Among other things, Trench told the inquiry:
On 3 January 1909, I visited Nellie Lambie at 15 South Kinning Place, at the house of her aunt. She was lodging there. I had with me a sketch of Oscar Slater which I had received from Superintendent Ord. I showed the sketch to Lambie. She could not identify. She said she did not know him.
Trench had gone on to ask Lambie if she was confident that Francis Charteris was the man she had seen fleeing Marion Gilchrist’s flat on the night of the murder. She replied, ‘It’s gey [or ‘very’] funny if it wasn’t him I saw.’ Trench added:
My conclusion after meeting Lambie was that if she had had any one to support her she would have sworn to [Charteris]. So much impressed was I that I mentioned the fact to Superintendent Ord the next morning, asking if he thought that [Charteris] might not be the man. His only answer was, ‘[Superintendent William] Douglas has cleared up all that. What can we do?’
Against this, there was the inquiry testimony of Margaret Birrell, her lodger Fred Cowan, and Helen Lambie herself, all of whom denied that Lambie had so much as breathed the name of Francis Charteris, either on the night of the murder or at any time in the future. Mary Barrowman, in turn, repeated her story from the original trial about a man much like Slater running past her on the street outside Marion Gilchrist’s house, and Barrowman’s employer came forward to deny having ever told Trench that he doubted the girl’s word. Superintendent Ord also contradicted his subordinate officer’s account:
I did not on 3 January, 1909, instruct Lt. Trench to visit Helen Lambie at the house of her aunt. I did not give him a pencil sketch of Oscar Slater. I never saw such a sketch. I have no recollection of Lt. Trench reporting to me anything of a conversation in which Helen Lambie is said to have told him with regard to [Charteris] being the man she saw: ‘It’s gey funny …’ and followed on with other remarks to the same effect. I can say positively that no such statement was ever made to me.
Superintendent Douglas added, ‘I saw Miss Birrell [on the night of 21 December], and she did not say that Helen Lambie made any such statement [about Charteris] to her.’
According to Chief Detective Inspector John Pyper of Glasgow Central Division, neither Birrell nor Lambie had ‘ever [said] anything then or since that would cast the slightest suspicion on [Francis Charteris]’. He concluded, ‘I have carried on a good part of the [investigation] and from all I have heard I have not a shadow of a doubt that [Charteris] had nothing to do with the murder.’ When James Millar, the inquiry’s presiding officer, came to report his findings to the Secretary of State for Scotland, he added his opinion that Margaret Birrell, Helen Lambie and Mary Barrowman seemed to be honest and trustworthy witnesses, and that both they ‘and certain of the attending police officers exhibited signs of great surprise when Trench’s statements were read to them’.
Lieutenant Trench is often held up today as an intrepid fighter for justice who knowingly put his own career at risk in order to blow the whistle on the lazy and unscrupulous detective work that had characterised the Slater case so far. It may be a caricature, but if so, it’s one with a grain of truth. That he was generally perceived as more rational and reasonable than the gruff, bullet-headed John Ord (and for that matter, Ord’s superior and near-namesake, Chief Superintendent John Orr) doubtlessly enhanced Trench’s credibility as a champion of the convicted man, and thus also his present-day appeal. His outward appearance – solid and jovial – together with the fact that he was a holder of the King’s Medal, and was widely regarded as a conscientious and diligent investigator during his first twenty years on the force, contributed to his image of respectability and competence. In any event, he seems to have been a model police officer, if not one who was strikingly gregarious or sociable towards his colleagues.
In November 1912, Trench had been largely responsible for preventing a miscarriage of criminal justice in a case popularly known as the Broughty Ferry murder, which bore certain similarities to the Marion Gilchrist affair. An elderly spinster named Jean Milne had been found battered to death in her Dundee home, and suspicion quickly fell on one Charles Warner, a Canadian-born drifter who moved around the area, generally sleeping in the open, if the weather held, intruding on someone’s barn or shed when conditions forced him indoors.
Trench, who was seconded to lead the investigation into the murder, soon concluded that the victim had known her killer, and that her death had very likely been the result of an argument about money. A half-smoked cigar found in the dining room fireplace suggested that Miss Milne had had a male caller on the day in question, an impression strengthened by the open bottle of whisky and two glasses on the sideboard.
Meanwhile, the nomadic Warner had made his way to Maidstone, in Kent, where the local police arrested him. Trench interviewed the prisoner, who told him that he had been in Antwerp on the day of the murder. Although Warner had no hotel or restaurant receipts to support his story (he’d slept rough when travelling), he produced a ticket to indicate that he had pawned his waistcoat while abroad. Trench went to Antwerp, located the pawnshop, and confirmed the alibi. Warner was released without charge.
Although Jean Milne’s murder remained unsolved, it was widely acknowledged that an innocent man had at least been spared a trial and a possible capital conviction. When the Glasgow papers reported on the case, several of them published pictures of Lieutenant Trench being welcomed back to the station house by his commanding officer, Chief Superintendent Orr. Within a short time, the two would engage in a bitter professional struggle, with Trench the loser.
This benign impression of John Trench may not always hold up to closer scrutiny, however. In January 1914, he had decided to enlist the help of a Scottish lawyer and author named David Cook to publicise the Slater case. Trench’s numerous critics on the Glasgow force suggested that in doing so he had been motivated less by a selfless quest for truth and justice and more by his ambition to position himself as the best-known of the contestants to succeed Superintendent Orr when the time came. If so, his strategy for professional advancement failed spectacularly. On 14 September 1914, the Glasgow Magistrates’ Committee recorded:
After full and careful consideration of the case … the Committee unanimously found [Trench] guilty of the charge on which he was suspended by the Chief Constable, viz communicating to a person who is not a member of the Glasgow Police Force, namely Mr David Cook, Writer, information which he had acquired in the performance of his duty, and copies of documents from the official records in the case of Oscar Slater, [and] the Committee, in respect of said finding, and in terms of Section 78 of the Glasgow Police Act, 1866, dismissed Dt. Lt. Trench from the Force of that City.
This was not the end of former Lieutenant Trench’s troubles at the hands of his sometime employer, the Glasgow Police. In August 1915, both he and David Cook were sent for trial (in the same courtroom where six years earlier Slater had been condemned to death) in a somewhat bizarre case brought against them for handling stolen goods. The charge arose from the January 1914 burglary of a Glasgow jewellery shop, and the police contention that Trench and others had subsequently tried to swindle £400 out of the insurance company covering the loss. The judge quickly brought an end to the proceedings when he told the jury, ‘I direct you that there is no justification at all which would enable you to return a verdict of guilty against the defendants’.
Although Trench walked from court a free man, it was said that he was broken by his experiences. After fighting overseas with the Royal Scots Fusiliers, he returned to Glasgow and died there in May 1919, aged 50. Seventy years later, the Scottish Office conducted a full review of Trench’s dismissal from the police and concluded that this had been ‘harsh’. However, according to then Secretary of State Donald Dewar, ‘There is no statutory authority to issue a pardon or posthumous rehabilitation of this officer. He should have contested his original treatment in a court of law.’ It remains unclear how, exactly, Lieutenant Trench could have effectively mounted a challenge to hi
s expulsion from the police in September 1914. By the time the official letter confirming the magistrates’ decision reached him, he was already in advanced training with his battalion for overseas duty, a service he could easily have avoided had he so wished because of his age.
This is not necessarily to endorse Trench’s eventual view of the Oscar Slater case, however. The scenario he outlined of corruption and treachery involving literally dozens of brother officers may well be plausible, given the laissez-faire approach which we know many police officers of the time took to their investigations. What more compelling proof could there be of this conspiracy than Slater’s trial itself, in which no positively incriminating physical evidence was presented, but where the judge informed the jury that the defendant did not warrant the presumption of innocence?
At the same time, to believe Lieutenant Trench’s narrative in its entirety is to accept not only that the Glasgow Police colluded as one to frame Slater, but that, in time, their conspiracy reached down into the local community as far as the likes of the bootmaker Colin Maccallum, Mary Barrowman’s employer, who emphatically denied making the remarks Trench attributed to him, and 32-year-old businessman James Howat, who told the 1914 inquiry that he was ‘quite sure’ Barrowman had come to his home on the night Marion Gilchrist was murdered, a story Trench insisted was totally fabricated.
Reading the transcript of the inquiry today, it’s hard to see what practical grounds the civilian witnesses like Maccallum and Howat might have had for lying quite as brazenly as the believers in a conspiracy think they did. As the generally sympathetic William Roughead wrote:
Mr Trench was an able and experienced officer whose promotion from the ranks was earned by 21 years’ meritorious service. That any man with a record such as his should have invented the whole story is well-nigh incredible … He had nothing whatever to gain by persisting in his statement, he stood to lose and in fact lost everything – prestige, place, and pension. On the other hand, it seems almost beyond belief that these respectable witnesses would state deliberately what they knew to be false. Both stories cannot be true.
Although the complete text of the Slater inquiry remained secret for the next seventy-six years, a partial transcript was published on 29 June 1914. It happened to be the day on which the world awoke to the news that the schoolboy terrorist Gavrilo Princip had shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo, setting in train the reflexive diplomatic steps that led to war.
Conan Doyle, who was then visiting Canada, was not impressed by what he read of the Glasgow proceedings. ‘No one who has mastered the facts can read this account without amazement,’ he wrote in the Spectator later in July:
It appears to completely cut away point after point which told against Slater at the trial. How the verdict could be that there was no fresh cause for reversing the conviction is incomprehensible. [It is] the supreme example of official incompetence and obstinacy.
Fortunately for Slater, just as Trench and Cook left the field, and Doyle himself increasingly turned to his twin preoccupations with the war and spiritualism, the campaign for justice was strengthened by a new recruit who promised to bring to it qualities of tenacity and aggression possibly accentuated by his taste for strong drink.
William Park, a Glasgow-based freelance writer and an early proponent of investigative journalism (or ‘muckraking’, as it was known then), came of an old and wealthy family from western Scotland. He was a tall, striking figure, with a love of fast women and slow horses to match his fondness for the local malt. At the same time, he was widely read and partial not only to Sherlock Holmes but also the socialist effusions of the Scots-born MP, Keir Hardie, whose public eulogy on Karl Marx he used to quote with enthusiasm. The author Peter Hunt later referred to Park as ‘that strange, self-tortured fanatic, whose avowed intent it was to disembowel the Glasgow Police’.
On 23 September 1914, Park wrote to Conan Doyle to point out several ‘discrepancies’ and ‘rank fabrications’ in the recent Slater inquiry. Two days later, another letter arrived. In it Park wondered if Doyle might care to write to the Secretary of State for Scotland, though he, Park, agreed that little could realistically be done for Slater until after the war – ‘and he may be dead by then, as several ex-convicts have told me that he is off his head’. The correspondence continued on a roughly weekly basis during the remainder of 1914. On 8 October, Park wrote to tell Doyle that he considered the Secretary of State:
A hopelessly stupid man … He is simply a promoted man in the street. It is our view … that the Trench business should only come in as an episode to the main story of the sham inquiry and humbug report.
A fully organised campaign for Slater’s release was still incomplete at the end of 1914. By then Doyle was heavily involved in writing on behalf of the War Propaganda Board, as well as training his own home-defence militia, and had less time to devote to what he called ‘pacific affairs’ as a result. He seems to have politely acknowledged Park’s letters without actively encouraging them. ‘In spite of the shocks and strains which each day brought,’ Doyle later remarked, ‘I did not grudge the many hours of concentrated thought [the Park correspondence] demanded’, language that perhaps suggests the opposite was true. Another letter, of 7 December, told Doyle of Park’s intention to proceed with a book on the Slater case, and more particularly ‘to expose the police conduct, show how they prepared their prosecution, [and] illustrate the discrepancies between statements at trial and those given secretly to police’.
By the following spring, Park’s focus had turned to the criminal case brought against John Trench and David Cook. ‘I shall be glad of any suggestions from you,’ he wrote to Doyle on 20 May. ‘Your keen acumen and experience of police methods may throw light on the mystery of the arrests.’ A civil but noncommittal response ensued. The previous autumn, Conan Doyle had published his fourth and final Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, while retaining his usual ambivalence about his ‘poor hero of the anemic printed page’.
‘If I had a good competence, I would devote myself to some serious literary or historical work,’ Doyle told his editor at The Strand, before adding, ‘I have large commercial interests and if they took a good turn (as they may well do) I should be in that position.’ Doyle had spent some seven weeks in 1886 creating Holmes and, it could be argued, the rest of his life regretting it. He did not actively investigate the Slater case between 1914 and 1925, although he frequently went on record lobbying for an inquiry, or supporting the pleas of Park and others for a new trial. Nor did he forget the convicted man. ‘From time to time one hears word of poor Slater from behind his prison walls,’ Doyle wrote, ‘like the wail of some wayfarer who has fallen into a pit and implores aid from the passers-by.’
About the war itself, Doyle was unambiguous. Every Briton should give tirelessly to the cause, he said, and before long he was drilling his volunteers, writing the history of battles almost before their outcome was conclusively known, and agitating for everything from the issue of proper body armour to the commissioning of a special badge for any soldier suffering a wound.
The conflict also marked the point where he came to finally reconsider his spiritual beliefs. As both the nation’s and his own family’s losses mounted, Doyle increasingly turned to the séance room for comfort. In the spring of 1916, he contributed two letters to the psychic journal Light on the theme ‘Where is the Soul during Unconsciousness?’ Together, they addressed the question of ‘life’s ultimate purpose’ and the ‘inchoate yearning for meaning’ Doyle saw all around him. The strands of theory and experience he wove together in Light would help form the basis for the new spiritualist movement which emerged in the early 1920s, and that led millions of people who had never read a word of his detective fiction to take serious note of him.
By early 1917, Conan Doyle was talking about the importance of applying the ‘psychic line’ to certain miscarriages of criminal justice. ‘There was a Spiritualist circle which used to meet in Fal
kirk,’ he later wrote:
… and shortly after the [Slater] trial messages were received by it which purported to come from the murdered woman. She was asked what the weapon was which had slain her. She answered that it was an iron box-opener [or crowbar]. Now I had pondered over the nature of certain wounds in the woman’s face, which consisted of two cuts with a little bridge of unbroken skin between. They might have been caused by the claw end of a hammer, but on the other hand, one of the woman’s eyes had been pushed back into her brain, which could hardly have been done by a hammer, which would have burst the eyeball first. I could think of no instrument which would meet the case. But the box-opener would exactly do so, for it has a forked end which would make the double wound, and it is also straight so that it might very well penetrate to the brain, driving the eye in front of it.
The reader will reasonably ask why did not the Spiritualists ask the name of the criminal. I believe that they did and received a reply, but I do not think that such evidence could or should ever be used or published. It could only be useful as the starting point of an inquiry.
It was not, as it turned out, the last such paranormal investigation into the Oscar Slater case. Starting in the winter of 1917–18, Doyle himself made regular attempts to summon the spirit of Marion Gilchrist, and once claimed that he had ‘seen the lady with great clarity’ during a séance held by candlelight in his Sussex dining room.
The Man who Would be Sherlock Page 26