The Dominici Affair

by Martin Kitchen

  Drummond pointed out that before the war the nation’s food supply was adequate for energy-rich foods but had been deficient in calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin B. It was estimated that in 1940–41 home production could cover one-third of energy requirements, two-thirds of the need for calcium, one-third of the necessary vitamin A, two-fifths of vitamin B1, and, thanks to increased potato production, all the vitamin C. He suggested increasing vitamin B1 by increasing the extraction rate of flour, or by fortifying white flour with the synthetic vitamin. He also called for increasing the importation of cheese, dried or condensed milk, pulses, canned fish, and the vitamin A and D concentrates needed to fortify margarine. The importation of fruits, other than oranges, should be reduced, because they used up valuable shipping space that could be used for essential foodstuffs that could not be produced at home. He singled out nuts in the shell and dates as being particularly uneconomical.

  In September 1941 Drummond wrote a memorandum on the nutritional effects of two years of war. He pointed to an overall loss of weight in the winter of 1940–41 that could only be offset by an increase in home production. His insistence that people should grow as much food of their own as possible was the inspiration for an enormously successful “Dig for Victory” campaign, which encouraged people to turn their lawns and flower beds into vegetable gardens and to cultivate allotments. This campaign was supported by the pedagogically inclined cartoon figures Doctor Carrot and Potato Pete, who preached the nutritional value of vegetables that were in plentiful supply but were generally considered to be dreadfully bland.

  Drummond’s calculations were based on the generous requirement of twenty-nine hundred calories per person for a Spartan diet on a scale of “Spartan,” “subsistence,” “adequate,” and “substantial,” the last of which he defined as being higher than the prewar average. He overestimated the need for imports, for the British would have been adequately fed on supplies required for a Spartan diet; but if he erred on the side of generosity, he had his priorities right. He may have been lost in the details, but he had an intuitive grasp of the wider principles. He realized the importance of balanced meals in schools, in canteens, and in the hugely successful “British Restaurants,” which were established by the Ministry of Food but run as nonprofit communal organizations by local authorities to provide excellent ration-free meals for the modest price of nine pence.11 Levels were set for adding vitamins to margarine and orange juice, and a mound of useful information was distributed on the nutritional requirements under wartime conditions for all sections of society from babies to the aged. Drummond was particularly concerned with providing nutritional supplements such as cod liver oil, black current and rose hip syrup, and vitamin tablets to expectant and nursing mothers and their children. When milk was rationed, priorities were set that targeted vulnerable groups. He also chaired the People’s League of Health, which produced a number of clearly written and practical pamphlets on nutrition that were widely distributed.

  His greatest achievement, which won the Ministry of Food few friends, was the creation of the “national loaf,” based on flour of 85 percent extraction, in the spring of 1942. This bread replaced the much-loved but vitamin-deficient white loaf of 70–75 percent extraction. In this effort he was ably assisted by Dr. T. Moran, the director of the Flour Millers’ Research Association, who had been seconded to the ministry in June 1940. The headline of an obituary for Jack Drummond in the Evening News read, “He Gave Us the Wartime Loaf.” It is doubtful whether many readers were particularly grateful.

  The combined efforts of the various ministries and organizations resulted in a marked improvement in public health despite all the wartime shortages. This remarkable achievement was recognized by the American Public Health Association in 1947, when it awarded the Lasker Group Award to the Ministries of Food and Health for their outstanding efforts to improve the people’s health. It was an effort in which Sir Jack played a key role. The citation pointed out that despite a host of adverse environmental factors, public health was not only maintained but also improved in many areas. Rates of infantile, neonatal, and maternal mortality and stillbirths reached the lowest levels ever. The incidence of anemia and dental cavities declined, the rate of growth of schoolchildren improved, tuberculosis was brought under control, and overall nutritional standards were higher than before the war. The Lasker Foundation’s Award Committee singled out “four great leaders in this historic enterprise” for special praise: Lord Woolton, Sir Jack Drummond, Sir Wilson Jameson, and Sir John Boyd Orr.12

  Drummond did a certain amount of traveling during the war. His most hazardous trip was to Malta in May 1942 to help solve the serious nutritional problems of the island, which was under siege and suffered continuous bombing.13 He went to the United States on several occasions to supervise food supplies that were sent under the Lend-Lease Act. As a result Great Britain imported dried milk in 1941, and dried eggs came from California and Wisconsin in the following year. There was initially a problem of salmonella in dried eggs, but it was soon overcome. He was a delegate to the Hot Springs Conference in June 1943, which led to the formation of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Its chairman, the distinguished physiologist and professor André Mayer from the Collège de France, said in an address to the organization: “Monsieur Drummond, vous anglais, vous faites toujours des révolutions avec tant d’élégance!” (You English, your revolutions are always so elegant!)

  After the D-Day landings, Drummond was appointed adviser on nutrition to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force and to the Allied Post-War Requirements Bureau. He also chaired a special committee on nutrition established by the Council of British Societies for Relief Abroad that produced a manual for the use of relief workers.14 In October and November 1944 he was responsible for food distribution in France and Belgium. In February 1945 he was appointed chairman of a special commission of doctors and scientists who were to address the needs of the malnourished and starving in Holland. In May, dressed in a Home Guard uniform and under a flag of truce, he was permitted to pass through the German lines. He was then appointed adviser on nutrition to the Allied Control Commissions for Germany and Austria and served in this capacity until 1946. His major contribution during this tour of duty was to devise special foods for former concentration camp inmates, who were so chronically undernourished that they were unable to digest normal solid foods.

  Despite Drummond’s heavy wartime schedule, he continued to lecture on nutritional subjects in his capacity as the Fullerian Professor of Physiology in the Royal Institution from 1941 to 1944. In 1944 he was appointed chairman of King Edward’s Hospital Fund, and that work led to the publication of two important memoranda on hospital diet, a topic that had been sadly neglected. His life’s work was acknowledged in 1944 with a knighthood and his election to the Royal Society. He was also awarded the U.S. Medal of Freedom with silver palms and in 1946 was elected an honorary member of the New York Academy of Sciences. The Dutch government made him a commander of the Order of Orange-Nassau, and the University of Paris awarded him an honorary doctorate. In 1945 he resigned his professorship at University College, London, and accepted the position of director of research at the Boots Pure Drug Company in Nottingham. Meanwhile, he was still seconded to the Ministry of Food to continue his work on the Control Commissions until 1946. Two years later he was elected to the board of Boots.

  Some were surprised that Drummond left academia for industry, but he had always been more interested in the practical application of scientific ideas than in pure research. During his time at the Ministry of Food, he had shown exceptional ability as a team player and committeeman. He could grasp any given problem as a whole and stick to the principles rather than getting bogged down in petty details. Above all he enjoyed the wide range of opportunities open to him, in contrast to the restricted environment of the laboratory. In his new position at Boots, he saw an opportunity to bridge the gap between academic and industrial research. He could n
ow fully use his ability to mix easily with all sorts of different people. As his close friend Professor G. F. Marrian from Edinburgh University said, an additional attraction was that he had been frustrated by lack of funds for research before the war, and Boots offered him generous support. A handsome annual salary of £4,000 ($16,000), which greatly exceeded the top of the academic scale, was doubtless an added attraction. Its Research Department had a staff of seventy scientists and was divided into six divisions: chemistry, pharmacology, bacteriology, biochemistry, horticultural and agriculture science, and veterinary science. Drummond paid particular attention to the expansion of the company’s veterinary research department at Thurgarton, an estate with a thousand acres of farmland. The company also had two other experimental farms in Scotland.

  While Drummond was a founding member and chairman of the Fine Chemicals Group of the Society of Chemical Industry, he abandoned his own research and ceased to publish any serious papers. This is also far from surprising. He was in no sense an outstandingly original scientist and made no further significant additions to scientific knowledge. He worked through others and had a direct influence on events. He was interested in the practical application of scientific research and was an effective popularizer and communicator of scientific ideas who furthered the careers of many who worked under him. His major achievement was that he seized the opportunity offered during exceptional wartime conditions to have a genuinely scientific approach to nutritional problems adopted on a national scale.

  Drummond became greatly interested in the development of antibiotics and the treatment of tropical diseases. His successor at Boots, Dr. Gordon Hobday, complained bitterly that he was too much of a philanthropist who paid immoderate attention to drugs for combating tropical diseases, where there was no money to be made. As Stanley Chapman sourly wrote in his biography of Jesse Boot, after Drummond’s death, “the research programme veered over towards research projects with a more reassuring market potential. The emphasis shifted towards the search for drugs to alleviate what have been called ‘diseases of civilisation’—rheumatism, peptic ulceration, cardio-vascular diseases and (very recently) mental disorders.”15 Boots, anxious not to be seen as unmoved by the brutal murder of this idealist who paid scant regard to the balance sheets, sent a contribution of £7,000 ($28,000) to a fund that established a professorship in his memory.

  Under Drummond’s stewardship, the major achievements of the Research Department in the early years included the discovery of Turk-e-san, an effective drug for the treatment of a disease in turkeys known as blackhead, and Cornox, a selective weed killer that was particularly effective against docks, thistles, and poppies. Cornox, originally known as 2,4-DP (Dichlorprop), was in fact a patent pinched from the German firm Schering AG in 1945. A German murderer had used this weed killer to considerable effect. Sir Jack also supervised the building of an expanded bacteriological and pharmacological research laboratory at the company’s Beeston headquarters.16 This expansion was greatly hindered by the building restrictions imposed by the government’s austerity program.

  Having moved to Nottingham, Drummond played an active part in public life, serving on the Regional Advisory Council for Further Education and the British Empire Cancer Campaign. As an enthusiastic first-nighter, he also was a director of the Nottingham Playhouse. He was a youthful, warm, and cheerful man who thoroughly enjoyed the good things in life. He had a love of good food and wine, and was an early member of André Simon’s Wine and Food Society. He traveled widely and intelligently. Always anxious to please, he was easily approachable, although with his characteristic British reticence it was hard to develop any intimacy with him. He could be outspoken and even brusque; his humor was sometimes tinged with cynicism. The distinguished physiologist C. Lovatt Evans said that with his “steely inflexibility of purpose,” Drummond “could be devastating towards incompetence and astringent to fools.”17 But he seldom displayed this side of his character and was widely popular, living his many-faceted life to the fullest.

  He left an estate of £6,680 ($26,720). After the deduction of punitive death duties and the payment of outstanding debts, this left a mere £2,762 ($11,048).18 These figures were published in Le Parisien Libéré and Combat.19 The French police were anxious to know who the beneficiary of the will was. Sûreté Nationale wrote to the CID, saying that “the conditions of the succession is [sic] likely to put the investigation onto a new track.” This proved to be an overly optimistic assessment. All the money went to Sir Jack’s first wife, Mabel, because she had not remarried. The CID replied to Sûreté that Sir Jack’s solicitors said that the will was perfectly normal and did not think “that the circumstances of the will opened up any new line of enquiry into the murder of Sir Jack Drummond and his family.”20

  Gaston Dominici

  Gaston’s mother, Clémence Rosalie Dominici, was the daughter of hardworking immigrants from Calabria, who owned an olive oil mill just outside Digne, the departmental capital of the Basses-Alpes.21 She was a temperamental young woman who was barely able to speak French, communicating in a mixture of broken Italian and Provençal patois. After a series of scrapes and confrontations, she was thrown out of the house. She worked as a maid for a printer and bookbinder in the town. At the age of twenty she found herself pregnant and uncertain who was the father, although she claimed to be almost certain that it was her employer.

  Having been unable to procure an abortion, Clémence’s child was born at seven o’clock in the morning on 22 January 1877 in her small bedroom in la rue Montée-des-Prisons. The window looked out across the street at the bleak walls of the Saint-Charles prison. It was snowing lightly. Clémence decided to hand the child over to public assistance. The midwife, Mademoiselle Philippine Guichard, took the newborn child home and in the afternoon of the following day took the infant to the town hall, which was conveniently situated close by. The mayor’s deputy was at a loss as what to do with a tiny, nameless, and fatherless child who had been rejected by his mother until Philippine suggested that she could try to persuade Clémence to change her mind.

  Her efforts were successful. On 29 January, one week after the birth, Clémence Dominici went to the town hall and acknowledged her son, whom she named Gaston. It was an inauspicious beginning. Digne was a closed, intolerant society, a hive of petit-bourgeois respectability that was intolerant toward outsiders. It is a drab little town, hemmed in by grim mountains. The main street, the Cours Gassendi, is named after a local seventeenth-century priest, philosopher, and scientist who is best known for having given the aurora borealis its name. The thoroughfare lacks distinction and is as unmemorable as the lunar crater named after the genius. It comes as neither a shock nor a surprise that the prison occupies the commanding position in the town. Digne’s other distinguished inhabitant was Alexandra David-Néel, explorer, occultist, anarchist, and Buddhist, who became a guru to the Beat Generation. She chose to settle in Digne because it reminded her of Lhasa, Tibet, which she had visited in 1924 when foreigners were forbidden entry. Digne’s only delight is an abandoned, glorious Romanesque church slightly outside the town that is surrounded by masons’ yards.

  Digne’s latest inhabitant was to become every bit as well known as Gassendi and David-Néel, but none could have foretold how or why. Here was a little bastard of Italian descent, who grew up to be resentful, aggressive, and emotionally deprived. Gaston was admitted to a monastic school but was soon expelled for cocking a snook at one of the brothers. His mother was soon pregnant again and lost whatever interest she ever had in her fatherless boy. Dressed in rags and seldom washed, he roamed the streets and the surrounding hillsides. When Clémence became pregnant for the third time, she decided to abandon him to the municipal authorities. His younger brother Léon soon followed him into their tender care. Clémence died in 1895, thirteen days after giving birth to her eighth illegitimate child.

  On 15 November 1898 Gaston was called up for military service and was posted to the Seventh Cuirassiers in Lyon. By
then he had received a rudimentary education that left him barely able to read and write. Since he never learned to speak French properly, he was reduced to speaking a local dialect. For the previous few years he had worked as an agricultural laborer for small farms near Digne. The army licked this undisciplined and rebellious Provençal into some sort of shape, and he finished his three years’ service with a certificate of good conduct and with a torso covered with tattoos of naked women. He returned to civilian life in December 1901, a grown man who was answerable to no one and determined to go his own way. He was a handsome, well-built, hardworking lad who was fond of the girls and drank an average of three quarts of wine a day, with a few shots of marc to settle the digestion. He also had a quick temper and was ever ready to pick a fight.

  He worked as a shepherd at the tiny hamlet of Entrevennes. Across the valley of the Asse lay the village of Brunet. With four cafés, a modest boardinghouse, and two dances every weekend, it was the liveliest spot in this remote part of Provence. Gaston would go there every weekend, but the other young men were careful to avoid this quarrelsome, hard-drinking primitive. They preferred to dance to a mechanical piano, while Gaston played cards with the older men in one of the cafés and downed vast quantities of the local rouge. One of these cafés was owned by a man named Maillet, who quite by chance was to follow Gaston as he moved and whose son was to play an important part in the Drummond murder drama.

  Among the families living at Brunet was that of Germain. The father of two daughters, Marie and Rose, was a highly respected tenant farmer. He kept a close eye on the two young girls, who hardly left the house except to go to Mass every Sunday. Gaston, whom Monsieur Bec at Entrevennes had fired after tiring of his explosive nature, was now working as a shepherd at a nearby farm at Angelvin. He had been joined by a friend from Digne, soon to be known locally as “Little Sequin.” The two went out on the prowl and soon spotted the Germain sisters. But they were now faced with an intractable problem. How could they get to know them? A casual flirtation was out of the question. Marriage was the only solution, and it was one that appealed to Gaston. His eye had fallen on Marie, quite a pretty little thing who was known to be hardworking and conscientious, and her father was not totally without means. Gaston, who had no intention of being a mere shepherd for the rest of his life, saw the match as an opportunity for social advancement.