by Robin Odell
Because of the prevalence in Egypt of crimes committed with firearms, Dr Sydney Smith had adopted an experimental technique being developed in the USA. This involved combining the optical systems of two microscopes in order to compare two different specimens side-by-side in the same field of vision. Thus it became possible to examine and compare bullets and cartridge cases in minute detail.
When Smith examined the bullet which had killed the Sirdar, he saw a familiar mark on it. Between the normal rifling grooves scratched on the bullet as it spiralled its way out of the gun’s barrel was another wider groove which he had seen before. The bullet had been fired from a weapon with a defect in its muzzle which left its characteristic mark. What was significant about it was that he had seen exactly that same mark on bullets recovered from a number of previous murders. With characteristic boldness, he told the officers in charge of the investigation that he could identify the murder weapon.
Making full use of informers and acting on ‘information received’, police officers hunting the Sirdar’s assassins narrowed their search to a group of nationalists led by Shafik Mansour, a lawyer who had been arrested several times on suspicion of murder. Initial enquiries failed to produce any useful evidence so the police decided to use a spy. Two of the assassins were quickly identified as the Ennayat brothers whom it was thought would confess if they realised the inevitability of being convicted.
A ruse was devised based on Smith’s belief that if he could lay his hands on the brothers’ guns, he would be able to confirm them as the murder weapons. The brothers were therefore advised by the spy to make a run for it in the expectation that they would take their weapons with them. They reacted as expected and fell neatly into the trap laid for them. They were arrested on a train which they believed would carry them beyond the reach of the authorities. A basket of fruit in their possession was searched and four automatic pistols and a quantity of ammunition were found.
Two of the weapons were .25 calibre pistols and hence of no immediate interest to the murder investigation. But the remaining guns were both .32 calibre, one a Browning or Sûreté type and the other, a Colt. Smith took the two .32 pistols to his laboratory and in a tense atmosphere with the Chief of Police and Director of Public Security looking on, test-fired them into boxes containing cotton wool. This was a standard procedure to ensure that the only marks made on the bullets would be those left by the guns.
The test bullets and cartridge cases were put under the comparison microscope and viewed next to the bullets and casings taken from the scene of the Sirdar’s assassination. The results showed that the Sûreté pistol had been fired three times at the murder scene and the Colt was clearly identified as the murder weapon on account of the flaw in its barrel which left the characteristic mark on bullets if fired. With some excitement, Sydney Smith wrote later, ‘I was able to say with absolute certainty that this pistol, and no other, had fired the bullet that killed the Sirdar.’
Faced with the certainty of conviction, the Ennayat brothers confessed and implicated others in the assassination incident. In the mopping-up operation which followed, police arrested six others, including the gang leader, Shafik Mansour, and located the workshop containing the tools used to convert the bullets into ‘dum-dum’ ammunition.
The trial of the eight men accused of conspiring to kill Sir Lee Stack was held in May 1925. Dr Sydney Smith gave evidence for the prosecution. Asked if any of the pistols featuring as exhibits had been used in the shooting, he picked up the Colt and held it above his head; in his other hand, he held a jeweller’s lens. Referring to the defect in its barrel which left a tell-tale mark on bullets fired from it, he said, ‘I declare definitely that they (the murder bullets) were both fired from this Colt.’ The eight assassins were found guilty and sentenced to death. Seven were hanged and one had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
The outcome was a triumph for Smith and his application of a little-known scientific procedure. The doctor with his jeweller’s lens became a much-admired figure and, like Sir Bernard Spilsbury, made a signal contribution to the development of forensic medicine. Smith was a pragmatist. When his former tutor, Professor Harvey Littlejohn, visited him in Cairo, a batch of Marsh Test apparatus sets for identifying arsenic became a subject for discussion. ‘Why do you need so many?’ asked Littlejohn. ‘Homicides,’ replied Smith with disarming simplicity. He applied the same criterion to the need to cope with crimes involving firearms – find a technique that works and use it.
The contrast between Sydney Smith’s birthplace in New Zealand and that of Spilsbury in England could hardly have been greater. The distance separating Roxburgh, Otago from Leamington, Warwickshire is considerable but the social and environmental gulf in the last century was enormous. Smith’s father was a road builder in an underdeveloped region inhabited by goldminers and sheep farmers, whereas Spilsbury senior was a professional man in a prosperous town. Despite the differences, there was one common thread – both families had a love of learning and culture.
Smith was born in Roxburgh in August 1883 and, as a schoolboy, came under the spell of a perceptive village schoolmaster. Stimulated at school and encouraged by his parents, young Smith decided he wanted to see the world and believed that the best way of achieving his ambition was to become a doctor.
He began his scientific education in unfashionable Roxburgh by working as apprentice to the local pharmacist. This provided a useful stepping stone to the position of chemist’s assistant in Dunedin and opened the door to formal tuition and the chance to gain some qualifications. At the age of twenty-three, Smith qualified as a pharmacist and started to earn a modest salary. He at once began to study for entrance to the University of New Zealand and, in due course, enrolled as a part-time student at Victoria College, Wellington.
He combined his studies with his job of dispensing pharmacist at Wellington Hospital and thus could claim a toe-hold in the world of medicine. The aspiring doctor achieved good results and in 1908 he decided that Edinburgh was the place to learn his chosen profession. Using money saved from his earnings as a pharmacist, he made the first of many long journeys from the Antipodes to Scotland. There he secured a scholarship worth £100 for three years and settled down to study at one of the world’s great centres of medical learning. He cherished his early experiences of Edinburgh and, years later, the student was destined to return as master.
Sydney Smith qualified as a newly fledged medical practitioner in 1912. He gained a first class degree and also won a research scholarship. The young man about to make his mark on the world thought it prudent to share his life and he married soon after graduating. Kitty would be his ‘good companion for half a century’ as he described her in his memoirs.
He embarked on a career in forensic medicine almost by accident. He worked in general practice for a month as a locum tenens in Fife, but concluded from the experience that he was not cut out to be a GP. Ophthalmology was the subject he chose for his research scholarship and he had just started at the Eye Department of Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary when he was interviewed by the Dean of the Faculty, Professor Harvey Littlejohn.
Littlejohn was also Professor of Forensic Medicine in the university and had succeeded his father Henry in the Chair. He was part of the rich Scottish tradition of forensic medicine, being to Edinburgh what the Glaisters, father and son, were to Glasgow. Littlejohn saw potential in the young New Zealander and talked him into becoming an assistant in his department at a salary of £50 a year. Thus began Sydney Smith’s journey into forensic medicine, a branch of learning that Scotland had put on the map in 1807 by establishing the first professional Chair of its kind in the English-speaking world.
Edinburgh is the true home of the forensic arts in Britain, for, in addition to the city’s pioneering lead in the teaching of forensic medicine, it was also the spiritual home of Sherlock Holmes. The great fictional detective, famed for his investigative genius, was the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who, as a young man, had stu
died medicine at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. One of his tutors was a distinguished surgeon, Joseph Bell, a doctor with an enviable reputation for his diagnostic skills. He was also renowned for his powers of observation which he used to study his patients’ appearance and thereby deduce the nature of their occupation and character.
Bell urged his students to use all their faculties before coming to a decision about anything. It was admirable advice for a young man in any profession but for a doctor it was particularly significant. Merely by observing one of his patients and without questioning or examining him, Bell informed a group of students that the man was left-handed and a shoe-repairer by trade. Explaining himself to both patient and students, Bell remarked that the worn patches on the trousers were caused by gripping a lap stone between the knees and the fact that the right side was more worn than the other indicated that the cobbler wielded the hammer in his left hand. Conan Doyle recognised this perceptive gift and moulded it into the character of Sherlock Holmes with the telling force that emerged with his stories.
The spirit of Joseph Bell permeated the lecture theatres at Edinburgh and by the time Sydney Smith studied there, Sherlock Holmes was well established in the nation’s reading habits. Smith soon concluded that his chosen field of specialisation required more than observation and deduction – knowledge had to be acquired and experience gained. After all, forensic medicine, or medical jurisprudence as it was more formally called, was an amalgam of two great professions – medicine and law. In some instances, the association with law enforcement was very close and at Edinburgh, Harvey Littlejohn, in addition to being the University’s Professor of Forensic Medicine, was also Chief Surgeon to the City Police. Moreover, some aspects of the forensic pathologist’s job were hardly medical, such as the examination of firearms, cartridge cases and bullets, a field in which Sydney Smith was to gain pre-eminence. This work was directed to the pathologist on account of his knowledge of gunshot wounds; also, because in an age before forensic science became established in its own right, the doctors were the custodians of such scientific knowledge that could be applied to the investigation of crime.
After a short spell understudying the master, Smith was given his first major investigation. In June 1913, two ploughmen came across a mysterious object floating in a water-filled quarry near Winchburgh in West Lothian. Their first reaction was that a passing vandal had thrown a farmer’s scarecrow into the quarry where it lay waterlogged and spread-eagled to frighten passers-by. On closer inspection, the two men realised that the object was not one but two human shapes tied together with window cord. With the aid of a tree branch, they dragged out what proved to be the bodies of two fully clothed, long dead children.
The local police had received no reports of any missing children and there was no information on which to start an investigation. Indeed the doctor called to the scene believed that a post-mortem examination of the corpses would be a waste of time in view of the state of decomposition which was so advanced as to have rendered their features unrecognisable. The pathologist took the view that this made it even more necessary to carry out an autopsy in the hope of providing the police with some information whereby the youngsters could be traced.
Smith began by examining the remnants of rotten clothing clinging to the bodies. The children were dressed alike and on one of the shirts he observed a laundry mark which proved to be the imprint of a poorhouse at Dysart in Fife. The clothing yielded no further clues, so attention was directed to the bodies, which exhibited the phenomenon known as adipocere whereby their fat had been converted to a firm, wax-like consistency. This is an unusual condition which occurs over a long period when a body is subjected to damp conditions such as immersion in water or burial in damp ground. The process is one in which the neutral body fats are hydrolysed into a mixture of fatty acids and soap with the result that the body, especially the limbs, retain much of their original shape.
In the remains which confronted Sydney Smith, the bodies had been wholly transformed into adipocere, with the exception of their feet. As his examination progressed, the pathologist was able to establish that both victims were male and, from measurements of their height, he determined that one was aged about six to seven years and the other about four. These estimates were confirmed by examining the teeth which, in the case of the elder boy, showed that his first permanent molars had come through; this tended to confirm his age as about six years. The younger boy had all his milk teeth and as none of his permanent teeth had emerged, his age was put at between two and four years. Inspection of the epiphyses, the soft growing ends of the long bones, in the elder boy confirmed an age of around six or seven years.
Examination of the internal organs showed them to be normal, although remarkably well preserved. Of particular interest was the content of the stomachs which had also been preserved intact. In both bodies, the stomachs contained a quantity of material which included easily identified vegetables; peas, barley, potatoes, turnips and leeks. All the ingredients, as Smith readily recognised, of nourishing Scotch broth. This material which had been preserved by the adipocerous covering of the bodies was of particular importance in helping to establish time of death. The partially digested nature of the stomach contents suggested that the boys had eaten their last meal about one hour before they died. The disused quarry where the boys were found was in a secluded area reached by a long, winding cart track. The likelihood was that the two youngsters had fallen foul of someone with local knowledge, probably a person known to them; possibly even a parent.
The pathologist’s medical detective work had thus provided a few facts for the police to build up an investigation. The adipocerous state of the bodies suggested death had occurred between eighteen months and two years previously, and hence the boys would have gone missing during the late summer or autumn of 1911. Their ages were known fairly precisely and also their heights. The shabby quality of their clothing combined with the poorhouse stamp on one of the shirts indicated impoverished family circumstances. Armed with these details the police soon discovered that two boys, aged seven and four years, had disappeared from the Winchburgh area in November 1911. Their father, Patrick Higgins, a former soldier, was a widower who had been imprisoned for failing to maintain his children. The two boys were looked after in the poorhouse at Dysart while their father served his jail sentence.
Enquiries among local men who knew Higgins made it plain that he had been seen with the boys one night in November and, when asked how they were, replied that he had found a home for them. The police swiftly collected a number of witnesses’ statements which justified issuing a warrant for Higgins’s arrest. He was apprehended in Broxburn and, in due course, tried for murder at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh. His defence, based on a history of epilepsy, was that he was of unsound mind when he killed his sons. Despite medical evidence supporting this claim, the jury brought in a guilty verdict by unanimous decision but with a recommendation to mercy on account of the time which had elapsed since the crime was committed.
Higgins was not granted a reprieve and his execution was fixed for 1 October 1913. Sydney Smith attended the hanging. ‘It was the first time I had seen a man hanged,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘and I found it rather an unpleasant experience; especially as I had been partly instrumental in bringing him to the gallows.’ Smith also gave a dispassionate account of the execution, remarking that the magistrates’ clerk had assured news reporters afterwards that Higgins had been calm and his death instantaneous. It worried Smith that when he tested the pulse of the executed man, a feeble heartbeat was still discernible. He accepted that with the neck broken and the spinal cord severed, death was practically instantaneous. But there was always the nagging doubt that, with continued circulation of the blood, a degree of consciousness might still be present.
Alongside Smith’s evident compassion went his hard-headedness. He had the teacher’s instincts and as his first important case had presented him with an uncommon example of adipoc
ere, he resolved to keep a specimen for subsequent demonstration purposes. With Harvey Littlejohn’s startled approval he secured his specimens – two heads, an assortment of limbs and the internal organs – which he had parcelled up and took with him on the train to Edinburgh. He and Littlejohn survived a nervous journey, ignoring the quizzical looks from fellow passengers disturbed by the unpleasant stench which seemed to be associated with their luggage. The specimens of adipocere ended up in the University’s Forensic Medicine Museum where they were used to teach generations of students.
Thoroughly captivated by his first encounter in the realm of forensic medicine, Sydney Smith decided to drop his part-time ophthalmology work and to take up public health which was a better complementary discipline. By 1914, he had obtained an MD and taken a Diploma in Public Health which qualified him to move up the career ladder. In the summer of that year, he applied for the position of assistant to Dr Hamilton, Principal Medico-Legal Expert to the Egyptian Government. He was accepted for the post but the wheels of bureaucracy in Cairo ground so slowly that, tired of waiting, he took a job in his native New Zealand.
Smith was on board a ship bound for New Zealand when events in Europe led to the outbreak of the First World War. On reaching his destination he took up his position as Medical Officer of Health for Otago based at Dunedin but volunteered at once for military service. His application was not immediately accepted but in due course he joined the New Zealand Army Corps and carried out medical duties at various military camps which paralleled his civilian public health work. Despite a number of ingenious attempts to join the momentous events taking place on the other side of the world, he stayed in New Zealand until 1917, when he was summoned to Egypt.
Dr Hamilton had died unexpectedly and the government in Cairo cabled Dr Smith offering him the post of Principal Medico-Legal Expert which carried with it a lectureship in forensic medicine. The New Zealand Government raised no objection and the itinerant pathologist sailed for Egypt on board a troopship carrying men to the Middle East.