The Man who Would be Sherlock

by Christopher Sandford

  Meanwhile, many of the papers again took up the mystery of Marion Gilchrist’s death. If not Slater, then who was responsible? The Daily Record and the Sunday Chronicle were among those to actively campaign for a full judicial inquiry, while others, like the Citizen Herald, continued to insist that the real crime was that the ‘Jewish-born brute’ had escaped the gallows in the first place.

  Doyle himself used the pages of the Empire News to try to establish ‘who [were] the guilty parties of the whole episode’. He again disparaged Helen Lambie as a witness, and took the opportunity to warmly salute the late Lieutenant Trench, but apparently for legal reasons fell short of naming the actual killer. Doyle was less squeamish in his private letter to Stanley Baldwin. ‘A note as to who did do the crime may interest you,’ he told the prime minister, before recapping the salient facts of the case and explaining that it had all been prompted by the contents of Marion Gilchrist’s will.

  In the days that followed, Doyle sent a circular letter to all 615 British MPs demanding a public inquiry. Among those to receive this was 50-year-old Brigadier General John Charteris, the Unionist member for Dumfries, whose brother Francis was the man Doyle, taking Lambie at her published word, believed had battered Marion Gilchrist to death. As a result of this petition, a special bylaw was passed to allow the new Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal to retroactively hear Slater’s case.

  Doyle also wrote direct to the released prisoner:

  Dear Mr Oscar Slater,

  This is to say in my wife’s name and my own how grieved we have been at the infamous injustice which you have suffered at the hands of our officials. Your only poor consolation can be that your fate, if we can get people to realize the effects, may have the effect of safeguarding others in the future.

  We still work in the hope of getting an inquiry into these iniquities and eventually, as I hope, some compensation for your undeserved suffering.

  Slater replied effusively:

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, you breaker of my shackels [sic], you lover of truth for justice sake … My heart is full and almost breaking with love and gratitude for you and your dear wife lady Conan Doyle and all the upright men and women, who for justice sake (and that only) have helped me, me as an outcast.

  Till my dying day I will love and honour you and the dear Lady, my dear, dear Conan Doyle, yet that unbounded love for you both, makes me sign plainly

  Yours,

  Oscar Slater.

  Doyle had no way of knowing that this was to be perhaps the last fully friendly exchange he would ever have with Slater, whose correspondence from then on dwelt increasingly on financial matters rather than the technicalities of his guilt or innocence. As a result, there was some noticeable cooling of the ‘unbounded love’ so freely expressed in the heady days of November 1927. Soon Slater was writing to ask Doyle’s advice about which lawyers to appoint to pursue his claim for compensation. In time, the monetary aspects of the whole affair became something of a mutual preoccupation. Doyle generously guaranteed £1,000 of his own funds to help pay for Slater’s future defence, while launching a petition for additional contributions in the pages of the Jewish Chronicle. The intended beneficiary was not entirely happy with these initiatives. On 7 December, Slater (rarely at his most confident with the written word) wrote to tell Doyle that he was aware of his fundraising efforts on his behalf, but disappointed by some of the response. ‘I thought that half a dozen influential Jews … would have paid the bill like sportsmen,’ he complained:

  Dear Sir Arthur, it makes me sick absolutely sick to think on such actions. If [need be] I will pay it all … All collected money must go back to the Jews and we will thank the few who have given for their kindness.

  Two weeks later, Slater wrote again to ask Doyle to accept a present which ‘although of no great value is dear, dear to my heart because I have handled it daily for more than ten years’. This may have been Slater’s homemade cigarette case; the following summer he sent Doyle a silver cigar-cutter in lieu of the £300 he had been asked for, and Doyle returned this with a curt note saying he would prefer the cash instead.

  New Year’s Day 1928 brought another exchange about smoking materials. Thanking Doyle for the gift of a pipe, Slater wrote, ‘Yesterday I went down to the shore to have a quiet puff and except a little burning at the tip of my tongue I have enjoyed it imensely [sic].’

  But even this congenial mood was soon to pass. In March, Slater wrote to furiously deny having given an interview critical of Doyle in the Daily Express, and to tell him:

  Your pipe, sir, is dear to me, as a gift – but to use it, it is a failure, then only by touching it my tongue starts to nip, and any attempt to fill the pipe makes my stomach heave up and down.

  Thanks largely to Doyle, Slater was able to engage the eminent Scottish barrister Craigie Aitchison, a future Lord Advocate, to represent him at his appeal. The lawyer charged £80 a day for his services. Although Slater’s correspondence in this period shows flashes of feeling for Doyle and his other benefactors, it makes them out as unreasonable about money. ‘Sir Arthur still makes me beg for my capitol [sic],’ he complained.

  Slater’s petition was submitted to the Secretary of State for Scotland on 2 March 1928. Its first five numbered paragraphs spoke about the flawed eyewitness testimony presented at trial, while the sixth and critical one contended ‘that the presiding Judge in said charge animadverted on the character of your petitioner to his prejudice’.

  There were further pained exchanges about money throughout the spring. ‘Sir Arthur! I never have failed my friends yet!’ Slater protested on 2 May, admitting that a recent letter from the author had upset him greatly. Slater’s rabbi friend later described him as behaving ungraciously in this period. After receiving a cheque, ‘It was rare that he took note of the amount without complaining it was too little, or that others were benefitting from funds which he felt were his’. On 5 May, Slater wrote to tell Doyle that he was grateful to William Park, as well he might be, but ‘this great worker makes mistakes also’. He added that he was prepared to pay the immediate expenses for his appeal, ‘but nothing later’.

  Meanwhile, the Lord Justice General, Lord Clyde, had agreed that Slater might have his day in court, but not be allowed to personally testify there. This was not well received. On 13 June, Slater informed the press that he was withdrawing his appeal. When a reporter from the Ayrshire Post went to his home to ask him about his reasons for doing this, ‘Slater got so upset that we fell into a noisy row in the sitting room. I terminated the interview.’ A few days later, Slater relented and agreed to pursue his claim after all. ‘I think that I have hurt you, my faithful friend,’ he wrote to Doyle on 17 June:

  But I am not sorry that I have acted as I did, because I only behaved, as any other animal would behave, who is free, yet lying bleeding and wounded on the ground, using his last strength, to lash furiously out again, when painfully treated.

  On 9 July, Slater’s appeal hearing opened in front of Lord Clyde and four other judges. They sat in the same Edinburgh courtroom where the criminal trial had taken place nineteen years earlier. It’s a curious detail that other than his shocked outburst on hearing the original verdict against him, Slater himself failed to say a word at either of the proceedings, and had not even attended the 1914 inquiry. Explaining his decision, Lord Clyde remarked that the petitioner in this case clearly had nothing new to say, and thus ‘it would be quite unreasonable to spend time over his examination now, and the court therefore is not prepared to allow his evidence to be received’.

  In July 1928, Conan Doyle was 69 years old. He still spent long hours every day at his desk, reading a constant flow of letters and reports about often outlandish paranormal activities (the claims of a woman to have levitated from one part of London to another, for example, or of a man who reported pieces of coal mysteriously falling from his ceiling), and keeping up his own prolific output on both spiritual and material matters. Although Doyle’s reputation had been made wit
h his invention of Holmes over forty years earlier, and he was by now a wealthy man, the words just kept on coming. For him, writing was like scratching an endless itch. During that summer, Doyle contributed articles on everything from the true meaning of life to the correct way to bowl a cricket donkey drop. Among other time-consuming projects, he took up the case of the missing transatlantic flier Walter Hinchliffe, whose disappearance he speculated had been caused by transportation to a parallel universe, rather than bad weather. The ridicule of much of the press, the opposition of the Church, and the refusal of the government to relax the witchcraft laws saw Doyle increasingly content to distance himself from the Establishment he had once seemed to embody.

  In September 1928, Conan Doyle also brought out a new edition of The Coming of the Fairies, in which he reaffirmed his belief that the events eleven years earlier at Cottingley were of greater significance to mankind than Columbus’s discovery of the New World, and soon went on to offer not only a fresh warning about the impending global cataclysm, but also a detailed geological account of how it would happen. This boiled down to a complicated formula involving the tilting of the polar axis and the consequent cracking of the earth’s crust – another example, perhaps, of the author’s twinned faith in science and the occult.

  In the middle of these various commitments, Doyle took the time to return to the city of his birth to attend the Slater appeal, both as an act of moral support and to cover the proceedings for the Sunday Pictorial. That the world-famous and now physically ailing author would drop everything on his behalf was something Slater himself took in his stride. ‘The old man puffed about here like a noisy train,’ he remarked. It was their first personal meeting.

  Doyle in turn found little to modify his unfavourable opinion of Slater’s character. Nonetheless, his published report of the proceedings showed that he could be warmly sympathetic towards the victim of a miscarriage of justice without assuming any personal liking for him. ‘One terrible face stands out among all those others,’ Doyle wrote in the Pictorial:

  It is not an ill-favoured face, nor is it a wicked one, but it is terrible nonetheless for the brooding sadness that is in it. It is firm and immobile and might be cut from that Peterhead granite which has helped to make it what it is. A sculptor would choose it as the very type of tragedy. You feel that this is no ordinary man, but one who has been fashioned for some strange end. It is indeed the man whose misfortunes have echoed around the world. It is Slater.

  After four days of evidence, the judges took another week to reach their decision. They found little with which to take issue in the testimony presented at the original proceedings. However, the trial judge on that occasion had failed to warn the jury to put out of their minds any prejudice they might have had about Slater’s personal lifestyle, and more particularly ‘his disreputable relations with the female members of his household’. As a result, Lord Clyde announced, ‘We think that the instructions given in the charge amounted to misdirections in law, and that the judgement of the court before whom the appellant was convicted should be set aside.’

  This was still very far from a ringing declaration of Slater’s innocence. Rather than announcing that he had been the victim of a ghastly miscarriage of justice, the tribunal had quashed his conviction on what amounted to a technicality. It wasn’t that Helen Lambie or anyone else had lied under oath at the original trial, but that Lord Guthrie should never have uttered the fateful phrase in his summing-up, ‘A man of that kind has not the presumption of innocence in his favour’. Nonetheless, it was vindication of a sort. Cheers went up in the courtroom as Lord Clyde concluded his judgement, and The Times remarked that the crowd outside was ‘ecstatic … it was not the logic but the nature of the ruling which was so startling’. There were cries of ‘He’s a jolly good fellow!’ and ‘Dear old Oscar!’ Spectators waving hats and arms crowded around Slater on the steps of the courthouse, and the general air of festivity continued long into the warm summer’s night both in Edinburgh’s streets and pubs.

  Slater himself ‘very calmly’ returned to his hotel, where he later sat down to write Doyle a letter with his impressions of the whole affair. He was not entirely satisfied with the outcome, he admitted. Welcome as the verdict was, Slater wrote:

  They went to [sic] far in throwing muck at me in a open court … This cruel five judges, this judges, who knew the frame up of my case, should have limited themselves a little and in not doing so, even the lay man in the street know now that my character was the staff for the Crown to lean on. I will fight and expose the all – all them who I know have taken my confidence and have betrayed me.

  That night, while the normally staid town of Edinburgh celebrated, the hero of the hour retired early to bed.

  Showing his Scots good sense, Conan Doyle took the pragmatic view that the verdict was the best they could reasonably hope for, and that the priority now was to press the government for financial redress. ‘You will get not a penny if you do not apply for it,’ he wrote to Slater on 1 August. This was timely advice, because that same morning the British Cabinet met in Downing Street, and as part of their discussion (immediately after a debate on armed forces’ pensions, and before one on the regulation of ‘reconstituted and synthetic cream’) considered:

  … how best to compensate the appellant Slater … After review, [it] was agreed that the Secretary of State for Scotland should endeavour to secure a settlement of the question on the basis of an ex gratia payment of £5,000 to Slater, but, if necessary, should have authority to give up to £6,000.

  In time this latter sum was accepted.

  Conan Doyle then began his long campaign to have Slater reimburse the defence funds Doyle and others had raised on his behalf. ‘Will you now relieve those who supported you of their costs?’ he enquired on 9 August, requesting a ‘clear and direct’ reply. One was never forthcoming. Throughout what proved to be the last two years of his life, Doyle was regularly obliged to break away from his spiritualist ministry to squabble with the man who had once professed his ‘unbounded love [and] honour’ about relatively minor sums of money. It seems fair to say that at the heart of the problem lay not so much a dispute about cash as a fundamental difference in moral values. Doyle simply assumed that Slater would wish to immediately clear his debts to his supporters. In his position, this is what Doyle himself would have done. But Slater took the view that he should never have been put on trial, nor had to mount a defence, in the first place, and thus was not liable for the expenses incurred. This offended Doyle’s code of honour. ‘You seem to have taken leave of your senses,’ he wrote to Slater. ‘If you are indeed responsible for your actions, then you are the most ungrateful as well as the most foolish person whom I have ever known.’

  The Doyle-Slater relationship went steadily downhill from there. By 1929, it had achieved total dysfunctionality. ‘These bills have to be met now … I beg you will send me a cheque by return for £300,’ Doyle wrote in one letter; and in another he spoke to their mutual friend William Park of this ‘tiresome man’. There is relatively little in the later correspondence about the fate of Marion Gilchrist. Slater clearly saw himself as the principal victim of the whole affair, and Doyle was increasingly forced to act more as an accountant than an avenging detective. His files on the case document his out-of-pocket disbursements, his travel expenses and the sales figures for Park’s book, but the actual crime is elided. Doyle carefully preserved a letter written to him by a P.E. Baker on 13 September 1929. In it, Baker refers to a clipping from a local newspaper, and says:

  … that in using the term ‘ungrateful dog’, you really flatter Slater. As the owner of a well-bred dog, I cannot conceive how even a mongrel would be as undeserving as this. As I believe the common rat has yet to be proven of any real value to humanity, whereas dogs have, it might be more appropriate to use the term, ‘Dirty Rat’.

  In time, Slater himself wrote direct to the Scottish Office to express his opinion that ‘the [authorities], in common fairness, oug
ht not to expect me to bear the costs of this case’. Though most of his letter was low-key, he ended sharply, invoking the principles of humanity, justice, freedom and ‘British fair play’ cruelly denied him over the past twenty years. He got a ‘Dear Slater’ letter back from a civil servant indicating that the £6,000 was the full and final settlement, though in theory it could be reduced on review, and that the appellant’s further comments on the matter were not actively encouraged. That concluded the government’s direct interest in the case.

  Slater continued to trade epistolary barbs with one of the world’s most accomplished and personally tenacious authors, however, and eventually he and Doyle took their dispute to court. This was perhaps the least edifying part of the whole saga that followed in the wake of Marion Gilchrist’s death. Doyle’s friend Anthony Clyne, a religious sceptic, wrote to him on 14 September 1929 with the hope that his squabbles with Slater would not be allowed to blunt his enthusiasm for truth and justice. ‘That I disagree so flatly with your views on various subjects should make my assurance more convincing,’ he added.

  Two days later, Leopold Greenberg, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, wrote to tell Doyle that he was ‘very perturbed’ to hear he was taking action against Slater, which he considered a ‘sorry ending to what [had been] something of a noble and successful endeavour’. The following week, Doyle’s lawyers wrote to Slater’s regarding the date of a possible civil hearing in Edinburgh. The respondent’s ill health delayed this, however, leaving Doyle to make more unappreciative comments about his adversary in the press. In one of several vitriolic notes with which he bombarded the author in 1929 on the ‘vile stuff and abuse pouring from your pen’, his erstwhile comrade, now thorn in his flesh, Slater, complained of ‘unbelievable lyes [sic] in the newspapers’.