by Robin Odell
For Sydney Smith this was the beginning of a distinguished literary thread in his career. In 1925, he published his Forensic Medicine and Toxicology which he modestly described as, ‘probably the first really well-illustrated work on the subject in Great Britain’. The textbook included a comprehensive chapter on ‘Wounds from Firearms’, an area of specialisation in which he was undoubtedly an expert. This paved the way for his editorship of Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, a work of great medical scholarship and learning, which in due course he would pass on to Keith Simpson, a forensic pathologist of the coming generation.
At the time of Smith’s emergence as a leading figure on the forensic scene, Simpson was a student at Guy’s in London. Another link in the chain of forensic evolution was being forged in Glasgow where John Glaister the younger was in general practice and researching his doctorate of science thesis on the subject of classifying mammalian hair. In due time, Glaister would succeed Smith in Egypt but, for the moment, ‘The Patriarch’ ruled supreme in his desert kingdom, building both his reputation and experience.
‘On the whole, the desert is a pretty good place for murder,’ Smith wrote in his memoirs. His reasons for saying this were, naturally, well-founded, for the desert is a quick destroyer of mortal flesh. Abandoned bodies are soon reduced to skeletons, thus making identification difficult. Apart from information regarding sex, race, age, height and build which could be gleaned from the bones of long dead human beings, Smith became adept at interpreting other phenomena. In one case there was an abnormal flexion in the hip joints of a skeleton, suggesting that at some stage the body had been doubled up. Remnants of rotted sacking at the scene led him to believe that the body had been thrust into a sack. Such proved to be the case when the murder suspect confessed to his crime. Bullets, bones, fingerprints, clothing and bloodstains were all part of the pathologist’s stock-in-trade.
Whereas the details of Spilsbury’s cases were faithfully recorded on his file cards but sadly never collated into a textbook, Smith used his case experience to very good effect. Editions of his Forensic Medicine published well into the 1940s, and still carried illustrations which derived from his work in Egypt.
One of the founding fathers of forensic science in Britain was Dr Alfred Swaine Taylor who, at the age of twenty-eight, was appointed Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at Guy’s Hospital Medical School. The first edition of his influential textbook was published in 1836 and has been in print ever since. Like Smith in the next century, he had the opportunity to study the use of firearms and the wounds they inflicted at close hand. In his case it was in Paris during the 1830 revolution. Taylor’s textbook was regarded as the ‘bible’ by students of forensic medicine and it was perhaps fitting that Sydney Smith should succeed to its editorship. The appointment was certainly a mark of the high esteem in which he was held.
While on leave in Edinburgh in the summer of 1926, Smith and his wife called on Harvey Littlejohn. He found his friend and mentor in a troubled state. On 5 April, Littlejohn had carried out a post-mortem examination on the body of fifty-year-old Mrs Bertha Merrett. She had died of a gunshot wound to the side of the head in a position usually consistent with suicide. The casualty doctor at the Royal Infirmary who examined Mrs Merrett when she was admitted saw none of the usual signs associated with a suicidal head wound. There was an absence of tearing around the wound entry and no evidence of any powder deposits or singeing commonly seen in close-range gunshot wounds.
Smith thought it looked like a case of murder and this contention was borne out by the results of tests carried out with the weapon involved. Littlejohn was convinced and wrote a second report stating his opinion that suicide and accident could be ruled out, leaving murder as the likely option. The dead woman’s son, Donald, who had been in the house at the time of the shooting, was arrested and charged.
Donald Merrett was tried in February and it was in many ways a north-south confrontation of experts. The full weight of Scottish forensic expertise was assembled on behalf of the Crown from both Edinburgh and Glasgow – Harvey Littlejohn and John Glaister senior aided by Sydney Smith and Glaister junior. They were ranged against the mighty Spilsbury, backed by Robert Churchill, the gun expert, for the defence. The outcome, which is included in Chapter One, was a stalemate in the sense that the verdict of ‘Not Proven’ allowed Merrett his freedom after serving twelve months in prison for forgery. But, ultimately, the moral victory went to the Scots, for Smith’s prophetic words at the time, ‘That is not the last we’ll hear of young Merrett,’ were fulfilled many years later. In 1954, Merrett murdered his wife and mother-in-law and subsequently committed suicide.
The Merrett trial proved to be a turning point for Smith. He believed that the stress created by the case was a contributory factor to Harvey Littlejohn’s death in 1927. When he visited his former teacher in hospital before returning to Egypt, Littlejohn extracted a promise from him that he would come back to take his place when he died. Smith diverted the conversation away from such morbid considerations but, ten days later, Littlejohn was dead. Shortly after his return to Cairo, Smith received a letter from the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in Edinburgh inviting him to apply for the post of Professor of Forensic Medicine. The position is a Regius Chair, being made not by the university but by the Crown. A letter soon arrived from the Secretary of State for Scotland offering Smith the appointment of the most prestigious Chair of Forensic Medicine in Britain.
After much heart-searching but with their young children’s education at the forefront of their minds, the Smiths decided to return to Britain. Sydney had spent eleven years in Egypt and it had proved a happy time domestically as well as being rewarding from a professional point of view. The Egyptian Government honoured him with the award of the Order of the Nile and his colleagues staged a farewell dinner at Cairo’s Turf Club. The dinner menu had a cartoon on its cover depicting Smith wearing a kilt and tarboosh and carrying a copy of Taylor’s Principles under his arm. It was an affectionate view of a man who had achieved a great deal to advance the standing of his profession. So, Sydney and Kitty and their children left the desert sun behind them in 1928 and headed for a grey Edinburgh. One possibly small consolation was that Kitty would no longer have to buy Keating’s Powder in the large quantities needed to keep Sydney clear of fleas on his excursions into Egyptian crime dens.
Returning to Britain at the beginning of April, Smith was in time to follow the trial at the Old Bailey of Frederick Guy Browne and William Henry Kennedy charged with the murder of a police constable. He had read the press reports of the shooting in an Essex country lane the previous September, while in Cairo. It was a case in which firearms evidence played a major role and one in which the use of the comparison microscope, pioneered by Smith, represented a breakthrough in crime investigation in Britain. Robert Churchill, who had opposed his views in the Merrett case, was the expert called for the prosecution. Browne and Kennedy’s conviction rested almost entirely on ballistics evidence and Churchill’s biographer, Macdonald Hastings, was generous in acknowledging the stimulus which Smith had provided by developing the new techniques. For his own part, Smith said, ‘I followed the case with an almost proprietary interest.’
Smith soon immersed himself in the work of the university and, although he had succeeded Harvey Littlejohn in the Chair of Forensic Medicine, he was not appointed Chief Surgeon to the Edinburgh Police. That post had been taken by Littlejohn’s assistant, Dr Douglas Kerr, who made a considerable success of it. Smith was too big a man to harbour anything more than a few regrets but there is no doubt that he was disappointed at not having routine access to police work. He also missed the variety and exotic nature of the sort of cases he had encountered in Egypt. But compensation lay in the opportunity to appear as an expert witness in important criminal cases, some of which would justly be described as causes célèbres.
He was soon to find himself at odds again with the pre-eminent forensic expert of the day, Sir Bern
ard Spilsbury, when they were drawn against each other in one of the great trials of the 1920s. Spilsbury was at the peak of his impressive career. He had featured in most of the important murder cases of the century and was immensely respected by the public. But he was neither traveller nor innovator, qualities which gave Sydney Smith greater depth. What Sir Bernard possessed was single-mindedness and sureness of reputation, while Smith was largely unknown to the public and was thought of chiefly as an academic. The truth was that their experience was of equal quality but that Spilsbury had enjoyed the greater publicity.
The clash between these personalities took place at Lewes Assizes in March 1930 where Sidney Harry Fox was being tried for murder; not an ordinary murder but for the uncommon crime of killing his mother. Sixty-three-year-old Mrs Rosaline Fox perished in a fire in her bedroom at the Hotel Metropole in Margate on 22 October 1929. Her son had raised the alarm but too late to save his mother who had apparently been overcome by smoke and fumes. A verdict of accidental death was returned by a coroner’s court and Mrs Fox was buried in her native Norfolk.
It was only when the dubious nature of Sidney Fox’s character began to emerge that suspicion started to form. He had a record as a blackmailer and swindler and it appeared that six days before his mother died he had taken out two insurance policies on her life. As a result of enquiries by Chief Inspector Hambrook of Scotland Yard, Sidney Fox was taken into custody. Meanwhile, his mother’s corpse was exhumed and a post-mortem carried out by Spilsbury. The pathologist concluded that Mrs Fox had been strangled and her son was charged with murdering her.
Sydney Smith was asked by Fox’s solicitor to give evidence for the defence. After carefully examining the medical aspects of the case, he agreed to appear as an expert witness. The details of the trial for murder that ensued are covered in the preceding chapter. Apart from a man’s life, what was also at stake was the reputation and integrity of Britain’s foremost forensic experts. Smith was as well practised in the role of giving expert testimony as was Spilsbury, but he lacked the public acclaim. From the outset, he was intrigued by Spilsbury’s post-mortem report on Mrs Fox and found it remarkable that Sir Bernard concluded from the medical evidence that she had died of ‘asphyxia due to manual strangulation’. There appeared to be no external signs of injury and a complete absence of the usually unmistakable indications of strangulation. As Smith noted later, ‘a person being strangled fights like mad’ and, even though elderly, will struggle furiously to pull away the constricting hands.
The very nature of such a fight for life causes marks and scratches on the neck and, often, minor injuries around the mouth and nose. The unsuccessful struggle to draw air into the lungs results in blueing of the lips and ears and frothing at the mouth and nose, with the tongue frequently protruding. Moreover, there is customarily bruising of the neck muscles as the strangler tightens his grip in order to overcome the victim’s struggles, with the result that the delicate internal structures of the throat are damaged. Spilsbury found none of these classic signs, yet was firm in his conclusion that death was due to strangulation.
The evidence for strangulation as cause of death was a bruise which Spilsbury had seen on the larynx of the dead woman. He had removed the tissue at post-mortem and placed it in formalin. Before Sidney Fox appeared at Sussex Assizes, Smith had the opportunity to examine the specimen in Spilsbury’s laboratory at University College Hospital. The two men had met before but this was their first professional consultation or, as it turned out, confrontation.
Spilsbury produced the larynx on which he had described seeing a bruise the size of half a crown. To start with, Smith could not conceive how such a substantial internal bruise could have been inflicted without leaving external marks. But his amazement was complete when, with Spilsbury looking over his shoulder, he examined the larynx but could see no bruise at all. ‘No. You can’t see it now,’ explained Spilsbury, ‘but it was there when I exhumed the body.’ Smith questioned him about the apparent disappearance of the bruise and was told that ‘it became obscure before I put the larynx in formalin’. Some tight-lipped discussion ensued in which Smith expressed his incredulity that a bruise of such a size could simply disappear. He acknowledged the difficulties in differentiating between bruising and patches of putrefaction and wondered if what Spilsbury had seen was not the latter. Spilsbury listened politely but declined to accept any alternative explanation; it was a bruise and nothing more, he contended.
What would have put the matter beyond argument would have been the microscopic examination of a section of the bruised tissue. Bruising is caused by the rupture of small blood vessels which allows blood to escape into the surrounding tissue where it clots to form a patch of discolouration. Blood forced into the tissues in this way is not affected by post-mortem changes and, hence, confirmation of such bruising can be easily established microscopically. Unfortunately, Spilsbury did not take a section because, as he had explained, the bruise had become obscure before he put the larynx in preservative.
So there it was and, in court, Spilsbury, with the aid of an anatomical model of the human neck, indicated where he had found the bruise which led him to believe that Mrs Fox had been strangled. An interesting point was brought out which was that while the delicate hyoid bone in Mrs Fox’s throat had apparently survived the strangler’s attack, Spilsbury himself had broken it inadvertently in two places while examining it in his laboratory.
Under cross-examination by the Attorney-General, Sir William Jowitt, Sydney Smith cast doubt on the accuracy of Spilsbury’s findings. Sir William seemed to be affronted that Smith dared to challenge the opinion of such a renowned figure.
‘Do you suggest,’ he asked, ‘that Sir Bernard Spilsbury would not know the difference between discolouration due to post-mortem changes and a bruise?’
Smith, too experienced a performer to be ruffled by such exchanges, answered, ‘I say no one can tell by looking at a stain whether it is a post-mortem stain or a bruise.’
The Attorney-General then asked, ‘Do you say that you would never say a bruise was a bruise until you put it under a microscope?’
‘No,’ replied Smith, ‘I should cut into it.’
Of course, he was quite correct and had Spilsbury adopted this procedure and, for good measure, taken a section for microscopic examination, the eventual confrontation of opinion need never have occurred. Thus, in a court of law where a man was on trial for his life, the cause of this victim’s death for want of any confirming evidence was resolved on the basis of one doctor’s observation.
In the event, Spilsbury’s view won the day because of the strength of his reputation rather than the infallibility of his methods. In fairness, Mr Justice Rowlatt, in his summing up to the jury, pointed out that, ‘No one can say that an individual, whatever his position and skill, is never likely to be mistaken. No one can claim for anybody infallibility.’ Nevertheless, the jury believed Spilsbury and Smith did not think they would have returned a guilty verdict but for the London pathologist’s evidence.
Commenting on Fox’s denial of the jury’s verdict that he had murdered his mother, Smith said he believed he was innocent. He would not have put the deed past him, particularly in light of the insurance he had taken out, but, despite the circumstantial evidence, he did not think he had strangled his mother. It was more likely in his view that Mrs Fox died of heart failure precipitated by the shock of waking up in a smoke-filled room. But at least one of Sidney Fox’s lies was undone by Mrs Harding, wife of the Hotel Metropole’s manager. In her efforts to calm the apparently distraught son who had discovered a fire in his mother’s bedroom, she cradled his head and ran her fingers through his hair. Later she told her husband, ‘That boy’s hair is full of smoke and he never went near the room!’
Sydney Smith’s place in Egypt had been taken by John Glaister who, to use the modern term, had been head-hunted for the position. Glaister was told that in Cairo he would see almost as many medico-legal cases in a week as he would see
in Glasgow in a year. Certainly Egypt was a good training ground for the forensic pathologist and Smith was putting his experience of investigating murder by poisoning to good effect in a case that took him to Cornwall.
Annie Hearn, a lady in her early forties, had not enjoyed a happy life. Her husband disappeared a few days after their wedding in 1919 and despite a lack of any clear information about his fate, she took to describing herself as a widow. She lived in the Midlands with her invalid sister, Lydia Everard, who she called Minnie, until 1921, when they moved to Lewannick near Launceston in Cornwall. The move was undertaken for the benefit of Minnie, a chronic sufferer of gastric illness. Their neighbours in Trenhorne Farm were William Thomas and his wife Alice with whom they were very friendly. The two sisters and the Thomases often went out together for drinks in the countryside and, when Minnie was poorly, Alice Thomas made junkets and other delicacies for her.
This state of affairs continued for several years but in July 1930, after two or three bad bouts of gastric trouble, Minnie died. During her years of illness when she lived in Cornwall, Minnie had been treated by two doctors from the local practice and they were well aware of her condition. She was buried without fuss and her sad loss seemed to draw Annie Hearn closer to the Thomases. Their friendship continued as before and they enjoyed the occasional picnic; Annie’s contribution to these outings was to provide the sandwiches.
On 18 October 1930, several months after Minnie’s death, they went off on one of their afternoon excursions, equipped with sandwiches made by Annie with a tinned salmon filling. These refreshments were eaten at about 5 p.m. when they stopped for a cup of tea at a café in Bude. On the drive home, Alice Thomas was taken ill with what her husband took to be food poisoning. When they reached home, she was put to bed, suffering from vomiting and diarrhoea. A doctor was called and at around 9.30 that evening Dr Graham Saunders from Launceston attended the sick woman and diagnosed food poisoning; Annie Hearn offered to look after the patient.