the line to Saxton Grange, each taking their turn to trace these abortive attempts at communication for the benefit of the judge and jury. John Clarke, represented the Glasgow exchange, James McKenzie spoke up for Leeds, while Mary Morris took to the field for the little telephone office at Tadcaster. They all agreed that the first call had been placed at nine forty, and that the second – unanswered – call had been made at ten o’clock. Mary Morris provided the additional information that she had unsuccessfully attempted to connect another caller to Saxton Grange that night. This had been a purely local call, emanating from the telephone booth in Tadcaster Market Place, which had been made at ten minutes to eleven that night, but two separate attempts had failed to raise a response on that occasion.

  Julius Whitehead, a telephone linesman, rounded off the evidence about the telephone, by confirming that on the morning following these abortive attempts to contact the farm, he had inspected the wires leading to the telephone which was located inside the house at Saxton Grange, and found that they had been cut, at a point just outside the drawing room window. Whitehead then explained, with the aid of a diagram, the way in which there were actually two lines connecting Saxton Grange to the outside world, one of which ran into the farm office, which stood on the opposite side of the drive to the main buildings and a second line which served the telephone in the drawing room. He explained that although these lines had two separate numbers, and operated entirely independently during the working day, with one number ringing out in the office and the other in the house, when the office was locked up at night, the line which served it would always be switched over so that it rang out in the house. This meant that whichever number was dialled after office hours, all the calls would be diverted to the drawing room telephone.

  ‘So, Mr Whitehead, when the telephone line going into the house was cut that night, am I right to say that whichever number was called, the telephone would not ring out anywhere on the premises?’ Mr Streatfield wanted to know.

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘How about outgoing calls?’

  ‘You can’t make a call once the line’s been cut.’ Whitehead made no attempt to hide the fact that he thought this was a particularly stupid question.

  ‘But the line leading into the farm office had not been cut, had it?’

  ‘No. You could still make an outgoing call using the phone in the office.’

  ‘Mr Whitehead, pardon me for labouring this point – you are quite definite that although the wire leading into the house had been cut, and all incoming calls had been diverted to the telephone in the drawing room, there would have been nothing at all to prevent anyone from making an outgoing call from the telephone in farm office?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ replied the witness. ‘In fact several calls were made from the office on Wednesday 6 September, before the wires running into the house were repaired.’

  Ernest nodded imperceptibly. Like his barrister, he had no dispute with anything the telephone company employees had to say. However, his face hardened slightly at the name of the next witness. There was no love lost between himself and the farm bailiff. Murray Stuart had never liked him from the first. Jealousy, probably, because he, Ernest, had been longer at Saxton Grange than Stuart himself and because he had a way with the local girls and a manner that Stuart had always covertly disapproved of. He was
old school, was Stuart, Ernest thought. Stood up smart when spoken too, whereas Ernest had never been one to tug his forelock. Stuart would never keep his hands in his pockets, while he spoke to his employer, nor yet answer back.

  It was evident to all that Murray Stuart was uncomfortable from the moment he entered the court. A bloke like Stuart was well enough, ordering a lad to muck out the pig sties, or seeing to the gangers who’d come with the threshing machine, Ernest thought, but in among these posh folk, with their wigs and gowns and books and whatnot, he was well and truly out of his depth.

  He had not expected to get any help from Stuart, which was just as well.

  Once Stuart’s credentials regarding the farm had been established, prosecuting counsel got straight to the point. Had the man, Brown, ever threatened to do things to Mr Morton, Mr Paley Scott wanted to know.

  ‘Oh yes, plenty of times.’

  ‘Can you give us any examples?’

  ‘Well…’ Stuart paused. When the words finally emerged, they came out in a rush. ‘He said once, “I will clout the little bugger, one of these nights.”’

  ‘And did the accused man, Brown, come into your cottage and make threats against Mr Frederick Morton, around about July, last year?’

  ‘He did.’ Stuart sounded a little more confident in his surroundings now. He took a breath before speaking, so as not to gabble this time. ‘In August last year, he came to my cottage in Towton at around midnight. He said the way things were going, we’d all be out of a job in a couple of months. He said that he could wreck the place if he wanted to – and that he would do it too.’

  Ernest kept his features rigid. He and Stuart had no more than tolerated one another, but who would have expected a fellow worker to rat on a man; floating conversations in which they had engaged after a night in the pub together?

  By the time Paley Scott moved on to ask about the night of the fire, Murray Stuart had warmed to his task. Brown had driven into the village at around three in the morning, the farm bailiff said, sounding the horn of the horsebox as he came, which was what had initially woken everyone. He had brought the vehicle to a halt immediately outside Stuart’s own cottage and when Stuart had poked his head out of the bedroom window, in readiness to ask what the hell was going on, Brown had pre-empted the enquiry by shouting up that Saxton Grange was ablaze.