The Dominici Affair

by Martin Kitchen

  Gaston was now an inculpé, which under French law meant a great deal more than simply the “accused.” There was an assumption of guilt, such that henceforth he was referred to as “the assassin” in the press. Whereas the local press had already jumped the gun, the Parisian papers now joined in. Le Figaro, France’s leading conservative newspaper, called him “the assassin, or more exactly the criminal, because it is not yet certain that premeditation was involved, in the case of old Gaston Dominici, an almost octogenarian horror.”29 It also called Gaston a “brute,” a “savage,” “an old bandit,” “senile,” a “vicious clodhopper,” the “ogre of Lurs,” a “megalomaniac,” a “monstrous old man,” “an old goat stinking of grease and pastis,” “repulsively boastful,” and “sadistic.”30 Le Parisien Libéré announced that the “Lurs Affair” had been solved, the “odious assassin” discovered.31 Gaston Dominici was now painted as an “abominable brute”; a “sinister old man”; a “ferociously brutal, solitary and choleric poacher”; a “horrible and incomprehensible man out of a nightmare”; the “Lurs Killer”; the “tattooed killer”; a man “with his penis in one hand and a machinegun in the other”; and the “patriarch-assassin.”32

  The reaction to charges being laid against Gaston in the British press was quite different. British libel laws are severe. The accused is never described as guilty until judgment has been reached. The British press thus merely reports on the trial. Confessions made by the accused are never published.

  Since this investigation was conducted in a foreign country, the British press had given it far greater coverage than would have been the case had it been done in Britain, but it never hinted that Gaston might have been the culprit. The differences between French and British law were often the cause of some confusion, particularly because the position of examining magistrate and the practice of having the accused reconstructing crimes do not exist in British law. The most that was said was an article in the Daily Express congratulating Commissioner Sébeille on the successful conclusion of a lengthy investigation.

  The British press had been loud in its denunciations of French police methods over the last fifteen months, but now Sébeille proudly announced that he had silenced all such criticisms by the triumph of his “applied psychology” method. The British with their empirical bent remained unconvinced. The case rested on the denunciations of two of Gaston’s sons, plus certain circumstantial evidence. Where, they asked, were the hard facts that could lead to a conviction? There were still a number of unanswered questions. Did Gaston act alone? Would he have needed an accomplice? Was he sacrificing himself for another? Was it really possible accurately to reconstruct the triple crime? What motive could be behind this appalling massacre?

  With Gaston Dominici formally charged, Sébeille became a national hero. Although the case was now sub judice under French law, there were no restraints on the public reporting of the investigation, so Sébeille continued to talk openly to the press. Minister of the Interior Léon Martinaud-Deplat was presiding over a dinner in Marseille when he was given the news. Rising to his feet, he announced that Gaston had been charged and proposed that Sébeille should be promoted and awarded the Légion d’honneur. Robert Hirsch, director general of national security, invited Harzic, Sébeille, Constant, and the rest of the Ninth Mobile Brigade of the judicial police in Marseille to dinner at the resplendent Parisian restaurant Pavillon Ledoyen. The heads of the judicial police, the gendarmerie, and the Office of Territorial Surveillance were in attendance. Praise was heaped upon Sébeille. The director of the judicial police asked for his autograph on the menu and told him to take a holiday. A promotion seemed imminent. Marcel Massot, a deputy from the Basses-Alpes, also called for a Légion d’honneur.

  Sébeille received some five thousand congratulatory letters, with the post office offering to pay for any that were insufficiently stamped. A Swiss woman sent him 100,000 francs for his holiday expenses. In Lurs he was pampered, with the peasants offering him wine, the women kissing him. He was feted as the man who had delivered them from a nightmare. The News Chronicle seconded these remarks by describing Sébeille as a “43-year old crack detective.”33 The commissioner basked in this adulation, but he still had nagging doubts about the motive behind this brutal and senseless crime. It seemed to be a murder done in a moment of blind rage, but would this explanation stand up in court?

  6

  Two Lives

  Sir Jack Drummond

  Jack Cecil Drummond was born in Leicester on 12 January 1891.1 His father was a major in the Royal Artillery serving in India. Both parents died when he was very young, so he was brought up by his elderly aunt and her husband, Captain Spinks, a veteran of the Crimean War. Jack was sent to the John Roan School in Greenwich, a grammar school established in 1677; to the Strand School in London, which had originally been attached to King’s College of the University of London; and to Tulse Hill in South London. His childhood appears to have been somewhat bleak. Mrs. Spinks was a strict nonconformist and insisted on dragging young Jack off to chapel at regular intervals. Captain Spinks was a keen gardener, and it is from him that Jack grew to love flowers and outdoor life.

  He showed no particular aptitude at school, either in the classroom or on the playing fields. His enthusiasm for cricket far outran his skills. He just managed to squeak through the entrance examinations to East London College (now Queen Mary College), where he blossomed and graduated in 1912 with a first-class honors degree in chemistry. While an undergraduate he met Mabel Straw, a fellow student, whom he later married. She was soon widely known as a gracious and kindly woman and a charming hostess.

  On graduation he worked as a research assistant at King’s College, which led him gradually into the field of biochemistry. Having worked briefly on the staff of the Government Chemist, he moved to the Cancer Hospital Research Institute. Jack had joined the Special Reserve of Officers and held a commission in the East Surrey Regiment, but he was found unfit for active service in 1914 because of a heart condition. He therefore continued his work at the Cancer Hospital.

  Professor W. D. Halliburton, head of the Department of Physiology at King’s College, after whom the department is now named, was greatly impressed by Drummond’s work and did much to further his career. Halliburton served on the Food (War) Committee of the Royal Society later in the war. Impressed by Drummond’s work on nutrition in rats, he asked him to investigate the fat-soluble accessory food factors in butter and margarine. The work resulted in a joint paper published in 1917 that was later incorporated into the Food Committee’s 1919 report.

  Drummond became interested in vitamins and the practical application of nutritional knowledge resulting from this work, and such an approach remained his main concern throughout his professional career. He was part of the new discipline of biochemistry, which addressed exciting new ideas in the field of nutrition. In 1912 Frederick Hopkins, a professor of biochemistry at Cambridge, had referred to some recently discovered substances as “accessory factors of the diet.”2 They were referred to as “vitamines” (from vital amines), a term that the Polish biochemist Dr. Casimir Funk of the Cancer Hospital used for the first time in a paper that same year. Drummond in 1920 suggested dropping the e in “vitamins” on the grounds that the termination “in” implied a substance of unknown constitution.3 Henceforth, “fat soluble A” became known as vitamin A and “water-soluble B” as vitamin B. Drummond’s work on nutrition, particularly in the area of vitamin deficiencies and infant feeding, was widely admired and in 1918 was acknowledged with his being granted a doctorate of science. That same year he was appointed to succeed Funk, who had emigrated to the United States, as a physiological chemist at the Cancer Hospital.

  In 1919 Drummond was appointed a lecturer in biochemistry at University College London, where in 1922 at the early age of thirty-one he was appointed to the newly created Chair of Biochemistry, a position funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. From 1920 to 1925 his research covered a staggeringly wide range of issue
s involving vitamins A and B and their practical application. Often accused of being more concerned with the broad sweep than with the tedious attention to detail, he darted from one problem to another with youthful enthusiasm, inspiring others to do the spade work while he reaped the benefits of their practical application. Although most of his work was concerned with some aspect of nutrition, he encouraged his graduate students to pursue their own interests and go their own way. As a result his department produced more professors than any other school of biochemistry. He was a gifted speaker, whose specialized lectures on nutrition were outstanding, given his ability to explain complex scientific ideas to lay audiences. Always interested in the practical application of science, he carried out a great deal of consulting work for industry, some felt to the detriment of his purely scientific work.

  Many often said Drummond had an artistic temperament—he was a very talented amateur painter—and that his interests were too extensive for him to make any real contribution to science. He had boundless energy, playing as hard as he worked. He founded a dining club for informal gatherings between students and staff, played cricket with great enthusiasm, and was always willing to give informal talks to undergraduates.

  By the 1930s there was widespread interest in nutrition, in part due to the problems arising from the Great Depression. In 1931 the Ministry of Health established a committee to examine general questions of nutrition, and in 1933 the British Medical Association followed suit. The latter’s work resulted in the publication in 1936 of a report by John Boyd Orr titled Food, Health and Income, which came to the shocking conclusion that 50 percent of the population was seriously undernourished.4

  Drummond became directly involved in the public health aspect of nutrition when he examined the findings of Dr. G. E. Friend, the medical officer at Christ’s Hospital, that showed incidents of fractures among schoolboys rose when margarine replaced butter in the later stages of World War I and fell again when butter was restored in 1922. Drummond wrote in the preface to Dr. Friend’s published report: “It is a fact at once surprising and humiliating that with thousands of years of human life and experience behind us we are actually engaged today in acquiring laboriously the knowledge necessary to enable us to feed and rear our children properly.”5 The Friend report was far from satisfactory because the research population was at a day school; thus, the boys spent most of the time at home, where there was no control over their diets. But the report’s findings inspired Drummond to pursue his research into nutrition and public health.

  The Rockefeller Foundation was most interested in Drummond’s work. It awarded him a traveling fellowship for January to May 1936 to visit Holland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Poland, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark so he could examine problems of nutrition, particularly in the poorer sections of society. He was immensely impressed by the experiments in canteen feeding that he witnessed in eastern Europe and put the knowledge he gained on this tour to great effect when he began to advise the Ministry of Food in wartime Britain. Although he continued to do research into vitamins and general biochemical topics, he became increasingly interested in the historical aspects of nutrition, particularly with respect to the disastrous effects of the Industrial Revolution on public health.

  Drummond became deeply involved in the subject in 1933 when he served on the British Medical Association’s committee to examine the minimum weekly expenditure required for a healthy diet. His new interest resulted in the publication of The Englishman’s Food (1939), which he coauthored with his longtime secretary Anne Wilbraham, whom he married the following year.6 A fine piece of historical research, it collects under one cover a large amount of disparate material and presents it in a lively and readable style. The principal argument of their book is (in what now seems an astonishing claim) that despite our knowing all that was necessary about nutrition, the problem remains of how to give those whose health is adversely affected by faulty nutrition the essential knowledge and the appropriate food. This was an urgent problem among the poorest section of the community. Some of the science is now outmoded, some issues such as the contemporary concerns about cholesterol and trans fats are virtually ignored, and some of the historical statistics are questionable, but the book has survived remarkably well. Its relevance is scarcely diminished.7 Drummond published a more specialized monograph, titled Biochemical Studies of Nutritional Problems (1934), in which he integrated biochemical research from his own and other laboratories with medical, social, and historical observations in a lively and readable manner.

  Shortly after the outbreak of war Drummond was appointed chief adviser on food contamination to the Ministry of Food with the responsibility of examining the effects of poison gas on food. This work necessitated visits to the Porton Down Experimental Station to conduct experiments on decontamination and on standards of fitness for foods that had been exposed to poison gas. His findings were published by the Ministry of Food in 1940.8

  Drummond was now somewhat in limbo. University College had moved to Wales, and he had been informed that his services would no longer be needed although he remained on the payroll. He was thus unable to do much scientific work, and his duties at the ministry had been fulfilled. In January 1940 the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee called upon his expertise to examine the question of wartime bread, a subject that had been suggested by his friend Dr. J. Vargas Eyre. The various ministries concerned were asked to send their scientific advisers, but the Ministry of Food had no such appointment. Drummond therefore addressed the committee in a private capacity. He made an urgent plea for whole-wheat bread and flour to be made readily available, particularly to the poor, and although he was certainly no vegetarian, he stressed that fresh vegetables and dairy produce were far more important than meat. The flour millers were soon up in arms against this proposal, arguing that the 25 percent taken from wheat for the production of white flour was an essential animal foodstuff. Drummond countered by pointing out that a smaller amount of wheat was needed to produce whole-wheat flour and that there were alternative forms of fodder.

  On the same day that the committee met, on 31 January, Drummond submitted a memorandum to the Ministry of Food on wartime nutrition. His main suggestions were that bread should be of the highest possible nutritional value; that the consumption of potatoes, oatmeal, cheese, and green vegetables should be increased; and that expectant and nursing mothers, as well as children up to the age of fifteen, should be given at least a pint of milk per day. Margarine should be fortified by the addition of vitamins A and D. Meat shortages could be offset by increasing the consumption of cheese and fish.

  The next day Drummond was officially appointed scientific adviser to the Ministry of Food. He had sufficient experience working in the laboratory, and his historical studies gave him the necessary background and perspective. His ability to communicate and to get on well with all sorts of people, combined with his energy, enthusiasm, and approachable manner, made him ideally suited to the post. He found himself in a somewhat tricky position, however: nutrition was the responsibility of the Ministry of Health, whereas the Ministry of Food was responsible for seeing that its recommendations were put into effect, and the Medical Research Council offered specialized advice. Drummond was thus in danger of not having a clear mandate. Furthermore, he was sharply critical of the medical profession for failing to take due account of the scientific basis of nutrition. But he had in Lord Horder—the king’s physician and a pillar of the medical establishment—a powerful ally in that he was also a keen laboratory scientist with an interest in both nutrition and the social issues of health.

  Drummond helped overcome a number of problems as a member of the Standing Interdepartmental Committee, established in 1941, where his easygoing charm and down-to-earth approach was greatly appreciated. The Ministry of Food was a relatively new institution, founded by Lloyd George’s government in 1916, and did not carry much weight; but this changed when Neville Chamberlain appoin
ted Lord Woolton minister in April 1940. He was a “nonparty” man of conservative leaning. His background was in the retail trade; his approach, practical. Realizing the importance of advertising and propaganda, he and his ministry soon became immensely popular. He even managed to sell the idea of a tedious concoction known as “Woolton Pie”—carrots, parsnips, potatoes, and turnips mixed with oatmeal and covered with a pastry or potato crust and served with brown gravy—to the hungry British public.

  In 1940 the Lord Privy Seal Kingsley Wood, in his capacity as chairman of the War Cabinet’s Committee on Food Policy, established a Scientific Food Policy Committee to determine guidelines on the minimal diet required to maintain national health during the war.9 This involved addressing a host of problems, including the availability of supplies from both home and abroad, transportation, foreign exchange, and other complex economic issues. Dietary concerns—such as the nutritional value of various foodstuffs, supplies of fats and oil, minimal protein and vitamin requirements, and the use of dried milk and powdered eggs—all had to be addressed. Drummond played an important role in the committee, although it is not possible to say precisely what his contributions were to its deliberations.

  His major involvement in the ongoing debate was to insist that reducing total food consumption would be a grave mistake and would necessarily lead to overall efficiency reductions, which had proved the case during the First World War. He was able to ensure that bread and potatoes remained off the ration plan throughout the war.10 This was only possible because white bread was not produced until the war was over, only to be rationed in June 1946, and because the ministry grossly overestimated its requirements.