Classic Scottish Murder Stories

by Molly Whittington-Egan

  On January 23rd 1929, Robert’s wife, Margaret, died, but his temperamental oddity was already determined; bereavement was not the precipitating factor. The author understands that the novel No Mean City by Alexander McArthur and H Kingsley Long, published in 1935, was resented in Glasgow, seen as too violent and sensational, but it is, in fact, a moral tale with a deep layer of valuable social commentary. Set in the Gorbals, it seems, even so, to have application to Robert Willox’s character: ‘An understanding and reasoned contempt for one’s neighbours, together with a fiercely unreasoning conviction of personal superiority, is not an uncommon phenomenon of the slum mind. Perhaps there is, all the time, a subconscious rebellion against conditions which are outwardly taken for granted. In face of all evidence to the contrary, he is still confident that the day will come when his superiority will compel recognition.’

  In the matter of housing, ‘It follows that society in the tenements is graded far more narrowly than in the outside world. One street may be definitely “better class” than another and not such good class as a third. Families that have two rooms look down upon those that live in a “single end”.’ The small Willox family, with both males in full employment, will have been regarded as highly respectable in their ‘room-and-kitchen’ apartment on the third floor or ‘flat’ with three other similar dwellings on the same level. All had been improved by the addition of an individual lavatory. That comfort aside, these were bleak times; there were no bathrooms, and there was only one cold-water tap in the kitchen sink. Sacks of coal were carried up the stairways by strong carters and stored in the lobbies or kitchen jawbox. The Willox family had a gas range and gas lighting. Water was heated on the range and there was a grate for a coal fire.

  The kitchen could be kept warm, and there was nothing strange about the fact that Bertie and his father both slept in the kitchen, which measured 10 by 13 feet, one on a bedstead and the other probably in the typical bed-recess or ‘cavity bed’. What does seem unusual is the state of the prized ‘room’ which was completely devoid of furniture. Another family would have let it, even if, like Robert Willox, they were admirably solvent. The furniture had not been pawned.

  After the death of his wife, Robert took Bertie out of work to keep house for him, and paid him 2s. 6d. to 4s. 6d. a week, at the father’s discretion. Outrageous as this seems to us – and Roughead considered the domestic conditions ‘at once unnecessary and discomfortable’ – it may have been a mere cultural expedient. The main breadwinner in an arduous job (Robert left home at 4.45am for the Pointhouse Shipyard and returned at 6.00pm) expected someone resident in the apartment to prepare meals, buy in food, clean and wash. Gender was not always an important determinant. If the woman of the household was in employment and the man not so, the man would shop and cook. Robert did not, perhaps, intend Bertie’s demotion to last forever and may have calculated that his own greater earning capacity was to be preserved at all costs. The Depression of 1930 was imminent, but, as it happened, A & J Inglis did survive.

  Although Bertie accepted his new status with apparent resignation, inwardly a fierce resentment burned. He was generally regarded as a good boy. It was a miserable, reduced, existence for a 21-year-old lad who had recently lost his mother. There were many idle, aimless hours to fill and he used to wander round the streets with his friends, play billiards, and go to the cinema. His father was not good company. Dancing was all the rage, the dance-halls thronged, but he did not seek out girlfriends in any context.

  There is a special edge to Roughead’s commentary in a case where he had sat in court like a murderer’s albatross in the seat specially reserved for his plumpish frame. Some there were (not Roughead) who saw Madeleine Smith plain. Roughead, who obviously rather liked, or felt much sympathy for, the fair-haired boy, managed to have a word with Bertie Willox at his appeal hearing, outside the court. It must have been an ordeal for Roughead, a most retiring person, to have pushed himself forward when he saw the opportunity, but a sense of duty will have impelled him. What he observed was interestingly to the point: ‘a well-spoken, pleasant-mannered lad of rather effeminate type – most unsuitably cast, one should think, for the role of First Murderer.’

  Bertie’s drastically reduced circumstances left him short of the readies for cigarettes, his small amusements, and clothing, which was important to him. Roughead says that he ‘had but two suits’ – one was brown, the other black, yet, in fact, to have two ‘whole suits’ with waistcoats was an achievement in itself. He developed the habit of falsifying the household accounts to his own advantage, but was in continual fear of being found out. He was obviously afraid of Dada and the menace of the uniformed petty tyrant still perfuses the story of the crime.

  It was a dark Monday, November 4th 1929, at 9.20 in the evening, and all was as quiet as it might be in that tall, gloomy building. In their three separate ‘houses’ on the third floor or flat, neighbours (Mrs G McKenzie, William Dale, and Mr and Mrs William Watt) were minding their own business. Then their ordinary lives suddenly moved into another dimension when young Bertie Willox, usually so well-behaved, began to bang on their respective doors and emit a kind of ‘wailing howl’. They crowded on to the landing. The lad was extremely agitated and almost incoherent. ‘Look! Look! Look!’ was all they could make out.

  He pointed to the open door of his apartment, which was illuminated by gaslight, and in its yellow glare they saw the body of Robert Willox in his commissionaire’s uniform stretched in the lobby on the threshold of the kitchen, the head surrounded by a big blob of blood. No-one cared to enter in upon the lurid scene which lay within like an illustration from Thomas Burke’s Limehouse Nights. There was of course no telephone available, and they sent Bertie off at a run to fetch the police. He arrived at the Northern Police Office at 9.30pm, in an exhausted condition and quite beside himself. ‘Send an ambulance! Send an ambulance! My father is bleeding!’ he informed the duty officer. Three times he ‘swooned’ and may genuinely have fainted. When they asked him what had happened, he made oblique answer that, ‘My mother died some time ago’.

  A pair of constables walked him back to Grove Street, and, on the way, he made the first of a series of discrepant, improvising remarks. There was no real guile in him, only horror and despair. He and his father, he said, had had their supper that evening, and he had then washed the dishes and set the table for breakfast before going out at 6.30pm. His father, he thought, must have fainted and cut his head against the iron bed. At the house, Robert Willox was obviously dead, with severe head injuries. The meal laid on the table in the kitchen spoke of supper, not breakfast, and supper prepared and not touched at that. A piece of boiled beef had been fished out, apparently in readiness for carving, from a pot of broth which rested on the range. Some vegetables from the broth lay on top of the beef. Crockery and cutlery were all clean. One report said that marmalade, sugar bowl, and teacups were all present, but that may not be accurate.

  Inspectors called. The Yale lock on the front door was intact. Asked if there were a ‘likely’ weapon in the house, Bertie ingenuously mentioned a heavy coal hammer, and it was found in a kitchen cupboard, clean and dry, when it would have been expected to be covered in coal dust – unless Bertie were an exceptionally obsessional housekeeper. It was a 2lb engineer’s hammer with a short wooden shaft and a double metal head.

  Bertie’s shoes, very wet, were found on the cross-bars below the table. He was now wearing boots, a waterproof, and a cap. It was a very rainy night, and the day could have been just as wet. The assumption was that the shoes, like the hammer, had been washed. His suit was discordant; he was wearing his black jacket and his brown trousers, but he could have been in the habit of mixing his clothes for variety of effect.

  His neighbour, Mrs Watt, corroborated Bertie’s account that Robert Willox had come home at 6.00pm. It appeared that he had been attacked very soon after entering the apartment, because he had not taken off his boots, and two daily papers, both unopened, and his spectacles, we
re still in the pockets of his overcoat, which was hanging up in the lobby. Only 2 ½d. was found on the corpse, and the lining of both trouser-pockets was bloodstained as if entered by an incarnadined hand. Blood had spattered all over the lobby and kitchen. The fire had gone out, but the grate was still warm. The sink looked clean. A damp towel hung from a nail, and a very wet dishcloth was folded up on the side of the sink.

  A leaf torn from a scribbling-pad on the dresser bore confirmation of the ingredients of supper (and a general Monday replenishment): ‘Monday. Bone, Vegetables, ¼ stone potatoes, 1½ pints milk, ½ dozen eggs, 1lb. b.b. [boiling beef]’.

  Professor Glaister, who held the chair of Forensic Medicine at Glasgow University, and Dr Campbell, casualty surgeon, arrived at midnight and examined the body and surroundings by the light of torches. At a subsequent post-mortem, the most important findings were that the hammer fitted the wounds, and that the stomach was entirely empty. No supper. There was no rigor mortis (but there had been a fire in the kitchen).

  Bertie’s several statements to the police were, in composite, that when he left home between 6.30 and 6.45pm, his father was sitting down polishing the buttons on his uniform tunic (which he was wearing when found). Bertie had had supper waiting for him – soup, rice-pudding, and a drink of milk, not tea, which he did not take in the evening, even on Sundays. There was no sign of rice-pudding, nor a glass of milk on the table, the lack of which would support his first story that, he Bertie, had washed up the supper things. If Dada had consumed only soup, not beef, that would nicely explain the uncut ‘joint’, even smaller after cooking, which, theoretically, could have been intended for a later occasion, and had been left out to cool. He could have taken only a little soup, because the pot was full up to 1¼ inches from the top.

  When his father came in that evening, he took off his coat and cap and himself hung them on the peg in the lobby. It was his habit to leave his keys dangling from his pocket-chain until he had hung up his coat, and then he put them in his pocket. (Significantly, however, the bunch of keys was found still attached to a trouser-button by a chain, lying on the floor behind the body – as if death had pre-empted the set routine.) Bertie did not know who set the table as it was found (lame, this): probably it was his father, whose nightly custom it was to do so for the early breakfast next morning. (But he had already said that he, Bertie, had laid the table.)

  Once out of the house and into the cooling rain, Bertie’s movements round and about the neighbourhood were multiple and were well attested to by direct evidence. Accompanied by a ‘pal’, James Turner, aged 19, whom he had known since their schooldays, met by chance in Grove Street at, said Turner, 6.30pm, he played billiards at Sinclair’s rooms at St George’s Cross. Angus Duff, the manager, said that Bertie Willox played there nearly every night. (So Dada did not impose a curfew on Cinderella once duty had been done.) Bertie Willox and James Turner played there that night from 6.35 to 7.05pm and those precise times were marked out on the play sheet for Monday, November 4th. Bertie played under a strong light and was perfectly composed, with a steady hand and unwavering eye.

  Further information which narrowed down the crucial times, lasting from 6.00pm until Bertie left the house, was provided by Isabella McKinney, who said that he was in the shop in Grove Street at which she worked, buying a packet of cigarettes at 6.25pm. Several other people encountered the two pals on their way to billiards. They tried, but did not succeed, to get free passes to the Empress Picture House, and Turner said that they had no money. He denied asking one Felix Carey to change him a pound, which Carey said that he saw – a green £1 note.

  Moving on, Bertie had some debts to pay. He was still accompanied by Turner, who later denied it. Rain-drenched, he called on Mrs Margaret Duffy at No. 532 St George’s Road, and gave her three £1 notes, a half-crown and one shilling. She gave him back sixpence for himself. The sum represented loans for shifty transactions such as redeeming a pledge on his father’s war medals. Next, at about 7.15pm, he called on Denis Daly, of No. 91 Hopehill Road, salesman with the Household Supplies Company, and squared an old account for £2. 14s. lld., tendering and receiving change for a £5 note. He claimed that Dada had provided the cash that evening, specifying that Bertie was to pay the two creditors forthwith and ‘get them off the map’. If the money was earmarked, then the two pals footloose in the street really did have no money to speak of. Bertie said that after paying the debts he was left with a few shillings for food shopping.

  The wet, dismal evening was still not over, and at 7.30pm Bertie called at No. 490 St George’s Road, where there lived a very good friend, Alfonso Jacovelli, who possessed the additional attraction of a real, working gramophone, which they played with for a time. Alfonso, aged 21, was married – Bertie had been his best man – and had known Bertie intimately for eight years. He knew all about Bertie’s chronic impecuniosity since his mother’s death, and his habit of pledging even Mother’s rings, the aforesaid war medals, and the very bed sheets of the household. Sometimes he loaned him small sums.

  It so happened that on the actual day of the murder, Alfonso had called on Cinderella at No. 79 Grove Street, between 1.00 and 2.00pm and, out of kindness, had invited him to spend the evening with him at St George’s Road, to arrive at 7.30pm. Alfonso noticed that the Willox’ table was set as for a meal. He was not an expected visitor, and this was no mise-en-scène for his benefit. There were two plates with a small piece of (unspecified) pudding on them, and some cold meat ‘on the bunker’ (the slab beside the sink). There was a pot on the gas range. Roughead wonders en passant why the table was ‘thus spread and furnished between 1 and 2pm for a meal to be consumed at 6?’ We can but surmise. The cold meat could have been Bertie’s lunch. Roughead would not have known that boiling beef is notoriously tough and has to be simmered for hours. Most people prefer rice-pudding, hot, but it is not obligatory! A ‘piece’ does not sound like rice-pudding, but if stodgy enough it might qualify. A quantity might have been left over from Sunday. We cannot expect perfect culinary standards or timing from a boy of 20. He could well have made advance preparations on the principle of getting hated chores done. Two puddings would certainly indicate that Bertie was expecting to feed his father and was not premeditating an act which would deprive Dada of his pudding. It seems most unlikely that he was going to offer the pudding as a delicacy to another pal. Bertie complained to Alfonso that he was hard-up.

  That evening at Alfonso’s, Bertie said that he would not stay too long because he was tired and wanted to go to bed. (And tired he looks, in the Weekly News photograph taken the day after the murder.) ‘He was quite cheery; some moments he was quiet’ – as Alfonso had seen him often enough before. He was wearing his brown trousers with his black jacket but between 1pm and 2pm he had been wearing his full brown suit. Alfonso saw a small leather ‘case’ sticking out of Bertie’s waistcoat pocket, and made a grab for it, just for fun, but was foiled. After a couple of hours, Alfonso accompanied his friend home as far as the corner of Grove and Scotia Streets, where they parted, said Alfonso, at 9.30pm. It was never seriously mooted that Bertie committed the murder and cleared up in the spare ten minutes before he alerted the neighbours, but, as if he wished to block any such potential suggestion, Bertie said that he looked into Meehan’s shop before going home and spoke to Margaret Maguire (the assistant) who smiled but made no reply. She herself denied this incident. Up the stairs, then, he went, Bertie’s statements concluded, to make the ghastly discovery.

  A constable took him to an old friend, Mrs Smith, at No. 5 Canal Street, to spend the first night after the murder. The next day, Detective Inspector Stewart sat him down in the police office and asked him to show what money he had. Bertie produced 2s. 11d. He said that he absolutely did not know what money his father had had, because (a telling detail) he always doled it out to him in a secretive way, turning his back on his son. The Inspector then noticed – for yet again there was no attempt at concealment – a small leather wallet sticking out o
f the lad’s waistcoat, which, on examination, revealed four £1 notes and four pawn-tickets. Bertie’s explanation was that the £4 was payment from the Weekly News for an interview earlier that day, for a photograph of his father, and for allowing himself to be photographed (in preparation for which occasion he had gone to Thomas Duff, a barber, for a haircut, shampoo and shave). And, sure enough, J R M Christie, a staff reporter was able to confirm that he had paid over £3, not £4, and he actually identified those three notes found in the wallet. The spare £1 was suspiciously unaccounted for, and another small matter troubled the Inspector: Bertie was denying that he had paid Daly the debt owing with a £5 note even when Daly was brought to confront him. ‘No,’ said Bertie, ‘I paid him three single pound notes.’

  There were too many discrepancies and a dreadful deed seemed to dwell behind his candid, worried eyes. They arrested Bertie Willox and confiscated all his clothing for blood testing. The results were not strongly evidential of his guilt, considering that Professor Glaister counted 29 bloodstains upon the kitchen door alone. He found three small blood spots on the shirt worn presumably at the relevant time but he later admitted that they were probably ‘exaggerated flea-bites’. On the brown jacket, brown waistcoat and brown trousers there were a few stains ‘faintly positive of mammalian blood’, and signs of washing by rubbing with a wet cloth. The wallet and all four £1 notes were completely free from bloodstains. The hammer, however, did show traces of mammalian blood. The damp towel and dishcloth were not tested.

  At the fiercely contested five-day trial begun on December 16th 1929, and held in the North Court, Glasgow, Bertie Willox did not give evidence on his own behalf, which was, no doubt, a wise decision, since he had already shown a tendency to weakness. A previously mooted plea of insanity had been abandoned after an examination by a team of alienists. A great deal of importance was attached to the evidence of Mrs Florence Watt, the next-door neighbour, supported by her husband, William, and a caller named Harrington (a witness later claimed by the defence). By unfortunate design, her lavatory was so positioned that it projected like a tongue into the kitchen and lobby area of the Willox’ premises, in such a way that there were three partitioning walls, which provided the opportunity for embarrassing overhearing.