by Margalit Fox
That day, Superintendent Ord placed a description of the two wanted men in the evening papers, and Glasgow soon blazed with rumor. “News of the dastardly outrage, so daringly executed in the heart of the city, thrilled the people of Glasgow and Scotland generally,” the Scottish journalist William Park would later write. “The hue and cry for the murderer and his theft of a diamond brooch spread so widely as eventually to embrace the greater part of the civilized world.”
On the evening of December 25, 1908, a Glasgow bicycle dealer named Allan McLean called at police headquarters. He told the police that a man he knew—a foreigner and a Jew—had been trying to sell a pawn ticket for a diamond crescent brooch. The man’s name, he said, was Oscar.
Chapter 2
THE MYSTERIOUS MR. ANDERSON
McLean had never been to Oscar’s home, but he knew where he lived. On the evening of December 25, he led a Glasgow police detective, William Powell, to the building, 69 St. George’s Road, a few blocks south of West Princes Street. Questioning residents, Powell learned that the man in the top-floor flat, who answered to the name Anderson and was said to work as a dentist, fit the description McLean had supplied. Powell reported his findings to Superintendent Ord, and at eleven-thirty that night he was dispatched to the building again, accompanied by two colleagues, with orders to arrest Anderson if the need arose.
The detectives climbed to the top-floor flat and rang the bell. The door was opened by a German maid, Catherine Schmalz. Her master was not home, Schmalz told them: he and “Madame” were on holiday in Monte Carlo. No, she said, no one named Oscar lived there.
The detectives searched the flat. They were looking for a pawn ticket, but what they found instead was just as damning. In a bedroom, they spied a piece of wrapping paper from a newly opened parcel: “Anderson” had mailed his watch to London for repairs, and the watchmaker had fixed it and sent it back. The wrapper read, “Oscar Slater, Esq., c/o A. Anderson, Esq., 69, St. George’s Road.”
The wrapper has been preserved in the collection of the National Records of Scotland, in Edinburgh. It weighs barely an ounce: I have held it in my hand. But on the strength of that ounce of crumpled paper, addressed in elegant turn-of-the-century copperplate, Oscar Slater would be pursued, tried, convicted, and very nearly hanged.
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FOR THE FIRST TIME since Miss Gilchrist’s murder, the police had the full name of the man who had pawned a diamond brooch. It was clear to them that Slater and Anderson were one and the same, a surmise that proved correct. From neighbors, they learned that Anderson and a woman had left shortly after eight that night, bound for the railway station. This seeming flight only heightened the appearance of guilt, and from headquarters, Ord issued instructions to watch all southbound trains. Thus the pursuit of Miss Gilchrist’s killer, until now a diffuse affair, began to home in on Slater.
Next, the police sought the shop where Slater had pawned the brooch. They made inquiries in the local gambling clubs he was known to frequent—“marginal clubs, peopled by marginal characters,” Peter Hunt has called them. From a friend of Slater’s, a bookmaker’s clerk named Hugh Cameron, they learned that he had left a diamond brooch at Liddell’s, a pawnshop on Sauchiehall Street in central Glasgow. Cameron also asserted, the police said afterward, that Slater was not a dentist but rather an occasional dealer in jewelry and, even more damning, a pimp.
On the morning of December 26, Glasgow detectives brought Helen Lambie to Liddell’s to identify the brooch. It was the wrong one, she said immediately: Miss Gilchrist’s brooch was set with a single row of diamonds, whereas Slater’s had three. The pawnbroker said that Slater had left the brooch there on November 18, more than a month before the murder. It had been in the shop without interruption ever since.
As far as Slater’s continued candidacy as a suspect went, this development should have been a “fiasco,” as Conan Doyle pointed out. “Already the very bottom of the case had dropped out,” he wrote. “The starting link of what had seemed an imposing chain, had suddenly broken….The original suspicion of Slater was founded upon the fact that he had pawned a crescent diamond brooch….It was not the one which was missing from the room of the murdered woman, and it had belonged for years to Slater, who had repeatedly pawned it before. This was shown beyond all cavil or dispute. The case of the police might well seem desperate after this, since if Slater were indeed guilty, it would mean that by pure chance they had pursued the right man.”
But pursue him they did, for the police were anxious to produce a suspect, and in Slater—gambler, foreigner, Jew, and possible procurer—they had found a sublime one. “The trouble…with all police prosecutions,” Conan Doyle remarked with a caustic lucidity worthy of Holmes, “is that, having once got what they imagine to be their man, they are not very open to any line of investigation which might lead to other conclusions.” That was precisely what transpired the moment the Glasgow police trained their sights on Slater.
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ONE OF FOUR CHILDREN of Adolf Leschziner, a baker, and his wife, Pauline (also called Paula), Oscar Slater was born Oskar Josef Leschziner on January 8, 1872, in Oppeln, a town in Silesia, then part of the German Empire. He had a brother, Georg, and two sisters: Amalie, known as Malchen, and Euphemia, known as Phemie. The family favorite, Oskar was reared in Beuthen, a threadbare mining town in the region, near the Polish border. “I was educated very inadequately at the village school and never acquired any great proficiency as a scholar,” a 1924 article in the British press quotes Slater as saying. “I liked to play truant.”
For a footloose, high-spirited young man, Beuthen held few prospects. As a youth Oskar lighted out for Berlin, where he worked for a timber merchant, and later for Hamburg, where he was a bank clerk. But the celluloid-collared life was not for him. At eighteen, possibly to avoid conscription by the German army, he left the country, roaming over the European continent, Britain, and the United States. Keenly intelligent if not book-smart, he lived by his wits, earning income from card playing, billiards, and racetrack betting, along with modest dealing in secondhand jewelry.
Slater’s family was poor. His parents were reported to live in “two or three well-kept rooms” in a “decayed tenement house” in Beuthen. Adolf, an invalid with spine disease, could no longer work by the time Oskar was a young man. Pauline was partly blind. Throughout his wanderings, Slater regularly sent them money. “I could not wish a better son for any parents,” his mother told a reporter for the Glasgow Herald who had sought her out in Beuthen after Slater’s arrest. “Eighteen months ago I had to undergo an operation for cataract in my eye. It cost twenty pounds and Oscar sent me ten pounds to help towards it. He was my son, my best son.”
Slater first visited England in about 1895. There, to accommodate locals who struggled with “Leschziner” and its unwieldy clump of consonants, he began calling himself Oscar Slater. Arriving in Glasgow for the first time about six years later, he became immersed in what one modern British writer has called an “underworld, peopled by strange denizens with Runyonesque monikers—the Moudie, the Soldier, the Acrobat, Willy the Artist, Little Wrestler, the Diamond Merchant….A tricksy world of street-betting, whores and whoring, reset*1 or the harbouring of ‘iffy’ goods, playing the horses and the cards, and tickling the ivories or billiard-balls for money.” In about 1904, Slater, separated from his Scottish wife, met the nineteen-year-old Antoine in London; she accompanied him on his subsequent travels.
Though Slater could be hotheaded and volatile, he was by all accounts not violent. His Scottish prison record notes two prior arrests, both for minor offenses. The first, in London in 1896, was for malicious wounding in what was apparently a pub brawl. (He was acquitted.) The second, in Edinburgh in 1899, was for disorderly conduct. (He received a sentence of 20 shillings or seven days in jail; knowing Slater, it is quite safe to assume that he paid the fine.)
That Antoine was a prostitute seems likely; that Slater was a pimp is far less certain, though he was repeatedly tarred as such at his murder trial. But Slater’s dubious livelihood—whatever it might have been—together with his foreignness, his Jewishness, and his dapper defiance of the class to which his birth should have consigned him, were more than enough to damn him, first in the public eye and later in court. For if Oscar Slater had succeeded at little else in life, he had managed to become a sterling embodiment of everything that post-Victorian Britain had been taught to fear.
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IT WAS NO EASY THING to be a Jew in early twentieth-century Britain. What was more, Slater had arrived in Glasgow at a time of especially intense paranoia—and correspondingly intense anti-Semitism. Just three years before, the British Parliament had passed the Aliens Act of 1905: the first significant restriction of its kind in the country’s peacetime history, it severely curtailed immigration from outside the British Empire. Though it did not say so overtly, the act was widely understood to have been aimed at Eastern European Jews, who in the late nineteenth century, fleeing pogroms and penury, had begun arriving in Britain in large numbers. Attitudes toward these new arrivals would vary over time and across the nation. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anti-Jewish bigotry permeated nearly every aspect of British life.
In England, Jews met with a long, deeply entrenched anti-Semitic tradition. During the Middle Ages, the belief that Jews engaged in usury and blood libel—the abduction and murder of Gentile children to use their blood in religious rituals—had wide currency. In 1190, in the deadliest pogrom in English history, a mob rampaged through York, looting Jewish homes, burning them to the ground, and murdering their occupants, resulting in the deaths of more than 150 Jews. In 1290, under King Edward I, the Jews were expelled from England, “the first ejection of a major Jewish community in Europe,” as one historian has described it. Only in the mid-seventeenth century, under Oliver Cromwell, were Jews allowed, quietly, to return.
In the Middle Ages and afterward, Jews, like members of other marginalized groups, were denied many of the legal protections that England afforded the archetypal citizen: the free white native-born law-abiding Christian adult male. “The lay Englishman, free but not noble, who…has forfeited none of his rights by crime or sin, is the law’s typical man,” a pair of early twentieth-century historians write, discussing the medieval period. They continue:
But besides such men there are within the secular order noble men and unfree men; then there are monks and nuns;…then there is the clergy constituting a separate “estate”; there are Jews and there are aliens; there are excommunicates, outlaws and convicted felons who have lost some or all of their civil rights; also…infants and…women,…and a word should perhaps be said of lunatics, idiots and lepers.
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the situation of English Jews had improved, though only in part: much depended on the degree of assimilation and class status that individual Jews had been able to attain. In London, a small handful of Jews could be found serving in Parliament from the late 1700s onward. Until the passage of Britain’s Jews Relief Act in 1858, however, they were required to take the same oath of office that other MPs did, including the words “and I make this Declaration upon the true Faith of a Christian.” The act let them omit that phrase.
Early Jewish MPs included David Salomons, a lawyer and member of an established banking family, who in 1855 became the first Jewish Lord Mayor of London. Also among them was Benjamin Disraeli, who would serve as prime minister through much of Victoria’s reign, to date the only person of Jewish birth to hold that office.
By late Victorian and Edwardian times, British anti-Semitism was again on the rise. One provocation was the volume of Jewish settlement: between the early 1880s and the start of World War I, some two and a half million Jews left the European continent, and about 150,000 of them settled in Britain. In 1914, London had a Jewish population of 115,000—about 2 percent of the city as a whole. (Glasgow’s the same year was much smaller: about 7,000, or just under 1 percent.) A second provocation was the increasing presence of poorer, less assimilated Jews.
In the late 1880s, for instance, with London terrified by the Ripper murders, it was barely a matter of weeks before they were connected publicly with the Jewish menace. “Following the discovery of the third ripper victim in 1888,” the criminologist Paul Knepper has written, “rumours circulated that the killer had to be a shochet, a kosher butcher; crowds gathered in several parts of the East End to abuse and harass Jews. Sir Robert Anderson, head of [Scotland Yard’s] Criminal Investigation Department, enflamed anti-Jewish furore by repeating his belief that ‘Jack’ was a Jew of Polish background. ‘One did not need to be a Sherlock Holmes to discover…,’ Anderson said, ‘that he and his people were low-class Jews.’ ”
By this time, Parliament was already considering the question of restricting Jewish immigration, first taken up formally in 1887 and culminating in 1905 in the Aliens Act. “Crime had become part of the rationale for restriction,” Knepper said, adding: “At issue was not whether immigration led to an increase in crime rates, and if so, why, but rather the kinds of criminal behaviour embedded in particular racial characteristics.” He added:
Anti-alien and antisemitic agitators circulated leaflets linking Jews with prostitution, gambling, and other crimes. A typical circular…asked: “Why do we want an aliens Bill?” The answer appeared in block letters: TO SUPPRESS ALIEN CRIME, TO STAMP OUT ALIEN VICE….Joseph Banister, an incandescent anti-Semite who published a flurry of booklets and brochures on the immigration issue, characterised foreign Jews as “thieves, sweaters,*2 usurers, burglars, forgers, traitors, swindlers, blackmailers, and perjurers.”
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SCOTLAND, AT LEAST IN earlier times, was less susceptible to the reflexive anti-Semitism for which England was known. “Scottish Protestants put great emphasis on the Old Testament and for them the Jews were the biblical people of the old covenant,” Ben Braber, a historian of Scottish Jewry, has written. “Protestants…identified themselves as the people of the new covenant and as such they were rather benevolent towards Jews.”
As in the rest of Britain, the acceptance of Jews by Christian Glasgow was furthered largely by class. The first Jews settled there in the early nineteenth century; by the mid-1800s, as the city’s new middle class cultivated a taste for luxury goods, its small Jewish community, then about four dozen strong, rose up to fill the need. That community included an optician, a quill merchant, a jeweler, a furrier, and an artificial flower maker.
But in the late nineteenth century and afterward, the influx of large numbers of Jews, many of them destitute, met with a mixed reception even in Scotland. “A small group of Jews in Glasgow could be tolerated and individual Jewish businessmen…be admired and accepted into polite society,” Braber writes. “The same tolerance, admiration and acceptance would not automatically be extended to the new immigrants.”
The arrest and trial of Oscar Slater brought Scottish anti-Jewish feeling to the fore. The case centered on two foundation stones of anti-Semitic belief: blood and money. It also touched on an issue that for British bourgeoisie was a raw nerve: the supposed involvement of many new Jewish immigrants in criminal pursuits, particularly the scandalous vices of prostitutio
n and pimping.
The knowledge that a Jew was sought underpinned the investigation from the start. Allan McLean, the bicycle dealer who put police on to Slater, made this clear. So did a Glasgow landlady named Ada Louise Pryne, who in January 1909 told police that the suspect’s description resembled a former tenant, whose face, she declared, “was of a Jewish type.”
Even Glasgow’s Jewish community held Slater at arm’s length. In the spring of 1909, after Slater had been sentenced to death, one of his few early champions, Rev. Eleazar P. Phillips, minister of Glasgow’s Garnethill Hebrew synagogue, helped organize a campaign to commute the sentence.*3 Anxious not to have their hard-won respectability tarred by association with a new immigrant of dubious livelihood, officers of the synagogue reprimanded him. If Phillips was to work on Slater’s behalf, they told him, he must do so on his own.
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BY THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, urban anxieties had given rise to social institutions, and social practices, designed to protect the public from “undesirables.” Foremost among these were the police departments that had sprung up in cities throughout Europe. The City of Glasgow police force, one of the first in Britain to be established by an act of Parliament, was inaugurated in 1800. At midcentury, an associated field of scholarship arose, known as criminology, which likewise sought to safeguard people and property. Its best-known practitioners—a cadre of anthropologically minded pseudoscientists—bestrode Europe in the 1860s and afterward, calipers in hand, attempting to codify the physical hallmarks of the criminal class. Their work, they asserted, would let members of the Victorian bourgeoisie spot criminals, and other marginal characters, at a safe distance.