It has to be said that Doyle himself fell short of this model of forensic precision and acuity in his own investigation of the Oscar Slater affair. He neither visited the scene of the crime nor personally interviewed any of the principals. He took an instant dislike to Slater himself. Later, Doyle told a spiritualist meeting, ‘Instead of thanking me for my efforts … he recited to me his material grievances, a list that was as varied as it was long.’ As we’ve seen, the two men continued to argue about financial matters right up to the time of Doyle’s death.
Set against this, however, was the author’s sheer tenacity in pressing Slater’s case in the pages of books and newspapers, and his numerous direct appeals to members of successive British governments. Over the years, even the most senior ministers would prove less fastidious about meeting him than might have been the case for a purely anonymous petitioner seeking redress on behalf of a convicted murderer. A working relationship with Doyle often brought with it a social component. At the time Ramsay MacDonald wrote to the Scottish Secretary in October 1927 to demand Slater’s release, for example, he sent a second, more personal note, thanking Doyle for the recent gift of several signed first editions of his books. This was the sort of connection that few other campaigners could ever hope to enjoy with the ranks of the political or judicial Establishment.
Doyle’s name lent instant credibility to a cause such as Slater’s, which otherwise might never have come to the point of an inquiry, let alone a full appeal. It should also be remembered that he published William Park’s book on the case, often considered to have been the turning point in Slater’s fortunes, and that he did so contrary to the advice of his wife and many others who believed he was risking his own reputation as a result. Doyle later described Park as ‘hav[ing] within him that slow-burning, but quenchless, fire of determination which marks the best type of Scotsman’. This was equally true of Doyle himself. He may not have been the world’s greatest forensic detective, but no one was better at stubbornly pursuing the facts of a case and exposing them to the proper audience – which is what good investigative journalism, like good police work, is based upon.
There is another compelling theory of what happened to Marion Gilchrist on the evening of 21 December 1908. This version of events also turns on the contents of the victim’s will, but it involves the Birrell as much as the Charteris family. The reputation of Wingate Birrell, in particular, stood low in the Glasgow of this period. Aged 40 at the time of Miss Gilchrist’s death, stocky and dark complexioned, he was a British Army veteran who had since been reduced to earning a precarious living by hawking pin cushions, a role he allegedly combined with shop-breaking and other petty crime.
Birrell had apparently spent some time in Australia, but by 1908 was living in digs at Woolwich, south-east London, from where he’s known to have regularly travelled home to Scotland. A January 1909 Glasgow Police file on the Gilchrist murder refers to Birrell as being ‘of bad character’, which suggests he had come to their attention before the murder. A second official report quotes a relative describing him as ‘a wild young man [who] has been on more than one occasion sent abroad by his family but always turned up again’. This would seem to echo the contents of the anonymous but impressively detailed letter someone sent to the Scottish Secretary on 20 May 1909, at which point Oscar Slater was scheduled to die just seven days later.
‘My Noble Lord,’ it began:
I am so frightened you are going to hang Slater – He never committed the murder – Nelly Lambie was engaged to Birrell, Miss Gilchrist’s nephew. He was a very wild chap – and none of his family would have anything to do with him as he was always borrowing money from them & kicking up rows. But Nelly said she did not care as she would be far grander than anybody in the street someday … On the night of the murder she had a man in the kitchen – at 6.30. When she went out or was expecting anyone she put a piece of coal between the doorstep and the door, then a slight push opened it … Well, after the murder the man went over the kitchen window, crossed the street into the Crescent, saw the crowd around the close and walked away – he left that night for London, sold the brooch to a dealer in Little College St and left for New Zealand before anyone knew.
Did Wingate Birrell kill his aunt? The author Thomas Toughill, a highly respected researcher into the Slater case, is one of those who believes Miss Gilchrist’s death was the result of a simmering family feud about the old lady’s will that finally boiled over into homicidal violence on the night of 21 December. Birrell may conceivably have been in league with Helen Lambie, and very possibly have recruited Francis and Archibald Charteris, or been recruited by them, in the commission of the crime. (The third Charteris brother, John, was serving with the army in India at the time of the murder.)
Strange things had begun happening in West Princes Street during December 1908. Several local residents believed that someone was keeping watch outside the Gilchrist flat, and Rowena Adams’s testimony about the man she saw loitering there shortly before 7 on the night of the 21st could have fit Francis Charteris just as easily as it did the mysterious Paddy Nugent. At that point, it’s said, Archibald Charteris and Wingate Birrell had slipped into the flat while Helen Lambie went out to buy the newspaper and establish her alibi.
‘Whatever the plan was,’ Thomas Toughill writes:
… it did not take into consideration Wingate’s temper … When Miss Gilchrist started to harangue and insult him, he saw red and beat her to death. He then left the house by climbing over the kitchen window. Archibald, who was still in the bedroom looking through his aunt’s private papers when Lambie and Adams entered the flat, summoned up the necessary composure and calmly walked past them in the hallway. In the street, he met up with his brother and the two rushed off down West Princes Street, almost colliding with Agnes Brown in the process … Birrell was told he had to flee the country, which he did via Kelvinbridge underground station, just across the road. He was in such a state when he reached the station that he attracted the attention of the booking clerk, Annie Armour, who testified at trial that she believed the man she saw was Slater.
We’ve seen that Francis Charteris went on to a distinguished medical career, and his brother Archibald eventually rose to the heights of the Glasgow legal profession as a solicitor, author and lecturer. Before emigrating to Australia, he had frequent dealings with James Neil Hart, the chief law officer who prosecuted Oscar Slater. Wingate Birrell, who sometimes called himself William Gilchrist, and claimed to be the murder victim’s illegitimate son, died on 4 March 1909, of tuberculosis, at a charity hospital in London.
At the end of the day, there are two possible variants of what really happened, and why Marion Gilchrist’s murder should have assumed so much importance both to Conan Doyle and others. The first and now most popular explanation is that members of the Charteris and Birrell families were engaged in an internecine feud of almost Shakespearean dimensions, had wished to read or extract certain of the old lady’s papers and entered her flat to do so, and that the actual murder was a ghastly but unintended consequence of this intrusion. This theory seems to broadly fit the contours of a classic inheritance crime, of the sort quite often seen in the Holmes stories and elsewhere, and it in fact occurred to several people even before Oscar Slater went on trial in May 1909. The suggestion that one of Miss Gilchrist’s relatives had wielded the bludgeon that killed her and had then stood by while another man was convicted in his place was not new. Something of the sort had been rumoured ever since it emerged that Helen Lambie had supposedly run straight from discovering her employer’s lifeless body to the nearby home of Margaret Birrell and told her, ‘Oh, Miss Birrell, Miss Birrell, Miss Gilchrist has been murdered, she is lying dead in the dining-room, and oh, Miss Birrell, I saw the man who did it’, and gone on to name the guilty party as Francis Charteris.
Set against this plot line is the fact that Lambie appears to have been either a congenital liar, or, as Conan Doyle preferred to put it, ‘incorrigibly dim’, and
thus makes an unappealing witness as to whether she in fact said these words. The counter-theory is that the maid had blurted out the names of Archibald Charteris or Wingate Birrell – Margaret Birrell’s brother – as the supposed killer. Lambie would have easily recognised both men, and there’s some circumstantial evidence that she was on terms of intimacy with the latter. Wanting to protect her brother, the theory goes, Margaret Birrell had simply substituted ‘Francis’ for ‘Archibald’, omitting the name of Wingate altogether, when Lieutenant Trench had come to interview her two days later. Many students of the Slater affair, Conan Doyle among them, would champion this view about one or more of the Charteris brothers being involved, and Francis Charteris himself ruefully acknowledged it when, as an old man, he spoke to the press about the case in 1961.
The problem with this theory is that no one has ever conclusively shown any physical evidence directly linking members of the Charteris or Birrell families to Marion Gilchrist’s murder, and none of the alleged conspirators ever admitted to their role in it. In order to accept the ‘insider’ version of events, it’s also necessary to believe that there was a long-running and far-reaching Establishment plot to protect the reputations of a then only modestly prominent group of local doctors and lawyers, and that, Scottish law prescribing the death penalty for anyone found guilty of fabricating evidence in a capital case, those engaged in the cover-up would have been risking their own lives as a result.
A close examination of the purported conspirators’ actions on the night of 21 December would also seem to raise questions about their involvement. Could, for example, Francis Charteris have left the scene of the crime at around 7.10 p.m., as has been claimed, then have made his way back to his own home, or at least to a conveniently quiet street corner, conferred there with his brother Archibald and a blood-soaked Wingate Birrell, agreed on a story that would bind all three of them in an intrigue that would last the rest of their lives, taken leave of his confederates, and composed himself sufficiently to then walk back to the murder scene from which he had fled in panic only a few minutes earlier, and present himself as a disinterested doctor and acquaintance of the deceased who was there to help if required? This may or may not be exactly what happened; it is a conceivable, even if it’s an implausible, scenario. No one ever proved that Francis Charteris did all this, however, and at the very end of his life he told a reporter, ‘I am no more a murderer than you are’.
The other explanation, which still refutes much of the case presented by the Crown in 1909, is that someone curious about the contents of Marion Gilchrist’s will, presumably but not necessarily a family member, had entered her flat on the night in question, and that this individual had previously enlisted Oscar Slater as an accomplice. Once again, it has to be said the supporting evidence is purely circumstantial. Slater lived in the general vicinity. His drinking haunts lay close by Wingate Birrell’s. He was known to deal in stolen goods. He had an alibi, but not exactly an airtight one, for the time in which the murder was committed.
Had he acted as a lookout, or as a straightforward burglar on the night, perhaps as a blind while others ransacked the old lady’s papers? What still strikes anyone reading the full transcript of the trial is the sheer number and variety of witnesses prepared to identify Slater, whatever the individual discrepancies in their accounts. Marion Gilchrist’s neighbour Margaret McHaffie, for example, told the court that she had seen someone ‘loitering about’ for several weeks before the murder, and subsequently ‘had no difficulty’ in recognising the man as Slater. Annie Armour, the local station booking clerk, similarly testified that she had ‘no trouble in picking the prisoner out’ from among the dozen or so men shown to her at a police line-up. A Glasgow tram conductor named William Sancroft remembered that he had been discussing the murder with some of his passengers on the evening of 23 December, that ‘all of a sudden a man who was sitting on [a] seat got up in a hurry and passed by, pushing me to the side’, and that this, too, he later recognised as being Slater.
What emerged in the statements of various neighbours and transport workers ensued also in those of local businessmen, schoolteachers and beat policemen. In addition to these, there were several other witnesses to Slater’s presence on the scene, quite apart from the disputed but insistent accounts of Helen Lambie and Mary Barrowman. It’s true that the unimpeachable Arthur Adams, Miss Gilchrist’s downstairs neighbour, swore only that Slater ‘closely resembled the man’ he had seen leaving the victim’s flat, but it’s possible that Adams acted more from an abundance of caution, and his stated opposition to the death penalty, than any real doubts about the killer’s identity. A correspondent named G.M.A. McChlery wrote to the Scotland Herald in December 1993, ‘My father told us on many occasions that Arthur Adams had told him that he was sure Slater was the man, but he would not swear to it in court as that would have meant the rope.’
The full truth about Marion Gilchrist’s brutal murder may never be known. But there must remain a suspicion that the police stumbled on to at least part of the story, that having got their man to their own satisfaction they simply ignored any additional or contrary evidence, and that they did so more as a result of institutional sloth and incompetence than in support of any well-oiled municipal conspiracy. We can say with some conviction that Oscar Slater wasn’t the lone assassin in this case, and thus not guilty of the crime as it was presented to the jury in May 1909. Whether he was completely innocent of any involvement in Marion Gilchrist’s death is another matter.
Instead of doggedly following the trail of evidence in the Slater case, Conan Doyle took the polemic approach with a series of indignant pamphlets and articles. As a result, his role was closer to that of Dr Watson than Sherlock Holmes. Even if falling short as a forensic detective, however, Doyle was incapable of supporting a cause half-heartedly, and over the course of eighteen years he contributed hundreds of pages of editorials and reports, petitions to officials and legislators, and legal notes and letters to fellow sympathisers in Britain and overseas. Slater owed him a significant debt of gratitude for his eventual release.
We’ve seen how their relationship still cooled. In later years, Slater came to discount or ignore Doyle’s part in securing his freedom, and answered occasional interview requests on the subject with a brief, pre-printed card which read, ‘Publicity not desired’. With his compensation from the Crown, Slater maintained a small flat in Glasgow as well as his seaside bungalow in Ayr, where he eventually came to retire with his second wife. His funds exhausted, he was destined to end his days on parish relief.
In 1946 Slater applied for naturalisation as a Scottish citizen, but a final decision on the matter was still pending when he succumbed to an apparent stroke two years later. He was aged 76 at the time of his death, and it was just over twenty years since he had walked through the gates of Peterhead Prison into freedom. Among the many obituary notices published around the world was one in a Glasgow newspaper which read, ‘Oscar Slater Dead at 78, Reprieved Murderer, Friend of A. Conan Doyle’ – a statement that contained both an error of fact and a highly debatable matter of opinion.
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5 A slightly surreal photograph exists of Conan Doyle, dressed in tweed plus fours, sitting over some correspondence at his garden table in Sussex. The caption reads, ‘Portrait of the famous author writing his 440th letter to William Park about Oscar Slater, 1927’.
9
IS CONAN DOYLE MAD?
Like many late nineteenth-century rationalists inspired by scientific discoveries, the young Conan Doyle always seemed to be searching for an earthly detachment. He wished, in other words, to be engaged as a scientist with the physical world, and yet apart from it. He knew that he wasn’t alone in this. When, in 1893, the 34-year-old Doyle applied to join the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), he’d already attended dozens of séances, toured haunted houses, and conducted experiments in mesmerism and mind control with eminently solid citizens like his friend Henry Ball, a society archit
ect, and Alfred Drayson, the retired major general who believed in spirits.
The president of the SPR who approved Doyle’s application was no less established a figure than Arthur Balfour, a former Conservative Leader of the House of Commons and future prime minister, whose friend Annie Marshall had at one time regularly brought him letters written to her from the Other Side. Marshall had once predicted her own death in ‘Neptunian – that is enigmatic – circumstances, in which water will play a part’ (she drowned herself at the age of 31), and added, ‘Our great spiritual thinkers will always face a dubious public reception’.
Among the SPR’s other prominent members at around the time Doyle joined it were the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s peer in the theory of natural selection; the physicist and radio pioneer Oliver Lodge; Lodge’s fellow scientist William Crookes, a commercially successful inventor and founding editor of Chemical News; and the crusading Fabian author, Frank Podmore. The list isn’t exhaustive.
In its prospectus, the SPR made it clear that it sought to bring what it called ‘pure scientific logic’ to its activities, which then ranged from its meticulous census work enquiring into the prevalence of ‘spiritual hallucinations’ (of the 17,000 British adults canvassed in one survey, 1,684 said that at some time they had been physically ‘embraced’ or ‘kissed’ by an unseen force, among several other less conventional liaisons), to a perhaps more engrossing paper on a Holmes-like case given the name ‘The Spectre Dog of Peel Castle’. It was an approach that seemed to combine coldly Holmesian observation and analysis with an underlying belief in the reality of paranormal communication, and thus one that would have appealed to a young medical man with an open mind on basic theological issues.
In other words, Conan Doyle united the qualities of a rational thinker with a lifelong and deepening interest in the intangibles of human existence. He himself saw no contradiction between the popular author of neatly constructed detective stories and the occultist who sat down around the baize table to summon the spirits. Rather, the one was the logical evolution of the other. Speaking of the ‘psychic question’ in his 1924 memoirs, Doyle wrote:
The Man who Would be Sherlock Page 30