Bamboo

by William Boyd

  Treves was called to Windsor on the 18th where he confirmed the earlier diagnosis of perityphlitis. True to his own methods he proposed waiting a while before operating to ensure that the capsulation should be completed. Treves visited the King daily and then, on the 21st, an improvement was observed. The King’s temperature dropped and the abdominal swelling appeared to go down and he felt well enough to travel to London. The coronation, set for the 26th, seemed likely to take place as planned, the abdominal pains apparently cured by the traditional doses of opium. But on the afternoon of the 23rd the pain returned and with it fever and repeated vomiting. The remission had been short and it was decided that an operation should take place on the morning of the 24th. Treves was to act as surgeon; also present were Laking, Lord Lister and surgeons Barlow and Smith.

  Edward VII was grossly corpulent—his waist measurement was forty-eight inches—and Treves had to cut to a depth of almost five inches before he found the abscess, fortunately still encapsulated, surrounding the remains of an almost completely destroyed appendix. Treves then cut into the abscess and the pus was discharged. The resulting cavity was cleaned and two rubber drainage tubes were inserted. The wound was dressed with ideoform gauze. As Treves’s biographer Stephen Trombley* comments, “Contrary to contemporary reports and current misinformation, Treves did not remove the King’s appendix. The belief that Treves and the King combined to make appendicitis ‘fashionable’ is ill-founded.”

  Treves deliberately did not remove the appendix and he would have been appalled to think that he had done anything to popularize “appendicitis.” But the fact is that Treves took a massive risk in proceeding the way he did and in not removing the appendix. It was now vital that the wound cavity close of its own accord, but from the bottom up, as it were. Any other form of healing might give rise to a sinus which could provoke other complications. The few days or so after the operation were anxious ones as the surgeons and doctors waited apprehensively for any sign of the symptoms of general peritonitis. Luckily for them King Edward made a good recovery and by mid July was fit enough to convalesce for three weeks on the royal yacht. The coronation eventually took place on 9 August.

  Treves was credited with saving the King’s life (and was duly made a baronet) yet there is a school of thought which would allege that in fact he needlessly endangered it. His insistence on waiting for some days before operating, his surgical intervention occurring finally when the King was in extremis and then his decision not to remove the appendix and only to drain the abscess were in line with prevailing medical orthodoxies. But they were far from being unchallenged orthodoxies, even in 1902. Indeed there was a consensus of well-informed medical opinion and overwhelming evidence that indicated that the swift removal of the appendix was the only truly successful method of treating these abdominal inflammations. Each of Treves’s decisions could have resulted in King Edward’s death: the delay and the reliance on opium could have caused the abscess to rupture; the tendency to operate only at the last minute often provoked peritonitis rather than relieved it, or was so late as to be redundant; and to leave the remains of the ulcerated appendix in the wound and to rely on chance that it would heal properly can be argued, with even a little hindsight, to be instances of malpractice.

  Why was Treves, who throughout his career was such an innovator, such an advancer of surgical practice, so remiss when it came to the saving of his sovereign’s life? The answer lies, I would suggest, in a curious blend of xenophobia, vanity and shameful remorse.

  In 1888 Frederick Treves removed a vermiform appendix and laid claim to be the first man in Britain to do so. However there is no doubt that the honour in discovering that the appendix was the root of so many abdominal inflammations went to American surgeons. Treves, for all his pioneering work, was an also-ran and his substantial ego was unhappy with this state of affairs. He then sought repeatedly to denigrate all the American advances in this field using every resource of patronizing mockery and pompous cynicism at his disposal. His disappointed vanity led him uncharacteristically to adopt the most conservative of approaches in this area of his expertise. Most surprisingly for a surgeon, as Trombley observes, Treves did not advocate surgery. His preferred method of treating “perityphlitis” was by medical means—bed rest and opiates. His wil-fulness was to have tragic consequences.

  In 1900, Treves’s daughter Hetty, aged eighteen, fell ill with abdominal pain. Treves did not diagnose appendicitis. Hetty became iller and iller, feverish and vomiting. For some reason Treves refused to see what was happening. Eventually, inexorably, other symptoms appeared that indicated that, as a result of her father’s delay, Hetty had contracted peritonitis. Treves decided to operate but two colleagues persuaded him that it was pointless. Hetty died in great physical distress.

  It is almost impossible to imagine Treves’s feelings at this time and he never spoke of the enormous grief and guilt he must have felt. Yet he did write about it, obliquely. In 1923, the year he died, Treves published a curious story called “The Idol with Hands of Clay.” It tells the story of a young surgeon who, so convinced of his own mastery of his craft, decides to operate on his own wife when she falls ill with appendicitis. During the operation he makes a fatal mistake and his wife falls into a coma, the surgeon struggles to save her and yet is unable to do so and she dies in his arms. Some glimpse of Treves’s response to his own tragedy is made available here:

  [The surgeon] caught a sight of himself in the glass. His face was smeared with blood. He looked inhuman and unrecognizable. It was not himself he saw: it was a murderer with the mark of Cain upon his brow. He looked again at her handkerchief on the ground. It was the last thing her hand had closed upon. It was a piece of her lying amidst this scene of unspeakable horror. It was like some ghastly item of evidence in a murder story. He could not touch it. He could not look at it. He covered it with a towel.

  And yet this terrifying object lesson made him an even stauncher opponent of the new advances being made in America. By ironic happenstance, a few days before he operated on Edward VII, Treves gave a lecture on appendicitis in Hammersmith Town Hall, a talk which was a sneering exemplar of his contempt for the American surgeons as well as being both patently wrong and purblind about medical matters. He stated with arrogant confidence that “The very great majority of all cases of appendicitis get well spontaneously … [another fact] which I think should be emphasised as strongly as the last one, is this: operation during an acute attack of appendicitis is attended with great risk to life.”

  Four days later, the man who held these opinions had to operate on his king.

  Treves was very lucky. Edward VII was even luckier, and no thanks to his sergeant-surgeon. Treves’s hubris, negligence or wilful obstinacy had caused the death of his daughter. That same wilful obstinacy could easily have caused the death of Edward VII. It is intriguing to speculate what the course of the nation’s history, and perhaps Europe’s history, might have been if George V had come to the throne in 1902 instead of 1910.

  In Treves’s case, however, the analysis is not so speculative. The death of his daughter, as the story demonstrates, shocked him terribly. In such a situation what could he have done? To admit all his thinking and public statements about appendicitis were wrong would be to compound the guilt unbearably. The only way I can understand this aberrant behaviour in an otherwise innovatory and brilliant surgeon is that for Treves so doggedly to persist with his old discredited theories, to continue to think he was right and the Americans were wrong, allowed him to live with himself more easily; the more he scoffed and sneered the more it allowed him to see his daughter’s death as a tragedy and not as something of which he was directly culpable. More relevantly, when the same set of symptoms recurred in his monarch, for Treves then to advocate the swift removal of the royal appendix would also have been a tacit admission of the fatal misdiagnosis of his daughter, just two years earlier. Because of his personal grief, the barely admitted guilt he felt, Treves had to recommend bed
rest and opiates to his dangerously ill king. He nearly got away with it. The remission of 21, 22 and 23 June seemed to bear out everything he had said in the Hammersmith lecture. But when the pain and the vomiting returned Treves had to contradict his own best medical advice and undertake an operation during an acute attack of appendicitis. But even then he could not go all the way and remove Edward’s appendix. The ruined vestigial organ was left in the King’s body, almost, one might say, as a small symbolic gesture of medical defiance—the final act of a man who could not admit he had been wrong.

  1994

  The Duke of Windsor and Sir Harry Oakes

  During a stormy night in the middle of World War Two—Wednesday, 7 July 1943—in Nassau, in the Bahamas, a multi-millionaire called Sir Harry Oakes was murdered in his bedroom. The cause of death was a blow to the head by some sort of spiked weapon or club causing four circular wounds an inch deep and a quarter inch in diameter. Shortly after, an attempt was made to set the victim on fire. Petrol was doused on the body and bedclothes and lit. The murderer—or murderers—then left, but the fire did not take. A house guest discovered the badly scorched corpse before breakfast the next day.

  During the 1980s I visited the Bahamas on many occasions and heard all sorts of lurid tales about the Oakes murder—tales embellished with rumours of currency speculation, sexual innuendo, Mafia gangsters and millionaire Nazi sympathizers. I decided to feature the murder as an episode in a new novel to see if I could elucidate the mystery and began to read everything I could find on the subject. The truth, as far as I can determine, is more banal, but, in a way, no less sinister.

  Harry Oakes had made his fortune prospecting for gold in Canada and had come to live in the Bahamas to avoid paying tax on his millions. However, he involved himself in the community, forming partnerships with local businessmen, and philanthropically encouraging the islands’ industries. It would be fair to say that Sir Harry Oakes was the colony’s most important citizen—after the governor of the Bahamas himself.

  And that governor of the Bahamas was the ex-King of England, Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor.

  The Duke and Duchess of Windsor had been sent to the Bahamas in 1940, after the fall of France, in a deliberate attempt to keep them out of the public eye and under control. Both of them were infuriated by the appointment, seeing it as an insulting act of royal spite, and detested the place (the Duchess referred to it as “this moron paradise”). However, they both pursued their official duties with conspicuous diligence and no visible signs of bad grace—even though the Duke made every effort to have himself transferred away. He wanted desperately to be a kind of roving ambassador for Britain in the United States.

  The death of Sir Harry Oakes came as shocking news to the Duke. He had known Sir Harry well but the last thing he wanted now was the scandal and notoriety that such a prominent murder was bound to encourage. The case had to be solved—and fast.

  This can be the only explanation for the Duke’s next move. Instead of calling on the Bahamas’ perfectly competent CID force (headed by Police Commissioner Colonel Erskine-Lindop) he asked two Miami homicide detectives (one of whom had acted as his bodyguard on a trip to Florida) to fly immediately to Nassau and take over the investigation. The Miami police force at this time was one of the most corrupt in the USA: there is no reason to assume the Duke was aware of this.

  The two detectives—Captains Melchen and Barker—arrived on Thursday after lunch and went to work. In the small, febrile and somewhat decadent community that was the wartime Bahamas speculation about the identity of the murderer was loud. Common gossip centred immediately on one Alfred de Marigny, Sir Harry’s son-in-law, as the likely culprit. De Marigny, an indigent playboy figure straight from central casting, had eloped two years earlier with Sir Harry’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Nancy, and they had married. Sir Harry’s death would see a significant amount of his fortune devolve on her.

  Like most of Nassau’s white community, the Duke was convinced de Marigny was prime suspect. Melchen and Barker swiftly interviewed de Marigny and took away samples of his clothing for investigation. De Marigny had given a dinner party on the night of the murder but had driven some guests home, not far from Sir Harry’s house, West-bourne, and there was a damaging thirty-minute hole in his alibi. De Marigny had motive and means: if he could be placed in the house the case would look watertight.

  Melchen and Barker summoned de Marigny to Westbourne for further interrogation. In the course of being questioned de Marigny was asked to pour a glass of water from a carafe and was made to handle a cellophane-wrapped packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes. He was then allowed to leave.

  The next day, Friday, 9 July, the Duke came to Westbourne where he had an unwitnessed, confidential twenty-minute discussion with Melchen and Barker. This is the crucial moment in the investigation. In all their inquiries the Miami detectives had been accompanied by Erskine-Lindop or other members of the Bahamian police. But now the Duke wished to talk to Melchen and Barker alone. Two hours later de Marigny was arrested and accused of the murder. A perfect fingerprint—from the little finger of his right hand—had been found on a piece of furniture (a folding screen) in the murder room. De Marigny had been caught: it was almost as good as a smoking gun.

  When de Marigny came to trial in October 1943 the prosecution case against him was demolished with brutal thoroughness by his counsel, Godfrey Higgs. Captains Melchen and Barker, the fingerprint experts, were rapidly exposed both as incompetents and liars. De Marigny’s fingerprint had been “lifted” (with a piece of Sellotape, probably from the cigarette pack) and placed on the screen. It was established beyond doubt that the print could not have been genuine. The case against de Marigny was a clear set-up and he was found not guilty and acquitted.

  Now it was vital to keep a lid on the stench rising from the Oakes affair. The Duke was conveniently absent (in the USA) during the trial; he had not been interviewed and was not called as a witness. Neither he nor the detectives were ever asked about the substance of their Friday, 9 July conversation. Why? Simply because royal prestige and royal sway were still very potent in those days. Huge efforts were made to spare the Duke any embarrassment. He never explained why he had bypassed his own CID. More curiously still, after the trial the case was closed. Yet de Marigny was innocent: therefore, by definition, the killer was still at large. The Duke refused ever to talk about the subject of Sir Harry Oakes and his death and forbade the matter to be raised in his presence.

  Why was the Duke so sensitive? What did he know? I now don’t believe the theory that he was speculating in wartime currencies—with Sir Harry Oakes’s help—for vast profits through Mexican banks (a treasonable offence); nor do I believe this murder was anything to do with American Mafia bosses wanting to build a casino in Nassau. The Duke called in Melchen and Barker because he wanted the affair solved quickly: he reasoned that the Americans would work faster than the local CID. And he was right. By planting a fingerprint Melchen and Barker had incriminated and arrested de Marigny in just over twenty-four hours. De Marigny was duly locked up in jail until the trial and everyone assumed he was guilty. Only the brilliance of the cross-examination saved him and exposed the detectives’ culpability.

  But what about the Duke’s role in all this?

  My theory goes like this. The planting of the fingerprint, in the context of Miami 1943, was routine work for Melchen and Barker. The carafe and the cigarette pack ploy testify to this. In their unwitnessed twenty-minute conversation with the Duke on Friday, 9 July, I believe they would have hinted that they had conclusive proof, or could manufacture the conclusive proof, that would put de Marigny in the murder room. Language would have been veiled and euphemistic on both sides. But the Duke—however covertly—would have to authorize them to go ahead. It is inconceivable that, having been summoned by the Duke himself, the two American detectives would have corrupted the evidence in a high-profile murder case on British colonial soil without, at the very least, a royal nod a
nd a wink.

  The governor of the Bahamas was a weak and worried man in 1943 but even the most charitable interpretation of his actions tends inexorably to the conclusion that the Duke of Windsor colluded with Melchen and Barker to pervert the course of justice. I deliberately don’t use the word “conspiracy”—that requires too much malice aforethought. The Duke would always be able to deny that he knew what the detectives planned, but he was no fool. De Marigny, thanks to his lawyer’s skills, was acquitted and the false evidence exposed. But what if he had not been? If de Marigny had been found guilty then he almost certainly would have been hanged. One wonders if the Duke’s conscience would have been unduly troubled. I suspect not.

  So who killed Sir Harry Oakes, and why? That, as they say, is another story. But the Duke’s duplicitous role in the investigation and the incrim-ination of an innocent man is hard to gainsay. In 1943 the Duke wrote to the Foreign Office saying, “The whole circumstances of the case are sordid beyond description.” No one else was better placed to know.

  2002

  Charles Lindbergh

  (Review of Loss of Eden: a Biography of Charles and

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh by Joyce Milton)

  It is almost impossible now, in these days of cheap global air travel, laser-guided weaponry and routine trips to outer space and back, to conjure up the astonishing glamour and fascination of aviation when it first began. Hard too, when thousands of airline pilots are being made redundant around the world, to envisage the aloof, almost superhuman allure of the figure of the aviator. Part demigods, part daredevils, the first flyers achieved a renown and provoked an awestruck reverence in the public that now seem almost incredible. These were real men and women who risked their lives in a medium previously denied human endeavour and in machines that seemed to counter every natural law. And the fact that they were the first truly modern heroes, with the ancient values of fortitude and temerity yoked to the very latest technology the twentieth century could produce, perhaps explains why the mix was so potent and the idolatry so febrile and impassioned. Not until the first astronauts came along would the aviator as modern hero be displaced from his pedestal, but even then it was only by another form of pilot.